Jean-Christophe Grangé - The Empire Of The Wolves

She was saved by the bell.

"I'll go," she said, spinning on her heel. "Make yourself comfortable. I'll be back."

Anna pushed aside some boxes and sat down on a stool. She started laying out some Romeos on a tray-squares of fresh coffee mousse. The room was already full of the heady odors of chocolate. At the end of the day. Their clothes and even their sweat smelled of it, and their saliva was saturated with sugar. It is said that bartenders get drunk from breathing in alcohol vapors. Do chocolate sellers get fat from being around such delicacies?

Anna had not put on an ounce. In fact, she never put on any weight. She ate like pig, but the very food seemed to avoid her. The glucose, lipids and fibers went through her without touching the sides.

While she was arranging the chocolates, Ackermann's words came back to her. A lesion. An illness. A biopsy. No. She would never let them slice her up. And especially not him, with his cold gestures and insect eyes.

In any case, she did not believe in his diagnosis.

She just could not believe it.

For the simple reason that she had not told him a tenth of the truth.

Since the month of February the lapses had become far more frequent than she had admitted. These moments of emptiness now came on her at any time, anywhere. A dinner party with friends, a visit to the hairdresser's, when buying a magazine. Anna now often found herself surrounded by strangers, with nameless faces, in the very heart of her daily life.

Even the nature of the attacks had changed.

It was no longer just a question of names slipping her mind and memory lapses. She also had terrifying hallucinations. Faces went hazy trembled, then altered before her very eyes. Expressions and looks began to waver and float as though seen through water.

Sometimes, they looked like faces made of burning wax, which melted and folded into themselves, creating demonic grimaces. On other occasions, features vibrated and shook, until a series of different expressions became simultaneously juxtaposed. A cry Laughter. A kiss. They all merged together in a single physiognomy. A nightmare.

Anna lowered her eyes when walking in the street. At parties, she never looked at the person she was speaking with. She was becoming nervous, timorous and scared. The "others" now just reflected back the image of her own madness. A mirror of terror.

Nor had she really described the sensations she experienced concerning Laurent. In fact, her uneasiness never went away, never completely disappeared after a lapse. There was always a trace left, a hint of fear. As though she no longer really recognized her husband. As if there was a voice whispering to her. "It's him, but it isn't him."

Deep down, she sensed that Laurent's appearance had changed, that it had been altered by plastic surgery. Ridiculous.

This craziness had an even more absurd aspect. While her husband was becoming ever more a stranger to her, one of the shop's regular customers was starting to feel strikingly familiar. She was sure that she had already seen him somewhere… It was impossible for her to say where or when, but her memory lit up in his presence. With an electrostatic tingle. And yet, this spark never led to a precise memory.

The man came once or twice a week and always bought the same Jikola chocolates squares filled with marzipan, rather like oriental delicacies. He in fact spoke with a slight, perhaps Arabic accent. He was about forty, always dressed in the same way, in jeans with a threadbare corduroy jacket buttoned up to his neck, like an eternal student. Anna and Clothilde had nicknamed him "Mr. Corduroys."

Every day they watched for him. It was a game of suspense for them, an enigma, a pleasant way to pass the time. They often elaborated hypotheses. He was a childhood friend of Anna's, or an old boyfriend, or instead a furtive pickup merchant and she had caught his eye at some cocktail party.

Anna now knew that the truth was far simpler. This reminiscence was just another sort of hallucination set off by the lesion. She should not focus on what she could see or what she felt about anybody's face, because she no longer had a reliable system of references.

The door of the shop opened. Anna jumped-she realized that the chocolates were melting in her clenched hands.

Clothilde appeared in the doorway. She whispered between her curls: "It's him."

Mr. Corduroys was standing beside the Jikolas.

"Good afternoon," Anna said at once. "Can I help you?"

"Two hundred grams as usual, please."

She slipped behind the main counter, picked up the tongs and a glassine bag, then started to fill it with the pieces of chocolate. At the same time, she looked around at the man, her eyes veiled by her eyelashes. First she saw his large leather shoes, his overlong jeans crinkling up like an accordion, and then his saffron yellow corduroy jacket. Worn down in places into a threadbare lustrous orange.

Finally, she dared a glance at his face. It was uncouth, square, framed with disheveled brown hair. More the face of a peasant than of a refined student. He was frowning in an expression of annoyance or else concealed anger.

Yet Anna had already noticed that when he opened his eyelids, they revealed long feminine eyelashes and violet irises, ringed with gilded black: the back of a bumblebee flying over a field of dark violets. Where had she seen that look before?

She placed the packet on the scales. "Eleven Euros, please."

The man paid, picked up the chocolates and spun around. A second later, he was outside.

Despite herself, Anna followed him to the door. Clothilde joined her. They watched the figure crossing Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honors, then diving into a black limousine with frosted windows and foreign license plates.

They stayed there, on the doorstep, like two crickets in the sunlight. "So?" Clothilde finally asked. "Who is he? Don't you know yet?"

The car vanished into the traffic. In answer, Anna said, "Got a cigarette?"

Clothilde removed a crumpled pack of Marlboro Lights from her trouser pocket. Anna inhaled the first drag, finding the same soothing sensation as she had experienced that morning in the hospital courtyard. Clothilde said, skeptically "There's something wrong about your story"

Anna turned around, elbow raised, cigarette pointed like a weapon. "What?"

"Let's suppose that you once knew this person, and he's since changed."

"Well?"

Clothilde puckered up her lips, making the sound of a beer bottle being opened. "Well, why doesn't he recognize you?"

Anna watched the cars driving beneath the dull sky, splashes of light crisscrossing their bodywork. Farther on, she could see the wooden façade of Mariage Frères, the icy windows of La Margie Restaurant and its doorman, who was staring at her placidly.

Her words vanished into the blue-tinted smoke: "Crazy. I'm going crazy"

Once a week Laurent met up with the same "pals" for dinner. It was an unchanging ritual, a sort of ceremony. They were not childhood friends or members of any particular circle. They had no shared passion. They were simply part of the same corporation: policemen. They had met at various stages of their careers, and today each of them had reached the top of his particular specialty.

Like the other wives. Anna was excluded from these get-togethers, and when the dinner was held in their apartment on Avenue Hoche she was asked to go to the movies.

Then, three weeks before, Laurent had asked her to join them at their next meeting. First she refused, especially as her husband had then added, in his male nurse tones, "You'll see. It'll take your mind off things." Then she changed her mind. She was in fact rather curious to meet Laurent's colleagues and to be able to see at first hand other examples of top-ranking policemen. After all, he was so far the only model she knew.