Skeleton Dance

by Aaron Elkins

  "You have the world's most absolutely gorgeous submaxillary triangle, did I ever tell you that?" he murmured into her throat.

  "Yes, many times," she said sleepily. "It never fails to take my breath away."

  His fingertips glided over the tender flesh beneath her chin. "The soft swell of your Digastricus—"

  "Thank you. Now, shh." With a practiced motion that was all the more affecting because of its easy, familiar intimacy, she pushed on his shoulder to let him know she wanted him on his back. Having arranged him to her satisfaction, she patted his chest as if she were plumping a pillow, worked her head into the hollow of his shoulder, threw one round, sturdy leg over him, sighed, and fell back asleep. Gideon remained awake but was content—much more than content—to lie without moving, his arm under the weight of her and his fingers curled loosely in her dark hair, utterly relaxed and empty of mind, conscious of little more than her closeness and the clean, sweet, warm smell of her. The window was open; dappled morning sunshine filtered through the slats of the wooden shutters, making patterns on the floor and paler, shifting, green-tinged reflections on the ceiling. Time passed.

  "I hope," he said, when she began to move and stretch, "that in addition to being pleasant, this morning's, um, activity proved to you that I am back in command of my capacities."

  She opened her eyes and smiled at him. "I was worried about your head, not—"

  "My head is fine too," he said. "Everything is fine." It was, too, or very nearly. "Tell me, what can I do to convince you?"

  "Well…" She rolled onto her back, yawning. "Maybe if you went downstairs and came back with a couple of cafés au lait, that might do it."

  He kissed her one more time and climbed out of bed. "Give me five minutes."

  Julie snuggled back under the covers and closed her eyes again. "You might want to put on some clothes first," she said, snickered quietly to herself, and went back to sleep.

  At one side of the Hotel Cro-Magnon, enclosed by crumbling stone walls covered by trailing ivy, was a private breakfast garden with a few round tables of filigreed metal; a sheltered oasis of shade trees, bright flowers, and potted plants no more than ten yards from the main street. It was here, at an umbrellaed table, with the last droplets of morning dew still shimmering on the leaves around them, that they sat awaiting their breakfasts half an hour later.

  "What's your schedule this morning?" Julie asked. "Do you see Jacques Beaupierre first?"

  "Yes, that seemed like the right protocol. He's on for ten o'clock, followed at ten-thirty by Pru, who's probably going to be the most informative, then Montfort and the rest of them."

  "You're just doing half-hour interviews? You could have done that over the phone from home. Not that I'm complaining," she said, taking in the scene around them.

  "These are just the introductory sessions, to give me an overview. I'm sure I'll have follow-up questions for them later."

  "M'sieu-m'dame," said Madame Leyssales, the proprietress, bearing a tray heavily loaded with their cafés complets—big stoneware pitchers of coffee and hot milk, little ceramic pots of jam and butter, and heaped baskets of warm rolls and croissants. Each of the empty coffee cups had a third of a baguette standing upright in it, wrapped in a napkin.

  Julie's eyes widened. "Wow, things have changed in France. I seem to remember rather small breakfasts, by and large."

  "It's not that," Madame Leyssales said as she set the tray down. "It's only that I remember the gentleman and his appetite from the last time he was here."

  "And bless you for it, madame," Gideon said, tucking in at once. "I haven't had anything since lunch yesterday."

  "Bon appetit," she said unnecessarily and retired.

  It wasn't until the coffee was half-gone, the baskets half-emptied, and the table littered with flakes of croissant, that Gideon sat back with a sigh. "Now, where were we?"

  "You were telling me your schedule."

  "Right—Julie, aren't you having any croissants at all? You can't get them like this in the States."

  "I was afraid I'd get my hand stabbed if I reached for one. Is it safe now?"

  He laughed. "I'm reasonably sated, yes. Anyway, I should be free at noon or a little after. How about joining me for lunch?"

  "Rats, I can't. I have a ticket for the eleven-thirty Font de Gaume cave tour. It was the only opening they had all day. But I'm meeting Pru McGinnis for lunch at one—she introduced herself at the session yesterday; I really liked her. Why don't you join us?"

  "No good. At one I'm due at the mairie to make out a deposition."

