Stonekiller

by J. Robert Janes

  Using a primitive scaffold of poles that had, in places, been driven into natural openings, Danielle Arthaud stood on high with a hand braced against the black mane of a cave lion. There was a primitive stone lamp in her other hand and this she held up for the artist, so that one first saw her from the side, all but naked, slim, lithe, pert and primitive next to her tall, blond, muscular, blue-eyed mate whose hammer-hard buttocks few women could refuse to look at and linger over, ah yes.

  ‘They are using a paste of goose fat and ground pyrolusite. That is a flint burin, an engraving tool, in his hand but he really doesn’t scrape the rock or damage the figures in any way — we’re not so thoughtless. Once the animal was outlined, the ancients then filled the scratches in with colours similar to those she will pass to him on the palettes. Woman is seen as the helpmate always.’

  Danielle Arthaud’s auburn hair was loose and uncombed. There were smears of grease and ashes on her flanks and arms, her face too. Around her slender waist there was a leather thong and from this hung a skin pouch of tools. Killing tools? wondered Kohler, suddenly taken aback and worrying all the more about Juliette. The actress wasn’t wearing anything else but a strand of bone beads and primitive tattoos of dark blue dots on her breasts and cheeks. These items were zoomed in on so that one saw the beads and the dots very clearly.

  Two naked children crouched beside the fire. The boy was grinding the pyrolusite, while the girl heated some over the fire perhaps to further darken it.

  The first take came to an end. Take Two came up but apparently it lacked spontaneity, though he could see no difference. We’ll go with the first,’ said the film’s German director. There was little argument from his French counterpart. Even so, von Strade, the pacifier, called out, ‘Rerun the damned thing. They want another look at her ass.’

  ‘Nacktkultur,’ breathed Kohler. ‘The nudist movement that is now such a part of Nazi ideology.’

  ‘The cult of the body, yes,’ confided the Baroness, ‘but always the nakedness is seen as striving towards the perfection of a higher ideal than the self, in this case, the art of the cave and a record that has not only survived countless millennia but traces our ideology and ancestry right back to the beginnings of time.’

  Goebbels would love it. The Führer also, of course, and Herr Himmler, the ex-pimp, ex-chicken farmer and now head of the SS, but where the hell was Juliette?

  ‘Why do they need Lascaux?’ he asked.

  They were rerunning the takes. She would press her lips to his ear again. ‘To work out the techniques of lighting, filming and sound pick-up. To gain stock footage we can use and to offer a parallel to our cave which goes back in time so much further.’

  ‘But the paintings at the Discovery Cave are similar?’

  ‘Better.’

  ‘Though done a lot earlier?’

  She shook her head and placed the flat of a hand lightly on his chest. ‘There the paintings are of the same age as these and Cro-Magnon in origin, but the amulet and the figurines are much older. They are Neanderthal, yes? So what we find very faintly among the paintings at the Discovery Cave, we find on the amulet also and thus our cave encompasses the whole of prehistory and is positive proof.’

  ‘Do you mean to tell me there are swastikas among the Discovery cave paintings?’

  ‘Yes. It’s remarkable. It’s fantastic. It is everything the Führer could have hoped for.’

  Ah merde.… ‘Why no clothes?’

  Was he always such a doubter? ‘The beasts are perfect specimens and they wear no clothes. Therefore it is thought to show perfection existed also among those who drew the animals and hunted them. One is surprised and shocked a little — it is unexpected, yes — but one is also fascinated by what is going on. There is that sense of mystery, that sense of body worship which glorifies perfection not for itself but for a higher ideal.’

  ‘The State, the Party and the swastika.’

  ‘Very few of the scenes have total nudity. Lascaux was a religious site, was it not? There perfection was worshipped and we must show this.’

  She really believed it. The kids in the film came up again and Kohler felt a tug at his sleeve. ‘That’s me,’ whispered a bright-eyed girl of seven, searching for praise he had to give.

  ‘I’m impressed,’ he said and grinned. ‘Hey, I like it.’

  ‘Gut,’ said the Baroness harshly, ‘then what you are about to see will not trouble you.’

