Skeleton Dance (8 page)

"And so you think that might have been him in the cave?"

"I offer it as a possibility," said Joly. "He seems to have had no shortage of enemies. Apparently he was a drifter who had come to the area not long before and had found a job plying a shovel. He had had bad relations with several townspeople, and there are reports of some unpleasantness with a co-worker at his place of employment. I lack the details, but would you agree that it sounds worth looking into?"

"Yes, it does. Well, I'll be back at the bones this afternoon, Lucien. I'll give you a call and let you know what I have. You find out what you can about his physical characteristics and, who knows, maybe we can come up with a match."

"Very good. Oh, by the way, our police pathologist, Dr. Roussillot, is nominally in charge of the remains, so he is required to certify your findings. He may choose to join you at the morgue. I hope you don't mind?"

"Mind, why should I mind?"

"Well, I'm afraid Dr. Roussillot may be somewhat stiff-necked for your taste; a nice enough fellow to be sure, but fairly new on the job—he was a professor until last year, you see, and as a result has an inclination to be somewhat fussy and punctilious, as well as an unfortunate tendency toward tedious speeches. Ah, not, that is to say, that professors necessarily—"

"That's okay, Lucien, don't worry about it."

"You will try to get along with him, won't you?"

Gideon laughed. "I get along with you, don't I?"

"He spent two years at Cambridge, speaks a wonderful English."

"Lucien, don't worry about it, I'll get along fine with the guy."

"Excellent," Joly said, sounding relieved. "Oh, and perhaps you could also do me the service of seeing if there is anything to the story of this Bousquet's 'unpleasantness' with a co-worker? I'm sure that you could do it more smoothly, more in the natural course of events, than I could."

"I appreciate the compliment," Gideon said in all sincerity, "but how in the hell am I supposed to do that?"

"His place of employment," said Joly, "was the Institut de Préhistoire."

   Some things never changed.

So Gideon thought with a smile as he stood unnoticed in the doorway of the Café du Centre's small, plain back room. It was a few minutes before eleven o'clock and the institute's fellows had gathered early for their meeting. There they were at the same scarred round table, the only table in the room, coffee cups and frosted carafes of water at hand, going at it hammer and tongs, just as they'd been doing three years ago, two of them stalwartly standing up for the Neanderthals as brothers, or at least cousins (despite the recent DNA evidence to the contrary), and the other three just as vigorously (and more accurately, in Gideon's view) in favor of demoting them to distant in-laws, no closer to humans than they were to the great apes.

Leading the anti-Neanderthal charge, as before, was the diminutive but formidable Audrey Godwin-Pope, one of the two Americans on the staff, and at 68 its second oldest member, after Beaupierre; a forthright, free-spoken woman with iron-gray hair done up in a bun, author of over a hundred monographs, and president of Sisters in Time, the feminist caucus of the International Archaeological Society. Audrey was on her second—or was it her third?—four-year appointment to the institute. (According to the charter the American fellows received four-year renewable appointments; the French fellows were appointed to indefinite terms.) Three years earlier, the last time the directorship had been open, she too had been a competitor, along with Beaupierre and Carpenter, but of course Carpenter had been selected and then a few months later Beaupierre had been appointed to replace him. Now it was widely and approvingly understood that Audrey was next in line in the unlikely prospect that Beaupierre were to leave any time soon.

Supporting her against the pro-Neanderthalers was the vinegary, pedantic Émile Grize, the staff paleopathologist, the only Frenchman Gideon knew who affected bow ties, generally oversized and usually with a gaudy, multicolored pattern, both of which sadly accentuated his own meager frame and vaguely reptilian features. Today it was flying yellow egrets on a field of mauve, not a happy choice for a man with the complexion of an over-the-hill Roquefort cheese.

The third and final member of the Neanderthal-as-poor-relation group was the other American, and the other woman, on the staff, Prudence McGinnis, her flyaway red hair more or less held back by a couple of barrettes. Sitting within easy reach of a plate of chocolate brioches, Pru was big, jolly, and irrepressible, with a washerwoman's thick, red wrists and forearms, and a body like an only slightly gone-to-seed female Russian shot-putter's. Gideon's and Pru's friendship went back to his days at Northern California State, when Pru, only three years younger than Gideon, had been a student in the very first graduate course he had taught. With her cocky, funny, shoot-from-the-hip New York manner she had struck many on the faculty as insufficiently reverent, but Gideon had taken to her from the first. Irreverence had been in short supply in the anthro department at Northern Cal, and from Gideon's perspective view Pru had been a breath of fresh air.

