Breathless in their tangle, the couple went at it and he stood not two metres from them. Pale white, all arms, legs, buttocks and breasts, they gave to the dewy grass a primordiality that made him uncomfortable. Their grunts and groans, their sighs grew until they filled the night and he had to move away to stand under an oak whose spreading limbs all but hid the moon.
Am not dead, wrote Fillioux. Wounded 1914 missing action amnesia. I beg your loving forgiveness and understanding. Am to work on film.
The postcard had been dated 10 October 1941. Five days later Madame Fillioux visited the cave with Professor Courtet who had then returned to find the second chamber and its paintings.
A mortar and some lumps of pyrolusite had been taken from the cave by the daughter on the day before the woman’s death, the Sunday and the very same day the sous-facteur had been killed. Auger hadn’t been aware of the danger nor had Madame Fillioux. Fools … had she been so foolish as to trust completely?
She had intended to poison that husband of hers as well as the son-in-law.
Rolls of tracing paper held the sketches she had made at Lascaux on at least two of her three visits, the last of which had been in mid-November, presumably after the Professor’s discovery.
Animals other than those at Lascaux had been included, as were three sets of handprints – tracings of a man’s and a woman’s hands most probably – and her own sprayed imprints as well for contrast or proof positive.
10,000 francs were missing. Postcards from the parents, from Fillioux, from Courtet and from Danielle Arthaud might settle everything but for now they would have to wait. He had to warn Hermann and Madame Jouvet. He could not lose the contents of the carpet-bag. Without it, there was nothing.
Steps sounded on the gravel drive as someone hurried through the gates. A muffled male voice said in German, ‘She’s in there with Kohler. That makes things much easier.’
Ah nom de Jesus-Christ, it was Oelmann and Jouvet!
‘What do you want me to do?’ asked the husband.
‘Stay out here. Get that wife of yours away from Kohler and kill her. Do it with a stone. Open her up just like her mother but do it where she won’t be found for a while. The stables – yes, that would be best. They’re over there.’
‘What if they don’t come out?’ hazarded Jouvet tensely.
‘They will. They’ll have to. I’ll make certain they do.’
‘Don’t you want me to question her first?’
Oelmann sucked in an impatient breath. ‘Just kill her, dummkopf. Kohler doesn’t have a gun.’
Again there were steps on the gravel. The moon hid itself and for a time Jouvet stood alone looking towards the gates, waiting until instinct drove him to pivot swiftly on that bad leg of his and demand, ‘Who’s there? Come out now or I’ll fire.’
Ah merde, Hermann … Hermann, why must things be so difficult? ‘Monsieur, it is only me, St-Cyr.’
Gilded swans craned their necks into staircase railings that lost themselves among the hanging tapestries and chandeliers of the floors above. From somewhere distant came the sound of a piano – Chopin perhaps – and then, elsewhere, that of a girl running her voice through its range for no other reason than that she felt like it at 2:00 a.m. and the tower she was in resonated beautifully.
In room after room members of the cast and crew slept, sometimes four to a bed or on the carpets, in chairs, anywhere they could doss down.
Kohler cursed their luck. They were lost and Oelmann, having caught sight of them on the main staircase, was right behind them.
‘The stables must be this way,’ he said, only to see Madame Jouvet falter in doubt. He had thought the stables best for a speedy exit. Verdammt!
‘That way?’ he asked. The chateau was huge.
‘We have come too far. We should have turned off back there.’
‘That narrow corridor?’
‘Please don’t let him get me. Please!’
She started back and when Kohler caught up with her, he ran with her to the corridor and then darted down it into darkness. ‘Look, this isn’t it,’ he said, convinced. ‘It’s a dead end.’
Panelled walls enclosed them on three sides. Anxiously she ran her hands over them even as steps in the other corridor signalled Herr Oelmann’s approach. Why is there no door?’ she whispered. There has to be one.’
‘It’s a laundry chute, that’s why,’ he said and she heard him opening its doors even as the girl with the voice ran through her scales and the piano player rippled the keys.
Kohler put the woman behind him and cocked the Webley. Shooting an SS, even if a member of the Propaganda Staffel, wasn’t such a good idea, but.…
The steps went on to vanish in some other corridor or into one of the rooms. ‘Come on. Don’t wait.’
Running, they made it to the swan-staircase and went up it and along a mirrored corridor past vases of white silk lilies to stand uncertainly between two life-sized sculptures of Aphrodite.
‘A bath,’ said Madame Jouvet in despair.
Gently Kohler pulled her aside to ease the door open and then to softly close it behind them.
There was water on the floor in little pools, bare footprints too, and towels, a white robe, another and another but only the first of them was a man’s. So vast was the room, so tall its fluted columns, the marble tub with its gold taps was all but lost on a dais behind a flimsy curtain.
‘No one,’ he breathed. ‘Bath oil, soap, sponges, wine and biscuits. Three glasses but where the hell did they go? Wait here.’
‘No. Please.…’
‘Stay close then.’ Oelmann must have beaten them to it and, seeing who the occupants were, had panicked and emptied the tub but had not yet pulled the plug.
There was no one in the adjoining room. Pyjamas hung on pegs. ‘Boys’,’ he breathed. ‘Ah merde … A pair of specs.’ He held them up to the light.
‘Herr Eisner,’ she said sadly, a whisper. They’d be naked, those two boys and this man. They would be hiding in some secret passage or cupboard from Herr Oelmann. Why could he not leave her alone? Not now, she said bitterly. Never now. I know too much and this … this business here is only one more thing he cannot allow.
Sickened by what they had stumbled into and trying to steady herself, she felt a clothes hook beneath her hand and let it take some of her weight. She was exhausted. Her children would be so worried about her.…
Softly the panel opened. Wet footprints on the parquet floor led down a darkened corridor no wider than her shoulders.
One after the other, they came out into what must, at one time, have been the bedroom of a concubine.
But it, too, was in darkness.
Under lights, in total silence now, vans, lorries, mounds and orderly stacks of equipment, wardrobe trunks – all the plethora of the film trade – were jammed into the stables where once horses and livestock had been kept and a carriage or two remained.
Jouvet made St-Cyr thread his way among the coils of electrical cable and spare generators, motion-picture cameras in aluminium cases and past tall stagings of boards atop which camera and cameraman would be seated in better times.
For St Cyr, a consummate lover of the cinema, it was a Herculean downfall, a policeman’s disgrace.
Tossing the carpet-bag with its load into a corner of the stall Jouvet had forced him into, St-Cyr turned and said, ‘Now look, my friend, interfering with a police officer in the course of his duties is most unwise since he is the only one who can save you.’
‘Pardon?’
The walking stick was in his left hand and this Jouvet leaned on. The Luger was in the hand that, though badly scarred, was still far too useful. You were under suspicion of murder but … ah but, there is now perhaps sufficient evidence to suggest you may not have done it after all.’