As a brilliant young graduate student at the University of Michigan forty years before, he had been anointed the next generation’s great paleoarchaeologist, and many scholars in the field – like anyone else, he had his detractors – would have agreed that the prediction had come to pass. For the last several decades he had been one of the two or three most eminent men in the discipline, an admirably exacting field-worker, and teacher of half the current crop of European Neolithic archaeologists.

The whiskey breath that hung about him – and it was still well before noon – came as no surprise. It was as inextricably attached to him as his voice. In a leather-clad, stainless-steel flask in his attache case, Gideon knew, was a pint of Tullamore Dew Irish whiskey, the day’s (but not the evening’s) supply. Gideon had never seen him drunk, nor heard tales of binges from others (and academics are eager tale-tellers), but he’d never seen him wholly sober either. He drank from the time he got up – Gideon had been at a seven A.M. conference breakfast with him once, and the flask was already in use, spicing up his coffee – until he went to bed. But he did it only a very little at a time, just a few drops, so that there was always alcohol in his system, but never enough to make him even close to tipsy. Whether his typical good humor was whiskey-induced there was no way of knowing, since he was never without the flask.

Round, soft, and rosy, he was built more like an infant than a man of seventy. His head was large for his body, his arms and legs stubby, and his hands small and fat, with puffy, dimpled wrists. A belly like an overinflated beach ball; a globular forehead; pink, smooth, bulgy cheeks; a gurgling, throaty sort of chuckle always at the ready. One of Gideon’s associates (not a fan of Vanderwater’s) referred to him as Big Baby. “Did you know Big Baby’s getting the Childe award this year?” “Did you hear Big Baby’s coming out with another damn book?”