Arisaig, Scotland, 1943
Captain Jack Manners was exhausted; sweating so much in the chill Highland rain that he thought the desert fever had come back. His pack was full of rocks. The absurd little Sten gun with its narrow strap was cutting into the side of his neck, and his feet were sopping wet inside the heavy boots. At least in North Africa they had worn comfortable desert boots of light suede. It never ceased to amaze him-the only part of the British Army actually fighting the Germans dressed like a bunch of holidaymakers, in beards and shorts and corduroy slacks, cravats around their necks to keep the dust out. Some chaps even swore by their silk shirts, cool in the heat of the sun, warm as the chill of the desert night made the hard ground as cold as the stern metal of their tanks. Yet back here in Britain they were playing at soldiers, demanding glossy boots and pressed uniforms and close shaves even though there were never any razor blades. And they weren’t even fighting! When the reinforcements came out to Egypt from England, it took them weeks to get ready to fight Jerry. Still, he thought with a fairness that had been bred into him so hard it had become instinctive, it had taken him and his Hussars at least a year, and some decent tanks and a decent general, to learn how to fight Jerry. And given the right ground and enough time to dig in against our air power, Jerry could still dish it out.
“You need some hate in a war such as this, Jacques,” panted the man beside him. “When the body fades, and the will fades, then must come the hate.”
Jack Manners did not respond. He slogged on to the top of the hill, bracing against the wind that whipped off the Irish Sea like a volley of cold knives, and plodded grimly down the next slope until the loom of a rock promised some relief from the weather. He nudged the Frenchman beside him, edging him across to the rock. Then Jack took out his compass, and checked the bearing again.
“Remember what they told us,” he said, speaking in French. “Five minutes rest every hour.” He knelt down, shuffled off his pack, and began kneading the calves and thighs of his partner, who had ducked his head inside his parka to light a cigarette. Jack had long ago given up trying to stop Francois from smoking on duty. Last thing at night, he stubbed one out, half-smoked, and woke in the morning to relight it. The Frenchman’s legs were trembling with the strain of the climb.
“I have never understood your English masochism. In all the war I have seen, in all the battles I have endured, I never once had to march. I took aircraft and stole cars, borrowed motorbikes and even a bicycle. But never marched,” said Francois. “You only make us do this to keep us busy, like you make your conscripts paint the coal white in the barracks and pick up all the matches from the parade ground.”
“Remember what we learned from Rommel-train hard, and fight easy,” said the Englishman, slapping Francois’s calf to signal the brief massage was over. “Your turn.”
Francois knelt and began rubbing warmth into the Englishman’s legs. It felt blissful, feeling his blood flow again. He wanted to close his eyes and savor it, but this was an exercise. He had to keep his eyes open. Christ knows when an instructor would jump out from behind a rock, stage a mock ambush, haul them in for another of the mock interrogations.
“Don’t talk to me about your bloody Rommel,” said Francois. “That’s the trouble with you English. You admire your enemies. The more they beat you, the more you worship them as honorary English gentlemen.”
“We beat Rommel,” Jack said calmly. “We beat the living daylights out of Rommel and his panzers. You know that, Francois, you were there. But first we had to learn his lesson.”
“I know. Train hard, fight easy. Train together, never fight apart. I learned it, too, even before you. We had Rommel and his 7th Division coming at us and through us in 1940.” The last words were torn out of his mouth by the wind’s rising howl. Francois stood up, slapping his hands together, spitting out his cigarette, shouldering the pack, and preparing to move off. “And we held him off for a week at Bir Hakeim, even with those silly little antitank guns you gave us.”
“You’re forgetting something,” said the Englishman. Francois shrugged and knelt to pick up the glowing ember of the cigarette, squeezing out the glow with his hardened fingers, then shredding the tobacco into the wind, screwing up the tiny shred of paper and stuffing it into a pocket. No traces. They marched on down the hill toward the loch, the ground getting steadily wetter, both men scanning the shore and the dead ground for signs of ambush. There would be one, somewhere before the end of the exercise.
Jack Manners needed no reminding. That was when they had met, in that dreadful summer of 1942 when Rommel’s Afrika Korps had broken through the British lines south of Tobruk, and destroyed the Free French at Bir Hakeim with day after day of tank and Stuka bombardment. Jerry had picked off the undergunned and underarmored British tanks in his usual style and rolled them all the way back to El Alamein. Jack, on leave in Cairo, had suddenly been called in as a French-speaker to help organize a reception for the pitiful remnants of General Koenig’s Free French garrison. Francois had got out on a German motorbike, a BMW he had taken from a dispatch rider in an ambush, and ridden north to join the British and keep on fighting. That was the meeting, Jack supposed, that made this partnership and this posting and this blisteringly bloody training course in Argylle inevitable. But if he were honest with himself, he’d have volunteered for SOE anyway.
Special Operations Executive, fulfilling Churchill’s orders to “set Europe ablaze,” was how the lecturers told it. They hadn’t done much in the past three years. A few escape lines to get downed RAF pilots out of Occupied France and into Spain, a few sabotage operations, some intelligence tapped out on wireless by frightened operators waiting for the German direction-finding trucks to track them down. He would never have volunteered for that. But this new operation of the Jedburgh teams was going to be different. Training the French Resistance, bringing in the arms that could let them fight, and then leading them into battle behind the German lines to destroy the bridges and the communications that would otherwise bring the panzer divisions that would throw the Allied invasion force into the sea. No spying, no skulking about the French countryside in some shabby civilian clothes. He would wear his uniform and fight as a soldier. That was a mission worth training for. Suddenly he felt Francois’s hand close tightly on his arm.
