The Night Gate - Enzo MacLeod Investigation Series 07 (2021)

by Peter May

  ‘Is there?’ Schneider very slowly and deliberately unclipped his holster and drew out his pistol. With a ramrod-straight arm he pointed it directly at Huygue, the muzzle a matter of centimetres from his forehead. ‘Well, this is my authority, and it outranks anything your precious Kunstschutz might have to say on the subject.’ In a movement so fast and unexpected that it took everyone by surprise, he grasped the pistol by its barrel and clubbed Huygue across the head with the butt of it.

  Huygue dropped immediately to his knees. His hand flew to his forehead, coming away with blood on the fingers. But he made no sound. Schneider reholstered his weapon and turned to the others.

  ‘Down!’ He pointed at the ground, and everyone fell to their knees to stretch themselves out on the warm castine. ‘Not you!’ He grabbed Georgette by the arm as she was about to do the same. ‘You’ll take my men round the château. Every room in the place. And you’ll open any crate they ask you to.’

  It took almost an hour to pass through every room in the building, stopping frequently to uncrate random works of art for inspection. Georgette was intimidated by the eyes on her. Six war-weary young men with appetites that had been denied them by conflict. There was not a smile among them, nor a single moment of human empathy. She felt their contempt for her at the same time as their animal appraisal. And she was afraid.

  When finally they reached the salle des gardes, one of them kicked over her camp bed, tipping its sheets and blankets across the floor. ‘What’s this?’ he said. The only one of them who had any French.

  ‘It’s where I sleep.’

  She saw them exchanging glances. ‘Alone?’

  ‘There’s not exactly room for two,’ she said.

  He lowered his face towards hers. ‘Don’t be so fucking insolent.’ Then he nodded towards the crate with the three red dots. ‘Open it.’

  Georgette began to panic. Could there be anyone in the world who would not recognise the face of the Mona Lisa? And who knew what would happen if they did. ‘It’s just a painting,’ she said.

  ‘Open it!’ He bawled in her face.

  But she stood firm. ‘It’s too delicate to be exposed to the sunlight.’ And was unprepared for the rifle butt that clubbed her to the ground. Her head struck the flagstones and light exploded in her skull. Almost immediately she was being yanked back to her feet and dragged out through the entrance hall to the courtyard.

  Schneider was sitting on one of the stone benches, in the shade of the trees at the far side of the square. He stood immediately, throwing his cigarette away across the gravel, sending up a shower of sparks, and strode across to the group emerging into the sunlight. One of the troops was carrying the crate that held the Mona Lisa, and the soldier who had struck Georgette held her arm in a vice-like grip. She could barely stand, and felt blood trickling down the side of her face.

  A rapid-fire exchange that she didn’t understand passed between the commanding officer and his men before he turned to Georgette. ‘I’m told you obstructed the opening of this crate.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I advised against it because of the fragile nature of the painting inside.’

  ‘I told you to open any crate they asked you to.’

  She pulled her arm free of the soldier who held it and straightened up defiantly. ‘And there are some things just too precious to be exposed to the elements. But then, I wouldn’t expect a man like you to understand that.’

  She had half expected it, but the open palm that he took across the side of her face still knocked her over and left her sprawling in the gravel. ‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’ he shouted.

  She glared up at him with hatred in her eyes. ‘I think you just answered your own question.’

  He turned away and barked a command at the nearest soldier, who immediately drew a long-bladed knife from his belt and began prising open the wooden crate. The sound of nails freeing themselves from the grain of the wood echoed back at them off the carved stonework of the château, and the soldier pulled away the protective leatherette and fireproof paper to expose the Mona Lisa to the gaze of every man and woman in the courtyard. A face that stared back at them across four centuries.

  ‘Mein Gott,’ she heard Schneider whisper.

  ‘What the hell is going on here?’ A familiar voice rang out through the still, warm air.

