Skeleton Dance

by Aaron Elkins

"Apparently I did," Émile said, tight-mouthed. "And what sort of lesions would these be?"

  "Extremely subtle ones," Gideon said diplomatically. "That's why no one's noticed them until now. What you find is this diffuse periostitis on the internal aspects of some of the ribs—generally four through eight, on the left side. They're faint, but they can be seen if you know to look for them."

  "Is that so?" said Émile, growing interested. He might not like being taught anything by the younger Gideon, but he was a paleopathologist (a trained paleopathologist)—one of the best there was, Gideon was ready to admit—and this was new data. "And this would presumably be a byproduct of chronic pulmonary tubercular infection of the subjacent pleural tissue?"

  "Exactly. The—"

  "Chronic pulmonary tubercular infection of the subjacent pleural tissue," said Beaupierre. "My, my, the waters are growing deep for us mere archaeologists. Well, well, Gideon, it's been most interesting, but I think we ought to conclude now. It's almost noon, and I'm sure we all have some final preparations to make for the symposium."

  "One thing more," Montfort said, re-emerging from the solitary, superior plane to which he'd retreated again. "In regard to your book, Dr. Oliver: I don't want—I'm sure none of us want—to see Professor Carpenter made to look ridiculous."

  There were murmurs of assent around the table; heartfelt, as far as Gideon could tell. Carpenter had been a popular and—until the debacle that had ended his career—a respected director.

  "I won't make him look ridiculous," Gideon said.

  "Nor his scholarship either," added Beaupierre.

  But that was a trickier proposition. "I'm not trying to make anything look ridiculous, Jacques, but I don't see how I can get around the fact that his scholarship is suspect. How else could he have been—"

  Montfort interrupted. "Dr. Beaupierre refers not to the unfortunate episode of the Old Man of Tayac, but to the entire body of Professor Carpenter's work, the total thrust of his research. And mine," he added with unmistakable emphasis. "As unfortunate as his lapse of judgment in this case was, I hope you will make it clear that it has no bearing on the fact that other Neanderthals in other places do demonstrate beyond any possible doubt the existence of artistic proclivities."

  "They do, do they?" said Audrey, her hackles rising. "Beyond any possible doubt?"

  "Better duck," Pru breathed in Gideon's ear. "We're off again."

  She was right. Montfort rounded on Audrey, his eyes glittering with the zeal of battle. "Doctor, I am at a loss to understand how you can continue to dispute the existence of art, legitimate art, in the Middle Paleolithic. We now have evidence of pigment traces—yellow, red, black, brown—applied to stone at well over two dozen Neanderthal sites. Are you seriously suggesting that this was all unintentional, the result of some kind of repeated accident?"

  "Of course not," said Audrey, taking up the challenge, "but I hope you're not suggesting that the application of coloring materials to a surface is necessarily an artistic act."

  "Not an artistic act?" put in Beaupierre. "But… but of course it's an artistic act. What else would you call it?"

  "Any one of a hundred things: simple curiosity, or a primitive enjoyment of novel effects, or an instinct for play. In all these sites you mention, can you point to a single application of color that could be called a pattern, a meaningful design?"

  "Oh… pouf," said Beaupierre weakly.

  "Go ahead and pouf all you like, Jacques," Émile said, "but Audrey is clearly in the right. All these pigment traces of yours are no more than smears or formless dabs. Oh, at best I suppose they might represent a naÏve form of aesthetic appreciation on the part of Neanderthal Man—"

  "Neanderthals," Audrey said automatically.

  "On the part of Neanderthals, but nothing to be confused with artistic intent as we use the term."

  "Oh, yes?" said Montfort, warming to the debate, "and just how do you propose to separate the two? Is there really so obvious a difference between artistic appreciation and aesthetic appreciation—even 'naÏve' aesthetic appreciation, as you choose to call it?"

  "That's right," said Beaupierre. "Yes, very true. We all know, mm, ah…"

  "Oh, come on, people, give me a break," Pru said. "Babies play with crayons. Give a chimp some finger paints and he's happy for hours. So what? Does that make him an artist?"

