dragging the dead Spaniards into the big cave, and Francois’s torch picked out the parachute containers, the latches still open as Manners had left them. Then the torch lifted at something on the wall, and Francois said, “What the devil …?”
It was a bear on the passage wall, a big and prowling black bear. The torch moved on to a brown horse with a black mane, one of its legs disappearing into a fresh bullet scar on the rock. Manners moved forward to look more closely and something crunched heavily beneath his feet. It was a slab of rock, sliced off the wall. He kicked it out of the way, nearly losing his balance as his feet slid on wet blood.
Francois had gone on into the main cave, and the torch picked out a big stag, its antlers down, and its feet churning up turf as it pawed the ground ready to charge. A doe with an arrow in her throat stood beside it, and below that, a pathetic fawn collapsed on its rump, with the silhouettes of two human figures behind. One was drawing a bow. The other, female, crouched, holding a spear.
“Another Lascaux,” said Francois, and turned the torch to the far wall. “This is better than Rouffignac, better than Font-de-Gaume. It’s better than anything I have ever seen.”
A great landscape unfolded before them in the dimness of the torch. It was recognizably this same countryside of Perigord, the smooth, curving rock of the cliffs, that swirl of river and line of trees, that wide evening sky with the pinks of sunset, but a landscape that teemed with long-gone life. A bear was emerging from a cave, a great bull with flaring horns stood beside his cow, and a herd of short and sturdy horses, almost like Shetland ponies, were moving to drink.
“It’s marvelous,” breathed Manners, lost in the painting. The gunfight might never have been. This was another world, an innocence, and a lost perfection. To think that this had been waiting on the walls around him when he first stumbled upon this hiding place for his weapons.
“I do not believe this,” said Francois, as he moved the torch yet again, and a huge face leaped at him from the rock. A handsome youth, half-smiling and with lively eyes, a slim face and firm jaw and long, curling hair. Then the woman appeared, lovely in that combination of shyness and assurance that had first attracted Manners to Sybille. He thought, I could fall in love with her. I have already.
“Our ancestors,” said Francois.
“You could be right, sir. He looks a bit like you,” said Lespinasse. So he did, that sharp intelligence with the fine features and slightly dreamy eyes.
“Right,” snapped Francois, bringing them back to reality, and suddenly Manners could smell again the cordite and the blood in the air. The spell had broken. “Let’s get the guns out.”
He and Francois linked their belts together to haul the containers along the passageway. Francois climbed up, propping the torch in the tree roots, and with Manners and Lespinasse heaving and Francois hauling, they managed to wrestle them up and out, to roll onto the wide stretch of grass.
“You two stay down,” said Francois. “And I’ll push the bodies down to you, one by one. We’ll have to leave them in the cave. If the Communists and Spaniards didn’t kill us in retaliation, the Americans would.” Manners felt almost grateful to him, for putting the nightmares of retribution into words.
Little Florien, the Russian, Marat, and finally McPhee, flopping down headfirst. Lespinasse took the shoulders and Manners took the feet, and half dragged them down along the passageway and laid them, side by side, in the center of that splendid tomb that had already disappeared again into darkness. As they crawled back out, Lespinasse in the lead, Manners knocked into the slab of rock he had pushed aside earlier, and in the torch glow, he saw the shape of a bull on the whiteness of the chalk. He picked it up to study it more closely, and found it not as heavy as he had thought. It seemed the natural thing to take it with him.
Francois had rigged the small charges of plastique while they were laying out the bodies. One beside the tree root, another in the rocks on the shelf above. That seemed oddly fitting. The place had been opened by a German mortar. British explosives could seal it again. They manhandled the containers down to the road and into the truck. Then they went back for their guns, and to light the fuses. After the explosions, they checked that the place was sealed. And then they went back down through the trees, Manners slithering clumsily with his rock in his hand. Lespinasse and Francois took the Citroen, and Manners drove the truck. In Le Bugue, he stopped in the square where the old men played
CHAPTER 22
Everything about Malrand’s house was the same, except that Lespinasse was waiting for them inside, looking grim and formidable-beside the big fireplace, and there had been different security men outside. The big security man nodded cool recognition at Manners as Malrand came forward to kiss Clothilde and Lydia, and shake Manners’s hand.
“There is champagne, of course, but I need something stiffer,” said the President. He was dressed in stout shoes and old corduroys and a worn leather jacket, and they made him look his age. “Major, perhaps you’ll join me in a scotch?”
“I hear from Lespinasse that you came close to your goal when you were stumbling round la Ferrassie,” Malrand went on. “There is a lost cave, of course, where your father’s painting came from, and I suppose it’s time for the secret to come out. And time for the dead to be properly buried. I’m far too old to campaign for this job again, and I’d rather the truth came out than find your British government dropping all sorts of ponderous hints about unfortunate repercussions.”
“My government?” said Manners. “What does my government have to do with this?”
Malrand gave a cold smile. “I have been in this business too long to believe in coincidences, my dear Major. Your father had his own reasons to keep silence, but I always assumed that his death would open Pandora’s box. The disappearance of the painting and the consequent publicity simply confirmed my fears. If you didn’t steal your own painting, then I am sure you are well connected with the department of British Intelligence that did. I presume you found something in your father’s papers, a memoir, something that told you how this mess began. Something that a President of France would want very much to keep secret and that your British Intelligence would use to put pressure on me.”
“I’m not attached to any Intelligence department,” snapped Manners. “And although I still don’t understand why you want to keep the cave secret I suspect that you organized the theft of that rock as part of your own cover-up.”
“My cover-up!” snorted Malrand. “If only French Intelligence were so efficient.” He turned away with a shrug. “You don’t understand much about politics if you think a politician would ever entrust that kind of secret to his Intelligence agencies.”
Lydia felt her head turning from one man to the other as if she were watching a tennis match. A cough came from the fireplace. Lespinasse had broken silence.
“Not Intelligence, Monsieur le President. Us. Your security team. Trying to forestall potential embarrassment. Saw no need to trouble you with it.” Lespinasse chewed on his mustache. “In fact, we had a bit of help, just between us, from our British colleagues. Just a favor between professional colleagues, you might say. We understand these political things that are best kept quiet.”
Lydia gaped in astonishment. She had never felt more American in her life. What an arrogant, overbearing, dreadful kind of system these damned Europeans operated. They lived by the cover-up and the conspiracy. And all this useless hunt and Clothilde’s tragedy and her embarrassment and the barefaced theft from her auction house had all stemmed from their secret little ways of doing favors for each other and their feudal masters. Gathering her rage, she braced herself to tell them what she thought of the lot of them when she heard a funny, creaking sound.
It was Malrand, and he was laughing. Laughing so hard that he could hardly catch his breath. He bent over,
