"Calm down, Jones. You did just fine in there. Just
fine."
"Sure. I did great."
"Listen to me. You made your point. Believe me, you did. I talked to Mulhouse at his home for almost an hour yesterday, and he conceded that he'd overreacted."
"Well, I didn't hear him apologizing."
"No, but you didn't find yourself arrested, either. Those lawyers could have drummed up any number of charges from vandalism to treason. Don't you see? You won. Hell, if booze were legal, I'd buy you a drink."
"I won, but I had to apologize? What kind of victory is
that?"
"Look, Mulhouse has to maintain his cloak of credibility. If you had ripped it off by refusing to apologize, he would have had no choice but to ruin your chances at the Sorbonne."
Indy knew Conrad was right. "What about this apology
I have to write?"
"It's your chance to explain to everyone what you were doing. Just don't gloat; say you know it was a mistake."
"Yeah. I suppose."
Conrad clasped him on the shoulder. "That's the spirit. Good luck in Paris. I envy you. I'm sure you'll do well and find what you're looking for."
As Conrad walked away, Indy thought about what the professor had said. What was he looking for? He didn't know, but he had the feeling that he'd recognize it when he saw it.
3
LADY ICE
Paris—October 1922
It was a brisk fall morning and Indy bundled his leather jacket around his throat as he traipsed along the boulevard St. Michel. Unlike most of the Frenchmen he passed on the street, he wasn't wearing a scarf.
Madelaine had given him one last Christmas, but he hadn't seen her for several weeks and wearing it reminded him of her.
He leaned forward, pulled his hat low over his brow, and picked up his pace. He not only wanted to escape the cold, but he was looking forward to the lecture this morning in his Greek archaeology class. The topic was Apollo's Oracle, and he was curious about the approach Professor Belecamus would take.
He crossed the campus, heading directly to the class room building. After two years of studying at the Sorbonne, he felt he knew the city almost as well as a native Parisian. But, of course, he would always be a foreigner here, and oddly enough he liked the feeling. He was an outsider, on the inside.
He was in his third year of a Ph.D. program that focused on ancient written languages, and was taking his second course in classical Greek archaeology. It fit well
with his study of Old Greek, but there was also something else about the course that particularly captivated him—the professor.
Everything about her, from the clothes and perfume she wore to the way she talked and walked, was distinctly feminine. And yet, beneath this veneer he sensed a strength and self-possession that intrigued him. The di chotomy hinted at the mystery of this woman and also defined the boundaries of her personal area. Too close and you're in trouble, it whispered.
So far that had not been a problem. He was midway through his second course with her and was excelling in it. His knowledge of Old Greek as well as his thorough understanding of Greek mythology made him something of a standout among his peers, but she had acted as if he didn't exist.
A few days earlier, he had approached her after class and asked a couple of questions about her lecture. She'd answered in a brusque tone that matched the cold indiffer ence in her eyes. He refused to be intimidated, and had told her how much he enjoyed her lectures.
"That's nice," she'd said, then excused herself and brushed past him.
Dorian Belecamus was Lady Ice. That was the way he thought of her. Yet, ice could be melted, and somewhere below her thick protective coating there must be a warm, friendly woman who longed for intimacy.
Or so he fantasied.
Lost in thought, he collided with someone as he entered the classroom and realized it was she. He dropped to one knee to retrieve the notebook that had slipped from Belecamus's hand. His eyes shifted to her trim legs, which were just inches from his head. On most days she dressed in a long skirt and a white blouse covered by a sleeveless velveteen waistcoat. But today she wore a shorter plaid schoolgirl dress that made her look as if she might be one of the students rather than the instructor.
She crouched and plucked up a paper that had slipped out of the notebook. They stood at the same time and their eyes met; hers were lovely, wide and dark, almost black. "Sorry, Dr. Belecamus. I didn't see you."
"Thanks, Jones." She flicked a hand at her thick raven hair. It was tied back with a bow and set off her compelling eyes, high cheekbones, and full mouth. "Nice running into you. See me after class. I have something to talk to you about."
Abruptly, she turned away and walked to the podium. Indy gazed after her, astonished that she'd actually smiled at him. He glanced around the classroom, expecting to see looks of envy from the men, knowing glances from the women. But no one seemed to notice. He'd broken, or at least cracked, the cake of ice that encased Dorian Belecamus, and no one cared. What was with these guys? Their expressions were as inscrutable as the mugs on the skulls that stared out from the cases that lined the walls of the room.
The French were supposed to be lovers, but none of them seemed to think there was anything special about their instructor.
He sat down at a desk on the aisle, opened his note book, and tried to think of reasons she would want to see him. He could think of none. A plain-looking girl with stringy brown hair and wire-rimmed glasses leaned over toward him from the next seat. "God, did you see how she's dressed today?" she whispered.
"Like she thinks she's one of us."
No comparison, Indy thought. Worlds apart. Worlds improved. "She's not. Not even close," he said in a commiserating tone. He turned back to his notebook, cutting off the conversation.
"The topic today is one with which I am intimately
familiar," Belecamus began. Ironic, he thought. She was intimate with a dead city.
"As a child I visited the ruins of Delphi during the early years of the modern restoration, which began in 1892." Her eyes darted to the door and a late arrival squirmed under her gelid stare as he found a seat. "As a high school student and later in college, I spent my summers working first as a volunteer, then as a paid assistant at the site. Delphi became the focus of my graduate study, and my Ph.D. thesis. Before coming to teach here, I spent five years as the chief archaeologist at the ruins while associated with the University of Athens."
She looked down a moment, and smiled to herself. "One of my assistants once made the mistake of jokingly referring to me as Pythia. As we all know Pythia was the name of the succession of women who served as Apollo's Oracle, or the Oracle of Delphi. To become Pythia a woman had to be from a poor farmer's family, more than fifty years old, and not particularly intelligent." Her eyes roamed around the room. "I hope you can understand why I did not feel particularly charmed by the comment."
This elicited a collective laugh from the class. Belecamus definitely fit neither the age bracket nor the intelligence quotient, and she most likely was not from a poor family, Indy thought.
"Pythia made her pronouncements from the altar in the Temple of Apollo, where she sat on a copper-and-gold tripod set above a fissure in the earth. Intoxicating vapors supposedly rose from the aperture, causing the woman to enter a frenzied trance." She smiled again, as if at some private joke, and her gaze settled on Indy. "One witness from the first century A.D. described Pythia's transforma tion this way: