Stonekiller (19 page)

‘And her daughter?'

The large brown eyes filled with moisture. ‘Blamed for everything though it was no fault of hers, poor thing. It was wrong, though, of Ernestine to force that girl into a marriage Juliette did not want. My son, he was killed in the Ardennes, in the invasion of 1940, but Juliette and he, they were always in love. Even after she went to Domme to teach, they would write to each other in secret at least once a week, and when she and her children came home for the summer holidays, they would walk along the river bank with the children. Nothing … nothing ever happened to stain their relationship. Nothing. It was pure.'

A nod would be best to indicate he understood. ‘Was there anything to suggest that this most recent trip of Madame Fillioux's was any different than all the others?'

‘Nothing. Ernestine kept to herself about such things. Her private life was her fortress.'

‘But you have said the two of you spoke of the past?'

‘Years ago and never of her private life.'

‘Then was there anything unusual about last year's visit?'

‘Last year's …? But … but she made two visits, Inspector. One at the usual time and the other in mid-October, the 15th, I think.'

The visit with Courtet. The payment of 10,000 francs.

‘Did Juliette know of this second visit?' asked St-Cyr calmly.

The shoulders were shrugged. The
patron
simply didn't know.

‘And the visit of 17th June of last year?' The day the trunk had turned up in an antique shop in Saint-Ouen.

‘For several days after her visit Ernestine was preoccupied and forgetting things she would not normally have forgotten. Little things, you understand. It was as if she had either done or seen something she regretted, something she could tell no one, not even Juliette.'

When, please, did the husband leave for Russia?'

‘Ah! not until September of last year. Ernestine was so happy when she heard the news, she forgot the past and tried to mend all fences. “It is a gift from Heaven,” she said. “He won't come back. They will kill him for us.”'

‘And when
did
he come back?'

‘In the third week of March.'

The rushes were being shown in the
grand salon
of the château where magnificent crystal chandeliers, gilded mirrors and deep blue velvet drapes rose to elegantly formal soft blue swirls and cream mouldings of plasterwork. Louis XIV sofas, settees and armchairs were lined up together with much-used wooden and canvas folding chairs. Several of the cast and crew sat up front on the Aubusson carpet or to the sides on the harpsichord, on the grand piano, and the tables with their fantastic marquetry and clutter of porcelain figurines and clocks. Some smoked cigarettes or small cigars, others sipped wine, nibbled pastry or, arriving late and still in work clothes and boots, dined on huge sandwiches crammed with
pâté
and roast goose. The youngest of the cast ran rampant, a game of hide-and-seek. The older teenagers browsed, looked bored, held hands or slipped away to explore each other.

‘The owners must be tearing their hair,' snorted Kohler, still searching for a sign of Juliette.

‘Willi simply bought the place lock, stock and barrel. It was easier,' confided the Baroness. ‘Besides, they were Jewish and he arranged things for them.'

Jewish, ah yes, the lucky ones. Passage to Tangier, Alexandria or Tel Aviv, perhaps even New York. Anything was possible if connections suddenly opened up and the price was paid.

Juliette had not come downstairs, not yet, a worry, thought Kohler.

Taking him by the hand, Marina von Strade guided him through the crowd until they reached the far side of the room and could see at a glance where her husband sat in the middle, smoking a cigar. With von Strade were the two directors, one French and the other German, the two lead cameramen, lighting men, casting directors, story and film editors.

‘Lascaux,' she said. ‘Can you not feel the sense of anticipation? It is like the prelude to orgasm, yes? Everything builds, everything must be perfect or all is lost. There is that exquisite tension, that mounting which then suddenly bursts with revelation which both overawes and overcomes. Never have they worked so hard and on a film of such importance.'

The lights were dimmed, the projector's lamp came on. A hush settled. One couple left off kissing to stare at the screen. A glass of the red toppled over, too late to be saved.

Flickering, the film's leader ran through a series of letters and numbers.
Moment of Discovery, Scene Twenty, Take One.
..

