The Faces of God

by Mallock;

  After a long night of recuperation and data processing in the back of his mind, he woke up ready for action. It was eight-thirty in the morning. In the distance, the bells of Notre-Dame rang to summon the faithful; the day’s first mass was about to begin. Mallock made his decision immediately. He also had an office to celebrate. He thought he had enough information to try and go over to the other side, and bring back—if not answers, at least good, relevant questions.

  He would stake out the boulevard of the insane, and stalk the killer to the very end of his madness. Inside the box of his skull, Mallock would skip from sidewalk to sidewalk, melting into the shadows on each street corner. Patiently, he would lie in wait for the beast in window reflections and rearview mirrors. And he’d be damned if he didn’t come out of it having learned something more from the fiend—or even trapping him in his head. He had to live somewhere, after all, and why not Number 13 Insanity Boulevard, dead-end street of the deranged?

  No one was going to come and disturb him. From the back of the closet, in a hole he’d made in the wall, he took a brightly-colored iron box that had once contained tiger balm. What it held now was a lot more formidable.

  Now he swallowed a microscopic capsule of dimethyltryptamine, a synthetic product of ayahuasca. Sometimes he took an ibogaine infusion. Then, he carefully took his opium pipe from the glass case in the living room. It was a cloisonné piece of ivory and jade. A longtime user, he preferred to keep the ceremonial aspect of all this brief. Three minutes later, he loaded the pipe with the paste he had softened and rolled into a pellet.

  It was the cure for all his inhibitions.

  It wasn’t a habit, so much as a last resort. At his son’s death, facing a pain that seemed to have no remedy and no limit, one of his friends had introduced him to it. Opos papaver somniferum. Morphine, to fight death and despair. He only turned to it rarely, still using bits from the same lump he had purchased back then, and only when the huge waves of sadness came back—or when he wanted, as he did this morning, to free his intuitions and let them run wild in a chaotic clog-dance in his head.

  With the first inhalations he felt all of his body’s mooring lines give way.

  Very quickly, he found himself in a room, a sort of chapel made of grease and rust, crowded with steel machines. At the very back a woman was suspended by chains above a kind of altar. Below her, a lance stuck in the floor seemed to be waiting for her to fall and be impaled. In the foreground, sitting at a workbench with his back turned, a person was writing. Slowly, holding back his steps, Mallock approached.

  It was one of the Makeup Artists; he was sure of it. The fear and repulsion he felt couldn’t lie to him. He kept moving forward, his gaze fixed on those shoulder blades and that filthy spine. He wanted to know, to discover the words the murderer was writing so carefully with a Sergent-Major fountain pen. The closer he got, the more unbearable the noise of the pen’s nib on the crumpled paper became. The scraping sound reminded him of evil, of flesh ripping. In uneven handwriting that slanted to the left like the opposite of italics, the Makeup Artist was writing a poem:

  831. Truth comes from the face of God,

  832. Like power,

  833. Lines of lava dancing,

  834. The comet spinning out of control,

  835. On the purple of popes,

  836. Truth comes from the faces of God,

  837. Mysterious arrangements,

  838. Made by archangels on horseback,

  838. With pyramidal antics.

  839. And while God talks to us about the melancholy of volcanoes,

  840. The infinitely small becomes infinitely large.

  Occasionally the tip of the pen caught on the rough surface and then freed itself sharply, causing spurts of ink. Before each verse he wrote the number of the line.

  841. Truth comes from the face of God,

  842. From his pupils and his teeth,

  843. From the clouds and the wind,

  843. From his belly and his eyes,

  845. Oh, divine watchtower,

  846. From his heavy golden tongue,

  847. From his eye that is soft and from that which bites,

  848. From his mouth where resonates, hidden behind,

  849. The orphan phoneme: Father!

  848. And while God talks to us about the nostalgia of volcanoes,

  849. The infinitely small joins the infinitely large!!!

  After these three exclamation points were drawn, Mallock had a sudden flash of certainty that the killer was about to turn around. To reveal his face, and devour Mallock’s own. Just then he woke up and found himself back in his own living room. His opium pipe had fallen and broken, and his sheets were soaked. Even though he had just returned, he was angry at himself for this moment of cowardice, and decided to go back. He knew he was capable of it, and he was still under the influence of the drug. He concentrated again on the assembly hall of what looked more like a factory to him now than a religious place.

  But he wasn’t himself anymore.

  In fact, he wasn’t inside his own head, or in the Makeup Artist’s. Terrified, he realized that he had fallen into the very worst place: the suspended body of the victim, the one he had seen in the back of the chapel. His spirit was stuck there, like an insect caught in amber resin.

  Amédée was now seeing through the eyes of the woman the killer had just captured, and whose terror now mingled with his own fear. In front of her, large, at the very back of the room, a name was written in capital letters: CAZ . . . AVE. The central letter dangled, unreadable.

  Setting down his pen, the Makeup Artist approached the body, lowered it slightly, and began slobbering on it. His mouth dripped sticky, silvery drops, like a snail’s trail. The victim didn’t move, her eyes bulging. Through these same eyes, Mallock contemplated the monster below. The woman in whose body he was trapped was completely conscious, drunk with terror.

