Murder in Lascaux (29 page)

“Freemasons?” asked Toby, with a quizzical expression. “What were they doing on the list?”

“Beats me,” I replied, “I thought they were some quaint eighteenth-century club with secret handshakes, but obviously they were an issue in the thirties.”

“And not the Germans?”

Not for Pierre.

Gounot. Would that have been Marc's father, the one who was denounced after the war as a collaborator?

“Has to be,” said Toby. “Remember that according to Daglan, he got involved with an archaeologist Himmler sent to visit the caves around here to prove Hitler's theory about racial superiority. It couldn't be anyone else.”

Then it was true Marc's father had been working with a German on some archaeological project in the Dordogne that was of interest to the Nazis. But why were they working here at the château? Unless there was prehistoric art on the grounds or, rather, under the ground, there was no reason for them to be focused on Cazelle.

“This provides a link between Marc and the Cazelle family,” observed Toby.

“But that doesn't give him a motive for murdering the man from the Bureau of Antiquities.”

“It might. We need to learn what's in the Cazelles' cave.”

“Marianne swears the cave is of no importance. Do you still think she's lying?”

“Why wouldn't she lie, if there really is a hidden trove of art? That's something the family would want to protect and keep secret from the government. And Malbert was trying to inspect the cave.”

“Yes, but how does Marc come into the picture?”

“We know Malbert exposed his father's wartime past. But what if there's another part of the story that still hasn't come out, some secret involving an archaeological discovery at Cazelle? Maybe Marc feared Malbert would uncover that secret. That would explain why Marc might try to silence Malbert now rather than at any other time in the past when he could have found an opportunity.”

Yes, that made sense. And there was something else in this journal entry that leaped out at me. Drawings, wrote Jenny Marie. The young professor was making drawings to send back to Germany. Of what? Prehistoric frescoes? If none existed, what else was he after? There was that rumor about paintings that had been stored at the château during the war to keep them out of Nazi hands. Could the professor have been making an inventory? But surely Jenny Marie would have known about that secret had she been asked to participate or to copy paintings, and no reference to anything of the kind appeared in the notebook.

Instead, what the notebook recorded was a moving, ground-level account of life in southwest France during the war years. I read with foreboding that as hostilities with Germany neared, Jenny Marie grew increasingly estranged from her nephew.

And when war finally broke out and France capitulated in the summer of 1940, it was no surprise to Jenny Marie that Pierre embraced the collaborationist government set up in Vichy under Marshal Pétain. Antoine was despondent after the armistice was signed. Jenny Marie made plain her views about Pétain.

Nor was she solaced by living in the phony free zone, unoccupied by German troops but managed by Vichy on behalf of their Nazi masters. “What we do ourselves is more humiliating than what is done to us by our conquerors, because it is we who do it,” she wrote in August 1942. The occasion was the roundup and deportation of Jews in the Southwest, abetted by French officials.

Jenny Marie was prescient. By 1943, Hitler saw no reason to prolong the sham of a free zone in the South and ordered the total occupation of France.

So Pierre's son, Charles—the current baron—had toyed with the idea of joining the Milice! Charles was then nineteen. He had entered the French army in 1939 but had been released and sent home after the 1940 armistice. I had no trouble picturing the baron as a young man recently demobilized, panting for membership in a right-wing terrorist organization. That his father had doubts about the Milice was provident, for as the war ground to an end, the Resistance exacted heavy reprisals on its members. Charles had survived the war, but he might not have survived the peace. No wonder he was hesitant to talk about those years, except in the vaguest terms.

As we came to the end of the journal, what surprised and moved me the most was Jenny Marie's account of the circumstances of her brother's death. Cross-checking her final journal entries with the volume on the Resistance that Toby had picked up, we were able to piece together the following events.

During the first two years of the occupation there had been very few efforts on the part of the local population to try to help French Jews. But after the roundups of August 1942, cracks began to appear in the wall of public indifference. There were some who tried to hide Jewish families and, if possible, to spirit them out of the country. In the Southwest, the most effective of these networks was the OSE, Œuvre de secours aux enfants, or Children's Relief Organization. Routes were established to smuggle Jewish children over the Pyrenees into neutral Spain, and from there to safe harbors elsewhere. Word spread throughout France that a path of escape led through the Dordogne, and news of it brought a plea to Jenny Marie from her old friend Aimée Laurance.

She hadn't heard from Aimée for many years. Unlike Jenny, Aimée had given up her career for marriage and had raised a family. She was a widow now. Her daughter had married a Jewish pharmacist, and there was a grandson. Now she wrote to her former comrade, desperate for help.

The boy came in May. He arrived at twilight in the back of a truck, hidden in one of several sacks of potatoes. Antoine, old as he was, carried the sack inside himself.

But events forced a move more precipitously than Jenny Marie and Antoine anticipated.

Jenny Marie was shaking with anger when she wrote this line. I could tell, because her pen wavered. She must have been trembling with outrage when she spoke it, too.

There was no further news of either Antoine or Arnaud. There never was.

“Do you think our friend the baron betrayed Antoine to the Milice?” asked Toby.

“Betrayed his own grandfather? I hope not. Jenny Marie didn't think so, or she would have written about it.”

But whatever she may have thought after that night, Jenny Marie said no more. Following the narration of these events, there was a melancholy sketch of the face of a young boy, but no other entry in the notebook for a full three months. Then, in September, she wrote: “
Je vais mourir.
”A doctor had come and delivered grave news about her lungs. The outcome was inevitable, the doctor said. “I am going to die, and perhaps that is just as well.”

I wondered whether Jenny Marie, ill and with no end of the war in sight, had placed this last notebook behind the offering plaque in the chapel—she who had never been religious. The last page of the notebook was undated and filled with sketches of tiny crosses, quite distinctive ones, with the stem and crosspiece of similar thickness so the form looks almost round. I recognized the pattern from the family's Limoges china. Scrawled across the drawings, as if to cancel them out, in capital letters from the lower left hand corner of the page to the upper right, was the prayer repeated on the offering plaque: “Deliver us from Evil.”
DÉLIVRE-NOUS DU MAL
.