by Mallock;
32.
Tuesday, January 11th
On Tuesday morning Robert was at his desk. He tried to thank Mallock, who waved him off.
“Don’t ever do anything like that again.”
“I’m sorry. Thanks for bringing my gun back. It made me feel . . . ”
Mallock cut him off. “I’m warning you, if you die I will fucking kill you,” which got a smile out of Bob. “Let’s not talk about it anymore,” he added. “Go find Francis and he’ll brief you. It has to do with bags and delivery people—right up your alley. I’m going to see Mordome.”
“Consider it done, boss.”
“I just thought of something else, too. It’s the kind of large brown-paper bag, very heavy, that people reuse as garbage bags.”
“So?”
“I’m not sure. Ask Ken to explain. It was his idea anyway.”
When Amédée arrived at the IML, Mordome was finishing his autopsy of the actress’s skull, watched by an American medical examiner who was there in an observational capacity. The largest country in the world apparently wasn’t about to trust a little developing nation like France. Mordome, without overtly taking offense, ignored both of them regally and spoke loudly for the benefit of the recording system:
“I’m incising the sellar diaphragm covering the pituitary gland in order to remove the fossa hypophyseos. After sectioning the diaphragm of the sella turcica, I will sever and then bend back the posterior clinoid processes . . . The hypophyseos has now been withdrawn from the pituitary cavity . . . I am lifting up the sellar diaphragm and dissecting all around it . . . Now that I’ve done that, and if no one has any objections, I’m going to take a pause to greet Superintendent Mallock, who has just entered the room, as he deserves.”
The metallic clink of a microphone being switched off.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Mordome, talking only to Mallock. “That maniac literally emptied out this poor woman’s body cavity like you’d do with a chicken. He widened the pubic area by cutting the pelvic floor and ripping out the tissue; I’ve noted the presence of one ragged skin edge and one smooth edge. Then he just sank his arms into the cavity and tore out everything he could find. A real massacre. I don’t even think he stopped there. We found beard stubble in the lower abdomen, also head hair, neither of which belongs to the victim. Analysis should show that it’s from a white man.”
“He put his head inside her body?”
“I don’t see any other explanation.”
“I still can’t believe anyone could do something like this. And so many murders, for so many years.”
“What do you mean ‘so many years’? Don’t exaggerate, now; the first murder was only in—”
“Forget I said anything. I’ll fill you in as soon as I can. Okay?”
Mallock glanced sideways at the American pathologist. Luckily the man was half-asleep thanks to jet lag.
Amédée left Mordome perplexed. It was strange, the impressions these murders made on normal people. First there was disgust, then anger and fear, followed rapidly by incomprehension. But the most surprising thing was the final feeling, which was in the process of completely overwhelming people like Mallock and Mordome. Not resignation, but the sense of an almost metaphysical helplessness, like you might feel in the face of destiny, when your child is ripped away from you in the midair explosion of an airplane.
In the main lobby, just before leaving the red-brick building, Mallock was assailed by a vision. It was fairly common for him to receive messages unprovoked, but it had already happened three times on this case. He considered it a sort of rebound effect of the drugs, especially the one he used to expand his field of vision, lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD, the famous drug produced from rye ergot by Sandoz Laboratories. He sometimes combined it with a dose of opium.
His body had started trembling, and he had to lean against the wall. The setting of this new vision seemed familiar to him. It was the Hotel de Crillon, in the room where the actress had been slaughtered. Like in his last dream, he found himself behind the killer, trying to reach him.
The bastard was crouched a few feet away from him, head buried up to the neck in the actress’s abdomen. It wasn’t Kathleen Parks on the bed, but Marilyn. Amédée stood totally helpless in the lobby of the IML, mouth open and eyes closed. In the other place, the Makeup Artist’s body had begun making jerking motions. He was biting, ripping, tearing body tissues apart.
Becoming aware of the superintendent’s presence, the Makeup Artist pulled his head abruptly out of the corpse’s crotch. Before Mallock’s eyes was the image of a carrion-eater withdrawing his damp head from the belly of an antelope. A warm savanna wind wafted toward Amédée, bringing with it the sweet odor of putrefaction. Marilyn’s hair was red. Dripping with blood and secretions, the Makeup Artist’s face turned slowly in Mallock’s direction. Running his tongue over his upper lip, he said:
“Yum yum, Superintendent! Would you like a taste?”
Mallock staggered. At almost the same instant, as if from far away, he heard:
“Superintendent? Sir?”
One of the Institute guards had come over to help him. He looked at Mallock, worried. “It happens to us all, even at our age,” he added.
He clearly thought that the superintendent was still distressed by an autopsy, or maybe a difficult identification. Mallock had no problem with that. It was a useful explanation. He straightened and thanked the officer for his concern.
“I’m feeling much better now, thanks.”
He took a few steps outside the building before realizing how bad he felt. Where could he find some comfort? Regain his strength before going back on the attack?
“If only Amélie . . . ” he murmured under his breath.
