Karnak, in which fundamentalist crackpots had shot at a tour bus. An Australian woman had been wounded.
Haddon was fuming. “If he’s been dead for over four thousand years, perhaps someone would explain to me how he came to be wearing modern dress.” He pointed to the shoulder and arm bones protruding from a snarl of twisted galabiya; the cloth was clearly from the present day, a cheap, everyday material patterned with gray stripes, more filthy than rotted.
“Ah, but he wasn’t,” Saleh said. “These bones were not inside the garment, they were merely caught up in the cloth. These remains have been gnawed on by small animals, and dragged here and there across the ground. Is it surprising they became trapped in the cloth? Show them the numbers, Gabra.”
The sergeant, some ten years older than his superior, squatted at the tangle of bones and cloth and gently turned the bones over. In the same faded ink, in the same precise, spidery, old-fashioned hand, F4360 had been written on the humerus and on the back of the scapula.
“It’s on all the bones?” Haddon asked.
“Yes, sir, all bones with big sizes,” said Gabra. “I think this lady’s conclusion must be so. See how brown and dry are the bones? From olden times, assuredly.” His English was less orthodox than the major’s, but livelier.
Haddon turned grimly to TJ. “I think we’d better see what your husband has to say about this.”
TJ nodded, but she didn’t hold out any hope that Jerry would be able to shed much light on things. They had both come to Horizon House seven years earlier, hired as a team; TJ as a staff archaeologist and Jerry as administrator of the extensive library. It had taken four months before he’d happened to notice that his official title was librarian/registrar, and when he’d asked Haddon what that meant, he’d learned that he was also in charge of the old collection of artifacts and skeletal remains-at least to the extent that anyone was in charge. In reality, neither Haddon nor anyone else (including Jerry) gave much of a damn about it.
Even TJ didn’t. The fact was, it wasn’t much of a collection. Ninety percent of it had been excavated in the 1920s by the famous-to some, the infamous-Cordell Lambert. Those had been the days when most Egyptologists were still glorified grave-robbers, and Lambert, an Arizona copper magnate turned ardent archaeologist in his fifties, was even less well-trained than most. Objects had been torn out of the ground with no concern for stratigraphy or relationships. The few really extraordinary pieces had found their way into museums and private collections outside of the country; the best of the rest had been commandeered by the Egyptian government; and whatever was left had been exhibited in Lambert’s “museum” for a few years and then gone into storage to be forgotten.
The el-Fuqani skeletal collection was squarely in the last category. Crudely dug up and primitively processed, it had been placed in storage in 1927 and lain there ever since, exciting no interest, scholarly or otherwise. Why anyone would take the trouble to remove one of them and toss it into the junk pile was anybody’s guess.
They found Jerry in his office off the library reading room. When he was told that the mysterious remains were apparently those of a Bronze Age man from the time of Userkaf, first pharaoh of the Fifth Dynasty, he too burst out laughing, which didn’t appear to improve Saleh’s mood any, or Had-don’s either. But a discreet gleam of amusement appeared to play about Sergeant Gabra’s dark eyes.
“And how did they get there?” the director asked crossly.
Jerry shook his head blankly. “Don’t ask me.”
“Perhaps we could now go and see where this collection is kept?” Saleh said, civil but manifestly impatient.
“Sure,” Jerry said, “you bet, good idea.” He unfolded his skinny frame from behind the desk. “Right this way.”
He took them across a path to the modest but roomy structure known as the annex. It had been constructed by Lambert as his museum, but it had been decades since it had served as anything but a workspace and a repository for bones and artifacts.
As they entered Jerry grasped TJ’s wrist and spoke in a whisper. “Where is this stuff, exactly?”
She laughed. “Are you serious? You don’t know where the el-Fuqani material is? You’re supposed to be the registrar.”
“Listen, I’m lucky I know what it is.”
“Back of the storeroom off Workroom A,” she told him.
