Stonekiller

by J. Robert Janes

  ‘Nom de Jésus-Christ, Louis. Look what the hell they’ve done to our valley.’

  The dawn had broken and through its soft, primordial blush, cranes, ladders, platforms and towers stood stock-still, while straight up the right side of the valley, over brush and rock alike, a primitive wooden set of rails carried a cart and camera pylon.

  The cinematographer in Louis was intrigued. ‘As the Baroness and her prehistorian climb to the cave, assistants wind the trolley slowly up the slope so that the camera can record their progress for posterity.’

  Juliette Jouvet was silent. Staging went up only so far, then the trolley took over. But right at the entrance to the cave, and on the same side, a platform had been built. Now an open parasol of unbleached Egyptian cotton stirred forlornly in the breeze as if waiting for something to happen. High above it, a honey buzzard circled. The hawk was so beautiful and majestic. How many times as a girl had she and maman watched one so similar she would come away from the cave filled with thoughts of it?

  ‘It’s his valley, isn’t it?’ said Kohler, nodding at the hawk.

  ‘Or hers. To me the hawk has always been a male, but now I wonder if I was right. Is that not my mother up there watching me?’

  The film’s set crews had done their job with blitzkrieg speed, even to somehow hauling in two huge, camouflaged electrical generators with banks of storage batteries, all courtesy of the Wehrmacht. Heavy black cables were strung here, there. Sometimes hidden, most often not, they were dabbed with yellow paint to warn people not to trip. Lights … some big, some small, were even mounted in the trees whose interfering branches had been ruthlessly broken and left to hang or brutally decapitated and dragged away.

  ‘They’ve completely taken over,’ murmured the passionate naturalist and lover of prehistory in Louis. ‘What was once so beautiful has been ravaged.’

  Sections had been roped off — a portion of the stream where Marina von Strade and her prehistorian would pop the corks and toast their discovery; the picnic site where they would feed each other sweet cherries or mushrooms perhaps; parts of the path to the waterfall where the two would strip for a healthy bathe before a severely academic romp in the cave and doe-eyed glances under those of the aurochs or whatever, thought Kohler. But even in these locations there was change. Potted trees had been brought in and, still in their pots, planted where none had existed before. Leaves and branches had been carefully trimmed so as not to intrude. Pine needles had been scattered over the sharp husks of chestnuts from years ago so as to soften the lovers’ picnic site and bugger that crap about audiences knowing one tree from another. When you’ve got the screen filled with a woman who liked to bathe in the buff or have her bottom polished, who would care?

  Shabby in a dirty grey cloak with staff and beret, a scraggly-bearded shepherd came to stand at the very edge of the cliff, just above the dark entrance of the cave. As his flock gathered about him, they, too, peered curiously down at the scene below.

  A stone fell to clatter and bounce until its sound was no more. The shepherd raised a hand in greeting and called out to them. He asked about the crane and platform hoist he had seen mounted up the valley by the waterfall. ‘It is not safe, I think,’ he said. ‘More stones are needed to weight the base of it down.’

  Down … down … stones … stones, the echoes came, his patois harsh and broken like the rocks from which it had sprung.

  He moved his staff to point out the location. Frightened, one of the lambs bolted into space. ‘Ah, no,’ gasped Juliette. The thing hit a slab of rock and broke its head, bouncing and flying through the air before coming to rest. Hind legs twitching … twitching until at last they were still.

  Ruefully the shepherd surveyed the loss and for a moment glared at them in silence. ‘Idiots!’ he shrieked. ‘See what you have made me do.’ Do … do.… ‘A Christian gesture, one of goodness of the heart and you … you … I hope you all bash your shitty heads to pieces and give your blood to the stones.’ The stones.…

  Ah merde.… ‘Pay no attention, madame,’ said Kohler gently. ‘That’s a month’s wages. Anyone would have said the same. He didn’t mean it.’

  ‘He did. He has come to this little valley like that since a boy. It was always his special moment and even then maman and I intruded, though we fed him sometimes and tried to get to know him.’

