“She was completely intact when we found her. Last night when I left … it was extraordinary … Now …” Gabriella looked at Sabina. “Now she’s broken apart, here and here … .” She pointed to the mummy’s waist, her neck and her right hand. “She had been holding on to that box. Or what’s left of it.”
“What box?”
Josh could see Gabriella flinch. She hadn’t meant to draw the detective’s attention to the broken receptacle. But now she was trapped. She pointed across the room to the splintered wood.
“What was in it?”
She shrugged. “It was sealed. We hadn’t opened it yet,” she lied. “Now you know everything I know. Can I go to the hospital?”
“As I said, the professor is in intensive care. His wife is with him. As soon as there is news, they will call me and I will tell you. Or if we are done sooner than that, you can go over then. In the meantime—” his accent was pleasant, giving a lilt to the English words “—you expect me to believe that you found this mummy holding on to a box and you didn’t open it?”
“Yes. We have protocols. We go slowly. Everything was a surprise. One more could wait. We wanted to examine the seal before we destroyed it.”
He turned around to Josh, flinging questions so fast there was no time to duck. “You are?”
“Josh Ryder.”
“The man who called the ambulance?”
“Yes.”
“Mr. Ryder, what was in the box?”
“I have absolutely no idea.” Josh’s turn to lie.
“What were you doing down here?”
“I had just met the professor, he was telling me about the find.” Damn, had he screwed up? Had he just admitted he was in the tomb?
“What time did you get here?”
“Around six-thirty this morning.”
“Why so early?”
“I don’t need much sleep.”
“I talked to Dr. Samuels while I waited for the ladder. He told me that you are from New York, that the two of you had an appointment to meet Professor Chase at the hotel at eight o’clock but that you didn’t show up.”
“No, I was here.”
“That’s what is so confusing. Why would you come here a few hours before you were going to be brought here by Professor Chase? Was there something here that couldn’t wait?”
Gabriella listened just as intently as Tatti; after all, she didn’t know what had happened, either.
“I couldn’t sleep. Jet lag. Too much coffee. I don’t know. I took a walk.”
“You took a walk. Fine. You could have walked anywhere. Why here? Why didn’t you wait? Why did you come here alone without your associate and without Professor Chase?”
“I told you. I was restless.”
“How did you get here? There is no car for you.”
“No. I said I walked.”
“You walked? Walked from where?”
What was it about Tatti that seemed so familiar?
“From the hotel. The Eden. We’re staying there.”
“I really need to go to the hospital,” Gabriella interrupted.
“Professor Chase, please. As I have said, the doctors are going to call me as soon as they know anything. This is the scene of a murder attempt, and you know the man who was attacked. You might also know who attacked him. There are also, potentially, priceless artifacts here. You are the only one who knows what they are, where everything was, what has been moved, what might have been taken if something was taken. You will do me more good here than you will do him there. At least for now.”
Turning his attention back to Josh, he picked up where he’d left off.
“So. Yes. You said you walked here from the Eden?”
“Yes.”
“You evidently like to walk.”
It wasn’t a question, and Josh didn’t answer it. He was still trying to figure out what was so familiar about Tatti. When he realized it he almost laughed. It wasn’t some memory lurch. Every one of the detective’s mannerisms seemed borrowed from one of two Hollywood stereotypes, either Inspector Clouseau or Detective Columbo.
“Now, Mr. Ryder. Please.” He let his exasperation show. “Tell me what the truth is about what really happened.” He was a movie star playing the part of a real-life detective.
“I did tell you. I slept badly. I woke up, I took a walk.”
“It’s ten kilometers from the Eden, Mr. Ryder. Exactly what time did you leave the hotel?”
“I’m not sure, I wasn’t paying attention. It was still dark.”
“Professor Chase, did Mr. Ryder or Dr. Samuels know the address of this site?”
“No. We didn’t tell them. But despite all our efforts it has been in the press.”
“Yes, it has.” Tatti nodded. “Is that how you found it, Mr. Ryder? From the newspapers? From a taxi driver?”
“No. No one told me. I didn’t know where I was walking. Ask the emergency operator. I didn’t know where I was when I called.”
“She told us that you had to call someone on the phone to find out the address. But that might be a very convenient ploy, no? You pretend you don’t know where you are so as not to look suspicious.”
Again, it wasn’t a question, so Josh didn’t give him an answer.
“Let’s assume you are telling me one truth. How can you explain that truth? How can you make sense out of leaving your hotel at, say, five o’clock in the morning, and finding your way here?”
“I can’t.”
“What do you take me for, Mr. Ryder, a fool? What were you doing here?”
All Josh could think of was the explanation Malachai gave to the children he worked with: the five-, six-, seven- and eight-year-olds who were frightened by the power of the stories in their heads. “You are unforgetting the past, that’s all. It might seem scary but it’s really quite wonderful,” he would tell them.
That might have been what Josh was doing there, but it was the last explanation he was going to give.
Gabriella interrupted the detective and begged him to conduct the rest of the interview outside of the tomb. “This is an ancient site that we’ve just begun to work on. I need to protect it and close it down as soon as possible.”
Tatti promised her they would work as quickly and carefully as possible and leave as soon as they could, but not quite yet. He turned back to Sabina, and his eyes rested on her. For a few seconds, it was totally silent in the tomb. And then he asked Gabriella, once more, what she thought had been taken.
She was losing her patience. “We’ve been over this, haven’t we?”
“We have. But I’m still not satisfied that you and the professor found this tomb, excavated it, started to catalog its contents and yet never looked inside the box. Weren’t you curious?”
“Of course. But there is a protocol. To us, every inch of this tomb is as exciting as what might be in the box. The very fact that the woman buried here was comparatively incorruptible was of greater archaeological and scientific importance—even religious significance—than some trinket inside a box.”
“So it was a trinket?”
She