Alex laughed, bitterly.
“I pointed out to him that sixty million dead people was possibly an oversupply of broken eggs. And the fucking omelette turned out to be the Gulags, and the Lubyanka, and the Purges. He just looked over my head and sighed. He was an arsehole, Julia. I’m sorry. An idealist and a thinker, but an arsehole.” The rain was streaking the cab windows. Alex snapped the words. “Arsehole. Like all of them, all of those soixante-huitards and those seventies radicals and those CND Marxists, all of those Euro-Communists. I hate them. Wankers. How could you be a Communist after Mao, after the Terror? It’s like being a Nazi after the Holocaust. How could you be a Communist at the same time as the Khmer Rouge were killing babies?”
Julia had rarely seen Alex this sincere and vehement. Normally he was sarcastic and languid to the point of nihilism.
They sat in silence. Then Alex patted her on the knee.
“Anyway, darling — I think we have arrived.”
He was right. They’d arrived at the archives of the archives of the Musée de l’Homme. It was a huge gray warehouse, surrounded by nothing much: garages and vacant offices.
Tipping the cabbie, they crossed the rain-stained empty concrete parking lots. Alex said it reminded him of IKEA in far north London. Julia had a childish urge to cross her fingers. This was their last best hope; it was definitely their last hope. They had tried literally everywhere else: the Louvre and the Pasteur, private museums, the Broca archives, and now they were down to a bleak steel warehouse in a dismal ’burb of Paris beyond the Périphérique. One last shot.
The only official presence, the only human presence, was a large grouchy man in a small, depressing office with a sliding-glass window. The archivist of the archives of the archives.
“Eh, bonjour,” he said, giving them a curt nod through the open window. “Et vous êtes?”
They explained in bad French. He checked their credentials, yawned, and did a magnificently Gallic shrug. “Pas de problem.” He returned to his sports newspaper, L’Equipe.
With an air of tourists approaching the Parthenon, they stepped into the vastness of the secondary archives of the Musée de l’Homme. It really was like IKEA — but a frighteningly disorganized IKEA. It swiftly became apparent that these archives had not been indexed in any way. It was just stuff: vast acres of steel shelves with boxes and artefacts and plastic bags. It was academic debris, the forgotten old dreck in the curatorial attic.
For an hour they wandered disconsolately around the vast building, peeking in boxes of tiny amber beads from Mauritania, staring in perplexity at half a broken bird-god from Madagascar. In this hour they realized they had scrutinized maybe 0. 2 percent of the collection.
In despair the couple retreated to the office, to ask the archivist for help.
He shrugged, like they had asked him if he could spit farther than a llama. Like their question was quite surreally redundant.
Pressed once again, the official relented: grudgingly he told them that this cathedral of stuff, this huge warehouse of rubbish, was what remained following the recent translocation of the museum from the Palais Chaillot to its new site at the Quai Branly. Everything the Parisian authorities thought too worthless or irrelevant to be stored in the official archives had been thrown in here. The Frenchman specifically used the word for “thrown”: jeté.
Julia stared down the gigantic aisles of steel shelving in the great cold warehouse. It was pointless. They were defeated. Her determination of the morning had already reached a dead end.
They retreated to the study room. It was a bleak space like a classroom in a fairly poor schooclass="underline" a scattering of tables, a drinks machine. There were two other people there. Two more willing scholars sent to les banlieues of anthropology. They had boxes open, or files to study — obviously they had made their finds.
Julia approached one of the scholars, a thin young man in black jeans hunched over a dirty and apparently African tribal mask.
She asked him, in her best French, how he had made his find: how he had located the tribal mask among the millions of boxes.
The man answered in cheerful English. He was American.
“It’s a total nightmare. That’s why no one comes here. They say they will have properly archived everything by the end of the decade. I would give it two decades. I was lucky, I was told by someone else exactly where to find this. What do you think? A death mask of the Cameroonian Fang, eighteenth century, real human hair!”
The death mask was thrust in Julia’s face. She smiled, and backed away slightly.
Returning to his work, the man said: “If you haven’t got a location, a shelf mark, you’re kinda screwed. Sorry. Your only hope is chance. You might luck out.”
They weren’t going to get lucky. Julia knew it. She gazed at Alex and shrugged and they both walked, defeated, to the door. As she reached the door she realized she was passing another vast pile of boxes. She paused.
“What? Julia? What is it?”
She said nothing. She was staring at the large pile of boxes, dozens of them, stacked roughly, unordered.
Alex said again, “What?”
Julia had been in enough libraries and archives to recognize what this pile implied.
“These are boxes waiting to be shelved. Stuff that’s been examined or added, very recently.”
“Rrright….” Alex drawled. “And?”
“Think about it! We’re presuming the Prunières collection must be here, somewhere in these archives, because we’ve searched everywhere else. If the collection exists, it must be dumped in this warehouse.”
Her lover sighed with a hint of impatience. “Fine. Yes. So?”
“Remember what Ghislaine said about the skulls I found? ‘They will be put in the Prunières collection.’ If Ghislaine meant that, and we have no reason to doubt him, the skulls would have been brought here recently. And added to the collection!”
Alex’s frown turned into a bright and flashing smile.
“Got it! Clever girl! So our boxes could be…”
“Just in this pile! In fact, they should be here. Waiting to be shelved—”
Julia was already wading into the stacks and columns.
The boxes were arranged in piles of ten and fifteen; it took them twenty minutes to sift through a quarter of the columns. Then forty minutes. Then fifty. It seemed they would have no luck, until Alex said, very slowly and rather portentously:
“Julia, look. There.” He was pointing. “Third box down. By the door.”
Looking across, she counted down the column of boxes. Her eyes rested on one with a large and discernible label, handwritten and florid and visible from a distance: Prunières de Marvejols, 1872.
There were, in fact, three boxes, all labeled the same way, sitting one on top of the other. Stifling her intense and scholastic excitement, Julia fought through the mess to the boxes, which they then briskly carried from the stack to a table. Alex was smiling at Julia’s glee. She didn’t care; she ripped open the first carton like it was a take-out Indian meal and she was very hungry.
They peered inside.
The boxes contained several human skulls, obviously Neolithic. All had been trepanned. They were not the skulls that she had found. Why not?