‘And that is when you gathered the lumps of pyrolusite,’ he said more harshly than intended. She dropped her hands, tugged the skirt from her belt and tried to free it from clinging to her thighs.
‘The stones for the cave painting, Inspector — you know this is what they were for. Why is it, then, that you demand it of me?’
She was facing him now and saw him draw in a breath in shock. She tried to smile self-consciously and this split her battered lips and made her wince. Blood trickled down her chin and she wiped it away with the back of a hand. ‘The sooty black dust of another era, Inspector. The children … my students. I was preparing for a little lesson in our history. I thought if I had some of the black, a little of the ochre, some grease — dear God there is now so little of it here and it is hoarded as never before and always priced too high.’ She stopped herself, touched her hair, felt suddenly at such a loss to appear so poorly, and tucked strands of her hair up under the tight diadem of braids.
‘Some oil, yes, or melted fat — foie gras, isn’t it possible that the ancients might also have loved the fat of goose livers?’ she asked. ‘Some clay to mix with the colours if needed. I could let the children see for themselves why Lascaux, it …’ Ah no, why had she said it? she wondered.
‘Lascaux?’ he reminded her.
Her hands fell to her sides in defeat. Yes, the cave paintings everyone still talks of. The Sistine Chapel of the Périgord.’
And a cave painter, madame, was that it? he wondered but did not ask. She had been badly beaten by her husband. Blood had seeped through to stain the left shoulder of the housedress but she was, as yet, unaware of this. Perhaps five metres separated them. The rabbits slept, the chickens took little interest. The smells of both mingled with that of the vegetables and earth she had watered with the leavings of the laundry.
‘How did you find the cave on that Sunday?’ he asked.
‘Disturbed. I knew someone had been there very recently to look it over — matches … I have found some burnt ones. Ah, I thought,’ she shrugged and winced and clutched her left shoulder only to drop her bloodied fingers and stare at them in dismay. ‘I … I sensed it, Inspector. Right away I felt the presence of another — yes, yes, that was how it was. It made me uncomfortable. I hesitated to go into the cave but mother was coming and I had to be warned ahead of time of any trouble. I went in only to the gisement, not into the darkest parts behind. I kept my hammer ready.’
‘Madame, your shoulder …?’
‘It is nothing. It will stop.’
Damn you, don’t interfere in something that doesn’t concern you! was written all over her. So, okay, he would have to leave the shoulder for a moment. ‘But … but you collected the pyrolusite lumps?’
She had him now; he could not know the truth. ‘Yes. Mother and I had a cache of them. From time to time when others came to the cave, they uncovered pieces from the gisement but thinking them of no value, left them. These lumps we hid, the little mortar also.’
‘And you met no one?’
‘No one.’
Ah merde, why must she be so wary? ‘Did you know of the filming?’
She blanched. ‘The filming …? Please, what is this?’
She was lying and he knew it but there was nothing she could do about it, she said to herself. Nothing yet.
‘The story of your mother and father, madame. The trunk of artefacts you spoke of, the diary, her finding the cave and leading your father to it, their visits in the spring and summer of 1912 and again in 1913. The beginning of the ritual, madame, that would eventually lead your mother to her death.’
He gave her a moment. She knew she had betrayed herself by lying.
‘Now come, please,’ he said. ‘It’s unforgivable of me to press so hard. There must be a doctor. That shoulder had best be attended to.’
‘Then come into the kitchen. Fix it if you must and let me change. I will not walk with you or anyone through this town, not now, not until my lips have healed at least a little.’
Once bared, the shoulder revealed the skin had been broken in several places. The slash from the walking-stick had left a welt perhaps as long as the width of his hand. He bathed it and changed the dressing she had applied herself. His touch was very tender and all the time he worked, he muttered things to her and to himself. ‘Our attitudes must change. No man has the right to do this to any woman. Sutures … you had best have them.’
She shook her head. ‘It will heal. I can’t have talk.’ He dabbed at the skin to dry it but did he notice how fine her skin was? Did he think it a shoulder worth caressing, and not of her mother’s but of her father’s family, of wealth and good breeding? Did he wish the dress would drop so that he might see her as she had been under the waterfall on that Sunday? That Sunday.…
He would have found the towel in her rucksack, would have discovered the change into work clothes but had yet to say anything of them. ‘Where is your partner?’ she asked tightly.