“Over there, opposite the island,” the Frenchman breathed. Jack peered into the darkness. The man had eyes like a cat. Maybe there was something, a bulky shape, perhaps some movement. It looked like a lorry. It was hard to tell. “We go round behind them,” Francois said. “We ambush them.”
“Careful,” said Jack, his tiredness and his fever quite gone. “It is a favorite trick they use. The tethered goat. They show us a target that looks easy, tempting us to ambush them, when they have the real ambush set up to catch the ambushers. You go right. I go left. We meet on the loch shore. If we see no signs of ambush, then we hit the lorry from the back. If one of us sees an ambush, take it out with a burst from the Sten, and the other rushes the truck. If one of us gets caught, he sets off a Thunderflash to warn the other. See a Thunderflash, then get out of here and back to camp. Hear a Sten, rush the truck.”
They separated, moving swiftly down the hill, almost instinctively avoiding the loose shale that would betray the sound of their footsteps, skirting rocks that were light enough for a silhouette to stand out. The three-week course had taught them a lot. Jack felt the ground start to flatten beneath his feet, and knelt to stretch out his hand, feeling for a trip wire before the inevitable track that follows the loch shore. Nothing, but he felt the sudden absence of heather, and ridged mud and flint beneath his fingers. This was the track.
He paused, listened, and then crawled across. No trip wire on the far side. He could see the lorry more clearly now against the water, about fifty yards to his left. No sign of movement. If he were setting up the ambush, it would be straight ahead, one man facing the truck to see any sign of movement against the water, another facing this way to watch the track. The wind was still strong enough down here to cover the sounds of his movement. He leopard-crawled along the slight ditch by the track, aiming to get thirty yards to the flank. Grenade-throwing distance. Cautiously, he parted the thin grass to peer through. A minute passed before he saw the movement, a fleeting blur that could have been a man’s head.
He slipped the Sten from his shoulder, pulling the bolt back as he rose, and then sprayed the ambush point with a short burst of blanks as he charged it. He changed direction to his left and fired another burst, dropped and rolled to the right, and fired again. Rose and half-darted, half-staggered the last few yards to the ambush and jumped into the depression, to see an outraged sheep scamper complainingly away. A blaze of lights from the truck caught Francois, charging upon it from the loch side, as two Commando sergeants brought their hands together in slow, ironic applause.
“Not bad at all, laddie,” came a cheerful Scots voice from his rear. “If Jerry starts putting sheep on duty, you’ll have them cold. But he’s not that short of men, yet.”
The instructors slept in comfortable rooms in the grim, granite country house. At least, Jack assumed they were comfortable from his own billet in the Nissen hut, a semicircle of corrugated iron that ran with water on warm days and grew a sheen of ice on cold ones. The tiny iron stove in the center of the hut could toast one side of anyone standing over it, while his back froze. His clothes were always damp. There was room to hang only socks above the stove. He and Francois had been the first of the Jedburgh teams to arrive, and had grabbed the lower bunks closest the stove, and put their kit on a third, to reserve it for the American officer who was supposed to join them.
“The Americans are always late,” said Francois. He was lying on his bunk, smoking, as Jack tried to secure his socks so that they would not drop onto the stove and burn. “Three years late in 1914, two years late this time. So they are improving. Maybe our American will turn up next week, bringing us tinned peaches and Lucky Strikes.”
“At least they brought us some decent tanks in the desert,” Jack said. The socks looked secure. He’d already lost one irreplaceable woolen sock to that damn stove, and even his mother’s dedicated knitting could hardly keep on unraveling old cricket pullovers to make him new ones. Maybe if the Americans could bring as many socks as their troops were distributing stockings to the English girls … He damped down the uncharitable thought.
“Ah yes,” mocked Francois. “One wonders how we foolish Europeans ever managed our wars without them. Marlborough, Napoleon, Bismarck-if only they had had American tanks.”
“Bismarck was no general. He was a politician,” said Jack, reasonably.
“So he did more damage, perhaps. The politicians are the enemy, Jack. The ones who tell us what we are supposed to be fighting for, beyond the obvious logic of defending our countries and our women. Beware the politicians. They lost France, nearly lost England, and will probably lose Europe even if we do win this damn war. You are right, my friend, about the Americans and their wealth. They have ensured that we will win this war with their bombers and their tanks and their factories. But I do not think they have understood that the most important war will be the one that comes next, the one against the Communists.”
Jack shrugged; Francois was always talking about Communists. There was no point to telling him that Uncle Joe Stalin and the Red Army were holding down two hundred German divisions on the Eastern Front when the British had been fighting just four of the bastards in Africa. One war at a time was Jack’s motto, and he’d count himself lucky if he got through this one.
“You will see, my friend, when we get to France,” said Francois, lighting yet another Players from the stub of the one he had been smoking. “Today it looks as if the Communists are the main part of the Resistance. But the moment we start rallying men to ambush the German columns and blow up the bridges, the Communists will disappear with their weapons. They will disappear and watch us Gaullists die with our patriots, and then they will creep back out from their cellars and use the guns we fly in to take over what is left of France. They will do the same in Italy, in Belgium, and Holland. The next war has started already, my dear innocent Englishman. And the Americans will be late for that one too.”
