We stopped halfway down the drive and looked back at Massot’s elongated shadow moving through the trees, which were bathed in the glow of the spotlight. The ticking of the metal detector carried clearly in the evening air, and I had misgivings about the secrecy of the enterprise. We might as well have put up a sign at the end of the drive saying MAN LOOKING FOR GOLD.
We told our friends over dinner about the treasure hunt that was going on more or less under the cover of darkness. The husband, who had been born and raised in the Lubéron, was not optimistic. He told us that when metal detectors had first become available they were more popular with the peasants than hunting dogs. It was true that some gold had been found. But now, he said, the area had been combed so thoroughly that Massot would be lucky to find an old horseshoe.
Even so, he couldn’t deny the existence of our two napoléons. There they were, on the table in front of him. He picked them up and chinked them in his hand. Who knows? Maybe we’d be lucky. Or maybe Massot would be lucky and we’d never hear about it. Was he someone who could be trusted? My wife and I looked at each other and decided it was time to go.
It was just after midnight when we got home, and Massot’s van had gone. The spotlight had been switched off, but there was enough of a moon for us to see large mounds of earth scattered haphazardly across what we were trying to turn into a lawn. We decided to face the full extent of the damage in the morning.
It was as if a giant mole, maddened by claustrophobia, had been coming up for air and spitting out mouthfuls of metal. There were nails, fragments of a cartwheel rim, an ancient screwdriver, half a sickle, a dungeon-sized key, a brass rifle shell, bolts, bottle tops, the crumbling remains of a hoe, knife blades, the bottom of a sieve, birds’ nests of baling wire, unidentifiable blobs of pure rust. But no gold.
Most of the newly planted rosebushes had survived, and the lavender bed was intact. Massot must have run out of enthusiasm.
I left him to sleep until the afternoon before going over to hear his account of the night’s work. Long before I reached his house, I could hear the metal detector, and I had to shout twice to get him to look up from the bramble-covered hillock that he was sweeping. He bared his dreadful teeth in welcome. I was surprised to see him so cheerful. Maybe he had found something after all.
“Salut!” He shouldered the metal detector like a gun and waded toward me through the undergrowth, still smiling. I said he looked like a man who had been lucky.
Not yet, he said. He had been obliged to stop the previous night because my neighbors had shouted at him, complaining about the noise. I didn’t understand. Their house is 250 yards away from where he had been working. What had he been doing to keep them awake?
“Pas moi” he said. “Lui,” and he tapped the metal detector. “Wherever I went, he found something—tak tak tak tak tak.”
But no gold, I said.
Massot leaned so close that for one awful moment I thought he was going to kiss me. His nose twitched, and his voice dropped to a wheezing whisper. “I know where it is.” He drew back and took a deep breath. “Beh oui. I know where it is.”
Although we were standing in the forest, with the nearest human being at least a kilometer away, Massot’s fear of being overheard was contagious, and I found myself whispering too.
“Where is it?”
“At the end of the piscine.”
“Under the roses?”
“Under the dallage.”
“Under the dallage?”
“Oui. C’est certaing. On my grandmother’s head.”
This was not the straightforward good news that Massot obviously thought it was. The dallage around the pool was made up of flagstones nearly three inches thick. They had been laid on a bed of reinforced concrete, as deep as the flagstones were thick. It would be a demolition job just to get down to the earth. Massot sensed what I was thinking, and put the metal detector down so that he could talk with both hands.
“In Cavaillon,” he said, “you can rent a marteau-piqueur. It will go through anything. Paf!”
He was quite right. A miniature jackhammer would go through the flagstones, the reinforced concrete, the pipes feeding the pool, and the electric cables leading from the filtration pump in no time at all. Paf! And maybe even Boum! And when the dust had settled, we might very easily find nothing more than another sickle blade to add to our collection. I said no. With infinite regret, but no.
Massot took the decision well, and was pleased with the bottle of pastis I gave him for his trouble. But I see him from time to time standing on the path at the back of the house, looking down at the swimming pool, sucking thoughtfully at his moustache. God knows what he might do one drunken night if someone ever gave him a marteau-piqueur for Christmas.