‘They don’t all look like SS or Gestapo with false papers but then … ah then, Hermann, it is often so hard to tell with those, is it not, and they would need false papers to venture into the Free Zone under cover.’
‘Piss off! They’re just friends along for the ride.’
‘Then let us see what they want.’
3
SUNLIGHT STRUCK THE PLACE DE LA HALLE AND glared from the tiled roof of the town’s seventeenth-century covered market. It made the air above the car’s bonnet vibrate and brought the smell of vaporizing gasoline.
The only shade was under the timbered balcony of the market or within its expanse, the only sound, that of a flight of homing pigeons. Perhaps one hundred and sixty people were gathered. Shopkeepers, café owners, waiters and chefs stood in aprons at the doors of their premises. Mayor Pialat, florid and in a hurry in a black homburg, heavy black woollen suit, black tie, vest, gold watch chain and stomach, paused half-way between the Governor’s House, with its shuttered first-storey windows and its second- and third-storey side turret, to stare up at his precious pigeons and wet his lips in apprehension.
Mopping his brow and grey bush of a moustache, he continued on across the stony square where tufts of weeds and wedges of stunted grass had suffered the ravages of drought and tethered goats.
He disappeared into the shady recesses of the market. Not a word was said. Though the crowd listened intently, all they could hear were those damned pigeons.
No swastika flew from the grey-roofed turret of that lovely sixteenth-century house. No German sentries stood on either side of its french doors, no patrols tainted the air with the smell of sweat and saddlesoap or the sound of their rifles as they fired at a post and white-targeted ‘terrorist’ or hostage and saw him suddenly slump.
No swastika pennant flew from the front left wing of the car yet it could just as well have done so, such was the mood of the crowd. The South was haven to far too many the Germans wanted. Homing pigeons such as those might carry secret messages and were forbidden in the North.
Like tourists from the other side of the moon, the five visitors waited impatiently for the mayor to unlock the old iron gates to the stone staircase that led down into the warren of caves and tunnels beneath the town. Used as a hiding place during the Hundred Years’ War and then in the Wars of Religion, the caves would be pleasantly cool.
But why the interest? wondered St-Cyr. Why the impatience? And why the hell was sous-préfet Deveaux playing tour guide and host when he knew very well there was a murder to attend to?
The visitors were swallowed up, the woman going first in that hip-clinging white silk dress of hers and a big, floppily-brimmed and beribboned chapeau, the mayor bringing up the rear and bleating, ‘The lamps, madame et messieurs. You must each take one so as not to get lost.’
‘Toto, darling,’ came the earnest female voice up from the darkness, rich and deep and musical, the accent exquisite and one hundred per cent of the salons along the rue Royale. ‘Toto, light one for me. There’s a good boy. Willi … Willi, how can we possibly get a crew in here?’ The switch to deutsch maintained the richness. ‘Franz, it’s fascinating — were the English slaughtered or did they hide in these caves?’
‘Baroness, I believe the Huguenots captured the town in 1588.’
‘Did they slaughter the French Catholics or did they, too, escape into these caves? It’s marvellous what holes in the ground can tell us about history. Willi … Willi, make a note of that. Oo, darling, there’s such a lovely breeze. It’s blowing right up my dress. It’s like the bathe I had under that little waterfall. It’s delightful.’
A short, stocky Périgourdin of sixty years, sous-préfet Odilon Deveaux returned from the depths and as he came up the stone steps in his banker’s suit, he was caught in the half-light by the two from Paris Central and shrugged. ‘Jean-Louis … ah, a moment. Yourself also, Haupsturmführer. Please.’ A stumpy forefinger touched the grim-set lips of a cop who had seen it all and had just lost patience. The gaze was hooded, the nose massive, the warts, moles, scars and clefts pronounced, the eyebrows a bushy, unclipped iron-grey.
Out of breath, he had to pause at the top of the stairs. ‘The asthma,’ he managed. The pollen and the dampness. Cats … she has a cat. Her perfume … ah, it may be marvellous but it’s giving my lungs a seizure! A moment.’ And then, ‘Come … come away for a little privacy. Give me a cigarette, please.’
