by Mallock;
“What if you started by doing a portrait of the victims?”
“A portrait? But we already have photos of them.”
“Not portraits—one portrait. Singular.”
“A composite sketch of a series of victims? That’s a first.”
“Maybe. Not really. I don’t care. Try to see if they have something in common. Features, mouth, eye color, race . . . ”
“You want them on different overlays, but the same file?”
“Yes, and synchronize the color correction, so it looks like they were all taken with the same light. And with equal proportions so we can superimpose them. It’s possible that he’s attracted by a certain facial symmetry, or a different structure: wide-set eyes, mouth close to the nose, a certain shape of eyes-mouth triangle. Look into that angle; look for common points, and make me a list.”
Francis was writing everything down carefully. When he looked up to ask another question, his boss had already gone into the next room.
On the large conference table, other than his two large files, Mallock had half a dozen boxes brought by RG’s assistant, filled mostly with the contents of the female victims’ handbags.
“This is one of the thoughts I had recently,” Grimaud had said. “Even though they were all killed in their homes, I asked the families for permission to borrow their purses. I hoped their address books and other personal details might help us establish a relationship between them. I haven’t had the time to do it, so it’s yours to follow up with. Don’t forget to give all these things back to the families; I personally agreed to that.”
Mallock spread everything out on the conference table. These personal things, exhibited anonymously and with detachment, made for a sad tableau. Key-rings, mobile phones, lipstick used with private dreams of seduction, shiny face powder: the last witnesses to see the victims alive. Coin purses and wallets, fine batiste handkerchiefs containing the final lip-print, a kiss sent from the beyond. To whom? Odors of perfume and rice powder mingled with ink and leather—the irreplaceable, inimitable scent of women’s handbags.
Off to one side there were also the contents of the male victims’ wallets—and, even more horribly, those of the children’s schoolbags.
Ken had arrived at the office with dark bags under his eyes, which were puffy “as a cat’s asshole,” he thought it appropriate to specify. “I’ve come straight from Saint-Mandé. I stopped by for your viewing pleasure, and also to make a good impression, but I’m knackered. So just listen to me without rushing me, and then I’m going to go off and go beddy-bye, okay?”
“Sure, go on. I’m all ears.”
Of Japanese and Italian heritage, Ken referred to himself as a peasant. He had lived in France since the age of eight. A stocky man of five foot nine with black hair and a mug like Jackie Chan’s, his was a mixture of race and blood which, he gleefully admitted, he’d never completely understood. His origins and the tumult of his school years had made him a fairly odd character. Extremely clever, and of redoubtable physical strength, he was a good companion no matter the circumstances. To compensate occasionally for a slight lack of strictness in his work, he used dry wit and a good mood that nothing seemed able to alter. He and his wife, a pretty, voluptuous blonde called Anne and nicknamed Ninon, were expecting their first child. It was a girl whom they were calling Nina. Ken had chosen “Niwi” at first, but Ninon had objected, and no more had been said about the matter.
“I stayed until the end to sign the report,” he began. “It was just a flash of intuition that I should—à la Mallock. As you know, it’s standard procedure for a body to be turned over in case there’s something hidden under it. And guess what was there?”
Sure of his effect, Ken let three seconds of silence go by.
“I don’t know . . . a syringe?”
Robbed of his bombshell, Ken gasped. “How did you know?”
“Just intuition . . . à la Mallock,” chuckled Amédée.
“You really are a goddamn wizard!”
“Where’s your respect, Monsieur Inspector?”
“It went home to bed, and I plan to join it very soon. Anyway, they say ‘captain’ now. And since I was a senior detective, I’m actually a chief inspector—with all due respect, Monsieur Chief Superintendent . . . I mean General!”
“Yes, yes, I know. My captains are chief inspectors now; it’s much simpler. So, the fingerprinting?”
“We tried at the scene, but nothing. Nada. Not even one partial fingerprint. Keep dreaming, boss.”
“Okay. Before you go off to recharge your batteries, I have something to show you. I’ve got practically all the contents of the handbags here. Notice anything?”
Mallock was addressing not only Ken but also Bob, who had just joined them in the conference room.
“Out of the half-dozen handbags present here,” he continued, not waiting for a response, “five contain a public transportation card and four have metro tickets. Same thing for one of the wallets and one of the schoolbags.”
“Seems normal, boss. We’re in Paris.”
“You’re going to look into it anyway. Call the families and ask them if the victim happened to have a usual route, maybe a daily one. If they all say it was on the same metro line, would that still seem normal to you?”
“Gotcha. I should have kept my trap shut, right?”
“Right. And if the metro’s our common denominator, you get your ass down there and check it out, okay?”
Mallock had dictatorial tendencies: a kind of imperialism, watered down for everyday life. He observed all the formalities, of course, but he imposed a fanatical professionalism on his colleagues. The atmosphere in the Fort became very strained during investigations. Amédée, when stressed, was inflexible and severe in a way that only his constant kindness and attentiveness at all other times made acceptable.
He stood up and walked out the door, saying: “Call me when you have anything. I’ll be back at three o’clock.”
