Extraordinary People ef-4

by Peter May

‘Yes, we do.’ Everyone turned in surprise to see Sophie standing at the table. She was holding the box of Madeleine cakes. She folded back the lid and held it out, as if offering them one. ‘It’s written on the inside of the lid.’

  There was a series of numbers scrawled on the white card. 19070230. And they were followed by two words. Toute seule.

  Enzo got up and crossed the room to take the box from her. He looked at the numbers, and knew at once what they were. The 19th of the 7th at 02.30 hours. He checked his watch. Today was July 18th. Madeleine was making a rendezvous to meet him alone in the Salle des Fresques in a long-abandoned German bunker twenty meters below the streets of Paris, at two-thirty tomorrow morning.

  III

  The rain beat a constant rhythm on the taut canvas of the maroon awning overhead, filtered daylight casting red shadows on all of their faces. Enzo sat hunched over their table watching tourists in brightly coloured plastic raincoats hurry by. They sat in silence, waiting for Raffin, who was still inside speaking on the telephone. Simon had ordered a whisky and told Enzo that he should have one, too. But Enzo wanted to keep his head clear. As clear as it could be after a night without sleep, and only twelve hours to prepare for a meeting with the woman who had kidnapped his daughter. A woman who had killed at least four times. As it was, his head was aching. There was a loud tinnitis ringing in his ears, and his eyes were burning. Sophie sat silently sipping a tisane, and Nicole was leafing through a pile of papers and photographs she had taken from Enzo’s satchel. Bertrand stared gloomily across the bridge opposite, towards the ële de la Cité.

  It was the same bridge from which, just over a week earlier, Enzo had thrown himself into a passing barge. He sat now watching the rain mist as it thrashed down on the swollen waters of the Seine, and he found it hard to believe he had done something so stupid. He had been someone else then, in another lifetime. So much had happened since that evening in Cahors when he had accepted the Préfet’s wager. But he could never have foreseen that it would lead to this.

  He turned and looked through the window, beyond the reflections of Notre Dame, into the brasserie. Waiters in black waistcoats and long white aprons were clearing debris from tables. He could see Raffin speaking animatedly on a telephone by the bar, a poster on the wall behind him of an Alsatian Frenchman feasting on German sausage courtesy of Produits Shmid. Raffin hung up and walked briskly to the door, emerging from the restaurant on to the terrasse. For once he seemed less than stylish. His raincoat hung damply from his shoulders, and his wet hair had fallen forward across his forehead. He swept it out of his eyes and lit a cigarette.

  ‘He’s coming to the apartment at midnight.’

  ‘Do you trust him?’ Enzo asked.

  Raffin pulled up a seat. ‘When he took me down to do that piece for Libé I could not have been more completely in his hands. Frankly, Macleod, I doubt if there’s anyone who knows the catacombes better. He has his own maps and charts, meticulously accumulated during years of personal exploration. It’s his life’s work.’

  ‘And he makes a living at it?’ Bertrand asked. ‘I mean, taking people down there illegally?’

  ‘A very good living from all accounts.’

  ‘I don’t want him to take me down,’ Enzo said. ‘All I need him to do is get me in, and provide me with enough information to get me where I need to be.’

  ‘Papa, you can’t go down there on your own.’ Sophie’s eyes were red from tears already spilled as a result of her father’s stubbornness.

  ‘She’s right, Magpie,’ Simon said. ‘I mean, think about it. Why does this Madeleine woman want you to go down there in the first place. So she can can hand Kirsty back and tell you to be a good boy? I don’t think so. I think she’s using Kirsty as bait to lure you down there so that she can kill you to stop you from revealing her identity.’

  ‘We already know who she is,’ Nicole said. Enzo flashed quick eyes at her, and she held up the list of Schoelcher students that she had dug out from amongst his papers. ‘And Sophie was right about the butcher’s cleaver.’ She handed the list to Enzo. ‘Marie-Madeleine Boucher. Right after Marie Bonnet and before Hervé Boullanger.’

  Enzo ran his eye down the list, and there it was in black and white. MARIE-MADELEINE BOUCHER.

  Raffin said, ‘And it’s not Charlotte, Enzo.’ He had been shocked on the drive from Auxerre to learn of Enzo’s fears. ‘I’d stake my life on it.’

  ‘You don’t have to,’ Sophie said. ‘My Papa does.’

