by Knox, Tom
She toweled away the last dampness. Vigorously. She wasn’t going to let go, not now. Moreover, she was involved with these murders, the chain of mysterious events, whether she liked it or not. And she knew the two evolutions in her life converged: the skulls and the murders, there was a link. But what? Even if she was resolved, the complexities were intense.
Dressed and ready, she stepped eagerly into the kitchen. Alex was there, doing his laid-back thing. Consuming his coffee and croissants, reading Le Monde very slowly, trying to improve his French and failing.
They had done this many mornings through the summer. The ritual was sometimes comforting; right now, for Julia, it was frustratingly sluggish, a wholly unnecessary delay.
“Please, come on, Alex, this is unbearable, all this waiting, let’s go.”
He put down the newspaper.
“Right now?”
“Right now.”
An hour later they were in a taxi heading north for St. Denis, a rougher part of Paris, not the Paris of Haussmann and the boulevards, this was the Paris of les banlieus—literally, the “places of banishment”—the Paris of Algerian and Moroccan kids with no jobs, the Paris of couscous and Muslim rappers and nervy policemen in riot gear standing by vans just down the road from teeming mosques.
It was dull and cold and drizzly: late November. Their destination was the subsidiary archives of the Musée de l’Homme: the most far-flung outpost of the empire of Parisian ethnology.
Alex spoke: “You know I met him. Just a couple of times.”
“Who?”
“Hector Trewin.” The taxi had stopped at a junction. Alex gazed out at some Arab kids in Inter Milan shirts, doing nothing.
“I didn’t know that.”
“Well, it’s true. Sort of. I mean, we weren’t best mates. But I went to a few of his lectures at Balliol, the Ashmolean, when I was a student. And we chatted. He was very, very slightly famous.”
“And?”
Alex shrugged a laconic shrug. Julia insisted, she wanted to talk.
“Go on, tell me! Trewin, what was he like?”
“A lot of the students revered him, this great Marxist intellectual. But he creeped me out. Everything was theoretical. The world was theoretical. Breakfast was bloody theoretical. He simply wouldn’t acknowledge that there was a practical problem with communism; as far as he was concerned, Marxist theory was fine so it should work, and one day it would. We just had to keep trying. I asked him about Stalin and Mao and he actually said, ‘You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.’”
Alex laughed, bitterly.
“I pointed out to him that sixty million dead people was possibly an oversupply of broken eggs. And the fucking omelette turned out to be the Gulags, and the Lubyanka, and the Purges. He just looked over my head and sighed. He was an arsehole, Julia. I’m sorry. An idealist and a thinker, but an arsehole.” The rain was streaking the cab windows. Alex snapped the words. “Arsehole. Like all of them, all of those soixante-huitards and those seventies radicals and those CND Marxists, all of those Euro-Communists. I hate them. Wankers. How could you be a Communist after Mao, after the Terror? It’s like being a Nazi after the Holocaust. How could you be a Communist at the same time as the Khmer Rouge were killing babies?”
Julia had rarely seen Alex this sincere and vehement. Normally he was sarcastic and languid to the point of nihilism.
They sat in silence. Then Alex patted her on the knee.
“Anyway, darling—I think we have arrived.”
He was right. They’d arrived at the archives of the archives of the Musée de l’Homme. It was a huge gray warehouse, surrounded by nothing much: garages and vacant offices.
Tipping the cabbie, they crossed the rain-stained empty concrete parking lots. Alex said it reminded him of IKEA in far north London. Julia had a childish urge to cross her fingers. This was their last best hope; it was definitely their last hope. They had tried literally everywhere else: the Louvre and the Pasteur, private museums, the Broca archives, and now they were down to a bleak steel warehouse in a dismal ’burb of Paris beyond the Périphérique. One last shot.
The only official presence, the only human presence, was a large grouchy man in a small, depressing office with a sliding-glass window. The archivist of the archives of the archives.
