The Tenth Chamber

THIRTY-SIX

Bonnet led Luc by the hand. He had no need for weapons or protection. Luc was shuffling like an automaton, distant, eyes searching, passive and compliant.

‘There you go,’ Bonnet coaxed, as if addressing a dog. ‘This way, follow me, good lad.’

Bonnet headed down a corridor off the main chamber. He opened a door.

It was one person’s idea of a fantasy.

The windowless room was lined in heavy apple-red and gold matelassé fabric, giving it the appearance of an Arabian harem. The only light came from two standing lamps in the corners glowing with low-wattage bulbs. Gauzy peach-coloured fabric billowed from the ceiling, covering the plaster. A large bed took up much of the floor, its box springs lying on a rug, the bedspread orange and satiny. Shiny red pillows everywhere.

In the middle of the bed, Odile was naked and slowly writhing like a snake looking for a place to bask in the sun. She was creamy and voluptuous, a good, tight body, her pubic hair as black as her long tresses.

‘Here, Odile,’ her father said proudly. ‘I’ve got him ready for you. Stay with him as long as you like, have him as many times as you can. I’ll be back to check.’

She appeared too dreamy to understand, but when her eyes found Luc she began touching herself and moaning.

Bonnet pushed Luc forwards. ‘Okay, do a nice job. Have some fun then bon voyage. Enjoy the Ruac tea, Professor.’

With that, he shoved both of Luc’s shoulder blades hard and sent him flopping onto the bed.

Odile reached for him, grabbing at his clothes, popping the buttons off his shirt with uninhibited force, working on his jeans.

Bonnet watched for a few moments, laughed heartily and left. He checked his wristwatch and went back to the main chamber to change the record on the phonograph, sit and watch the carnal nakedness of the couples who chose the basic comfort of rugs on the floor.

In about an hour he’d finish off Luc and Sara and lay them out for Duval to reward his pigs in the morning. Where was that old codger? Bonnet searched the floor, looking for a particularly wrinkled, skinny nakedness. He wasn’t there. Probably went into one of the private rooms. And where was Bonnet’s wife? He scanned for a big pink rump with long grey hair down to her keister. ‘Don’t tell me she went off with Duval!’ he said to himself, laughing. ‘That old man’s a scoundrel!’ Then he spotted the wife of the village baker, a redhead a hundred years younger than himself who looked a bit like Marlene Dietrich in her prime.

She was astride one of the men, a farmer by trade, who’d done the botched car job in Cambridge then kidnapped Sara. He was a hard man Bonnet trusted for hard jobs. He’d killed more Germans during both world wars than any man from Ruac. Now, his eyes were closed and his teeth gritted. Her breasts were bouncing up and down to the beat of the musette drums.

‘Hey, Helene,’ Bonnet shouted to the redhead over the music. ‘Later on. You and me! I’ll find you.’

Odile was alternatively clawing at Luc, stroking him, moving her hands over the broad expanse of his back down to his waist, trying to wriggle off his tight jeans.

Her eyes were glassy, her lips moving as if talking, but nothing was coming out. Then a word formed, and another, ‘ Cheri, cheri.’

Luc’s eyes snapped open.

He looked around the room then took her head in his large hands and said, ‘I’m not your cheri, and I’m not going to screw a great-grandmother.’

He tried to shake her off but she grabbed him tighter, her nails digging into his back.

‘I’ve never done this before,’ he said angrily.

He scowled and slammed his fist into her jaw.

Thankfully, she went limp immediately so he didn’t have to pummel her to unconsciousness.

He lifted himself off the bed and rearranged his clothes, watching the naked woman quietly breathing. ‘You look pretty good for one hundred and sixteen,’ he said. ‘I’ll give you that.’

He fished inside his pockets for his mobile and as expected, it was gone.

He twisted the door knob open. Bonnet had thought his daughter was enough of a honey pot to keep him in an unlocked room, Luc figured.

The corridor was empty, the music wafting from the large hall.

His head was perfectly clear. It was clear when he drank the tea. It was clear twenty minutes later. It was clear now.

He’d put on an act. He’d faked being zoned. He watched Sara and the villagers and did his best imitation. Bonnet had been fooled, that’s all that mattered.

