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

by Peter May

  He was silent for so long that she was finally forced to drag her eyes away from the ceiling to look at him.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘He could only have been there because he knows that.’

  ‘That’s what I thought. Though, I’ve no idea how. There are only a handful of people alive who know about it.’ She hesitated. It was the last shred of her secret. ‘I’ve been instructed to swap it for the original, if I think the real one is in danger of being seized.’

  His blue eyes seemed to look right through her for some moments before refocusing. He touched her lips with a finger that he then ran down over her chin and breast, to graze a nipple and cause her to inhale sharply. ‘You should do it now,’ he said. ‘Before he thinks you will. Then when he makes his move he’ll have no idea you’ve beaten him to it. And if the forgery’s as good as you say it is, he won’t know that he doesn’t have the real thing.’

  And all Georgette could think of was that if Wolff ever managed to get his hands on the Mona Lisa, even if it was just the copy, he’d have had to come through her to get it.

  Lange was still staring at her. And as if he could read her thoughts he said, ‘I told you, George. Wherever Wolff is, I’ll be there, too. So don’t worry.’

  He’d been gone for hours now, promising that she would see him again in the next days. And she had remained naked and tangled among the bed sheets, fretting about the future, both short- and long-term. Although the latter, she knew, would not be an issue if the former turned out badly.

  Long before the sun vanished, she had drifted off into a shallow, dreamless sleep, waking only as night fell, and sitting up with a start. Her head was pounding, and though the blood had long ago dried, the head wound inflicted by the rifle butt still hurt.

  She climbed out of bed and padded into the bathroom to wash. Then spent the next few minutes in front of the mirror examining the wound on her forehead. She dabbed it carefully with boiled water but still it started to bleed again. She staunched the blood with an application of petroleum jelly that she found in a jar in the cupboard.

  Now she switched focus to look at herself. The upper right side of her face was badly bruised, and her left cheek still bore the evidence of the slap delivered by the German officer. Her hair was a mess. Cut short before the war, it had started to grow itself out in uneven tufts. And in the absence of a functioning hairdresser, she had spent the last four years cutting it herself. What in God’s name did Lange see in her?

  The thought made her smile. But it was a smile that quickly faded as the decision that confronted her displaced everything else. To switch the paintings or not. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, before opening them again to find herself staring at doubt.

  She went back to the bedroom to dress, then into the kitchen to make herself a cup of tea and sit cradling it alone at the long table. The painting was not big. Just seventy-seven centimetres by fifty-three. She knew, too, that the poplar board was not heavy. At the other side of the kitchen, she saw her leather-bound art folder propped against the wall. It would comfortably accommodate the size of the painting and some soft felt to protect it.

  She took a sip of her tea, cooled enough now not to burn her lips, and made her decision.

  It was a little after daybreak when Georgette cycled across the flood plain the next morning, her art folder strapped across her back. Wisps of mist rose from the river like smoke in the first heat of the sun. A long straight road cut across the valley, and she could see the red-brick of the church on the hill above Bétaille glowing in the early light.

  It took about fifteen minutes, and the guard on night shift at the double garage was finishing a final cigarette as he waited for his colleague to arrive and free him to head off to his billet and a well-earned sleep during the hours of daylight. She dismounted and leaned her bike against the gate and showed him her ID. ‘You’re not the usual girl,’ he said.

  She smiled. ‘We all have different skill sets. I’m here to check on the big canvasses today.’ All the works were inspected on a regular basis by assistant curators checking for signs of heat damage, or dampness, or mould, or invasions of insects.

  He flicked away his cigarette end. ‘You’re early.’

  ‘The girls tell me it gets pretty hot up there during the day.’ She nodded towards the apartment above the garage. She grinned. ‘Don’t want to be getting sweaty hands all over the canvasses.’

  He took her round the back and up steps to the door, unlocking it to let her in. ‘I’ll probably be away by the time you’re finished. I’ll let my colleague know you’re here.’

