‘Is fraud not a crime?’
‘Don’t be impertinent. You know it will only get back to your boss.’
Courtet and Eisner exchanged worried glances. Christian Dussart, the French film director, asked, ‘When can we start work at the house in Beaulieu-sur-Dordogne?’
‘As soon as my partner and sous-préfet Deveaux are finished with it.’
Von Strade drained his glass. ‘Deveaux is on his way right now, having given up his beauty sleep. He’ll have the necessary men with him. We start work at 1800 hours tomorrow.’
‘1800 hours but.…’
‘No buts, Herr Kohler. Sturmbannführer Boemelburg is looking forward to previewing Moment of Discovery with you and St-Cyr even if your leg-irons and handcuffs get in the way. That little order, my friend, comes straight from Herr Himmler.’
‘Ah merde, Berlin …?’
‘Unless Herr Himmler is in Bohemia still executing reprisals for Herr Heydrich’s untimely demise. A village has been razed and all one hundred and ninety-one of its adult males given the rope or the bullet. That is in addition to the one hundred and thirty-one who were executed right on the spot of the murder. All the women and children of the village have been sent to concentration camps — let’s not deny they exist. The children to one, their mothers to another.’
‘I’ll talk to Louis.’
‘You do that. You take a leaf from our book. Find your stonekiller if you must, but keep the story line so simple even an ignoramus can grasp what you have to say. Titillate the masses with a few tasteful glimpses of our Danielle’s beautiful posterior and you will have millions in your pockets and millions, my friend, are what is at stake. Marina, see that he gets everything he needs and enjoys himself. Your Toto is, I gather, busy elsewhere.’
‘He’s watching the rerun of The Wizard of Oz because I told him to.’
‘Good. That should keep his mind busy. It’s the rest of him you’ll have to watch.’
‘His cock, Willi?’
‘My dear, when you get angry it only makes you more beautiful. Oh by the way, Danielle was not at the rushes. Remind her that attendance is mandatory and cast in stone in her contract.’
‘Why not remind her yourself, darling?’
‘Because tonight I’m busy. You can tell her that too. Tell her she’s being punished and that from now on she had best behave herself.’
‘She’ll only come begging.’
‘Then let her. That is exactly what I want.’
Danielle Arthaud had drunk most of the latest bottle of Monbazillac but still Herr Kohler had not come to find them. Still Juliette waited and prayed for him to release her from this … this torment.
Far from helping things, the wine had only made the actress more irritable. She constantly muttered, ‘Willi, how can you do this to me? I need it, damn you.’ Now up, now down, now pacing about or glancing at her wrist-watch, she would hurriedly wipe her nose with the back of a hand. The deep brown eyes were no longer lovely and wide but the pupils hard and constricted. The lips were no longer generous but tight and uncertain.
‘You refuse to tell me anything,’ accused the woman petulantly. ‘I give you things; you give me nothing. The coup de grâce, eh, schoolteacher? Why, please, did your father come back?’
‘He didn’t!’
‘He did!’
‘He’s dead. He died on the Marne.’
‘Your mother … those postcards.… Are you certain he did not write to her? Certain, do you hear?’
‘Stop it! Just stop it! I know nothing. A flask … his initials. His flask. It … it was found near the stream. Mother’s … mother’s blood had been washed off.’
Danielle sucked in a breath. ‘So, evidence was carelessly left and yet you still doubt his return from the dead? Was there anything else?’
Kohler … where the hell was he? ‘Two bottles of champagne, the 1889.’
And you hate to tell me anything, thought Danielle, because you are so afraid of what I might do to you with my stone tools. Ah yes, my battered little housewife, if I touched you now, you would jump. ‘Listed as missing in action does not have to mean being blown to pieces or cut to ribbons by machine-gun fire.’
She was not smiling. She really meant it. ‘If … if he has come back, I wouldn’t know what he looked like. He could walk right past me and I … I would never know.’
‘Then you do believe he has come back. Admit it!’
Ah damn the woman! ‘Perhaps. I … I really do not know.’
