Aaron Elkins: Dead men’s hearts

But Major Saleh wasn’t there to answer questions. “This area, it has not been used in how long?”

“Five years,” Haddon said. “That’s correct, isn’t it, Dr. Baroff?”

“Right, everything in it was ruined in those colossal rains.”

Saleh nodded his remembrance. With Upper Egypt averaging a fraction of an inch of rain a year, no one who lived there would be likely to forget the eighteen-hour deluge that had dropped more rain in a single day than most of them would see for the rest of their lives.

“So we built a new, roofed storage area onto the garage,” TJ went on, “and haven’t used the old one since. Well, for a while it was a sort of dump for things, but not anymore.”

“You know,” Haddon said, “we really should clean the place out and knock it down. It’s disgusting. Breeding area for rats and all sorts of disagreeable things. I had no idea.”

TJ gritted her teeth and glared at him. How many times had she told that to Haddon in the last five years? Ten? Twenty?

“Dr. Haddon-” she began, but clamped her mouth shut. Not in front of strangers. Not in front of anybody. She had borne him all these years without ever once becoming really, thoroughly unglued, and she could make it through to the following September. In less than a year he would be retired, with any luck at all they would appoint her director, and it would be a bright new world.

Of course she’d be a nut case by then, but nobody but she was going to know it.

Once in the enclosure, the policemen led them to the skull, which had been turned from its upside-down position onto its right side. “Please examine it for yourself,” Saleh said. He stood aside to give them room.

The two Egyptologists looked at the skull, TJ on one knee, Haddon leaning over from the waist. The policemen stood quietly, obviously waiting for a response.

“What are we supposed to be looking for?” TJ asked.

But Haddon was quicker than she was. He pointed indignantly at the skull. “What’s this?”

With her eyes she followed the direction of his finger. There on the left side of the frontal bone, a line of letters in faded black ink barely showed against the brownish ivory of the bone. No, not letters, numbers. She leaned closer.

“F4360,” she murmured. “I’ll be damned.”

“What does this mean?” Haddon demanded, addressing the major. “Who wrote this?”

“Yes, this needs knowing,” Saleh agreed.

“It’s one of ours,” TJ said and sat back on her heels, barely able to keep from laughing. “The damn thing is from our own collection.”

The two officers exchanged a look.

Haddon stood up angrily, brushing off his knees although he had never been on them. “Do you mean to say the cursed thing is an archaeological specimen-one of our archaeological specimens?”

“F4360 is Fuqani 4360,” TJ told Saleh. “It’s from el-Fuqani, the Old Kingdom cemetery that was dug up in the 1920s.” And now she did laugh. “You’ve got yourself a tough nut to crack, Major. Give or take a few years, he’s been dead since 2400 B.C.”

Saleh’s smile was perfunctory and reserved. He was large for an Egyptian, with a smooth, impassive face and a knack for making you feel that you were keeping him from really important duties.

And we are, TJ thought. There had been another “incident of unrest” yesterday, this time not far from Karnak, in which fundamentalist crackpots had shot at a tour bus. An Australian woman had been wounded.

Haddon was fuming. “If he’s been dead for over four thousand years, perhaps someone would explain to me how he came to be wearing modern dress.” He pointed to the shoulder and arm bones protruding from a snarl of twisted galabiya; the cloth was clearly from the present day, a cheap, everyday material patterned with gray stripes, more filthy than rotted.

“Ah, but he wasn’t,” Saleh said. “These bones were not inside the garment, they were merely caught up in the cloth. These remains have been gnawed on by small animals, and dragged here and there across the ground. Is it surprising they became trapped in the cloth? Show them the numbers, Gabra.”

The sergeant, some ten years older than his superior, squatted at the tangle of bones and cloth and gently turned the bones over. In the same faded ink, in the same precise, spidery, old-fashioned hand, F4360 had been written on the humerus and on the back of the scapula.

“It’s on all the bones?” Haddon asked.

“Yes, sir, all bones with big sizes,” said Gabra. “I think this lady’s conclusion must be so. See how brown and dry are the bones? From olden times, assuredly.” His English was less orthodox than the major’s, but livelier.

Haddon turned grimly to TJ. “I think we’d better see what your husband has to say about this.”

TJ nodded, but she didn’t hold out any hope that Jerry would be able to shed much light on things. They had both come to Horizon House seven years earlier, hired as a team; TJ as a staff archaeologist and Jerry as administrator of the extensive library. It had taken four months before he’d happened to notice that his official title was librarian/registrar, and when he’d asked Haddon what that meant, he’d learned that he was also in charge of the old collection of artifacts and skeletal remains-at least to the extent that anyone was in charge. In reality, neither Haddon nor anyone else (including Jerry) gave much of a damn about it.

Even TJ didn’t. The fact was, it wasn’t much of a collection. Ninety percent of it had been excavated in the 1920s by the famous-to some, the infamous-Cordell Lambert. Those had been the days when most Egyptologists were still glorified grave-robbers, and Lambert, an Arizona copper magnate turned ardent archaeologist in his fifties, was even less well-trained than most. Objects had been torn out of the ground with no concern for stratigraphy or relationships. The few really extraordinary pieces had found their way into museums and private collections outside of the country; the best of the rest had been commandeered by the Egyptian government; and whatever was left had been exhibited in Lambert’s “museum” for a few years and then gone into storage to be forgotten.

The el-Fuqani skeletal collection was squarely in the last category. Crudely dug up and primitively processed, it had been placed in storage in 1927 and lain there ever since, exciting no interest, scholarly or otherwise. Why anyone would take the trouble to remove one of them and toss it into the junk pile was anybody’s guess.

They found Jerry in his office off the library reading room. When he was told that the mysterious remains were apparently those of a Bronze Age man from the time of Userkaf, first pharaoh of the Fifth Dynasty, he too burst out laughing, which didn’t appear to improve Saleh’s mood any, or Had-don’s either. But a discreet gleam of amusement appeared to play about Sergeant Gabra’s dark eyes.

“And how did they get there?” the director asked crossly.

Jerry shook his head blankly. “Don’t ask me.”

“Perhaps we could now go and see where this collection is kept?” Saleh said, civil but manifestly impatient.

“Sure,” Jerry said, “you bet, good idea.” He unfolded his skinny frame from behind the desk. “Right this way.”

He took them across a path to the modest but roomy structure known as the annex. It had been constructed by Lambert as his museum, but it had been decades since it had served as anything but a workspace and a repository for bones and artifacts.

As they entered Jerry grasped TJ’s wrist and spoke in a whisper. “Where is this stuff, exactly?”

She laughed. “Are you serious? You don’t know where the el-Fuqani material is? You’re supposed to be the registrar.”