  There were takes of domesticity too, outside the Lascaux Cave and under the pines. Of Danielle and other women in skins cracking walnuts, then butchering a fresh-killed deer. Her bloodied hand gripped a flint knife to slit the skin and work deeply into the flesh until, arm buried up to the elbow, she drew out the guts. Blood on her knees and thighs, blood on her breasts, shoulders, neck and face. Using a handaxe, she expertly chopped meat from a bone and placed it on the embers to roast.

  The heart, the liver and kidneys she offered up on her knees with dripping hands to her mate, the embodiment of Teutonic master race.

  Ah Gott im Himmel, Louis, thought Kohler grimly, her eyes, they’re so bright, so feverish she has to be on something. Cocaine … was it cocaine?

  End of take. End of trailer. End of black letters and numbers …

  ‘Who taught her to do that?’

  ‘Professor Courtet perhaps, though he is not nearly so proficient. She was with us at the cave on the Friday. She couldn’t wait to see it but when we got there, it was as though Danielle had known of it all along. She was the first to enter, the first to pause, the first to cry out in wonder and the last to leave.’

  And now you’ve told me not only that you suspect her, and have let her get her hands on Juliette, but that you hate her. Is your Willi screwing the hell out of her? wondered Kohler. For a price of course. But who is her lover, who does she go to time and again no matter what? That big buck discus thrower in the film or someone else, someone you want all for yourself. Or is it simply cocaine?

  ‘Look, I’d better find Madame Jouvet, eh? I’d better call my partner to let him know where I am. Is there a telephone?’

  ‘Of course. Willi couldn’t function without one and neither could the others.’

  * * *

  The jangling of an unanswered telephone was unnerving but St-Cyr let it ring until it stopped. He had to search the house of Madame Fillioux thoroughly. He had to be certain the woman hadn’t hidden the postcards elsewhere and perhaps counted on waiting until later to tell her daughter.

  ‘These old Renaissance houses,’ he muttered. ‘The poorer the owner, the greater the number and craftiness of the hiding-places.’

  Shaking his pocket torch and saying, ‘Ah damn the lousy batteries these days!’ he went into the room at the head of the stairs to play it on the open drawer at the bottom of the armoire and ask again, ‘Who else could have known of this other than the daughter?’

  He was down on his hands and knees and reaching well under the other side of the armoire when the telephone started up again. He waited. He searched. Straining, he muttered, ‘Ah merde, why don’t you go away? The woman’s been dead for a week tomorrow!’

  As if in answer, it stopped. The wood was rough in places. There was no dust. There were no cobwebs, even though Madame Fillioux had not been an exemplary housekeeper. ‘Too busy but …,’ he said and, heaving on the thing, moved the armoire from the wall sufficiently to shine the torch behind it. The floorboards were clean and bare and in short lengths. He moved the armoire a little more. The first round wooden peg came out so easily, he felt a rush of elation. The second, third and fourth were no different.

  Stacking the boards, he played the light on Madame Fillioux’s little treasures. There were the letters from Henri-Georges the woman had used as proof to obtain her marriage certificate, it also. Both wire cages and corks from those first bottles of Moët-et-Chandon were there, as were a fine silver necklace and a diamond pin.

  Twelve louis d’or represented the savings of a lifetime. The 10,000 f
rancs was missing but had it been spent?

  In bundle on top of bundle, there were four sets of postcards. Gingerly he took them up. Some were from a year ago and more — he could see this at a glance for they were of the printed message kind, the sender being able only to fill in the blank spaces here and there and cross out the unwanted words. Others were fully written out and more recent. Some were from the parents of the husband — requests for help that began in that first desperate winter of 1940-41. He’d read them later. No time now, no time. Others were from Professor Courtet — yes, yes — and still others from Danielle Arthaud, but.…

  Caught unwares, he was startled by the jangling of the telephone and hissed, ‘Ah, go away and leave me to it!’

  There were four rolls of tracing paper, of that heavy grey-white sort artists often use for rough sketching. Each was bound by an elastic band. Not all of the rolls were of the same width or length, but from beneath their outermost layers, inner colourings gave haunting shapes of animals in brick red, ochrous yellow and sooty black.

