Extraordinary People ef-4

by Peter May

  ‘Be careful, these steps are uneven.’ Franck led them down in what felt like an unending spiral, dizzying and disorientating. They heard a far-off growling, the air around them vibrated and the ground shook. ‘It’s just the métro,’ Franck shouted back to them. ‘Don’t worry about it.’

  And still they went down. Enzo felt his ears popping with the pressure, and he shivered. The temperature had dropped by more than fifteen degrees. Finally, they seemed to reach the foot of the staircase, and bowed their heads to pass through an arched entryway into a narrow tunnel. The walls and ceiling were constructed entirely from masonry and led them into a section of tunnel hacked from pure limestone. It ran off to left and right. Franck turned right, taking them past columns and arches to a junction where a long gallery led to another arched doorway opening into a square room lined by stone benches. There were niches set into the walls, charred by candles, and layered with the solid coloured pools of once molten wax. There was a stone table set in the centre of the room. There was, too, evidence of recent habitations: food wrappers and empty beer cans and cigarette ends. It smelled of grease and stale smoke.

  ‘I thought since we were down here anyway you might be interested in seeing this place,’ Franck said. ‘The quarriers built it for their own recreation. It was originally called the salle des carriers, but it’s more popularly known these days as the salle de repos. It’s a favourite meeting place for tunnel rats. We raid it from time to time, but they usually have a pretty good early warning system.’

  Enzo wandered around this perfectly constructed stone room more than thirty meters below an unsuspecting world above and ran his fingers lightly over the cool, smooth stone. Beneath an arched niche in the back wall, the date 1904 had been carved into the stone. It was just over a hundred years since men had created this room as a place of rest. He could not imagine what life must have been like down here for the generations of quarriers who had hacked tens of thousands of tons of stone from limestone bedrock to build their city. What kind of existence had they eked out in this dark, choking, subterranean world?

  Franck was watching him with mild amusement. ‘You should visit the ossuary sometime.’

  ‘Ossuary?’

  Raffin said, ‘In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Paris authorities started clearing city-centre cemeteries which had become a health hazard. They allocated about eleven thousand square meters of the catacombes out at Denfert as a dumping ground for the bones. There are something like six million people stacked up in those tunnels, floor to ceiling. The bones and skulls are arranged in macabre patterns.’ He chuckled. ‘I suppose the men who transferred them from the cemeteries had reason enough to find ways of amusing themselves.’

  It occurred to Enzo that there was irony in the discovery of a single skull in tunnels which concealed six million.

  ‘Anyway,’ Raffin said, ‘this isn’t what we came to see, is it?’

  ‘No.’ Franck turned and led them back along the gallery and through a rabbit warren of tunnels. They passed street names beautifully carved into blocks of stone corresponding to the names of the streets above — BOULEVARD VINCENT, RUE ALBERT BAYET — and surrounded by the scratched and spray-painted graffiti of a less elegant generation.

  They carried on until they reached a stone marked ROUTE DE PARIS à CHOISY CôTé EST, and they turned left into a narrower transverse tunnel that took them to the other side of the street overhead.

  ‘We’re under the Avenue Choisy here,’ Franck said. ‘Right below Chinatown.’

  On the other side, a marker stone was inscribed ROUTE DE PARIS à CHOISY CôTé OUEST. But here, the way was blocked. The roof and part of the wall had caved in, piles of stone and rubble and earth preventing their further progress.

  ‘Well, this is it.’ Franck turned around and his lamp nearly blinded them. ‘For what it’s worth.’ Both Enzo and Raffin raised their hands to shade their eyes. ‘The Inspection Général des Carrières send surveyors down regularly to check below the sites of possible new building. No point in throwing up skyscrapers if they’re just going to fall down again. It was a surveyor who came across this tunnel collapse. It seems the tin trunk had somehow been concealed in the wall, bricked into a recess. If the roof hadn’t come down it would still have been there.’