  The Makeup Artist/writer picked up a set of dentures made of platinum set with precious gems, like a carnival prize. The teeth were sharp and overly large, almost burlesque. Like a joke, a trick. Rolled back and puffed out by the dentures, the woman’s lips looked like two slugs copulating. Calmly, the mad poet pressed against the victim so he could begin cutting out various pieces: toes, lips, and other protuberances.

  Blood spurted and he recoiled, disgusted by this body that had no control. Hidden behind a mask that stank like burnt rubber, a second killer appeared and advanced in his turn toward the victim, and toward the terrified Amédée trapped inside.

  It was the face that interested this second killer. He began his own ritual by brushing a puff filled with rice powder over her skin, and then he dabbed rouge on her cheeks and blue eyeshadow on her eyes and the sides of her nose.

  The photo session that followed, which was apparently the specialty of the masked Makeup Artist, was long and laborious. The Makeup Artist adjusted his camera to the millimeter; then he waited for the blood to flow a little, not too much; for the light to change, for the expression on the victim’s face to be just right. The other killer came back to bite here and there, at the photographer’s request.

  The photographer, whose movements were more feminine, used a tripod that ended in three sharp points that stuck into the ground.

  Amédée tried not to sink into madness. His mind was still supporting the damaged consciousness of the young woman, but he could feel the body they shared beginning, slowly, to slip away. Like a wounded animal secreting a few miraculous endorphins before being devoured, a merciful contentment began to creep over him. This was the final pause, before the worst. Through the screaming eyes of the woman he saw a brick wall, a giant inscription, a grotesque drawing on a window. Unless it was stained glass?

  But the calm was brief. His photographs taken, the second Makeup Artist made way for another creature: the third monster in this cursed trinity, a
flabby dwarf with reptile hands. He began licking the martyred body, sucking its breasts, its clotted blood. Everything that flowed, everything that had been forcibly extracted, down to the slightest humor. Very quickly, his movements accelerated along with his excitement. He turned around, slapped, scratched, bit, sometimes so fast that the eye couldn’t even see him. His jaws, his tongue, his jaws, his tongue, his jaws, his tongue . . . Finally tired and replete, he decided to finish the job. Between the woman’s legs, his eyes closed, he thrust a golden lance upward. When the point of it came out his victim’s mouth, he screamed at the top of his lungs:

  “Toreador!”

  Waking up covered in cold sweat, Mallock repeated the word to himself with horror: Toreador! He had never experienced that degree of reality before, never so much perversity, during one of his sessions. Were there three Makeup Artists? What was the significance of this kind of trinity in all the horror? The father, the son, and the Holy Spirit? A family? The idea was as interesting as it was terrifying—a father-and-son serial killing team? With the mother as a regular accomplice? Was it possible?

  In any case, he had at least come back from his expedition with the answer to one of his questions, the solution to the mystery of the little holes in the floor. Why hadn’t he thought of it before? It made so much sense! The tripod of a camera.

  He stood up and went into the kitchen.

  Think about something else. Coffee. Wash these terrifying visions away. But his heart wouldn’t stop pounding. His vision had been so brutal that he couldn’t free himself from it. He had the impression, was almost positive, that somewhere in Paris a young woman was hanging, disemboweled or impaled, in a disused chapel. Go rescue her. Maybe she wasn’t dead yet.

  He bit his lip. It would be difficult to send his men out looking for a nightmare. Especially without giving them any explanation, any trail to follow.

  Mallock knew he hadn’t made any of it up or guessed any of it. With him, everything had an equal basis in reality. So? Where had this vision come from? What had he seen? Deduced? From what?

  Two coffees. Ice-cold shower. Back to the living room in his white bathrobe. Cigar. Mozart.

  He remembered what Mordome had said: “In one of the cases there was an obvious attempt at impalement. He tried that even before starting to drain the blood. A real butchery.”

  That explained the vision, but not everything. What else had he heard or seen, maybe in a file, or in the street, that made him so nearly certain that the Makeup Artist had decided to have another try at impalement?

  Reflexively, during his dream, he had had the idea of counting and memorizing the number of windows in the ceiling and façade. On one of them, between two broken panes of glass, the figure of an impaled body had been clumsily painted. He had also read a half-erased inscription somewhere on the wall of the big chapel. Two pairs of letters. AZ and AV.

  17.

  Monday morning, January 3rd

  When he woke up for the second time, Mallock felt the need to call his little team—not so much to make sure they were there as to get an update on Jules and Julie.

  Ken picked up the phone. “We’re all here except Bob,” he assured him. “The only one missing is our beloved boss.”

  “How are our lovebirds doing?”

  “Tanned as movie stars.”

  Mallock smiled. He was excited to see them, and to be able to count on Julie’s exceptional brain for assistance.

  “Have them find me the name of a large chapel that’s definitely been closed for a few years, or maybe abandoned.”

  “Is that it? Do you have a name?”

  Hesitation.

  “Well, I have the letters CAZ in a group, and then a space, and then AVE. But no idea about an address.”

