J. Janes - Stonekiller

No swastika pennant flew from the front left wing of the car yet it could just as well have done so, such was the mood of the crowd. The South was haven to far too many the Germans wanted. Homing pigeons such as those might carry secret messages and were forbidden in the North.

Like tourists from the other side of the moon, the five visitors waited impatiently for the mayor to unlock the old iron gates to the stone staircase that led down into the warren of caves and tunnels beneath the town. Used as a hiding place during the Hundred Years’ War and then in the Wars of Religion, the caves would be pleasantly cool.

But why the interest? wondered St-Cyr. Why the impatience? And why the hell was sous-prefet Deveaux playing tour guide and host when he knew very well there was a murder to attend to?

The visitors were swallowed up, the woman going first in that hip-clinging white silk dress of hers and a big, floppily-brimmed and beribboned chapeau , the mayor bringing up the rear and bleating, ‘The lamps, madame et messieurs. You must each take one so as not to get lost.’

‘Toto, darling,’ came the earnest female voice up from the darkness, rich and deep and musical, the accent exquisite and one hundred per cent of the salons along the rue Royale. ‘Toto, light one for me. There’s a good boy. Willi … Willi, how can we possibly get a crew in here?’ The switch to deutsch maintained the richness. ‘Franz, it’s fascinating – were the English slaughtered or did they hide in these caves?’

‘Baroness, I believe the Huguenots captured the town in 1588.’

‘Did they slaughter the French Catholics or did they, too, escape into these caves? It’s marvellous what holes in the ground can tell us about history. Willi … Willi, make a note of that. Oo, darling, there’s such a lovely breeze. It’s blowing right up my dress. It’s like the bathe I had under that little waterfall. It’s delightful.’

A short, stocky Perigourdin of sixty years, sous-prefet Odilon Deveaux returned from the depths and as he came up the stone steps in his banker’s suit, he was caught in the half-light by the two from Paris Central and shrugged. ‘Jean-Louis … ah, a moment. Yourself also, Haupsturmfuhrer. Please.’ A stumpy forefinger touched the grim-set lips of a cop who had seen it all and had just lost patience. The gaze was hooded, the nose massive, the warts, moles, scars and clefts pronounced, the eyebrows a bushy, unclipped iron-grey.

Out of breath, he had to pause at the top of the stairs. ‘The asthma,’ he managed. The pollen and the dampness. Cats … she has a cat. Her perfume … ah, it may be marvellous but it’s giving my lungs a seizure! A moment.’ And then, ‘Come … come away for a little privacy. Give me a cigarette, please.’

Gathering them in, he guided them across the covered market to a line of benches against the far wall where a helmeted Wehrmacht corporal held a carbine in poster-paper over the words, Give your labour in the fight against Bolshevism. ‘Paris …,’ he wheezed in again. ‘Only one of them is Parisian – an ex-waiter, ex-boot-black, I think. The rest are originally from Berlin and Vienna. Very famous, very connected and very demanding. The cigarette?’ he repeated.

Kohler shrugged, I’m fresh out. Louis found his megot tin. Consternation registered. ‘But … but what is this?’ managed Deveaux. ‘No tobacco but those? I would have thought.…’

‘It’s the way things are,’ shrugged Louis apologetically. ‘We beg, we borrow, we pick up like everyone else but we cannot steal.’

‘Or be caught doing so,’ offered Kohler, the chief tobacco thief whenever possible.

Hermann chose five of the butts and began that painful process of first trying to free the tobacco and then of finding paper and spittle enough to roll one. Though a former bomb-disposal expert and prisoner of war, he could not roll a cigarette. It was God’s little irony. ‘Here, Louis, you do it. I’m all thumbs. It’s that dress and a bathe under that waterfall. Our princess must have paid the valley a visit.’

‘Baroness … she’s a baroness and Austrian. That site, my friends.… That site has to be “cleaned”.’

‘Pardon?’ managed Louis.

‘“Cleaned”, as I have said. The film crew, they are shooting at Lascaux but are to descend on the valley in a matter of days. Two perhaps or three. It depends on the weather and the shooting.’

‘A film crew?’

The cigarette was handed over. Deveaux couldn’t wait for a match and hauled out a battered lighter with a flamethrower’s torch. ‘Ah!’ he said, narrowly missing his eyebrows. ‘Fucking gasoline. One has to be careful, eh? These days one has to make do in so many ways. It’s desperate. I once took my eyelashes off.’

He coughed. He inhaled again and rested his back against the wall. ‘They are shooting a film, yes. A docu-drama – please don’t try my patience with questions. Let them tell you themselves. I will give you the essence of it.’

Another moment passed. The rise and fall of his chest began to lessen, though God knows why, thought Kohler. That ‘tobacco’ could be anything. Sweepings of manure and herbs, dried linden blossoms or carrot tops.

‘It’s about a cave, a trunk of artefacts that was found in a Paris antique shop, and a woman – please don’t ask me to explain how their minds work, these creative people. The film is to be called Moment of Discovery. She’s the female lead. The boy from Paris is just an assistant on the “dig”.’

‘And the archaeologist, the prehistorian?’ asked Louis quite pleasantly.

Deveaux was quick to sense trouble and eased his crotch with a massive heave. ‘These fucking trousers … ah, the crap they make these days. Always pinching in the wrong places, always splitting up the ass when you don’t want them to and causing the balls to sweat.’

So much for the shortages.

‘The archaeologist, yes,’ said Deveaux. ‘That one flubbed his lines the other day. He’s being shot again – yes, yes, that is what they have said. Shot for being nervous, eh? Stage-struck perhaps, who’s to say. The male lead in the thing. The woman, the Baroness, found the cave for him by deciphering the hieroglyphics of some abbe. The Church … must the Church always stick its nose in things?’

They waited. They did not dare to say a thing, these two from Paris Central. So, good, yes, good, let it be a lesson to them. Jean-Louis was more than an acquaintance but would not understand why the matter was very delicate, very difficult. Ah yes.

Deveaux hauled at his crotch again and let his stomach relax. ‘There are two prehistorians on the staff. Advisers, yes. One is from Paris and is French so as to give our side of the story perhaps. The other is German, a professor from Hamburg, but they are not actors. The one who flubbed his lines is the cock of those ancient times perhaps, though if you ask me, my friends, I would have split his skull long ago and dined happily on the brains and heart! These others, they are also at Lascaux, each ranting in his own way about possible damage to the cave paintings. They’re purists.’

‘A film,’ said Louis, throwing Kohler a worried glance.

Clouds of smoke poured from the hairy grottoes of the sousprefet’s nostrils. ‘Yes. A joint production of Continentale and the Institut des Filmes Internationales de Paris. Lights, cameras and action, and slate boards to tell us which scene they are shooting. Without those boards, no one would know which end was up. At least I wouldn’t.’

Kohler let Louis ask it. ‘And they want the site of the murder cleaned? ’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s not possible.’

Deveaux gave the sigh of a father whose patience has just been sorely tried. ‘Jean-Louis, it was I who had you pulled off that train. A stroke of luck, I thought. Ah, I cannot tell you how relieved I was to learn that you and the Haupsturmfuhrer were available, but,’ he tossed the hand with the cigarette, ‘but I will let these feelings I have for you be set aside in honour of saving your hides. Herr Goebbels, the Reichsminister of Propaganda, has personally sunk 50,000 marks of his own money into the project.’