Skeleton Dance

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 “Perigord 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'Academie 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?'