She heard the dry sound as he riffled through them. From time to time he paused as if suspicious of something and she knew he was watching her out of a corner of his eye. ‘Madame,’ he began, and she heard his voice against the clamour of the past. ‘Madame, these cards.…’
A car horn sounded. Someone leaned impatiently on it. The detectives stopped their searching, Herr Oelmann swore beneath his breath, ‘Marina.…’
He left them then and she went to close the drawer only to see that the postcards did not contain those urgent pleas for help her mother had received from Paris. Pleas that had been steadfastly refused. Yes, refused!
St-Cyr noticed her furtively glance up at them. Four greasy, putrid parcels had been selected to lie waiting on the sorting table. ‘All are for the parents’ address in Paris, madame. Two fat geese, a loin of pork, some butter and cheese.’
‘Ah no …’
‘Did your mother not tell you she was sending food to your father’s family?’ he demanded.
‘No! No, she didn’t!’
And now there are tears and you feel betrayed, he said silently to himself, because she didn’t tell you everything.
The stamps had been cancelled on Saturday, the 15th of June, two days before the murder. A last gesture of reconciliation?
The detectives were upstairs now, in the auberge where heavy floorboards complained even from beneath carpets that had hidden them for ages. The halls were dark, the ceilings low, the hanging iron lamps extinguished, the rooms shut in by heavy drapes maman had refused to replace. ‘Some day,’ she would say — and Juliette could hear her mother’s voice so clearly — ‘some day these things will be worth a fortune.’ The heavy oak chests and massive armoires, the dressers and canopied beds whose carvings a timid girl had secretively traced when opening a room to a visitor who had looked and searched and inevitably found it wanting.
There had never been many of these visitors. Travelling salesmen and produce buyers mostly, sometimes an estate agent or notary. Often maman had argued with herself about living down here but always the possibility of lodgers had presented a moral and economic dilemma particularly when she, herself, had grown old enough for men to look at in that way men did. Yes, yes, she said, remembering suddenly a heavy door that had closed behind her, an unwanted, terrifying hand and panic … panic like she had never known before.
Maman had called up the stairs to save her. Maman …, Why had she not told her about the food parcels directed to that address in Paris when she had sworn never to send the parents Fillioux a single morsel? “Never, so long as I live!”
Suddenly finding herself alone, Juliette blinked and tried to remember which of the rooms the detectives had just entered. Herr Oelmann was downstairs with the Baroness and the others. Perhaps the film people had gone to look at the river, perhaps they simply waited in silence. With him, as with the detectives, she would never know if she was alone until it was too late, but she had to try or else the one called St-Cyr would only find the secret drawer and take from it the postcards maman would have saved. The postcards …
The room she wanted was behind her, at the head of the stairs. The floorboards sighed. She felt a draught — Herr Kohler? she asked herself but heard only the board as her weight was released.
From the head of the stairs, whose dark railing she had polished countless times, she chanced a look down to the entrance of the shop.
No one was there so that was good. The ancient latch was stiff as always. The armoire was to her left, the bed to the right. Only a small, shuttered window could be opened in this room.
Closing the door behind her, she tried to calm herself but it was no use. The bed was old and high up off the floor and she remembered it so clearly. There were also two heavy armchairs she had never liked, a simple washstand with stone basin, a jug, a mirror, a towel.…
These things were all to one side of the armoire whose severe dark oak was so forbidding she had to remind herself St-Cyr had already opened it in search of Monsieur Auger’s body.
Kneeling on the carpet, she threw a glance behind her as she felt deeply under the right side of the armoire for the little pewter pin one had to pull down before the spring-activated drawer would automatically open.
Maman had chosen to hide her most valuable things in the poorest and least expensive of the rooms, the room in which Henri-Georges Fillioux had first come to stay in the early spring of 1912, the room in which his daughter would now.…
No one walked along the corridor outside, no one called out to her. There was not a sound yet her fingers shook so hard they could not find the pin and she had to ask, Is this not the same armoire, the same room?
