by Mallock;
“Come on, let’s get out of here. If we’re late to the office our grouch of a superintendent will yell at us again.”
“You’re not wrong. I know him, and he’s completely pitiless. Hurry up; I’m sure he’ll be there soon.”
They all laughed again, and headed to their own cars to return to Number 36
The rest of the day was devoted to everything Mallock had shoved aside since the beginning of the case. He worked with another group, which he called his nursery, and he was pleased to find them motivated and conscientious—or maybe it was just his good mood making him see the world through rose-colored glasses.
When he got home at around eleven o’clock that night, the sky was a light chestnut color and the air had a sharp, peppery quality. In the square next to his apartment building, lit and warmed by tall outdoor lamps, people were dining outside. Mallock realized he was hungry—and that he couldn’t be bothered to cook anything.
He went home and put the Beatles’ third anthology on the CD player. Yesterday he would have liked to ask Marvin for more details about the Fab Four’s first visit to the United States, but it wasn’t the right time. He tore a large hunk off a baguette and took one of his homemade goose-liver terrines out of the fridge. No diet tonight, he told himself firmly.
The Beatles had been a big part of his life in the past, and they always would be in the future.
Amédée’s passion for the Beatles had really begun in 1965. He’d been a teenager living deep in the countryside, an hour outside of Caen. His father, Ferdinand, had rented land owned by his brother Aristide. Born in Béarn in 1930, Amédée’s father lived his life as if it were an ordeal, an obstacle course that he already knew he would fail. He wasn’t a cowardly man, but every day he woke up defeated, and every night he went to bed aching. Well—that wasn’t entirely true. Ferdinand did have his triumphant mornings. Sometimes they even lasted a whole week. At these times he was full of projects and optimism. Too much, even, because he tended to spend “willy-nilly,” as his brother warned him. A new tractor, the latest combine harvester, or new show chickens: Mille Fleur and Pekin Bantams, Dark Indian Games, Sebrights, Dwarf Marans . . .
Later the sickness that ate away at Ferdinand would be given a name: manic depression. People with his symptoms would be diagnosed as bipolar, but it came too late. After failing to make a profit from his own land, located between the two big “B”s, Bayonne and Biarritz, Ferdinand had decided to join his brother Aristide Mallock, nicknamed Aristote, who had established himself successfully in Normandy.
Amédée was ten years old when he discovered Calvados. Everything was gray and muddy in Normandy, even the sun. Just a huge, confusing stretch of plain, full of wheat that surrounded everything. Sometimes there were glorious sunsets, so beautiful they were nauseating. They lacked the weighty power of the southwestern skies, in which you could still see God’s Nabist brushstrokes.
In 1966, Mallock received two hits from a revolver. The first shot was fired by his mother, right after she tried to hang herself. Amédée had found her in time and held her legs up for more than an hour before his father came to the rescue. Marie, born with the maiden name of Ferré on February 29th, 1932, in a small port town in Brittany, promised she would never do it again. Two weeks later, on her birthday, she’d blown her brains out with her grandfather’s old ordnance revolver. In fact it hadn’t exactly been her birthday. Since that year wasn’t a leap year, she didn’t even have one.
It was in the morbid and tragic aftermath of this that the second revolver shot came.
For his thirteenth birthday on June fourteenth, Aristote had come over for lunch. He had brought two things with him: a Grundig pickup radio for his younger brother, whose birthday was June twenty-first, and a record of modern music for his nephew Amédée. The cover was a curious mixture of photos and drawings. The group was called the Beatles, and the album was . . . Revolver. Mallock would learn later, of course, that the title had nothing to do with the weapon. Paul had wanted to play on the word’s double meaning in English, a mystical meaning connected to the motion of the earth, to karma, and everything that was just starting to emerge then and would later become the New Age movement—and a second, much more concrete meaning: the spinning of the record itself.
