The Caves of Perigord

by Martin Walker

  “Vot ya, tovarishch,” came the reply from the Russian behind them. He must have been watching them from the moment their car drew up and followed them up the hill. Manners recalled the Schmeisser.

  A head emerged from behind the uprooted tree. It was Florien, one of the lads who had helped them put the bazookas into the cave. He must have guided Marat here. Manners sighed inwardly at the complications of French politics.

  “We have come to take the bazookas to Terrasson,” said Manners. “It’s a joint action of the Armee Secrete and your FTP comrades to try and hold the road to Perigueux. We might as well go together.”

  “I regret that my orders do not mention Terrasson,” said Marat. “I am not throwing away my men’s lives on foolish gestures against tanks.”

  “And no doubt your orders tell you to keep the bazookas as souvenirs,” mocked Francois. “They’ll come in useful after the war.”

  “Hey, calm down,” said McPhee. “We’re taking them to Perigueux, to blast our way into the Gestapo building in the Credit Lyonnais, and some others to hit the Hotel Normandie at Bergerac. It’s my idea, the only artillery we’ve got to take out their HQs. The battle of the Das Reich division is over, you guys. We lost it. They roll on. We stay, and take out the garrisons they leave behind.”

  “That is not what the joint command has agreed,” said Francois calmly. “Those orders bind you as well as me, McPhee.”

  “Orders have to change when the situation changes. That’s what we’re trained for. To use our initiative,” said McPhee.

  “This is getting us nowhere,” said Manners equably. “Let’s be sensible-about this. You say you need a bazooka to hit German headquarters. Fine. Take two, and half the rockets. And let us have the other two for Terrasson.”

  A long pause.

  “Sounds good to me,” said McPhee.

  Malrand shrugged. Marat nodded and waved his Russian across to join them. Igor shouldered his Schmeisser and headed down into the cave.

  “And you won’t believe what’s in there,” said McPhee, turning to follow him. “Not guns, I’m talking about. It’s an art gallery down there.”

  Francois fired his Sten, two short bursts, one that toppled the Russian into the pit and the other that cut down Marat. Lespinasse, not needing an order, fired a long burst into the jumble behind the tree roots, and stunned with shock, Manners saw the American crumple. Then Francois tossed a grenade.

  Manners dove to the ground at his side, expecting the grenade to ignite the rockets, or more gunfire from the Spaniards in the cave. There was no cover. He hugged the ground, his hands over his head and the grenade went off with a muffled crump. Then silence. One more short burst from a Sten. Then silence.

  “You weren’t much use,” said Francois.

  Manners rolled over and looked at him. He was standing over the body of Marat, his gun still aimed down. Lespinasse changed magazines.

  “You’re insane,” Manners said, and scrambled to his feet to look for McPhee. His torch still glowed on the ground. He picked it up and looked at the carnage. Marat was dead, the back of his head shot away. That must have been the last burst he heard.

  McPhee and the Russian were tangled in the tree roots, both dead. And below them was a mass of tree limbs, shredded by the grenade. Manners plodded dully across to McPhee’s body, his mind a jumble of horror at an accident and suspicion of deliberate murder, at the hatreds of French politics, and the Spanish girl and human jealousy. The American lay on his back, his head drooping into the hole that led to the cave. Blood had spread across his face and over his shaved scalp. Sickened, he turned to Francois, his voice thick and tired, but he had to ask. “Was this politics or Mercedes?”

  “Don’t be a fool. This had nothing to do with women. Lespinasse, help the capitaine clear that mess away,” said Francois, as calmly as if he were ordering dinner. “We need those bazookas.”

  Manners hauled McPhee’s body clear of the tree limbs. The burst had caught him across the top of his chest and throat and the American’s head dangled. The Russian had been shot in the back, and Lespinasse helped pull him aside. Francois took the torch, and shone it down into the cave mouth. Lespinasse hauled on an arm, and it was Florien. Manners helped pull the body clear.

  “Our little traitor,” said Francois.

