Extraordinary People ef-4

by Peter May

  The light grew stronger and he could see out into the tunnel now. It was narrower than the others, and its walls were in a poor state of repair. The pursuing voices had gone quiet, but Enzo could hear them breathing and whispering. The beams of several flashlights shone down his tunnel, beyond his hiding place, criss-crossing, searching out every crevice and rock-fall. There was a brief, whispered discussion, and then the flashlights carried on along the top passage, until gradually their light faded completely and silence returned to the catacombes.

  Enzo did not stir for nearly two minutes, until he was certain that they were not coming back. Then, cautiously, he eased himself out into the tunnel. He felt for the switch on his helmet and turned on the light. The face caught full in its beam was that of a young man with a completely shaven head. He had a deep scar through his left eyebrow, and black smeared like war paint across either cheek. He opened his mouth to yell as he raised a baseball bat above his head. Enzo smashed him full in the face with the rock he still held in his hand. He both heard and felt the breaking of bone, and saw blood spurting in the lamplight. His attacker folded at the knees and pitched forward face-first. Enzo had no idea how much damage he had done, but he was not going to wait to find out. He picked up the baseball bat where it had tumbled among the fallen stones and scrambled out into the main tunnel, turning right, and right again, hoping that he was accurately retracing the steps he had taken just minutes before. He ran as fast as he could, semi-crouched, shoulders glancing off the tunnel walls as he propelled himself forward into the darkness.

  Even as he ran panic was setting in. What if he had turned the wrong way? Supposing he was heading north instead of south? Or east. He might be anywhere. He was sure he had passed this stretch of collapsed wall before. The tunnel narrowed here and took a jagged turn. It all seemed horribly familiar. He stopped running, and leaned against the wall to catch his breath, searching in his pocket for his maps. And then his heart nearly stopped. He could only find two. The bunker, and the Reseau des Chartreux. His Luxembourg map was gone. He remembered it had been in his hand when he first encountered the rappers. What had he done with it? He tried to think. In his panic he must have dropped it somewhere. ‘Fuck!’ he shouted at the top of his voice, but his cry of despair was choked off by the weight of the city above him. He dropped his face into his hands and screwed his eyes closed and wanted to weep.

  But there was no point in feeling sorry for himself. Again, he forced himself to focus. Still breathing stertorously, he checked his compass. He was, it seemed, still heading south-west. He must be going the right way. With his eyes shut he tried to visualise the map. The tunnel took a loop at the bottom end, and curved around to Samu’s roundabout. If he could only get to the roundabout, then he would be on to the Chartreux map, and back on track. He was not going to help himself by panicking. He forced all the air out of his lungs and drew a long, deep breath. With the wall to his left, all he had to do was keep going. He set off again, this time at a less frantic pace.

  Time and space and direction had no place here in the catacombes. Enzo had lost track of them all. It seemed that the only thing he could do was focus on the tunnel ahead and keep going. And going. Interminably onwards, despair creeping back with every negative thought. And then the tunnel began visibly curving away to his right. This had to be the bottom end of the loop. He stopped to check the Chartreux map. It showed a tunnel branching off to the right. But there was no sign of it. He pushed on. Still no tunnel. Panic was returning. And then there it was. A crooked support column, a section of collapsed ceiling, a tunnel leading directly north.

  Immediately ahead, the tunnel opened out without warning into a crude chamber, where ceiling and floor folded one into the other, and several misshapen columns supported the roof. Another tunnel fed into the space from the north, and a cemented brick wall blocked the way out. Near the foot of it, someone had taken a sledgehammer to break a way through. A chatière. It was a small, ragged-edged hole, and Enzo looked at it doubtfully, wondering if he would be able to force his big frame through it. He stripped off his cagoule and got down on his knees. He got an arm through, and then his head, and he twisted to get his shoulders in. Even as he managed finally to drag himself through to the other side, he realised that it would not have been possible for Madeleine to force Kirsty all this way through the catacombes against her will. Either she had been tricked into going voluntarily, or Madeleine knew another way in.

