Skeleton Dance

by Aaron Elkins

  "I'm sorry, sir, I felt I had to ask. I hope you understand."

  Montfort sat drawn into himself, with his lips compressed, volunteering nothing. The conversation, such as it was, expired. A summer fly, alive beyond its time, buzzed dejectedly on the window sill.

  Turn… clack. Turn…

  Gideon cleared his throat. What he wanted to ask about were Montfort's views on Carpenter's plane crash but he decided it might be a better idea to change the subject. "Pru just told me that the Tayac metapodials are kept here. Would it be possible for me to see them?"

  Montfort shrugged. The pen was flicked onto the desk. "Come with me," he said, rising heavily from his chair, and leading the way to Madame Lacouture's immaculate office.

  "The key to PN-277," he told her brusquely..

  She looked up from her desk, frowning. "To Tayac?"

  "Yes, Tayac, that's what I said."

  She had that forbiddingly proprietorial look on her face, but if she was thinking about challenging him she changed her mind. "As you wish." Opening the middle desk drawer, she withdrew a key from a built-in key rack and handed it to Montfort. To Gideon she nodded stiffly but respectfully. Apparently, being seen in the company of the great man had raised him in her estimation.

  Montfort took Gideon back into the outer room with its homely litter of papers and stone tools, went to a gray metal cabinet with a small pasted-on paper label that said PN-277—the PN would have stood for "Périgord Noir," designating the archaeological region, the 277 for the site number assigned to Tayac—and swung open the doors. Inside were a few lidless cartons containing some nondescript and even dubious stone tools (Gideon remembered that the best of the materials had gone to Paris) and a single, small cigar-box-sized plastic container with its lid closed. Montfort signaled to Gideon to clear a corner area on one of the tables, placed the container in the resulting space, and, without preamble, lifted the lid.

  "There you are, the instruments of disaster themselves. Help yourself."

  They didn't look like instruments of disaster. They didn't look like much of anything; four small, flattish, slightly curved, dun-colored bones, thickened at the ends, with an insignificant little hole, not much different from a natural foramen, at one end of each. They lay in a row on a bed of cotton batting, and what they looked like more than anything else was a row of slightly oversized foot bones from an ordinary house cat. Which was natural enough, come to think of it. Aside from being a little bit larger and a lot more extinct, Felis spelaea, the prehistoric cave lynx, was pretty much the same animal as Felis catus, the common domestic cat. But of course these weren't just any old Felis spelaea bones, these were the bones that had set Mesolithic archaeology on its collective ear, at least for a while, causing elderly, supereducated men and women to shout insults at each other (and in one celebrated episode, to hurl bones at one another at the annual meeting of the European Society for Archaeological Research at Cambridge University).

  And what had brought it all on were those insignificant little ovoid holes, especially the one in the leftmost metapodial, the one that had been drilled only partway through, thus "establishing" that it was not a trade item, but a homemade Neanderthal product, caught in-process, so to speak. Gideon picked it up, turned it over, and lightly fingered the perforation.

  "No wonder these had everybody going for a while," he said, replacing it in the container. They're a whole lot more convincing than I thought they'd be. What exactly was it that first made you think they might be fake, do you remember?"

  "I'm afraid I can take no credit for that. To be perfectly honest, it was that letter, that anonymous letter. Without that, I think I might never have allowed myself to believe… to even consider the possibility, the monstrous…"

  "What about that letter, Michel? Did you ever come to any conclusion as to who might have written it?"

  Montfort shrugged wearily. "Who knows? Bousquet, I suppose. There was… ah, what difference does it make now? The fact is, it was true, and it performed a valuable service to our science, unwelcome though it was."

  "But how would someone like Jean Bousquet have known that it wasn't a real find, that the bones came from a museum?"

  Montfort glared at him from under ragged eyebrows. "Exactly what are you driving at?"

  "I was just—"

  Montfort cut him off. "Gideon, I must tell you I'm extremely troubled by your direction. Is this the sort of thing you're looking for for your book? Speculations? Unverified suppositions?"

