Extraordinary People

I

Jacques Gaillard was dead. Enzo was certain of it.

He rubbed his eyes and looked at the clock on the mantelpiece. It was a little after three, and a party in one of the apartments opposite was still going strong. They had opened their windows wide, the musky aromatic smell of cannabis wafting its way across the narrow street, and the air was still vibrating to the monotonous rhythm of some endless Latin dance rap.

The party had begun around midnight, and Enzo had simply shut it out by reading through Raffin’s notes, and allowing himself to be absorbed into the arcane world of Jacques Gaillard.

JG, as he was known to his friends, had been the eldest son of a provincial lawyer in Angoulême. Early intellectual promise resulted in his being sent to the Henry IV Lycée in Paris, one of the best secondary schools in France. There, he rose to the top of his class, and won first prize in economics at the Concours Général. By this time he already knew that he wanted to go to ENA. The École Nationale d’Administration, the crème de la crème of the French system of Grand Écôles, accepted only the brightest intellects in the country, and turned out Prime Ministers and Presidents like a shark grows new teeth.

A degree from the Institut d’Études Politiques, popularly known as Sciences-Po, would have been the normally accepted route. But his father had insisted that he take a “proper” diploma first, and so he had enrolled at the Faculté de Droit et Sciences Économiques d’Assas. But such was the young Jacques’ genius, that this was not enough to keep him fully occupied. And so he had also enrolled at the Sorbonne, studying history.

By the time he graduated from both institutions, he had developed a good network of politically engaged friends. And had started his research into the history of early French cinema.

Acceptance to Science-Po was a formality, and given his previous academic record, his course there was reduced from four years to two. Such was his reputation for intellectual brilliance that by the time he sat the competitive exam for entry to ENA, he was already known to nearly half the members of the examination board. He sailed through the gruelling forty-five minute Grand Oral, during which prospective students are grilled, in public, on any subject chosen by a panel of five experts.

According to memoirs published later by some of that panel, and others who were there that day, Gaillard barely allowed them to get a word in.

Finishing in the top ten of his twenty-seven month course guaranteed him a pick of the top jobs in the Civil Service. Over the next twelve years his career went from strength to strength, and after a highly successful stint as principal advisor to the Minister of Finance, he was actively pursued by the Prime Minister’s office, eventually being appointed an advisor to the Prime Minister himself.

Which is when he published his book on the History of French Cinema, and his spectacular rise to prominence hit a brick wall.

Satirical cartoonists in the French media used him as a club with which to beat the Prime Minister. He was variously depicted as whispering advice into the premier’s ear on which of that week’s movie releases he should watch, or offering him tips on the most likely winner of best actress at the César Awards, or which film would take the Palm d’Or at Cannes. One particularly cruel cartoon in the satirical journal Le Canard Enchaîné conjured up an exceptionally gross-featured Prime Minister slipping JG a thick wad of two-hundred franc notes and asking if he could fix him up for the night with Sophie Marceau.

It seemed, however, that Jacques Gaillard was enjoying his new-found celebrity, and positively thrived on his increasingly frequent television appearances.

Then, between 1994 and 1996 he was “invited”—a clear euphemism for “instructed”—to direct students at ENA in an investigation into the history of French financial policies since the war. Perhaps an attempt by the government to lower his profile. But if that were the case, then it failed. For it was during that same period that Gaillard was asked by the French broadcaster TF1 to host his own cinema review show on television once a month, a chance he jumped at.

And then, that August, he vanished off the face of the earth. Enzo re-read Raffin’s account of it in the book.

Enzo had never seen Gaillard’s show, but when he looked through the various photographs in Raffin’s file, his face was very familiar. A cartoonist’s gift. Aged forty-nine when he disappeared, Gaillard had disguised his encroaching baldness by contriving an extraordinary bird’s nest of dyed and lacquered curls. He had also cultivated one of those excessive French moustaches which, after an initial droop, curled extravagantly up around his cheeks.