  He reached back to retrieve his cagoule and the baseball bat, and he sat on the floor with his back to the wall, examining his two remaining maps. At the bottom left of the bunker map, on the Rue d’Assas, almost immediately adjacent to the Salle des Fresques, there was a notched circle with an arrow drawn to it. Plaque IDC en face de la librairie d’Assas, it said. Samu had told him all the exits into the Rue d’Assas had been walled up. But maybe Madeleine had made her own chatière.

  Enzo looked around and realised for the first time where he was. This was the north end of the German bunker. Concrete floors, pointed walls. Corridors rather than tunnels. Doorways, some with old metal doors, buckled and torn, still hanging from rusted hinges. The walls were covered in graffiti. Arrows pointed to Hinterhof, S. Michel, N. Dame-Bonaparte. Black letters painted on a white background warned, Rauchen Verboten. A more recently constructed redbrick wall barred that way forward. Enzo got to his feet and checked his map and his compass and then turned due south. Even after all these years, the German passion for order was still apparent in the ruins of this wartime bunker. Out of the haphazard chaos of the catacombes, they had created a grid-system of corridors and passageways, rows of doorways leading off to rooms and offices. It made Samu’s map easy to follow.

  The graffiti artists had been everywhere. Enzo saw several ghostlike white figures painted on brick. A skull and crossbones beneath which someone had scrawled RAMBO 21 DEC 1991. A mock street sign read, Passage of the Invisibles. An explosion was painted in red and white on another wall, a skull at its centre. NP NB was stencilled into it, and below it the legend, CONTAMINATION. Side by side in one corridor, he passed a row of what had once been chemical toilets. The remains of a wooden seat still straddled the pit in one of them. A primitive tribal figure with red facial war markings leered at him from a freshly bricked-up wall.

  Everywhere he turned, strange images were caught in the light. He saw old junction boxes fixed high on the walls, cables still spewing from the busted interiors from which they had been ripped more than half a century before. More recently someone had tried to make navigation easier by painting colour-coded arrows on the walls where corridors divided and led off in different directions. But Enzo had no way of making sense of them.

  He passed through a doorway and into one of the original tunnels hacked out of the rock by the ancient carriers. It ran east to west, effectively dividing the bunker in two. At the end of it, the map showed a corridor leading further west, and through another doorway into the Salle des Fresques. Another thirty meters and he would be there. He turned off his light and stood in the pitch black listening to the silence. It was as dense as the darkness, and just as impenetrable. His own breathing was deafening. He waited for his eyes to adjust to any other light source, and somewhere very faintly in the far distance he picked up the merest glimmer. Very carefully, fingertips picking their way along the wall, he drifted as quietly as he could through the darkness of the tunnel towards it. Slowly the light grew stronger, until he reached the end of the passage, and moved back into the regimented world of German planning. He passed three rooms on his right, before turning into a short corridor. A doorway on the left opened into the Salle des Fresques. The light was strongest here, although still feeble. A soft, flickering light that danced gently around the opening. Enzo advanced one cautious step at a time. There was still no sound, except for the ringing in his ears and the rapid beat of his heart pulsing in his throat.

  He moved into the doorway, and the Salle des Fresques opened out in front of him, beyond a he
avy, rusted iron door which stood ajar. It was a long space, brick walls giving form to a chamber hewn roughly from solid bedrock. He recognised some of the paintings from the internet. The Aztec Indian, Armstrong on the moon, the skeleton with its warning on AIDS. There were others. Marlene Dietrich, Spiderman, a penis with wings, a green man from outer space, a couple of big-booted thugs with mohican haircuts and an axe. But otherwise the salle was empty. The light came from a single candle which stood burning in the middle of the floor, set solid in a pool of its own melted wax. Next to it, the glass of what looked like a wine bottle glowed green in the flickering flame. The shadow of the bottle fell across the floor to flit around the walls with the frescoes.

