Extraordinary People

I

As he got to the foot of the stairs, Charlotte was padding naked from the bedroom wiping the sleep from her eyes. ‘What happened?’ she asked dreamily. ‘I thought I heard the sound of something breaking.’ And then she saw his face. Chalk white and etched with hurt and anger. ‘What’s wrong?’ The alarm in her voice was clear.

He threw the photograph on to the table, and the glass cracked in the frame. She looked shocked, her eyes full of incomprehension. He said, ‘I think there’s something you forgot to tell me.’

She walked to the table and glanced at the photograph behind the broken glass, and he saw realisation break over her like a wave, leaving her drenched with weary resignation. But her first instinct was to cover her nakedness, to dress up her sudden vulnerability. ‘It was none of your business,’ she said, almost under her breath, and she turned back to the bedroom.

Enzo went after her. ‘Well, I think it’s my business now.’ She pulled on a towelling dressing gown and held it tight around her, then stood her ground defiantly. ‘Are you going to tell me?’ he asked.

‘He was my uncle.’

Enzo felt his anger simmering and bubbling inside him. He fought to keep it from boiling over. ‘You lied to me.’

‘I didn’t lie to you. I didn’t tell you, that’s all.’

‘You lied by omission. It’s the same thing.’

‘Oh, crap!’ She pushed brusquely past him and out into the kitchen again. He followed her. She said, ‘I just met you a week ago. I didn’t know you. And I certainly didn’t owe you. The truth or anything else.’

‘Does Raffin know?’

‘Of course he does. That’s how I met him. When he was researching the book.’

A tiny explosion of air escaped from the back of Enzo’s throat. ‘Oh, right. Of course. It all becomes clear. You got involved with Raffin because you thought you might learn something about what happened to your uncle. But when he failed to come up with anything you didn’t already know, you dumped him. Just as I appeared on the scene promising to take a fresh look.’

‘It wasn’t like that.’ She folded her arms across her chest and faced him off.

‘Well, tell me how it was, then.’

She glared at him, angry and defiant and defensive. ‘I never thought for a minute that Roger was going to turn up anything new about my Uncle Jacques. I fell for him, that’s all. I thought he was charming and funny, and we had great sex.’

Enzo almost flinched. This was more than he wanted to know.

‘I dumped him because I got to know him. After that first flush of infatuation, I discovered that the more I knew him the less I liked him. It happens all the time. You meet someone. You think they’re great. Then you find out they’re not as great as you thought they were, and you move on.’

‘To me.’

She shook her head. ‘It was you who asked me up for coffee, remember?’

‘No. You asked yourself. And you’re the one who kept turning up at my door. Not that I wasn’t happy to see you. But it was you who came to Épernay. It was you who got the key to my room, you who got into my bed.’

She was only able to meet his angry gaze for a moment before she turned away. ‘You were the first person in ten years who seemed like he might actually find out what happened to my Uncle Jacques. And I wanted to be around when you did.’ She swung back to face him, vindication burning in her eyes. ‘I loved that man. A lot of people didn’t. I don’t know why. Because to me he was the kindest, sweetest, gentlest person. And someone just took him away from me. Wiped him off the face of the earth, without reason, without trace.’

‘So you used me.’

‘Yes.’

Enzo felt the bottom falling out of his world.

‘Not that I didn’t find you attractive.’

‘Oh, please!’

‘But, yes, I thought there was a good chance you might turn up something new.’ She drew a deep breath. ‘And then I got to know you. And the more I got to know you the more I got to like you. Just the opposite of how it was with Roger.’

‘You don’t know me at all.’ This was hurting more than he had thought it would.

‘I know enough to know that you make me feel like I’ve never felt before about any man.’

But Enzo didn’t want to hear it. This could only get worse. He started lowering the portcullis. ‘You know what I think?’ He answered his own question. ‘I think you use people. I think you used Raffin, and I think you’re using me. And when this is all over I’ll be nothing more to you than a piece of history.’

She looked at him with her big, dark eyes, like some wounded animal. Full of hurt and incomprehension. She shook her head slowly. ‘You’re wrong, Enzo.’

