The Tenth Chamber

THIRTY

Thursday Afternoon

Luc still had several hours until dinner with Isaak. He lay on the hotel bed, his computer, warm on his belly, ready to doze off and retreat to a sanctuary of oblivion. His email inbox was staring him in the face. He wavered in indecision whether to snap the laptop closed and let it be for now.

Instead, he clicked on the message from Margot.

He had to do it some time, why not now? Take the bitter with the sweet, have a glance at the last happy interlude in a life. The message line simply read: H UGO ’ S PHOTOS. He took a deep emotion-choked breath and clicked on the attachments.

A series of a dozen jpegs downloaded in a daisy-chain of embedded images.

He scrolled down and took each one in.

Shots of Luc, Sara and Odile, strolling through Domme.

Table shots inside the restaurant – Sara and Luc together, Hugo, with a cheesy grin, his arm slung around Odile, a hand resting casually on her bosom.

Then a group snap of the four of them, taken by the waiter, a selection of house desserts spread on the table. You could almost hear the laughter.

At the bottom of the scroll there was one more photo.

He stared at it. It didn’t fit – its presence made no sense.

He clicked to render it full screen.

What the hell?

It was an oil painting, on a yellow wall. A young man, of the Renaissance perhaps, seated and staring suspiciously at the artist. His face was long and effeminate, his hair flowing onto his shoulders. He had a black foppish hat, a white shirt with impossibly puffy sleeves and, most strikingly, his shoulder was draped with a rich fur coat from a spotted leopard.

What was this doing on Hugo’s mobile? Did someone use the camera after he was dead? Who would take a dead man’s mobile phone to a museum and use it to photograph a painting?

Wait! The time and date stamp!

The date of the photo time marked in crisp digital display: 11:53 p.m.

What was it the gendarme had told him at the crash scene?

‘He didn’t make it to the village. If he left your camp at eleven-thirty, the accident must have happened no later than eleven-forty.’

Luc was sitting on the edge of the bed now, raking his hand through his hair over and over, as if the static electricity would fire more synapses in his brain.

11:53 p.m.! Thirteen minutes after he was supposed to be dead, Hugo takes a picture of an oil painting?

Another conversation came back to him, flooding into his consciousness with startling clarity, a snippet that was accessible, that his mind must have tagged for future use.

At the welcome party for the excavation, the council president from Périgueux, Monsieur Tailifer, had been gushing over the local lore.

‘The Resistance struck the main railway line, near Ruac, and made off with a fortune, maybe two hundred million euros in today’s money, and some very famous paintings, let me add, including Raphael’s Portrait of a Young Man, all on their way to Goering personally. Some of the loot made it to de Gaulle and was put to good use, I’m sure, but a lot of that money and the art disappeared into thin air. The Raphael was never seen again.’

Luc was breathing heavily now, as if he’d just finished an anaerobic sprint and was air-hungry, repaying his oxygen debt.

He clicked on to Google Images and entered R APHAEL ’ S P ORTRAIT OF A Y OUNG M AN.

And there it was. The same painting, on a website devoted to looted art recovery.

The caption read: T HIS MASTERPIECE REMAINS MISSING.

Luc was a man who knew his way around museums and what’s more, he loved everything about them. In ordinary circumstances he would have savoured the experience of discovering a new museum, particularly one located in a charming nineteenth-century hotel perched on a pleasant knoll on the banks of the Marne.

He would have inhaled the mustiness of the exhibit halls and been captivated by the complexities of off-limits storage areas. The Museum of National Resistance in Champigny-sur-Marne, had a collection rather more recent than his usual haunts, but all museums shared a pleasing commonality.

However, this was not an ordinary moment in his life and he rushed through the entrance hardly noticing the environs.

At the ticket booth he breathlessly announced ‘Professor Simard for Monsieur Rouby,’ and paced while the attendant placed a call.

They had talked less than an hour earlier. Luc had reached the curator after a frenetic series of calls had shunted him from museum to museum, archive to archive, all over France. His request was quite specific, which helped, but he was getting nowhere until a sympathetic elderly woman in Corrèze, at the Museum of Resistance Henri Queuille, mentioned that thirty boxes of archival material pertaining to Luc’s topic of interest had been sent to Champigny-sur-Marne for cataloging and preservation.

