The Caves of Périgord (50 page)

“My government?” said Manners. “What does my government have to do with this?”

Malrand gave a cold smile. “I have been in this business too long to believe in coincidences, my dear Major. Your father had his own reasons to keep silence, but I always assumed that his death would open Pandora’s box. The disappearance of the painting and the consequent publicity simply confirmed my fears. If you didn’t steal your own painting, then I am sure you are well connected with the department of British Intelligence that did. I presume you found something in your father’s papers, a memoir, something that told you how this mess began. Something that a President of France would want very much to keep secret and that your British Intelligence would use to put pressure on me.”

“I’m not attached to any Intelligence department,” snapped Manners. “And although I still don’t understand why you want to keep the cave secret I suspect that you organized the theft of that rock as part of your own cover-up.”

“My cover-up!” snorted Malrand. “If only French Intelligence were so efficient.” He turned away with a shrug. “You don’t understand much about politics if you think a politician would ever entrust that kind of secret to his Intelligence agencies.”

Lydia felt her head turning from one man to the other as if she were watching a tennis match. A cough came from the fireplace. Lespinasse had broken silence.

“Not Intelligence, Monsieur le Président. Us. Your security team. Trying to forestall potential embarrassment. Saw no need to trouble you with it.” Lespinasse chewed on his mustache. “In fact, we had a bit of help, just between us, from our British colleagues. Just a favor
between professional colleagues, you might say. We understand these political things that are best kept quiet.”

Lydia gaped in astonishment. She had never felt more American in her life. What an arrogant, overbearing, dreadful kind of system these damned Europeans operated. They lived by the cover-up and the conspiracy. And all this useless hunt and Clothilde’s tragedy and her embarrassment and the barefaced theft from her auction house had all stemmed from their secret little ways of doing favors for each other and their feudal masters. Gathering her rage, she braced herself to tell them what she thought of the lot of them when she heard a funny, creaking sound.

It was Malrand, and he was laughing. Laughing so hard that he could hardly catch his breath. He bent over, one hand groping for the support of a chair, the other for a handkerchief. Lydia turned to glare at Manners, but even as she looked his face twitched into a grin, and his shoulders started to shake as the laughter infected him.

“I’d be very surprised if the British government knew anything about it,” Lespinasse added with a big wink at her and smiling broadly. He was going to say more but his shoulders heaved as a great gust of laughter began to shake his big frame. Speechless with outrage, Lydia suddenly heard a fit of giggles from Clothilde, who grinned at her, looked at the helplessly guffawing men. and then threw up her hands in mock despair at the whole ridiculous world of men and began to belly laugh in her turn. Lydia felt her own mouth beginning to pull and her throat constrict and her tummy shake as the infection caught her as well. Dammit, she thought as she heard herself laughing helplessly, what instinct is it about us humans that won’t let us keep a straight face when everyone around us is chortling like idiots?

“Oh, my sainted aunt,” heaved Manners. “What a glorious mess!” And collapsed into guffaws again.

“Governments don’t know a thing about it,” wheezed Malrand, weakly. “We never do, you know.” And that set him off again.

“You’re a pair of dreadful crooks,” chortled Clothilde, red-faced, her hair in disarray, but squinting at Malrand and Lespinasse with definite affection.

“You’re all bloody intolerable,” groaned Lydia, holding her stomach.

A door opened and a nervous maid peeped in, her eyes bulging as she took in the scene of mass hysteria. That set them off again, but a little more feebly, and Malrand wiped his eyes and stood up straight and got himself back under control.

“God,” he said. “Haven’t laughed like that in years. There’s no medicine like it.” Lydia found it impossible to gaze at them with anything other than a warm, benevolent grin on her face, and a particularly warm glow when she looked at Manners. What a splendid, genuine laugh he had.

“And what do you plan to do with the reward money, Lespinasse?” Malrand asked, still beaming in pure delight.

“Not collect it, Monsieur le Président. The painting has already been delivered to the Embassy, so it’s in French hands.” That set him off again, and a softer, but still sympathetic detonation from everyone else.

