The Caves of Perigord

by Martin Walker

  “Do you know where they took the guns that night?”

  “No, there was a big argument about it, young Francois and that Commie bloke Marat, shouting at each other in whispers when I got that cart down to the dip. Marat wanted to take the guns and divide them among his Spaniards and scatter to get away from the Germans. I call them Germans, but they were Russians mostly, Russians and some other lot, swarthy blokes. Anyway, young Francois wasn’t having that, and Berger was trying to sort it out when he sent me back up the hill. It was daft. I could hear that big twenty-millimeter cannon going back up beyond la Farge, and there were these two arguing like fishwives.”

  “What I remember next was the big explosion, as I was going back up the hill. One of the carts we had to abandon was full of ammo. Le capitaine crawled up to it, took the pin out of a Mills bomb, and stuck it between two of the cases, so when the Germans came to move it, the lever snapped back and the whole cart blew. There were bullets cooking off all over the place. That was when it ended. Le capitaine told me about it later. We had a laugh about it the last time I saw him, when he came over for old Lespinasse’s funeral.”

  “Where did young Francois want to take the guns? Did he know a place?”

  “Oh, he had places everywhere, that one. He knew everybody, all the farmers and their sons, and most of the daughters too, knowing young Francois. I suppose he knew old Dumonteil, up on the ridge. The Germans deported him, and burned the farm. But we’d never have got the carts up there. Young Francois must have had somewhere else nearby, some little cave or hollow. He knew it all like the back of his hand, because of his hunting. He was a great one for hunting as a boy. Still is, come to that. You can have all these political crises up in Paris, and he’ll still come down here and take a day or two hunting the becasse with me. The best hunting in the world, he calls it, the fastest, most cunning bird of them all. Even round here, he can still show me little corners that I don’t know, where he says we might get lucky, and sure enough, there’s a becasse.”

  “Maybe the guns were just abandoned that night, with all the fighting and the argument,” Clothilde pressed.

  “Oh no, we’d never do that. And anyway, I know we got some of the stuff that night because le capitaine had promised us some of those new wonder drugs, sulfa drugs they called them, for our medical supplies. And I know we got that because they used it on me when I got shot later on at Terrasson, when that Das Reich division came through. About a week or ten days later, it must have been. I remember it very well. It was a powder, and they sprinkled it on my shoulder where the bullet had gone through. Strapped me up with a bandage, and told me I was as good as new. I wasn’t, mind, but young Francois said since it was my left shoulder, and that didn’t stop me firing a gun. I was young then, and healed fast, and it was all so exciting that you couldn’t stop. That’s where your dad was killed, Terrasson.”

  “Where did young Francois get the sulfa powder from? Where had he kept it?”

  “He gave some of us a medical kit to carry with us. I remember Lespinasse had one, because he had to use it at Terrasson. Young Francois was using that Citroen car by then, the one he’d pinched from the Milice in le Buisson. The old traction-avant with the running boards. It was a lovely car, that. He’d pile five or six of us in, guns and all, ammo in the trunk, and those medical kits he made up, and off we’d go. The mobile reserve, he called it. That was a joke, because the real Mobile Reserve was the Vichy one. Real bastards, they were. He always made sure we had some medicinal brandy in the back of the Citroen, brandy and cigarettes. He couldn’t do without his cigarettes, young Francois. That’s how we got to Terrasson, in that Citroen. We had to make a detour round Rouffignac, because the Germans had burned it.”

  “Was the English capitaine with you at Terrasson?” asked Lydia.

  “I don’t know, mademoiselle, I don’t remember seeing him. He didn’t come in the Citroen. He used one of the trucks we got from the Falange, a nasty bunch of North Africans. Sort of police, based in Perigueux, led by a real bastard called Villeplana, used to be a professional football player. We ambushed them and got one of their trucks. Le capitaine was off a lot around that time, attacking all the German petrol dumps so the Das Reich couldn’t refuel. He took us in the mobile reserve along on one attack on the big fuel bunkers they kept at the Roumanieres airbase. That was just before Terrasson. He might have come along with us after that to Terrasson, but I don’t remember. Sorry. It was all a long time ago.

