Skeleton Dance

by Aaron Elkins

  "A long time before you," Gideon said.

  "Not that much. Anyway, my roommate, Gloria Kakonis—she was track and field too—had this old umbrella stand that she got somewhere that was made from this humungous, motheaten old hippopotamus foot, you know? Gross. So late one night, in the middle of January, right after a snowstorm, we drop a couple of heavy books inside it, hook up twenty feet of clothesline to either side, and take it outside, up to the campus, right out in front of Bascom Hall. Then Gloria grabs hold of one rope, and I get hold of the other rope, and we start carrying this thing down the hill suspended between us, okay? Only every couple of feet we set it down in the snow so it looks like a footprint. But our footprints are so far away nobody connects them. What? What are you grinning at?"

  "It's a funny story, Pru. I'm just imagining it."

  "Wait, it gets better. We carried that thing for an hour, till our arms were practically coming out of our sockets and we couldn't feel our toes any more from the cold. Then we go back home and wait for the next morning."

  "When everybody discovers to their astonishment that there was a hippopotamus loose on campus the night before," Gideon said.

  "Not exactly. Actually, they didn't know what the tracks were, so they brought in a couple of professors from the zoology department. They look at the tracks, they look at each other, and go, like, 'Egad, Farquelhar, damned if it isn't the greater four-toed Hippopotamus amphibius!' And off they trot, following the tracks, and by now there's a whole crowd with them, including some reporters. So. Down the hill they go, through town, and right out onto Lake Mendota, which is frozen, of course, under all the snow—and which also happens to be the water supply for Madison, if you remember. Out they all go on the lake, a hundred yards, two hundred yards… and suddenly the tracks stop."

  "Stop?"

  "Stop. End. In a big, hippopotamus-sized hole."

  Gideon burst out laughing.

  Pru threw her head back and cackled along with him. "Nobody wanted to drink the town water for a year—and even then everybody said it tasted like hippopotamus!"

  When they finished chortling, Pru wiped her eyes and said: "Are you going to put that in your book?"

  "Nope."

  "Why, you don't believe me?"

  "Not for a minute. Okay, can we get serious now?"

  "I'm always serious. When am I not serious?"

  "Okay, seriously then, put me in the picture. I know what the Tayac hoax was about and how it turned out and all, but I don't have any feel for the way it was."

  "It was crappy."

  "Yeah, okay, I understand that, but what happened, exactly? How did it start? You were there; did Ely bring everybody out to the site to see those four bones? Did he come running into the office one day waving them over his head and yelling? What?"

  Pru took her hands from behind her head, crossed her arms on her chest and brooded silently for a few moments.

  "It was a dark and stormy night," she said.

  Gideon sighed.

  "No, really. Well, a dark and rainy late afternoon and we were all at the café—all of us but Ely—having one of those edifying, useful debates that we love so much over a carafe of vin de la maison. I think at the moment, appropriately enough, the issue of contention was our favorite: Neanderthal artistic behavior or the lack thereof. You know the drill, I think?"

  Gideon nodded. "Did the Neanderthals ever produce anything that could reasonably be called 'art'? And by extension, were they therefore capable of understanding and practicing symbolic behavior? Or did true symbolic behavior arise only with the coming of the Cro-Magnons? Or was there a more diffuse—"

  "You got it," Pru said. "So there we were, going at each other hot and heavy—we must have been on the second carafe by then—when in comes Ely, dripping wet. He walks up to us without a word and just stands there. He looks at us. We look at him. We all know something's up, but what?" She paused, seeing that Gideon had begun jotting notes.

  "Would you rather I didn't write this down?" he asked.

  She began to say something but changed her mind. "No, go ahead, I guess. It's not as if it's a secret. So where was I? Right, Ely stands there looking at us. He says exactly five words—this is a quote, not a paraphrase—'I've just come from Tayac.' Then he puts this knotted bandana on the table in front of us and starts untying it, but it was soaked, so he has to get a knife and saw it open, which he does, while in the meantime we're dying of suspense because of this weird look on his face. And then he gets it open and there on the table are those four little bones with the little holes in them." She slowly shook her head, remembering. "Knocked our knee socks off."

