'This is a little different. Bousquet was never reported to the police as missing, he was reported as a thief.'
By his landlady, Madame Renouard, according to whom Bousquet had fled after removing from a secret drawer in her cupboard 60 francs in cash, an antique lapel watch valued at 180 francs, and a treasured cameo brooch; one of a pair that had belonged to her grandmother. He had also left with his rent four weeks in arrears, a matter of some 600 francs. The municipal police, under Prefect Marielle, had mounted an unsuccessful search for him, concluding after a week that he had permanently left the area, and there the matter had lain. A few months later there was a brief flurry of speculation that he might have returned; Madame Renouard, discovering that her grandmother's
'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 Prehistoire.'
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Chapter 8
* * * *
Some things never changed.
So Gideon thought with a smile as he stood unnoticed in the doorway of the Cafe 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 Emile 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.