  The honey buzzard was feasting on the eyes and offal, and when they drew near it in their climb, intestines were being dragged out to glisten in the early morning sunlight. Blood red against the grey-white of the stones, the intestines momentarily became still under the fiercely glaring eyes of the hawk whose rights had also been intruded upon, ah yes.

  ‘It is not good,’ she murmured. ‘It is an omen I must heed even as my ancestors would have done at the dawn of time.’

  They were hungry and tired, and she wished the détectives would go to sleep but there was no time. Did they always run on Messerschmitt benzedrine? she wondered. Herr Kohler’s hand shook. Jean-Louis said, ‘This is positively the last time, Hermann. The heart, yes? You cannot go on like this. Crush them up, madame, and sprinkle them on the pâté and bread our illustrious Bavarian Gestapo has fortuitously stolen for us from a certain château. Then you must show us the second chamber and the paintings.’

  ‘The paintings, yes,’ she managed. ‘Messieurs, there … there is something I must tell you. When Herr Kohler found me in …’

  ‘It’s Hermann. Please, it’ll be easier.’

  ‘Merci. When Hermann, he … he has found me in the Professor’s room, I was going through my father’s journals. I … I was certain then that… that the page where he had described the cave in depth was missing — carefully cut out with a razor blade or flint knife.’

  ‘By Courtet or by Danielle?’ breathed St-Cyr.

  ‘Or by my father, yes?’ she said sadly. ‘Like Lascaux and lots of other caves in the Dordogne, there are often chambers with passages between. Here, at the back of this chamber, there are two passages. The one continues out to the east to end on the surface in an entrance big enough only to slither through. This one, the Professor has called a ventilation shaft, a chimney for the fires. The other passage, it … it does not go out to the surface and has troubled me very much, you understand. Mother spoke of it on her visit last year. She asked if I remembered her warning me not to enter it.’

  They waited for her to continue and at last she said, ‘Inside the cave, this passage, it is about three metres to the north-west of where the ventilation shaft opens. It is narrow, too, but soon it becomes a long chamber whose roof, though not so high as this, wanders in the rock for some distance. Because there were shafts in the floor and some loose rocks, my mother never let me explore it but she and my father did when they first came here. I’m certain of it. Certain, too, that there were then no paintings. Cro-Magnon was not fool enough to have used that chamber.’

  ‘No paintings, Louis,’ said Kohler. ‘A forgery like I told you she said.’

  She touched his hand in apology. ‘Please understand that … that I had to find things out first for myself. When I came here on that Sunday just before she died, I crawled into this passage Professor Courtet claims to have discovered but which was, I think, sealed off so as to let him find it. It is not safe in there. It’s really very dangerous but … but there are paintings now as … as good as any.’

  ‘Madame, is there something else you wish to tell us?’ asked Louis, causing her to start and hazard, ‘No … no, there is nothing, Inspector.’

  Wires led to lights. The set crew had even discreetly mounted switch panels at the entrance to the main chamber and at that of the second.

  The storage batteries worked. All at once the cave lit up and, blinking, Kohler saw Juliette standing, ashen, beside Louis.

  ‘Me first,’ she managed, prising off her espadrilles. ‘The bare feet, they are surer, messieurs.’

  At once she hoisted herself up into the hole and disappeared from sight.

  ‘Y
ou next, Louis.’

  ‘The shoes, Hermann. Please tuck them out of sight. The carpet-bag, it must not leave our hands.’

  ‘And the schoolteacher?’

  ‘Let us keep a careful eye on her.’

  On a white crystalline background of calcite, shaggy black and black-spotted ponies raced amid charging brown-red aurochs and yellowish brown to rusty red reindeer. Antlers and horns were all but interlocked, the figures often overlapping in an endless panorama, some filled in, some only in outline, the colours rich and earthy, the animals startlingly alive but of the distant past and haunting.

  ‘Ah mon Dieu,’ breathed St-Cry, ‘they’re magnificent.’

  ‘But they can’t be real,’ snorted Kohler, ‘unless we say they are.’

  As at Lascaux, so also here, the chamber followed the channel of an ancient underground stream and opened upwards to an irregularly arched and pitted roof some three to four metres above them.

  ‘Here,’ said Juliette anxiously. ‘The first of the shafts in the floor. Please be careful.’

