Skeleton Dance

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 Emile 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, Emile 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 Emile, but he'd barely sat down in the paleopathologist's cubicle and asked his first question before Emile 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 Cafe 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 cafe au lait and Emile's cafe noir and his pair of croissants. But now the small talk was over. Emile finished the first croissant, moved the plate aside, straightened his bow tie—drooping orange clocks a 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.” Emile 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,” Emile 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 protege, his —'

'If you've already made up your mind on the matter,” Emile said stiffly, “I can't help wondering why you want my opinion.'

'No, no, I haven't made up my mind, Emile. 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. Emile 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 Emile himself, let's not forget Emile—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?'

Emile'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, Emile. 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?'