Skeleton Dance
Page 5
"B.P.?"
"Sorry, before the present."
Joly poured them all a little more of the local white wine, a fruity Montravel. "I see. And what of this hoax, this argument?"
"Well, first you have to understand—as Julie pointed out yesterday—that anthropologists love to argue—"
"Is that so?" Joly murmured.
"—and nowhere is that more true than in Neanderthal research." He leaned back out of the way as the waiter laid the gleaming arsenal of utensils for the next course. "Right from the beginning—and the original Neanderthal Man was found in 1856—there's been a continuing, usually noisy fight over where to put him."
Joly showed his surprise; one of his eyebrows went up a millimeter. "Where to put him? He's not in a museum?"
"What I meant," Gideon said, laughing, "was where to put him taxonomically."
The issue, he explained, was the place of the Neanderthals in the long progression of human evolution. Were these muscular, beetle-browed creatures our ancestors—that is, the ancestors of modern Europeans—or were they evolutionary dead ends, crowded off the branches of the human tree like so many withered fruits, when our true ancestors, the Cro Magnons, arrived in Europe from Africa, bringing with them the technological marvels and cultural advances of the Upper Paleolithic age? Was Neanderthal Man the shambling, grunting, bent-kneed brute of the comics, dragging his woman along by the hair, or was he a sensitive being with language, culture, and an appreciation of beauty and art? Were the Neanderthals, in fact, human beings at all, or did they belong somewhere lower in the evolutionary scale, down with the monkeys and the apes?
"I see," Joly said. "And what is the position of the Institut de Préhistoire on these questions?"
"They don't have a position. They're divided just like every one else. Half of them are staunch defenders of the Neanderthals as card-carrying Homo sapiens, and the other half think they should be frog-marched out of the human line altogether, right into the trash pile with Gigantopithecus, Australopithecus boisei and all the other evolutionary wriggles that didn't go anywhere." That, at least, had been the way they'd all felt back then, and knowing them Gideon couldn't imagine they'd changed their views very much.
Julie took over at that point, explaining to Joly, with considerable zest, about the finding of the four perforated bones and their subsequent exposure as a fraud. By the time she finished the magret de canard had been brought, demolished and removed; likewise the salade verte, and the three of them were doing their seriously diminished best with the cheese course.
After a long, meditative lull in the conversation, Joly, first asking Julie's permission, lit his first Gitane of the evening. "And this is so very important?" he finally said as smoke swirled from his mouth and nostrils. "The making of a necklace?"
Gideon washed down a sliver of cheese—Géromé, according to Joly with a sip from his wineglass, now filled with a dry red Bergerac. "You better believe it. To put it simply, the making of decorative objects is one of the things that makes us unique, a convenient dividing line between human beings and everything else that's ever lived. Apes don't do it, monkeys don't do it, Homo erectus didn't do it; only Homo sapiens does it. So if you can establish that the Neanderthals did too, that pretty much means you have to classify them as one of us; not Homo neanderthalensis, a separate species of their own, but Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, a fully human subspecies, a kind of race."
"I see," Joly said. "Then I assume these bones caused a considerable uproar among those interested in such things?"
"Are you kidding? Once the news got out, it split the whole world of Middle and Upper Paleolithic anthropologists—"
"All eleven of them," Julie said, then quickly held up her hands: "I apologize, I couldn't help myself."
"—into two warring camps. The institute staff themselves were split right down the middle. Some people flat-out refused to believe it, some even came pretty close to calling Ely Carpenter a faker, but his defenders were just as adamant, and the Old Man of Tayac—le Vieux de Tayac—carried the day."
"Carpenter," Joly said, tipping his head back to expel a lungful of smoke. "Not 'Carpentier'? He wasn't a Frenchman?"
"No, he was an American, but he'd lived in France for a long time, a decade or more."
"And he himself was the perpetrator?" Joly asked.
