by Mallock;
“Oh yes,” Marvin clarified. “‘Needles’ is the name we use over there for the killer you call the Makeup Artist.”
26.
Current day, but somewhere else
Crying with happiness before the beauty of the finished work. Crying and getting a hard-on, watering them with tears and cum, lacrimae Christi, all these beautiful iconic faces. They call me the Makeup Artist, but I am so much more. More than one; I am many. And not old, not young, but immortal!
In the secret room he keeps, away from prying eyes, the murderer undresses slowly, meditatively, like a priest withdrawing after the mass; stole, hood, amice, maniple, and cappa magna.
I am he who provides pain. Death, the great cleanser. Polluted with sin, contaminated by men, our Earth is bloodless, and I, I will wash it with great strokes of my tongue.
The killer moves slowly into the red-tiled bathroom. His secret chapel, covered with the number nine, written in white ink . . .
I am a harvester of faces. A fisher for pearls. I go down to the bottom of others to bring back, from God, eyes, mouth, cheeks, and hair. Holding my breath, I plunge into their caverns of flesh. And there I tear out serpents and sinew, vice and viscera . . .
Deep in thought, the Makeup Artist fills his bathtub with the blood taken from his latest victim. As always, it appeared redder to him, more luminous. In this magic liquid were millions of cells that still lived, carrying the genetic heritage of the last chosen one, fragments of the divine image. While he waits, he picks up his numbered poem again. His pen squeaks as it writes verses 832, 833, 834, and 835. He puts a large sheet of blue blotting paper on top; it sucks up the ink. He recites a few phrases from Pilgrim of the Absolute:
“I relish homicidal epithets and stunning metaphors . . . I invent catachreses that impale, understatements that burn alive, circumlocutions that emasculate, and hyperboles of molten lead.”
The murderer lets several liters of hot water run into the tub in order to bring the mixture up to the 98.6 degrees required for the ceremony. Then he slides into the liquid body of the actress. His erection is painful.
God, I can feel you! High above, far beyond our Babel of bricks where, for want of a bandage, you think of us. Soon, I will gaze upon you, I know it. And I will know it.
He throws his head back, immerses himself completely. He stays like that, holding his breath under the surface of the little red lake. Thirty seconds pass. After the last lapping sounds stop, silence settles over this secret part of the apartment. Here, away from Mother, the great “not even” has disappeared into the blood.
Above all, death cannot be gentle!
Outside, the laughter of children rises into the sky. Tires squeak; a bicycle brakes in front of the little bakery that sells fruit tarts.
BOOK THREE
27.
Friday, January 7th
In the room at the Hotel de Crillon, twilight had slowly fallen without any of the police officers thinking to turn on the lights. His big body swathed in darkness, Marvin the FBI agent told the astonishing story of the Makeup Artist.
“His code name in the United States is ‘Needles,’ or ‘Twelve,’ the precise and unchanging number of injections he’s made in the victims since the beginning.”
He lit a cigarette. The flame illuminated the face of an exhausted man at the extreme limit of resignation.
“Everything I’m going to tell you about this individual has been classified top secret for seventy years now. Every theory has been imagined, even the most improbable ones, from communist plots to extraterrestrials to cults. All without success. Our only victory in this whole case is that we’ve managed, miraculously, to keep it confidential.”
He licked his upper lip with the tip of his tongue.
“Aside from that, this is our most bitter failure. There have been more than two hundred victims now. The very first investigators on the case have died, and our man is still on the run.”
Mallock was dumbfounded. The figure was terrifying. It wasn’t just the death and suffering of so many people; it was also what it implied about the Makeup Artist’s intelligence and cunning. It couldn’t be only one person. It wasn’t possible.
He asked Marvin: “Is this the first time he’s attacked a well-known person?”
“Not really.”
A cloud of hesitation passed over Marvin’s eyes. He looked at Mallock for a few seconds. Apparently reassured by what he saw there, he made his decision. From an envelope in the inner pocket of his jacket he took a tattered photograph. It was a snapshot taken at a murder scene. The stretched-out woman was blonde. Mallock turned over the photo. On the back of it was written: “Los Angeles. Norma Jeane Mortenson/Baker. Five Helena Drive. August 4th and 5th, 1962.”
“Is it her?”
“It was.”
Marvin tucked the photo carefully, almost lovingly, back into the envelope.
“This is why there are multiple gray areas surrounding her autopsy and her death. Without doing too much damage for a change, he would have used simple barbiturate injections. An enormous quantity of drugs, which makes the suicide theory impossible. Even Sergeant Jack Clemmons, who was first on the scene, immediately realized that it was staged. She was on her stomach, her hand stretched toward the telephone. But the back already showed traces of cadaveric lividity. She’d been turned over after death. What did he do with her while she was on her back? At the time we thought maybe he’d taken photos for his subsequent use, certainly for autoerotic acts, but we couldn’t tell for sure because she’d still been on her back long enough for lividity to be marked. So? For the poisoning, he used microscopic injections, which is where the nickname ‘Needles’ came from. Twelve of them, distributed all over the body to allow the product to be introduced and the blood to be extracted.”
