by Peter May
In the stillness of the house she could very nearly feel Lange squeezing the trigger, and she flinched at the sound of the gunshot when it came. Something whistled past her and embedded itself in the door. She opened her eyes, startled to see Lange gazing down in astonishment at blood bubbling through a large hole in his chest. He looked up to see Georgette staring at him, and as if shutters had come suddenly down on his life, his eyes turned up towards heaven and he toppled forward to hit the flagstones with the sickening slap of flesh and bone on unyielding stone.
As he fell she saw, standing behind him on the side terrace, the pale figure of Karlheinz Wolff, arm raised, his pistol trembling just a little in his hand as he pointed it through the open door. His leather flying jacket hung open, sweat trickling from the hairline beneath his cap. The faintest of smiles lit a troubled face. He said, ‘You put your trust in the wrong man, Georgette.’ He drew a deep breath. ‘You know what a Mischling is?’
She had no voice to find, every sense and sensation numb with shock. She shook her head.
‘It’s the German word for a half-breed. The Nazis stole it specifically to describe someone of mixed Jewish and Aryan race. It’s what they call me.’ His voice was laden with bitter irony. ‘Some grandmother I never even knew.’ He ran his tongue over dry lips. ‘I was never, ever, going to deliver the Mona Lisa to that condescending, Jew-hating cretin Göring. From the moment he asked me to, I knew that my whole war was going to be dedicated to keeping her safe from him. And from Hitler.’ He cast his gaze down towards the man who had stolen his fiancée, blood pooling slowly around his body on the floor.
He raised his eyes again to meet hers, and his head snapped suddenly to the side as a single shot rang out. His pistol clattered away across the flagstones, an arc of blood spouting from the side of his head as his legs buckled beneath him and he fell on to the terrace just beyond the door.
Georgette heard cautious footsteps approach, and the shadows of three men darkened the doorway as they stopped to check that Wolff was dead before turning into the room. One of them held a pistol in his hand and pulled off his cap with the other. And Georgette saw that it was Jean-Luc Percet, the guard from the château. He grinned when he saw the prone figure of Lange on the floor. ‘Two for the price of one, eh? Good thing René Huygue sent us to get those guns from your cellar this afternoon, or it might have been your blood on those flagstones.’
The three maquisards buried Wolff’s body in a half-dug trench in the park next to the house, where the cantonnier had been preparing to lay a drainage pipe. They bundled Lange’s body into his sports car and drove it off through the still deserted village, not a living soul daring to open a window or unlatch a shutter. The burned-out remains of the MG were found two days later at the foot of cliffs downriver, the remains of its driver burned beyond recognition.
Georgette was left alone in the house, with blood on the floor, and the world’s most famous painting secreted away in her attic where no one, now, would even come looking for it.
It was almost a year later, on May 7, 1945, that the Germans surrendered and the war came to an end. In all those months, the dead place, seared into her soul by the events of that June day the previous year, had prevented Georgette from spilling so much as a single tear.
And just as it had on that fateful day almost a year before, the sun was shining the day the war ended. Instead of cycling to the château, Georgette took her bike and retraced the route Lange had taken her on their drive into the hills. She found the entrance to the hayfield where he had parked, and the stone bench set into the hillside just below the road where he had kissed her.
She climbed down to sit alone on the cool stone and gaze out across the landscape that dropped away into the valley below. The turrets of Château de Montal catching the oblique light of the sun, its honey-coloured stone glowing warm against the spring green and all the fruit trees in blossom. The towers of the Tours Saint-Laurent, from which they had transmitted her message to London in an effort to try to keep the artworks in the château safe from bombers, stood in stark silhouette against a painfully blue sky.
The same hum of insects and the same dull clunk of distant cowbells filled the air, just as it had the day she felt Lange’s lips on hers and knew that they were going to make love. There were so many reasons to remember him, but only one that now brought the tears she had refused to cry in all this time. And she wept. And wept. With unrestrained grief.
A little over a month later, on June 15th, the Mona Lisa, along with many other artworks from Montal, made the return journey to Paris to resume her rightful place in the Louvre. Eight months later, the rolled canvasses which had been stored above the garage in Bétaille, including Veronese’s The Wedding Feast at Cana, and Sketch for the Feast, also made the long trip home. When the crate containing Sketch for the Feast was eventually unpacked, it was found to be empty. No copy or reproduction of the Mona Lisa was found. And no one, least of all the authorities at the Louvre, were going to admit that it had ever existed.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Enzo blinked, almost as though waking from a dream, or with the lights coming up at the end of a movie. The completion of the story had taken most of the day, and only now did his stomach growl its displeasure at missing lunch. Outside it had grown dark, earlier since the turning back of the clocks the week before, and the fire had all but gone out. The air in the room had turned chill, and it was only now that he noticed it. Moonlight flooded in through the stained glass, and Anny sat like an apparition in her rocking chair, looking at him expectantly.
He said, ‘And the one reason that Georgette had above all others for weeping over Lange . . . was you.’
Her smile was so distant it barely registered. ‘I was just two months old when the war ended and she made her pilgrimage to that bench on the hill. It was a month after his death that she discovered she was pregnant. I always loved my mother with a passion, monsieur. And never knew, of course, the man who had betrayed her. The man who was my father. I would have wished to have known him. Truly. If only to find that one redeeming feature, the reason that he did what he did.’ He heard the tiniest break in her voice. ‘None of us would like to believe that their father was a monster.’
‘And did your mother ever find it? That one redeeming feature. In retrospect, I mean.’
‘I don’t believe so, monsieur. She never got over it, right up until the day she died. Although she spoke of him often, and sometimes with a fondness that I found hard to credit.’
‘And the story you have told me is the story she told you.’
She smiled. ‘A story I heard so many times. Over and over, from my earliest recollection. Until it seemed to me, monsieur, that I had been there myself. Felt her pain, her love, her sense of betrayal, as if it were mine.’ She turned her gaze to the floor where the door opened into the hall towards the kitchen. ‘If you look carefully, you can still see where the blood of my father stained the flagstones. In a way, he’s always been here. My mother acquired this house from the mairie, with money inherited from her mother. I was born here, grew up here, have never known any other home.’
‘Your mother married, didn’t she?’
‘Yes. A doctor. Albert Lavigne. The only father I ever knew. My mother gave birth to my half-sister a few years later, but Albert died before Claire even reached her teens, and my mother was alone again. And remained so for the rest of her life.’
‘That’s sad.’ Enzo grieved for Georgette, too. After everything that had happened to her, she had surely deserved some happiness. ‘But she always had you.’
The sadness now in Anny’s smile was almost painful. ‘She did. Although I was never quite able to shake off the feeling that somehow she saw Lange every time she looked at me. The sins of the father, and all that. Claire never carried that taint. Sadly, she passed before I did, so on my death I will leave the house to her daughter, Elodie, and it will remain w
ithin the family.’
‘And the Mona Lisa?’
Sharp eyes flickered towards Enzo. ‘Back in the Louvre where she belongs.’
Enzo scratched his chin thoughtfully. ‘You know, it occurs to me that the reason both Narcisse and Bauer came here to seek you out was the belief that somehow you still possessed the Mona Lisa forgery. Passed on to you by your mother. After all, given its provenance, and the role it played in history, it must be worth a small fortune. Not to mention the story that goes with it. A bestseller if ever I heard one.’ He paused. ‘And, then, there is always the possibility that it wasn’t, after all, the original that was returned to the Louvre at the end of the war.’
Anny laughed. ‘You are letting your imagination run away with you, monsieur. Truth be told, there is actually no evidence whatsoever that such a forgery ever existed. It could just as easily have been a fanciful fabrication of my mother’s. A story to entertain. Or confuse.’
‘Confuse who?’
She shrugged and smiled. ‘Anyone who heard it.’
‘Well, I think that two men certainly heard it. Though not from you. Or your mother. And it’s why one of them is dead, and the other missing.’
Her smile faded, but it was clear to Enzo that she was going to say nothing further on the matter. He eased himself stiffly out of his armchair, and felt every ache and pain inflicted on him by the events of the night before. He said, ‘I have a notion that I might just know where that missing man is. And if’ – he caught and corrected himself – ‘when I find him, perhaps finally the truth will come out.’
CHAPTER THIRTY
It was very nearly a full moon. A hunter’s moon. And since it was the second one of the month, a blue moon also. Tomorrow, on a Halloween when the streets would be deserted, and children confined to their homes by the lockdown, it would reach fulfilment. But Enzo found it hard to believe that it could cast any more light than it did tonight. The causses, as he drove south on the narrow D20, shimmered in what seemed like daylight. Red rocky soil turned over for the coming winter, drystone walls glowing silver at the roadside, trees stripped of leaves casting deep, dark shadows. For the first time, Enzo realised why they called it a hunter’s moon. It was the last full moon of autumn, when night hunters could go out to stock the larder for the lean months ahead.
But Enzo did not have the luxury of waiting for tomorrow’s full moon to go in search of his man. From midnight tonight the lockdown would kick in and it would no longer be legal for him to be out and about.
Turning off at the tiny village of Miers to head cross-country, it took him another fifteen minutes to reach the junction where the road doubled back towards the Gouffre de Padirac.
The Gouffre de Padirac was a tourist construct a couple of kilometres from the village of Padirac itself. No one lived there. Bars and cafés, restaurants and hotels, bordered a long road lined by trees that led gently downhill to a sprawling white and red-brick building on the very edge of this huge black fissure in the earth. Beyond it, the Auberge du Gouffre cast long shadows in the moonlight, and a small park stretched away across the valley floor towards wooded countryside in the west. In summer, thousands of tourists would queue here for hours below long covered walkways to hand over their euros and enter the building, gaining access to the stairs and lifts that would take them deep into the bowels of the earth. But as Enzo cruised slowly down the hill, the place was utterly deserted. Shutters drawn. Not a single light in the windows of the three-storey Padirac Hotel. The ghosts of summer long gone, a bleak and desolate winter in prospect.
