by Mallock;
The sky was darkening to violet, and the temperature hovered around freezing. The aromas of roasted chestnuts and mulled wine wafted from the cafés opening onto the square. Mallock passed his old Jaguar, immobilized by the cold. Poor little thing; just two more days to go, and then on Sunday she would have a warm place to sleep, protected from half-wits and the elements. After two years of hemming and hawing, Amédée had finally rented a space in a private garage just a few steps from his flat, on the other side of the Rue de Rivoli.
“You’ll see—you’ll wonder how you ever did without it,” the seller had promised him.
Mallock had no doubt of it. In the meantime, he was obligated to go on foot to his old friend’s bookshop on the Rue des Mauvais-Garçons. Tiny flakes of snow had begun fluttering out of the ink-purple sky. At the top of the Rue du Bourg-Tibourg the neighborhood’s shopkeepers had erected an imposing flocked Christmas tree; the mixture of textile fibers and water-based glue adhering to the branches cemented the victory of artifice over nature. As a final outrage, the whole tree had been painted blue. Dazzled children circled the tree, shrieking, their backs glowing orange in the cafés’ lights and their faces turned blue by the illuminated tree.
In front of his friend Léon’s secondhand bookshop, Mallock stopped for a moment to contemplate the window display.
Dusted with artificial snow and adorned with two garlands and three balls, it was the same jumble of books and manuscripts as always; a treasure laid out in an order understood only by Léon Galène, “like radio sets,” he told his customers. As he did every year, the elderly bookseller had put out a figure of Santa Claus in ice skates, spinning endlessly. The poor toy was so old that it had become rather horrifying, like the pieces of dusty styrofoam and the ancient yellow star dangling from a brass curtain rod.
It was Christmas Day, but the shop was open. A book is always a treat, Léon had written in his elegant cursive on a battered piece of cardboard. Mallock entered, causing the wind chimes that hung from the ceiling to jingle.
“Hello, Superintendent. How are things going?”
The stirring scent of old paper.
“They’re going. How’s business, Léon? I swear I’m coming next year on December first to throw all these decorations in the bin. Especially Father Christmas and that star.”
“Why? You know the yellow star is an unforgettable memory for me.” Léon gave a loud bark of harsh laughter.
“You’re a lunatic, my friend.”
Léonhard Scheinberg had led something of a tumultuous life. Mostly tragic. His entire family had been exterminated by Hitler’s goons and he himself had spent three years in the camps. Between the ages of nine and eleven he had experienced the unspeakable, the very worst. He almost never talked about it, and Amédée, more than anyone, respected that silence.
“Must never forget . . . never forget . . . what a load of bullshit! I lived through it, and it’s my right to forget,” he had confided to Mallock once in a moment of temper. “It’s my suffering. It belongs to me, myself, and I, and no one else. It’s not just mine—it is me. If I want to kill it and bury it in the back garden, that’s my right, isn’t it?”
During the first years of his repatriation in Paris Léon had tried to regain a taste for life; first by simply learning to walk again, and then burning the candle at both ends:
“You know, Amédée, when you’ve been through something like that—you can’t move afterward. It’s like you’re frozen. Stunned. Many people let themselves die afterward. Others . . . well, they gulped life down too fast and it killed them. I—after a period of recovery, I tried to pick up my life story where I’d left off, to get back into it. To go back. Good God—to go back! But they’d sent me to a country that was so far away. Even now I’m not even sure it’s really a place on Earth. I went through so many train stations, over so many hills of bone, so many destroyed arches. I got good and far away . . . there was always so much death behind me. It seemed like death had won without my realizing it, like it was clinging to me with invisible hooks. Strapped to me like a goddamn pair of suspenders. That’s why it just kept dropping by. Over and over . . . ”
Then Léon, a master of the one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn, had laughed at his own joke—and quickly become serious again.
