Extraordinary People

Chapter Twenty-Four

The Rue Rotrou was just two streets away from Raffin’s apartment. Samu parked on a carpet of light laid down in the road by the large, overlit window of an art gallery on the east side of the street. The two men abandoned the car and splashed across the pavement to the shelter of an adjoining doorway. Samu rapped sharply on the glazed door with the back of his hand, and his signet ring almost cracked the glass. Through the condensation, they saw a silhouette loom against the light, and the door opened to reveal a much smaller man than his shadow would have had them believe. He wore a suit, his tie loosened at the neck and the top button of his shirt undone. He was bald, with a sallow complexion, and darting, frightened eyes.

‘Come in, quick.’ He glanced into the street and closed the door behind them. ‘It’s one thing when we’re open for business, Samu. But it looks pretty damned strange to have all my lights on at this time of the morning.’

‘Turn the fucking things off, then.’ Samu took a white envelope from an inside pocket and handed it to him. ‘You’ll get the rest when Monsieur Macleod gets back.’

The gallery owner glanced nervously at Enzo. ‘How long will you be?’

‘As long as it takes,’ Samu said. ‘Come on, take us down. And turn out the lights when you come back up.’

The cream-painted walls of the gallery were hung with movie poster originals by Alain Lynch. There was an exhibition of Ellen Shire abstracts, and several of Gilbert Raffin’s stylised Paris-scapes. Enzo wondered briefly if the artist was related in some way to Roger.

‘This way.’ The little man led them down a steep, narrow staircase to the basement of his shop. It was dry and cool down here. Dozens of paintings were stacked against the walls and draped with cloth. He took out a bunch of keys and unlocked a door beneath the staircase. It opened into blackness. He reached into it to find a light switch, and a single yellow bulb brought sudden hard light to a narrow passage with brick walls and an earthen floor. There was a smell of damp and the sound of small creatures scuttling into the shadows. Old cobwebs hung in folds, draped from the ceiling like fine-spun gossamer curtains. ‘You know your way from here.’

‘I do,’ Samu said, and he stepped into the passageway, stooping to avoid a rusting steel beam. Enzo followed and shivered. It felt cold here in the dark and damp. The basement door slammed shut behind them, and he heard the key turning in the lock. Samu said, ‘Mostly these cellars are used to access the sewer system, but if you know where to look you can get right down into the catacombes. Come on.’ And he set off briskly along the passage. They hurried past locked doors leading to the basements of shops and apartment blocks. And as the light faded behind them, they switched on their helmet lamps, sharp beams cutting through damp air, swinging left and right with the turn of their heads.

Samu seemed to know his way by heart, taking right turns, or left, without hesitation. To Enzo, one turn looked like any other. Brick walls and steps and narrow openings. Rusting steel doors. Samu delivered a breathless commentary as they moved through the dark. ‘We just crossed under the Rue de Médicis. If we turned right we’d come up against the wall of the car park beneath the Sénat.’ He opened a door and they went down a short flight of steps into a huge tunnel that arched above their heads and roared with the sound of rushing water. Drips fell like rain from the brickwork overhead. The beam of Enzo’s lamp flashed across the black streaked surface of what looked like an underground river in spate. A narrow walkway with a rusted iron rail ran along the side of it. It was slippery like ice underfoot. ‘Jesus!’ he heard Samu’s voice rise above the roar of the water. ‘I’ve never seen it like this before!’

‘Where the hell are we?’ Enzo shouted back.

‘We’re in the sewers! But don’t worry, the shit’s all in the pipes. This is just rainwater draining down from the streets.’ They slithered along the walkway for twenty or thirty meters. ‘We’re under the Jardins du Luxembourg now.’

‘Maybe it would have been easier climbing the fence,’ Enzo shouted.