A clapperboard arm crashed down on the chalked slate and suddenly the hush became a gasp as the screen filled with colour — deep red, brownish red, rusty brown, yellow and dark sooty black. In outline after outline, with some of the figures filled in, giant aurochs roamed beside reindeer and shaggy ponies across the white roof and walls of the cave.

Back-lit so as to give the effect of the animals rushing to overwhelm the viewer, the figures were life-sized and sometimes much larger, and often they overlapped. A red ochre aurochs bull with sharply curved horns preceded a black bison. Shaggy black or red ponies galloped in succession while deep red reindeer with huge spreads of antlers looked on and one had to seek out and follow every line. There was so much, they were so beautiful.

There was still no sign of Juliette, ah
merde.
… ‘Fantastic,' sighed Kohler. ‘Oh
mein Gott
, Louis has to see this.'

It thrilled her to hear him say so. ‘The Chamber of Bulls we are calling it,' confided Marina with a whisper whose warm breath caressed his ear. ‘This part of the Lascaux Cave is more than seventeen metres long but there are two other passages, you will see.'

She squeezed his fingers and pressed her hip against his.

About a metre and a half from the floor, the paintings began where the walls and roof had been naturally coated with a fine white crystalline deposit of calcite. Again and again the camera moved in for detail, sucking up colour and silhouette to reveal dusty spots of black or red beneath and within some of the ponies. Each rise and fall of the rock had been used to emphasize some feature, a powerful shoulder, a stampede-driven eye, the swollen belly of a pregnant mare, the figures moving with each contour, so much so that in some the artist could not have seen the head while drawing the hindquarters, yet the thing was perfect.

‘Very simple, very stylistic and yet so full of life you feel you are standing in the midst of them. There is a sense of uplifting, godlike purity that is hard to define.'

Kohler could not help but feel humbled and said so.

The cameras panned the walls, came in close or stood well back and used changes of lighting so that very quickly, within perhaps two minutes, the viewer realized the silhouettes could not have been executed unaided. The walls and roof were simply too high. The passage narrowed to half a metre at floor level but broadened upwards. It twisted through the dark grey limestone until, distant now as one approached, one saw a light all but hidden around a corner. Softer, more amber and flickering. Shadows on the wall. A man … a woman.…

Using a primitive scaffold of poles that had, in places, been driven into natural openings, Danielle Arthaud stood on high with a hand braced against the black mane of a cave lion. There was a primitive stone lamp in her other hand and this she held up for the artist, so that one first saw her from the side, all but naked, slim, lithe, pert and primitive next to her tall, blond, muscular, blue-eyed mate whose hammer-hard buttocks few women could refuse to look at and linger over, ah yes.

‘They are using a paste of goose fat and ground pyrolusite. That is a flint burin, an engraving tool, in his hand but he really doesn't scrape the rock or damage the figures in any way — we're not so thoughtless. Once the animal was outlined, the ancients then filled the scratches in with colours similar to those she will pass to him on the palettes. Woman is seen as the helpmate always.'

Danielle Arthaud's auburn hair was loose and uncombed. There were smears of grease and ashes on her flanks and arms, her face too. Around her slender waist there was a leather thong and from this hung a skin pouch of tools. Killing tools? wondered Kohler, suddenly taken aback and worrying all the more about Juliette. The actress wasn't wearing anything else but a strand of bone beads and primitive tattoos of dark blue dots on her breasts and cheeks. These items were zoomed in on so that one saw the beads and the dots very clearly.

Two naked children crouched beside the fire. The boy was grinding the pyrolusite, while the girl heated some over the fire perhaps to further darken it.

The first take came to an end. Take Two came up but apparently it lacked spontaneity, though he could see no difference. We'll go with the first,' said the film's German director. There was little argument from his French counterpart. Even so, von Strade, the pacifier, called out, ‘Rerun the damned thing. They want another look at her ass.'

‘
Nacktkultur
,' breathed Kohler. ‘The nudist movement that is now such a part of Nazi ideology.'

‘The cult of the body, yes,' confided the Baroness, ‘but always the nakedness is seen as striving towards the perfection of a higher ideal than the self, in this case, the art of the cave and a record that has not only survived countless millennia but traces our ideology and ancestry right back to the beginnings of time.'