“When you come back from that kind of place, you bring death with you. We brought it back on the bottoms of our shoes, in our eyes, in every pore of our skin. And God knows I washed until my skin nearly came off, but it’s still there. Always. Every day. In us, and behind us. Understand?”
That was how Léon had explained things one day to his friend Amédée. One day. Only once. Mallock had said he understood, knowing perfectly well that he did not. The old man was running, running away from death that chased him even now.
For Amédée, though, like for most humans, death lay ahead.
After a long convalescence, Léon had climbed back aboard his life. He was famished, and though his heart and bones had been weakened he hadn’t let a single orgy pass him by. His Zazou clothes, a few misdemeanors, his beautiful blue eyes, two or three underhanded maneuvers in casinos and betting shops, and his immoderate taste for the masculine sex had all combined to earn Léon a few stints in the capital’s jails. But finally, with time, he had calmed down.
“Unless I doubled down,” he had said, “I was out of the race.” But first he had fallen helplessly in love and shacked up with a gorgeous young stud to whom he taught everything he knew about being an antiquary. He had given the amorous Léon everything he wanted—and then, one day, had taken off with the store’s cash register. Undiscouraged, Léon had “gotten back in touch” with another beautiful young thing, and the farce had begun all over again.
In the mid-1980s, he had finally found the lid for his pot: a forty-year-old cellist, grand, goy, et gai, as kind as he was brilliant. Four years later, AIDS took his partner from him, and Léon had tried to join him in death. He failed. The force of his grief had brought him closer to his friend Mallock, his comrade in tragedy.
And one day, the old bookseller had found his smile again.
For Mallock, that ray of light—that movement of lips and eyes—was the victory of the heart over grief, of life over brutality, and of affection over everything else.
At sixty-something years old, when so many others his age were retiring, Léon had opened a bookshop in the heart of Le Marais. In ten years he had built a solid reputation as an expert.
“For once I’m going to spare you my recitation on the death throes of the book,” Léon announced. “Let’s talk about you. What can I do for you?”
“Can you bring me those press clippings on recent unsolved murders?”
“You didn’t even ask me if I have them ready. You know me well, eh?”
“Too well, and for too long,” Amédée joked, holding a first edition of Harry Dickson’s adventures delicately in his hands. This one was nothing less than The Hermit of the Devil Swamp, the first investigation of the American Sherlock Holmes, a series that had been recreated more than translated by Jean Ray, and an adolescent passion of the young Amédée’s. Whenever a new episode was published, a kindhearted librarian in Caen had alerted him and Mallock had leapt on his old moped to go after it. Once back in his bedroom he would stretch out on his bed with a heap of sweets: butter toffees, jelly beans, licorice sticks. And there he would fly up out of his village, and then out of Normandy and over the Channel, higher and higher, past the white cliffs of Dover, and finally touch down a century in the past, in the notorious streets of London.
“Am I to understand that Monsieur le Superintendent has finally been let in on the action?”
Mallock started. “What action?”
Léon, putting away a pile of books, didn’t bother glancing up at Mallock. “What do you take me for, some idiot journalist?”
“My dear Léon, what strange idea has taken root i
n that paranoid little Jewish head of yours now?”
Léon looked up, his blue gaze piercing Mallock’s. “I’ve got all the articles here, from Libé and Voici and Le Figaro and Detective, and they’re all telling me the same thing. My paranoid Jewish mind sorts information like lentils, as you cops say—except I keep the pebbles and throw out the beans, the pre-digested crap the police and the other bureaucrats serve up to the pencil pushers. It’s fine when they don’t give out complete files at press conferences today, just abstracts, the same thing they publish for public consumption. Gather the information for people so they don’t tire themselves out; suggest angles so they don’t have to spend time deciding which ones are the most relevant, and voilà, there’s your shitty copy. Fortunately, despite everything, there’s still truth in life. Little bits of it fall through the holes in the sieve. Those are my pebbles.”
Mallock had listened to Léon with a smile on his face. “So what’s your conclusion?”