The door of the Nissen hut opened, and a gale blew in. It was followed by a large green kit bag, a curse, and a very wet young man in an almost white belted raincoat and a small pointed forage cap, which seemed designed to steer the rain straight down his face and neck. A big round metal helmet hung from the strap of the gas mask haversack that was slung over one shoulder, and bumped rhythmically against the rifle that hung from the other. He was also burdened by a pistol holster, a map case, an electric torch, and another haversack on his back.
“Do you always carry all that?” inquired Francois politely, in his precise English.
“Only when I’m traveling light. You ought to see me drop in by parachute,” said the American, dumping his burdens one by one and spraying water over the bunks as he flung open his raincoat to approach the stove. Jack stretched out a hand to save one of his socks from falling onto the top of the stove. The other had been spattered with the rain that the American was shaking from his oddly cut dark hair. His head was shaved, except for a wide strip that ran proudly from front to back.
“Captain James Tecumseh McPhee, U.S. Rangers, at your service, gentlemen. Don’t ask about the Tecumseh, I get touchy. And I’m so hungry and so wet that I’m touchy enough. Just let me hug this stove and get some warmth into these godforsaken bones, and if one of you guys wants to look inside that big haversack he’ll find a bottle of Johnnie Walker’s finest, which my ancestors invented specially in order to survive this fucking climate.” He put his hands within a millimeter of the glowing stove lid and sighed deeply. Suddenly he broke into French. “We all need one drink, and I need three, and I’m sorry about knocking down the sock.”
“They stopped serving dinner about two hours ago, I’m afraid,” said Jack. “But I’m sure the cookhouse can do you a SPAM sandwich.”
“SPAM,” grunted the American. “As my great-grandfather’s old commander once said, war is hell.” He turned from the stove to the haversack, pulled out a bottle of scotch, a large can of ham, three oranges, a bottle of Martell brandy, and a smaller can that he tossed at the recumbent Frenchman.
“Foie gras,” said Francois, in tones of worship. “I have not seen foie gras since 1940.”
“It’s my last can. The reason I volunteered for this crazy assignment was that I reckoned it was about the only chance I’d get to find some more.” He pulled out another can of ham, and then took a complicated knife from his pocket, prized out a can opener, carved his way efficiently around the rim, and brought out some oatmeal biscuits. He tossed the can opener to Francois and opened the scotch.
“When my great-grandfather heard General Sherman make his celebrated remark, he thought to himself that war could be made pretty tolerable so long as one kept lots of good friends in the commissariat, a pearl of wisdom that he passed down through the family. I have made bosom buddies of the modern equivalent, the ferry pilots who bring the B-17s over here. A doting mother, a moderately considerate father who was too bad at making money in the twenties to lose any in the Wall Street crash, combines with regular transatlantic flights and a decent scotch ration to permit me to test great-grandpa’s theories to the limit. And once we get to France, I guess we live off the land for as long as our livers can take it. Gentlemen, here’s to war,” and he passed around the scotch.
“You wouldn’t happen to have a Sherman tank hidden in that magnificent haversack, old boy?” inquired Jack as he took the bottle. The American’s eyebrows lifted, and he smiled sunnily, waiting for Jack to continue. “If we’re going to live off the land, as you say, we might find one comes in rather useful.”
“The land,” intoned Francois, inhaling the scent of the foie gras on his biscuit, “is not what it was, since the Boches have been at it. But we shall conduct ourselves in the spirit of your admirable great-grandfather, and no doubt we shall get by. And if starvation threatens, we can always count on our intrepid English colleague to catch himself another sheep. After our last exercise, I can tell you that he is very good at hunting sheep.”
“Better than foxes, I guess,” said the big American around a mouthful-of canned ham. “At least you can eat them.”
In the three weeks remaining of their fieldcraft training at Arisaig and Loch Ailort, the American showed that he had little to learn. Fit and fast, and fresh from parachute training and Rangers school in the States, he won grudging praise from the instructors and the affection and respect of the English cavalryman. Francois, who had already accepted Manners as a comrade of the desert war, was more guarded with the American. It began when McPhee said casually that he had read Francois’s book about the war in Spain, and asked if he had ever some across a college friend who had volunteered for the Lincoln Brigade. Manners had no idea what they were talking about, and had never heard of the book. Nor had he known that Francois had written one.
“You didn’t know our little partner here was a glittering light of the French intelligentsia? College girls back home would buy his book and moon over that sexy photo in the frontispiece even if they couldn’t understand a word of it,” he explained. “Francois is the European civilization we’re all fighting for, Jack. We’re just the rude mechanics, you and me.”
“Your Lincoln Brigade were all Communists,” said Francois. “They did what Moscow wanted, not much for Spain.”
“Well, I guess some of them probably were,” McPhee said lazily. “But the guy I knew, he just wanted to stop fascism. He got back, too. He’s in the Marines now, in the Pacific theater. But a lot of British guys went to that International Brigade, Jack. Maybe even some guys you knew.”
“Barely knew there was a war on, old boy. I was in Palestine at the time, putting down an Arab rising, and then India, playing polo at Quetta.” Jack laughed. “Great training for tank warfare, polo. The old regiment hung on to the horses as long as they could, then they put us into armored cars. Never could understand why the wretched things didn’t go when I tried to feed them oats. The only chap who seemed happy with the conversion was the farrier. He said there wasn’t much difference between horseshoes and tank treads.”
“You have just been introduced to the subtlety of English humor,” Francois explained. “Jack here fought his way back and forth across Africa two-or was it three? — times. Against the Italians, all the way to Benghazi until Rommel’s panzers pushed them back to Egypt. And then back again to Benghazi until Rommel pushed them back to Egypt again.”
