Skeleton Dance

'Well—'

Emile hooted sourly. “And of course he was able to show ‘exactly how it was done.’ Who better than the person who perpetrated it in the first place?'

Gideon sipped his cooling, milky coffee and pondered, trying his best to look at things with an open mind. “Look, everything you say is certainly possible,” he said after a few moments, “but why pick on Montfort? Why assume that it wasn't Ely himself, for example? I'm not saying it was, but wouldn't he be the more obvious choice?'

'There are three obvious choices, the three men whose theories of Middle Paleolithic cultural development were ostensibly confirmed by the finding of those worked metapodials—theories, I need hardly point out, on which they had publicly staked their reputations: Ely Carpenter, Jacques Beaupierre, and Michel Montfort. Let's look at them one at a time. Ely was surely not foolish enough to imagine that he could escape exposure for long with such an artifice. Jacques, on the other hand—we speak in confidence, I assume?'

'Of course.'

'Jacques, on the other hand—it pains me to say it—hardly possesses the ingenuity and cunning necessary to execute such a scheme.” He paused, waiting to see if Gideon would agree or disagree. Gideon, who was undecided on this point, gave him a take-it-any-way-you-like shrug instead.

Emile took it as agreement. “And that,” he concluded with the air of a lawyer wrapping up an airtight case before a bedazzled jury, “leaves us with Michel . . . Georges . . . Montfort.” Voila.

* * * *

Things were getting interesting, Gideon thought, watching the Vezere glide by at his feet, slow, and green, and placid, in no hurry to get anywhere. By himself at lunch time, he had repeated the meal he'd had the day before with Julie—marinated roast beef and sliced tomato on a baguette, with a paper cone of French fries and a bottle of Orangina, all from a streetside crepe and sandwich stand—and taken them down to the park, to the same riverside bench he'd shared with Julie.

There, on a pleasant lawn among brilliantly green young willow trees, he slowly ate his sandwich, looking at the river and the terraced fields and white limestone cliffs beyond it, watching the boaters trying to steer their rented, inflatable pink kayaks, listening to the relaxing clicks and murmurs of the men playing petanque behind him, and mulling over his conversations of the morning.

Emile alone had been willing to voice his suspicions about Tayac, and although his accusation of Montfort did have at least a certain internal logic, it was hard to know how seriously to take it. Did Emile himself really believe what he was saying, or was he venting his dislike of Montfort, a dislike keener than Gideon had realized . . . or was he simply playing malicious little mind-games for the fun of it, something Gideon had no trouble imagining him doing?

Whichever, it was important to remember that, as Emile himself had said, he had no empirical data (otherwise known as hard evidence) to support his views. Still, it was a line of thinking that hadn't previously occurred to Gideon, and, improbable or not, it had now lodged itself under the surface of his mind like a burr.

He was also finding it difficult to make up his mind about Jacques Beaupierre. Was it really possible, given the circumstances, that anyone, even Jacques, could have actually forgotten the name of the Thibault Museum? Pru's defense of him notwithstanding, it hardly seemed believable. And if he hadn't really forgotten, then clearly, he had chosen not to answer. Why? The obvious reason was that he preferred Gideon not to know just which museum the lynx bones had come from. And the obvious reason for that—the most likely reason, anyway—was that he didn't want Gideon to know that he himself was associated with it. And if you accepted that much, there was only one place to go with it: Beaupierre was afraid that Gideon might leap to the conclusion, the very reasonable conclusion, that Jacques himself, with easy access to the Thibault, had had something to do— something very central to do—with the obtaining of those bones and therefore with the hoax itself.

In other words, that Jacques Beaupierre had been the one behind it.

On its own terms it made as much sense as Emile's theory about Montfort, and in the same way. Had the fraud been successful, it would have confirmed Jacques’ long-held, often-stated beliefs about Neanderthal culture. Suppose he'd been driven enough to plan the hoax and pull it off, but afraid to risk the fall-out if it were to be exposed? In that case, why not plant it in Carpenter's private dig? That way, with Ely sure to shout about it from the rooftops, the cause would be advanced. But if it were to be found out, as it inevitably, necessarily was found out, it would be Carpenter who would—and did—take the vilification. Was the genial, abstracted Beaupierre capable of that?

On the other hand, he reminded himself, this was the same man who'd needed reminding on whether he'd had breakfast the other day, the same man who, in Gideon's presence, had once hemmed and hawed and been unable to put his finger on the exact title of a book he himself had written two years earlier. (It was L'Archeologie.) Surely, honestly forgetting the name of the Musee Thibault was within his abilities, as Pru had said. And Emile, who knew the director better than he did, had almost contemptuously dismissed him as the possible perpetrator.

. . . as it inevitably, necessarily was found out. The words drifted back through his mind, so distinctly and separately that his lips involuntarily shaped them. Had exposure of the fraud truly been inevitable? If so, then yet another possibility had to be considered: what if everyone had been looking at the hoax the wrong way round? What if its purpose had not been to promote the sensitive-Neanderthal school of thought but to discredit it? Looked at that way, it had been a great success: Ely, Montfort, Jacques, and their brothers-and-sisters-in-arms had come out of it bruised and winded, along with their theories. But for the other side, the Neanderthal-as-hopeless-knucklehead-side, it had been a great shot in the arm; their theoretical stock had soared.

And looking at it from that angle, Gideon thought, tipping the bottle up to get the last cool, sweet swallow out of it, meant that Audrey, Emile, and Pru might have had the very same motive as anyone else in planting those doctored bones for the luckless Ely to find and to crow about—namely, giving a leg up to their side in the theoretical wars when the truth came out.

Wonderful, he thought with a shake of his head and a wry smile, this was real progress. When he'd started off this morning he didn't have a single suspect, beyond Ely himself, on whom to hang the Old Man of Tayac. Now there wasn't anyone who wasn't a suspect.

It just went to show what the scientific method could accomplish when properly employed.

Yawning, he reached for the cone of frites, saved for his dessert, and stood up. Carpenter was on his mind too as he started back up the path. Pru and Jacques had both jumped defensively, almost angrily, to his support. Ely had been “the very model of integrity” . . . “a really, really neat guy.” But had he, really? When Gideon had known him three years before, he'd found him competent and likeable, with an