  Unrolling the widest of them, and holding it to the light, he sucked in a breath and said, ‘Ah nom de Dieu, has she been to Lascaux to copy the cave art there so as to then repeat it in the Discovery Cave?’

  In silhouette, and sometimes only in outline, bison and shaggy black ponies raced across the paper with reindeer and sharp-horned aurochs. There were others too. The woolly rhinoceros, mammoth, musk oxen and giant elk — but had these been among the animals portrayed at Lascaux? He didn’t think so. Red deer, wolf, badger, fox and rabbit also appeared on the tracing paper, salmon too.

  Each pigment had been worked into the paper with a fingertip where necessary, the woman using the technique to quickly flesh out colour and give shadings so as to emphasize line and form and highlight shadow, imparting life to the sketches.

  With a start, he realized he had opened two of the other rolls yet had no recollection of having done so.

  Test patches of natural pigments were displayed on the narrowest roll and he could see that the woman had experimented with them, adding clay, then water, for ease of spraying through a tube or for working into the rock face with thumb and finger.

  Tucked inside this roll was another. Here a succession of handprints had been traced from a rock wall but try as he did, he could not recall any mention of such in the news reports of the Lascaux discovery.

  ‘Two sets of handprints,’ he said softly as he unrolled the thing further. ‘One larger and far stronger than the other. A man, then, and a woman.’

  From across the ages they seemed to cry out to him, but then a blown pigment spray of reddish-brown ochre outlined a third set. Below these last handprints Madame Fillioux had written her name, and he could see that she had not only tested the technique on herself but had juxtaposed her own prints with those of the past, if indeed they really were of the past.

  Again the telephone rang. Again, startled half out of his wits, he jumped.

  Stuffing things into his pockets and setting the rolls of tracing paper aside, he anxiously replaced the boards and heaved at the armoire until it was back in place.

  Then he took everything upstairs to the attic to find a carpetbag and to empty her bedside drawer.

  Again the telephone rang but so softly was it heard, he had to run down the stairs that now were all but in darkness, the beam of his torch bouncing from the walls and railing.

  ‘Allô …? Allô …? Is that Beaulieu-sur-Dordogne?’

  ‘Yes … Yes.…’ He was out of breath and impatient.

  ‘Give me the Chief Inspector Jean-Louis St-Cyr, please.’

  ‘It’s me.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Me, madame. Now connect us.’

  ‘A moment … Ne quittez pas, monsieur.’

  ‘Ah nom de Jésus-Christ, madame, you are giving me a fatal heart attack!’

  ‘Bad-mouthing an operator is an offence against the law, monsieur. I shall disconnect you as of this moment!’

  ‘Ah, no … no, madame. Forgive me. A case of two murders. Much work still to be done and obstacles to be overcome.’

  ‘Obstacles?’ she asked.

  Ah merde. ‘Just a few.’ She’d be certain to listen in.

  ‘Louis, it’s me. Where the hell have you been?’

  ‘Enjoying my dinner and a digestif.’

  ‘I thought so. You’re giving me a hernia. You know that, don’t you?’

  ‘Hermann, just tell me what you want.’

  ‘I’m at Château d’ Aimeric — it’s named after one of their troubadors, I think.’

  ‘Cut the travelogue, please.’

  ‘It’s to the east of the Sarlat road and about half-way between Lascaux and that other hole in the ground. I think the weather’s fine.’

  ‘Good for fishing?’ Good for Hermann.

  ‘The best. At least a river pike. A big one.’

  ‘Have you a gaff?’

  ‘Ah, no, not yet. Maybe I can borrow one from the sparrow. It’s possible.’

  Madame Jouvet must be with him. ‘Don’t argue, then. Don’t agree either. Just do it again.’

  D.A., thought Kohler. ‘Okay, Chief. I think I’ve got it.’

  ‘Paris, four, fifteen, seven, five place première and still quite comfortable if jaded. Our second-in-command this year. A goose perhaps.’

  ‘Good. Yes, that’s very good, Chief. Hey, I think you’ll like the fishing. I’ll check it out for you.’

