The Tenth Chamber (15 page)

Zvi Alon was a no-show for breakfast. His car was found parked above the cliffs. The cave gate was locked and undisturbed. Jeremy anxiously came forward to tell Luc about Alon’s request for the key the night before, to which Luc angrily denied he’d granted the man permission.

In a panic, the team began searching the undercliffs and found nothing at all. Then Luc made a command decision and ordered the morning shift to begin work inside the cave while he contacted the authorities.

Given the profile of the Ruac excavation a lieutenant, named Billeter from the local gendarmerie, personally responded to the call. When he ascertained the matter to be complex, he summoned his superior officer from the Group Gendarmerie of the Dordogne in Périgueux, Colonel Toucas, and mobilised a police boat from Les Eyzies to motor up the Vézère.

By mid-morning, Luc was radioed in the cave and informed that Toucas had arrived. The colonel was a rather loutish-looking man, slightly overweight, bald, with big facial features and dangling, creased ear lobes. His moustache was clipped too short for the wide expanse between his nose and upper lip, leaving a naked line of skin, and like many men with a paltry head of hair, he compensated with a goatee. But he had an incongruously smooth, elegant voice and a rather cultured Parisian accent. Luc would have had more confidence in him if they’d been speaking over the telephone.

They met at Alon’s rental car. The two had only begun to talk when the young Lieutenant trotted over and excitedly informed them that a body had been found near the river bank.

Luc would not make it back to the cave that day.

His first duty was to take a boat to identify the corpse. The task left him queasy and shaken. Alon was bloodied and broken. A sheared-off tree branch had gruesomely impaled his lower abdomen. The stuttering fall had bashed his face and twisted his arms and legs into bizarre angles like the limbs of the old juniper tree high on the ledge. Even though it was cool and dry, insects had already staked their claim.

There were statements to be taken. Luc had to surrender his office to Toucas and his men to conduct their interviews. Late in the afternoon it was Jeremy who was the last to be questioned and he emerged from the Portakabin as drained of blood as Alon’s remains. Pierre was waiting for him. He goodheartedly swung his long arm around Jeremy’s shoulder and took him away for a drink.

The mood around the camp was grim. After dinner Luc felt compelled to address the group. Toucas had informed him that pending an autopsy, it seemed probable that Alon had slipped while attempting to climb down in the dark; there was no reason to suspect otherwise. There was a straight line from the ladder to the body’s resting place. The trauma he suffered was consistent with a great fall. Luc passed the assessment along to the sombre group.

After reflecting on Professor Alon’s contributions to their field he led a minute of silence and concluded by beseeching everyone to accept that access to the cave beyond protocol-defined hours was strictly prohibited and that he alone would control the keys. One would remain on his keychain, the duplicate would be locked in his desk.

Luc hardly ate. Hugo took him back to his caravan, fed him a liquid diet of bourbon and played New Orleans jazz on his battery-operated MP3 player until Luc eventually fell asleep in his clothes. At that, Hugo switched off the music and listened to a hooting owl until he too drifted off to sleep.

Despite the tragedy, work at Ruac continued. Alon would have to be replaced but that hole in the team would not be filled until the next season.

They forged ahead with the plan for the first campaign. The focus of the initial excavations would be two chambers: the cave floor at the entrance chamber, or Chamber 1, its official designation, and the Chamber of Plants, Chamber 10.

Space was tight within Chamber 10 and Luc restricted access to only a few people at a time. That core group included Sara, Pierre, Craig Morrison, the lithics expert from Glasgow and Carlos Ferrer, their authority on microfauna, the diminutive bones of small mammals, reptiles and amphibians. Luc felt he was making a devil-may-care statement by teaming Sara with the Spaniard, but his gut fluttered every time he saw them working next to one another, their bodies almost touching. Fortunately Desnoyers had been correct. The bat population started thinning almost immediately. There were a few stubborn hold-outs flapping around the rear chambers but the team was greatly relieved the ceiling had ceased moving.

