Skeleton Dance (10 page)

Gideon wished he were more sure of that himself, but in any case it was the chance he was looking for, and before anyone could disagree he said: "Yes, there is. You could tell me what Bousquet looked like."

They did, but nothing they said was useful. Brown eyes, brown hair, balding at the crown. An average guy, nothing special, not particularly tall, or short, or fat, or thin.

It fit the body in the cave, all right, but so did every other average white guy in France. "Does anybody remember his having any sort of serious infection?" he asked after a moment, thinking of the inflammation he'd found on the left ulna. "Skin ulcers that wouldn't heal, maybe?"

"Skin ulcers where?" asked Beaupierre.

"No, it works better if you tell me."

"No, no skin ulcers," Beaupierre said.

Then why did you ask where?
thought Gideon. But of course with Beaupierre, you couldn't necessarily assume he had anything logical in mind when he spoke. Or anything at all.

Thoughtfully, Audrey lifted a hand. "Do you mean an infection that he had while he was here, or are you also interested in earlier ones?"

"Either," Gideon said. He wasn't sure how old the bone inflammation was.

"Well, he had t.b. when he was a boy, I know that. He told me about it once. He got it in West Africa—his father was a well-driller when Jean was in his teens, and the family lived in Mali for a while. Afterward, he had to spend some time at a government sanatorium in Menton."

"Do you mean skeletal t.b.?" Gideon asked with interest. He hadn't spotted any signs of it in his earlier examination—whatever the inflammation on the ulna was, it wasn't tubercular—but then he hadn't been looking for it, and the bones hadn't been cleaned yet, and if it had been a slight case he might easily have missed it. In the morgue, with good lighting and cleaned bones, it would be different.

"No, I don't think so," she said uncertainly. "The other kind, that affects the lungs."

"Pulmonary tuberculosis," Émile said professorially. "Consumption, in the vernacular. That will be no help to you, Gideon. As a trained paleopathologist I'm well aware—as I'm sure you are—that it leaves no evidence whatever on the bones."

"Actually it does sometimes," Gideon said. He knew he was stepping on Émile's ultra-sensitive toes, but science was science. "It turns out there are some characteristic skeletal lesions that show up about half the time. It's a new finding. There was a paper in the
AJPA
a few years ago. You might have missed it."

"Apparently I did," Émile said, tight-mouthed. "And what sort of lesions would these be?"

"Extremely subtle ones," Gideon said diplomatically. "That's why no one's noticed them until now. What you find is this diffuse periostitis on the internal aspects of some of the ribs—generally four through eight, on the left side. They're faint, but they can be seen if you know to look for them."

"Is that so?" said Émile, growing interested. He might not like being taught anything by the younger Gideon, but he
was
a paleopathologist (a trained paleopathologist)—one of the best there was, Gideon was ready to admit—and this was new data. "And this would presumably be a byproduct of chronic pulmonary tubercular infection of the subjacent pleural tissue?"

"Exactly. The—"

"Chronic pulmonary tubercular infection of the subjacent pleural tissue," said Beaupierre. "My, my, the waters are growing deep for us mere archaeologists. Well, well, Gideon, it's been most interesting, but I think we ought to conclude now. It's almost noon, and I'm sure we all have some final preparations to make for the symposium."

"One thing more," Montfort said, re-emerging from the solitary, superior plane to which he'd retreated again. "In regard to your book, Dr. Oliver: I don't want—I'm sure none of us want—to see Professor Carpenter made to look ridiculous."

There were murmurs of assent around the table; heartfelt, as far as Gideon could tell. Carpenter had been a popular and—until the debacle that had ended his career—a respected director.

"I won't make him look ridiculous," Gideon said.

"Nor his scholarship either," added Beaupierre.

But that was a trickier proposition. "I'm not trying to make anything look ridiculous, Jacques, but I don't see how I can get around the fact that his scholarship
is
suspect. How else could he have been—"

Montfort interrupted. "Dr. Beaupierre refers not to the unfortunate episode of the Old Man of Tayac, but to the entire body of Professor Carpenter's work, the total thrust of his research. And mine," he added with unmistakable emphasis. "As unfortunate as his lapse of judgment in this case was, I hope you will make it clear that it has no bearing on the fact that other Neanderthals in other places
do
demonstrate beyond any possible doubt the existence of artistic proclivities."

