Skeleton Dance (6 page)

With Joly, Gideon hurried over for a closer look. What he saw was a small, squat cylinder of what looked like lead with a bluntly pointed conical head, something like a .22-caliber slug from a cheap Saturday Night Special, of which Gideon had seen more than he wished. But this one was different, with a hollowed-out base and an oddly constricted middle—as if a wire had been wound around it and pulled tight—so that the whole thing was shaped like a squat hourglass. And that was something he couldn't remember having run into before.

"What kind of bullet is that, Lucien?"

"It's not a bullet," Joly said, bending over to peer at it, his hands on his knees. "I believe it's an air-rifle pellet."

"An
air
gun pellet?" Gideon said incredulously. "I've never heard of anyone killed by an air gun." Actually, he had; a teenager accidentally shot through the eye so that the pellet had lodged in his brain, but in this case they were dealing with penetration of skin, of muscle, of
bone
. "I didn't think it was possible."

"No, no, not an air
gun
, an air
rifle
. This is not from one of your—what is it, your toys that shoot, what are they called…"

"BB's."

"Yes, BB's. No, my friend, an air rifle is a different matter—a weapon, not a toy. Equipped, for example, with a sophisticated gas-compression system and the proper ammunition, it can be quite powerful, quite accurate; as a hunting weapon, for example."

"I didn't know that," Gideon said, happy to give Joly a chance to do some showing off of his own.

The pellet having been duly photographed
in situ
, Joly stooped, picked it up, and placed it on his palm. "I believe this is what is called a magnum, probably a 6.35-mm. pellet, or perhaps only 5 mm. Larger and heavier than most, but of course quite light compared to your average firearm bullet." He closed his eyes while he hefted it. "I doubt if it weighs even fifty grains," he said with a significant look at Gideon.

"Oh?" Gideon said, completely out of his element by now.

"That would suggest," Joly explained, "that he was shot from close range, certainly less than twenty meters and probably a great deal less, considering that bone was penetrated. Such a light projectile would lose energy very quickly, regardless of the initial muzzle velocity, you see."

"I see," Gideon said. "That would also explain why it didn't make it all the way through."

Joly nodded his agreement. "Very good, Durand," he said with satisfaction, giving the strange pellet to the officer to bag.

He brushed invisible dirt from spotless hands and smiled, pleased with the day's efforts. "Come, shall we go and meet your Julie?"

   "Julie, this is my old friend and valued colleague, Inspector Joly. Lucien, allow me to present my wife."

Joly bowed, straight-backed and stiff. "A great pleasure, madame."

"Please, call me Julie."

"Yes? Thank you, and please call me…"

Ahum
, thought Gideon.

"…
ahum
, Lucien."

   The soft gurgle of the nearby river floated through the open French windows of the restaurant Au Vieux Moulin, set, as its name implied, in an ancient stone mill at the entrance to the village of Les Eyzies. At the table nearest the window the second course,
risotto aux truffes
, had been cleared away, the silverware removed and replaced for the third time, and the
ravioles de langoustine aux jus de crustaces
announced and presented in a ceramic tureen from which the waiter deftly whipped the cover with a practiced flourish.

The conversation, easy and pleasantly unfocused to this point, flagged as they worked their way attentively through the ravioli, and the plates and silver had been removed once again before Joly spoke, introducing a new subject. "Gideon, I would like to know a little more about this notorious scandal that has so plagued the Institut de Préhistoire—the Old Gentleman of Tayac. Tayac—that is the name of an
abri
, I presume?"

"Yes, a Neanderthal
abri
just north of here, probably no more than a quarter-of-a-mile from the one we were working in today. The institute ran a summer dig there for a few seasons in the early nineties. The habitation level was carbon-dated at around 35,000 years B.P."

"B.P.?"

"Sorry, before the present."

Joly poured them all a little more of the local white wine, a fruity Montravel. "I see. And what of this hoax, this argument?"

"Well, first you have to understand—as Julie pointed out yesterday—that anthropologists love to argue—"

"Is that so?" Joly murmured.

