The Caves of Périgord (36 page)

Lydia decided to announce that she was giving up and going back to London when they all met the next morning at Clothilde’s museum at Les Eyzies. Clothilde had drunk her way down the bottle until her head sagged, and Lydia had thrown the two men out and bedded down on the couch, after putting Clothilde to bed and washing up the dishes. She had woken early, made coffee, and felt her spirits steadily droop as the watched the morning mist hang dully over the river. The sky was gray and it looked like rain. She took the small photograph of Manners’s rock from her bag and looked at it reproachfully. What a mess it had caused. She roamed through Clothilde’s bookshelves, pulling out Leroi-Gourhan on Lascaux, and a monograph by Clothilde on bone tools and their uses. Desultorily, she glanced through the pictures, read Clothilde’s conclusion while barely comprehending a word of it, and then turned to a picture book for children about life in the Neolithic age. That was more her level, she told herself glumly.

Even after her shower, there seemed little point in her staying. Malrand’s big new reward would probably get the rock back. Horst was far better at the archive research than she would ever be. Manners was clearly more interested in Horst’s damned old archives than he was in her. And the whole project had become thoroughly depressing. She didn’t even feel so interested in Manners anymore, she told herself, as her hangover thumped steadily behind her eyes. Still, she was a lot better off than Clothilde, who looked like death when she rose, gulped the coffee Lydia had made, and disappeared into the bath for nearly an hour. She emerged, drank more coffee, lit a cigarette, and came out to the terrace to put her arms around Lydia and hug her tightly.

“Thanks for staying. I’m very glad you did.” Smelling marvelous, Clothilde was dressed with her usual dash. She looked as if she had made a miraculous recovery. Lydia wished she could.

“This is the kind of day when I ought to go to Paris and buy myself a new pair of shoes,” Clothilde said. “You look as though you could use the same therapy.”

“I’m not sure why I’m still here,” said Lydia. “The whole thing has become very upsetting. For you, for Horst, and I’m feeling wretched. I think I’ll go back to London.”

“And leave your handsome major to me?” laughed Clothilde. “Don’t be silly. These things that happened in the war happened to other people, not to us. They lived in an impossible time and had to do impossible things. We live in a time of possibilities. There are things we can do, people we can interview now we know so much more. There are geological maps we can look at, places to be searched on the ground. We can find this cave, Lydia, and teach Malrand a lesson.”

“Where on earth do you get your confidence?”

“From you. Last night was a disaster for me, and you rolled up your sleeves, took care of me, cleaned the place up, and fed me coffee this morning. You were confronted with a problem and you tackled it. Thank you. And while you had to wait for me, you carry on researching.” She gestured at the open books.

“Now we have another problem to tackle, finding that cave. I’m not going to let you go back, Lydia. Your friendship is one of the good things to have come from this whole drama that has been launched upon us. We have all been conscripted into this, and we have to see it through.”

She went into the kitchen, made toast and boiled two eggs, and forced Lydia to eat. They went out to the car, and Clothilde put the hood down, handed Lydia a headscarf and tied another around her own ginger curls, and raced off down the narrow back road to Les Eyzies. They had climbed the long stairs to the old ch‚teau tucked into the
rock ledges above the town, the building site of the new museum busy below them, and found Horst and Manners already there, poking amiably around the exhibit of tools made from reindeer bones and antlers.

“Did you know that I’d have to kill thirty reindeer to make you a necklace like this?” Manners said to Lydia by way of greeting. “Worth every terrified moment. You do look a treat, both of you. Poor old Horst and I had to nurse our hangovers with lots of coffee and croissants. You two look as if you’re fresh from the beauty parlor. Don’t know how you do it, but I’m very glad you do.”

Horst did indeed look grim, but Manners’s cheerful babble got them across the embarrassments of the previous evening, and a determined Clothilde marched them into her office and started spreading very large-scale maps across her desk. Her office was small and neat, with a spectacular view across the river, but she quickly bustled them into action.

“That’s the map for Cumont and la Ferrassie, where the parachute drop took place. And that’s the geological survey map of the same district. Major, find some drawing pins and stick them up on that corkboard on the wall. Horst, you know the geology. See what you find, and then you and the major can go and tramp the ground. He’s a soldier. If anyone can identify the kind of place his father would have picked to hide guns, he can. I suggest we meet back here just before the museum closes at five, have a drink, and compare notes.”

“What are you two going to do?” asked Horst.

“Well, we can’t go surveying the ground dressed like this. If you find anything worth a closer look, we’ll dress for it tomorrow. Today, Lydia and I have some old Resistance men to interview. Or we may decide we need to shop for a new pair of shoes.”

“In which case,” smiled Lydia, “We’ll call you from Paris to put off our drinks.”

The first two men they called on were also on the list that Manners had been given by Morillon back in Bordeaux. The railway man from le Buisson was called …tienne Faugère, and his memory was sometimes precise, sometimes vague. He lived with his married daughter, who made them coffee as they sat in the neat little garden to talk. He remembered Malrand, and a trade union organizer called Marat, and remembered being beaten up by Russian soldiers in German uniform while a French Milice tough he had been at school with asked him question after question.

“I shot him the day the Allies landed,” the old man said proudly. “The local police decided it was time to change sides, arrested the local Milice types, and brought them to the square beside the cinema. There wasn’t much of a trial. But I told what he had done to me, and the chief of police gave me his revolver, so I went up and spat in his face and shot him in the head. He was crying. I had to shoot him twice. Your mum was there in the crowd, Clothilde, with all the women. Some of them came up and kicked the body. He’d been a devil with the women, that one, particularly the ones whose husbands were off in Germany. Then we went off to Tulle, and spent two days shooting Germans till they sent the tanks against us. I got away, but a lot didn’t.”