"Nobody knows," Gideon said. "He denied it, of course, but he came in for a lot of abuse and ridicule. So did the institute, even though they didn't really have any part in it. Even today some people think Carpenter was responsible, some people think he was duped. Either way, he was thoroughly disgraced."
"Which do you think he was," Julie asked, "duper or dupee? You haven't said."
"I think he was duped. Sure, he might have wanted something like this to be true, but from what I know about him he wasn't the kind of guy to try to falsify the archaeological record. Besides, it was such a primitive kind of fake; someone with Carpenter's credentials would've been able to pull off something a lot more sophisticated, a lot harder to detect."
"How was it done?" Joly asked.
"The holes in the bones were made with an electric drill bit—which, I should point out, was not found in your standard Middle Paleolithic tool kit—and then stained with something so that they didn't look freshly made. That was it." Somebody like Carpenter would have known it was only a question of time before someone saw through it."
"And afterwards," Joly asked, "what happened to him?"
"Oh, about what you'd expect. His reputation was in shreds of course, and from what I understand he got a little paranoid about it; kind of wacky. In the end, he had to resign, of course."
"And now where is he?"
"No place he can be reached, I'm afraid. He was an amateur pilot, he had his own plane, and he crashed it not too long afterwards; up in Brittany."
Joly glazed at the beamed ceiling for a while, smoking placidly. "If he was so good a scientist," he said, watching the blue-gray tendrils spiral slowly up to be torn apart in the breeze, "and if the hoax was so primitive, how was it that he was taken in?"
"That's the question, all right. It's one of the things I'll be tackling in the book."
"And who did the taking in?" Julie added.
Gideon nodded. "Yup, that's also the question. A man named Jacques Beaupierre's the director now and he's given me his blessing to talk to the whole staff and ask them anything I want. I'm hoping I can come up with some answers."
"I would also be interested to know—"Joly began.
"Lucien, let me ask you something. What's with all this interest in the Old Man of Tayac? You don't think—or do you think—there's some connection between the institute and Mr. X back there in the cave?"
Joly plucked a shred of tobacco from his lips and leaned back in his chair. "Let me show you something." From the inside pocket of his suit jacket he took an unsealed white envelope. Inside were three black-and-white photographs of the same object that he laid out side by side on the tablecloth. He waited for their response.
"A rusty trowel," Julie said after a moment.
"Lying on the ground," said Gideon.
"Keenly observed," said Joly. "It was found by one of my officers in the brush about twenty-five meters from the entrance to the abri in which we were this afternoon. Now look at this one, the enlargement. What do you see burned into the handle?"
Gideon turned the photo to read the letters. "Initials… I.P." He glanced back up at Joly. "Meaning?"
"Institut de Préhistoire!" Julie said.
"Very good, madame—ah, Julie. So I also concluded. And when I took it there, Monsieur Beaupierre took one look at it and identified it as having originally come from their tool bin." He turned to Gideon. "There's your connection, my friend."
Gideon let this sink in for a moment. "Twenty-five meters away. You can't exactly call that the scene of the crime."
"Approximately eighty feet," Joly said. "About as far, wouldn't you say, as a man might be expected t
o throw it, if he had just come out of the cave and wished to get rid of it at once?"
Gideon shook his head. "Sorry, Lucien, I think you're reaching. These people have run digs all over the place around here. Archaeologists are always leaving stuff like this behind, or having it ripped off, or just losing it." He gathered up the photographs and handed them back to the inspector. "My guess is that what you've got here is a simple coincidence."
"Good," said Joly, pocketing the envelope. "Excellent. I love simple coincidences. I delight in simple coincidences. Whenever I see a simple coincidence I smell a commendation in the offing."
For a few minutes they all digested quietly, Joly smoking and Julie and Gideon sipping wine, all three ruminating over their thoughts. The tray of cheeses was removed, the demitasse cups brought.