  “Do you want me to show you the place where we hid, the camp the Germans found?” he went on. “It’s just down the track and through the woods, near the old entrance to the Gouffre, the one where they had the horse with the long rope that would let people standing in this giant bucket down into the cave. I think the people at the Gouffre are using it again, if you pay extra. No horse now, of course. An electric winch.”

  He took them around to the barn, where a muddy Land Rover was parked. They drove down the road toward le Bugue for half a mile before turning off on a rutted farm track, and then into the woods along a track that Lydia could not begin to discern. The big car heaved and jolted, splashing through a thick stretch of bog, before Albert began climbing again. He swung the wheel sharply to avoid a big oak tree and parked below a sudden outcrop of smooth limestone.

  “This was it,” he said. “You see the borie over there.” He pointed to a low, circular stone hut, little more than a ruin now, its roof gone and saplings growing through it. “That’s where le capitaine slept, him and young Francois, and where they kept the ammo. Then we had the cave.” He plunged forward to the rocks, shouted to Clothilde to bring the torch, and began pushing through a tangle of bushes. Lydia looked with dismay at her clothes, saw Clothilde smile and shrug, and they followed the old man in.

  With the torch, they could see it was more overhang than cave, no deeper than five meters, but about thirty meters long with a low roof and dry, gritty floor. The inner walls were smooth, and there were no gaps, only some curious scars in the rock. Clothilde moved forward intently, to see if they were ancient engravings, and Albert said, “That’s the German cannon.” Then he steered the torch to one side, where the cave wall and floor had been charred black. “Flamethrower,” he said. “They didn’t get us. We’d left by then. One of Berger’s rules. Never too long in the same place.” He stood in silence for a while, remembering.

  “Were there any other caves you used, Albert?” Clothilde asked, gently. “I’m looking for one where there may have been some of the old cave paintings.”

  “The big one at Rouffignac, of course, the one where they have the train. We used that a bit. And a couple of the ones near Les Eyzies, but only for the odd night because they were so well known. The Germans just had to use a tourist map and they’d had found us. We slept in Combarelles once, but never stored anything there. Young Francois took us to a couple near la Micoque, on the way up to Rouffignac, but they were like this, more overhangs really. I never saw any paintings.”

  “Could you find them again?”

  “Oh yes, I think I could, But you ought to ask young Francois. You and he were very close once,” he said kindly.

  “He’s a busy man, Albert.”

  “Sure, I’ll take you. But you’ll find no paintings.”

  “I might find a midden, one of their old rubbish tips and latrines. You can find out a lot from latrines, Albert. Like what they ate, and what kind of tools they used. You can measure the pollen and tell what the weather was like.”

  “Ice Age, wasn’t it?”

  “Not all the time. The time I’m mostly interested in, when they were doing the cave paintings at Lascaux, it was pretty much the same climate as now, a thousand-year-long warm period between the cold spells. They had trees and brambles just like these.” She led the way back to the car, chatting about the tools they made from reindeer antlers until they reached the farm. He insisted on giving her a box of eggs and a bottle of his homemade pineau, and waved them off, calling, “See you
at the market, and give my best to your mum.”

  Manners’s face was brick red from his day in the sun, and Horst looked exhausted, when they found them on the terrace of the Cro-Magnon Hotel. They were drinking pastis, and nibbling olives, and Horst ordered them some drinks while Manners described the search pattern they had followed on the large-scale map. Clothilde leaned over the map and told them Albert’s story, of the flight down the track with the cart, and the row in the hollow by the road, and the booby-trap Manners’s father had set with the grenade.

  “We also found out that Marat was not at Tulle, nor were his Spaniards,” said Lydia. “Wherever he was killed, it wasn’t there. And he had a big row with Malrand on the night of the German attack on the parachute site, about who was to get the guns and where to take them.”

