The Avignon Quintet (175 page)

He had by now turned quite pale and strained and his recital had a tendency to flag as his story neared its crisis. He came and slumped down beside her in the pew and let his head fall into his hands. He closed his eyes and went on in a lower key. “Of course you may not want to hear it, it may seem too painful. But I was hoping to win your sympathy and confidence by offering the text to you; and, by the way, there is one passage which refers to you in it. It is where Livia says to him: ‘You only settled for me because Constance was not available – she was in love with Aubrey: but it was she you really loved, really wanted!’ Inextricable the strands of motive which make up the repertoire of a single human heart.” (This was Constance’s thought, and also: one can become morally responsible for things, situations, desires, of which one is ignorant.)

“Go on,” she said in her dry tone of utter amazement, for the whole of this recital had shaken her to the depths. If asked to invent an answer to her questionings she would not have been able to devise anything as baroque as the truth. Hilary and Livia! And then, to cap it, the image of herself as figuring in this history, as accumulating Dharmic guilt for situations she was not even aware of … He had started talking again in his halting fashion: “Do you want to hear more, then? It is not a very happy story. Hilary had now become the prisoner not of the Gestapo but of the French Milice whose newly appointed head was a fervently anti-British ex-policeman, avid for advancement. For him even a death sentence hardly satisfied his bloodthirstiness. It hardly satisfied his hate which was nourished on sentiments of secret shame and cowardliness. People who are cowardly enough to cut off women’s hair are toneless souls and would cut off anything. That is why we Germans loathed the French so. This bleak and dreadful little man proposed to use the brand-new guillotine which Vichy had sent him to make an example of Hilary! I wanted this, of course, but I had not worked out in detail just how I would like it; nor had I taken Livia into consideration! I tried to delay the judgement but there was a limit to what I could do, and besides I had lost control of my prisoner now – the French tried and condemned him to death. Meanwhile Livia herself had been picked up and imprisoned for further questioning. The French had been quite intrigued by parts of the interview which seemed to them to promise useful information – rubbish, of course! But meanwhile Livia found herself in the fortress in the next cell to her brother. From the priest who was sent to console them she now learned that Hilary was due to be guillotined on the morning of the next day but one. There was no hope for him as he had been judged by secret tribunal – at that time the police was a law unto itself, and many a private grudge was paid off in this way. There was worse to follow, for in order to punish her also for her resentful and non-cooperative attitude under questioning, it was decreed that she should be forced to witness Hilary’s execution in the prison yard where this dreadful toy had been set up at last. The other day I found the day-book of the Milice with the most detailed instructions about the uses of the instrument. Vichy’s special tribunals of 14 August 1941 had a military figure as a president and special laws – death sentences for all proven Communists and Anarchists. The first to die was the town tart, a gipsy called Guitte. I remember a few laconic phrases from this record:
M. Défaut, l’exécuteur des hautes oeuvres, a commencé son travail à l’aube, à echancrer la chemise autour du cou, entraver les pieds avec une ficelle et d’attacher les mains derrière le dos
… all in great detail. Hilary is there listed simply as
espion anglais
. The guillotine is referred to as
les bois de justice
, or as stags’ antlers. Beside it were placed
deux grands corbeilles en osier
by the executioner whose assistant pinioned Livia’s arms and dragged her to the site. He was called Voreppe and later he committed suicide because, his wife said, he could not stand the
bruit sourd
of the falling blade which he always seemed to hear in his memory. Hilary struggled and choked, and so did she; there was quite a fight before they managed to force his head into the half moon of steel and release the heavy blade. It was now that she inflicted the wound which cost her her sight, plucking a dirk from the belt of one of the guards. She intended to do away with herself but was forcibly prevented and carried back to the garrison infirmary where she was drugged and put back to bed. It was over!”

He gave a gross sob and fell silent; and so was Constance now, silent for what seemed an eternity during which in her imagination she relived this awful scene, ran it through repeatedly like a cinema film until she felt sick and apprehensive for her reason almost … But what could she say? It was she who had sought for answers to certain questions – and here they were, totally unexpected answers! Moreover answers which apparently cost him great pain to formulate and express. She looked at him with curiosity, wondering what the motivation might be of such a performance. Then she said, “What are you expecting of me? I am curious to know.”

