by Mallock;
I’m so sorry, little Nathalie. Forgive me!
Disgusted and ashamed, Mallock prayed for the young woman as he dragged a box to the center of the factory and sat down on it, lit a cigar, drained the flask of whiskey he had brought, and tried to put himself in the killer’s place.
What had the bastard done next?
If he really wanted to have a chance at understanding, Amédée would have to lose all sense of morals or moderation and become nothing but impulse. Walk up to his darkest thoughts and then keep going forward, again and always, to where the earth was flesh, the ocean blood, and the skies made of shit. Where chaos and ignorance played together, laughing in all directions. He would have to go to this mutual there, this collective junk pile, this hard-packed noxious magma, if he ever wanted to find the killer.
He got back to Paris at around seven o’clock. Amélie was waiting for him, sitting in the same place as yesterday evening, on the terrace of the same café. Amélie again. Amélie for always? Mallock asked himself.
Love. Tongues flicking everywhere, mindlessly, all over. Butterflies. Lips and kisses, like an army of little fish. Vibrations and shivers. The skin speaking, the mind going silent. The body taking over, moving as it liked. No mooring lines, no compass but the cock, stretching and thrusting straight ahead . . . and the waves, and the wind!
At two o’clock in the morning, like on the previous night, with Mallock not daring to ask her why, Amélie left quickly. The day had been emotionally draining, and he fell immediately back into a deep sleep. He began to dream. His son came back home. He was taller, and his hair had grown. With tears in his eyes, he ran into his father’s arms.
“I’m sorry, Papa, I didn’t mean to make you sad!”
Then he began telling Mallock everything he had done while he was away.
“I thought you were dead,” babbled Amédée in his sleep.
“But I am dead, Papa.”
To prove his point, Tom began to tear off big pieces of his own skin, ripping out chunks of the rotting flesh that covered his face with astonishing ease. His skull and the bones of his jaw were luminous white. Clean and pure. He only had a small spot of orange pus left on his right cheekbone. Mallocked wiped it away delicately using a handkerchief corner moistened with saliva.
“Thank you, Papa,” said Thomas.
Then he had begun sticking pieces of a mask made of flesh back onto his skull, a mask modeled to look like his face from before. When he was finished, he asked: “Where is the bathroom? I need to wash up, freshen up a little.”
He was holding Amélie’s big makeup kit. A pool of fat beige worms squirmed at his feet.
Mallock woke at four o’clock in the morning, covered in cold sweat. How did Amélie’s makeup kit figure into this whole thing? Did it symbolize the petite nurse, his new love? He decided to stick with that explanation. Still upset, he went into the bathroom, using the same square of toilet paper, folded in half, to wipe away his tears and blot a drop of urine that splashed on the seat.
He went back to sleep with the feeling that he would wake up smack in the middle of a battlefield, with bullets flying in every direction, and one of them would lodge right in his head with a noise like a seagull’s shriek.
Which was exactly what happened.
20.
Wednesday morning, January 5th
It was almost nine o’clock by the time Mallock got to Number 36. For once it seemed like the whole world had woken up earlier than him: the journalists hanging out in the lobby, the furious judge, the impatient big boss, all the way up to the Secretary of the Interior, who had gone so far as to call him personally. He and Mallock had known each for a long time and had a mutual respect for one another, kind of like two brother bears do until the day they come to blows.
Mallock’s whole team was on deck. The mission of the day was to finish summarizing the different listings. The place was a madhouse, with printers shrieking in agony and Julie trying to orchestrate the whole thing. He decided to leave them alone and shut himself in his office.
At exactly noon, he had to hold a press conference organized by the higher-ups. In the pressroom he found himself dropped in front of a bristling forest of microphones. The trap had been set and there was no way he could extricate himself. Mallock would avenge himself by not making the reporters’ job an easy one. He stood with his hands in his pockets, taking a fiendish pleasure in alternating “nothing really new” with “at this stage of the investigation I can’t comment on that,” “as soon as . . . ” and “I realize that and I understand, but . . . ”
It was tit for tat, with the press, for its part, alternating between “What is the government doing?” “Have you been pressured?” and the famous “The public has the right to know.” As if the press gave a fuck about the public. Mallock only thought it silently, but so strongly that the whole room knew how he felt.
“How many victims are there exactly?” was the question repeated most often. The more deaths there were, the wider the audience would be. They were shooting for a record. Not just to sell copies or boost viewing numbers, but also so they could all bathe together in the cathartic water of this modern-day Ganges, the media. A crime like this would make all others pardonable, the major and minor sins committed by everyone else. They were professional hypocrites, making themselves unworthy so they could try to be worthy. Greedy for a clean conscience but empty of any true kindness.
These were the things Mallock thought about at times like this.
Fortunately, his contempt had the effect of keeping him silent as he endured this scene of human baseness. The quietest people are often the ones holding back from screaming out their rage, or hurling bombs. Mallock—even though he was a superintendent, even though he held the door for women and helped elderly people cross the street—was one of those people.
