Dead Men's Hearts

by Aaron Elkins

  It was all mildly amazing and a bit amusing to Gideon. At home Phil's life was an exercise in planned disorganization. Constantly behind in his schedule, constantly overlooking things like bills and appointments, perpetually late ("Sorry, I remembered I had to do the laundry." "Sorry, the rubber plant needed repotting."), he bumbled along from one day to another, happily enough, to be sure, but always seemingly on the edge of chaos. Here, in his professional capacity, he was a man of infinite capacity, his fingers on the strings of every available resource.

  During breakfast, a bright buffet of melons, figs, dates, tangerines, and warm loaves of sweet bread, Forrest went over the shooting schedule. All of the morning's interviews would take place in or around the Tel el-Amarna Museum not far from the ship. At 8:00, Haddon would talk about his early experiences there. At 9:30, it would be Gideon's turn; he would discuss Pharaoh Akhen-aten and his times. And Arlo would display and discuss some of the old finds from Lambert's day at 11:00. TJ had an off-day.

  "But which finds?" Arlo asked. "What do you want me to talk about?"

  "Anything," Forrest said. "Talk about jewelry."

  "Well... there is some jewelry here that I'm quite interested in myself, but I don't know—"

  "Fine, perfect."

  In his own way, Arlo looked pleased.

  "So long as it's visual," Forrest said.

  "Well, of course it's visual."

  "Fine, perfect."

  As Forrest went on, Arlo leaned worriedly toward Gideon. "What does he mean by visual?"

  "You've got me, Arlo."

  "Isn't jewelry visual? I mean, by definition?"

  "You'd sure think so."

  "I'm really not very good at this sort of thing," Arlo said.

  "Okay," Forrest said, "anybody who's not involved in the shooting, you're free to spend the morning wherever you want. But remember, the boat has to leave at one o'clock sharp, so please— give my ulcer a break and be back in plenty of time. We're on a tight schedule and I wouldn't even want to try to extend our time in Egypt."

  And miss even a single, splendid day of Anatolian boar-hunting, Gideon thought.

  Chapter Ten

  The Tel el-Amarna Museum stood at the desert's edge a few hundred yards from the river, a little more than a mile south of the huddled brown village of el-Till and hard against the scant remains of what had once been the King's Street in the great city of Akhetaten. No more than a utilitarian structure when constructed in 1913 as headquarters for Lambert's first excavation, the plain, one-story stucco building had been going downhill ever since. For twenty years after 1913 it had gone unused. In the 1930s, the University of Bern had taken it over for two decades. Then, in the 1950s, it had been turned over to the Egyptian government for use as a museum, but the money had never come through to properly maintain or staff it, and its finer pieces had gone one by one to more prestigious institutions. Now its undistinguished and slowly deteriorating collection was open to the public only a few afternoons a week, and irregularly at that.

  It was nobody's fault, Gideon knew. Egypt, possessor of the greatest accumulation of archaeological material in the world, also happened to be one of its poorest countries. If there wasn't enough money to shore up the Great Sphinx against the groundwater that was eating it away, or to safeguard Luxor Temple against the corrosive salts in its soil, what chance was there to turn the dowdy Tel el-Amarna Museum into anything special? And if they did, how many people would come to visit it? Why would anyone, given the mind-numbing wealth available in the rest of the country?

  Those members of the Horizon expedition who had the choice went elsewhere this morning. TJ took Julie on a tour of the ruined estates and houses that had made up the northern "suburbs" of Akhetaten, Bruno and Jerry trudged up the long incline to the famous painted cliff tombs on the ridge behind the city, Phil wandered around the village of el-Till making new friends, and Bea got a book and a pitcher of tea and went up to the Menshiya's sun deck.

  Gideon, Arlo, Haddon, and the film crew had the museum to themselves except for Dr. Ann, the cadaverous, understandably hangdog museum director, who hovered, apologetic and solicitous, in the background.

  Shooting began in the workroom, formerly a classroom in which a bright and single-minded twenty-year-old named Clifford Henry Haddon had been among those who had succeeded in penetrating the mysteries of hieroglyphic symbols at the feet of the celebrated Professor Heinrich Wiedermeister of the University of Bern.

