The Tenth Chamber

THIRTEEN

‘That’s it?’ Luc exclaimed.

Hugo had stopped translating. He closed the email attachment and turned his palms upward in a gesture of apologetic futility. ‘That’s all he’s decoded so far.’

Luc impatiently stamped his foot, shaking the portable building. ‘So they made a tea from these plants. Then what?’

‘Hopefully, our Belgian friend will have more for us soon. I’ll send an encouraging message. I’d hate for him to get distracted by something like a Star Trek convention and lose interest.’

‘There was a skeleton, Hugo, and artefacts! But now, no surface finds in the tenth chamber or anywhere else. What a loss!’

Hugo shrugged. ‘Well, they probably did what they said they were going to do. They gave the pre-Christian cave man a Christian burial!’

‘It’s like finding an Egyptian tomb cleaned out by grave robbers. An in situ skeleton from the period would have been of immense value.’

‘They left the paintings for you, don’t forget that.’

Luc started for the door. ‘Send an email to your friend and get him to hurry up with the rest of the manuscript. I’m going to talk to Sara about the plants.’

‘If I were you, I’d do more than talk.’

‘Oh for God’s sake, Hugo. Grow up.’

Sara’s caravan was dark but Luc still rapped on the door. There was a muffled ‘Who is it?’

‘It’s Luc. I’ve got some important news.’

After a few moments, the Spaniard Ferrer opened the door, shirtless, and cheerfully said, ‘She’ll be right with you, Luc. Want a drink?’

Sara lit a mantle lamp and appeared at the doorway, flushed with embarrassment like a caught-out teenager. Her blouse was one buttonhole off and when she noticed it, all she could do was roll her eyes at herself.

Ferrer gave her a peck on the cheek and took off, remarking without a touch of bitterness that business came first.

Luc asked if she’d be more comfortable if they talked outside but she invited him in and lit the lamp in the sitting area. Its hissing sound broke the silence. ‘Seems like a nice fellow,’ he finally said.

‘Carlos? Very nice.’

‘Did you know him before Ruac?’

She frowned. ‘Luc, why is it I’m feeling like I’m being interrogated by my father? This is a little awkward, wouldn’t you say?’

‘Not for me. I’m sorry it’s awkward for you. That wasn’t my intention.’

‘I’m sure.’ She sipped from a bottle of water. ‘What did you want to talk about?’

‘Our plants. I think they were put to specific use.’

She leaned forward, unwittingly exposing glistening cleavage. ‘Go on,’ she said, and as he repeated the story gleaned from Barthomieu’s manuscript she obsessively twirled strands of hair over and over, tightly enough to make her finger blanch. It was a nervous habit he’d forgotten until just now. During their final night together she’d done it a lot.

He wasn’t sure if it was his presence that was causing her stress or Barthomieu’s story. Either way, when he was done and they had both made eager comments about the work that lay ahead, he told her to take it easy and get a good night’s rest.

From her quizzical expression, he suspected his tone carried more admonishment than advice.

The second day of the excavation quickly unspooled and knotted up like a tangled fishing line.

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.

Odile was taking it all in like a tourist and asked a stranger to take a picture of them with her mobile phone. The wind was playing with her short, filmy dress, a summer frock even though it was a chilly autumn evening. She looked dark and sultry, like a latter-day matinée star. Hugo paid close attention to the wind gusts and was rewarded with glances of her thighs and higher. But when he did, he noticed large blotches of black-and-blue, fresh bruises that looked painful and angry.

Luc was in a polite gentlemanly mode, engaging Sara in neutral thoughts about the remnants of the town’s original thirteenth-century architecture. Later, when Hugo button-holed Luc to mention Odile’s bruises, Luc shrugged and informed his friend that it was clearly not their business.

The dinner itself was lavish and Hugo splashed out for some expensive bottles. Everyone drank liberally, except Luc who gladly accepted the role of designated driver and the discipline that went along with it. After all, until the excavation ended in a week’s time, he was Sara’s boss, and bosses had a certain responsibility of behaviour.

Hugo had no such duty. He and Odile sat next to each other, watching the sunset from their valley-facing table. They ogled each other, made suggestive jokes and touched each other’s arms whenever they laughed. Sara joined in the jollity as best she could, but Luc could sense an invisible barrier, a negative energy field of his own creation.

Hugo was telling a bad joke he’d heard him tell before and Luc’s mind drifted instead to a crazy thought: if he could go back in time just once, where would he go? To that night with Sara at Les Eyzies two years ago or to Ruac thirty thousand years ago? The decision was tolled by the arrival of the entrées.

Odile didn’t seem to be the kind of woman who liked to talk about herself but she responded perfectly well to a man like Hugo who placed himself at the centre of every anecdote and story. She laughed at his jokes and asked leading questions to nudge him along. Hugo was thoroughly enjoying himself and wanted a record of the evening so he snapped photos with his mobile phone and passed it across the table to Sara to take shots of him mugging with his date.

It was only when Hugo stopped talking long enough to chew his beef, that Sara could jump in with a question for Odile. ‘So I’m curious. What’s it like living in a small village?’

