Peter May - Extraordinary People

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.