Peter May - Extraordinary People

He picked up the book about the children’s fresco and flipped through its colourful pages of naively painted tropical fish and underwater seascapes. He could not, for the life of him, see the relevance of it. A mural painted on a wall sixty meters long. And a book about the history of the computer. He picked up the Iron Cross and held it between thumb and forefinger. If she was making this easy for him, why was he finding it so hard? And, in his mind, he answered his own question. Because he was looking for difficult answers.

He dropped the cross and picked up the computer book. Computers, an Illustrated History . Why couldn’t he see it? And then suddenly he did. ‘Goddamn!’ he said, angry with himself for trying to make it so complicated. He stood up, pushing past the others, and crossed the studio to Kirsty’s laptop on the desk below the west-facing window. He checked the cables. It was connected to the mains, and to the telephone line via an ADSL modem, which meant she had a high-speed connection to the internet.

‘What is it, Papa?’ Sophie asked.

‘It’s in here,’ he said, and he switched on the computer. It would take a minute or so to boot up.

‘What is?’ Raffin stood behind him as Enzo pulled a chair up to Kirsty’s desk and sat down in front of her laptop.

‘When you’re on-line,’ Enzo said, ‘you leave a trail of the sites you’ve visited. They get stored under History, in the browser.’

‘Of course,’ Nicole said. ‘ Computers, an Illustrated History .’

They watched and waited in silence while the computer took what seemed like a lifetime to load its desktop screen. And when, finally, it did, Enzo stared in shocked disbelief at the picture Kirsty had chosen for its background. It was an old photograph, taken more than twenty years ago, in the back garden of their red sandstone terraced home on the south side of Glasgow. Kirsty was maybe five years old. She had been almost blond at that age, a head full of big, soft curls. She was wearing a pale lemon sleeveless dress and a wide-brimmed straw hat with a blue ribbon which she had pushed back on her head. Her eyes were sparkling, and an impossibly wide grin revealed one missing front tooth. Crouched beside her, an arm around her waist pulling her towards him, a young Enzo smiled self-consciously at the camera. His hair was shorter then, darker, his white streak more pronounced. Kirsty had one arm dangled around his neck. Father and daughter as Kirsty remembered them. As she wanted to remember them. The father she had loved. The father who had loved her. A moment shared. And not all the years which had passed since could take that away from her. Enzo bit his lip and fought to hold back his tears. How could he have been so careless with his daughter’s love?

‘I thought she hated you.’ It was Sophie’s voice that broke the spell, and again he heard an edge of jealousy in it.

‘I thought she did,’ he heard himself say, almost in a whisper.

‘You don’t put a picture of someone you hate up on your computer screen,’ Sophie said. ‘Not when you have to look at it every day.’

‘She never hated you,’ Simon said. ‘Just…just never forgave you.’

Enzo took a deep breath and dragged his eyes away from the photograph. There was no time to be distracted.

‘Here, let me in.’ Nicole nudged Enzo aside and her fingers rattled across the keyboard. He blinked away his tears and watched as she opened up the browser, then clicked on the History tab on the left-hand side of the screen. The History drawer slid open. It was empty, except for a single link:

http://14e.kta.free.fr/visite/AssasObservatoire/index.html .

Nicole clicked on it. Immediately, they were connected to a page under the heading, LE QUARTIER ASSAS — OBSERVATOIRE. Down the left side of the screen were twenty or thirty links to streets and boulevards and other quartiers in the fourteenth arrondissement . In the top right corner was a tiny map labelled VILLE DE PARIS. An area of it was patched in blue. Most of the rest of the screen was filled with an enlarged plan of the blue area. It was a shaky, confusing, hand-drawn map, with streets represented by single, often broken lines, and names squeezed into spaces that were sometimes too small for them. It was, Enzo thought, how you might represent a rabbit warren. It certainly looked liked one.

‘What is it?’ Bertrand asked.

It was Raffin who replied. ‘It’s a map of the Grand Reseau Souterrain. The catacombes . Or, at least, a part of them.’ He leaned forward to peer at the screen, and then he traced a line with his finger. ‘There’s the Rue d’Assas.’

And Enzo realised he was looking at a map of the tunnels immediately below ENA’s international building in the Avenue de l’Observatoire, where only two days ago he had been given the photograph and video tape of the Schoelcher Promotion. He remembered the helpful Madame Henry telling him how monks had established the Order of Chartreux there in 1257, digging the stone to build it out of the ground below, creating a network of tunnels and chambers in the process. Somewhere right below where we’re standing now , she’d said. And there it was, immediately south of the Luxembourg Gardens. Above a mess of squiggles and loops and dead-ends, the author of the map had written Fontaine des Chartreux , and drawn an arrow pointing down into the muddle.

‘What’s that?’ Enzo guided Nicole’s mouse hand slightly to the left so that the arrow was pointing at two words.

They all squinted at them. They were far from clear. ‘It looks like Abris Allemand ,’ Nicole said.

Enzo frowned. ‘German shelters? What does that mean?’

‘Aren’t we looking for something with a German connection?’ Bertrand said. ‘The Iron Cross.’

‘Yes…’ Still Enzo could make no sense of it. Nicole moved the mouse fractionally to her left and the arrow turned into a tiny hand, which meant there was an invisible link there on the map. She clicked on it, and a new page wiped across the screen. It was headlined, LE BUNKER, and beneath it was a detailed map of something called the BUNKER ALLEMAND DU LYCéE MONTAIGNE.

‘It’s the plan of an old German bunker,’ Raffin said. ‘Right below the Lycée Montaigne. They must have built it during the occupation. It looks like some kind of communications and command centre.’

It was huge, a labyrinth of rooms and corridors, each carefully delineated and notated. Arrows indicated old entrances which had long since been bricked up. There were warnings about obstacles and pitfalls.

‘There!’ Bertrand stabbed a triumphant finger at the map. Enzo peered at where he was pointing. Three tiny, blurred words. Salle avec fresques .

Suddenly they had made sense both of the Iron Cross and the book about the children’s fresco. Deep in the bowels of the city, in the triangle between the Avenue de l’Observatoire and the Rue d’Assas, there was an old German wartime bunker with a room full of frescoes.

Nicole scrolled down the page, then, to discover a series of photographic images of the tunnels and rooms in the bunker, walls covered with graffiti. And beneath them was a link directly to the Salle des Fresques . She clicked on it, to download thirteen different images of graffiti art plastered over the walls of a single room in the bunker. An Aztec warrior facing down a dragon. An astronaut on the moon with an American flag. A skeleton in dinner jacket and bow-tie holding up a notice about AIDS.

‘That’s where I’ve to meet her,’ Enzo said.

Simon scratched his beard. ‘How do you know that?’

‘Because that’s where the clues have led us. That’s her message. Go to the Salle des Fresques.’