Peter May - Extraordinary People

‘Good girl.’ Raffin embraced her and kissed her on the cheek. She responded and hugged him back. Enzo watched awkwardly, and was annoyed by the tiny worm of jealousy he felt stirring inside. They broke apart and Raffin said, ‘I’ve got to go to the office and update my story. Two dead now. Three if you include Gaillard.’

‘Four, if you include the boyfriend,’ Enzo said.

‘Was Roques really murdered?’ Charlotte asked.

‘He was murdered all right,’ Raffin told her. ‘If not by his lover, then by someone else.’ He looked at Enzo. ‘Makes you wonder about Hugues. Either someone is prepared to kill again and again to cover up the original murder. Or fate has conspired to take three lives by pure coincidence.’

‘I don’t believe in fate or coincidence,’ Enzo said.

‘No, neither do I.’ Raffin tugged at Enzo’s lapels to straighten his ill-fitting jacket, and he looked at it ruefully. ‘I’ll get the jacket another time.’ And he kissed Charlotte on the cheek again. ‘Catch you later.’ He went running off towards the Pont St. Michel, waving and shouting at a taxi which had appeared from the Boulevard du Palais.

Charlotte and Enzo stood looking at each other. ‘You’re a little underdressed,’ she said.

But Enzo couldn’t even bring himself to smile. ‘Jesus, Charlotte, this is getting scary.’ And he took her in his arms, and held her for a very long time. She moulded herself into all his contours and held him just as tightly, and he felt a huge rush of fatigue and relief and affection.

‘Come on,’ she said finally, dark eyes looking intensely into his. ‘Let’s get you home.’

As they walked along the quay, past the Préfecture de Police, and towards the floodlit Notre Dame, she slipped her hand into his, and he squeezed it, grateful for the comfort. They crossed the Pont St. Michel and turned down past the oldest tree in Paris, a grizzled acacia which stood at the centre of a garden brooding darkly behind spiked railings. Charlotte’s car was parked beyond the Église St. Julien-le-Pauvre. A down-and-out slept opposite the church in the doorway of a tea shop.

At her car, Charlotte turned and reached up to hold Enzo’s face in both her hands. She gazed at him for a moment, a fleeting infusion of mixed emotions, then reached up on tiptoe to kiss him softly on the lips. He was caught off-guard by her sudden tenderness. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

‘What for?’

She shook her head, smiling sadly. ‘Just…everything.’

Hot water beat down on his head and shoulders, streaming over his chest, and hanging in droplets from a million hairs. He wanted to stand there forever, just letting it wash over him, taking with it the taint of a dead man’s blood, the awful image of his gaping, lifeless face. The shower door opened and Charlotte stood naked before him, a slight, quizzical smile on her lips. She stepped up to share his water, and her dark curls unfurled into long, black ribbons over her shoulders. She stared at him through the steam. ‘I love your eyes,’ she said. And she touched his face and pushed his wet hair back behind his ears. Then she dropped both hands to find and hold the softness of his penis, and he immediately felt the blood rushing to it. Her breasts pressed against his belly, and as his passion flowered, she slid her hands behind him to hold his buttocks and pull him towards her. She turned her head to one side and pushed her face into his chest.

They stood like that for a long time, under the running water, before stepping out to towel each other dry, skin glowing pink, wet hair hanging in damp ropes. She peppered him with kisses, and ran her fingers gently through the wiry hair on his chest, then took his hand and led him back through to the bedroom. Beyond the walls of glass which looked down on the garden courtyard below, the dark seemed very intense. Enzo felt strangely exposed. Anyone out there on the gallery opposite could see right in, just as he had the previous evening. Now he was lying among the lilac sheets that he had seen earlier, Charlotte on top of him, something frantic in the ferocity with which she bit his lip and pushed her tongue in his mouth. She reached down to find his erection and guide him inside her and thrust her hips at him with an energy he found hard to match.

He came quickly, almost overcome by fatigue and a strange melancholy, and she immediately lay down beside him to curl into his hip. ‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered. His turn to apologise.

‘Why?’ She seemed surprised. ‘You were lovely.’ She reached over and turned out the light, and they lay in the dark for ten or fifteen minutes without stirring. Moonlight spilling across the rooftops washed down through the angled glass roof of the warehouse, into the garden below, and through the tall windows of the bedroom. Enzo lay with his eyes open, and they adjusted to the light, so that he could follow every shape and contour. His brain refused to stop. He caught the slightest movement in his peripheral vision and turned his head to find himself looking into two luminous, saucer-like green eyes. Zeke sat on the bedside cabinet staring at him, and Enzo wondered if the cat had watched them making love. Wondered if it was jealous.

His thoughts were broken by Charlotte’s voice, small and hoarse in the dark. ‘You know, I bought this place ten years ago from an old couple who’d lived here in the war. They were just newly married when the city was occupied by the Nazis. They ran a coal merchant’s business, and the Germans forced them to supply them with coal. They told me that the street was known as Little Italy, because of the number of Italian soldiers billeted here. They had been made to provide food and lodgings for two of them.’ She reached across his chest to twirl the long strands of his hair idly in her fingers. ‘Then after the allies landed, and the liberation of Paris was close, Parisians all over the city rose up against the occupiers. The couple who owned the coal merchant’s shot and killed their two Italian lodgers. They told me this, because when I was buying the property, I asked them why the cellar below the warehouse had been bricked up and cemented over. And they said that’s where they had buried the Italians. They were in their seventies by then, and they said I was the first person they had ever told.’

‘And did you believe them?’

She laughed a little. ‘I don’t know. But I’d like to. I’ve come to think of the bodies in the cellar as my Italians. Buried for eternity. And that I’ll always have their ghosts for company on cold winter nights.’

Enzo thought about the sense he’d had earlier of vulnerability, of exposure to anyone who might have been watching from out there in the dark. And he thought about the ghosts of the two Italian soldiers who had never, after all, made it back to the olive groves in the southern sun. ‘I hope you’re not thinking of adding a third Italian to the collection,’ he said.

He heard the rustling of sheets, and then her lips, soft and cool, on his cheek. ‘I’d like to think that maybe my real-life Italian would stay voluntarily.’

He closed his eyes and felt himself drift off into confusion. She had a powerful effect on him. There was no doubting that. And yet the signals she gave him were mixed and conflicting. She didn’t want a relationship, she said. And yet she was happy to make love to him. Her relationship with Raffin was over, but she didn’t want to make him jealous. And now she wanted her real-life Italian to stay voluntarily . What did she mean? I love your eyes , she had told him. Had she changed her mind about not wanting a relationship? He was nearly fifty years old, and he still had no greater understanding of women than when he was fifteen.