The cluster of sharp, short incisions gave no pattern. Some were parallel to the length of the piece, some at right angles to it. Some had a short barb at one end, either slanting to the left or right. Clearly they had been cut by working the point of a flint burin back and forth. The shavings would have been blown out from time to time but did the markings mean anything? Were they the first sign of written language?
Only when Courtet had taken a small, marked disc of tracing paper from his wallet and had slid this over the scratches, did they see the swastika among them.
‘At least fifty thousand years old,’ he said. ‘Henri-Georges was always an advocate of greater age than anyone else, but I have to conclude that he was correct.’
‘Fifty thousand years,’ said someone.
‘Perhaps far more,’ whispered Juliette. Maman, she cried inwardly. Maman, what is this?
‘A swastika,’ breathed Kohler.
‘Yes,’ said Courtet. ‘I do not doubt it for a moment and neither does my colleague from the Reich, the Herr Dr Professor Eisner.’
‘The greatest discovery of all time,’ said the Baroness. ‘Now you see why the filming of Moment of Discovery is so important and why the Reichsminister Dr Goebbels is urging us to keep to the schedule.’
St-Cyr drew on his pipe in quiet contemplation. The amulet was certainly very old, the figurines also. And true, one could sometimes make unexpected patterns out of primitive scratches but nom de Dieu, was this not going too far?
Hermann seemed to think so too, but still gazed on the objects with the rapt attention of a small boy at a carnival.
The Surete had best clear the throat and the air. ‘Professor, upstairs in the room my partner overheard you saying something about another chamber?’
‘Ah, the grotte, yes. After I had visited the cave with Madame Fillioux, I went back to study it alone. I had the journals of your father madame, and that of the abbe. I felt certain though that they both had missed something. Henri-Georges … your father, madame, he was always too intense, too patient with his little investigations. Every grain of sand had to be examined and accounted for. The gisement was there at the mouth of the cave and, yes, this suggested a place of lengthy habitation, not a grotte for the worship of creatures of the hunt. But the cave, it has two entrances, yes? A much smaller one to the east, one not much used since it is barely large enough to slither through. A ventilation conduit for the smoke of their fires perhaps. This entrance suggested to me that there might possibly be further openings and I persisted.’
Good for you, was that it, eh? snorted Kohler inwardly.
Courtet went on. ‘I found a fissure and rocks that, on close examination, revealed lime had been redeposited to cement the gaps. Clays washed in from the plateau above had contributed to the hiding of the opening of this new chamber. Believe me, the paintings are magnificent, Inspectors. For an hour or more I walked along the ancient channel beneath them, looking up always and aided only by the beam of my torch. Then I could no longer help myself. Ah, I could not. I knelt, as those early hunters must have done, in abject prayer. My moment of discovery.’
‘Dr. Goebbels should see them then,’ said Kohler firmly. ‘I’ll let Sturmbannfuhrer Boemelburg know of it. He and Gestapo Mueller are old friends. They’ll impress upon the Reichminister the importance of his coming here to consecrate the site.’
‘After he’s seen the film,’ said Oelmann tightly. ‘Do we have clearance to shoot the initial scenes here at the house?’
‘Clearance …? Ah no. No, I’m afraid not,’ said the Surete. ‘Not until the victim’s living quarters have been dusted for fingerprints.’
‘But there was no body, no murder here?’ objected Courtet. ‘Surely there is now no need for further delays?’
‘Well?’ demanded Oelmann.
‘Yes, please tell us,’ insisted the Baroness.
The hand with its pipe was given that little toss Kohler had come to know so well. ‘A day, two days … perhaps a week. Until I am certain no one has searched through Madame Fillioux’s personal belongings, that attic is sealed.’
‘But that’s impossible,’ swore Oelmann, darting an accusing glance at the professor. ‘Filming is to begin up there.’
‘But the trunk, it had lain in the cellars, had it not?’ said Louis.
‘They lived up there,’ countered Oelmann harshly. ‘We want to record the poverty. It’s important to show how she lived. She did not realize the true meaning of what she had stumbled upon.’
Ah, the wonder of celluloid, thought Kohler. An ignorant sixteen-year-old peasant girl portrayed by a thirty-five-year-old Austrian baroness with a bottom that liked to be polished.
* * *
The heat was on, the noonday silence of the village seemingly impenetrable. As St-Cyr and Kohler shared a cigarette, Franz Oelmann tinkered with the car’s engine while Courtet, morose and silent, sat on his precious trunk refusing to budge until Lemieux came back to guard it. Not wanting to return to Lascaux just yet, the Baroness and her Toto had gone to find the village’s only cafe. Juliette Jouvet had retreated to the river to avoid Herr Oelmann and seek solace in her loneliness.
‘Louis, this thing …,’ began Kohler, and St-Cyr could tell his partner was really worried. ‘A fucking swastika on a bit of deer-horn fifty thousand or even twenty thousand years old. Goebbels and Himmler – der Fuhrer, for Christ’s sake. Ah verdammt, what are we to do? Take the Baron’s offer of 250,000 apiece to look the other way or get stubborn?’
Hermann had never looked the other way. ‘Remain calm. Try to think as Madame Fillioux would have done.’
Kohler took a deep drag before handing the cigarette over. ‘Postcards from the father’s parents in Paris.’
‘Pleas for food Madame Fillioux ignored until two days before her death.’
‘Postcards from the Professor he absolutely has to have returned. 10,000 francs and a visit to that cave with her.’
‘Then miraculously he finds the paintings in another part of the cave, having already come into possession of the trunk.’
‘A cave she must have known only too well,’ grumbled the Bavarian. ‘Our schoolteacher receives a frantic telephone call from the mother and pays the cave two visits before successfully retrieving the mortar and lumps of pyrolusite. She lies about the first visit. She thinks someone was watching her on the second. Could it have been that husband of hers?’
‘Our veteran.… Perhaps, but are there postcards from her father, Hermann? Postcards her mother didn’t tell her of? Is this not what she is now worrying about? Everything suggests Madame Fillioux thought her long-dead husband had returned but our victim also knew Professor Courtet.’
‘Yet she laid out the picnic as for the husband,’ said Kohler, exhaling smoke through his nostrils in exasperation. ‘Champagne was left at the site. She didn’t bring it but did the husband? His flask is found – she couldn’t have had that, could she? Christ, so many went AWOL in that last war, who could blame them.’
St-Cyr took the cigarette from him to savour it. ‘Henri-Georges was very skilled in the use and making of stone tools but is Professor Courtet?’
‘Not according to the daughter. She even challenged him to make one. When she was a child, the mother told her Courtet and her father hated each other.’
‘And now the Professor has everything Henri-Georges once had.’
A cave, a trunk and now a film and fame. ‘Oelmann must be Himmler’s man on location, Louis. If that cave really is a forgery, our friend from the SS will do everything necessary to keep it quiet. They’re in too deep.’
Everything including killing the woman? But what of the sous-facteur Auger, wondered St-Cyr. What of the daughter’s husband?