The Seven Turns of the Snail's Shell: A Novel Page 4

  Anna noted that he was short and rather stocky. She decided that he was probably in his twenties, maybe a university student, or an artist perhaps.

  “Pardon, Monsieur?”

  “With your permission, Mam’selle?” He nodded at her pen and open journal. She hesitated and then handed them over to him.

  “May I turn the page?”

  She nodded.

  He carefully laid the journal on the table and turned to a fresh page. On it, he drew a quick, circular drawing.

  “C’est quoi ça?” Monique asked with impatience.

  “Beh, l’escargot, n’est-ce pas? The snail?”

  “Oui.” Anna nodded. There was a slight resemblance to a snail’s shell.

  Monique squirmed in her chair.

  Next the waiter drew a downward-curved horizontal line resembling a frown through the center. “Voilà la Seine,” he paused to check to see if they were with him. “It runs through the center of the city, hein? And it curves around—comme ça.” He extended the line upward and to the left, then completed the circle. Again, he checked on their understanding. “L’escargot, oui?”

  Anna smiled, nodded, and enjoying herself, she took a sip of her espresso. It looked indeed just like the venerable escargot, the snail that the French find a culinary delicacy.

  “Now, I show you the good part, Mam’selle. You will remember this way all the arrondissements of Paris.”

  She watched as he put in numbers, starting with numbers one through four, above the line in the very center, and continuing clockwise below the line with numbers five through seven. “Now we are crossing the river again. We are on the Right Bank.” He put in the numbers eight through twelve above the line. “We are now dropping to the Left Bank at La Nation.” Numbers thirteen through fifteen on the Left Bank completed the next turn of the shell. After adding arrondissements sixteen through twenty on the Right Bank, he made a circular motion around the whole with a flourish, holding the pen in his hand as would a maestro conducting an orchestra with his baton. “The périphérique, the auto route, goes around the twenty arrondissements.” He pointed to the outer curve. “Bois de Boulogne, west, Clichy, Saint-Ouen, Saint-Denis, north, Montrouge, Ivry-sur-Seine, to the south. The outskirts.”

  “Parfait. Bravo!” Anna applauded, and the young man gave a little bow.

  “À votre service, Mam’selle.”

  A customer entered the café and sat down at a table nearby. The waiter handed Anna’s pen back to her and hustled off to wait on his new arrival.

  Anna looked at the map he had drawn. She tried to count the turns.

  “Interesting concept, but I don’t see seven turns,” she said to Monique.

  Monique’s neck stiffened, and her head cocked to one side. “Where on earth did he get that strange idea? The seven turns of the snail’s shell. I’ve never heard of such a thing. Anyway, chérie, before we were so rudely interrupted, were you implying that C-C moved in with Reggie? I can’t believe that. They were friends—but lovers? Ah, non, I don’t believe it.”

  “I don’t know, Monique. You remember how Reggie was—what sort of girl she was, I mean.” Anna’s thick eyebrows met in a frown.

  “Well, I agree that she was a rather well-endowed little putain. I didn’t like her much,” she added, frowning.

  “Monique, she introduced me to C-C, but I just think that she was jealous and possessive of him at the same time. She probably convinced him that I didn’t care because I went back to the U.S. Why else wouldn’t he have answered any of my letters?”

  “But, I’m confused, chérie. You are saying that he would have made some kind of commitment to Reggie when he wasn’t willing to make a commitment to you?”

  “Yes…no…well, maybe. I don’t know.”

  They had emptied their cups, paid l’addition, and were strolling through the massive, wooden doors of the stone gateway into the cobblestone street when they heard someone say, “Mam’selle. Un moment.”

  The waiter was behind them; he had followed them out the door. “Mam’selle, the story I told you? About the seven turns?” He spoke directly to Anna, ignoring Monique entirely.

  Anna nodded.

  “You will find what you are searching for, Mam’selle, but beware,” he added hesitantly as he wagged his finger at her in a sinister fashion, his closely set, black button eyes looking directly into hers. “It may not be what you want.” Then he performed a slight bow, turned on his heel, and scurried quickly back into the café.

