by Mallock;
Mordome put the larva into a glass bottle, then plunged his tweezers back into the little girl’s eye to pull out some more examples. “This time,” he said, “we’ll have a good idea of the time the crime took place.”
Now it only remained to finish the orofacial autopsy and then cut the stitches on the girl’s mouth so they could open it. Except for Mordome, who kept on speaking loudly, everyone was profoundly silent. Amédée and the three assistants stood white-faced, hands clasped behind their backs, heads down. When all of the stitches had been cut, Mordome asked for help. He and Mallock had to force the jaws open; they came apart suddenly, with a crack like a dead branch snapping.
None of them would ever forget what they found inside the child’s oral cavity—not just the nature of the things, but above all the way the mouth was so horrifically overstuffed.
13.
Friday, December 31st. Happy New Year!
Outside in the sun, the cold was tolerable even for Mallock, who wore only a light jacket. He decided to go back to the office on foot. He needed to walk—and, more than that, he needed to let something inside him explode.
Tears or anger—it didn’t matter which.
A sort of nursery rhyme had been running through his mind for several minutes; a song by Gainsbourg, about a wax doll, or a rag doll. He knew he’d never be able to erase the little girl with the braids from his memory. Crossing through the flower market, he was surprised when a sob escaped his lips. He quivered imperceptibly, unbearably full of sadness and rage. His throat tightened.
The first thing he did back in his office was to pour himself a large whiskey. The gold liquid slid down his throat, taking with it the muck that had built up in his heart and his gut. To keep on living as if nothing was wrong—was that even possible? Mallock couldn’t understand how the world hadn’t stopped turning, even just for a second, to weep for this little girl. To say goodbye to her.
There was only one remedy. Work.
He called Bob to give him the samples he had taken in the mysterious little holes from the house in Saint-Mandé. “Take these to the lab and have them test for blood, and if it’s there, see if they can find out whose it is.”
“What should I put on the label?”
“Saint-Mandé/floor holes/second floor.”
Bob muttered an obliging “okay” and left the room.
The day dripped by like a marshmallow hung from a steel hook. Amédée didn’t try to hold it back. There were calls to return, notably from Queen Margot, but he didn’t make any of them. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to talk—or if he even could.
His colleagues left one by one, popping their heads into his office to call out the traditional “Happy holidays, boss” that they repeated every December thirty-first.
At seven o’clock, weary of the silence, Mallock activated the security system and closed up the central part of the Fort. He only did that twice a year, for May first and the New Year. On the floor below, a team would continue working through the night on the data entry he had requested. He stopped by to say hello to them, partly to keep them motivated, but also out of kindness—though the old grump would never have admitted that.
Outside, the sidewalks carried the scent of oysters and lemon.
The cold had returned, bringing a few drops of rain with it—all the better to spoil the ambience. No matter; it was still a holiday. It was written on the calendar. Civilians were hurrying to celebrate, emitting occasional peals of laughter. Whatever happened, they would celebrate the New Year. And honestly, that obsession had always bothered Mallock a bit, though he had never tried to figure out why.
Those forced parties with mandatory kisses at a predetermined time, those stupid resolutions that never stuck, and the way people made sure to repeat them the following year to anyone who hadn’t died in the meantime. It stressed him out. He thought the holiday was desperate and morbid, and as depressing as a funeral. And they weren’t burying a year; he couldn’t care less about that; it was like burying your childhood, the time you had lost, just shoving it under the carpet, along with the dust and all the regret and remorse. Three, two, one, midnight: now everyone’s happy. They kiss, they throw themselves at each other, and then they ignore each other the next day and go back to the usual routine of hatred, or at best indifference.
Not only that, it reminded him too much of his childhood, and his New Year’s Eves, which were never celebrated.
At home, several voicemails were waiting for him. A dozen “Happy New Year”s and three invitations to come and celebrate—including one from Margot Murât, and one from Amélie.
“If you’re free, maybe we could . . . ”
And how! A few seconds later, his heart thumping, he dialed her number.
“Hello, you’ve reached the home of Amélie Maurel. Unfortunately I’m not in, but don’t leave me wondering who called—leave a message after the beep, please!”
“It’s Mallock . . . Amédée,” babbled the superintendent, and hung up.
Then, for more than an hour, he tried to stand being in his apartment. Around nine o’clock he gave up. Paris was at the table, having dinner. Mallock wasn’t happy being inside or outside. Only Amélie’s presence could pull him out of his funk. The clinking of forks and glasses in the courtyard reminded him that he hadn’t had any lunch that day.
He still wasn’t hungry. Gainsbourg’s song had returned to his head and with it had come sadness, slowly but surely, like a flood. He thought for an instant about calling Margot back. She was often associated with his attacks of spleen, and she was the most effective remedy for them. But it wouldn’t have been fair—not to her, and not to Amélie.
Not wanting to bother anyone, or to feel sorry for himself, he was preparing to begin a long and exhaustive single-malt Scotch tasting back in his apartment when the telephone rang.
It was Léon. “Amédée, can you come here, quickly?”
“Where? Why?”
“I’m at Saint Paul’s church, with a friend. Understand?”
“Canon Lasalle? Is there some problem?”
Léon didn’t answer right away. Then: “I think he’s your Makeup Artist.”
“The canon?” Amédée laughed. “I’m not surprised; he’s a nasty-looking piece of work.”
“I’m not joking, Mallock. He just struck again.”
“Who?”
“I think it’s the Makeup Artist, but that doesn’t change anything. There’s a body here.”
The air suddenly crackled with electricity.
“In the church?” Mallock’s heart pounded.
“Yes. Get over here; hurry!”
Had the son of a bitch shortened his interval between killings again? Mallock thought back, occupying his mind while he prepared to go. He had previously calculated that it would be four days before the next murder. Saint-Mandé had been on December twenty-eighth, and now it was almost January first. The count was right.
Despite the icy sidewalks and freezing air that took his breath away, it only took him five minutes to reach his destination. Léon was waiting for him at the top of the church’s six-columned forecourt, his face chalk-white. Without saying a word, he slid a large key into the lock and turned it three times. The canon was waiting for them in the ventail, trembling and red-eyed.
“Toward the baptismal fonts. On the right,” he babbled. He indicated a large pillar composed of four columns with his finger. “Just behind there.”
Like in most churches, the air was cold and damp, filled with the odors of incense, mold, and cat urine. Behind him, Amédée heard the key turning three times again in the closed door. The canon was terrified by the thought that a member of his flock might think of coming in to pray.
As he walked toward the spot indicated, Mallock’s breath came faster. The fear of what he might discover was mingled with that of coming across the monster. What if he
was still there, hiding behind a column? The Devil in God’s house. He verified the comforting presence of his guns in their holsters, but he thought twice about drawing one of them. This was a church, and the former choirboy in him was reluctant. He contented himself with resting his hand on his little .25 automatic.
A rendezvous with the Devil, in a church, on New Year’s Eve. Only Mallock could have ended up in a situation like this.
Around the curve of the pillar, in a large white marble basin filled to the brim with blood, Mallock discovered a child made up like an angel in a fresco. His chest, a moonlike islet surrounded by purple, floated on the surface of the macabre scallop-shaped bathtub.
For the first time since Thomas’s death, Mallock crossed himself, before taking off his coat and putting it on the floor beneath the font. He took out the small digital camera he always carried on him, just in case.
“Call Number 36,” he instructed Léon, holding out his mobile phone. “Tell them to come and bring technicians.”
Without waiting for a response, he began taking photos of the scene. He turned all the way around, snapping from every angle. He also took wide-angle and close-up shots, bending to take pictures from just a few centimeters away.
Léon was approaching him to relay the response to his phone call, when he saw his friend do something that froze him momentarily in his tracks. It seemed that Mallock couldn’t bear to leave the child in this state, and in full view of everyone.
He saw Mallock bend his large body over the marble scallop shell and, dipping his arms into the blood filling the font, pick up the child’s corpse.
A noise like dripping water. Sweet sadness. A strange fruity smell. Damp distress. Bloody drops falling on the ancient stone slabs.
With infinite care, Amédée set the small, defiled body down on his overcoat. Then he stood there, unmoving, the sleeves of his jacket drenched in blood.
Preserve traces of evidence and clues!—how many times had he screamed that at his chief inspectors? And now he had moved the body! Even though it wasn’t critical, because he had taken every possible photo, it was still a thoughtless move.
He began mentally ticking off what they would find in the blood from the font: Fibers from his own coat. Hairs from Mimi, his housekeeper’s kitten. Traces of whiskey and tobacco leaves. He looked again at the shell-shaped font.
All around it, the floor was spotted with thousands of red drops.
The whole life of an innocent child, fallen like rain.
The canon, who had withdrawn into the sacristy, passed in front of Mallock to place a silver crucifix on the improvised shroud. Still in shock, the three men moved closer to each other, as if to intone a last prayer.
It was midnight.
Laughs and shouts of joy from outside penetrated the church’s walls and echoed in the nave.
“Four! Three! Two! One! HAPPY NEW YEAR!”
BOOK TWO
14.
Saturday morning, January 1st
Mallock got home at dawn, his heart heavy and his body soiled. He was hardly in the door before he pulled off his clothes and threw them into a bag. He didn’t know yet whether he should throw them away or take them to be dry-cleaned. He decided to keep them without washing them. You never know. He’d done enough stupid things at the crime scene.
Had he really seen it? His bloody wrists and fingers didn’t really leave any room for doubt. Some certainties were nightmarish: a child had been tortured and martyred and laid out like an offering to the Devil in a christening font in a church right in the middle of Paris.