The drawer popped open. It slid so easily it was like magic. Relief flooded through her and for a moment she shut her eyes and pressed her forehead against the carpet but then instinct drove her to silently close the drawer and to hesitantly stand with her back to whomever had come so stealthily into the room.
He did not move. He made no sound. She felt her skin begin to crawl. She knew he would make her tell him everything. He’d make her open the secret drawer.
‘Henri-Georges Fillioux,’ muttered St-Cyr, standing in the attic beside the victim’s bed, ‘have you come back from the dead to murder the woman who never stopped loving you or did Jouvet, the husband of that daughter your parents ignored, do it to save himself?’
Like so many such photographs from that other war, this one could not help but evoke poignant memories of fallen comrades. Fillioux wore his captain’s uniform well. The high cheekbones of the daughter were there, the long lashes, wide lips, proud chin and serious gaze. He had even given her the blue eyes — all these things were stamped on her as if by the insistent mallet of the mother.
But what would Fillioux look like today at the age of fifty-five? Almost certainly heavier about the face, with sagging jowls and pouches under the eyes, the skin far less smooth, the cheeks less cleanly-shaven due to that ever-present shadow most men develop with age. Grey-haired too, perhaps, but suave and aristocratic — yes, yes, unless so battered by the war, all such things had become totally meaningless to him.
There’d been no sign of the sous-facteur Auger, no sign of a break-in either. Though he felt the attic had been thoroughly searched, St-Cyr could find no evidence of this. Even so, he used the point of his pocket-knife to open the drawer of the bedside table.
Unlike so many, Madame Fillioux had not kept a rosary beside her at all times. There was no handkerchief, no alarm clock for one who would hear the cock crow anyway. No lurid train novels or books of romantic poetry.
The handaxe was beautiful, the scrapers, knives, burins and awls so perfect on their bed of towelling, they evoked instant images of the cave and that little valley, and he knew then that before she went to sleep each night, she had used these talismans to keep in touch with her dead husband.
‘Ah merde,’ he said of the handaxe, ‘was this used to kill you? Was one of those scrapers used to remove the flesh, that knife to open it?’
The tools were all carefully numbered and he knew she would have a record of the locations where they had been found in the layers of the gisement.
A small, suede-covered book of photographs, patiently picked through with the aid of the knife-point, revealed that the girl of seventeen had learned well how to use a camera. There were several shots of Fillioux, lithe and handsome but so very serious. In one he was removing encrustations of lime from the artefacts, in another, diligently writing up his journal. Some photos recorded their own little moments of discovery — a blade of flint, a knife with a deliberately fashioned place for a forefinger to rest as the tool was held between the thumb and middle finger, a handaxe, a lump of pyrolusite, a mortar, the grinding of pigments of various sorts, the mixing of them with grease and sometimes clay on a rough pallet of stone with a spatula of flint.
A blowing tube of bird bone was being used to spray ochre onto a flat rock — handprints were being recorded. Charcoal had bee
n ground.
Cave art was known in those summers of 1912 and ’13. As the couple had worked at excavating, so had they developed their ideas of the life of those times. Fillioux had been far ahead of the traditionalists, a renegade no doubt among academic circles. A heretic perhaps but he had grasped the truth in the only way one really can, by doing each task as his forebears had.
A pile of flint chips revealed the art of cleaving a usable tool from a nodule by sharply striking the cutting edge one wanted in the finished tool and splitting the larger fragments away from it. Too often his fingers had been cut and she had had to bandage them as best she could. In one photograph the lace of a torn petticoat was inadvertently revealed.
Fillioux seldom smiled but when he looked at the camera, did he see a girl so suited to his needs he wanted her by his side always or did he simply see someone he could use to advance himself?
Only at the last was that handsome frame uncluttered by clothes. In one shot, the naked savage held a handaxe and a flaming torch at the mouth of that cave. In another, disembowelled, a piglet lay ready for the spit. Blood covered the prehistorian’s hands and forearms. Blood was spattered on his chest and face, his thighs and groin.
