Dead Men's Hearts

by Aaron Elkins

  "Nope, just Bea. I've been there before and it's just—Hey, looka here—TJ, is that the skull you were talking about?"

  Haddon glowered murderously at her.

  TJ cleared her throat. "Uh, well, actually, Mr. Gustafson, it's, uh—"

  Haddon flung up his hands. "Never mind!" he shouted skyward. "We at Horizon House have no secrets. We are an open book. Tell all, tell all!" And he stamped off, his tuft of beard stiffly leading the way.

  A momentarily crestfallen Bruno watched him go. "What did I say?"

  TJ smiled. "Nothing, he's been under a little strain, that's all. It's nothing personal."

  "Glad to hear it. Hope he's okay." He looked happily down at the skull. "So tell me, what's the story?"

  "It's a long one, Mr. Gustafson," TJ said.

  Chapter Six

  Gideon was not at his most scintillating. He was, in fact, having trouble keeping awake. It had been a long couple of days.

  He and Julie had left Port Angeles before dawn the previous morning, starting with a three-hour trip by car and ferry to the airport. Then a long wait at SeaTac, followed by sixteen grubby hours and ten increasingly debilitating time-zone changes to Cairo International Airport. This was followed by a hair-whitening forty-five-minute taxi ride into the city to clear up a problem with their visas, and then back to the airport by means of a taxi journey that was marginally less bloodcurdling than the first one (or were they already getting used to it?). They'd missed their flight to Luxor and had had to wait for two hours in the grungy, noisy airport, fidgety and disoriented, until the next one left.

  They had arrived at Horizon House in time for a shower, a dazed tour of the facility and a round of introductions, followed by cocktails that they hardly needed but accepted anyway, and a heavy "roast beef" dinner that Gideon was fairly certain had been water buffalo, not that his taste buds were at their most discriminating.

  Afterward, as he did most evenings, Haddon had invited a few people to his study for after-dinner drinks and a little anthropological chitchat. Julie had wisely declined, going off to bed instead, but Gideon had accepted for courtesy's sake. Grainy-eyed and dopey, he was doing his best to participate, but it was a losing battle. And the subject matter wasn't helping things. Since halfway through dinner they had been mired in a lexicological discussion, or rather a lexicological lecture by Clifford Haddon, on the vagaries of Middle Egyptian script.

  But then Clifford Haddon was famously more at home in the remote past than in the present. Gideon had never met him before, but had heard it said of him that while teaching in the classics department at Yale in the 1950s, he would stand at the blackboard drawing wonderfully detailed street maps of ancient Alexandria, or Herculaneum, or fifth-century Athens ("This was where Socrates lived, this would have been the house of Alcibiades ...") but would have to rely on the kindness of colleagues to drive him to and from campus because he could never get the hang of downtown New Haven. In the same way, he knew most of the many versions and derivatives of hieroglyphic script, along with ancient Greek, Latin, Sumerian, and Coptic—but, even after eighteen years in Egypt, had never bothered learning more than a few catchphrases of modern Arabic.

  Gideon had found the stories amusing, but the man in the flesh considerably less so. And Middle Egyptian was heavy going, particularly on thirty hours without sleep.

  "And so, despite the predilections of contemporary scholarship," Haddon was saying, brandy in hand, his slight body at ease in the old leather chair, "I continue to adhere to my original view that the splitting of the determined infinitive in Middle Egyptian was far more widespread than is commonly understood, even today." He had been in full pedantic flight for some time.

  "Fascinating," Gideon said, not above borrowing a leaf from Rupert LeMoyne's book in a time of need.

  Still, he had to admit that there was a certain fusty charm to Haddon's speech, a Victorian cast that went well with their surroundings. They were in Haddon's two-story study, a big, headmasterish room straight out of Goodbye, Mr. Chips and dating back to the days of Cordell Lambert, the first director of what was then known as the American Institute of Egyptian Studies. Along one wall was a dark sideboard with cut-crystal flasks and glasses from which Haddon had offered port and cognac (no takers except Haddon himself and Bruno Gustafson). Next to it was a black iron staircase that spiraled up to the narrow, railed mezzanine that gave access to the room's chief glory, the Lambert Egyptological Library, housed in section after section of finely made, glass-fronted cabinetry.

