He poured out another glass of brandy and pushed it toward Clothilde. She took it without a word, her eyes fixed on his, her face suddenly bloodless.
“It wasn’t what you think,” Horst went on slowly. “He wasn’t a collaborator. It was your mother. She was pregnant and Geissler brought pressure through her. He had her arrested, threatened her with a concentration camp, and then released her. He called it ‘the usual measures.’ Your father fed them information through her, to save her. And to save you, I suppose.”
“Does it say how he died?” she asked flatly.
“No, the Brehmer Division was transferred in late May. Geissler’s final report said he had handed on her file, as a source, to the Gestapo.” He gripped her hand, tightly. “It needn’t be true, Clothilde. Intelligence officers make up sources all the time, just to have something to tell their superiors.”
“So it’s a lie, what they put on the war memorial-‘fusille par les Allemands’-shot by the Germans. The Resistance records are a lie.”
“No, they’re not. He was killed at Terrasson when the Das Reich division stormed through to open the road to the railhead at Perigueux. The Resistance records are clear, the date, and the place. The body was found, Clothilde. You know that. Your father was shot by German troops, trying to fight them. The war memorial is true.”
“It’s just the rest that is a lie, then,” she shot back. She poured herself another brandy, and pushed the bottle over to Lydia. “Whatever am I going to say to my mother?”
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 Faugere, 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.”