“IF THIS WERE A MYSTERY novel, I don’t see any really good suspects other than Karl,” Arthur said, still on the swivel chair in his office. I asked if he had any concrete reason to suspect him. He didn’t. It was all speculation. “It looked to me like Harvard was kind of closing up behind its threatened professor. I always connected his getting tenure with Jane’s being murdered.”

The timing of Karl’s tenure had felt too significant to be random to me, too. And a few other mysteries dangled in close proximity: Jane and Karl’s relationship had started out well enough, but, if Boyd and Arthur were right, it soured, and I didn’t know why.

Also, if Jane’s killer was someone in the department, I found it hard to believe that her murder on the morning of Generals, a pivotal moment in her academic career, was simply a coincidence.

And, finally, I was intrigued not just by the timing of Karl’s promotion, but also by the fact of it. Until 2005, when Harvard made all junior professor offers automatically tenure-track, it was rare for a junior professor to get tenure at the school. Instead, the university brought in outside scholars who had already made names for themselves elsewhere. Karl was the last junior professor of archaeology to be tenured from within for the next forty-three years. A few former members of the department told me that 1969 had been an exceptional time. (David Maybury-Lewis, then an assistant professor of anthropology, was also given tenure that year.) For some reason that they couldn’t explain, a window apparently opened up that year that allowed junior professors into the castle, creating a mad urgency to get tenure before the window shut.

Even so, for Karl to get the promotion, he had to have been exceptional. Karl credited his rapid ascension to his field experience, the recommendation letters his UPenn mentors wrote, and his publication record before coming to Harvard. And Tepe Yahya was a landmark discovery. But would the 1968 season and the survey of the site from the year before have been enough? It certainly wasn’t Carmania, as Karl had come back contending. But the tenure committee may not have known that the site’s connection with Carmania had been misjudged––or even if it had, that it might not have cared. (Less than two years later, in 1970, the Tepe Yahya progress report made no mention of Carmania.)

Carmania was a good story, and the newspapers had already done their work of amplifying it. In November 1968, the Boston Globe celebrated Karl as the man who had unearthed Alexander the Great’s lost citadel: “For centuries, scholars have been aware that Carmania once existed. Yet they have never been able to find the fabled fortress. […] But this past Summer, the Harvard team headed by C. C. Lamberg-Karlovsky […] dug out the ancient fort.” The evidence was scant: supposed elephant teeth found at the top of the mound, and the fact that Tepe Yahya, like Carmania, according to an ancient Greek historian, was located a “five days’ march from the sea.” But that didn’t stop Karl from confidently declaring to the Globe: “I am positive we have discovered Carmania.”

I was starting to believe that there were two kinds of archaeologists: the scholars like Jim Humphries and Richard Meadow, who were meticulous and bound by data, and, as I’d seen sitting in his class, the storytellers like Karl. I was also starting to believe that the storytellers always won. We seemed to value memorability more than accuracy as long as no one forced us to look too closely. As Arthur had said on the call before we met, “If you can tell a real good story about what your site was and what it was doing and why it was there, and so on, that’s what the truth is. The best story? That’s the truth. Whether or not it actually happened.” Perhaps the only people who could have forced the tenure committee to examine the truth behind Karl’s claims were some of the people who had been on the dig that summer.

But proximity, I scolded myself, didn’t equal causation.

“I don’t know how to close that loop,” I told Arthur.

He said he didn’t know how to close the loop, either, and added, “Yeah, well, look. If he did it, it’s been a long time, but it would be good just to clear it up. As I said, I wish he did, but wishes don’t necessarily reflect reality.”