  In the main part of the room, on a threadbare rug over a red tile floor, were a chunky Victorian two-seater and two worn, deeply buttoned, burgundy leather armchairs arranged to face a formidable, homely old desk with scalloped edges and a glass plate on top.

  In books on the history of Egyptology there was usually an old photograph of a stiffly posed Cordell Lambert, chin in hand, sitting at this very desk, in this very room—only the walls were different; flowered wallpaper instead of today's off-white paint—and it was behind the same desk that the current director, Clifford Haddon, now sat so comfortably. Gideon was in one of the armchairs, Bruno Gustafson was in the other (Bea had gone off to bed), and, side by side on the uncomfortable-looking two-seater were Tiffany Jane ("Call me TJ. Or else.") Baroff, Horizon's assistant director and supervisor of field activities, and Arlo Gerber, the head of epigraphy.

  TJ Baroff was an outspoken, strapping woman in her mid-thirties, leggy and casual. When they'd arrived she'd been wearing wrinkled tan shorts, an oversized man's work shirt, and dirty Converses. Now, in a clean T-shirt and wraparound skirt, barelegged and sandaled, she still looked like what she was: a field archaeologist at her happiest grubbing in the dirt for a crumbling fragment of a clay cooking pot. Her roughly pulled-back hair was sun-streaked, her arms and legs chapped and sunburnt, her knees scuffed.

  Gideon had liked her right off. During dinner she had helped keep his chin from settling into his soup with a hearty denunciation of the fossilized, old-style Egyptologists—if she included Haddon she didn't say so—who had ruled Egyptology for so long and were more like dilettantish linguists and classicists than real anthropologists, more interested in quibbling over verb-form distinctions and royal family trees than in using the techniques of modern archaeology to reconstruct the lives and institutions of the ancient Egyptian people. Not her; she'd ten times rather discover a peasant's hut full of everyday tools and utensils that said something about real, daily life than be the one to find the legendary sun temple of Nefertiti.

  Gideon felt the same way and said so.

  Arlo Gerber, who had sat next to Gideon at dinner, was another sort, a defeated, indoorsy kind of man with an ashy pallor that was common enough in Seattle, but must have been no mean trick to maintain living year-round in Luxor. In his early forties, he could hardly be called a fossil yet, but it wasn't going to take long. Hunched, narrow-shouldered, and restrained—well, stuffy—with graying temples and a sorry little cat's-whiskers mustache, Arlo was a classically trained Egyptologist whose job it was to supervise the intricate, exacting process of Horizon's epigraphic unit. There, weathered and broken stone texts and scenes were reconstructed, interpreted, and recorded through a complex technique involving photography, line drawings, blueprints, and—above all—the scholarship of men like Arlo.

  To be honest, five years of it was enough, he had told Gideon. But what he was excited about, and he knew Gideon would be interested in this, was the book he was working on, Personal Ornamentation from the Time of Akhenaten. Saying the title did for him what saying "Shazam" did for Billy Batson. Behind that modest brow, mental muscles of steel had suddenly flexed and rippled. His pale eyes had gleamed. He had pulled his chair a few inches closer to Gideon's, the better to talk about it. Wasn't it extraordinary how little had been done on Amarna Period jewelry? There was some material in Aldred, of course, but that was about it as far as anything of breadth and substance went. Wasn't it high time that this sad situation was rectified?r />
  Gideon, working hard to keep his chin out of the mashed potatoes, had said that it certainly was.

  That had been an hour ago. Now he glanced up at the pendulum clock on the wall. Nine-forty. They'd been in Haddon's study only fifteen minutes. He would give it another twenty to be polite, and then call it quits. Any more than that and they'd have to carry him to his room.

  Haddon was sipping brandy and staring at the ceiling, apparently gathering further thoughts on the determined infinitive in Middle Egyptian.

  "Any promising fieldwork going on these days, TJ?" Gideon asked, in hopes of heading him off.

  TJ came out of her own reverie. "What? Well, yes, as a matter of fact. We're in our fifth season of a dig right across the river, in the Western Valley. It's a workers' community—something like Deir el-Medinah, but not as big. Lambert originally excavated most of it in the 1920s, but in those days they didn't have the techniques to do the kind of job we can do today, and we're doing it right this time. We're learning a lot about New Kingdom daily life—ordinary people, I mean, not the royal court."