At the very end, like you might toss a rotting carcass to the sharks, Amédée gave the reporters one or two bits of information, along with a few salacious details. They scribbled notes, recorded, filmed. Their shining eyes, wet lips, and satisfied greediness were a lovely sight.
He got back to his office at around one o’clock, armed with a traditional ham-and-butter baguette and the beer that goes with it. Next to his telephone he found the chart with the contents of the victims’ address books listed in rows. His team had done their job and left their offering on the altar of their holy superintendent, and now, famished, they’d gone off in search of a restorative lunch.
Mallock decided not to wait for them before familiarizing himself with the lists. He settled himself comfortably in his chair. Very quickly, his expression changed. The document’s conclusions were so shocking that he had to reread them several times. Aside from the phone numbers of a few well-known administrative offices, a single name appeared in several address books.
Just one name!
And what a name!
Utterly stunned, he threw the report across his office, as if by doing so he could just forget about it and move on to something else. But reality is stubborn, and the facts were staggering. The implications of what he had just discovered struck him right in the heart.
He was still struggling with his thoughts half an hour later, when Ken, Francis, and Julie returned.
“Have you read it? It fits pretty well, eh boss?”
It was Ken who had spoken. Francis was next to him, nodding in excited agreement. Strangely, Julie was silent.
“When we saw the results we did a background check on her. She lives alone. According to her building manager she had a very conflicted relationship with her mother before she died.”
“The mother died around six years ago,” put in Francis. “The same time that the murders started.”
“And as a health-care professional,” Ken interrupted, “she’d know all about syringes. And—get this, we kept the best part for last—other than the injections, what�
�s her favorite hobby?”
Amédée didn’t really want to guess. Ken, sensing this, went on without waiting for an answer.
“Mademoiselle Amélie Maurel is a stage-makeup artist!”
“Specializing in tranvestites,” finished Francis with a flourish, smiling.
Hearing these last three syllables pronounced with so much glee, covered in depravity and blood, was unbearable. That magical, adored name—her name—the very one he had held in his arms all night. But wait . . . no. Not quite all night. She’d left at two in the morning both times. Where had she gone after that? Home, he told himself weakly, not really believing it.
He remembered his conversation with Mordome: “Besides the twelve ceremonial punctures, I’ve found other needle marks, all grouped on the little girl’s thighs. She must have had some kind of daily treatment, probably for diabetes. The urine analysis will confirm that.” . . . “Did she give herself the shots?” . . . ”Not at her age; it would have been the parents, or maybe a nurse.”
As if she could hear Mordome speaking in her boss’s head, Julie spoke up. “We’ve confirmed that the little Modiano girl was receiving daily treatment. Insulin shots for diabetes.”
Ken and Francis both nodded in agreement. An unexpected silence followed. Except for Julie, who suspected something, they were anticipating well-deserved congratulations from their boss. Mallock, though, was stunned.
The coincidence was unbearably cruel. When he recovered his wits, it was to chew out his poor lieutenants, who were incredulous and appalled at so much ungratefulness.
“I don’t want anything but facts and proof! Nothing else! This is nothing but a bunch of goddamn idiotic conjecture!”
Mallock had stood up behind his desk so he could scream at them more effectively. He gesticulated furiously for a good two minutes, like a caricature of an angry boss. Then, abruptly, conscious of his men’s stupefied expressions and the ridiculousness of his own behavior, he broke off his tirade, like a shower suddenly running out of water.
At the same moment, his phone rang. Mallock made a grab for it, incredibly happy for the distraction. He listened silently, leaning on his free hand, and suddenly remembered the telescopic lampposts at the Louvre. On the other end of the line, a guy from the INPS was confirming that his intuition had been spot-on. There was a partial fingerprint on the syringe found beneath Madame Modiano’s body, on the tip of the plunger. They would know more soon.
Mallock thanked the technician and hung up.
Then, feeling slightly guilty about his suspicions, he opened his wallet and carefully pulled out a business card—the one Amélie had given him. “So you’ll have my private number too, in case you want to reach me more easily,” she had said, unable to stop herself from blushing.
“Ken, dust for prints on this card and compare them with the one on the syringe.”
A look of confusion passed over Francis’s face, but for once he knew to keep quiet. Ken took the card gingerly, using his tie to avoid adding his own fingerprints to it, or smearing the ones already there.
“Sure, boss.” He had the wisdom not to say anything else, though the voice inside him wondered—loudly—how in the world a card with the murderer’s fingerprints on it had ended up in their favorite chief superintendent’s wallet. He suddenly remembered one of Mallock’s nicknames, “the Wizard,” and feeling a troubling mixture of respect and fear, he turned to obey the order he had just been given.
Mallock called him back. “Wait, Ken, have you seen Bob? Nothing new with the metro?”
“He told me two of the victims have been formally identified. Thanks to the Louvre’s surveillance center we’ve even got visual confirmation. Both of them were seen with a priest—Bob will have mentioned that to you; the old-fashioned kind, with the cassock and the whole shebang. That’s all he’s got, for now.”
