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?"
"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 dis credit 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 entertaining flair for the dramatic, but at the same time there had been something about him-unexpected gaps in his erudition, a surprising unevenness in his knowledge-that had made Gideon wonder. Once, when Gideon had made a passing reference to Paranthropus robustus, he'd been shocked to see that Ely hadn't had any idea what he was talking about, although he'd done a good job of covering it. Of course, that alone didn't- "Ah, it's a pleasure to see a man that deep in thought. Dare I interrupt?"
It was Audrey Godwin-Pope, striding stoutly along at his side-all hundred-and-ten pounds and five-feet-two of her-in her swaying tweed skirt, gray cardigan, and crepe-soled, lace-up shoes, with her sturdy tortoise-shell glasses hanging from a lanyard around her neck and a pencil sticking out of the gray bun at the back of her head (in the past, he'd seen as many as three at a time).
"Oh, hi, Audrey, sorry I didn't get to you this morning; I ran a little late."
"Not to worry. So what is it that's furrowing that manly brow, or shouldn't I ask?"
"I was thinking about Ely Carpenter, as a matter of fact." He slowed his pace to let her keep up more easily and held out the paper cone. " Frites?"
She reared back. "Do you have any idea what they fry those things in around here? Thinking about Ely along what lines?"
"Oh, his background, his education; wondering what kind of a person he was, really."
"A one-of-a-kind," she said warmly. "A really splendid man. The usual male hang-ups, of course, but in his case-"
"What do you mean, a one-of-a-kind?"
"Just that." She smiled and shook her head. "There'll never be another Ely Carpenter, Gideon. I'm sure you know about his amazing past-grew up out West, parents divorced, got into trouble early, spent a couple of years on a juvenile detention ranch in Montana, learned about cowboying, got onto the professional rodeo circuit at seventeen-"
"No, I had no idea about any of that. Really?"
"Really. And what's more he was good. I've seen the cups and the ribbons: bull-riding, calf-roping-"
"When did he go into archaeology?"
"Oh, much later. After he got tired of falling off bucking broncos he spent some time in the Air Force as a mechanic, then did the same thing for another dozen or so years with a commercial air transport company. And then, of course, he won the lottery. Well, you know, perhaps I will try one of those frites. How much harm can one do?"
"They're all yours," he said, passing her the cone, which she didn't refuse. "Won the lottery in what way?"
"In the real way, the way that counts. State of Connecticut, almost a million dollars. Whereupon he decided that, more than anything else in the world he wanted to be an archaeologist. Quit his job, went back to school with a vengeance-here's this forty-six-year-old airplane mechanic, not even a high-school graduate, mind you, but in less than five years he had his M.A. Wrote a letter to his hero-Michel Montfort-declaring his passionate interest in the Middle Paleolithic and his admiration for Michel's work, and begging for the chance to study under him. Michel said come ahead, three years later he had his doctorate… and the rest is history."
That explained a lot, it seemed to Gideon. Ely had essentially been a self-made man, starting school in middle age and then immediately plunging into a narrow, obscure, and difficult subject area. It was an admirable course to follow-people had done a lot worse with lottery winnings-and it had a lot of things going for it, but breadth of education and systematic scholarship weren't among them. Certainly, it explained the gaps in his knowledge. Possibly, it also explained why he'd been so easily taken in over the Tayac hoax-assuming, of course, that he was the victim and not the perpetrator.
"Fantastic story," he murmured. "Actually won the lottery."
"Yes, but, you know, he really had no interest in the money. He had a retarded, grown daughter, did you know that?"
They were coming to the turn-off in the path that led up to the mairie, the town hall, where Gideon would be filing his report on the previous day's attack, and his mind was turning to that. "Yes, I heard," he said a little absently. "Back in the States."
"Yes, and I think most of it went to take care of her," Audrey continued, lost in recollection. "But then, apart from his airplane, Ely didn't have any use for a lot of money. He wasn't a fancy dresser or a high-liver. He drove an old clunker." She finished the frites and absently wiped her fingers on her sweater. "Aside from flying and shooting, archaeology was his whole life. Two or three times a year he'd take a few days to fly off to one of his air-rifle competitions in Lisbon or Barcelona, and that was it. Other than that…" She drifted pensively off.
"Well, I head up this way," Gideon said. "Thanks for-" He stopped in his tracks and stared at her, dumbfounded.
"One of his WHAT?"