“Swozzled,” agreed Jerry. “One of these nights he’s going to fall in the fountain and kill himself on his two a.m. rounds.”
“He makes rounds?” Arlo asked. “At night? I knew he was an insomniac, but-”
“You don’t see him,” Jerry said. “Your window faces the other way. He prowls around till two or three in the morning, talking to himself and falling over stuff.”
TJ was shaking her head. “You know, it’s really not that he drinks that much. It’s the interaction with the medications he’s on that does it; that stuff for anxiety, or depression, or whatever he takes. I’m surprised he can see straight.”
“Now what in the world does he have to be depressed about?” Arlo asked. “We’re the ones who have to work for him.”
Jerry laughed. “If you had to be Clifford Haddon, you wouldn’t be depressed?”
“You certainly have a point there,” Arlo said, pressing his eyes with his fingertips. “Well, I guess I’d better get to bed too.”
“Not me,” Jerry said, stretching. “I left Forrest and his crew over in the annex with some six-packs and pizza, and I bet they’re still there. I know I could use a couple of beers.”
“God knows, so could I,” TJ said fervently.
“You can say that again,” said Arlo after a moment’s reflection.
Chapter Five
Whatever aura of mystery had hung over the storage enclosure the night before, it was not in evidence in the dusty, flat 9 a.m. sunlight of the next morning. The enclosure looked like what it was, a squalid, fifteen-square-foot pen crammed with the household and workplace castoffs of years. Most of it-the shabby, anonymous clothing, the moldy automobile cushions, the time-grayed newspapers-was peacefully disintegrating. Some-the broken toilet bowl, the warped plastic coat hangers-would be around for future generations of archaeologists to potter blissfully among.
Major Yussef Saleh and Sergeant Monir Gabra of the Qena Governate Police, Criminal Investigation Division, had been pottering for half an hour. They were not blissful. They had located, in addition to the bones found the night before, the other half of the pelvis, a few long bones and ribs they took to be human, and several irregular smaller pieces that they thought might be human hand or foot bones. They had found no signs of foul play and hoped they would not; sorting through the broken tools, discarded utensils, and rusty, unidentifiable pieces of metal in search of a probable blunt or pointed instrument of death was a task neither of them cared to think about.
Following proper police procedure, the bones had not been disturbed until they had been photographed and their positions sketched and described. Then, kneeling on a cracked rubber that that they had found among the junk, they delicately turned over the skull.
After a moment, the two men looked at each other with puzzled expressions.
“Yes?” Clifford Haddon glanced up, not pleased to be interrupted. When he saw that it was Major Saleh, his tone became more cordial. “Ah, yes, Major, may I help you?”
“Will you come with us, please?”
Haddon stiffened. Spots of deeper color popped out on his pink throat. “Come with you-where?”
“To the storage enclosure,” Saleh said. “I would like to ask you about something if you can spare a few minutes.”
“The-” The spots disappeared. “Oh, yes, certainly. Of course, Major.” He stood up and looked at TJ. “Will you come too, please, Dr. Baroff?”
“Certainly, Dr. Haddon,” TJ said, formality for formality. The object, she supposed, was to impress the Egyptian police with the businesslike decorum of Horizon House. Well, what they didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them.
She closed the budget file on which she had been briefing him so that he could continue to delude the visiting Gustafsons into thinking that he had his finger on the pulse of Horizon House’s operations, and rose to join them. She knew perfectly well why Haddon had asked her to come along. He was afraid the officers might ask him something he didn’t know the answer to-which covered one hell of a lot of ground-and he wanted TJ, who took her administrative role as assistant director seriously, at his side to bail him out.
Well, fine. Anything was better than sitting alone in a room with him, trying to explain item after item, none of which he knew anything about, but on all of which he was maddeningly ready to lecture her at mind-numbing length.
“You’ve found something, then?” Haddon asked the major as the four of them followed the network of flower-bordered gravel pathways to the storage enclosure.
But Major Saleh wasn’t there to answer questions. “This area, it has not been used in how long?”
“Five years,” Haddon said. “That’s correct, isn’t it, Dr. Baroff?”
“Right, everything in it was ruined in those colossal rains.”
Saleh nodded his remembrance. With Upper Egypt averaging a fraction of an inch of rain a year, no one who lived there would be likely to forget the eighteen-hour deluge that had dropped more rain in a single day than most of them would see for the rest of their lives.
“So we built a new, roofed storage area onto the garage,” TJ went on, “and haven’t used the old one since. Well, for a while it was a sort of dump for things, but not anymore.”
“You know,” Haddon said, “we really should clean the place out and knock it down. It’s disgusting. Breeding area for rats and all sorts of disagreeable things. I had no idea.”
TJ gritted her teeth and glared at him. How many times had she told that to Haddon in the last five years? Ten? Twenty?
“Dr. Haddon-” she began, but clamped her mouth shut. Not in front of strangers. Not in front of anybody. She had borne him all these years without ever once becoming really, thoroughly unglued, and she could make it through to the following September. In less than a year he would be retired, with any luck at all they would appoint her director, and it would be a bright new world.
Of course she’d be a nut case by then, but nobody but she was going to know it.
Once in the enclosure, the policemen led them to the skull, which had been turned from its upside-down position onto its right side. “Please examine it for yourself,” Saleh said. He stood aside to give them room.
The two Egyptologists looked at the skull, TJ on one knee, Haddon leaning over from the waist. The policemen stood quietly, obviously waiting for a response.
“What are we supposed to be looking for?” TJ asked.
But Haddon was quicker than she was. He pointed indignantly at the skull. “What’s this?”
With her eyes she followed the direction of his finger. There on the left side of the frontal bone, a line of letters in faded black ink barely showed against the brownish ivory of the bone. No, not letters, numbers. She leaned closer.
“F4360,” she murmured. “I’ll be damned.”
“What does this mean?” Haddon demanded, addressing the major. “Who wrote this?”
“Yes, this needs knowing,” Saleh agreed.
“It’s one of ours,” TJ said and sat back on her heels, barely able to keep from laughing. “The damn thing is from our own collection.”
The two officers exchanged a look.
Haddon stood up angrily, brushing off his knees although he had never been on them. “Do you mean to say the cursed thing is an archaeological specimen-one of our archaeological specimens?”
“F4360 is Fuqani 4360,” TJ told Saleh. “It’s from el-Fuqani, the Old Kingdom cemetery that was dug up in the 1920s.” And now she did laugh. “You’ve got yourself a tough nut to crack, Major. Give or take a few years, he’s been dead since 2400 B.C.”
Saleh’s smile was perfunctory and reserved. He was large for an Egyptian, with a smooth, impassive face and a knack for making you feel that you were keeping him from really important duties.
And we are, TJ thought. There had been another “incident of unrest” yesterday, this time not far from
