Aaron Elkins: Dead men’s hearts

“Come on, I’ll show you the rest of the place,” she said when he didn’t answer, and led him off. She was polite and enthusiastic and Gideon asked intelligent questions, but an edge had come between them again, and he was glad when she looked at her watch, mumbled apologies, and went back to her clipboard and her graduate students.

On his way back to the sorting area he passed the camera crew on its next-to-last day of shooting. They were taping activities at one of the more interesting excavations, a building that had been a well-equipped bakery, and Kermit was arguing sourly with the local site supervisor because the young man wouldn’t let him set up directly on the excavated clay floor. Nearby, restless as a chained bear, Forrest shambled back and forth wearing an oversized Panama hat with a jaunty red band, trying to bite what was left of his nails.

“Hi, Forrest, how’s it going?” Gideon said without thinking.

He should have known better. “Don’t ask,” Forrest mumbled and then told him: Half of yesterday’s taping was going to have to be reshot because some bozo on the ferry had knocked a box of cassettes into the river the previous evening. Cy was being sulky because Kermit had overruled him on a complex shot that Cy had spent an hour setting up, and Kermit was acting sulky because Forrest had overruled him. Patsy wasn’t acting any sulkier than usual but she had diarrhea, which meant they had to stop for ten minutes between every shot while she made a run for the can. The whole thing was coming apart in their faces.

And Haddon had screwed things up beyond redemption, not to speak ill of the goddamned dead, by picking a hell of a time to fall into the Nile. Corners were going to have to be cut, interviews were going to have to be scratched “Sounds really tough, Forrest. Um, am I still on at noon?” Hope had stirred. Had the director been hinting that Gideon’s session would have to be dropped?

No such luck. “God, yes,” Forrest said, shocked, “We need you more than ever. What are you supposed to be talking about?”

“Racial composition in ancient Egypt,” Gideon said reluctantly. “We were going to reshoot the session I was doing with Kermit the other-”

“No, screw it,” Forrest said, scanning his wilting and dog-eared shooting schedule and making a few more smudgy pencil marks on it, “we don’t need that, let’s forget that one.”

That was something, anyway.

“How about if instead you do the hour on village life you were going to do tomorrow? That’ll give me tomorrow to-”

“I don’t think so, Forrest. I’m not ready. There were some things I was going to look up in the library.”

Forrest gnawed his two-inch-long, much-gnawed stub of yellow pencil. “I could probably switch you from noon to two o’clock. Would that give you enough time? Kermit will have a fit, but, what the hell, screw Kermit too.”

“You mean you wouldn’t need me at all tomorrow?”

“Right, finish it off today.”

Gideon considered. It would rush him, but it would also mean a day with Julie tomorrow, an entire free day on theirown, the only one they’d had since coming to Egypt and the only one they were going to get.

“You’re on,” he said.

Which was why he and Julie were now climbing into one of the white Horizon vans to be taken to the ferry dock. The driver, a smiling new hire named Gawdat, slid the side door closed with a clunk, ran around to the front, climbed into the driver’s seat, turned the key, and started them up the steeply inclined road.

They drove past the ruined foundations of what everyone said was the set from an old movie, although no one knew its name, then around the base of Monkey’s Spine, the curious, humpbacked knob that loomed over WV-29, and then onto the long escarpment that led to the main road to the Nile. Once on the escarpment, an enormous panorama spread out on their left. They were at the very edge of the great plateau of the Western Desert, riddled with canyons and dropping away, foothill by tawny foothill to the distant Nile, a dull brown band between two narrow strips of green as sharply defined as if they’d been drawn on a map. Beyond the farther strip the desert began its slow climb again, desolate and sterile, and continued far beyond the range of their sight, for almost three thousand terrible miles, the largest desert in the world, across the whole of Libya and Algeria and Morocco…

“I forgot,” Julie said abruptly.

Gideon turned from the window. “Leave something back there?”

“No. I forgot all about it. In all the fuss. The ledger.” She put her hand on his arm. “Yesterday.”

“Maybe complete sentences would help,” he said.

“I found the chronological ledger,” she told him as if he were being particularly dense. “I went looking for it and I found it.”

He sighed. “I think I missed something.”

“You missed the chronological ledger, is what you missed.”

“That’s not too surprising. What’s a chronological ledger?”

It was a register, she explained excitedly, in which new accessions to a museum were recorded as they came in, as an adjunct to the object cards. It had occurred to her that there might have been such a register in Lambert’s time, that it might still be around, and that a record of the head that Haddon had described, the head that was at the center of every strange thing that had been going on, might be in it.

She squeezed his arm. “And it was.”

Gideon shook his head, still bewildered. “Do you mean a field catalogue, a site notebook? But they wouldn’t have been using one here in 1924. It wasn’t part of the standard archaeological method yet. Cordell Lambert wasn’t Howard Carter.”

“I’m not talking about archaeology, I’m talking about museumology.” She started rummaging in her duffel-sized canvas purse. “I went into the old office in the annex before dinner yesterday and browsed around. There were some dusty old ledgers down on the oversized shelves.”

“I never saw them.”

“You’d have to be looking for them. They were in there with the bound periodicals. Anyway, they were the Lambert Museum’s chronological ledger from 1920 to 1926. Damn, where is that thing? Ah…”

She pulled out the soft leather pocket notebook that was always in her purse, the one that he’d given her on her promotion to supervisor so that she would have her own little black book. “Here it is. ”21 March, 1924. Head of-‘ Here, you read it.“

He snatched it from her. “ ‘Head of young woman or girl, inscribed, made of yellow jasper…’ This is it, Julie!”

“Really?” she said mildly. “You know, I wondered if it might be.”

He laughed and read on. “ ‘Height five and one-eighth inches to base of neck, not including one and one-quarter-inch tenon for insertion into mortise joint in shoulders.” “ This was it, all right. The head Haddon had seen, the head he’d described. Something like an Ali Hassan-type chuckle rumbled around inside Gideon’s chest. ” ’Chipped left ear and some abrasion of tip of nose. Slightly elongated skull shape, possibly for mounting of wig.“ ”

He slapped the notebook against his palm. “Julie, this is great. It confirms everything we-”

He stopped in mid-sentence, scowled, and tore the notebook open again.

“Look at this,” he said wonderingly. “ ‘Head of a young woman or girl, inscribed…’ ” He slapped his forehead. “Where’s my mind been? I should have figured this out days ago, before we ever got back to Luxor!”

“I’m afraid I’ve missed something,” Julie said. “What is it that we’re talking about?”

“Remember my telling you how Ali Hassan was leering at me and muttering about ‘the final element, the last part’?”