The Faces of God

by Mallock;

  Mallock wasn’t really hungry. He ran a hand through his hair, pushing it back off his face. It had become a tic since he decided to keep his hair long. A bad-boy hairstyle for a big-city superintendent.

  “A fantastic restaurant, not expensive and not kosher, to celebrate your next arrest; how does that sound?”

  It wasn’t often that Léon invited him out to dinner.

  “I’m sorry, but I’m really not up for it,” Amédée declined after a hesitation. “But I will use your phone, if you don’t mind.”

  “Make yourself at home.”

  The superintendent gave his orders. Then he hung up the phone slowly, dreamily, as if the handset were made of crystal. Amélie was still fighting. The thought obsessed him.

  “Actually, I think I would like to come to dinner.”

  Léon grinned and reached for the crank for the metal shutter again. “Let’s get sloshed. Okay?”

  It was okay with Amédée. Outside, pedestrians were hurrying home, their thoughts caught between a past that no longer existed and a future that was uncertain at best. Within the superintendent’s heart there was a curious lapping noise, like a concert of clicking tongues.

  23.

  Thursday morning, January 6th

  By six A.M. Mallock had almost finished installing a twenty-four-hour surveillance system outside Father Bertrant’s house. There was no question of arresting the little priest. Not yet. The drug in the bodies didn’t allow for a precise dating of the injections. It would still take some time to compare the timelines of the latest murders with the clergyman’s schedule. Ken had been assigned the task of looking into the priest’s habits as discreetly as possible, and at seven o’clock he would begin questioning every possible witness he could get his hands on: neighbors, the housekeeper, members of the congregation, the sexton. He would have to ensure their full cooperation while at the same time convincing them to keep quiet for a few hours. This was precisely why Mallock had chosen Ken for the job. He could be subtle when he chose to, and his ability to persuade people and make them like him was among the highest in Number 36. It was up to him and Julie to reconstruct the priest’s activities. Back at the Fort, Jules and Francis would compare this data to the estimated times of the murders.

  Mallock had another reason for setting up twenty-four-hour surveillance on the priest: to keep him from committing another crime while Amédée and his team put together the case against him. For now, they didn’t have anything more than conjecture. They would have to collect a complete set of circumstantial evidence, whether it took them three hours or three days.

  To add to this network of activity, Mallock had given Bob the mission of showing the priest’s picture to the witnesses from the metro. To make the identification more conclusive, they had collected a dozen ID photos of clergymen who resembled him—which had been no small job at five o’clock in the morning. At seven o’clock the surveillance system was fully installed and Mallock found himself left with nothing to do but wait—which, truth be told, was ninety percent of an investigator’s job.

  He went down to the café. Not a flake of snow in the sky. The ground was littered with confetti and scraggy islands of dirty snow, the sad remnants of the holidays. The darkness of night lingered, refusing to leave. In the warmth, protected by the bar-tabac’s window from his phobia of crowds, Mallock dunked his croissants and contemplated the morning’s army of the damned. Parisians streamed like human sacrifices into the ravenous mouth of the metro.

  Keeping off to one side, avoiding the head count, not participating, living on the fringes, and never giving in—never giving in or conforming—these things were vitally important to him. Why? He didn’t really know. He played with the question, flicking it around along with the crumbs that had accumulated on the little round table. He pushed them delicately over the table’s edge into the palm of his other hand and then dumped them into his empty cup.

  That was the only thing you could do with a lot of questions.

  “How much do I owe you?”

  “Coming, Monsieur le Superintendent.”

  At eight-thirty, after trying unsuccessfully to reach his friend from the ambulance, Mallock called the hospital. Amélie was in intensive care at the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital. She was under police protection and her medical bulletin was being updated regularly. Amédée asked to speak to the intern on duty.

  “Her condition is stable. She’s still in a coma. Sorry, Superintendent.” Then: “There’s no point in calling. We’ve been ordered to let you know if there’s any change at all.”

