Skeleton Dance

by Aaron Elkins

  "Oh, well, then."

  Archaeology had been Beaupierre's whole life, Gideon knew. He had been born and raised in Les Eyzies, the son and grandson of local amateur antiquarians, and he had been immersed in local prehistory since the age of nine. At the same time, he was a man whose native keenness of mind had never been his forte, and it was common knowledge, or at least common belief, that his ascendance to the directorship after Carpenter's humiliating resignation had been based more on seniority than merit; the seventy-four-year-old Beaupierre had been with the institute since the day of its inception almost forty years before. He had already been passed over three times, most recently when he'd competed for it against Carpenter himself, and to the general surprise of the archaeological establishment, Carpenter, the new kid on the block, had been appointed. But with the all-too-colorful Ely Carpenter soon gone in a cloud of scandal, it was felt that the prudent, industrious Beaupierre's day had come. Besides, there wasn't much risk in it; by that time the directorship had become little more than an honorary post with a few routine administrative duties.

  "Bonjour, Jacques," Gideon called, when the unseeing Beaupierre, lost in thought, or at any rate lost in something, came abreast of them.

  Beaupierre stopped. "Eh? Mm?" He peered blinking at Gideon through his glasses—rectangular-lensed and framed in thick black plastic, a style last in vogue in the 1950's—and broke into a sweet smile. "Ah, it's Gideon, isn't it? You've arrived! Is it Tuesday then, or am I…"

  "We got here yesterday," Gideon said, shaking Beaupierre's offered hand. "This is my wife, Julie."

  "How delightful! Enchanté, madame. Gideon, these interviews of yours—when would you wish to begin them?"

  "As soon as I can. I have this case I'm working on with the police, but I can fit them in whenever it's convenient for you and your people."

  Beaupierre put his finger to his rounded chin. "I wonder, could you join us later this morning at our staff meeting? You could make your arrangements with them individually."

  "Well…"

  "Go ahead," Julie said. "I'll be fine, there's plenty to do. Besides, I've already gotten more quality time out of you than I was expecting for the whole trip."

  "Excellent, most kind, madame," said Beaupierre. "Our meeting is at eleven, Gideon. Perhaps you could describe your purposes in coming in a little more detail. I've told them, of course, but it would be an opportunity for you to orient all of them yourself at a single sitting, and, mm… well."

  "Sure, I'd like to."

  "In the afternoon, however, we are taken up. There is a symposium at two." He turned to Julie. "Madame, if you have some interest in the Middle Paleolithic era, perhaps you would care to honor us by attending? It will be in English, you know."

  "Yes, thank you, I'm planning to be there."

  Beaupierre seemed genuinely delighted. "I look forward to seeing you and to introducing you to our fellows. And you, Gideon—we'll see you at eleven? You remember where we meet?"

  "Is it still that café just down from the institute, on the square—"

  "The Café du Centre, yes, that's the place. But only until next week," he added, beaming joyfully at them, "when we finally move into our new quarters, our wonderful new quarters, with our own full-size conference room at last, and a reception area, and the most modern storage facilities, and… and so forth. The dedication ceremony will be Monday morning. Will you still be here then? Can you come?"

  "If we're here, we'll certainly come," Gideon said.

  "We'd love to," Julie said.

  "You have no idea how long it's been in coming, or what a difference it will make. Oh, the difficulties… ah, well, mm…" He bobbed to them individually and shook hands with Gideon. "Good day to you both. A great pleasure, madame."

  "Actually, he seemed pretty focused to me," Julie said as the director continued on his way. "Once he got started."

  "He did, didn't he? Maybe I've been giving him a bum rap. He's sharper than I remembered."

  "Oh, Gideon!" Beaupierre had gone about ten paces and turned. "Which way was I going when we met?"

  "Uh… the same way you are now."

  "Ah, good," said Beaupierre, patting his belly. "Then I've had my breakfast."

  When he stopped off at the Hotel Cro-Magnon before going to the staff meeting, Gideon was told by the clerk at the desk that an Inspector Joly from Périgueux had telephoned, asking him to call.

  "Lucien, what's up?"