And suddenly the fire of their argument was extinguished, as if a salamander had come between them and put out the flames. Enzo felt spent. He walked past her and out into the early afternoon sunshine. The heat was building, and he felt the sun burning his skin. He thrust his hands in his pockets and walked off through the long grass choking the garden, until he found a stone bench placed so that it gave on to an undisturbed panorama of the valley below. He felt the stone hot through his trousers as he sat down, and he closed his eyes. The air was filled with the sound of a million humming insects, and then the church bell chimed one. It was extraordinary, he thought, how a single hour could change your life.

And in that moment of introspection, as anger subsided, the first doubts crept in to undermine his self-righteous certainty. Had he, after all, judged her too hastily, too harshly? He opened his eyes to the full glare of the sun and knew that whatever the truth, it was too late now to unsay the things that had been said.

II

He had no idea how long he sat there staring out over the Cère valley with its hills and gorges and tangling forests. It seemed like forever, but the church bell had not yet struck two. Ten minutes earlier he had heard the distant chatter of Charlotte’s printer, and now he caught a movement out of the corner of his eye, and turned to see her wading through the grass towards him. She was wearing jeans and a large, shapeless tee shirt with a faded Bart Simpson head on it. A sheaf of papers was fluttering in her trailing hand. She stopped a meter short of him, and he looked up to see that she had been crying. Her eyes were bloodshot and watery, and sadness was smudged in the shadows beneath them. But she looked at him without emotion.

‘Get over it.’ She held out a sheet of paper.

‘What’s this?’

‘I got to thinking about the clues again,’ she said. ‘It seemed a little more constructive than sitting about feeling sorry for myself.’

Enzo ignored the barb. ‘And?’

‘And, I got to thinking about those dates. 1927 to 1960. They seemed kind of like the dates you see in brackets after the name of someone who’s dead. A life span.’

‘A short life. Just thirty-three.’

‘He was.’

‘Who?’

She pushed the sheet of paper at him. ‘See for yourself. I just put the dates into the search engine and that’s what came up.’

Enzo glanced at the printout, squinting at it in the bright sunlight. DAVID DIOP — POET (1927–1960). It was an entry on a page of the library section of the University of Florida website. Diop had been born in Bordeaux, the son of a Senegalese father, and his work had reflected a deep hatred of colonialism in Africa. Killed in a plane crash in 1960, most of his poetry had been destroyed with him, leaving for posterity only the twenty-two poems published before his death.

He looked up at Charlotte. ‘So? He had a Senegalese father.’

‘So I looked at that list of Schoelcher students you got from ENA.’ She held it out to him. ‘I’ve marked the name with a highlighter.’

He looked at the green, highlighted name on the list. François Diop. And through the mist of blood and anger and pain which had clouded his last hour, an extraordinary clarity emerged. The dates engraved on the salamander. François Premier. Africa. Senegal. All leading incontrovertibly to the name of another of Jacques Gaillard’s students. François Diop. He turned shining eyes on Charlotte, and for the moment everything that had passed between them was forgotten. ‘What do we know about him?’

She shrugged. ‘I haven’t looked yet.’

He wrote François Diop up on the board, circled it, and drew arrows to it from everything else, except the cup and the whistle. ‘Okay, so we know who, but not where.’ He crossed to the kitchen table and picked up the group photo of the Schoelcher Promotion. There were four black faces amongst them. One of them was François Diop, and François Diop had tried to murder him. Of that he was certain. But he had not got a clear enough sight of the face to be able to recognise him. Certainly not from a tiny image in a ten-year-old photograph. ‘Have you found anything yet?’

Charlotte was still typing and working the mouse. ‘There are quite a number of François Diops. Apparently Diop is one of the commonest names in Senegal.’ She was scrolling down a list of more than one hundred and thirty links. ‘Wait a minute, I’ll try to narrow the search by linking the name to ENA.’ She searched again, and this time only a handful of links appeared. Mostly articles or official documents relating to a high-ranking fonctionnaire in the French diplomatic service. She pulled up an article headed, DIOP TIPPED AS NEXT DIRECTOR OF PEACEKEEPING OPERATIONS. She quickly scanned the text. ‘This is him.’ And Enzo rounded the table to stand beside her and lean over the laptop to peer at the screen. He smelled the traces of perfume in her hair, felt the heat of her body next to his, and suffered a huge rush of regret. He forced himself to focus on the text of the article.