Gathering them in, he guided them across the covered market to a line of benches against the far wall where a helmeted Wehrmacht corporal held a carbine in poster-paper over the words, Give your labour in the fight against Bolshevism. ‘Paris …,’ he wheezed in again. ‘Only one of them is Parisian — an ex-waiter, ex-boot-black, I think. The rest are originally from Berlin and Vienna. Very famous, very connected and very demanding. The cigarette?’ he repeated.
Kohler shrugged, I’m fresh out. Louis found his mégot tin. Consternation registered. ‘But … but what is this?’ managed Deveaux. ‘No tobacco but those? I would have thought.…’
‘It’s the way things are,’ shrugged Louis apologetically. ‘We beg, we borrow, we pick up like everyone else but we cannot steal.’
‘Or be caught doing so,’ offered Kohler, the chief tobacco thief whenever possible.
Hermann chose five of the butts and began that painful process of first trying to free the tobacco and then of finding paper and spittle enough to roll one. Though a former bomb-disposal expert and prisoner of war, he could not roll a cigarette. It was God’s little irony. ‘Here, Louis, you do it. I’m all thumbs. It’s that dress and a bathe under that waterfall. Our princess must have paid the valley a visit.’
‘Baroness … she’s a baroness and Austrian. That site, my friends.… That site has to be “cleaned”.’
‘Pardon?’ managed Louis.
‘“Cleaned”, as I have said. The film crew, they are shooting at Lascaux but are to descend on the valley in a matter of days. Two perhaps or three. It depends on the weather and the shooting.’
‘A film crew?’
The cigarette was handed over. Deveaux couldn’t wait for a match and hauled out a battered lighter with a flamethrower’s torch. ‘Ah!’ he said, narrowly missing his eyebrows. ‘Fucking gasoline. One has to be careful, eh? These days one has to make do in so many ways. It’s desperate. I once took my eyelashes off.’
He coughed. He inhaled again and rested his back against the wall. ‘They are shooting a film, yes. A docu-drama — please don’t try my patience with questions. Let them tell you themselves. I will give you the essence of it.’
Another moment passed. The rise and fall of his chest began to lessen, though God knows why, thought Kohler. That ‘tobacco’ could be anything. Sweepings of manure and herbs, dried linden blossoms or carrot tops.
‘It’s about a cave, a trunk of artefacts that was found in a Paris antique shop, and a woman — please don’t ask me to explain how their minds work, these creative people. The film is to be called Moment of Discovery. She’s the female lead. The boy from Paris is just an assistant on the “dig”.’
‘And the archaeologist, the prehistorian?’ asked Louis quite pleasantly.
Deveaux was quick to sense trouble and eased his crotch with a massive heave. ‘These fucking trousers … ah, the crap they make these days. Always pinching in the wrong places, always splitting up the ass when you don’t want them to and causing the balls to sweat.’
So much for the shortages.
‘The archaeologist, yes,’ said Deveaux. ‘That one flubbed his lines the other day. He’s being shot again — yes, yes, that is what they have said. Shot for being nervous, eh? Stage-struck perhaps, who’s to say. The male lead in the thing. The woman, the Baroness, found the cave for him by deciphering the hieroglyphics of some abbé. The Church … must the Church always stick its nose in things?’
They waited. They did not dare to say a thing, these two from Paris Central. So, good, yes, good, let it be a lesson t
o them. Jean-Louis was more than an acquaintance but would not understand why the matter was very delicate, very difficult. Ah yes.
Deveaux hauled at his crotch again and let his stomach relax. ‘There are two prehistorians on the staff. Advisers, yes. One is from Paris and is French so as to give our side of the story perhaps. The other is German, a professor from Hamburg, but they are not actors. The one who flubbed his lines is the cock of those ancient times perhaps, though if you ask me, my friends, I would have split his skull long ago and dined happily on the brains and heart! These others, they are also at Lascaux, each ranting in his own way about possible damage to the cave paintings. They’re purists.’
‘A film,’ said Louis, throwing Kohler a worried glance.
Clouds of smoke poured from the hairy grottoes of the souspréfet’s nostrils. ‘Yes. A joint production of Continentale and the Institut des Filmes Internationales de Paris. Lights, cameras and action, and slate boards to tell us which scene they are shooting. Without those boards, no one would know which end was up. At least I wouldn’t.’
