The Tenth Chamber (9 page)

Finally, a plum senior staff position at the Ministry was within his grasp.

He ran his finger over the clear acrylic cover of the dossier. Was this was his path to heaven, or hell?

Marolles came as summoned, standing at attention, his moustache twitching, waiting to be recognised.

Gatinois motioned for him to sit.

‘I’ve read it. Cover to cover,’ the general said evenly.

‘Yes, sir. It’s certainly a problem.’

‘A problem? It’s a disaster!’

The small man nodded solemnly. ‘Yes, sir.’

‘Tell me, in the history of this unit, has anyone ever been inside that cave?’

‘No, no. I’ve checked the archives and Chabon queried Pelay. It’s been sealed since 1899. Certainly,
we’ve
always let sleeping dogs lie. And, to the best of our knowledge, no one from the outside has rediscovered it.’

‘Until now,’ Gatinois added coldly.

‘Yes, until now.’

‘What do we know about Luc Simard?’

‘Well, he’s a professor of archaeology at Bordeaux—’

‘Marolles, I’ve read his biography. What do we
know
about him? His personality. His motivations.’

‘We’re working up a profile. I’ll have it to you within the week.’

‘And what can we do to stop this before it starts?’ Gatinois asked with a calmness that seemed to surprise the colonel.

Marolles took a deep breath and delivered an unfavourable assessment. ‘I’m afraid the project has already attained a positive momentum within the Ministry of Culture. It will undoubtedly be approved and funded, I’m sorry to report.’

‘Who’s your source?’

‘Ah, one bright spot in a dark sky,’ Marolles said hopefully. ‘My wife’s cousin works in the relevant department. He’s an unctuous fellow named Abenheim. He’s always poodling up to me at family gatherings, making sly references to his belief I work in clandestine services. I’ve tried to avoid him.’

‘Until now, perhaps?’

‘Exactly.’

Gatinois leaned forward and lowered his voice conspiratorially, as if someone else were in the room. ‘Use this man. Suggest to him that someone within the DGSE is interested in Simard and his work. Imply something negative but say nothing specific. Tell him to keep you informed of everything, to insinuate himself into the project as much as possible. Tell him if he does well that certain people within the state apparatus will be grateful. Keep it on that kind of level.’

‘I understand, sir.’

Gatinois leaned back, straightening his back to its usual position. ‘At the end of the day, you know, Bonnet will probably sort this out. He’s a ruthless bastard. Perhaps all we’ll need to do is sit back and watch the carnage.’

Luc had bypassed the usual channels and had gone straight for the top. The stakes were too high. If feathers were ruffled at his own university and with regional bureaucrats at the Department of Dordogne, then so be it.

The cave had to be protected.

He used the full weight of his academic position and his friendship with an important senator from Lyon to secure an immediate face-to-face meeting at the Palais-Royal with the Minister of Culture and her top antiquities deputies including the Director of the National Centre of Prehistory, a respected archaeologist named Maurice Barbier, who fortunately maintained a cordial relationship with Luc. The participation of Barbier’s Deputy Director, Marc Abenheim, was less fortunate. Luc had butted heads with Abenheim for years, and the two men had a mutual dislike for one another.

Working from a lavishly illustrated dossier replete with his photos, Luc requested an emergency protection order, an accelerated permitting process, and a sufficient allocation of ministry funds to secure the cave and begin its excavation.

Heeding advice from his senator friend, he glossed over the enigmatic Ruac manuscript to keep the high-level assembly focused on one issue at a time. And taking further advice, he liberally used the term, ‘Spectacular New National Monument’.

The importance of having another Lascaux and Chauvet from the perspective of international prestige and local economic development wasn’t lost on the group. Maurice Barbier was moved to a state of excitement that appeared to border on illness. Red-faced and nearly trembling, he declared that an emergency order would have to be immediately drawn up designating the cave a Historic Monument. A commission would be established to determine correct procedures and methodologies and to select the leadership of the excavation campaign.