  Manners flipped open Horst’s research file. “Here we are. The night of May twentieth, acting on information received, a company of Freiwilliger-that’s the Russians, they called them volunteers-and a squadron of armored cars broke up a parachute drop at Cumont, killed four Maquis, and captured the weapons. Casualties described as ‘light,’ except for one container that blew up. They brought in another company the next day to set up roadblocks, and two more to search the district. Nothing more found. Arrests, interrogations, three farms burned as reprisals. Hang on, there’s a cross-reference.”

  Horst took the file, and thumbed through to the back, where stapled sheafs of photocopies were neatly labeled with differently colored tabs. “They set up a special unit, called the Hohlegruppe, the cavern team, for attacks on caves. They were equipped with Panzerfausts-that’s like your bazookas-and flamethrowers. They brought the Hohlegruppe in for the search, so they must have thought they were looking for a cave. A Leutnant Voss commanded it, and he reported no action that day.” He looked across the table at Clothilde. “The first thing I did was to check every cave Voss mentions. There’s not one that isn’t listed or marked on your maps.”

  “There’s an easy solution to this, surely,” said Lydia. “We just ask Malrand. He must know what happened to the guns that night. But if he knows, then whatever cave it was won’t have any paintings. Malrand would have said.”

  A long silence fell. “I wonder if he would,” said Manners. “He certainly hasn’t been much help on Clothilde’s project.”

  “Remember what I said to you in Bordeaux, Lydia,” Horst added. “Malrand is a politician. He doesn’t want a scandal about his wartime partner stealing a cave painting. He just wants it back and put on display, with no questions asked. We have our own various reasons for wanting to find the cave whence it comes, but I don’t see that he does. And look at Clothilde-we already know that delving back into this wartime history is like lifting a stone-you never know what grief will come crawling out.”

  “This business about Marat is very curious,” said Manners. “He has a row about guns with Malrand, who hated Communists anyway. Then he disappears.”

  “Not quite disappeared,” said Clothilde. “He was seen again after May twentieth. He was seen almost three weeks later, at Brive, just after D-Day in Normandy, trying to get the Gaullists and the rest of the Resistance groups to join this Communist uprising. Where he did not turn up was at the battle in Tulle, where you would expect him to have been, on the eighth and ninth of June.”

  “Where was Malrand then?” asked Lydia.

  “Trying to slow down a small army. Say a thousand tanks and twenty-five thousand men. The Das Reich division was one of the SS units, which were twice as big and far better equipped than the usual panzer divisions. After D-Day it was moving north from Toulouse to join the fighting in Normandy, and fighting Resistance ambushes all the way,” said Manners.

  “But where exactly? Was he at that meeting in Brive of all the Resistance groups, the one where Marat was seen? And where was your father, Manners? Was he there too?”

  “We know Malrand was at Terrasson,” said Clothilde. “Albert told us that. But he had a Citroen, he could get around fast.”

  Horst checked his sheaf of archives. “June eleventh, Terrasson was cleared by units of the SS Das Reich division fighting their way along the road to Perigord, which they reached the next day. It was a busy time. That was the same day the Germans burned the village of Mouleydier, after Soleil’s group held the bridge across the Dordogne and beat off repeated attacks. There was another battle at an armored train that day, just outside Perigueux. The whole region was erupting.”

  “The poor devils assumed that the Allies were about to send in an airborne division to liberate them,” said Manners. “They didn’t know they had two months more to wait before the Germans finally pulled out. Still, they did the job London wanted, delaying the Das Reich division.”

  “We’re missing the point here,” said Lydia. “The chap who finished up with the rock was your father, not Malrand. So it is your father who is our connection to this unknown cave. It’s his movements we ought to be following. If we can.”

  “Oh, quite,” said Manners. “But it’s interesting you used the word following. Horst and I rather got the impression we were being followed today, both here in Les Eyzies and then when we went tramping around la Ferrassie looking for a cave. More than just an impression, in fact, because I saw him twice, each time in a different car, and once he was wearing a beret to disguise his bald pate. What’s funny is that Malrand is supposed to be in Paris, and this chap told us that he always traveled with him. But I’ll take my oath that it was that presidential security man, Lespinasse, whose father was in the same group as Malrand and my pa.”