  "I can imagine," Gideon said, and so he could. "But didn't anyone express any doubts? I mean, you must have wondered—"

  "If only," Pru said wistfully. "Maybe things wouldn't have turned out the way they did. But, you know, at the time nobody dreamt—I mean it never crossed our minds—I mean, now it's obvious, of course, but then even the suggestion that they were faked would have been so, so—"

  "I know," Gideon said. "I'm doing a whole book on the problem, and I'm not finding any shortage of material." He finished making a notation, taking care to write legibly so that he'd be able to read his notes later, something that wasn't always doable. "So when did the first suspicions arise?"

  "Pretty soon, actually, as soon as we got over the shock, but it was that letter that really brought the whole thing tumbling down. You know about the letter, don't you?"

  "The anonymous letter to Paris-Match?"

  "Yeah." Pru took her feet off the drawer and rolled her chair back a few inches. "It said the bones actually came from this little museum, which was easy enough to check out. They did, all right, and that did it. Everybody in the world had to accept them as a fraud. Except Ely."

  "What did he do?"

  "At first he wouldn't acknowledge the evidence, just kept defending his find, which really isolated him. And made him look more and more ridiculous, poor guy."

  "It must have been really hard on him. From what I've heard, he got a little paranoid."

  "More than a little. You know, even after it got through to him that he'd been had, he never really recovered. He got terribly suspicious of everyone— blamed everybody but himself for what'd happened to him. He spent all his time—twelve, fourteen hours a day—digging a couple of sites in the woods, working them all by himself or maybe with a single workman to help. The institute pretty much had to run itself for a while there."

  "What was he after?" Gideon asked. "Or was it just a kind of escape for him?"

  Pru shook he head. "No, I think he still believed in his own theories and he was determined that if he just kept going he'd come up with something—anything—to confirm them. I guess that makes him obsessive as well as paranoid. Or is it compulsive?"

  "Either way," Gideon said with genuine sympathy, "it sounds as if he went over the edge."

  "I think that's fair to say, yes. He came up with nothing, of course."

  "And even if he had, who would have taken it seriously?"

  "You got a point there, partner. And so in the end he pretty much self-destructed and had to resign." Her gaze shifted over Gideon's shoulder to the cubicle's single, small window and for a few seconds she stared through it without speaking. "And then," she said in a faraway voice, "he climbed into his little toy plane, pointed it toward Brittany, took off into the wild blue yonder… and thank you and goodbye, Ely Carpenter."

  Gideon looked hard at her. "You make it sound as if… do you think he committed suicide?"

  "Do you happen to know what his last words were?" she asked him.

  "No, of course not." And then after a moment: "Does anybody?"

  "Oh, yes. It was in the papers. He was on the radio to the local air traffic control when he went down, and the very last thing he said was 'Dites-leur que je suis desolé.'"

  "Tell them I'm sorry," Gideon murmured. "So you think it was suicide?"

  "Sort of."


  "Sort of? How do you sort of commit suicide?"

  "Oh, you know what I mean. He'd radioed for help, so you can't call it suicide in the usual sense, but I think it was a lot closer to self-destruction than to an accident. I think Ely just plain self-destructed."

  "'Dites-leur que je suis desolé,'" he repeated thoughtfully. "Pru, isn't it possible that was a kind of confession, that he was admitting to having faked those bones himself?"

  "No, I don't." she said stiffly.

  "So what was he apologizing for?"

  "It could have been for a lot of things, Gideon. How much do you know about his life? He had a retarded grown daughter that he left in an institution back in the States, did you know about that? He always felt guilty about her. He had a divorced wife back there too. Who knows what else? But I think he was just saying he was sorry for getting himself and the institute involved in the whole damn mess, that's all."

  "That's certainly possible, but isn't it also possible he was admitting—"

  "No, it isn't." She straightened up in her chair and squared her shoulders. "It wasn't Ely, Gideon, definitely not Ely."