“Eh, bonjour,” he said, giving them a curt nod through the open window. “Et vous êtes?”
They explained in bad French. He checked their credentials, yawned, and did a magnificently Gallic shrug. “Pas de problem.” He returned to his sports newspaper, L’Equipe.
With an air of tourists approaching the Parthenon, they stepped into the vastness of the secondary archives of the Musée de l’Homme. It really was like IKEA—but a frighteningly disorganized IKEA. It swiftly became apparent that these archives had not been indexed in any way. It was just stuff: vast acres of steel shelves with boxes and artefacts and plastic bags. It was academic debris, the forgotten old dreck in the curatorial attic.
For an hour they wandered disconsolately around the vast building, peeking in boxes of tiny amber beads from Mauritania, staring in perplexity at half a broken bird-god from Madagascar. In this hour they realized they had scrutinized maybe 0. 2 percent of the collection.
In despair the couple retreated to the office, to ask the archivist for help.
He shrugged, like they had asked him if he could spit farther than a llama. Like their question was quite surreally redundant.
Pressed once again, the official relented: grudgingly he told them that this cathedral of stuff, this huge warehouse of rubbish, was what remained following the recent translocation of the museum from the Palais Chaillot to its new site at the Quai Branly. Everything the Parisian authorities thought too worthless or irrelevant to be stored in the official archives had been thrown in here. The Frenchman specifically used the word for “thrown”: jeté.
Julia stared down the gigantic aisles of steel shelving in the great cold warehouse. It was pointless. They were defeated. Her determination of the morning had already reached a dead end.
They retreated to the study room. It was a bleak space like a classroom in a fairly poor school: a scattering of tables, a drinks machine. There were two other people there. Two more willing scholars sent to les banlieues of anthropology. They had boxes open, or files to study—obviously they had made their finds.
Julia approached one of the scholars, a thin young man in black jeans hunched over a dirty and apparently African tribal mask.
She asked him, in her best French, how he had made his find: how he had located the tribal mask among the millions of boxes.
The man answered in cheerful English. He was American.
“It’s a total nightmare. That’s why no one comes here. They say they will have properly archived everything by the end of the decade. I would give it two decades. I was lucky, I was told by someone else exactly where to find this. What do you think? A death mask of the Cameroonian Fang, eighteenth century, real human hair!”
The death mask was thrust in Julia’s face. She smiled, and backed away slightly.
Returning to his work, the man said: “If you haven’t got a location, a shelf mark, you’re kinda screwed. Sorry. Your only hope is chance. You might luck out.”
They weren’t going to get lucky. Julia knew it. She gazed at Alex and shrugged and they both walked, defeated, to the door. As she reached the door she realized she was passing another vast pile of boxes. She paused.
“What? Julia? What is it?”
She said nothing. She was staring at the large pile of boxes, dozens of them, stacked roughly, unordered.
Alex said again, “What?”
Julia had been in enough libraries and archives to recognize what this pile implied.
“These are boxes waiting to be shelved. Stuff that’s been examined or added, very recently.”
“Rrright….” Alex drawled. “And?”
“Think about it! We’re presuming the Prunières co
llection must be here, somewhere in these archives, because we’ve searched everywhere else. If the collection exists, it must be dumped in this warehouse.”
Her lover sighed with a hint of impatience. “Fine. Yes. So?”
“Remember what Ghislaine said about the skulls I found? ‘They will be put in the Prunières collection.’ If Ghislaine meant that, and we have no reason to doubt him, the skulls would have been brought here recently. And added to the collection!”
Alex’s frown turned into a bright and flashing smile.
“Got it! Clever girl! So our boxes could be…”
“Just in this pile! In fact, they should be here. Waiting to be shelved—”
Julia was already wading into the stacks and columns.
The boxes were arranged in piles of ten and fifteen; it took them twenty minutes to sift through a quarter of the columns. Then forty minutes. Then fifty. It seemed they would have no luck, until Alex said, very slowly and rather portentously:
“Julia, look. There.” He was pointing. “Third box down. By the door.”