  Schneider spun around to see a figure in field-grey army uniform and peaked cap striding across the courtyard towards them. He looked at the rank on the newcomer’s epaulettes and curled his lip in a sneer. ‘How dare you, Hauptmann! You are outranked here, and this is none of your business.’

  Paul Lange reached into an inside pocket and drew out a folded sheet of paper which he shook open and held in front of the Standartenführer’s face. ‘I don’t think you outrank the Führer,’ he said. ‘And I am here on his business.’

  Schneider cast eyes across the sheet of paper that Lange held before him, and Georgette saw the skin tighten across his face. Lange gave him time to read, then carefully folded it away, and slipped it back into his jacket. He turned towards Georgette, holding out a hand to help her back to her feet, and looked with concern at the blood trickling from her hair. Red welts were raising themselves across her face where Schneider had struck her.

  He wheeled around to smash a clenched fist squarely into the face of the SS officer, knocking him into the dust of the courtyard. And every rifle was suddenly trained upon him. He ignored them and glared at Schneider with contempt. ‘What kind of barbarian are you?’ He had raised his voice only a little. ‘A German officer does not strike an unarmed woman.’ He turned towards the open crate. ‘This is the world’s most famous painting, exposed to full sunlight in a dusty courtyard. It needs to be repacked immediately and taken indoors.’ A flick of his head raised several curators to their feet, and they collected the crate and the packing to carry them quickly back into the château.

  Schneider was on his feet again, wiping blood from his face with the back of his hand. He picked up his SS Panzer field cap and his humiliation was almost painful. But regardless of Lange’s apparent rank, the man carried a piece of paper that superseded pips and stripes, and Schneider knew better than to question it. He did his best to recover his dignity, reaching into an inside pocket to produce a folded sheaf of documents which he held out towards Lange. ‘I have papers, too. Orders to search the château and arrest a guard here called Jean-Luc Percet.’

  Lange ignored his papers. ‘Well, you’ve searched the château. Check the documents of the guards, and if you find your man, arrest him and be gone.’

  Fear for Jean-Luc rose again in Georgette’s breast, and she quickly searched the faces of everyone in the courtyard only to realise that Jean-Luc was gone. Somehow, in all the distraction, he had seized his opportunity to slip away. Through the château, no doubt, out into the kitchen garden on the blind side and away across the fields to the safety of the woods.

  Nonetheless, everybody stood tense in the midday heat, as soldiers examined the papers of every person in the courtyard. When they failed to turn up the suspected Maquis leader, Schneider spat in the castine and threw a dangerous glance at Lange with icy blue eyes. ‘If we ever meet again, Hauptmann, there will be a reckoning.’

  He jumped back into his Kübelwagen, and with spinning wheels throwing dust and chippings up into the fibrillating air, he accelerated out through the gate. His men ran at the double to their waiting troop carrier and scrambled on board. Within minutes the roar of its diesel engine, and the growl of the tanks that awaited it at the foot of the hill, became a distant echo.

  There was an almost audible sigh of collective relief, but still nobody spoke. Most eyes turned towards Huygue, who gently touched the wound on his head. The blood had dried, coagulating quickly in the sun, but a swelling like an egg had raised itself on his temple, and the bruising all around it was already starting to show. He glanced at Lang
e. ‘Thank you, Hauptmann,’ he said.

  But Lange ignored him. He turned, concerned, to Georgette, and took a handkerchief from his pocket to wipe the blood from her face. ‘Do you live in the château?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Then you should go home and get that wound dressed. Is it far?’

  She shrugged. ‘Thirteen, fourteen kilometres.’

  He seemed surprised. ‘You have a car?’

  She smiled at his naivety. ‘A bicycle.’

  ‘Good God,’ he said. ‘You can’t cycle fourteen kilometres in this state. I’ll give you a lift.’

  Georgette flushed self-consciously and glanced towards Huygue. ‘I’ll be fine.’

  ‘I insist. You could be concussed.’

  Now she felt Huygue’s eyes on her and couldn’t meet them. All the weapons they had removed from the château the night before were neatly stacked beneath a tarpaulin in her cellar.