One image obsessed him, ridiculous, dreadful, grotesque; that of a giant hard candy. That was what the murder scene had resembled. A piece of white sugar-candy tucked inside a scallop shell. A red fruit candy inside which someone had placed a plastic baby before filling the shell with strawberry or raspberry syrup, so the baby would stick to the inside. Red and white. The Makeup Artist definitely had a taste for the grotesque. He seemed to be obsessed with the Devil, with redemption through suffering; the same aesthetic preference for torture and hellish visions you might find in the paintings of Goya or Hieronymos Bosch, like in the right-hand panel of The Garden of Earthly Delights.
Mallock sat for a long time on the closed toilet lid in the bathroom, naked and sticky with blood, hands resting on his knees, head down, lost in thought.
It was only when he’d finally gotten into the shower that he placed the name of the strange odor he had identified at first as blood. Judging by the smells that were magnified now by the hot water diluting the liquid in the bottom of the shower, it seemed obvious now, and it also explained the image of sweets that had dominated his imagination. The red liquid in which the child’s body had been soaking was a mixture of wine and syrup—strawberry or raspberry, he still wasn’t sure which. Grenadine, maybe?
The telephone rang at ten minutes to eight.
“It’s me, Margot. Happy New Year! So, my superintendent isn’t calling me anymore?”
“Not after finding a baby’s body in a baptism font.”
There was a heavy silence. God knew, it was hard to shut Queen Margot up! But he’d struck home this time. He’d definitely been too harsh, and he knew it.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m pretty tense.”
Margot had recovered her composure somewhat. “Well, you could at least have clued me in.”
“About what?”
“I thought we had a gentlemen’s agreement.”
“What are you talking about? An agreement about what?”
“The Makeup Artist; what else?”
Now it was Mallock’s turn to be closemouthed—or the opposite, really; hearing Margot say the suspect’s name made his jaw hit the floor. “You know about it?” he asked finally. “What do you know exactly? Who tipped you off?”
“Yeah, I know about it. I know everything, or almost everything, about your serial killer. And no, no one tipped me off. It’s been public knowledge since five o’clock this morning. I’ve been a little annoyed, as you might imagine.”
Mallock acknowledged the point. With the murder of the child to top it all off, the new year was starting off with a flourish. A funereal one.
Hoarse trumpets and dented hearts.
Amédée tried to explain to Margot the series of events that had led him not to tell her anything. It wouldn’t totally exonerate him in her eyes, but it might soften the reprisals she had undoubtedly planned.
“Okay, okay, my dear superintendent,” she said at last. “I don’t forgive you, but I understand. I won’t bother you now; you’re going to get enough abuse from my colleagues without my joining in. Now, on another note, I hope you’ve lost a little bit of weight. I wouldn’t say no to the idea of dinner one of these nights, complete with dessert and sexy banter. And if you give me a tiny apology and a big exclusive between the pears and the cheese, well, then—and only then—will we call it even.”
Mallock and Margot had spent six months together, two years after Thomas’s death. She had helped him enormously, giving him back if not a taste for life, at least a reason not to do away with himself. Then she had gotten bored. The misanthropic homebody tendencies and sadness that had dominated Amédée back then hadn’t agreed with Margot Murât, who was made for dancing and belly-laughing, weeks in the Seychelles and weekends in Venice. He adored her, though she could be a bit intrusive sometimes. Like many women she talked a lot, often too much, and the happiness she brought him made him uncomfortable. What right did he have to be happy when Thomas was dead? He wouldn’t allow himself to feel joy without Thomas there. So, one day, with great tenderness and many promises, they had decided to break up. Just for a while, they had said. Since then they had held on to a strong friendship and, even though she was married now, Margot called him every now and then for a little spin in the bedroom. Stuffed suit that he was, it bothered him. It was against h
is principles. Margot, amused by his old-fashionedness, always laughed and reminded him that he had seniority over her dear husband.
Embarrassed by his own indecision, Mallock stammered: “Yeah—maybe, why not,” before hanging up.
He really was hopeless sometimes.
Margot hadn’t lied. He had barely stepped outside when he was blindsided by the banner headlines blaring from every newspaper displayed outside the corner shop. So much for the low-profile anonymity of the Makeup Artist.
Makeup Artist, Serial Murders, Mallock, and 13 were the terms that popped up the most often. For some reason, several papers contained the same mistake. Though there had been thirteen crime scenes identified, double murders had been perpetrated at two of those scenes and, counting the latest murder, which nobody was talking about yet, there were sixteen killings—and if that number had been there it would really have shattered any goodwill he still had toward the papers. Another inaccuracy was that only Superintendent Amédée Mallock’s name appeared in the stories, as if he had been on the case from day one. There were no specifics given about the murders themselves. Someone had definitely spilled the beans, but no documents had been leaked, which was some consolation at least. If they had, there would have been a lot more facts and probably some images given. There was a lot of blather, but there were hardly any illustrations.
Only the rich get richer, police version: Mallock was suddenly headline news, with the pleasure of seeing himself ten years younger and thirty pounds lighter. After looking at all the front pages he went inside the shop, which featured a large and brand-new blinking plastic Santa Claus, lit up from within.
“Hello, Superintendent; you’re the star today! It’s all about you and your crazy lunatic! You’re famous!”