Diop was based at the Quai d’Orsay, in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. During the previous nine years he had been appointed to a string of diplomatic postings in Washington, Tokyo, and Moscow. He had embarked on that golden path after graduating from the Schoelcher Promotion at ENA as one of the top students of his year. His ethnic background had stood him in good stead and, according to this particular journalist, he was now being groomed by friends in the Foreign Minister’s office for a top position at the UN.

There was a photograph of Diop grinning lopsidedly at the camera. He was a good-looking young man. The caption claimed he was just thirty-five years old, a child prodigy who was more than fulfilling everything which had been predicted for him.

The article went on to delve into his “extraordinary” background as an underprivileged black kid, the son of Senegalese immigrants, who grew up in one of the most notorious banlieu in Paris. His exceptional intelligence was noticed early by his teachers, as was his wonderful natural ability as a footballer. It was rare to be blessed with one outstanding talent. But such brilliance, in both academic and sporting disciplines, was unheard of, certainly in a black Parisian ghetto kid. As a teenager he had been pursued by several top French football clubs: Paris St. Germain, Metz, Marseilles. But he had been persuaded by his French teacher to take the academic route. While his star might have shone brightly for a few short years as a top sportsman, his teacher had told him, it would have dimmed as surely and quickly as his body was destined to decline. But his mind would grow and expand for decades to come. It was good advice.

Diop gained easy access to the élite Université de Paris Dauphine, renowned for turning out the future captains of French commerce and industry. There he quickly developed into a brilliant all-round mind, so that by the time he graduated he was able, with just one year’s preparation at Sciences-Po, to sail through the Grand Oral and the stringent entry exams for the Écôle National d’Administration at his first attempt. He was, then, still only twenty-three.

Even today, however, he had not completely given up his football. As a student he had been the star player in ENA’s official student football team — a mix of current and former pupils who played in a Monday night league. Since his return to Paris, he was still turning out every Monday as a former pupil, and was still their star player.

Enzo put his hand over Charlotte’s to scroll back up to Diop’s photograph. He stared at him hard for nearly half a minute. It was difficult to believe that this smiling young man had tried to kill him. That ten years earlier he had been part of a ruthless and savage group of students who had murdered their teacher. All of them endowed with rare intelligence, each of them on the threshold of brilliant careers. Why on earth had they done it?

He had left his hand resting on Charlotte’s, and he became suddenly self-conscious. He quickly removed it. ‘So there’s our sporting connection,’ he said. He glanced up at the whiteboard. ‘The cup and the whistle must lead us, somehow, to the next body part.’ It felt awkward now to talk about body parts with the victim’s niece. Like speaking carelessly about a dead person to a recently bereaved relative.

‘I suppose the cup could be some kind of football trophy,’ Charlotte said. ‘The division one championship, or the Coupe de France.’

‘Or any cup won by one of those teams who was interested in Diop as a teenager.’ Enzo pulled a sheet of paper towards him and scribbled the names down. ‘Paris St. Germain. Metz. Marseilles.’

Charlotte stood up. ‘Football’s for boys. I’ll leave you to it.’ And she crossed to the fireplace and pulled the curtain aside, to disappear into the darkness of the attic staircase.

Enzo stood for a moment, wondering whether he should go after her. But decided against it, and sat down instead in front of the laptop. It only took him a few minutes to track down a UEFA website bristling with football statistics from around Europe. He scrolled back to the year 1996. The Championnat de France and the Coupe de France had both been won that year by Auxerre, the League Cup by Metz FC. The UEFA Cup had been won by Bayern Munich, and the Champions’ League by Juventas. Paris St. Germain, more affectionately known as PSG, had won the European Cup Winners’ Cup, and Germany had lifted the European Nations Cup at the end of a three-week competition in England. So two of the clubs who had pursued Diop as a schoolboy, PSG and Metz, had won trophies in 1996.

He heard Charlotte coming back down the narrow wooden staircase. She pulled open the curtain at the foot of the stairs, and emerged carrying a small television set which she placed on the far end of the kitchen table. It was an old set, with a built-in video player. She began searching in a drawer of the buffet for a mains extension.

‘What are we watching?’ he asked.

‘If the television still works I thought it might be useful to take a look at this.’ She lifted Enzo’s manila envelope from the table and took out the video record of the Schoelcher Promotion that Madame Henry had given him in Paris. Enzo had forgotten all about it. He had no idea what Charlotte thought they might learn from it. Perhaps she just wanted to take a closer look at her uncle’s killers.