  "But what about the incised stone, the worked bone?" said Montfort. "Do chimpanzees carve crosses in stone?"

  Several voice responded, but Audrey's was the most penetrating. "For heaven's sake, Michel, are you back on that nummulite fossil from Hungary? One of the lines on that "cross" is a natural crack, you know that as well as I do."

  "And the other?"

  "The other," said Émile, "is an ambiguous mark that could easily have been caused by skinning, butchering, or any one of a thousand utilitarian, totally unaesthetic activities."

  Montfort looked sadly at him. "Always and forever the ready answer."

  "I may not be an archaeologist—" Émile said

  Montfort muttered something inaudible.

  "—but it hardly takes an archaeologist to see it's just a scratch, that's all, a simple scratch on a stone. To refer to it as an 'incision,' a term connoting human agency, is spurious and misleading. I don't mean this in a personal sense, of course, Michel."

  Montfort snorted. "And do you also have an answer for the complexly incised—pardon me, the scratched—bone fragment from Peche de l'Azé?" He thumped the table, making empty coffee cups rattle in their saucers.

  "Natural erosion," said Émile, uncowed, with his chin thrust out.

  "—the perforated reindeer phalanges from La Quina—"

  "Carnivore activity."

  Montfort, shaking his head, gazed sadly at him.

  "But… but the perforated wolf metacarpal from Bocksteinschmiede?" said Beaupierre, taking up the argument as well as he could. "What about that?"

  "Not proven to be Middle Paleolithic, as opposed to Upper Paleolithic!" cried Audrey, partway to her feet.

  Beaupierre and Montfort let fly at the same time. Oh, yes? How did she explain the artifacts from Bilzingsleben? What about Repolusthöhle? Arcy-sur-Cure? Cueva Morín in Spain?

  Gideon had been long forgotten. All of them, including even the usually mellow Pru were talking at once, or rather shouting; banging the table and waving their arms for emphasis. Through the open door of the room Gideon saw the café's proprietor, standing behind the bar, exchange smiles and wags of the head with a couple of his customers. These scientists!

  "I guess I'll be going," he announced. "Thanks very much for your help."

  He thought no one had heard him over the din, but as he rose from his chair Pru touched his elbow, smiled, and said in her fluent French:

  "Bienvenue chez les fous."

  Welcome back to the madhouse.

  Chapter 9

  Because Les Eyzies had neither a morgue nor a hospital, the bagged bones from the cave had been taken to the morgue-room of the hospital at St.-Cyprien, another ancient Périgord town five miles from Les Eyzies, this one clustered at the foot of an imposing twelfth-century abbey on the banks of the Dordogne. Having driven there in the compact, olive-green Peugeot that Julie had rented for them by e-mail from the United States, Gideon was told by the front-desk receptionist, a friendly, chatty woman who laughed at the end of every sentence, that he would find the morgue in the basement—right down those stairs, in the room at the end of the corridor.

  "Will I need a key, madame?" he asked in French.

  She chuckled good-naturedly. "No, you won't need one, monsieur, we don't usually lock the morgue. Not too many people try to get in—or out, for that matter. And besides, the other gentleman is there."

  "Other gentleman?" he said, surprised. And then: "Oh, would that be Dr. Roussillot, the police pathologist?"

  "I don't know, I didn't ask his name."

  She didn't ask Gideon's name either, he reflected critically as he went down the st
airs. Joly himself might run a tight ship, but this sort of evidence-storage would never pass muster under American chain-of-evidence requirements. Gideon was the second—at least the second—person to have access to the bones without having to provide identification. Aside from that, they'd been left unattended for who knew how long; that left a huge chink into which a defense attorney or a judge could toss a monkey wrench on the grounds that it could no longer be proven beyond a doubt that these bones really were the selfsame bones that had been removed from the cave. And it was on just such objections that many an otherwise solid case could—indeed, had—come apart at the seams.

