The Faces of God

by Mallock;

  A whole battalion of police officers was waiting to pounce on her.

  How could she be the sadistic piece of garbage he’d been hunting with such hate? Would she have had the physical strength to commit the crimes alone? In his heart he didn’t believe it, but the facts weren’t budging. She was an accomplice, at the very least. An accomplice to the murders of children? Impalement? Evisceration? By what hellish miracle? And what about her tenderness? Her incredible sweetness? Mallock knew that he wouldn’t be able to handle all these contradictory feelings for very long before they destroyed him. He decided to double the dose of his antianxiety medication as soon as he got home. It wasn’t really a reasonable thing to do, but the strain was too much. He had to do everything he could to stay calm and able to make decisions. It was just then, as he entered Baudoyer Square, that he had a flash of illumination—but it was so much in Amélie’s favor that he questioned it for a few moments before deciding that he would accept its consequences.

  And those consequences were enormous.

  In the house in Saint-Mandé during his second visit, he had realized the extent of the murderer’s mania and perfectionism. The killer had managed to move the body three times with enough fastidious cleanliness to fool the police. How could it be conceivable that this same person could be foolish enough to leave a syringe at the murder scene—especially in that specific spot under the corpse’s back, which was nowhere near the place on the body where the blood-draining punctures had been made? It was impossible. Even better, this fact alone put Amélie in the clear. Because this act of concealment bore the obvious signs of being a trap, the trapped person was, de facto, eliminated as a suspect.

  In front of his apartment building Mallock saw himself yesterday, in the same place, holding Amélie’s hand. He had to stop the arrest. He was so tense that he tried to unlock his apartment door with the keys to his office—which jammed in the lock, of course, so that he couldn’t turn them or even pull them out. He lost a precious minute extracting them and trying again with the right set of keys.

  When he finally burst into his den, an icy breeze made the door slam shut behind him. He must have left a window cracked at the other end of the apartment. That was what he thought, at least, until he reached the kitchen. It wasn’t a window in there but instead the service door, wide open. In a fraction of a second his revolver was in his hand. Never for a moment did he consider that he might have left the door open, or even that there had been a break-in. The air was filled with a smell—and with it came a terrifying certainty. The Makeup Artist—the hate-filled madman who had been haunting his days and his nights—was there, mere feet away from him, hiding in a room, or a corner, or even the service staircase. An image came into his mind of a sweaty little man, flabby if not fat, with tiny hands and a clumsy walk, his face gleaming like an oil-soaked sponge. The vision was horrifying, and Mallock steeled himself to search the rest of the apartment. His difficulty opening the door should have alerted him. Waves of cold sweat poured down his body. His hands were welded to his weapon, his right index finger poised on the trigger. When he finally reached the bedroom, the shock was so overpowering that his heart froze and he couldn’t breathe.

  Amélie lay on the floor in the middle of the room. Her face was painted with the Makeup Artist’s grotesque work. Like a nightmarish Ophelia she was immersed in a pool of blood so dark that her body was reflected in it, as if she were levitating in a scarlet abyss.

  Mallock mobilized his whole team. They only had a few steps to walk. They stood, stunned, before the spectacle of their suspect, suddenly transformed into a victim. And in the very apartment belonging to their own superintendent!

  A young doctor from the coroner’s office arrived a few minutes after the ambulance. He and Mallock knew each other, but Amédée blanked completely on his name. He tried to remember it, just so he could think about something else. Forget what he had seen in his bedroom. Forget that an army of gloved officers was in there now, looking, photographing, touching.

  “A word, Superintendent. The young lady seems to have been drugged. She’s lost a lot of blood, but I think she has a chance of pulling through.”

  Mallock gaped at him, almost incapable of understanding the words. He squinted and managed to ask, “She isn’t dead?”

  “No. She’s comatose, and I had trouble finding a pulse. It’ll take a few hours to analyze the substances she’s absorbed.”

  “Get in touch with Professor Mordome. He’ll know which drugs they are; he’s already studied them.”

  Only then did Mallock realize just how much of a wreck he was. His hands were shaking. He surprised himself by taking out his lighter to light a cigar he didn’t even have. He was not in a normal state of mind. For him, time virtually froze right there. If he hadn’t suddenly decided to run home, Amélie would be dead. If he hadn’t made the mistake with the keys, there was a very good chance he would have been killed himself. He lowered his head and closed his eyes.

  If Amélie survived, destiny would be treating him fairly for once.

  The team of paramedics, accompanied by the doctor in charge, carried the stretcher out slowly. Amédée had time to catch a glimpse of the young woman, perfused, intubated, ventilated. Her face was white, smeared with red streaks, her hair soaked with blood. Extradural, subdural, or intracerebral hematoma; contusion? The doctors couldn’t say yet.

  It took all Mallock’s courage to go back into his bedroom. He forced himself to squat down and examine the floor. The first thing he saw was miniscule. Laid out in an equilateral triangle were the now-familiar three little marks in the carpet, near where Amélie’s head had lain. A camera tripod?