And now you are trembling, schoolteacher. You are thinking — yes, I can see it in your eyes as you sit there at my dressing-table — that your father and I might have done the killings. ‘There are photographs, paintings — the portrait the parents Fillioux commissioned of their son in uniform. I could get them for you. He was very handsome. Your mother must have loved him dearly. I would have yielded, too, to such a one but in that cave, I think. Yes, in that cave.’
With the tip of a forefinger, Danielle extracted a droplet of wine from her glass and, reaching out, made the sign of the cross on Juliette’s brow. Abruptly it was wiped away.
‘Tell me something, schoolteacher. Did that mother of yours ever visit the cave at Lascaux?’
The blue eyes leapt. ‘So as to copy the paintings? No! Mother … Mother would have told me of such a visit. She wanted very much to see them, yes, of course, but the war, the Occupation in the North, the uncertainties.… It was not so easy to escape one’s responsibilities at such times, or at any other for that matter.’ She gave a shrug.
And now you are lying, thought Danielle, and your eyes, they duck away from me rather than face the matter squarely. ‘But if she had gone there, what would she have done?’
Ah damn her anyway! ‘Lighted a candle and stood in awe of the paintings. Wished with all her heart that my father had been with her.’
The mother had been to Lascaux but had the daughter not known of all of the visits? It was possible, thought Danielle, shrewdly looking her over, wanting to shake the life out of her.
In a whisper, she asked, ‘Did your husband know we were to make a film of their discovery?’
‘André’ …? It’s possible. I … I really don’t know. Mother didn’t tell me so he … he would have had to find out in … in some other way. Ah no, mademoiselle, did you …?’
You poor thing, said Danielle to herself. You’re so pretty in that dress of mine but are you even aware of it now? ‘Then if he did find out, would your husband not have seen money in it for himself?’
Had they paid André for information? Had Danielle been the go-between? ‘To understand him, Mademoiselle Arthaud, you must realize my husband hates everything around him, not just myself. The school, his humdrum life, the pittance of a salary he was paid and will be paid, the lack of all promotion. The war, it was passing him by. Talk … all he talked about was killing Communists, so the Germans, they let him.’
The glass was drained. Some bureau drawers were desperately searched and then those of the dressing-table. Again the muttering came for Willi von Strade to help her. And then she stood so close they all but touched.
‘Women.… Did your husband do things to the women he and his comrades took prisoner? Did he not boast of how he could use the stone tools he had with him as objects of interest to set himself apart from the others?’
Ah no … ‘Who … Who has suggested such a thing to you? Who?’
When no answer came, the schoolteacher dropped her eyes and blurted, ‘It was André. You’ve been getting him to tell you about mother and her visits.’
One could take her by the shoulders now and she would not resist. One could slap her hard and all she would do was dissolve into tears. ‘But if not me,’ said Danielle, moving in closer still, ‘then your father. Is that not so, my little one? He could have met and talked with that husband of yours and you … you would be none the wiser.’
She must smile up at her bravely through her tears, thought Juliette. She must give he
r the answer such a statement deserved. ‘André would have told me my father had returned. He would have laughed in my face, mademoiselle, and would have shouted that my mother had been crazy to have waited all her adult life for a man who had neglected to tell her he was still alive.’
‘And already married? Have you not thought of this, too, schoolteacher?’
‘No!’
‘But if he is alive, and if he did write to her and then kill her or get that husband of yours to do it for him, you can see why he would want to steal the postcards and kill the sous-facteur also. And you must ask, What will you do? Help him or help to convict him?’
The schoolteacher’s hair was soft, and when Danielle ran her fingers through it, the woman did not resist but simply bowed her head and wept. ‘I’ll kill myself. I’ll do it this time because if he’s alive, mother meant to kill him and I … I said nothing to anyone about it. I’m so ashamed.’
‘Good. Then go and kill yourself. Give him what he most needs, the silence of the only one who can speak out against him. Trade your pathetic life for his and let him get on with the research he has had to neglect for so long. It’s what your mother would have wanted, madame, had she not meant to kill him. Now get out of here. I’ve got things to do.’
