to the unused enclosure, thrown the Amarna head in after him, and left them there, shielded from nonexistent passersby by the stucco walls and the piles of junk, Arlo, whose eyes had been fixed on the floor as he spoke, looked up. “And that’s about it.”
Not by a long shot, Gideon thought.
Gabra didn’t think so either. “Why did you become frightened? If all was as you say, you did nothing wrong. Whyyou have said nothing all this long time? Why do you come forward now?”
“Oh, well,” said Arlo reluctantly, “that’s a long story.”
Gabra gestured with his cigarette. Time was no problem.
Arlo carefully laid his cigarette in an aluminum-foil ashtray and began. He spoke like a man who’d already been tried and condemned, hunched forward as if against the fetid damp of an Egyptian jail, with his hands squeezed flat between his knees.
It had started several weeks before the fatal night. There had been an outbreak of pilfering from the annex. It was an old and recurring problem at Horizon House. Nothing of significance; merely the sort of generic, everyday bits and pieces that might be palmed off to tourists for five or ten dollars. It had been going on in Egypt for millennia, and there always seemed to be more where they had come from. Still, Arlo said, one couldn’t help but hate to see them go off to Topeka and Fort Lauderdale to gather dust on knickknack shelves next to Toby jugs and commemorative spoons. He had grown suspicious of Abdul, who had started there at about the time the latest rash had begun, and who, as a janitor in the annex, had easy access to the collection.
He had reported his suspicions to Haddon and a trap had been laid. The bait had been snapped up and Abdul had been fired, but not until after a horrible scene during which the Egyptian had refused to accept Haddon’s decision and loudly accused Arlo, as Allah was his witness, of everything from offering him money to steal the objects to-and here Arlo flushed and lowered his voice-asking him to procure women and, er, ah, little boys, young children. It was too absurd for anyone to take any of it seriously, of course, and Haddon had called for a constable to send Abdul packing, but it had been terribly stressful for Arlo.
“May I have another cigarette?” he asked Gabra. His own, left untouched in the foil tray, was a cylinder of ash.
Gabra slid the open pack across to him along with the lighter.
“And you saw him next…?”
Arlo had some trouble getting the cigarette lit but finally managed. “I told you, that night at the back door of the annex, the night I-the night he fell.”
“Died,” said Gabra.
“Yes,” Arlo said after a moment. “Died. When that happened, I-J suppose I panicked. How could I tell anyone what happened? I was afraid it would look as if I killed him because of his revolting accusations. I was nearly hysterical- I felt-I heard his head crack, you see-all I wanted to do was get out of there, get him out of sight, so I- well, you know the rest.”
“No, not all,” Gabra said. “Since 1989 you can easily dispose of these bones. Why have you not done it sooner? Why do you leave them all this time until they are discovered, which must happen eventually?”
Ado’s shrug was half-shudder. “I couldn’t bring myself to touch him, or even to go back in there where he was. I think I made myself believe it had never really happened. I suppose I hoped somehow it would all never come to light.”
“Yet you come forward now,” Gabra said.
“Yes, because Dr. Oliver was working on it.” Arlo raised his eyes to Gideon in mournful tribute. “I knew it was only a question of time before you found out who it was.”
As compliments went, Gideon supposed, it wasn’t bad.
“What will happen to me now?” Arlo asked. “Am I under arrest?”
“Please, just to be patient,” said Gabra. “Dr. Oliver, I think you have things to ask?”
Indeed he did. He nodded his appreciation; not all cops were so collaborative. “Arlo, you’re sure that what he was making off with was an Amarna head?”
“Oh, yes, there was no question. Dr. Haddon described it perfectly on the ship the other night.”
“Yet you said nothing when the time was there,” Gabra said.
Arlo hung his head. “No.”
“When this all happened in 1989 you already knew about the theft at the site, didn’t you?” Gideon asked.
“Of the statuette? Yes, everybody knew about that.”
“And it didn’t occur to you that the head might go with the body? That the two thefts might be related?”
“Of course it occurred to me,” Arlo said with a brief spark of temper. “I told you: I was frightened. I just wanted to put it behind me, can’t you understand that?”
Yes, Gideon could understand that. Faced with the prospect of an Egyptian prison he too might have wanted to put it behind him.
“Arlo,” he said more gently, “let’s talk about last Sunday night when Ragheb found the skeleton, all right?”
Arlo nodded cautiously.
“After everybody went to bed, you went back to the enclosure, you painted the numbers on the bones-”
Arlo blinked, transparently surprised. His fingers almost stopped trembling. “What?”
“You painted-”
“I most certainly did not.”
Gideon blinked back. “You didn’t paint the numbers? You didn’t bury the original 4360? You didn’t take the head?”
“Absolutely not,” Arlo said, sounding offended for the first time. Accidentally killing a man was one thing; perpetrating a ludicrous escapade involving buried skeletons and faked numbers was clearly beneath his dignity.
“Well, who did?”
Arlo took a long, thoughtful pull on his cigarette. “Well now, how in the world would I know that?”
“The funny thing is,” Gideon said, holding up his hand to refuse the three-foot-long flexible smoking-tube the waiter was offering him, “I believe him.”
“As do I,” Gabra agreed, sighing with his first burbling puff on the narghile that had been placed on the tiled floor beside their table.
At the sergeant’s suggestion they had left Horizon House for a nearby outdoor cafe on Shari Mabaad after concluding their session with Arlo, who had almost wept with relief on being told by Gabra that he was not under arrest or in imminent danger of it, but was merely to keep himself available in Luxor for further questions, and to keep to himself what he had told them.
Arlo had done a cogent if not altogether coherent job of explaining himself. He had spent a terrible night after they had all gone out to look at the skeleton, he said, determining at dawn that he would confess and finally confront his fate that day. He had steeled himself to face Saleh and the wheels of Egyptian justice, and then he had been as flabbergasted as anyone else when the numbers were discovered on the bones the following morning. At first he had leaped at the idea that he had suffered some sort of hallucination four years earlier, that el-Hamid’s death had never happened, that the skeleton really was that of F4360.
But even Arlo, who clearly had some considerable propensity for deluding himself, couldn’t quite make himself believe that. In the end he had accepted the astonishing development as a kind of cosmic gift, like finding a winning lottery ticket among one’s dry-cleaning stubs. He had gratefully accepted his salvation, had asked no questions, had looked no gift-horses in the mouth. He had been delivered from evil, and he had had no intention of upsetting things by trying to find out who had done it or why.
No, it wasn’t very logical, but it did sound convincingly like Arlo.
“Somebody recognized that head for what it was,” Gideon mused aloud now, “then killed Haddon afterward because he’d seen it too. The question is: who?”
“ ‘When the cow stumbles,” “ Gabra said somberly, ” ’many knives come out.“ ”
This gloomy particle of Eastern wisdom hung in the air while the waiter set down their orders: mint tea for Gabra, Turkish coffee (“Here we call it Egyptian coffee,” Gabra had reproved him) for Gideon.
“Here’s what I think,” Gideon said. “I think the skeleton was painted to keep anyone from realizing it was one