"They do, do they?" said Audrey, her hackles rising. "Beyond
any
possible doubt?"

"Better duck," Pru breathed in Gideon's ear. "We're off again."

She was right. Montfort rounded on Audrey, his eyes glittering with the zeal of battle. "Doctor, I am at a loss to understand how you can continue to dispute the existence of art, legitimate art, in the Middle Paleolithic. We now have evidence of pigment traces—yellow, red, black, brown—applied to stone at well over two dozen Neanderthal sites. Are you seriously suggesting that this was all unintentional, the result of some kind of repeated accident?"

"Of course not," said Audrey, taking up the challenge, "but I hope you're not suggesting that the application of coloring materials to a surface is necessarily an artistic act."

"Not an artistic act?" put in Beaupierre. "But… but of course it's an artistic act. What else would you call it?"

"Any one of a hundred things: simple curiosity, or a primitive enjoyment of novel effects, or an instinct for play. In all these sites you mention, can you point to a single application of color that could be called a pattern, a meaningful design?"

"Oh… pouf," said Beaupierre weakly.

"Go ahead and pouf all you like, Jacques," Émile said, "but Audrey is clearly in the right. All these pigment traces of yours are no more than smears or formless dabs. Oh, at best I suppose they might represent a naÏve form of aesthetic appreciation on the part of Neanderthal Man—"

"Neanderthals," Audrey said automatically.

"On the part of Neanderthals, but nothing to be confused with artistic intent as we use the term."

"Oh, yes?" said Montfort, warming to the debate, "and just how do you propose to separate the two? Is there really so obvious a difference between artistic appreciation and aesthetic appreciation—even 'naÏve' aesthetic appreciation, as you choose to call it?"

"That's right," said Beaupierre. "Yes, very true. We all know, mm, ah…"

"Oh, come on, people, give me a break," Pru said. "Babies play with crayons. Give a chimp some finger paints and he's happy for hours. So what? Does that make him an artist?"

"But what about the incised stone, the worked bone?" said Montfort. "Do chimpanzees carve crosses in stone?"

Several voice responded, but Audrey's was the most penetrating. "For heaven's sake, Michel, are you back on that nummulite fossil from Hungary? One of the lines on that "cross" is a natural crack, you know that as well as I do."

"And the other?"

"The other," said Émile, "is an ambiguous mark that could easily have been caused by skinning, butchering, or any one of a thousand utilitarian, totally unaesthetic activities."

Montfort looked sadly at him. "Always and forever the ready answer."

"I may not be an archaeologist—" Émile said

Montfort muttered something inaudible.

"—but it hardly takes an archaeologist to see it's just a
scratch
, that's all, a simple scratch on a stone. To refer to it as an 'incision,' a term connoting human agency, is spurious and misleading. I don't mean this in a personal sense, of course, Michel."

Montfort snorted. "And do you also have an answer for the complexly incised—pardon me, the
scratched
—bone fragment from Peche de l'Azé?" He thumped the table, making empty coffee cups rattle in their saucers.

"Natural erosion," said Émile, uncowed, with his chin thrust out.

"—the perforated reindeer phalanges from La Quina—"

"Carnivore activity."

Montfort, shaking his head, gazed sadly at him.

"But… but the perforated wolf metacarpal from Bocksteinschmiede?" said Beaupierre, taking up the argument as well as he could. "What about that?"

"Not proven to be Middle Paleolithic, as opposed to Upper Paleolithic!" cried Audrey, partway to her feet.

Beaupierre and Montfort let fly at the same time. Oh, yes? How did she explain the artifacts from Bilzingsleben? What about Repolusthöhle? Arcy-sur-Cure? Cueva Morín in Spain?

Gideon had been long forgotten. All of them, including even the usually mellow Pru were talking at once, or rather shouting; banging the table and waving their arms for emphasis. Through the open door of the room Gideon saw the café's proprietor, standing behind the bar, exchange smiles and wags of the head with a couple of his customers. These scientists!

"I guess I'll be going," he announced. "Thanks very much for your help."