The smashing of the roasted bones to free their marrow was recorded, the eating of it.
Wearing nothing but a skin pouch of stone tools, Fillioux gazed at her as she must have at him, their own Adam and Eve, but had he really loved her?
There were no photographs of the girl she had once been, none of the picnics beneath the chestnut tree or of the wine, the champagne. Perhaps he kept these photographs from her and took them away with him to the Marne, perhaps he didn’t bother recording her at all. But he had written letters to her and these she had used to establish her claim.
There was no sign of these letters or of the marriage certificate. Though he searched, St-Cyr could not find them but thought again that she would only have left such things in a very special place.
* * *
Alone, Kohler could hear the Baroness and the boy at the foot of the stairs. ‘Toto, darling, please go up to find out what is taking the détectives and everyone else so long. Ask Franz to come down and see me. Ask Professor Courtet or the woman’s daughter. Janine … or was it Juliette — yes, yes, that was it. Someone must know what is going on.’
‘Why must you always order me around?’ blurted Lemieux.
There was a pause. Perhaps she touched the boy’s cheek or traced a fingertip down the open neck of his shirt front, perhaps she gave him a whiff of that perfume the sous-préfet’s asthma had rebelled at.
‘Darling, you know I love to do it with you. Isn’t that enough? Here, then, take me by the hand. Together we will mount the stairs to discover the secrets of this little place.’
‘You know the Professor and then Herr Oelmann told us to stay with the trunk. You know the détectives will only start asking questions if they find us up there.’
‘But, darling, how can we possibly know anything?’
‘We were at the cave on that Thursday before the murder.’
‘But no one saw us. We were quite alone. You excelled yourself. You were very much the savage. It … it was really quite remarkable and exquisite, isn’t that so? Sex in the coolness of a primitive hole in the ground whose walls and roof hauntingly reflected the light from our candles and evoked the trampling herds of the past.’
‘Damn you, Marina, why must you do this to me?’
‘Because it pleases me.’
‘Courtet won’t like it if I leave his precious trunk outside.’
‘Then let the Professor come downstairs to protect it himself.’
The Professor, ah yes, thought Kohler. The French half of the scientific team that was to vet every little aspect of prehistory in the film. An intense, wiry little man, very academic, very serious and with gold-rimmed spectacles, a sharp nose, thin, angular face and lips that seldom smiled. The one who had come from Lascaux with the trunk, not letting it out of his sight for a moment until the temptation to be alone with Madame Jouvet had proved too much for him.
Grey-haired, immaculate in a dark suit, vest and tie, and in his mid-fifties, Courtet had known exactly which room the woman would be in. Perhaps he had read the father’s diary, the record of a first visit to a tiny auberge in an insignificant little riverside village. Perhaps he had simply guessed correctly, but Franz Oelmann had been right on his heels and the good professor should have known a hawk like Oelmann would hunt for every mouse.
Kohler let the couple pass by. He gave them time to find a room of their own, then stepped along the corridor silently to ease the door open a crack.
The voices were muffled if insistent but clearly the daughter was on the defensive. She stood with her back to a tall armoire and Kohler could just catch a glimpse of her in the mirror above the washstand.
Oelmann was standing nearest the bed, the Professor on the carpet in front of the woman.
‘Madame, I wrote to your mother requesting permission to use the story of your parents in the film. All I want is the return of my letters,’ said Courtet.
‘I don’t have your letters, monsieur. Maman must have destroyed them. She seldom kept such things.’
‘Letters of such importance?’ demanded the Professor, irritably tossing a hand. ‘Oh come now, madame, your mother was far too astute. She wrote back to state that the payment of 10,000 francs was more than adequate.’
‘10,000 francs, it is not so much.’
‘Letters?’ said Oelmann. ‘Surely you mean postcards?’
