The Magyar Venus

CHAPTERTEN

October 1

I believe I must admit to myself that the analysis of this find is beyond my capabilities. All of us are amateurs really, and I feel keenly the need of some expert guidance. The Nadasdi family, as enthralled as I am by the discovery and its implications, has offered to ensure that the bones make it safely back to England in the care of one of their most trusted servants. I will send it to the Bramley Museum where the distinguished scholars there will assuredly be able to instruct me as to its age. I have completed drawings of the site from my sketches, as well as a detailed description of the excavation which I will send with the bones. Together I believe they will assist the experts who have promised to study our work, carefully. I would take the precious cargo there myself, and indeed will follow it to England, perhaps later this year, but I have word from T that he will be in Budapest soon, and I am therefore hastening to my lodgings in the Lipotvdros to await him.

September 18/19

Once I'd recovered from the excitement of finding the skeleton, it became clear to me that I had come to something of a dead end in Budapest. I went with the Divas to the apartment buildings they had identified as possible homes to Piper. They all answered to the description, but I wasn't sure where that got me. I checked the list of residents at the doors of each, and there was no Fekete, and no Nadasdi either.

So there I was in Budapest with a skeleton I had no idea what to do with. I didn't think I was going to be able to take Stalin home with me. I was pretty sure carrying bodies across international borders was a no-no, even if there wasn't a possibility that they were twenty-five thousand-years-old— to say nothing of the gun. One could only imagine what they'd say as the box passed through the x-ray machine at the airport. The best solution would be to show it to Karoly, and let him deal with it. He had all the connections in the museum community here. Who knows? The National Museum might be thrilled to have Stalin.

But Mihaly Kovacs was dead, and Anna Belmont still haunted my dreams.

By late that next evening I was in London. I'd told the front desk I would be out of town for one night, but that I was keeping the room. Hoping to keep incursions under my bed from occurring, I stressed they wouldn't need to clean the room until I was back. I went out and bought lots of kraft paper and wrapped Stalin and his case up tightly, and shoved him back into his hiding place. I then left a message for the Divas and Karoly to the effect that I was going to London to look at some merchandise Clive had asked me to check out while I was in Europe, but that I would be back the following evening.

I was at the entrance to the Bramley Museum as it opened the following day. It was a rather stuffy old place. Karoly had said he wanted to update it, and I could certainly see why. It lacked the interpretive experience that the best museums now offered, and showed instead row after row of display cases, each item marked with a sorry little number that you had to search out if you were interested in knowing at all what you were looking at. In the foyer there was an oil portrait of Cyril Piper, along with a number of chief curators. Karoly was not there. Perhaps Karoly's soon-to-be-ex-father-in-law, as chair of the board, had seen to that.

I had phoned from Budapest to arrange an appointment to see the material they had there on Piper, and was ushered into a carrel toward the back of the reading room by a short, plump woman with spiky hair. "I'm Hilary," she said. "Hilary Edmonds. You'll remember my name if you think of Mount Everest. My father was something of a mountaineer, and named me after Sir Edmund Hillary. Rotten sense of humor if you ask me. I've put out some books and documents for you, and I'll just leave you here to work away. You'll find me out at the front if you need me. I'd start with those," she said, pointing to one pile. "There's lots more when you're done with that."

"Thanks," I said. I looked at the mountains of material with some dismay. All I had wanted to do was to see for myself the presentation Piper had made to his colleagues, to look at the original drawings, and get a sense of the man. This pile of paper looked more like a doctoral thesis than some casual research to me.

She must have noticed the look on my face. "Is it the Magyar Venus you're interested in?" she said.

"Yes," I said.

"There's a shortcut, you know, a new book. It's called—"

"The Traveler and the Cave," I said, pulling out my by now rather worn copy. "I've read it, more than once."

"Then you are serious," she said. "Good for you. I'll leave you to it."

I suddenly felt very tired. The task seemed more than a little daunting. But I was here, wasn't I? I started at the top and began to wade through. Most of it was almost impossible to read unless you had a lot of time. There was a great deal of correspondence, all of it handwritten, the sheets of paper now in a protective wrap. I'd asked for copies of the minutes of the meetings in the Piccadilly pub, and there was a rather large pile of those. The group met almost, but not every, month, and the presentations were by and large about bones. There was one about the ravages of syphilis that was particularly revolting, and others comparing the skulls of negroid peoples with those of the British. I will not get into the content; let me just say that today one might assume one had happened upon the minutes of a Ku Klux Klan meeting by mistake. It was a reflection of the times, perhaps, but reading it made me squirm.

