She tried to deflate the tension. "Don't worry it was only a detail.”
“What's the patient's name?" the officer insisted.
Mathilde felt the chill rise higher in her body. "Thanks," she replied. "I'll call Ackermann myself"
"As you wish."
Le Garrec was retreating, too. They both adopted their usual roles, their usual casual tone. But they knew that during this brief conversation, they had crossed a minefield. She hung up after promising to call him back for lunch sometime.
So it was certain that the Henri-Becquerel Institute had its secrets. And Eric Ackermann's presence in this business deepened the mystery even more. Anna Heymes's "delusions" were now seeming less and less psychotic…
Mathilde went into the private part of her apartment. She had a particular gait: shoulders up, arms along her body fists raised and, above all, hips slightly swaying. When she was young, she had spent a long time perfecting this oblique step, which she thought suited her figure. It had now become second nature to her.
When she reached her bedroom, she opened a varnished writing desk, decked with palm leaves and bunches of reeds. A Meissonnier 1740. She used a miniature key, which she always kept on her, and then pulled open a drawer.
She opened a coffer of woven bamboo, encrusted with mother-of-pearl. At the bottom, there was a piece of chamois leather. With her thumb and forefinger, she pulled aside the rolls of cloth and revealed the glittering presence of a forbidden object: A Glock 9-mm automatic pistol.
It was an extremely light weapon, with a mechanical lock and a safe-action catch. Before, this pistol had been used as a piece of sports equipment, and its use had been authorized by an official license. But now this gun, loaded with sixteen armor-plated bullets, was no longer authorized. It had become an instrument of death, forgotten by the labyrinthine French bureaucracy..
Mathilde weighed the gun in her palm, thinking over her current situation. A divorced psychiatrist with a lousy sex life, hiding an automatic pistol in her writing desk. She smiled and murmured, "How symbolic can you get?"
When she returned to her consulting room, she made another phone call, then went over to the couch. She had to shake Anna extremely hard before the woman showed any signs of waking up.
Finally, the young woman rolled over slowly. She stared at her hostess, showing no surprise, her head to one side.
In a low voice, Mathilde asked, "You didn't tell anyone that you'd come to see me?"
Anna shook her head.
"No one knows that we know each other?"
Same answer. It occurred to Mathilde that she might have been followed. It was now double or nothing.
Anna was rubbing her eyes with the palms of her hands, making herself look even more strange, with her lazy eyelids, that languidness about her temples, above her cheekbones. She still had the marks from the blanket on her cheek.
Mathilde thought of her own daughter, the one who had left home after tattooing on her shoulder the Chinese ideogram for "the truth.”
“Come on," she whispered. "We're going."
30
"What did they do to me?"
The two women were speeding along Boulevard Saint-Germain toward the Seine. The rain had stopped but left its presence everywhere in the glints, glitters and blue splashes of the night's vibrato.
To conceal her doubts, Mathilde adopted a professorial tone. "A treatment," she said.
"What sort of treatment?"
"Clearly something new which has allowed them to alter parts of your memory"
"Is that possible?"
"Normally speaking, no. But Ackermann must have come up with something… revolutionary technique connected with tomography and the brain's regions."
While driving, she constantly peered over at Anna, who was slumped on the seat, staring forward, her two hands clenched between her thighs.
"A shock can cause partial amnesia," she went on. "I treated a soccer player after a collision during a match. He could remember part of his existence, but not all of it. Maybe Ackermann has found a way to do the same thing using drugs, irradiation, or some other technique. A sort of screen that has been pulled across your memory"
"But why?"
"In my opinion, the answer lies in Laurent's work. You must have seen something that you shouldn't have, or else you have some information connected with his activities, or maybe you're just a guinea pig.. Anything is possible. We're in a world of madmen."
At the end of Boulevard Saint-Germain, the Institut du Monde Arabe appeared to their right. Clouds were drifting across its glassy sides.
Mathilde was amazed at how calm she felt. She was driving at over sixty miles an hour, an automatic pistol in her bag, with this death's-head by her side, and she did not feel at all afraid. Instead, she had a sensation of a certain distance, mingled with childlike excitement.
"And can my memory be restored?" Anna spoke awkwardly. Mathilde recognized this tone. She had heard it a thousand times during consultations at the hospital. It was the voice of obsession, of madness. Except that this time, the patient's delusions corresponded to reality.
Mathilde chose her words carefully: "I can't answer that until I know what technique was used. If it was a chemical substance, then maybe there's an antidote. If surgery was used, then… I'd more pessimistic."
The little Mercedes glided past the zoo in the Jardin des Plantes. The sleep of the animals and stillness of the park seemed to unite in the darkness to dig out an abyss of silence.
Mathilde saw that Anna was crying, in the small staccato sobs of a little girl. After a while, she recovered her voice, which was mixed with tears. "But why change my face?"
"That's a mystery. Maybe you were in the wrong place at the wrong time. But that wouldn't mean having to change your appearance. Unless the situation's even crazier, and they've altered your entire identity"
You mean I was someone else before?"
"That's what the plastic surgery could lead us to suppose.”
“I’m. I'm not Laurent Heymes's wife?"
Mathilde did not reply. Anna went further: "But what about my.. feelings? My… intimacy with him?"
Anger gripped Mathilde. In the midst of this horror, Anna was still thinking about love. There was nothing to be done about it. When a woman was shipwrecked, it was always desire and feelings first.
"All my memories of being with him… I can't have just invented them!"
Mathilde shrugged, as though to alleviate the seriousness of what she was about to say "Maybe your memories were implanted. You told me yourself that they're fading away, that they seem unreal… Normally speaking, such a thing is impossible. But someone like Ackermann is capable of anything. And the police must have given him unlimited means."
"The police?"
"Wake up, Anna. The Henri-Becquerel Institute. The soldiers. Laurent's job. Except for the Maison du Chocolat, your universe was entirely made up of policemen and uniforms. They were the ones who did this to you. And now they're looking for you."
They had reached the perimeter of Gare d'Austerlitz, which was being renovated. One of its façades revealed its own inner void, like a movie set. The windows gaping below the sky looked like the leftovers of a bombing. On the left, in the background, the Seine ran on. Dark silt drifting slowly.
After a long pause, Anna said, "There's someone in this story who isn't a policeman."
"Who?"
"The customer in the shop. The one I recognize. My colleague and I call him Mr. Corduroys. I don't know how to explain this, but I sense that he's not part of all this. That he belongs to the part of my life that they've wiped out."
"But why has he crossed your path?"
"Maybe it's a coincidence."
Mathilde shook her head. "Look, one thing I'm sure of is that there aren't any coincidences in this business. You can be certain that he's working with the others. If his face rings a bell, it's probably because you saw him with Laurent."