“A whole lot of crap,” Léon laughed. “There are a good half dozen murders whose descriptions don’t stick. It’s bullshit, if you ask me. How can I put it—it sounds hollow, like a theatre set. There’s no meat to it, not even bones, just a barely-drawn outline and a lot of clichés. You’re keen on linguistics; you know that what makes good information is having a balance between too much repetition, too many references, and the unpublished data. Too many original elements—too many bits of exclusive information coming one right after another—and it becomes too hard to follow. Too many repetitions and boring references, and you’ve got a totally empty speech. Here there’s only déjà-vu and emptiness; not the slightest amount of . . . well, news.”
Mallock could think of no response to this, and contented himself with congratulations. “Bravo to you, but this time there’s a lot more to it. It’s no use trying to be cagey with you.”
“I should hope not! No keeping secrets from your Léon!”
“No. But I need you to promise me something. Spit on the floor and repeat after me: ‘I swear on the head of my next lover that I will not tell anyone about this.’”
To his astonishment, Léon complied, hawking a shiny glob of phlegm onto the polished floor of his shop. It wasn’t the parquet Léon loved; it was his books: ancient newspapers, illustrated magazines, paperbacks, and leather-bound histories of the Empire and tales of Puss in Boots, Gulliver, and the Musketeers. He adored the outdated sagas, still smelling of faded ink, of tigers, elephants, and maharajas; the Indian misadventures of pampered “Darjeeling darlings” in the twilight years of the British Empire. He swooned over the coarse seafaring novels with their fragrances of salt-foam and seaweed and pickled herring, their siren-haunted islands and peg-legged wizards.
Mallock told Léon everything he knew about the Makeup Artist—including the embargo.
“What a mess this is!” Léon exclaimed. “And believe me, that’s exactly why they brought you in. Have you started your investigations yet?”
“Not yet—officially, at least. But let’s say it won’t be long . . . which is why I asked for the stories. I want to reread everything the press has said about these murders.”
Though Mallock tended to limit his reading of journalists’ prose to small doses, he liked looking through Léon’s scrapbooks. They allowed him to trace an idea through a forest of contradictory theories, and sometimes they even triggered one of his famous hunches. The collective unconscious: this was what the “visionary superintendent” wanted to explore in Léon’s books. Out of these cutout, already-yellowing articles a sort of truth would emerge; its tentacles deformed, half-smothered in various rotten digressions. You just had to know how to decode it. It was like a rose blooming on a shit heap of gossip and noise. And sometimes, though very rarely, it would contain information that came neither out of someone’s crazy imaginings nor from the official version. Some journalists, bless them, still did real work.
Léon brought two scrapbooks out from the back of the shop. They were of thick black cardboard made to look like leather. They were both exactly the same size and thickness as the files in Number 36, a coincidence that Mallock chose to take as a good omen.
“Here you go. Have fun,” said Léon, plunking the books down loudly on his desk.
“Do you mind if I take them with me?”
“Take them, take them. I don’t worry with you. Plus I owe you one—I’ve put together my best scrapbooks from your investigations.”
Mallock muttered a modest denial.
“Besides, one good turn deserves another,” continued Léon. “I guess I’ll read the rest in the newspapers—but make sure that doesn’t keep you from coming to see me, kid.”
“Oh—by the way, I’m going to buy that Harry Dickson from you. When’s it from exactly, 1930?”
“Nope, ’33. An excellent vintage—the year I was conceived! A few of them came out that year, as I’m sure you know. The Red Widow—you’ve already got that one, don’t you?—and The Sign of Death, which I’ve looked for everywhere for you. It seems to get rarer all the time.”
“Can I write you a check?”
Léon put his hand on Mallock’s back and steered him firmly toward the door. “Don’t waste your time; take it. I’ll put it on your tab.”
“Thanks again, Léon. Happy holidays.”
