by Mallock;
Europa Editions
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously.
Copyright © Jean-Denis Bruet-Ferreol by 1999
Published by arrangement with Agence littéraire Pierre Astier & Associés
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
First publication 2015 by Europa Editions
Translation by Tina Kover
Original Title: Les visages de Dieu
Translation copyright © 2014 by Europa Editions
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
Cover Art by Emanuele Ragnisco
www.mekkanografici.com
ISBN 9781609452605
Mallock
THE FACES OF GOD
Translated from the French
by Tina Kover
I was one of those beings divinely formed for unhappiness, who seem to have spent nine hundred years in their mother’s womb before emerging woefully to spend a desolate childhood in the worthless society of men . . .
I felt as if I had fallen from some empyrean into an endless wasteland, and human beings seemed to me like so much vermin. That was my perception of human society at the age of fourteen—and it remains the same today.
One day, however, I revolted; the malice of my fellow students had finally crossed some unremembered line. Unsheathing a knife, I leapt with bombastic bravado on a group of forty young jokers. I was frothing at the mouth, crushed with blows, superb . . .
LÉON BLOY—Le désespéré
PROLOGUE
Tuesday, December 28th
3:20 A.M.
Outside, Paris was sleeping off its capital-city excesses. Parisians always gorged themselves between Christmas night and New Year’s Eve dinner. Oysters, foie gras, smoked salmon . . .
The telephone rang in the darkness.
“Who is it?” Mallock barked.
“It’s me, Grimaud. The Makeup Artist has just struck again. You need to come—they said—”
“Where?” Mallock got up to flick on the ceiling light.
“The entrance to Saint-Mandé. Rue du Parc, in the 12th. Do you know it?”
“I’ll find it.” He hung up and sat on the edge of the bed, grimacing. Throbbing migraine; aching back. He closed his eyes, stretched his neck right, then left. Forward, then backward. Another meeting in hell for the superintendent. He knew the way by heart. Forcing his protesting body to move from the bedroom to the bathroom, he splashed cold water on his face at the sink.
The battered face in the mirror stared back at him quizzically.
You think you can go on like this much longer?
He sighed. Twisted the cap delicately off the toothpaste. Turned on his electric toothbrush. Grimaced stupidly in the mirror as blood dripped into the white sink. Amédée brushed his teeth like he did everything else—with fierce determination.
Two days earlier, Raymond Grimaud had brought him the monster’s file and left again without speaking. No one likes to be taken off a case right in the middle of it, but he had seemed relieved. Why? Rinsing his mouth, Amédée Mallock tried to imagine which side the first blows might come from. Everything Grimaud had told him, made worse by everything he hadn’t, and by the shakiness of his voice, had been quite enough to awaken Mallock’s fears. The investigation he had just been handed would be both punishing and complex. A shit-covered stick, as his colleague Bob would prosaically sum it up when they discussed it the next day.
Mallock turned away from his own gaze in the mirror and sighed. It had become a tic, a way of expelling sadness. First a deep breath drawn in—as if it were scouring the pit of his stomach for all the painful thoughts, every scrap of anguish—and then the exhalation, to push them as far away as possible. To . . . where?
He went back into the bedroom and dressed warmly. Suit, button-down shirt, black T-shirt. In the middle of the night and the dead of winter, murder scenes could be cold. Very cold.
Five feet eleven inches of muscle and bone, the superintendent had the silhouette of a wrestler and hands like a strangler’s. He was fifty-five years old, and handsome despite a prominent nose with a funny little cleft in it that made it look a bit like an ass. His smile held a hint of sadness that was echoed in his green eyes, which gleamed in the imposing mass of his face. Amédée was a mixture of slight fatalism and clinging melancholy. He had an obsession with anxious types and shaggy blond hair like Depardieu.
Outside it was dark and deserted, and he shivered in his worn-out, faded trench coat. The streets were dead and the air smelled of winter. A few garlands fluttered here and there, their leaves flickers of color in the night. The parking lot was three blocks away, and it took Mallock longer than usual to pull his car out of the garage. The Jaguar, like him, wasn’t fully awake. Neither of them were spring chickens anymore, and neither relished being yanked out of bed in the middle of the night.
After a few minutes on the road he turned on the heater and lit up a Havana cigar with a label that read King of the World, then grabbed a CD and put it in the player without looking at it: Lacrimosa dies illa, qua resurget ex favilla Judicandus homo reus. Hulc ergo parce, Deus, Pie Jesu Domine Dona eis requiem . . .
Mozart’s requiem suited Amédée’s mood. He had looked at the crime-scene photos, and one word was all it took to characterize them: horror. This was more than a puzzle to solve; it was a nightmare, lying in wait for him. The scumbag he was out to find wasn’t just unbelievably perverted, he was also extremely intelligent. He’d been fingered for seven murders initially—two children, one man, and four women—but then there had been six more deaths, if Mallock had understood Grimaud correctly.
“You need to know everything,” Grimaud had said, even before the waiter brought them the lunch menu. And, without giving a thought to the time or where they were, he had summarized all that horror for him. A mixture of blood, perversion, and all the foul humors that humans normally keep locked away inside. A cocktail mixed by the Devil personified.