Samu grinned and turned off into a feeder tunnel. The water was calf deep, and the power of it was almost strong enough to take Enzo’s feet from under him. They waded against the flow of it to a flight of steps leading up to a metal door set into the wall. Samu heaved it open and they climbed into a dry, circular, concrete chamber. Metal rungs set into the wall ascended into blackness. Even with his head tipped back and the beam of his lamp pointed straight up, Enzo could not see where they went. The darkness above them seemed to snuff out the light. When Samu slammed the door shut, the roar of water in the sewers became a distant rumble. He produced from somewhere beneath his waterproofs an iron crossbar with metal lugs at one end, and knelt on the floor. Enzo tilted his head to direct the beam of his lamp downwards, and saw that there was a circular IDC metal plaque set into the concrete. Samu slipped the lugged end of his crossbar into a slot beneath the letters and turned it like a key to lock it in place, and then he braced himself to pull the lid aside. He strained and grunted as the cast iron slipped out of its circular groove and dragged across the concrete. The darkness it uncovered was profound.

Samu stood up, breathing hard and grinning triumphantly. ‘Et voilà. You’re in.’ Enzo could see the first rungs gleaming dully in the light of their helmets. ‘It’ll take you straight down into a little antechamber right off the main drag. There’s a short stretch of tunnel. It’ll take you west about fifteen meters. When you get to the end you turn left. That’s south. You’ll be right below the Grande Avenue du Luxembourg, and then you’re following the map.’ He fumbled in his pocket and pulled out what looked like a wristwatch with a velcro strap fastening. He held it out. ‘Put that on your right wrist.’ Enzo took it and realised that it was a compass. ‘You’ll find that you get pretty disorientated down there. That should keep you straight.’ He went into an inside pocket and brought out a tarnished silver cigarette case. He opened it to retrieve a pre-rolled cigarette and lit it, his lighter bringing fleeting colour to a bloodless face. ‘What are you going down there for, man?’

But Enzo just shook his head. ‘You don’t want to know.’

Samu shrugged. He looked at his watch. ‘It’s just after one-thirty. How long are you going to be?’

‘I don’t know. Two, maybe three hours.’

‘I’ll be back here at three-thirty. I’ll wait till five. If you haven’t shown by then, you’re on your own.’

Enzo nodded.

‘Bon courage.’ Samu extended a hand. It was cold and limp when Enzo shook it.

Enzo crouched on all fours and dropped a leg into the hole to find the first rung. He tested his weight on it before lowering himself carefully to reach the next. It was a tight squeeze. By the time he was a dozen rungs down, the hole had swallowed him entirely. The sound of metal dragging across concrete forced him to crane his head back and look up. He saw the light of Samu’s helmet extinguished as the iron plaque slid back into place above him. For a moment, he panicked, crushed by darkness and claustrophobia. He wanted to shout, like a child at bedtime whose parents have turned out the light. He was breathing too rapidly and knew that he was in danger of hyperventilating. He fought to control it, holding down the acid in his stomach until the first flush of panic passed. He had to get to the bottom as fast as possible.

With arms and legs trembling, he climbed down as quickly as he could, and found himself standing in a small space crudely hacked out of the rock and shored up with brick. A narrow tunnel stretched ahead of him. It looked as if it had been bored out of the rock by a giant drill. Bent almost double, and bracing himself with hands and feet against its curving walls, he made slow forward progress until he reached a barrier crudely constructed from rough-cut blocks of masonry. Some of them had been knocked out. He peered through the hole to see that he would have to climb backwards through it to get down into the wide, square tunnel which crossed at right-angles beyond. He heard his cagoule tear as he eased himself through the gap, its hood catching on a jagged edge of rock. He cursed and yanked himself free, jumping, almost falling backwards into the tunnel. He steadied himself against the brick, legs quivering from the effort, and found himself looking at a street sign painted on a smooth stone slab set into the opposite wall. G.DE AVENUE DU LUXEMBOURG CôTé DU COUCHANT. It was covered in graffiti, red and blue and silver arrows, the letter A inside a circle. Already he seemed to have lost his bearings.

Turn left, Samu had said. South. Enzo double-checked with his compass. Of course, now he was facing the other way, and had to turn right. He steadied himself for a moment, then began south along the tunnel. The roof and floor seemed smooth, hacked out of solid bedrock. The walls were made from roughly cut stone bricks. It was narrow, little more than his own width again, and he had to stoop to avoid scraping his helmet on the roof. His breath condensed in white clouds in the lamplight as he pushed on as quickly as he dared. He passed several junctions branching off to east and west. In places the walls had collapsed, and he had to clamber over fallen masonry. Occasionally the tunnel widened, and crude brick columns had been constructed to support the roof. In other places the walls bulged, narrowing to the point where he could barely squeeze himself through.

