'He couldn't
'What do you mean?'
'Jacques been involved with the Thibault since he was a kid, for God's sake. He's been on the board of trustees for umpteen years. Armand Thibault was his mother's brother. You tell me, how could any normal person not remember its name?'
How, indeed, Gideon wondered. Was it possible that Beaupierre—
But Pru was wagging a blunt finger in his face. “No, no, no, no, that's not what I meant. I see what you're thinking, I know how your mind works. You're thinking he was hiding something, he was being devious, am I right?'
'Well, I don't see how I can help it.'
'Forget it, prof, Jacques wouldn't know ‘devious’ if it walked up to him and said
'Maybe not, but—'
'Come on, pal, don't make a federal case out of it. You know Jacques pretty well—where his brain is at any given time, nobody can say. The man's not accountable. He's a few peas short of a casserole, shall we say. The receiver's off the hook sixty percent of the time, you know? The elevator usually doesn't go all the way to the top floor, or let me put it this way, the sewing machine ran out of thread a while back, the—'.
'Okay, enough,” Gideon said, laughing. “I think I get your drift.'
[Back to Table of Contents]
Chapter 13
* * * *
More out of courtesy than in hopes of learning anything new, Gideon began his session with Michel Montfort with the same opening question he'd used with Jacques: will you tell me in your own words about the Tayac affair? His account, expectably briefer and more focused than Beaupierre's, was still the same story, and Gideon used the time to study the celebrated archaeologist sitting across the desk from him.
Pru had given him as apt a nutshell description of Montfort as he'd ever heard. “Somewhere along the way,” she'd once told him over a glass of wine, “Michel crossed over the line from being a legend in his own time to being a legend in his own mind.'
He had known at once what she'd meant; there was a whiff of play-acting in Montfort's famously blunt manner. But not really an unpleasant whiff; in fact it tended to take the edge off his frequently disagreeable remarks and give him a playful, Papa-Bearlike quality. At the same time it could leave you with the feeling that you weren't actually dealing with a snuffly, grousing, basically good-hearted old codger at all but some character actor who had specialized in snuffly, grousing, basically good-hearted old codgers for so long that he couldn't remember how to play anything else. Gabby Hayes with a Ph. D. and a French accent, say.
Not that Montfort could really be called an old codger. He was only in his middle fifties, but he was one of those people who seemed to have been around forever. He had already been a great name when Gideon was an undergraduate. And with his old-fashioned taste in clothes—dark suits, usually blue or black, with matching vests, always buttoned—and his bulb-nosed, fleshy, weathered face ('a face like a two-pound loaf of homemade sourdough,” Pru had said at the same memorable tete-a-tete), he was like a holdover from another generation, lacking only a black derby to complete the picture of a self-made, rough-and-ready 1920's merchant king.
But he'd changed a lot in the last three years; more than Gideon had realized at the previous morning's staff meeting. Physically, he was much the same: a little older of course, but still thick and hearty across the chest and shoulders, yet at the same time he seemed in some intangible way diminished, like a man who has successfully recovered from a serious operation, and yet, in an indefinable way, is not—and never again will be—the man he was. The Tayac affair had taken a lot out of him and no wonder. He had put his own considerable reputation on the line backing the “find” and the integrity of man who had made it, he had—
'Hello there. I've finished,” Montfort said.
Gideon blinked. “Excuse me?'
'I said I've finished. Telling it in my own words.'
'Oh, of course, I just—'
'Some time ago now. I thought you might not have noticed.'
Gideon smiled. “I'm sorry, I'm afraid I was thinking—-'
'Is that what that was?” Montfort was playing with his blunt-barreled, tortoise-shell fountain pen, impatient as always but seemingly not in a bad-humored frame of mind. “Now, if there's anything else you want to know . . .'
'I'd certainly like to know if you have any idea—any hypothesis, even—as to who was behind the hoax. And why.'
Montfort's fleshy chin descended to his chest. “I do not.'
'Are you completely satisfied that Ely himself had nothing to do with it?” He braced himself for the explosion Beaupierre had warned him about.
Montfort took his eyes from Gideon's and stared fixedly at the wall beyond, a wall full of framed diplomas and certificates—the same ones, Gideon thought, in the very same places, that had hung there three years ago.
'I am,” he said.