  "About that 'tap on the head,' you mean?"

  "Right. Joly's going to meet me there and help me through it."

  "And then what? Back to the institute for more interviews?"

  "No, they'll have to wait for tomorrow. All the institute people are going to be at part two of that symposium this afternoon. I should probably finish up at the mairie by two or two-thirty, and then I'm free. What about you? Are you going to sit in on the symposium again?"

  She tore off a piece of croissant, applied cherry jam, and chewed away. "Mm, you're right; good. No, I don't want to go to the symposium." She hesitated, chewing. "Can I ask you something? Do these institute people really have a good reputation? They all seemed… well, frankly, like a bunch of… of quibbling eccentrics to me."

  "That's because they do quibble and they're mostly pretty eccentric. But yes, you bet they have a good reputation—a terrific reputation—and they deserve it. That little outfit has been right at the forefront of Paleolithic scholarship for almost thirty years. A guy like Beaupierre may live in his own world most of the time, but nobody can match him for Mesolithic tool technology, and Montfort is a giant in European archaeology—even the Tayac mess couldn't change that—and Émile can be kind of a jerk, but he's done some wonderful stuff on ancient disease demographics, and Audrey's contributed more to the understanding of Cro-Magnon social structure than almost anyone, and even Pru—"

  "Okay, okay, I believe you," Julie said. "Just the same, I think I'll give it a skip." She gave him a little grin with just the corners of her mouth. "But you know what would be fun? I heard there's a kind of reconstructed early-man cave-village up the road a little, near Tursac, with scenes of Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons hunting woolly mammoths, and fighting saber-toothed tigers, and so on. It's called Préhistoparc; how about going up there?"

  "Julie, saber-toothed tigers were extinct in the Old World by the end of the Pliocene; they didn't coexist with Neanderthals or Cro-Magnons, so they could hardly have been hunted by them."

  Julie rolled her eyes. "How did I wind up with such a pedant? Come on, what do you say?"

  "What, you'd rather spend two hours walking around some phony-baloney Paleolithic Disneyland than hear some of the world's premier authorities, people who really know what they're talking about, discuss the latest ideas on Mousterian stone-tool typology?"

  "Sure, wouldn't you?"

  "Definitely," Gideon said.

  "Besides," said Julie, laughing, "I've had all the Châtelperronian side scrapers, bifacial Acheulian hand axes, and Levalloisian flake-cores I can stand for some time to come."

  "Wow, that sounded great."

  She grinned at him. "Just don't ask me what any of it means."

  The offices of the Institut de Préhistoire were on the second floor of one of the few two-story buildings on Les Eyzies' main street, at the other end of the village (i.e., four blocks away) from the Hotel Cro-Magnon. Sturdily built of rough-cut limestone blocks in the traditional Périgord style, with a steeply pitched, stone-tiled roof, it was owned by a cooperative society of canned foie-gras producers. The society occupied the ground floor, a single spacious chamber furnished in the grand style of an 1880's bank, with dark mahogany railings around the sides, Turkish carpets underfoot, claw-footed mahogany desks for its officers, and a hushed air of profitable, discreetly conducted commerce. A spotlit display of its members' products, in the form of a gleaming pyra
mid of gold and silver cans of goose liver, occupied pride of place on an ornate stand at the center of the room. The prosperous-looking men at the desks eyed Gideon expectantly when he entered but lost interest when he nodded and went to the stairwell that led to the upper floor; evidently he was merely another archaeologist.

  Once having climbed the stairs into what seemed to be a general-use area, part archaeological storeroom, part break room, and part copy center, Gideon found himself thoroughly at home: scuffed, thirty-year-old steel-and-Naugahyde office furniture, a photocopy machine, an ancient but apparently functioning mimeograph machine, a glass pot of brown sludge—coffee?—that looked as if it had been on the warmer for a week, two tables littered with journals, primitive stone tools, and Coke cans, and the mixed smells of millennia-old stone dust, wooden floorboards, and stale coffee—all the familiar, user-friendly sights, scents and clutter of scholarly inquiry.