Goebbels would love it. The Führer also, of course, and Herr Himmler, the ex-pimp, ex-chicken farmer and now head of the SS, but where the hell was Juliette?

‘Why do they need Lascaux?' he asked.

They were rerunning the takes. She would press her lips to his ear again. ‘To work out the techniques of lighting, filming and sound pick-up. To gain stock footage we can use and to offer a parallel to our cave which goes back in time so much further.'

‘But the paintings at the Discovery Cave are similar?'

‘Better.'

‘Though done a lot earlier?'

She shook her head and placed the flat of a hand lightly on his chest. ‘There the paintings are of the same age as these and Cro-Magnon in origin, but the amulet and the figurines are much older. They are Neanderthal, yes? So what we find very faintly among the paintings at the Discovery Cave, we find on the amulet also and thus our cave encompasses the whole of prehistory and is positive proof.'

‘Do you mean to tell me there are swastikas among the Discovery cave paintings?'

‘Yes. It's remarkable. It's fantastic. It is everything the Führer could have hoped for.'

Ah
merde.…
‘Why no clothes?'

Was he always such a doubter? ‘The beasts are perfect specimens and they wear no clothes. Therefore it is thought to show perfection existed also among those who drew the animals and hunted them. One is surprised and shocked a little — it is unexpected, yes — but one is also fascinated by what is going on. There is that sense of mystery, that sense of body worship which glorifies perfection not for itself but for a higher ideal.'

‘The State, the Party and the swastika.'

‘Very few of the scenes have total nudity. Lascaux was a religious site, was it not? There perfection was worshipped and we must show this.'

She really believed it. The kids in the film came up again and Kohler felt a tug at his sleeve. ‘That's me,' whispered a bright-eyed girl of seven, searching for praise he had to give.

‘I'm impressed,' he said and grinned. ‘Hey, I like it.'

‘
Gut
,' said the Baroness harshly, ‘then what you are about to see will not trouble you.'

There were takes of domesticity too, outside the Lascaux Cave and under the pines. Of Danielle and other women in skins cracking walnuts, then butchering a fresh-killed deer. Her bloodied hand gripped a flint knife to slit the skin and work deeply into the flesh until, arm buried up to the elbow, she drew out the guts. Blood on her knees and thighs, blood on her breasts, shoulders, neck and face. Using a handaxe, she expertly chopped meat from a bone and placed it on the embers to roast.

The heart, the liver and kidneys she offered up on her knees with dripping hands to her mate, the embodiment of Teutonic master race.

Ah
Gott im Himmel
, Louis, thought Kohler grimly, her eyes, they're so bright, so feverish she has to be on something. Cocaine … was it cocaine?

End of take. End of trailer. End of black letters and numbers …

‘Who taught her to do that?'

‘Professor Courtet perhaps, though he is not nearly so proficient. She was with us at the cave on the Friday. She couldn't wait to see it but when we got there, it was as though Danielle had known of it all along. She was the first to enter, the first to pause, the first to cry out in wonder and the last to leave.'

And now you've told me not only that you suspect her, and have let her get her hands on Juliette, but that you hate her. Is your Willi screwing the hell out of her? wondered Kohler. For a price of course. But who is her lover, who does she go to time and again no matter what? That big buck discus thrower in the film or someone else, someone you want all for yourself. Or is it simply cocaine?

‘Look, I'd better find Madame Jouvet, eh? I'd better call my partner to let him know where I am. Is there a telephone?'

‘Of course. Willi couldn't function without one and neither could the others.'

*  *  *

The jangling of an unanswered telephone was unnerving but St-Cyr let it ring until it stopped. He had to search the house of Madame Fillioux thoroughly. He had to be certain the woman hadn't hidden the postcards elsewhere and perhaps counted on waiting until later to tell her daughter.

‘These old Renaissance houses,' he muttered. ‘The poorer the owner, the greater the number and craftiness of the hiding-places.'

Shaking his pocket torch and saying, ‘Ah damn the lousy batteries these days!' he went into the room at the head of the stairs to play it on the open drawer at the bottom of the armoire and ask again, ‘Who else could have known of this other than the daughter?'