It was also the area in which Haddon had more recently directed that the rubbish from the outdoor storage enclosure, along with the bulldozed wreckage of the enclosure itself, be plowed under. To that end, under Jerry’s supervision, a sizable crater had been gouged in which most of the junk had already been buried. The original pit had not been large enough, however, and now a second, smaller hole had been scooped out by the backhoe. In so doing, it had unearthed trash no different from what might have been in an American landfill of the 1920s: bits of lumber and corrugated cardboard, deteriorating clothing, shoes (some with buttons), rusted tin cans and metal corset bones, and patent medicine containers-including six that were plainly recognizable as Milk of Magnesia bottles. Apparently American stomachs had not rested easily in foreign countries even then.
These had all been brushed off and placed in fiberboard boxes ready for stowing away, presumably for future graduate students desperate for thesis topics to sift through and theorize from.
But the newly found object that had caused Gideon to be summoned was set by itself on the ground at the feet of Jerry Baroff, who regarded it contemplatively, puffing on a pipe. “TJ’s at the dig this morning so they called me. I thought I better call you.”
It was a plain brown paper sack the size of a large grocery bag, crumpled and soil-stained, but not old. Protruding from it was the proximal end of a broken femur, unmistakably human. Inside was a jumble of other bones, no less certainly Homo sapiens.
Gideon looked at Jerry. “Another skeleton? This is getting to be old-hat around here.”
“Not exactly,” Jerry said. He leaned down to point with his pipe at a row of letters on the shaft of the femur.
Gideon bent to read them, then straightened up with a perplexed frown.
“I’ll be damned.”
It wasn’t a row of letters, it was an identification number, written in a precise, spidery, old-fashioned hand.
F4360.
Chapter Fifteen
“Amazing, isn’t it?” Jerry said. “All I can say is, somebody sure is bound and determined to get rid of the poor old guy”
“Except this isn’t the same poor old guy,” Gideon said.
Jerry peered at him. “But the numbers-”
“Look at this humerus,” Gideon said, pulling it partway out of the bag. “The other one didn’t have a left humerus, remember? It didn’t have any cervical vertebrae either, and here’s a C-5.” He rummaged in the bag. “C-4 too.”
“Easy for you to say,” Jerry said.
Gideon probed gently through the bones. All of them were disarticulated, with only a shred or two of brown, dessicated soft tissue here and there. It seemed to be a more complete specimen than the one he’d examined the other night, and every bone seemed to have F4360 on it, in careful, crisp, slightly faded, turn-of-the-century writing like the writing on the other set.
“Is it possible that the collection has two sets of remains with the same number?” he asked.
Jerry shrugged. “Who knows what’s possible? I don’t think anybody’s gone through the el-Fuqani stuff in 50 years. And they made a lot of mistakes in those days.”
Gideon nodded. They made mistakes these days too. And not only at archaeological digs. Not long before, he’d been involved in a mixup at a medical examiner’s lab when two sets of remains had inadvertently been assigned the same number. If it could happen there, in a state-of-the-art 1990s facility, then why not here?
But the numbers, the crisp, clean appearance of the numbers, had him thinking along different lines, trying to see again in his mind’s eye just what all those 4360s had looked like on the previous Monday. He’d been ferociously jet-lagged then and hadn’t paid much attention, but it seemed to him now that there had been a difference…
He hefted the humerus, eyes closed, then did the same with the sacrum. But it was hard to concentrate; forty feet away the backhoe reversed and moved forward, started and stopped, grumbled and snarled.
Gideon put the bones back into the bag and stood with his hands on his hips. “I think it’d be better to take these back to the lab where I can spread them out. Can I get into the annex?”
“Sure, there are some kids working in there, so the door’s unlocked. I better stay with these guys a while. Who knows what kind of strange stuff they’re going to turn up next?”
Whatever it was, Gideon thought, picking up the bag, it was going to have to go quite a ways to be any stranger than this.
The first thing he did was to go to the skeletal storage racks to assure himself that F4360… the first F4360… was still in its box.
It was.
All right, then. At least he wasn’t letting his imagination run away with him. With the box under one arm and the bag under the other he went out into the workroom where five or six student interns were indifferently washing pottery fragments while they gossiped with morbid enthusiasm about Haddon’s death and its repercussions for Horizon House. When they heard Gideon coming there was a switch to sober graduate-student-speak about horizons and time lines.
“Is there another workroom?” Gideon asked.
“Down the hall, second door on your right,” he was told.
In the other room, a duplicate of the first, he closed the door behind him loudly so that they could get comfortably back to Haddon, and fifteen minutes later the two sets of remains were laid out on a library table, the largest surface in the room. The ones from the box were on his right, the ones from the sack on his left. He stepped back for a first visual comparison.
Except for a slight difference in color, they were superficially similar: dry, fragile, and crumbly, with the spidery F4360 neatly inscribed on almost every piece in very much the same Edwardian handwriting. Even the individual sets of bones came close to duplicating each other: skulls, pelves, long bones, and a few odds and ends to round things out.
But that was only superficially. If what Gideon was thinking was true there was a hell of a difference between them.
He heard Phil Boyajian talking to the students in the other room and a few seconds later he appeared with two clinking glasses of iced tea. “Jerry told me you were working on yet another bag of bones. I thought you could use this.”
“Thanks, Phil.” He gulped the tea mechanically, too preoccupied to cringe at the usual three spoons of sugar, Middle Eastern style, that Phil had loaded it with. Phil, who was staying at Horizon House for a few more days while he gathered On the Cheap material, pulled over a high stool and sat down to watch.
“What’s…” He blinked. “Two sets of bones with the same numbers? How can that be?”
In one hand Gideon was holding one of the femurs that had just been dug up; in the other a femur from the box. He sniffed at them alternately.
“Hm,” he said.
“Really?” Phil said, ratcheting the English drawl up a notch. “How informative.”
“Don’t be impertinent,” Gideon said. “Watch and learn.” He touched both of the bones in turn to his tongue and considered.
Phil grimaced. “My God, what next? I shudder to think. Does Julie know that the man she kisses goes around doing that?”
Gideon held out the one from the bag. “Here, you try it.”
Phil reared back. “You’re out of your mind.”
Gideon looked at him. “This from the man who never turns down a new experience? What would your readers think?”
Phil held up his hands. “You have to draw the line somewhere.”
“All right, just smell it.” Gideon extended the bone again.
Phil stood up, put down his tea, and sniffed, gingerly but gamely. He shook his head. “So?”
“What’s it smell like?”
Phil was clearly at a loss. “Like a skeleton?”
“Like an old skeleton, right? Sort of musty, tomblike?”
Phil laughed. “Gideon, the only skeletons I’ve ever smelled have been old skeletons, and as I recall, this is what they smelled like. How would I know what a new skeleton smells like?”