The Faces of God

by Mallock;

  It was at this moment of intense satisfaction that he realized his mistake.

  “Don’t forget to come get the key card on Monday morning. Otherwise you won’t be able to get back in,” the seller had warned him.

  Fortunately Amélie, his pretty physiotherapist, was coming today. There was no better way to keep the big bear from clawing. He avenged himself by parking in a spot marked “deliveries only” in front of the horrible little superette on the corner. The old Jaguar’s blue, white, and red police sticker would protect it from the motorcycle cops.

  Back at home, he smartened himself up a bit. For Amélie. The nurse and physiotherapist had been recommended to him by the blue-eyed pharmacist in the little square, her grey hair in a chignon, who had said:

  “She’s been giving my son his shots for years.”

  Coming from this charming woman, that seemed like the best reason in the world to trust her. If she, who was almost a doctor, had entrusted this young person with the fruit of her loins, there could be no doubt about her skill! Mallock, obligingly, had followed her recommendation.

  He was still congratulating himself for it.

  His first time seeing her through the peephole of his front door had been a shock. Love at first sight—with a whole quiverful of Cupid’s arrows for good measure, which had lodged in his head as well as his heart. Not to mention other places.

  To Mallock she was, quite simply, perfect. More than perfect. Even her flaws were adorable. She was a bit of a scatterbrain, her gaze always slightly unfocused, as if she were constantly thinking about what she might have forgotten. She was sweetly chaotic. The giant holdall she had once spilled on the living room floor had contained, besides her pharmacy kit and an assortment of makeup, half a dozen novels. Imagine—a woman who loves One Hundred Years of Solitude, Red Dragon, and Book of My Mother! She was everything a person could dream of in a partner—at least, for a misanthrope like Mallock. For this woman, he could break his solitude. But would she want him?

  When Amélie arrived, he took off his shirt for the cortisone injection. And, as she plunged the needle into his back, Mallock, happy to receive this pain from her still-cold little hands, grinned like a fool.

  Today, once again, they kept to the formalities.

  “I didn’t hurt you too much, did I?”

  “I didn’t feel a thing.”

  “Do you have time for a cup of tea?” he asked, buttoning his shirt.

  “I’d love one, if it’s not too much trouble.”

  Amédée babbled a polite denial and made for the kitchen. Three minutes later they sat silently across from each other at the table. As usual, they talked about the rain, the nice weather, the respective characters of people they knew—but there was a bit more, too. Amélie was incredibly kind; serious and harebrained at the same time; yet cultivated when the conversation required it. Always intelligent.

  “I must admit, all my clients are adorable,” she said.

  “Naturally. You’re adorable too,” Mallock ventured, carefully setting his teacup down. The cup looked tiny; at least half the size of the one Amélie was drinking from. Odd. He knew they were identical.

  “I’m sorry,” she said; “I’ve got to go.”

  “Next Wednesday?”

  “Next Wednesday. No injections next time; we’re going to work on extension. Take a muscle relaxant the night before, and a painkiller when you wake up.”

  “And Friday? Shall we say morning or evening?”

  For the sake of simplicity, and to keep Mallock from forgetting the time, she always came at either eight o’clock in the morning or eight o’clock at night.

  “Morning, otherwise I can’t come. Friday’s the thirty-first—New Year’s Eve. By five o’clock that evening I’ll be slaving over a hot stove.”

  Amédée walked her out, imagining her adorable nose dusted with flour. At the door he shook her hand, holding it a few seconds longer for the sheer pleasure of it. He felt incredibly awkward and unfashionable around her. Awkward and clumsy, while she was pure femininity. Petite, dark-haired and green-eyed, with a swanlike neck and a mouth that was as sublime as her teeth, and the way she moved.

  He stared out the window when Amélie had gone. How much longer was he going to wait before he asked her out to dinner? As enjoyable as it was, the game was beginning to go on a bit long. What if she got tired of it? The problem was that he no longer felt anything. Before, he had known when he had a chance. When his athletic body and clear green eyes were making sparks fly. Here, nothing. Flatline. He had been watching her expressions carefully, but could read nothing.

  To get away from his thoughts, Mallock called his office one last time.

  “Where are we, Francis?”

  “We’ll have the stuff by ten o’clock tomorrow morning. What should I do in the meantime?”

  Mallock hesitated for a second. The little devil inside him thought of giving his colleague another job to do, but it was the big angel that won out:

  “Go home. We’ve got a hell of a battle in front of us. You’ll need your strength.”

  At around ten o’clock that night, Mallock finally made his way to the kitchen for something to eat. It was only when he was standing in front of his open refrigerator that he realized he wasn’t really hungry. He finally reheated some broth from the previous day’s chicken, using kitchen shears to snip some bits of white meat and leek into it and adding three diced turnips. Tabasco sauce; capful of port; salt and pepper.

  Back in the living room, he put on a concerto for flute and harp. Mozart took him directly into the heart of his most intimate, most essential thoughts. Sipping the piping-hot soup, he gazed into the cold fireplace. Two embers had miraculously survived the fire of the previous evening; now they were staring at him like two eyes. Mallock was tempted to speak to them. But whose gaze was this? His son’s? Amélie’s? Or maybe the killer’s?