Sara was concentrating on a one-by-one-metre square of earth bordering the south-west wall of Chamber 10 where Luc had discovered the flint blade. The upper layers were encrusted with modern guano, complicating her work since bat droppings were rich in the pollen she was seeking. Her goal for the first season was to find a guano-free layer and make a preliminary assessment of the types and frequency of pollen and spores. In an ordinary dig her remit as paleobotanist would have been to assess the flora and climate during the period of study. The paintings in the tenth chamber were a constant reminder that Ruac was far from ordinary.

About ten centimetres from the surface the earth turned from black to tan and the guano petered out. The transition zone was at the level where the bottom of Luc’s upright blade had rested before its removal.

The Chamber 10 group stood and watched as Pierre cheerfully scraped away the last of the black earth from the square metre. After a series of photos, they decided to go deeper.

Before proceeding, they changed into fresh suits, boots and masks and swapped out all their trowels, brushes and spatulas to avoid contaminating older levels with younger pollen. Sara climbed into the square to do the honours and began trowelling a section for sample collection. She had barely begun when she said ‘Oh wow!’ and stopped working.

Ferrer was bending over her back and started yammering in his hyper way, ‘Look, look, look!’

‘Is that flint?’ Pierre asked.

Morrison asked to step in and switch places with Sara. The six-and-a-half foot white-haired Scot folded himself into a crouch and whipped out his specimen brush. The object was smooth and yellowish but it was not stone. ‘Not my shop, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘Looks like bone. All yours, Carlos.’

Ferrer brushed away some more dirt and picked around the object with a dental tool. ‘No, no, it’s not bone. More champagne tonight. It’s ivory!’

After they’d carefully exposed the entire object, leaving it in place for photography, Pierre ran to fetch Luc who was working at the furthest point in Chamber 1.

‘What are you so excited about?’ Luc asked him.

Even though he was wearing his mask, Luc could tell by the crinkling around his eyes that Pierre had a huge, childlike smile on his face. ‘I’m in love, boss.’

‘With whom?’

‘It’s not a whom, it’s a what.’ Pierre was having fun with him.

‘All right, with what?’

‘The prettiest little ivory creature you’ve ever seen.’

When he got to Chamber 10, Luc gushed. ‘Well done! It’s a beautiful thing. It completes the picture. Now we can say that Ruac has everything, even portable art. I wish Zvi had seen it. It looks Aurignacian, just like our blade.’

It was a carved ivory bison about two centimetres in length, as polished and smooth as a river pebble. The animal could have been stood upright on its flat-bottomed feet. Its thick neck was holding its head high and proud. Both small carved horns were intact. The right eye hole was visible and its flank was inscribed by parallel lines, an attempt at depicting fur.

Sara said, ‘When we’ve got it plotted and photographed, I’ll take my first pollen sample right under it.’

‘How long until you know something?’ Luc asked.

‘I’ll start when I get back to the lab this afternoon. Tonight, hopefully, for something preliminary.’

‘Then it’s a date. I’ll see you in the lab tonight.’ He thought he heard Ferrer snort at him from under his mask but he couldn’t be certain.

The snort mutated into a shout of sorts and a rat-a-tat of Spanish. Sara called Luc back. Ferrer’s bone-finding eyes had spotted something all of them had missed. A few centimetres away from the ivory statuette was a speck of brown and Ferrer was on his hands and knees with a dental pick. ‘Jesus,’ he moaned. ‘I think we were kneeling on it.’

‘What is it?’ Luc demanded.

‘Wait, wait, let me work.’

It was a small thing, not tiny in the realm of the micro-fauna that Ferrer was accustomed to handling, but quite small, about half a centimetre in length, less than a quarter centimetre in width. Because of its size it didn’t take him long to expose the bone.

‘So?’ Luc asked, hovering over the square like an expectant father.

‘You’re going to have to get some better champagne, my friend. It’s a fingertip, a distal phalanx.’

‘What species?’ Luc asked, holding his breath.

‘It’s human! An infant’s fingertip! We struck gold!’

Sara collected her pollen samples and the rest of the team trowelled and picked away at the square of earth in search of more human bones. By quitting time they had come up empty but they’d already hit the jackpot. Human bones from the Upper Paleolithic were rare as hen’s teeth. The find was the talk of the camp and Ferrer passed the little bone around in its plastic specimen box like the relic of a saint. None of them were expert enough in hominid infant bones to assign a definitive age, let alone a genus and species. Outside academics would have to be consulted.

