The Tenth Chamber (8 page)

The café was dimly lit, six tables with plastic tablecloths, only one of them occupied. The owner was behind the bar. He had leathery skin, a full head of white hair and a salt and peppar flecked moustache. His gut was round and protruding. Two diners, a young man and an older woman stopped talking and stared as if a couple of spacemen had arrived.

‘Serving?’ Hugo asked.

The owner pointed to one of the tables and gruffly laid down two paper menus before retreating towards his kitchen, shuffling his heavy legs across the floorboards.

Luc called after the fellow about the location of the nearest gendarmerie. The owner slowly turned and answered with a question: ‘Why?’

‘Someone broke my car window.’

‘While you were driving?

‘No, I was parked.’

‘Where were you parked?’

In the face of this interrogation, Luc glanced incredulously at Hugo before blowing the guy off. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘Probably somewhere illegal,’ the old man mumbled under his breath loud enough for them to hear. Then, with more volume, ‘Sarlat. There’s a station in Sarlat.’

Hugo sniffed at the air. He knew that odour anywhere. His bread-and-butter aroma. ‘Was there a fire nearby?’ he asked the old man.

‘Fire? You smell something?’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s probably my clothes. I’m the local SPV chief. That’s what you smell.’

Hugo shrugged and began eyeing the pretty raven-haired woman at the corner table. She was no more than forty. There was a natural curl and bounciness to her hair and she had pouty lips and nice bare olive legs showing beneath a clingy dress. Her companion was younger by at least a decade, with the thick shoulders and ruddy complexion of a farmer, and since it was unlikely this was her boyfriend or husband, Luc guessed that Hugo would therefore be unimpeded from being Hugo.

True to form, Hugo said, ‘Nice day,’ in her direction with a grin and a nod.

She replied with a small facial gesture that, if it was a smile, lasted no longer than a second. To put the period on the sentence, her scowling companion purposely tapped her forearm and reengaged her in conversation.

‘Friendly place,’ Hugo said to Luc. ‘They’re having omelettes. So will I. Let the natives lead the way, I always say.’

Luc excused himself and came back in a few minutes to find that Hugo had ordered beers. ‘Was it clean?’ Hugo asked.

‘Not really.’ He laid his mobile phone on the table. ‘Here’s to us,’ Luc toasted with the beer Hugo had ordered.

They kept their voices low while they hungrily tucked into three-egg cheese omelettes and pommes frites.

‘You know I’ll have to drop everything,’ Luc said wistfully. ‘All my projects have to end. None of them will ever be finished.’

‘Well, that’s obvious,’ Hugo replied. ‘But you’re okay with that, no?’

‘Of course! I’m just feeling overwhelmed all of a sudden. You never prepare for something like this.’

‘I’m happy for you,’ Hugo said expansively with a touch of playful sarcasm. ‘You’ll be busy and famous, I’ll return to my grubby business life and only emerge from time to time to bask in your reflected glory. Please don’t forget your old friend down the line. Maybe you’ll name it, Pineau-Simard, or if you must, Simard-Pineau, and toss me a bone once in a blue moon when you’re on the chat shows.’

‘Don’t be so fast to disappear behind the curtain,’ Luc laughed. ‘You’ve got a job.’

‘Oh yes?’

‘The manuscript. You’re the manuscript guy, remember?’

‘Surely it’s of less importance now.’

‘Not at all,’ Luc insisted, whispering. ‘The manuscript is part of this. When it’s time to tell the story to the world, we’ll have to understand its role. There’s some kind of important historical context that can’t be ignored. The book must be decoded,’ he whispered.

‘I suppose I can make some enquiries,’ Hugo sighed.

‘To whom?’

‘Ever hear of the Voynich manuscript?’

Luc shook his head.