"I've been thinking a-bout the issues we were discussing earlier," Joly said. "Was Neanderthal a human being? Was he not a human being?" He followed this with one of his elaborate Gallic shrugs—eyebrows, chin, and shoulders all going up at the same time, mouth going down. "Forgive me, but there have been no Neanderthals for tens of thousands of years, what does it matter?" He ground out his cigarette, already smoked two-thirds of the way down. "To speak frankly, it hardly seems something that sensible people would quarrel over."
"Sensible people, no," Julie said, "but we're talking about Paleolithic archaeologists. It's against their principles to agree with each other."
Gideon laughed along with her. "She's right, they get nervous when everybody has the same theory. They haven't even agreed on whether 'Neanderthal' should have an 'h' in it or not; there are the old-guard pro-'h' and the radical anti-'h' camps. You know, the institute's holding a public symposium at the community lecture hall tomorrow, Lucien. Why don't you come to it? You'll get some idea."
"What is the subject?"
"It's called 'Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon: Differences and Similarities.'
Joly pursed his narrow lips. "'Neanderthal' with or without the 'h'?"
"With, I think. They're traditionalists on that point."
"Even so, I'm sorry to say I have other business." His eyes lit up. "Ah, dessert. Prepare yourselves."
The market town of Les Eyzies winds for half-a-mile along the east bank of the green, slow-flowing river Vézère, prettily situated at the base of an undulating, three-hundred-foot-high wall of honey-colored limestone cliffs. In the Middle Ages it had been little more than an unwelcoming cluster of mean stone houses huddled beneath the great, brooding chateau of the barons of Beynac, built into the very face of the cliffside, but today, with the lords long gone, the village hums with activity. Visitors come because of the region's celebrated prehistoric finds, the local gourmet shops and restaurants, and the refreshing mixture of commercial bustle and open-faced country simplicity that is the essence of village life.
Charming in the daytime, it is spine-tinglingly evocative at night, when the modern shops and cafés are dark, but the ancient, cobbled streets are lamplit, and strategically placed floodlights illuminate the bony ruins of the chateau on its rock-cut terrace, the medieval stone houses that still remain around it, and above, all, the dramatic cliffs themselves that rear up only a few yards from the main street, brilliantly lit at their base but disappearing into blackness above.
It had been light when they went into the restaurant; it was dark when they came out, and for a few minutes the three of them stood in the parking lot without speaking, their faces turned up to the light-bathed curves and hollows of the cliffs. Gideon and Julie turned down Joly's offer of a lift back to the Hotel Cro-Magnon, preferring to walk the quarter-mile, and started slowly on their way.
"Lucien speaks better English than I do," Julie said after a while. "It hardly seems fair."
"Well, his father worked for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Lucien spent most of his adolescence in London. "
"Ah."
"He sure knows how to order a meal too, doesn't he?"
"It was wonderful, but my God, I don't think I'll ever be able to eat again. Look at me, I'm waddling, not walking. You know, this answers a question I've had for years."
Gideon cocked an eyebrow. "Oh?"
"Well, I couldn't help wondering why your on-site research has always focused on early man in Europe, especially here in the south of France, rather than on Africa, where the remains are so much more ancient. I think I'm finally beginning to see why."
"Well, of course," Gideon said. "It's pretty tough finding a three-star restaurant in the Rift Valley. I thought you figured that out a long time ago." He reached an arm around her shoulder and pulled her close to kiss her soft, fragrant hair, and then they fell silent, walking hand in hand through the near-deserted streets.
When they came to the hotel, Julie started in but Gideon tugged her along. "Not yet, I want to show you something."
"In the dark?"
"I'm equipped," he said, taking out a pocket flashlight and flicking it on.
He led her to an unlit, nondescript alley that turned toward the cliffside half-a-block beyond the hotel, at the end of which, aided by the flashlight, they threaded their way between a couple of parked cars and pushed through a rusted, unlocked, waist-high metal gate, ducking their heads—or at least Gideon had to duck his—to enter a small, shallow abri, one of several that dimpled the base of the cliffs here, one beside the other. The next one over held a propane tank; the one after that, considerably larger, formed the rear wall of the Hotel Cro-Magnon. The one in which they stood, however, the smallest of the three, held nothing at all.