  The two Spaniards beneath Florien were jammed in the cave entrance. Lespinasse went down but couldn’t tug them free.

  “Try pushing them down into the cave,” said Francois.

  His back against the big taproot of the tree, Lespinasse began pushing with his feet, grunting with effort. Manners coughed with the stink of cordite, and then turned aside and retched. Down in the cave something gave, and Lespinasse called something cheerful as the tangle cleared. He crawled into the passage, and then shouted back, “It’s O.K. There’s room to stand here.”

  “Let’s get our rockets,” said Francois. Manners just looked at him, still incapable of speech.

  “I’m sorry about McPhee,” said Francois, as he clambered down into the cave. Then he stopped and added, “He just got caught in Lespinasse’s burst. It was an accident of war, Jacques. I liked McPhee, you know that.”

  Wearily, Manners picked his way down the tree roots and into the passage he remembered. Lespinasse was dragging the dead Spaniards into the big cave, and Francois’s torch picked out the parachute containers, the latches still open as Manners had left them. Then the torch lifted at something on the wall, and Francois said, “What the devil …?”

  It was a bear on the passage wall, a big and prowling black bear. The torch moved on to a brown horse with a black mane, one of its legs disappearing into a fresh bullet scar on the rock. Manners moved forward to look more closely and something crunched heavily beneath his feet. It was a slab of rock, sliced off the wall. He kicked it out of the way, nearly losing his balance as his feet slid on wet blood.

  Francois had gone on into the main cave, and the torch picked out a big stag, its antlers down, and its feet churning up turf as it pawed the ground ready to charge. A doe with an arrow in her throat stood beside it, and below that, a pathetic fawn collapsed on its rump, with the silhouettes of two human figures behind. One was drawing a bow. The other, female, crouched, holding a spear.

  “Another Lascaux,” said Francois, and turned the torch to the far wall. “This is better than Rouffignac, better than Font-de-Gaume. It’s better than anything I have ever seen.”

  A great landscape unfolded before them in the dimness of the torch. It was recognizably this same countryside of Perigord, the smooth, curving rock of the cliffs, that swirl of river and line of trees, that wide evening sky with the pinks of sunset, but a landscape that teemed with long-gone life. A bear was emerging from a cave, a great bull with flaring horns stood beside his cow, and a herd of short and sturdy horses, almost like Shetland ponies, were moving to drink.

  “It’s marvelous,” breathed Manners, lost in the painting. The gunfight might never have been. This was another world, an innocence, and a lost perfection. To think that this had been waiting on the walls around him when he first stumbled upon this hiding place for his weapons.

  “I do not believe this,” said Francois, as he moved the torch yet again, and a huge face leaped at him from the rock. A handsome youth, half-smiling and with lively eyes, a slim face and firm jaw and long, curling hair. Then the woman appeared, lovely in that combination of shyness and assurance that had first attracted Manners to Sybille. He thought, I could fall in love with her. I have already.

  “Our ancestors,” said Francois. “Les premiers Francais.”

  “You could be right, sir. He looks a bit like you,” said Lespinasse. So he did, that sharp intelligence with the fine features and slightly dreamy eyes.

  “Right,” snapped Francois, bringing them back to reality, and suddenly Manners could smell again the cordite and the blood in the air. The spell had broken. “Let’s get the guns out.”

  He and Francois linked their belts together to h
aul the containers along the passageway. Francois climbed up, propping the torch in the tree roots, and with Manners and Lespinasse heaving and Francois hauling, they managed to wrestle them up and out, to roll onto the wide stretch of grass.

  “You two stay down,” said Francois. “And I’ll push the bodies down to you, one by one. We’ll have to leave them in the cave. If the Communists and Spaniards didn’t kill us in retaliation, the Americans would.” Manners felt almost grateful to him, for putting the nightmares of retribution into words.

