The Night Gate

Chapter Twelve

Bauer sat back in his chair, removing his eyes from the painful concentration of light that his desk lamp threw upon the diaries. All the various pains he felt seemed fused into one general ache. Bruised and battered, and enormously fatigued, the escape offered by sleep was seductive. But, still, his excitement at what he had just read banished any thoughts of calling it a night.

He leaned forward again, and selected the final diary, effectively fast-forwarding through four years of war. The entries now were much briefer, and felt hurried. Wolff’s careful, considered handwriting had become slapdash and erratic. There was the sense of uncertainty, of a turn in the tide of events. The final entry pre-dated the D-Day invasion in June, and was an abrupt end to his journal. Bauer imagined that this was when he had returned to Germany on leave and left the diaries in the safekeeping of his lover, Bauer’s grandmother, Lisbeth.

But before then, by the spring of 1944, it seemed he had tracked down the Mona Lisa to a château in south-west France, where it appeared to be in the safekeeping of a young woman called Georgette Pignal. In an increasingly irregular hand, Wolff wrote that he had heard that this woman had been specifically tasked by de Gaulle with keeping the painting safe, and out of the hands of the Nazis. He also suspected that she was somehow in league with his nemesis, Lange. Why he believed this was not clear, but Bauer imagined that the answer must lie in earlier entries.

Although it seemed that she was living a short distance from the château itself, in a village called Carennac, Wolff reported that she was spending her nights at the château.

That his grandfather’s journal ended here, so abruptly and without conclusion, was infuriating. Bauer felt frustration welling up from deep inside him. But there was nothing, and no one, for him to lash out at, no focus for the venting of his vexation. He dropped the diary on to the desktop and wakened his laptop with a sweep of his fingers on the trackpad. He opened his browser and brought up a Google search page. His bruised fingers had stiffened up, and it was only with difficulty that he typed Carennac into the search window.

His screen immediately filled with links to tourist sites describing the village as the epitome of provincial France in the Dordogne valley, with its medieval stone houses and Romanesque church. Several sites referred to it as one of the most beautiful villages in France. Images revealed steeply pitched red-tiled roofs with towers and turrets rising over honeyed stone. The Wikipedia entry listed its permanent population as 408.

Bauer sighed. This seemed like a waste of time. He was about to give up when a link to an article in a local newspaper well down the page caught his eye. The newspaper was La Dépêche du Midi, and the article which had appeared on an inside page just three days earlier, was headlined ‘MACABRE DÉCOUVERTE SOUS UN ARBRE MORT: UN CADAVRE DATANT DE LA DERNIÈRE GUERRE’. Bauer selected and copied it, and entered it into Google Translate. MACABRE DISCOVERY UNDER A DEAD TREE: A CORPSE FROM THE LAST WAR, appeared in the translation window. Which excited his interest sufficiently for him to have the entire article translated.

A dead tree, brought down during a storm in the village of Carennac, has revealed the remains of a body buried in a park sometime during the last war.

Metal and leather artefacts recovered with the bones have led experts to believe that this was the corpse of a German air force officer. A bullet hole in the cranium appears to have been the cause of death.

All the remains, from what seems to have been a hastily dug and shallow grave, have been collected and sent to Paris for analysis by a forensic archaeologist.

Three brief paragraphs that sent all the hairs rising on the back of Bauer’s neck, and his mind doing circuits around the room. The pounding of his heart actually felt painful. Was it possible that these were the remains of Karlheinz Wolff? A German air force officer, they thought. Missing in action, was how Lisbeth had reported the last words she’d had of her lover in France. Bauer knew from his diaries that he had been there. Had someone shot him in the head and then buried him in haste? Just a stone’s throw away from the château where the Mona Lisa was being kept. But who, and why?

Bauer held his face in his hands and breathed deeply for several long minutes. But it was what he read next, about the occupant of the house adjoining the park, that had him reaching for the first of the diaries. His fatigue banished. Pain retreating to the very edge of consciousness. He would refill his glass. Again. And again. However many times it took to see him through the reading of his grandfather’s diaries from first page to last.