He left her to set up the TV, and returned his attention to the computer. He typed PSG into the search window and hit the return key. The official website of Paris St. Germain came up at the top of the page. He clicked on the link. A menu down the left-hand side of the home page offered him a range of options from Matches to Ticket Sales. He selected Club, and from a sub-menu, Histoire. The page which downloaded offered a brief history of the club from its creation in 1970 to the present day. Enzo scanned the text, but nothing jumped out at him.

From a range of options along the top of the page he selected the period 1990–2000. A detailed history took him through that decade. The events of season 1995-96 focused on the winning of the European Cup Winners’ Cup — their first European trophy. He also read through an account of the following season. But again there was nothing to connect the club to any of the other clues. Or to François Diop. Enzo breathed his frustration into the rafters.

Charlotte had found a cable and was plugging in the TV set. She switched it on, and white noise issued from tiny speakers. She turned it to mute and said, ‘I was thinking about those numbers on the referee’s whistle.’

Enzo glanced up at the board, where he had written 19/3 beneath the photograph of the whistle. He had not yet given them any consideration. ‘What about them?’

‘What do they look like to you?’ She pushed the cassette into the slot beneath the screen, and like a mouth it opened up to swallow it whole.

Enzo looked at the numbers, vaguely shaking his head. He took a stab in the dark. ‘I don’t know…a date?’

‘Exactly.’

He sat up. Why had he not thought of that? ‘Nineteen, three. March 19th.’ He looked at Charlotte. ‘Does that mean anything to you?’ But even as he asked, he knew the answer. ‘19th of March, 1962. The date of the ceasefire in the Algerian War. There are streets and squares all over France named 19 Mars 1962.’

‘That’s the problem. There are too many of them, unless you can tie one to a specific location.’

Enzo looked at her, surprised. ‘You’d already thought this through?’

‘Of course.’

‘So when were you thinking of sharing it with me?’

‘I just did.’ She stabbed the play button on the set. ‘Do you want to watch this or not?’

He left the computer and moved around the table as a piano began playing some soft classical music. The group photograph that Enzo knew so well came up on screen, with the caption, PROMOTION VICTOR SCHOELCHER 1994-96. Then, VIE D’UNE PROMOTION, followed by close-up shots of the faces in the photograph. They were all there. Gaillard, Hugues d’Hautvillers, Philippe Roques, François Diop. Enzo stared at it grimly. How many others had they not yet identified?

With a bad sound cut, the picture jumped to a shot of hanging French flags, and the caption, LE CONCOURS. This was an extract from some French television news item. A voice-over full of gravitas listed the names of famous énarques. Jacques Chirac, Alain Juppé, Lionel Jospin, Valery Giscard d’Estaing. The leaders of a generation. And, thought Enzo, a roll-call of crooks. The camera lingered on the façade of ENA’s former Paris HQ in Rue de l’Université. These presidents and prime ministers, the voice-over intoned gravely, had all passed through these hallowed gates. And today, it went on, there were more than four thousand énarques running both the French government and the private sector.

The camera wandered, then, into the torture chamber where ENA’s panel of experts conducted the Grand Oral. Five smug interrogators sat behind a long, oval table smiling sadistically in anticipation of the inquisition to come. An elaborate timer stood on the table to count off the minutes.

The short film then segued through various sequences, amateur footage, and excerpts lifted from professional news reports. Students sitting in the ENA library discussing their course, shots of skiers at Puy St. Vincent during their bonding break. A lecture room full of students listening in rapt silence to their lecturer.

Enzo heard Charlotte’s sharp intake of breath, and realised that the lecturer was Jacques Gaillard. He was brusque and business-like, addressing his students with the absolute confidence of a man free of self-doubt. Even in this fuzzy clip, with its bad ambient sound, his charisma was electrifying. He commanded total attention, complete respect. As the camera panned around the students, Enzo saw the languid figure of Philippe Roques, leaning one elbow on the arm of his chair, listening intently to his teacher. Enzo hit the pause button, and the picture froze on Roques’ face. ‘Philippe Roques,’ he said. And he turned to see silent tears running down Charlotte’s cheeks.