I found Piper's presentation on the skull from the Biikks, and it was rather more interesting reading. Piper's hypothesis was that this was the discovery of very early man. He hazarded a guess as to the age, and it was considerably more recent than the carbon dating on the Venus, only ten thousand years. Piper, of course, hadn't had the benefit of carbon dating. The first radiocarbon dates weren't published until 1949, the result of studies by an American chemist by the name of Willard Libby.

The final item in the minutes was a statement by one of the members, a man by the name of William Llewellyn, that Piper's find would be rather difficult to top. It made me think this was a competition of some sort between a group of scholars, each striving to outdo the other. Not that this was any different from academia today, but there was something about the tone of the minutes that kept niggling at me. I decided I'd have a chat with my new friend Hilary.

"This group of people that met every month at the pub off Piccadilly," I said. "Was it a real club? I mean did you have to pay to join? Was it a professional association of some sort? I'm having trouble figuring out what its purpose might have been."

"I've often wondered the same thing," she said. "Are you hungry?"

"Hungry?" I said. "I guess so. It's lunch time."

"I'm heading out for a sandwich. Would you care to join me? I'm going to the pub where Piper and his pals met. It's something I do from time to time. The food isn't bad. There's a roast turkey, ham, with mashed potatoes and mooshy peas."

"You mean the pub still exists?"

"Oh yes," she said. "You may find the answer to your question there."

I didn't know what mooshy peas were, but onsite research with Hilary didn't sound like a bad idea. The pub was called the Brook and Hare, and the sign on the outside looked very old and authentic, with the requisite picture of a hare jumping over a brook. Inside it was a fine place, dark and pubby. I passed on the green goo, which I took to be mooshy, or was it mushy peas that must have been whirred around in a blender, and had a really good roast turkey sandwich on grain bread, and a beer. Hilary had the full meal with lots of gravy, and a beer to keep me company, she said. We took our food to a back room where smoking was not allowed.

"This is the room where Piper and his colleagues met just about every month," she said. "It probably looked about the same then as it does today. At that time it would have been a private room. It even had a separate entrance. You can see the door. It's a fire exit now."

I looked around as we ate. The room was paneled in dark wood, and windowless. I could imagine the men sitting around smoking cigars, drinking ale, and listening to each other speak.

"What do you think?" she said.

"It's a great place," I said.

"Notice anything different about the motif?"

"Motif?"

"Skulls," she said.

"Where?" I asked, but then I saw it. Up where the wall met the ceiling a row of grinning skulls, painted with a deft hand, circled the room. You wouldn't really notice them. They were done in such a way that they looked like a repetitive pattern of some kind, somewhat art nouveau-ish with swirls and leafy things. You had to be paying attention to see what they were.

"There's a reference in the minutes to the publican decorating the room to their specifications," Hilary said. "You asked what kind of group it was. I think it was just an informal gathering, nothing official. They were mostly anthropologists, interested in bones, and I suppose they thought the skull decor was cute, or something. I've always thought that the pub's name was a bit of a joke," she added. "And that perhaps it was chosen as the meeting place for that reason. The pub predates Piper by about twenty years."

Brook and Hare? A joke? "I don't get it, I'm afraid," I said after a moment's pause.

"The Brook and Hare, Burke and Hare," she said.

"Burke and Hare," I said, slowly. "It rings a bell, but you're going to have to help me here. I'm from the colonies, you know."

She laughed. "In that case, it behooves me as a representative of an imperial power to enlighten you. William Burke and William Hare were a couple of rather notorious mid-nineteenth century grave robbers in Edinburgh, Scotland. They made their money digging up bodies and selling the cadavers to doctors and other scientists. This was a time when science was quite the rage, and apparently supplying skeletons for research was a lucrative venture. Grave robbing, however, was frowned upon, even then. When the Bobbies posted a guard on the cemetery Burke and Hare favored, the two of them began to create their own cadavers, to put it politely. They murdered people in other words, so they'd have something to sell. They were caught eventually and executed for their crimes."