  To get a definitive confirmation, he asked the crime-scene techs to make a cast of the marks in fine elastomer, and then to take tissue, dust, and hair samples inside and around the triangle. He issued an order that the sites of the other murders also be subjected to the same analyses. In the meantime, a squadron of white jumpsuits got to work dusting for fingerprints.

  Mallock sat down on the edge of his bed, physically and morally exhausted. Where had he gone wrong? The piece of shit had attacked his Amélie, and he hadn’t seen anything coming. His eyes burned with pain and anger.

  As he struggled to regain a bit of composure, he heard a very faint sound like the rustling of wings. Not a pigeon or a crow; more like a butterfly, as if one were trapped somewhere in his apartment, fluttering against windows and curtains, trying to get out.

  He soon figured out what the strange noise was.

  An army of brushes loaded with granite powder was busily dusting the walls of his apartment in search of handprints.

  22.

  Wednesday evening, January 5th

  Bob, who had stayed at Amélie’s building, was now wondering what he was supposed to look for. If Amélie Maurel wasn’t guilty, that changed everything. His brain ground into action like rusty machinery. Fairly quickly for Bob, a bright idea occurred to him. He would listen to the voice messages on the phone. Proud of himself, he approached the answering machine with the half-grouchy, half-fearful air common to people who resist modern technology.

  There was only one message:

  “This is Superintendent Mallock. I’ve got a bad cold and my back is in really bad shape. I’d appreciate it if you could see me. Just come by whenever you can; I’ll be waiting.”

  The voice was muffled. It bore a very slight resemblance to the superintendent’s voice, especially if he had a cold, but it wasn’t him. Bob knew Mallock’s voice like the back of his hand.

  “What the hell is going on here?” he said aloud in the empty apartment.

  If he had known what the relationship was between his superintendent and the victim, the speaker’s use of the formal vous rather than the informal tu would have confirmed his theory. He played the message again three times. No. It wasn’t his boss.

  “Goddammit, it’s a goddamn
fucking trap!” he realized, with unusual insight.

  He searched the apartment for several more minutes but didn’t find anything in particular, other than a complete professional makeup kit, which brought back his suspicion of Amélie for a few seconds until he remembered that she was comatose, a victim of the Makeup Artist.

  “You’re an idiot sometimes, Robert!” he bellowed aloud.

  Bob knew that age had whittled away little by little his mental faculties. Soon he wouldn’t really be in a condition to work anymore, and the idea scared the crap out of him. What if it was already the case? If Mallock was only keeping him around out of friendship? To avoid hurting him? To make sure he’d get full retirement benefits? He was a very nice person underneath his curmudgeonly surface, that Amédée. Almost too nice sometimes.

  Just as he was about to leave the apartment, Bob noticed a Filofax sitting on a chair. Inside it was a remarkably well-organized client directory. All the people in it were listed according to the part of Paris they lived in, and each one included a passport photo or Polaroid next to his or her name, along with a brief medical note. Clearly Amélie didn’t rely on her memory, or even on digital technology. The Modiano family’s information was there too, with a photo of the little girl, her first name, and the dose of insulin to inject her with on each visit.

  It still seemed beyond bizarre. Another coincidence? As a seasoned cop he knew that there was a word for a certain accumulation of . . . disturbing connections: guilt. The young nurse could perfectly well have been attacked by her own accomplice.

  Bob went off to find his boss and give him a report. Another lovely blend of facts and mysteries. Well, it would be up to him to sort it all out.

  He waved at the pharmacist as he passed her shop window. She tried to ask him some questions, but he brushed her off. “Sorry, madame, but there’s nothing I can tell you right now.” He had no desire to be the bearer of bad news—and besides, he was in a hurry. His wife was making veal stew for dinner. “Try to be on time for once,” she had requested, already annoyed.

  Things weren’t awful between the two of them anymore; they’d been all right for a while now, and he figured that everything would work itself out in the end—not that he felt obligated to make the slightest effort on his own end, or change his sexist, narrow-minded ways.

  With traffic the way it was, there was no way he’d make it home before nine o’clock. He comforted himself by remembering that veal stew was just as good reheated.

  After half a bottle of Scotch and the lightning-quick visit from Bob bringing him Amélie’s things, Mallock had felt the need to get out of his apartment. It was too late to go back to the Fort, so he wandered aimlessly around the neighborhood before ending up at Léon’s.

  “I’ll be all yours in five minutes,” murmured the bookseller, who was helping a customer.

  His Mallock had the look of a man who was having a bad time of things, and there was something else in his face, too, something more. Something that worried Léon.

  Amédée scanned the shelves for a book—any book; something to lose himself in, to short-circuit his morbid thoughts for a few seconds, to stave off the image of an unconscious woman being loaded into an ambulance. In the very back of the store, in the religion section, among a horde of Old Testaments, Kabbalahs, and other gospels, he found a small, dog-eared missal bound in blue. Was it a subconscious desire to pray? He opened the book. Two dozen colored cards fell out of it. He stooped to pick them up; they were naïve-style icons adorned with lace and gilding, pious images, the kind grandmas offered at Holy Communion. Ecstatic faces, chromos of God and all the saints.

