Murder in Lascaux (17 page)

“That's what I understood, but, I tell you, this is one touchy topic. I'm not going to ask again.”

All this heat about churchly things made me think of Madame Martin's declaration that Jenny Marie had turned away from religion on Revolutionary grounds. However, being anticlerical in honor of Bastille Day seemed quite a different thing from being anti-Rome in deference to a medieval sect. I also wondered how the chapel of the Black Virgin fit in with what we'd heard. I had assumed that the activity at the chapel—clean altar cloths, fresh flowers—meant that the Cazelles were pious Roman Catholics. Apparently not.

These musings were put to rest by our arrival in the little cathedral town of St. Cyprien. The café occupied the corner of a busy street, but there was a sheltered terrace in the back. We took a table outside and enjoyed the late light of midsummer. The waiter suggested a bottle of chilled Beaujolais; we accepted. It paired nicely with the savory rabbit. We ate with relish, recounting our separate afternoons. I told Toby what I had learned in the library about Jenny Marie and what I had learned about Fernando from Madam Martin. Over coffee, we made our plans for the next day.

Toby wanted to visit Lascaux II in the afternoon. This elaborate copy of Lascaux, famous in its own right, is located just a few miles from the original. It was built in the 1980s for the general public, who were no longer permitted inside the authentic cave. Toby thought that by visiting the facsimile we might learn something that could have a bearing on the investigation.

“Look,” he said. “We now know of two people who might have wanted to kill Monsieur Malbert—Marc and Fernando. Three, if you count the guide, who would have had the same motive as Marc. Both Marc and his uncle had access to Lascaux. As for Fernando, we don't know how he could have entered the cave, unless one of those two was helping him. We need more information, and one way to get it is to take the tour and refresh our recollections of what happened.”

“Isn't this kind of thing the inspector's job?” I asked. “I'm here to find out about Jenny Marie's paintings. I need tomorrow afternoon to work on her journals.”

“Then I have an idea. In the morning, I'll go to the cooking class, and you go to the library. You can work straight through lunchtime. Then in the afternoon we'll go to Lascaux II and get a bite on the way. They give tours till six. I'll ask Marianne to call and reserve tickets for us.”

Except for having to skip cooking class, I liked the plan. I now had so many questions about Jenny Marie that I could hardly wait to get back to her papers. I've also always liked mornings. Getting to work in the library before others were up and reading through the lunch hour would suit me very well.

“Okay,” I conceded. “But let's find Marianne when we get back and explain what we're doing. I don't want her being surprised if I miss the class. If we tell her tonight, it will be all right.”

T
he next morning, the dawn of Midsummer's Eve, I tiptoed down the dark hallway toward the main salon, which was dimly lit by the faint light coming through the windowed doors at the back of the room. I hugged the left wall, found the library door, and fit Marianne's key into its lock. Entering, I was pleased to see nothing had been disturbed, and eagerly I resumed my reading of the journals.

Soon I was absorbed again in Jenny Marie's life. Volume 2 of the journals found her at the Académie Julian in Paris. I'd done previous research on the Académie and was delighted to come across a firsthand account of student life there. At that time, women were excluded from the other studios, but Rodolphe Julian's art school was open to both sexes, giving talented women a unique opportunity to pursue a career in art. The journal entries described Jenny Marie's newfound friends at the academy, her teachers, and her daily exercises—and brought to life what for me had been a historical footnote.

The strong suit of the academy was figure drawing, and Jenny's sketchbooks from this period were filled with studies of models, both male and female, drawn from every conceivable angle and pose. But the young artists were exposed to newer trends in painting as well, including impressionism, now a generation old. In the most exciting entry in her journal, Jenny recorded a meeting with Berthe Morisot, the most prominent female painter in the movement. Morisot, who had married Manet's brother, had her first solo exhibition in Paris in 1892, and Jenny Marie went to see it with her friend Aimée.

I pondered these words. Jenny Marie had never married. So far, her journal revealed nothing about a romance, and I wondered if there had ever been a man in her life. In any event, this entry documented Jenny Marie's interest in impressionism and was of interest for that reason. I pushed back from the table and rose to take a closer look at the two paintings in the library, both done in the impressionist style. The ornately framed oil painting to the left of the window was identified by its nameplate as
Parc Monceau au printemps
. It depicted a bright scene of well-dressed women walking haughtily by an old couple trying to sell flowers from a park bench. The small painting hanging on the other side of the window was called
Gamins au jeu
. It showed two thin but lively youngsters playing a game with sticks and stones in a dirty cobblestone street. She had dated this one next to her signature, and it was the date given in the journal, 1894. Yes, I thought, the influence of Berthe Morisot was apparent.