  * * *

  The world above ground was a burned-out white, blinding and hot. Enzo’s eyes adjusted quickly, but he knew that it would take the sun longer to warm through to the chill deep in his bones. The Place d’Italie was jammed with traffic and late afternoon shoppers. White flags emblazoned with red Chinese characters fluttered on either side of lamp posts around the small park which created a roundabout for the traffic, and Enzo noticed for the first time that half the population seemed to be oriental. Ethnic Chinese from French Indochina. He looked down the length of Avenue Choisy and saw the red lanterns and flashing neon characters delineating Chinatown and wondered just where exactly they had been below ground.

  Franck had gone to find detective Thomas from the Quai des Orfèvres. Raffin was still brushing the dirt from his trousers. ‘What now?’

  ‘I want to talk to the pathologist.’

  Raffin checked his watch and shook his head. ‘Then you’ll have to go on your own. I still have to earn a living — and I’m going to have to change out of these clothes.’

  IV

  It was only four stops on the métro from Place d’Italie to the Quai de la Rapée in the neighbouring twelfth arrondissement. Enzo sat gloomily in the crowded carriage, sunlight streaming through windows as the train rattled beneath the girdered arch that spanned the Seine. With all these bodies pressed around him, the heat was stifling. He looked down to his left and saw the square redbrick building that housed the Institut Médico Légal on the west bank of the river. The bodies stored there, in tiered drawers, would be kept at a somewhat cooler temperature.

  Enzo was not optimistic. What had seemed like an interesting development, the skull in the trunk, was probably no more than an eccentric diversion. If the pathologist had reconstructed a head from it without facial or scalp hair, then it couldn’t be Gaillard. Even if the flesh and brain of the head had rotted away to nothing, the evidence of hair would still have remained. It took hair much longer than five years to decompose. King Tutankhamun had still had hair.

  So what was left? Nothing but a theory constructed from a bloodstained floor, a doodle in a diary, and a fifty-year-old French movie.

  He got off at the Quai de la Rapée and walked back along the river bank, traffic roaring past on the expressway below. On the far side of the water, the boats of the River Police were tied up at the Quai St. Bernard. A small park beside the morgue was deserted. Cars and trucks thundered across the Pont d’Austerlitz, and the clatter of the métro trains was only slightly muted by their rubber wheels. It was a noisy corner of the city, but Enzo supposed that the morgue’s present tenants would not be too troubled.

  The bodies were kept downstairs, behind the thick stone walls of the basement, and there cut open in tiled rooms devoid of daylight by pathologists in pursuit of death’s dark secrets. There was disabled access to the main entrance one floor up, but it occurred to Enzo that the real disabled access was one floor down, via the back door. He climbed steps to the front door and walked into an airy reception hall lined by the busts of famous physicians and asked for Docteur Henri Bellin.

  Bellin’s office was up a narrow staircase on the first floor. The pathologist was a man in his sixties, and gave the impression of being possessed by a nervous energy he found difficult to contain. A tweed suit hung on a tall, angular frame that Enzo was sure carried less flesh than some of the cadavers downstairs. He had a pathologist’s pallor, and strong, bony hands scrubbed so clean they were almost painful to look at. He was in the process of clearing his desk for the day. Like most pathologists, he was meticulously tidy.

  ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ he said. ‘I remember it well. Odd, very odd. All those strange items in the trunk. Still, tha
t wasn’t my brief. My only interest was the skull.’

  ‘You carried out a forensic examination?’

  ‘Yes, yes I did. Nothing very remarkable about it as I recall. A middle-aged male, aged somewhere between forty-five and fifty-five.’

  ‘How could you tell?’

  ‘Females have more delicate mandibles, and much more gently sloping foreheads.’ He laughed nervously. ‘And I never like to discuss the fact that there is roughly two hundred cubic centimeters less space in a female skull to house the brain. Women don’t like to hear it.’ He slipped some papers into a briefcase. ‘I was able to determine the age because the sutures — that’s the joints between the bones — were completely ossified. There were also some deep furrows on the inside of the skull, something usually caused by blood vessels in an older person.’

