Dead Men's Hearts

by Aaron Elkins

  "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 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 Haddon'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?" Sale
h 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 out of proportion. It was odd, yes, but hardly earth-shattering.

  "Only one set of bones was missing," she said calmly, doing her best to emulate Jerry. "Whoever threw it out, and whatever reason he did it, we now have it back. In very short order, 4360 will be back in his snug little box again, as good as new."

  "Except for a gnawed bone here and there, and whatever was carried off by the rats," Haddon said, "but what's that among friends?"

  TJ eked out a smile. "Well, actually, I think the rats got to him back in the Fifth Dynasty. They usually don't find 4,400-year-old bones very appetizing."

  "I don't find any of this very appetizing."

  "Sir," Jerry put in, "you can rest assured that nothing like this will ever happen again. I'll go over the security arrangements with a fine-tooth comb—"

  What security arrangements would those be, TJ wondered.

  "—and make whatever changes are necessary. I'll clear them with you first."

  "Do," Haddon said aridly, and to TJ: "Shall we return to the scene of the crime, Doctor?"

  "Sure," said TJ, but wasn't this the scene of the crime?

  * * *

  Haddon picked up a femur and rubbed the dirt off with the heel of his hand. "Forty-three sixty," he read aloud, shaking his head. "Do you have any idea what a laughingstock we'll be if this gets out?"

  TJ studied her toes.

  Haddon dropped the bone back in the dust and wiped his hands on a handkerchief. "First," he said, "I want this area scoured for every bit of bone that can be found. You do it; your husband wouldn't know a metacarpal from a marshmallow. Then I want them cleaned and put back where they belong. And then I want this horrible enclosure torn down and its contents thrown away. I want it done immediately, is that understood? Have Mrs. Ebeid see to it."

  "Getting the garbage people to come out anytime soon is going to be a problem," TJ said. "They're—"

  "Bury it, then. Dig a hole, shovel it in, and cover it over. Use the whatever-it's-called."

  "Backhoe," said TJ. "There's a lot of stuff in here. It'd have to be a pretty big hole."

  "Well, put it—where was it Arlo suggested?—in the northeast corner, where Lambert's people used to bury their trash. That's appropriate enough; some of this rubbish has been around at least since then." He kicked disgustedly at an old-fashioned kerosene space heater, dented and rusty, and gestured with both arms. "What a pigsty. We should have had it cleaned out—" He stopped, frowning and uncertain, his eyes focused on something in his mind. "Wait a minute. Wasn't there ..."

  He turned to look at a corner of the enclosure, against which an old bed frame was propped. He pointed at the base of the bed frame. "There was a head there."

  "No, sir," TJ said after a second, "the skull was over here, by the—"

  "Not a skull, a head."

  "A—head?"

  "The head of a statue," he said irritably. "A statuette. What the devil did you think I meant?" He prowled around the enclosure, edging around bones and junk, his eyes searc
hing the ground. "Yellow jasper, or possibly quartzite—about half-life-size, I think. It's not here." He peered at her. "You didn't see it?"

  "No, sir," she said respectfully.

  "Don't take that tone with me, young woman. I was neither overtired nor intoxicated." But he seemed uncharacteristically indecisive on this point himself. He chewed at his lower lip. "Of course it was dark, and there was a great deal of excitement, what with Arlo hopping about, and the light flashing everywhere. It's possible that I may have been... didn't I point it out?"

  TJ shook her head. "I don't think so."

  "I didn't?" He grew more unsure still. "That's odd, I'm sure I remember ..." He poked randomly at piles of trash with his foot. "Well, it's not here now, at any rate."

  "No, it doesn't seem to be," TJ said.

  "Could someone have taken it?"

  "Taken it?" TJ said. "You mean, taken it? Between then and now?"

  "I mean—never mind." He continued to worry his lip. "Now that I think of it, I suppose it could have been an illusion caused by the flashlight beams. All those moving shadows ..."

  "I can ask the others if they saw it."

  "Yes, do. No, don't. We'll keep this between ourselves. I shouldn't want anyone to think ..." He cleared his throat and drew himself up, recovering some of his firmness. "And need I point out that nothing about this outlandish affair need be repeated to our visitors? There is no reason in the world for Bruno Gustafson or anyone else connected with the foundation to know anything about—"

  "Um," said Tiffany. She was trying to decide how—or whether—to break it to Haddon that Bruno already knew about the finding of the skeleton. He and Bea had provided the pizza and joined in its eating the previous night, and the discovery in the enclosure had naturally become the main topic of conversation once she, Arlo, and Jerry had arrived.

  "Um," she said again. "There's a slight problem—"

  "Hi!" Bruno himself said brightly, appearing magically at the entry to the enclosure. "What's going on in here?"

  Haddon blinked and walked toward him, blocking his view.

  "Why, good morning, my dear Mr. Gustafson. I understood that you were flying to Abu Simbel today."