  Enzo did not know whether to be alarmed or relieved. He stepped into the room and switched on his helmet lamp. He was quite alone. He crossed to the candle and crouched beside it to examine the bottle. It was a bottle of Chartreuse. And he saw then that the glass was clear. It was the liquid that was green. Green Chartreuse. The liqueur made by the Chartreux monks. He swore, and spat his frustration at the floor. Right to the end Madeleine was playing with him, leaving him clues to decipher. And this one was, perhaps, the easiest of them all.

  He took out his maps. The Reseaux des Chartreux was immediately south and east of the bunker. At its southernmost tip was the Fontaine des Chartreux. Samu had told him that it got its name from the green water that ran down the walls to collect in a stone sink made centuries before by the monks. There was an exit marked from the German bunker into the reseau at its south-east corner. And from there it looked a fairly straightforward route to the fontaine. He checked the time. It was twenty past two.

  As he stood up, he heard the same bloodcurdling howl which had greeted him on the turnoff from the Grande Avenue du Luxembourg. It was followed by a series of whoops and hollers. He wheeled around and ran back along to the near end of the tunnel which transected the bunker. This time he turned south, and then east, following a long, straight corridor past door after door giving on to deserted concrete rooms. It was hard to believe that all this had once been inhabited by German intelligence officers and administration staff, a command and communications centre controlling the occupation of the city. At the far end he turned south again, still running, passing more ghostly figures white painted on the walls, until he reached an arched stone doorway. An iron gate blocked his way. Beyond it was the reseau. Rusted hinges screamed their protest as he pulled the gate wide enough to let him slip through. On the other side he stopped again to look at the map. He was fifteen meters below ground here. The route he wanted to follow was marked on the plan as the Chemin du Bunker. It dog-legged south towards the fontaine at the bottom end. He stood listening. The screams and catcalls had faded. He hurried through the chamber beyond the gate and loped out into the network of tunnels that ran beneath the former Chartreux monastery.

  He was now in one of the tunnels dug out by the monks themselves, and he had to stoop low to avoid cracking his helmet on the roof. These must have been small men. In some places the tunnel narrowed to the point where he had to turn sideways to squeeze through. In others it seemed unusually wide, with a shelf sloping away to the ceiling along the left-hand wall. Some of the walls appeared to have been constructed from cement and pebbles, repairs perhaps where some of the original walls had tumbled down and left the structure unsafe.

  At the bottom end of the Chemin du Bunker, there were passageways leading off left and right, and his tunnel narrowed to another iron gate set into a squared doorway. Enzo stopped to listen. All he could hear now was the drip, drip, drip of water. He turned off his lamp, and after a moment saw the faint flickering glow of distant candlelight beyond the gate. Moving more cautiously now, he slipped past it and into a large, cavernous chamber whose curving roof was supported on crooked pillars. The light was coming from a narrow opening in the far wall. Enzo approached slowly, until he could see that there was a flight of stone steps leading down through the rock to a lower level. And there, at the foot of the steps, was the basin the monks had chiselled out of limestone to collect the water that dripped from the ceiling and ran down the walls. A candle burned in an alcove immediately above it, and the water itself gleamed a luminescent green by its light. Drips, like raindrops from the ceiling, broke its surface in ever increasing hypnotic rings. There were stone shelves set into the wall on either side of the basin, and on the left-hand wall, a figure sat cross-legged in the gloom staring down into the water as if in a trance. A slight figure, a woman, dark hair falling across her face. She appeared to be wearing a ski-suit and climbing boots. There was a small rucksack strapped to her back.

  As Enzo moved into the doorway she heard him and turned to look up the stairs. It was Marie Aucoin. The Garde des Sceaux. She was wearing no make-up and looked older than on the two previous occasions they had met. Her face was a sickly white, all humour leeched from her eyes. She swung her legs around to dangle from the shelf and placed her hands palm-down on the edge of it.

