Murder in Lascaux (31 page)

Marianne made a batch of the classic batter, with just vanilla for flavoring, and told us her secret, which was to use yeast granules, not baking powder, as leavening. Then she gave each pair of us a way to distinguish our batch. Roz and I were shown how to make the version from Domme. The others, making flat, square waffles, made theirs unique by adding tasty ingredients: coconut shavings in David and Lily's, cinnamon and cloves in Patrick and Dotty's. Marianne joined Toby to lace a batch with lemon zest and vodka (they call it “eau de vie” in France). When dozens of
gaufres
were piled on platters, we sat at the long kitchen table, served ourselves liberally, and treated our
gaufres
to the finishing touches. As Marianne explained, it's customary to serve them with a choice of confectioners' sugar, jam, or raspberry sauce. All options were on the table (literally). With all this sweetness, everyone's mood soared. There was laughter and silliness, including some combative blowing of confectioners' sugar between Dotty and Toby.

As we left the room, I was happy to see Dotty giving Roz a mischievous smile. She'd just had a very good time, so she could feel benevolent toward her stick-in-the-mud sister-in-law.

With this family spat momentarily at rest, my mind drifted back to the more serious family drama recounted in Jenny Marie's hidden notebook. On the way to our room, Toby and I stopped again in the corridor in front of the portrait of the Nazi archaeologist. (That's how I now thought of him, and with that identity tag, he looked even more menacing than before. Had Jenny Marie captured a gleam of fanaticism in his eyes, or was that just my imagination?) I was considering how to treat the information Toby and I had discovered. While I had an obligation to my hosts, I also had an obligation to the truth. Would I be able to tell Jenny Marie's story without offending her family?

B
ack in our room, we had time for a short rest before the afternoon's excursion to Rouffignac. Almost as soon as I stretched out on the crisply made bed, I dropped off to sleep, with Toby by my side. A half-hour later, he ear-nibbled me awake.

“Time to get ready to leave.”

It felt as if I had slept for hours. “I don't want to go.”

“You'll regret it if you stay behind,” Toby assured me. “Who knows if we'll be back this way again?”

“But to go into another cave after what we've just gone through?” I frowned petulantly and rolled over to go back to sleep.

“They're waiting for us,” said Toby, with another ear-nibble.

“I'm sleeping,” I whined.

“It's one of the few painted caves left that are still open to the public,” said Toby, poking me on the clavicle. “It's art.”

I guess that did it (the art, not the poke), and after more half-hearted foot dragging, I agreed to go.

Lily, on the other hand, stayed home. As we waited for Fernando's van, David made her apologies to the group, which weren't necessary for Toby and me. We understood all too well why she would blanch at the idea of entering another cave. At one-fifteen, Fernando pulled up with unnecessary speed, scattering pebbles and punishing the brakes. Today he had one of his sullen looks. No one greeted him as we climbed in and took our seats.

“This should be fun,” Dotty said to Patrick. “And look here.” She turned to Roz and me. “I picked up these cute berets at the dance last night. There's one for each of us girls for the cave. They say it gets chilly in there. I have one for Lily too, but I'll save it for her. Go ahead, try them on.” We did. I guessed this was Dotty's way of trying to smooth things over with Roz, so I played along. Toby said I looked chic. After posing a bit for fun, I took mine off and put it in my tote for later.

Traffic at this hour was light. We drove through St. Cyprien to the tiny village of Campagne, followed the bend in the Vézère River to Les Eyzies, passed below the town's dramatic cliffs, and headed to Rouffignac along a rural road.

David was reading from his guidebook. “Did you know,” he announced, “that Rouffignac was the site of one of the worst Nazi massacres during the war? The Germans burned the village to the ground in reprisal for a raid launched by the Resistance. March 1944. The only building left standing was the church. The whole town was rebuilt after the war, so there's not much to see in the town itself.” We were solemn for a few moments as the van skirted the town.

“What does your book say about the cave?” Patrick asked David.

