The Faces of God

by Mallock;

  What if the lists yielded nothing? Amédée was petrified with nerves. There was one consolation; it had started snowing again, just the way he liked it, heavy and slow. He stopped in his Breton café to wet his dry throat with a double whiskey. A quick “Thanks, boss” and he was out the door. Now he could really enjoy the snow.

  At home he jumped straight on the rabbits, wiping the surplus mustard off the pieces before browning them and then pouring generous amounts of white wine and chicken stock into the pot.

  Ken, Jules, and Julie arrived like a small army at nine o’clock sharp. Bob and Francis showed up ten minutes later.

  “Goddamn, that smells good,” was the heartfelt greeting from both of them.

  Mallock settled his little team in the living room and encouraged them to help themselves to various kinds of alcohol, then disappeared into the kitchen to mix goose liver and rabbit liver, cream, pepper, salt, and cognac. At the last minute he stirred the still-raw concoction into the dish.

  Silence descended on the living room as they ate. The sounds of cutlery and the inelegant chewing of Francis, Jules, and Bob were the only sounds intruding on the culinary stillness. They liked it! Mallock decided to make his confession right in the midst of these agreeable circumstances.

  “I haven’t told you everything about the Makeup Artist.”

  He rattled off the rest without stopping to breathe.

  All of it.

  Everything.

  From the first case to the last, just before the appearance of Needles on French soil. The only thing he left out was the Marilyn story. That wasn’t necessary, and the secret had to be kept safe.

  There was another silence.

  Half-astonished, half-appalled, they considered this incredible story, now conjugated to the past tense, and the consequences it meant they would be the first ones to deal with in the near future. Without planning it they all began to talk at the same time, which resulted in an unintelligible jumble of noise: How can this be possible? . . . Maybe there’s more than one . . . What a fucking nightmare! . . . People are sick, aren’t they . . . Would anyone like coffee? . . . I disagree . . .

  “Take turns, kiddies, please. We’ve got plenty of time.”

  Julie went first, going directly on the attack.

  “But what are your thoughts about it, boss?”

  As they talked, wondering about the bestial Twelve/Needles, somewhere else—not very far away—the one who called himself the great “not even” was calmly locking the three locks on the door of his secret room in his mother’s house.

  At the same moment as Mallock tried to comfort his troops by suggesting leads and theories, the Makeup Artist was developing his latest roll of film. While Julie tried to rationalize thoughts that hearing the facts had turned very dark, the Makeup Artist was scanning one of his best photos so he could add another face to his collection. Just as Francis and Jules divided the last morsels on the plate, the Makeup Artist was repeating to himself, “God made man in His own image,” the phrase that had started everything such a little while ago, and an eternity ago. And while Julie unselfconsciously wiped up the leftover sauce on the plate with big hunks of bread, the Makeup Artist was mixing his pigments for the creation of a new icon, a new Christ Pantocrator.

  This was his passion, the sole purpose of all his torments and the ones he inflicted on others: collecting faces. Faces like the Face of God. Just one more model and his personal art gallery would be complete. She, his final specimen, had already been selected; she, a paragon of virtue, a young woman he had only just seen, would be his chosen one.

  For a long time now he’d been able to spot an angel from a hundred yards away. This one would be his masterpiece, the final image to shock the unconverted, while giving him the keys to Heaven at last!

  Her name was Julie, and he would have to be very careful, because she was a member of the police force.

  35.

  United States of America, ten years earlier

  To celebrate his fifteenth birthday, or for some other reason he’d never tried to figure out, his mother had sent him to New York. Just like that. All alone, with a reservation at a YMCA and some classes to take in a school not far from Central Park. Just as remarkably, she had added an envelope containing more than enough pocket money on top of that. He was supposed to spend three weeks in America, but he ended up staying three months, for the whole summer vacation. His mother called him regularly. Sometimes from Paris, but mostly from somewhere more exotic: Marrakesh, Istanbul, Kyoto. He could only be sure about one thing: she was never alone in her room.

  At first, the teenager didn’t make any friends and spent his time walking the streets of the Big Apple. It was wonderful, a revelation! The feeling of freedom, and much more than that. Something intoxicating. Being able to let his feet take him anywhere they wanted, with no desire except to feel the asphalt under his feet and the exhilarating sense of the skyscrapers towering over his head. Discovering, losing himself, finding himself. No schedule. No mother. Existing without her and feeling himself spreading his wings. It was one of the happiest times of his life.

  One morning he woke up feeling weightless and worn out. He had changed. A sweetish odor filled the little room, exacerbated by the warmth of the July morning. His pajamas and belly were covered with a sticky, dried substance.

  He spent his first day as a man at the French-American school in a state of euphoria. At noon, forsaking the services of an overly noisy cafeteria, he opted for a stroll in Central Park instead. Classes wouldn’t start again until three o’clock. A hot dog stuffed with onions and ketchup in hand, he settled himself on a bench. The grass was an odd survivor in this world of glass and steel.