  "Why 'definitely not'?"

  "Gideon,' she said, leaning forward, "I am not going to get into it, okay? Don't push me, okay? Just take my word for it, he wouldn't have done it. Ely Carpenter was a really, really neat guy until this happened to him."

  "Sorry," Gideon said meekly.

  Pru sat back, suddenly sheepish. Her jaw muscles, which had bunched up, relaxed. "Yeah, me too. I didn't mean to come on so strong, but I really had a lot of respect for the man." She faltered, then went on. "In fact there was a time—oh, hell, you'll find this out anyway—when the two of us… when I came that close to marrying Ely, or did you already know that?"

  "No, I didn't know it."

  Not that he could claim to be bowled over at the news. Pru's cheerful, brawny amiability had always been attractive to men, and it seemed to work the other way around too, but never for very long. Ever since he'd known her she'd been in and out of affairs, uniformly brief, and rarely associated with any visible trauma. "Why didn't you, or am I getting too personal?"

  "Oh, I don't know, I don't really remember—oh, wait a minute, yes I do. He was already married at the time, that must have been it. Later, after he got divorced, I guess I just never got around to it again."

  "Well, I didn't mean to—"

  "Listen, it's not just that I had a thing for him, trust me. He was a first-rate archaeologist too; he really was. I hate the way his reputation's been raked over the coals over that stupid Tayac thing, I hate it. He'd never in a million years have pulled a dumb stunt like that."

  "But apparently he did fall for it," Gideon said gently.

  Pru puffed her cheeks and blew out a mouthful of air. "Yeah, that he did, he surely did."

  "Okay, if not Carpenter, who then?"

  She shook her head. "No. Uh-uh. Look, haven't I given you all kinds of goodies? Isn't that enough? Go bug someone else."

  "Pru, help me out, will you? I have to start somewhere. If you say it's a guess, that's what I'll treat it as, unless it leads somewhere definitive on its own."

  She took her feet off the drawer and leaned forward, looking her one-time professor in the eye, her elbows on the arms of her chair. "Let's say it was the other way around—let's say I was sitting here asking you to rat on one of your colleagues, and all you had to go on was a guess—no proof, no real evidence, just a hunch— would you do it?"

  "So it is one of your colleagues?" Gideon said.

  "God, are you pushy. Look, don't get tricky with me, just answer the question. Would you do it?"

  "Yes."

  "Bullshit"

  "All right, no," Gideon admitted, "I don't suppose I would." But even with Pru's unwillingness to answer, she'd told him something, or he thought she had. Colleague. Fellow-archaeologist, fellow-scholar at the institute. Pru didn't go along with the Bousquet-as-perpetrator idea. She had somebody else in mind.

  "Suppose, my eye. You know you wouldn't." She returned her feet to the drawer and leaned back again. "Okay, then, enough of that. Anything else I can help you with?"

  "Yes, do you happen to know what museum those four metapodials were taken from? I'd love to go have a look at them. All I've seen are photos."

  "Sure, but you don't have to go to any museum. They're right here."

  "The original cave lynx bones? With the holes?"

  "Yes, what are you so surprised about? The museum didn't want any more to do with them, so we hung onto them. They're under lock and key—important historical artifacts. Ask Jacques or Michel to show you."

  "Will do. I'm off to see Michel next."

  "And for your records, the museum they came from is the Musée Thibault. It's just a hole in the wall, run by one of the local antiquarian societies, but it's been around forever. It's in La Quinze, a few kliks north of here, on the way to Périgueux."

  "Thanks," Gideon said, writing it down. "Jacques couldn't remember."

  "He couldn't remember?" Pru laughed. "Jesus, how does the poor soul make it from one day to the next?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "Jacques been involved with the Thibault since he was a kid, for God's sake. He's been on the board of trustees for umpteen years. Armand Thibault was his mother's brother. You tell me, how could any normal person not remember its name?"