  His childhood came flooding back to him, with its flavors of communion wine, incense, and dead flowers. Part of his youth, scattered in pieces, like so many wartime truces. When little Amédée, awkward in his red cassock and white surplice, was an altar boy. That child had had a few rare but sensational moments of happiness. Why had the Chief Superintendent forgotten these bits of his boyhood, the times when he, only a very little boy, had knelt, haloed by the glorious colors of the stained-glass windows in the Saint-Clotilde church? Smells came back to him: plaster and incense, ink and saltpeter, the nausea-inducing urine of the rectory cats. The taste of stale bread soaked in communion wine. Noises, too. Bells, the creaking of wooden pews, the rubbery squeaking of the priest’s shoes as he climbed the stairs of the pulpit, weighed down with angels.

  An icy chill ran through him, jolting him out of his unexpected nostalgic haze. At the very center of the riot of luminous auras, blue draperies, crosses, and robes were the faces of the saints, and of Jesus and Mary. Their faces were all made up in the same way. Waxy white skin, orange-red cheekbones, eyes raised heavenward, azure-blue eyelids, and mauve cheeks hollowed out with suffering. They were the exact same colors and characteristics used by the Makeup Artist; absolutely identical, with the same loving, meticulous attention to detail. And they were also similar to the matte pastel colors, surrounded by shining gold, of the small stolen icon.

  Mallock was suddenly very far away from his childhood. The last few seconds had brought him a whole new and unexpected lead, an opening in the impenetrable wall of his investigation.

  Carefully replacing the religious images in the little missal, he remembered the report on cases ten and eleven, the long discussion about Léon Bloy, and the exchange with Ken: “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.”

  Mallock had brought Amélie’s Filofax with him. He opened it now. He knew what he was looking for, but he never expected to find it so easily. On page 72, under the letter “B,” he saw the face of a middle-aged parish priest, Father Bertrant. Forty-one years old, scoliosis. 1xHp3 and C2P: 3xd. Then she had written: not married. Was it a lapse in concentration, or a joke? Amédée stood there for a few moments, gazing at the oval face with its gaunt cheeks darkened by a closely-shaven black beard. The eyes were large and protruding. Very pale. The thin white lips made an almost perfect horizontal line under the long and aquiline nose. Was it a killer’s face? Yes and no. The superintendent had stopped relying on morphopsychology a long time ago.

  Léon’s customer finally left without buying anything.

  “Talk about a pain in the ass! She’s worse than you!” Léon teased him, hoping to coax a smile out of him. “Come on, it’s dinnertime. Let me close up and then it’s my treat, okay?”

  “Why not.”

  While Léon turned the handle of the crank that lowered the metal shutter in front of the shop, Mallock asked him:

  “You know me. Do you think I’m capable of screwing up? Being completely wrong about something?”

  “Anything’s possible; you’re not infallible. Your visions are beyond bizarre sometimes. But, paradoxically, I’ve never seen you be led astray without a very good reason.”

  “This time I have the distinct impression that I’ve been taken for a ride.”

  The iron curtain had just touched the ground and Léon stashed the crank behind a pile of books.

  “It’s almost like he’s controlling my premonitions,” Mallock said. “I don’t think I should put any more stock in them at all. When I try to get a sense of him physically I don’t get anything at all, except an impression of something dirty and terrifying. Bizarre features, as if they’ve been eaten away by water, and all coming from different faces.”

  “Is the great Mallock scared?”

  “I have been living with a kind of fear since I saw what he’s capable of. You’d be afraid too, if you’d seen it.”

  “I have seen it, you know.”

  “Yes—that’s right, sorry. But now it’s become very personal. He just
attacked one of my friends.”

  “Oh, my dear boy. I’m so sorry. Did he . . . ”

  “Almost. She’s in a coma. You know her; she lives on the other side of the square, above the pharmacy. Amélie Maurel.”

  “I remember her perfectly. Very pretty and a real sweetheart. A nurse, isn’t she?”

  “Exactly. He attacked her in my own apartment, and I almost captured him—or the other way around, actually. He might just as easily have killed me. This guy is formidable and I’m afraid that I’ll fail, that I won’t catch him. Unless the little priest is the killer.”

  “Little priest?”

  “Oh—nothing.”

  “A new suspect?”

  “Don’t push, Léon. I can’t tell you anything.”

  “At least tell me if you’re serious. I mean, you sought me out to talk about Léon Bloy and other joys. You owe it to your Doctor Watson to tell me the latest.”

  “Okay, you’re not wrong. Let’s just say that this priest would be interesting to look into. It matches our theory about sanctification by torture. And all the types of rituals the killer has used correspond to different components found in the Catholic religion. I’ve done some research, and there are a lot more to come. There’s contrition and compunction, repentance, penitence, and resipiscence. If we add retribution, reversibility, and redemption, that makes eight terms for a single . . . issue; eight missions that might correspond to all the atrocities that have been done to the victims’ bodies. It all matches up very nicely, in fact.”

  “Well, let’s go celebrate,” said Léon. “You can tell me more about it.”