“Well, it says it's enormous. ‘The galleries and chambers extend for more than eight kilometers,'” David read. “That would be, like, five miles. That's why they built a narrow-gauge track for an electric train to take visitors through it. It's too far to walk in the dark. Plus the train cuts down on dust and pollution.”

“How far does the train go in?” asked Dotty.

“About four kilometers, it says here,” replied David. “You see paintings and engravings of a variety of animals, mostly mammoths. They call it the Cave of a Hundred Mammoths.”

“Neat,” said Dotty, sounding like a little kid.

We came to an isolated farm, followed a sign directing us to the cave, and pulled up at the side of the road in front of a gaping entrance. Metal chairs were arranged so visitors could wait outside until the train was ready. A few steps inside led to a huge antechamber that had been developed to hold tour groups. A ticket booth, a souvenir stand, and a variety of educational displays were spaced throughout the chamber.

We wandered around, looking at the exhibits. Roz stayed outside, sitting on one of the metal chairs, sunning herself while waiting for our tour to depart. Fernando strolled around inside, looking at the displays. Normally he remained with the van while we were making our visits. It was odd seeing him mingle with us.

After about fifteen minutes, our tour group was called, and we filed through a metal security door leading into the cave. Immediately there was a temperature drop, but the air felt dry rather than damp. Dotty, Roz, and I donned our berets anyhow, more in the spirit of playfulness than for warmth. The mini electric train was waiting for us. It looked like a row of toy wagons, the sort that might take tourists around a fair-ground. The cars were open, with banquettes for seats and iron handrails in front of each row. When full to capacity, each car could seat perhaps a dozen people if everyone squeezed tight. However, as this was the first tour after lunch, the cave wasn't crowded. Toby and I had a bench to ourselves, and there were even a few empty rows here and there. Besides our cooking companions, the other passengers were French, and among them were excited children, abuzz with chatter.

The little train had four connected wagons with small platforms at each end for an engineer, who doubled as the tour leader. Our guide looked college-aged; he was probably a student earning summer money. “I should warn you that much of today's journey will be in the dark, to protect the paintings,” he announced, swinging into his seat and putting the train into gear.

The wagons started rolling with a mild jolt, like a subway train pulling out of a station. That impression was reinforced by the low tunnellike ceiling of the passage we now entered and by the screeching of the wheels. The train's headlamp threw a cone of light ahead of us, but otherwise all was dark. As the little train picked up speed, the screeching grew louder, and the walls flickered in front of us in the headlight's gleam.

Our first stop must have been several hundred meters from the entrance. The guide switched on a low-intensity wall light to reveal four mammoths and two bison, but the drawings were indistinct. We continued on our way again, rattling in the dark, until we paused to examine a bear burrow, illuminated this time by the guide's flashlight. There were a number of these round hollows throughout the cave, he told us. The giant bears, which were three times larger than their modern equivalents, had dug their nests out of the cave's soft walls so they could hibernate.

After swerving gently to the right, we passed a cul-de-sac containing the drawings of two more mammoths and a rhinoceros. A short distance beyond was another mammoth, engraved on the wall by a Cro-Magnon artist who had used a pointed rock. The beast's eye was a natural bump on the wall that must have inspired the artist to draw the rest of the body, and it could be seen only by oblique light. The guide used his flashlight to make the point, and then we set out again. The train rocked and clattered deeper into the cavern.

Afterward, I was able to retrace the stages of our journey with the aid of a diagram of the cave. The train tracks in Rouffignac are laid out in the shape of a
Y
, with the bottom stem of the
Y
at the entrance. We were now about a half-mile from the entrance, where the tracks fork to the right and to the left, along the two upper branches of the
Y
. At the end of each branch is a gallery. When we reached the junction, we took the fork to the right, leading to a small gallery. But to visit the main gallery, which is at the end of the other branch of the
Y
, our train would have to reverse, back out again to clear the junction, and then take the branch to the left.

In the gallery at the end of the right branch we saw a frieze of seven mammoths. The images were all painted in outline, using manganese. (The animals of Rouffignac come only in black.) Now we were ready to reverse our tracks—quite literally. The guide hopped off his seat at the front end of the train and walked to the other end, got on again and set the train in reverse, using the rear engine.