Julie looked around, puzzled. "This is what you wanted to show me?"
Gideon smiled. "Yes." He shone the flashlight onto a weathered marble plaque bolted to the stone immediately above the opening.
Ici furent decouverts en 1868 les hommes de Cro-Magnon par Francois Berthoumeyrou.
Julie's lips moved as she worked her way through the French. "Here… something… discovered in…" Her eyes widened. "Gideon, is this actually the original Cro-Magnon Man cave? This little place?"
That was exactly what it was, he told her, pleased with her reaction. They were on hallowed historic (or prehistoric) ground. It had been right there, right beneath their feet in that unremarkable, little-visited cavelet, that three thirty-millennia-old skeletons of a type never before seen in prehistoric burials had been uncovered by workmen during the construction of the Les Eyzies railway station across the road; the very place, so to speak, where modern humankind had made its entrance onto the anthropological stage.
"Wow," said Julie with something gratifyingly close to awe. "It sends goosebumps down your back, doesn't it?" She smiled at him. "Did you bring that flashlight all the way from home just so you could show me this place in the dark?"
He shrugged. "It doesn't weigh anything."
"You're a romantic, you know that?"
"Of course. I thought that was why you married me."
"You know, maybe it was at that."
"Gideon," she said on the short walk back to the hotel, "do you think my French is good enough to let me get anything out of that Neanderthal-Cro-Magnon symposium you were telling Lucien about?"
"You don't need French. It's in English."
"English? How come?"
The Institut de Préhistoire, he explained, was funded jointly by the Université du Périgord and the Chicago-based Horizon Foundation, and was by charter composed of both French and American scholars. Bilingual fluency was required for appointment, and papers and symposia might be in either language. This particular one was to be videotaped for use in American universities and would therefore be conducted in English.
"That's great," she said. "I'll plan on going, then."
"Good, but I have to tell you, if it's more goosebumps you're after, forget it. It's likely to be pretty dry stuff."
"That's okay," she said, standing on tiptoe to nuzzle at his earlobe as he turned the key to their room. "I have other sources for goosebumps."
Chapter 7
So for a few hours they acted like tourists. They had a leisurely breakfast in their room in the ivy-covered Hotel Cro-Magnon, which was every bit as rustic and pretty an inn as Gideon had remembered. Afterward, they strolled along the street, chatting about nothing in particular and looking in shop windows, but mostly simply passing the time together, peacefully, pleasantly, without event or object. A sort of jet-lag-decompression time.
They were heading into a café for a coffee stop when Gideon spotted a familiar figure coming diagonally across the street toward them, somewhat in the manner of a soft-bodied sea creature undulating over the ocean floor.
"Here comes Jacques Beaupierre," Gideon said.
Julie stared. "That's the director of the Périgord Institute of Prehistory? The old gentleman who just walked right in front of that truck?"
It was true, and it was typical. The plump, balding Beaupierre had just ambled directly across the path of a flatbed truck loaded with baskets of walnuts, which had been forced to pull up to a sudden stop. One of the baskets had tipped over, spilling nuts onto the truck's bed and into the road, and the driver was leaning out of the window vigorously making his objections known. Beaupierre, equally oblivious to truck, driver, and nuts, was placidly continuing his crossing, an amiably dreamy look in his blue, bespectacled eyes. He was, if the movements of his lips were any indication, deep in consultation with himself. Gideon guessed that if he were to be suddenly stopped and asked where he was, or where he was going, it would take a while for him to come up with the answers.
"Well, it's true, he's not the most focused guy in the world," Gideon said, "but"—searching for something good to say—"but he does know his Middle Paleolithic stone-tool technology."