occasional woman hardy enough to elbow her way through the mob.
“Madame, monsieur, les hors d’oeuvres,” Phil announced. “Here we have the stand of Mr. Farag Shash, famous among those in the know. The best fuul in Luxor.”
It was certainly the most popular. There were twenty people clustered around the wagon, with others taking the place of everyone who left with a filled bowl. Diners sat at seven or eight newspaper-covered folding picnic tables set up helter-skelter in the street, lapping it up and hissing for more, which was delivered by a second teenager in a stained galabiya who poured it out of a spouted metal jug. Others ate leaning against walls or simply standing up. It took Gideon, Julie, and Phil five minutes to work their way to the front of the crowd, plunk down their pound notes-about thirty cents-and then fight their way, spoons and bowls in hand, back out through the hungry gaggle around the cart.
“Whew,” Julie said.
“I heard Bea grumbling the other day about how much better the Egyptians would get along in life if only they learned to stand in line,” Phil said.
“Bea has a point,” Gideon said. “Pardon my cultural absolutism.”
Phil shook his head. “It’s a good thing he likes bones,” he said to Julie. “He’d never have made it as a cultural anthropologist.”
They were lucky in getting a just-vacated table with three chairs, under a red, white, and green umbrella that proclaimed Corona Extra, La Cerveza Mas Firm. The sheets of newspaper on the table hadn’t been changed for a while, but the stew smelled wonderful, the setting was agreeably exotic, and Gideon was glad to be just where he was, doing just what he was doing, with just the people he was with. Fuul was the nearest thing to a national dish that Egypt had; a paste of mashed fava beans prepared in a hundred different ways. Gideon had tried a good dozen and had liked most of them, but he was ready to agree that Mr. Shash’s version won hands-down.
For several minutes they ate in animated silence, wolfing down the mixture of beans, garlic, onions, oil, and spices. When they had eaten enough to slow down a little, Julie spoke pensively, having ruminated on their earlier discussion for an hour.
“So now we have two murders: Dr. Haddon and an unknown Egyptian-both of them, we think, having something to do with an Amarna head seen by Dr. Haddon, except that he never saw it because it was never there.”
“Well, I’ve been giving that some thought,” Gideon said. “I think it was there.”
Phil looked up from his bowl. “There in the enclosure or there in the drawer?”
“Both, just the way he said. Think about it: why would he give us a detailed description-yellow jasper, five inches high, dug in 1924-of something that wasn’t there? If he was trying to save face, wouldn’t he have described one that was there, so he could show it to us when we got back to Luxor? Why would he go out of his way to promise to show us something that he knew wasn’t going to be there to show?”
Phil considered. “How do you explain it, then?”
“Easy,” Gideon said. “Haddon did see it in the enclosure, and later he saw it in the drawer, exactly as he said, because someone took it out of the enclosure and put it there. And then, afterward, someone-probably the same someone- came along and took it out of the drawer and put it someplace else.”
“And why would this someone be doing these curious things?”
“I think it went into the drawer because that was where it belonged; it was a perfect place to ‘hide’ it as long as no one was looking for it. I think it was taken out of the drawer when Haddon started talking about having seen it and getting people excited.”
Julie shook her head. “But I thought one of TJ’s students checked and found out there was no record of it in the collection. Do you mean she was lying?”
“Stacey Tolliver, you mean. No, I’m pretty sure she was telling the truth.”
“Well, then, if there was no such head in the collection-”
“But I think there was.”
“This is getting pretty deep,” Phil said.
No, it was ridiculously simple, Gideon told them. He’d spent some time with Stacey that afternoon in the old Lambert Museum office, looking at the way they kept their records. What he found was an ancient sixteen-drawer card file-the kind with curled brass pulls on the drawers-in which there were “object cards” for all the items in the collection. Each three-by-five-inch card consisted of a description of the item and its catalogue number, which was also painted on the object itself. The number 24. I would mean that the item was the first object collected in 1924; 24.500 would be the five-hundredth.
“Sure, that’s a fairly standard system,” Julie said; she had administered two small museums for the Park Service and had kept up her interest in the field. “We use it in the Service.”
“The difference being,” Gideon said, “that yours is on computer. This one’s on handwritten three-by-five cards that have a hole in the bottom for a metal rod that keeps them in place.”
“Fascinating,” Phil remarked to Julie, “and don’t you just bet it’s relevant?”
“It’s relevant, all right,” Gideon said. “All you’d have to do if you wanted to steal something and make it look as if it’d never been there would be to walk away with the object itself, and then stroll over to the card file and pull out the object card. That’s it. There isn’t any other record. And that’s exactly what somebody did. Well, I think so; I’m ninety-nine percent sure.”
Julie smiled as she spooned up the last of her fuul “Only ninety-nine percent? Isn’t that a little tentative for you?”
“Not anymore. I’ve learned my lesson. Considering the way I cleverly determined that a man killed five or so years ago was a four-thousand-year-old scribe, I thought maybe I ought to exercise a little more restraint in my deductions.”
“But there’s a problem,” Phil said. “If you removed the object card, there’d be a gap in the numbering system.”
“Sure, but it wouldn’t matter. There are hundreds of gaps in the numbering system already. Every time they gave something away to another institution the card was just tossed.”
“Mmm,” Phil said doubtfully, concluding the subject for the moment. “Everybody done? Time to move on. We still have four and a half dollars to go.”
After stand-up stops for thick, unflavored yogurt, pickled vegetables, and tahina -sesame paste-with fried bread chips, Phil led them to a koshari shop, a clean, plain, indoor restaurant. At the door they handed over fifty piasters-sixteen cents-and were given deep bowls, which they gave in turn to a bucket-brigade line of servers behind a counter. A layer of pasta was shoveled into the bottom of each bowl, then scoops of lentils, rice, tomato sauce, and fried onions. Another fifty piasters got them each a plateful of pita bread and a plastic bottle of Baraka mineral water.
They found a free end of a wobbly wooden table and joined a group of Egyptian men who paid them no attention but went on steadily and singlemindedly getting koshari into themselves, a few with forks, most with fingers and bread. The three Americans went at it with their forks, but with diminished enthusiasm; it was tasty but this was their fifth stop.
“No, no, no, no,” Phil said pushing lentils around in his bowl, “it couldn’t be as easy as you said. No museum, even in those days, would have been idiotic enough to have a system that easy to fool. There must be some backup, some-”
“Actually, Phil, there are museums that still do it that way,” Julie said. She put down her fork. “There was a case only a few years ago where just the kind of thing Gideon is talking about happened. Somebody stole an Egyptian pectoral from a museum in Philadelphia. They also took the object card. This was in the early 1980s as far as anybody can tell, but it might have been even earlier. The thing is, without the card nobody had any idea it was missing until ten years later, and that was only because it showed up in another museum and it looked sort of familiar to someone.”
“There you are, then,” Gideon said. “It could have been done. I think it was done. The question is: why? According to Haddon, it was a run-of-the-mill piece, not that valuable.”
Phil looked soberly at Julie. “Something tells me he’s been giving this some thought too.”
Gideon smiled. “You know what a composite statue is?
Phil nodded. “Where different parts of it are made from different kinds of stone. The Romans did it.”
“The Egyptians did it too,” Gideon said, “but only in the Amarna Period. Usually, the head-and sometimes the
