He had no formulas or tables to work from, but he did find a pair of spreading calipers and a steel tape measure in the other workroom, and those would get him by. For an hour he made steady progress, interrupted only by the return of Phil at noon with two chicken-salad sandwiches and a bottle of Thumbs-Up Cola. The Luxor police had been contacted and had promised to respond with dispatch, he said. They had even sounded as if they meant it.
At 1:30, still hunched over the worktable, he had just gotten to the sandwiches when Mrs. Ebeid, Horizon House’s administrative assistant, appeared. A meticulous woman of earnest propriety, she had commandeered Gideon and Julie for half an hour almost the moment they’d arrived to impress on them the sacrosanct and inviolable rules of Horizon House residence: towel allotments, linens, eating times, no food in the rooms, make your own bed, no air conditioner unless the temperature reached a hundred degrees.
“You didn’t hear the telephone ring?”
Gideon, caught in mid-thought and mid-bite, looked up. “What?”
She eyed him. “You didn’t hear the telephone ring?”
“No. Yes, maybe. It was in another room. I didn’t think it was for me.”
Mrs. Ebeid’s nose quivered. She had picked up the smell of the still-moist femur. She looked down at what he was doing and took a step backward, apparently unused to seeing someone with a human fibula in one hand and a chicken-salad sandwich in the other.
Possibly it was against the Horizon House rules. “Was it for me?” he asked. Delicately, he placed the fibula on the table.
Mrs. Ebeid remained at her new distance, which made him twist to look at her. “It was. Major Saleh of the police. He is most anxious to speak with you.”
“Well, I’m anxious to speak with him. How do I get hold of him?”
She handed him a slip of paper with the telephone number, leveled one more unappreciative glance at his work and/or his lunch, and made her exit.
Gideon had heard war stories from Phil about the misdirected calls, long waits, and generally horrible state of the Egyptian telephone system, but apparently they didn’t apply to lines that went to the police department because he had gotten through to Saleh with satisfactory speed-on the second try, in fact-and the phone had been picked up on the first ring.
But the major’s attitude proved to be less satisfactory. He began with condolences on Haddon’s death, but Gideon had barely gotten to the skeletons when Saleh interrupted with an indulgent laugh.
“Let us go back a few days and look at this from the beginning, Professor. A human skeleton is discovered at Horizon House. How sinister! To the American mind, what can it be but murder? The police are called. An investigation is launched. And the result? Not murder at all, but an innocent museum piece many thousands of years old that had strayed a few feet from its place. The police file is closed.”
It wasn’t looking good. Saleh sounded just like el-Basset: important, dismissive, preoccupied, and wholly disinclined to take him seriously.
“Major-”
“An eminent American professor appears on the scene,” Saleh continued over Gideon’s voice, “and deduces that the bones are those of an ancient scribe.” He paused to let this sink in. “That is correct, is it not?”
Yes, damn it, it was correct. How did Saleh know about it? “I made a mistake,” Gideon grumbled.
“A few days later,” Saleh went on, “another skeleton is discovered. The professor rethinks his earlier conclusions. The new skeleton is the migrating museum piece; the other one is not ancient after all, but that of a modern-”
“Major, it’s not a matter of rethinking. There’s evidence.” He explained-briefly; he could sense Saleh’s attention wandering-about the writing on the bones, about the coloring, about the smell, the taste “But all these things,” Saleh interrupted again, “are, forgive me, matters of opinion? With no way to prove?”
“No, that’s not so. Bones can be tested for age: fluorine level, nitrogen content, pH level-”
“And you can do these tests here?”
“Well, no.”
“Well, neither can I.”
Clunk.
Gideon tried again. “I think we have something more important here than how old the bones are, Major. I think we have a murder.”
“Murder in the reign of Userkaf or murder now?” Saleh said pleasantly.
Gideon didn’t like it, but he swallowed it. As calmly as he could, he explained, but he could hear Saleh engaged, sotto voce, in another conversation.
“Yes, well,” Saleh said, interrupting him yet again, “we will certainly look into this.”‘
Gideon was not cheered. “And there’s something else,” he said rapidly, trying to keep Saleh from hanging up. “I think Dr. Haddon’s death may not have been an accident.”
