Extraordinary People ef-4

by Peter May

  Reluctantly, Pierre Lafeuille stayed another half-an-hour while Enzo poured hot, black coffee into him and tried to sober him up. Finally, there was no keeping him any longer. Enzo walked him down into the square. The sky was a pale yellow glow in the east, but the town was still asleep. Lafeuille shook his hand. ‘It’s been a privilege, Monsieur Macleod.’

  ‘It’s been an experience, Monsieur Lafeuille.’

  Lafeuille grinned and got into his battered Deux Chevaux. It coughed unhealthily as he turned the key, but roared into life and the sound of it echoed around the square. Enzo watched as it weaved away down the Rue Georges Clemenceau towards the church of St. Urcisse. It would be a long hundred kilometers.

  Chapter Nine

  I

  Outside, the town was starting to come alive. He heard the street sweepers and the bin men, the growling motor of the machine that washed down the pavements, great circular brushes spinning along the gutters. He heard boulangers’ vans heading off on their first deliveries, and the smell of fresh bread wafted warm and yeasty on the cool morning air. Commerçants were arriving to open up cafés and bars, the first cars were laying claim to their parking places in the square, and rising above it all, the frenetic chatter of birds concealed among the leaves of the plane trees.

  Enzo leaned on the rail at the open French windows and looked down into the square. The sun was beginning to squint over rooftops to the east. His head was pounding, and his face was sore. The smell of coffee came to him now, and cigarette smoke, and he turned back into the séjour. The moment when he might have gone back to bed had come and gone. Sleep had seemed unlikely in the aftermath of an eventful night, and the Ordre de la Libération had begun nagging at him again. He gazed thoughtfully at the board, and the name of Edouard Méric, which he had written up beside the photograph of the medal. And he remembered Nicole complaining that although she had been able to get back to the main website from Méric’s biography page, there didn’t seem to be a link to it from the site itself. Or to any of the other biographies, which surely existed.

  He sat down at the computer and hit the space bar. The screen lit up. At least one of them had enjoyed a good sleep. He found the home page of the Ordre de la Libération, and a menu on the left side of the page offered him a link to Les Compagnons de la Libération. He clicked on it, and a fifteen page document downloaded and opened up on his screen. It consisted of three columns. The left-hand column listed the forenames of the medal’s one thousand and thirty-eight recipients. The middle column gave their surnames, and the right-hand column the date when the medal was awarded. But the list was alphabetical, rather than chronological. So Enzo asked his computer to search for the date 12/05/43. A message came up which read, No occurrences were found in the document. His heart sank. Another dead-end. Then he realised that the dates in the right-hand column gave the year in full. So he made another search, this time asking for 12/05/1943. Up came the name André Mounier. Enzo was getting excited. He was given the option to search again. He took it. And another name appeared. Philippe Roques. He searched again. There were no further names. So, both André Mounier and Philippe Roques had been awarded the Ordre de la Libération on the same day — May 12th, 1943.

  Enzo returned to the home page and found what Nicole had missed the previous day — a sub-list of links under Les Compagnons de la Libération which led to individual biographies. He clicked on it. A long page listed all the names in alphabetic groupings. Enzo selected the letter M and immediately jumped to the list of names starting with that letter. There were dozens of them. He searched through them several times, with a growing sense of frustration. For some reason André Mounier did not appear on the list. He returned to Google and asked it to search the internet for André Mounier and Ordre de la Libération in the same sweep. They came up together at the top of a very short list, and the link took Enzo to an empty biography page on the website of the Ordre. A message told him that this biography was currently unavailable.

  He cursed his bad luck and went back to the page with the list of alphabetic groupings, and hit the letter R. There were six lines of names. Philippe Roques appeared in the middle of the fourth line. He clicked on the name, and Roques’ biography materialised in front of him, along with a photograph. Roques had an old-fashioned, square-jawed face with neatly parted dark hair and round, tortoiseshell glasses. He had the faintest smile on his face, gazing off to camera left, lights reflecting in both eyes. He looked like an intelligent man, and his biography confirmed that impression.

