The Caves of Perigord_ A Novel - Martin Walker [30]
“Oh, I can be outraged if there is a point to it. But there isn’t,” said Clothilde. “I am fatalist about thefts, ever since I was burgled as a student. They are a fact of life. And if the police find the rock, then all will be well. But I doubt that they will, so we are left with an even deeper mystery. But then we had a mystery to begin with. Where did it come from, where is the cave of its origin, and why this bull, which is almost certainly by the hands of Lascaux, should be the only miniature we know of? That is three big mysteries that already confront us, and now we have a fourth. Who took it and why?”
“That makes five. Add a sixth—where is it now?”
“I assume an art thief who knew what he was doing somehow heard about the find and broke in. If so, he will try to sell it, and we may hear of it that way. Or when he realizes there is no market for these things, he will find a way to accept the reward we have offered. And then we are back where we started, examining the rock for any clues to its provenance. But I shall start on that next week. We have a national laboratory that does computer enhancement, and I already sent them your digital photos. I am almost certain already that this is no modern copy, but that should make sure. And since you photographed the backs and the sides of the rock, we have a chance to narrow down the geology.”
“I wish I shared your confidence. I keep thinking the thief could simply destroy it. Or we might never hear of it again. Remember that this rock has sat in an Englishman’s home for fifty years, and nobody had the slightest idea that it existed. So presuming it does come from an unknown cave, its secret has been well kept.”
“That is the part of the mystery that intrigues me. It even excites me,” said Clothilde. “This Englishman worked with the Resistance in Périgord. So there are records. We can track down the people he worked with, ask the old men who still survive from those days. There are some friends of my father where I can make a start.”
“Was your father in the Resistance there?”
“Yes. He was shot by the Germans, but some of his old comrades are still alive.”
“I’m sorry, I had no idea.”
Clothilde shrugged and reached into her bag for another cigarette. “I never knew him. He was shot during the Liberation, a few months before I was born. And then my mother married again, after the war, so I had another father, a good man. A teacher, still alive. He and my mother still live in the district, and he writes about local history. He wrote a book that was quite controversial, about the Resistance. These things still matter, in France, to the old men and some of the politicians.”
“It must have made things complicated, when you and Horst were together. His being a German.”
“Not for me. I was born after the Liberation. So was he. These were things other people had done, not us. My adoptive father felt the same way. He liked Horst. But for my mother, it was difficult. And Horst is not very German, if you understand me. He is more like an American, in some ways. He studied in America, you know. He drove a French car, spoke French well—almost as well as he speaks English.”
“I rang him today with the bad news, told him not to bother to come to London because there was nothing to see. He was much more furious than you,” Lydia said. “He said he’d probably come over anyway, to talk to the owner, see if he could find out any more about where the rock came from.”
“That’s Horst,” Clothilde smiled, rather fondly. “Once he gets his teeth into something, he doesn’t give up easily. Maybe that’s the German in him. Or the scholar. And he’s right, what’s more. The Englishman who first had the rock is the key to this. We assume that he brought it back from the war as a trophy, from the Périgord. So either he found it, or somebody gave it or sold it to him. Your Englishman was no scholar, and his son thinks he was no expert on the caves and the paintings and never showed any more interest in the matter. So it seems