  "Ah, Gideon, a little news. I've been speaking with the prefect in Les Eyzies about a fellow named Jean Bousquet, who disappeared from the village three years ago—"

  "Wait a minute, I thought you told me there weren't any unclosed cases."

  "This is a little different. Bousquet was never reported to the police as missing, he was reported as a thief."

  By his landlady, Madame Renouard, according to whom Bousquet had fled after removing from a secret drawer in her cupboard 60 francs in cash, an antique lapel watch valued at 180 francs, and a treasured cameo brooch; one of a pair that had belonged to her grandmother. He had also left with his rent four weeks in arrears, a matter of some 600 francs. The municipal police, under Prefect Marielle, had mounted an unsuccessful search for him, concluding after a week that he had permanently left the area, and there the matter had lain. A few months later there was a brief flurry of speculation that he might have returned; Madame Renouard, discovering that her grandmother's other cameo brooch was missing, was convinced that the rapacious Bousquet must have slunk back to complete the heist. But there was no other evidence to support this, and it had come to nothing. Bousquet, having disappeared once, was not seen again.

  "And so you think that might have been him in the cave?"

  "I offer it as a possibility," said Joly. "He seems to have had no shortage of enemies. Apparently he was a drifter who had come to the area not long before and had found a job plying a shovel. He had had bad relations with several townspeople, and there are reports of some unpleasantness with a co-worker at his place of employment. I lack the details, but would you agree that it sounds worth looking into?"

  "Yes, it does. Well, I'll be back at the bones this afternoon, Lucien. I'll give you a call and let you know what I have. You find out what you can about his physical characteristics and, who knows, maybe we can come up with a match."

  "Very good. Oh, by the way, our police pathologist, Dr. Roussillot, is nominally in charge of the remains, so he is required to certify your findings. He may choose to join you at the morgue. I hope you don't mind?"

  "Mind, why should I mind?"

  "Well, I'm afraid Dr. Roussillot may be somewhat stiff-necked for your taste; a nice enough fellow to be sure, but fairly new on the job—he was a professor until last year, you see, and as a result has an inclination to be somewhat fussy and punctilious, as well as an unfortunate tendency toward tedious speeches. Ah, not, that is to say, that professors necessarily—"

  "That's okay, Lucien, don't worry about it."

  "You will try to get along with him, won't you?"

  Gideon laughed. "I get along with you, don't I?"

  "He spent two years at Cambridge, speaks a wonderful English."

  "Lucien, don't worry about it, I'll get along fine with the guy."

  "Excellent," Joly said, sounding relieved. "Oh, and perhaps you could also do me the service of seeing if there is anything to the story of this Bousquet's 'unpleasantness' with a co-worker? I'm sure that you could do it more smoothly, more in the natural course of events, than I could."

  "I appreciate the compliment," Gideon said in all sincerity, "but how in the hell am I supposed to do that?"

  "His place of employment," said Joly, "was the Institut de Préhistoire."

  Chapter 8

  Some things never changed.

  So Gideon thought with a smile as he stood unnoticed in the doorway of the Café du Centre's small, plain back room. It was a few minutes before eleven o'clock and the institute's fellows had gathered early for their mee
ting. There they were at the same scarred round table, the only table in the room, coffee cups and frosted carafes of water at hand, going at it hammer and tongs, just as they'd been doing three years ago, two of them stalwartly standing up for the Neanderthals as brothers, or at least cousins (despite the recent DNA evidence to the contrary), and the other three just as vigorously (and more accurately, in Gideon's view) in favor of demoting them to distant in-laws, no closer to humans than they were to the great apes.

  Leading the anti-Neanderthal charge, as before, was the diminutive but formidable Audrey Godwin-Pope, one of the two Americans on the staff, and at 68 its second oldest member, after Beaupierre; a forthright, free-spoken woman with iron-gray hair done up in a bun, author of over a hundred monographs, and president of Sisters in Time, the feminist caucus of the International Archaeological Society. Audrey was on her second—or was it her third?—four-year appointment to the institute. (According to the charter the American fellows received four-year renewable appointments; the French fellows were appointed to indefinite terms.) Three years earlier, the last time the directorship had been open, she too had been a competitor, along with Beaupierre and Carpenter, but of course Carpenter had been selected and then a few months later Beaupierre had been appointed to replace him. Now it was widely and approvingly understood that Audrey was next in line in the unlikely prospect that Beaupierre were to leave any time soon.

