Luc agreed with him and added, ‘There’s a lot of ground-breaking material here. It’s not just you who’s going to have to reevaluate beliefs. Everyone is. The Chamber of Plants alone. And if it’s Aurignacian, which I accept you don’t buy into, then what?’
‘Yes, the plants, of course they’re something totally new. But it’s more than that. The whole gestalt of the place is getting to me. The bird men, particularly. One with the bison, one with the vegetation. I looked at them and that goddamn curse word, shaman, kept popping into my head.’ He slapped Luc’s knee. ‘If you tell Lewis-Williams I said that, I’ll kill you!’
‘My lips are sealed.’
Pierre trotted over and towered over them. ‘Got a minute, Luc?’
Alon’s knees cracked when he stood up. He raised up on his toes and steadied himself with an arm on Luc’s shoulder to whisper some hot-breathed words in his ear. ‘Would you let me go back to the cave tonight, alone, just for a few minutes? I need to experience it on my own, with just one small light, like they did.’
‘I think we need to stick to protocol, Zvi.’
Alon nodded sadly and went on his way.
Luc turned to Pierre. ‘What’s up?’
‘A couple of people from Ruac village are here to speak with you.’
‘Do they have pitchforks?’
‘They brought a cake.’
He’d seen them before. The couple from the café in Ruac.
‘I’m Odile Bonnet,’ the woman said, ‘and this is my brother Jacques.’
Odile clearly noticed the look of recognition on Luc’s face.
‘Yes, the mayor is our father. I think he was rude to you before so – well, here’s a cake.’
Luc thanked her and invited them to his caravan for a brandy.
She had the flashing smile and sultry looks of a golden-era film star past her peak, not his type, a little on the easy side and too much of the peasant in her, but definitely Hugo’s kind of woman. Even though it was chilly, she liked to show a lot of leg. Her blank-faced oafish brother didn’t seem as pleased to be there. He stayed quiet, a bit of a cipher, probably roped into coming along, Luc figured.
She sipped the brandy while her brother swallowed his in large gulps, like beer. ‘My father is not a modern man,’ she explained. ‘He likes the quiet old ways. He doesn’t like tourists and outsiders, Germans and Americans in particular. He’s of the opinion the painted caves, especially Lascaux, have changed the character of the region, with the traffic and the postcard shops and the T-shirts. You know what I’m saying.’
‘Of course,’ Luc said. ‘I completely understand his position.’
‘He reflects the views of the majority in the village which is why he’s been mayor for as long as I can remember. But I – my brother and I – are more open-minded, even excited about your discovery. A new cave! Right under our noses! We’ve probably hiked by it dozens of times.’
‘I can arrange a tour,’ Luc replied enthusiastically. ‘I can’t tell you how much I want the support of the village. Yes, it’s a national treasure, but first, it’s a local treasure. I think local involvement from the beginning will help shape the future of Ruac Cave as a public institution.’
‘We’d love to see it, wouldn’t we, Jacques?’ He nodded automatically. ‘We’d also like to volunteer. We can do anything you’d like: Jacques can dig or move things around – he’s strong as a farm animal. I can file, I can draw well. Cook. Anything.’
There were a couple of sharp raps on Luc’s caravan door and it swung open. Hugo was there, hoisting a magnum of champagne with a red bow around its neck. ‘Hello!’ Then, seeing Luc was with someone, he added, ‘Oh, sorry! Shall I come back?’
‘No, come in! Welcome! Remember that nice couple from the café in Ruac? Here they are.’
Hugo climbed in and immediately shifted his attention to the woman, and when it was established the man with her was her brother, he joked the champagne was for her. They chatted for a while then Odile uncrossed her legs and announced they’d have to be off.
‘The answer is yes,’ Luc said to her. ‘I’d welcome your help at the campsite. Cave work is going to be very restricted but there’s lots to do here. Come anytime. Pierre, the guy who showed you in, will set you up.’
This time her parting smile to Hugo was unambiguous. Luc felt the kind of humming sometimes experienced around a high-voltage line.
‘If I’d known she’d be here I would have come yesterday,’ Hugo said. He looked around the cramped caravan. ‘This is where the famous Luc Simard, co-discoverer of Ruac Cave, is staying? Not exactly Versailles. Where am I sleeping?’
Luc pointed to the spare bunk at the far end that was piled high with Luc’s laundry. ‘There. Have some brandy and don’t you dare complain.’
Zvi Alon button-holed Jeremy in the kitchen where the student had gone to brew a cup of tea.
The bald man blurted out, ‘Luc gave me permission to visit the cave on my own for a short while. Let me have the key.’
Jeremy was thoroughly intimidated by Alon and his tough reputation. His bony knees were practically knocking. ‘Of course, professor. Do you want me to go with you to unlock it? It’s tricky going down in the dark.’
Alon held out his hand. ‘I’ll be fine. When I was your age I was commanding a tank in the Sinai.’
Luc started filling Hugo in on the first day’s activities but as he was speaking, he sensed his friend was restless. Suddenly Luc stopped talking and demanded, ‘What is it?’
‘How come you’re not asking me about the manuscript?’
‘Has there been progress?’
‘I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of a Caesar cipher?’
Luc impatiently shook his head.
‘Well, it’s a pathetically easy code that Julius Caesar used for secret messages. It practically requires your foe to be illiterate since it’s so easy to break, just a shift of say three letters to the right or left. Most of his enemies couldn’t have even read the plain Latin so it worked fine for him. Over time code breakers and code writers competed for rather more sophisticated methods.’
Luc was red-faced with testiness.
‘Okay, okay, well according to my guy from Brussels, one of the Voynich geniuses, our manuscript was coded with something called the Vigenère cipher which by itself is pretty remarkable since it wasn’t thought to be invented until the sixteenth century. It looks like our Barthomieu or a colleague was a few hundred years ahead of his time. I won’t bore you with the details but it’s a far more complicated variant of the Caesar cipher with an additional requirement of requiring secret key words for deciphering.’
‘If you don’t cut to the chase, I’m going to kill you with my bare hands,’ Luc shouted.
‘This morning, before I left Paris, my Belgian geek told me he was close to cracking a few pages. He thinks there are probably at least three sections, each with its own key word. He was crunching numbers, or whatever it is that computer people crunch, and he told me he’d email me when he had something definitive. Is there someplace I can check my mail?’
Luc practically grabbed him by his jacket. ‘The office. Let’s go.’
As they passed the camp fire, Luc pointed at a woman and said to Hugo, ‘By the way, that’s Sara.’
Immediately he wished he’d kept quiet because Hugo sprinted towards her and introduced himself as one of Luc’s oldest friends not to mention the co-discoverer of the cave.
‘I’ve heard of you,’ she sparkled. ‘I can’t believe we never met back when, you know, Luc and I…’
‘And I’ve heard of you too!’ Hugo exclaimed. ‘So lovely, so intelligent. Luc, come over here!’