Stonekiller (35 page)

‘It's perfect for them. They will have their film, their
Moment of Discovery
and no one will say a thing against it because we and the cave will no longer exist!'

‘Are you still certain Courtet killed Madame Fillioux?'

They had spent the week arguing. ‘
Yes
, for the last time.'

‘Then just remember, Danielle is an actress and she could have done both killings all by herself. You should have insisted that he sign a statement. I backed you up, but I had my doubts.'

How pious! Hermann had a thing about Danielle. Recurring nightmares in which he was assaulted with a handaxe by a naked savage who bore a striking resemblance to her. He had even started his partner dreaming of it.

A cigarette was lighted and shoved between Kohler's lips. ‘Hey, what about my partner?' he asked his countryman.

‘Tobacco shouldn't be wasted on scum.'

Ah
merde …
could he make the cigarette last? wondered Kohler. Could he stall for time? Something … there had to be something they could do to stop things.

Brutally they were hustled up to the cave — forced to climb at a run, to fall, to hit the rocks and bruise the knees, a shoulder, an arm … hands tied behind their backs.

Already
Moment of Discovery
was in Berlin, in its final stages of editing. Already Herr Oelmann was back in Paris, the Baron and the Baroness having a little rest at their home in Vienna, and the château had been emptied and closed.

Herr Eisner had returned to Hamburg. Of the film's personnel only Professor Courtet and Danielle Arthaud were to witness the final proceedings.

‘They'll shoot them, Louis. Courtet's and Danielle's bodies will be found in that little glade riddled by bursts from their Schmeissers. One dead actress and one dead prehistorian in the wake of the terrorists.'

‘Danielle will have realized there is only one thing she can do.'

‘Hit you on the head with a handaxe, eh?' snorted Kohler only to be clubbed into silence.

At the entrance, the
gisement
was at its thickest, exposed in benches where Fillioux and the Abbé Brûlé before him had opened the deposits to study them. Rusty sardine cans, cast-off espadrilles and worn-out work gloves — the refuse of two-legged badgers — were strewn about. A rucksack, a broken wine bottle, innumerable shards of black flint, a litter of old bones.…

‘Inspectors.…' Pale and shivering, Danielle came out of the darkness in tears between two of the
Sonderkommando.
‘The parents Fillioux were going to leave everything to that woman if she helped them. A goose, a chicken, some butter — if only she would forgive their long rejection of her, she would have it all but she did not know this and I … why I could not let it happen, may God forgive me. Now you know.'

‘But you did not kill Madame Fillioux,' said Louis, shaking off the
Sonderkommando
who held him.

She flicked a glance at Hermann. ‘No, but I intended to — it would all have been blamed on my father, yes? — and I was going to if I had to, just as you have said.'

‘And the postcards, mademoiselle? The things I left in the cave?'

‘Juliette told them where to find the cache in the wall near the ventilation shaft. They … they have burned every last scrap of the drawings and the postcards, and have stolen the louis d'or and the jewellery.'

‘And Juliette?' asked the Sûreté.

Would he condemn her right to the end? ‘We have kissed and I have held my half-sister as I should have done long ago.'

‘Then it's finished for us, Hermann, and we had best go in and get it over with. Goodbye, mademoiselle.
Bonne chance.
'

‘You also.'

In the flickering light from two candles, a lunging aurochs charged, and as they sat on the floor of the second chamber, bound hand and foot, they heard, in imagination only, the sound of its hooves as it thundered over terrain long gone to join stampeding ponies.

The leader of the
Sonderkommando
gave them the once over and nodded curtly. ‘So now we will leave you,' he said. ‘Enjoy yourselves.'

Six men had gloated over their predicament for the past week. Deveaux was wheezing badly and near to death simply from the loss of breath. Juliette sat next to him with her knees up and her back and hands against the wall. Then there was a shaft, the chasm in the floor Toto Lemieux had fallen down, and then Hermann and himself. Ah
nom de Dieu, de Dieu
, why must things be so difficult for them?

‘Louis, they're using cyclonite mixed with a plasticizer. Diesel fuel, crankcase oil and sawdust, maybe. Something to make it pliable like margarine. You can smell the bitter almonds but it's not nearly so strong as with Nobel 808 or even straight old dynamite.'