  How, indeed, Gideon wondered. Was it possible that Beaupierre—

  But Pru was wagging a blunt finger in his face. "No, no, no, no, that's not what I meant. I see what you're thinking, I know how your mind works. You're thinking he was hiding something, he was being devious, am I right?"

  "Well, I don't see how I can help it."

  "Forget it, prof, Jacques wouldn't know 'devious' if it walked up to him and said bonjour."

  "Maybe not, but—"

  "Come on, pal, don't make a federal case out of it. You know Jacques pretty well—where his brain is at any given time, nobody can say. The man's not accountable. He's a few peas short of a casserole, shall we say. The receiver's off the hook sixty percent of the time, you know? The elevator usually doesn't go all the way to the top floor, or let me put it this way, the sewing machine ran out of thread a while back, the—".

  "Okay, enough," Gideon said, laughing. "I think I get your drift."

  Chapter 13

  More out of courtesy than in hopes of learning anything new, Gideon began his session with Michel Montfort with the same opening question he'd used with Jacques: will you tell me in your own words about the Tayac affair? His account, expectably briefer and more focused than Beaupierre's, was still the same story, and Gideon used the time to study the celebrated archaeologist sitting across the desk from him.

  Pru had given him as apt a nutshell description of Montfort as he'd ever heard. "Somewhere along the way," she'd once told him over a glass of wine, "Michel crossed over the line from being a legend in his own time to being a legend in his own mind."

  He had known at once what she'd meant; there was a whiff of play-acting in Montfort's famously blunt manner. But not really an unpleasant whiff; in fact it tended to take the edge off his frequently disagreeable remarks and give him a playful, Papa-Bearlike quality. At the same time it could leave you with the feeling that you weren't actually dealing with a snuffly, grousing, basically good-hearted old codger at all but some character actor who had specialized in snuffly, grousing, basically good-hearted old codgers for so long that he couldn't remember how to play anything else. Gabby Hayes with a Ph. D. and a French accent, say.

  Not that Montfort could really be called an old codger. He was only in his middle fifties, but he was one of those people who seemed to have been around forever. He had already been a great name when Gideon was an undergraduate. And with his old-fashioned taste in clothes—dark suits, usually blue or black, with matching vests, always buttoned—and his bulb-nosed, fleshy, weathered face ("a face like a two-pound loaf of homemade sourdough," Pru had said at the same memorabl
e tête-à-tête), he was like a holdover from another generation, lacking only a black derby to complete the picture of a self-made, rough-and-ready 1920's merchant king.

  But he'd changed a lot in the last three years; more than Gideon had realized at the previous morning's staff meeting. Physically, he was much the same: a little older of course, but still thick and hearty across the chest and shoulders, yet at the same time he seemed in some intangible way diminished, like a man who has successfully recovered from a serious operation, and yet, in an indefinable way, is not—and never again will be—the man he was. The Tayac affair had taken a lot out of him and no wonder. He had put his own considerable reputation on the line backing the "find" and the integrity of man who had made it, he had—

  "Hello there. I've finished," Montfort said.

  Gideon blinked. "Excuse me?"

  "I said I've finished. Telling it in my own words."

  "Oh, of course, I just—"

  "Some time ago now. I thought you might not have noticed."

  Gideon smiled. "I'm sorry, I'm afraid I was thinking—-"

  "Is that what that was?" Montfort was playing with his blunt-barreled, tortoise-shell fountain pen, impatient as always but seemingly not in a bad-humored frame of mind. "Now, if there's anything else you want to know…"

  "I'd certainly like to know if you have any idea—any hypothesis, even—as to who was behind the hoax. And why."

  Montfort's fleshy chin descended to his chest. "I do not."

  "Are you completely satisfied that Ely himself had nothing to do with it?" He braced himself for the explosion Beaupierre had warned him about.

  Montfort took his eyes from Gideon's and stared fixedly at the wall beyond, a wall full of framed diplomas and certificates—the same ones, Gideon thought, in the very same places, that had hung there three years ago.

  "I am," he said.

  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… .