Extraordinary People

I

The Université Paul Sabatier was smudged across a great, sprawling campus on the southern outskirts of Toulouse. Sabatier had been the Dean of the Faculty of Science at Toulouse University in the early part of the twentieth century, and winner of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1912. Enzo had often thought how the great man would have been horrified to see the crumbling collection of faculty buildings thrown up in his name thirty years after his death. The science-based university consisted of disparate, ugly concrete blocks separated by vast car parks and scrubby patches of sun-scorched grass which turned to mud in winter.

From the dilapidated administration building, an avenue of trees flanked a long rectangle of green, stagnant water leading to a series of lawns providing a perspective to the distant, classical Lycée Bellevue on the other side of the Route de Narbonne.

Enzo parked in front of the administration block and climbed broken steps, past graffitied pillars, to the main entrance hall. The office of the Président was one floor up on the mezzanine level. His secretary ushered Enzo into his office and told him that the Président would be with him shortly. Huge glass windows gave out on to the view towards the Lycée Bellevue whose belle vue the university was spoiling. Students attending summer courses ambled across the concourse below, unhurried in the striking heat of the southern sun. The office was airless and hot. There was no air conditioning, and Enzo took a handkerchief from his satchel to mop his forehead. He sat down in front of the Président’s vast desk and let his eyes wander across the shambles of paperwork which littered it. The Président’s glasses lay, half open, on top of a pile of exam papers. Designer tortoiseshell frames, lenses divided in two for distance and close work. On an impulse, Enzo reached over to pick them up. They were handsome spectacles, and he wondered if they might suit him. He put them on and stood up to try to catch his reflection in the window. As he did, he heard the door opening behind him, and he snatched the glasses from his face. He turned, slipping his hands behind his back to hide them.

‘Macleod,’ the Président said, and he held out his hand.

Enzo swapped the Président’s glasses from one hand to the other, and firmly shook the one being proffered. When he returned his right hand to its place behind his back, it was only to discover that somehow the index finger of his left had become jammed in the bridge between the two lenses. He pulled discreetly, but it wouldn’t budge.

The Président dropped into his chair and regarded Enzo thoughtfully. ‘You’re a damned nuisance, Macleod.’

‘Yes, Monsieur le Président.’

‘Well, sit down.’ He waved a hand at the chair opposite.

But Enzo knew he could not very well sit down with his hands behind his back. He yanked again at the glasses. ‘I’d rather stand.’ He felt awkward and foolish.

‘As you wish.’ The Président began searching about his desk, lifting and laying papers, a frown forming itself in deep lines between his eyes. ‘I spent an unpleasant fifteen minutes on the phone with the Chief of Police yesterday. I suppose you can imagine the topic of conversation?’

‘I suppose I can.’

The Président flicked him a fleeting glance, suspecting sarcasm, then returned to his search. ‘He was adamant that the place for a Professor of Biology is in the classroom. And I have to tell you, I agreed with him.’

‘Yes, Monsieur le Président.’

Finally, the frustrations of his fruitless search boiled over. ‘Where the hell are my glasses! I’m sure I left them on the desk. Damned things cost an arm and a leg.’ He looked up at Enzo. ‘You didn’t see them, did you?’

‘No, Monsieur le Président.’ Enzo wedged the glasses in his right hand and pulled hard with his left. There was a loud crack as the frame broke in two across the bridge.

The Président looked up. Enzo moved his head around as if his neck was troubling him. ‘Good God, man, I’d get that seen to,’ the Président said. He opened a drawer and pulled out that morning’s edition of Libération, and Enzo slipped the broken halves of the glasses into his pocket. ‘And then this appears in the paper this morning.’ He held it up. But Enzo didn’t need to look. He had read Raffin’s account of the find in Toulouse during his flight down from Paris. ‘I know your background is in forensic science, Macleod, but that is not the capacity in which you are employed by this university. Your antics are attracting unwelcome publicity. We require state as well as private funding, and we cannot afford to offend our political masters. There could be financial implications. You understand?’

‘Yes, Monsieur le Président.’ Enzo was wondering what to do with the broken pieces of the Président’s glasses, which were burning a hole now in his pocket.

