Skeleton dance

Chapter 26

By the time Joly had poured his second glass of Bergerac from the carafe on the sideboard, the first was having its mellowing effect. He sipped, rolled the wine luxuriously around his mouth, put down the glass, and smiled benignly at them, a man who had earned his ease.

"I want to thank you-both of you-for your very great assistance."

"Lucien," Gideon said, "I was on the phone to you the minute I figured out it had to be Montfort. You already knew. How?"

In reply Joly passed him a photograph. "Does this person look familiar, Gideon? The picture's a few years old."

Gideon looked at a murky photocopy of a shirtless, heavyset man sitting in a rowboat and squinting good-humoredly into the sun.

Gideon handed it back. "Nope."

Joly smoothed the photo on his thigh and with a few deft, precise squiggles of his pen, outlined a foppish goatee and began to fill it in.

"Roussillot!" Gideon exclaimed, turning the picture toward him. "The fake Roussillot, the guy in St.-Cyprien!"

"Yes," Joly said. "Not," he added pointedly, "that he bears much resemblance to the sketch you provided."

"Well, hell, when did I ever say I was any good at-"

"But who is he?"

"His name is Paul-Marie Navarosse," Joly said, taking back the picture and admiring his artwork.

"How did you find him?"

By means, Joly explained, of dedicated, intelligent police work. As Gideon would remember, he had wondered from the beginning about Carpenter's airplane. What had really happened to it? Where was it now? One of his lines of investigation had involved contacting the aviation authorities for a list of persons who had registered the acquisition of a Cessna 185 in the twelve months following Carpenter's disappearance. There had been four of them, and when one-Navarosse-proved to be a small-time importer, a shady character who had twice been the subject of smuggling investigations (one conviction, overturned), Joly took a long, hard look at him.

What he learned made him suspicious enough to have the plane impounded for examination. And despite a few deceptive alterations and papers by the dozen seemingly proving that it had been bought from a Tunisian clock manufacturer named Sadiq who had owned it for the previous six years, an exacting physical examination proved beyond any doubt that it was Carpenter's old Cessna, the plane that had supposedly been rusting on the muddy bottom of the Bay of Biscay for the last three years.

From there, it was only a small step to wondering if it hadn't been Navarosse in the pilot's seat that night, Navarosse who had made the emergency call to air traffic control, Navarosse "But what was his connection to-" began Julie.

Joly, who disliked having his narrative rhythm disturbed once he got it going, frowned, waited for silence, and continued.

Navarosse, it turned out, had had a sister, Angelique, who, until her death six years before, had lived in Les Eyzies, where she had been the wife of a renowned archaeologist named Rashly, Julie did it again. "Michel Montfort! They were brothers-in-law!"

Just so, said Joly, giving up on narrative rhythm with a sigh. At that point the connection to Montfort was established. He had been saddled for twenty-five years with a black-sheep brother-in-law whom he had helped out time and time again, not so much from a sense of familial loyalty as from one of self-preservation. Navarosse, it seemed, had not been above using the distinguished Montfort's aversion to scandal to get himself out of his frequent scrapes. Through the years Montfort had grudgingly provided him with false alibis and even with false purchase orders and receipts to keep his wife's name (and his own) out of the papers. And of course every "favor" had tightened Navarosse's hold on him for the next one.

"This time, however," Joly said, it was Montfort who demanded favors in return-first the faked airplane crash and then the retrieval of the bones from St.-Cyprien."

"The business with the plane was a two-way favor," Gideon pointed out. "Navarosse wound up with an expensive piece of equipment."

And a useful one, said Joly. A long-time pilot, he'd been using the plane, one of three that he owned, in the illegal transportation of everything from liquor and cigars to cashmere sweaters and primitive sculpture. And like most enterprising smugglers he had a front: an import company in Le Bugue that specialized in exotic game-meat from Spain and North Africa, for which, of course, he maintained Joly paused fractionally, looking at Julie, who came in on cue.

"A cold storage warehouse!" she cried. "Freezers!"

Joly nodded and for a minute or two the three of them sat quietly, mulling it all over. "You know," Gideon finally said thoughtfully, "I think that just about wraps things up."

"Yes," said Joly, "the circle closes. The snake grasps its own tail."

"Only this time it doesn't disappear," Gideon said.

On a shared impulse all three of them clinked glasses and drank.

"Well, then," Joly said, draining his glass. "What next? Where are the Olivers off to?"

"Oxford," said Julie, "for a few days' library research. And a little sightseeing. And a little just plain relaxing."

Joly smiled at Gideon. "What, no bones?"

"No, not this time, I'm afraid."

Julie solemnly shook her head. "Gee, that sure is a shame."