  “Don’t patronize me,” Mallock snapped. “I want details about the coma, her MRI, her current condition.”

  “Yes . . . well, Superintendent, the doctor based his diagnosis principally on a clinical examination of the eyes. The reticular activating system is in a part of the brain close to the oculomotor pathways . . . ”

  Mallock listened carefully. The news wasn’t good. He murmured a grudging “thank you” and hung up. The Makeup Artist had shown him just how strong his love for Amélie was, and it shocked him. With the brief exception of Margot, since Thomas’s death he hadn’t believed himself capable anymore of loving. Really loving.

  At ten o’clock Jonas Paraclet, one of the crime scene technicians, came by to give Mallock his report on the three suspicious holes discovered in the floors of the different crime scenes. After submitting the superintendent to a full three-minute barrage of pseudo-scientific jargon, Jonas finally got to the point.

  “It’s safe to say that your guess was right, and the holes were made by a camera tripod. We analyzed all the samples found inside and around the triangles, as you instructed. We didn’t find anything outside them, but inside there were traces of makeup, and hair and skin fragments from the victims.”

  The conclusion was simple.

  After drugging them, the Makeup Artist made them up to look like religious images before photographing them. Mallock had known it already, but here was confirmation. The camera must be positioned right above the victims’ heads, shooting straight down, like on a repro stand. Mallock thought about stakes again. This was also a kind of stake, a visual one. The theft of an image. Its revelation and its inversion. A beam coming from between the three posts of the tripod to impale the victims’ faces, freezing life at the instant of sacrifice—the ecstatic grimace of the person offering up his or her suffering for the sake of the mystical body’s health. The ceremony was perfectly choreographed; there was no room for the slightest repentance. And the preamble, the prelude to the devouring, was the makeup session, to make the victim more . . . appetizing.

  Once his work was finished, the Makeup Artist moved them to the bed to mutilate them, to extract every bit of suffering still left in their poor bodies. He redesigned them according to his own madness, his aesthetic and theological ambitions. He shaped them, molded them, with knives and swords and his own teeth. The draining of their blood had to begin at the same time as the torture. Maybe a few minutes before it, but no more. He had to make sure they kept breathing. That their hearts kept beating.

  “I don’t know if . . . ” Jonas began.

  “Quiet!” ordered Mallock, deep in thought.

  He went back over all the phases of the ceremony in his mind. Immobilization; makeup for the souvenir photo; then the blood draining, the violence to the bodies, the penetration of the sword into the lower abdomen, and the final morbid staging.

  “He’s not the first sicko to take pictures of his victims,” Mallock mused aloud. “But it’s definitely the first time I’ve heard of a maniac confident enough to take the time to use a tripod. What kind of photo requires that kind of equipment?”

  Jonas Paraclet, it turned out, was an expert on the subject. “For me it would be a photo without flash. With normal indoor lighting and 400 ASA film, you can only shoot at an eighth of a second, and that’s if you have a bright lens. With
a really good-quality digital camera you can adjust the sensitivity to 3200 without too much interference. Now, with the thirtieth, the photo can still be made blurry by the slightest movement of the camera, especially if we’re assuming that the photographer in question is nervous or excited. The only thing that can solve that kind of problem is a really rigid stand. If he’s a maniac he might even use a shutter release to avoid vibrations, or a timer. He pushes the button, and in the time it takes for the chronometer to count ten seconds, any wobbling will stop.

  “We should assume that our crazy bastard definitely needs absolutely clean, sharp photographic records . . . for some subsequent purpose I don’t even want to think about.”

  “Photographs of victims are usually kept as trophies or used as masturbation aids, or both,” Jonas found it necessary to point out, even as he realized that Mallock had no need of that kind of precision.