Why wasn’t he affected?

No hallucinations, no other-worldliness, no nothing. Just a headache.

Sara was convinced he’d be immune? How did she know?

Sara.

He had to find her. The thought of Jacques pawing her body made him sick with rage.

He started twisting door knobs.

One after another, the same thing: old, overweight people having it on, oblivious to his intrusion. It was beyond unappetising.

After he tried all the private rooms off that corridor, he crept to the main hall. Bonnet was sitting in a chair on the opposite side of the room, resting drowsily. There was no sign of Pelay. There was enough floor-squirming going on between him and Bonnet to make him think he could slink low and make it to the next corridor.

He dropped down, frog-walked along the wall.

He was level with the tea-service table. The Ruac Manuscript was so close.

He didn’t even think. He just acted, dropping to his belly, starting to crawl.

He was swimming in a sea of naked bodies who were oblivious to his presence. He gritted his teeth and kept going.

He looked over for Bonnet.

He wasn’t in his chair.

Christ, Luc thought. Christ.

In one more second he was under the table.

He reached up and felt his hand close around it.

Sara, I’m coming.

He quickly wriggled back to the wall. Bonnet was nowhere to be seen so he boldly rose and sprinted to the next hallway, shoving the manuscript into his shirt.

He opened the first door he came to.

An old couple sweaty and panting.

Then, the second door.

On the bed, was a man with a hairy back and unbuttoned trousers. Jacques was awkwardly trying to peel them off with his free hand. The only part of Sara he could see, hidden underneath the beast, was tan silky hair, cascading onto the pillow.

There was a standing lamp, a heavy iron affair.

He felt a kind of murderous rage he’d never felt before.

It made him grab the lamp, snapping the plug from the wall.

It made him swing it like a pick axe, bringing the base crashing down onto the man’s thoracic spine.

And when Jacques arched his back in pain, raising his head off Sara’s chest and baying like a wounded dog, it made him swing the base of the lamp hard into his skull, crushing it like a walnut, and driving his body halfway off the bed.

Sara was moaning. He held her naked against him and told her she was going to be all right. Her eyes wouldn’t focus. He kept speaking to her, whispering into her ear which felt cold against his lips. And finally he heard a tiny, breathy, ‘Luc.’

There wasn’t time to try to dress her. He pushed Jacques’ corpse off the bed and wrapped her in the blood-splattered bedspread. He was about to lift her when he had a thought. He dug into Jacques’ pockets. The hard edge of Jacques’ mobile felt wonderful against his fingertips. He glanced at it.

No bars. Of course. They were underground.

He pocketed the phone, bundled Sara up and carried her in his arms, pushing the door open with his knee.

The corridor was empty.

He started to run with her, away from the music.

He felt strong and she felt light.

The hallway was darker the further he got from the main hall. He strained to see what was ahead.

Stairs.

Bonnet checked his watch again, lifted his heavy hips out of the chair and plodded back to Odile’s room to see how she was getting on with her paramour.

It had been four years since the birth of a new child in Ruac. They needed to pick up the pace if they wanted to sustain themselves. Odile was too picky for his liking. A women as attractive as her should be pumping out babies like a machine.

But she’d been pregnant only three times in her long life. Once during the First World War, where she lost the baby to a miscarriage. Again, right after the Second World War, a boy sired by a Resistance fighter from Rouen, who’d died of an infant fever. And again in the early sixties to a Parisian lad back-packing through the Périgord, a one-night stand.

This time a girl was born. She grew up young and pretty and carried the hopes of Bonnet and the entire village on her little shoulders. But she died in a freak accident down in the basements. She had been climbing on the old German crates, trying to scramble to the top of the box mountain, when one of the crates toppled and crushed the life out of her.

Odile had sunk into a depression and despite her father’s pleadings, lost interest in the pursuit of men from the outside.

Until the archaeologists came to town.

The only bright spot in a nightmare as far as Bonnet was concerned.

Bonnet opened her door, expecting to see two beautiful people making love, but she was alone, snoring, with a puffy jaw.

‘Jesus Christ!’ he exclaimed.