  There was a dismayed silence on the other end of the line. The nice thing about being in charge was not always having to explain his moods and other whims. And Mallock certainly had his share of them.

  “Just a red-brick chapel. I think it’s red brick, at least.”

  “Bravo for today’s mystery. You’ve outdone yourself, boss. Want to clue us in?”

  “No.” Mallock hung up, smiling. Truthfully, he didn’t even know himself where the information was coming from. His dreams, certainly, but before that? What had he seen? Where? Why those letters? He knew he hadn’t invented them.

  It was time to go to the office. Rubber boots. The amount of snow falling outside left him no choice. Regretfully he pulled on a pair of snow boots. He’d be too hot inside, and they were hideous. Oh well.

  His front door opened on the silence of his building’s inner courtyard. There were at least two inches of snow on the ground. In one corner the branches of the little birch tree were covered.

  Mallock struck out into the snow. The sounds of the city were muffled, cars moving silently, pedestrians struggling at the same pace against the slow, densely falling flakes. Under the bridge he saw a barge float by, also covered with snow. The riverbanks were white. In the distance, Notre-Dame was only an impression seen through the millions of flakes.

  There was no way the Makeup Artist could strike in weather like this. God had turned his giant snow globe over in the night and set it down on his bedside table. It was obvious. Wherever the snow fell, you were protected. Mallock had some very bizarre certainties sometimes.

  He went into the first open shoe store, chose a pair of boots specially designed for snow and ice, and left his old ones with the clerk.

  “Are you sure you don’t want them? I can put them in a box for you. It’s a shame; they’re still in pretty good shape.”

  Some things, especially the ugliest, least appreciated ones, never break, wear out, or get lost. You always lose the gold cigarette lighter your lover gave you, but never the horrible cheap commercial one you bought out of desperation, which will stay with you until you’re dead and buried.

  Mallock had no mercy for his snow boots. “Burn them and scatter the ashes in the sea,” he ordered, before sweeping majestically out of the store in a huge swirl of snow.

  Mallock was passing the Deux Palais bar when he heard someone calling his name. He thought at first that it was the Breton owner haranguing him, but it was RG himself, sitting with a large coffee and a basket full of pastries in front of him.

  “There you are! We thought you were lost!”

  “Yeah . . . I know. I got an earful about it. But no,” he grumbled, “it was my secretary. She’s lost her marbles or got mud in her ears or something. I told her I was going to be gone. I took advantage of the fact that you’ve taken over the case to have a long New Year’s weekend, fall off the face of the earth for a few days. Oh—Happy New Year, by the way.”

  “Happy New Year, Raymond. But how do you manage to make it so no one can find you? And why? I’d never be able to do it.”

  “I go to the seaside, alone. Doesn’t matter which beach; doesn’t matter which hotel. I spend my days outside, gazing at the horizon and reading. It works, believe me. As for why . . . well, I don’t know, really. Maybe I’m hoping that my absence will make people notice my presence for a change.”

  There it was. Amédée promised himself he would be nicer to RG next time. Which didn’t keep him from sticking to his accustomed role as a heartless bastard.

  “Should I assume that you haven’t made any more progress with the poison?”

  “Actually I have. I didn’t want to piss off Mallock. I’d finished almost everything before I left. I spent from last Wednesday to Friday working on your problem. The final results came in this morning. It’s nothing special. I can sum it up for you in a few words.”

  Mallock pulled up a chair next to his colleague’s. Sheltered beneath the bar’s red awning, they were surrounded by a curtain of snowflakes falling just centimeters away from them. RG launched into an explanation of the ingredients in the famous “cocktail.”

&n
bsp; “Weirdly, chemical submission is better known by the public at large than it is correctly used by hospitals and doctors. It’s a relatively recent phenomenon, but film and novels jumped on it, which explains its popularity. So as not to have to make any arrangements, our Makeup Artist—sorry, Artists—just made up their own blend, which I think was the first mistake on their part. In any case, it’s the only thing that’s given us any objective information about them: the assholes have real skill in chemistry. It’s not just any cocktail, according to the experts who analyzed the components; it’s an ‘intelligent assortment,’ well dosed and fairly . . . short-lived. A short half-life, it’s called. The appearance of these psychoactive substances with high effectiveness and rapid elimination is a deviant side effect of advances in therapeutic medicine. They were developed for the good of the patients, but . . . ”

  “H’lo, Superintendent.” Talkative as ever, the Breton bar owner had come to wait on his longtime customer in person.

  “H’lo,” responded Mallock in the same way.

  “Well?”

  “Macchiato,” replied Mallock with a smile and a wink, going along again—as always—with the knowing brevity of their exchanges.

  RG hadn’t finished his speech. “Actually, I broke my vow of solitude and called Mordome Saturday morning. He would have been able to reassure you that I wasn’t dead, as a matter of fact. I asked him to hurry up and take samples from the child you just found in the church, hoping he’d be able to identify traces of products in one of the little boy’s three biological environments—blood, urine, and hair. It’s incredibly complicated, as you know. Chemical submission substances affect different systems: GABAergic,8 histaminic, dopaminergic, serotonergic . . . ”