swelled with deposits and gifts from other local archives and family estates.
It was slow going. Luc was impressed at how meticulously the Resistance had documented their activities. Whether from pride or a military sense of discipline, some of the local operatives wrote voluminously about plans and results for, what turned out to be, posterity.
The first twenty boxes had no mention of the Ruac raid. Chantelle was going through box 21 and Luc was rifling box 22 when she announced, ‘This looks promising!’ and took the files over to Luc.
It was a notebook with the seal of a lycee general in Perigueux, dated 1991. It appeared an enterprising student had done a project on the war, interviewing a local man who had been a Resistance fighter. The man, a Claude Benestebe, who was in his late sixties at the time of the exchange, recounted a raid on a German train a mile from the station at Les Eyzies. From the very first page, it sounded like Luc’s incident. He began to page through Benestebe’s oral history while Chantelle took the lid off the next box. I was barely seventeen years old in 1944, but very much a man I would say, very adventurous. In truth, the war saw to it I would never have a normal end to childhood. All the frivolous things that teenagers do today, well, I did none of them. No games, no parties. Yes, there was romance and even some flings, but it was in the context, you know, of a struggle for existence and liberty. The next day was never a certainty. If you didn’t pack it in during a mission, the boche could have plucked you out of a crowd to be taken a hostage and shot for this or that. We didn’t really expect to survive the attack on the Banque de Paris train in June 1944. We knew it was an important raid. We had the information maybe two weeks in advance from a bank employee in Lyon that a lot of French cash and Nazi loot were going to be sent via rail from the main branch in Lyon to Bordeaux for transfer to Berlin. We had the word that the entire train, some six box cars, were chock full, so we had to be prepared to make off with all of it in case we succeeded. We were told that two box cars would contain nothing but objets d’art and paintings looted from Poland, bound for Goering personally, who wanted all the best pieces for himself. Well, I can tell you that it was a big operation. The maquisard, as you know, were diverse, to use a polite description. Yes, there was central coordination, to some extent, by de Gaulle and his lot in Algiers, but the Resistance was very much a local affair where the maquis were making it up as they went along. And for sure, there was no love lost between one maquis band and another. Some of them were right-wing nationalists, some Communists, some anarchists, everything. My group which had the codename, Squad 46, operated out of Neuvic. We simply hated the boche. That was our philosophy. But for this train job, about half a dozen maquis bands worked together to pull it off. After all we needed a hundred men, many trucks, explosives, machine guns. The attack point was between Les Eyzies and Ruac, so we had to involve the Ruac maquis, Squad 70, I recall, even though no one trusted them. They cloaked themselves with a Resistance banner, but everyone knew they were in it for themselves. They were maybe the biggest thieves in France next to the Nazis. And they were vicious as they come. They didn’t just kill the boche. They tore them to pieces when they had the chance. Usually there were big screw-ups and people got hurt or killed but the night of 26 July 1944 went like a dream. Maybe the boche were too clever by half, deciding that too much security would attract attention, but the train was lightly protected. At 7:38 precisely, we attacked from all sides, blew up the track and derailed the locomotive. The German troops were massacred quickly. I never had a chance to fire my own rifle, it was over so quickly. The Banque de Paris guards who were French employees, gave their pistols to our commander who fired off rounds and returned them so they could say they tried to fight us off. By 8:30, the train was unloaded. All of us formed a human chain up from the track to the road, passing money bags and crates of art to the trucks. Only years later did I learn that in today’s money, that train had tens of millions of French francs. How much of it made its way to Andre Malraux and Charles de Gaulle? I don’t know, but it’s said that millions of francs and quite a bit of art never made it out of Ruac. Who knows what’s true. All I know is that it was a pretty good night for the Resistance and a pretty good night for me. I got good and drunk and had a high old time.
Luc looked through the rest of the file but there was nothing else of interest, nothing about the Raphael painting. But the discovery of a tangible link to Ruac gave him the enthusiasm to keep pressing on to the last box.
In the late afternoon, Chantelle left the research room to fetch two cups of coffee. The overhead fluorescents were now brighter than the light streaming through the windows. There were only two boxes left and when he was done, he’d get a taxi back to Paris and meet Isaak. Box 29 was largely filled with a photo archive, hundreds of glossy shots printed on the heavy paper of the day. He moved through them quickly, as if he was dealing cards at a poker game, and the moment the girl came back with coffee was the moment he saw the photo with the hand- written caption printed in black ink on the white border, G EN. DE G AULLE IN R UAC CONGRATULATING THE LOCAL MAQUISARD
UNIT, 1949.
De Gaulle towered above the others. He was dressed in a dark business suit, squinting into the sun over the photographer’s shoulder. Behind him was the village cafe looking much the same as it did now. He was flanked by six people, five men and a woman and was shaking hands with the oldest man.
Luc’s eye was drawn immediately to the old man. And then another young man, and then the woman.
‘Coffee?’ Chantelle asked.
He couldn’t respond.
Because Chantelle disappeared.
And the room disappeared.
It was him and the photo. Nothing else.
The old man looked strikingly like the mayor, Bonnet. The young man looked like Jacques Bonnet. The woman looked like Odile Bonnet.
He stared some more, from face to face.
He shook his head in confusion. The resemblance was uncanny.
Paris was glowing in the twilight. From Luc’s taxi he hardly noticed the Eiffel Tower alight in the distance. With all the rush hour traffic, he had just enough time to get back to his hotel before Isaak came to pick him up but now he wished he hadn’t made the appointment.
He had thinking to do, facts to sort through, puzzle pieces to assemble. He didn’t need idle chit-chat. He’d be better off sitting in his room with a clear head and a clean sheet of paper. He’d be seeing Colonel Toucas the next day. He wanted to lay out a coherent theory, not ramble on like a nut. He wanted to be back home; if he hadn’t already missed the last train he would have preferred travelling tonight.
He ought to cancel.
He called Isaak.
‘What are you, telepathic?’ Isaak said. ‘I’m just working on a translation for you.’
‘You did it earlier. What do you mean?’ Luc asked.
‘The new one!’ Isaak exclaimed. ‘The Belgian guy’s been busy. He’s finished! Margo forwarded his email an hour ago. I wanted to have it ready for you by dinner.’
‘Look, about dinner. Do you mind if we postpone? I’ve got some urgent work.’
‘No problem. What about the translation?’
‘I’m stuck in traffic. Could you read it to me over the phone? Would you mind?’
‘Luc, whatever you want. Let’s do it now.’
‘Thank you. And Isaak, before you start, what was the last key word?’
‘That’s what got me excited. It’s one of those words that get a medievalist’s heart beating. It was TEMPLARS.’
THIRTY-ONE
Ruac, 1307
Bernard of Clairvaux had been dead for a very long time but a day did not pass without someone at Ruac Abbey thinking about him or mentioning his name to make a point or punctuate a prayer.
