The Caves of Périgord: A Novel

of foodies; men who made exaggerated talk of sauces and dishes and treated fashionable restaurants as if they were something to do with art.
    “Did Malrand come to your house after the funeral?” she asked, making the question casual. She felt uncomfortable, turning the conversation into an interrogation.
    “Of course, took a drink, said some gracious things. Stayed about ten minutes. He’d said a few words at the grave, about my father being a great friend of France. That sort of thing. Spoke very good English.”
    “Did he look around the house, go to your father’s study? I’m wondering whether he may have seen the rock—I presume it was on display in your father’s room.”
    “No, I don’t recall him being anywhere but the hall and the main drawing room. He strolled around the garden with me a bit, saying he remembered it from the war. Apparently he’d been to stay with my father. He spoke about my grandmother and her garden, made me walk him up the drive to the lodge, where she lived when the Americans took over the house.” He put down his knife and fork, finished his champagne.
    “But I see what you mean. If my father had picked it up in France, that was the time they were working together in Périgord. He may have known something about it. But if my father was up to no good and pinching bits of France’s glorious heritage, then the President of France would hardly have gone out of his way to honor the memory of someone he suspected as a thief. As for the old man’s study, it was a bit of a mess. Books and maps everywhere. He always had some thought of writing his memoirs. Never did, or at least nothing I ever saw or found beyond some notes. There were maps of the Western Desert all over the place, spread on tables and window ledges. The rock was behind one of them, on a bookcase. But it wasn’t in plain sight, even if Malrand had looked in. He did ask me, though, if my father had ever finished his memoirs. They knew one another well enough for that. The only other sign of his time in France was his copies of Malrand’s books; each signed by the author. I started one of his novels, but couldn’t finish it. Not my kind of thing. But I liked his book about the war in Spain back in the 1930s.
    “You seem jolly interested in all this,” he went on, picking at the salad the waiter had brought them. He didn’t seem very pleased with it. But he had not been much interested in the food, simply ordering what she had already chosen. “It must be your American curiosity.”
    “Nothing American about it,” she said, suddenly conscious of her accent. “Anyway, my mother’s Scottish.”
    “But you are American, or Canadian. And not just by your speech. It’s your manner—you are very direct, very determined, going straight to the point. Look at the way you put me to the question all through lunch. And your interest in the origins of this rock of mine is a lot more than I’d have expected.”
    “Why do you say that? That ‘rock of yours’ was entrusted to our care. We lost it. And the police do not seem at all hopeful of getting it back. They said it was a very professional job, by someone who knew what he was looking for and exactly where to find it.”
    “That must narrow down the list of suspects,” he said.
    “Well, it narrows it down to those people who had seen a copy of the next day’s Times , and the first edition was on sale in London by eleven P.M. on the night of the theft. And then it was on the paper’s Internet site before midnight and on the BBC Radio news at the same time. A million people could have seen or heard it, noticed the reference to the auction house and me. There are some very alert thieves in the art world.”
    “But you are not responsible for its loss. It was stolen. There’s a difference,” he protested.
    “I still feel responsible, and not only to you. There’s a responsibility to the thing itself, as a piece of history or a work of art. We still don’t know if it’s genuine. We still don’t know its provenance. There may be a marvelous cave out there somewhere. That’s what my German expert says, and he seems pretty keen on tracking it down.”
    “What about that French woman from the museum?”
    “Clothilde—she was quite ready to pay you an honorarium for the piece. And she has arranged for the museum to offer a reward for its return, which may be the best chance of getting it back. She wanted it, just from seeing the photographs. But she