“And now it’s time for that drink,” said Malrand. “Damn the scotch, I need champagne. Lespinasse, pull yourself together, you old crook, and open the bottle.”

They clinked their glasses, still grinning warmly at one another. Malrand turned to Manners. “Was there anything in your father’s papers?”

“No. All I found was an old photograph of a handsome woman in the back of the case where he kept the rock. The name ‘Sybille’ was scrawled on the back.”

“Sybille,” said Malrand, drawing the name out. “Our doctor. A vet, in fact. They had an affair, I recall. A lovely woman. I envied your father. She looked after him when he got wounded in the foot, you
know. I suppose that’s when it began. She was killed at Terrasson, while helping the wounded.”

“Did you know about the house?” Lespinasse interjected, turning to Manners.

“What house?”

“Her house, and the vet’s surgery. Sybille’s. She left it to your father in her will. She had no children, no other relatives.”

“That’s how he was able to take the rock back to England,” said Malrand. “He put it there on the night he found it, and then when he came back after the war, he took it back in his car. I never objected. He’d fought for it, in a way. He certainly had a right to it.”

“I had no idea,” Manners stammered, a faraway look in his eye as he began to absorb the depth of the things he had never known about his father. Lydia’s heart went out to him.

“He gave the house and the surgery back to the town and the commune, asking that they be kept as free housing for a vet, in her memory,” Lespinasse said. “Every time he came back here, he’d go over there and just stand in the rooms for a while. After my father’s funeral, I took him over there. When he came out again, he was humming some old Charles Trenet tune and there were tears on his cheeks. She meant a lot to him.”

“To dear Sybille, a French heroine,” said Malrand, raising his glass.
“Morte pour la France.”

“She was killed at Terrasson you said, in the last fight against the Das Reich division?” pressed Lydia. There were things she wanted clearing up.

Malrand nodded. “A lot of people were killed at Terrasson.”

“But not this man Marat.”

“No, Marat died at the cave during an argument over some British guns. They were ours, and he tried to steal them for the Communist Party, probably to be used in some future attempt to seize power. There
was a shootout and Marat was killed, along with a Russian who was with him, a couple of Spanish Communists, and tragically the American officer who was with us, McPhee.”

Lydia felt her mouth fall literally open. Clothilde sat down with a thump. Malrand simply sipped reflectively at his champagne and lit a cigarette.

“That’s the great secret. I didn’t want the cave open because it’s still a grave. And when those bodies come out, the scandal would have ended my career.”

“Your father and I survived, along with Lespinasse’s father,” he went on, breathing out a long plume of smoke. “That’s why he’s here. Quite a family reunion. Anyway, first I think I ought to give you this. Your father wrote it, and entrusted it to me. I wrote a similar account, and gave it to him. My version was sent back to me after his death by his lawyer, in a sealed envelope bearing the instructions that it should be sent to me in the event of his death. Here is his. He wrote it in this very room.”

He went to the desk, opened a drawer and handed Manners a slim brown envelope with a blob of red sealing wax on the flap. Manners ripped it open, and began reading aloud:

To whom it may concern:

This statement describes events which I witnessed at the cave at la Ferrassie, outside Le Bugue, on the night of June 9-10, 1944, as a captain in the British Army attached to the Special Operations Executive and working with the French Resistance. Along with Colonel Malrand of the Free French forces, and Captain James McPhee of the United States Army, we had gone to the cave to recover a cache of arms which we had stored there after German forces interrupted a parachute drop at Cumont nearby. I found the cave by chance, after German mortar fire knocked down a tree and opened the entrance.
The guns were being appropriated by a leader of the FTP Resistance organization known as Marat, a devout Communist who had fought in Spain. Marat was accompanied by a Russian agent and two Spanish Communists. Determined to appropriate the guns, they attacked us, and in the subsequent shooting, Lieutenant McPhee was killed along with a French Resistance fighter attached to Colonel Malrand’s unit known to me only as Florien. Marat and his team were all killed. We left the bodies in the cave, sealed it with explosives, and took the weapons to Terrasson, where they were used in the attempt to deny the road to the SS Das Reich division. The cave was found to contain a number of remarkable wall paintings, probably many thousands of years old. In view of the highly charged political situation at that time in the war, Colonel Malrand and I took the view that it would be irresponsible to the Allied war effort to publicize the murder of an American officer by Communist militants, including a Russian agent, in their attempt to steal weapons. We took this decision on our own responsibility, and now make this written statement to affirm our joint wish that the existence of the cave and its remarkable paintings, along with the tragic events of that night, should be made publicly known after our deaths.

