Aaron Elkins: Dead men’s hearts

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?

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 Had-don’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.