  It was very hot, and for the first time in his life he bought alcohol—two cans of beer. It was thanks to that bubbly fermented hops and to the sperm flowing in his genitals that, seeing a young adolescent boy with fine features and long hair coming toward him, he had the great revelation of his life. God had truly created man in his own image!

  He was fascinated, and the attraction scared him. The specter of homosexuality. But then he realized that this face only appealed to him because of its resemblance to the religious images he’d been collecting since he was six years old. Nothing sexual about it—quite the opposite, in fact, he had concluded.

  God created man in his own image. They were all his children, of course, but some of them had inherited his features, his magic, while others—like him—were only failures. Bad sketches he should have torn up.

  The most incredible thing was that he didn’t feel any resentment or despair, but rather relief. As imperfect as he was, he was part of God’s destiny. Aren’t abnormal children even more loved than the others?

  He was surprised to find that he was smiling. Lost in Central Park, he had just found himself.

  A gray squirrel approached him, looking him straight in the eyes. Its two front paws clutched a tiny human skull. He reassured himself that it must really belong to a rodent or a bird. A baby monkey, maybe. There was a zoo right nearby.

  He skipped his afternoon English class and went back to his room to sleep. The night was dreamless, colorless. He woke up at five in the morning.

  Dawn was beginning to wash away the colors of the night and replace them with pastel tints. It was in that moment, standing at that window, that he surprised himself for the first time by imagining his destiny. Without knowing what shape it would take, or even worrying about it. Just feeling the delirious joy of that incredible certainty. A unique path had been laid out on this Earth just for him. All he had to do was find it. Everything could finally begin now. Quiet please, we’re filming. The scene is set, the actors made up, and the camera rolling at sixty frames a second, like life. Lights! Too late to turn back. Wind machine! Bring in the extras!

  Action!

  Act I

  In which the name of Ralph Bar
nes Bennet

  appears for the first time.

  On his third day in New York he found a mimeographed note from the YMCA management under his door. Every new arrival was supposed to go and introduce himself to the director of the establishment, but in his absence you could meet with the building manager and have your presence duly noted for administrative purposes.

  At 2:30, before classes started again, the young man went down and knocked on the small door behind the billiard room.

  “Come in!”

  Surrounded by four chrome fans, the manager, Bill Baxter, an enormous mass of fat, was waiting for him. He was impressive. Five hundred pounds of damp pink folds. In front of him there was a pile of yellow washcloths, and behind him a heap of the same cloths, soaked with water. The manager spent his time absorbing the sweat that accumulated beneath his fat folds. In the middle of that mass of flesh his face was strangely beautiful, his eyes magnificent.

  “They call me BB,” he said in precise French. “I’m the manager of this kid factory. And you are?”

  The young Frenchman introduced himself with much more self-assurance than was typical at his age. BB noticed it, and realized that the two of them shared a kind of monstrosity and, therefore, a suffering. The incredible obesity of one, and the skinniness and startling face of the other.

  “If you get lonely or have any problems, come see me. I don’t get too many visitors, and I’d like the company.”

  That was the beginning of a bizarre friendship. An odd and atypical bond, but an essential link in the chain that would transform the teenager, little by little, into the Makeup Artist. A few days later, he surprised himself by confiding in BB about his fascination with religious icons. He even told him about his theory about the faces of God, like a confession, a violent need to finally share his secret. The other man had listened, sponging out his armpits, a funny smile on his lips. Whether by coincidence or the implacable will of destiny, his brother-in-law, who owned a trendy art gallery, had just been telling him about a painter who apparently shared a very similar kind of madness:

  “He makes old-style icons,” he told the boy.

  They absolutely had to meet; he would call his brother-in-law to organize a get-together.

  “It might be interesting for you,” he added, tossing an umpteenth sweat-soaked cloth over his shoulder. “I’ll figure something out and let you know when it’s set up.”

  On the following Fourth of July the country celebrated its independence, and New York throbbed with the noise of millions of fans and air-conditioning units blowing the air around. In the street, women’s high heels sank into the burning asphalt with a slight sucking noise. The city had just set a new record high temperature. In this furnace, a pale and empty child would soon change into something else, a creature with outrageous dreams, macabre and bloody.

  The art-seller with whom BB had set up the meeting was a person of little interest. He tried to survive by exploiting the talent of artists whose egos he fed with hope, superlatives, and cut cocaine. Still, he and his brother-in-law were filling the roles that fate had written for them, like film extras who are superfluous but without whom the principal intrigue can’t develop. He introduced the young Frenchman to Ralph Bennet, the icon-loving painter.

  Bennet was a big, burly man with tiny bright-blue eyes. He seemed, despite his size, like a part of the sky. His silvery gray hair was like a mass of cumulus clouds; his gaze a retreating horizon you tried and tried to reach until you came to continents full of monsters. That was how the young Makeup Artist saw him for the first time. He instantly felt fear and respect for him, and real fascination.

  They quickly started spending more time together than was reasonable. Ralph began teach him the basics necessary for making icons. He was passionate about everything, from practical work to presentations of theological theories related to it. He was particularly sensitive to the magical relationship that existed between the two domains, the spiritual “why” of the composition of the adhesive, or the alchemical symbolism of the number of days it took to dry.