Looking across, she counted down the column of boxes. Her eyes rested on one with a large and discernible label, handwritten and florid and visible from a distance: Prunières de Marvejols, 1872.
There were, in fact, three boxes, all labeled the same way, sitting one on top of the other. Stifling her intense and scholastic excitement, Julia fought through the mess to the boxes, which they then briskly carried from the stack to a table. Alex was smiling at Julia’s glee. She didn’t care; she ripped open the first carton like it was a take-out Indian meal and she was very hungry.
They peered inside.
The boxes contained several human skulls, obviously Neolithic. All had been trepanned. They were not the skulls that she had found. Why not?
Yet these different skulls were trepanned.
Besides the skulls, the boxes also yielded several flint arrowheads, in a soft cotton bag, and a file of slender documents, written in exquisitely mannered old handwriting, tiny but entirely legible. The notebooks of a layman Victorian scientist. They were but a few pages long. Ten minutes later she sat back.
Her friend-with-benefits looked up from the wounded skulls he was examining and gave her a sly smile. He said, “C’mon, don’t tease. What did he say? Prunières?”
“He found exactly what I found, on the Cham. Skeletons with wounds, lots of them; and skulls with trepanations. Little rondelles cut from the cranium. He was hunting in the caves of Lozère, to the west, near the Tarn.”
“I see. And?”
“And he made notes for a lecture, summing it up. Here, I’ll read it out.” She picked up one notebook and stolidly translated: “‘In the Baumes-Chaudes caves, situated in that part of the valley of the Tarn which belongs to the department of Lozère, I picked up numerous bones bearing scars, characteristic of wounds produced by stone weapons. Some fifteen of these bones, such as the right and left hip bones, tibiae, and vertebrae, still contain flint points flung with sufficient force to penetrate deeply the bony tissue. I have also presented to the Congress at Clermont many bones bearing traces of’…” She paused. “I’m not sure of this word … no, hold on. Ah, it’s cicatrized. “‘Many bones bearing cicatrized wounds, from the cave of l’Homme Mort, and beneath the Aumède dolmen.’…” She turned the page and looked at Alex. “There’s lots more like this. He found thousands of wounded bones, and dozens of trepanations, across Lozère.”
Alex whistled, low, appreciatively.
“Hmm! And the upshot, does he speculate a link?”
She said, “Yes. It’s vague, and he admits it is kinda theoretical. But he wonders if…” She quoted again: “‘If we may posit the existence of a relatively advanced society, in upper Languedoc, many thousands of years before the birth of Christ, prone to severe violence. In this regard, perhaps the trepanations can be seen as a reaction to the violence. We know from the estimable Doctor Mantegazza, of Peru, who did such prodigious research in the Sanja-Huara cave, in the Anta province of that distant land—’”
“He’s a bit wordy.”
Her smile was excited. “He is. But he gets there! Listen. ‘We know from Mantegazza’—blah blah—‘that certain civilizations in pre-Colombian antiquity practiced the same cranial surgeries, probably as a way of exorcising evil spirits, allowing demons to escape. It is surely’”—she leaned closer to the page, squinting at a word—“‘plausible that our ancestors on the wild Causses of the Lozère attempted similar interventions: they tried to excise the violence in their culture by freeing the demons in their brains. By drilling holes in their skulls.’”
Alex said, “Intriguing. Very intriguing. He thinks they were all killing each other, so they tried to save their culture with some primitive brain surgery—to get rid of violent urges. Not entirely impossible. It helps to explain Stone Age trepanation.”
She lifted a hand.
“This last paragraph is even more curious.” She quoted the conclusion: “‘If I am permitted the liberties of a veteran, in our war on scientific ignorance, I might add one more thought. Could there be a connection between my modest discoveries and the strange objects recently reported by Garnier, in his gallant explorations of the Mekong River in upper Cochin China?’”