  ‘I believe the teeth had been smashed.’

  ‘That’s correct. Someone had taken a cylindrical instrument of some sort and done considerable damage. To the mandible as well. I had to do quite a bit of reconstruction work around the mouth.’

  ‘Presumably the teeth were smashed to prevent identification from dental records.’

  ‘Yes, of course. There were a number left intact, though. Not enough to facilitate positive identification — assuming that we’d had something to compare them to — but enough for me to recast and recreate a mouthful of teeth for the facial approximation.’

  ‘The reconstruction?’

  ‘Forensic facial approximation is what I prefer to call it. I have evolved my own technique. A blend of the Russian and American methods. You know, Gerasimov claims one hundred percent success. Even Gatliff claims seventy percent.’

  ‘And what is your success rate?’

  ‘Oh, I think probably around eighty. The skull from the catacombes is one of my notable failures.’ But it was not a failure with which he seemed too concerned. His present preoccupation seemed to be with leaving. ‘Was there anything else?’

  ‘Do you still have it?’

  ‘Do I still have what?’

  ‘Your forensic facial approximation.’

  ‘Well, yes, of course.’

  ‘Could I see it?’

  Bellin sighed his irritation and glanced at his watch. ‘I suppose so.’ He crossed his office and threw open the doors of a tall wall cabinet. The shelves inside were lined with heads, strange lifeless eyes staring out from the darkness of their odd final resting place. Nearly thirty human faces sculpted in plasticine. Likenesses of the dead. Hair, too, was represented by interwoven layers of plasticine, making it easy for Enzo to recognize the skull in question. It was the only one without any. Enzo stared at it curiously. It did not appear to bear much resemblance to Gaillard, except for a similar fleshiness about the lips and a slight droop at the corners of the eyes. The nose was, like Gaillard’s, unremarkable. Enzo was disappointed that the face did not seem more familiar. He had spent hours the previous night staring at photographs of Gaillard. But he knew that facial and head hair can dramatically change the way a person looks.

  Enzo reached up and touched the recreated face, almost as if he were hoping to feel the bristles where the flamboyant Gaillard moustaches had been shaved.

  ‘You recognise him?’ Bellin seemed surprised.

  ‘Only because I’d been told you’d made the face and scalp hairless. Why did you do that?’

  ‘Because there was no hair with the skull.’

  ‘Isn’t that unusual?’

  Bellin shrugged his indifference. Lack of success had bred lack of interest. ‘Sometimes mice take hair away from decomposing heads to build nests.’

  ‘But the head was locked in a trunk. It wasn’t airtight, so no doubt insects got access to accelerate the process of decomposition. But there was no way mice could have got into that trunk.’

  ‘That’s true,’ Bellin conceded.

  ‘So didn’t it strike you as odd that there was no hair at all?’

  ‘It was impossible for me to determine why there was no hair. He might have suffered from alopecia. His head might have been shaved.’

  ‘And if his head and his face had been shaved, might someone not have done that for the same reason they smashed his teeth — to prevent recognition, to stop identification?’

  ‘Of course, anything is possible.’

  Enzo reached into his satchel and searched for a photograph of Gaillard from Raffin’s file. He held it out towards Bellin. ‘Whiskers and a coiffure like this might have been somewhat recognisable, don’t you think?’

  Bellin took the photograph. ‘Good God! It’s Jacques Gaillard.’

  ‘Like I said. Somewhat recognisable.’

  Bellin lifted his reconstruction off the shelf and carried it through to a small adjoining room. There were computers here, and facial and cranial charts on the walls, and a table in the centre of the room with a half-completed facial approximation on it, tiny wooden dowels inserted at thirty-four different reference points around the head. The skull had been cast in plaster, and the mandible in cold cure resin, before being rearticulated with the cranium. Both were visible down one half of a face criss-crossed with a complex of plasticine strands representing the musculature. Bellin placed the finished head next to it and switched on a bank of overhead lamps which bathed the table in soft, bright light. He looked at the photograph, examined the head, and then re-examined the photograph. Suddenly he had rediscovered all his lost enthusiasm.