  When he’d gone, she stepped carefully over the half dozen large rolled canvasses that lay along the length of the hall and the room beyond it. The shutters were all closed, and sunlight lay in narrow strips across the floor where it squeezed in through lateral vents. To her left a small kitchen gave on to a larger room stacked floor to ceiling with other works on the inventory. Elaborately designed pre-war wallpaper had seen better days. With her copy of the inventory in her hand, she made her way down the hall, turning left towards a small toilet, and a room opening to her right where she knew the Sketch for the Feast was stored. Here the wallpaper was peeling from the walls, an old fireplace shuttered off, soot lying thick all around the hearth. The crated paintings were stacked against the wall opposite, and it took Georgette nearly ten minutes, moving each one with great care, to find what she was looking for. The crate with the three yellow dots.

  She carried it out into the hall to prop against the wall, before swinging the art folder from her back and opening it out on the floor. From her satchel she took out a small hammer and a chisel and very gently prised open the case. Peeling back the leatherette and the fireproof paper she set eyes for the first time on the reproduction of La Joconde. She pushed open the toilet door to let light from a window high up on the wall above the cistern spill out into the hall, and turned back to the painting.

  She knelt down and gazed at it with an overwhelming sense of déjà vu. She had seen the Mona Lisa so many times, touched her, bathed in the light of her presence, examined the brush strokes da Vinci had laid down with such tenderness on this poplar panel four hundred years ago. Cast critical eyes over the film of finely cracked paint and varnish that they called craquelure, damage that time had wrought to scar her beauty.

  She found that she was holding her breath. It hardly seemed possible that this was not the real thing. She had not understood, until now, how Jaujard could claim to have been unable to tell it apart from the original. In the last two years, no one had been more intimate with the Mona Lisa than she. Like a lover she had slept with for all those months. And yet here, in the sunshine that slanted down across the hallway, she found herself doubting if this was the copy or the original. She touched it with a reverence born of incredulity. If she could not tell them apart, then neither could Wolff.

  The sound of male voices drifted up from outside. The changing of the guard broke the spell. Quickly she lifted the painting from its crate and laid it on the soft felt with which she had lined her art folder the night before. She folded in the top and bottom flaps and tied it shut, then quickly reassembled the crate to restore it to its place in the stack against the wall of the front room. When it was safe to do so, she would return with the original and the switch would be complete. Only she and Lange would know it had been done and Wolff, she was sure, would suspect nothing. After all, there was no immediate or apparent threat to La Joconde at the Château de Montal. Why would she have swapped them?

  Still, as she cycled away across the river valley, she harboured a niggling doubt about what she had done. Suppose what she had always taken for the original was really the copy. That Jaujard was somehow playing a game of double bluff, and had made her unwittingly complicit in the deception. She shook her mind free of the thought. It was, she knew, just the uncanny quality of the reproduction that ha
d unsettled her. She was doing the right thing.

  She felt the weight of it on her back. A load that far outweighed any reading which might be obtained by placing it on the scales. The weight of four hundred years of history. She put her head down and pedalled faster, heading back to the house in Carennac where she would transfer it to the cardboard suitcase which had accompanied her on this whole extended adventure.

  It was late morning by the time Georgette arrived at the château, the suitcase strapped to the back of her bike. As she wheeled it across the courtyard one of the guards quipped, ‘Not leaving us for that German, are you, George?’

  She forced herself to laugh as naturally as she could. ‘You don’t get rid of me that easy, Fred.’ She patted the suitcase. ‘Just a change of bed sheets for my camp bed after those brutes stamped all over them yesterday.’