  The basement corridor's main purpose seemed to be to serve as a storage area for conveyances. Gideon had to thread his way around gurneys, wheelchairs, and walkers to get to the double doors at the end of the hallway. Once there, he pushed them open to enter a small, immaculate, white-tiled room furnished with a desk along one wall, a rack with clean rubber aprons and white coats, a barred, glass-fronted cabinet holding the usual blood-freezing assortment of autopsy tools, and, in the center, a single, old-fashioned, porcelain-topped autopsy table at which a heavily-built built man in a white coat was removing one of the paper bags of bones from the macaroni carton.

  At Gideon's entrance, he looked up sharply, the point of his fastidiously shaped Van Dyke bristling. "What do you want? This is a restricted area. I'm extremely busy. Do you have permission to be here?"

  Dr. Roussillot, I presume, Gideon thought. "I'm Gideon Oliver," he said in French, cautiously advancing. "You must be Dr. Roussillot."

  He received a wary nod in reply.

  "Well, I'm the anthropologist who's been working with Inspector Joly. I'm supposed—"

  "Of course, forgive me, the anthropologist," he said, not really rudely, but making it amply clear whose turf this was, who was encroaching on whom, and who'd better not try getting away with any snake oil. He leaned over to shake hands, briefly and formally—one businesslike flap down, one up—then made room for Gideon at the table, shoving to one side the marred leather satchel at his feet. "Be so good as to bring me up to date, please, professor."

  Gideon did, resorting to shaky Latin when his French didn't extend to the diffuse periosteal lesions that he would be hunting for on the ribs.

  "How interesting. Shall we examine the ribs, then?"

  "If you don't mind, I'd rather set everything out in anatomical order first. It'll only take a minute. Will you give me a hand?"

  "Certainly," said Roussillot.

  Gideon started at the head-end. Roussillot began with the lower body, removing the left femur from its sack, and grasping it firmly around the shaft. "I'm sorry about this," he said. "I don't see any other way."

  "Hm?" Gideon said absently, absorbed in scraping a bit of dirt from a clavicle. "Sorry about—"

  He was sitting on the floor.

  His legs were crumpled in front of him. His head hung loosely forward with his chin digging into his sternum. He was staring dully at his hands, one of which lay, palm-down, flat against the cool smoothness of the linoleum floor; the other was loosely curled in his lap. A hard, sharp, vertical edge, a corner of something, cut into his spine. When he shifted to ease the discomfort, the sudden loss of support sent him flopping bonelessly over backwards, banging his head on the floor and wrenching a grunt of pain out of him.

  Whooh!

  The sound startled, then steadied, him. His body and his mind began to come together. He waited for the white flash of pain to dim and for the billows of nausea to recede, then gingerly reopened his eyes. He was looking at a ceiling bank of blue-white neon lights shielded by metal grills. When they began a slow, circling tilt from left to right he shut his eyes again and kept them shut while strength and consciousness flowed—trickled—back into him.

  Where was he? What had happened to him? He'd had a quick lunch with Julie in Les Eyzies, he remembered that. They'd taken marinated roast-beef-and-tomato sandwiches, bottles of Orangina, and paper cones of French fries to a bench near the river and he'd told her about the unexpected direction the staff meeting had taken. Then, while she went back to the hotel to put her feet up for an hour before going off to her symposium, he'd driven to St.-Cyprien to finish his examination of the bones, and there he'd met—

  The bones! His eyes flew open. The ceiling started its tilt again but this time he stuck it out, staring hard at the lights and willing them to be still. When they settled down to no more than a shimmering wobble, he gathered himself together and pulled himself slowly up with the aid of the autopsy table. For the first time he was aware of a jack-hammer pain behind his left ear, just above the mastoid process. He put his fingers on the spot and winced when they touched a tender, walnut-sized knot. At least he now knew what had put him on the floor in the first place.

  He also knew, even before he'd made it to his feet, what he would find, and find it he did. The bones were gone, the satchel was gone, Dr. Roussillot—the so-called Dr. Roussillot—was gone.

  But the macaroni au fromage carton was still there. Grasping the table hard for support he stared at the empty box until his blurry vision cleared a little more. And in one of its corners, caught under a flap of cardboard, he saw a single tooth, a familiar one with a dull gray filling, a first bicuspid that had come loose from the mandible; all that was left of the skeleton from the abri.