"—and nowhere is that more true than in Neanderthal research." He leaned back out of the way as the waiter laid the gleaming arsenal of utensils for the next course. "Right from the beginning—and the original Neanderthal Man was found in 1856—there's been a continuing, usually noisy fight over where to put him."

Joly showed his surprise; one of his eyebrows went up a millimeter. "Where to put him? He's not in a museum?"

"What I meant," Gideon said, laughing, "was where to put him taxonomically."

The issue, he explained, was the place of the Neanderthals in the long progression of human evolution. Were these muscular, beetle-browed creatures our ancestors—that is, the ancestors of modern Europeans—or were they evolutionary dead ends, crowded off the branches of the human tree like so many withered fruits, when our true ancestors, the Cro Magnons, arrived in Europe from Africa, bringing with them the technological marvels and cultural advances of the Upper Paleolithic age? Was Neanderthal Man the shambling, grunting, bent-kneed brute of the comics, dragging his woman along by the hair, or was he a sensitive being with language, culture, and an appreciation of beauty and art? Were the Neanderthals, in fact, human beings at all, or did they belong somewhere lower in the evolutionary scale, down with the monkeys and the apes?

"I see," Joly said. "And what is the position of the Institut de Préhistoire on these questions?"

"They don't have a position. They're divided just like every one else. Half of them are staunch defenders of the Neanderthals as card-carrying
Homo sapiens
, and the other half think they should be frog-marched out of the human line altogether, right into the trash pile with
Gigantopithecus
,
Australopithecus boisei
and all the other evolutionary wriggles that didn't go anywhere." That, at least, had been the way they'd all felt back then, and knowing them Gideon couldn't imagine they'd changed their views very much.

Julie took over at that point, explaining to Joly, with considerable zest, about the finding of the four perforated bones and their subsequent exposure as a fraud. By the time she finished the
magret de canard
had been brought, demolished and removed; likewise the
salade verte
, and the three of them were doing their seriously diminished best with the cheese course.

After a long, meditative lull in the conversation, Joly, first asking Julie's permission, lit his first Gitane of the evening. "And this is so very important?" he finally said as smoke swirled from his mouth and nostrils. "The making of a necklace?"

Gideon washed down a sliver of cheese—Géromé, according to Joly with a sip from his wineglass, now filled with a dry red Bergerac. "You better believe it. To put it simply, the making of decorative objects is one of the things that makes us unique, a convenient dividing line between human beings and everything else that's ever lived. Apes don't do it, monkeys don't do it,
Homo erectus
didn't do it; only
Homo sapiens
does it. So if you can establish that the Neanderthals did too, that pretty much means you have to classify them as one of us; not
Homo neanderthalensis
, a separate species of their own, but
Homo sapiens neanderthalensis
, a fully human subspecies, a kind of race."

"I see," Joly said. "Then I assume these bones caused a considerable uproar among those interested in such things?"

"Are you kidding? Once the news got out, it split the whole world of Middle and Upper Paleolithic anthropologists—"

"All eleven of them," Julie said, then quickly held up her hands: "I apologize, I couldn't help myself."

"—into two warring camps. The institute staff themselves were split right down the middle. Some people flat-out refused to believe it, some even came pretty close to calling Ely Carpenter a faker, but his defenders were just as adamant, and the Old Man of Tayac—
le Vieux de Tayac
—carried the day."

"Carpenter," Joly said, tipping his head back to expel a lungful of smoke. "Not 'Carpentier'? He wasn't a Frenchman?"

"No, he was an American, but he'd lived in France for a long time, a decade or more."

"And he himself was the perpetrator?" Joly asked.

"Nobody knows," Gideon said. "He denied it, of course, but he came in for a lot of abuse and ridicule. So did the institute, even though they didn't really have any part in it. Even today some people think Carpenter was responsible, some people think he was duped. Either way, he was thoroughly disgraced."

"Which do
you
think he was," Julie asked, "duper or dupee? You haven't said."