“Tell him to add the latest victims to his collection and keep going.”
“I’ll do the fingerprints first and then I’ll tell Bob.”
Mallock threw his sandwich into the trash can and went off in search of something more substantial, ending up back at the Deux Palais. He needed noise and warmth. Not the kind at the Fort, but a restaurant, with its comforting smells of grilled meat and coffee. The boss was there and pounced on him, almost talkative:
“Mallock twice in one day! To what do I owe the honor?”
“Just hungry,” lied Mallock, kissing his waitress, who was an old friend, on the cheek.
He sat and stared out the window at the falling snow for a good twenty minutes, barely touching his cassoulet.
“Not good?” asked the bar owner.
“Not hungry,” admitted Mallock.
The knockout blow came when he returned to the office. The fingerprint found on the syringe’s plunger matched the ones on Amélie’s business card. The dactyloscopic characteristics left no room for doubt. The technician talked to him about dermal papillae in arches, inner loops, and whorls. He was sure of himself. There were more than nine points of similarity in the different ridges, including a pool with a very specific pattern.
There were two or three other possible ways of interpreting this information, but Amédée didn’t even try. Everything pointed to Amélie as the perpetrator of these crimes. Or at least as an accomplice to one of them. Not only was he going to have to arrest her, but he would have to make her talk. For a second he thought about having himself taken off the investigation. There was clearly a conflict of interest here. And then some. A lot more. Infinitely more.
He stood frozen for a good fifteen minutes. Feelings and impressions rushed at him chaotically. He had loved the hands, the fingers that had sewn an eight-year-old girl’s mouth shut after disemboweling her. He had adored the face, the features that so many people had stared at with horror. The smile, the teeth that had bitten and amputated. Amédée still wanted to believe in her innocence, but Superintendent Mallock could not.
He barely made it to the bathroom before vomiting up a combination of bile and beer.
21.
Wednesday afternoon, January 5th
At three o’clock, even though he didn’t need a warrant to proceed with the arrest, Mallock put in a call to Judge Humbert. Hoping to avoid giving a detailed summary of the investigation, he began the conversation by announcing:
“We’ve got the Makeup Artist. It’s a female.”
But it was obvious that the judge wanted to know everything. Did he have a journalist to tip off? Amédée managed to sidestep the request by promising to call him back as soon as the arrest had been made.
By four-fifteen everything was prepared to go and take the suspect into custody. Everyone was ready . . . except Mallock. Even though he had no personal doubts about the organization of the arrest, his intuition was screaming at him to delay it. Though he hadn’t sensed anything, he who had rubbed elbows so often and so intimately with the investigation, there had to be another explanation for the wall of proof that had built up so suddenly. Maybe she was connected in one way or another, even innocently, to these crimes. He couldn’t deny that anymore; doing so was pointless and no one would understand it, not even Mallock himself. The time for action was now, and—all things considered—it was better if it were Superintendent Mallock, her Amédée, who did the dirty deed.
Accompanied by a special armored police van crammed full of officers, the beginnings of a migraine, and four lieutenants, Amédée went to Amélie’s house. He parked his car on the Rue de Rivoli and heaved a huge sigh of sadness and stress.
The fucking stations of the cross.
Which one had he gotten to, exactly? The crown of thorns?
The killer nurse lived above the pharmacy in the little square.
He entered, and barked without any other greeting: “Amélie Maurel, which floor?”
“Fourth,” babbled the pharmacist, surprised at this lack of courtesy
from her usually polite customer.
“Which way do I go?”
“Uh—go back outside, and it’s the green door on the right. On the left, I mean, when you’re facing the display window.”
This at least earned the woman a “thank you,” which was a minimal bit of civility from Mallock, who was usually more than kind.
They climbed the stairs and he rang the doorbell, slightly out of breath. He had never been to her apartment, and never imagined he’d see it for the first time under this kind of circumstance. After several fruitless tries, it seemed clear that she wasn’t at home. But he had to be sure. The locksmith they had brought with them opened the door, which was secured with a simple twenty-year-old lock; no dead bolt, no armor shielding. Kind of odd for a paranoid monster. There was no one inside.
“We’ll search the place later,” said Mallock. “Stay here and wait for her. Be discreet. Arrest her quietly if she comes back before I do. Keep in mind that she’s only a suspect; I’m counting on you. I’m going to get my car and run home while we wait. It’s right nearby and I’m taking up unnecessary parking space in the street.”
Mallock fled. He gave himself five minutes to park his beloved car in the private garage, stop by his apartment for some migraine tablets, and return to the little square on foot.
At the bottom of his parking garage, the wonderful smell of mushrooms made him yearn for the seaside or a vacation in the country. He backed his Jaguar into the parking space, cursing his idiotic neighbor, who was edging systematically out of the space assigned to him. He slammed the door of his car and ran toward the exit. The steep slope meant for cars exiting the garage extracted a few grimaces of discomfort from him. The pain brought Amélie back to his mind.