  A normal killer, maybe, but not the Makeup Artist. He’s obsessed with creating religious images, was what Amédée thought. But aloud he kept it to a polite “That’s probable, Jonas. Thanks for your work. Just leave it here, please.”

  It was eleven-thirty and Mallock wanted desperately to call the hospital again. But just then Jonas doubled back to his desk. “Sorry, sir, but this was against the wall behind the door.”

  “Thanks.” It was the forensic entomologist’s report. He opened it.

  “The death of the youngest female victim found at Saint-Mandé probably took place on the morning of Sunday, December twenty-sixth, between four and five in the morning.”

  The rest of the report specified the factors backing up this conclusion, complete with meteorological data and morphological and chromatic details concerning the fly larvae.

  Within half an hour Ken had been informed of the new developments. Julie and Jules added the data to their table. Shortly after that, Robert came back from his ramble through the metro looking happy.

  “I’ve got formal identifications from two out of our three witnesses. The third one couldn’t say either way; there was a lot of ‘I’d need to see him in person’ and ‘I’d really like to see you there.’ We’ll have to call them for—”

  “You’re a bit behind on the news, Bob,” Mallock interrupted with a sly smile. “Ken’s already summoned them for a repeat performance this afternoon. You should really spend a little more time at the office, you know. What is this bizarre fascination you have with mass transit?”

  24.

  Thursday afternoon, January 6th

  At one o’clock, Mallock and Bob went down to lunch. Twenty minutes later Ken rolled in, grinning. “How much is the Chief Superintendent willing to pay for some really good news?”

  “A croque-monsieur and a half; not a penny more.”

  “What a bargain. I’m out of here—hell if I can’t find a more generous superintendent somewhere around here,” Ken retorted, pretending to turn around and leave.

  “Talk or you’re fired. Have a seat.”

  “Our little priest didn’t lead services on Saturday or Sunday of the Christmas weekend. Not low mass, and not high mass. He just left a note on the church door: Absent due to illness. Does that make our Mallock happy?”

  “So-so. It’s only circumstantial.”

  “I said I had really good news. Same story on New Year’s Eve. Same note on the door.”

  “Now you’re talking. I’ll call the judge and we’ll run out and nab him.”

  “What about my sandwich?”

  “You can have it when we get back.”

  An hour later, up in Fort Mallock, Ken was finally wolfing down his lunch, watching the little priest out of the corner of his eye. As was so often the case, the monster looked harmless on the surface—and yet there was something about him, something macabre, overly fragile and awkward.

  Father Bertrant had moist yellow skin and was dressed in a shiny old cassock that had glints of green and wine-red in it. Zinzolin, thought Mallock, remembering Madame Modiano’s autopsy. A pair of gold-framed eyeglasses magnified the man’s close-set gray eyes. His mouth hung open; his upper lip was so thin as to be almost nonexistent. Beneath a bald skull and a smooth forehead his face was incredibly thin; the skin of his cheeks looked like it was being sucked in on either side of his nose by the two deep vertical lines there.

  Even though the killer’s personality and the number of murders he had racked up were more than enough reason to take precautions, his weak, sickly outward appearance had dissuaded them. They didn’t think they had anything to fear from this man who looked like he had one foot in the grave. Obviously in a hurry to get on with things, Mallock had simply told the little priest to sit down on an imitation-leather stool in the middle of Ken’s office. He had even been reckless enough to take off the man’s handcuffs, with the ludicrous rationale that this is a clergyman; they don’t commit suicide.

  Amédée had decided to let their suspect stew in his own juices for a while. He phoned Jules and Julie and told them to make an exhaustive search of the man’s apartment. Then he left the priest to sweat it out. It was a full hour before he was finally ready to grill the alleged Makeup Artist.

  Ken and Bob joined him in his office; they would back Mallock up during what they all expected to be a marathon interrogation. Amédée started out by talking to them about the strategy he planned to use to get what he wanted.

  When they went back into Ken’s office, the judge called.

  “Where are we with this?”