At the foot of the hill Enzo parked his car and stepped out into an eery silence. Street lights seemed superfluous in the phosphorescent light of the moon. He consulted a crude little map in the trifold advertising the gîte available for summer let. And followed a path along the far side of the park to where a gravel track cut away through long grass. A house sat up on the slope in the shade of several large oak trees.
He hardly needed his torch to find his way up to it, acorns and beech nuts breaking open underfoot. It was built into the side of the hill, a shallow Roman-tiled roof above a bungalow with cellar and terrace out front, a short flight of steps leading to the main door. All of its windows looked securely shuttered. A carport adjoining the left side of the house languished in deep shadow. Enzo shone his torch into the darkness and saw a racing bike leaning against the wall. And his heart began to beat just a little faster.
He made his way through the long grass to the far side of the property and climbed up to the back of it. A rear door opened on to an overgrown garden where fruit trees offered scented summer shade and escape from the sun. To the left of the door, shutters on a window stood almost imperceptibly ajar. Enzo directed the beam of his torch at them and saw splintered wood where they had been forced open.
He doused the light of the torch and tucked it into his belt before reaching up to swing them fully open. A pane of glass in the window beyond had been smashed, and as he stepped closer he heard it crunching beneath his feet. He looked around and spotted a white plastic table and two chairs beneath the nearest tree, green-streaked and discoloured by damp. He fetched one of the chairs to place beneath the window, and standing on it, pulled himself up on to the ledge. From here he could reach through the broken pane to release the clasp on the other side and push the window open. The house breathed warm air and the smell of stale cooking into his face. And something else that he couldn’t quite identify. Soap. Or perfume. Or, perhaps, aftershave. Carefully he grasped the window frame at each side and dropped silently into the dark.
He crouched for a moment, letting his eyes accustom themselves to the change in light, and listened intently for the slightest sound. But the silence was more profound than the dark, and he slowly stood up to take the torch from his belt.
It was perfectly possible that Bauer was long gone. That he had been here, Enzo was in no doubt. The bike in the carport was witness to that. But there was also a chance that he was still there. That he had heard Enzo climbing in through the window, perhaps seen his torchlight as he approached the house.
That torchlight now revealed him to be in a small bedroom. The bed was neatly made and had not been slept in. Enzo wondered about calling out. But if Bauer were here, and perhaps asleep, he didn’t want to alert him to his presence. He opened the door very gently and peered out into a narrow hallway that transected the house, gable to gable. Glazed double doors halfway along it gave on to a large front room. Enzo moved cautiously over the tiled floor and into the lounge. A wood-burning stove stood in a fireplace at one end, a dining table at the other. A sofa and armchairs were gathered around French windows that in summer would open on to the terrace and a view of the park, and the red and white entrance to the gouffre at the far side of it.
The table was strewn with documents and maps, and a pile of black leather-bound notebooks, all picked out in sharp relief by Enzo’s torch. There were several mugs containing the coagulated remains of half-drunk milky coffee. And something about the smell of this room told him that someone had been in it very recently.
Enzo crossed to the table and flicked one-handed through the pages of one of the notebooks, training his torch on it with the other. Faded ink and what he realised was neat German script. Nothing he could read. He played the light of his torch across the tabletop until it settled on the printout of an article from what he recognised as the local newspaper of the south-west, La Dépêche du Midi.
He picked it up and scanned it quickly. A dead tree brought down during a storm in the village of Carennac . . . the remains of a body . . . a German air force officer . . . a bullet hole in the cranium. Then Enzo froze. The park is overlooked by the house that once belonged to Georgette Pignal, famous for being tasked by de Gaulle during WW2 with keeping the Mona Lisa out of German hands. The house is still lived in by her daughter Anny.
So this is what had brought Bauer to Carennac. But more
than just the belief that the remains found in the park were those of his grandfather, he must have known, somehow, about the copy of the Mona Lisa. Must have thought that, even if she didn’t have it herself, Anny must know where it is. Enzo laid the article back on the table and found himself thinking the same thing himself. It couldn’t simply have disappeared.
He caught the movement out of the corner of his eye too late. A figure took shape, materialising from the dark, to club him to the ground with a fist like iron. The force with which he hit the floor knocked all the breath from Enzo’s lungs, and his torch went skidding away across the floor, casting crazily dancing shadows around the walls. Until it smashed against the stove, plunging the room into darkness.
His assailant stepped quickly over his body and ran through the hall. As he pulled himself groggily to his knees, Enzo was aware of the front door opening and he called out, ‘Bauer! For God’s sake, Bauer. I’m here to help you.’ But he heard the man’s feet clattering away down the steps and off into the night.
Wearily he staggered to his feet and raised a hand to his cheek. He felt blood, and a swelling coming up already beneath his skin. He hurried through the hall and out into the moonlight washing across the terrace, and saw the figure of Bauer running down the hill towards the park. Had there been hunters about, they could have fixed him easily in their sights.
Enzo sighed. ‘I’m too fucking old for this,’ he breathed at the night, and started down the steps after him.