  ‘Marie, Madeleine, Charlotte, whoever the hell she might be,’ Simon said, ‘even if you knew for sure, she doesn’t know that.’ He took a long, deep breath, and Enzo heard the tremor in it. ‘And I hate to say this, Enzo, but it’s possible that Kirsty’s already….’

  ‘Don’t!’ Enzo cut him off. ‘Don’t even think it!’ He took a moment to compose himself. ‘I have to go alone. Because that’s what Marie-Madeleine Boucher wants me to do. I can’t just do nothing. And I can’t go to the police. I have to believe that Kirsty’s okay, so I’m not going to do anything to put her in more danger than she’s already in. I’ll keep the appointment, and I’ll take my chances. Because there’s nothing else I can do.’

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  I

  Nicole had spent several hours during the afternoon trying to track down Marie-Madeleine Boucher on the internet. But there were nearly a thousand references to the name, in both France and Canada, and not one of them linked directly to ENA. It could take days to find out who she really was.

  Enzo had passed the remains of the day in something close to a trance. Now, in the glare of a desk lamp, the maps spread across Raffin’s desk burned themselves on to his retinas. It was pitch outside, and still the rain fell. Dense, slow-moving storm cloud had been dumping its precipitation on the city for nearly twenty-four hours. The television news was reporting that the Seine had burst its banks in several places. There had been flash floods all across Paris. But it was a warm, summer rain, the air sticky and breathless, and several times Enzo had found himself wiping a fine film of cold sweat from his forehead. A black cloud of swallows was swooping and diving around inside his stomach. He glanced at his watch. It was nearly a quarter past midnight.

  The smoke from Samu’s constant roll-ups hung still and blue in the lamplight. Raffin said that the tunnel rat was reputed to have got his nickname because in another life he had been a medic with the SAMU, the Service d’Aide Médicale Urgente. But he did not know if that was true. Samu’s real identity was a secret he guarded closely.

  He was a tall, thin, nervous man in his middle forties. He grew greying hair to collar length and gelled it back from his face. He had the pallor of a man who spent his life below ground, his complexion grey and pasty and scarred by adolescent acne. The thumb, index and middle fingers of his right hand were nicotine orange. His jeans and tee-shirt hung loosely from a skeletal frame, and he seemed incapable of staying still for two minutes. His very presence was unsettling. He circled the desk slowly like an animal stalking prey.

  ‘You really don’t want to go down there on your own,’ he said to Enzo. It was the obligatory health warning, like the caution on a cigarette pack that smoking will kill you. ‘If you get lost you’re fucked. You could be wandering those tunnels forever. And then again, you might encounter some of the undesirables. Most of the folks who do the catacombes are all right. It’s a bit of fun, a bit of excitement. Something different. You find a room down there, you light some candles, you smoke some dope, you play some music. The graffiti artists are okay, too. Dedicated boys and girls. Like pigs in shit with all those virgin walls. But there’s some bad dudes, too. Drug dealers, junkies. Guys who’d slit your throat for ten centimes and not think twice about it. And that’s not to mention the tunnel cops. They’ll lock you up and fine you a fucking fortune.’ He pulled on the last of his current roll-up and drew his lips back in a grin. Smoke seeped through brown-stained teeth. ‘So you really don’t want to go down there on your own.’<
br />
  Enzo really didn’t. ‘All the same, I am going.’ Madeleine had already made the decision for him. Samu had no idea why he wanted to go down into the catacombes, and Enzo wasn’t about to enlighten him.

  Samu glanced at Raffin. He knew there was more to this than he was being told. But he just shrugged. ‘Your funeral.’ He turned and leaned over the desk, sifting through the various maps. ‘I’m only going to give you three plans. No point in confusing you.’ He smoothed the first of them out on top of the others. It was headed, GRANDE AVENUE DU LUXEMBOURG (NORD). He clamped his roll-up between wet lips and screwed his eyes up against the smoke as he searched in his pockets for a red marker pen. When he found it, he leaned over the map again, spilling ash and brushing it aside with the back of his hand. ‘This is your master map. I’m going to mark out your route on it. You don’t deviate from this, my friend, or you’re fucked, okay? It’s a labyrinth down there, a maze. Once you’re lost, you’re lost. Lots of the tunnels are murée, they’ve been bricked up by the authorities. We’ve knocked cat holes in some of them.’ He looked appraisingly at Enzo. ‘But you’re a big guy. You could have trouble squeezing through. Most of them were made for skinny guys like me.’