And fortunately, Champigny-sur-Marne was a scant twelve kilometres from the centre of Paris.

Max Rouby was a charming sort of man, in many ways an older version of Hugo, and Luc had to shrug off the unsettling transference. The curator was more than happy to extend a professional courtesy, one museum man to another, and put his minuscule staff at Luc’s disposal. Luc was given a table in a private archives area and a homely young woman named Chantelle began to dolly in the pertinent cardboard boxes.

‘Okay,’ he said, ‘we’re looking for any documentation of a Resistance raid against a German train in the vicinity of Ruac in the Dordogne in the summer of 1944. It was carrying a lot of cash and maybe art. Is there an index?’

‘That’s why it was sent here but unfortunately we haven’t got to it yet. It won’t hurt for me to thumb through it today. It’ll make my job easier later on,’ she said helpfully.

They dove in. As they sorted through wartime memos, diaries, newspaper clippings, black-and-white photos and personal diaries, Chantelle told him what she knew about the lending museum.

Henri Queuille was an important post-war politician who had been active in the Resistance in the Corrèze area during the occupation. When he died, his family bequeathed his house to the State for the purpose of remembering and honouring the Resistance efforts in the region, and in 1982 both Mitterrand and Chirac attended the inauguration of the museum. The family archives served as the backbone but over the years the museum swelled with deposits and gifts from other local archives and family estates.

It was slow going. Luc was impressed at how meticulously the Resistance had documented their activities. Whether from pride or a military sense of discipline, some of the local operatives wrote voluminously about plans and results for, what turned out to be, posterity.

The first twenty boxes had no mention of the Ruac raid. Chantelle was going through box 21 and Luc was rifling box 22 when she announced, ‘This looks promising!’ and took the files over to Luc.

It was a notebook with the seal of a lycée général in Périgueux, dated 1991. It appeared an enterprising student had done a project on the war, interviewing a local man who had been a Resistance fighter. The man, a Claude Benestebe, who was in his late sixties at the time of the exchange, recounted a raid on a German train a mile from the station at Les Eyzies. From the very first page, it sounded like Luc’s incident. He began to page through Benestebe’s oral history while Chantelle took the lid off the next box.

I was barely seventeen years old in 1944, but very much a man I would say, very adventurous. In truth, the war saw to it I would never have a normal end to childhood. All the frivolous things that teenagers do today, well, I did none of them. No games, no parties. Yes, there was romance and even some flings, but it was in the context, you know, of a struggle for existence and liberty. The next day was never a certainty. If you didn’t pack it in during a mission, the boche could have plucked you out of a crowd to be taken a hostage and shot for this or that.

We didn’t really expect to survive the attack on the Banque de Paris train in June 1944. We knew it was an important raid. We had the information maybe two weeks in advance from a bank employee in Lyon that a lot of French cash and Nazi loot were going to be sent via rail from the main branch in Lyon to Bordeaux for transfer to Berlin. We had the word that the entire train, some six box cars, were chock full, so we had to be prepared to make off with all of it in case we succeeded. We were told that two box cars would contain nothing but objets d’art and paintings looted from Poland, bound for Goering personally, who wanted all the best pieces for himself.

Well, I can tell you that it was a big operation. The maquisard, as you know, were diverse, to use a polite description. Yes, there was central coordination, to some extent, by de Gaulle and his lot in Algiers, but the Resistance was very much a local affair where the maquis were making it up as they went along. And for sure, there was no love lost between one maquis band and another. Some of them were right-wing nationalists, some Communists, some anarchists, everything. My group which had the codename, Squad 46, operated out of Neuvic. We simply hated the boche. That was our philosophy. But for this train job, about half a dozen maquis bands worked together to pull it off. After all we needed a hundred men, many trucks, explosives, machine guns. The attack point was between Les Eyzies and Ruac, so we had to involve the Ruac maquis, Squad 70, I recall, even though no one trusted them. They cloaked themselves with a Resistance banner, but everyone knew they were in it for themselves. They were maybe the biggest thieves in France next to the Nazis. And they were vicious as they come. They didn’t just kill the boche. They tore them to pieces when they had the chance.

