Skeleton Dance (16 page)

As far as Gideon was concerned, with any luck that day had 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."

   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 think, 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.

Émile took it as agreement. "And that," he concluded with the air of a lawyer wrapping up an airtight case before a bedazzled jury, "leaves us with Michel… Georges… Montfort."
Voilà
.

   Things were getting interesting, Gideon thought, watching the Vézère glide by at his feet, slow, and green, and placid, in no hurry to get anywhere. By himself at lunch time, he had repeated the meal he'd had the day before with Julie—marinated roast beef and sliced tomato on a baguette, with a paper cone of French fries and a bottle of
Orangina
, all from a streetside
crêpe
and sandwich stand—and taken them down to the park, to the same riverside bench he'd shared with Julie.

There, on a pleasant lawn among brilliantly green young willow trees, he slowly ate his sandwich, looking at the river and the terraced fields and white limestone cliffs beyond it, watching the boaters trying to steer their rented, inflatable pink kayaks, listening to the relaxing clicks and murmurs of the men playing
pétanque
behind him, and mulling over his conversations of the morning.

Émile alone had been willing to voice his suspicions about Tayac, and although his accusation of Montfort did have at least a certain internal logic, it was hard to know how seriously to take it. Did Émile himself really believe what he was saying, or was he venting his dislike of Montfort, a dislike keener than Gideon had realized… or was he simply playing malicious little mind-games for the fun of it, something Gideon had no trouble imagining him doing?

Whichever, it was important to remember that, as Émile himself had said, he had no empirical data (otherwise known as hard evidence) to support his views. Still, it was a line of thinking that hadn't previously occurred to Gideon, and, improbable or not, it had now lodged itself under the surface of his mind like a burr.

He was also finding it difficult to make up his mind about Jacques Beaupierre. Was it really possible, given the circumstances, that anyone, even Jacques, could have actually forgotten the name of the Thibault Museum? Pru's defense of him notwithstanding, it hardly seemed believable. And if he hadn't really forgotten, then clearly, he had
chosen
not to answer. Why? The obvious reason was that he preferred Gideon not to know just which museum the lynx bones had come from. And the obvious reason for that—the most likely reason, anyway—was that he didn't want Gideon to know that he himself was associated with it. And if you accepted that much, there was only one place to go with it: Beaupierre was afraid that Gideon might leap to the conclusion, the very reasonable conclusion, that Jacques himself, with easy access to the Thibault, had had something to do—something very central to do—with the obtaining of those bones and therefore with the hoax itself.

In other words, that Jacques Beaupierre had been the one behind it.

On its own terms it made as much sense as Émile's theory about Montfort, and in the same way. Had the fraud been successful, it would have confirmed Jacques' long-held, often-stated beliefs about Neanderthal culture. Suppose he'd been driven enough to plan the hoax and pull it off, but afraid to risk the fall-out if it were to be exposed? In that case, why not plant it in Carpenter's private dig? That way, with Ely sure to shout about it from the rooftops, the cause would be advanced. But if it were to be found out, as it inevitably, necessarily was found out, it would be Carpenter who would—and did—take the vilification. Was the genial, abstracted Beaupierre capable of that?

On the other hand, he reminded himself, this was the same man who'd needed reminding on whether he'd had breakfast the other day, the same man who, in Gideon's presence, had once hemmed and hawed and been unable to put his finger on the exact title of a book he himself had written two years earlier. (It was
L'Archéologie
.) Surely, honestly forgetting the name of the Musée Thibault was within his abilities, as Pru had said. And Émile, who knew the director better than he did, had almost contemptuously dismissed him as the possible perpetrator.