He stopped frequently to consult his map. He had crossed four junctions, and was certain that the next turn to his right was the one that Samu had marked in red. He must have passed beyond the Luxembourg Gardens by now, and be heading south beneath the Avenue de l’Observatoire. In spite of the cold, he was sweating profusely. His helmet felt hot and uncomfortable and chafed above his ears. His back ached from the constant stoop.

He arrived at the fifth junction. The wall on the east side was partially collapsed, and he had to scramble across the rubble to get into the tunnel heading west. He was certain that this was his turnoff. Almost. But that single, tiny, nagging grain of doubt was enough to completely undermine his confidence. What if it wasn’t? If he got lost, then Kirsty would be lost, too. He forced himself to try to think calmly. He had to trust his judgment, and Samu’s map. And, in any case, Samu had said that if he missed his turn he would come up against the new multi-story car park and know that he had made a mistake. He wondered if, perhaps, he should carry on to that dead-end, just to be sure, and then make his way back to the turnoff. But there wasn’t time. He looked at his watch. He had no idea how long any of this was going to take.

So he headed off west, checking constantly with his compass. The tunnel should start curving to the south-west. But if the compass was to be believed, he seemed to be heading north-west. It was impossible to tell if the tunnel was curving or not. He could not see far enough ahead to make that judgment, and he had to keep his eyes down to avoid tripping over debris or falling into holes.

After several minutes, to his great relief, the tunnel seemed to arc south, just as it did on the map. He passed another opening veering off to his right, turning north this time. He looked at the map. There it was, leading off into a parallel network. He did not want to go that way. According to the plan there should not be any turnoffs on his left. If he hugged the left wall all the way, it should lead him to what Samu had called the roundabout beneath the Rue Auguste Comte.

He had gone, perhaps, twenty or thirty meters when he heard the first bloodcurdling howl. It was almost feral, and it stopped him in his tracks. He could hear the faint thump, thump, thump of distant music. Another shriek. And then laughter. Several voices, whooping and hollering. The music was getting louder, finding form in the dark. He could distinguish now the monotonous rhythm of a repetitive rap track. The thumping of a bass drum, the vibration of a bass guitar. More shrieking. It was getting closer, coming towards him from the direction of the bunker.

Enzo stood rooted to the spot. He had no idea what to do. There was nowhere to go. Maybe they were just kids out for a good time. Maybe they would say hey man, and shake his hand, and go on their way. Now he could see the light of their flashlights beyond a curve in the tunnel. And if he could see theirs, then they could see his.

Suddenly the music went dead, and the lights went out. The silence was absolute. And terrifying. Much worse than the music and the shrieking. He heard the faintest rustling, and then dark shapes moved into the farthest reaches of the beam from his helmet. He saw its light reflected in their eyes as they inched around the curve of the tunnel towards him. Five, six sets of them. They stopped, and there was a short, tense period of assessment, and then they all switched on flashlights and Enzo was momentarily dazzled. Another standoff, before a repetition of the howl which had first alerted Enzo to their presence. Like a bugler trumpeting the command to attack. It sparked off a chorus of shrieks, and their lights came flying towards him like frenzied fireflies. There was clearly going to be no hey man, and shaking of hands. Enzo turned and ran as fast as he could, back the way he had come. But they were younger, faster. It would only be a matter of time before they caught him.

He saw the rubble gathered around the north turn he had passed moments earlier, and he slithered over it into the turnoff. He fumbled for the switch on his helmet and turned off the light. A wall of blackness smothered him before his eyes adjusted to the reflected lights of the youths streaming in his wake. They were just out of sight beyond the turnoff. Enzo scrambled forward, tripping and stumbling, and almost fell into another turnoff on his left. He groped his way around a support column and felt where the wall had collapsed to create a shallow recess. He climbed over the rock-fall and rolled into it. He felt around for a sharp piece of rock that would fit into his hand, and pressed himself against the stone, trying to stop his breath from grating in his throat.

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 heavy, 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.’