At odds with them on almost every point was the smaller pro-Neanderthal contingent, comprised, as before, of Jacques Beaupierre, the affable, constitutionally absent-minded director; and the gruff, bearlike Michel Montfort, distinguished Paleolithic archaeologist, diplomate of the French Académie des Sciences, and generally acknowledged to be the institute's most distinguished scholar if not its most diplomatic member. As befitting his status, he had been offered the directorship several times, offered it on a silver platter, but having no interest in or patience with administrative matters he had consistently declined—to the relief of all concerned.

Although outnumbered three to two and on the less generally accepted side of the argument, Beaupierre and Montfort more than managed to hold their own, thanks mostly to Montfort's imposing persona and acknowledged preeminence.

It was amazing, really, that they never got tired of haranguing each other, or that they'd never physically attacked one another in sheer frustration. (Or maybe they had, who knew?) Probably, the answer lay in the fact that they were out of each others' sight for seven months out of every twelve. According to the terms of its charter, the institute was in session only five months a year, from late June to the end of November, typically allowing them a three-month digging season followed by a two month "data consolidation" period. Except for Jacques Beaupierre, whose administrative duties were year-round, and Pru McGinnis, who held no outside faculty position, the staff members spent the rest the year away from the institute and each other on half-or three-quarter-time appointments at their home universities.

But whatever the reason, their endless debate had never been in danger of growing stale. "Ridiculous!" Montfort was declaring in his blunt Alsatian French at the moment. "Do you really think that if we could take a typical Neanderthal, give him a shave, dress him up in a jogging suit, and sit him down in a New York subway train, that any of the other passengers would even look twice at him?"

Pru received this with a hearty laugh. "You're absolutely right, and you want to know why? Because people who ride the New York subways know better than to notice
anybody
. Believe me, I know what I'm talking about here."

Watching from the doorway, Gideon smiled. It was nice to see that Pru was still Pru.

"As to the New York subway," said Émile Grize dryly, the egrets bobbing under his chin, "that is a subject on which, happily, I am unable to speak with conviction. However, as a trained paleopathologist—" As Gideon remembered, Émile began a lot of sentences with "As a trained paleopathologist"; in his own mind he was the one real scientist in this band of rock-hunters. "—as a trained paleopathologist I can assure you that a Neanderthal would
not
pass unnoticed in the Paris Métro, however well-shaven."

He sounded positively offended at the idea, as if, were poor Charlie Caveperson to shamble unassumingly aboard at the Étoile metro station, he, Émile Grize, would personally boot him off at the next stop.

"Be that as it may," said Audrey Godwin-Pope in her usual no-nonsense manner, "I would think we might agree that the outward appearance of these beings is beside the point."

"
Does
this interminable discussion actually have a point?" Montfort asked. "It continues to elude me."

"It was my impression," Audrey said, standing up to him (no surprise there), "that it was their social organization that was under discussion, and there even you, Michel, have to admit the evidence is unambiguous. They had none—at least not on a human level. Everything we know about Neanderthal society tells us that it was on a par with that of a wandering troop of mountain gorillas, nothing more."

"Is that so?" Montfort snorted, leaning combatively forward. "Suppose you tell me then: when was the last time you encountered a wandering troop of mountain gorillas that made a practice of burying their grandfathers?"

Touché
, Gideon thought. Montfort was on the wrong side of the argument, but
touché
all the same.

"I saw a study recently," Jacques Beaupierre piped up, "that suggests there is now good reason to believe that the morphological differences between Neanderthal Man—"

"Neanderthals," said Audrey with the stoic demeanor of someone who was making the same correction for the thousandth time and had no hope that it was going to take this time any more than it had before. Nice to see that she hadn't changed either. "Or Neanderthalers, if you prefer."

