Gideon looked up sharply from the chunks of shish kebab he’d been pushing around with his fork. “What was Abe’s idea?”

“That you do some of the narration. He was still chairman of the board then, and as soon as the subject came up, he said you’d be perfect for it. Right, hon?”

“Absolutely right,” Bruno agreed.

For the first time, Gideon’s resistance weakened. Abraham Irving Goldstein, then already near retirement, had been his professor in graduate school, his mentor, his father-figure (or grandfather-figure), and finally his friend. His death from a kidney infection four months before, at the age of eighty-one, had left a space in Gideon’s life, and Julie’s too, that no one else would ever fill.

And narrating a film was exactly the sort of thing Abe would have come up with for him; something to get his nose out of the dusty alleys of Pleistocene hominid taxonomy. Abe had never stopped nagging Gideon-gently, to be sure- about spending too much time in the library stacks and skeletal labs, and too little among people who still had some flesh on their bones.

“Abe really wanted me to do it?” he said softly.

At this sign of wavering, they laid it on: The project would take only two weeks. His work would be undemanding. Nobody was expecting prepared presentations, they simply wanted him to respond to the interviewer’s questions in a relaxed, conversational manner; after-the-fact editing would smooth everything out. It was doubtful that he’d be needed for more than an hour or two a day, so there would be plenty of time for sightseeing and relaxation.

Besides that, another good, old friend of Gideon’s was going to be involved too. Since Phil Boyajian would be in Egypt researching one of his travel books anyway, they had talked him into coming along to handle the logistics, a guarantee of smooth sailing and good company.

“Well-” Gideon said.