Kohler nudged the door open but by then Louis was right behind him.
Juliette Jouvet withdrew into herself. They were all in the shop now and gathered about the trunk which the professor was opening. The one called St-Cyr stood next to the far end, while Herr Kohler stood back a little so as to watch the others and herself.
She had a good view from behind the actress and her lover. She had thought it the very best of positions, for it gave a chance to think and to try to calm herself though Herr Kohler could see her clearly enough. He knew she had been terrified up there in that room. He knew she was hiding something.
They had not forced her to reveal where her mother’s hiding-place was, not yet. For that Herr Oelmann would have to wait and so would the Professor but now each would compete with the other to get her alone and she did not know which to fear the most.
The Professor was pale from being indoors a lot. Indeed, now that she could examine him more clearly, she felt that the stories maman had told her as a child had been absolutely true. Like so many of his colleagues, Professor Courtet had always had others to do the work of excavating for him. The skin of his hands was smooth and soft-looking, the nails fastidiously trimmed. An expert, yes, of course, but one who preferred to keep his distance from the things he studied whereas her father, unlike most other prehistorians, had been just the opposite.
The last strap came undone, the lid was opened. Nearer to her, an arm swung down, a hand was pressed flat. The fabric of the Baroness’s zebra-striped dress rippled as it was smoothed.
At the opening of the trunk, Toto Lemieux had chosen to comfort the Baroness in the only way he knew. By fondling her seat while everyone else was distracted! Everyone but herself, the daughter, who had watched the two of them as they had kissed and played with each other under the waterfall and then had climbed naked to the cave, to enter it and each other.
Wrapped in a brown chamois and tied with stout white cord, the figurines lay in a bundle on the partitioned upper tray of the Abbé Brûlé’s trunk. His leather-bound journal was there beside that bundle, and next to these things were her father’s journals, all twelve of them. Five from that first season’s work, seven from the second, just as maman had said.
There were handaxes and other specimens of stone tools in the several compartments which varied in size so as to accommodate everything, even the extra nails and twine the good abbe had used to peg out his layers, the measuring tape too — a dressmaker’s tape. Again, it was just as maman had always said.
The cord around the chamois was being untied.
‘Professor, a moment, please,’ said the Sûreté, his pipe cupped in a hand — ah, she had not seen him even light it! The one called Kohler was no longer where he had been standing. Herr Oelmann was looking at her. What does he see? she asked herself and silently wept.
‘Professor, you were a contemporary of Henri-Georges Fillioux,’ said St-Cyr with a little toss of his pipe-hand. ‘What was he like?’
Ah damn the Sûreté! thought Courtet acidly, his glasses winking in the light. ‘Jealous. Insidiously private and secretive. Very possessive of his research. Young to the point of being arrogant beyond his years. We were both assistants under Mouton at the Sorbonne. Henri-Georges went to war and I stayed on. It was a toss-up. Old Mouton said that even though our families might think to shield us from the cannon, he would see that the nation at least got a half-measure of our powder. A fifty-centime piece was tossed.’
‘And he won,’ breathed Herr Kohler who was now standing directly behind her — why … why had he moved himself so close? wondered Juliette.
‘Yes, he won, if you wish to put it that way.’
‘I do,’ — she heard Herr Kohler saying this even as the Professor’s dark brown eyes fell from looking at him to momentarily settle on herself with a coldness that hurt so much she could not meet his gaze.
She let her eyes settle on Lemieux’s hand to watch the lover brazenly caress the Baroness.
A hush fell on the gathering as, side by side and perhaps no taller than the length of her hand, the soft yellow stone figurines lay revealed on their little rumpled bed of brown suede as if in the exhaustion of having just made love fifty thousand years ago. The arms were cut off almost at the shoulders so that they, with the bodies and the very simply crafted heads, formed the two crosses the Abbé Brûlé had been so excited about.
The legs were long and straight — rigid from their loving. The hips of the woman were somewhat broader than those of the man. Only at his waist had the ancient sculptor carved a girdle from which to hang a pouch of stone tools.
‘Adam and Eve,’ said Courtet.