Signed, John Philip Manners

Witnessed, François Malrand Hervé Lespinasse

Manners then unfolded the second sheet of paper from his father’s letter, a rough sketch map of the cave’s location, showing Cumont, la Ferrassie, and the track between them.

“I believe we must have come very close to it,” he said, handing the map to Lydia with a smile.

“Tell me about the paintings,” said Clothilde.

“I imagine you’ll see them soon enough,” said Malrand. “But you will be gratified to learn that your theory is right. La Marche cave is not the only place where prehistoric man left images of human faces. It contains portraits, one of a man, the other of a woman. They are extraordinary. I have never been able to forget them. There is also a landscape, with animals depicted among trees and rocks and a sky, which I found very beautiful.”

“I suppose I can understand why the two of you decided to keep the cave and the shootings a secret during the war when the Russians were still our allies,” said Lydia. “But why afterward, during the cold war?”

“Politics, I’m afraid. I had embarked on a political career, and with French Communists getting twenty percent of the vote, I would not have had much future as a Gaullist who had shot some. And then there was the complication of the dead American. And for your father, my dear Major, a career in the British Army would not have been helped by getting involved in that kind of French political mess. It was not very brave, but I still think it was wise. We decided to let sleeping dogs lie. It was what you Americans call a cover-up.”

“And now?” said Clothilde.

“I’m not sure,” said Malrand. “I think I’ll leave it up to you. You can open the cave, publicize the paintings, revolutionize all our theories about art and prehistoric man, and provoke an interesting political drama, perhaps even a crisis here in France. The newspapers and the opposition will have a wonderful time. And I suppose it will increase the value of my memoirs.”

“What do you want to happen?” Lydia asked him. She felt somehow that there was something missing from the story, something on which she could not put her finger, but that did not ring true. Malrand seemed too comfortable with all this, like someone retiring tactically to a reliable second line of defense after the first one had broken. At the same time, if he were getting away with something, she didn’t really mind. She had developed a soft spot for the old boy.

“I have been thinking about that for a long time,” said Malrand. “I want two things, and the first is that we should all now climb into the car, and I will take you to the cave site. Then I’ll tell you the second.”

This time they all piled into a single limousine. Lespinasse drove, Manners sat beside him, and Malrand had somehow managed to place himself in the back with a woman on either side. He looked very pleased with himself. They parked at la Ferrassie, and Malrand led the way, Lespinasse coming after with a large picnic basket from the trunk of the car. It was a brisk climb, but the old man seemed infused with energy and set an urgent pace. Finally they came out, as Lydia had suspected from the sketch map, on the same green sward where she and Manners had disported themselves so delightfully the previous day. She caught his eye and tried one of Clothilde’s winks. He blushed. Good.

“Here we are,” said Malrand. “I come here from time to time. It’s a lovely spot. The first time was with your two fathers, in September of 1944, after they had liberated Toulouse and got me out of prison. We collected all the cartridge cases, and tidied up the mound of rocks, over there behind that leaning tree.”

Lespinasse opened the picnic basket, and took out a small silver tray, some flutes, and a bottle of champagne. The cork popped noisily, and he poured five glasses. One for himself, Lydia noted, approvingly.

“Was that the tree that was blown aside by the German mortar?” asked Manners, strolling across to it, as Lespinasse served the champagne.

“Yes, and still alive. I suppose the taproot gets water.” The tree seemed to emerge from a large, grass-covered mound. There was no sign of fissure in the rock.