He was, and Phil had been about to leave for his office when Gideon appeared.
Instead, all three of them had taken a taxi to the police station, Julie asserting her determination not to give them a chance to get into any more trouble on their own. She had pressed herself close to Gideon’s side during the ten-minute drive, mute and fragile, and he had kept his arm around her, brimming with contrition and with love. “I’m fine,” he murmured into her ear again and again. “I’m fine, Julie.”
By the time they pulled up at the station she was herself again.
“One suggestion,” she said as they walked up the steps.
Gideon looked at her.
“You might do better in there without the beard.”
“The-?” He snatched it off his face.
Gabra had been in a bad mood to begin with, and he had been stonily unamused by their story, but eventually Phil’s enthusiasm-he was back to thinking it had been a jolly adventure-had swayed him, and he had begun to see the good side. A simple plan quickly evolved. Undercover law enforcement people in sufficiently disreputable-looking galabiyas would begin drifting into the cafe at 5 p.m., an hour before the meeting with Ali Hassan, and station themselves at several tables. Gabra would be in a car a block away. As soon as Gideon came in and sat down with Hassan, the police would quietly appear at the table and it would be over before it began. No complicated sting operation, no money changing hands, nothing dangerous at all. Even Julie’s mind had been put at ease.
But not so much that she had let him get out of her sight since. At first he’d grumbled about it, but the truth was that he loved it when she fussed over him and she knew it, so there wasn’t much point in grumbling.
They had breakfasted at Horizon House with the dig crew at 5 a.m., then joined them on the public ferry to the west bank, where they’d been picked up by the two Horizon vans stationed there and taken the eight desolate miles to WV-29. He had spent a peaceful, lovely two hours helping her with the sorting until TJ had come up and offered him a tour of the dig.
Reserved at first, she soon became a spirited guide, leading him through the maze of tumbled mud blocks and square pits that made up the Eighteenth Dynasty workers’ settlement. Around them diggers both Egyptian and American scraped away with everything from hoes to teaspoons under the sharp eyes of the site supervisors. Students wandered self-consciously around with clipboards or fiddled endlessly with surveyors’ tools and tripod-mounted cameras.
Gideon found it hard to pay attention. His thoughts about TJ, and to a lesser extent Jerry Baroff, had been uneasy since Gabra had told him about the four-year-old theft of the statuette body. That had happened on TJ’s watch; she had been the dig supervisor then as now. Yet in all the past week, with everything that had occurred, she had never mentioned it. Why not? How could the possible connection between the body and the head have escaped her of all people? Gabra had seen it in a flash. So had Gideon. So would anybody.
And why had she so readily-so adamantly-accepted as fact Stacey’s determination that there had never been such a head in the collection? It hadn’t taken Gideon very long to find sizable room for doubt. He had no good answers for these questions, and he didn’t like the direction they had taken him. Somebody at Horizon House was a murderer, but he preferred that it not be TJ, thanks all the same.
“This building here was shown in Lambert’s records as a brewery, but actually it was a butcher shop,” she was saying. “You know how we know? It’s fascinating: the-”
“Wasn’t there a theft here a few years ago?” It had come blurting out on its own.
TJ stopped, her arm still extended, her finger still pointing at whatever she’d been pointing at.
“Did I miss something? What’s that got to do with anything?”
“I understand it was an Amarna statuette.”
“That’s right. Just the body.” She looked at him quizzically, then took him a few dozen yards to the left, to the neatly excavated remains of a rectangular hut where two Egyptian workmen were protecting the eroded tops of the mud-brick foundations, using paintbrushes to lay on a cementlike goop out of a bucket.
“It came from here,” TJ said. “This was a sculptor’s studio. It was probably something he was working on. The bastards were on it like vultures the very same night we found it. Why? What’s the sudden interest?”
He hesitated. “Oh, I was just thinking about the head that Haddon saw and wondering if the two of them-”
She flung up her hands with a laugh. “Christ, you never give up, do you? Gideon, believe me-truly-there was no head. Haddon was just doing his usual number, trying to cover his poor old rear end. What does it take to satisfy you?”
More than that, he thought, and yet he was marginally reassured. Conceivably, it was as simple as that-that TJ really, sincerely believed that Haddon had never seen the head, that there wasn’t any head to see, that it was first a delusion and then an invention. She hadn’t made a connection between the body and the head because she had never for a moment believed the head existed. It was possible, he supposed. He hoped it was true.
“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-”