He sighed profoundly and for a moment seemed at a loss for words. They stared at each other – there were still tears in his eyes as well as hers. “I want,” he said, “to meet Lord Galen if possible. I have something important to say to him – something which may make me useful, nay indispensable to him. I know that you know him and that he is somewhere in the region at this moment. Isn’t that so?” She watched him with some curiosity as he wound and unwound his fingers, for his pallor was quitting him and this new departure brought a flush to his cheek. “Yes, but why exactly?” she said out of pure perverseness. “I feel you must tell me a good deal more before I trouble old Galen on your behalf!” He made an impatient gesture with his head and said, “Very well, then I see I shall have to tell you the whole story. I was afraid of boring you, for it does not concern you in any way. But it could concern him, and I might secure his good offices in the question of my trial for enemy activities – it is coming up in Avignon in some months, and I need sponsors of his calibre. It would not be at all compromising for him to intervene and help me because after all I have quite a solid case in my own favour. After all, I
did
work
for the British as they will certainly testify. But just to make the whole thing 100 per cent secure I would like to offer Lord Galen something unique, something that he has been looking for for years – the Templar treasure! To go back a little way in history, one of the most helpful collaborators was Dr Jourdain – it’s from him that I know all that I do about you all. And at some period in the war he had to hospitalise and sedate a young French clerk called Quatrefrages who had been working for the Galen consortium on the whole Templar problem. It was from him – often it was from his ravings because sometimes he wasn’t all there – that I found out how much work and thought had already gone into the project upon which he hoped to found a whole fortune – I suppose a second or third! Of course this interested me very much. When Quatrefages was discharged I kept in touch with him, and by mildly threatening him with the displeasure of the Gestapo I obtained all the historical and topographical material he had accumulated on behalf of Lord Galen and the Egyptian prince who shares this interest. In the meantime a new and different line of inquiry developed from the discovery that the Roman workings of the abandoned mines near the Pont du Gard could be transformed into ammunition caches for all the stuff which was pouring down upon us in the Rhône valley and which we must stack up in some safe place against the day when the big battles for the south of France became a reality, as the German Command thought – and with good reason! But the sappers in charge of the operation were Austrians with a bad record for mutinies and desertions and they went about their work with sabotage in mind. So it was that as fast as they cleaned out the corridors and stacked the incoming ammunition they mined the whole place very thoroughly and in such a way that from a relatively small central explosion they could cause a chain of secondary ones which might blow everything into the air – even the Pont du Gard itself! They wired the whole place up so scrupulously that the five master-keys or detonators could be set in place in a matter of minutes. It was at this time that they stumbled upon the door in the rock which opened into a hollowed-out group of five contiguous caves with cemented walls and stone masonry of high finish. From here they started coming out with precious stones which of course were difficult to sell except to the gipsies, and that is how I got wind of the find, from a gipsy who was ‘helping’ me with my inquiries into other matters. That is how I got into touch with the sapper Schultz, the drunken sergeant of the troop who together with one other-rank claimed to have made the find and who had locked up the cave, intending to keep this booty for himself. But meanwhile the general situation had deteriorated greatly and we were preparing for a wholesale evacuation. At this point the story of the ammunition train took over. As a parting act of revengeful vindictiveness the General commanding the retreat decided to inflict a mortal blow upon the city. He planted a train full of munitions on the railway bridge and commanded the unit of sappers to boobytrap it as thoroughly as possible so that when the troops had reached a fair distance from the town a skeleton rearguard could set alight to it and cause an explosion of unpredictable violence. Yes, there is no doubt, Avignon would have become a hole in the ground! And at this point the drunkard Schultz who had never performed a coherent act of magnanimity in his whole life, ordered his men to mutiny and refuse! They started to try and barricade themselves into the tunnels but the garrison was ordered out and with a couple of tanks they dislodged them and took the whole lot prisoner. The outcome was not far to seek. They were lined up against the wall in the public cemetery and executed for treachery. Later the townsfolk covered their mass grave with roses to show their gratitude. But while people were found to dig the grave the bodies lay along the wall for nearly a week and I gave myself the disagreeable task of picking them over at night with the aid of lanterns, in search of a map which I knew must exist, a map of the caves with all their secreted ammunition. Otherwise how dare to enter them and search for the treasure? Schultz was the last to die – he was forced to watch all the other executions. The map was on him!

“It took me a little while to work out the code he employed – parts of the glossary are in a kind of electrical shorthand. But I finished by comprehending it, and also the elaborate system of lighting which enables one to light up the whole place; also the grotto which houses the entry and exit system and the keys. There were some obscurities but thanks to what I had learned from my long dialogue with Quatrefages I knew a few things about the quincunx shape of the caves. In architecture the quincunxial shape was considered a sort of housing for the divine power – a battery, if you like, which gathered into itself the divinity as it tried to pour earthward, to earth itself-just like an electrical current does. This magical current was supposed to create an electrical ‘field’ around the treasure and protect it from being discovered until its emanations were fully mastered and could be used in the alchemical sense to nourish a sort of world bank which might enable man to come to terms with matter – his earthly inheritance, so to speak. It sounds utter rubbish, I know, and I am not personally very much concerned with that aspect of the business. I share Lord Galen’s simpler and more practical view of things. I think that riches offer the only tangible safety for a man who has clearly seen how dangerous and horrible his fellow man is. There is no other way of protecting oneself against him except by amassing money and creating a protective power-field of money – that is my view. Well, I wish to try to interest the consortium he represents in my scheme. I am the only living person who can offer safe access to the treasure which otherwise would be out of reach of everyone because of the sheer hazards of the boobytrapping. There is no means at present of evaluating how much is at stake, but the sum must clearly be tremendous, and of course we must keep the secret if we can. I have even gone so far as to secure an official licence to reactivate this abandoned Roman mine with all its workings (fortunately the whole area still belongs to a single family which is delighted to accept a handsome sum for the licence) so that we could place the whole sector out of bounds to the general public while we went to work on the quincunx of little cells … You see why I must meet Lord Galen and put this whole matter to him? Of course I shall want equal membership in the consortium, an equal share of the spoils. Goodness me, can’t you see the possibilities of such a thing?”

They stared at each other in silence for an eternity. “Yes, I see,” she said at last. “I will tell him.”

He burst out laughing with delight. So they fell to discussing the details.

FIVE