It was one o’clock in the afternoon on Tuesday, and the superintendent was exhausted and starving.
8.
Tuesday afternoon, December 28th
Mallock ordered three croque-monsieurs1 and three beers at the bar, to be sent to the office for his team. For himself he chose a croque-madame2 and sat down by himself in the back of the cafe. Three Santa Clauses were leaning on the bar, talking about salaries and pay raises and their lack of job security. They had stuffed their long white beards into their pockets so as not to spill anything on them. Mallock thought that public gatherings of Santa Clauses should be forbidden; they could do too much damage to children’s imaginations. He thought about getting up and ordering them to circulate, but attacked his sandwich instead. A couple sat near him, talking and holding hands. He’d had that, once. Maybe he would again one day, with Amélie . . .
He thought of Margot again, too. Margot Murât. Where was she now? He’d always had a major weakness for the petite journalist. She was a hell of a reporter.
Following his train of thought, he picked up his phone. “Ken, when are our lovebirds supposed to be back?”
“Jules and Julie? They should be back on Monday morning, after New Year’s Eve. I guess they have plane tickets booked. You want me to—”
“No, no, we’ll leave them alone! It’ll be just fine to have them back in good form on Monday. Now, on a different note, we’re going to need to do a complete inventory of all the handbags, item by item, and then make up a sort of table, with everything laid out like a puzzle, as Audiard would say.”
“When you say ‘we,’ for some reason I feel like you really mean me. Am I imagining things?”
“Not really. You’ve always showed good analytical ability, which is a great thing!”
The men chuckled softly on both ends of the line.
“Now, what am I doing, exactly?” Ken asked eventually.
/> “I’ll explain it. Draw a table and call one row ‘lipstick,’ for example, and next to that you write ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ If yes, specify the color and the brand. ‘Mobile telephone,’ yes or no, operator, etc. Do the same thing with the photos, seeing if there are any of the same people in them. List every item; don’t leave a single thing out. Pens, brushes, crosswords, pencil sharpeners, sex toys, Bibles—I want everything. Then move on to address books and bank cards.”
Mallock paused just long enough to gulp down a large bite of his croque-madame and think for a couple of seconds about his next instruction and all the work it would involve.
“You’re going to hate me, but we also have to put everything in the address books, mobile phones, and any iPhones or iPods in the computer, and analyze the bank statements from the victims’ homes, and their handbags and pockets. You can’t use your ‘items’ table for this, and you can’t do it alone. We’re going to need a drudge or two to do data entry. We have to be able to look at everything in a database, with as many fields as possible so we can cross-reference the data in every possible way. We have to find out if there’s a friend or lover common to the victims, or if they did their shopping at the same place, had the same butcher or hairdresser, and that’s the kind of job we need a computer for.”
“I understand that, but it’s going to take at least four days with three data-entry people working full time. And because of New Year’s Eve and January first, we’ve got two days less.”
Ken wasn’t wrong. Getting civil servants to work was already hard enough, but during the holidays they moved slower than molasses in January. “Well, how about we say you hire six operators and I expect my results next Wednesday?”
“And when does poor Ken get to sleep, exactly?”
“Right now, if you want. Go in my office and stretch out on the sofa. In two hours you’ll feel like a new man. This is war, my boy. You can sleep when we’ve thrown the trash away—or when you’re dead.”
Ken sighed on the other end of the line. It was pointless to argue with the boss when he was like this.
“After your nap, I want you to get to work. I want those listings on my desk by Thursday morning at the latest. We all need to jump on this case, and there’s no more money in the budget. As of now you’re on overtime ad libitum,” Mallock said mercilessly. “As soon as you have the listings, fill out your own paper table. The Machin truc chouette lipstick you’ve just noticed—where was it bought? By whom? Fruits and vegetables: where were they purchased, and so on. In a nutshell, you’re going to take all the information and chart it out by brand, race, shape, store, or religion.”
“In a nutshell,” repeated Ken, “I’m looking for the slightest thing all these things from everyday life have in common.”
“Yep! But you’ve got to get to the very bottom of the concept.”
“Meaning?”
“The very bottom of each handbag, for example. You’ll find dust there. Have it analyzed, individually and then each sample against the others. Two fibers from the same carpet, matching pubic hairs, sand or gravel from the same place—we’d be incredibly pleased with any of that.”
“Got it, boss! Bon appétit, see you soon,” said Ken philosophically, already overwhelmed by the task in front of him.
At two o’clock Amédée returned to the office with Eskimo Pies for his team, partly out of kindness, but largely as a way of apologizing for his next idea. He noticed that Francis hadn’t touched his croque-monsieur. The young inspector was finishing up his basic retouches on the various photos in the file. He was bent over the screen, lips parted, using the “stamp” tool.
“You’ll have better luck with the healing brush or the patch. And also, don’t make yourself too crazy. I don’t need you to give me a work of art,” fibbed Mallock, who couldn’t abide botched work.
“I know you, and I don’t want to have to start over.”
Bob, for his part, had crammed the rest of his sandwich into his mouth so he could attack the ice cream before it melted. “Thanks for the snack, guv.”