What could you say about this music? That it tore down the dark and dusty curtains smothering his childhood? That it opened the doors to rooms full of mirrors and rain? The best way to put it might be that it woke Amédée up, bogged down as he was in the Norman moors of his adolescence. Like a wild buffalo deciding to live, he dragged himself out by pulling on the music as if it were so many life-saving ropes. The essence of the sounds, the sense of vibration—all of it, from the shocking flatness of the bass drum to the blaring sharpness of the brass—all of this said life.
Amédée needed it. Desperately.
Three months after Marie Mallock’s death, Amédée’s father was institutionalized. Aristote, that kindly misanthrope, knew his duty. He took the boy into his home. Saint-Aubin was a small village by the sea. Though devastated and lost, Amédée put on a brave face. Pride, and the desire not to be a burden on someone else, made him keep his troubles to himself. It was a kind of reserve and unwavering dignity that would stay with him always.
In the face of so much sadness and loss, “What’s the point?”s and “Why me?”s could easily have won out over his good nature. It’s hard to stay standing, to stay upright, when the ground falls out from under your feet.
Luckily there was the sea. She and Amédée had an immediate connection. They shared the same gentleness, the same quick temper. They were both mercurial but generous; quiet but full of stories.
Every evening after he came home from school on the bus from Caen, the young Mallock headed directly for the seawall, often stopping at his best friend’s house on the Rue Aumont. On the beach he would take off his socks and clunky shoes to bury his toes in the sand, and gaze out at the soothing horizontal line of the horizon. Contact was made.
Then Amédée would tell the waves about his day.
The days and nights passed in this way. Convalescing by the sea, Amédée healed gradually from the wound of his mother’s death. With his father it was more complicated, and more painful. Every visit to Ferdinand ripped off the scabs, and the boy’s heart would start bleeding all over again. He wished for many things, including, one day, his father’s death.
He was still wishing for it.
Aristide Mallock was what you might call a man of few words, but he had a good heart, and though he never told his nephew as much, he had a great deal of compassion for Amédée. It was a feeling that turned bit by bit into friendship and then affection, encouraged by the young man’s proud and responsible attitude—in which the uncle, never having had children of his own, saw something of himself. It even made him smile sometimes: watching his nephew be confronted by the indifference and nastiness of wealthy classmates or muscle-bound bullies, poor people who were scornful because they were less poor, and poor people who were violent because they were more poor. Right before Aristide’s eyes it turned Amédée into a younger version of him—a kindly misanthrope.
At the end of June 1967, to reward Amédée for finishing the school year with teacher commendations and a spot on the honor roll, Aristote brought back from London a kind of blazing sun, a colorful and dazzling thing: Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
This new Beatles album was like the crashing of a giant gong all over the world, exhorting the earth to wake up and sing, to look at the beauty and brilliance of things, to rediscover color after decades of gray. Paul, at the peak of his creativity, had converted George and then John and Ringo, and the whole world after them.
Mallock would always be grateful to them, because he had been one of those millions of people whose lives had been changed forever.
For dessert, Amédée put together an omelette au rhum. He blended
whipped egg whites with three yolks he had beaten together with powdered sugar until pale. After tasting his foie gras, he ignited the omelette. Despite his fatigue, the eternal gourmet in him had won out again.
Just before going to bed he swallowed a sugar cube onto which he had squeezed a few drops of one of his magic potions. Lying down, he calmly allowed thoughts of the Makeup Artist to overcome him, closed his eyes, and went off to his meeting.
Seven times he woke up, body drenched in sweat and head throbbing with migraine. Seven times he went back into enemy territory. The insanity of others, as terrible as it is, lives somewhere deep inside all of us, in one of those secret rooms that we never open except in the presence of evil, or an ill wind. That night, once again, Mallock accepted the risk that his madness would awaken and take him where both his parents had gone.
This oppressive legacy only made the courage he showed at times like this more admirable.
