Jean-Christophe Grangé - The Empire Of The Wolves

They were waiting for her in the last room.

A dozen smaller canvases were protected by red velvet cordons. Savage, broken, fractured portraits: a chaos of lips, noses, bone, where eyes desperately searched for a direction.

These paintings came in groups of three. The first, entitled Three Studies of the Human Head, was dated 1953. Livid, blue, cadaverous faces bore traces of their first wounds. The second triptych seemed like a natural continuation, breaking through into a higher level of violence. Study for Three Heads, 1962. White faces shifted away from the viewer, the better to return and display their scars beneath a clown's makeup. Strangely, these wounds seemed to be trying to raise a laugh, like the children who were disfigured in the Middle Ages in order to turn them forever into clowns and buffoons.

Anna moved on. She did not recognize her hallucinations. She was simply surrounded by masks of horror. Their mouths, cheekbones and stares spun around, twisting their deformities into unbearable spirals. The painter had clearly been relentless with these faces. He had attacked them, sliced them up with the sharpest weapons. Brushes, spatulas, knives… he had opened their wounds, flaying their skins, ripping into their cheeks…

Anna's head sank into her shoulders as she walked, doubled up with fear. She now only glanced at the portraits from beneath shivering eyelids. A series of studies, devoted to a certain Isabel Rawsthorne, was an apotheosis of cruelty. The woman's features had been quite literally shattered. Anna retreated, desperately looking for a human expression in this swirl of flesh. But all she found were scattered fragments, tortured mouths, bulging eyes with circles like cuts.

Suddenly, she gave in to the panic, turned on her heels and rushed to the exit. She was crossing the gallery's entrance hall when she noticed a copy of the exhibition's catalogue, lying on a white counter. She stopped.

She had to see… to see his own face.

She feverishly flicked through the book, past photos of his workshop, reproductions of works, before finally coming across a portrait of Francis Bacon himself A black-and-white photo, in which the artist's stare gleamed more brightly than the glossy paper.

Anna placed both her hands on the page in order to look him straight in the eye.

His eyes were blazing, avid, in a broad, almost moonlike face, supported by powerful jaws. A short nose, scruffy hair and cliff like brows completed the portrait of this man who seemed quite capable of standing up to the flayed masks of his paintings each morning.

Then a detail caught Anna's attention.

One of the painter's eyebrows was higher than the other. The hawkish, staring, astonished eye seemed to be fixed on some distant point. Anna grasped the unbelievable truth: Francis Bacon physically looked like his portraits. His appearance shared their madness and distortion. Had this asymmetric eye inspired the artist's deformed visions, or had his paintings finally disfigured their creator? In either case, the works merged with the artist's features…

This simple realization produced a revelation.

If the deformities of Bacon's canvases had a real source, why shouldn't her own hallucinations have an underlying truth? Who could say that her own delusions did not arise from a sign, some detail that really existed?

Another suspicion froze her. What if, beneath her madness, she was fundamentally right? What if Laurent and Mr. Corduroys had really changed their appearances?

She leaned on the wall and closed her eyes. Everything fit together. Laurent, for some unknown reason, had taken advantage of her fits of amnesia to change his features. He had gone to see a plastic surgeon, to hide inside his own face. Mr. Corduroys had done the same thing.

The two were accomplices. Together, they had committed some terrible crime and for that reason had altered the way they looked. That was why she had a malaise when she looked at them.

With a shudder, she rejected how impossible or ridiculous such reasoning might seem. She quite simply sensed that she was getting near the truth, no matter how crazy it might sound.

It was her brain against the others.

Against all the others.

She ran to the door. On the landing, she noticed a painting she had not seen before, just above the banister.

A mass of scars was trying to smile at her.

At the bottom of Avenue de Messine, Anna spotted a café. She ordered a Perrier at the bar, then went straight downstairs in search of a phone book. She had already lived out the same scene, that very morning, when she had looked for the number of a psychiatrist on Boulevard Saint-Germain. It was perhaps a ritual, an act to be repeated, like crossing the circles of initiation, recurring ordeals, before reaching the truth…

Flicking through the dog-eared pages, she looked for Plastic Surgery. She looked not at the names but the addresses. She had to find a doctor in the immediate neighborhood. Her finger stopped on the line that read "Didier Laferrière, 12 Rue Boissy-d'Anglas." So far as she recalled, this street was just by La Madeleine, about five hundred yards away.

Six rings, then a man's voice. She asked: "Dr. Laferriére?"

"Speaking."

Luck was on her side. She did not have to pass the obstacle of a receptionist.

"I'd like to make an appointment, please."

"My secretary's not here today. Hang on…"

She heard the sound of a computer keyboard.

"When would suit you?" The voice was strange, silky lacking in tone. She answered, "At once. It's an emergency"

"An emergency?"

"If you let me see you, I'll explain."

There was a pause, a second's hesitation, as though he was full of mistrust. Then the cotton-wool voice asked, "How long will it take you to get here?"

"Half an hour."

Anna heard a slight smile in the voice that answered. In the end, this urgency seemed to amuse him. "I'll be expecting you."

"I don't understand. What sort of operation are you interested in, exactly?"

Didier Laferriére was a small man, with a neutral face and gray frizzy hair, which precisely matched his toneless voice. A discreet character, with furtive, imperceptible gestures. He spoke as though through a screen of rice paper. Anna realized that she would have to penetrate this veil if she was going to obtain the information she wanted.

"I haven't really decided yet," she replied. "To start with, I'd like to know more about how operations can change a person's face. -

"Change it in what way?"

"Completely."

The surgeon adopted a professorial tone. "In order to effect profound improvements, it is necessary to attack the bone structure. There are two main techniques: grinding operations. Which aim at reducing prominent features, and bone grafts. Which instead build up certain regions."

"How does it work, exactly?"

He took a deep breath and paused for thought. His office was plunged into shadows. The windows were covered by shutters. A weak light caressed the Asian-style furniture. There was a confession-box atmosphere about the place.

"When it comes to grinding." he went on. "We reduce the height of the bones by passing beneath the skin. For grafts, we first remove the fragments, generally from the parietal bone, at the top of the skull, then we introduce them into the regions concerned. We sometimes also use prostheses."

He opened his hands, and his voice softened. "Anything is possible. All that counts is your satisfaction."

"Such operations must leave traces, mustn't they?"

He smiled briefly. "Not at all. We work using an endoscope. We slide optic tubes and micro instruments beneath the tissue. Then we operate on the screen. The resulting incisions are minute."