Andre would kill her. He would relish the beating he would first hand out. Her face, her lips, her eyes and nose, and why … why is it, please, that he felt such a need to take out all of his bitterness on her?
Her father had come back. Maman had wanted her kept out of it and that is why she had told her nothing. Nothing of the paintings, the forgery. Nothing of what she had been up to, the unexpected, the impossible, in a cave she knew so well. Ah yes.
The tears were brushed away. The road went downhill and she hurried to catch up only to realize she was alone … alone.
Apprehensively her heart hammered. Disturbed, upset that the detectives had not told her to stop, she stood astride the bicycle Herr Kohler had stolen for her from the chateau and waited – listened – tried hard to find them.
Nothing … only silence and then … then that feeling of closeness, of his caring she had experienced, now the loss of it … the loss. He had really cared about her, she said. He had!
Her spirit was wounded and, yes, it hurt to know they still did not trust her completely. Hesitandy she began to walk the bicycle back up the hill.
A cigarette was being shared. Dark against the night sky, the two detectives had paused just on the other side of the hill so as to be alone, and when in dismay she called out to them, they stopped talking and waited for her to join them. Did they sigh inwardly with impatience?
‘Your husband, madame,’ began St-Cyr and it was clear that they had been discussing Andre and her father. Were they working together, was that it, eh, messieurs? Has Andre been telling Henri-Georges all about maman and her annual visits, visits that never changed until the last? And all about the daughter who secretly dreaded each of her mother’s visits to the house afterwards yet had to show the brave front and the bruises, the smashed lips, the shame of a marriage that had gone so wrong?
‘Your husband, madame. Hermann and I were simply discussing how best to protect you and return you safely to your children.’
‘Andre is dead, madame. Louis had to kill him.’
‘Dead …? Please, what is this you are saying?’
St-Cyr told her then and in the silence of the night, they heard her suck in a breath and say, ‘A stone.… Killed with a stone.’
Kohler reached out to her. ‘Oelmann,’ he said. ‘He’ll realize where we’ve gone. He may feel he has to get help this time from the Perigord Sonderkommando. Louis and me, we … we were wondering if it might not be best for you to go home to Mayor Pialat, madame. He’ll do his best to hide you. Think about it, eh? The two of us could ride on together and then I could come back to help Louis.’
She squeezed the hand that had taken hers. She said, ‘You both are kind. Merci but, please, you will need me at the cave, yes? The paintings? The second chamber Professor Courtet claims to have found all by himself. The postcards, too, I think.’
‘They’ll come after us, Louis. They’ll have to,’ said Hermann grimly. ‘Oelmann won’t be able to leave things now.’
She rode on ahead, but on the downhill slope they soon caught up with her and she felt first one put a comforting hand on her shoulder and then the other, and she laughed aloud because she had to tell them how relieved she was to know they trusted her.
But at the bridge over the stream that would, some fifteen or twenty kilometers to the south, find its little waterfall, they again stopped to listen to the night.
Its stillness was of that other time and she knew they each listened as Neanderthal would have done, wondering why it was that just before dawn the night was always at its darkest. ‘I love you both for the way you have made me feel,’ she said. ‘Just give me a handaxe and I will show you what I can do with it.’
9
It was like something out of TOTO and the Seven Dwarfs or Snow White and the Yellow Brick Road, thought Kohler. It was not real – oh mein Gott, no. It was weird and horrific.
‘Nom de Jesus-Christ, Louis. Look what the hell they’ve done to our valley.’
The dawn had broken and through its soft, primordial blush, cranes, ladders, platforms and towers stood stock-still, while straight up the right side of the valley, over brush and rock alike, a primitive wooden set of rails carried a cart and camera pylon.
The cinematographer in Louis was intrigued. ‘As the Baroness and her prehistorian climb to the cave, assistants wind the trolley slowly up the slope so that the camera can record their progress for posterity.’
Juliette Jouvet was silent. Staging went up only so far, then the trolley took over. But right at the entrance to the cave, and on the same side, a platform had been built. Now an open parasol of unbleached Egyptian cotton stirred forlornly in the breeze as if waiting for something to happen. High above it, a honey buzzard circled. The hawk was so beautiful and majestic. How many times as a girl had she and maman watched one so similar she would come away from the cave filled with thoughts of it?
‘It’s his valley, isn’t it?’ said Kohler, nodding at the hawk.
‘Or hers. To me the hawk has always been a male, but now I wonder if I was right. Is that not my mother up there watching me?’
The film’s set crews had done their job with blitzkrieg speed, even to somehow hauling in two huge, camouflaged electrical generators with banks of storage batteries, all courtesy of the Wehrmacht. Heavy black cables were strung here, there. Sometimes hidden, most often not, they were dabbed with yellow paint to warn people not to trip. Lights … some big, some small, were even mounted in the trees whose interfering branches had been ruthlessly broken and left to hang or brutally decapitated and dragged away.
‘They’ve completely taken over,’ murmured the passionate naturalist and lover of prehistory in Louis. ‘What was once so beautiful has been ravaged.’
Sections had been roped off – a portion of the stream where Marina von Strade and her prehistorian would pop the corks and toast their discovery; the picnic site where they would feed each other sweet cherries or mushrooms perhaps; parts of the path to the waterfall where the two would strip for a healthy bathe before a severely academic romp in the cave and doe-eyed glances under those of the aurochs or whatever, thought Kohler. But even in these locations there was change. Potted trees had been brought in and, still in their pots, planted where none had existed before. Leaves and branches had been carefully trimmed so as not to intrude. Pine needles had been scattered over the sharp husks of chestnuts from years ago so as to soften the lovers’ picnic site and bugger that crap about audiences knowing one tree from another. When you’ve got the screen filled with a woman who liked to bathe in the buff or have her bottom polished, who would care?
Shabby in a dirty grey cloak with staff and beret, a scraggly-bearded shepherd came to stand at the very edge of the cliff, just above the dark entrance of the cave. As his flock gathered about him, they, too, peered curiously down at the scene below.
A stone fell to clatter and bounce until its sound was no more. The shepherd raised a hand in greeting and called out to them. He asked about the crane and platform hoist he had seen mounted up the valley by the waterfall. ‘It is not safe, I think,’ he said. ‘More stones are needed to weight the base of it down.’
Down … down … stones … stones, the echoes came, his patois harsh and broken like the rocks from which it had sprung.
He moved his staff to point out the location. Frightened, one of the lambs bolted into space. ‘Ah, no,’ gasped Juliette. The thing hit a slab of rock and broke its head, bouncing and flying through the air before coming to rest. Hind legs twitching … twitching until at last they were still.