A rap on the library door interrupted my reading. “May I come in?” It was Marianne. “I'm sorry to disturb you, but Inspector Daglan is here and wants to speak to you and your husband. They are waiting in the salon. I'm afraid I have to get back to the class, so could you lock up here and meet the inspector as soon as possible? “

“Of course. I'll be there in a minute.” Frustrated, I marked my place, closed the journal, turned off my laptop, and picked up my purse. I was careful to lock the door behind me.

W
hen I entered the salon, Daglan was seated in an armchair with his legs crossed, talking to Toby. I sat down beside Toby on the couch and exchanged greetings with Daglan.

“Will you take coffee?” he asked. I saw that he was nursing a small cup himself and that there was a pot and an empty cup beside it.

“Yes, thank you.” I had missed my coffee this morning. “How may we help you, Inspector?”

Before he could reply, Toby said he had just been telling the inspector about our meeting with Marc Gounot and how little we knew about him, despite appearances.

“Yes, that is my question to you,” rejoined Daglan, handing me the cup he had just poured for me. “Would you mind telling me how long you and your husband have known Marc Gounot and how you met?”

Just the right amount of anxiety coursed through me—not enough to make me glance up at Toby, but just enough to caution me not to. I didn't want it to appear that we were coordinating a story. I kept my eyes on the inspector as I recounted how we had met Marc by chance at his mineral shop, consented to a drink with him at the nearby café, and then were sought out by him after our restaurant dinner with the cooking-school group.

Toby jumped in. “I know it seems suspicious we would meet the nephew of Monsieur Gounot on the day after the murder, but that's what happened. And we might not have met him if we hadn't visited the library in Castelnaud. The librarian there told us not to miss the rock exhibit, which was in Marc's shop.”

“The young woman who has provided Marc Gounot with an alibi?”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

“Very convenient. So Marc Gounot can claim you never would have met him without her suggestion.”

Toby countered with the facts, but the inspector seemed determined to believe, or to pretend to believe, that we had met Marc by prearrangement. He just wasn't sure for what purpose. After fruitlessly grilling Toby again on his antique business and his knowledge of paleontology, he took another tack.

“Madame, did you think it advisable to socialize with one of the possible suspects in this murder investigation?”

“No, I didn't, Inspector. In fact, it made me uneasy. But Marc was insistent. We agreed to have a drink with him, that's all, and we said we wouldn't discuss the murder. But then when Marc started talking about himself, he seemed so vulnerable. I felt sorry for him.” At the quizzical rise of the inspector's eyebrows, I retold the story Marc had related of his father's disgrace.

“So, you know something about that, eh?” Inspector Daglan looked down at his shoes. “I wonder if you really know the whole truth about the father, Henri Gounot. He behaved very badly during the war.”

“What exactly did he do?” Toby asked.

“Evidence wasn't collected formally, because he committed suicide as soon as the charges against him were brought to the head of the Bureau of Monuments and Antiquities. But the evidence is right there in the personnel files of the bureau.”

“Evidence of what?” I pressed.

Daglan considered a moment. “First, Henri Gounot systematically purged from the bureau all employees of Jewish extraction. For this we have ample proof. His letters of denunciation were found in the bureau's personnel files. There were only three cases of dismissal, but this was not a small matter. All three—two men and a woman—were later deported and died in concentration camps.”

Toby looked as stunned as I felt.

“But that's not all. Henri Gounot also served his German masters by spreading their racial propaganda, and he ended by compromising his profession.”

“How do you mean?” I asked.

Daglan sat back and sighed. “How much do you know about the ideology of the Nazi SS?”

“A little,” said Toby.

“Do you know what attracted their interest in the Dordogne?”

“No, I don't.”

“Well, then, let me tell you. No doubt you know Herr Hitler believed in a race of superior ‘Aryans' that supposedly went back to prehistoric times. Well, he gave his friend Himmler the assignment of finding archaeologists sympathetic to that view. Their mission was to prove that the cave art discovered at the turn of the century in France and Spain was Aryan—that the cave men had come from Northern Europe, not from Southern Europe, or worse, Africa.”

“You're not saying,” I asked in shock, “that the French Bureau of Antiquities collaborated with Himmler's project?”