  As he got his fingers clumsily around it, the walls began their slow wheeling again, the edges of his sight to grow dark. Clutching the table Gideon let himself back down to the floor, making it just as the black, sick void reared up and engulfed him again.

  Chapter 10

  "I talked to the doctor," Julie said. "The tests were all negative, nothing broken. It was just a simple concussion. He was really happy with the results."

  "Oh, just a simple concussion, is that right?" Gideon said, slumped in an armchair, with his head leaning back and a damp towel thrown across his eyes. "Just a little neuroaxonic fragmentation? Merely some cortical ischemic necrosis, is that all? Just some trifling disintegration of the midline reticular nuclei here and there? Oh, I'm delighted to hear he's happy."

  "Something tells me you're not in a very good mood."

  "No? Well, you wouldn't be either. What else did he say?"

  "He said you'd probably be feeling worse before you felt better—"

  "He got that right."

  "—but a good night's sleep should take care of it. He left you some sleeping pills. If you still feel funny tomorrow, he wants you to go back and see him again."

  "Right, sure." He took the towel from his eyes and threw it ill-humoredly onto the high-backed sofa, squinting at the bright afternoon light streaming into the room.

  "He gave you some pain pills too; want them?"

  "No, I don't want to get dopey. God."

  "Gideon, are you sure you wouldn't rather be in bed?"

  He shook his head, a mistake.

  "Should I have some food sent up? Or we could go downstairs if you feel up to it."

  "No, I just want to sit here and whine."

  She was quiet for a while. Then she said: "I think I know what your problem is. It goes back to your college days, when you used to box. You got knocked out four times, after all—"

  "Three," Gideon growled. "Two, if you don't count TKO's."

  "—and you're probably just wondering how many more brain cells you can afford to lose. Am I warm?"

  She said it lightly, a throwaway pleasantry accompanied with a smile, but her voice was taut, and Gideon was abruptly aware of how drawn her face was, how anxious her eyes, how flat and yellowish the area under them. Until now he'd been too wrapped up in his own misery to notice, but he noticed now. He'd taken a knock on the head, yes, but it was Julie who'd gotten the telephone call that told her her husband had apparently had some sort of seizure and was in the hospital undergoing head X-rays, Julie who'd had to make the frightened taxi ride to St. Cyprien, Julie who'd held his hand and made small jokes while he lay with his hea
d immobilized in a metal cage, waiting to be slid into the ominous, clanking MRI machine. And since then it had been Julie who'd continued to make small jokes and small talk in that strange, tight little voice, jollying him along while he'd sat ungratefully around, first in the hospital, and now in their hotel room, doing little more than grumbling that he felt rotten.

  My God, he thought, ashamed and guilty, what if the situation had been reversed? What would he be feeling if it had been Julie who'd been hurt and he who'd received the call…?

  He waited for the thickening in his throat to ease, and then he gave her a smile of his own, his first in a long time. "Don't you worry about it, I have brain cells you wouldn't believe; plenty to spare, enough for two people."

  It was a pleasure to see her eyes come snapping alive again. "Now that," she said, "sounds more like the modest fellow I know and love."

  She leaned over to kiss him, and as she did, they heard the sound of a car pulling up to curb below. Julie went to the window, came back, and kissed him again. "Maybe you ought to get some shoes on. L'inspecteur est arrivé."

  The Cro-Magnon's upstairs lounge was situated on a stairway landing in a corner just big enough for three comfortable armchairs and a coffee table. Being at the rear of the building, directly against the cliffside, it lacked, as did many of the other houses and shops, a conventional back wall. Instead, the smooth, curving limestone of the cliff itself served as the rear of the hotel. The effect, especially when coupled with the subdued lighting from two low-wattage table lamps, was of a cave, an abri with modern conveniences.

  It was in this pleasant, restful niche—easy on Gideon's throbbing eyes— that they met with Joly over a pot of tea and a plate of fruit tarts brought upstairs by Monsieur Leyssales, the hotel's proprietor.

  "The man you describe," said Joly, gravely stirring a second teaspoon of sugar into his second cup of tea, "is not Dr. Roussillot."

  Gideon smiled, or tried to. "Gee, why am I not surprised?"