Kohler let Louis ask it. ‘And they want the site of the murder cleaned?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s not possible.’
Deveaux gave the sigh of a father whose patience has just been sorely tried. ‘Jean-Louis, it was I who had you pulled off that train. A stroke of luck, I thought. Ah, I cannot tell you how relieved I was to learn that you and the Haupsturmfuhrer were available, but,’ he tossed the hand with the cigarette, ‘but I will let these feelings I have for you be set aside in honour of saving your hides. Herr Goebbels, the Reichsminister of Propaganda, has personally sunk 50,000 marks of his own money into the project.’
‘Goebbels … Ah nom de Jésus-Christ!’ exploded Kohler. ‘I knew we should have stayed on that train. This is all your fault, Louis.’
‘It can’t be his own money, can it?’ hazarded the Sûreté. ‘Besides, a delay of a few days cannot matter.’
‘Perhaps you should personally ask him,’ countered Deveaux. ‘Perhaps, as the Baroness von Strade has said, the Reichsminister will pay the site a little visit.’
Oh-oh … ‘A propaganda film?’ bleated Kohler.
‘The dawn of prehistory. Moment of Discovery.’
Kohler tramped on the accelerator to cool things off. The touring car, big and heavy, shot along the narrow street and out through the Porte del Bos, to rip down the cliffside and hit the bridge across the river. Ninety … one hundred and twenty kilometres an hour … one hundred and ninety … a great set of wheels.
‘Hermann — horses!’ cried the only passenger, hastily crossing himself.
The horses were all over the road ahead. Twenty … thirty … Rumps and tails and lonely brown dumps on the stones.…
The brakes were hit. The car slewed. The horses, on frayed tethers, bolted heavily into the surrounding fields, dragging their dealer with them.
Dust rose and settled. The smell of burning rubber was unpleasant.
‘I warned you,’ seethed St-Cyr. ‘I have tried to tell you to expect the unexpected on our roads but ah no, no, the Gestapo are invincible. They know everything. They steal a car so as to hurry to a murder scene before everything is removed, and all but kill its only passenger. Grâce à Dieu, I have not soiled my trousers. Excuse me, Inspector, while I relieve the bladder.’
Kohler could hear him pissing against a rear tyre, a favourite French trick, since it gave the lie of big, proud, brave dogs in a nation defeated.
The horse-dealer, a member of the nouveau riche, was not so pleasant. Having recaptured two of his nags and burned the skin off both palms, he approached the car in a hurry. ‘Imbécile! Salaud! Did your mother have the syphilis, eh? Did she not obtain the certificat sanitaire before conceiving you?’
There was more. Age, some fifty-six years perhaps, did not interfere. Barnyard bootscrapings were referred to. Horse shit was furiously flung at the car.
At last the dust settled. The nags snorted and tossed their wild-eyed heads. The moon face of the dealer began to lose its colour. The dark brown eyes under that cap and thatch of grey hair, began to worry. The half-smile was crooked.
‘Your name?’ breathed Kohler, still from behind the wheel of the car. He had the sun above and the world at his feet.
St-Cyr did up his flies. The engine cooled.
‘My name …? What has that to do with things? Are you so stupid you cannot see what you have done? Those horses — all thirty-six of them — were for the Russian Front!’
‘Louis, check his licence.’
‘My licence …?’
‘Illegal dealers, a lack of labour, and enforced shipments of produce to the Reich are the curse of French agriculture,’ mused the Gestapo whose only proffered identification was a wallet badge that was held up in the palm of a giant’s hand. ‘Production has fallen drastically and since there are so few horses left in the zone occupee, the farmers there are forced to plough using the wife and kids while here in the South, the Reich employs whatever means it can to get what remains.’
‘But… but you’re one of them?’
‘Hermann, we have work to do.’
‘The fact that I’m “one” of them does not matter.’ One of the few good things Vichy had tried desperately to do was to save what few horses remained.
Kohler calmed the two horses and from a shabby pocket, found the stray carrot he had picked up in the market — a piece of good fortune, a future snack. ‘We’re waiting,’ he said, giving each of the horses a half-carrot.
The man winced and tossed the wounded hand of inconsequence. ‘My licence … oh, well certainly, it is …’
‘Not so good, right? Then you’re under arrest, my friend. Climb in the back. You can help the boys in blue remove the corpse we found. Maybe they’ll let you ride with her.’
‘Hermann, please. He will only be an inconvenience. Let us tear up his licence. Let us remove his boots and make him walk down this road as his horses will eventually do.’
There was a nod the Sûreté understood only too well. The man’s undershirt and drawers were used to clean the bonnet and windscreen, the tweed cap gave a nice shine. Water was no problem for the river was close and the labour free.
The current caught the jodhpurs and other things. It took the jacket and the bits of an identity card that would be very hard to replace. It took the torn scraps of a dubious licence.
They left the man without a stitch, to bathe his hands and think about breaking the law for profit, no matter for whom.
Hermann had a thing about horses. ‘Those poor old nags wouldn’t have come home from Russia, Louis. I had to do it’
‘Of course.’
When they reached the glade, the body had already been removed. The grass and wild flowers had been cut and raked so hard, the place all but looked like a lawn, albeit damp from several washings, and smelling like a brothel sprinkled with cheap perfume. There was no sign of the picnic under the chestnut tree by that little stream, no sign of anyone. Even the empty champagne bottles had been taken, even their corks and wires. It was as if the murder had never happened. Even the honey buzzard had buggered off.
‘Sarlat… they will have taken her there,’ managed Louis. It was not far. Perhaps seven kilometres at most.
‘Death caps and fly agaric.’
‘Ah merde …’
Nightmare visions of some undernourished flic came to them, those of the family also. Seven children perhaps and the wife and both sets of grandparents.
‘With the phalline poisoning of the death cap, Hermann, induced vomiting, even immediately after eating, is often of little use, since the poison, it is so readily absorbed.’
They were moving now — thrashing their way through the underbrush. They could not travel fast enough.
‘Though the symptoms are delayed from twelve to twenty-four hours,’ sang out the Sûreté anxiously, ‘they consist of violent pains and burning sensations in the stomach, fainting fits, cramps, unstoppab
le diarrhoea, bloody stools, vomiting, cold sweats, shivering and an enlarged liver. These things can last up to ten days. Ten!’
Breathlessly he finally broke free of the woods to slide down to the railway embankment. Kohler followed and they ran along the track. ‘At the end, the pulse slows, the victim turns yellow, the breathing becomes very laboured. There is collapse and then death.’
A not-so-speedy release. End of mushrooms, end of lecture. ‘Hey, since you know the way, I’m going to let you drive,’ said Kohler. ‘Don’t hit anything. My nerves won’t take it.’
* * *
The telephone calls were made, the panic had subsided. Mathieu Vaudable, in his forty-third year as coroner of the Périgord Noir, removed his gold-rimmed pince-nez. He cleared his throat and the sound of this, caught in dank medieval cellars off the rue de Siége in one of the oldest parts of Sarlat, was harsh.
‘These cellars,’ he said by way of apology. ‘Jean-Louis, I regret the apprehensions you and Herr Kohler have suffered on account of the mushrooms. I myself was shown the basket and took immediate possession of it.’
In specimen after specimen, Amanita phalloides (death cap) and Amanita muscaria (fly agaric) lay among the stone tools Vaudable had had sent over from the local museum. He had not yet taken time out for his dinner and probably wouldn’t.
He picked up a death cap with his tweezers. ‘The flat but round cap and dirty green shade which fades to brownish-yellow,’ he said, ‘but is sometimes pale yellow or bluish, yes? The most deadly of our mushrooms, messieurs.’
There were white gills but on some specimens these had acquired a greenish cast. Each specimen had a swollen base, and a cup that was enclosed in a sheath. The presence of this indicated that the mushrooms had been dug out.
‘The Amanita muscaria is not nearly so poisonous. The cap, though similar to its little friend, is a brilliant vermilion to orange red. The gills are white or yellowish and the stem underground is covered with white scales. These specimens have also been dug out by our victim.’
‘And the stone tools?’ managed Kohler.
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