At this, Abenheim, who had been silently scowling during Luc’s presentation, piped up and began to make the case for direct Ministry involvement, the implication being that he ought to head such a commission and personally take charge of the excavation of this new cave. Luc simmered at the unctuous performance. Abenheim was of Luc’s generation, a couple of years older, certainly as well credentialed in academic archaeology but, unlike Luc, he was not a field man. Luc viewed him as an autocratic bureaucrat, more like a pale, scrawny accountant than an archaeologist. Luc loved shovels and picks and the sun on his back. Abenheim, he imagined, had an abiding affinity to telephones and spreadsheets and fluorescent-lit government offices. Abenheim, for his part, undoubtedly saw Luc as a glory-seeking swashbuckler.

Barbier deftly deferred any discussion of leadership and urged the group to consider for now only the larger issues at hand.

The Minister took charge and crisply gave her assent to the protection order and the granting of emergency funds. She instructed Barbier to forward his recommendations on a commission and asked to be kept informed of all developments. And with that, the meeting was over.

Luc left the room whistling cheerfully through the marble corridors of power. Outside in the sunshine, he yanked off his necktie, tucked it into his pocket and went to meet Hugo near the Louvre for a celebratory dinner.

For a bureaucracy as Byzantine as the Ministry of Culture, the follow-through was executed at breakneck speed. Luc breathed easier when Barbier informed him two weeks later that the newly formed Ruac Cave Commission had designated Luc as the director of the excavation, with only a single dissenting vote. ‘You don’t have to guess who that was,’ Barbier joked, but urged Luc to try to keep Abenheim well informed and happy, if only to make Barbier’s life easier.

Then Barbier added in a tone panged with jealousy, ‘You’ll be made a Knight of Arts and Letters, you know. It’s only a matter of time.’

Luc replied sardonically, ‘If I have to wear a suit and tie for that, I’m not so keen.’

Within a week a military-style operation was loosed upon the Vézère valley. A detachment from the French Engineers Corps backed up by the local gendarmerie accompanied Luc to the Ruac cliffs where a massive bank-grade titanium gate was bolted into the rock face over the mouth of the cave. Power cables were dropped from the top of the cliff, closed-circuit cameras were installed, a prefab guard hut and Portaloos were placed in the woods above the site and sturdy aluminium cliff ladders with railings were hung over the edge providing easier access than trekking along the ledges.

When the convoy noisily rumbled through Ruac, Luc could see faces suspiciously peeking through lace curtains. Outside the café, the white-haired owner halted his sweeping, leaned on his broom and scowled into Luc’s slow-moving Land Rover with an irritable flicker of recognition. Luc resisted the boyish impulse to shoot the old man the finger but he did, as he would later regret, lay down a wickedly obvious wink.

After the cave was shuttered and padlocked, Luc had his first restful sleep since the night of discovery. He’d been sick with worry over the threat of leaked information, vandalism and looting. That was behind him now.

The work could begin.

Yet, it was well into the autumn before a full-scale campaign could begin. One couldn’t just snap one’s fingers. There was a team to assemble, schedules to clear, equipment to sort out, accounts to establish, accommodations to arrange.

That last task, as mundane as it was, proved difficult. Luc was determined to find local accommodations, preferably in Ruac. Nothing frustrated him more than losing valuable time commuting to a dig. He was advised to contact the Mayor of Ruac, a Monsieur Bonnet, to see if there were houses that might be rented. Failing that, permission to set up caravans and tents in a farmer’s field with some access to water would suffice. He wasn’t against roughing it. In fact, camping improved the camaraderie in these kinds of enterprises. The lack of creature comforts usually begat a useful sort of bonding.

It was, to say the least, unpleasant to learn at the last possible moment that the mayor and the white-haired owner of the café were one and the same.

Bonnet pointedly sat Luc down at the identical plastic-clad table as before and wordlessly listened to his pleas with his meaty arms tightly folded as if he was keeping his guts from spilling out.

Luc employed every rhetorical arrow in his quiver: the mayor would be helping his café, his town, his country. His diggers would be good and respectful neighbours. He’d arrange for a personal tour of this marvellous new cave; if there was a Madame Mayor, she could most definitely come too. Surely, the mayor must be curious what all the fuss was about? Surely. As Luc doggedly pressed ahead with his one-sided conversation the mayor’s unshaven jaw remained fixed.