  “More than that,” said Lydia. “Old Lespinasse was at the battle in Terrasson with Malrand on June eleventh, and drove around with Malrand in some special team he had.”

  “So of the four key people who might know where this cave was, Marat and Lespinasse and my father are all dead. Which leaves Malrand, who doesn’t seem to want to find it,” mused Manners. “Curiouser and curiouser.”

  CHAPTER 17

  The Vezere Valley, 15,000 B.C.

  He finally found her in the one impossible place, a chosen refuge he could never have foreseen. Deer had searched late into the night as the wind rose steadily, along the fringe of the woods and down along the riverbank, calling her name. Three times, he turned back to the village, to the glowing fire of her mother’s hearth where her parents sat feeding the flames with fresh wood, vainly waiting for Moon to reappear. Each time he looked at them in silent hope, and each time they shook their heads before he set out again. The last time, the wind gusting hard now and bringing the first lash of driven rain, he had gone to his lonely tent, surprised to find Dry Leaf lying asleep in the old man’s buffalo robe. He collected his gifts, his new bag, and his lamp and ax and knife, and filled the bag with smoked meat. He put fresh tinder in the pouch, slung an old water skin over his shoulder, and felt ready for whatever the new day might bring. Lightning crackled in the sky, and the rumble of deep anger came from the heavens. There was cause enough for anger this night.

  He only had this one night to find her. The chief hunter had seen to the bleeding arm of the Keeper of the Bulls, wrapping it with moss and bark and thongs, and promising to pick up the girl’s trail when the sun rose. The rest of the village was dark as he moved through it. The childless widow had sobbed herself to sleep. The hearth of the Keeper of the Bull’s sister seemed to simmer in angry silence. From tents here and there, he heard the laughter and whispers and warm cries of the newlyweds, and tried not to think of what he had lost.

  Finally, less because he thought he might find her than because of the comfort its familiar feel and smell might bring him, he headed past the rain-dampened ashes of the long fire and into the cave. From long habit, he had lit his lamp on an ember pulled deep from the buried heart of the fire, and the dim gleam of his own lamp made him slow to realize that there was another glow, far back in the cave. His heart jumped. Of course she would be here! But no, perhaps the Keeper of the Bulls had come, to take new strength from h
is own beasts. Deer put his hand to the hilt of his knife, slipped the thong around his neck, and crept forward, past the ghostly bulls and down past the bend where the tumbling horse fell forever, and then down again toward the well where there was always water.

  Moon was shrunk far back but defiant in the small cavern, a rock clutched fiercely in her hand, a smear of the Keeper’s blood still on her cheek. Her face eased as she saw him and then brightened. But she held the rock close, and he took his hand from his knife and squatted. Beside her were a small bowl of the dark earth and a thick stick of charcoal.

  “I will not go back. Not to him,” she said.

  “I know,” he said softly. “I have a bag full of food and tools. I have come to take you with me.”

  “The hunters will follow us and bring us back.”

  “I think I know a way they cannot follow,” he said. “I will never let them take you to him to be his woman.”

  “They may take me, but he cannot have me. He is doomed,” she said.

  “The hunter put the moss on his wound. It is not likely that he will die from a bite.”

  “No. The Great Mother has come to my aid. She directed me here, and put the darkness into my head. When I woke, she had left me with the knowledge of what I must do. I have doomed him. Look,” she said, pointing at the wall behind Deer’s shoulder.

  He turned, and then started back, stunned and frightened, and awed by the evidence of a power in Moon he had never suspected. This was woman’s magic, mysterious and chilling, and his hand moved instinctively to cup his groin. He needed no explanation to understand that what Moon had said must be true. The Keeper of the Bulls was doomed, condemned by the destructive power of his own art.