  She went into the salle des gardes and gathered up her old bed sheets where they still lay strewn across the floor next to her upturned camp bed. She righted the bed and folded the sheets and blanket neatly on top of it, before sliding her suitcase underneath. Then she ran up the vaulted stairwell, sunlight streaming in, top and bottom. The whole château seemed to glow in the light of the reprieve of yesterday’s search by the Germans. At the top of the steps she turned right along the hallway and into the Chambre de Nine, where Huygue sat at a desk pushed in beneath the window. He slept in the apparent luxury of a four-poster bed set against the near wall, among yet more crates of paintings.

  He turned as he heard her and quickly stood up. ‘Shut the door behind you.’ The bruising on his forehead was already yellowing around its outer edges, a dressing on the wound inflicted by Schneider’s pistol grip. He lowered his voice. ‘What the hell, George? I’ve been worried sick.’

  ‘About me, or your precious stash of guns?’

  He glared at her, and she crossed to where the crate with the three red dots leaned against the wall beside his desk. She crouched down to examine it. ‘Is she alright?’

  ‘Yes, thank God.’ He let out a long sigh. ‘What’s going on between you and that German?’

  She looked at him sharply. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You know perfectly well what I mean. He knew you.’

  She stood up. ‘Yes. He was a regular at the Jeu de Paume when I was in Paris. He’s with the Kunstschutz. You do what these people tell you or you suffer the consequence.’

  ‘What was he doing here?’

  She shrugged. ‘On some kind of unannounced tour of all the depots, apparently. So we can probably expect him back. It’s just as well he chose to show up yesterday.’

  She glanced down at Huygue’s desk and saw that he was updating some kind of journal. 31 mai: ouverture de la caisse contenant la Vierge d’Autun. Opening of the case containing the Virgin of Autun. Which Georgette knew to be a painting by Jan van Eyck dating from around 1435, depicting the Virgin Mary presenting baby Jesus to Chancellor Rolin in his church of Notre-Dame-du-Chastel in Autun in Burgundy. A bizarre portrait commissioned by Rolin himself showing him with mother and son in his church. A priceless work, in more ways than one.

  She returned her attention to Huygue. ‘You’d better move those weapons out of my cellar in case he comes back. He showed a great deal of interest in the property. It was all I could do to get rid of him.’

  That night she stayed over at the château as usual, the Mona Lisa in her crate propped at the head of her camp bed. But Georgette was unable to sleep. She made coffee after coffee and sat in the dark through the early hours of the morning until she was certain that everyone else in the château was asleep.

  She could see the guard perched on the wall beyond the gate to the courtyard, smoking as he always did to relieve his boredom through the hours of darkness. Earlier the moon had risen in a startlingly clear sky, to cast its luminance across the landscape and lay a dazzling white sheen on the castine of the courtyard, broken only by the shadows of trees around its perimeter.

  She placed the suitcase on her bed, opening it up to unfold the green felt wrapped around the painting she had stowed inside, and was struck all over again by the uncannily familiar image she unveiled. Quickly she opened up the crate that held the real Mona Lisa and for just a moment placed the two side by side against the wall. It seemed almost supernatural. The same smile twice. The same gaze in two pairs of eyes that never left her. Then hurriedly she fitted the doppelgänger into the crate with the red dots, replacing the wrappings, and closed it up. With shaking hands, she lifted La Joconde to take the place of her imposter in the suitcase, carefully swaddling her in green felt.

  She slid the suitcase back under the camp bed and lay down to stare up into the vaults, aware that her whole body was trembling, her breath coming in short, rapid bursts, as if she had just run a hundred metres.

  The deed was done.

  It was just a week later, on June 6, that news reached the château of the Allied invasion of Normandy, and it sent a buzz of fear and expectation through all of the staff stationed there. Already there were reports of German divisions heading up from the south, making their way north to join the battle to repel the invaders. Under constant attack from guerrilla groups of Maquis fighters, the Germans were exacting terrible reprisals on the civilian population as they went.

  The following day Huygue took Georgette aside to tell her that several maquisards fighters would be calling by the house in Carennac in the next day or two to recover the weapons from her cellar. ‘The Germans will be here in the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours,’ he said.

