‘Do you mean to tell me there are swastikas among the Discovery cave paintings?’
‘Yes. It’s remarkable. It’s fantastic. It is everything the Fuhrer could have hoped for.’
Ah merde.… ‘Why no clothes?’
Was he always such a doubter? ‘The beasts are perfect specimens and they wear no clothes. Therefore it is thought to show perfection existed also among those who drew the animals and hunted them. One is surprised and shocked a little – it is unexpected, yes – but one is also fascinated by what is going on. There is that sense of mystery, that sense of body worship which glorifies perfection not for itself but for a higher ideal.’
‘The State, the Party and the swastika.’
‘Very few of the scenes have total nudity. Lascaux was a religious site, was it not? There perfection was worshipped and we must show this.’
She really believed it. The kids in the film came up again and Kohler felt a tug at his sleeve. ‘That’s me,’ whispered a bright-eyed girl of seven, searching for praise he had to give.
‘I’m impressed,’ he said and grinned. ‘Hey, I like it.’
‘Gut,’ said the Baroness harshly, ‘then what you are about to see will not trouble you.’
There were takes of domesticity too, outside the Lascaux Cave and under the pines. Of Danielle and other women in skins cracking walnuts, then butchering a fresh-killed deer. Her bloodied hand gripped a flint knife to slit the skin and work deeply into the flesh until, arm buried up to the elbow, she drew out the guts. Blood on her knees and thighs, blood on her breasts, shoulders, neck and face. Using a handaxe, she expertly chopped meat from a bone and placed it on the embers to roast.
The heart, the liver and kidneys she offered up on her knees with dripping hands to her mate, the embodiment of Teutonic master race.
Ah Gott im Himmel, Louis, thought Kohler grimly, her eyes, they’re so bright, so feverish she has to be on something. Cocaine … was it cocaine?
End of take. End of trailer. End of black letters and numbers …
‘Who taught her to do that?’
‘Professor Courtet perhaps, though he is not nearly so proficient. She was with us at the cave on the Friday. She couldn’t wait to see it but when we got there, it was as though Danielle had known of it all along. She was the first to enter, the first to pause, the first to cry out in wonder and the last to leave.’
And now you’ve told me not only that you suspect her, and have let her get her hands on Juliette, but that you hate her. Is your Willi screwing the hell out of her? wondered Kohler. For a price of course. But who is her lover, who does she go to time and again no matter what? That big buck discus thrower in the film or someone else, someone you want all for yourself. Or is it simply cocaine?
‘Look, I’d better find Madame Jouvet, eh? I’d better call my partner to let him know where I am. Is there a telephone?’
‘Of course. Willi couldn’t function without one and neither could the others.’
* * *
The jangling of an unanswered telephone was unnerving but St-Cyr let it ring until it stopped. He had to search the house of Madame Fillioux thoroughly. He had to be certain the woman hadn’t hidden the postcards elsewhere and perhaps counted on waiting until later to tell her daughter.
‘These old Renaissance houses,’ he muttered. ‘The poorer the owner, the greater the number and craftiness of the hiding-places.’
Shaking his pocket torch and saying, ‘Ah damn the lousy batteries these days!’ he went into the room at the head of the stairs to play it on the open drawer at the bottom of the armoire and ask again, ‘Who else could have known of this other than the daughter?’
He was down on his hands and knees and reaching well under the other side of the armoire when the telephone started up again. He waited. He searched. Straining, he muttered, ‘Ah merde, why don’t you go away? The woman’s been dead for a week tomorrow!’
As if in answer, it stopped. The wood was rough in places. There was no dust. There were no cobwebs, even though Madame Fillioux had not been an exemplary housekeeper. ‘Too busy but …,’ he said and, heaving on the thing, moved the armoire from the wall sufficiently to shine the torch behind it. The floorboards were clean and bare and in short lengths. He moved the armoire a little more. The first round wooden peg came out so easily, he felt a rush of elation. The second, third and fourth were no different.
Stacking the boards, he played the light on Madame Fillioux’s little treasures. There were the letters from Henri-Georges the woman had used as proof to obtain her marriage certificate, it also. Both wire cages and corks from those first bottles of Moet-et-Chandon were there, as were a fine silver necklace and a diamond pin.
Twelve louis d’or represented the savings of a lifetime. The 10,000 francs was missing but had it been spent?
In bundle on top of bundle, there were four sets of postcards. Gingerly he took them up. Some were from a year ago and more – he could see this at a glance for they were of the printed message kind, the sender being able only to fill in the blank spaces here and there and cross out the unwanted words. Others were fully written out and more recent. Some were from the parents of the husband – requests for help that began in that first desperate winter of 1940-41. He’d read them later. No time now, no time. Others were from Professor Courtet – yes, yes – and still others from Danielle Arthaud, but.…
Caught unwares, he was startled by the jangling of the telephone and hissed, ‘Ah, go away and leave me to it!’
There were four rolls of tracing paper, of that heavy grey-white sort artists often use for rough sketching. Each was bound by an elastic band. Not all of the rolls were of the same width or length, but from beneath their outermost layers, inner colourings gave haunting shapes of animals in brick red, ochrous yellow and sooty black.
Unrolling the widest of them, and holding it to the light, he sucked in a breath and said, ‘Ah nom de Dieu, has she been to Lascaux to copy the cave art there so as to then repeat it in the Discovery Cave?’
In silhouette, and sometimes only in outline, bison and shaggy black ponies raced across the paper with reindeer and sharp-horned aurochs. There were others too. The woolly rhinoceros, mammoth, musk oxen and giant elk – but had these been among the animals portrayed at Lascaux? He didn’t think so. Red deer, wolf, badger, fox and rabbit also appeared on the tracing paper, salmon too.
Each pigment had been worked into the paper with a fingertip where necessary, the woman using the technique to quickly flesh out colour and give shadings so as to emphasize line and form and highlight shadow, imparting life to the sketches.
With a start, he realized he had opened two of the other rolls yet had no recollection of having done so.
Test patches of natural pigments were displayed on the narrowest roll and he could see that the woman had experimented with them, adding clay, then water, for ease of spraying through a tube or for working into the rock face with thumb and finger.
Tucked inside this roll was another. Here a succession of handprints had been traced from a rock wall but try as he did, he could not recall any mention of such in the news reports of the Lascaux discovery.
‘Two sets of handprints,’ he said softly as he unrolled the thing further. ‘One larger and far stronger than the other. A man, then, and a woman.’
From across the ages they seemed to cry out to him, but then a blown pigment spray of reddish-brown ochre outlined a third set. Below these last handprints Madame Fillioux had written her name, and he could see that she had not only tested the technique on herself but had juxtaposed her own prints with those of the past, if indeed they really were of the past.
Again the telephone rang. Again, startled half out of his wits, he jumped.
Stuffing things into his pockets and setting the rolls of tracing paper aside, he anxiously replaced the boards and heaved at the armoire until it was back in place.