Usually there were big screw-ups and people got hurt or killed but the night of 26 July 1944 went like a dream. Maybe the boche were too clever by half, deciding that too much security would attract attention, but the train was lightly protected. At 7:38 precisely, we attacked from all sides, blew up the track and derailed the locomotive. The German troops were massacred quickly. I never had a chance to fire my own rifle, it was over so quickly. The Banque de Paris guards who were French employees, gave their pistols to our commander who fired off rounds and returned them so they could say they tried to fight us off. By 8:30, the train was unloaded. All of us formed a human chain up from the track to the road, passing money bags and crates of art to the trucks.

Only years later did I learn that in today’s money, that train had tens of millions of French francs. How much of it made its way to André Malraux and Charles de Gaulle? I don’t know, but it’s said that millions of francs and quite a bit of art never made it out of Ruac. Who knows what’s true. All I know is that it was a pretty good night for the Resistance and a pretty good night for me. I got good and drunk and had a high old time.

Luc looked through the rest of the file but there was nothing else of interest, nothing about the Raphael painting. But the discovery of a tangible link to Ruac gave him the enthusiasm to keep pressing on to the last box.

In the late afternoon, Chantelle left the research room to fetch two cups of coffee. The overhead fluorescents were now brighter than the light streaming through the windows. There were only two boxes left and when he was done, he’d get a taxi back to Paris and meet Isaak. Box 29 was largely filled with a photo archive, hundreds of glossy shots printed on the heavy paper of the day. He moved through them quickly, as if he was dealing cards at a poker game, and the moment the girl came back with coffee was the moment he saw the photo with the hand-written caption printed in black ink on the white border, G EN. DE G AULLE IN R UAC CONGRATULATING THE LOCAL MAQUISARD UNIT, 1949.

De Gaulle towered above the others. He was dressed in a dark business suit, squinting into the sun over the photographer’s shoulder. Behind him was the village café looking much the same as it did now. He was flanked by six people, five men and a woman and was shaking hands with the oldest man.

Luc’s eye was drawn immediately to the old man. And then another young man, and then the woman.

‘Coffee?’ Chantelle asked.

He couldn’t respond.

Because Chantelle disappeared.

And the room disappeared.

It was him and the photo. Nothing else.

The old man looked strikingly like the mayor, Bonnet. The young man looked like Jacques Bonnet. The woman looked like Odile Bonnet.

He stared some more, from face to face.

He shook his head in confusion. The resemblance was uncanny.

Paris was glowing in the twilight. From Luc’s taxi he hardly noticed the Eiffel Tower alight in the distance. With all the rush hour traffic, he had just enough time to get back to his hotel before Isaak came to pick him up but now he wished he hadn’t made the appointment.

He had thinking to do, facts to sort through, puzzle pieces to assemble. He didn’t need idle chit-chat. He’d be better off sitting in his room with a clear head and a clean sheet of paper. He’d be seeing Colonel Toucas the next day. He wanted to lay out a coherent theory, not ramble on like a nut. He wanted to be back home; if he hadn’t already missed the last train he would have preferred travelling tonight.

He ought to cancel.

He called Isaak.

‘What are you, telepathic?’ Isaak said. ‘I’m just working on a translation for you.’

‘You did it earlier. What do you mean?’ Luc asked.

‘The new one!’ Isaak exclaimed. ‘The Belgian guy’s been busy. He’s finished! Margo forwarded his email an hour ago. I wanted to have it ready for you by dinner.’

‘Look, about dinner. Do you mind if we postpone? I’ve got some urgent work.’

‘No problem. What about the translation?’

‘I’m stuck in traffic. Could you read it to me over the phone? Would you mind?’

‘Luc, whatever you want. Let’s do it now.’

‘Thank you. And Isaak, before you start, what was the last key word?’

‘That’s what got me excited. It’s one of those words that get a medievalist’s heart beating. It was TEMPLARS.’