Mallock couldn’t help but admire the quality of this cowboy’s French.
“The medication theory was disproved by the autopsy,” Marvin continued. “Marilyn Monroe had supposedly swallowed forty tablets of Nembutal and twenty of chloral hydrate. But they found no trace of barbiturates or even refractive crystals in the stomach or intestines. At the same time, the concentration of chloral hydrate and barbiturates in the blood was three times the lethal dose. She would have been dead after receiving a third of what was in her blood at the time of autopsy.”
Angelina added, with a curious sense of humor: “You’d have to imagine her dead on her back, then waking up—perfectly fresh and made-up, by the way—and getting out of bed to find a new syringe, which was as nonexistent as her glass of water, and injecting herself in different parts of her sublime body with two times more poison than she’d already taken, before going back to sleep for good—with one last ‘boop boop be doop,’ of course.”
Mallock cracked a smile.
Marvin picked the story back up. “At the time, the FBI imposed a complete blackout on the case, but we couldn’t prevent gossip. In fact, we just barely avoided catastrophe. The media wanted to know everything. The CIA and the FBI were right in the crosshairs. Fortunately, the actress’s links to the Kennedys and the suspicions about the younger brother had their effect. Everyone was in agreement about burying the affair and confirming the suicide. The serial-killer theory was never mentioned. Even today, nobody knows who the real culprit was. One thing’s for sure as far as I’m concerned, which is that she didn’t take her own life. This was the work of Needles. For me there’s no doubt about it. As for the fact that she was found outrageously made-up, that surprised no one. It was Marilyn. Even though everyone close to her knew perfectly well that she always took off her makeup before going to bed.”
“And dressed in a drop of Chanel No. 5,” finished Mallock, before asking: “Were you assigned to the investigation?”
“I almost could have been. Marilyn died in August ’62. But there were already a ton of guys on the case: Don Wolfe, Jack Clemmons, Anthony Summe
rs. No, my first encounter with the person you call the Makeup Artist didn’t happen until two years later, in ’64, on Saturday, February eighth. The previous day at noon, the Fab Four had landed on American soil. I made lieutenant that same day. The next day, Saturday, I got married. In the late afternoon I was called to the scene of my first case as lead investigator. The man behind the whole thing was the one we ended up calling Needles, your Makeup Artist. I remember it like it was yesterday.”
Angelina Allen shifted slightly in her chair to adjust her skirt. Her legs were superb. Who still had the nerve in this day and age to say that women didn’t age well?
He was also liking Tom more and more. After all, he’d just discovered that the man was a fellow member of the huge international family of Beatles maniacs.
“So, that Saturday, February eighth, 1964? It was Beatles Day?” he encouraged him.
“You might say that. It was particularly warm for a February weekend, and for several days the media, especially Murray the K, hadn’t stopped talking about the visit from the four lads from Liverpool. They were going to be live on Ed Sullivan that night and I had no intention of missing it. It was a sacred day for me. As I told you, I’d just been named lead investigator on a case, and married the love of my life. She’s French, from Bordeaux, which is where my decent French comes from. Anyway, for me this was happiness and glory. The arrival of the Beatles, of whom I was one of the earliest fans, was the icing on the cake. I’ve never had another day like it since.”
He stopped speaking for a moment; the emotion was still there. His eyes shone.
“Even more strangely, this was the murder that almost revealed the Makeup Artist’s existence to the public at large. And the Beatles are indirectly responsible for the fact that it remained a secret. The newspapers had been brought up to speed about the crime for once, but they were far too busy covering the Fab Four’s visit to America to pay much attention to anything else. The FBI took advantage of that to fix it, confuse the issue.”
The American took obvious pleasure in using highly typical French expressions.
“But how has he been able to escape all these police for so long? Supposing that he was fifteen years old at the time of the first crime in 1929, he would be in his eighties today. Two hundred murders without being arrested—that’s inconceivable.”
“But at the time, nobody had yet made the connection between all of these deaths. My modesty will suffer from admitting this, but when I was put on that new investigation there was no question of Needles, Twelve, or any other Makeup Artist. It was a murder like any other. Unique. Like any young cop just starting out I was ambitious and stubborn; I desperately wanted this case to be more important than my superiors thought it was. The pride and vanity of youth. So I searched everywhere, dug out old files, pursued new leads.”
“Uncovered a lot of tricky issues and kicked up some dust,” Mallock finished for him.
“That’s exactly it,” smiled Marvin. “But I’m sorry; I’m going to have to stop there. This story is much too long, and we need to get over to the embassy right away. They’re expecting our report.”
“We’re already late,” confirmed Angelina, very prettily.
“Can we meet again when things calm down a bit?” suggested Marvin. “Sunday, for example?”
“Okay, Sunday. Come to my apartment. It’s in Le Marais.”
They agreed on an early-morning meeting, at eight o’clock.
“We’ll bring the croissants. But before we go, I need to warn you about something.” Marvin paused for full effect and lit a cigarette.
“Much later, after twelve years of investigation, on March twentieth, 1979, I personally arrested the man I’d been chasing for fifteen years. Needles, in person. And yes, I did put the Makeup Artist under lock and key. To be continued in the next episode, at your apartment.”
