University of Bordeaux sign was torn in half and tucked under the wiper blades as a clear taunt.
‘Friendly locals,’ Hugo sneered. ‘Shall we return the beer cans to their rightful place?’
‘I’m not going to let this spoil my mood,’ Luc insisted, through gritted teeth. He began sweeping up the glass with the torn pieces of cardboard. ‘Nothing’s going to spoil my mood.’
Before putting the car in gear, he rummaged through the glove box and started swearing.
‘I thought nothing was going to spoil your mood,’ Hugo said.
‘My registration’s gone. Why the hell would someone steal my logbook?’ He snapped the cover closed and drove off muttering.
In the centre of Ruac, they stopped at the small cafe, nameless, just a sign: C AFE, T ABAC. When Hugo attempted to lock the car, Luc pointed to the smashed window and ridiculed him, but before they went inside he cautioned, ‘Be careful what you say. We have a big secret to protect.’
The cafe was dimly lit, six tables with plastic tablecloths, only one of them occupied. The owner was behind the bar. He had leathery skin, a full head of white hair and a salt and peppar flecked moustache. His gut was round and protruding. Two diners, a young man and an older woman stopped talking and stared as if a couple of spacemen had arrived.
‘Serving?’ Hugo asked.
The owner pointed to one of the tables and gruffly laid down two paper menus before retreating towards his kitchen, shuffling his heavy legs across the floorboards.
Luc called after the fellow about the location of the nearest gendarmerie. The owner slowly turned and answered with a question: ‘Why?’
‘Someone broke my car window.’
‘While you were driving?
‘No, I was parked.’
‘Where were you parked?’
In the face of this interrogation, Luc glanced incredulously at Hugo before blowing the guy off. ‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘Probably somewhere illegal,’ the old man mumbled under his breath loud enough for them to hear. Then, with more volume, ‘Sarlat. There’s a station in Sarlat.’
Hugo sniffed at the air. He knew that odour anywhere. His bread-and-butter aroma. ‘Was there a fire nearby?’ he asked the old man.
‘Fire? You smell something?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s probably my clothes. I’m the local SPV chief. That’s what you smell.’
Hugo shrugged and began eyeing the pretty raven-haired woman at the corner table. She was no more than forty. There was a natural curl and bounciness to her hair and she had pouty lips and nice bare olive legs showing beneath a clingy dress. Her companion was younger by at least a decade, with the thick shoulders and ruddy complexion of a farmer, and since it was unlikely this was her boyfriend or husband, Luc guessed that Hugo would therefore be unimpeded from being Hugo.
True to form, Hugo said, ‘Nice day,’ in her direction with a grin and a nod.
She replied with a small facial gesture that, if it was a smile, lasted no longer than a second. To put the period on the sentence, her scowling companion purposely tapped her forearm and reengaged her in conversation.
‘Friendly place,’ Hugo said to Luc. ‘They’re having omelettes. So will I. Let the natives lead the way, I always say.’
Luc excused himself and came back in a few minutes to find that Hugo had ordered beers. ‘Was it clean?’ Hugo asked.
‘Not really.’ He laid his mobile phone on the table. ‘Here’s to us,’ Luc toasted with the beer Hugo had ordered.
They kept their voices low while they hungrily tucked into three-egg cheese omelettes and pommes frites.
‘You know I’ll have to drop everything,’ Luc said wistfully. ‘All my projects have to end. None of them will ever be finished.’
‘Well, that’s obvious,’ Hugo replied. ‘But you’re okay with that, no?’
‘Of course! I’m just feeling overwhelmed all of a sudden. You never prepare for something like this.’
‘I’m happy for you,’ Hugo said expansively with a touch of playful sarcasm. ‘You’ll be busy and famous, I’ll return to my grubby business life and only emerge from time to time to bask in your reflected glory. Please don’t forget your old friend down the line. Maybe you’ll name it, Pineau-Simard, or if you must, Simard-Pineau, and toss me a bone once in a blue moon when you’re on the chat shows.’
‘Don’t be so fast to disappear behind the curtain,’ Luc laughed. ‘You’ve got a job.’
‘Oh yes?’
‘The manuscript. You’re the manuscript guy, remember?’
‘Surely it’s of less importance now.’
‘Not at all,’ Luc insisted, whispering. ‘The manuscript is part of this. When it’s time to tell the story to the world, we’ll have to understand its role. There’s some kind of important historical context that can’t be ignored. The book must be decoded,’ he whispered.
‘I suppose I can make some enquiries,’ Hugo sighed.
‘To whom?’
‘Ever hear of the Voynich manuscript?’
Luc shook his head.
‘Well, to make a very long story a very short story, it’s a bizarre, possibly fifteenth-century manuscript that was acquired by a Polish rare-books dealer named Voynich in 1910 or thereabouts. It’s a fabulous thing, really, the craziest collection of fanciful illustrations of herbals, astronomical signs, biological processes, medicinal concoctions, even recipes, and it’s all written in a beautifully weird script and language that’s defied a century of deciphering efforts. Some think it was written by Roger Bacon or John Dee, both mathematical geniuses of their day who dabbled in alchemy circles, others think it’s a giant fifteenth- or sixteenth-century hoax. Anyway, I bring it up because, to this day, amateur and professional cryptographers have tried to break the code. I’ve met some of these people at seminars and conferences. They’re real characters with their own language. You should hear them go on about Beaufort ciphers and Zipf’s law and other crap, but I can contact one of the less loony ones and see if he’ll look at our book.’
‘Okay,’ Luc nodded. ‘Do it. But be very discreet.’
The couple at the other table got up to leave without any attempting to pay. The young man pushed through the door first. Following behind, the woman glanced over her shoulder, looked directly at Hugo, and repeated that fleeting almost-a-smile before the door closed and she was gone.
‘Did you see that?’ Hugo asked Luc. ‘Maybe the countryside isn’t so bad after all.’
Three men came in, two of them farm hands from the look, their hands dirty, shoes crusted with dirt. The third, an older man, was clean and well dressed in a suit without the tie. The cafe owner nodded to them from behind the bar and addressed the older man loudly by name. ‘Good day, Pelay. How are you?’
‘The same as I was at breakfast,’ he said gruffly, but while he was answering, he gawked unselfconsciously at Luc and Hugo.
The trio occupied a rear corner table, talking among themselves.
Luc felt distinctly uncomfortable. Since the cafe owner seemed to be communicating with the men behind them with his eyes, Luc felt as if he was in the children’s game, piggy in the middle. Every time Luc turned his head to look behind, the men glanced away and resumed their chat. Hugo seemed oblivious to the little drama, or perhaps, Luc, thought, he was being overly sensitive.
The owner called over their heads. ‘Hey, Pelay, do you want some bacon later?’
‘Only if it’s from Duval,’ the man answered. ‘I only eat bacon from Duval.’
‘Don’t worry, it’ll be from Duval.’
Luc noticed the owner flip the Open sign in the window to Closed.
He heard a chair sliding, wood on wood.