There wasn’t any need to search the room. There was no place to hide.

He rushed out and ran as fast as his arthritic hips could carry him towards Jacques’ room.

There he found a profoundly worse scene. His son, bashed, bloody and most certainly dead, Sara gone.

‘My God, my God, my God!’ he muttered.

Something had gone terribly wrong.

Where was Simard?

‘Pelay!’ he screamed. ‘Pelay!’

Luc carried Sara up the dark stairs. At the top there was an unlocked door.

They were in a kitchen, an ordinary cottage kitchen.

He carried her through into a hall and a sitting room, dark and unoccupied, the layout similar to Odile’s house. He placed Sara onto a couch and adjusted the sheet to cover her properly.

He parted the curtains.

It was the main street of Ruac.

Isaak’s car was parked across the street in front of Odile’s house.

All the houses were connected. The underground hall was, as he suspected, an excavation under the road.

He quickly checked Jacques’ phone. There was a good signal. He punched up the recent call list.

Father – mobile.

Good, he thought, but no time now.

The keys to Isaak’s car were long gone.

He had a quick rummage; he tried to be as quiet as he could, assuming the occupant of the house was somewhere underground, but he couldn’t be sure of that.

In the hall he found two useful items; a set of car keys and an old single-barrelled shotgun. He broke the gun open. There was a shell in the barrel and a few more rounds in a pouch.

Bonnet waddled through the underground complex, screaming for Pelay. In the clutches of the tea, none of the other men would be functional for a good hour or more. The fate of his village was riding on him.

I’m the mayor, he thought.

So be it.

Then he found Pelay in one of the corridors, slipping out of one of the rooms.

‘Where the hell were you?’ Bonnet screamed.

‘Checking. Watching. Keeping the peace,’ Pelay answered. ‘Like I’m supposed to be doing. What’s the matter?’

Bonnet yelled for Pelay to follow him then told him what had happened through breathless gasps as the two old men began to run.

Bonnet found the light switch for the corridor.

Nothing.

At the next corridor he again switched on the lights.

He pointed. ‘There!’

There was a streak of red marking the floor where Sara’s bloody bedsheet had dragged. The corridor led to the baker’s house. He drew his pistol and both men made for the stairs.

Luc awkwardly bundled Sara into the cramped back seat of the baker’s Peugeot 206 parked in front of the cottage. The car had obligingly chirped and given itself up when Luc pressed the unlock button from inside the sitting room.

He started it, put it in gear and sped off.

In his rear-view mirror he saw Bonnet and Pelay emerging from the baker’s front door. He heard a shot ring out. He shoved the Peugeot into second and floored it.

Bonnet ran back to his café to get his own car keys.

They had to be stopped.

They had to be killed.

He screamed these mandates at Pelay.

Luc was talking fast and loud and pushing the little Peugeot to its limits on the dark empty country road. He was brow-beating a low-level emergency services operator to push his call higher. He needed to speak to Colonel Toucas in Périgueux.

The colonel had to be wakened!

He was Professor Simard from Bordeaux, goddamn it!

He had the Ruac Abbey murderers in sight!

Bonnet had his keys in hand and was about to shut the café door when his mobile rang.

Luc was shouting at him. ‘It’s over, Bonnet. It’s done. The gendarmes are on the way to Ruac. You’re finished.’

Bonnet’s rage spouted like lava. ‘You think it’s done? You think it’s done? It’s done when I say it’s done! Go to hell and say goodbye to your goddamned cave! Come on, try to stop me! Come on! Try!’

Bonnet’s car was at the kerb in front of the café. He folded himself into the driver’s seat and Pelay climbed in beside him as fast as an old man could.

‘My rifle is in the boot,’ Bonnet said.

‘I’m still a good shot,’ Pelay grunted.

Bonnet pulled the car over to the side of the road at a point he knew, closest to the cliffs. Pelay retrieved the rifle and gave it a perfunctory check. It was an M1 carbine with a sniper scope, liberated from a dead US soldier in 1944. Pelay had been there. He remembered the day. He and Bonnet also took the young man’s wallet and boots. It was a good gun that they’d used to kill a lot of boche. Bonnet kept it clean and oiled.