  Danielle Arthaud had been sent a parcel by sous-facteur Auger on the 15th of April to Number seven place des Vosges, apartment five. ‘Hey, Louis, I almost forgot. Your horoscope tells me there’s likely to be snow and a shooting star tonight. Have you got your helmet?’

  ‘Snow …? My helmet …? Ah, yes, I’ll … I’ll be sure to wear it.’

  ‘You’d better. The first will make you do things you shouldn’t; the second will bash your head in if you’re not careful.’

  They rang off and for a moment St-Cyr remained lost in thought and worried. Danielle Arthaud was at the château with Hermann who had evidence enough not only to suspect her but to suggest she was on cocaine. Herr Oelmann, ‘the shooting star’, was not there.

  One always had to speak in code these days, especially in the North where the Gestapo, with all-too-avid French assistance, monitored everything. Regrettably no calls were allowed to cross the Demarcation Line unless to the SS of the avenue Foch or to Gestapo HQ in the Sûreté’s former building on the rue des Saussaies. One could still call London from here. He could call New York, Lisbon, Zurich or Buenos Aires if he wanted and hear those voices from freedom so far away, but he could not call Marianne and Philippe to let them know he had been detained.

  Perhaps she’d understand, perhaps she wouldn’t think, as she had so often of late, that life was passing her by and he had simply forgotten them.

  When he heard a car rolling softly up to the house, he silently cursed his luck. Had he left the lock off the door?

  For the life of him he could not remember.

  Juliette Jouvet was silent and uneasy as the last of the truffes sous la cendre was delicately divided in half with a thin and beautifully worked blade of grey-blue flint.

  Danielle Arthaud heaved a contented sigh as she sat looking at the pieces. ‘These things,’ she said of the truffles, ‘they fill my soul and make me feel like a lover condemned to a longing which can never be satisfied.’

  The actress took another sip of the Monbazillac and let that sweet, golden wine trickle down her lovely throat before reverently placing one half of the truffle in a palm to pass it to her guest, her little charge, her schoolteacher, mother and battered housewife who still appeared so shy and timid.

  ‘That blade is Magdalenian — Cro-Magnon,’ said Juliette tightly. ‘Where, please, did you get it?’

  ‘Ah, don’t take such offence. I borrowed it.’

  ‘It’s from the cave of my father.’

  ‘Is that so bad? You were there. Ah, please don’t de
ny it. You saw the paintings on Sunday, yes? Paintings like you had never seen before. Me, I saw them on the Friday as Marina will most certainly have told your détective by now. They filled me with rapture. I wanted to lie naked on the floor in supplication before them. Naked under an aurochs, madame, and with my legs spread to take the release of his little burden.’

  Did such a thought embarrass her? wondered Danielle, having said it just to see what would happen. It must, for that little bird said harshly and in confusion, ‘As the deposits of the gisement become younger, the tools become better and far more skilfully worked. One also finds flints from distant places, mademoiselle. These flints indicate trade between groups. That flint you still have in your hand, it is not native to my father’s cave but is blue like those from the valley of the Seine.’

  ‘Are you denying that you saw the paintings or merely avoiding the issue?’

  ‘I … I don’t know what you mean? I … I went in only to the gisement.’

  And you are lying, said Danielle to herself, but lies are told only to hide other matters. They weren’t getting on. For a start, the richness of the bedroom had made the schoolteacher ashamed of her poverty and ignorance of such things, the silks, the brocades of gold and silver, the clothes too. Clothes that were scattered all over the room as if, worn once, then dropped without a care until picked up by someone else.

  Silk underwear clung to the canopied roof of a magnificent Louis XIV bed. A pale rose brassiére dangled from the arm of a Renaissance chair whose dark and deeply carved arms only further embarrassed the schoolteacher since she sensed, ah yes, that the chair, it had been used for more than one purpose. What purpose, please? demanded Danielle silently only to say, ‘Relax,’ and give a generous grin with lips that were as wide and fine as the schoolteacher’s, were hers not so broken. ‘I’m here to be your friend. You’ve had two terrible shocks. Then there is the little matter of your dress, your husband,’ she said, nibbling delicately at her share of the truffle and giving the battered housewife the fullness of big brown eyes whose irises were so deep and wide and disconcerting.