As we backed up toward the junction, the bright beam from the headlight of an oncoming train suddenly lit up the tunnel, blinding us when we turned our heads to look. “Don't worry,” said our guide, “we do this all the time. Just wait.” By signal, the train coming toward us stopped to give us room to back up beyond the junction. We did so, and for a moment the two stopped trains stood facing each other on the same track, casting dueling headlight beams at their passengers. Our guide hopped down again from his perch, walked to the forward end of our train, retook his former seat, and steered us onto the left-hand fork, while opening the way for the oncoming train to fork to the right, along the track where we had just backed up.

As the two trains branched off in separate directions, I caught a glimpse of the second train's driver—it was Marc Gounot. With one hand on the throttle and the other waving at us, he was smiling broadly, as if he fully expected our trains to meet. Dotty saw him too, and waved excitedly. In the half-light, her smile looked conspiratorial. She must have told Marc about our group's visit to Rouffignac while they were dancing at Domme and learned he'd be working here today, since neither of them seemed surprised by the encounter.

“How about that?” said Toby in my ear. “What's he doing here?”

Our train screeched and jostled along in the dark again until it reached the terminus of the left branch of the track, where we found ourselves in a domed chamber, softly lit and wide enough for the track to loop around for the return ride. This was Rouffignac's most famous gallery, the hall of the Great Ceiling, covered with dozens of images of animals. The guide invited us to dismount and examine the ceiling more closely.

I strained to make out some of the outlines. Children were pointing out animals to their parents; it seemed easier for them to spot forms than it was for the adults. As I stared up intently, the images gradually resolved from a mass of lines into individual creatures. But the figures overlapped each other in a confusing way. Horned mountain goats were drawn right over mammoths, with no attempt to keep the animals distinct.

Dotty latched onto us when people in the group began moving around to get a better look.

“How old did he say these paintings were?” she asked.

“Oh, between sixteen and twenty thousand years old, I think,” answered Toby. “They're not exactly sure.”

“Really! How could they last that long?”

“Well,” I volunteered, “there's no weather down here to erode the walls, and the cave was sealed off from the outside for most of that time.”

Ignoring me, she kept talking to Toby. “Which is your favorite? I like that mammoth with the big curved tusks. And that little goat over there with horns.”

“I think that's an ibex,” said Toby.

“Is that some kind of goat?”

“It is,” replied Toby. “I don't know if they're still around or extinct.”

“They still have them in the Pyrenees,” I offered. Could have kept it to myself.

“They're cute,” said Dotty, addressing Toby. “The mammoths are extinct for sure, aren't they?”

“For sure,” I observed dryly.

“What about that rhinoceros? I thought they only lived in Africa.”

“Back then they lived in Europe too, until they died off,” explained Toby patiently. “They had wooly coats and were different from the ones that live in Africa.”

“Interesting,” said Dotty.

Toby nodded. She fell silent for a moment. “It's mysterious, down here, isn't it? This is my favorite of everything I've seen so far on the trip.”

With Dotty attached, we continued to amble around the chamber, heads craned up at the ceiling, until it was time for the return journey. On the ride in, Toby and I had occupied a bench in the last wagon on the train, and without giving it any thought, we headed to reclaim our seats. But Dotty beat me to it. Beaming girlishly, she squeezed in beside Toby in the next-to-last row. He shrugged, feigning helplessness, and so did I. She's hoping to make Marc jealous if our trains cross paths again, I thought.

The rows directly in front and in back of them were empty. I hadn't paid attention to where our other friends were sitting, but remembering my promise to keep Roz company, I looked for her beret. I couldn't locate her. By then the train was about to start, so I hopped onto the seat in front of Toby and Dotty. Later I tried to remember the person who had climbed onto the last bench in the car behind them just as our train pulled out. It was a man—at least I thought it was a man—wearing a cap with the brim pulled down, the lower part of his face wrapped in a scarf. He was dressed in that drab blue work outfit you see on farmers and store-keepers all over the country. I didn't recognize him, nor could I recall him being part of our group when the tour began.