Wind chimes. Cold outside air. Door closing behind him. Léon, smiling, watched through the window as his friend disappeared into a grey haze of snowflakes. His wrinkled features were reflected in the glass. He had eyes like a faded aquarium and a strong nose, in the middle of a face scattered with reddish splotches. He gazed at his reflection, and realized with a start that apprehension had slowly transformed his smile into a rictus. Forgetting his Jewish roots, he couldn’t stop himself from murmuring an ecumenical and surprising:
“Jesus and the Virgin Mary protect you!”
It was 6:23 in the evening when Mallock banged his apartment door shut behind him. The intensifying cold, and the prospect of a good whiskey, had hastened his steps. His living room smelled of wax. Anita, his luscious housekeeper, had polished all the furniture last Thursday. He rubbed his hands together, feeling a flicker of returning joy in his heart. Santa Clauses and animated displays in department-store windows; jingle bells and sugary scents; all were forgotten.
Seven minutes later, a lovely poplar blaze crackled in the fireplace. He had turned off the Christmas tree. A glass of pure single-malt threw amber reflections on the palm of his left hand, while a double Corona Punch cigar began its slow burn.
He had a job to do. Innocent people to protect. A piece of garbage to catch. And a mystery to solve.
Truth be told, he loved it.
3.
Sunday, December 26th
The next day, Mallock woke up with a throbbing migraine crushing his forehead and the back of his neck. A ray of sunlight was in the process of finishing the insidious hammer job begun by a mixture of insomnia, smoke, and alcohol.
Getting up was painful.
Standing in front of his coffeemaker, he couldn’t keep from grumbling. Nothing was going right this morning. The stupid contraption was taking forever to percolate; his goddamn cup was hiding somewhere; the bloody sugar bowl was empty and the milk sour.
He grabbed the earthenware saucer that belonged with the missing cup and flung it with all his strength down the hallway, hoping it would shatter against the bathroom door. Bingo! It exploded into shards. He felt slightly better, but not enough. The two other cups and saucers, which made up the whole rest of his coffee service, met the same fate, giving the same ceramic shrieks as they smashed on the lacquered wood of the door.
You couldn’t condemn a person for murdering things.
The previous evening, instead of eating a quick dinner and going to bed, Mallock had dived straight into his investigation. With the files in his lap he had begun his journey—the personal itinerary that would l
ead to him to another man’s murderous insanity.
The forest of articles clipped by Léon was immediately striking in its lack of photos. Most editors wanted illustrations; they’d get a police-artist composite sketch, a snapshot of the crime scene, or a photo of the victim—dressed up for first communion, or smiling and tanned on the beach last summer. Here, there was nothing; no serious imagery apart from a few pictures of the fronts of houses where a “mysterious murder,” a “sadistic crime,” or a “terrible tragedy” had taken place. The titles were as varied as their authors’ imaginations. No matter; Mallock wasn’t expecting them to shed any light on the case.
Of course, he knew the reason for it: the embargo imposed by the higher-ups. The lack of photos was glaring evidence of it, as was the obvious lack of details about the homicides. All the papers had cobbled together fantastical stories apparently supported by an interview with a neighbor or a tearful relative. She didn’t have an enemy in the world . . . it’s the work of a madman . . . I don’t understand; she was such a nice person. The questions, like the photos, seemed as if they were meant to replace the scoops and other earth-shattering revelations that usually surrounded this kind of sensational news item.
The simple idea of serial crime didn’t appear until three months in, at the very beginning of Léon’s second scrapbook. It was in an article signed M.M. for Mallock’s great friend Margot Murât, nicknamed Queen Margot. She had entitled the article “Too many police to be honest.” In it, she described her surprise at the tone of the press conferences given by Number 36, and at their polite eagerness to give the newspapers an amount of information as impressively large as it was useless. “Why do I have the uncomfortable feeling that these gentlemen have just thrown a smokescreen over us?” she finished by wondering, in her inimitable style.
It was past midnight when Mallock picked up Dublin’s file. He stared at it for a while without opening it, wondering if he should get some sleep and start again tomorrow. Hadn’t he done enough for tonight?