  "It sounds interesting," Gideon said. "Maybe I could get out to see it sometime this week?"

  TJ's teeth flashed. "Sure! Just tell me when—"

  "You know," Haddon said airily, his eyes still on the ceiling, his hands clasped behind his neck, "I was just thinking: these questions pertaining to the split infinitive bring naturally to mind the controversy over the supposed use of the independent pronoun to express a relation of possession. In that matter, I must respectfully take issue with Gardiner's views. I believe I can do so persuasively. Ahem."

  Gideon steeled himself, but the courageous Bruno took advantage of Haddon's cogitative pause to change the subject.

  "Say, did you ever find out any more about those bones?" he asked the director.

  Gideon perked up a little. Bones?

  Haddon turned abruptly snappish. "There was nothing to find out. It's all been taken care of with no harm done."

  "What do you mean, nothing to find out? What about what it was doing there?"

  "Honestly, Mr. Gustafson, it was no more than—"

  "Seemed to me like something for the Skeleton Detective," the impervious Bruno continued. He looked toward Gideon with a jocular wiggle of the eyebrows. "The Case of the Body in the Dustbin."

  Haddon smiled thinly. "I doubt very much if it would hold Dr. Oliver's interest."

  He was wrong, of course. Bones could always hold his interest. And compared to Middle Egyptian split infinitives, they were spellbinding. "Actually—" he began.

  "And what about that head?" Bruno asked. "I heard—"

  Haddon yawned delicately, tapping his mouth with his fingers. "I do beg your pardon," he said. "Obviously, it's past my bedtime. And Dr. Oliver must be positively exhausted. How thoughtless of me to keep you up. Tomorrow's another day."

  After that there wasn't much to say other than good night.

  * * *

  The living quarters at Horizon House—twelve bunk-bed cubicles for graduate students and seasonal staff, eleven roomier but no less Spartan rooms for permanent staff and visitors, and the director's two-room apartment—all opened off the handsome courtyard-patio with its arched portico, its fig and mango trees, and its tinkling, tiled Moorish fountain. Gideon and Julie's room was in the north wing where the accommodations for visiting VIPs were located along with two rooms for married staff. Bruno, who was a visiting VIP if there ever was one, had chosen instead to stay at the New Winter Palace Hotel (or rather Bea had; if she was going to go traipsing around the Third World, she'd declared, she was damn well going to do it first-class). He headed for the front gate of the compound, where the guard would call him a taxi, leaving Gideon, TJ, and a yawning Arlo to walk across the tiled patio to their quarters.

  Jerry Baroff, whom Gideon had met at dinner, was sprawled in one of the rattan garden chairs in the dark, feet up on a low table and placidly smoking his pipe.

  "Hi," he said, "how'd the seminar on Middle Egyptian go?"

  Gideon smiled. "You mean the subject's always the same?"

  "Uh-uh, lucky guess. Sometimes it's the Co-regency. I don't know, tonight just felt like Middle Egyptian." He pointed the bit of his pipe at them. "Verb forms, am I right?"

  "Right on," TJ said, laughing. "Right up until Bruno brought up the bones, and then it was 'Good night, ladies.’”

  "What was that all about?" Gideon said. "I didn't have a chance to ask."

  "Good God, it'd take all night to tell," Arlo said. "You must be falling off your feet."

  "Not really," he said truthfully. "I'm dragging, all right, but I'm not sleepy."

  Jerry hooked a skinny ankle around another chair and pulled it toward Gideon. "Have a seat, then." He got up in loosely coordinated segments and brought another one for TJ. Arlo, who seemed torn between staying and leaving, finally sat down too, but on the edge of the chair, prepared to leave at any moment.

  Gideon was happy to stay outdoors for a while longer. Their room was on the musty side, and Julie would be profoundly, unwakeably asleep anyway. Out here the night air was fragrant with flower blossoms and pipe tobacco, the breeze soft, the purling of the fountain timeless and serene. The thick stucco walls surrounding the patio softened the steady traffic noises.

  TJ flopped into her chair and swung a knee over the armrest. "Okay, we've got this Fifth Dynasty skeletal collection that we keep in the museum ..."

  Ten minutes later, with occasional help from Arlo and Jerry, she'd finished.