  Born in Paris in 1910, Roques studied political science before going on to become a parliamentary correspondent. He was called up as a reservist in 1939, then spoke out fiercely against Pétain and the Vichy government after the armistice, going on the run to try to establish contact with the Free French. He was successfully involved in the creation of resistance networks in the Cantal, and eventually airlifted out to London where de Gaulle entrusted him with an important mission. He was to return to France and hand-deliver letters to key political figures. He succeeded in his mission, and after helping to establish the National Council of Resistance, was called back to London. His plane, however, was unable to land, and he was forced to take the circuitous route to England via Spain. Which was when disaster struck.

  At Argelès railway station on the Mediterranean coast, almost within sight of Spain, he was arrested by the Gestapo and taken to Perpignan. Outside the Gestapo headquarters he attempted to escape and was shot twice.

  Enzo looked again at the photograph of Roques. A man who had loved his country and done everything in his power to secure its freedom, shot down in the street by brutish occupiers who shared neither his intelligence nor his culture. His smile seemed sad now. He had not lived to see his country freed from Nazi tyranny.

  Enzo’s eyes drifted back to the final paragraphs of Roques’ story and he felt a wave of pins and needles prickle across his scalp.

  A loud thump made him turn, and his excitement was momentarily interrupted by the sight of Nicole, fully dressed, standing in the doorway with her large suitcase beside her. She was very pale and avoided meeting his eye. ‘I’ll need a hand down the stairs with my case.’

  Enzo was nonplussed. ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Home, of course. I can hardly stay after what happened last night.’

  Enzo waved a dismissive hand. ‘Oh, forget about that. Your dad and I sorted everything out. He’s a nice guy.’

  Nicole gazed at him in astonishment. ‘He was beating you up.’

  ‘Yeah, well, understandable. I’d probably have done the same thing.’ Nicole was shaking her head in disbelief, and Enzo said, ‘Look at it this way. It shows how much he loves you.’

  Nicole blushed. ‘Well, I wish he would show it some other way.’ She tilted her head and looked at Enzo as if for the first time. ‘Oh, your poor face. You need a cold compress on those bruises.’

  ‘It’s too late for that.’

  But she was already heading for the kitchen, and spotted the empty whisky bottle and the two glasses. ‘Were you two drinking?’

  ‘We had a couple.’

  ‘A couple? The bottle’s empty!’

  ‘Well, it wasn’t exactly full to begin with.’ Enzo wondered why he felt the need to defend himself.

  Nicole returned with ice cubes wrapped in a dish towel. ‘Here.’ She pressed it on to his bruised cheek.

  He winced. ‘Ow! That’s sore!’ Her large, trembling breasts were on a level with his eyes, and he was momentarily distracted from his pain.

  ‘I can still smell the alcohol off you,’ she said. ‘You need a coffee and something to eat.’ And then a thought occurred to her. ‘Have you even been back to bed?’

  ‘Look….’ Enzo pushed the ice from his face. ‘Never mind all that.’ He nodded towards the computer. ‘I’ve made a breakthrough here.’ The Roques biography and his photograph were still up on the screen.

  Nicole glanced at it, her interest piqued. ‘Who’s that?’


  ‘Philippe Roques. Awarded the Ordre de la Libération on May 12th, 1943. He was working for the Resistance until the Gestapo caught him on the south coast. He was shot trying to escape outside the Gestapo building in Perpignan.’

  Nicole shrugged and pushed the ice back into Enzo’s face. ‘So what’s that got to do with anything?’

  ‘Well, the thing is, he didn’t die immediately. They rushed him to hospital, where he died in the early hours of the morning.’

  ‘I still don’t understand.’

  ‘Guess what the hospital was called?’

  She frowned, and thought. And then her face lit up. ‘St. Jacques?’

  Enzo grinned. ‘I knew you were smart.’ He drew a deep breath. ‘Philippe Roques died in the Hospital St. Jacques in Perpignan. And apart from the connection with our scallop shell, do you know why else that’s important?’

  She shook her head and shrugged. ‘I don’t know…Is there a hospital called St. Jacques in Toulouse?’

  ‘Et voilà!’