‘Cro-Magnon,’ said Louis. ‘Upper Palaeolithic and no older than about 20,000 years, as are similar things from other sites.’
‘It is as I have thought myself, Inspector,’ acknowledged Courtet reluctantly. ‘But the abbe’s notes position the figurines much lower in the gisement. Henri-Georges was most thorough in pin-pointing the exact stratum. Those, he said, were found with the chunky, flint tools of Neanderthal and are Mousterian in age, so far, far older. Perhaps fifty thousand years.’
‘But those are not all that was found,’ said the Baroness softly. ‘Show them the amulet. Here, let me.’ She moved away from her friend.
‘Ah no, madame. No. Not even if my life is to be forfeited,’ seethed Courtet.
‘But I’m going to wear it in the film?’
‘No, you’re not!’ hissed Courtet quivering. ‘We are having a replica made. Did you think for one minute I would let you handle them again?’
You fool, swore Kohler. You don’t know what you’re saying to that woman.
‘Baroness, it’s all right. It’s all being taken care of,’ soothed Franz Oelmann. ‘The Reich’s prehistorian, Herr Eisner, has okayed everything, Professor. The replicas are to be used after the Baroness has first opened the trunk to reveal the figurines. She will put on the amulet then as that one’s mother did.’
The amulet …?’ began Juliette only to stop herself and ask inwardly, Maman … Maman, what is this he is saying about your wearing it?
A knotted thong had been thoughtfully provided and yes, the tongue-shaped bauble of deerhorn had probably been polished thousands of years ago, and yes, it had been engraved with the primitive incisions of some ancient scribe but was it any more than twenty thousand years old? wondered St-Cyr, and concluded, no.
The cluster of sharp, short incisions gave no pattern. Some were parallel to the length of the piece, some at right angles to it. Some had a short barb at one end, either slanting to the left or right. Clearly they had been cut by working the point of a flint burin back and forth. The shavings would have been blown out from time to time but did the markings mean anything? Were they the first sign of written language?
Only when Courtet had taken a small, marked disc of tracing paper from his wallet and had slid this over the scratches, did they see the swastika among them.
‘At least fifty thousand years old,’ he said. ‘Henri-Georges was always an advocate of greater age than anyone else, but I have to conclude that he was correct.’
‘Fifty thousand years,’ said someone.
‘Perhaps far more,’ whispered Juliette. Maman, she cried inwardly. Maman, what is this?
‘A swastika,’ breathed Kohler.
‘Yes,’ said Courtet. ‘I do not doubt it for a moment and neither does my colleague from the Reich, the Herr Dr Professor Eisner.’
‘The greatest discovery of all time,’ said the Baroness. ‘Now you see why the filming of Moment of Discovery is so important and why the Reichsminister Dr Goebbels is urging us to keep to the schedule.’
St-Cyr drew on his pipe in quiet contemplation. The amulet was certainly very old, the figurines also. And true, one could sometimes make unexpected patterns out of primitive scratches but nom de Dieu, was this not going too far?
Hermann seemed to think so too, but still gazed on the objects with the rapt attention of a small
boy at a carnival.
The Sûreté had best clear the throat and the air. ‘Professor, upstairs in the room my partner overheard you saying something about another chamber?’
‘Ah, the grotte, yes. After I had visited the cave with Madame Fillioux, I went back to study it alone. I had the journals of your father madame, and that of the abbe. I felt certain though that they both had missed something. Henri-Georges … your father, madame, he was always too intense, too patient with his little investigations. Every grain of sand had to be examined and accounted for. The gisement was there at the mouth of the cave and, yes, this suggested a place of lengthy habitation, not a grotte for the worship of creatures of the hunt. But the cave, it has two entrances, yes? A much smaller one to the east, one not much used since it is barely large enough to slither through. A ventilation conduit for the smoke of their fires perhaps. This entrance suggested to me that there might possibly be further openings and I persisted.’
Good for you, was that it, eh? snorted Kohler inwardly.
