"What's your schedule this morning?" Julie asked. "Do you see Jacques Beaupierre first?"
"Yes, that seemed like the right protocol. He's on for ten o'clock, followed at ten-thirty by Pru, who's probably going to be the most informative, then Montfort and the rest of them."
"You're just doing half-hour interviews? You could have done that over the phone from home. Not that I'm complaining," she said, taking in the scene around them.
"These are just the introductory sessions, to give me an overview. I'm sure I'll have follow-up questions for them later."
"M'sieu-m'dame," said Madame Leyssales, the proprietress, bearing a tray heavily loaded with their cafes complets -big stoneware pitchers of coffee and hot milk, little ceramic pots of jam and butter, and heaped baskets of warm rolls and croissants. Each of the empty coffee cups had a third of a baguette standing upright in it, wrapped in a napkin.
Julie's eyes widened. "Wow, things have changed in France. I seem to remember rather small breakfasts, by and large."
"It's not that," Madame Leyssales said as she set the tray down. "It's only that I remember the gentleman and his appetite from the last time he was here."
"And bless you for it, madame," Gideon said, tucking in at once. "I haven't had anything since lunch yesterday."
" Bon appetit," she said unnecessarily and retired.
It wasn't until the coffee was half-gone, the baskets half-emptied, and the table littered with flakes of croissant, that Gideon sat back with a sigh. "Now, where were we?"
"You were telling me your schedule."
"Right-Julie, aren't you having any croissants at all? You can't get them like this in the States."
"I was afraid I'd get my hand stabbed if I reached for one. Is it safe now?"
He laughed. "I'm reasonably sated, yes. Anyway, I should be free at noon or a little after. How about joining me for lunch?"
"Rats, I can't. I have a ticket for the eleven-thirty Font de Gaume cave tour. It was the only opening they had all day. But I'm meeting Pru McGinnis for lunch at one-she introduced herself at the session yesterday; I really liked her. Why don't you join us?"
"No good. At one I'm due at the mairie to make out a deposition."
"About that 'tap on the head,' you mean?"
"Right. Joly's going to meet me there and help me through it."
"And then what? Back to the institute for more interviews?"
"No, they'll have to wait for tomorrow. All the institute people are going to be at part two of that symposium this afternoon. I should probably finish up at the mairie by two or two-thirty, and then I'm free. What about you? Are you going to sit in on the symposium again?"
She tore off a piece of croissant, applied cherry jam, and chewed away. "Mm, you're right; good. No, I don't want to go to the symposium." She hesitated, chewing. "Can I ask you something? Do these institute people really have a good reputation? They all seemed… well, frankly, like a bunch of… of quibbling eccentrics to me."
"That's because they do quibble and they're mostly pretty eccentric. But yes, you bet they have a good reputation-a terrific reputation-and they deserve it. That little outfit has been right at the forefront of Paleolithic scholarship for almost thirty years. A guy like Beaupierre may live in his own world most of the time, but nobody can match him for Mesolithic tool technology, and Montfort is a giant in European archaeology-even the Tayac mess couldn't change that-and Emile can be kind of a jerk, but he's done some wonderful stuff on ancient disease demographics, and Audrey's contributed more to the understanding of Cro-Magnon social structure than almost anyone, and even Pru-"
"Okay, okay, I believe you," Julie said. "Just the same, I think I'll give it a skip." She gave him a little grin with just the corners of her mouth. "But you know what would be fun? I heard there's a kind of reconstructed early-man cave-village up the road a little, near Tursac, with scenes of Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons hunting woolly mammoths, and fighting saber-toothed tigers, and so on. It's called Prehistoparc; how about going up there?"
"Julie, saber-toothed tigers were extinct in the Old World by the end of the Pliocene; they didn't coexist with Neanderthals or Cro-Magnons, so they could hardly have been hunted by them."
Julie rolled her eyes. "How did I wind up with such a pedant? Come on, what do you say?"
"What, you'd rather spend two hours walking around some phony-baloney Paleolithic Disneyland than hear some of the world's premier authorities, people who really know what they're talking about, discuss the latest ideas on Mousterian stone-tool typology?"
"Sure, wouldn't you?"
"Definitely," Gideon said.
"Besides," said Julie, laughing, "I've had all the Chatelperronian side scrapers, bifacial Acheulian hand axes, and Levalloisian flake-cores I can stand for some time to come."
"Wow, that sounded great."
She grinned at him. "Just don't ask me what any of it means."
The offices of the Institut de Prehistoire were on the second floor of one of the few two-story buildings on Les Eyzies' main street, at the other end of the village (i.e., four blocks away) from the Hotel Cro-Magnon. Sturdily built of rough-cut limestone blocks in the traditional Perigord style, with a steeply pitched, stone-tiled roof, it was owned by a cooperative society of canned foie-gras producers. The society occupied the ground floor, a single spacious chamber furnished in the grand style of an 1880's bank, with dark mahogany railings around the sides, Turkish carpets underfoot, claw-footed mahogany desks for its officers, and a hushed air of profitable, discreetly conducted commerce. A spotlit display of its members' products, in the form of a gleaming pyramid of gold and silver cans of goose liver, occupied pride of place on an ornate stand at the center of the room. The prosperous-looking men at the desks eyed Gideon expectantly when he entered but lost interest when he nodded and went to the stairwell that led to the upper floor; evidently he was merely another archaeologist.
Once having climbed the stairs into what seemed to be a general-use area, part archaeological storeroom, part break room, and part copy center, Gideon found himself thoroughly at home: scuffed, thirty-year-old steel-and-Naugahyde office furniture, a photocopy machine, an ancient but apparently functioning mimeograph machine, a glass pot of brown sludge-coffee?-that looked as if it had been on the warmer for a week, two tables littered with journals, primitive stone tools, and Coke cans, and the mixed smells of millennia-old stone dust, wooden floorboards, and stale coffee-all the familiar, user-friendly sights, scents and clutter of scholarly inquiry.
On the table nearest him there were a dozen or so pieces of worked stone, rounded chunks of quartzite four or five inches across, one end of which had been crudely chipped from both sides into a rough but usable cutting edge. These were the bifacial Acheulian hand axes that Julie had talked about. He picked one up almost automatically and hefted it, grasping the smooth, rounded portion. This was one of the deep, one of the near-mystical, pleasures of anthropology, at least as far as Gideon was concerned. He had in his hand a tool that had been made and used perhaps 100,000 years ago. Just as he now grasped it, a strange, primitive creature, not quite human as we understand the term, languageless, naked or perhaps clothed in animal skins, had once clutched it-this very same stone-in a filthy hand to hammer bloodily away at living bone or horn. One could almost feel, or at least imagine that one could feel, a connection, an affinity across that unimaginable gulf of time and essence "Puis-je vous m'aider?" The voice was icy, female, proprietary, and suspicious. "Je m'appelle Madame Lacouture."