Well, well. Gabra’s lips pursed. It seemed there might be something to this anthropology business after all. Maybe, like a lot of things, it depended on who was doing it.
Hair black, mustache black, eyes brown… He smiled. Not much help there from Gideon Oliver and his bones.
For another five minutes he browsed in the police file, then pushed himself away from the desk. He leaned back as far as the defective chair would let him, his fingers clasped behind his head, and blew smoke at the stained ceiling.
El-Hamid had had six earlier arrests for tomb-robbing and the like, but only a single conviction. When he wasn’t stealing antiquities he worked mostly in the family shop. Occasionally he found a job in Luxor but never lasted long. He had, in fact, worked as a janitor at Horizon House for three months in its laboratory, but not at the time of the theft. He’d been let go two weeks previously over an accusation of petty thieving. Took it badly too, making enough of a scene so that a constable had to be called to eject him from the premises. There had been some thought that he might later have stolen the statuette more from revenge than anything else, but with him nowhere to be found, there had been no way to prove it one way or the other.
“Well, well,” Gabra said. “Asila, will you get me Horizon House on the telephone? I want to talk to a gentleman named Gideon Oliver.”
“It’s broken,” Asila said.
His good-tempered laugh must have surprised her. “Well, then, use the one in here.”
Chapter Nineteen
“For you, Gideon,” Bea said, holding out the telephone.
Gideon dabbed at his mouth with a napkin and walked around the end of the table, around Haddon’s still-empty chair, to take the call. Lunch, which had begun at eleven o’clock on account of a full afternoon shooting schedule, was just ending and Bea, sitting closest to the wall table on which it was situated, had reached behind her to pick the telephone up, not pausing in her attentions to a cup of sherbet.
It was Mrs. Ebeid. “The police are calling for you again,” she said. “Will you speak with them this time?”
“I would have spoken with them last time,” Gideon said, “but I didn’t hear the phone-”
“Dr. Oliver? I am Sergeant Gabra. I have been reading your report with interest. May we discuss it this same afternoon?”
Well, what do you know. Somebody at the police department actually gave a damn after all. Gideon swallowed his amazement.
“Sure, when would you like?”
The only thing he had scheduled was a one o’clock session with Forrest and Kermit to reshoot the previous day’s interrupted segment on race, and he was more than happy to put it off, even at the cost of further frazzling poor Forrest. Maybe if he put it off enough times, Forrest would decide to forget about it altogether.
“Would one o’clock be convenient? I will come there.”
“Perfect,” Gideon said happily. “Why don’t we meet in the library? I think we’ll have it to ourselves.”
“Very good.”
“Sergeant? You’ve decided to pursue this then?”
“I would think so. And-” There was a pause. “Your views on the death of Dr. Haddon, which you attached to your report? I would be interested to hear more.”
Gideon topped off his coffee at the urn and slipped into the chair beside Julie again. He’d thought he was finished eating but now he reached for a few more dates from the fruit bowl.
“Things,” he said, “are looking up.”
Sergeant Monir Gabra was a weathered, gravel-voiced man in his mid-fifties with most of one earlobe missing and an old knife scar on his cheek beside it to make clear how it had happened. He was wearing a brown woolen uniform, past its prime and closer in its styling to that of the el-Amarna private with the pinned-on stripe (not that Gabra’s stripes were anything but firmly attached) than to the splendid outfit of the commanding general of River and Tourist Police. With his ample black mustache and glistening, foxy, slightly bulbous eyes, simply changing from the uniform into a galabiya would have let him pass with ease as a seller of dried spices or inlaid cigarette boxes in the souks.
All in all, Gideon had the feeling he was going to get further with the sergeant than he had so far done with his boss; a hunch that quickly proved accurate.
Under the high, groined ceiling of the otherwise deserted library, seated across one of the monograph-littered tables from Gideon, smoking one cigarette after another, asking frequent questions in his shaky English, he had listened to everything Gideon had had to say about the unidentified remains, about Haddon, about the Amarna head.
“Well then,” he said when there wasn’t anything more, “I think you are right. We have here a police matter.”
Gideon, who’d come to the meeting not knowing what to expect, felt like a spent runner who’d finally managed to pass the baton. From now on it was Gabra’s job to do the worrying and suspecting.
“I’m happy to hear you say it. After my experience with General el-Basset, I wasn’t quite sure what your reaction would be.”
“Well, you must make allowances for General el-Basset,” Gabra said. Did “And for Major Saleh” hang in the air, or was Gideon imagining it?
“Here we do things differently,” Gabra said complacently. “Already we are making progress, you see. We have succeeded to identify the remains.”
In one day? They did things differently, all right. “Who is it?”
As always, he was curious to know where he’d gone right and where he’d gone wrong in reconstructing the onetime owner of those bones. But this time he was leery too. He’d already botched this one once, and now he was thinking that he’d probably gone out a bit too recklessly on another long limb or two.
Gabra, who smoked like most of the Egyptians Gideon had met, which was to say incessantly, lit up again. “Did you know this, that since four years, on ninth of October, 1989, there was a robbery at site number WV-29, resulting in the death of a policeman?”
“No, I didn’t. What does-”
“That the person believed to do this was one Abdul Nasr el-Hamid, who has worked in Horizon House until shortly before this theft and murder? That he has not been seen alive since this theft and murder? That this Mr. Abdul Nasr el-Hamid was forty-six years old and 172 centimeters tall, and that in addition to being a tomb-robber he was by trade a tailor? That his right eye was lower than the left?”
After a moment’s silence Gideon let out a peal of triumphant laughter that would have shocked anybody but a seasoned cop or another forensic scientist. He was used to hitting nails on the head, but not all of them at once.
“I was lucky,” he said.
“May we continue to have such luck,” Gabra said. “Ah, the object that was stolen will interest you, I think. It was asmall, Amarna sandstone statue-a statuette-that was without its head.” He smiled. “You see? A small Amarna statue with no head is taken from the excavation on the one hand… and now a small Amarna head with no statue is found in the enclosure on the other. Would you say these events are coincidence?”
Not unless somebody had just repealed Abe Goldstein’s old dictum, the Law of Interconnected Monkey Business, they weren’t. When that many queer, related things were going on around one another, they had to be connected: the headless body, the bodiless head, the death of Abdul Nasr el-Hamid in 1989, the death of Clifford Haddon four years later.
“There is more,” Gabra said. “This Abdul Nasr el-Hamid was a member of the el-Hamid family of Nag el-Azab, who have been known to commit tomb-robbing for many years.”
“I see. Sergeant-”
“Ss,” Gabra said with his eyes focused over Gideon’s shoulder. Gideon turned to see a highly agitated Arlo Gerber in the doorway, his wispy mustache twitching.
“Yes?” Gabra said.
Arlo jumped. “That man. I-I can tell you who he was.”
“Man?” Gabra said. “And you are…?”
Arlo licked his lips. “I am…?”