  Supporting her against the pro-Neanderthalers was the vinegary, pedantic Émile Grize, the staff paleopathologist, the only Frenchman Gideon knew who affected bow ties, generally oversized and usually with a gaudy, multicolored pattern, both of which sadly accentuated his own meager frame and vaguely reptilian features. Today it was flying yellow egrets on a field of mauve, not a happy choice for a man with the complexion of an over-the-hill Roquefort cheese.

  The third and final member of the Neanderthal-as-poor-relation group was the other American, and the other woman, on the staff, Prudence McGinnis, her flyaway red hair more or less held back by a couple of barrettes. Sitting within easy reach of a plate of chocolate brioches, Pru was big, jolly, and irrepressible, with a washerwoman's thick, red wrists and forearms, and a body like an only slightly gone-to-seed female Russian shot-putter's. Gideon's and Pru's friendship went back to his days at Northern California State, when Pru, only three years younger than Gideon, had been a student in the very first graduate course he had taught. With her cocky, funny, shoot-from-the-hip New York manner she had struck many on the faculty as insufficiently reverent, but Gideon had taken to her from the first. Irreverence had been in short supply in the anthro department at Northern Cal, and from Gideon's perspective view Pru had been a breath of fresh air.

  At odds with them on almost every point was the smaller pro-Neanderthal contingent, comprised, as before, of Jacques Beaupierre, the affable, constitutionally absent-minded director; and the gruff, bearlike Michel Montfort, distinguished Paleolithic archaeologist, diplomate of the French Académie des Sciences, and generally acknowledged to be the institute's most distinguished scholar if not its most diplomatic member. As befitting his status, he had been offered the directorship several times, offered it on a silver platter, but having no interest in or patience with administrative matters he had consistently declined—to the relief of all concerned.

  Although outnumbered three to two and on the less generally accepted side of the argument, Beaupierre and Montfort more than managed to hold their own, thanks mostly to Montfort's imposing persona and acknowledged preeminence.

  It was amazing, really, that they never got tired of haranguing each other, or that they'd never physically attacked one another in sheer frustration. (Or maybe they had, who knew?) Probably, the answer lay in the fact that they were out of each others' sight for seven months out of every twelve. According to the terms of its charter, the institute was in session only five months a year, from late June to the end of November, typically allowing them a three-month digging season followed by a two month "data consolidation" period. Except for Jacques Beaupierre, whose administrative duties were year-round, and Pru McGinnis, who held no outside faculty position, the staff members spent the rest the year away from the institute and each other on half-or three-quarter-time appointments at their home universities.

  But whatever the reason, their endless debate had never been in danger of growing stale. "Ridiculous!" Montfort was declaring in his blunt Alsatian French at the moment. "Do you really think that if we could take a typical Neanderthal, give him a shave, dress him up in a jogging suit, and sit him down in a New York subway train, that any of the other passengers would even look twice at him?"

  Pru received this with a hearty laugh. "You're absolutely right, and you want to know why? Because people who ride the New York subways know better than to notice anybody. Believe me, I know what I'm talking about here."

  Watching from the doorway, Gideon smiled. It was nice to see that Pru was still Pru.

  "As to the New York subway," said Émile Grize dryly, the egrets bobbing under his chin, "that is a subject on which, happily, I am unable to speak with conviction. However, as a trained paleopathologist—" As Gideon remembered, Émile began a lot of sentences with "As a trained paleopathologist"; in his own mind he was the one real scientist in this band of rock-hunters. "—as a trained paleopathologist I can assure you that a Neanderthal would not pass unnoticed in the Paris Métro, however well-shaven."

  He sounded positively offended at the idea, as if, were poor Charlie Caveperson to shamble unassumingly aboard at the Étoile metro station, he, Émile Grize, would personally boot him off at the next stop.

  "Be that as it may," said Audrey Godwin-Pope in her usual no-nonsense manner, "I would think we might agree that the outward appearance of these beings is beside the point."