  But this morning's interview, with Gideon watching from the back of the room, got off to a poor start. Haddon, standing in front of some racks of inscribed stone fragments and looking slightly ridiculous in an oversized bush jacket with enough shotgun-cartridge loops to satisfy the most bloodthirsty White Hunter, was stiff and fussy, squinting under the hot pole-lights. Patsy, cigarillo dangling from the corner of her mouth, was sweating grouchily over a tangle of wires while Cy, looking as if he might topple over asleep at any second, manned a videocamera set up on a tripod. Forrest, who had the ability to look bored and desperate at the same time, was alongside the camera, keeping his eyes mostly on a monitor a few feet away and prompting Haddon with edgy questions.

  "And so after you got your master's degree at Yale, you came directly here to work on the dig and study with Wiedermeister, is that right?" He was maintaining the singsong, doggedly cheerful tone employed by the edgy young when dealing with the recalcitrant elderly.

  "Well—"

  "Cut," Forrest said. "Please, Dr. Haddon, look, I don't mean to keep interrupting, but would you try not to start every sentence with 'well?" It was only 8:10 in the morning and already his smile was tight and glassy. "Okay? All right?"

  Haddon compressed his lips and nodded. His beard stuck out straighter.

  "All right, do you want to start again? Try to make it sound interesting now."

  "I will try," Haddon said, "difficult as it may prove."

  Things, Gideon thought, were not improving.

  Haddon waited for the signal to begin again, and peered frankly into the lens. "In the fall of 1944, with my master's degree in hand, I leaped at the chance to come—"

  "Cut," Forrest said. He smiled harder. "This is just great, really great, but it would be even better if you didn't look into the camera. It makes it a little severe. You know, like Uncle Sam saying 'I want you'? We can't have that, can we?"

  He laughed. Haddon glowered.

  Forrest's massive face arranged itself into a merry smile. "So. Just speak right to me, not to the camera. "Okay? All right?"

  Haddon gritted his teeth, nodded, and started when Forrest dropped his chin. "Well—"

  "Please." Forrest's voice was a little strangled. "No 'well's'. Okay? All—"

  "Young man, I will make a bargain with you," Haddon said. "If you stop saying 'Okay? All right?', I'll stop saying 'well.' How does that suit you?"

  Gideon winced. Tempers were already simmering, and it was just the first hour of the first morning of taping. Making a movie, a retired Port Angeles neighbor who had worked in Hollywood had once told him, was like making sausage. The finished product might be terrific, but you didn't necessarily want to watch the process.

  He made an unobtrusive exit and wandered for twenty minutes or so through the ill-lit, poorly labeled museum, but there wasn't much to hold his attention: broken stelae, fragmentary statues, a few shabby, anonymous mummies and mummy cases. All in all, watching the rest of Haddon's interview promised to be more uplifting.

  On the way back he passed a small library in which Arlo and Dr. Afifi stood at a table arranging five or six shoebox-sized containers.

  When Gideon entered, Dr. Ann excused himself and humbly backed out, leaving the room to the two Americans as if he had been the intruder.

  "Oh. Thank you, Doctor," Arlo called absently after him, staring dejectedly into the boxes. "Just look at this," he said to Gideon. "Nobody but an anthropologist would know this was anything but a pile of junk."

  "Mm," said Gideon. He was an
anthropologist, and it looked like a pile of junk to him.

  In the boxes, arranged without apparent design, were blackened, kinked strands of metal—probably low-quality gold— squashed into shapeless clumps; dull pebbles that on closer examination were drilled beads of faience, carnelian, and jasper, the remains of necklaces or collars that had fallen apart millennia before; flattened, crumpled, copper armlets and anklets; bent, broken amulets in the forms of fish and flowers; various gewgaws of faience, the ubiquitous glass paste of ancient Egypt. There were gobs of unrecognizable stuff with tags attached to them by red string—like toe tags in a mortuary, Gideon thought, and there was something appropriate in the parallel.