“See, I told you.” Jack laughed again. “Just like polo. We called it the Benghazi handicap.”
“A simple soul, our Jack,” said Francois. “No politics in the desert. Just war as a kind of cricket.”
“Why aren’t you flying, Francois?” the American wanted to know. “You flew in Spain, shot down a few fascists as I recall.”
“The Allies are not short of pilots in this war,” Francois replied. “But there are not enough Frenchmen ready to go back and work with the Resistance. The war in the air is simple. The war on the ground in France will be complicated, at least for me if not for you two. You are just fighting a war. Like all Frenchmen, I have the peace to think about.”
When they were posted south to Stevenage for the demolition course, just as the Allies took Sicily and the Italians pulled out of the war, McPhee had the more to learn. He seemed confused between the use of plastic explosives in cutting charges to take out pylons and railway lines, and the ammonal for the lifting charges to destroy bridges. Manners came up with the memory trick that seemed to help him. P for plastic and for precision; A for ammonal and to annihilate. But when they moved on to Huntingford for the course in industrial demolition, the American seemed to get confused again.
“Not too good on destroying things, fellas,” as the doctored lubricant grease with the grit that would grind away at industrial bearings smeared itself onto his clothes and face. “I guess it goes against the grain.”
They lived in one another’s pockets, always training together, given weekend leave passes at the same time. Once, they went back to the Manners family home in Wiltshire, a small country house with one wing that had been rebuilt after the Parliamentarians had destroyed it in the English Civil War. “You would always be a Royalist, Jack,” Francois had laughed, as McPhee shook his head in disbelief at the age of the place and the deferential pleasure of an elderly serving man and the even older cook at the return of the young master. His father, the general, was somewhere in India. His mother appeared for meals, but was otherwise in her garden.
“I guess we know what you’re fighting for, Jack.” McPhee grinned as they took the train back to London, ready to start the black propaganda course at Watford. “For the King-Emperor and the old landed estate.”
“Did you not know, McPhee?” Francois interrupted. “This was a farewell visit. The house has been requisitioned to become a brigade HQ for American troops. Her ladyship will be moving out into the lodge, from which redoubt she will try to protect her garden against your gallant countrymen.”
“I didn’t know Mummy had told you about that,” said Jack. “But it won’t be for long. We get the old place back, once the invasion goes in and the war is over.”
“I sure hope the guys take care of it,” said McPhee, embarrassed. “Maybe I’ll know somebody in the brigade, tell them to look after it.”
“A pity you do not know somebody among the Germans who have been occupying my house since 1940,” said Francois.
In the silence that followed, as Francois smoked and McPhee stared out of the train window, Jack realized that a pattern had been established. The Frenchman needled the American, even when he did not mean to. There was a constant irony in everything that Francois said, and a bitterness that he did not bother to conceal. Jack took it equably. He had come across far odder types in the desert, and had learned to tolerate eccentricities in the regiment.
They were comrades in arms, bound together by duty and by a common mission, and he admired the Frenchman’s brains and grit even if he didn’t follow the chap’s obsession with politics. But the American seemed in his own way as clever and as well read as Francois, just as attuned to the political minefield they were heading into, but somehow less nimble than Francois in discussing it.
“I never asked you, Jack,” Francois broke in. “How do you speak French so well?”
“A governess I had before I went away to school. She was French. And then skiing at Chamonix in the winter, Cap d’Antibes in the summer, I kept in practice. Just seemed to have an ear for it. And never much liked lying on the beach, so I’d go and talk to the fishermen and the waiters,” Jack replied. “Then, the interpreter’s course was something to do while I was in Quetta. Couldn’t play polo all the time. So I was assigned to liaison duties during the phony war, based in a corps HQ at Longwy on your Maginot line. I suppose that’s how we first met, when they were looking through the files in Cairo for any odd bod whose docket said he spoke French when you came back with General Koenig’s boys, after Bir Hakeim.”
Francois nodded. “And you, McPhee. Your French is good, too.”
“Usual way, Francois. A sleeping dictionary, a petite amie. I was in France in 1939, best year of my life. Springtime in Paris, a girl, a crazy idea that maybe I could be a writer. Can’t figure whether I fell in love with her or with France, and while I was working it out, I ended up speaking a language I never could handle at school, although they tried hard enough. Hell, you learn a lot in bed.”
“Perhaps we should try to find you a pretty teacher of demolitions,” laughed Jack. “Then you’d sort out your fuses and your ammonal fast enough.”
“Explosions in bed,” grinned Francois. “There’s an idea.”
“Don’t worry about me, you guys. We have the best part of another year of training before we get sent in. Figure it out. We in the Jedburgh teams are meant to drop into France just before the invasion to help coordinate the Resistance. There’ll be no invasion this year, not with the American troops still coming in, and the new front in Italy. Besides, the summer’s just about over and we can’t cross the Channel with the storms coming on. We’d never be able to ensure supplies to the beachhead. So the invasion will be next year, May or June, ’44. So we’ll drop into France in May. That gives us nine, maybe ten more months. More training. Winter in Scotland, underwater demolitions training in those freezing lochs. I have all the time in the world.”
“You are right, of course,” Francois said. “Except for one thing.”
“What’s that”?
“The Germans. More precisely, the Abwehr and the SD, the Sicherheitsdienst, and the Gestapo. They are not idle. They roll up the Resistance cells with a dismaying regularity. If the clever chaps in Baker Street who devised this whole operation think that there are too few networks on the ground for us to work with when we drop in, they may send some of us in early, to have the time to build up our own teams. At least, that is what my Free French masters think in Duke Street. And since Jean Moulin managed to forge the various Resistance factions into a single structure, the Gaullists probably know the situation better than the Englishmen in SOE.”
