She could make it she just knew she could.
She went straight down to the basement. Her chest was burning. She was breathing in short gasps. But her plan was coming together in her mind. The police trap was going to close in on the ground floor. Mean while, she would sneak out via the slope of the garage, which led to the other side of the building, on Rue Daru. There was a good chance that they had not thought of that exit yet…
When she reached the garage, she ran across the concrete floor, without turning on the light, toward the swing door. She was just aiming the remote control when the door opened. Four armed men were running down the slope. She had underestimated the enemy. She just had time to hide behind a car, her two hands on the ground.
She saw them pass by feeling the vibrations from their boots in her chest, and nearly burst into tears. They were now peering in between the cars, playing their flashlights across the floor.
She leaned back against the wall and noticed that her arm was sticky with blood. The tourniquet had unraveled. She tightened it up again, pulling at the material with her teeth, while her mind raced in search of inspiration.
Her pursuers were slowly drawing away, searching, examining and combing every square inch of the basement. But they would also eventually retrace their steps and find her. She glanced around once more and, a few yards to her right, noticed a gray door. If her memory was right, this exit led to another building that also opened onto Rue Daru.
Without another thought, she slid between the wall and the bumpers, reached the door and opened it just enough to be able slip through it. A few seconds later, she burst into a bright, modern hallway. Nobody. She jumped down the stairs and leapt out.
She was running along the road, savoring the feel of the rain, when a screech of brakes brought her to a halt. A car had just come to a stop a few inches away from her, brushing against her kimono.
Scared and broken, she stepped back. The driver wound down his window and shouted: "You ought to look where you're going, darling!"
Anna paid no attention to him. She was peering left and right in search of police officers. It seemed to her that the air was charged with electricity and tension, as though a storm was brewing.
And the storm was her.
The driver slowly passed her. "You should get your head examined, lady!”
“Piss off"
The man braked. "What did you say?"
Anna threatened him with her bloodied finger. "I told you to piss off!"
He hesitated, his lips trembling slightly. Then he seemed to understand that something was wrong, that this was not just any street shouting match. He shrugged and drove of.
Another idea. She dashed toward Paris 's Orthodox church, a few numbers up the road. She went past the grating, across a gravel courtyard, then up the steps that led to the old varnished wooden door. She pushed it open and threw herself into the shadows.
The nave seemed to her to be plunged in utter darkness, but in reality it was the beating in her temples that was blinding her. Little by little, she made out the brown tints of gold, the reddish icons, the coppery backs of chairs, like so many dampened flames.
She walked on cautiously noticing other discreetly mild glimmers. Each object here was fighting for the few drops of light that were distilled by the stained-glass windows and the candles on their cast-iron chandeliers. Even the characters in the frescoes looked as if they wanted to extract themselves from their shadows to drink a little brightness. The entire space had an aura of a silvery glow-a gleaming play of shadows, containing a silent battle between light and dark.
Anna got her breath back. Her chest was burning up. Her skin and clothes were soaked in sweat. She stopped, leaned against a pillar and savored the stone's coolness. Before long, her heartbeat started to slow down. Everything about the place seemed to have calming virtues: the candles swaying on their chandeliers, the long melting faces of Christ like bars of wax, the gleaming lamps hanging like lunar fruit.
"Is something the matter?"
She turned around to see Boris Godunov in person-a huge priest, dressed in black vestments, with a long white beard covering his chest. She could not help wondering which picture he had walked out of.
In his deep voice, he asked, "Are you all right?"
She glanced around at the doorway, then asked, "Do you have a crypt?"
"I beg your pardon?"
She forced herself to articulate each syllable. "A crypt. A place where funerals are held."
The priest thought he knew what she wanted. He adopted an appropriate expression and buried his hands in his sleeves. "Who are you burying, my daughter?"
"Myself"
22
When she got to emergency admissions at Saint-Antoine Hospital, she realized that she was in for another ordeal. A struggle against her madness and disease.
The strip lights in the waiting room reflected off the white tiles, wiping out any light from outside. It could as easily have been 8:00 in the morning as 11:00 at night. The heat increased this stifling feeling. A suffocating, inert energy weighed down on her body like a lead casing drenched in antiseptic smells. Here, you entered the transit zone between life and death, which lay outside the succession of hours or days.
On the seats screwed to the walls sat a surrealistic sample of the dregs of humanity. A man with a shaved head, who was constantly scratching his forearm, leaving a deposit of yellow dust on the floor: his neighbor, a tramp strapped into a wheelchair, who was swearing at the nurses in a throaty voice while begging them to put his guts back into place; just beside them, an old woman was standing dressed in just a paper coat, which she kept taking off, while mumbling unintelligibly, to reveal a gray body, with elephant wrinkles and a baby's diaper. Only one person looked normal. She could see him in profile sitting by the window. But when he turned around, the other half of his face was encrusted with shards of glass and scabs.