  On the table nearest him there were a dozen or so pieces of worked stone, rounded chunks of quartzite four or five inches across, one end of which had been crudely chipped from both sides into a rough but usable cutting edge. These were the bifacial Acheulian hand axes that Julie had talked about. He picked one up almost automatically and hefted it, grasping the smooth, rounded portion. This was one of the deep, one of the near-mystical, pleasures of anthropology, at least as far as Gideon was concerned. He had in his hand a tool that had been made and used perhaps 100,000 years ago. Just as he now grasped it, a strange, primitive creature, not quite human as we understand the term, languageless, naked or perhaps clothed in animal skins, had once clutched it—this very same stone—in a filthy hand to hammer bloodily away at living bone or horn. One could almost feel, or at least imagine that one could feel, a connection, an affinity across that unimaginable gulf of time and essence—

  "Puis-je vous m'aider?" The voice was icy, female, proprietary, and suspicious. "Je m'appelle Madame Lacouture."

  Gideon jumped guiltily and practically flung the tool back on the table. "Excuse me, madame," he stammered in French. "I have an appointment with Dr. Beaupierre."

  Madame Lacouture was a sharp-faced, peremptory woman in a mannish suit, who reminded him of a dozen academic department-head secretaries he had known (and trembled before). He had often wondered if it was an international type, perhaps genetically determined, transcending all cultural barriers. In any case, this particular one was plainly skeptical. "Professor Beaupierre has informed me of no appointments. Your name and your affiliation, please?"

  "Gideon Oliver. I'm from the University of Washington. Uh, Professor Oliver," he added, in hopes that it might impress her a little more.

  It didn't come close. "Come with me, please," she said briskly, throwing him a we'll-soon-see-about-this look over one padded shoulder.

  She marched him past a flimsy wallboard partition to a narrow hallway off which a row of offices, constructed from the same cheap wallboard, opened. The first was Beaupierre's, as cluttered and utilitarian as the outer area, with nothing on the walls but a marked-up scheduling calendar, and with piles of open books and journals teetering on tables and even on the floor. The director, seated at his desk, didn't hear them coming. Motionless and absorbed, he had his nose buried in a journal.

  "Professor Beaupierre," Madame Lacouture began.

  Beaupierre looked up vacantly, focused with some effort, and smiled. "Hello, Gideon, what are you doing here?"

  "We had an appointment."

  "Today?"

  "I'm afraid so. We made it at yesterday's staff meeting, but if it's not convenient—"

  "No, of course it's convenient. I'm at your service. Merci, Madame Lacouture."

  "Next time," she told him in French, "please try to remember to inform me of your schedule." It was something she told him a lot, Gideon guessed.

  "Sit down, sit down," Beaupierre said. "Just give me a moment, a single, er, moment… extremely interesting… Bulletin de la Société Préhistorique Française… want to see…" He returned to his journal while Gideon took the armchair beside the desk. At his elbow was a holder with two photographs, one of Madame Beaupierre, a svelte, glossily handsome woman whom Gideon had once met, and the other of Beaupierre's two grown daughters, women who had been cruelly tricked by their genes in that it was their dough-faced, sausage-shaped father they took after.

  "How very interesting," Beaupierre said, pulling off his glasses and looking up from the journal at about the time Gideon was wondering if the director had forgotten he was there. "Were you aware that Révillion has conclusively demonstrated that the blade cores from Seclin have a closer relationship, volumetrically speaking, to Upper Paleolithic than Middle Paleolithic forms?"

  "Ah… no, as a matter of fact I wasn't."

  "You must admit, it raises a number of intriguing issues."

  "It certainly does." For starters: who was Révillion, where was Seclin, and what the hell was "volumetrically speaking"? "Jacques, do you suppose we could get on to Tayac? We only have half-an-hour."

  "Of course, of course." Beaupierre closed the journal, pushed it to one side, and made a visible effort to concentrate on his guest, peering at him as if through misted glass. His open, friendly face was all concentration. "How can I help you?"

  "How about starting by giving me an overview of the whole affair in your own words? Just to make sure I have it straight."

  Beaupierre nodded gravely, crossed one knee over the other, steepled his stubby fingers in front of his mouth, and proceeded, in a relatively coherent fashion, to tell Gideon the familiar story: how Carpenter had been working the Tayac site on his own; how he had jubilantly proclaimed his great find of four perforated bones; how an anonymous letter to Paris-Match had soon charged that they had actually come, not from a Paleolithic abri, but from the collection of a small, out-of-the-way museum where they'd been stored for upwards of forty years.

  Gideon teetered on the edge of asking Jacques' opinion on whether or not Jean Bousquet had been the writer of that anonymous letter, but he couldn't quite talk himself into the conviction that to do so would not be crossing the forbidden line between legitimate research and 'playing detective,' something he'd promised both Joly and Julie not to do. Reluctantly, he set it aside for the time being. Maybe later he'd figure out a way of talking himself into doing it. That, or renegotiate.

  "What museum did the bones come from, Jacques?" he asked instead. "It's near here somewhere, isn't it? I'd like to go and see the bones for myself."

  "What? Oh, it was… yes, not too far…" He snapped his fingers ineffectually. "The name escapes me, mm…" He rolled his eyes upward but apparently found no clue on the ceiling and went on with his recounting of the hoax: how the shocking accusation of fraud had been substantiated, and how a wretched, repudiated Carpenter had had to resign in disgrace.

  "Such a terrible, terrible end for him," he finished with a sigh. "Would you care for some coffee? It should be… I can ask Madame Lacouture to, mm, ah…"

  "I sure w—no, thanks," Gideon said, remembering barely in time the pot of black, gluey matter on the warmer. "Jacques, what do you honestly think Carpenter's part in all this was? I know you've thought about it a lot. Could he have planted those bones himself, or—"

  Beaupierre nearly came out of his chair. "Certainly not!" he exclaimed, shocked. "What a thought! Ely Carpenter was the very model of integrity." "I'm only asking the question; I'm not suggesting anything," Gideon said placatingly.

  "Ha, you'd better not ask such a question of Michel. He'll throw you out the door. Ely was like a son to him—not in age, of course, but otherwise—and the idea that… that… well, the very idea that Ely himself would…"

  "Well, who then?" He didn't like upsetting Jacques, but this was one of the questions that had brought him to France in the first place. And now he had more reason than ever to ask it.

  "I'm sure I—I have no idea."

  "Come on, Jacques. You must have thought about it."

  "Thought about it? Oh, well, of course,
thought about it… but… to what purpose… mm…" His fingers crept longingly across his desk toward the journal, his eyes toward the printed page.

  That seemed to be that; for Beaupierre, after all, it had been a pretty long attention span. Gideon got to his feet.

  "Well, thanks, Jacques. I'm off to see Pru; which way's her office?… Jacques…?

  Chapter 12

  "So tell me, what else is going to be in this book besides the Old Fart of Tayac?" Pru McGinnis asked. "Piltdown, I suppose?"

  Her chair creaked under her considerable weight as she leaned back, ran her fingers through her already disordered red hair, clasped her fingernail-chewed hands behind her head, and propped her snakeskin-booted feet on an opened drawer, one over the other, clunk, clunk. After getting her doctorate from Northern California State, she had taught for four years at the University of Missouri, from which she'd emerged with a country-western drawl and a style of dress to match—jeans, boots, belt buckles the size of dinner plates. The accent had soon gone, but the Western garb remained.

  "Piltdown, of course," Gideon said. The Abominable Snowman, the yeti, the Tasaday hoax, the Formosan Psalmanzar story—"

  "Ah, good old Psalmanzar. Well, I'll give you one I bet you don't have. What do you know about the Lost Hippopotamus of Lake Mendota?"

  "I never heard of it."

  "Aha. See, that's because we kept it a secret till now. The world was not yet ready. But today… today at last, I break my silence."

  Gideon put down his note pad and settled back. If Pru was in the mood to tell one of her fish stories the only thing to do was relax and enjoy it because he didn't know any way to stop her. The Old Man of Tayac would have to wait.

  "What are you putting your pen down for, are you crazy?" she asked. "This'll be the best part of your book. This'll make it a best-seller."

  "I figure I'll just memorize it. That way I'll get every word."

  "Sure, I can see how that makes sense. Okay, this happened when I was an undergrad at the University of Wisconsin. You went there too, didn't you?"