Three young adults whose early years were blighted by World War Two cross paths in Paris in the early 1960s in the final months of Algeria's war for independence against France. They settle into a blissfully dissolute life on the Left Bank but the first is drawn into a deadly confrontation with a violent countryman while the second, who survived Auschwitz as a teenager, takes little interest in events unfolding around her. The Algerian conflict, however, intrudes upon the life of the third, a British freelance reporter. As a child, he was lightly wounded in a German V2 rocket attack but discovered only years later that the tooth of a woman killed in the blast had embedded itself in his leg. Given a choice of having it extracted, he opts to keep it there, feeling a strange affinity with the victim. He is assigned to cover developments in Paris and then in Algiers as madness grips the city, with extremist European bands roaming the streets and dispensing death to Moslems in the hope of preventing Algeria from claiming its independence. After affronting dangers in Algeria and in other wars, he comes to believe the tooth has helped to keep him safe, acting as a talisman and constant companion.