  As he came nearer, he realized that there were others. Smaller embers, nearly extinguished. Stupidly, as if they were the first stars of the evening, he began to count them. Two by two. One, two, three . . . ten, eleven, and twelve. Thirteen! A great shudder ran through him. The twelve apostles were looking back at him, and at their head the dark Christ, the fallen angel. He cursed his mediumistic abilities, and also what his mother had made religion into—a tool of domination, submission, and terror.

  Behind his back he felt another kind of heat; creeping, moving, interspersed with sharp, freezing gusts of wind. It was the Devil in person, come to confront him in his own living room. There could be no doubt; he felt him, heard him, urinating powerfully in every corner and behind the sofa. Howling with laughter over the noise of his own pissing on the glass screen, the devil was now soaking the television set. Completely paralyzed, petrified with fear, Amédée couldn’t move. Just before leaving, the apparition squatted on the low table to defecate some kind of blue worm, before coming very close to Amédée, and licking his ears. The odor was unspeakable.

  Waking from his doze with a jolt, the former choirboy remained prostrate for a good fifteen minutes, aghast. In front of the fireplace, he waited for the embers to go out. Then, seeking some reassurance, he looked out the window. The first stars had appeared in the sky. He spoke to them about Amélie and Thomas, and then went to bed feeling almost calm.

  It was that night, around 3 A.M., that the ringing of the telephone dragged him out of bed and sent him to Saint-Mandé, to look at the woman and her little daughter who had been massacred by the Makeup Artist.

  7.

  Back to the morning of Tuesday, December 28th

  The man in blue loden, after forcing his way past the security cordon, had come up to Mallock and grasped his arm.

  “Where is my daughter? Has something happened to my wife?”

  The two men were face to face. Mallock said:

  “They’re dead.”

  T
wo little puffs of breath. Two words. Two missiles. The man had just been killed in his turn. Of the person he had been, the man who believed in happiness, nothing remained now except a little head of sadness on a counterfeit body still gripping, by automatic reflex, a briefcase that had occupied his time. All the problems in that case, even the thorniest ones, no longer existed. François Modiano had worked for years as a chief engineer at Schlem. Now he was nothing more than an anguished planet frozen in a starry emptiness.

  But how else could Mallock have said it? He asked himself the same question every time, always knowing that there was no answer. With time, the crushing superiority of questions over the horrible no-man’s-land of answers becomes understandable. How do you announce a thing like this? Approach another person bearing filth, sadness, the end of the world? One might say it slowly, progressively, or all at once, like ripping off a bandage. But it wasn’t bandage being torn away—it was the whole skin, and the heart with it. There was no other way—even though Mallock, obstinately, was still searching for one.

  A few minutes earlier, François Modiano had been excited about finally getting home for Christmas Eve. In his head he had already been hugging both of his girls, and they were covering him with kisses.

  “Hi, sweetheart. You’re not too tired, are you?” his wife would have asked him, smiling.

  His little girl would have simply murmured, “Papa,” barely opening her eyes when he bent over her bed to kiss her goodnight.

  Even if they hadn’t been those words exactly, they would have been others. Lovelier ones. Things about Christmas; the roast capon and the gifts from Saint Sylvester, and lots and lots of sweets. Mallock carried, more than escorted, François Modiano to the ambulance, which stood useless and flickering, its rear doors wide open. There would be no miracles for the dead. No remedies or bandages for those who were deceased at the scene.

  It was only an ambulance, but it knew. So why did men persist in hoping?

  His face twisted in pain, the unfortunate Modiano sat down on the rear tailgate. His hands were shaking, but he couldn’t cry. Amédée held back from questioning him. Later, maybe. As a medic pushed up his sleeve to give him an injection, the engineer slowly forced out a sentence.

  “How did this happen?”

  There was no way to answer that question. The man in loden should be spared for now, though of course he wouldn’t escape it forever. It was one more thing inflicted on the survivors: the complete and exhaustive rundown of the abuses the victims had suffered during the murders. Denying them the right to a lie, to the simple but soothing “No, they didn’t suffer.” Subjecting them instead to an abominable array of information. It seemed like this allowed them to begin the work of grieving. Maybe, but some details killed more than once.

  Mallock spoke, but of other matters. There were things the inconsolable could say to one another. They could even share quality silences. This is what he did, before going off to find the man a cup of very hot coffee. Then he waited with him for the drug that had been injected into his veins to take effect. Afterward, talking softly to him, he watched for the sister to appear, weeping, followed by the grandparents.

  As he was leaving, he gave them his card. “If you need anything, please don’t hesitate. I’m going to be heading the investigation personally, and I’ll keep you informed.”

  Then, heavyhearted, he went to speak to Ken again: “You’re on your own. Watch them closely. They absolutely cannot see the bodies; not inside and not when they bring them out. I’m counting on you.”

  The sun was beginning to rise. Everything was grey and depressing. Glacial. A garbage truck appeared in the street. The noise of garbage-bin lids clanged off sleeping façades. Wake up, good people. Bye-bye, off to your jobs. The banality of the sounds, more than anything else, brought home the demonic aspect of what had taken place in the very backyard, on the second floor of this suburban house with no history.