  ‘You’re kidding?’

  ‘I’m not. And I bet you know it, even if you don’t know you do. The Hôtel-Dieu St-Jacques. It’s the large, pink-brick building on the west side of the Pont Neuf, right on the river. Only it’s not a hospital any more. Parts of it are open to the public now, and I think there’s a museum there. But originally it was the first big hospital in Toulouse, built sometime in the middle ages, and used as a shelter for centuries by pilgrims on their way to Compostelle.’ In spite of being assaulted by Nicole’s father, his excess of whisky, and his lack of sleep, Enzo’s eyes were shining.

  He stood up and hobbled across the room to the whiteboard. All his muscles from the night’s exertions were beginning to stiffen up. He lifted an eraser, wiped out Édouard Méric and wrote Philippe Roques in his place, next to the photograph of the medal. Then he drew an arrow directly to the circle he had made around Toulouse and wrote Hôtel-Dieu St-Jacques underneath it.

  ‘Everything leads here,’ he said. ‘Everything. Either directly, or indirectly.’ He turned around to see Nicole in his seat at the computer, concentratedly tapping at the keyboard and staring at the screen.

  ‘Here we are.’ She was triumphant. ‘You were right, there is a museum there now. La Musée d’Histoire de la Médicine de Toulouse. And that makes absolute sense of the antique stethoscope, too. There’s some background about the place on the website.’ She scanned through it. ‘Ah-ha!’ She looked up, her face glowing, all memories of the night before long forgotten. ‘On the 1st of May, 1806, the hospital became the Imperial School of Medicine. And it’s first director?’ She didn’t wait for Enzo to guess. ‘Alexis Larrey — Dominique Larrey’s uncle — who was also appointed professor of anatomy.’ She nodded knowingly. ‘The femur. There’s even a painting of Dominique Larrey here…sorry, Baron Dominique Larrey.’ She pulled a face. ‘Weird-looking guy.’ She tapped some more. ‘And this is interesting. One of the exhibition rooms in the museum has got lots of stuff about him in it.’

  ‘Then it’s got to be there,’ Enzo said.

  ‘What has?’

  He waved his hand vaguely. ‘I don’t know…A clue. Something that’s going to lead us to Gaillard’s remains.’

  Nicole looked horrified. ‘You mean, you think the rest of his body’s there?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘How? I mean, how would they get it into the place? Where would they put it? It wouldn’t exactly be easy to hide a body in a museum.’

  But Enzo had an inspiration. ‘Wait a minute. The whole place was closed down for several years during the nineties, while it was being renovated. I can remember passing it. It was just like a building site. What better place to hide a body?’ He dropped his ice pack on the table and lifted his satchel. ‘Come on.’

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Toulouse.’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Right now.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘In my car.’

  ‘You’re in no condition to drive.’

  ‘Neither was your father.’

  ‘He never is. I won’t get in the car with you, Monsieur Macleod.’

  Enzo sighed. ‘Well, do you drive?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Okay, then I’ll get in the car with you.’

  II

  It was not yet ten when Enzo and Nicole stepped off the métro at St. Cyprien and began back along the Rue de la République towards the river. They had parked two levels below the Place du Capitole, emerging into the vast paved, pedestrian square, with its magnificent Hôtel de Ville at the east side facing a long gallery of arcaded shops on the west. Even though the universities were on summer break, Toulouse was still a young person’s town, brimful of life. There were bistros and cafés and boutiques on every corner. Kids on bikes and roller blades. La Ville Rose, it was called, because of its distinctive pink brick. The roofs of the buildings were shallow-pitched and Roman-tiled in the Mediterranean style. The Mediterranean itself was less than two hours away. Enzo disliked cities. But if he was forced to live in one, he would probably pick Toulouse.

  The Rue de la République was a long, narrow street. Some of the brick buildings had been rendered and painted. Green and pink and peach, with grey and maroon and pale green shutters. It was the heart of the city’s Latin Quarter, which was really just an area with a large immigrant population, mostly from the former colonies.

