Peter May - Extraordinary People

As he stood up, he heard the same bloodcurdling howl which had greeted him on the turnoff from the Grande Avenue du Luxembourg. It was followed by a series of whoops and hollers. He wheeled around and ran back along to the near end of the tunnel which transected the bunker. This time he turned south, and then east, following a long, straight corridor past door after door giving on to deserted concrete rooms. It was hard to believe that all this had once been inhabited by German intelligence officers and administration staff, a command and communications centre controlling the occupation of the city. At the far end he turned south again, still running, passing more ghostly figures white painted on the walls, until he reached an arched stone doorway. An iron gate blocked his way. Beyond it was the reseau . Rusted hinges screamed their protest as he pulled the gate wide enough to let him slip through. On the other side he stopped again to look at the map. He was fifteen meters below ground here. The route he wanted to follow was marked on the plan as the Chemin du Bunker. It dog-legged south towards the fontaine at the bottom end. He stood listening. The screams and catcalls had faded. He hurried through the chamber beyond the gate and loped out into the network of tunnels that ran beneath the former Chartreux monastery.

He was now in one of the tunnels dug out by the monks themselves, and he had to stoop low to avoid cracking his helmet on the roof. These must have been small men. In some places the tunnel narrowed to the point where he had to turn sideways to squeeze through. In others it seemed unusually wide, with a shelf sloping away to the ceiling along the left-hand wall. Some of the walls appeared to have been constructed from cement and pebbles, repairs perhaps where some of the original walls had tumbled down and left the structure unsafe.

At the bottom end of the Chemin du Bunker, there were passageways leading off left and right, and his tunnel narrowed to another iron gate set into a squared doorway. Enzo stopped to listen. All he could hear now was the drip, drip, drip of water. He turned off his lamp, and after a moment saw the faint flickering glow of distant candlelight beyond the gate. Moving more cautiously now, he slipped past it and into a large, cavernous chamber whose curving roof was supported on crooked pillars. The light was coming from a narrow opening in the far wall. Enzo approached slowly, until he could see that there was a flight of stone steps leading down through the rock to a lower level. And there, at the foot of the steps, was the basin the monks had chiselled out of limestone to collect the water that dripped from the ceiling and ran down the walls. A candle burned in an alcove immediately above it, and the water itself gleamed a luminescent green by its light. Drips, like raindrops from the ceiling, broke its surface in ever increasing hypnotic rings. There were stone shelves set into the wall on either side of the basin, and on the left-hand wall, a figure sat cross-legged in the gloom staring down into the water as if in a trance. A slight figure, a woman, dark hair falling across her face. She appeared to be wearing a ski-suit and climbing boots. There was a small rucksack strapped to her back.

As Enzo moved into the doorway she heard him and turned to look up the stairs. It was Marie Aucoin. The Garde des Sceaux. She was wearing no make-up and looked older than on the two previous occasions they had met. Her face was a sickly white, all humour leeched from her eyes. She swung her legs around to dangle from the shelf and placed her hands palm-down on the edge of it.

‘Surprised?’

He stared at her for a long time, anger slow-burning inside him. ‘Yes,’ he said finally.

‘Good.’ She managed a wan smile. ‘Then perhaps I’m not too late.’

‘I was married to Christian when I was still working at the Société Générale,’ she said. ‘But finance was his forte, not mine. Still, it was useful to have a wealthy husband to support me through two and a half years as a student at ENA.’ She gazed back up the stairs at Enzo. She was a woman who liked the sound of her own voice. ‘It was starting to become fashionable at that time to accept students from the real world . It went against the stereotype of the cloistered academic, even though I already had my degree from Sciences-Po. But I preferred to be enrolled under my maiden name. Didn’t want to be thought of as a kept woman. So I was Marie-Madeleine Boucher, then.’ She smiled. ‘But when I ran for Deputé in Val de Marne, the name seemed a little too religious for a secular politician. And so I was happy to become Marie Aucoin and take my seat in the National Assembly.’

‘Where’s Kirsty?’

The Garde des Sceaux seemed disappointed by his lack of interest in her story. She sighed. ‘All in good time.’

‘Whose good time?’

‘Mine, of course.’

‘What do you want?’

Something hardened in her cold, blue eyes. And there was an edge to her voice. ‘To fulfil my destiny. I am forty-five years old, Monsieur. I am a woman, and I am the Garde des Sceaux. Do you have any idea how impossibly difficult it is to be all those things at the same time?’ She allowed herself a small smile of self-satisfaction. ‘And that’s just the beginning. Already they’re whispering in the corridors of Matignon about the possibility of my appointment as Prime Minister. But the Élysée Palace is my real destiny. To be the first woman elected to the office of President. An office from which I can change the future of my country. To which I can restore the vision of Napoléon and the genius of de Gaulle. I can lead France back to greatness.’

‘I admire your modesty.’

‘Modesty is for fools!’ She jumped down from her shelf. ‘Why don’t you come down and join me?’ It wasn’t so much a request as an instruction. She moved away from the foot of the stairs to the far side of the small chamber the monks had built to accommodate the fontaine. She took off her rucksack and laid it on the shelf beside her and folded her arms.

Enzo hesitated. He knew that once he had descended into the chamber he would be trapped there. ‘Where’s Kirsty?’ he demanded again.

‘She’s nearby.’

‘If you’ve harmed her….’

‘She’s alive and well. And it is not my intention to do anything to change that.’

Still he hesitated.

‘Unless you force me to.’

He had no choice then. Slowly, reluctantly, he climbed down the six steps into the pit and turned to stand facing her across the green basin. They were only two meters apart, and he saw now that her eyes were quite dead. Almost opaque. She saw the world through cataracts of self-deception. She looked at the baseball bat dangling from his right hand and smiled.

‘Really, Monsieur, did you think you were going to beat me to death?’

‘It’s dangerous down here.’

‘Not if you know your way around. I’ve been exploring the catacombes since I was a student. I love it. It’s like life, really. You need to know what lies beneath, to understand what’s on the surface.’

‘Why did you kill him?’

The sudden directness of his question seemed to ruffle her surface calm, and for a moment he caught a glimpse of the darkness that lay beneath.

‘He humiliated us.’ Her mouth curled in anger. ‘Picked us out as the brightest and best and then told us how much smarter he was than we would ever be. A process of daily, ritual humiliation. He had this compulsive need to demonstrate his superiority. Always at our expense. In private he would tell us that we were the future of France, in public he made fools of us in front of our fellow students. He wanted to mould us in his image, but made it clear we would always be inferior copies. He wanted us to worship at the altar of his brilliance, an acknowledgement from the intellectual cream of our promotion that we were mere cerebral midgets in the shadow of his towering intellect.’ She almost laughed. ‘And what had he become, this great brain? A reviewer of films.’