  The wretched thing plunged straight down into an uncomfortable darkness. The rock was grey nearest the floor and had a velvety texture Kohler didn’t like because it crumbled when touched.

  Cave bear and cave lion stared down at them from above in outlines of black and yellowish red with dusty spots of black to which sprayed red-ochre handprints had been added beneath the figures. ‘A moment, my friends,’ gasped St-Cyr breathlessly. ‘A moment.’

  Unrolling the tracing paper, he smoothed it over the handprints while Juliette and Hermann looked on and match was made for match. One set larger, one smaller and then … then.…

  ‘Your mother, madame, she has shown us that her handprints are not the same as these.’

  ‘She has made a record of them to prove she had nothing to do with … with any of this. She must have known what was happening to the cave last year when she came to visit us.’

  ‘A forgery,’ sighed Kohler, ‘but is it one Courtet is all too aware of, or was he sucked in just like the rest of them?’

  ‘Perhaps but then. … It is too early for us to say, Hermann, but could the man’s handprints have been made by using a glove?’

  ‘Made by a woman, then …? Ah merde, it’s possible,’ hazarded Kohler, catching the drift and not liking it. ‘Madame, your hand.… Would you put it over the smaller of these?’

  ‘The … the scratches on the walls, messieurs,’ she stammered, abruptly moving on ahead to deftly point them out. ‘Engraved by a flint burin. They are hardly visible, yes? beneath the salmon here and the head of the bison up there but … but in the beard of the woolly mammoth too, I think. Here … along here, please. No! Be careful. That shaft — ah it is so big and deep, messieurs. Watch out!’

  A stone fell and they didn’t hear it hit bottom. Sickened by her refusal to match her handprints with those on the wall and by the gaping hole in the floor, Kohler looked doubtfully up at the roof.

  The engravings she had pointed out were very faint and overlain by pigment spray in rusty red, sooty black and ochrous yellow but how the hell did she know so much about them unless she had made them? Ah merde …

  ‘The amulet,’ sighed St-Cyr, looking at her closely.

  ‘Ah! I have it here,’ she said, avoiding his gaze. ‘I … I have forgotten to return it to its little compartment in the trunk. Professor Courtet, he … he will never forgive me.’

  ‘Nor us,’ muttered Kohler acidly as she dragged the thing from around her neck and handed it to Louis.

  ‘Incisions have been added to those that were already there,’ she said, a whisper. ‘Again, I should have told you but … but what was I really to do?’

  A forgery.…

  In line for stone-cut line those on the walls and roof were a match to those of the amulet and out of nothing but a jumble of faint scratches came swastikas.

  Down through the long irregularities of the chamber there was nothing else to suggest a forgery, so cleverly had the paintings been done.

  ‘The mortar and the lumps of pyrolusite, madame. Is it that your mother was prepared to let the forgery she had discovered continue so she could poison your father before exposing what he did, or is it that she merely wanted further proof she had had nothing to do with any of this?’

  His gaze could not now be avoided and she knew then that he still did not trust her and that she should have matched her hands with those on the walls. But Danielle and I, Inspector, she said to herself, we are of the same size, the same build, so the handprints, they would be the same. Ah yes, the same.

  ‘Well, madame, can we have your answer?’

  ‘Mother … I think she knew what had happened here and that my father had come back to betray all they had believed in and worked so hard to preserve and record.’

  ‘Then your father made the forgeries with, as the handprints suggest, the assistance of a woman and there was no need for the use of gloves to give the impression of his having been here?’

  Ah damn, he still did not trust her. ‘Yes … Yes, that is how it must have been. Revenge … my father wanted only revenge against Professor Courtet and … and mother must have threatened to tell everyone what he was up to.’

  When the lights suddenly went out, both of them heard her gasp, ‘Ah no, my father.…’

  For several seconds there was nothing but the hollow sound of quietly moving air and then that of their breathing.

  ‘HELMUTT, YOU’VE LEFT THE FUCKING LIGHTS ON AGAIN!’ came a distant shout, echoing in the chamber. ‘HOW MANY TIMES MUST I TELL YOU THE BATTERIES WILL ONLY BLEED DOWN?’