Sous-préfet Deveaux, his jacket cast aside in deference to a fireman’s duties, refilled the tin cup with brandy and slid it carefully across the table in Madame Fillioux’s kitchen. ‘Another, Jean-Louis. It’s not every night I have to pluck a burglar from the roof of a house in this little village.’
‘A burglar … ah yes, the carpet-bag. I should have known better. So should the cat.’
Merde, what a night! The cat had trapped the tile. The torch beams of Oelmann and Jouvet had homed in on the creature. The neighbours, awakened in any case and secretly watching the proceedings, had seen the cat release the tile to hear it shatter on the cobblestones.
No sooner had Oelmann and Jouvet left in the car, than the citizens of the lower village had come out in force. Nightgowns, nightcaps, brooms, sticks and lanterns, men, women and boys … eager boys with sharp stones. Ah nom de Dieu. Long ladders had been placed at every corner of that wretched roof and others fast carried up to be laid on the tiles as in a fire drill. They had refused to let him climb down. An officer of the law on a murder case.
‘The carpet-bag, they expected me to give it up before they would let me even think of using one of their ladders!’
Deveaux coughed cigarette smoke and wheezed in as the tears came. ‘Ah, don’t sound so wounded. A small miracle, eh? Gendarmes from Sarlat in the nick of time. In Paris, the tenants would have dragged you free and let you chase after that tile just to see if you would sprout wings and play the harp.’
They would have, some of them. Deveaux had sent five of his best men out to Auger’s farm to begin work there. Two others were dusting for fingerprints in the attic, while still others had the unenviable task of opening every last one of the parcels and of disposing of the contents after making suitable notations. The commissariat in Domme had been alerted and a magistrate’s warrant restraining Jouvet would be sought. The husband had to be stopped.
‘Jean-Louis, this thing, eh? It’s getting a little bigger than either of us would wish. Heads will roll if that cave is a forgery and we proclaim it to the world. Vichy have informed me that I am to have the orchestra play softly so as not to awaken the snorers.’
‘Ah yes, Berlin. Herr Goebbels invests 50,000 marks to show the world that the swastika owes its origins not just to the humble Cro-Magnon cave-dwellers of the ancestral Dordogne but to those from some fifty or a hundred thousand years ago. Presumably under all that Neanderthal body hair, pure Aryans existed. But to use that to lay claim to the whole of France? To legitimatize the conquest …? Ah! as a patriot, I find that impossible to swallow.’
Deveaux refilled the cup and gave him the look of a priest at confession. ‘Whether or not the Neanderthals wiped themselves with swastika leaves or prayed to that symbol is no concern of ours. Let history take care of itself and let Herr Goebbels claim whatever idiocy he wishes since he, and the others, have the muscle, eh?’ Effusively he threw out his hands. ‘Those prehistorians, Jean-Louis, they’re like old women. Insidiously jealous of one another, insanely so and envious to the point of greed. Ah! so they want to warp history a little to gain prestige and power for themselves, others will come along to correct their mistakes and show us all what idiots came before them. You know that, I know it too. A year, two years — this war can’t last for ever, can it? Time sorts out all things. God waits only for the bell of truth and so must the rest of us since He’s the ringer.’
‘You’re trying to tell me something, Odilon. Since it isn’t a request to see what I have in this bag, why not enlighten me?’
Ah nom de Dieu, must Jean-Louis be so stubborn? ‘That bag, I could ask you to open it but I’m close enough to retirement to want my pension. André Jouvet was in Sarlat on the Monday from noon until the four o’clock bus. Several reliable sources have confirmed this. He can’t be the killer of Madame Fillioux though one of his friends might have done it. We are still working on this.’
‘And what else, Odilon?’
Regrettably it would have to be said. ‘That woman paid three visits to Lascaux.’
Curses were heard from among the parcels, footsteps in the room above. ‘Three visits?’