“But Jean Moulin has gone, disappeared, arrested,” said McPhee. “Night and fog, that good old German way.”
“It is a dangerous game, Resistance, and a lot of people disappear. It will be dangerous in Europe for a long time I think. After the Germans, we might be playing it against the Russians,” said Francois. “And I think we three will be playing it long before next May, McPhee.”
CHAPTER 4
Time: The Present
Lydia had expected to find Clothilde difficult. She would have been entitled to be furious at a wasted trip. Instead, she found the Frenchwoman a comfort, as she helped satisfy the demands of the police for an authoritative opinion on what the stolen rock was and what it might be worth. She was quite splendid with the man who came from the insurance company, informing him that he might count himself fortunate that Lydia had listed the value at a mere ten thousand pounds.
“For once, we can use the word priceless and mean it,” she had snapped, eyes ablaze with professional righteousness. Lydia found her admirable. And Clothilde was even useful with the hapless Justin, who was obviously terrified of her. And she bullied the directors into matching the ten thousand pounds she decided her museum could offer as a reward. So after the paperwork and the meetings with directors and the police and insurance affairs had all been dealt with, it was evening, and when Clothilde asked Lydia if she could recommend a quiet hotel, she insisted that the Frenchwoman come and stay with her. It was, she felt, the least she could do. Clothilde wanted to go to Chinatown for dinner, saying it was the one food she missed in Perigord. She devoured most of the Peking duck she insisted they eat, attacked a vast plate of Szechuan beef, chattered amusingly about a holiday she had taken in China, drank three beers, and tried to pay the bill. Lydia, who had seldom enjoyed an evening more, firmly refused.
“I accept only if your auction house is paying,” said Clothilde. “And if they are not trying to blame you for all this mess.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because they will want to blame somebody, and you are a woman. That is how male-dominated organizations tend to work. And that was the impression I had at your office.”
“I’m afraid you might be right. They were dropping some pretty strong hints about my desk failing to bring in enough money even before this happened.”
“Not enough product, or not enough rich clients?” Clothilde grinned. “I know something about your auction houses.”
“Not enough of either, not for my preclassical area. I don’t seem to be very good at rounding up rich collectors.”
“A friend of mine in one of the Paris auction houses, an Egyptologist, had a similar problem,” said Clothilde. “So she got the list of all the people who had come to the last few sales of Napoleon’s materials-and that is a very big thing in France-made a deal with a travel agency, and offered to guide historical tours of Napoleon’s Egyptian expedition. She took them to the site of the battle of the Pyramids, told them about the Rosetta Stone, and then took them down the Nile in a luxurious boat. By the end of the trip, she had a whole new list of clients and made a lot of money. You could do the same.”
“That’s a splendid idea,” said Lydia, trying not to think about the lack of Napoleonic enthusiasts in Britain, or the reluctance of wealthy collectors to visit those remoter parts of Iraq and Central Asia that produced the bulk of her treasures. Quickly, she signed the bill she had charged to her credit card. “That advice is certainly worth a good dinner, even if my company were not paying. Which they are,” she lied. But she let Clothilde pay for the taxi.
“You are being very reasonable about this theft,” Lydia said when they were back at her apartment, sipping the malt scotch that had sat untouched in the cupboard since the end of the affair with David. “In your place, I would have been outraged.”
“Oh, I can be outraged if there is a point to it. But there isn’t,” said Clothilde. “I am fatalist about thefts, ever since I was burgled as a student. They are a fact of life. And if the police find the rock, then all will be well. But I doubt that they will, so we are left with an even deeper mystery. But then we had a mystery to begin with. Where did it come from, where is the cave of its origin, and why this bull, which is almost certainly by the hands of Lascaux, should be the only miniature we know of? That is three big mysteries that already confront us, and now we have a fourth. Who took it and why?”
“That makes five. Add a sixth-where is it now?”
“I assume an art thief who knew what he was doing somehow heard about the find and broke in. If so, he will try to sell it, and we may hear of it that way. Or when he realizes there is no market for these things, he will find a way to accept the reward we have offered. And then we are back where we started, examining the rock for any clues to its provenance. But I shall start on that next week. We have a national laboratory that does computer enhancement, and I already sent them your digital photos. I am almost certain already that this is no modern copy, but that should make sure. And since you photographed the backs and the sides of the rock, we have a chance to narrow down the geology.”
“I wish I shared your confidence. I keep thinking the thief could simply destroy it. Or we might never hear of it again. Remember that this rock has sat in an Englishman’s home for fifty years, and nobody had the slightest idea that it existed. So presuming it does come from an unknown cave, its secret has been well kept.”
“That is the part of the mystery that intrigues me. It even excites me,” said Clothilde. “This Englishman worked with the Resistance in Perigord. So there are records. We can track down the people he worked with, ask the old men who still survive from those days. There are some friends of my father where I can make a start.”
“Was your father in the Resistance there?”
“Yes. He was shot by the Germans, but some of his old comrades are still alive.”
“I’m sorry, I had no idea.”
Clothilde shrugged and reached into her bag for another cigarette. “I never knew him. He was shot during the Liberation, a few months before I was born. And then my mother married again, after the war, so I had another father, a good man. A teacher, still alive. He and my mother still live in the district, and he writes about local history. He wrote a book that was quite controversial, about the Resistance. These things still matter, in France, to the old men and some of the politicians.”