  It was material that had been in storage for fifty years, Arlo told him, ever since Lambert had excavated it; never written up in the literature, never even properly catalogued. Apparently it had been dug up out of the ground, brushed off, stuck in its boxes, and then utterly forgotten. If there had been any attempt at repair or restoration, there was no sign of it.

  It was Egyptian archaeology's old, familiar story, Gideon thought. There was simply too much, that was the problem. Too much material, too many eager excavators over too many decades, and not enough patient, expert people to make something of what came out of the ground. Even the great Cairo Museum was reputed to have an attic and two basements full of crates from the 1890s that they hadn't yet gotten around to opening.

  "They're no help to you in your book?" Gideon asked.

  Arlo uttered a rueful laugh. "Not in this condition. And half these things aren't jewelry anyway, despite the labels."

  He fingered a clump of dull metal strands in one of the boxes. Bits of black flecked off to join the layer of similar debris in the bottom. He picked up a small almond-shaped eye of black and white faience, rimmed with metal, and turned it disgustedly over. "The eye shows up frequently enough as an amulet motif in the Amarna Period," he said in a dusty, disheartened voice, "but never in its naturalistic form. Only as the Eye of Horus."

  Gideon nodded. The Eye of Horus, or udjat, with its characteristic, curling ornamentation, was familiar to anyone who had ever opened a book on Egyptian art. "What are they then?"

  "What?" Arlo shrugged and put it down. "Bits of toys, funerary objects, what difference does it make? No doubt they'd be of interest to others, but not to me." He flicked some of the other things with his fingers. "Very possibly there are some things here that might amount to something, but it would take someone months of restoration even to begin to know."

  "And you don't want to do it?"

  "Me? I wouldn't know how. I've spent my whole life as an epigrapher. I'm not like you, you know. I don't know how to do anything."

  Well, what was there to say to that? Arlo's doughy, woeful face and subdued little mustache, combined with the depressing state of the Tel el-Amarna Museum, was getting to him. His spirits, which had started the day blithely enough, were sinking fast. "I guess I'd better get back to the workroom, Arlo," he said. "I'm up next after Haddon, and Forrest will get nervous if I'm not around. He wants to shoot before the sun gets too bad."

  "Yes, do that." Arlo's eyes were still on the boxes of blackened metal. "Do you suppose I really ought to talk about this on camera, or find something else?"

  "I'd say something else," Gideon said gently. "Whatever 'visual' is, I don't think this is it."

  * * *

  When he peeked gingerly back into the workroom, Gideon found things much improved. Haddon, perhaps more relaxed now that he was used to the lights and the equipment, was being charming. In front of a broken tablet that had been mounted on the wall, he was bent sharply at the waist and had his head tipped ludicrously, as if he were trying to read the inscriptions upside down.

  Indeed, he explained for the camera (but looking at Forrest), he was reading them upside down because it was the only way he could translate them. That was the way he'd learned because in 1944, with the war going on, books were hard to come by. The class had been held—in this very room, sitting right at this very table—with only one copy of the text for old Professor Wieder-meister and his three students. The professor, a better scholar than he was a teacher, had mumbled his lectures with the book on the table in front of him, turned toward himself most of the time.

  "And I," Haddon said with a comical grimace, "had the misfortune to have the seat directly across from him."

  Forrest urged him on with a rolling wave of his hand. "Great," he mouthed. Gideon, smiling, thought so too. Haddon could be charming when he wanted to.

  "And let me assure you," Haddon added, twinkling away, "that was far from the worst aspect of sitting opposite him, in his line of fire, so to speak. Old Wiedermeister, you see, had the habit of chewing raw garlic cloves." He rolled his eyes. "The man had breath that could knock over an Apis bull at fifty yards."

  "Cut, that'll do it right there," said Forrest. "That was wonderful, Dr. Haddon, just outstanding." He was patently pleased but already glancing at his watch and worrying about the time. "Don't go anywhere, Gideon," he called over his shoulder. "We'll set up outside on the King's Street, in front of the palace."