Luc wished he could have taken that wink back.

When he was done, Bonnet shook his head and spat out, ‘We like our peace and quiet in Ruac. No one here is interested in your precious cave. We’re not interested in your studies. We don’t want tourists. There’s no place for you to stay, monsieur.’ With that, he got up and left for the kitchen.

‘That went well,’ Luc muttered to himself on his way out the door.

A couple of dull-looking teenagers held their ground on the pavement, forcing Luc to step off into the road. They sniggered over his forced detour.

He was in the mood for a dustup, and had a fleeting vision of beating the daylights out of them. But he held his tongue and his temper and angrily climbed into his Land Rover. At least his window hadn’t been smashed again, he thought bitterly, as the village disappeared in his rearview mirror.

Thankfully, Abbot Menaud came to the rescue. There was a level, well-drained field on abbey grounds located behind the old stables, tucked enough out of the way that the monks and the archaeologists would hardly notice each other. He wanted no compensation, although he added a humble request to visit the cave when it wasn’t terribly inconvenient.

On a windy Sunday in October, the Ruac Cave team began arriving one by one at the abbey campsite. Luc had been there for a week with two of his graduate students, Pierre, a Parisian originally from Sierra Leone, and Jeremy, a Brit with a broad Manchester accent. They made an unlikely pair, Pierre, black as onyx, tall and athletic and Jeremy, colourless and puny, but they shared a schoolboy sense of humour and were grateful to be involved in something historic. They worked tirelessly setting up the camp and preparing a good welcome for the team.

Caravans were dispersed in a giant circle, like an Old-West wagon train protecting itself from attack. Each senior team member would have his or her own caravan, junior members would double-up and grad students would triple-up. Undergrads would have to make do with tents on the periphery. The caravans had reasonably comfortable bunks and the deluxe ones had small sitting areas with built-in desks. There was no electricity but each unit had a couple of mantle lamps. It was all very well thought-out and properly hierarchical.

But in the spirit of egalitarianism, Luc insisted on having the same-sized unit as his deputies. He carefully considered where to put Sara. Too close would send one message, too far away, another. He opted to assign her a caravan two away from his.

In the centre of the circle they erected a kitchen shed and pantry and beside it they raised a large canvas ridge tent with picnic tables for group meals in inclement weather. The final structure was a Portakabin building containing the excavation office and laboratory, complete with a generator to run the computers and a satellite dish for Internet. Near it, they dug a large fire pit for the obligatory evening campfires and ringed it with wine-crate seating.

One section of the dilapidated barn was assigned to male portable latrines. Another section was for the women. Two sets of cold-water showers were rigged, the best they could do under the circumstances.

That was it – for better or worse, this was going to be their village, but Luc was quite sure that once the team laid eyes on the cave, no one would be grousing about living conditions.

On the dawn of the day, Luc admitted to himself he was nervous about Sara’s arrival. As a rule, he thought more about work than emotions. So, what was making him jittery? He had legions of ex-girlfriends. When he reconnected with old flames by happenstance or design it was usually all very lighthearted. But that morning, sitting at his desk, drinking his coffee, he felt a gnawing hollowness. Their ‘item’ years seemed far-away and washed-out like an over-exposed photo. He remembered certain things clearly enough, mostly about the way she looked, even the way she smelled, but forgot others, mostly about the way he had felt.

Always a slave to punctuality, she was among the first to arrive, and when Pierre knocked on Luc’s door to let him know Sara Mallory was there, he felt a quivering in his belly, schoolboy nerves.

She looked small and light and lovely.

She was apprehensive too, and frosty. He could tell by the way her peach-glossed lips were pressed together in a forced smile. He greeted her and pecked both cheeks in an official manner, as if they had never been intimate. Her skin was fine, almost translucent, showing the pink blush of capillaries under the surface. Before he backed away he got a whiff of her hair. No chemical fragrance; the scent was hers alone and he remembered the way he used to enjoy pulling out the clip and letting her light-brown hair spill over her chest where he nuzzled its tan silkiness against her breasts.