"Perhaps the group that met here thought the pub name was cute, then, too," I said. "I found some of the content, and certainly the tone, of those meetings a bit offensive. These people were—"

"Racist pigs? I know what you mean. I think you have to be sympathetic to the times, you know, the standards of the day. I mean we shouldn't judge the past by current thinking. Having said that, I would agree with you. I can't help but feel that this was a group of men who were not only racists, but misogynists, too. There wasn't a single woman in the group, and there are letters in the file from at least one woman asking to be admitted to the group, and others from the members making pretty clear this was not something that would ever be allowed. Does the name Francis Galton mean anything to you?"

"Sure," I said. "He wrote the book about travel that Piper used as a reference point, The Art of Travel, I think it was. And he was the man who coined the term eugenics, wasn't he? The idea that races can be improved by only letting the fittest, in all senses of the word, people marry? Piper attended a lecture of Galton's, and was not terribly impressed."

"Did you know that Galton developed what he called a Beauty Map of the British Isles, rating cities by how attractive the women were. London won, of course."

"Ugh," I said.

"Exactly," she agreed. "I'll take your word for it that Piper didn't approve of this kind of thing, but the fact of the matter is that some of the members of the group that met here would not have disagreed with Galton's theories. A rum bunch when it comes right down to it."

"A rum bunch, but not, perhaps, atypical, as you put it," I said.

"Maybe," she said. "Most of these men were scientists, you understand. They had an academic interest in the subject at hand. Having said that, some pretty terrible things were done in the name of science. And I'm not talking about murderers like Burke and Hare."

"You're referring perhaps to the bad habit some explorers had of bringing—what's the word I'm looking for here, live specimens maybe?—back with them, bringing native people back home from their travels and showing them off to an amazed public?"

"Yes. I know that we can't be self-righteous about it. When you think of the experiments the Nazis carried out, we could hardly say that we are past all that. But at the end of the last century, at the time Piper was our chief curator, leading anthropologists in both the States and here regularly plundered graveyards in the name of research."

"I have been struck more than once in the course of my research," I said, not telling her what that research actually entailed. "That perhaps my definition of civilization, my previously firmly held conviction that things are almost inevitably getting better despite the odd setback, needs to be rethought. I have to tell you, though, that Piper makes it quite clear he does not agree with these kinds of theories. I have trouble reconciling this room and the group you have described with the author of the diaries."

"I hope you're right," she said. "Sometimes working on this stuff leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Maybe it's just boys will be boys."

"On that score, I thought there was a little bit of one-upmanship in that group," I said. "As if each presentation had to top the last."

"Exactly. Let's face it, these guys collected skulls. Not for sport exactly, but each month one of them had to come in with a skull and it was, as you've said, rather competitive. Piper was a big success with his skull from Hungary. No one else had come in with one anywhere near as old. Unfortunately, they had no idea just how old it was. They almost certainly didn't. I don't want to imply, when I talk about Burke and Hare, that the men who met in this room killed people to get the skulls or anything, but I can't help feeling it was entertainment as well as science, you know? Rather grotesque, when you think about it."

"Very." There was something niggling away at the back of my own skull at that moment, but I was focused on what I saw as a more immediate problem. "Where did the skulls go, then?" I asked. "Does the Bramley still have the skeleton Piper found with the Venus?" Please, I pleaded silently, let her say yes, so I can show Stalin to Kdroly and get the thing out from under my bed!

"No, we don't. We've looked. It's gone."

"You often read about fantastic things being rediscovered in a drawer somewhere in storage in a museum," I said, mightily disappointed, but not prepared to give up. "It may still be possible to find it. Couldn't it be there, somewhere?"

"I don't think so. Most of the stories you hear about that sort of rediscovery occur when someone is looking for something else, and just happens upon the object, whatever it is. But we've done a thorough search for this one. Once the Venus was confirmed, we got right on it. The Cottingham Museum in Toronto asked us to have a look for the skeleton, of course, but we would have, regardless. This isn't new. We had an inquiry from someone even before the Cottingham made it official. This person was looking for both the skeleton and the Venus. The Venus wasn't here, and the skeleton isn't either."

"Someone asked about the Venus?"

"Yes," she said. "Amazing, isn't it? It could have been someone working for the Cottingham, I suppose. They went on to find it, though, didn't they? Serves this place right, if you ask me. The man who found it, perhaps you know, is a former chief curator of this museum, a chap by the name of Karoly Molnar. I really liked him. He was trying to pull us kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century. People said he got the job because of his wife. She was the chair of the board's daughter, don't you know. But I thought he was great. And he's the one who figured it all out."

