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.