"No, no. Not at all."
"You sound a little detached."
"Surprised, I would say. But everything's fine. At least, I think it's fine." He paused, then, "And what about the site? What's going on with you?"
"I'm with Rick at the monastery now. We're digging in the catacombs of quadrant four. I think we'll be down later today, or tomorrow at the latest."
"Excellent. Keep up the good work, Andr. I'll talk to you in a day or two."
And he rang off.
Marek clipped the phone back on his belt and frowned. What the hell did all that mean?
The helicopter thumped by overhead, its sensor boxes hanging beneath. Stern had kept it for another day, to do morning and afternoon runs; he wanted to survey the features that Kramer had mentioned, to see exactly how much showed up in an instrument run.
Marek wondered how it was going, but to talk to him, he needed a radio. The nearest one was in the storehouse.
"Elsie," Marek said as he walked into the storehouse. "Where's the radio to talk to David?"
Of course, Elsie Kastner didn't answer him. She just continued to stare at the document in front of her. Elsie was a pretty, heavyset woman who was capable of intense concentration. She sat in this storehouse for hours, deciphering the handwriting on parchments. Her job required her to know not only the six principal languages of medieval Europe, but also long-forgotten local dialects, slang and abbreviations. Marek felt lucky to have her, even though she stayed aloof from the rest of the team. And she could be a little strange at times. He said, "Elsie?"
She looked up suddenly. "What? Oh, sorry, Andr. I'm just, uh, I mean a little" She gestured to the parchment in front of her. "This is a bill from the monastery to a German count. For putting up his personal retinue for the night: twenty-nine people and thirty-five horses. That's what this count was taking with him through the countryside. But it's written in a combination of Latin and Occitan, and the handwriting is impossible."
Elsie picked up the parchment and carried it to the photography stand in the corner. A camera was mounted on a four-legged stand above the table, with strobe lights aiming from all sides. She set the parchment down, straightened it, arranged the bar code ID at the bottom, put a two-inch checkerboard ruler down for standardization, and snapped the picture.
"Elsie? Where's the radio to talk to David?"
"Oh, sorry. It's on the far table. It's the one with the adhesive strip that says DS."
Marek went over, pressed the button. "David? It's Andr."
"Hi, Andr." Marek could hardly hear him with the thumping of the helicopter.
"What've you found?"
"Zip. Nada. Absolutely nothing," Stern said. "We checked the monastery and we checked the forest. None of Kramer's landmarks show up: not on SLS, or on radar, infrared, or UV. I have no idea how they made these discoveries."
They were galloping full tilt along a grassy ridge overlooking the river. At least, Sophie was galloping; Chris bounced and jolted, hanging on for dear life. Ordinarily, she never galloped on their outings together, in deference to his lesser ability, but today she was shrieking with delight as she raced headlong across the fields.
Chris tried to stay with her, praying she would stop soon, and finally she did, reining up her snorting and sweaty black stallion, patting it on the neck, waiting for him to catch up.
"Wasn't that exciting?" she said.
"It was," he said, gasping for breath. "It certainly was that."
"You did very well, Chris, I must say. Your seat is improving."
All he could do was nod. His seat was painful after all the bouncing, and his thighs ached from squeezing so hard.
"It's beautiful here," she said, pointing to the river, the dark castles on the far cliffs. "Isn't it glorious?"
And then she glanced at her watch, which annoyed him. But walking turned out to be surprisingly pleasant. She rode very close to him, the horses almost touching, and she leaned over to whisper in his ear; once she threw her arm around his shoulder and kissed him on the mouth, before glancing away, apparently embarrassed by her moment of boldness.
From their present position, they overlooked the entire site: the ruins of Castelgard, the monastery, and on the far hill, La Roque. Clouds raced overhead, moving shadows across the landscape. The air was warm and soft, and it was quiet, except for the distant rumble of an automobile.
"Oh, Chris," she said, and kissed him again. When they broke, she looked away in the distance, and suddenly waved.
A yellow convertible was winding up the road toward them. It was some sort of racing car, low-slung, its engine growling. A short distance away, it stopped, and the driver stood up behind the wheel, sitting on the back of the seat.
"Nigel!" she cried happily.
The man in the car waved back lazily, his hand tracing a slow arc.
"Oh Chris, would you be a dear?" Sophie handed Chris the reins of her horse, dismounted, and ran down the hill to the car, where she embraced the driver. The two of them got in the car. As they drove off, she looked back at Chris and blew him a kiss.
The restored medieval town of Sarlat was particularly charming at night, when its cramped buildings and narrow alleys were lit softly by gas lamps. On the rue Tourny, Marek and the graduate students sat in an outdoor restaurant under white umbrellas, drinking the dark red wine of Cahors into the night.
Usually, Chris Hughes enjoyed these evenings, but tonight nothing seemed right to him. The evening was too warm; his metal chair uncomfortable. He had ordered his favorite dish, pintade aux cpes, but the guinea hen tasted dry, and the mushrooms were bland. Even the conversation irritated him: usually, the graduate students talked over the day's work, but tonight their young architect, Kate Erickson, had met some friends from New York, two American couples in their late twenties - stock traders with their girlfriends. He disliked them almost immediately.
The men were constantly getting up from the table to talk on cell phones. The women were both publicists in the same PR firm; they had just finished a very big party for Martha Stewart's new book. The group's bustling sense of their own self-importance quickly got on Chris's nerves; and, like many successful business people, they tended to treat academics as if they were slightly retarded, unable to function in the real world, to play the real games. Or perhaps, he thought, they just found it inexplicable that anyone would choose an occupation that wouldn't make them a millionaire by age twenty-four.
Yet he had to admit they were perfectly pleasant; they were drinking a lot of wine, and asking a lot of questions about the project. Unfortunately, they were the usual questions, the ones tourists always asked: What's so special about that place? How do you know where to dig? How do you know what to look for? How deep do you dig and how do you know when to stop?
"Why are you working there? What's so special about that place, anyway?" one of the women asked.
"The site is very typical for the period," Kate said, "with two opposing castles. But what makes it a real find is that it has been a neglected site, never previously excavated."
"That's good? That it was neglected?" The woman was frowning; she came from a world where neglect was bad.
"It's very desirable," Marek said. "In our work, the real opportunities arise only when the world passes an area by. Like Sarlat, for instance. This town."
"It's very sweet here," one of the women said. The men stepped away to talk on their phones.
"But the point," Kate said, "is that it's an accident that this old town exists at all. Originally, Sarlat was a pilgrimage town that grew up around a monastery with relics; eventually it got so big that the monastery left, looking for peace and quiet elsewhere. Sarlat continued as a prosperous market center for the Dordogne region. But its importance diminished steadily over the years, and in the twentieth century, the world passed Sarlat by. It was so unimportant and poor that the town didn't have the money to rebuild its old sections. The old buildings just remained standing, with no modern plumbing and electricity. A lot of them were abandoned."