‘With the others. Returning the car we borrowed. Asking questions of them.’
‘The others?’
He was noticing the older welts on her back. He would be dropping his eyes slowly down the gap in her dress.
‘Yes. An actress, a film producer and a young man of twenty perhaps. He is an assistant on the archaeological dig in the film. Two others also. One from the Propaganda Abteilung at 52 Champs-Elysées, Paris. The other is the sous-préfet of the Périgord Noir.’
She didn’t say a thing. She only looked at the wall in front of her.
‘My partner, madame, he’s very good. He’s from the Gestapo but is not like any of those types. We’re simply Common Crime, the two of us. The Kripo for him, the Sûreté Nationale for me and no Gestapo brutality so do not worry yourself. If you find my fingers gentle, his would also be.’
We aren’t here to hurt you, we are here to help. This was what he implied, but how could anyone help her now?
‘There,’ he said at last and let her pull up the shoulder of her dress. ‘I will wait outside while you change.’
‘No … no, it’s all right. I will go upstairs to the attic’
There was no sign of her two children and he knew she must have sent them off to that old mill perhaps, or to gather clover and dandelions for the rabbits. There was no sign of Jouvet.
The school was quiet and far hotter than before. He wondered how Hermann was doing. He knew he had to ask her about the champagne and the flask that had been found — the initials HGF engraved in dull grey, dented silver. A flask that had seen some use — how many had he seen himself among the officers of that other war?
HGF, the letters overlapping. ‘Henri-Georges Fillioux,’ he muttered to himself, seeing any one of the so many plain brown, waxed cardboard boxes that had come back with the last effects, the boots perhaps, the belt and webbing, the tunic and cap, the bloodstains — how heartless of the army. The last letters too.
Knowing that he had best not confront her with her father’s flask, not just yet, he waited but she did not come down from the attic and he heard himself saying to himself, Hermann … Hermann, I think I need you.
Kohler wasn’t sure but thought the Auberge de la truffe noire was in what had once been a small monastery. Languidly the Baroness strolled arm in arm with her Toto. And in her white dress she was like a fluid wraith passing through sunlight and shade, tall and graceful along the little paths that fell away from the inn to where the monks had prayed or gone about their humble chores in what had once been a potager. Herbs, vegetables and fruit trees.
No one was inclined to effort. The meal he had not partaken of had been too large, the wine excellent, the cognac superb.
Dreamily the Baron Willi von Strade, age sixty if a day, watched his actress-wife of thirty-five hold in close and serious discussion her latest lover, a boy of twenty, one Gérald ‘Toto’ Lemieux of Paris, on contract to the Institut des Filmes Internationales. Did the former boot-black have promise? Was she planning his future or mèrely
going over a minor scene to save him from a life of shining shoes or waiting on tables?
Lemieux was handsome, straight and tall, but no match for the Baron who could, Kohler surmised, simultaneously pluck the eyes and cock from a cobra unharmed. Verdammt, what was he to make of them?
Franz Oelmann of the Paris Propaganda Staffel was bemused by the little tête-à-tête and the Baron’s apparent complaisance. Perhaps he knew what went on between the Baron’s sheets, perhaps he even watched the fun. Stamped with that blue-eyed, closely trimmed blond print of the Master Race, he would no doubt carry double duty, working both for Goebbels and for Heinrich Himmler. Frankly, he stank of the SS and that only made one uncomfortable since von Strade and his wife would be certain to know of it while saying nothing and indicating absolute innocence of even such a thought.
Sous-préfet Odilon Deveaux, his chair tilted well back against the wall, propped by a foot that was jammed against a stone pillar, dozed as he should with half an eye open.
Only Mayor Pialat seemed anxious. Flustered — florid from too much wine and foie gras — he continually stole little glances at his pocket-watch and muttered about the urgency of things to himself. His pigeons were gone and might now have been plucked and eaten, but he could not leave. After all, the visitors were paying guests and the assistant chief of police was among them. Poor Pialat mopped his brow and wiped his lips, held up the flat of a hand at the refill Kohler offered, and said, ‘Ah no. No, merci, monsieur. A splendid meal. Magnificent. Exactly as in the years before everything was taken from us.’