Tom Marvin closed his mouth, not too displeased with the effect of his words.
Outside, rumors and shouts continued to disturb the silence. The death of the actress was still causing tears to flow in her many admirers—and ink to flow in the presses. Mallock wondered how they would manage to preserve the secrecy of the ins and outs of this affair. France wasn’t the United States; the Beatles had split up a long time ago; John had been murdered, and George, the quiet one, devoured by the big C. How could they make a diversion now?
Mallock pulled himself together. “No, no, the ambassador will wait! You’ve said too much now—or maybe not enough!”
Smiling, Marvin went on with his story. The capture of Needles!
“You know, I don’t deserve all the credit, Mallock,” he said. He had already begun using the familiar, friendly tu with the superintendent. “These things are always a team effort. In the early seventies, thanks to interstate cooperation and the arrival of computers, we were able to start collecting information on unsolved murders and disappearances. Then we put together a whole set of composite sketches of serial killers and mass murderers. Every time someone captured one of these monsters the lead investigator would fill out a form: age, demeanor, behavior, analytical description of modus operandi—we called them ‘similarities’ back then—and the origin of their criminal conduct. From these we built up a whole typology of archetypes, which we then used to profile this particular type of killer. That was the first version of the ViCAP system, which is used widely today. Using the criteria principle, you can code what we call the criminal signature and try to update similar, earlier cases using computer cross-referencing. Sorry to subject you to all these explanations; I know you’re very familiar with these methods.”
Mallock stared at him, surprised by the personal nature of the last remark. What did Tom know about him? The American agent clarified:
“I noticed that you couldn’t put a name—or rather, a memory—to my face, but I could. We know each other. I met you when I worked with the BSU.13 The FBI called you in to help catch Necros Allan Poe. That ruffled a hell of a lot of feathers. The Bureau, turning to some little Frenchie for help—that didn’t sit well with a lot of people. Including me, at first, to be honest. But you did a superb job, with your own particular style . . . your French touch,” he smiled. “So, still don’t remember me? Subtract twenty years, forty pounds, and a lot of this hairiness.”
Mallock finally recognized him. At the time, Marvin had been best friends with Amédée’s partner on the American case, Scott Amish, nicknamed “Scottish” because he was as horny and pointy-nosed as the terrier.
Back then, Tom Marvin’s hair wasn’t yet white, and he was close-shaven like all FBI agents. Plus, he’d only ever spoken to Mallock in English. In the span of a few seconds he remembered the whole case and all its sordid details; his subsequent return to Paris, and the terrible news. He had always felt guilty about it. If he had stayed in France instead of playing American detective, he might have been able to save Thomas. Marvin seemed to hesitate, and then made his decision.
“I found out what happened to your son, your little Tom, while you were working on the investigation for us. We were all really shocked.”
Mallock lowered his head, avoiding the eyes of the other people in the room. Marvin understood that the wound was still raw, and quickly picked his explanation back up.
“I have all the results of the analysis concerning Twelve here with me. They’re at your disposal. I think you may find it interesting, even though our databases aren’t directly workable here in Europe. The criteria used in ViCAP aren’t totally transposable to the Old World. You don’t have the same kind of lunatics on this side of the Atlantic.”
“Don’t worry, Marvin, my team has set up a database that will serve as an interface. We had a little look around in your terminals—for the good of everyone,” Mallock smiled.
The FBI agent gave him a knowing smile before continuing his story.
“One glorious day, I spotted my suspect. I was convinced o
f both his guilt and his identity, and I managed—thanks to a trace of sperm on a Polaroid—to arrest him and throw him in the slammer. Four hours later he slit his throat with his own fingernails. He’d kept them long and strong and sharp for that very purpose—and others as well, no doubt. It’s not very politically correct to admit it, but the whole department was relieved. I even popped open a bottle of champagne with my main investigative team. We were so happy that the whole business was finally over and done with. No more murderer, no more murders. But the day after he was buried there was a new crime signed Twelve, and another one the day after that, five hundred miles away. Both killings had an identical MO to Needles. I was taken off the case, and it took me years to recover. In fact, I’m not sure I ever really have.”
Marvin’s eyes had drifted shut as if in slow motion, his neck bowed. He took a deep breath and continued:
“Ten years later my successor, Scott, the one you hunted the serial killer with, had the same experience, but this time he was the one who killed the suspect, a man called Ralph Barnes Bennet. Here again, we thought it was finished.”
Angelina hadn’t taken her eyes off her colleague. Amédée wondered if they were together. They would have made a handsome couple, like in the movies.
“A few months ago,” resumed Marvin, “since we hadn’t had any more murders of this type on American soil, we were going to close the case—but then we heard about the killings in France. In spite of my advanced age, they put me back on the investigation. I’m sorry to give you the news this way, Mallock, but Scott went down during a police raid three years ago. Our government and the head of the FBI officially contacted the French authorities, and then went directly to your big boss, Monsieur Dublin. Other than him and the Secretary of the Interior, only three people know about this—plus your President.”