Aaron Elkins: Dead men’s hearts

“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-”

“Urn,” 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.

“Urn,” 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.”

“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.

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.