‘Well, to make a very long story a very short story, it’s a bizarre, possibly fifteenth-century manuscript that was acquired by a Polish rare-books dealer named Voynich in 1910 or thereabouts. It’s a fabulous thing, really, the craziest collection of fanciful illustrations of herbals, astronomical signs, biological processes, medicinal concoctions, even recipes, and it’s all written in a beautifully weird script and language that’s defied a century of deciphering efforts. Some think it was written by Roger Bacon or John Dee, both mathematical geniuses of their day who dabbled in alchemy circles, others think it’s a giant fifteenth- or sixteenth-century hoax. Anyway, I bring it up because, to this day, amateur and professional cryptographers have tried to break the code. I’ve met some of these people at seminars and conferences. They’re real characters with their own language. You should hear them go on about Beaufort ciphers and Zipf’s law and other crap, but I can contact one of the less loony ones and see if he’ll look at our book.’

‘Okay,’ Luc nodded. ‘Do it. But be very discreet.’

The couple at the other table got up to leave without any attempting to pay. The young man pushed through the door first. Following behind, the woman glanced over her shoulder, looked directly at Hugo, and repeated that fleeting almost-a-smile before the door closed and she was gone.

‘Did you see that?’ Hugo asked Luc. ‘Maybe the countryside isn’t so bad after all.’

Three men came in, two of them farm hands from the look, their hands dirty, shoes crusted with dirt. The third, an older man, was clean and well dressed in a suit without the tie. The café owner nodded to them from behind the bar and addressed the older man loudly by name. ‘Good day, Pelay. How are you?’

‘The same as I was at breakfast,’ he said gruffly, but while he was answering, he gawked unselfconsciously at Luc and Hugo.

The trio occupied a rear corner table, talking among themselves.

Luc felt distinctly uncomfortable. Since the café owner seemed to be communicating with the men behind them with his eyes, Luc felt as if he was in the children’s game, piggy in the middle. Every time Luc turned his head to look behind, the men glanced away and resumed their chat. Hugo seemed oblivious to the little drama, or perhaps, Luc, thought,
he
was being overly sensitive.

The owner called over their heads. ‘Hey, Pelay, do you want some bacon later?’

‘Only if it’s from Duval,’ the man answered. ‘I only eat bacon from Duval.’

‘Don’t worry, it’ll be from Duval.’

Luc noticed the owner flip the Open sign in the window to Closed.

He heard a chair sliding, wood on wood.

He had the vivid sense of hard stares on his back.

The owner started clattering glasses, arranging them noisily on a shelf.

Luc didn’t like the prickly way he was feeling and was about to turn to confront the imagined stares when he heard the squeal of brakes.

A blue and white gendarmerie van jerked to a stop behind his Land Rover and Luc gladly sprang to his feet. ‘I called them about my car,’ he told Hugo. ‘Come out when you’re done.’ He took the opportunity to glower at the men in the corner but they refused to meet his gaze.

The owner stepped around the bar and gruffly slapped down the bill. ‘I’m closing now anyway.’

Luc glanced at it contemptuously, threw some euros on the table and said to Hugo, ‘Don’t be so quick to change your mind about the countryside.’

Luc stared at the phone long and hard before lifting the handset and punching the number he had found on her web page.

It wasn’t easy making the call, in fact it was entirely out of character, but this was, after all, an extraordinary circumstance.

He needed the best people and in her field there was no one better. He simply refused to compromise.

He was in his office on the Bordeaux campus, watching a fast-moving Atlantic storm soak the quadrangle. The familiar, insistent UK dial-tone blared into his ear and then, just like that, he heard the soft roundness of her voice.

‘Hello, Sara?’

‘Luc?’

‘Yes, it’s me.’

There was silence on the line, prompting him to ask if she was still there.

‘I’m here. I’m just trying to decide whether to hang up on you.’

It had been two years since they first met.

She’d spent that summer in Paris working on her book, A
Palynological Perspective of the Magdalenian to Mesolithic Transition
, which hadn’t been destined for the bestseller lists, but would further cement her growing credentials.

He was at Les Eyzies, doing survey work and opening the first tranche of what would become a multi-year campaign.

They’d been an ‘item’ as she called it, for two years. He’d heard her lecturing in her bad French at a Pleistocene conference at the University of Paris and afterwards he had sidled up to her at the drinks reception. Later, she would tell friends she saw him coming, smoothly manoeuvring through the assembly like an assassin, and hoped the darkly handsome guy was heading her way. He disarmed her with effusive compliments about her work in perfect American English. They had dinner that night. Dinner the next night too.

