As always, it made him smile. He put a forefinger on the tip of her nose. “You’re just lucky you’ve got that twitchy little quadratus labii superioris,” he said. “Otherwise you wouldn’t get away-”

“If you think you can distract me by talking dirty, forget it. Now tell me about Ivan Gunderson.”

“Okay, one more time…”

Ivan Samuel Gunderson was a throwback and very probably the last of his kind. In the late nineteenth century they had been common, these men of wealth, amateur archaeologists who dug the ancient sites of Egypt or Europe or Mesopotamia. But since the 1930s, the field had become institutionalized. Excavations were funded by universities or foundations and conducted by formally trained PhDs with ever narrower specialties. Amateur, self-taught archaeologists were no longer welcome. More than that, they were kept at a distance.

Except for Ivan S. Gunderson. Without even a bachelor’s degree in archaeology, he had been a well-known figure in European and Middle Eastern prehistory for four decades. A self-made multimillionaire – as a young man he had speculated with fabulous success in South American tin mining – he was unique in being able to purchase the land on which promising archaeological sites lay, rather than having to wangle permission from reluctant landowners to excavate on their property. This he did, freely and often, so that it wasn’t uncommon for him to be working two or three sites at a time, using local people as workers and overseers. Where permission from government officials was necessary, particularly in the Middle East, his freehandedness with money came in particularly helpful.

His slapdash, untrained approach to excavating naturally enough made the professionals nervous, but since he was working on his own land, there was nothing they could do. Besides, he was extremely popular with them, having endeared himself to them with a practice that outdid anything the nineteenth-century amateurs ever did.