Odile squeezed her lips into an ‘it is what it is’ gesture and said, ‘Well, it’s all I know. I’ve been to Paris before so I know what’s out there, but I don’t even have a passport. I live in a cottage three doors away from the house I was born in – upstairs in my father’s café. I’m growing in Ruac like one of your plants. If you pull me out by the roots, I’ll probably die.’

Hugo finished swallowing in time to say, ‘Maybe you need some fertiliser.’

Odile laughed and touched him again. ‘There’s enough manure in Ruac. Maybe just some water and sunlight.’

Sara wondered, ‘It must be hard meeting new people in a tiny village.’

Odile wiggled the fingers of her left hand. ‘See, no ring. You’re right. That’s why I wanted to work for you. Not to get married! To meet new people.’

‘What’s your impression so far,’ Luc asked.

‘You’re all so smart! It’s a stimulating environment.’

‘For me, also,’ Hugo said, refilling her wine glass with a smile that bordered on a leer.

On the drive back, Sara was quiet but the two tipsy ones in the back seat were chatting non-stop. In the rear-view mirror Luc spotted a kiss here, a grope there. When they got close to the abbey, he heard Hugo whispering, pleading to come over.

‘No,’ Odile whispered back.

‘What about tomorrow?’

‘No!’

‘Why, do you live with someone?’

‘No.’

‘Oh, come on.’

‘I’m old-fashioned. Date me some more.’

Hugo sat on his bunk, watching Luc strip down to his briefs then brush his teeth.

Hugo remained dressed. ‘Aren’t you going to bed?’ Luc asked.

‘I’ve got to see her,’ Hugo moaned.

‘Oh for God’s sake!’

‘Did you see those legs?’

‘This is like university redux. You used to go on like this all the time.’

‘So did you.’

‘I outgrew it.’

‘Did you?’

Hugo got up and fumbled around for his car keys.

‘Look, you had a lot to drink,’ Luc admonished.

‘I’m okay. I’ll go slow and I’ll keep my window open. Fresh air’s my friend. Are you my friend?’ His speech was too slurred for comfort.

‘Yes, Hugo, I’m your friend. I should drive you.’

‘No, believe me, I’m fine. You’ve got a dig to run.’

They went back and forth a few times until Luc finally acquiesced and said, ‘Be careful.’

‘I will. Don’t wait up for me.’

By the time Hugo got to the village he was sober enough to question his own sanity. All he knew was she lived ‘three doors down’ from the café. But which direction and on what side of the street?

If this was going to be an exercise in chance involving knocking on doors, the probability of looking like a fool was fairly high. Sorry to wake you, Madame, do you know where the mayor’s daughter lives? I’m here to screw her.

The main street was empty, not a soul in sight, not surprising since it was almost midnight. He slowly drove towards the café, counting doors. Three doors down on the same side, the cottage was dark. There was a large motorcycle by the door. Scratch that one, he thought. Probably.

He counted off three doors on the other side of the café. That cottage had lights burning on both floors. He stopped to have a better look. What was it she’d said about having an orchard? She’d made the comment at the peak of his inebriation, before dessert. And what kind of orchard – apple, cherry, pear? At this time of year without fruit how would he know? With his assemblage of city skills, he could hardly tell a bush from a tree. He parked on the side of the road and crept along the side of the cottage to get a look at the back garden. The moon was his friend. It was full and provided enough light to see at least a dozen trees laid out in rows.

It certainly looked like an orchard and that gave him hope.

The door was blue, the small cottage lemony sandstone. He knocked lightly and waited.

Then he knocked harder.

The curtains were drawn on the ground-floor windows. One set of curtains in the sitting room was parted just enough to see inside but there was no sign of her or anyone else.

He took a few steps back to look at the upstairs bedroom window. The curtains were back-lit. He picked a few small pebbles from the flower bed and tossed them against the window like a teenage boy trying not to wake the parents.

Again, nothing.

The rational thing to do was get back in his car and drive off; he wasn’t even positive this was the right house. But a wave of Parisian temerity swept him back to the door. He tried the knob.

It turned fully and the door unlatched.

‘Hello?’ he called out hopefully. ‘Odile? It’s Hugo!’

He entered and looked around. The sitting room was neat and pretty, like you’d expect from a single woman.

‘Hello?’ he called again.

He glanced into the kitchen. It was small and immaculate, no dishes in the sink. He was about to go in for a better look when he noticed mail on the hall table, an electricity bill on top. Odile Bonnet. He felt better.

‘Hello, Odile?’

He stood at the base of the stairs and hesitated. Only rapists ascended to a woman’s bedroom unannounced and uninvited.

‘It’s me, Hugo! Are you there?’

There were muffled bars of music. He was sure of it. He followed the sound to the kitchen.

Then he saw it right away, over the kitchen table, big as life.

‘Jesus Christ!’ he gasped, splaying his arms involuntarily. ‘Jesus Christ!’

He looked around to make sure he was still alone and yanked out his mobile phone to hastily shoot a picture.

The music was louder. He thought he ought to turn around and leave, look at the snapshot in the morning and think things through with the sober light of day, but against his better judgement he followed the melody.

There was a door by the pantry. When he opened it, there were stairs leading to a cellar. The music was louder still, guitars, an accordion, a thumping drum – musette music, not his favourite. There was a naked dirty bulb lighting the stairway.

He walked halfway down when the light went off and he was in darkness.

‘Odile?’