  It was satisfying, but the most delicious things were yet to come.

  After some time had passed, Ralph confided to the boy that, in addition to the traditional dash of vodka, he added a small amount of seminal fluid to the glue for the icons. As a supreme honor and a mandatory rite of initiation, he would take some of the teenager’s sperm that night for the first time.

  After the preparation of a dozen icons, interrupted by touching that had nothing to do with ritual anymore, Ralph decided to initiate him into the supreme art of the hunt.

  It happened in the street, in full reality. The first thing was to learn to see the auras surrounding the faces of the chosen ones, a halo of light that framed the upper part of the body.

  The first time he managed it, he felt like the whole world had finally started making sense. Only a minuscule number of humans had the power to perceive what he had seen. He owed this incredible joy, this brilliance, to Ralph and his teachings. His natural tendencies had helped him, yes, but on his own he would just have kept collecting religious images for years and years without being able to go beyond, without ever being able to go through the mirror. It was thanks to Ralph that he understood that these seemingly innocent icons weren’t the imaginary and symbolic representations people thought they were, but true photographs, faithful representations of a reality that had been hidden since time immemorial.

  Since he owed everything to Ralph and shared his aspirations, he made no objection when the man told him the ultimate purpose of the hunt, and its corollary: the killing of the chosen ones. For the painter things were simple, even though they remained mystical. He practiced “angel hunting” the way other people collected butterflies.

  Spotting the rarest species, capturing them with strings and nets, and then putting them to sleep using cotton soaked with chloroform. As with butterflies, he also practiced the art of injection. The needle had to penetrate at a very precise angle. Finally, the specimen was photographed. This took both patience and quickness. And then remembering the Marquis de Viracalas’s instructions! It was incredibly important that the halo not shine at its full brightness until the exact moment of the death agony, and that it disappear just as suddenly when the subject was dead. The entire art of it therefore consisted of taking the photo using a relatively long exposure, and at the very last moment. Captured too late or with a poorly-prepared subject, the divine features would go blurry, the aura turn dull. Too soon and the halo wouldn’t have yielded its full potential yet.

  The limbus was as fragile as the colored dust on a butterfly’s wings.

  Act II

  In which the Makeup Artist commits his first murder.

  Ralph Bennet had asked his young disciple to pick out the next victim himself. For reasons he didn’t try to go into in depth, he chose the only friend he had made in New York, Bill Baxter. He took a photo of him, zooming in close up, and showed it to Ralph. The decision was unanimous:

  “His face is superb and his eyes are divine.”

  The operation was simple to finalize, both because he knew the sedentary habits of the huge manager by heart, and because of their friendship. He organized with BB, who never suspected a thing, the time and circumstances of his own death.

  They were supposed to see each other late that night to watch the rerun of a boxing match together. At midnight the teenager went to Bill’s apartment, making sure to leave the door open behind him. Five minutes later, Ralph walked in. After an instant’s hesitation at the enormity of the mass of flesh in front of him, the painter moved noiselessly forward and knocked him out cleanly.

  It was Scott Amish, Tom Marvin’s colleague and friend, who discovered the body.

  The lieutenant, a high-ranking member of the Behavioral Science Service, had been on the trail of this psycho killer for some time. It wasn’t the first serial murder case of hi
s career; he had arrested several of them in the past few years, including the notorious Boston Strangler. When he saw the body, or rather what was left of it after the slaughter and ten days of heat, it took him several minutes of standing on the threshold before he could bring himself to take a step into the room. The victim’s decapitated head had been placed on top of the television, which was running the “Star Spangled Banner” over a shot of a patriotic statue. His brain and the internal flesh of his face, liquefied by natural decomposition speeded up by the heat, had leaked out of his eyes, ears, and nose. A necklace of maggots squirmed around the severed neck.

  The rest of the body was even worse. Bill Baxter had been burned alive. The floor of the room was covered with vile slices of flesh and human fat, yellowish adipose masses sliced into sections and seeming to float like so many icebergs on a sea of blood. In the middle of it all a body, made thin again by cutting, showed every muscle and a few pale bones.

  Scottish had a fleeting image of a whale being carved up on the deck of a fish-packing boat before he turned and stepped back out into the hallway to throw up.

  Act III

  In which the Makeup Artist receives his inheritance.

  One evening Ralph was late. His eyes were even more distant than usual. The Makeup Artist wondered if maybe he’d failed at his task, disappointed his mentor. That would screw up everything. The two of them were preparing to capture their third angel, a superb Face of God that the teenager had spotted two days earlier. Ralph had promised to reverse the roles for the first time. He would assist his student without intervening directly.

  “In fact, you really should go alone, but wait a few days yet,” Ralph had said.

  And then he revealed that the boy would be the seventh in a line of hunters who had been practicing their art since the turn of the century. He gave him a small leather-covered wooden trunk containing all the Faces of God, the auras harvested and photographed, all the way back to the ones made by the first hunter, the inventor of the faces, a French nobleman who had come to America aboard the Stella Maris: the Marquis François-Henri de Salis-Viracalas.