  Little Florien, the Russian, Marat, and finally McPhee, flopping down headfirst. Lespinasse took the shoulders and Manners took the feet, and half dragged them down along the passageway and laid them, side by side, in the center of that splendid tomb that had already disappeared again into darkness. As they crawled back out, Lespinasse in the lead, Manners knocked into the slab of rock he had pushed aside earlier, and in the torch glow, he saw the shape of a bull on the whiteness of the chalk. He picked it up to study it more closely, and found it not as heavy as he had thought. It seemed the natural thing to take it with him.

  Francois had rigged the small charges of plastique while they were laying out the bodies. One beside the tree root, another in the rocks on the shelf above. That seemed oddly fitting. The place had been opened by a German mortar. British explosives could seal it again. They manhandled the containers down to the road and into the truck. Then they went back for their guns, and to light the fuses. After the explosions, they checked that the place was sealed. And then they went back down through the trees, Manners slithering clumsily with his rock in his hand. Lespinasse and Francois took the Citroen, and Manners drove the truck. In Le Bugue, he stopped in the square where the old men played boules, and let himself in the back gate into Sybille’s yard. The place was dark, the door locked, and her bicycle was gone. He slipped his slab of rock behind the rabbit hutch and left. Then he climbed into the truck and drove woodenly on toward Terrasson and a last, despairing effort to stop an armored division, his mind locked in an ancient landscape and his heart yearning simultaneously for Sybille and for a girl who had been dead for thousands of years.

  CHAPTER 22

  Time: The Present

  Everything about Malrand’s house was the same, except that Lespinasse was waiting for them inside, looking grim and formidable-beside the big fireplace, and there had been different security men outside. The big security man nodded cool recognition at Manners as Malrand came forward to kiss Clothilde and Lydia, and shake Manners’s hand.

  “There is champagne, of course, but I need something stiffer,” said the President. He was dressed in stout shoes and old corduroys and a worn leather jacket, and they made him look his age. “Major, perhaps you’ll join me in a scotch?”

  “I hear from Lespinasse that you came close to your goal when you were stumbling round la Ferrassie,” Malrand went on. “There is a lost cave, of course, where your father’s painting came from, and I suppose it’s time for the secret to come out. And time for the dead to be properly buried. I’m far too old to campaign for this job again, and I’d rather the truth came out than find your British government dropping all sorts of ponderous hints about unfortunate repercussions.”

  “My government?” said Manners. “What does my government have to do with this?”

  Malrand gave a cold smile. “I have been in this business too long to believe in coincidences, my dear Major. Your father had his own reasons to keep silence, but I always assumed that his death would open Pandora’s box. The disappearance of the painting and the consequent publicity simply confirmed my fears. If you didn’t steal your own painting, then I am sure you are well connected with the department of British Intelligence that did. I presume you found something in your father’s papers, a memoir, something that told you how this mess began. Something that a President of France would want very much to keep secret and that your British Intelligence would use to put pressure on me.”

  “I’m not attached to any Intelligence department,” snapped Manners. “And although I still don’t understand why you want to keep the cave secret I suspect that you organized the theft of that rock as part of your own cover-up.”

  “My cover-up!” snorted Malrand. “If only French Intelligence were so efficient.” He turned away with a shrug. “You don’t understand much about politics if you think a politician would ever entrust that kind of secret to his Intelligence agencies.”

  Lydia felt her head turning from one man to the other as if she were watching a tennis match. A cough came from the fireplace. Lespinasse had broken silence.

  “Not Intelligence, Monsieur le President. Us. Your security team. Trying to forestall potential embarrassment. Saw no need to trouble you with it.” Lespinasse chewed on his mustache. “In fact, we had a bit of help, just between us, from our British colleagues. Just a favor between professional colleagues, you might say. We understand these political things that are best kept quiet.”

  Lydia gaped in astonishment. She had never felt more American in her life. What an arrogant, overbearing, dreadful kind of system these damned Europeans operated. They lived by the cover-up and the conspiracy. And all this useless hunt and Clothilde’s tragedy and her embarrassment and the barefaced theft from her auction house had all stemmed from their secret little ways of doing favors for each other and their feudal masters. Gathering her rage, she braced herself to tell them what she thought of the lot of them when she heard a funny, creaking sound.

