She was free. Alive.
And that was already a lot.
At noon, she was in Place de la Concorde, where she took the metro. Line number one, direction Chateau de Vincennes. Sitting at the rear of the compartment, she decided that she wanted confirmation, before even thinking about running away. She had mentally run through the hospitals on this line and had picked Saint-Antoine, just by the Bastille.
She had been waiting for twenty minutes when a doctor appeared carrying a large envelope of X-rays. He put it down on an empty counter, then bent down to rummage through one of the drawers. She rushed over to him.
"I have to see you at once."
"Wait your turn," he said over his shoulder, without even looking at her. "The nurse will call you."
Anna grabbed his arm. "Please. I must have an X-ray"
The man turned around angrily, but his expression changed when he saw her. "Have you checked in at reception?"
"No."
"Have you any health coverage?"
"None."
The doctor looked her up and down. He was large, dark-haired and hearty, in a white robe and cork-heeled clogs. With his tanned skin, coat open in a V to reveal a hairy chest and gold medallion, he looked like a parody of a ladies' man. He stared at her blatantly, a connoisseur's smile across his lips. Pointing at the ripped kimono and dried blood, he asked: "Is it for your arm?"
"No. My… my face hurts. I need an X-ray"
He frowned slightly, scratching his body hair-the harsh mane of a stallion. "Was it a fall?"
"No, I've just got facial pain. I don't know."
"Or just sinusitis." He winked. "There's a lot of it going around."
He looked around at the room and its occupants: the junkie, the wino, the grandma… the usual suspects. He sighed, then suddenly seemed more inclined to take some time out with Anna. He treated her to a broad Mediterranean grin, then whispered warmly, "I'll give you a good scanning, young lady. A full frontal."
He grabbed her arm. "But first of all, let's strap you up."
An hour later, Anna was standing in the stone gallery that ran along the borders of the hospital garden. The doctor had showed her there while she was waiting for the results of the tests.
The weather had changed. Darts of sunshine were melting into the downpour, transforming it into a silver mist of unreal clarity. Anna attentively observed the leaps and bounds of the rain on the leaves of the trees, the glinting puddles and the narrow streams sketched out between the gravel and roots of the thickets. This minor occupation allowed her to keep her mind empty and her latent panic at bay. Above all, no questions. Not yet.
The footfalls of clogs sounded to her right. The doctor was coming back, beneath the arcades of the gallery, holding the images. His smile had completely disappeared. "You should have told me about your accident."
Anna jumped. "What accident?"
"What happened to you? Was it a car crash?"
She stepped back in fear.
He was shaking his head in disbelief.
"It's amazing what they can do now with plastic surgery. To look at you, I'd never have guessed…"
Anna seized the printout from his hands.
It showed a skull that had been fractured, stitched and then totally stuck back together again. Black lines revealed grafts that had been performed on her brows and cheekbones. Marks around her nose showed that it had been completely resculpted. Screws in her jawbones and temples were keeping prostheses in place.
Anna broke into a nervous laughter, a laughing sob, before fleeing beneath the arcades, the printout waving in her hand like a blue flame.
PART IV
23
For the past two days, they had been roaming around the Turkish quarter. Paul Nerteaux could not understand Schiffer's strategy. On Sunday evening, they should have gone straight to see this Marek Cesiuz, alias Marius, the head of the Iskele, the main network of illegal Turkish immigrants. They should have shaken up this slave trader and gotten him to give them his files on the three victims.
Instead of that, the Cipher had decided to regain contact with "his" neighborhood, to find his feet again, as he put it. So for two days now, he had been sniffing around, checking and observing his old bailiwick, but without questioning anyone. Only the driving rain had allowed them to remain invisible in their car-to see without being seen.
Paul was champing at the bit, but he did have to admit that in forty-eight hours he had learned more about Little Turkey than he had during the three months of his inquiries.
Jean-Louis Schiffer had started by introducing him to the adjacent diasporas. They had gone to Passage Brady, off Boulevard de Strasbourg, the center of the Indian world. Beneath a long glass roof, tiny brightly colored shops and dark restaurants hung with blinds stretched into the distance. Waiters were calling out to the passersby, while women in saris let their navels do the talking among the heavy fragrances of spices. In this rainy weather, with waves of humidity expanding and enlivening each odor, they could have been in a market in Bombay during the monsoon.
Schiffer had showed him the addresses that were used as meeting points for the Hindis, Bengalis and Pakistanis. He had pointed out the heads of each confession: Hindu, Muslim, Jain, Sikh and Buddhist… Within a few doorways, he had summarized this concentrated exoticism, which, he said, wanted nothing better than to dissolve.
"In a few years' time," he said with a grin, "the traffic cops around here will all be Sikhs."
Then they had taken up position on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Martin opposite the Chinese businesses: groceries that looked like caverns, soaked with the smell of garlic and ginger; restaurants with drawn curtains that opened like velvet cases; the glistening windows and chrome counters of delicatessens, covered with salads and dumplings. At a distance, Schiffer had introduced him to the main community leaders, shopkeepers whose stores provided a mere five percent of their total turnover.
"Never trust these buggers," he said, grimacing. "Not a single one of them's straight. Their heads are like their food. Full of things diced to pieces. Stuffed full of monosodium glutamate so as to put you to sleep."
Later, they went back to Boulevard de Strasbourg, where West Indian and African hairdressers shared the pavement with cosmetics wholesalers and joke shops. Under the copings, groups of blacks sheltered from the rain, presenting a perfect ethnic kaleidoscope of all those who frequented the boulevard: Baoulés, Mbochis and Betés from the Ivory Coast, Laris from Congo. Bas-Congos and Baloubas from the former Zaire, Bamelekes and Ewondos from Cameroon…
Paul was intrigued by these ever-present, yet perfectly idle Africans. He knew that most of them were drug dealers or con men, but this did not stop him feeling a certain warmth toward them. Their lightness of mood, their humor and that tropical life, which they managed to transmit even to the asphalt thrilled him. Above all, he found the women fascinating. Their smooth, dark stares seemed to have some hidden relationship with their lustrous hair, which had just been uncurled at Afro 2000 or Royal Coiffure. Fairies of burned wood, masks of satin with large dark eyes…
Schiffer gave him a more realistic, and detailed, description: "The Cameroonians are kings of forgery, from banknotes to credit cards. The Congolese specialize in threads: stolen clothes, fake labels and so on. The Ivorians are nicknamed ' SOS Africa.' Their specialty is false charities. They're always hitting you up for the starving Ethiopians or orphans of Angola. A lovely example of solidarity. But the most dangerous of all are the Zairians. Their empire is built on drugs. They reign over the entire neighborhood. The blacks are the worst of all," he concluded. "Pure parasites. Their only aim in life is to suck our blood."