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.”
“Listen, I’m lucky I know what it is.”
“Back of the storeroom off Workroom A,” she told him.
As they crossed the workroom with its pottery fragments in open trays and its containers of glue and preservatives, Saleh sniffed the air appraisingly. “I smell… what is it?”
Gabra knit his brow. “Pizza?”
“Must be the glue,” Jerry said, straight-faced. He led them confidently through the storeroom to a floor-to-ceiling set of open metal racks on the end of which was taped a flyblown, typewritten placard: “El-Fuqani, 1921-23, C. Lambert.” The three-shelf racks were loaded with heavy cardboard boxes stacked two high. Jerry moved down the racks, forefinger extended, scanning the numbers on the front of the boxes. A few stacks in, he stopped.
“Here we go, 4360.”
He pulled out the box, set it on an empty rack, and, with a flourish, swept off the lid.
Except for a crumbly accumulation of bone dust, it was empty.
“So,” Saleh said with his cool smile, “the mystery is solved. Nothing very serious, it seems.”
Haddon’s bearded jaw had stiffened. “I consider it quite serious enough,” he said, looking directly at Jerry. “These specimens are housed here on the assumption that they be given proper care and protection. They have received that protection for some seventy years, but now it seems that some rather slipshod practices have been allowed to take hold.”
“I’ll look into the matter, sir,” Jerry said with that serenity that sometimes infuriated TJ, sometimes filled her with admiration, and never stopped amazing her. Even after living with him for twelve years. How did he do it? And he wasn’t even nursing an ulcer from suppressed emotions; he just didn’t give a damn. In his place, she thought, flames would be shooting out of her nose.
“I think we’d better look into it right now,” Haddon snapped, “while we still have the services of these good gentlemen.”
“I don’t know what-”
“How many more of our specimens have been made off with? Are any of them still in their boxes?”