  It was Malrand, and he was laughing. Laughing so hard that he could hardly catch his breath. He bent over, one hand groping for the support of a chair, the other for a handkerchief. Lydia turned to glare at Manners, but even as she looked his face twitched into a grin, and his shoulders started to shake as the laughter infected him.

  “I’d be very surprised if the British government knew anything about it,” Lespinasse added with a big wink at her and smiling broadly. He was going to say more but his shoulders heaved as a great gust of laughter began to shake his big frame. Speechless with outrage, Lydia suddenly heard a fit of giggles from Clothilde, who grinned at her, looked at the helplessly guffawing men. and then threw up her hands in mock despair at the whole ridiculous world of men and began to belly laugh in her turn. Lydia felt her own mouth beginning to pull and her throat constrict and her tummy shake as the infection caught her as well. Dammit, she thought as she heard herself laughing helplessly, what instinct is it about us humans that won’t let us keep a straight face when everyone around us is chortling like idiots?

  “Oh, my sainted aunt,” heaved Manners. “What a glorious mess!” And collapsed into guffaws again.

  “Governments don’t know a thing about it,” wheezed Malrand, weakly. “We never do, you know.” And that set him off again.

  “You’re a pair of dreadful crooks,” chortled Clothilde, red-faced, her hair in disarray, but squinting at Malrand and Lespinasse with definite affection.

  “You’re all bloody intolerable,” groaned Lydia, holding her stomach.

  A door opened and a nervous maid peeped in, her eyes bulging as she took in the scene of mass hysteria. That set them off again, but a little more feebly, and Malrand wiped his eyes and stood up straight and got himself back under control.

  “God,” he said. “Haven’t laughed like that in years. There’s no medicine like it.” Lydia found it impossible to gaze at them with anything other than a warm, benevolent grin on her face, and a particularly warm glow when she looked at Manners. What a splendid, genuine laugh he had.

  “And what do you plan to do with the reward money, Lespinasse?” Malrand asked, still beaming in pure delight.

  “Not collect it, Monsieur le President. The painting has already been delivered to the Embassy, so it’s in French hands.” That set him off again, and a softer, but still sympathetic detonation from everyone else.

  “And now it’s time for that drink,” said Malrand. “Damn the scotch, I need champagne. Lespinasse, pull yourself together, you old cr
ook, and open the bottle.”

  They clinked their glasses, still grinning warmly at one another. Malrand turned to Manners. “Was there anything in your father’s papers?”

  “No. All I found was an old photograph of a handsome woman in the back of the case where he kept the rock. The name ‘Sybille’ was scrawled on the back.”

  “Sybille,” said Malrand, drawing the name out. “Our doctor. A vet, in fact. They had an affair, I recall. A lovely woman. I envied your father. She looked after him when he got wounded in the foot, you know. I suppose that’s when it began. She was killed at Terrasson, while helping the wounded.”

  “Did you know about the house?” Lespinasse interjected, turning to Manners.

  “What house?”

  “Her house, and the vet’s surgery. Sybille’s. She left it to your father in her will. She had no children, no other relatives.”

  “That’s how he was able to take the rock back to England,” said Malrand. “He put it there on the night he found it, and then when he came back after the war, he took it back in his car. I never objected. He’d fought for it, in a way. He certainly had a right to it.”

  “I had no idea,” Manners stammered, a faraway look in his eye as he began to absorb the depth of the things he had never known about his father. Lydia’s heart went out to him.

  “He gave the house and the surgery back to the town and the commune, asking that they be kept as free housing for a vet, in her memory,” Lespinasse said. “Every time he came back here, he’d go over there and just stand in the rooms for a while. After my father’s funeral, I took him over there. When he came out again, he was humming some old Charles Trenet tune and there were tears on his cheeks. She meant a lot to him.”

  “To dear Sybille, a French heroine,” said Malrand, raising his glass. “Morte pour la France.”

  “She was killed at Terrasson you said, in the last fight against the Das Reich division?” pressed Lydia. There were things she wanted clearing up.