She’d told her friends, even told her mother back in California, that she’d fallen; she’d drunk the Kool-Aid and gone back for more. That they spoke the same language professionally was nice though hardly the basis for her attraction. She knew his reputation but beyond that, there was something wild and untamable about him which she took as a challenge. He was almost ten years older than her and she wanted to believe he’d sown enough wild oats to be able to settle into something resembling monogamy. She poured energy into the relationship like a boiler-operator on an old coal-fired steamer, shovelling, constantly shovelling. He’d announced so many times in his taunting way that this was the longest affair of his life that she was sick of hearing it. She bridged the geographic gap between her position in Paris and his in Bordeaux by living on the train. She’d been expecting an invitation to join him on his dig that summer but it never materialised and she heard through the rumour-mill about a special friendship with a comely Hungarian geologist on his team.

So, out of mounting concern over the paucity of texts and calls, she hired a car and one Friday afternoon, arrived unannounced at his dig. Judging from the strained expression of pleasure on his face at seeing her, and the sidelong glances from the Hungarian who, regrettably for Sara, was a real stunner, the rumours were true. Her visit only lasted until early the next day. Sometime around three in the morning she angrily broke it off, spent the rest of the night at the furthest edges of his bed and let him sleep when she slipped away at dawn. Within months she had accepted a faculty appointment at the Institute of Archaeology in London and there she completely faded from his life.

‘Please don’t hang up. This is important.’

She sounded concerned. ‘Are you all right?’

‘No, no, I’m fine, but I need to talk to you about something. Are you in front of a computer?’

‘Yes.’

‘Can I send you some material to look at while I hold the line?’

She hesitated then gave him her email address.

He heard her breathing into the mouthpiece as he attached some files and sent them on the way. ‘Got it?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Open photo 93 first.’

He waited, staring at his copy of the picture, still mesmerised by it, and tried to imagine her at the moment of download. Two years wasn’t such a long time. She couldn’t have changed much. He was glad he finally had an excuse to call.

She sounded startled, as if someone had dropped a stack of china behind her back. ‘God! Where’s this from?’

‘The Périgord. What do you think?’

It was a picture of the dense herd of small bison with the bird man in their midst.

‘It’s magnificent. Is it new?’

He enjoyed the excitement in her voice. ‘Very new.’

‘You found it?’

‘Yes, I’m happy to say.’

‘Does anyone know about it yet?’

‘You’re among the first.’

‘Why me?’

‘Open Number 211 and 215 next.’

They were taken in the last of the ten chambers, the Hall of the Plants, as Luc had come to call it.

‘Are these for real?’ she asked. ‘Was this photoshopped?’

‘Unmanipulated, unretouched, au naturel,’ he replied.

She was quiet for a moment then said in a hushed voice, ‘I’ve never seen anything like it.’

‘Didn’t think you had. Oh, and one more thing. I found an Aurignacian blade in direct association with the paintings.’

‘Oh, boy . . .’ she whispered.

‘So, I need a plant expert. Want to come and play?’

Gatinois sat rigidly at his antique chinoiserie desk keeping his ankles, knees and hips fixed at ninety degree angles. He never slouched, not even at home or at his club. It was the way he was brought up, one of the social artefacts of a merchant family vaguely clinging to its aristocratic heritage. At the office, the sight of his erect posture contributed to his carefully cultivated image of imperiousness.

He had in his hand a dossier entitled: ‘Proposal to Mount a Major Excavation at Ruac Cave, Dordogne, by Prof. Luc Simard, University of Bordeaux’. He had read it, sedulously, poring over the photos and absorbing the implications unfiltered by static from his staff.

After nine long years running Unit 70, this was his first bona fide crisis and it was stirring up mixed emotions. On one hand, it was a disaster, of course. The Unit’s sixty-five-year mission was threatened. If a major security breach occurred, there’d be hell to pay. His head would certainly roll, but not only his. Could the Minister of Defence survive? The President?

But the fear of bad outcomes was tempered by the perfumed whiff of opportunity. Finally, he would be front-and-centre in the Minister’s mind. His instincts were telling him to stir the pot. Get his superiors agitated, keep things hot. Then, if he was ultimately successful in keeping the lid on Unit 70, he’d surely be recognised.