The Caves of Perigord_ A Novel - Martin Walker [4]
“If you walk out with it now and take it home and put it back on the bookshelf, there is nothing that I or anybody else could do,” she said, wondering if this were the right argument to make to this stranger. The last thing she wanted was for him to walk out with his rock. But if it stayed with her, she would have to contact the proper authorities. This conversation with a potential client had suddenly become very complicated. “I don’t think you should do that. Not because you could make much money out of this, but because I don’t think it would be right.”
“Well, it’s not my fault. I just inherited the damn thing,” he said, squinting at the side of the rock. He straightened and then looked squarely at her. “I don’t mean that. It’s not a damn thing. I think it’s marvelous. I always have, even as a boy. I used to go from looking at it in my father’s study out to the fields to look at the cattle, wondering why this felt more like the real things than the Buttercups and Jennies I’d take to the milking shed.” His voice trailed off, and he cleared his throat. “How can you tell if it is real? Carbon-dating?”
“Carbon-dating only works on organic material like cloth or vegetation. This is rock,” she said, her voice crisp. “I would have to consult with an expert or two, send them photographs, see if any caves have been vandalized of paintings like this. But I can tell you there is no market in this kind of work, if I am right about its provenance. This is not a conventional item of preclassical art, this is prehistory from the very dawn of primitive man. Governments take this kind of thing very seriously.” He was not reacting at all. Perhaps he did not understand her sense of outrage.
“Imagine if somebody tried to sell one of the stones from Stonehenge,” she went on, thinking the English parallel might stir him. “If your father took this, even if the cave had collapsed and this had been plucked from a pile of rubble, then I think the French government would want to revoke whatever medal they gave him.” He was nodding gravely, but without real comprehension. In fact, he was looking at her in that appraising, male way, that made this even more complicated. She would have to be blunt. “I understand you brought this here in good faith, hoping it might be worth money. But I have to warn you that it could land you in serious legal trouble if you tried to sell it. Not a windfall, sir, but quite possibly a prison sentence.”
“So, none of this kind of thing is ever sold, nor ever appears at auction,” he said. “There is no market, and so no value. I am left with a curious and highly unsavory family memento, and the thought that my father may have been a bit of a rogue.”
“You are left with an obligation,” Lydia said. “I think we ought to try to find out if this is real, and if so, where exactly it comes from. There may be a hole in a cave painting, although I don’t know of one offhand. Anyway this probably belongs in a museum. Sometimes there can be a finder’s fee, but in this case, which looks like the result of an act of vandalism, that might be difficult.”
She looked at it again, noticing the way the curve of the jaw and of one of the horns followed carefully the folds and indentations in the rock, using the shape of the stone to give a sense of force and muscle in the beast. Where the jaw met the neck, the painter had suddenly blurred his line, as if to suggest movement. She had not seen the real Lascaux cave, only the copy that the French government had built when the breath of too many tourists threatened to damage the original. But she remembered this trick of the blurred line to suggest movement, and the way that artists would try to follow the shapes of rock on which they drew. If this were a fake, it was a remarkably fine one.
“What do you suggest I do? Take it home to