Courtet went on. ‘I found a fissure and rocks that, on close examination, revealed lime had been redeposited to cement the gaps. Clays washed in from the plateau above had contributed to the hiding of the opening of this new chamber. Believe me, the paintings are magnificent, Inspectors. For an hour or more I walked along the ancient channel beneath them, looking up always and aided only by the beam of my torch. Then I could no longer help myself. Ah, I could not. I knelt, as those early hunters must have done, in abject prayer. My moment of discovery.’
‘Dr. Goebbels should see them then,’ said Kohler firmly. ‘I’ll let Sturmbannführer Boemelburg know of it. He and Gestapo Mueller are old friends. They’ll impress upon the Reichminister the importance of his coming here to consecrate the site.’
‘After he’s seen the film,’ said Oelmann tightly. ‘Do we have clearance to shoot the initial scenes here at the house?’
‘Clearance …? Ah no. No, I’m afraid not,’ said the Sûreté. ‘Not until the victim’s living quarters have been dusted for fingerprints.’
‘But there was no body, no murder here?’ objected Courtet. ‘Surely there is now no need for further delays?’
‘Well?’ demanded Oelmann.
‘Yes, please tell us,’ insisted the Baroness.
The hand with its pipe was given that little toss Kohler had come to know so well. ‘A day, two days … perhaps a week. Until I am certain no one has searched through Madame Fillioux’s personal belongings, that attic is sealed.’
‘But that’s impossible,’ swore Oelmann, darting an accusing glance at the professor. ‘Filming is to begin up there.’
‘But the trunk, it had lain in the cellars, had it not?’ said Louis.
‘They lived up there,’ countered Oelmann harshly. ‘We want to record the poverty. It’s important to show how she lived. She did not realize the true meaning of what she had stumbled upon.’
Ah, the wonder of celluloid, thought Kohler. An ignorant sixteen-year-old peasant girl portrayed by a thirty-five-year-old Austrian baroness with a bottom that liked to be polished.
* * *
The heat was on, the noonday silence of the village seemingly impenetrable. As St-Cyr and Kohler shared a cigarette, Franz Oelmann tinkered with the car’s engine while Courtet, morose and silent, sat on his precious trunk refusing to budge until Lemieux came back to guard it. Not wanting to return to Lascaux just yet, the Baroness and her Toto had gone to find the village’s only café. Juliette Jouvet had retreated to the river to avoid Herr Oelmann and seek solace in her loneliness.
‘Louis, this thing …,’ began Kohler, and St-Cyr could tell his partner was really worried. ‘A fucking swastika on a bit of deer-horn fifty thousand or even twenty thousand years old. Goebbels and Himmler — der Führer, for Christ’s sake. Ah verdammt, what are we to do? Take the Baron’s offer of 250,000 apiece to look the other way or get stubborn?’
Hermann had never looked the other way. ‘Remain calm. Try to think as Madame Fillioux would have done.’
Kohler took a deep drag before handing the cigarette over. ‘Postcards from the father’s parents in Paris.’
‘Pleas for food Madame Fillioux ignored until two days before her death.’
‘Postcards from the Professor he absolutely has to have returned. 10,000 francs and a visit to that cave with her.’
‘Then miraculously he finds the paintings in another part of the cave, having already come into possession of the trunk.’
‘A cave she must have known only too well,’ grumbled the Bavarian. ‘Our schoolteacher receives a frantic telephone call from the mother and pays the cave two visits before successfully retrieving the mortar and lumps of pyrolusite. She lies about the first visit. She thinks someone was watching her on the second. Could it have been that husband of hers?’
‘Our veteran.… Perhaps, but are there postcards from her father, Hermann? Postcards her mother didn’t tell her of? Is this not what she is now worrying about? Everything suggests Madame Fillioux thought her long-dead husband had returned but our victim also knew Professor Courtet.’
‘Yet she laid out the picnic as for the husband,’ said Kohler, exhaling smoke through his nostrils in exasperation. ‘Champagne was left at the site. She didn’t bring it but did the husband? His flask is found — she couldn’t have had that, could she? Christ, so many went AWOL in that last war, who could blame them.’