"I think he was duped. Sure, he might have
wanted
something like this to be true, but from what I know about him he wasn't the kind of guy to try to falsify the archaeological record. Besides, it was such a primitive kind of fake; someone with Carpenter's credentials would've been able to pull off something a lot more sophisticated, a lot harder to detect."

"How was it done?" Joly asked.

"The holes in the bones were made with an electric drill bit—which, I should point out, was not found in your standard Middle Paleolithic tool kit—and then stained with something so that they didn't look freshly made. That was it." Somebody like Carpenter would have
known
it was only a question of time before someone saw through it."

"And afterwards," Joly asked, "what happened to him?"

"Oh, about what you'd expect. His reputation was in shreds of course, and from what I understand he got a little paranoid about it; kind of wacky. In the end, he had to resign, of course."

"And now where is he?"

"No place he can be reached, I'm afraid. He was an amateur pilot, he had his own plane, and he crashed it not too long afterwards; up in Brittany."

Joly glazed at the beamed ceiling for a while, smoking placidly. "If he was so good a scientist," he said, watching the blue-gray tendrils spiral slowly up to be torn apart in the breeze, "and if the hoax was so primitive, how was it that he was taken in?"

"That's the question, all right. It's one of the things I'll be tackling in the book."

"And who did the taking in?" Julie added.

Gideon nodded. "Yup, that's also the question. A man named Jacques Beaupierre's the director now and he's given me his blessing to talk to the whole staff and ask them anything I want. I'm hoping I can come up with some answers."

"I would also be interested to know—"Joly began.

"Lucien, let me ask
you
something. What's with all this interest in the Old Man of Tayac? You don't think—or do you think—there's some connection between the institute and Mr. X back there in the cave?"

Joly plucked a shred of tobacco from his lips and leaned back in his chair. "Let me show you something." From the inside pocket of his suit jacket he took an unsealed white envelope. Inside were three black-and-white photographs of the same object that he laid out side by side on the tablecloth. He waited for their response.

"A rusty trowel," Julie said after a moment.

"Lying on the ground," said Gideon.

"Keenly observed," said Joly. "It was found by one of my officers in the brush about twenty-five meters from the entrance to the
abri
in which we were this afternoon. Now look at this one, the enlargement. What do you see burned into the handle?"

Gideon turned the photo to read the letters. "Initials… I.P." He glanced back up at Joly. "Meaning?"

"Institut de Préhistoire!" Julie said.

"Very good, madame—ah, Julie. So I also concluded. And when I took it there, Monsieur Beaupierre took one look at it and identified it as having originally come from their tool bin." He turned to Gideon. "There's your connection, my friend."

Gideon let this sink in for a moment. "Twenty-five meters away. You can't exactly call that the scene of the crime."

"Approximately eighty feet," Joly said. "About as far, wouldn't you say, as a man might be expected to throw it, if he had just come out of the cave and wished to get rid of it at once?"

Gideon shook his head. "Sorry, Lucien, I think you're reaching. These people have run digs all over the place around here. Archaeologists are always leaving stuff like this behind, or having it ripped off, or just losing it." He gathered up the photographs and handed them back to the inspector. "My guess is that what you've got here is a simple coincidence."

"Good," said Joly, pocketing the envelope. "Excellent. I love simple coincidences. I delight in simple coincidences. Whenever I see a simple coincidence I smell a commendation in the offing."

For a few minutes they all digested quietly, Joly smoking and Julie and Gideon sipping wine, all three ruminating over their thoughts. The tray of cheeses was removed, the demitasse cups brought.

"I've been thinking a-bout the issues we were discussing earlier," Joly said. "
Was
Neanderthal a human being? Was he
not
a human being?" He followed this with one of his elaborate Gallic shrugs—eyebrows, chin, and shoulders all going up at the same time, mouth going down. "Forgive me, but there have been no Neanderthals for tens of thousands of years, what does it matter?" He ground out his cigarette, already smoked two-thirds of the way down. "To speak frankly, it hardly seems something that sensible people would quarrel over."

"Sensible people, no," Julie said, "but we're talking about Paleolithic archaeologists. It's against their principles to agree with each other."