  He took his marker pen and traced a thick red line along a route running north to south. ‘This is the Grande Avenue du Luxembourg. Most people get access to it through a couple of hidden entrances in the Luxembourg Gardens. The authorities deny they’re there. But they exist all right. Trouble is…’ he glanced at Enzo again, ‘…I doubt if you’re up to climbing the railings. But I know another way in. We’ll come to that.’ He returned to the Grande Avenue du Luxembourg. ‘You keep following this straight down. It’s pretty easy going. You don’t take any of these turnoffs until you get to here.’ He stopped his pen tip at a junction which branched off to the west. ‘If you miss this one you’ll know soon enough, because the tunnel comes to a dead-end where they’ve built a multilevel underground car park.’

  Enzo wondered fleetingly if it was the one where Diop had tried to murder him.

  ‘You’re around ten meters down at this level. The deepest you’ll go is fifteen.’ His pen followed the turnoff. ‘Keep going west. You can’t go wrong. Ignore any branches, just stick to my line. Until you get to here….’ At which point he pulled over a second map. This one was headed, RESEAU DES CHARTREUX. ‘This shows the area in more detail. You can see the German bunker marked out here at the top left, and down below it are the tunnels quarried by the Chartreux monks. Right down at the bottom here is the Fontaine des Chartreux. It’s a big, hollowed out chamber with a stone sink to collect water that runs down the walls. They call it the Fontaine des Chartreux because the water is green, just like the liqueur made by the monks. If you find yourself there, you’ll know you’re in the wrong place. It’s a dead-end. You used to be able to get in from the tunnels under the Rue d’Assas, but it’s all been bricked up. If you do get lost, you can always try and get into the Rue d’Assas through some of the chatières at the south-west corner of the German bunker. It’ll be a tight squeeze, but you might make it. If you get into the Rue d’Assas you’ll see there are two tunnels, one either side of the street. They’re linked by these transversals, kind of shallow tunnels that cross under the road at right-angles. You might need to use one or more of them to find an exit up to the street above. It’s a general principle. Most of the main over-ground avenues and boulevards have two tunnels running beneath them linked by transversals.’

  Samu stood up to roll another cigarette, and Enzo could only see his hands in the light of the desk lamp as they manipulated the paper and tobacco shreds. His voice came disembodied from the darkness outside the circle of light. ‘Anyway, the main thing is not to get lost. And you won’t, if you follow the red line.’

  From his brief visit to the catacombes beneath the Place d’Italie, Enzo had a good sense of what to expect. Low, arching tunnels, cold, damp, fetid air, darkness, claustrophobia. He would be completely and utterly alone, venturing voluntarily into a trap set for him by the woman who had stolen his daughter. It was madness. Madeleine had every possible advantage. And he had absolutely no idea what he was going to do when he got there. He felt a creeping cloak of hopelessness start to wrap itself around him. But there was nothing else for it. He had to follow this through.

  ‘Okay, this is where you’ll come in off the Luxembourg map.’ Samu had lit his roll-up and was tracing his red line into the Chartreux map from the top right-hand corner. ‘Down to what looks like a roundabout here. You’re more or less below the Rue Auguste Comte at this point. It was walled up in eighty-eight, and we knocked a chatière in it in ninety-two. A lot of people have squeezed through that hole, so you might just make it.’ He switched maps again, to a detailed plan of the bunker, and circled the roundabout at the top right. ‘Okay? You see where we are?’

  Enzo nodded.

  ‘Right, now you’re in the bunker. It’s a mess. A real bugger’s muddle.’ He drew a careful red line that zigzagged south and then west through what seemed like an impossible maze. Then he made a small circle and stood up triumphantly. ‘And that’s it. The Salle des Fresques.’ Enzo could barely see his grin through the smoke. ‘It’s quite something. A bit like a bad trip.’

  Enzo thought that this whole undertaking was one big, bad trip. ‘How long will it take me?’

  Samu shrugged. ‘Thirty to forty minutes. Depends how fast or how slow you are. Could be quicker, could be longer.’ He unfolded three, clear plastic ziplock bags. ‘I’m going to put the maps in these to protect them from the wet. After all this rain you might find there’s a bit of water down there.’ He began slipping the maps into their bags. ‘Guard them with your life, my friend, because it may well depend upon them.’