‘I’ve always thought you were a maverick, Macleod. You’re too chummy with the students. I hear that you’ve been known to go drinking with them, and that they even invite you to parties. Is that true?’

‘Yes, Monsieur le Président.’

The Président shook his head. He was feeling about in his pockets. ‘Doesn’t do. Doesn’t do at all. Not good for discipline.’

‘Is there a problem with my student pass rates?’

‘No.’ The Président gave a little defensive shrug of each shoulder. ‘But that’s not the point.’

‘What is the point, Monsieur le Président?’

‘The point is, Macleod, that I want you to lay off this amateur detective nonsense.’

‘I’m on holiday, Monsieur le Président.’

The Président stood up. ‘Yes, you are, Macleod. And I can arrange for it to be permanent if that’s how you’d prefer it.’

‘No, Monsieur le Président.’

‘Good, then we understand one another.’ He stretched out a hand to indicate that the interview was at an end.

Enzo shook it. ‘Yes, Monsieur le Président.’

And as he walked through the outer office he heard the Président shout to his secretary, ‘Amélie! Have you seen my glasses?’

‘No, Monsieur le Président.’ Amélie hurried through to help him look for them.

Enzo took the pieces from his pocket and dropped them in the wastepaper bin. He didn’t feel so bad now about breaking them.

II

It was early afternoon by the time he stepped off the Toulouse train in Cahors. He was depressed and disheartened. Warned off the Gaillard case twice. Once by the government, once by his employer. And he had spent most of the previous night dwelling on what might have been with Charlotte. He had known from their first meeting at Raffin’s apartment that she was special. She was affecting him in a way no woman had since Pascale. Dry mouth, palpitations, loss of self-confidence. It was uncomfortably like being a teenager again. He hardly knew her, and yet he knew that what he felt was more than just attraction. And last night, when they kissed, he had wanted simply to possess her. Entirely. It had been hard for him to accept her rejection, and he had lain awake most of the night thinking about it. There was no knowing when he would next be in Paris. And so he had no idea when he might see her again. The only redeeming thought in which he found comfort was that last night it was she who had come to see him.

He let himself go with the flow of disembarking passengers, out through the station foyer and into the afternoon sunshine.

It was a fifteen minute walk back to his apartment, where the final straw awaited him. He saw it as soon as he opened the door. Bertrand’s metal detector. He could not believe it was still there. ‘Sophie!’ he bellowed. But there was no response. The apartment was empty. He had no idea where Nicole might be. He picked up the metal detector and stormed off down the stairs in search of his car.

Bertrand’s gym was on the west side of the river, across the Pont Neuf, at the far end of the Quai de la Verrerie. The gym had been converted to its present purpose from a disused miroiterie. Tall windows along the front of the building flooded the interior with light. It was divided in two. There was a salle des appareils, filled with heavy weightlifting and fitness training equipment. A room beyond it with a sprung wooden floor was used for aerobics and dancing. One of its walls was lined entirely with mirrors so that overweight housewives could watch their flesh heaving as they tried to exercise it away.

Enzo had never visited the gym. He knew that it had an older clientele during the day, and that in the evening it was a popular haunt for the town’s teenagers. There were nearly twenty cars parked outside, and Enzo had trouble getting parked himself. He took the metal detector and pushed open the door. A number of middle-aged men and women looked up from miscellaneous pieces of equipment, and nodded and mumbled bonjour. A television set mounted on the wall was belting out MTV music videos. There was a sour smell of body odour and feet. Through windows along the back wall, he could see thirty or more women, ages ranging from twenty-five to sixty-five, dance-stepping in time to an endlessly repetitive beat. Bertrand was leading them, calling out each change in step. He wore a muscle tee-shirt, and close-fit shorts that cut off just above his calf. Enzo had only ever seen him in jeans and loose-fitting tee-shirts, and was almost shocked by his beautifully sculpted physique. God only knew how many hours of muscle-burning weight training it took to build a body like that.

Now that he was here, the metal detector in his hands, Enzo was not quite sure what to do with it. He could hardly burst into the aerobics class waving it at Bertrand. He decided to wait until the class was finished. He sat down on an exercise bench and waited through another ten minutes of mind numbing dance beat before the women began streaming out towards the changing rooms, a babble of breathless, excited voices.