“Yes, I spoke to General el-Basset yesterday. He was quite impressed with your theories.”
Gideon gritted his teeth and plowed ahead against the odds. “Those antemortem abrasions on his face-”
“Professor Oliver? Perhaps it would be better to consider one murder at a time?”
“Look, Major,” Gideon snapped, “as far as I’m concerned, if you don’t care about letting murderers run around loose, then the hell with it, do what you want. It’s your country.”
It was hardly the way to bring Saleh around, but by now Gideon was feeling patronized and thoroughly surly. It did him good to let off some steam.
Saleh let a moment pass, then surprised him. “Would iv be possible for you to put your findings into a report?” As if Gideon hadn’t just finished jumping down his throat.
It took him a moment to shift gears. “You want me to write them up?”
“If it would cause no difficulty.”
“I’d be glad to.” Was this progress? Had he shamed Saleh into action?
“And if I sent someone to pick it up at, say, four o’clock, it might be ready?”
“It’ll be ready.”
After he hung up Gideon took a walk to get his blood going again-he’d been cooped up with the bones for three hours-but was driven back by the sun into the relative coolness of the high-ceilinged annex. From the main house buffet he brought back a glass of blessedly sugarless iced coffee to sip while he stared moodily at the bones of the unknown man who’d breathed his last in the enclosure perhaps five years ago. He wasn’t sure whether he’d gotten a brush-off from Saleh or not, but the major would get his report. And that would have to be that, however Gideon felt about it. He didn’t see any way to fight the entire Egyptian bureaucracy, and solving crimes without the police was Phil’s approach to things, not his.
The basic skeletal work had been done: sexing, aging, racing, stature estimation (that had taken a call to a Cambridge colleague for the Trotter-Gleser multiple regression formulas), and so on. And, of course, the probable cause of death. All in all, he’d pulled a fair amount of information from this chewed-up cluster of scraps, but he had yet to come up with what he wanted most: an alternative explanation for the assemblage of traits that so perfectly mimicked the pattern that went along with a life as a scribe. What had he been or done? What habitual patterns of behavior had left that distinctive and unusual record in his skeleton?
He separated the offending bones and laid them out in front of him: the innominates with their roughened ischial tuberosities; the bowed fibula; the finger bone with its marked ligament-attachment lines. To them he added a metacarpal that also had some unusually prominent areas of ligament attachment, and one other oddity that had puzzled him from the beginning: the skull with its unusual tooth wear pattern: incisors worn down almost to nubs, while the molars showed only moderate wear. Humans did their chewing with their back teeth; if you were going to get extensive attrition anywhere, it ought to be on the molars.
It was the second time he had looked at them all in a row like this, and once again he had the feeling that the answer was there, right in front of him, just out of reach. In finger-snapping distance, so to speak.
It was possible, of course, that there was no single explanation, that each trait had a separate, unrelated cause, but he couldn’t make himself quite believe that. There was a configuration here, a constellation that taken as a whole made sense if he could only comprehend it. For the dozenth time he picked up the fibula, the phalanx, the inominate. He fingered them, turned them over, put them down. He sat on a high stool, his heels hooked over the rungs, and chewed ice from the coffee. He picked them up again.
Five minutes later he snapped his fingers.
At 4:10, a police constable with smudged glasses and only a few words of English came to get the report, which Gideon had typed on a forty-year-old Remington he’d found in a dusty office. After considerable protest and two calls to police headquarters the constable reluctantly agreed to take away the skeletal material, which Gideon felt would be better off in the police vault than lying around Horizon House, prey to who knows what new drollery.
Once the constable had left with his unwelcome burden, Gideon washed up and went to the other workroom, where some of the students had regathered to number pottery and gossip some more about Haddon’s death.
“Excuse me, is one of you Stacey?”
A young black woman with a scarf around her head looked up from the row of potsherds on the table in front of her. 1 am.
“Stacey,” Gideon said, “do you suppose I could have a few minutes of your time?”