  "Does this interminable discussion actually have a point?" Montfort asked. "It continues to elude me."

  "It was my impression," Audrey said, standing up to him (no surprise there), "that it was their social organization that was under discussion, and there even you, Michel, have to admit the evidence is unambiguous. They had none—at least not on a human level. Everything we know about Neanderthal society tells us that it was on a par with that of a wandering troop of mountain gorillas, nothing more."

  "Is that so?" Montfort snorted, leaning combatively forward. "Suppose you tell me then: when was the last time you encountered a wandering troop of mountain gorillas that made a practice of burying their grandfathers?"

  Touché, Gideon thought. Montfort was on the wrong side of the argument, but touché all the same.

  "I saw a study recently," Jacques Beaupierre piped up, "that suggests there is now good reason to believe that the morphological differences between Neanderthal Man—"

  "Neanderthals," said Audrey with the stoic demeanor of someone who was making the same correction for the thousandth time and had no hope that it was going to take this time any more than it had before. Nice to see that she hadn't changed either. "Or Neanderthalers, if you prefer."

  "Differences between Neanderthals," said Beaupierre without missing a beat—-he was used to it too—"and modern humans are not evolutionary at all, but nothing more than the result of an iodine-deficient diet, due to their distance from the seacoast."

  "Iodine deficiency is well-known to result in thyroid dysfunction and eventually, if severe and protracted enough, in cretinism," Émile observed in his surgical but long-winded fashion. "Are we therefore to assume that the position of this study that the Neanderthal population is not a separate race or species at all, but simply an assemblage of cretins?"

  Beaupierre's brow furrowed. "Ah… well, yes, I suppose that would follow, yes."

  It was enough to make people sigh, and shake their heads, and glance around the room, finally becoming aware of Gideon. Pru at once jumped up and strode to the door to welcome him, her hand outstretched and her lively gray eyes almost on a level with his own. He smiled, equally glad to see her, although he could have done wit
hout her bonecracking gorilla-handshake, which he saw coming but couldn't in decency avoid. Audrey, more restrained, merely said, "Hello, Gideon, it's nice to see you again," but her stern mouth softened and even curved upward a little at the corners. These, fellow-Americans, were the two people he knew best and liked most. Montfort, whom he knew less well, was his usual crusty self but went so far as to rise halfway, grunt, and shake hands somewhat absently (a relief after Pru's knuckle-grinder). Only Émile Grize limited himself to no more than a frugal nod, which Gideon accepted as a cordial welcome, considering the source.

  Audrey and Pru made room for him between them, a café crème was brought for him, and the business part of the meeting was attended to. With the institute in its annual data-consolidation mode, archaeological digs had been suspended while members concentrated on interpreting the season's findings. Thus, the discussion concerned little more than the publication schedules of various institute proceedings and monographs, and these were quickly, almost cursorily, dealt with. The language of discussion was then mercifully switched to English as a kindness to the newcomer, and Beaupierre turned the floor over to "our old friend, Gideon Oliver, the Skeleton Detective of America."

  Ignoring the raised hairs on the nape of his neck that this hated phrase invariably produced, Gideon began: "As you all know, I'm here in connection with the book I'm doing on errors and fallacies in the social sciences; anthropology in particular. The Old Man of Tayac—"

  But the sudden sensation of wary, quivering antennae all about him produced by these few words told him that they did not all know—in fact that none of them, apart from Beaupierre, had known—anything about it. Surprised, Gideon turned inquiringly to the director. "I thought you said…?"

  "Ah, I've told everyone that you would be coming here to interview them," Beaupierre said nervously. "But it may be, now that I think of it, that perhaps I neglected to mention, ah, the exact subject matter of your, ah, interest in, mm…" He closed his mouth, took a sip of coffee, and apparently lost interest, gazing tranquilly out the window, an earnest, cogitative look on his face. Beaupierre had a way of doing that—simply quitting in the middle of a sentence, giving the impression that it was still going on somewhere in the ether, only not out loud. It was as if a radio had been switched off in the middle of a sentence. Sometimes he'd flip the switch back on again in the middle of another sentence, which was equally disconcerting.