Skeleton Dance (15 page)

"Sure, but you don't have to go to any museum. They're right here."

"The original cave lynx bones? With the holes?"

"Yes, what are you so surprised about? The museum didn't want any more to do with them, so we hung onto them. They're under lock and key—important historical artifacts. Ask Jacques or Michel to show you."

"Will do. I'm off to see Michel next."

"And for your records, the museum they came from is the Musée Thibault. It's just a hole in the wall, run by one of the local antiquarian societies, but it's been around forever. It's in La Quinze, a few kliks north of here, on the way to Périgueux."

"Thanks," Gideon said, writing it down. "Jacques couldn't remember."

"He couldn't
remember
?" Pru laughed. "Jesus, how does the poor soul make it from one day to the next?"

"What do you mean?"

"Jacques been involved with the Thibault since he was a kid, for God's sake. He's been on the board of trustees for umpteen years. Armand Thibault was his mother's brother. You tell me, how could any normal person not remember its name?"

How, indeed, Gideon wondered. Was it possible that Beaupierre—

But Pru was wagging a blunt finger in his face. "No, no, no, no, that's not what I meant. I see what you're thinking, I know how your mind works. You're thinking he was hiding something, he was being devious, am I right?"

"Well, I don't see how I can help it."

"Forget it, prof, Jacques wouldn't know 'devious' if it walked up to him and said
bonjour
."

"Maybe not, but—"

"Come on, pal, don't make a federal case out of it. You know Jacques pretty well—where his brain is at any given time, nobody can say. The man's not accountable. He's a few peas short of a casserole, shall we say. The receiver's off the hook sixty percent of the time, you know? The elevator usually doesn't go all the way to the top floor, or let me put it this way, the sewing machine ran out of thread a while back, the—".

"Okay, enough," Gideon said, laughing. "I think I get your drift."

   More out of courtesy than in hopes of learning anything new, Gideon began his session with Michel Montfort with the same opening question he'd used with Jacques: will you tell me in your own words about the Tayac affair? His account, expectably briefer and more focused than Beaupierre's, was still the same story, and Gideon used the time to study the celebrated archaeologist sitting across the desk from him.

Pru had given him as apt a nutshell description of Montfort as he'd ever heard. "Somewhere along the way," she'd once told him over a glass of wine, "Michel crossed over the line from being a legend in his own time to being a legend in his own mind."

He had known at once what she'd meant; there was a whiff of play-acting in Montfort's famously blunt manner. But not really an unpleasant whiff; in fact it tended to take the edge off his frequently disagreeable remarks and give him a playful, Papa-Bearlike quality. At the same time it could leave you with the feeling that you weren't actually dealing with a snuffly, grousing, basically good-hearted old codger at all but some character actor who had specialized in snuffly, grousing, basically good-hearted old codgers for so long that he couldn't remember how to play anything else. Gabby Hayes with a Ph. D. and a French accent, say.

Not that Montfort could really be called an old codger. He was only in his middle fifties, but he was one of those people who seemed to have been around forever. He had already been a great name when Gideon was an undergraduate. And with his old-fashioned taste in clothes—dark suits, usually blue or black, with matching vests, always buttoned—and his bulb-nosed, fleshy, weathered face ("a face like a two-pound loaf of homemade sourdough," Pru had said at the same memorable tête-à-tête), he was like a holdover from another generation, lacking only a black derby to complete the picture of a self-made, rough-and-ready 1920's merchant king.

But he'd changed a lot in the last three years; more than Gideon had realized at the previous morning's staff meeting. Physically, he was much the same: a little older of course, but still thick and hearty across the chest and shoulders, yet at the same time he seemed in some intangible way diminished, like a man who has successfully recovered from a serious operation, and yet, in an indefinable way, is not—and never again will be—the man he was. The Tayac affair had taken a lot out of him and no wonder. He had put his own considerable reputation on the line backing the "find" and the integrity of man who had made it, he had—

"Hello there. I've finished," Montfort said.

Gideon blinked. "Excuse me?"

"I said I've finished. Telling it in my own words."

"Oh, of course, I just—"

"Some time ago now. I thought you might not have noticed."

Gideon smiled. "I'm sorry, I'm afraid I was thinking—-"

"Is that what that was?" Montfort was playing with his blunt-barreled, tortoise-shell fountain pen, impatient as always but seemingly not in a bad-humored frame of mind. "Now, if there's anything else you want to know…"

"I'd certainly like to know if you have any idea—any hypothesis, even—as to who was behind the hoax. And why."

Montfort's fleshy chin descended to his chest. "I do not."

"Are you completely satisfied that Ely himself had nothing to do with it?" He braced himself for the explosion Beaupierre had warned him about.

Montfort took his eyes from Gideon's and stared fixedly at the wall beyond, a wall full of framed diplomas and certificates—the same ones, Gideon thought, in the very same places, that had hung there three years ago.

"I am," he said.

Gideon waited for more, but nothing came. It was evident that the archaeologist's relative good humor had taken a turn for the worse. Now he was rhythmically rotating the fountain pen over and over against the desktop, thumping each end: Turn…
clack
. Turn…
clack
… .

"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."