"Differences between Neanderthals," said Beaupierre without missing a beat—-he was used to it too—"and modern humans are not evolutionary at all, but nothing more than the result of an iodine-deficient diet, due to their distance from the seacoast."

"Iodine deficiency is well-known to result in thyroid dysfunction and eventually, if severe and protracted enough, in cretinism," Émile observed in his surgical but long-winded fashion. "Are we therefore to assume that the position of this study that the Neanderthal population is not a separate race or species at all, but simply an assemblage of cretins?"

Beaupierre's brow furrowed. "Ah… well, yes, I suppose that
would
follow, yes."

It was enough to make people sigh, and shake their heads, and glance around the room, finally becoming aware of Gideon. Pru at once jumped up and strode to the door to welcome him, her hand outstretched and her lively gray eyes almost on a level with his own. He smiled, equally glad to see her, although he could have done without her bonecracking gorilla-handshake, which he saw coming but couldn't in decency avoid. Audrey, more restrained, merely said, "Hello, Gideon, it's nice to see you again," but her stern mouth softened and even curved upward a little at the corners. These, fellow-Americans, were the two people he knew best and liked most. Montfort, whom he knew less well, was his usual crusty self but went so far as to rise halfway, grunt, and shake hands somewhat absently (a relief after Pru's knuckle-grinder). Only Émile Grize limited himself to no more than a frugal nod, which Gideon accepted as a cordial welcome, considering the source.

Audrey and Pru made room for him between them, a
café crème
was brought for him, and the business part of the meeting was attended to. With the institute in its annual data-consolidation mode, archaeological digs had been suspended while members concentrated on interpreting the season's findings. Thus, the discussion concerned little more than the publication schedules of various institute proceedings and monographs, and these were quickly, almost cursorily, dealt with. The language of discussion was then mercifully switched to English as a kindness to the newcomer, and Beaupierre turned the floor over to "our old friend, Gideon Oliver, the Skeleton Detective of America."

Ignoring the raised hairs on the nape of his neck that this hated phrase invariably produced, Gideon began: "As you all know, I'm here in connection with the book I'm doing on errors and fallacies in the social sciences; anthropology in particular. The Old Man of Tayac—"

But the sudden sensation of wary, quivering antennae all about him produced by these few words told him that they did not all know—in fact that none of them, apart from Beaupierre, had known—anything about it. Surprised, Gideon turned inquiringly to the director. "I thought you said…?"

"Ah, I've told everyone that you would be coming here to interview them," Beaupierre said nervously. "But it may be, now that I think of it, that perhaps I neglected to mention, ah, the exact subject matter of your, ah, interest in, mm…" He closed his mouth, took a sip of coffee, and apparently lost interest, gazing tranquilly out the window, an earnest, cogitative look on his face. Beaupierre had a way of doing that—simply quitting in the middle of a sentence, giving the impression that it was still going on somewhere in the ether, only not out loud. It was as if a radio had been switched off in the middle of a sentence. Sometimes he'd flip the switch back on again in the middle of another sentence, which was equally disconcerting.

There was a polite interval, apparently to permit the director to continue if he wished, which he didn't, and then Audrey filled her water glass and looked at Gideon. "Is this a serious academic work, Gideon?"

Oh boy; not a question he'd been looking forward to answering. His throat began to get a little dry and he too filled his glass from one of the carafes. "Well, not exactly, no, Audrey. It's intended for a popular audience, but I do mean to treat the subject in a serious, scholarly way." Well, in as serious and scholarly a way as Lester would let him get away with.

"And what, may I ask," said Émile Grize, "is the title of this popular yet scholarly book?" As it often was with Émile, it was a toss-up as to whether or not he meant to be sarcastic.

"
Wrong Turns, Dead Ends, and Popular Misconceptions in the Study of Humankind
," Gideon said, figuring he was better off ignoring for the moment the less scholarly-sounding
Bones to Pick
part. Even so, it didn't do much to tone down the general air of mistrust. (Thank God he had held out against Lester's
Bungles, Blunders and Bloopers
.) Still, what could he expect? How happy could they be about dusting off a farce that had made them a public laughing stock only a few years earlier? The Tayac hoopla had even made it to the Jay Leno show for four nights running, surely a first for the field of Middle Paleolithic decorative technology.