“It’s not that Edgar didn’t have something valuable to add,” Julie mused as they sat on the last of the benches, finishing their ice cream cones, “but, well, he was one of those people who just sucked the oxygen out of the room. I remember, at dinner sometimes, when he’d leave early, it was as if this glowering black cloud had lifted.”

“I know. I’ve seen him on TV panels once or twice,” Gideon said. “Kind of a bully, I thought.”

“I’d say most people who had anything to do with him would agree with that.”

“Also very taken with himself-the handsome, brooding defender of the wilds.”

“That, too. Definitely.”

“Come on, let’s head back,” Gideon said.

Strolling eastward on the promenade brings with it the famous view of St. Michael’s Mount, the great, castle-topped medieval stone pile sitting in isolated glory far out in Mount’s Bay, and for a few minutes they walked toward it in silence, watching it turn from amber, to pale straw, to flaming orange as dusk settled in.

“Gideon,” Julie said after a while, “are you going to sit in on any of the sessions? Vasily would love for you to participate. He told me so in the last e-mail. He really respects you.”

“If I sit in, would he stop charging me twenty bucks a day?”

They both laughed, but it was a fact. Kozlov, generous as he might be in some respects, was a penny-pincher in others. Fellows were welcome to bring partners to the meetings, but additional food and lodging charges of twenty dollars a day (“to pay for extra work-staff peoples”) would be applied.

“He just might,” Julie said.

“Even so, I think I’ll pass. I have some work with me, and I also want to get over to the outer islands to see the Bronze and Iron Age sites, and then-”