He thought no one had heard him over the din, but as he rose from his chair Pru touched his elbow, smiled, and said in her fluent French:

"Bienvenue chez les fous.
"

Welcome back to the madhouse.

   Because Les Eyzies had neither a morgue nor a hospital, the bagged bones from the cave had been taken to the morgue-room of the hospital at St.-Cyprien, another ancient Périgord town five miles from Les Eyzies, this one clustered at the foot of an imposing twelfth-century abbey on the banks of the Dordogne. Having driven there in the compact, olive-green Peugeot that Julie had rented for them by e-mail from the United States, Gideon was told by the front-desk receptionist, a friendly, chatty woman who laughed at the end of every sentence, that he would find the morgue in the basement—right down those stairs, in the room at the end of the corridor.

"Will I need a key, madame?" he asked in French.

She chuckled good-naturedly. "No, you won't need one, monsieur, we don't usually lock the morgue. Not too many people try to get in—or out, for that matter. And besides, the other gentleman is there."

"Other gentleman?" he said, surprised. And then: "Oh, would that be Dr. Roussillot, the police pathologist?"

"I don't know, I didn't ask his name."

She didn't ask Gideon's name either, he reflected critically as he went down the stairs. Joly himself might run a tight ship, but this sort of evidence-storage would never pass muster under American chain-of-evidence requirements. Gideon was the second—at least the second—person to have access to the bones without having to provide identification. Aside from that, they'd been left unattended for who knew how long; that left a huge chink into which a defense attorney or a judge could toss a monkey wrench on the grounds that it could no longer be proven beyond a doubt that these bones really were the selfsame bones that had been removed from the cave. And it was on just such objections that many an otherwise solid case could—indeed, had—come apart at the seams.

The basement corridor's main purpose seemed to be to serve as a storage area for conveyances. Gideon had to thread his way around gurneys, wheelchairs, and walkers to get to the double doors at the end of the hallway. Once there, he pushed them open to enter a small, immaculate, white-tiled room furnished with a desk along one wall, a rack with clean rubber aprons and white coats, a barred, glass-fronted cabinet holding the usual blood-freezing assortment of autopsy tools, and, in the center, a single, old-fashioned, porcelain-topped autopsy table at which a heavily-built built man in a white coat was removing one of the paper bags of bones from the macaroni carton.

At Gideon's entrance, he looked up sharply, the point of his fastidiously shaped Van Dyke bristling. "What do you want? This is a restricted area. I'm extremely busy. Do you have permission to be here?"

Dr. Roussillot, I presume
, Gideon thought. "I'm Gideon Oliver," he said in French, cautiously advancing. "You must be Dr. Roussillot."

He received a wary nod in reply.

"Well, I'm the anthropologist who's been working with Inspector Joly. I'm supposed—"

"Of course, forgive me, the
anthropologist
," he said, not really rudely, but making it amply clear whose turf this was, who was encroaching on whom, and who'd better not try getting away with any snake oil. He leaned over to shake hands, briefly and formally—one businesslike flap down, one up—then made room for Gideon at the table, shoving to one side the marred leather satchel at his feet. "Be so good as to bring me up to date, please, professor."

Gideon did, resorting to shaky Latin when his French didn't extend to the diffuse periosteal lesions that he would be hunting for on the ribs.

"How interesting. Shall we examine the ribs, then?"

"If you don't mind, I'd rather set everything out in anatomical order first. It'll only take a minute. Will you give me a hand?"

"Certainly," said Roussillot.

Gideon started at the head-end. Roussillot began with the lower body, removing the left femur from its sack, and grasping it firmly around the shaft. "I'm sorry about this," he said. "I don't see any other way."

"Hm?" Gideon said absently, absorbed in scraping a bit of dirt from a clavicle. "Sorry about—"

   He was sitting on the floor.

His legs were crumpled in front of him. His head hung loosely forward with his chin digging into his sternum. He was staring dully at his hands, one of which lay, palm-down, flat against the cool smoothness of the linoleum floor; the other was loosely curled in his lap. A hard, sharp, vertical edge, a corner of something, cut into his spine. When he shifted to ease the discomfort, the sudden loss of support sent him flopping bonelessly over backwards, banging his head on the floor and wrenching a grunt of pain out of him.