art.”
“O.K., what about Rouffignac? Geissler says the Red Indians put up ‘a fierce resistance’when they sent a column to search the cave there. They found a base camp, some food supplies, but no arms dump. Geissler had the cave searched, and kept a couple of companies there for a week, just looking.”
“We’ve thought of Rouffignac. We’ll look again, but it has been well searched.”
“All right. I saved the best for last. You know Perony’s famous site at la Ferrassie, where he found the burials?”
“Yes, I know it well. I worked on Delporte’s subsequent dig there in 1973, when we found the skeleton of the two-year-old. But that’s not a cave, it’s an overhang. And it was Mousterian period, maybe as much as fifteen thousand years before Lascaux.”
“In the hills above it in May 1944, on a flat plateau near a small village called Cumont, the Brehmer Division managed to interrupt a parachute drop. They captured a couple of farm carts and the parachutes and some containers and a lot of British guns, and under interrogation, one of the captured carters said he knew they were taking the guns to a secret place near la Ferrassie. An Englishman was in charge of the operation. That’s it. He died under interrogation. They searched high and low but found nothing.”
“I know of no caves around there,” said Clothilde. “None at all.”
“The carter was not a local. He was a railway man from Normandy called Marcel Devriez who was working in Perigueux and the Milice records listed him as a suspected Communist. Under interrogation, he said he was only driving the cart because the farmer who was supposed to drive it was shot when the Germans opened up, and he was trying to get it away. He was unmarried and had no surviving family in the region. The Gestapo raided his home address in Perigueux, and found it empty. But they did find a lot of anti-Nazi propaganda in both French and Spanish.
“From the Resistance records in Bordeaux, I traced Devriez. He’s on the Perigueux war memorial for 1944, and was listed in Bordeaux as a member of the FTP, the
“Surely all those bodies were recovered and identified,” said Manners. “That’s how the names got on the war memorials.”
“Not Marat’s body, along with eight more of his men, and possibly some more who are simply listed as ‘Spanish comrades.’ Marat was last seen in Brive on the eighth of June, trying to persuade the Gaullists and other Resistance groups to join the general uprising on the day after the British and Americans landed at Normandy. He was turned down flat. The Resistance, which took its orders from London, had been told very firmly to get involved in no such foolhardy adventures. The FTP archives assume that Marat and his men were among those killed in the fighting in Tulle, or in the German reprisals. A lot of buildings were burned down, with bodies inside, and that seems the most likely explanation why they were never found. The Limoges command of the FTP was one of those that sent out in May 1944 the order to launch the national insurrection as soon as the Allies came ashore on D-Day, whenever that would be. Limoges was Marat’s base. The order probably came from him, or he felt bound by it. Anyway, despite all the pleas from London and from the Gaullists, the FTP went ahead with this mad plan to seize control of the district, starting with Tulle and Brive. Tulle alone proved too much for them, and the German garrison held out until some panzer reinforcements came from the Das Reich division. They smashed their way through the FTP guerrillas, and starting hanging the prisoners.
“That’s it.” Horst sat down again, looking drawn. Clothilde came and sat down beside him, and put her hand on his.
“That’s brilliant, Horst,” said Lydia, making herself busy with the roses, looking for vases. “You look shattered, you poor man. But really very well done. It just shows what a professional scholar, a true researcher, can do.” Roses in one hand, she thrust the unopened champagne bottle at Manners. “Here, make yourself useful.”
“This has been very difficult for me. I had not done this kind of research before, and I am sickened by what I found,” Horst said to Clothilde. “I knew, you see, what had happened here in theory. But I didn’t really know until I started going through those war journals and intelligence reports. All in clipped, official language.”
“I know what you mean, my dear fellow,” said Manners. “I’ve written some of those things myself. Terrible language, trying to be as flat as possible while writing about terrible things. Like writing back letters to the wives and mothers of men who have been killed under your command. Grim stuff.” He went into the kitchen, and with the skill of an old campaigner immediately found the cupboard where Clothilde kept her glasses, and came back and started to pour. “Tell me, Horst, did you come across the name of Malrand in your researches?”
“Just that formal report that Lydia gave me in Bordeaux. Nothing in the FTP or German military archives. but quite a lot about his brother, Berger. I’ve read his memoirs, of course, about getting captured and then being imprisoned in Toulouse.”
“What about a chap called Soleil, code name for a Resistance leader in Belves, real name Rene Coustellier or another fellow called Lespinasse?”
“Soleil, yes there is a lot about him in the Geissler reports, when they staged a big raid on Belves. Soleil got away. And Lespinasse was the name of one of the families from le Buisson who were interrogated because a son or nephew had run off and joined the Resistance. Their farm was burned and some family members deported. It’s all in the file.”
Horst fell silent and remained so throughout the meal, but he drank a great deal, and smoked Clothilde’s cigarettes between courses. They told him about their day with Malrand, the new reward offer, and his rejection of Clothilde’s proposal for a scientific search for new caves. Each time, he only grunted. The wine they had so enjoyed buying went down without comment or pleasure. Manners, still poring over the research file Horst had brought, didn’t even get a reaction when he detailed the connection between Malrand and his father. The three of them kept up a lame conversation, trying without success to bring Horst into it. Finally, pushing aside his cheese, Horst asked for brandy, lit another cigarette, and reached for Clothilde’s hand.
“One more thing in those files,” he said. “I wasn’t going to tell you, but you’ll find it anyway when you read it. Another name I came across in Geissler’s intelligence reports. It was Alfonse Daunier, your father. He was listed as the only source Geissler had inside the Resistance. He was the one who gave Geissler the parachute drop.”
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-‘
“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
