Aaron Elkins - Dead men’s hearts

Beyond that, Gideon was in muddy waters. He barely knew the difference between a money order and a certified check. In the Oliver household it was Julie who handled high finance.

“What would you suggest?” he said.

Hassan plucked at his lower lip. “Well, I don’t think a foreign draft would be a very good idea, and a wire transfer would complicate everything, wouldn’t you say?”

“Yes, that’s very true.”

“Your bank has a branch in Cairo?”

“Of course.”

“Good. Then why not a treasurer’s check?”

“Fine, good idea.”

“That way,” Hassan said, “you won’t have to use your real name.”

Gideon swallowed. “Mr. Hassan-”

The dealer held up his hand. “I know, I know. You assure me. Listen, Mr. Smith, or Mr. Jones, or Mr. Wilson, I don’t know what your name is, and I don’t care. I don’t ask questions, and I don’t answer them. There’s only one thing I care about: can you raise $40,000 in the next two days?”

“I can raise it,” Gideon said. “I’ll have it for you by tomorrow afternoon. Where shall I meet you?”

Hassan sat back, still pulling on his lip. “Can you find the el-Fishawy cafe again?”

“Where I was tonight? Yes.”

“Good. Six o’clock? You’ll have the money?”

“Naturally. You’ll have the statuette?”

“Naturally. He stood to shake hands a final time, rumbling contentedly, ”Until tomorrow, my dear Mr. John Smith.“

“Not a chance,” Julie said, squinting up at him from the umbrellaed folding table where she sat sorting potsherds under the flat, dazzling sky of the Western Valley. “I’m going with you.”

“I’m just going back to the House to get Red Land, Black Land and a couple of other things before I go on camera. I’ll be back by noon.” He smiled and put a finger on the bridge of her nose. “Your nose crinkles when you squint, did anybody ever tell you that? It’s that sexy little pyramidalis nasi of yours that does it.”

She shook her head, unmoved by these blandishments. “You’re not going anywhere by yourself, pal. You’re on probation.” She reached under the table, slung her bag over her shoulder, and stood up. “All right, let’s go.”

Gideon laughed. It had been this way since he’d returned to Horizon House the previous night after his meeting with Ali Hassan. He had come back to their room after a blindfolded ride to Luxor to find her standing there with Phil, pale with worry and close to tears. Phil, also concerned about him, had just used the telephone downstairs to call police headquarters, hoping that Gabra, with traditional Egyptian disdain for normal working hours, might still be at his desk.

He was, and Phil had been about to leave for his office when Gideon appeared.

Instead, all three of them had taken a taxi to the police station, Julie asserting her determination not to give them a chance to get into any more trouble on their own. She had pressed herself close to Gideon’s side during the ten-minute drive, mute and fragile, and he had kept his arm around her, brimming with contrition and with love. “I’m fine,” he murmured into her ear again and again. “I’m fine, Julie.”

By the time they pulled up at the station she was herself again.

“One suggestion,” she said as they walked up the steps.

Gideon looked at her.

“You might do better in there without the beard.”

“The-?” He snatched it off his face.

Gabra had been in a bad mood to begin with, and he had been stonily unamused by their story, but eventually Phil’s enthusiasm-he was back to thinking it had been a jolly adventure-had swayed him, and he had begun to see the good side. A simple plan quickly evolved. Undercover law enforcement people in sufficiently disreputable-looking galabiyas would begin drifting into the cafe at 5 p.m., an hour before the meeting with Ali Hassan, and station themselves at several tables. Gabra would be in a car a block away. As soon as Gideon came in and sat down with Hassan, the police would quietly appear at the table and it would be over before it began. No complicated sting operation, no money changing hands, nothing dangerous at all. Even Julie’s mind had been put at ease.

But not so much that she had let him get out of her sight since. At first he’d grumbled about it, but the truth was that he loved it when she fussed over him and she knew it, so there wasn’t much point in grumbling.

They had breakfasted at Horizon House with the dig crew at 5 a.m., then joined them on the public ferry to the west bank, where they’d been picked up by the two Horizon vans stationed there and taken the eight desolate miles to WV-29. He had spent a peaceful, lovely two hours helping her with the sorting until TJ had come up and offered him a tour of the dig.

Reserved at first, she soon became a spirited guide, leading him through the maze of tumbled mud blocks and square pits that made up the Eighteenth Dynasty workers’ settlement. Around them diggers both Egyptian and American scraped away with everything from hoes to teaspoons under the sharp eyes of the site supervisors. Students wandered self-consciously around with clipboards or fiddled endlessly with surveyors’ tools and tripod-mounted cameras.

Gideon found it hard to pay attention. His thoughts about TJ, and to a lesser extent Jerry Baroff, had been uneasy since Gabra had told him about the four-year-old theft of the statuette body. That had happened on TJ’s watch; she had been the dig supervisor then as now. Yet in all the past week, with everything that had occurred, she had never mentioned it. Why not? How could the possible connection between the body and the head have escaped her of all people? Gabra had seen it in a flash. So had Gideon. So would anybody.

And why had she so readily-so adamantly-accepted as fact Stacey’s determination that there had never been such a head in the collection? It hadn’t taken Gideon very long to find sizable room for doubt. He had no good answers for these questions, and he didn’t like the direction they had taken him. Somebody at Horizon House was a murderer, but he preferred that it not be TJ, thanks all the same.

“This building here was shown in Lambert’s records as a brewery, but actually it was a butcher shop,” she was saying. “You know how we know? It’s fascinating: the-”

“Wasn’t there a theft here a few years ago?” It had come blurting out on its own.

TJ stopped, her arm still extended, her finger still pointing at whatever she’d been pointing at.

“Did I miss something? What’s that got to do with anything?”

“I understand it was an Amarna statuette.”

“That’s right. Just the body.” She looked at him quizzically, then took him a few dozen yards to the left, to the neatly excavated remains of a rectangular hut where two Egyptian workmen were protecting the eroded tops of the mud-brick foundations, using paintbrushes to lay on a cementlike goop out of a bucket.

“It came from here,” TJ said. “This was a sculptor’s studio. It was probably something he was working on. The bastards were on it like vultures the very same night we found it. Why? What’s the sudden interest?”

He hesitated. “Oh, I was just thinking about the head that Haddon saw and wondering if the two of them-”

She flung up her hands with a laugh. “Christ, you never give up, do you? Gideon, believe me-truly-there was no head. Haddon was just doing his usual number, trying to cover his poor old rear end. What does it take to satisfy you?”

More than that, he thought, and yet he was marginally reassured. Conceivably, it was as simple as that-that TJ really, sincerely believed that Haddon had never seen the head, that there wasn’t any head to see, that it was first a delusion and then an invention. She hadn’t made a connection between the body and the head because she had never for a moment believed the head existed. It was possible, he supposed. He hoped it was true.