Aaron Elkins - Skeleton dance

Gideon turned the photo to read the letters. "Initials… I.P." He glanced back up at Joly. "Meaning?"

"Institut de Prehistoire!" Julie said.

"Very good, madame-ah, Julie. So I also concluded. And when I took it there, Monsieur Beaupierre took one look at it and identified it as having originally come from their tool bin." He turned to Gideon. "There's your connection, my friend."

Gideon let this sink in for a moment. "Twenty-five meters away. You can't exactly call that the scene of the crime."

"Approximately eighty feet," Joly said. "About as far, wouldn't you say, as a man might be expected to throw it, if he had just come out of the cave and wished to get rid of it at once?"

Gideon shook his head. "Sorry, Lucien, I think you're reaching. These people have run digs all over the place around here. Archaeologists are always leaving stuff like this behind, or having it ripped off, or just losing it." He gathered up the photographs and handed them back to the inspector. "My guess is that what you've got here is a simple coincidence."

"Good," said Joly, pocketing the envelope. "Excellent. I love simple coincidences. I delight in simple coincidences. Whenever I see a simple coincidence I smell a commendation in the offing."

For a few minutes they all digested quietly, Joly smoking and Julie and Gideon sipping wine, all three ruminating over their thoughts. The tray of cheeses was removed, the demitasse cups brought.

"I've been thinking a-bout the issues we were discussing earlier," Joly said. " Was Neanderthal a human being? Was he not a human being?" He followed this with one of his elaborate Gallic shrugs-eyebrows, chin, and shoulders all going up at the same time, mouth going down. "Forgive me, but there have been no Neanderthals for tens of thousands of years, what does it matter?" He ground out his cigarette, already smoked two-thirds of the way down. "To speak frankly, it hardly seems something that sensible people would quarrel over."

"Sensible people, no," Julie said, "but we're talking about Paleolithic archaeologists. It's against their principles to agree with each other."

Gideon laughed along with her. "She's right, they get nervous when everybody has the same theory. They haven't even agreed on whether 'Neanderthal' should have an 'h' in it or not; there are the old-guard pro-'h' and the radical anti-'h' camps. You know, the institute's holding a public symposium at the community lecture hall tomorrow, Lucien. Why don't you come to it? You'll get some idea."

"What is the subject?"

"It's called 'Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon: Differences and Similarities.'

Joly pursed his narrow lips. "'Neanderthal' with or without the 'h'?"

"With, I think. They're traditionalists on that point."

"Even so, I'm sorry to say I have other business." His eyes lit up. "Ah, dessert. Prepare yourselves."

The market town of Les Eyzies winds for half-a-mile along the east bank of the green, slow-flowing river Vezere, prettily situated at the base of an undulating, three-hundred-foot-high wall of honey-colored limestone cliffs. In the Middle Ages it had been little more than an unwelcoming cluster of mean stone houses huddled beneath the great, brooding chateau of the barons of Beynac, built into the very face of the cliffside, but today, with the lords long gone, the village hums with activity. Visitors come because of the region's celebrated prehistoric finds, the local gourmet shops and restaurants, and the refreshing mixture of commercial bustle and open-faced country simplicity that is the essence of village life.

Charming in the daytime, it is spine-tinglingly evocative at night, when the modern shops and cafes are dark, but the ancient, cobbled streets are lamplit, and strategically placed floodlights illuminate the bony ruins of the chateau on its rock-cut terrace, the medieval stone houses that still remain around it, and above, all, the dramatic cliffs themselves that rear up only a few yards from the main street, brilliantly lit at their base but disappearing into blackness above.

It had been light when they went into the restaurant; it was dark when they came out, and for a few minutes the three of them stood in the parking lot without speaking, their faces turned up to the light-bathed curves and hollows of the cliffs. Gideon and Julie turned down Joly's offer of a lift back to the Hotel Cro-Magnon, preferring to walk the quarter-mile, and started slowly on their way.

"Lucien speaks better English than I do," Julie said after a while. "It hardly seems fair."

"Well, his father worked for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Lucien spent most of his adolescence in London. "

"Ah."

"He sure knows how to order a meal too, doesn't he?"

"It was wonderful, but my God, I don't think I'll ever be able to eat again. Look at me, I'm waddling, not walking. You know, this answers a question I've had for years."

Gideon cocked an eyebrow. "Oh?"

"Well, I couldn't help wondering why your on-site research has always focused on early man in Europe, especially here in the south of France, rather than on Africa, where the remains are so much more ancient. I think I'm finally beginning to see why."

"Well, of course," Gideon said. "It's pretty tough finding a three-star restaurant in the Rift Valley. I thought you figured that out a long time ago." He reached an arm around her shoulder and pulled her close to kiss her soft, fragrant hair, and then they fell silent, walking hand in hand through the near-deserted streets.

When they came to the hotel, Julie started in but Gideon tugged her along. "Not yet, I want to show you something."

"In the dark?"

"I'm equipped," he said, taking out a pocket flashlight and flicking it on.

He led her to an unlit, nondescript alley that turned toward the cliffside half-a-block beyond the hotel, at the end of which, aided by the flashlight, they threaded their way between a couple of parked cars and pushed through a rusted, unlocked, waist-high metal gate, ducking their heads-or at least Gideon had to duck his-to enter a small, shallow abri, one of several that dimpled the base of the cliffs here, one beside the other. The next one over held a propane tank; the one after that, considerably larger, formed the rear wall of the Hotel Cro-Magnon. The one in which they stood, however, the smallest of the three, held nothing at all.

Julie looked around, puzzled. "This is what you wanted to show me?"

Gideon smiled. "Yes." He shone the flashlight onto a weathered marble plaque bolted to the stone immediately above the opening.

Ici furent decouverts en 1868 les hommes de Cro-Magnon par Francois Berthoumeyrou.

Julie's lips moved as she worked her way through the French. "Here… something… discovered in…" Her eyes widened. "Gideon, is this actually the original Cro-Magnon Man cave? This little place?"

That was exactly what it was, he told her, pleased with her reaction. They were on hallowed historic (or prehistoric) ground. It had been right there, right beneath their feet in that unremarkable, little-visited cavelet, that three thirty-millennia-old skeletons of a type never before seen in prehistoric burials had been uncovered by workmen during the construction of the Les Eyzies railway station across the road; the very place, so to speak, where modern humankind had made its entrance onto the anthropological stage.

"Wow," said Julie with something gratifyingly close to awe. "It sends goosebumps down your back, doesn't it?" She smiled at him. "Did you bring that flashlight all the way from home just so you could show me this place in the dark?"

He shrugged. "It doesn't weigh anything."

"You're a romantic, you know that?"

"Of course. I thought that was why you married me."

"You know, maybe it was at that."

"Gideon," she said on the short walk back to the hotel, "do you think my French is good enough to let me get anything out of that Neanderthal-Cro-Magnon symposium you were telling Lucien about?"