But, ill-prepared and driven more by impatience than strategy, he didn’t bring back much from this particular voyage. A few sensations of terror, smells and visions of thick walls, much too high, covered in brambles and bright scarlet vomit. A bunch of large red puddles at the bottom of a valley, held down by big carpet nails. In his dream, Mallock managed to rip out one of the nails. Imprisoned in one of these pools was the ethereal body of the little girl with blonde braids, which then rose up into the sky, while the Makeup Artist howled with rage as he watched one of the pieces in his collection get away from him.
It was a sad victory.
30.
Sunday, January 9th
A private exhibition of the Makeup Artist’s latest work.
No caviar, no champagne.
No laughter.
In front of Mallock there rose up an enormous apothecary cabinet with buttons, the kind that hardly existed anymore except in those big pharmacies out in the countryside that also served as herbalists’ and homeopathists’ shops. This particular cabinet was definitely the largest one Amédée had ever seen. A wooden ladder slid vertically along a rail so that all the drawers could be reached.
Mallock counted around eighty drawers made of oak. The smallest ones were about three inches square; the largest a foot high by two feet wide, with the depth ranging from just over two feet for the lower drawers to about eight inches for the upper ones. Even before he opened a single drawer, Amédée knew what they would contain. A veritable anatomy lesson, a terrifying jigsaw puzzle: all the bones, muscles, and organs of Mitsuko Mitzutani, aged twelve.
Tibia, clavicles, triceps, a complete set of ribs, the deltoid muscle . . . the monster seemed to be familiar with everything. A doctor, or a surgeon? Mallock thought suddenly. But he might just as easily have added poet to the list.
On the two drawers containing the feet, the killer had written Walk or dream. In the two tiny compartments containing her eyes he had written Last look. On the drawer with her severed lips inside: Stolen kiss. On the one with her head inside he had written a Shakespearean Not to be! And on the drawer holding her still-bleeding heart, he had scrawled Assembly required.
Mallock felt himself falling. It felt as if his left leg were freezing, turning to ice, and soon it wouldn’t be able to hold him anymore. He looked around for help, but he was alone. On the floor, a snake was lunging at a piece of wood shaped like a cross.
As he sank down to join it, Amédée woke up in his own bed. He’d been trapped by his dream visions again. While he was dreaming of this bizarre murder his bedroom window had come open, and snow had blown into the room, covering the left side of his bed and almost his entire leg.
Not having the heart to clean everything up and remake his bed, he settled for taking a very hot shower and going back to sleep on one of the huge living-room sofas.
Tomorrow is another day, as Tom Marvin would have said.
Outside, the courtyard was covered with a pretty white carpet. Mallock was woken up again, for good this time, by a curse:
“Shit, fuck!”
The FBI special agent had slipped—not on a dog turd, which was rare in Le Marais these days, but on the icy sidewalk. In the time it took him to stand up while Angelina laughed at him and brush the snow off his elegant coat, Mallock managed to pull on a shirt and trousers. He opened the door, trying to look like someone who’d been awake for hours and was expecting them.
“I’ve been waiting for you,” he bluffed, letting them in.
“Coffee?”
“Coffee!”
But Amédée hated lying, even about small, unimportant things. “Actually . . . it was your wounded-beast impression that got me out of bed,” he admitted to Marvin.
“Our meeting was for eight o’clock this morning, wasn’t it?” said Angelina, looking worried.
“Oh yes. I’d just forgotten to set my alarm clock. When I don’t tell it all my plans the night before and grope its hands passionately, it takes revenge. Luckily the foul mouth of a certain F . . . B . . . I . . . agent, to quote Hannibal, stepped in for its ringing.”
All three of them laughed. Like yesterday with Jules and Julie, he needed it. Needed the comfort and strength of camaraderie.
“I don’t need to tell you again that all of this has to stay absolutely confidential. If anything gets out we’ll deny everything, but it’ll really fuck things up.”
Mallock agreed but, for honesty’s sake, he clarified: “I do intend to give my principal colleagues an expurgated version of all of this. I can’t keep them in the dark.”