  Mallock headed back toward Paris. His jaw, his whole body was rigid. At the Porte de Vincennes he took the ring road, his hands clenched tightly on the black Bakelite steering wheel. Staring straight ahead, he tried desperately to contain his rage and sadness.

  After parking his old Jaguar in front of the flower market, Amédée sat down in a cafe to warm up and wait for eight o’clock to arrive.

  “Coffee, double cream, and three croissants.” His throat felt as if it were being squeezed. The image of the tortured little girl had joined the monstrous jumble he had built up in the pit of his stomach. He thought of the mother as well, and then of the child’s father, and he watched his own right hand as it dunked the first croissant, trembling.

  “Fuck,” he murmured.

  There was a message waiting for Mallock when he got to the office: Call Judge Humbert back. He would be in charge of the case of the Makeup Artist 2.0, for the time being. Could be better; could also be worse. Thirtyish, thick mustache, rumpled suit. In line with the unions, more fundamentalist than upstanding, he was a prototypical young judge, highly ambitious, full of himself and self-righteous. A real asshole, according to Mallock’s criteria.

  Curiously, for a police officer responsible for enforcing order and justice, Amédée was distrustful of rules and laws. Neither god nor master; an anarchist without a label; a kindly misanthrope; he abhorred religious posers and pasteurized cheese, conformism and repeat offenders, dominant thought and lack of comfort with equal fervor, just as he did all reductions, whether in sentence or price; fashion and celebrities; bad faith and anchovies; and the hypocritical semantics and repression of a democracy ashamed of itself but much too politically correct to be honest.

  Add to all of that his exaggerated sense of justice, his enormous heart that fell in love easily, his profound compassion for his victims, and 50 percent fat, and the result was this curious creature: a depressive, anarchist upholder of the law with small ears and white stubble who could have had “death to assholes” as his motto—if he hadn’t also had a sense of moderation, and of battles lost in advance.

  Mallock cast a satisfied eye over his department. He had inherited, if not the nicest offices in Number 36, then at least the least ugly. Five rooms: two of them doubles for his four inspectors, a smaller office for Bob by himself, and a wonderful common area, given the smallness of the premises, for briefings and technical material. Finally, adjoining this, was his Chief Superintendent’s office, with a view of the ocean—or practically, at least in Amédée’s head, since the Seine flowed toward the English Channel with the speed of a sustained current.

  Taken as a whole, the department was something of an oddity; comfortable and modern at the same time. At his request everything had been painted off-white except, the sole concession imposed by National Heritage, the gold leaf on the rare wood and plaster moldings miraculously surviving here and there. The overall result had nothing in common with the traditional image of a police bureau—a stroke of luck of which Mallock and his men were fully aware. They even felt a bit guilty when they thought about their less fortunate comrades, condemned to linoleum and plywood. The country treated its police officers very shabbily indeed. Most of the station was a joke, resembling nothing so much as a sad chicken coop. Mallock had fought hard for high-quality feed and fodder for his department, and he had gotten what they needed—plus a good deal extra.

  The replacement computers arrived with great fanfare at around ten o’clock and Mallock signed the release form. Francis ran over to the new toys like a small boy. “Hello there, you beauties,” he crooned at them.

  A certificate in electronics engineering haphazardly acquired in his younger days had earned Francis the designation of head of the department’s IT service, under the unofficial surveillance of Ken. Though not as clever or highly trained as him, Francis had eventually managed very well. Two years of night classes in coding combined with a dogged determination to learn had turned him into the king of the database, user-friendly or not
. These days he even went so far as to walk around armed with automatic code executors, intrusion test platforms, and other security flaw exploitation tools like IP spoofing or buffer overflow, in FBI or Intelligence Service files. Administrative files just weren’t quite enough for him anymore, and there were too few of them. So, while they waited for something to be decided, Ken, Francis, and Mallock had cobbled something together, with Amédée promising to cover for the others if a problem came up.

  “But make sure one doesn’t come up,” he had emphasized. “For now, Francis, start putting together everything you find in the file. Digitize and touch up the best crime scene photos, and also the photos of each victim, in the same format. I want five copies of everything. Each one of us has to have a complete and consistent series to look at and think about.”

  “I’m on it, boss!”

  “Five,” repeated Mallock, thinking of Dublin and Grimaud. “No more than that.”

  Then he had a bathroom break, got himself a coffee, and spent a few minutes watching Francis struggle valiantly with USB, Ethernet, and FireWire cords. When the young chief inspector finally switched on the first screen, he turned to the superintendent: “It’s too bad we don’t have enough elements yet to attempt a portrait of the Makeup Artist, or I would have tried the new biometric morphing program we got from the Federal Bureau in New York.”

  Mallock’s ideas often came to him in packs, like in billiards. His strength was to see or hear trajectories before anyone else did. For him, the whole universe was murmuring with clues, and his only talent was that he could hear them. This time, it was Francis’s denial that gave him the idea for a suggestion: