The Caves of Périgord: A Novel

were first deploying by train, just outside the village of la Farde, about fifteen kilometers north of Périgueux, just after the track crossed the small river Beauronne. The usual reprisals were inflicted, and the unit intelligence report claimed that they were a Communist band led by an American Red Indian and a mysterious Englishman—that would seem to point to your father, Captain Manners. There is a cross-reference to Gestapo records, which have not survived for this region in the archives. But I think that means the information was obtained by torture.”
    “Two dead, four wounded, one truck destroyed and one armored car damaged. Not much of an ambush,” said Manners, skimming the casualty report.
    “That was because the Brehmer Division had not yet taken formally under command some battalions of auxiliary troops, Russian refugees. They report only their own casualties from the armored car unit. There’s an appendix on the auxiliary casualties—forty-two dead and over a hundred wounded. It was quite an ambush, and the Red Indians, as the Brehmer Division called them, then became the unit’s top priority. The unit intelligence officer was a Hauptmann Karl-Heinz Geissler, a former panzer officer who had been badly wounded in the Kursk salient in the summer of 1943, and after convalescence, was transferred to antipartisan duties. That’s where he joined Brehmer. He was obviously a clever man and kept good records. He was killed in the Battle of the Bulge.
    “The really interesting reference comes on the sweep operation the Brehmer unit staged after Geissler brought some brains to bear on the problem. He backtracked over all the most recent guerrilla actions and arrested and interrogated a large number of villagers from le Buisson, where there had been a demolition of the railroads and a couple of associated ambushes. They found three villagers with relatives who had joined the local Maquis. Geissler, using the routine developed on the Eastern Front, systematically arrested all the other family members, starting with those who lived on farms, on the assumption that they would be providing food to the Resistance. One from each family was shot in front of the others, and the survivors were then questioned in the usual vicious way. As a result, one arms dump and a Maquis camp were found on the plateau of Audrix, near a well-known cave called the Gouffre de Proumeyssac.”
    “I know it well,” said Clothilde. “But it’s a tourist cave with stalagmites and stalactites—no art at all.”
    “But this arms dump was found in another cave, which the intelligence report says was marked on no known maps. It goes on: ‘The arms cache was booby-trapped, but surveillance reported no subsequent guerrilla action in this district.’” Horst looked up. “That’s one place to start looking. There are a couple more. First, apparently there are catacombs under Belvès that link it to some older caves.”
    “No, I know them quite well,” said Clothilde. “They grew mushrooms there. Well searched, and no cave art.”
    “O.K., what about Rouffignac? Geissler says the Red Indians put up ‘a fierce resistance’when they sent a column to search the cave there. They found a base camp, some food supplies, but no arms dump. Geissler had the cave searched, and kept a couple of companies there for a week, just looking.”
    “We’ve thought of Rouffignac. We’ll look again, but it has been well searched.”
    “All right. I saved the best for last. You know Perony’s famous site at la Ferrassie, where he found the burials?”
    “Yes, I know it well. I worked on Delporte’s subsequent dig there in 1973, when we found the skeleton of the two-year-old. But that’s not a cave, it’s an overhang. And it was Mousterian period, maybe as much as fifteen thousand years before Lascaux.”
    “In the hills above it in May 1944, on a flat plateau near a small village called Cumont, the Brehmer Division managed to interrupt a parachute drop. They captured a couple of farm carts and the parachutes and some containers and a lot of British guns, and under interrogation, one of the captured carters said he knew they were taking the guns to a secret place near la Ferrassie. An Englishman was in charge of the operation. That’s it. He died under interrogation. They searched high and low but found nothing.”
    “I know of no caves around there,” said Clothilde. “None at all.”
    “The carter was not a local. He was a railway