“It must have made things complicated, when you and Horst were together. His being a German.”
“Not for me. I was born after the Liberation. So was he. These were things other people had done, not us. My adoptive father felt the same way. He liked Horst. But for my mother, it was difficult. And Horst is not very German, if you understand me. He is more like an American, in some ways. He studied in America, you know. He drove a French car, spoke French well-almost as well as he speaks English.”
“I rang him today with the bad news, told him not to bother to come to London because there was nothing to see. He was much more furious than you,” Lydia said. “He said he’d probably come over anyway, to talk to the owner, see if he could find out any more about where the rock came from.”
“That’s Horst,” Clothilde smiled, rather fondly. “Once he gets his teeth into something, he doesn’t give up easily. Maybe that’s the German in him. Or the scholar. And he’s right, what’s more. The Englishman who first had the rock is the key to this. We assume that he brought it back from the war as a trophy, from the Perigord. So either he found it, or somebody gave it or sold it to him. Your Englishman was no scholar, and his son thinks he was no expert on the caves and the paintings and never showed any more interest in the matter. So it seems logical that he did not find it himself. Somebody local must have helped him or shown him, and then had some very strong reason to keep quiet. And who did he know locally?”
“The Resistance,” said Lydia.
“Exactly. So that is where I shall start. But perhaps you could help, Lydia. There must be records here about his military career, where he served, where he was. Could you find that for me, and the names of any networks that he worked with, any reports that he wrote?”
“Yes, I’d like to do that. There must be records in France, too.”
“There are the Compagnons de la Resistance. They are like a club of the old comrades, and they must have archives and memoirs. I can ask them, as the daughter of a Resistance man. Maybe the Communists will have something. My father was with them from before the war. I think he might even have been a party member. A lot of them were, in the Resistance. I will ask my mother, although my stepfather might know more. He will certainly know all about the local records and archives. Then there is a place in Bordeaux, the Centre Jean Moulin, which is named after one of the Resistance heroes, the one who was caught and tortured by Klaus Barbie of the Gestapo. You remember the Barbie trial?”
“Vaguely,” said Lydia. “I never had much reason to be interested before. But I think I might be seeing the son again. He asked me to lunch, and I owe him an explanation about the theft. I can ask him what he knows about his father in the war.” Lydia refilled their glasses, and grinned at Clothilde. “He’s not bad-looking, if you like the military type. Officer and gentleman. No longer young.”
“The military does that to them, after a certain rank. They age years with each promotion. Catch them young, and they can be very exciting. But then they get accustomed to commanding things and become tiresome, unless you want to make the effort. And having taken one look at military wives, I never wanted to join them. Garrison towns and being polite to the general’s wife. Not for me,” she grimaced. “Do you like soldiers?”
“I never came across one before.”
“There is no sign of a man in your apartment,” Clothilde said directly.
“No razors in the bathroom, you mean?” Lydia laughed as she felt herself blushing. “The last time there was a man in my life, he was far too discreet to leave anything like that. He always carried a portable electric razor and a clean shirt.”
“I would not trust that type,” Clothilde sniffed. “Always ready for adventure. And that, in my view, is a woman’s prerogative.”
At the Savoy Grill, which Major Manners said was the only place he really knew for lunch in London apart from his club, Lydia solemnly handed him a company check for ten thousand pounds with her apologies for the loss of his possession.
“That is the value I placed on it. That is what our insurance therefore pays out, or will if they know what’s good for them, even though the rock was not placed in our storeroom,” she said, and sipped her champagne.
“I therefore owe you two thousand pounds,” he said, smiling. “Under the terms of our agreement.” He was wearing a town suit today, a good one in dark blue, a striped shirt, a tie that looked regimental. His handkerchief was still in his cuff. She could detect no aftershave, which pleased her. There was an awful lot of male cologne in the art world, and she did not care for it.
“No,” she said firmly. “That was contingent on my doing some work that resulted in the sale of your rock, or at least its amicable disposal in a way that left you with no further obligations to France or anyone else. That is hardly the case now,” she said, thinking of the band of journalists and TV cameras thronging the street outside the salesrooms. “But there is one thing that troubles me. You barely mentioned your father’s service in wartime France when we spoke. Now I find that the President of France makes a private visit to his funeral. You must have known France was very important to him.”
“Naturally I did, but not from my father,” Manners said easily. The question did not seem to embarrass him in the least. “His reminiscences were all about the Middle East and North Africa, a bit of India. He hardly spoke of France at all. Nor did we visit it much when I was growing up. It was always Austria or Switzerland for the skiing, and summers in Scotland. He took me fishing, taught me to shoot. That kind of thing. Never much of a one for beaches or casinos. The south of France was never his style.”
“Did he never go back to Perigord?”
“Not that I know. But I can’t say I followed his movements closely,” he said. She did not know him well enough even to guess whether this straightforward, rather bluff manner of the plain-speaking officer and gentleman was real, or just a surface skin he wore, like a uniform. She had never known any soldiers. Perhaps they were all this way; what you saw was what you got. But Manners had a quick mind, possibly even a subtle one. She suspected there was more to him than he wanted to display-at least, she cautioned herself, display to her.
“What about Paris?” she asked him. “Catching up with his friend Francois Malrand, the rising political star. Did he keep up with his old comrade-in-arms, de Gaulle’s protege?”
