day’s interrupted segment on race, and he was more than happy to put it off, even at the cost of further frazzling poor Forrest. Maybe if he put it off enough times, Forrest would decide to forget about it altogether.
“Would one o’clock be convenient? I will come there.”
“Perfect,” Gideon said happily. “Why don’t we meet in the library? I think we’ll have it to ourselves.”
“Very good.”
“Sergeant? You’ve decided to pursue this then?”
“I would think so. And-” There was a pause. “Your views on the death of Dr. Haddon, which you attached to your report? I would be interested to hear more.”
Gideon topped off his coffee at the urn and slipped into the chair beside Julie again. He’d thought he was finished eating but now he reached for a few more dates from the fruit bowl.
“Things,” he said, “are looking up.”
Sergeant Monir Gabra was a weathered, gravel-voiced man in his mid-fifties with most of one earlobe missing and an old knife scar on his cheek beside it to make clear how it had happened. He was wearing a brown woolen uniform, past its prime and closer in its styling to that of the el-Amarna private with the pinned-on stripe (not that Gabra’s stripes were anything but firmly attached) than to the splendid outfit of the commanding general of River and Tourist Police. With his ample black mustache and glistening, foxy, slightly bulbous eyes, simply changing from the uniform into a galabiya would have let him pass with ease as a seller of dried spices or inlaid cigarette boxes in the souks.
All in all, Gideon had the feeling he was going to get further with the sergeant than he had so far done with his boss; a hunch that quickly proved accurate.
Under the high, groined ceiling of the otherwise deserted library, seated across one of the monograph-littered tables from Gideon, smoking one cigarette after another, asking frequent questions in his shaky English, he had listened to everything Gideon had had to say about the unidentified remains, about Haddon, about the Amarna head.
“Well then,” he said when there wasn’t anything more, “I think you are right. We have here a police matter.”
Gideon, who’d come to the meeting not knowing what to expect, felt like a spent runner who’d finally managed to pass the baton. From now on it was Gabra’s job to do the worrying and suspecting.
“I’m happy to hear you say it. After my experience with General el-Basset, I wasn’t quite sure what your reaction would be.”
“Well, you must make allowances for General el-Basset,” Gabra said. Did “And for Major Saleh” hang in the air, or was Gideon imagining it?
“Here we do things differently,” Gabra said complacently. “Already we are making progress, you see. We have succeeded to identify the remains.”
In one day? They did things differently, all right. “Who is it?”
As always, he was curious to know where he’d gone right and where he’d gone wrong in reconstructing the onetime owner of those bones. But this time he was leery too. He’d already botched this one once, and now he was thinking that he’d probably gone out a bit too recklessly on another long limb or two.
Gabra, who smoked like most of the Egyptians Gideon had met, which was to say incessantly, lit up again. “Did you know this, that since four years, on ninth of October, 1989, there was a robbery at site number WV-29, resulting in the death of a policeman?”
“No, I didn’t. What does-”
“That the person believed to do this was one Abdul Nasr el-Hamid, who has worked in Horizon House until shortly before this theft and murder? That he has not been seen alive since this theft and murder? That this Mr. Abdul Nasr el-Hamid was forty-six years old and 172 centimeters tall, and that in addition to being a tomb-robber he was by trade a tailor? That his right eye was lower than the left?”
After a moment’s silence Gideon let out a peal of triumphant laughter that would have shocked anybody but a seasoned cop or another forensic scientist. He was used to hitting nails on the head, but not all of them at once.
“I was lucky,” he said.
“May we continue to have such luck,” Gabra said. “Ah, the object that was stolen will interest you, I think. It was asmall, Amarna sandstone statue-a statuette-that was without its head.” He smiled. “You see? A small Amarna statue with no head is taken from the excavation on the one hand… and now a small Amarna head with no statue is found in the enclosure on the other. Would you say these events are coincidence?”
Not unless somebody had just repealed Abe Goldstein’s old dictum, the Law of Interconnected Monkey Business, they weren’t. When that many queer, related things were going on around one another, they had to be connected: the headless body, the bodiless head, the death of Abdul Nasr el-Hamid in 1989, the death of Clifford Haddon four years later.
“There is more,” Gabra said. “This Abdul Nasr el-Hamid was a member of the el-Hamid family of Nag el-Azab, who have been known to commit tomb-robbing for many years.”
“I see. Sergeant-”
“Ss,” Gabra said with his eyes focused over Gideon’s shoulder. Gideon turned to see a highly agitated Arlo Gerber in the doorway, his wispy mustache twitching.
“Yes?” Gabra said.
Arlo jumped. “That man. I-I can tell you who he was.”
“Man?” Gabra said. “And you are…?”
Arlo licked his lips. “I am…?”
Gideon helped him out. “This is Dr. Arlo Gerber, head of the epigraphic unit.”
“His name was Abdul,” Arlo blurted. “He used to work here.”
“Oh, yes?” Gabra said. “That is interesting. And what did this Abdul look like?”
“Look like?” Arlo was thoroughly disconcerted. He had come here to say something. He had planned it and rehearsed it, and Gabra had thrown him off his stride. Arlo’s hands fluttered indecisively. “He was… he had a…” His hand went to his face and pulled the right cheek down.
Gabra glanced meaningfully at Gideon.
“I can also tell you who killed him,” Arlo said.
“Ah,” Gabra said softly, “now this I would very much like to hear.”
“Well, it was, um-well, it was sort of-”
“Would you like to sit down, Dr. Gerber?”
“No thank you,” Arlo said mechanically, at the same time seating himself in a wooden chair on Gideon’s side of the table. He looked utterly flustered. “Could I please have one of those?” he said, gesturing at Gabra’s Cleopatras.
“Certainly.” Gabra held out the pack and lit Arlo’s cigarette with a lighter. Gideon hadn’t seen him smoke before.
Arlo’s fingers shook as he brought the cigarette to his lips. He inhaled with his eyes closed. His color improved slightly.
“It was me,” he said. “But it was an accident.”
Well, it was and it wasn’t. El-Hamid’s death, as Gideon had thought, had been caused by a fall. But the fall had been caused by Arlo. Directly and precipitately. As Arlo told it, he had surprised el-Hamid one night, walking out the back door of the annex with an Amarna head.
“And when was this, please?” Gabra asked.
“October 16, 1989,” Arlo said, like a man reciting the date of doomsday.
Gabra and Gideon exchanged glances. That made it just one week after the theft of the statuette at WV-29. Interconnected monkey business, all right.
“Proceed,” Gabra said.
Arlo proceeded. He had shouted at the man to stop. Instead, el-Hamid had begun to run. Arlo, calling upon reserves that came as a surprise to Gideon, and had very likely come as a surprise to Arlo, had chased after him. As el-Hamid rounded a bend his foot had caught on something and he had fallen hard, striking his head on the stone base of a defunct fountain.
When Arlo realized that he was dead he had gotten frightened. He had dragged the body twenty or thirty feet