  “Whatever was that about?” Monique huffed. “The nerve of the fellow.”

  Anna shook her head.

  CHAPTER 8

  A small group gathered in front of a television in an electronics store window on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. It was September 6, 1997. On the screen, millions of people lined the streets of London, watching a funeral cortège. Most of them were weeping. In Paris, the handful of bystanders stood silently in the rain under their umbrellas, participating in the spectacle. Anna stood among them. She had just seen Monique and Georges off to the airport. Their flight to California was due to leave in a couple of hours.

  The BBC announcer was speaking in hushed tones of the tragedy that had befallen the British royal family: “More than a million people weep today as they struggle to catch a last glimpse of Diana, Princess of Wales. Flanked by Welsh Guards, Diana’s remains are borne through the ancient streets of London on a First World War gun carriage drawn by six black horses. The cortège will arrive shortly at Westminster Abbey, where the funeral service will take place. We have all been touched, in one way or another, by the life of a woman who struggled with her own emotional problems even as she reached out to the victims of homelessness, AIDS, cancer, and land mines.”

  “Qu’est-ce qu’il a dit?” an old lady next to Anna whispered to her companion, who held up his hands and shrugged his shoulders, indicating that he hadn’t understood a thing.

  The camera zoomed in on the coffin draped in the red, gold, and blue of the British Royal Standard and decked with wreathes of white trumpet lilies and tulips. A white card inscribed with “Mummy” was nestled in a third wreath of white roses. A collective “Ahhhhh…” emanated from the gathering.

  The camera panned next to the acres of flowers laid at the gates of Kensington Palace and along the funeral route. The announcer was saying something about so many bouquets being in demand that the florists had declared a national shortage.

  The skies were gray, and the rain was falling harder as Anna put her hands in her coat pockets and walked down the street. Everywhere, it seemed, Diana’s famous face peered from the thousands of newspaper and magazine special editions being sold to mark the event.

  She entered a small café and took a seat at a table next to the window. As she watched the parade of umbrellas scurrying to and fro in the downpour, she thought about how Paris in September was such a different place. The summer tourists were gone. The Parisians had returned from their annual vacances. La Rentrée, they called it. Time to resume the routine and take back the city. What everyone does in September in France. With the cold rains arriving, the chestnuts on the boulevards had taken their cue too and were starting to show the first signs of color.

  Anna sighed. As much as she loved being in Paris, she was unhappy that she still had no leads as to the whereabouts of C-C. In the days before her departure, Monique had helped her search the MINITEL, the electronic phone directory. They had come up with nothing. When they had searched under Hôpital Assistance Publique and discovered twenty some hospitals in the Paris basin, Anna had nearly given up altogether.

  “I can’t just call every one of these,” she had said, looking at the list. “No one will ever talk to me. And anyway, what if he’s not even in a Paris hospital at all?”

  “Where else would he be?” Monique had said with a shrug. “I can’t imagine why anyone would want to live anywhere else. But you are correct, chérie. I agree that it would be too easy to dismiss you over the phone. So, ther
e is only one thing to do and that is to go visit all of the hospitals in person. Either that or hire a detective to do it.”

  Anna had laughed at the thought. “Well, I guess I could play detective myself. Maybe I could even appear in need of medical attention, if necessary.”

  Anna had arranged the list of hospitals by arrondissement and then plotted them on the waiter’s hand-drawn map in her journal. “It will take at least three days,” she had told Monique. “Day one—the eighteenth and tenth arrondissements. They’re close to each other, close enough to make fewer métro stops anyway. Day two—the fourteenth and fifteenth. Day three—the last two hospitals in the twelfth and thirteenth.”

  Today, when the two friends had said good-bye, Monique had asked, “So when do you begin your grand tour de Paris?”

  “Tomorrow. I’ll start tomorrow.”

  It was still raining the next morning when Anna started out on day one armed with her map of Paris and her plan of attack.

  At the Hôpital Lariboisière, she claimed to be a former college classmate of Dr. Gérard who had lost track of him.