  "Michel, I assure you I'm not going to be printing any unverified suppositions. At this point I'm just hunting for any kind of lead that I can follow up."

  That pacified Montfort, but not much. "I see. Well." He closed the container. "Now, if there's nothing else I can help you with, there are a number of matters awaiting my attention."

  Gideon gestured at the container. "Well, I was hoping you'd tell me a little about your own examination of the bones.."

  "I would have thought," Montfort said coldly, "that you would have taken the trouble to read my monograph in the Comptes Rendus de l'Ácademie before coming here."

  "I did, and I thought it was a tremendous piece of detective work," Gideon said hurriedly—and honestly. "It's just that my French wasn't quite good enough to carry me through some of the chemical analysis, and I want to make sure I have it right for the book."

  Montfort's scowl eased. The container's lid was raised again. "Of course, I understand. Where would you like me to begin?"

  "Could you sort of walk me through the whole thing?"

  "Tell you in my own words, you mean?"

  "Yes, exactly."

  "But this time you'll pay attention?"

  Gideon laughed. "On my honor." He held up a ready notebook and pen to prove it.

  Watching and listening to Montfort expound was a pleasure. He became a different man. The years dropped away from him as he spoke and gestured, and the old energies, the old enthusiasms of the scientist in his element visibly rekindled. And the process of inference and deduction he described really was dazzling, involving microscopic study, fluorine tests, crystallographic analysis, spectroscopic examination, and solid reasoning. In the end he had shown conclusively that the museum's identification numbers on the bones had been removed with abrasive and that the holes had been bored with a modern, carbide-tipped steel drill bit, then further abraded with a bone awl and smoothed with a rawhide thong to make them look authentically Paleolithic. Afterward, the bones had been soaked in an acid iron sulfate bath to disguise the giveaway light color of the abraded surfaces, then drenched in a dichromate solution to speed the oxidation of the iron salts.

  Gideon, whose forte had never been chemistry, wasn't sure that he understood it much better in English than he had in French, but at least now he thought he could make enough sense of the process to describe it for Lester's masses.

  When they went back to Madame Lacouture's office to return the key, she was just hanging up her telephone and she held up one hand to forestall them while she scratched some neat, quick notes in a record book on her desk, talking to herself while she did: "Eleven-thirty-five," she murmured in French, "Professor Barbier for Dr. Godwin-Pope… concerning… newly found bison figures at… Les Combarelles."

  She pecked the final period with satisfaction, closed the book, and looked up at Montfort. "You're finished with the key?"

  "Would I be handing it to you if I weren't? Now then, Gideon—"

  "Madame," Gideon said, his eyes never having left the record book, "is that a log of telephone calls?"

  She eyed him with misgiving. Apparently his rise in status hadn't necessarily extended to the asking of questions. "Yes," she said suspiciously.

  "And do you log in all calls?"

  "She does indeed," Montfort answered for her, "with the frightening efficiency of a machine. She always has, and she always will. Some day, God willing, we may even find a use for it."

  As far as Gideon was concerned, with any luck that day ha
d arrived. "Would you mind looking to see if you have a record of a call from Jean Bousquet?" he asked. "It would have been roughly three years ago. I'd like to know the date."

  Montfort rolled his eyes. "Are we back to that again? Why do you keep—" He interrupted himself. "Never mind, I don't want to know. It would have been in October or November," he told Madame Lacouture. "You may remember the call. As I recollect, you said he was somewhat abusive."

  A spot on either side of Madame Lacouture's throat turned crimson. "I remember," she said shortly. "I'll get the log."

  It took her three seconds to retrieve the appropriate volume from a file cabinet. "Jean Bousquet's call was made at two-fifteen in the afternoon, on the twenty-fourth of November," she said, reading from it with satisfaction. "He was telephoning from Ajaccio. The subject was the provision of a character reference from Director Beaupierre, who was unavailable at the time. I transferred him to Professor Montfort instead."

  "Well, there you are then," Montfort said. "The twenty-fourth of November. That would have been, oh, a good two months after the last we saw of him. Are you satisfied?"