Marvin’s mouth pursed with doubt—drawing attention to an impressive set of lips. “Expurgated how?”
“Keeping only what I think is necessary for a better overall understanding of the case.”
“That’s vague, but I trust you.”
“You can,” Mallock assured him.
“Fine, okay. I’ll start over from the beginning.”
Tom Marvin was finally going to tell the story of the Makeup Artist.
He moistened his full lips with a sip of coffee before beginning.
“When I was named lead investigator in ’64, there was no Makeup Artist. It was just an isolated murder case. Out of ambition, pride, enthusiasm, and youthful arrogance, I . . . uncovered some tricky issues and kicked up some dust, as you said the other day. Whether by luck or sheer coincidence, I had really hit the mother lode. It took my boss a long time to believe me. I had to bring him everything on a silver platter. In his defense, though, at first I couldn’t believe what was happening either. I thought I was going crazy. The more I searched, the more I found. It was like a bottomless well.”
Marvin drained the last drops of his coffee with a little slurping sound and put down the cup.
“I’d started out with almost nothing to go on: the makeup, traces of multiple injections, and the double cadaveric lividity. At the time there were no computers, no databases. It would be twenty more years before Steve Jobs created Apple—he got the name from our beloved Beatles, by the way. Hey, you’re a big Beatles fan. Do you know where that idea came from?”
Mallock would rather hear more about the Makeup Artist, but he decided to humor Marvin. A story for a story; it was only fair.
“London. A garden on Cavendish Avenue. Paul is directing a film crew in his private park. He goes into his living room and finds out that his old friend, the art dealer Robert Fraser, has been there without telling him and left a little painting by Paul’s favorite artist, Magritte, propped against a vase. He didn’t charge Paul anything and even left the door open behind him. He knows Paul wants the painting. It’s a picture of a Granny Smith apple with the words au revoir on it. That will become the model for the famous logo.”
Apple, apple turnover, pain au chocolat, croissant . . .
“The croissants!” The exclamation came from Amédée, who was starving.
Angelina rummaged in her bag with an apology. They hadn’t forgott
en. Mallock refilled the coffees and soon they were following his example and dipping their pastries in the hot liquid, à la française.
“Mmmmf . . . s’good,” mumbled Angelina, her mouth full.
“Come on, Tom, back to the Makeup Artist. I’m dying to hear what’s next.”
“Okay. So, again, no computers back then, no DNA, no mobile phones or any of those things that make our lives easier today. The only communication tool I had was the telex network, which at least allowed me to send copies of reports all over the place without having to travel. I traveled back in time, like Hop-o’-My-Thumb. And every time I thought I’d found the case princeps, I’d discover an even older one. All the way back to the famous Sharon Delanay, killed in Atlanta in December 1929. A hundred victims in all, sixty-two of which are definite. All identical. The exact same makeup, the same MO; very simple. He photographed them paralyzed but alive, killed them, and drained their blood, not necessarily in that order. At the time I wasn’t sure. Nothing else, and there was nothing spectacular about it. The needle marks were invisible, and the makeup, because he’d put it on women, didn’t attract any particular attention. That’s why it took the arrival of an upstart new detective like me to make the connection and set off a panic.”
Tom trailed off and stared into space. But Mallock wanted more.
“But what about the capture?”
“Oh . . . nothing special. I spotted him one day, that’s all. Like I told you, I was absolutely sure of his guilt because of a trace of sperm on a Polaroid. For the record, that was the very first identification through DNA in the world. A huge point of pride on top of the capture. If I hadn’t been so happy and so cocky, I wouldn’t have slipped up. His fingernails were as long and sharp as razors.”
“You couldn’t have noticed everything,” Amédée tried to reassure him.
“The worst thing is that I did notice them. I thought he used them on his victims, and I wasn’t too far off the mark. Ten years later, the same thing happened to Scott Amish. He was too sure of himself; he got himself into an untenable position, and he ended up having to take his suspect down without questioning him. A certain Ralph Barnes Bennet.”