  Lange’s car was parked at the foot of the hill. A brightly coloured green, open-topped sports car with extravagant front wheel arches that ran the length of its extended bonnet to running boards that stepped up to a two-seater bench seat behind the wheel. It was dusty from the drive down from Paris, its windscreen smeared with dead flies. Still, it was the kind of car Georgette had not seen since before the war.

  ‘Where did you steal this?’ she asked.

  ‘I bought it. In Paris.’

  ‘Do ERR have car showrooms now, as well as department stores?’

  He chuckled. ‘You never change, do you? I have no idea who owned it before. But it’s British. An MG T-type. Drives like a dream.’

  As Lange strapped her bike to the leather roof folded back above the boot, Georgette glanced up the hill towards the château. Turrets and chimneys rising from steeply pitched slated roofs above honey-yellow stone. And she knew that in the Chambre de Nine Huygue would be washing his wounds and panicking about what Lange might find when he got Georgette back to Carennac.

  They drove along the tree-lined main road to where it veered off southward towards Gramat, and a huge old farm building sat up on the rocks, with views out across the valley. Lange took the turn-off to Carennac, and followed the tiny River Bave to where it would debouch eventually into the slow-moving westbound waters of the Dordogne. He glanced across at Georgette in the passenger seat and saw her hair blown back from her forehead in undulating waves like water. ‘How’s the head?’

  ‘A bit sore. But I’ll live.’

  He grinned. ‘I never doubted it.’ Then hesitated. ‘Feel up to taking a little diversion? It’s a beautiful day. We shouldn’t let the Germans spoil it.’

  She looked at him curiously, but he kept his eyes trained straight ahead of him. ‘Present company excepted, presumably.’

  He smiled without looking at her. ‘Like everything else,’ he said, ‘there are good ones and bad.’

  They turned off little more than a kilometre later, and wound up into the hills on a road so narrow that they would have been forced to back into a field had they met anything coming the other way. The climb grew steeper, and Georgette could hear the MG’s engine straining. The road doubled back on itself through a copse of trees and over a tiny bridge, before emerging again into the early afternoon sunshine, and the whole valley of the Dordogne opened up below them.

  This was not somewhere Georgette had ever come with her bike, and the view was breathtaking. Sunlight shimmered across the patchwork valley, ripening crops glowing gold in fields of wheat and barley, the river itself like shining loops of silver ribbon serpentining randomly between the cliffs that rose distantly on either side. In the shimmering heat, the red stone of the château of Castelnau glowed pink on the far bank, and from where Lange drew his MG into the opening to a hayfield, they had a view east beyond the turrets of Montal, to the towers that clustered around the hilltop above Saint-Céré.

  A stone bench stood set into the hillside just below the road, and Lange helped Georgette climb down to join him, sitting on the warm stone to gaze out at the view. Nothing disturbed the silence of the land, except for the singing of the birds, the hum of myriad insects, and the far-off clang of cowbells ringing out across the hillside.

  For a long time they sat, reluctant to spoil the moment. She felt the warmth of his body at her side, almost burning where they touched. Eventually she said, ‘Do you think, if we had met under different circumstances, things would have been different between us?’

  ‘In some ways, yes.’

  She turned her head to look at him. ‘What ways?’

  He smiled. ‘I’d have had to work much harder to get you to come to my apartment for dinner.’ The smile turned sad. ‘And you wouldn’t have hated me just because I was German.’

  ‘I never hated you because you were German.’

  He turned amused eyes towards her. ‘Oh? So why was it you hated me?’

  ‘Do we have time? We could be here all afternoon.’

  Now he laughed. ‘That’s what I love about you, George. You never take me too seriously.’

  She felt a slight constriction of her throat, and an increase in her heart rate, and she wondered if there was anything else about her that he loved. She said, ‘I take your friend Karlheinz Wolff very seriously.’

  ‘He’s not my friend.’