The two men ran into the woods, the branches whipping their faces.

After a while, they separated.

Bonnet made straight for the cliffs. Pelay took an oblique path through the dark.

Luc drove to the dirt road leading to the parking area above the cave. He didn’t want to run the car all the way. Whatever happened, Sara had to be safe, so he parked a quarter mile away and leaned over the seat.

She was gradually coming out of it.

‘I’m leaving you here, Sara. You’ll be safe. I’ve got to save the cave. Do you understand?’

She opened her eyes, nodded, and drifted off again.

He wasn’t at all sure she did understand but it didn’t matter. Hopefully he’d be around to explain it to her later.

Bonnet could hear his feet pounding and rustling on the forest floor and the wheezy bellows sound his heaving chest was making. There was a clearing ahead, the gravel parking area which the archaeologists had laid down. He was close.

The big oak tree was across the gravel lot, the landmark he’d chosen, and he was glad he’d picked an easy one to spot in the dark.

The gravel sprayed under his heavy fire brigade boots.

Luc wished he had a torch to light his way. It was pitch black but he kept to the lane. It was a chore running with the shotgun. Sara had felt lighter in his arms.

Ahead was a band of grey, the horizon over the cliffs.

Something was silhouetted in the grey, moving.

Bonnet.

Bonnet was at the base of the tree. A metre away from the trunk was the pile of rocks which he and Jacques had piled up to mark the spot.

Bonnet fell to his knees and began to remove and scatter the rocks. The leather case was just below the ground in a shallow hole.

He slowly lifted the case out, careful not to disturb the copper wires that ran to its terminals. It was a Waffen-SS M39 detonator, liberated from a division of combat engineers in 1943. It was pristine and efficient-looking, a heavy brick of cast alloy and bakelite. Bonnet was confident it would work perfectly.

It had been a tough job but he was confident his old demo men had done it properly, auguring into the cliffs in a half-dozen spots, stuffing picratol, lots of it, deep into the ground. A huge swathe of the cliffs would crumble into the river taking the cave with it.

The cave that had brought his village to life and threatened it with death would be dust. If Pelay did his job, Simard would be dust. He’d find Sara and she’d be dust.

He cranked the wooden handle and heard it ratcheting. When he couldn’t turn it anymore he would put his thick thumb on the knob that said ZÜNDEN: ignite.

He heard the footsteps first then, ‘Stop!’

Luc was ten metres away, creeping forward on the gravel. He saw Bonnet hunched over something, doing something.

Luc lifted the shotgun to his shoulder.

Bonnet looked up and grunted a simple, ‘Go to hell!’

Luc could hear the sound of ratcheting.

The ratcheting stopped and Bonnet moved his hand.

At that moment, Luc’s head completely filled Pelay’s sniper scope, perfectly contrasted against the grey horizon.

Pelay was in low brush, on one knee. His hands were steady for a man of his age. Luc’s head was in sharp focus.

Luc screamed at Bonnet, ‘Not my cave!’

Pelay heard the shout and through the scope saw Luc’s lips moving. The cross-hairs were planted on his temple.

The trigger was digging into his forefinger. He began to squeeze it.

Luc reeled when he heard the shot from behind.

He expected to feel some kind of searing pain but there was nothing.

He turned back to Bonnet. The old man was only five metres away now.

Bonnet looked into Luc’s shotgun. He shouted, ‘Pelay! Hurry!’ His thumb was on a knob.

Luc shouted. But it wasn’t a word. It was a primitive roar, a primeval death cry that came from somewhere inside of him.

The shell from his shotgun exploded and flashed the darkness.

There was a thwacking. Wood, stone, flesh. It was bird shot.

Luc slowly moved forward, straining to see what he had wrought.

Bonnet was lying on his side, bleeding from his face, his eyes still searching. His right thumb was on the ignition button. His left hand was moving. It was grasping the copper wire that had been sheared off the detonator by shotgun pellets.

Bonnet was going to touch the wire to the terminal.

It was a centimetre away.

Luc didn’t have time to reload. He didn’t have time to smash Bonnet’s head or arm with the butt of the gun.

He was out of time.

Then, another shot rang out.