Peter May - Extraordinary People

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.

Enzo retreated to the apartment like the wounded stag that he was. The young buck had given him quite a mauling. There was still no one there when he got back. He picked his way into the séjour which seemed, if anything, even more cluttered. There were empty cola cans lying around, and pizza crusts in carryout boxes. The air was stale, and the heat stifling. He opened the French windows, only to be hit by a wall of even hotter air. Which was when he noticed that his whiteboard had been cleared of its first set of clues, and a new set of images fixed around its edges. A crude drawing of two skeletal arms; a bottle of Dom Perignon champagne; a photograph of a crucifix with the date April 1st written beside it; a picture of a dog tag with Utopique handwritten across it; a diagram of a dog’s skeleton with one of its front legs circled in red; a photograph of a lapel pin, complete with two men on a single horse and the inscription, sigilum militum xpisti . And someone had already begun trying to decipher them. There were words written up and circled, with arrows criss-crossing the board.