  ‘But I take it that’s why you’re here. Because he is.’

  He nodded.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘He’s staying in a hotel at Gramat.’

  She turned to look out once again across the valley. The birdsong seemed discordant now, the cowbells, like John Donne’s bells, tolled for her. No longer did she see sunlight spinning gold across the land. Only the shadows it cast. Somehow, suddenly, it felt as if the endgame was very near. And fear chilled her in spite of the heat.

  He said, ‘I’ve been back in Germany again. She’s finally agreed to a divorce.’

  She was surprised. ‘Lost her faith?’

  He shook his head. ‘It was never about faith. Just a way to get at me. But now he wants her to marry him, so being a good Catholic doesn’t matter any more.’

  He took her hand in his, and both fear and pleasure suffused her, nearly drowning all other senses. She felt an arm around her shoulder and half turned towards him to find his lips on hers. Warm, moist, tender, and she opened her mouth to his as his tongue sought hers. And she lost herself in a kiss that seemed to last for hours. Like drowning in him. Before they both broke apart to come up for air.

  He looked at her with such searching tenderness, his fingertips on her face. ‘Let’s go,’ he whispered, and she was uncertain whether she should be disappointed or excited. They stood up and still he held her hand as he led her back up to the road.

  For the remainder of the drive to Carennac neither of them spoke, each lost in their own private thoughts. She was full of both trepidation and anticipation about their arrival at the house. About the decisions she would face. To commit or not. To give or withhold herself. It had been so long in coming, she had lost any sense of objectivity in how she should respond.

  He parked his car at the foot of the steps, and followed her up to the little terrace at the front door. As they stepped into the house she wondered why she had ever worried about him uncovering the stash of weapons in the cellar. It was the last place they would be going.

  And now it was she who held his hand as she took him through the kitchen and into the tiny bedroom at the back of the house. A decision that she seemed to have had no conscious part in making. They undressed quickly, silently, dropping their clothes where they stood. Sunlight angled across the bed through half-closed shutters as they fell together among the sheets and pillows. The hardness of his body pressed against the softness of hers. Somehow it all felt just so right. Why on earth had it taken them so long?

  Afterwards they lay for a very long time in a tangle of
sheets. The house was cool behind its thick stone walls, but the sunlight where it fell across the bed burned their skin. Georgette’s headache still lingered distantly, but banished from consciousness by pleasure, and now fear of a future that seemed impossible. She turned to lay her head on his shoulder, and idle fingers played with the tangle of hair on his chest.

  ‘When will it end, Paul?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The war.’

  She felt the cloud of his uncertainty shadow the moment. ‘I don’t know. I really don’t.’

  ‘Do you think we’ll survive it together? You and I?’

  ‘God, I hope so.’ She felt his fingers running through her hair, and they lay in silence for even longer now, neither of them wanting to bring this to an end.

  Eventually, she said, ‘I saw Wolff.’

  He sat up immediately, staring at her. ‘When?’

  ‘A long time ago. The day we arrived, and delivered all the large rolled-up canvasses to a place across the valley there. A little village called Bétaille. He was parked up just along the street, smoking a cigarette and watching us unload our cargo.’

  ‘What canvasses?’

  ‘Oh, The Wedding Feast at Cana and others. Nothing that would interest Wolff.’

  ‘So why was he there?’

  She felt his eyes on her, but kept hers fixed on the ceiling, wondering whether she should tell him or not. She shrugged, as if that might somehow put off the moment.

  ‘George?’

  He wasn’t going to let it go. She sighed. ‘The rolled canvasses are accompanied by several other, smaller pieces. One of them is catalogued as Sketch for the Feast. Its crate is uniquely colour-coded with three yellow dots.’

  ‘Why would Wolff be interested in that?’

  And finally she let it go. ‘Because that crate contains a duplicate of the Mona Lisa. A forgery so good, that you and I couldn’t tell the difference. Painted on poplar, just like the original, by the best forger in a century.’