‘Bastard!’ she whispered.

Enzo let the tape run on. More shots of students, borrowed this time from BBC World. A caption, LA VIE à STRASBOURG. Students walked around the ancient streets of this centre of European power. In the language labs, yet more students conducted debates in foreign languages. German, Italian, English. They all seemed fluent. One student had enough confidence and wit to correct his chairman in English. ‘First, I would like to point out,’ he said, ‘that I am not Mister Mbala, I am Chief Mbala.’

And then there was Hugues d’Hautvillers, smiling, cocky, cracking jokes in German, aware of the camera on him and playing to the gallery. Enzo wondered what on earth had led him from precocious childhood to murder and suicide — if that’s what it had been.

The film cut to LES SPORTS. A mini-marathon. Students rowing and doing press-ups. And then a football match. A black player scoring a spectacular goal. François Diop. Fit. Strong. No wonder he had been able to overpower Enzo so easily. Enzo felt a huge surge of resentment and anger. These people had been given every advantage nature and society could offer. Intelligence, talent, privilege. And yet they had chosen to exercise their advantage by indulging in murder. Both then and now. Only now, it seemed, they were disposing of one another.

The end caption came up. BONNE CHANCE, TOUS NOS VOEUX, à BIENTOT, EN FORMATION PERMANENTE. The film was dated March 1996.

‘They graduated in March,’ Charlotte said quietly. ‘So they had five long months to plan and carry out the murder of my uncle. No rush of blood to the head, no crime passionelle. Just cold, calm, premeditated murder.’

She switched off the recorder, and it spat the tape back out at them, as if the cassette had left the same bad taste in its mouth as in theirs. They sat in silence, staring at the blank screen. Then Charlotte said, out of nowhere, ‘What about the Saints day? That came up in one of the previous sets of clues, didn’t it?’

Enzo did not immediately understand. ‘April 1st,’ he said. ‘But I don’t see….’

‘March 19th,’ Charlotte said patiently.

Enzo glanced at the board again and shook his head doubtfully. ‘We’ve already got a name.’

She shrugged. ‘It wouldn’t do any harm to know.’

Enzo returned to the computer and tapped the date into Google. ‘Saint Joseph,’ he said. ‘It’s Saint Joseph’s Day.’

In the moments of silence that followed, neither of them could think of any relevant observation. Then Charlotte said, ‘I’ll pack the TV away.’ And Enzo returned to his search of football clubs. He typed METZ FC into the search window, and when he punched the return key a link to the official website of FC Metz appeared at the top of the page. He clicked on it and was immediately subjected to a passage of loud rock music accompanying flashing animated images of a footballer intercut with the club’s official shield.

‘What in God’s name’s that?’ Charlotte asked.

But Enzo had frozen, his eyes locked on the screen, his heart pulsing in his throat. The animated sequence finished on a final image of the club shield, and then cut to the home page. ‘Jesus….’

‘What is it?’ Charlotte came around to look.

‘The official emblem of Metz football club. It’s a salamander.’ He pushed back his chair and crossed quickly to the whiteboard. He wrote up Metz FC and circled it. ‘That’s it. That’s the place.’

‘Metz?’

‘Yes.’

‘More body parts? More clues?’

‘It must be.’ Enzo turned back to the board and starting slashing arrows across it. ‘All the arrows that pointed to Diop carry on to Metz. Then we have another arrow from the salamander. Metz won the league cup in 1996, so another arrow from the football trophy. And then a final arrow from the referee’s whistle. Another football connection.’

But Charlotte was not convinced. ‘What about March 19th?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe the football stadium’s in rue du 19 Mars 1962. We’ll find out when we get there.’

Charlotte began studiously winding up the mains extension cable. ‘You might. I won’t.’

Enzo felt an unpleasant stillness settle on him. ‘You’re not coming with me?’

‘No. I have to get back to Paris.’

‘Don’t you want to know who killed your uncle?’

She turned on him, anger flashing in her eyes. ‘What do you care? All you’re interested in is winning your bet.’

If she had plunged a knife into his heart, she could hardly have hurt him more. But maybe it was no more than he deserved. He watched her in silence as she packed away the cables. ‘How will you get back to Paris?’

She shrugged, ‘You can drop me at the railway station at Tulle.’ And she lifted the television to take it back up to her room.