Oelmann and the Baron let him say it unchallenged. Embarrassed at the stupidity of his tongue, Pialat tried to tuck the watch away. He couldn’t understand more than three words of German. Exhausted from smiling and nodding, he again retreated into worry. With watery large brown eyes he searched the skies above the line of distant trees until, at last, Deveaux took pity on him to smile reassuringly and shrug as if to say, Les Allemands, my friend, we can do nothing but await their pleasure.
But all the time things had been going on in the Baron’s cranium beneath the immaculately brushed grey locks whose growing bald spot shone. As if on cue, he spoke. ‘What will it take, Herr Deveaux? 25,000 each to get them off our backs?’ The cops, the two détectives.
‘Marks or francs?’ asked Franz Oelmann.
‘Marks, of course. Reichskassenscheine, Herr Kohler, because that’s the way it has to be.’
And they can’t be sent home but must be spent in the occupied country. ‘This is still the Free Zone, isn’t it?’ said the sous-préfet. ‘I merely ask so as to be aware of things.’
The Baron overlooked the slight. ‘Even so, at twenty to one, that is still 500,000 francs, a substantial sum but worth it.’
‘But,’ sighed Deveaux, ‘Herr Kohler is subordinate to Gestapo Boemelburg in Paris who is, himself, subordinate to Gestapo Mueller in Berlin, is this not so? Correct me, please, Baron. If Herr Boemelburg insists, as he has by telephone this morning, that his two détectives continue their investigation with the utmost urgency, who are we to question such as him?’
‘We need the woman’s house,’ said Franz Oelmann flatly. ‘It is crucial to the story. The trunk will be taken there and Marina will find it.’
‘The Baroness. … Ah yes, of course,’ enthused Deveaux expansively, ‘but let our two détectives from Paris Central first examine the contents of the house. Letters, papers, little things — there may be something that will tell them where to look for the one who did the killing.’
Verdammt, the insolence of the French! ‘It’s someone local,’ snapped Oelmann. ‘A voyeur. He will have followed her, seen her bathe — watched her — good Gott im Himmel, idiot, use your brains. Excited by her nakedness, he went crazy and attacked her. Surely you have dossiers on all such types? You do, don’t you?’
Deveaux said nothing. He was like a man who quite willingly would give his worm to the fish who had stolen it, knowing well that little fish would soon be eaten by another.
Kohler thought he’d best say something. ‘That’s interesting. A voyeur?’
The Baroness and her Toto had disappeared behind a stone wall.
‘Look, this is serious,’ insisted Oelmann. ‘We have a very tight schedule. Shooting at Lascaux will be done in a day at most. Then it’s upriver to the house of that woman to find the trunk of artefacts and the diary of the abbe. Then we’re on location at the Discovery Cave, damn it, for whatever it takes.’
Kohler refilled the Propaganda Staffel’s glass and nodded for him to continue. The Baron let him and Oelmann, irritably taking out his cigarette case, lit up to decide how best to proceed. ‘Look, it’s unfortunate the woman was murdered but we can’t let it interfere. Moment of Discovery is to be previewed by the Reichsminister Goebbels in Berlin on the 15th of November. The Führer is to see it on the 5th of December at Berchtesgaden, after which it will be shown simultaneously in eighteen cities. Köln, Diisseldorf, Munich, Essen.… It’s crucial to the war effort that the people see it. Here, too, in France as well.’
He really meant it. He believed, as so many of the Nazis did, in the invincibility of the Reich and in their mission. ‘We’ll need transport,’ offered Kohler. ‘Louis and me, to check out the victim’s house tomorrow. Have the trunk there. We’ll want to take a look at it. Oh by the way, how did you come by it?’
Von Strade decided to intervene. ‘An antique shop in Paris last spring. An archaeologist, one of their leading prehistorians came upon it. We’ve hired him as an adviser and script consultant but have, of course, brought in our own expert to verify both the contents of the trunk and the cave. Make no mistake, we’re on to something with this.’