  ‘There are umpteen points of correlation here.’

  ‘Can you put hair on the head? And a moustache?’

  ‘I can do better than that. The danger is, of course, that one is influenced by the original. But I can photograph my approximation, front, side and back, and digitise the images into the computer. And with the help of an interesting piece of software called Face, as well as Adobe Photoshop, I can recreate Monsieur Gaillard’s unusual whiskers and coiffure and superimpose them on to a 3D image of the head.’ He removed his jacket, draping it over the back of a tall stool at the table, and lifted a white overall from the back of the door. His earlier impatience to leave for the day was quite forgotten.

  ‘How long will it take?’ Enzo asked.

  ‘Hmmm?’ Bellin seemed almost unaware that Enzo was still there. He had already begun setting up his camera.

  ‘How long?’

  ‘Come back tomorrow morning, Monsieur.’

  Chapter Five

  I

  Enzo sat in the window of Le Balto, below his studio, dipping his croissant in a large, milky coffee, and absently watching the regulars lining up along the bar drinking small, black coffees which they washed down with cold water. The morning was sticky and overcast. Across the street, people were breakfasting under the green awnings of the Bistro Mazarin, and the street cleaners had opened sluice gates to let water wash down the gutters of the Rue Jacques Callot before draining back into the sewers below.

  ‘Salut.’ Her voice startled him out of his reverie, and he turned to find Charlotte standing by his table. She wore jeans, and a knee-length, black cotton waistcoat open over a white tee-shirt. ‘May I join you?’

  He stood up. ‘Of course.’ They shook hands formally.

  She turned towards the small, ginger-haired woman behind the bar. ‘Un petit café.’ They sat facing each other. ‘Do you want another?’ she asked as an afterthought.

  He shook his head. ‘What are you doing here?’ And, then, before she had time to answer, ‘Looking for me, I hope.’

  A smile split her face and crinkled around her eyes. ‘Naturally.’ When her coffee arrived Enzo waited while she stirred in the sugar. She took a sip and looked up. ‘Roger tells me you have come up with a theory about what might have happened to Jacques Gaillard.’

  Enzo shrugged. ‘It’s just a theory.’ He tipped his head quizzically. ‘Why would that interest you?’

  She shrugged. ‘I’m always interested in the psychology of murder.’ Then paused. ‘And, as you know, I was around when Roger was doing his researc
h.’ She took another sip of her coffee. ‘And… maybe it seemed like a good excuse for seeing you.’ She examined the table for a moment, as if reluctant to meet his eye. Then she looked up boldly. ‘So?’

  ‘So what?’ It made him feel good that he might have been the real reason she was here.

  ‘So what’s your theory?’

  ‘Didn’t Roger tell you?’

  ‘No, he didn’t, actually.’

  Enzo regarded her thoughtfully. ‘Tell you what. I’ve had analysis done on some hard evidence I collected. The lab should have the results for me in…’ He looked at his watch. ‘…about half-an-hour. Why don’t you come with me? And then we’ll know whether or not it’s more than just a theory.’

  She held him in the gaze of her dark eyes for several moments, and he felt his stomach flip over. She was having a disproportionately disconcerting effect on him. ‘Okay.’

  * * *

  As he made his way down towards the Seine from the Rue de l’Université Enzo saw her rise in expectation from the bench where she had waited for him. Barges ploughed their way up river. A private motor boat passed in the other direction. The long, glass-topped boats of the bateaux mouches below the Pont de l’Alma opposite rose and fell gently on the wash. A little further east, along the left bank, tourists queued for tickets for a tour of les égouts—the Paris sewers. They were not yet open. Enzo was holding the large manilla envelope they had given him at the lab, and seemed a million miles away.

  ‘What happened?’ Charlotte asked.