Arriving at the Porte de Vincennes, Mallock rolled down his window to clear the car of cigar smoke and get a better view of the street signs. The air outside seemed charged with microscopic particles of fear, suicidal stars throwing themselves beneath the old Jaguar’s wheels.
At the bottom of Saint-Mandé he was greeted by the lights of police cars, a forest of flashing beams. At any other time the bright shifting colors would have soothed him. Orange light reflecting off the black and white cars: His colleagues were there. They would exchange handshakes, hot coffee, and a bit of small talk.
Here, however, that wasn’t the case.
On this night, only one thing awaited him: silence. The silence of the dead, and the living. In slow motion, four arms opened the rear doors of an ambulance. An old cop rubbed his forehead. Then mouths began to emit streams of words and vapor, lit by the screens of mobile telephones. Uniforms passed each other. Gazes avoided one another. And rage waited its turn. Two small dogs trembled, unsettled by the chattering lights that had invaded their night. A man vomited out his last illusions about the world behind a tree, as if ashamed. The snowflakes fell in solemn vertical columns.
Grief was here, too.
The two-story detached house had gypsy-blue shutters and was covered in new pink-and-white stucco. It looked like an English pastry shop and would have been appealing in other circumstances, a peaceful haven tucked away from the gazes of passersby. Tonight, however, it oozed death and fear.
Mallock
swallowed a great gulp of death, an abject mixture of physical putrefaction and rancid terror. Here, with no way out, the horrifying stench lodged remorselessly in your nostrils: the odor of rotten eggs generated by sulphydric acid, the ammoniacal emanations of postmortem bodily evacuations, the stink of gases escaping the corpse.
Ken, who served as both captain and funnyman in the service of “Fort Mallock,” their tiny state within the big government of Number 36 Quai des Orfèvres, the Paris office of the Criminal Investigation Division of the national police, had arrived before Mallock. “It’s over there, Chief,” he said. Unusually for him, he didn’t smile or crack a joke.
Inside, gloves were snapping and plastic-covered hands rummaging as drawers told their stories. Camera flashes periodically froze positions and feelings in livid indecency. Old photos on the wall showed anachronistic scenes of happiness.
Mallock carefully wiped his shoes on the metal scraper to the right of the door, detaching both traces of mud and fragments of apprehension. He remembered his dream; him and his big clodhoppers leaving smears of dirt all over the murder scene. That wouldn’t happen here. He sat down on a chair placed there for that purpose and took off his shoes, placing them on a small kitchen trolley, then stood up in his socks. Ken watched him, astonished. Yawning, Mallock took a pair of latex gloves out of his jacket pocket and then offered another pair to Ken, along with a bit of Vicks for the smell.
Ken took them, and led him upstairs.
Mallock grimaced as he entered the room. His face tensed and his body leaned forward slightly, as if someone had punched him in the stomach. The person known to insiders as the Makeup Artist was no ordinary murderer. He was a king among bastards. Emperor of the Maniacs. Amédée forced himself to look at the victim, barely managing to repress the thing that twisted his gut and rose into his throat—something between nausea, fury, and a sob.
The room was freezing. God have mercy, he thought.
Mallock the nonbeliever, calling upon God. He hadn’t done that in forever. Even after Thomas’s death he hadn’t prayed. Why now, tonight?
Maybe because here, very nearby, he felt the presence of the Devil—and the need to have God by his side.
Whether he existed or not.
The body had the look and color of wax, with blotches here and there of a hue somewhere between purple and black licorice. Zinzolin, thought Mallock, dredging the word up from the furthest depths of his memory. A deep reddish-violet dye made from sesame seeds. Zinzolin, he repeated in his mind. Dark circles surrounded each puncture mark. Mallock counted a dozen of them, all located over the passage of an artery. The young woman was nude, stretched out very straight on her bed, her eyes wide open. Her eyelids had been cut away, probably with a scalpel. Blood had coagulated darkly around each eye, as if they were lined with kohl.
“Zinzolin,” Amédée muttered to himself.
Her lipsticked mouth was wide open too, but it was full. A number of things would eventually be inventoried: ammonia, flour, grains of barley, formalin. Plus the dead woman’s eyelids, her ripped-off fingernails, and her nipples. Zinzolin. The word echoed in Mallock’s head. Zinzolin, like a mantra. Something to cling to.
The victim’s thighs were spread—or rather, torn asunder, like those of a frog pinned down before dissection—and the lips of her vulva were coated with the same lipstick as on her mouth. Later, the autopsy would reveal that in both legs the rounded top of the femur, covered with articular cartilage, had been wrenched out of the cotyloid cavity in the pelvis. He had wanted the dead woman’s knees to be far apart enough to touch the floor on either side of the corpse. The enarthrosis—the ball joint in the pelvis—had been crushed by the Makeup Artist, whose strength was as shocking as his rage.
The killer had finished staging the scene by tying the victim’s feet so that the soles pressed together, and then binding her hands in the same way with the same bloody beige rope. The same macabre minutiae. This double positioning of the torn and obscene body as if in prayer gave the whole spectacle a particularly morbid quality, like some torture chamber out of the Inquisition.