‘The very dawn of history,’ offered the sous-préfet.
‘And in our very own cave,’ said Pialat. ‘Who would have thought it possible.’
Canny suspicion, awe and pride were mingled so well in the voices of the two Frenchmen only Kohler noted it and rejoiced again in the French. Verdammt but they always surprised and amused, even if they were often troublesome.
A hand fell lightly on his shoulder and he felt the softly perfumed caress of fingers in the short hairs behind his left ear. ‘I play the part of the Frenchwoman who is ignorant of all these things, Herr Kohler, but whose very psyche is awakened by the Herr Dr Professor of our film who sees, as only the expert prehistorian can, the true meaning of what she has stumbled upon in the mouldy trunk of a long dead monk.’
The Baron gave her a brief smile of encouragement. Rather than use a meaty forefinger to extricate a few drunken fruit flies from his glass, he swished the cognac around and tossed it out.
More than fifty years of patient history hit the ground. Any sensible Frenchman would have downed it with pleasure. Deveaux wore the pained expression of the wounded who could say nothing. Pialat was so flabbergasted, he could not pull his gaze from the stained cobblestones.
The glass was refilled by Franz Oelmann. The fingertips continued to curl the hairs at the back of Kohler’s head. ‘You smell nice,’ he grinned. The Baroness pressed a hip against him and her sea-green eyes came down to look more closely into the faded blue depths of his. The thick, soft mass of strawberry blonde hair floated all around him. Her breath was warm.
‘At the cave we dig, we strip away the layers of the past, Herr Kohler.’ Her eyes widened to emphasize this. ‘It is all done very carefully, very correctly. We encounter stone tools quite different from the more recent, we dig deeper … deeper.’ Her chest swelled. ‘I find an Eve, the Professor finds an Adam. We see each other as at the very dawn of time. Love blossoms — isn’t it so when a woman works alongside a man in such a place? But we are pure, we are driven by a far higher ideal. The discovery.’
Of what, precisely? he wondered. Tomfoolery of the highest order, straight from the High Priest of Propaganda himself in Berlin, or.…
She fingered the white, cloth-covered button at the top of her dress. She had nice fingers, nice nails.
; ‘An amulet of deerhorn, mein lieber Detektiv. A species of deer not seen perhaps since time began.’
‘It has beautiful incisions,’ offered Franz Oelmann earnestly. ‘The first hole ever drilled, the very first ornament or piece of jewellery but not,’ he emphasized, ‘to be worn as frivolous finery but as something far deeper. A divine right.’
Oelmann’s steel-blue eyes registered the intensity of his belief in what they had come across.
‘We’re talking about the Neanderthals,’ said von Strade firmly. ‘Not the Cro-Magnons.’
‘So, I find the piece, the amulet,’ said the actress, ‘and I show it to the Herr Doktor Professor and we both kneel on the floor of the cave to gaze up at the paintings on the roof and walls as if in supplication before their god and ours, both one and united over the span of the millennia.’
She really believed it too. Emotion filled her eyes with moisture. She was an absolutely stunning woman. ‘But … but there aren’t any paintings in that cave.’ he managed. ‘Louis and I didn’t …’
A meaty hand fell on his to grip him with the urgency of a film producer who had much to lose and wasn’t about to let it go. ‘Oh but there are, Herr Kohler. Paintings of such extraordinary import as to be priceless and far beyond the value of those even at Lascaux. Our cave will become an international shrine when we’re done with it. People from all over Europe will come to witness what our film has shown them.’
Deveaux’s chest rattled as he heaved the sigh of a sous-préfet from whose hands the matter had fallen into those of another. Well, two others: Louis and his partner. Kohler threw him a glance that was ignored as, waistcoat unbuttoned, Deveaux’s thumbs were slid behind the broad suspenders and his chest eased a little.
Pialat searched the skies for his pigeons. Franz Oelmann’s gaze had lost none of its intensity.
The Baroness smiled excitedly. A hole in the ground … wasn’t that what she had said about the caves beneath the town? ‘Willi, it’s marvellous what holes in the ground can tell us about history.’
Stonekiller Page 7