  The woman at the front desk seemed sympathetic, but she was of no help.

  “Non, Mademoiselle. We have no one on staff by that name.”

  Near the Gare de l’Est, in the same arrondissement, there were two hospitals: Fernand Poisons on the rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis and the Hôpital Saint-Lazare.

  “Je regrette, Mademoiselle…mais non…there is no one here on our staff by that name.”

  The last, Hôpital Saint-Louis, was located near the Goncourt métro station. She returned to rue Beaujon and called Monique to give her a status. It was late. By now it would be early morning in California.

  “Day one down, Monique. No luck—not even a hope,” she sighed.

  “You sound like you are ready for a glass of wine and a hot bath. Do you think they are telling you the truth? What if this search is useless?”

  “Wouldn’t they have at least shown some recognition of his name, even if they were trying to withhold the information? I don’t know, Monique. They were all relatively small hospitals I visited today. I haven’t gotten to the big ones yet.”

  “How many do you have to visit tomorrow?”

  “Oh, let’s see. It’s the next turn of the snail’s shell.” She laughed as she consulted her map. “I feel like I’m following a snail’s trail instead. The fourteenth and fifteenth arrondissements—all the hospitals are near Denfert Rochereau and the Montparnasse cemetery. Good Lord, there are ten of them! I may have to split the list into two days.”

  “At least that’s a lovely part of Paris to walk. How’s the weather?”

  “Miserable. It’s much cooler.”

  Anna made one more call before she went to bed. She wanted to check on her grandparents and find out how her dog, Paris, was doing.

  “Oh, we are all just fine, dear,” her grandmother told her. “Paris is no trouble at all. When do you think you will be home?”

  “I don’t know, Grandma…in a couple of weeks. When Monique and Georges return. I’ll see you soon. Give a big hug to Grandpa for me. I love you both.”

  When she hung up the phone, she had a sickening feeling in the pit of her stomach, a dark feeling of foreboding she had never felt before.

  “I need sleep,” she said to Sabastien as she fed him his nighttime cookie. “What say we make that quick trip to the street, and then we can go to bed?” It was raining again, and she held the umbrella over both of them as the little dog completed his final pee of the day.

  The following day, in a cold storm, Anna set out in search of the hospitals located in the fourteenth and fifteenth arrondissements. As she entered the métro, she studied her map. There were five hospitals in the fourteenth; one specialized in burns. She could probably count that out. That wasn’t C-C’s area of specialty. One was a clinic—also probably not. He had wanted a hospital position. Another appeared to be a mental hospital. Again, probably to be discounted. That left two good possibilities—Hôpital Saint-Vincent de Paul and Hôpital Sainte-Anne in the fourteenth. She would start with them. Looking at the fifteenth arrondissement, there were two hospitals on the rue de Sèvres, but one was a children’s hospital. She crossed it off the list and also Institute Pasteur. Now she had a more manageable list of three to four hospitals for the day.

  Later, on the phone again with Monique, she reported that crossing possibilities off her list might not have been a good idea. “I came up with nothing at all today, Monique. It’s discouraging.”

  “Where do you go tomorrow?”

  “I’m taking the morning off to write. I’ve got to get some work done. In the afternoon, I’m going to just two hospitals. They’re the largest. One is in the twelfth, near the Gare de Lyon, and the other is in the thirteenth near the Gare d’Austerlitz.”

  “Well, I wish you bon courage, mon amie. Maybe your luck will turn.”

  They chatted about Monique and Georges’ appreciation for her apartment and how much they loved Laguna Beach, the weather in California, and so on, and so forth. Anna shivered. It was a cold night in Paris.

  Too early to call Grandma and Grandpa, she thought. Monique was still on Paris time, so she could call her anytime, but her grandparents would worry if she called them this early. I’ll call them tomorrow evening, she promised herself.

  On the third day of scouring the hospitals in Paris, she finally had the lead she so desperately sought.

