The Caves of Perigord_ A Novel - Martin Walker [118]
“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 Faugère, 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.”
“Is that where Marat was killed?” Clothilde asked.
“Marat? He