‘Postcards then,’ swore Courtet hotly. ‘Eight of them since only so many words are allowed each time. Letters still cannot be sent across the Demarcation Line even if they deal with something so crucial to science and the war effort.’
‘She has them,’ breathed Oelmann.
‘I don’t. Mother never told me of them. Never!’
‘Look, madame, I need the postcards only to justify the payment that was made.’
‘But, please, Monsieur le Professeur, how was the money sent when one cannot wire funds from the zone occupée or from here to there?’
‘I … I delivered it. I had to go over a few things with her — your father’s journals, the contents of the trunk, the cave.… She and I visited it last year in … in the late fall before … before the opening of the second chamber, before its discovery.’
‘And now you regret having to tell me of this visit, monsieur?’ she taunted angrily. ‘Why is it, please, that only now is anyone paying attention when, for all those years, maman could get no help?’
Courtet shrugged dismissively. ‘It was not up to me. Others made the decisions.’
‘Admit it, you all thought she was crazy. A postmistress from a little place like this? A woman who spoke of the Neanderthal and the Acheulian as though she not only knew them well, monsieur, but had lived their history. Can you fashion one simple stone tool, please?’
‘How dare you? I do not have to answer that.’
‘I dare because that is all I have and when I was a child, maman told me all about your hatred of my father, your constant jealousy and ridicule. He was an expert, damn you. An expert!’ She tossed her hands and head. ‘Ah! if you will allow me, I will gladly reveal to you the art of pressure flaking or the crafting of a Cro-Magnon spear point.’
Ah Gott im Himmel, thought Kohler, go carefully, madame.
It was Oelmann who said, ‘Your mother must have kept a few things. She would not have left you to find that little hiding-place all by yourself.’
Defiantly she stood her ground and folded her arms across her chest. ‘I know of no such place. We were too poor, monsieur, or is that simple fact not evident enough?’
‘Please,’ said Courtet, ‘the postcards. That is all I ask.’
He was not happy, this professor of prehistory. He did not like the inconvenience of her refusal or what she had said to him. ‘Is it that the postcards, they are incriminating, Professor?’ she asked.
His fists were doubled in anger but he did not even realize it, though Hen Oelmann did.
‘How is it, please, that you discovered the trunk?’ she demanded. ‘My father forbade his family to say anything of it.’
He shrugged. He silently cursed her probably, then snapped acidly, ‘Time passes, things change. The parents Fillioux are both in their final years, or did you not know this, eh, madame? Needs unimagined became paramount. The trunk was put up for sale in a shop I frequent. One day it was there — oh bien sûr, I had heard whispers of your father’s preliminary investigation before his tragic death in the war — a great loss, madame. Please, I assure you. Who of us hadn’t heard of those whispers? But until that day last year in June, I and my colleagues had never seen the trunk let alone any of its contents.’
And now you hate me, she said to herself but asked, ‘What day, please?’
‘The 17th of June.’
Their anniversary.… ‘A shop where, please?’ she asked harshly.
Kohler noted how quickly moisture rushed into her eyes. Mollified, the Professor said, ‘The Marché aux Puces. The Biron stalls.’
Paris, Saint-Ouen and the flea markets.
‘Its contents are priceless, madame. Your mother was absolutely right.’
Was it an offer of conciliation? wondered Kohler.
‘All mother ever wanted was to place my father’s name amongst you and see that he received proper recognition. Why did she have to die?
‘Your mother’s efforts will not have been in vain, madame, I assure you. When the film is complete, it will carry her name and that of your father among its credits. The cave will bear a suitable bronze plaque. A tribute to her dedication and resolve, to the memory of your father also.’
Lips were pressed against Kohler’s left ear. Fingers tickled the short hairs. ‘How touching of him,’ breathed Marina von Strade. ‘Left alone with her, would our professor be so kind, or Herr Oelmann? Our Franz who is so watchful, Inspector, he sees so many things, doesn’t he, Toto darling, but says so little. That’s what makes him so very dangerous.’
Stonekiller Page 10