  “Dr. Gérard? Charles-Christian Gérard?” The administrator at Hôpital La Pitié-Salpêtrière clarified the name after Anna finally found someone in that huge complex who was willing to speak with her. “He is on, how you say it, leave, Mademoiselle? We assume he is taking some time to travel. He does a lot of medical work in Africa, you know.”

  Anna was eager to keep the man talking. “Do you know where in Africa?”

  “Non, Mademoiselle.”

  “Do you have any idea when you can expect him to return?”

  “Non, again, Mademoiselle.” He shrugged his shoulders. “I’m afraid that is all I can tell you today.” His manner became abrupt and dismissive. His eyes stared at her coldly.

  Just great. Where could she go next? Anna went over the conversation in her head as she entered Monique and Georges’ apartment on rue Beaujon.

  The rain had let up, and Sabastien was begging for a walk, so she slipped on his leash and was just opening the door of the apartment when the phone rang. It was Monique calling from California.

  “Allô, Anna, can you hear me?” She was crying. “I don’t know how to tell you this, but we’ve just had the most frightening news. It’s about your grandparents. They have been in a horrible accident.”

  Anna’s heart stopped. Her grandparents, the only parents she had ever known, were all she had for family in the world.

  “What? Where are they?”

  “The police came to your apartment. I’m glad we were here. They said that the SAMU, I mean ambulance, took them to a hospital. Just a moment. I wrote down the name. They took them to the UCLA Medical Center. I told them where you were in Paris and that I would call you immediately.”

  “I need to leave Paris right away. I’ll be on the next flight I can get out. Please, Monique, try to find out what their condition is.”

  “If I can learn anything at all, chérie, I will call you.”

  Anna sobbed as she dialed Air France.

  “Oh, please God, don’t let me lose them,” she prayed.

  CHAPTER 9

  Los Angeles, California

  Only her grandfather was alive by the time Anna’s flight landed at LAX fourteen hours later.

  She choked back the tears when she entered his hospital room. He had just come out of surgery. His face was as pale as the white bed he lay in. His mouth gaped. There were scrapes from shards of glass on his cheeks and forehead. A plastic tube ran into his nose from an IV stand nearby. The distinctive smell of rubbing alcohol filled her nostrils.

  “He is very
weak. He sustained critical internal injuries,” the surgeon had told her. “He may not make it through the night.” They would control the pain, he said.

  “Oh, Grandpa,” she bawled and laid her face on the pillow close to his.

  The old man looked lovingly toward her. His unruly white eyebrows twitched as he blinked back the tears in his eyes. “Your grandma. She, oh God, Anna, she didn’t make it,” he said. His voice was raspy, his breathing labored. It appeared that he was drawing all his strength to speak. “She and I, oh dear God. We were hit. It came so fast. I couldn’t get out of the way. Oh, dear God. Why her?” He sobbed aloud.

  Tears welled in her eyes. “Shush, Grandpa, don’t wear yourself out. You need to rest.” She spoke as calmly and reassuringly as she could, concealing the anguish she felt.

  “Anna, there is something very important I need to tell you.” She tried to shush him again. “No, no, you must understand something that I have not told you previously.” He spoke haltingly. His chest heaved with every breath. “Who your father was, how your parents met…You know I adore you, and you have been the pride of my life. Now that your grandmother is gone…” He choked up again and hesitated. “I need to answer those questions you asked me so many times. Remember? You finally quit asking because I wouldn’t give you any information.”

  Anna nodded and stared at him. Her heart was pounding. She remembered how many times as a child she had asked him to explain who her father was, and he would always tell her that he didn’t know anything. Even after her mother died, and she was old enough to understand, he maintained his ignorance on the subject. He was correct about one thing. She had finally stopped asking. What use was pestering? She loved him as a father anyway.

  “I thought you didn’t know anything about my father?” She kissed his forehead and forced a smile. One of her tears spilled onto his cheek.

  “It was a long time ago, but I want you to know now. So you can… Anna, I was shot down over France during World War II, as you know.” Anna’s grandfather had never shared much of his war experience with anyone, even his wife. “I was rescued by a group of Résistance fighters from Corsica… They saved my life. One of them, a man named Diamanté, became my friend.”