Also in the file was a copy of the page beneath the final entry in the desk diary found in Gaillard’s study. Enzo reflected that Raffin must have had good sources to get hold of material like this. The page containing the final entry itself had been torn out. But because of the impression it had left on the page below, the police scientifique had been able to treat the paper in the lab with electrostatic detection equipment to find and then visualise the fibres damaged by the abrasive pressure of the pen. Enzo looked at it carefully. Mad à minuit, it read. Evidently, Gaillard had spent some time on the entry, for he had gone over the letters several times, and then surrounded them with idle doodles and curlicues. The kind of doodles he might have engaged in absently during a lengthy telephone conversation. The police had secured phone records for the night before the date of the entry. They showed that there had been a phone call — about fifteen minutes long — shortly before ten o’clock. It was the last call registered to Gaillard’s phone, and it had been made from a public call box. In spite of extensive publicity, no one had ever admitted to making the call.

Enzo frowned and read and re-read the entry. Mad à minuit. Many before him had puzzled over it and, in the end, failed to make sense of it. Mad at midnight. Except that there was no such word as mad in the French language. And why would he have mixed English and French? It had to be a shortening of another word. Enzo pulled a French dictionary from the bookcase and looked up words beginning with mad. There were not many. Madame, mademoiselle, and Madeleine, the French for Magdalene. Madagascar and Madeira, Madras and Madrid. Madalopam, a strong calico. Madéfier, the verb to wet or moisten. Madone, the Madonna. Madriér, a thick plank of wood. Madrure, a mottle on wood or porcelain. A few others. But nothing that chimed.

The date of the entry was Friday, August 23rd, 1996. So presumably it referred to a rendezvous somewhere at midnight that night. The speculation was that the entry had been made in the course of that final phone call registered to his number the night before. But there was no way to prove it.

Enzo turned his attention, then, to photographs taken of Gaillard’s apartment, and wondered again how Raffin had managed to get copies. Then he noticed a tiny sequence of figures printed in red in the bottom corner of the prints. 2906’03. A date. These pictures had been taken just a little over three years ago. He frowned. How was that possible? It was ten years since Gaillard had disappeared. He dug into the thigh pocket of his cargos and found his cell phone. He tracked down Raffin’s number and pressed dial.

Raffin managed to convey sleepy and irritated in a single word. ‘Oui?’

‘Roger, it’s Enzo.’

There was a splutter of indignation from the other end. ‘Jesus Christ, Macleod, do you have any idea what time it is?’

‘How did you manage to take photographs of Gaillard’s apartment seven years after he’d disappeared?’

‘What?’ Raffin was now transmitting a mixture of incomprehension and anger.

‘Did you take these photographs of Gaillard’s apartment?’

‘Yes.’

‘How?’

‘Because the place hasn’t been touched since he vanished. His mother has preserved it. Like a shrine. Except that she refuses to believe he’s dead. She wants it to be there for him, just as he left it, the day he returns.’

Enzo could hardly believe his luck. A potential crime scene, preserved as in aspic, available for re-examination after ten years. ‘I want to see it.’

‘Talk to me tomorrow.’

‘No, I want to see it tomorrow. As early as possible. Can you arrange it?’

He heard Raffin sigh. ‘Call me in the morning.’ He paused. ‘At a civilised hour.’ And he hung up.

Enzo sat for several minutes contemplating the prospect of being able to revisit Gaillard’s apartment after all these years. No doubt it had been cleaned after forensics had finished with it. But there was so much you could learn about a man from the space he inhabited. And there was always the possibility that Enzo might see something others had missed.

The party across the street continued relentlessly. God, did these people not have homes to go to? Enzo adjusted the desk lamp and rubbed his eyes again in the bright light it spilled across the papers strewn over the desktop. He stretched and thought about bed. But his mind was still full of Gaillard, and his eye lighted again on the photocopy of the diary page treated by forensics. He stared at it for a long time, and then screwed up his eyes, inclining his head, and became aware that his heart-rate had suddenly increased. He looked around the apartment, frustrated that it was unlikely to provide the tracing paper he needed. And then he had a thought and crossed to the small, open-plan kitchen where he began going through the drawers. The third one turned up what he was looking for. A roll of greaseproof paper. He tore off a good twelve inches, and took it back to the desk, smoothing it out over the top of the photocopy. Crisp, opaque paper, but thin enough for the lines beneath to show through. Ideal. He reached for a pencil and immediately began the careful process of retracing Gaillard’s final doodles.