Skeleton Dance

'Right. On second thought, make that ‘won the booby prize.’ What Ely came up with, you see, was this small cache of grave goods that were part of the old man's burial but had apparently been overlooked during the official excavation.'

'Overlooked?” said Julie, surprised. “Sounds a little careless.'

'Well, some of the ceiling had collapsed at least once during the last 35,000 years or so, you see, and it'd confused the strata quite a bit, so I guess it was excusable. Anyway, it was what Ely found in the cache that was so important.'

'Which was?'

'Four small, brownish bones about an inch long; metapodials—foot bones, tarsal bones—from a prehistoric cave lynx. And what made them unique . . . “ Gideon, no mean storyteller, paused for a couple of beats for the desired dramatic effect. “ . . . was that three of them had oval holes cleanly drilled through one end. The fourth was perforated partway through.'

Julie frowned at him over the rim of her cup. “So?'

'So they constituted, or seemed to constitute at the time, the very first concrete evidence that Neanderthals were advanced enough to produce any kind of art. You see, those bones were surely part of a necklace or bracelet that would have been strung together and worn. Plenty of things like that have shown up at Cro-Magnon sites, sure, but this was the first time they'd found any in a Neanderthal setting—in fact, they were the first Neanderthal decorative objects of any kind, or at least the first ones that weren't ambiguous.'

Julie thought for a moment. “I can see why that would be important, but how could anyone say for sure that the Neanderthals made them? You said the Cro-Magnons were here at the same time. So who's to say that they didn't make them? How do you know that this Old Man didn't steal them, or find them, or trade for them, or—'

'Ah, that's the part that was so slick, Julie. It was that fourth bone, the one that was only partway drilled through. The fact that one of them was unfinished was proof—well, as close as you can come to proof in this kind of thing—that it was in the act of being made right there, on the spot. The natural assumption was that the Old Man of Tayac was a craftsman, and that he was buried with the products of his labor—maybe accidentally, maybe not.'

'Ah, I see,” she said, sitting back and gazing out the countryside again. “Yes, that was clever.” She finished her coffee and put the cup on the tiny folding table below the window. “How did they find out it was a hoax?'

'It was an anonymous letter. It showed up at a Paris newspaper—Paris-Match, I think it was—about a month later, claiming that those four bones had been taken from some dusty little paleontology museum not far from Les Eyzies, perforated, and then planted in the abri, waiting to be found.” He hunched his shoulders. “They did an investigation, the claim turned out to be accurate, and that was that. The whole thing was discredited as a fraud.'

'Wow, I can see how that would have made a few waves.'

'More than a few. Anyhow, the question of whether Ely actually perpetrated the whole thing or just innocently fell for it has never been settled, and I'm hoping I can come up with some answers, or at least some credible possibilities. So the very first thing I want to do is sit down and see what the institute people have to say about it now, almost three years later. “

'After you look at Inspector Joly's bones for him, you mean.'

'Oh, that,” said Gideon carelessly. “How much work can that take?'

[Back to Table of Contents]

Chapter 5

* * * *

If all his forensic cases were like this, he would have been a happy man.

Dry. No gore, no brains, no guts, nothing greasy, nothing putrid, nothing nasty. Just clean, dry bones. The only smell, aside from the not-unpleasant fustiness of the bones themselves—not so very different from that of old books or decaying leather—was the damp, woodsy fragrance of the mosses and lichens that had managed to gain a foothold in the dim, rocky crevices at the base of the walls. It was almost like working at an early-man site.

Well, why wouldn't it be, it was an early-man site, an abri; maybe Cro-Magnon as Joly thought, but probably Neanderthal. The sloping roof of the cave, a few inches higher than Gideon was tall, was black with the soot of hundreds of fires, and embedded here and there in the earthen floor he could see small shards of chert and flint, dozens of them—not the scrapers, or choppers, or hand axes that you saw in museums, but the waste material, the discarded flakes that had been chipped away to form the stone tools. Long ago, some ancient, fur-wrapped flintknapper, possibly more than one, had squatted there by the fire, patiently hunched over his work, slowly shaping household implements or crude weapons from the smooth, dark stones of the nearby valley.

Much later, millennia later, others had come. A pair of archaeological test trenches, only faintly perceptible now, had been sunk at right angles to one another. It had been some time ago, perhaps thirty years, perhaps fifty. Whoever had dug them had apparently found nothing to encourage a full-scale excavation; the trenches had been filled in again and the excavators had gone elsewhere.

Later still, another visitor had found his way there, but this one had never left, or at least some of him hadn't, and Gideon had spent part of the morning and most of the afternoon working over what remained, using trowel, toothbrush, paintbrush, tongue depressors, and fingers in roughly that order. Gradually, he had freed the reddish- tinged bones from the dirt floor of the cave, where the body had been buried in the backfill at the intersection of the trenches. In the relatively soft, loose soil, and with most of what was left of the skeleton already disturbed by rodents or carnivores, it was an easy job and a quick one—or it would have been, had not Joly insisted on having his people draw charts, take photographs, bag insect remains, put the dug-up dirt through a sieve, and generally get in the way after each couple of millimeters of earth had been scraped away. Well, it was nobody's fault but Gideon's; it was at his forensic seminar in St. Malo that Joly had learned the proper techniques of retrieving skeletal material, and Joly, as Gideon well knew, was nothing if not a stickler.