“Maybe he went when I was at school or when he was serving in NATO. I think he was stationed there in some staff job when the HQ was still at Fontainebleau. before de Gaulle kicked them out to Brussels in the 1960s.” He shrugged and fell silent as the waiter came with their smoked salmon. “He went off to the races at Longchamps from time to time, I seem to recall. He won a lot of money once.”
Remember his father, she told herself. There was obviously a lot more to old Colonel Manners than he had ever allowed to meet the eye. Working underground with the French Resistance, staying on the run from the Germans. That must have meant something to do with Intelligence, a skill at keeping secrets. Perhaps his son was the same way, hidden depths.
“Fathers can have a lot of privacy in our kind of family,” he went on. “I was away at school, and he’d retired before I went to Sandhurst. Maybe they sometimes met in London. I wouldn’t know. But that friendship didn’t seem to play a big part in his life. He said nothing when Malrand won the election. I found no letters among his things, and I was as surprised as anyone else when the French ambassador rang to say that the President planned to come to the funeral. I’m slightly surprised you knew. It was kept very quiet.”
“Until the newspapers got hold of it, you mean.”
“Yes, until then.” He ate neatly, she noticed, without paying much attention to the food. Lydia was getting rather tired of foodies; men who made exaggerated talk of sauces and dishes and treated fashionable restaurants as if they were something to do with art.
“Did Malrand come to your house after the funeral?” she asked, making the question casual. She felt uncomfortable, turning the conversation into an interrogation.
“Of course, took a drink, said some gracious things. Stayed about ten minutes. He’d said a few words at the grave, about my father being a great friend of France. That sort of thing. Spoke very good English.”
“Did he look around the house, go to your father’s study? I’m wondering whether he may have seen the rock-I presume it was on display in your father’s room.”
“No, I don’t recall him being anywhere but the hall and the main drawing room. He strolled around the garden with me a bit, saying he remembered it from the war. Apparently he’d been to stay with my father. He spoke about my grandmother and her garden, made me walk him up the drive to the lodge, where she lived when the Americans took over the house.” He put down his knife and fork, finished his champagne.
“But I see what you mean. If my father had picked it up in France, that was the time they were working together in Perigord. He may have known something about it. But if my father was up to no good and pinching bits of France’s glorious heritage, then the President of France would hardly have gone out of his way to honor the memory of someone he suspected as a thief. As for the old man’s study, it was a bit of a mess. Books and maps everywhere. He always had some thought of writing his memoirs. Never did, or at least nothing I ever saw or found beyond some notes. There were maps of the Western Desert all over the place, spread on tables and window ledges. The rock was behind one of them, on a bookcase. But it wasn’t in plain sight, even if Malrand had looked in. He did ask me, though, if my father had ever finished his memoirs. They knew one another well enough for that. The only other sign of his time in France was his copies of Malrand’s books; each signed by the author. I started one of his novels, but couldn’t finish it. Not my kind of thing. But I liked his book about the war in Spain back in the 1930s.
“You seem jolly interested in all this,” he went on, picking at the salad the waiter had brought them. He didn’t seem very pleased with it. But he had not been much interested in the food, simply ordering what she had already chosen. “It must be your American curiosity.”
“Nothing American about it,” she said, suddenly conscious of her accent. “Anyway, my mother’s Scottish.”
“But you are American, or Canadian. And not just by your speech. It’s your manner-you are very direct, very determined, going straight to the point. Look at the way you put me to the question all through lunch. And your interest in the origins of this rock of mine is a lot more than I’d have expected.”
“Why do you say that? That ‘rock of yours’ was entrusted to our care. We lost it. And the police do not seem at all hopeful of getting it back. They said it was a very professional job, by someone who knew what he was looking for and exactly where to find it.”
“That must narrow down the list of suspects,” he said.
“Well, it narrows it down to those people who had seen a copy of the next day’s Times, and the first edition was on sale in London by eleven P.M. on the night of the theft. And then it was on the paper’s Internet site before midnight and on the BBC Radio news at the same time. A million people could have seen or heard it, noticed the reference to the auction house and me. There are some very alert thieves in the art world.”
“But you are not responsible for its loss. It was stolen. There’s a difference,” he protested.
“I still feel responsible, and not only to you. There’s a responsibility to the thing itself, as a piece of history or a work of art. We still don’t know if it’s genuine. We still don’t know its provenance. There may be a marvelous cave out there somewhere. That’s what my German expert says, and he seems pretty keen on tracking it down.”
“What about that French woman from the museum?”
“Clothilde-she was quite ready to pay you an honorarium for the piece. And she has arranged for the museum to offer a reward for its return, which may be the best chance of getting it back. She wanted it, just from seeing the photographs. But she said they are always looking for new caves, some long-term project with an echo sounder or something. It was all a bit technical for me. She seemed pretty confident they’d find it eventually, if it is there to be found. But what do you do now, cash the check and forget it?”
He sat back and looked her squarely in the eye. “Cash the check, certainly. Send you your commission. But then-well, I’m between postings and have some leave. I was in Bosnia for eighteen months, and then I start a staff college course in September. I thought I might spend some of this windfall on a trip to Perigord, look around my father’s old stamping ground. Visit a few of these caves and see what all the fuss is about.”
“You’ll probably run into this German chap, Horst, and into Clothilde, whom you would find amusing,” said Lydia, suddenly wondering if Manners was the French woman’s type. She smiled to herself. She wouldn’t give him much chance of escaping Clothilde’s clutches if the Frenchwoman decided on a summer fling with a dashing English officer. Dashing, there was a word she had never used before in connection with a man. She rather liked the sound of it.
