The Caves of Périgord: A Novel

must be an example of the blowing technique. A wash of color in the artist’s mouth, half-spat and half-sprayed through a half-closed fist would produce that effect. The rock had to be limestone. She was no expert on the oldest cave paintings of prehistoric man, but she knew that the bulls at Lascaux were ten, even twenty times larger than this. And she was certain that a painting such as this was never found outside its cave, and there was nothing of such size in any museum she knew. But if the rock were from the Lascaux culture, it would be priceless, and even historic. Unbidden, the thought came that this could be the very item to save her career. Properly handled, she told herself. It could also unleash the kind of scandal that could ruin her.
    “Yes, I think he was in the Dordogne area,” said Manners. “He was attached to Special Operations, with the French Resistance and all that. The summer of 1944, around the time of the D-Day invasion, I know he was in Périgord. He got a French decoration, the Légion d’Honneur . But this isn’t French, is it?”
    “I don’t know,” she said automatically, playing for time as the excitement surged through her again. “I’ll have to check. If it comes from one of the French caves, then it could be seventeen thousand years old, or even older. But it would be about as illegal as any artifact could possibly be. We couldn’t possibly sell it,” she said, straightening to look gravely at the man. There was no twinkle in his eye now, indeed, no expression at all, which irritated her. “This is not portable art, in any event. It has been cut from the living rock, from a rather larger painting. In artistic terms, and probably legally, this is a crime.”
    He looked at her silently, his head cocked slightly to one side as if he were about to speak. His self-confidence made him quite an attractive man, she thought. She felt herself blushing, and he carefully took the string he had unwrapped from the parcel, wound it into a small skein, neatly tied the loose end, and tossed it onto the table. Then he carefully folded the brown paper, drew a very clean handkerchief from the cuff of his jacket and wiped his hands before picking up the magnifying glass and looking carefully at the rock’s edges. He had very finely shaped hands.
    “If you walk out with it now and take it home and put it back on the bookshelf, there is nothing that I or anybody else could do,” she said, wondering if this were the right argument to make to this stranger. The last thing she wanted was for him to walk out with his rock. But if it stayed with her, she would have to contact the proper authorities. This conversation with a potential client had suddenly become very complicated. “I don’t think you should do that. Not because you could make much money out of this, but because I don’t think it would be right.”
    “Well, it’s not my fault. I just inherited the damn thing,” he said, squinting at the side of the rock. He straightened and then looked squarely at her. “I don’t mean that. It’s not a damn thing. I think it’s marvelous. I always have, even as a boy. I used to go from looking at it in my father’s study out to the fields to look at the cattle, wondering why this felt more like the real things than the Buttercups and Jennies I’d take to the milking shed.” His voice trailed off, and he cleared his throat. “How can you tell if it is real? Carbon-dating?”
    “Carbon-dating only works on organic material like cloth or vegetation. This is rock,” she said, her voice crisp. “I would have to consult with an expert or two, send them photographs, see if any caves have been vandalized of paintings like this. But I can tell you there is no market in this kind of work, if I am right about its provenance. This is not a conventional item of preclassical art, this is prehistory from the very dawn of primitive man. Governments take this kind of thing very seriously.” He was not reacting at all. Perhaps he did not understand her sense of outrage.
    “Imagine if somebody tried to sell one of the stones from Stonehenge,” she went on, thinking the English parallel might stir him. “If your father took this, even if the cave had collapsed and this had been plucked from a pile of rubble, then I think the French government would want to revoke whatever medal they gave him.” He was nodding gravely, but without real comprehension. In fact, he was looking at her in that