He thought again of Margot Murât. Did he have the right? He was desperate. To lay his heavy head between her breasts and let her stroke his hair. Allow himself a moment of inelegant vulnerability. She would understand. Why then, why hesitate? Why not grant himself this little weakness?
Very simply because, for Amédée, no matter how he twisted and turned the problem in his mind, the price of that consolation would always be too high.
Pride, or moral delicacy?
Sometimes the two go hand in hand.
33.
At the same time, somewhere else
Vertigo. It was in that word that he evolved most often.
After each wave of blood, each scarlet surge, the Makeup Artist cleaned all the instruments in his collection with mixed feelings. Pride and disgust. Peace and torment.
The sword gave him more unpleasant sensations than anything else. Not regret or remorse, no, but something that might be compared to a child’s guilt—if his conscience had survived his childhood. After the intense rage had worn off he became a spectator of his own crimes. Without blaming himself or experiencing contrition, he felt a kind of nausea before these orange and garnet traces on the steel of the scalpels. Only the fresh blood, still alive, harvested from his latest victim continued to give him pleasure.
For the rest, he used his mouth to polish his instruments of torture, so they would regain the shining cleanliness necessary for the next sacrifice. Because there would be a new chosen one. Of that, at least, he never had any doubt. Didn’t he have a mission to fulfill? Shouldn’t he, despite everything it cost him, continue to the very end of the quest? He was, after all, its final custodian.
He swished the plunger from the syringes he used for “withdrawals” back and forth under the running water, which went from red to dirty pink before regaining its transparency bit by bit. He loved this resurrection. This return to the cleanliness of first creation, of newness.
For the rest, he did the best he could.
He had always told himself stories. It was a habit, a drug. A condition sine qua non of his survival. How else could he bear those two mirror s
hards embedded in the faces of everyone, everywhere? How could he endure his parents’ gazes? He had been born ugly, but with a rare sort of ugliness, the kind that had an undeniable charm. Otherwise, why did people look at him like that? Only his mother and a few close friends pretended that he was handsome, or even sublimely beautiful, as they said. For him, that lie was the worst insult of all.
As he did every time, out of respect for his victims, he removed and changed the needles. Then he wrapped them in absorbent cotton before tossing them into the bottom of one of several brown-paper bags, those useful bags he got from his neighbor on the top floor, a rich old lady he sometimes ran errands for. At her request, though, he left the big store to deliver its own packages.
“You’re not going to break your back for an old biddy like me,” she said to him every time.
In fact, he never balked at doing things for her, because she was nice, and had never said anything to him about his ugliness or his beauty. Plus he liked big supermarkets. He could roam freely there, anonymous and content. And going about the peaceful act of shopping also gave him the opportunity to pick out his next model.
He was suddenly worried that he’d forgotten to take his medication. It was lucky that he had his little pills to keep him alive. Thanks to them, he’d been able to hold on for a long time. Then, one day, that hadn’t been enough anymore. What would have happened if his American friend hadn’t given him the mission? It had given him everything he was missing, everything that could finally fill the emptiness. Enabled him to reach a state of exaltation and bodily pleasure that his pills alone couldn’t give him anymore. The happiness of choosing and then harvesting icons was a profound joy that put him in a state of sanctified beatitude.
When he walked for hours in Paris looking for a simple face, nothing else existed. Like a man prospecting for gold he sought out, hidden in the soft gray flesh of the crowds, the faces that would bring him closer to God.
He had also learned from his readings that the sound was there too, the articulation and the verb. Every word proclaimed, even by the most repugnant souls, came from God. All men, without exception, even him, the great “not even,” echoed that voice. They were bearers of the first vibration of Creation: “Dreadful prophets, they could not open their mouths without shaking the stars!”
So, along with the faces, he had begun collecting phonemes and words, weighty paradigmatic columns and syntagmatic horizons, the divine origins of which he no longer had any doubt. Sometimes he integrated them, numbered, into his grand iconoclastic performances. Sometimes he carved them on his walls or in his flesh, with a needle and cuttlefish ink.
He could have survived like that if, one day, the happiness of fulfilling his mission, and his multiple harvests, wasn’t enough for him anymore. All these hidden sorrows and lies had only worked for so long. He had needed to add other pleasures to the mix.
Vindicated by his quest, he had taken advantage of it to let his rage explode, and revel in a primitive sexuality that he no longer tried to control. Once the photo was taken, and the face imprisoned in the depths of the lens, he let himself go, abandoning himself body and soul to the slaughter. Barbarism was a consolation for him. Like a cannibalistic coin collector, he experienced his savagery as a redemption, a voyage to the land of Insania, among the bloody watermelons and the grenades. A sculptor of flesh and an exhibitor of bones, the Makeup Artist created a hellish fearscape with his arrangements and painstaking attention to detail.
Dazzling darkness.
Because there was no other way for him.
How else can I fill this frozen emptiness, this chasm of desolation? My dizzying despair? How do I slow down my inexorable swallowing-up by the quicksand of emotion? Express my sorrow, and my bitterness. Say the words that remain long after the lips. And tell, even if everything is smashed because of it, the reason for my torment. Say to you, at last, “Mama, you are lying.”