‘And the detonators, Hermann?'

‘Time pencils. Acid bulbs that are crushed by pressing a ridge on the side of the pencil. Wires of varying thickness give delays as the acid eats away at them.'

‘Until the wire inside the pencil is gone and the spring it held back is released.'

‘And the detonator is struck.'

‘The pencils are coded red, I think,' said Juliette, squirming a little.

‘Red for ten minutes or a half-hour?' swore Kohler. There were six satchels on niches along the length of the chamber, God alone knew what else out there and at the entrance to the cave.

Again Juliette squirmed and again. Falling over on to her side, she lay there staring across the hole in the floor at them. ‘Danielle …,' she said. ‘Danielle has given me a flint.'

Her wrists came free. She sat up and began at once to cut the rope that bound her ankles. Hurry … they prayed. Hurry.

‘Hermann, madame. Release him first.' Time … would there be time?

The aurochs watched, the ponies too, the cave bear and cave lion as shadows moved across the walls and roof, racing now … racing.

Must do it, shouted Kohler to himself. Have to … Have to.…

‘RED, LOUIS! RED, DAMN IT! GET OUT,
MON VIEUX.
KISS GISELLE FOR ME. THE RUE DANTON, EH? THE HOUSE OF MADAME CHABOT.'

His new girlfriend.

They scrambled. They got Deveaux freed at last and tried to push, drag and coax him along the narrow tunnel that led to the first chamber. ‘My lungs. It is no use, Jean-Louis. Leave me … Save yourselves.'

‘Ten minutes, Louis.
Ten!
' shouted Kohler to hurry them up. A kilo of plastic to the satchel. First one and then another and another was checked and time pencils were not to be fooled with once their bulbs had been crushed. Not before either. The fucking things were always temperamental.

‘Louis, I can't remove any of them. Those bastards will wait until the cave has been blown.'

‘Leave it then. Hurry, Hermann. Juliette says that if we try, perhaps we can make it out through the ventilation conduit'

They were lying among the scrub, sheltering themselves, when the charges went off. Debris and flame shot out over them. The ground lifted and fell, then shuddered as passages far beneath them collapsed and dust and smoke rose up into the air.

The sharp staccato of Schmeissers followed — two short, sharp, lonely bursts, then silence crept in as they shook the dust from themselves and checked for cuts and abrasions.

‘Odilon is dead, Hermann. The heart, the lungs, it was too much for him.'

‘Let's go then. We've a job to do.'

Pardon? wondered Juliette apprehensively. ‘Messieurs …,' she began but Hermann had taken her by the hand and was leading her away from the valley.

‘We'll climb to the top of the escarpment and follow the stream back of the waterfall just as you did when you tried to get away from us with the carpet-bag.'

‘We need to find the road to Sarlat, madame,' came the breathless urging of the Sûreté. ‘They will have to walk out to the railway line and then along it to their car. Hurry … please hurry.'

‘But what about Danielle and the Professor?'

‘Nothing can help them now. It's ourselves we have to think of.'

Only then did she see the satchel in Hermann's hands and hear him say, ‘In their haste to get the job done, one of them forgot to activate a time pencil. It happens all the time with cocky recruits. He should have had a taste of Russia.'

‘And now?' she asked sharply.

‘Now we're going to pay them back!'

Ah
merde
, these two, they were crazy. They each knew exactly what the other had in mind. They were desperate.

Boemelburg was brooding. The summers in Paris were always the shits. Hot, humid and far too often grey.

The storm would pass, the gutters would soon run dry to fill the sewers.

Well up in his sixties and close to retirement, he was as tall as Hermann and every bit as big. ‘A rock-fall,' he said, not turning from windows streaked with the droppings of ungrateful pigeons too frightened by the shortages of food to roost anywhere other than the rue des Saussaies, the former headquarters of the Sûreté and now that of the Gestapo in France.

‘A rock-fall, Walter,' offered Louis only to receive the cold shoulder of, ‘It's Sturmbannführer to you.'

‘Ah, yes, forgive me.'