Anna was neither astonished nor scared by this chamber of horrors. On the contrary, it seemed like an excellent place to remain unnoticed.
Four hours before, she had dragged the priest down into the crypt. She had convinced him that she had Russian origins, was a fervent believer, had a terminal illness and wanted to be buried in holy ground. He had looked skeptical, but had still listened to her for half an hour. Thus he had unwittingly sheltered her while the men with red armbands had been combing the neighborhood.
When she had resurfaced, the coast was clear. The blood from her wound had clotted. She could walk the streets, with her arm in her kimono, without attracting too much attention. As she rushed on, she blessed the name of Kenzo and the extravagances of fashion, which meant that you could walk the streets in a dressing gown while looking quite simply trendy.
For over two hours, she wandered aimlessly in the rain, mingling in among the crowds on the Champs-Elysées. She forced herself not to think, not to near the gulches surrounding her consciousness.
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 looke
d 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."
Paul did not respond to any of these racist remarks. He had decided to remain oblivious to anything that did not directly concern their investigations. All he wanted was results. Nothing else mattered. Meanwhile, he was slowly progressing on other fronts. He had brought in two officers from the SARIJ, named Naubrel and Matkowska, so that they could follow up the lead about pressure tanks. The two lieutenants had already visited three hospitals, with negative results. They had now extended their inquiries to the contractors who work in the depths of Paris, under pressure so as to prevent the water table from leaking into their sites. Every evening, the workers used a decompression chamber. Darkness, underground… the lead sounded good to Paul. He was expecting a report later on that day.
He had also asked a young recruit in the Brigade Criminelle to collect other guidebooks and archaeological catalogues dealing with Turkey. The officer had made his first delivery the previous evening to Paul's apartment on Rue du Chemin Vert, in the eleventh arrondissement. A stack that he had not had time to go through yet but that would soon be accompanying him in his insomnia.
On the second day, they entered the true Turkish area. This neighborhood was bordered to the south by Boulevards Bonne-Nouvelle and Saint-Denis, to the west by Rue du Faubourg-Poissonière and, to the east by Rue du Faubourg Saint-Martin. To the north, the intersection of Rue La Fayette and Boulevard Magent
a capped the district. Its spinal cord ran along Boulevard de Strasbourg, which went up toward the;are de l'Est. Its nerves spread out to each side: Rue des Petites-Ecuries, Rue du Chateau d'Eau… Its heartbeat in the depths of Strasbourg Saint-Denis metro station, irrigating this fragment of the East.
From an architectural point of view, the neighborhood was unexceptional: some of its old gray buildings had been renovated, but many more were decrepit, as though they had lived a thousand lives. They all had the same layout: the ground and first floors were occupied by businesses; the second and third by sweatshops; then the upper stories below the roof contained living accommodations-overcrowded apartments cut into two, or three, or four, covering the surface like little paper squares.
In the streets, there was an atmosphere of impermanence, of passing through. Several of the businesses seemed devoted to movement, to the nomadic life, a precarious existence, always on the lookout. There were kiosks selling sandwiches that you could snack on while walking down the street; there were travel agents, to prepare departures and arrivals; there were currency exchangers, to give out euros; there were photocopy stores to duplicate identity papers… not to mention the numerous real estate agents and signs marked FOR SALE…
In all of these details, Paul read the power of a permanent exodus, a human flood from a distant source, pouring endlessly and messily along the streets. But this quarter also had another purpose: the making of clothes. The Turks did not control this trade, which was run by the Jewish community of Sentier, but since the great migrations of the 1950s they had established themselves as a vital link in the chain. They supplied the wholesalers, thanks to their hundreds of workshops and home workers. Thousands of hands working millions of hours that could almost compete with the Chinese. In any case, the Turks had the benefit of seniority and a slightly more legal social standing.
The two policemen had plunged into these crowded, agitated, earsplitting streets. Among the deliverymen, the open trucks, the bags and trolleys, the clothes passed from hand to hand. The Cipher acted as a guide once more. He knew their names, their owners and their specialties. He spoke of the Turks who had been his informers, the messengers he had had in his grip for various reasons, the restaurant owners who owed him favors. The list seemed endless. At the beginning, Paul had tried to take notes, but he had soon given up. He let himself be carried onward by Schiffer's explanations while observing the agitation all around them, picking up its cries, blaring horns, smell of pollution-everything that made the quarter what it was.
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