  Down … Down … ‘Messieurs,’ called out the Sûreté. ‘This chamber, it is occupied.’

  Occupied … Occupied … ‘Detectives, mein Heir, on a murder investigation.’

  ‘And under orders,’ sang out Kohler.

  There were whispers and then, ‘Verdammt, it’s those two from Paris, Helmutt. They’ve got no business being in there. Christ, we ought to leave them to fall through the floor!’

  ‘Ah, no … no, mein Herr, that would be most unwise of you,’ said Louis. The paintings are far too precious. Another Sistine Chapel, yes? but far, far better, I think, than Lascaux and exactly as the Baron von Strade has said.’

  It was wiser to leave the valley in haste than to hang around and, though they walked the bicycles along the railway line towards Sarlat, the memory of the cave paintings endured but more than this, far more, thought St-Cyr ruefully, was that of the handprints and the holes in the floor, of loose rocks just waiting to collapse from the roof. Whoever had done the paintings had been desperate.

  ‘The Amanita phalloides,’ he said, causing the others to pause. ‘The death cap, madame. It’s a puzzle, for its symptoms, they are delayed from twelve to twenty-four hours. But why, please, did your mother choose also to use the fly agaric whose symptoms are much more rapid, though the poison is far less dangerous?’

  ‘Louis.…’

  ‘Hermann, we are presented with a case whose solution appears quite simple — a straightforward but very brutal and demented killing apparently done by your father, madame, since your husband was in Sarlat on the Monday and could not have done it.’

  Juliette hesitated. Though he already knew what her answer must be, she would have to tell him. ‘Mother… mother would have wanted insurance, yes? If the one didn’t work, the other would.’

  ‘And?’ asked Louis.

  ‘She … she would have wanted both my husband and … and my father to suffer a little but then to … to experience relief only to discover later on exactly what she had done to them.’

  There, she had said it and now they would see how cruel maman could be, how willing to seek revenge herself. ‘Had she not been killed, she would have had the postcards as proof of my father’s involvement, also her sketches and the handprints of Danielle — they must be hers, yes? — and his, too, while I … I would have had the stone mortar they had used and … and the lumps of pyrolusite.�
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  ‘The postcards, Louis,’ said Hermann.

  ‘Yes, yes, we will get to them. Madame, a place for us to lie up, please. Somewhere out of the way. Even if hunger and thirst gnaw at us, sleep will be a benefit.’

  And you want to read the postcards in private without my seeing them, she said to herself, dismayed that he still did not trust her. ‘The farm, then, of my mother’s uncle, Inspector. The place where she and my father stayed in the spring and summer of 1912 and ’13.’

  ‘Louis, is that wise? Fillioux.…’

  ‘Wise or not, Hermann, even I can see that the last benzedrine you took has failed to work.’

  The farmhouse was on a hill where overgrown pasture, now intruded upon by young poplars, had once fed a few cows and an old horse. Half the roof had fallen in and as they entered the cellars where the stables had been, sunlight broke through gaps in the floorboards above. ‘It’ll have to do,’ said Kohler, finding hay to scatter. Fresh hay.… ‘Fresh, Louis?’ he managed.

  ‘My father,’ said Juliette. ‘He has lain up here.’

  Ah merde …

  The ashes of a cold fire held her as she crouched over them.

  ‘Sleep,’ said Kohler. ‘Louis and you first, then myself.’

  She tried to smile and look at him but found she couldn’t force herself to do so.

  ‘Let me take the first watch, Hermann.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Yes. It will give me time to think.’

  The air was still, the sun too bright, and all about the ruined farmhouse, the swallows held dominion.

  A fly stirred. Awakening, St-Cyr shook his head and breathed, ‘Ah merde … merde,’ when he realized what had happened. Four hours … five … had he been asleep that long?

  Driven from the farmhouse by Hermann’s snoring, which Madame Jouvet had apparently slept soundly through, the Sûreté’s thinker-watchman had succumbed to the heat of a sun which was now well past its zenith.

  Scattered postcards revealed the infrequent gropings of guilt-ridden hands and the black-printed words of the past leapt at him from among the tall and sometimes trampled grass.