“Is that where Marat was killed?” Clothilde asked.

“Marat? He wasn’t at Tulle. I saw him at Brive, just before we all went up to Tulle. All the commandants had this meeting at the monastery of St-Antoine, trying to decide what to do, who would go to Tulle. There was a big row between our lot in the FTP and the Gaullists who said they had orders from London not to go. But Marat stayed behind, with those Spaniards of his. No, I got to see most of the lads at Tulle because they had me taking round ammunition, what little we had. I was a strong young lad in those days. Marat wasn’t there. I’d have known.”

“Do you remember meeting an English officer or an American?”

“I heard about the American. We called him the Red Indian
because he had one of those funny haircuts. I never met him. I saw the Englishman one night, when they’d blown up the junction at le Buisson. I heard all these explosions and gunfire and went to the window and saw him getting away. I told the Germans that, when they beat me up. I had to tell them something. I couldn’t tell them about Marat and the way we got him all around the place on the trains. We had this tool chest on the trains below the coal. We never used it because we always rigged up hooks so the tools we needed were in easy reach. Two meters long but very narrow. We hid him in there. I couldn’t tell them that.”

They thanked him and left, and took the road for Audrix, to the next name on the list. Albert Escarmant had been one of the youngest of Berger’s group, the son of a farmer who had started by helping with the parachute drops. Now he ran the farm with his sons, who took the milk and butter and yogurt they made down to the local markets. Clothilde said she always bought from them, and knew the old man well. As they pulled into the muddy farmyard, Clothilde grinned at Lydia and said, “Remember those new shoes we talked about? Well, these aren’t new, but they are different.” And she pulled two sets of rubber boots, one very old and one quite new, from behind her seat, and handed Lydia the new ones.

Old Albert remembered the English officer, le Capitaine Manners, and the crazy American, and Berger and his brother, whom he called “young François.” He remembered the night the Germans had roared into the parachute drop at Cumont, their guns blazing.

“We wanted to scatter, but
le capitaine
wouldn’t let us,” he recalled. “He got us down into cover and firing back, and then ran among us, getting some to go round and take the Germans in the flank, and some more to try and help him creep up on the armored car with a Gammon bomb. It was one of those big ones with eight wheels. He didn’t get it, but he got us enough time for young François to get most of the guns away. Young François got me to cut the dead horses loose so we could get the carts. I finished up pushing mine and it was a nightmare. I had
to jam a bough into the wheels to stop it running out of control. But the Germans didn’t get it.”

“Where did you take the guns, Albert?”

“I took mine down that track that goes past la Farge, and then down the hill to that dip just before you come to the ruined old windmill on the road that goes over to Rouffignac. That was the rendezvous point. We always had a rendezvous prepared. Then Berger sent me back up the hill to help with the horses, but it was all over by then and I was on my own. So I went the other way, across the ridge toward Limeuil, and swam the river to get back to the old camp we had by the Gouffre. The Germans had found that one, but I knew a place to hide before I tried to get back to the lads.”

“Do you know where they took the guns that night?”

“No, there was a big argument about it, young François and that Commie bloke Marat, shouting at each other in whispers when I got that cart down to the dip. Marat wanted to take the guns and divide them among his Spaniards and scatter to get away from the Germans. I call them Germans, but they were Russians mostly, Russians and some other lot, swarthy blokes. Anyway, young François wasn’t having that, and Berger was trying to sort it out when he sent me back up the hill. It was daft. I could hear that big twenty-millimeter cannon going back up beyond la Farge, and there were these two arguing like fishwives.”

“What I remember next was the big explosion, as I was going back up the hill. One of the carts we had to abandon was full of ammo.
Le capitaine
crawled up to it, took the pin out of a Mills bomb, and stuck it between two of the cases, so when the Germans came to move it, the lever snapped back and the whole cart blew. There were bullets cooking off all over the place. That was when it ended.
Le capitaine
told me about it later. We had a laugh about it the last time I saw him, when he came over for old Lespinasse’s funeral.”

“Where did young François want to take the guns? Did he know a place?”

“Oh, he had places everywhere, that one. He knew everybody, all the farmers and their sons, and most of the daughters too, knowing young François. I suppose he knew old Dumonteil, up on the ridge. The Germans deported him, and burned the farm. But we’d never have got the carts up there. Young François must have had somewhere else nearby, some little cave or hollow. He knew it all like the back of his hand, because of his hunting. He was a great one for hunting as a boy. Still is, come to that. You can have all these political crises up in Paris, and he’ll still come down here and take a day or two hunting the bécasse with me. The best hunting in the world, he calls it, the fastest, most cunning bird of them all. Even round here, he can still show me little corners that I don’t know, where he says we might get lucky, and sure enough, there’s a
bécasse
.”

“Maybe the guns were just abandoned that night, with all the fighting and the argument,” Clothilde pressed.

“Oh no, we’d never do that. And anyway, I know we got some of the stuff that night because
le capitaine
had promised us some of those new wonder drugs, sulfa drugs they called them, for our medical supplies. And I know we got that because they used it on me when I got shot later on at Terrasson, when that Das Reich division came through. About a week or ten days later, it must have been. I remember it very well. It was a powder, and they sprinkled it on my shoulder where the bullet had gone through. Strapped me up with a bandage, and told me I was as good as new. I wasn’t, mind, but young François said since it was my left shoulder, and that didn’t stop me firing a gun. I was young then, and healed fast, and it was all so exciting that you couldn’t stop. That’s where your dad was killed, Terrasson.”