  "That's strange, all right," Gideon said. "But you know, people are always stealing stuff from skeletal collections. They make good souvenirs, I guess."

  "And dumping them in the trash fifty yards away?" she asked.

  "Well, that part's funny," he agreed. After a moment he said: "Was there anything special about this particular skeleton?"

  TJ shrugged. "Not that I could see. I think it's a male, but that's about all I could... I don't suppose you'd like to take a look, would you? You could do it now. It'd only take a minute."

  Gideon smiled, more wide awake than he'd been for hours. "Let's go."

  "I'll come too," Jerry said. "What do you say, Arlo?"

  Arlo raised his hands. "Spare me," he said with feeling. "I've done all the looking at bones I care to for some time to come, thank you. They're all yours."

  Chapter Seven

  In roughly anatomical position, under ferociously bright fluorescent lights, on a scarred, rimmed, metal table, they lay where Gideon had placed them: a skull, both femurs, both tibias, one fibula, three vertebrae, four ribs, a right scapula and humerus, and the bones of the pelvic girdle. Some, according to TJ and Jerry, had been attached when discovered, but handling since then had disarticulated them. A handful of smaller bones had been pushed to a corner of the table as being from rodents; all except a couple of metacarpals and the first phalanx of the right index finger, which were anatomically placed with the others.

  These, Gideon thought, looking down at them, are my kind of bones: ancient, brown, desiccated. Archaeological, not forensic. Nothing wet, nothing smelly, nothing nasty. And from a man so remote in time that it would have been affectation to talk with sadness or solemnity about his death. But not so remote that the bones didn't form a link back to him. Gideon ran a hand down the smooth, flat surface of a tibia and thought, with a feeling that would have been hard to describe, although he'd had it often enough: I am touching a man who ate, and walked, and laughed, and made love in the Bronze Age, a thousand years before King Solomon, two thousand years and more before Julius Caesar and Jesus Christ.

  "You said he's from about 2400 B.C.?" he asked.

  "That's right," TJ said, "Fifth Dynasty. Four thousand, four hundred years ago."

  "Four thousand, four hundred and seven, if you want to be exact," Jerry said.

  TJ looked at him. "Now how in the world would you know that?"

  "Because," Jerry said, "I remember you telling me when we first started here th
at the el-Fuqani material was 4,400 years old. And that was seven years ago. So ..."

  They all laughed. "Well," Gideon said, "then we know that 4,407 years ago, our friend here got himself done in by a nasty crack on the head." He patted a narrow, four-inch-long fracture in the right parietal, running diagonally forward and down to the coronal suture.

  The others craned forward. "This little crack killed him?" Jerry asked.

  "That's the way it can be with brain injuries and subdural hematomas."

  "Subdural whats?"

  "Hematomas. Internal effusions of blood. Leading cause of death in head injuries. Sometimes there's no visible damage to the skull at all."

  "Yeah, but you can't know that that's what killed him, can you?" Jerry asked "I mean, other people get skull fractures and live. I had one myself when I was a kid, bigger than this, and I'm doing just fine, thanks." He scratched the corner of his mouth with his pipe. "Well, fairly well."

  Gideon smiled. "Sure, but I think we can assume that yours has healed, Jerry. This guy's hasn't. That means he died before it had a chance to start mending. Which means the chances are very good that it's what killed him. Of course, it's possible that something else might have done it, so if we want to stay within the realm of certainty, all we can say is that he received a severe head injury very shortly before his death."

  "Well, yeah, I guess I can accept that," Jerry said, getting out his tobacco again.

  TJ gave him a brisk double-tap on the shoulder. "Good of you, old chap. So, Gideon, aside from that, is there anything special about him?"

  "Give me a minute and we'll see," Gideon said.

  Using the usual criteria on the skull and pelvis, he had already established that it was a "him," and probably middle-aged. There was some arthritic lipping on the vertebrae, but not much, which meant that he'd probably made it into his forties, but not out of his sixties. The sutures on the skull, not the most reliable of indicators, were mostly sealed, but parts of the later-closing ones—the sphenotemporal, the parietomastoid, the squamous—were still open, suggesting an age in the forties, maybe the fifties. Except for the oddly worn-down incisors (what in the world had this guy been gnawing on?), tooth wear was about right for a man in his middle years too. Taken all together, he estimated the age at forty to sixty-five.