“Zinzolin,” murmured Mallock one last time.
He knew the dead. Marked with suffering, sprawling, ridiculous, and bloody, covered in piss and stinking. He knew them. Like most cops, Amédée had seen his share of cadavers, of horrors of every kind and then some. Superintendents like Mallock built up a hard shell that kept out the sadness—along with a large part of the capacity for compassion, yes, but it would have been unbearable otherwise. You had to . . . if not like it, at least develop a tolerance for the bloodiness of it. Make it into a habit. Amédée, like all his colleagues, had learned to devour a croissant and sip a hot cup of coffee while appraising a crime scene. There was no point in judging it or pretending not to notice it. That was just how it was. End of story.
Thinking about it, it was only the survivors—the relatives and close friends—who still made an impression on him. Amédée never knew what to do with their terrifying grief, undoubtedly because he knew the weight of tragedy all too well. The infinite uselessness of mumbled words of regret.
Tonight, though, was different.
It was plain even without thinking about it that the victim had suffered unimaginably. The position and condition of this body were the result of sadistic mental torture inflicted out of the psychotic desire to inflict a specific kind of physical pain. There was a ruthless quality about it all. Mallock was reminded of some perverted child tearing off an insect’s legs while carefully keeping the creature alive for as long as possible. For fun.
Chest constricted, jaw clenched, teeth gritted, deeply upset, the superintendent spent more than a quarter of an hour combing the scene with his eyes, his hands clasped behind his back.
“Cover her, but don’t disturb anything,” he said eventually. “And close that goddamned window; it’s fucking freezing in here.” His voice sounded strange in his own ears; monotone, overly loud, and hoarse, as if he were getting over a lingering cold. He felt the touch of a hand on his shoulder from behind. Mordome, his friend and a brilliant specialist in anatomical pathology, had arrived.
“Hello, Superintendent,” he said calmly. “I’m glad they put you on this one. Not a moment too soon.”
“I’m glad you’re here.”
“Good, well, I suppose we’ll have to tolerate one another’s company again.”
Mallock’s face and mouth relaxed a bit. He almost smiled. “I’m going to need your insight, Barnabé. You’re one step ahead of me.”
Bernard Barnabé Mordome spoke quietly. “Six before this one. And a lot more really; twice as many, at least. But we’ll talk about it when we get a quiet moment. Looks like he’s back from his holiday.”
There was a long silence, during which they tried both to absorb the reality of the situation and to distance themselves from it. Only Mordome, absorbed in his work, seemed able to escape this double impasse.
“Poor woman. Our . . . client . . . seems to be losing it, really. It just gets worse and worse. This lunatic comes up with new variations every time, but he’s truly outdone himself to welcome you. This is . . . ” Unable to find the right words, he was silent. Even Mordome was affected by this, and God knew he’d seen his share of horrors and then some—an entire catalogue of atrocities, and yet there was still something new every day.
“She died a few days ago,” he said in response to Mallock’s unspoken query. “I’d say within 72 hours, sometime between the 24th and 25th of December. Santa Claus can be a real bastard.”
More accustomed than the others to these kinds of nightmarish scenes, the doctor had already moved into the second stage of reaction, which always followed sadness and repulsion: anger.
“That’s only an estimate. The window was open,” he continued, “and the cold undoubtedly slowed down the decomposition process. Fuck me, but this is terrible. Find that piece of shit for me
, Amédée.”
“I’m planning on it. Anyway, I’ll leave you to work. You’ll call me?”
“Don’t worry; if I see anything useful before they take the body away I’ll tell Ken, and he’ll let you know. But I wouldn’t count on it. See you in the fridge.”
Mallock clasped Mordome’s shoulder amiably. Everyone needed a bit of human warmth in moments like this. Turning to go back down to the first floor, he saw Raymond Grimaud.
Though not a huge man, RG was what might be called impressive in stature. He had the face of a former boxer, with dark olive skin that brought out everything white about him: the goatee that he always kept immaculately trimmed, his crew-cut silvery hair, and the gleaming whites of his dark eyes. He met Amédée’s gaze with the hint of a smile quirking the corner of his mouth. Theoretically it was infuriating to be taken off a case like this one, but on the other hand, to be replaced by a big name like Mallock, while not exactly an honor, was at least not humiliating. They’d just gone a notch higher, and no one would say anything about it. RG was keeping his mouth shut. The Abbot Cop, as he was nicknamed, knew how to pick his battles. Tonight, though he wouldn’t quite admit it to himself, he was feeling relieved. Truth be told, he couldn’t take any more. Not just of not being able to solve the case, but of the case itself. All these atrocities were weighing down his policeman’s soul like so many anvils. Yes, there was no doubt about it: Passing on this horrific buck would be a relief.
“Have you been here long?” Mallock asked.
“About ten minutes. You?”
“I got here almost half an hour ago. I live right nearby, so . . . ”
“You were right. It’s ugly in there.” RG looked at him sadly. “So is the other one. Maybe even worse, don’t you think?”