A metallic clunk made him look up. The bartender’s lip was curled.
Was he smiling?
When Pascal’s blond head started spraying blood, Édouard only had time to say, ‘Oh!’ before a bullet ripped through his brain too.
The café smelled of gunpowder.
There was a long silence until the man with the hunting rifle finally said, ‘What shall we do with them?’
The bartender started issuing orders. ‘Take them to Duval’s farm. Chop them up and feed them to the pigs. When it gets dark, take a horse and drag that machine of theirs far away.’
‘So there is a cave,’ one old man said quietly.
‘Did you ever doubt it?’ the bartender hissed. ‘I always knew it would be found one day.’
He could spit now without soiling his own floor. Édouard was lying at his feet.
A gob of phlegm landed on the man’s bloody cheek.
ONE
It began with a spark from a mouse-chewed electrical wire deep within a thick plaster wall.
The spark caught a chestnut beam and set it smouldering. When the old dry wood broke out in full combustion the north wall of the church kitchen started spewing smoke.
If this had happened during the day, the cook or one of the nuns, or even Abbot Menaud himself, stopping for a glass of hot lemon water, would have sounded the alarm or at least grabbed the fire extinguisher under the sink, but it happened at night.
The abbey library shared a common wall with the kitchen. With a single exception, the library did not house a particularly grand or valuable collection, but it was a part of the tangible history of the place, just as much as the tombs in the crypt or the markers in the cemetery.
Alongside five centuries of standard ecclesiastical texts and Bibles were chronicles of more secular and mundane aspects of abbey life: births, deaths, census records, medical and herbal books, trading accounts, even recipes for ale and certain cheeses. The one valuable text was a thirteenth-century edition of the Rule of St Benedict, the so-called Dijon version, one of the first translations from the Latin to Old French. For a rural Cistercian abbey in the heart of the Périgord, an early French copy of their patron saint’s tome was special indeed, and the book had pride of place in the centre of the bookcase that stood against the burning wall.
The library was a generously sized room with tall leaded windows and a grouted stone floor of squares and rectangles which was far from level. The central reading table required shims to prevent it from wobbling and monks and nuns who pulled up to the table had to avoid shifting their weight lest they bother their neighbours with clopping chair legs.
The bookcases which lined the walls and touched the ceiling were centuries old, walnut, chocolatey in colour and polished with time. Billows of smoke poured over the top of the cases on the afflicted wall. Had it not been for Brother Marcel’s enlarged prostate the outcome that night might have been different. In the brothers’ dormitory, across the courtyard from the library, the elderly monk awoke for one of his usual nocturnal visits to the water closet and smelled smoke. He arthritically shuffled up and down the halls shouting ‘Fire!’ and before all that long, the SPV, the volunteer fire brigade, was rumbling up the gravel drive to the Trappist Abbey of Ruac in their venerable Renault pumper.
The brigade served a coterie of Périgord Noir communes along the River Vézère. The chief of the brigade, Bonnet, was from Ruac and he knew the abbey well enough. He was the proprietor of a café by day, older than the others on his crew, with the imperious air and ample gut of a small-business owner and a high-ranking officer of the SPV. At the entrance to the library wing he blew past Abbot Menaud who looked like a frightened penguin in his hastily donned white robe and black scapular, flapping his short arms and muttering in guttural spasms of alarm: ‘Hurry! Hurry! The library!’
The chief surveyed the smoke-filled room and ordered his crew to set the hoses and drag them inside.
‘You’re not going to use your hoses!’ the abbot pleaded. ‘The books!’
‘And how do you suggest we fight this fire, Father?’ the chief replied. ‘With prayer?’ Bonnet then shouted to his lieutenant, a garage mechanic with wine on his breath, ‘The fire’s in that wall. Pull that bookcase down!’
‘Please!’ the abbot implored. ‘Be gentle with my books.’ Then, in