“One last thing. It’s not how I usually do things, but RG has brought my attention to the necessity of keeping this information secret. So when we’ve got our five copies with conclusions and everything, have each one of us sign every page. I want a signature on every image and every table. If there’s leak we’ll know which packet it’s from, and the culprit will have to answer to me.”
Deafening silence. Mallock knew he might have gone a bit too far, and that he’d probably expressed himself poorly as well.
“Listen. I trust you all completely, but I’ve given this a lot of thought. This system will protect us as much as it will the investigation. Any copy that turns up in broad daylight and isn’t signed by the Fort will exonerate us de facto. I’ll sign my own personal copy too. Other people have been able to maintain the embargo and it’s out of the question for one of us to fuck it up by being irresponsible.”
Bob, Ken, and Francis had all begun crunching quietly on their Eskimo Pies. The sight was comical.
“So . . . you can cram your sensitivity up your own asses, okay?” Mallock tossed the words off as he stalked out of the room, not sure exactly who he was angry at—his men or Dublin, who had put him in this situation. No—it was himself he was furious with, and he didn’t quite know how to handle it.
“Goddammit,” grumbled Bob. His Eskimo Pie, neglected too long, had begun sliding down its stick toward his fist.
9.
Wednesday, December 29th
During the night between Tuesday and Wednesday Mallock had a nightmare, his recurring one.
His father slammed the door to his room, clearing his throat and stomping down the stairs toward Amédée, hurling abuse at him:
“Where is the little bastard?”
Halfway down the stairs he missed a step and fell, swearing and crashing against the walls. But instead of simply falling he came apart, his limbs breaking off as if he were a gigantic porcelain doll. Making a horrible racket, the pieces of his body tumbled the rest of the way down the stairs and came to a stop a few centimeters away from Amédée. Covered with blood, his father stood up on his left arm—the only limb still attached to his torso—and cursed his incompetent, inadequate son. Then he broke into grimacing smiles and plaintive moans of “Help me, my boy!” More surreal images followed, as if to horrify the dreamer as much as possible.
Luckily, in the midst of these terrors there came a kind of patient clearing, an expression of perfect happiness. Up ahead a river flowed, populated by gigantic, phosphorescent Siamese fighting fish. Amédée found himself aboard a small boat, holding Thomas in his arms. Tom, pressed against him, alive, smelling like fresh bread. Together they rode down the river, with its eddies, its calm stretches, its blue icebergs and rapids; sometimes so wide there was nothing but sea on the horizon, and sometimes so narrow that they could touch the banks on either side. Then, insidiously, the sounds changed. Mallock continued to stroke his son’s hair and inhale the scent of his skin, but now there was a horrible odor of burning coming from the boy. The water around the boat turned into lava. After a final, love-filled look at his son, Amédée fell with him, prow first, into a chasm of flames.
Mallock never emerged unscathed from these fearsome nights. This morning was no exception; he woke with an aching back. He called Amélie, who answered just as he was about to give up.
“Oh, it’s you,” she said. “I was about to turn on the answering machine and go out on my rounds. Are we on for eight o’clock?”
“I’m sorry to bother you, but this time I’ve thrown my back out completely.”
“Would you like me to come earlier?”
“I’d really appreciate it. You or one of your colleagues, if you can’t do it.”
“I can manage it. I’ll come right away. Be there in three minutes.”
Amélie lived in the next
square over, in an apartment above the little pharmacy where she worked.
“Thanks so much. I’ll see you shortly.”
Mallock stretched his back slowly, grimacing, but he was happy. She was coming over. A good cup of coffee with a froth of milk and his joy would have been complete—but he couldn’t get up. Not wanting to waste time, he called his department. Here too, he had to wait a good ten rings before Ken answered.
“You’ve got some nerve. I’ve been very clear that the phone has to be answered before the third ring.”
“It’s been practically two nights since I got any sleep,” protested Ken. “And let me remind you, with all due respect, that it’s Wednesday, December 29th, and it’s barely 7 A.M., and we’ve got neither a receptionist nor a chief here. Now then: hello, boss.”
“Hello, Ken. Sorry. My sciatica’s making me crazy. I’m stuck in bed.”
“Your back’s got some nerve,” joked Ken.
Amédée knew he deserved that. “So—where are we?”
“I’m halfway done with the item chart. I’m waiting until nine o’clock before I go off in search of peons to do our data entry. Francis has finished up his part of the project, so he can show them what to do.”
“And Bob?”
“I think he’s almost done with his calls, but I’ll let him tell you what he’s found. He’s a bit touchy this morning. Kind of like his beloved boss.”
“Yeah, hi, guv,” Bob came on the line now, having practically wrenched the phone out of Ken’s hands. “I did as you asked and ended up getting the runaround three or four times. A lot of people aren’t overly fond of middle-of-the-night phone calls.”
“Go easy on me, Bob. What did you end up with?”
“A mixed bag, but—”
“But what?”
“Turns out seven of our nine victims took the Vincennes-La Défense line. But what dampens my enthusiasm is, that’s by far the most frequently taken route.”