  "Look, I don't mean to keep hammering on the point—but you're absolutely sure it was Bousquet himself on the line? Positive?"

  "That it was Bousquet? Yes, of course I'm positive. One couldn't mistake his offensive manner of speaking. Would you like me to swear to it? To attest to it in writing? In blood, perhaps?"

  Madame Lacouture closed the log book with a snap. "Is that what you wanted to know, Professor Oliver?"

  "It sure is, thank you," Gideon said, and welcome news it was, because, irrespective of whether those dog-chewed bones had or hadn't been Bousquet's, it established for a fact that he could hardly have been murdered by Ely Carpenter. Not when he was still alive two months after Ely's death.

  And as for Joly's suggestion that the story of Bousquet's phone call might have been a concoction in its entirety, that, he thought, was now out of the question. The idea that all five of them—Montfort, Beaupierre, Audrey, Pru, and Émile—had conspired in a lie to protect Carpenter, a man who had yet to be accused, from being implicated in the possible murder of an unidentified victim who might or might not be Bousquet was barely believable as it was. To add to that the now-required assumption that the iron-sided Madame Lacouture was in on the plot, even to the extent of falsifying her telephone log, was beyond credibility.

  No, whoever killed Jean Bousquet—if those bones were Jean Bousquet's—it wasn't Ely. A hoaxer he might well be; that was yet to be seen. But a murderer—no.

  "Speaking of Bousquet," Montfort said as they headed back into the hallway, "how did your examination of the skeleton go in St.-Cyprien? Did you find your diffuse periosteal rib lesions?"

  Gideon weighed his reply. "My examination," he said, "was inconclusive."

  Chapter 14

  Not for the first time, Gideon found himself wondering why the French weren't obese. There were plenty of scientific and pseudo-scientific explanations as to why they weren't all lying prostrate on the sidewalk with heart attacks despite all that duck grease and goose liver, but why weren't they fat? They deserved to be fat. The croissant Émile was chewing on, one of two on his plate, probably had a quarter-of-a-pound of butter in it, and it was very likely his second breakfast of the day, a particularly annoying French custom. But like most of his countrymen he was as thin-bellied as a snake. True, you did see occasional genuine tubbies lumbering along the streets, but when you got close enough to hear, they invariably turned out to be speaking English or German.

  Delicately, Émile wiped his chin. "So," he said with what Gideon took for a droll wink, "you would like to know who perpetrated the Tayac hoax. Wouldn't we all?"

  "I guess we would at that," Gideon said, perfectly willing to let him be arch if he wanted to. Having struck out three times in a row trying to get Beaupierre, Pru, and Montfort to take even a wild guess, he'd worried that he might be in for more of the same with Émile, but he'd barely sat down in the paleopathologist's cubicle and asked his first question before Émile had put a cautionary finger to his own lips.

  "Why don't we go out and talk about it over a decent cup of coffee?" he'd said with a meaning-laden glance (the walls have ears!) at the thin partitions.

  They had gone, not to the Café du Centre, the staff's usual gathering place, but a block in the other direction, to what passed for the downscale end of Les Eyzies, to a small, nameless corner bar ("Bar," said the sign painted on the window) full of stagnant cigarette smoke and blue-frocked, stubble-jawed road workers on their morning break, some drinking coffee, most drinking red wine. There, at a sticky table in the back, they had made clumsy small talk for a few minutes over Gideon's café au lait and Émile's café noir and his pair of croissants. But now the small talk was over. Émile finished the first croissant, moved the plate aside, straightened his bow tie—drooping orange clocks à la Dali on a field of sickly green—and leaned forward with his elbows on the table.

  "I have no empirical data, you understand. Only my own suspicions—firmly based, however, on what I trust is a solid framework of logical premises and inductive inference, rigorously applied."

  "I understand," Gideon said. Joly's remark about professors and speech-making came back to him.

  "Very well, then." Émile pressed his lips together and worked them in and out like an athlete preparing for a lip-wrestling competition.

  Gideon stretched out his legs, settled back in his chair, and moved his coffee within easy reach. This was going to take a while.

  "Montfort," Émile said.

  Gideon almost tipped over the coffee. "Montfort! But Montfort's the one who exposed it. He wrote the definitive paper."

  "Correction. Michel did not expose it. An anonymous letter to Paris-Match exposed it. Only after it was exposed and therefore no longer possible to credibly defend did he write his oh-so-illustrious definitive paper."

  "Well, that's a point, I guess, but—well, of all the people to possibly suspect… Ely was his protégé, his—"

  "If you've already made up your mind on the matter," Émile said stiffly, "I can't help wondering why you want my opinion."

  "No, no, I haven't made up my mind, Émile. I don't even know where to start, and I do want your opinion. You just caught me by surprise, that's all. I'm sorry. Okay, I'm listening. What possible reason would Montfort have for planting those bones?"

  "Consider the facts. Whose theory of Neanderthal cultural development did the Tayac bones supposedly prove?"

  "Ely Carpenter's."

  "Yes, but from whom did Ely get it? Michel—it was his own darling theory, wasn't it? He'd been spouting it for the last twenty-five years, decades before Ely ever appeared on the scene." His nose twitched like a squirrel's. "He's still spouting it, for that matter. Or were you suffering from a temporary hearing loss yesterday?"

  "No, I heard him all right, but—"

  "Surely you can have no doubt that he'd been hoping all his life for such a find. But since no such find existed—or could exist, let me add—does it require a great stretch of the imagination to speculate that his zeal got the better of him and he decided, shall we say, to help his theory along a little? I hate to suggest that your charming belief in the moral sanctity of the scientific community may be less than totally accurate, but such things have been known to happen. I hope I don't astonish you."

  Gideon nodded. Émile was right, they happened, and Tayac itself was a prime example. Somebody had faked those bones, and that somebody was almost certainly a scientist, and that scientist was very probably someone connected with the institute. That didn't leave very many possibilities, and the others—Ely, Jacques, Audrey, Pru… and Émile himself, let's not forget Émile—were all reputable, established scholars too, hardly more likely as tricksters than Montfort.

  "Okay, let's say you're right," he said. "Why wouldn't Montfort just 'discover' the bones himself?"

  Émile's gray eyes glittered. "Because, despite what you seem to thin
k, the great Michel Montfort is hardly a monument to courage. I believe he was afraid to attempt it on his own for fear of being found out. But by seeing to it that Ely was the one who discovered them, then if anything were to go wrong, it would be blamed on someone else. Which, I remind you, it was."

  "But then why—if all that's true—would he put so much time and effort into his monograph? He's the one who proved it was a fake, Émile. He showed exactly how it was done, step by step, in detail."

  "Why? To salvage his reputation to the extent possible."

  "How does that salvage his reputation?"

  "I should think it would be obvious. Didn't I hear a certain author say just the other day that Michel was going to be referred to as the 'hero' of the affair in an upcoming book? Or was I mistaken?"

  "Well—"

  Émile hooted sourly. "And of course he was able to show 'exactly how it was done.' Who better than the person who perpetrated it in the first place?"

  Gideon sipped his cooling, milky coffee and pondered, trying his best to look at things with an open mind. "Look, everything you say is certainly possible," he said after a few moments, "but why pick on Montfort? Why assume that it wasn't Ely himself, for example? I'm not saying it was, but wouldn't he be the more obvious choice?"

  "There are three obvious choices, the three men whose theories of Middle Paleolithic cultural development were ostensibly confirmed by the finding of those worked metapodials—theories, I need hardly point out, on which they had publicly staked their reputations: Ely Carpenter, Jacques Beaupierre, and Michel Montfort. Let's look at them one at a time. Ely was surely not foolish enough to imagine that he could escape exposure for long with such an artifice. Jacques, on the other hand—we speak in confidence, I assume?"

  "Of course."

  "Jacques, on the other hand—it pains me to say it—hardly possesses the ingenuity and cunning necessary to execute such a scheme." He paused, waiting to see if Gideon would agree or disagree. Gideon, who was undecided on this point, gave him a take-it-any-way-you-like shrug instead.