‘Yes. The first was in the late fall of 1940 when the country was still on its knees and trying to wake up to the Defeat and partition. The cave at Lascaux was closed, of course, but Madame Fillioux, their only visitor in nearly two months, paid to have it opened and spent several hours inside alone. Like others who are passionately interested in such things, she just had to see the paintings. There was a sketchbook with her and some chalks, a pencil too.’
‘And the other visits?’
‘Have more brandy. You’re still looking too pale. Last summer, in early August, from the 4th until the 7th, an extensive visit, again spending hours alone sketching the paintings. This time on tracing paper. “A scientific study,” she said. “Research for her husband.”’
‘Her husband?’
‘Ah yes, that is what the owner has told me. “I remember her well,” he has said. “Her sketches, they were magnificent. That one has a real feel for those times.”’
Merde … ‘And the third visit?’
‘Mid-November, after she and Professor Courtet had paid the Discovery Cave a visit. A few hours was all she could spare. Sous-facteur Auger would have known of the three visits but did Juliette? The first visit, yes most certainly but the others … ah, that might not be so.
‘And Herr Oelmann, does he know of the visits?’
The sous-préfet reached across the table for the top of his thermos and drained it. ‘He was at Lascaux during the filming and will have looked through the guestbook the owner keeps. When one visits, one prints their name and address and gives the signature, then later adds a comment on leaving. If I can look, so could he. Besides, because of the Occupation, not many have visited that cave.’
‘Then you would have seen if Juliette had paid it a visit?’
‘So as to duplicate the paintings, eh? Ah merde, you’re serious!’ Deveaux pinched his nose in thought. ‘Perhaps it is that Juliette has used another’s name. For me she’s not that kind of woman but.…’ He paused. ‘But I have to tell myself that no checks are ever made of any visitor’s identity card.’
‘Who else visited Lascaux?’
They had come to the crux of it at last. ‘Danielle Arthaud “and friend.” 25 May 1941, a Sunday, and not quite three weeks before Madame Fillioux’s annual visit to the Discovery Cave.’
‘Would our victim have read through the names?’
‘Most probably since the entry was on the same page as her visit in August.’
‘And Courtet?’
‘The Professor? Ah! I have forgotten. Six visits at various times, some in the company of other prehistorians �
�� one with Hen-Eisner, of course, and two visits all by himself. “A most welcome guest.” Hen Eisner has also paid visits without Courtet.’
‘So, we are left with Danielle Arthaud “and friend.”’
‘A stonekiller.’
The initial postcard from Danielle Arthaud to Ernestine Fillioux was dated Sunday, 25 May 1941, the very same day Danielle “and friend” had been at Lascaux, a worry to be sure. Ah nom de Dieu, what was this?
Alone at last in a room at the hotel in Beaulieu-sur-Dordogne, St-Cyr had set the four bundles of cards before him on the bed. In keeping with the law, since the 30th of September 1940 until the end of 1941, only those cards with printed messages had been in use. One filled in the blank spaces, a word for each, and crossed out the others where necessary. Making sense of a tragedy or some urgent problem was all but impossible but one did not stray from the printed words and spaces. If one did, the card was simply torn in half but not destroyed, ah no, they did not do things like that, the Gestapo and the French Gestapo or the Vichy police of the postal system. The card was saved, the sender questioned and then the recipient, who might not know a thing, was forced to give a very thorough account of themselves or else.
From among the others he chose the first card from the smallest bundle. It was dated 10 October 1941.
Hermann … Hermann, he said and, reaching for his pipe and tobacco pouch, threw everything back into the carpet-bag. Deveaux would have to give him a lift. Death caps and fly agaric.… No wonder Madame Fillioux had picked her mushrooms and hidden the postcards. Danielle Arthaud’s ‘friend’ must be Henri-Georges.
Juliette Jouvet had not yet rejoined him, a worry to be sure, thought Kohler, and one from which the Baroness constantly sought to divert him. It was as if she could not let him leave but had to lead him down a path of her own, ah merde.…
The screen was filled with colour. The girl with the dog and the pigtails was long-legged, purposeful and spunky to say nothing of her eyes, her lips and voice.
Stonekiller Page 17