'I've met him," I said. "I interviewed him for this article I'm writing."

"Weren't you impressed?" she said.

"Very," I replied.

"I adored him," she said.

We sat in companionable silence finishing our beers, she probably thinking about Karoly, I about Piper. As I looked at the little row of skulls at the ceiling, the thought that had been worrying its way to the forefront of my brain, surfaced.

"Calvaria Club," I said. It was almost a whisper.

"Sorry? I missed that. What did you say?" Hilary said.

"Calvaria Club," I said. "The skull club. I think they called themselves the Calvaria Club." My mind's eye was staring at a little piece of paper that had been stuck in Anna Belmont's desk. Calvaria Club. The implications of those two words hit me so hard I could barely breathe.

"Latin for skull, you mean?" Hilary said, not noticing my distress. "Interesting idea. I'll have a look and see if there's any such reference when I have the time. I have to get back to work," she said, looking at her watch. "Are you finished with your studies, or are you going to come back with me?"

"I'm coming back with you," I said. "This has been very helpful." She had no idea just how helpful she'd been. "Thanks for bringing me here."

"I enjoyed your company," she said. "You're a kindred spirit."

I went back to the Bramley and had another go at the pile of papers. This time I knew what I was looking for. This time I paid attention. It made a huge difference. I went immediately to the minutes of the meeting of the men who collected skulls, the Calvaria Club. For an unofficial group they had a pretty formal way of doing business. The minutes listed everyone in attendance, meeting start time, who was chairing, and so on. Piper was obviously a regular. His name appeared at almost every meeting over a number of years. And there it was, the discrepancy I'd been looking for. I grabbed my copy of The Traveler and the Cave, and, hands shaking, started flipping through the pages. Within only a few minutes, I'd found the proof.

I then went back to the correspondence, glancing at each piece just long enough to ascertain it wasn't what I was looking for, before flipping to the next. It took me a couple of hours to find it all, although further proof was not necessary. There was just something else I had to know.

Having found it, I just sat in that cramped study carrel feeling awful. As the implications of everything sank in, I began to feel literally physically sick. I'd started on this little exercise because I wanted to find out what happened the night Anna died. Somewhere along the line—it was not too difficult to identify when—the goal became instead to prove that the new man in my life was right, that the Venus was authentic, the diaries were authentic, the man was authentic. Sitting in that cave in the Biikks, I had believed it all so completely. And now I found I was wrong. The discrepancy was so huge, I was surprised I was the only one who'd noticed. Except that maybe I hadn't been. That thought turned my heart to ice.

The truth of the matter was this: On at least three separate occasions in 1900, Piper was listed as being in attendance at the Brook and Hare, at the same time there was an entry in the diaries from either Budapest or Lillafured. Piper was not only not the author of the diaries about the discovery of the Magyar Venus in Hungary, he hadn't even been there.

It was all a lie. It had been a lie back then. It was a lie now. I hadn't been able to reconcile the views of the author of the diaries with those of the presenter at the Calvaria Club because they were not one and the same. Piper had lied about everything, about traveling to Budapest, about writing the diaries, finding the cave, the skeleton, the Venus. All lies, pure and simple. He had taken the drawings, the detailed description of the project, and the skull, and claimed them as his own. And if Piper had lied, so had Karoly Molnar. And if Karoly had lied about this, he had lied about everything. In an instant my disappointment turned to rage. I was going to humiliate this man for deceiving me and everybody else. By the time I was finished with him, he would never hold down a decent job again.

I asked Hilary to direct me to a photocopier. I was going to make sure I kept a record of the damning evidence with me. That done, I asked her if I could use her computer to do an Internet search. It took about three minutes and only one search, to British Telecom, and I was ready to roll. I could see her looking at me wondering what was up. Perhaps I looked a little flushed.

Finally, I called the airline to change my flight, got a room at the hotel I'd stayed in the previous evening, and left a message for the Divas that I'd staying another night. I did not leave one for Karoly.

I knew who had written the diaries. I still didn't know who had driven Anna Belmont to her death, although I knew why. And I didn't know who had killed Mihaly Kovacs. I did know that there was something lurking behind all this that was almost too horrible to contemplate.