Philip Kerr - Esau

Sometimes the fossils were made to fit the theories instead of the other way around and it was not uncommon for people to buy fossils from a competitor’s sources with the express purpose of demolishing a contradictory theory. Theft was less common but not unknown. And the world of paleoanthropology as a whole was still recovering from the revelation in 1955 that the Piltdown skull discovered in 1912 at a gravel pit in southern England had been a blatant forgery.

In 1912 Charles Dawson, an amateur archaeologist, had discovered an apelike skull in a gravel pit near the village of Piltdown, in Sussex. His discovery appeared to indicate a being of considerable antiquity that also conveniently dovetailed with the prevailing view of a human ancestor equipped with considerable intellectual powers. But in reality Piltdown Man had been a neat combination of human cranium and an orangutan’s jaw.

The one absolute certainty in this uncertain, riven science was that any significant new find would probably occasion another bitter rivalry.

It was perhaps hardly surprising that the first person Swift telephoned to discuss her find was a lawyer.

Harztmark, Fry, and Palmer were her mother’s lawyers in London, administering a trust set up in Swift’s name and paying her a generous annual income through their San Francisco office. Swift had met Gil McLellan, the partner handling her money, only once, but it was always Gil she called on the rare occasions that she needed legal advice.

‘Stella,’ said McLellan when his secretary had put Swift through. ‘Kind of early in the day for a citizen of Bezerkeley. It’s not even nine o’clock. I had no idea that anthropology demanded such regular office hours.’

His hollow laughter sounded as if he could just as easily have been coughing.

That was one of the irritating things about lawyers: They always assumed that everyone else was a stranger to early office hours and hard work.

‘Listen, Gil,’ she said, quickly getting down to business before he could get around to asking her out to dinner, as he usually did. ‘I need your help.’

‘That’s what I’m here for.’

‘I want you to draw up a confidentiality contract. You know the kind of thing: The signatory agrees not to discuss or write about something, nor to claim any intellectual property in it, without my written agreement; and if anyone is proved to have used the same confidential information directly or indirectly obtained from me, without my consent, express or implied, he or she will be guilty of an infringement of my rights that is actionable in a court of law.’

Gil chuckled.

‘Are you sure you need my help? Sounds like you’ve got it pretty well covered there. You know, maybe you should have read law instead of anthropology, Stella.’

‘Can you do it?’

‘Sure. But let me ask you a couple of questions. First of all, what exactly is it we’re talking about here?’

‘A fossil. An important fossil.’ She paused for a moment. ‘We’d better call it a skull so that there’s no confusion.’

‘My second question relates to the quality of confidence,’ said Gil. ‘Information cannot be confidential if it is public knowledge, okay?’

‘Nobody knows about this fossil except me and the person who discovered it. This is not public knowledge.’

‘Okay, no problem. I’ll draw something up and fax you a draft in half an hour. That’ll keep you going until I can get you something on letterhead. That always scares the shit out of people.’

‘Gil, you’re a star.’

‘Give me your fax number so I won’t have to look it up. Call me back if there’s a problem. Call me back anyway. Instead of charging you for this, I’ll let you take me to lunch.’

As soon as the motorcycle courier delivered the final copy of the legal document that Gil McLellan had drafted. Swift went to see Byron Cody.

The earth sciences building was home to the university’s faculty of zoology, among others, and retained some scintilla of the Hellenic ideal with its mock colonnades. But with its fortress shape, square keep-style towers, and central courtyard, the building reminded her more of a central bank or some federal government institution.

She found Berkeley’s world-famous primatologist in a different office from the one he normally occupied. It was a room of pleasing solidity that ran almost half the length of the building and housed a collection of immaculate, leather-bound books that appeared to be rarely read.

‘My own office is being redecorated,’ Cody explained after he had kissed her on both cheeks. ‘I believe this belongs to some botanist who’s up the Amazon right now.’

She sat down and declined the offer of coffee from the machine in the hall.

‘The reviews of your new book have been good,’ she said. ‘I’m looking forward to reading it.’

‘I never believe my good reviews,’ he told her. ‘It’s only the bad ones I take any notice of. I find I can discount any amount of praise, even when it’s wholly accurate. Criticism is like air travel: When things are going well, you pay it little attention, but when you crash you just have to take it seriously.’

Swift smiled. Cody was one of her favourite people.

‘You’re lucky you caught me. I’m supposed to go and do a signing at Moe’s,’ he said. ‘Although I can’t see why my signature should make a difference to anything except a check. Really it’s not for another hour. I thought I’d do some book shopping first. But I’d much rather sit and talk with you. Swift.’

‘Actually, there’s something of mine I’d like you to read and sign,’ she said.

‘Grant proposal, is it? It’ll be a pleasure,’ he said, tossing McLellan’s letter on top of a precarious-looking pile of other papers.

‘I was hoping you might glance over it right now,’ she said. ‘It’s not a grant application. It’s more of a legal document.’

‘Now I’m really intrigued.’

Byron Cody read her document with a mixture of hurt and amusement. When he had read it once, Cody, a slow, careful man with a suitably Darwin-sized beard, read the confidentiality contract again and then sighed loudly.

‘What’s this all about. Swift?’ he asked, removing his half-moon reading glasses and cleaning them nervously with the end of his blue woollen tie.

‘As I said,’ she explained, ‘it’s a standard confidentiality agreement. It just makes what I want to tell you a privileged communication. Like a client and her lawyer, that’s all.’

‘And you’re the client?’

Swift nodded.

‘I’ll say one thing for you, Swift. You’re nothing if not thorough. This is the first time someone ever asked me to do this. For most people, intelligence is merely a blessing. But with you it’s a moral duty.’

‘Then let me come straight to the point. I’ve found something that might turn out to be really significant. If it is, I want to keep the lid on it for as long as possible. The last thing I want is for someone at IHO to put out a paper before I do.’

‘Is that a possibility?’

Swift shrugged.

‘Don Johanson based his new species, Australopithecus afarensis, on trashing some of Mary Leakey’s Kenyan fossils before she’d had a chance to talk about them herself.’

‘But he did discover Lucy.’

Lucy was the name Johanson had originally given to those afarensis fossils he had discovered himself, in Tanzania.

‘Yes, but he still had to demote her fossils in order to promote his own.’

‘Point taken.’ Cody took out his pen but still hesitated to sign the document.

‘Look, Byron, fossils are data. And the naming of a fossil is everything in this business.’

‘Business? Now we’re getting to it. I thought you people were supposed to be scientists.’