No, I am not beautiful. Not even sad, not even normal, not even a child, not even me, not even really alive. I am the great “not even,” whom no one loves, and who has given way to it. Not even taken away, not even afraid, not even fear and not even crying. I am all these “not even”s, a big “not even” who doesn’t love himself. Not even compassion and not even heart. My father—what did he look like? A humpbacked zebu with a rabbit’s head? A hyena or a wild boar? I don’t have a single image of that lunatic; not even any words, either. No last name. No first name. Nothing. Stillborn. Fucking murderer. Something Mama said, once:
“Papa? What papa? You were born without a father, my poor baby.”
That is why I’m like this. The great “not even” who doesn’t love himself. Born without balls, without a dick. An orphaned wild boar with my stripes taken away. A brave killer. Because “not even” was born without a face, without hands and arms, almost without a papa. An X-ray son. I don’t look like anything. Not even a white Venetian or Greek tragedy mask; nothing. Or maybe a shapeless mixture of all those things. A swollen sponge, a transparent empty space with little evil eyes.
34.
Wednesday, January 12th
Barely awake, Amédée headed for the kitchen. He had decided to chop two rabbits into pieces. Force of habit and a well-sharpened knife would come to his rescue. He put the pieces into a bowl and rubbed them with a mixture of cognac and fresh mustard. Salt, pepper, herbs, and Bob’s your uncle. He went into the bathroom for a nice hot shower. He’d finish up the recipe tonight.
Stepping into his department, he was impressed by the deployment of forces he’d ordered himself. The big central room had proven to be too small, so they had requisitioned the whole upper floor, a kind of dusty loft above the ceiling. Now this place that time and men seemed to have forgotten was sparkling clean and boasted twelve computers connected to the network and to the seven brand-new units on the lower floor.
Since the beginning of the week, three cadets directed by Ken and supervised by Francis had been entering data as soon as it arrived into one of the five lists they had created.
The first list held the names of people who had bought a Gascht tripod in the last fifteen years, including the ones who had purchased them secondhand or borrowed them.
The second list contained the full names of all the delivery people employed by the major supermarkets identified on Mallock’s advice, as well as the names of the clients who received deliveries. The Makeup Artist might very well have chosen his victims while he filled his delivery orders alongside them.
Amélie’s notebook constituted the third list, which Mallock considered the most important one. It was their reference. Every person in the notebook had been or would be questioned.
The fourth was a list of every individual in the police files, not just in France but in the bordering countries as well. The offenses ranged from a simple arrest for flashing to rape to sexual murder, and the list was more or less a rundown of all the wackos in Europe whose attorneys were trying desperately to get them released back into nature.
For a long time, Mallock had still believed that everyone should have the right to a second chance, to forgiveness and clemency. But he’d seen too many victims and devastated loved ones now to have any objectivity or even compassion left toward criminals. All his compassion went to the martyrs, not the psychopaths. His job was to find them and arrest them. He wouldn’t have traded places with a judge for all the tea in China.
The final list was a compilation of all the individuals who had ever been suspected, directly or indirectly, of the various crimes committed by the Makeup Artist.
The lists weren’t complete yet, but Mallock was convinced that, as laborious and painstaking as it was to put them together, only this methodical approach, which allowed them to cross-reference or combine pieces of information, would give them a chance of arresting the Makeup Artist. He felt sure that the name of the killer, or one of his close friends or associates, was contained somewhere in Am
élie’s notebook. If they found the same name in one of the other lists, they might have a chance.
This computer-based investigation was the backbone of his research system. The technological, rational part of him.
Mallock had realized that it was all the more necessary for him because the rest of his methodology often belonged, if not in the realm of magic, at least to a highly extravagant kind of intuition. He needed the weight of the computers and lists to keep him tethered to the ground, while the weather balloon of his intuition floated above the clouds. One was a heavy trawler dragging the sea bottom, while the other, assured of having something to eat tonight, indulged in a much more unpredictable kind of line-fishing.
They made a perfect pair, the bear and the RAM, synapses and circuits, the head and the hard disk.
It had been three weeks since he inherited the case of the Makeup Artist. Never in his life had he been so afraid of overlooking something, of getting bogged down in false theories while that piece of crap kept on killing women and children. With so many open leads and the lists getting closer and closer to being complete, Mallock felt like they had cast a net finely woven enough to keep their prey from escaping it.
He still needed to tell his team the whole truth about the Makeup Artist and his earlier career. Everything Marvin had told him.
That would happen tonight. The rabbit with herbs marinating peacefully at home was for them. Four times a year he gave himself over to the little ritual of cooking dinner for his group. It bonded them even more closely, and it was relaxing for all of them.
He left Number 36 at around six o’clock to finish getting things ready. Dinner was set for nine o’clock; he had plenty of time. Lots of fresh herbs, chicken liver . . . he stopped twice on his way home to pick things up.