  * * *

  King's Street. Palace. The words seemed overblown now, even ironic, Gideon mused aloud, trusting that the tiny lavaliere mike that Patsy had clipped onto his windbreaker was picking it up. His hand rested on a leaning, rusted stake that was part of the single-strand, barbed-wire fence surrounding what had once been the house of the pharaoh. The royal boulevard of Akhetaten was now the desolate, sandy track stretching away into the distance behind him, the remains of the royal palace all of two feet high. The gracious villas and open temples, the elegant pools and gardens, were desert once again. In the whole of this vast, once-glorious capital city, virtually nothing remained that was higher than the waist of a man.

  It had all been built of mud-brick that began to deteriorate the day it was made. In ancient Egypt, stone had been saved for the afterlife: for the tombs of the dead and the temples to the gods. Living people, from humble laborers to great pharaohs, had settled for sun-baked mud. In all of Egypt, with its hundreds of temples and thousands of tombs, not a single standing building remained to tell us how the ancients actually lived. What we knew, we knew from the clay models sometimes left in the tombs and— here Gideon waved an arm to encompass the acres of crumbling, desert-colored foundations glaring in the sun—excavations such as this one.

  "Very nice, very nice," Forrest said, nodding, as Gideon went on in this vein, "but could we get to the city itself now? And just stick to the main points, okay? All right?"

  Gideon had thought he was doing rather well but was willing to trust to Forrest as the director. "The royal city of Akhetaten—" he began accommodatingly.

  "And could you make it a little punchier? You know, just the main points? We're not looking for 'Ozymandias' here. No offense, but we have a boat to catch and I still have Arlo to do."

  Gideon took no offense, or hardly any. It was probably good for him to have somebody like Forrest around. His students were hardly in a position to tell him when he was getting windy, and he had recently noticed, as most professors did after a while, that his lectures mysteriously seemed to be getting longer with time.

  And he was glad now that he'd taken Julie's advice and decided not to start with a quotation from "Ozymandias" after all.

  Sticking closely to the main points, he told of how Akhenaten and his beautiful queen, Nefertiti, had decided in 1348 b.c. that the mighty priests and pantheon of Thebes had had their day. They had built this completely new capital city far to the north, and almost overnight the cult of Amon, supreme until then, had been stripped of its power. The new supreme deity—the only deity—was the god Aten, until then very small-fry indeed. The political and social ramifications were terrific.

  The Amarna Age it is called now, and its religious and artistic upheavals were tremendous. In religion, it was the beginning of the great tide of monotheism. In art, a revolutionary new style, naturalistic,
varied, and no longer unquestioningly reverential, burst on the scene. The famous head of Nefertiti, possibly the best-known piece of art in the world, had been sculpted in a studio in the workmen's village a few hundred yards from where Gideon was standing.

  Society, in short, had been stood on its ear—for a while. After Akhenaten's death, the supporters of Amon had their revenge. The city was razed. The court and all the people were moved back to Thebes. The subversive art style was purged. Images of Aten were obliterated. The name of Akhenaten was chipped out of inscriptions and struck from the historical roll of kings.

  The grand experiment had lasted fourteen years.

  "That's a wrap," Forrest said jubilantly. "Just great, Gideon. Nice and lively."

  Nice and short was what he meant, Gideon thought. Under half an hour in all. There would be plenty of time for Arlo's segment before they had to get back to the ship.

  Arlo's search had turned up a few modestly presentable items—part of an inscribed boundary stela, a bit of painted pavement, some fragmentary inscriptions dealing with Akhenaten's eldest daughter, Meritaten—and Forrest had agreed that they were sufficiently visual. It took a while to get the lights set up in the main exhibition room so that they didn't reflect off the glass cases, but finally everything was ready.

  Forrest pointed one finger at Arlo, who swallowed, and the other one at Cy, behind the camera. "All right, Arlo, tell us what's so interesting about that stela," he said, and to Cy: "Roll tape."

  Arlo peered woodenly and somewhat dazedly into the lens, like a frog gazing down the throat of a snake.

  "Well—" he began.

  Gideon quietly made his escape.

  Chapter Eleven

  "This could be a hundred years ago," Julie said dreamily.

  "Hm?" Gideon wasn't sure where his own thoughts had been, but he brought them back and turned toward the eastern shore, in the direction she was looking.