  II

  The marble woman reclining on the left slope of the triangular headed doorway opposite held her sword upright in the rain, impervious to the wet, unblinking in the glare of the floodlights that washed the building. There was something stoic about her. She wore a Mona Lisa smile of quiet confidence. Enzo sat in the dark by the window of Raffin’s study, and regarded her jealously. He wished he could find an inner calm to mirror her stony self-confidence. But in truth, he was afraid. More afraid than he had ever been in his life. Afraid for Kirsty, for what might already have become of her. Afraid that he lacked both the courage and the resources to be able to change her destiny. Or his. The rain made tracks down the glass, like tears, and in the light from the street, their shadows streaked his face.

  A shaft of pale electric yellow fell across the floor as the door opened from the séjour. Enzo heard the television, and the low murmur of voices coming from the other room. Raffin closed the door behind him and shut them out. He stood for a moment before crossing to the window. He had a parcel of soft cloth in his hand, which he held out and unwrapped to reveal the shiny, blue-black barrel of a gun with a polished wooden hand-grip. ‘It’s loaded. I want you to take it.’

  Enzo shook his head. ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I could never use it.’

  ‘Enzo….’

  ‘No, Roger!’

  Roger stood for a long time in the dark, the gun still in his hand, before finally he wrapped it up again. Enzo heard his shallow breathing. ‘You’ve got about ten minutes.’

  As he opened the door, Enzo called after him. ‘Roger…’ The journalist stopped and looked back. ‘Thanks.’

  Raffin and Simon passed in the light of the open door, and Raffin closed it behind him, leaving Simon standing in the dark.

  Without taking his eyes from the lady with the sword, Enzo said, ‘We’re closed. Didn’t you see the sign.’

  ‘Magpie, I don’t want you to do this.’ He started across the room.

  ‘We’ve already covered that ground.’

  ‘I don’t want to lose the two people I love most in this world.’

  Enzo turned to look at his friend. Even in the faint reflecting light from the street he could
see how pale he was.

  ‘You know that Linda and I always kept in touch. I saw a lot of Kirsty over the years. Whenever there was a problem, her mum would always call me.’ He looked down at his hands. ‘I guess, you know, because I never had any kids of my own…she became kind of like a daughter to me.’ He looked up and said quickly, ‘Not that I could ever take your place. She wouldn’t have had that. She always loved you, Magpie. That’s why she never found it possible to forgive you. It’s hard for a kid to take rejection.’

  ‘I didn’t—!’

  ‘I know.’ Simon held up quick hands to pre-empt his protest. ‘I’ve told her a thousand times. But you can’t rewrite the history she has in her head. However wrong she’s got it, it’s so ingrained it’s written in stone.’

  ‘That was her mother.’

  Simon nodded. ‘Linda didn’t help. You hurt her, Magpie. Kirsty was the only way she could get back at you.’ He sighed deeply. ‘It’s an old story.’ He looked past Enzo towards the statue across the street. ‘I want to call the police.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Enzo….’

  ‘No!’ Enzo faced up to his friend, two old stags prepared to lock horns to defend their territory. ‘It would be like signing her death warrant.’

  ‘Like you’re not signing your own?’

  ‘I’d rather die than know that I was responsible for her death.’

  ‘Jesus, Magpie,’ Simon’s voice whispered at him in the dark. And their foreheads came together in gentle acceptance that the fight was over, even before it had begun. Simon wrapped his arms around the boy he’d met on their first day at school together, and hugged him so hard Enzo could barely breathe. His beard scratched Enzo’s cheek. ‘Jesus,’ he whispered again.

  III

  Enzo slipped on his waterproof leggings, and pulled the lightweight plastic cagoule over his head. He folded his maps in two and zipped them into an inside pocket. He felt better now that the waiting was over. All the hours he had spent treading water felt like wasted time. Samu adjusted the webbing inside Enzo’s hard hat and got him to check the fit. Then he double-checked the lamp set above the peak. It shone bright and strong, powered by a brand-new battery. He handed Enzo a small, waterproof flashlight as backup. ‘Keep it safe,’ he said. ‘The last thing you want to be down there is in the dark.’