  The Hôtel-Dieu St-Jacques stood on the very edge of the Garonne, the walls of its basement cellars plunging down into the river’s slow-moving green water. Essentially, it comprised four-storey buildings around three sides of a long, rectangular garden. The entrance was on the corner of the Rue Viguerie and the Rue de la République, leading to the west wing of the mediaeval former hospital, and a small car park in front of the gardens. On the wall beside an open, glass-paned door, two large scallop shells flanked a sign which read, HôTEL DIEU SAINT JACQUES. A large poster was pasted to a hoarding advertising the museum, and featured the face of a man who looked to Enzo like the Scottish Bard, Rabbie Burns. In fact, it was Dominique Larrey.

  A man in uniform sat on the ledge of an open window next to the door and watched them approach.

  ‘We’re looking for the museum,’ Enzo said.

  ‘Closed,’ said the man.

  ‘What?’ Enzo couldn’t believe it. He looked at his watch. Surely it must be open by this time.

  ‘Closed Mondays and Tuesdays. Open every other day from one till six.’

  Enzo cursed. It was still only Monday. And they had never thought to check the opening hours. How could they possibly wait another two days to get into the museum?

  Nicole flicked her long hair back off her shoulder and did a flirty thing that Enzo had never seen her do before. He wouldn’t have believed her capable of it. Her father would have been mortified. ‘We’ve come a long way.’ She made big eyes at the man in uniform. ‘You couldn’t open up just for us, could you?’

  The man let his eyes wander lasciviously down to her quivering breasts. And then he looked up. ‘Sorry.’ Apparently the pleasure of exercising his power outweighed the allure of the girl from the farm.

  ‘Come on.’ Enzo led a disappointed Nicole back through the gate. Someday, he was sure, her charms would work on someone.

  They decided to walk back to the Capitole, and turned left across the Pont Neuf. Over the river they could see the roofs of the ancient city centre rising above apartment blocks and government buildings, a jumble of turrets and bell-towers, an odd blend of European and North African architecture that sat somehow comfortably together in this cosmopolitan old town. On the far river bank, tourist cruise boats were berthed at the quayside, and a Rastafarian in a black tee-shirt and sweat pants practised karate on a strip of grass, watched indifferently by his old Alsatian dog. Joggers trundled laboriously along the towpath before the heat of the day set in.

  The Hôtel-Dieu St-Jacques was below them now, on their left. The garden at its centre was ringe
d by carefully pruned lime trees. The lawn was divided into classical patterns by a low, manicured hedge, and two columns of bushes in the shape of egg cozies created a grassy avenue running from front to back. Enzo barely glanced at it. His mind was stewing over their misfortune. To have come so far in decoding the clues, to be within touching distance of a solution, and yet be denied by a quirk of opening times, was infuriating. He had no idea how he was going to fill the next forty-eight hours. He wasn’t even listening to Nicole. She had begun a diatribe on how he needed to take better care of himself. He still hadn’t had breakfast, she pointed out. He drank too much. He was too old to be getting into fights with her father. It wasn’t easy to shut out the voice. God help the poor soul who married her! There would, of course, be a couple of consolations. Although he doubted if that would be quite enough to make up for the rest. Then he felt her tugging on his sleeve. ‘What?’ he said tetchily, pulling his arm away.

  ‘What’s that?’ She pointed down to the gardens.

  Enzo glanced with irritation towards the expanse of meticulous greenery. Some anal gardener’s raison d’être. ‘It’s a bloody garden!’

  ‘No, at the far end, beyond the line of bushes.’

  Enzo peered in the direction she was pointing and saw what looked like a giant white saucer at the very apex of the lawn. He felt in his pockets for his glasses, but in their hurry to leave he had left them lying on the table in the séjour. ‘I’ve no idea. Why?’

  ‘Well, it looks to me very much like a giant scallop shell.’

  ‘What?’ Enzo struggled to try to bring the thing into focus. ‘Let’s go and see.’

  And they turned around and went back down to the gate. The man in uniform watched them approach and his eyes narrowed with suspicion. ‘It’s still not open.’

  They walked straight past.

  ‘Hey, where are you going?’

  ‘A walk in the garden. Any objections?’