  ‘Surprised?’

  He stared at her for a long time, anger slow-burning inside him. ‘Yes,’ he said finally.

  ‘Good.’ She managed a wan smile. ‘Then perhaps I’m not too late.’

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  I

  ‘I was married to Christian when I was still working at the Société Générale,’ she said. ‘But finance was his forte, not mine. Still, it was useful to have a wealthy husband to support me through two and a half years as a student at ENA.’ She gazed back up the stairs at Enzo. She was a woman who liked the sound of her own voice. ‘It was starting to become fashionable at that time to accept students from the real world. It went against the stereotype of the cloistered academic, even though I already had my degree from Sciences-Po. But I preferred to be enrolled under my maiden name. Didn’t want to be thought of as a kept woman. So I was Marie-Madeleine Boucher, then.’ She smiled. ‘But when I ran for Deputé in Val de Marne, the name seemed a little too religious for a secular politician. And so I was happy to become Marie Aucoin and take my seat in the National Assembly.’

  ‘Where’s Kirsty?’

  The Garde des Sceaux seemed disappointed by his lack of interest in her story. She sighed. ‘All in good time.’

  ‘Whose good time?’

  ‘Mine, of course.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  Something hardened in her cold, blue eyes. And there was an edge to her voice. ‘To fulfil my destiny. I am forty-five years old, Monsieur. I am a woman, and I am the Garde des Sceaux. Do you have any idea how impossibly difficult it is to be all those things at the same time?’ She allowed herself a small smile of self-satisfaction. ‘And that’s just the beginning. Already they’re whispering in the corridors of Matignon about the possibility of my appointment as Prime Minister. But the Élysée Palace is my real destiny. To be the first woman elected to the office of President. An office from which I can change the future of my country. To which I can restore the vision of Napoléon and the genius of de Gaulle. I can lead France back to greatness.’

  ‘I admire your modesty.’

  ‘Modesty is for fools!’ She jumped down from her shelf. ‘Why don’t you come down and join me?’ It wasn’t so much a request as an instruction. She moved away from the foot of the stairs to the far side of the small chamber the monks had built to accommodate the fontaine. She took off her rucksack and laid it on the shelf beside her and folded her arms.

  Enzo hesitated. He knew that once he had descended into the chamber he would be trapped there. ‘Where’s Kirsty?’ he demanded again.

  ‘She’s nearby.’

  ‘If you’ve harmed her….’

  ‘She’s alive and well. And it is not my intention to do anything to change that.’

  Still he hesitated.

  ‘Unless you force me to.’

  He had no choice then. Slowly, reluctantly, he climbed down the six steps into the pit and turned to stand facing her across the green basin. They were only two meters ap
art, and he saw now that her eyes were quite dead. Almost opaque. She saw the world through cataracts of self-deception. She looked at the baseball bat dangling from his right hand and smiled.

  ‘Really, Monsieur, did you think you were going to beat me to death?’

  ‘It’s dangerous down here.’

  ‘Not if you know your way around. I’ve been exploring the catacombes since I was a student. I love it. It’s like life, really. You need to know what lies beneath, to understand what’s on the surface.’

  ‘Why did you kill him?’

  The sudden directness of his question seemed to ruffle her surface calm, and for a moment he caught a glimpse of the darkness that lay beneath.

  ‘He humiliated us.’ Her mouth curled in anger. ‘Picked us out as the brightest and best and then told us how much smarter he was than we would ever be. A process of daily, ritual humiliation. He had this compulsive need to demonstrate his superiority. Always at our expense. In private he would tell us that we were the future of France, in public he made fools of us in front of our fellow students. He wanted to mould us in his image, but made it clear we would always be inferior copies. He wanted us to worship at the altar of his brilliance, an acknowledgement from the intellectual cream of our promotion that we were mere cerebral midgets in the shadow of his towering intellect.’ She almost laughed. ‘And what had he become, this great brain? A reviewer of films.’