He stood up and saw Bertrand laughing and joking with a group of them. Hard as it was to see past the facial piercing and the gelled, blond-tipped spikes, with reluctance Enzo supposed that Bertrand was a good-looking young man. The women couldn’t keep their hands off him, all anxious to kiss him goodbye. And he seemed to be enjoying it, flirting with them, encouraging them. His smile faded when he saw Enzo and the metal detector. He detached himself from the ladies and came across to shake his hand, the diamond stud in his nose glinting in the sunlight that slanted in through the front windows. Enzo grudgingly took the proffered hand. ‘You left something at the apartment.’ He thrust the metal detector into Bertrand’s chest. He was taller than Bertrand, but the boy’s physical presence was almost intimidating. A confrontation between the young buck and the grizzled old stag.

‘I can’t leaving it lying around here. It would be dangerous.’

‘I can vouch for that. And I don’t want it in my home.’

‘Fair enough.’ Bertrand turned and headed out of the door with it. Enzo followed him across the car park to a battered white Citroen van. Bertrand opened the back doors and threw the metal detector inside. He closed the doors and turned to face his girlfriend’s father. ‘You don’t like me much, do you, Monsieur Macleod?’

‘So you’re quick as well as fit.’

Bertrand looked at him with hurt in his soft brown eyes. ‘I don’t know why.’

‘Because I don’t want Sophie throwing her life away on a waster like you. I saw you in there with those women. Like some kind of…’ Enzo searched for the right word, ‘…gigolo. Disgusting.’

‘Monsieur Macleod,’ Bertrand said patiently, ‘these women pay good money to come to my fitness classes. It does no harm to be nice to them. It’s good for business. And as far as women are concerned, there’s only one in my life. And that’s Sophie.’

‘She’s not a woman, she’s just a girl.’

‘No, she’s a woman, Monsieur Macleod.’ Bertrand’s patience was wearing thin. ‘She’s not your little girl any more. So maybe it’s time you started letting her grow up.’

Enzo exploded. ‘Don’t you tell me how to bring up my daughter! I’ve done it for twenty years without any help from anyone. If it wasn’t for you she’d still be at university. She’s thrown away her future. And for what? Some muscle-bound dick-head who spends his days prancing about a gym with a bunch of middle-aged women. What possible future could she have with you?’

All the colour had drained now from Bertrand’s face. He stared back at Enzo with eyes that blazed anger and humiliation. He pointed at the gymnasium. ‘You see that gym? That’s mine. I created that. It was a derelict old factory until I raised the money to convert it. My father died when I was fourteen, and my mother couldn’t afford to put me through college, so I did it myself. I took two jobs, working nights and weekends.’

Enzo was already regretting his outburst. ‘Look…’ he said, determined that things should take a more conciliatory turn. But Bertrand wasn’t finished.

‘I’ve got a diploma on the wall in there. Top of my year. Do you know how hard it was to get that? Ten gruelling months at CREPS in Toulouse, studying anatomy, physiology, accounting, diet, muscle development. Do you know how many people apply for entry each year?’

Enzo shook his head. ‘No.’

‘Hundreds. And do you know how many they take? Twenty. The physical test’s tough. Twenty tractions, twenty push-ups, forty dips, twenty squat-lifts, and as many laps of the stadium as you can run in twenty minutes. Then there’s the written exam. General knowledge. An oral address to a panel on motivation and ambition, and then a gruelling question and answer session where they can ask you any question they damn well like for half an hour. It would be easier getting into one of the Grande Écoles.’

He paused for a moment, but only to draw breath. ‘So don’t call me a waster, Monsieur Macleod. I may be many things, but I’m not that. I do what I’m good at, and I’m good at what I do. I’ve worked damned hard to achieve what I have. And as far as Sophie’s concerned, I did everything I could to persuade her to stay on at university. But she’s the one who wanted to drop out. She told me there was no point in even trying to compete with her genius of a father.’

Enzo was stunned to silence, and felt the colour rising on his face.

‘Thanks for bringing the metal detector.’ Bertrand turned and went back into his gym.