The all but shaven dome of that grey and bristly head was irritably favoured by a meaty hand from which the sweat was then wiped. ‘An accident. Tourists from the Reich on a little holiday in the Dordogne and what do I hear but that their car has gone off the road.'

‘It must have blown a tire, Chief.'

‘Don't “Chief me, Herr Kohler. Just explain. A tire?' he asked.

Both Louis and he were dutifully sitting in front of the giant's desk. ‘The left front. They were speeding. There was a bend in the road — you know how those roads are. A hay cart — who would have thought one would be sitting in the middle of that road?'

‘Go on, I'm listening.'

Juliette Jouvet was safely with Mayor Pialat in Domme. She had hugged them both and had wished them well. ‘The rock-fall came down, the horse was frightened.'

Nordic blue eyes that were watery but not from sympathy surveyed them. ‘Six men were in that automobile.'

‘It went off the road and then it hit the entrance of a viaduct, Sturmbannführer.'

‘And then, Hermann?'

‘It skidded round and round into darkness, hitting the walls until it … it blew up.'

‘
Explosives!
' thundered Boemelburg, clenching a fist. ‘Time pencils in a box in the boot next to perhaps twenty kilos of plastic and seven hundred rounds of ammunition, to say nothing of the grenades. I'm surprised the horse wasn't hurt but it appears that someone had cut the traces.'

‘We found it grazing beside the road, Sturmbannführer. The poor thing was nervous but I managed to calm it.'

The SS over on the avenue Foch were crying foul but was there proof? The Vichy police were making noises. They'd not been consulted. An actress and a prehistorian had been shot to pieces. A sous-préfet was dead.

‘Gestapo Mueller wants a full inquiry but says
Moment of Discovery
is a triumph. Herr Himmler is delighted with the film but anxious for us to find those who blew up his cave.'

It was coming now and they both knew it. Boemelburg would have no other choice. Russia? wondered Kohler — he had not yet had time to see Giselle. They had come straight from the Gare d'Austerlitz. A car had been waiting for them.

‘Monks,' said Boemelburg distastefully. ‘Some little flea-bitten monastery where they make Calvados and raise bees. One of them has killed their abbot with a hatchet. You leave for Caen this afternoon — no, Louis, you do not even go home or call that wife of yours. You get out of Paris when I tell you to and you do not come back until I think it proper.'

‘No chance of seeing Marianne? But … but.…'

‘She'll leave you, Louis,' warned Kohler as they were hustled down the stairs and out into the courtyard to a waiting car. ‘That wife of yours will find some blond, blue-eyed son of a bitch to take her mind off your absence.'

A surrogate papa for Philippe. A lover … ah
merde, merde
, why must God do this to him?

God had no answer. He never did. He believed firmly that just as détectives should work things out for themselves so, too, should married couples.

In love, as in fighting crime, there were pitfalls.

‘Giselle will miss me,' lamented Kohler, ‘but, ah what the hell, Louis, it's better than having to face the SS over on the avenue Foch. Cheer up. You can send Marianne a postcard.'

‘I can telephone her,
idiot!
'

‘Not from the
zone interdite
.'

The Forbidden Zone, the Coastal Zone. Ah
merde
… a month? Had they been away that long this time? Three cases … three or was it four?

‘Three,' said Kohler. ‘But never mind. Absence always makes the heart grow fonder. It's that body of hers you're going to have to worry about. She's simply too good looking, Louis. You should have listened to her and let her go home to her parents in Brittany. You should have listened to your partner, but oh no, you had to keep her here in Paris. Wives are always best left at home on the farm with their parents. It's safer.'

‘Unless there has been bomb damage to the tracks, there is a ten-minute stopover in Mantes. I'll telephone her from there and never mind telling me all about your own wife whom you haven't seen in years, Hermann.
Years!
You had better watch out yourself.'

But when he did telephone, there was no answer, though the switchboard operator let it ring and ring.

Acknowledgement

All the novels in the St-Cyr-Kohler series incorporate a few words and brief passages of French or German. Dr Dennis Essar of Brock University very kindly assisted with the French, as did the artist Pierrette Laroche, while Ms Bodil Little of the German Department at Brock helped with the German. Should there be any errors, they are my own and for these I apologize but hope there are none.