  “Nowhere. I haven’t questioned him yet.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re going easy on him.”

  “He’s only a suspect, and he’s a man of the cloth. I haven’t . . . ”

  “So what? To hell with the goddamn clergy!” retorted the judge, in a fit of radical socialism that Mallock considered particularly inappropriate.

  “I’ll keep you posted,” he said simply, holding his temper for once. Better to cut the conversation short than to get into an argument now. In any case, he’d do exactly as he liked. There was no reason to break out the brickbat just yet. Hunting priests had become a national pastime, but Mallock wasn’t going to participate in that kind of execution—unless, of course, it turned out that the little priest was the Makeup Artist. Even though he was no believer in God himself, he knew that the balance between good and evil was infinitely more positive in clergymen than it was in the people who made a sport out of going after them. It wasn’t the former altar boy speaking in Mallock’s head now, but the seasoned cop who had seen them volunteering in the streets and the prisons. Still, Amélie was in a coma, and there had never been anything like these murders before. How would he react if the little priest confessed?

  Mallock noticed a group of visitors at the door of the interrogation room. The whole station had come to have a look at this sideshow phenomenon: a serial killing priest.

  “Get lost! Ken, close the Fort. I don’t want to see one more asshole in here.”

  The interrogation began at four o’clock and finished at five forty-two, when the little priest—without a whole lot of pressure from Mallock’s team—confessed to all his crimes.

  Father Bertrant, his mouth dry and his forehead gleaming with sweat, had only lasted five minutes before cracking. Yes, he admitted it. It had been stronger than he was. A diabolical impulse. He had resisted it for a long time, but the Devil had beaten him. As God is my witness. It had all started five years earlier.

  At that moment, Mallock’s heart began to race. Confessions always did that to him. But he was surprised by how fast the suspect had cracked this time. He’d been prepared for a long battle, not a KO at the first punch. Yes, he confessed everything—the young women, the stolen photos, all of it—but not rape. He hadn’t touched them sexually, ever, in any way.

  “I swear to you, Superintendent, I’ve never done violence to children, never caressed them. You can ask them.”

&nb
sp; Mallock thought it was strange to put those two words together, violence and caress.

  “Oh, we’ll ask them, Father,” he said. “You can be sure of that.”

  The little priest began to make excuses for himself, babbling about having too much love, infinite tenderness, and a carnal temptation of which he had been the first victim.

  “I didn’t think I was doing anything wrong, just taking a few photos from far away. It was just the solitude . . . it’s not easy, you know . . . celibacy.”

  “We aren’t talking about your masturbation habits, or voyeurism. This is a question of murder. Women and children, slaughtered!”

  Mallock knew the look of utter astonishment that came over the clergyman’s face, his mouth open and his eyes wide. He recognized it. Second shock. Ken or Francis might believe the little priest was just putting on an act, but all Bob and Mallock had to do was look each other.

  “Shit,” muttered Bob into his mustache. This was called experience, and the old redhead had plenty of that.

  Just then, Julie called from the rectory to tell Mallock what they had found: a complete photographer’s setup, including equipment for developing and enlarging pictures. There was nothing pedophilic about the priest’s photo collection. It was the work of a voyeur, pure and simple; a repressed admirer of the female form.

  “Most of the pictures were taken from far away, with a telephoto lens. Naked women in their bathrooms, mainly. There is a nude snapshot of one of the murdered women, but taken while she was alive. Looks like she’d gotten up in the middle of the night; the picture shows her naked in front of her refrigerator. Sorry, but that’s it. Jules and I will keep poking around just to be absolutely sure, but don’t get your hopes up; this isn’t our guy, unless he’s got another hideout somewhere.”

  The little priest had kept on babbling excuses while Mallock was on the phone. The accusation of murder was so ludicrous and unimaginable in his eyes that he had shrugged it aside and picked up his speech of repentance right where he’d left off.