how to honour their extraordinary leader’s bodily remains. He withdrew back into the cave. He would sit beside his dead father, drink the Soaring Water, and when he was done, he would know what to do.
It was nearly sunset when the clan finished restoring order to their world. They ascended the cliffs one more time and gathered around the cave mouth.
Tala emerged, spoke to them clearly and with resolve, waving his one good arm for emphasis. He had soared with the bison herd and in the distance, he saw the bird man flying into the cave and disappearing.
He had his answer.
Tal would be left in the Chamber of Plants, in the sacred place he had created. He would have his soaring bowl with him. He would have his ivory bison. His best flint blade. His bird man would be his company. No one would ever enter the chamber again.
Whereas the other ancestors dwelled around their camp fires in the sky, the great Tal would forever dwell inside his painted cave.
THIRTY
Thursday Afternoon
Luc still had several hours until dinner with Isaak. He lay on the hotel bed, his computer, warm on his belly, ready to doze off and retreat to a sanctuary of oblivion. His email inbox was staring him in the face. He wavered in indecision whether to snap the laptop closed and let it be for now.
Instead, he clicked on the message from Margot.
He had to do it some time, why not now? Take the bitter with the sweet, have a glance at the last happy interlude in a life. The message line simply read: H UGO ’ S PHOTOS. He took a deep emotion-choked breath and clicked on the attachments.
A series of a dozen jpegs downloaded in a daisy-chain of embedded images.
He scrolled down and took each one in.
Shots of Luc, Sara and Odile, strolling through Domme.
Table shots inside the restaurant – Sara and Luc together, Hugo, with a cheesy grin, his arm slung around Odile, a hand resting casually on her bosom.
Then a group snap of the four of them, taken by the waiter, a selection of house desserts spread on the table. You could almost hear the laughter.
At the bottom of the scroll there was one more photo.
He stared at it. It didn’t fit – its presence made no sense.
He clicked to render it full screen.
What the hell?
It was an oil painting, on a yellow wall. A young man, of the Renaissance perhaps, seated and staring suspiciously at the artist. His face was long and effeminate, his hair flowing onto his shoulders. He had a black foppish hat, a white shirt with impossibly puffy sleeves and, most strikingly, his shoulder was draped with a rich fur coat from a spotted leopard.
What was this doing on Hugo’s mobile? Did someone use the camera after he was dead? Who would take a dead man’s mobile phone to a museum and use it to photograph a painting?
Wait! The time and date stamp!
The date of the photo time marked in crisp digital display: 11:53 p.m.
What was it the gendarme had told him at the crash scene?
‘He didn’t make it to the village. If he left your camp at eleven-thirty, the accident must have happened no later than eleven-forty.’
Luc was sitting on the edge of the bed now, raking his hand through his hair over and over, as if the static electricity would fire more synapses in his brain.
11:53 p.m.! Thirteen minutes after he was supposed to be dead, Hugo takes a picture of an oil painting?
Another conversation came back to him, flooding into his consciousness with startling clarity, a snippet that was accessible, that his mind must have tagged for future use.
At the welcome party for the excavation, the council president from Perigueux, Monsieur Tailifer, had been gushing over the local lore.
‘The Resistance struck the main railway line, near Ruac, and made off with a fortune, maybe two hundred million euros in today’s money, and some very famous paintings, let me add, including Raphael’s Portrait of a Young Man, all on their way to Goering personally. Some of the loot made it to de Gaulle and was put to good use, I’m sure, but a lot of that money and the art disappeared into thin air. The Raphael was never seen again.’
Luc was breathing heavily now, as if he’d just finished an anaerobic sprint and was air-hungry, repaying his oxygen debt.
He clicked on to Google Images and entered R APHAEL ’ S P ORTRAIT
OF A Y OUNG M AN.
And there it was. The same painting, on a website devoted to looted art recovery.
The caption read: T HIS MASTERPIECE REMAINS MISSING.
Luc was a man who knew his way around museums and what’s more, he loved everything about them. In ordinary circumstances he would have savoured the experience of discovering a new museum, particularly one located in a charming nineteenth-century hotel perched on a pleasant knoll on the banks of the Marne.
He would have inhaled the mustiness of the exhibit halls and been captivated by the complexities of off-limits storage areas. The Museum of National Resistance in Champigny-sur-Marne, had a collection rather more recent than his usual haunts, but all museums shared a pleasing commonality.
However, this was not an ordinary moment in his life and he rushed through the entrance hardly noticing the environs.
At the ticket booth he breathlessly announced ‘Professor Simard for Monsieur Rouby,’ and paced while the attendant placed a call.
They had talked less than an hour earlier. Luc had reached the curator after a frenetic series of calls had shunted him from museum to museum, archive to archive, all over France. His request was quite specific, which helped, but he was getting nowhere until a sympathetic elderly woman in Correze, at the Museum of Resistance Henri Queuille, mentioned that thirty boxes of archival material pertaining to Luc’s topic of interest had been sent to Champigny-sur-Marne for cataloging and preservation.
And fortunately, Champigny-sur-Marne was a scant twelve kilometres from the centre of Paris.
Max Rouby was a charming sort of man, in many ways an older version of Hugo, and Luc had to shrug off the unsettling transference. The curator was more than happy to extend a professional courtesy, one museum man to another, and put his minuscule staff at Luc’s disposal. Luc was given a table in a private archives area and a homely young woman named Chantelle began to dolly in the pertinent cardboard boxes.
‘Okay,’ he said, ‘we’re looking for any documentation of a Resistance raid against a German train in the vicinity of Ruac in the Dordogne in the summer of 1944. It was carrying a lot of cash and maybe art. Is there an index?’
‘That’s why it was sent here but unfortunately we haven’t got to it yet. It won’t hurt for me to thumb through it today. It’ll make my job easier later on,’ she said helpfully.
They dove in. As they sorted through wartime memos, diaries, newspaper clippings, black-and-white photos and personal diaries, Chantelle told him what she knew about the lending museum.
Henri Queuille was an important post-war politician who had been active in the Resistance in the Correze area during the occupation. When he died, his family bequeathed his house to the State for the purpose of remembering and honouring the Resistance efforts in the region, and in 1982 both Mitterrand and Chirac attended the inauguration of the museum. The family archives served as the backbone but over the years the museum