St-Cyr took the cigarette from him to savour it. ‘Henri-Georges was very skilled in the use and making of stone tools but is Professor Courtet?’
‘Not according to the daughter. She even challenged him to make one. When she was a child, the mother told her Courtet and her father hated each other.’
‘And now the Professor has everything Henri-Georges once had.’
A cave, a trunk and now a film and fame. ‘Oelmann must be Himmler’s man on location, Louis. If that cave really is a forgery, our friend from the SS will do everything necessary to keep it quiet. They’re in too deep.’
Everything including killing the woman? But what of the sous-facteur Auger, wondered St-Cyr. What of the daughter’s husband?
Only time would tell, and time was something they did not have.
5
BEYOND THE DIRT TRACK THAT LED TO THE VILlage, the road climbed tortuously into the hills. Oak woods crowded closely, sweet chestnut grew near each habitation, and where sufficient land could be cleared and the soil was right, walnut plantations had been set out. But after nearly ten kilometres, they knew they had to turn back, knew also that they had been deliberately led astray.
Subdued and pale in the back seat beside Louis, Madame Jouvet had been giving herself time to think and had let them pass the turn-off.
‘Well? snapped Oelmann.
She was sickened by the little smile he gave. ‘The lane is very difficult to see. Monsieur Auger lives alone and uses a bicycle, so does not often need the fullness of an Autobahn.’
Touché, was that it? wondered St-Cyr, wishing she hadn’t let Oelmann get the better of her. ‘Madame, is it that you are afraid the sous-facteur has also been murdered?’
She dropped her eyes so swiftly it startled him. She turned away to stare at a fine old tree. The car crept along through woods where raspberries grew in summer and the voices of her mother and those of her children on holiday would come to her.
When they found it, the lane pitched downhill and, rather than chance the wash-outs, Oelmann said he would stay with the car.
Kohler didn’t like it one bit. Oelmann was only stalling. The bastard was going to follow at a distance.
They walked in silence. The wash-outs deepened. On the steepest slope, the lane became a scree of pale yellow boulders among the trees, and it was alongside this that a rope had been placed.
‘Auger would have had to carry the bicycle,’ breathed Kohler, shaking his head. Rather than fix the bloody road, the sous-facteur had probably written to the authorities and, having heard nothing, had got his ba
ck up and refused to do a thing. A stubborn man.
‘Madame,’ hazarded St-Cyr still looking at the scree, ‘would your husband and his friends in the LVF know of this farm?’
‘André …? But… but with his leg, monsieur? Surely you don’t think.…’
‘I am merely asking about his friends, madame. They are to march in the Bastille Day parade. To do so, implies a certain mobility.’
‘André would … would not have killed Monsieur Auger, Inspector. He had no reason to.’
She waited for him to ask, But what about killing your mother? She knew this was what he really wanted to say but he let the silence do its work.
Using the rope, they picked their way down the hill and when, at last, they had reached the bottom-lands, they saw the farm beside a bend in the river. The stone cottage with its tiled roof was all but hidden in a grove of walnut trees on the far side of a small pasture where a russet mare paused in grazing to flick her tail and stare at them. The sound of geese came from behind the cottage. There were no cows to milk.
‘He’s not alive,’ she said desperately. ‘No smoke comes from the chimney.’
The place was too quiet. ‘It’s summer. He’d only need the fire just before dawn and maybe in the evening,’ breathed Kohler. ‘Why’d he live alone like this?’
‘Why? Because it is the land of his father and when his older brother was killed in the last war, the farm fell to him.’
‘A bachelor,’ said St-Cyr, carefully searching the landscape for every last detail.
‘My mother was the only woman he ever loved, Inspectors. Though she refused him, she needed him and in her need, there was a kind of contentment for him. He never gave up trying and I was always the daughter he had never had. I loved him as a father.’
‘Ah merde, stay here, then, with Hermann.’
‘Try down by the river if … if he is not in the cottage. He … he liked to go fishing and would have spent all his time doing so if it had been possible.’
‘But only on a Sunday would he have had the time,’ sighed St-Cyr.
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