  They crossed the courtyard and passed through the gate to climb steps to the stone walkway above the garden. On the far side of the potager, wrought-iron gates stood open, leading to an avenue of trees and open country beyond. The means, Georgette imagined, by which Jean-Luc had been able to effect his escape from the château.

  Huygue lowered his voice, although there was no one else in sight. ‘We’ve received intelligence that the 2nd SS Panzer Division, Das Reich, has sent three regiments north by different routes. It looks like the second regiment is going to come through Saint-Céré. Might even pass our door. There’s something like a hundred and eighty-eight tanks, sixty trucks, light vehicles and a couple of dozen motorbikes. Nearly 4000 men in total.’

  ‘Good God,’ Georgette whispered. ‘It’s like an invasion all of its own.’

  Huygue nodded. ‘And a prime target for Allied bombing.’ He paused a moment to let that sink in.

  Georgette was quick to realise the implications. ‘If they start dropping bombs around here, they could easily hit the château.’

  ‘Exactly. We have to get word to London giving them our precise coordinates and explain exactly why it is an area to be avoided at all costs.’

  Georgette looked at him blankly. ‘How can we do that?’

  Huygue took her arm and led her down into the garden. ‘We have a radio transmitter in the towers above Saint-Céré. It’s a pretty makeshift affair, but we’ve been able to send and receive messages from London.’ He chuckled. ‘The boys call it Radio Quercy. The trouble is, none of our people have got very good English. Certainly no one nearly as good as you.’ Georgette knew now what was coming next. ‘Would you be prepared to draft a concise message in English to take up to the towers tomorrow? The boys will encrypt it and send it off. The transmitter will be dismantled immediately afterwards and taken away. Because there’s nothing surer than that the Germans are going to come looking for it.’

  Georgette closed her eyes and nodded. There was no need even to think about it. Whatever the risks. This was her duty. She felt the same sense of obligation as when de Gaulle had asked her to look after La Joconde. ‘Of course,’ she said.

  The Tours Saint-Laurent stood proud on a conical volcanic peak that threw its shadow across the town of Saint-Céré below. There were four towers, two of them taller than the others, and a two-storey dwelling comprising
the remains of what had once been a fortified château. It had had an impressive lineage of ownership over the centuries and was then in the stewardship of the Countess Annie de Coheix who, Huygue assured Georgette, had given tacit approval for the installation of radio equipment in the tallest of the towers.

  Georgette had only ever seen the towers from the valley that they dominated, often lost in cloud, but was still unprepared for the steepness of the climb she had to make on her bike to reach them. In the heat of the early afternoon, she cycled through the tiny village of Saint-Laurent, past the mairie, and pushed her bike up the final slope to a door set in huge wooden gates built into an arch in the fortifications. She was breathless and perspiring by the time she got there, the folded message tucked into her bra, damp from her exertions. A handle dangled on a chain almost beyond her reach. She had to stand on tiptoes to grasp it and pull hard to set a bell ringing somewhere on the other side of the gate. It seemed inordinately loud in the still of an afternoon whose heat almost vibrated with the hum of a million summer insects.

  The door creaked open just a little, and a tanned leathery face peered out at her. The face of a man she recognised from the gathering of resistance fighters the night she stumbled upon Huygue handing out weapons at Montal. He opened the door a little wider, peering out to make sure they were not being observed, before waving her in and slamming it shut behind her. She left her bike inside the gate and followed him up a steep climb between high stone walls, emerging through overhanging trees and shrubs at the entrance to the residential quarters of the old castle. Red and blond sandstone, rust-coloured shutters and doors. Extensive gardens stretched off to the towers at the south side of the hill, oak trees casting dappled shade on long grass. The maquisard took her the other way, past the echoing profundity of a deep dark well, to the highest of the towers. He opened a tall door to usher her in.