“Will you take your family?” she asked, suddenly curious.
“The family isn’t really mine anymore. That is, I was married, but it didn’t survive a couple of long tours in Northern Ireland. I was divorced six years ago. My son and daughter are away at school and I only get to see them on the holidays. My ex-wife lets me take them skiing and sailing, and to pantomimes. I brought them back to my father’s place last summer and taught them to ride. We went to a Club Med the year before that, the kind of place that keeps them busy.” He looked suddenly rather sad, Lydia thought. He forced his face into a slightly twisted grin. “As you can tell, I miss them. But what about you? You said your mother was Scottish. And your father?”
“American, from Minnesota, with lots of Norwegian ancestors.”
“How did your parents meet?”
“He did his military service in the Air Force, based in Scotland, in the education branch. He told me he spent his free time helping out at some experimental theater in Edinburgh, and that’s where they met. She was a teacher. They married, went back to Minnesota, and went slowly broke running a bookstore, so he ended up teaching in the local school.” She was going to stop there, but Manners’s silence was sympathetic. She didn’t want to tell him about the cross-country skiing trips and her father’s ramshackle bookshelves and the piles of paperbacks in the bathroom and the magic of his bedtime stories. Time to change the subject. She drank some water, put the glass down decisively. “Ten thousand pounds will finance quite a luxurious jaunt around Perigord for you.” She smiled to herself, thinking that Clothilde would certainly help him to spend it.
“Eight thousand pounds. You keep forgetting your cut,” he objected. “I mean it, Lydia. We had a deal, and what’s more you gave me good and honest advice. You persuaded me that this damn rock deserves to be back in its place, rather than in my father’s old dusty study, or adorning the wall of some overpriced penthouse. And you were the one who spotted what it was, or what it might be. You gave me the courtesy of your expertise. You earned the money.”
“I told you, I couldn’t accept it.” She had been in England long enough to feel faintly embarrassed at talk of money. At least, of her money. And she wished he would not press her. It was out of his character, somehow.
“Well, I have an alternative proposal,” he suggested, tentatively. “Please don’t misunderstand this, but why don’t you come too? If you won’t accept the money, let me put it to good use by financing your trip. You are interested, and you know a damn sight more about these caves and the art than I do. I’m sure you’d like to see the caves, and you have the contacts in place, people like your Clothilde and your German chap. You say you feel responsible to the piece as a work of art, and here’s your chance to do something about it. Do come. Separate rooms, naturally.”
She looked at him, startled. What an extraordinary suggestion. She hardly knew the man. “What do you mean, a chance to do something about it? If there’s one place the rock won’t be, it’s back in its home ground in Perigord?”
“How do you know? But if there is a black market trade in the stuff, rich and secretive collectors, that’s going to be the center of it. I take your point about a million people potentially knowing that the rock was in your building on the night it was stolen. But only one in a thousand would know its value, and only one in a thousand of them would be in a position to do something about it. Burglaries aren’t set up at a moment’s notice, at least not this kind.”
“I’m no detective,” she protested. “This is something for the police.”
“And do the police know the art world as well as you do? Do the police have the slightest idea of the kind of work this is, what it comes from and what it means. Do they know its context? It will probably all fizzle out, but it will give a purpose to our trip. I’m all for learning my way around the caves and the prehistoric paintings and all that, but I always like to have some point to my holidays. I’m not one just to potter round open-jawed with a guidebook like some casual tourist.”
“Anyway, I couldn’t possibly accept your kind offer. I don’t like people-paying my way, and this is just another way for you to bestow money on me that I don’t deserve,” she said. “Nor could I get away. I have two sales here in England next week and another one in Milan.”
“Splendid, I’ll need another week to wrap up my father’s affairs with the lawyer, and you can meet me in Les Eyzies on the way back from Milan.”
“Major Manners …” She imagined her mother at her elbow, prodding her to accept, just as she had always accepted invitations on Lydia’s behalf throughout her childhood.
“Lydia, please, call me Philip.”
“Major Manners, I fear this is not a good idea.” So there, Mother. But then, even more forcefully than the thought of her mother came the thought of what Clothilde would say.
“Well, let me put it another way. I’m out of practice at this, Lydia, but I’m also asking you because I enjoy your company and I want to get to know you better. If I am going to fulfill my own responsibility to this piece of rock that my father owned, then I have to know more about it. So in your own terms, and you are the one who made me think this way, then I need your professional services, quite apart from the fact that I also find your company congenial. So please come.”
“Let me think about it,” she temporized, suddenly reminded of Clothilde’s plan to recruit clients by organizing historical tours. The caves of Perigord, good food and wine, an undemanding lecture from Clothilde, it could be an agreeable jaunt for wealthy art lovers with a vague interest in prehistory. And it would be a very useful idea to float at the auction house. A preliminary reconnaissance would certainly be required. She looked at Manners thoughtfully. “In the meantime, if you are serious about doing something about this rock of yours, there is something you could do. The place to start would be your father’s war record, what he did, with whom he worked in France, any clues to the people that he may have met, someone who might have given him the rock or showed him where to find it. As his son, presumably you could get those easily. At least it would be somewhere to start.”
“There’s a good idea,” he said. “But then in a way, I suppose I already started. I wrote off to Malrand when you first told me about the theft, asking if he could shed any light on my father’s time in Perigord. I told him about the rock, and apologized for what seemed to be a pretty shabby bit of souvenir hunting. After all, as President of France, it’s almost his property.”