“A fake 4360.”
He thought this over for a moment. “You mean an accidental duplication of identification numbers, an error in-”
Gideon shook his head. “I don’t think so. Let’s try something.” He went to a steel sink along the wall, laid the femurs in it side by side, and set the rubber stopper in the drain. Then he ran a few inches of water into the tub, covering the two bones. “We’ll let them sit for a minute.”
He came back to the table with a magnifying glass from the shelf over the sink.
“A fake 4360,” Phil was muttering, his skinny arms wrapped around himself. “Then this other set, the buried one, is the real one?”
“Seems that way.” Gideon began using the magnifying glass to examine the numbers on the bones that had turned up that morning.
“And you know these mysterious and enigmatic things because the bones don’t smell?”
Gideon laughed. “That and a few other things.” He gave Phil the lens. “Compare the numbers on the two sets. Try the crania.”
It took him only a few seconds. “The ones on this one-” He was holding the skull from the storage box. “-are fuzzier. These others-” He patted the skull unearthed by the backhoe. “-are crisper.”
Gideon nodded. They were crisper, he suggested, because they’d been applied in the genuine 1920s manner: first, a patch of sealant (clear nail polish was as likely as anything else) would have been painted on the bone. Then the numbers would have gone onto this foundation in India ink, and then another layer of sealant would have been applied over them. The result was that the numbers were as clear seventy years later as they’d been the day they were put on.
But the numbers on the bones in the box had not been so painstakingly prepared. They had been written directly on the bone, and the ink had bled a little into the porous surface; not enough to notice if you weren’t looking for it, but amply clear under the magnifying glass.
“Yes, I see,” said Phil pensively.
“There’s more,” Gideon said.
The differences in color for example. Both sets of remains varied from individual bone to bone, as bones often did. But the ones from the bag-and not the ones from the box-had an amber, yellowish cast overall, and the pelvis and the two lumbar vertebrae were splotched with what looked like black lichen. The cloudy yellow sheen was the result of a gluey coat of shellac that had routinely been applied to skeletal material in the 1920s because it was thought to be the best way to preserve it. The black, lichenlike stains, on the other hand, went back quite a bit further. They were the residue of the asphaltlike substance that had been so copiously (and frustratingly, from the point of view of Egyptologists) smeared onto and inside mummies in ancient times.
“Now wait,” Phil said. “Even I know that el-Fuqani was a commoners’ cemetery. They wouldn’t have been mummified.”
“No, but even so they sometimes pumped a load of the stuff into the abdomen before they laid them in the ground, more or less for form’s sake. That’s why the stains are just on the pelvis and lower vertebrae.”
Phil sipped his tea. “Ah, so.”
None of these indicators, Gideon went on, were to be seen on the bones from the storage box. Hence, (a) they weren’t from Lambert’s dig, and (b) the chances were that they had never been on the inside of an ancient Egyptian at all.
“No offense, Gideon,” Phil said at length, “but why didn’t you mention any of this the other night when you looked at it?”
“I didn’t mention it because I didn’t notice it,” Gideon said ruefully, “which is what I get for trying to show off when I’m half-asleep.”
“ ‘He who plays with cats must bear the scratches,” “ said Phil. ”Another old Egyptian proverb, or maybe that one’s Persian. Tell me, what was the business about tasting them?“
“Oh, I was thinking about all the trouble Luxor has with salts in the soil. I thought I might be able to taste them, assuming the bones spent a few millennia in the ground.”
“And?”
“See for yourself,” Gideon said. “Take your pick, any bone will do.”
Phil smiled. “Why don’t you just tell me?”
“The ones from the bag taste salty,” Gideon said, “and the ones from the storage box don’t.”
“Which must mean you’re right.” Phil looked down at the bones. “The ones from the bag, the ones they just dug up, are the real McCoy. The ones they found the other night are fakes, new bones.” He glanced up with a peculiar expression. “How new, I wonder.”
“Ah, I almost forgot.” Gideon went to the sink, got out the femurs, and patted them dry with paper towels from a roll on the wall. “Let’s do some more smelling.”
“Oh, good,” Phil said.
Gideon sniffed at each of them.
“Strange,” Phil murmured. “All those cases of yours that I’ve heard you talk about-I’m not sure what I pictured you doing, but I always imagined the basic tools were calipers and suchlike. I never realized the job was fundamentally nose work.”
“More than you might think. Take another whiff yourself, will you?”
With a sigh of forbearance, Phil complied.
“Now it smells like wet old skeleton,” he said. “Which one is this?”
“The real one, the one from the bag. Now try the other one.”
Phil held it to his nose, sniffed, lifted his eyebrows, and sniffed again. “Now that’s interesting. It’s got a smell now. Like… like… what am I trying to… candles! It smells like wax.”
“Exactly,” Gideon said. “What you’re smelling is the grease in the bone, the fat. It’s what bones smell like for a few years after the flesh is gone. Sometimes, if the odor’s started to fade, putting them in water brings it out. And it means the remains are recent.”
“How recent?”
“Oh… under ten years, anyway. Two to five years would be my guess.”
Phil picked up the skull that went with the femur. “This is only about five years old?”
“Maybe a year or two more.”
Phil regarded him gravely, eyes narrowed. “So, Doctor, I take it you might be revising your earlier opinion?”
Gideon frowned. “My earlier opinion?”
Phil patted the skull. “About this gentleman having been a Fifth Dynasty scribe.”
He cackled with laughter, and after a moment Gideon burst out laughing too. “I may have to rethink that, yes.”
“Well, that’s very reassuring to us poor mortals. To know that even the great Skeleton Detective can screw up sometimes.”
“Royally,” Gideon said.
“But you know,” Phil said, “this is extremely weird. If you’re right, think about what it means. Sometime in the last ten years someone takes the real 4360 from its box and buries it in the old dump-the old old dump. Then he substitutes a new skeleton for it-and where do you get a new skeleton, by the way?-and goes to the not inconsiderable trouble of writing all the numbers in this delicate, old-fashioned script to make it look authentic. And then he goes ahead and puts that one in the storage enclosure, where it was almost equally unlikely to be found. It doesn’t-”
“Not exactly, Phil. I don’t think anyone put those bones in the enclosure. I think they were there because somebody died there and never left. And I don’t think the rest of it was done sometime in the last ten years, I think it was done sometime in the last ten days.”
The candle wax odor had seeped into the air from the damp bone now, faint but sickly. The students in the other room had gone. The musty building with its bits and pieces of five thousand years was silent and spooky.
Gideon leaned forward, palms on the table. “Last Sunday night, to be specific.”
“Last Sunday night?” Phil scowled at him. “But that’s when they found it!”
“That’s right. I think the numbers were put on after they found it, after they called the police. I think