At nine that evening, Luc came around to the Portakabin and found Sara working at the lab bench. Odile was with her doing accounts at Jeremy and Pierre’s shared desk.

Odile had quickly found a niche for herself keeping the paperwork for the groceries and household supplies, pretty much the same job she did by day for her father. Her brother was spending less time at the camp, only an hour in the evenings, helping the chef chop vegetables and the like.

Sara and Odile were chatting in French and giggling like girls when Luc noisily entered, sagging the floor with his cowboy boots.

Odile piped down and quietly resumed her work. Sara let him know she was almost ready to examine specimens under the binocular microscope. She’d worked through dinner, wet-sieving the material and chemically preparing the samples with hydrofluoric acid to digest the silicate minerals.

He watched her slender fingers thin-prep the first glass slide, pipette a drop of glycerol and mount a cover slip.

She adjusted the light and started scanning under low power and declared with relief that it looked like ‘good stuff’. Under higher power she moved the slide back and forth and exhaled deeply. He hadn’t realised she’d been holding her breath. ‘You can’t make this up.’

‘What is it?’

Her voice was raspy with excitement. ‘There’s the usual background of ferns and conifers but I see three abundant and very-unique populations of pollen. Have a look.’

He focused the microscope up and down to get his bearings. He was no expert but he could tell there were three predominant species of microscopic hollow spheres. One looked like hairy rugby balls, another like flat car tyres and the third like four-celled embryos.

‘What are they?’ he asked.

She looked over at Odile who was working away, oblivious. Odile didn’t speak English but Sara signalled discretion with her eyes. ‘Let’s talk outside, okay?’

They excused themselves and walked towards the campfire which was pleasantly crackling and popping. ‘Okay,’ he insisted, ‘what?’

‘The pollen is from the three plants depicted in Chamber 10
and
the manuscript:
Ribes rubrum
, the redcurrant bush that Barthomieu called gooseberries,
Convolvulus arvensis
, bindweed, or possession weed as Barthomieu called it, and
Hordeum spontaneum
, wild barley grass. The concentrations are staggering!’

Luc chimed in with what he thought might be her next words. ‘This tells us that significant quantities of these three plants were carried into the cave! They
were
used for a purpose. We’ve never seen this kind of activity in the Upper Paleolithic!’

She was beaming. The orange glow of the fire lit half her face. He suddenly remembered how much he used to admire the sharpness of her jawline, the way it set off her long delicate neck. It wasn’t the usual erogenous zone but it triggered something and he kissed her on the lips before she could react. He was holding her shoulders and at first he thought he felt the stirrings of a reciprocal kiss but instead there were hands on his chest pushing him away.

She wasn’t smiling anymore. She scanned the camp for prying eyes. ‘Luc, you and I had our moment. You chose to end it, I got over you, and that’s that. I’m not going to do this again.’

He took a slow breath, tasting her lipstick. ‘I apologise. I wasn’t planning that. It’s the excitement, you know, and maybe more, but you’re right, we shouldn’t go there. You and Carlos seem to have hit it off anyway.’

That made her laugh. ‘You know how it is, Luc. The archaeology equivalent to a shipboard romance. Once you disembark, it’s over.’

‘I admit I know about this syndrome.’

She gave him a canny look and said she wanted to check more samples and write up her findings. As he watched her leave he cursed himself. He wasn’t sure if he was angry because he’d kissed her or because he hadn’t done more to explain himself, to try to make amends for past transgressions. Either way, he wasn’t feeling so good about himself, but he was feeling pretty damned good about Ruac.

And there it was again, his old problem of work and women. No third leg to balance the stool. Maybe he needed a hobby, he thought, but he shook his head when he tried out the laughable image of Luc Simard swinging a golf club.

He’d go find Hugo and have a drink by the fire.

Despite Luc’s stolen kiss, Sara kept her word and participated in Hugo’s double date. For the occasion, Hugo pulled out all the stops and went for the spectacular hill-top setting of Domme, an ancient fortified town, its ramparts still intact. Before dinner at L’Esplanade, the best restaurant in the area, the four of them walked the ramparts and took in sweeping dusk views of the Dordogne River valley.