The Caves of Périgord: A Novel

curious, rather than aggressive.
    “There are few hard and fast rules about this. The Elgin marbles were bought and exported under the legal rules of the time, and have been better cared for in the British Museum than they might have been in Athens in the past. And that is a case where political issues will probably outweigh any artistic argument. But if somebody in my profession knows something had been taken illegally from a tomb or a temple—or a cave—then we have a sort of ethical code that says we do not deal in it and alert the proper authorities. The laws against trafficking in stolen goods certainly apply to the art world, and there is also a moral consideration, particularly about something such as this.” She gestured at the rock.
    “Would all your colleagues here, or at other auction houses, take the same attitude? Or is this a particularly American ethic, to do with fear of lawsuits?”
    “I certainly hope my colleagues would take the same view, on either side of the Atlantic. This is not about lawsuits, but about fair dealing,” she said crisply, suddenly wondering whether the whole thing had been some kind of test arranged by her management. “Now, would you like that receipt?”
    “Yes, please,” he said. “And I have to be back in town on Friday. If I came in at about midday, perhaps I could take you to lunch?” He smiled again. “You have been helpful above and beyond the call of duty.”
    “I’m afraid we tend to be rather busy on Fridays,” she said automatically, pulling a receipt form and a ballpoint pen from the drawer and starting to fill it in. “But I’ll certainly see you here at noon. And if you leave a phone number, I can let you know if some firm information comes back to me before then.”

    Lydia took a dozen digital photographs of the rock, and weighed and measured it carefully before asking a janitor to take it up to her office. Then she sent e-mails and the digitalized photos to Professor Horst Vogelstern in Cologne and to the National Museum of Prehistory at les Eyzies in the Dordogne, in the heart of France’s cave region. It had been founded by Denis Peyrony, the French scholar who had first identified the frieze of the horses in the Font-de-Gaume cave, and ever since had been the main center for the study of early man. She marked the museum e-mail for the attention of Clothilde Daunier, a curator renowned for her encyclopedic knowledge of Lascaux and the surrounding caves. Lydia knew her only by reputation. She had heard of Horst as one of the leading authorities on prehistoric art even before she met him at a reception after he had given a lecture at the Courtauld Institute when she had been studying there. As a courtesy, she sent another e-mail to her old professor at the Ashmolean in Oxford. It was not his field, but she thought he might be interested. At least he could confirm that it was not African. She pondered sending more e-mails to some of her classmates who were still working in the field. There was a boring Irishman, now teaching in Australia, who had been interested in cave painting, and that insufferable Californian who had gone into paleoarchaeology. No, she thought firmly. No need to reopen those old connections. She pulled out Ann Sieveking’s The Cave Artists and André Leroi-Gourhan’s Dawn of European Art, and increasingly fascinated, she read until the night watchman found her just before ten. She climbed the stairs again to her small office, just to look at it once more. The night watchman followed her, a rather dear ex-serviceman with a carefully tended long white mustache.
    “Should I put that in the storeroom for you, miss?” he asked. Then he looked at it. “That’s special, isn’t it?”
    “I think it is, Mr. Woodley. I think it could be very special.” She smiled at him, feeling comfortable with the elderly man.
    “Funny how you can always tell the real thing, the quality,” he said, turning her desk lamp to illuminate it more clearly. “Very old, is it?”
    “Probably seventeen thousand years old, if my guess is right.”
    “Crikey. Funny how you never think of art before the ancient Greeks. But it passes my test, miss.”
    “What’s that, Mr. Woodley?”
    “I get it now and again. First week I got this job, we had that Rembrandt in, and I got this shiver. I’ll never forget it. I’d never thought much about art before. Never seen much, I suppose. But I got it then, and I got it with that El Greco we had last