As they crossed the workroom with its pottery fragments in open trays and its containers of glue and preservatives, Saleh sniffed the air appraisingly. “I smell… what is it?”
Gabra knit his brow. “Pizza?”
“Must be the glue,” Jerry said, straight-faced. He led them confidently through the storeroom to a floor-to- ceiling set of open metal racks on the end of which was taped a flyblown, typewritten placard: “El-Fuqani, 1921-23, C. Lambert.” The three-shelf racks were loaded with heavy cardboard boxes stacked two high. Jerry moved down the racks, forefinger extended, scanning the numbers on the front of the boxes. A few stacks in, he stopped.
“Here we go, 4360.”
He pulled out the box, set it on an empty rack, and, with a flourish, swept off the lid.
Except for a crumbly accumulation of bone dust, it was empty.
“So,” Saleh said with his cool smile, “the mystery is solved. Nothing very serious, it seems.”
Haddon’s bearded jaw had stiffened. “I consider it quite serious enough,” he said, looking directly at Jerry. “These specimens are housed here on the assumption that they be given proper care and protection. They have received that protection for some seventy years, but now it seems that some rather slipshod practices have been allowed to take hold.”
“I’ll look into the matter, sir,” Jerry said with that serenity that sometimes infuriated TJ, sometimes filled her with admiration, and never stopped amazing her. Even after living with him for twelve years. How did he do it? And he wasn’t even nursing an ulcer from suppressed emotions; he just didn’t give a damn. In his place, she thought, flames would be shooting out of her nose.
“I think we’d better look into it right now,” Haddon snapped, “while we still have the services of these good gentlemen.”
“I don’t know what-”
“How many more of our specimens have been made off with? Are any of them still in their boxes?”
The same question had occurred to TJ, but she had hoped to examine the rest of the collection with Jerry later on, without anybody-especially and above all others, Clifford Haddon-watching balefully over their shoulders, waiting to pounce.
“Well, let’s just see,” Jerry said amiably, and took the lid from 4370, the box that had been beneath 4360. It was full of old brown bones. So was 4340, 4350, and 4370. So were the other fifty-two boxes. Everything was as it should have been; only 4360 was not peacefully resting where it was supposed to be.
Gabra, who had opened cartons with the others-Saleh had stood watching, glancing occasionally at his watch- rubbed dust from his hands. “Very good. Merely an error of some untrue sort.”
“Gentlemen,” Haddon said ardently, “you have my sincere apologies for wasting so much of your time.”
“I assure you, it was no trouble,” Saleh said formally. “I am only happy that it was not a more serious matter requiring continued police attention.”
“No, no, I take full responsibility for the actions and oversights of my staff.”
TJ silently ground her teeth again. What an unfailingly petty sonofabitch the man was. In his spiteful, self- centered way he managed to see all this as some kind of personal loss of face, which meant, from his point of view, that somebody- anybody but him-had to be blamed.
“Please, please,” said Gabra, who seemed like a nice guy. “It was a most interesting morning with no apologies being necessary.”
This elicited a few curt, unintelligible syllables in Arabic from Saleh, and a moment later the policemen had gone, leaving Haddon, Jerry, and TJ staring at one another over the empty box.
“I hope you understand,” Haddon said, “how deeply displeased I am, and that I am forced to consider the two of you responsible for the lapse in proper procedure that allowed this ludicrous incident to take place. As the major said, we’re fortunate it wasn’t more serious. This entire collection might well have been walked off with.”
“Dr. Haddon, let’s look at this reasonably for a minute,” TJ said. She didn’t feel like being reasonable, she felt like bashing him with the Seventeenth Dynasty stone jug on the rack behind him. Seven years she’d been there, and never once until now had she heard him express the slightest interest in the skeletal collection. If he’d ever been in this room before, it was news to her. So why all this goddamn fuss now? He was blowing a trivial, silly incident all
