Saleh extracted the last cigarette from the pack on his desk and threw the crumpled container into the wastepaper basket.
“No,” he said. “An old lead.”
He turned to the remaining two pages of the report, the part entitled “Conclusions and Implications.”
Gabra nodded to himself while he slipped the cellophane off another gold-striped pack of Cleopatras. At one hand lay Oliver’s report, at the other the file that Asila had brought him. The details were coming back now. It had happened four years earlier, in the fall of 1989 at WV-29, an isolated Horizon excavation in the Western Valley. Thieves had raided it during the night. It was not a major site by any means and would not have engendered the formidable investigation it had, if not for the murder of a police constable who was working as night watchman. He had been doped, tied up, and gagged, and when the crew had reported the next morning they had found him dead, choked to death on his own vomit. Probably it had been unintentional, but it was murder all the same. Of a policeman.
What they had taken was a small, Eighteenth Dynasty sandstone sculpture, a headless statuette “in the Amarna style.” It had been found only that afternoon and had not yet been measured or removed from the ground. The thieves had dug it up themselves. Gabra pulled a cigarette from the pack with his lips and flicked his cigarette lighter across its end while he rummaged in the clutter of papers (not all the clerks were as efficient as Asila) for the summary sheet. Ah, here. Signed by Saleh himself.
The investigation to this time leaves little doubt as to the involvement of the el-Hamids, the notorious and hereditary family of tomb-robbers from Nag el-Azab, where for several generations they have maintained a tailoring business as a front for their other activities.
Well, that was pretty much correct, except that the el-Hamids’ tailoring was no front. But that was Saleh for you. The major’s father had been a deputy minister and Saleh had grown up among the clean white villas and fragrant green gardens of Cairo’s Maadi district. Despite years of police work, he had never really come to understand the poor. Gabra, on the other hand, had been born in one of the swarming tenements near the Bab el- Luk, the son of a donkey-cart driver; understanding the poor had come with his birthright.
The el-Hamids were legitimate tailors, all right, but who could survive as a tailor in Nag el-Azab? This dilapidated warren of alleyways was only a few blocks from the heart of oh-so-fashionable Luxor, but the styles didn’t change as often on the muddy Shari el-Jihad as they did on the elegant Corniche. They didn’t change at all, in fact. Galabiyas and chadors were store-bought, then worn until they fell apart, which was the point at which the el-Hamids came into the picture, patching them up for a few piasters, and sometimes repairing shoes into the bargain.
It was impossible to live on such work, and so decades ago the family had learned to eke out a precarious and marginal sideline pilfering second-rate artifacts from the isolated secondary sites across the river, sites that better-class tomb-robbers didn’t bother with. He had dealt with some of them, not only on this case, but also at one time or another when they had been caught at their illicit trade, as they frequently were. (Clearly, three generations of tomb-robbing had failed to increase their proficiency.) Usually they were fined a few pounds or given a night in jail. Always they accepted their punishment with a shrug and went back the moment they were released to their tailoring and their stealing. Apparently their antiquities profits netted them more than the cost of their fines, because they certainly stuck at it. How much more was debatable. It was the rich dealers and middlemen-not the diggers who expended the sweat and took the risks-who came away with all the money.
But when had it ever been different? Now as ever, the poor man’s jaw ached with the rich man’s wealth. His own untutored father had ranted for entire evenings about the coming revolution, about the freedom of the masses, the righteous upheavals of a new order. And yet, all his life he had never been able to think beyond the occupation of cart-driver. When young Monir had told him he wanted to go to high school to prepare himself to be a policeman, the old man had been stunned. “Who will drive the cart after I’m gone?” he asked. “Who will provide for the family?”
Gabra pulled deeply on the cigarette and returned to the file summary sheet.
Nevertheless, it has been impossible to prove a verifiable connection to the el-Hamids. In addition, no witnesses of any kind have been found. Moreover, Abdul Nasr el-Hamid, the man thought to have been primarily responsible for the theft and the death of the guard, appears to have fled the area immediately after his crimes, possibly to the Sudan. And finally, a year-long search of the usual outlets for this type of antiquity, in which excellent cooperation was received from Police and Security Service branches in Aswan, Cairo, and Alexandria, has produced no usable evidence that a statuette similar to the one stolen has recently traveled in the usual channels, or even been offered for sale. Interpol was contacted as well, with negative results.
For these reasons, this case is being classified to inactive as of this date.
Major Yussef Saleh’s gorgeous, flowing signature followed at the bottom of the sheet. Abdul Nasr el-Hamid, Gabra mused, the killer-thief who had conveniently run off to the Sudan. Or so they had all thought. But hadn’t that been only because the rest of the el-Hamids had so stoutly maintained it? What the police knew was simply that he had disappeared, as if into the air.
Or into the old storage enclosure at Horizon House, Gabra said to himself, never to reemerge. He flipped through the file looking for Abdul el-Hamid’s description; if Gabra himself had ever met the man, he couldn’t remember it. Ah, here it was. Age, forty-six, height 172 cm, unusual facial appearance due to the right eye being lower than the left…
Well, well. Gabra’s lips pursed. It seemed there might be something to this anthropology business after all. Maybe, like a lot of things, it depended on who was doing it.
Hair black, mustache black, eyes brown… He smiled. Not much help there from Gideon Oliver and his bones.
For another five minutes he browsed in the police file, then pushed himself away from the desk. He leaned back as far as the defective chair would let him, his fingers clasped behind his head, and blew smoke at the stained ceiling.
El-Hamid had had six earlier arrests for tomb-robbing and the like, but only a single conviction. When he wasn’t stealing antiquities he worked mostly in the family shop. Occasionally he found a job in Luxor but never lasted long. He had, in fact, worked as a janitor at Horizon House for three months in its laboratory, but not at the time of the theft. He’d been let go two weeks previously over an accusation of petty thieving. Took it badly too, making enough of a scene so that a constable had to be called to eject him from the premises. There had been some thought that he might later have stolen the statuette more from revenge than anything else, but with him nowhere to be found, there had been no way to prove it one way or the other.
“Well, well,” Gabra said. “Asila, will you get me Horizon House on the telephone? I want to talk to a gentleman named Gideon Oliver.”
“It’s broken,” Asila said.
His good-tempered laugh must have surprised her. “Well, then, use the one in here.”
Chapter Nineteen
“For you, Gideon,” Bea said, holding out the telephone.
Gideon dabbed at his mouth with a napkin and walked around the end of the table, around Haddon’s still- empty chair, to take the call. Lunch, which had begun at eleven o’clock on account of a full afternoon shooting schedule, was just ending and Bea, sitting closest to the wall table on which it was situated, had reached behind her to pick the telephone up, not pausing in her attentions to a cup of sherbet.
It was Mrs. Ebeid. “The police are calling for you again,” she said. “Will you speak with them this time?”
“I would have spoken with them last time,” Gideon said, “but I didn’t hear the phone-”
“Dr. Oliver? I am Sergeant Gabra. I have been reading your report with interest. May we discuss it this same afternoon?”
Well, what do you know. Somebody at the police department actually gave a damn after all. Gideon swallowed his amazement.
“Sure, when would you like?”
The only thing he had scheduled was a one o’clock session with Forrest and Kermit to reshoot the previous