Alex sat forward.
“Cochin China. That’s the old name for French Indochina?”
Her nod was vigorous. “‘The valiant French imperialist, so recently returned from the terrors of the Khone Falls and the delights of Louanghprabangh, tells us that he unearthed several large jars, on a plateau near Ponsabanh, which contained very similar remains as to those discovered in our very own Lozère: many dozens of skulls, trepanned, and evidence of disturbing and coeval social violence. The connection is piquant and intriguing, and of course quite fantastical. It is for younger and better scholars to discover if there is any truth in my fantasies.’”
The notebook was closed. Alex was uncharacteristically silent. Then he spoke:
“A link with Indochina. Laos, Cambodia. Wow.”
“It’s time we told Rouvier about some of this, there are too many links. Too many. We need to go.”
Alex agreed; he stood and stretched and said he was impatient for coffee, a proper grand crème. A nice bar where they could talk all this over. Quick and efficient, they put lids on the cartons, replaced them on the shelf, then made swiftly for the exit and the rain.
But something nagged Julia as they went toward the big swing doors with the big grimy windows. Something had been nagging her for a while. She turned to Alex.
“Meet me at that brasserie, OK? That one we drove past—couple of blocks back.”
“Sure. But why?”
“There’s something I want to ask that asshole at the office. You go and have your coffee. Three minutes.” She stood on tiptoe and kissed him, her arms slung around his neck; she liked the fact that he was taller.
He smiled. “You’re getting gay on me, Julia.” But he was still smiling as he turned and quit the building. Julia watched him for a moment, happy amid the terrors that she had Alex. But now she had a more difficult duty than kissing Alex Carmichael.
Walking to the office of the dour Frenchman, she tapped on the glass partition. Sighing, tetchily, the curator put down his sports paper and slid back the glass.
Julia asked him about the pile of boxes in the study room. Obviously, whoever had examined the boxes had not used them to archive the discoveries that Julia had made: the new skulls had not been added. So who had been in to look at this specific collection? What had been their exact purpose in using the Prunières boxes?
She phrased the question directly: Did the archivist remember anyone who had come searching for the archives of Prunières de Marvejols?
The Frenchman nodded, and wearily explained that a scholar had been in for the last three days, frantically hunting down the very same boxes, finally locating them yesterday afternoon. This scholar had been quite annoying in several ways—the archivist yawne
d theatrically to underline the point—because the scholar had also demanded an obscure back issue of an obscure magazine of French anthropology, so that a specific article could be photocopied.
Julia asked if the archivist remembered the name of the writer of the article.
A petulant sigh.
“Non, mais je me souviens bien du titre. Nous n’arrivons pas à trouver l’article. Il a disparu. Voulez-vous connaître le titre?” No, but I remember the title. We could not find the article. It is missing. Do you want to know the title?
“Oui!”
The archivist sighed and turned and sorted through a pile of documents on his desk; then he handed a piece of paper through the window. The paper had one line written in capitals: it was the title and the author of this missing article.
The author’s name might have been underlined in blood, it was so conspicuous and alarming: Ghislaine Quoinelles.
Her anxiety and her speculations were cut short, the archivist spoke: Is that it? We are finished?
“Non … une autre question.”
Julia asked her final question. She wanted a description of the scholar. Picking up his copy of L’Equipe, the archivist yawned and answered without looking up: The woman is about thirty. She is a little strange. She has long dark hair, and a very white face. Perhaps she is Oriental.
Julia swallowed a surge of true and wild anxiety. She felt like she were about to throw up. The link was proved. They hadn’t just got “lucky” with the box. Their find was no coincidence. Someone had been in to use this box just a day before them. But it wasn’t some friend or colleague of Ghislaine’s.
It was the murderer.
Her fearful thoughts were once more interrupted. The official had slid back the window once more: he was pointing through the glass of the main door.