The Faces of God

by Mallock;

  It took him another hour to figure out how to slide open the wall. Once he was finally in the studio, he groped around for a light switch. Light flooded a small space. To the left there was an enormous armoire; to the right a bathroom done in red ceramic tile. A large closet, obviously homemade, took up almost all of the six-and-a-half-foot space noticeable from the outside. Opening the closet switched on another light. The interior held no clothing; it was completely filled with icons.

  All of the Makeup Artist’s work was there, as well as the exhibition of his principal victims. It was a terrible sight, an admirable and macabre spectacle: a five-row iconostasis, his masterpiece, including icons of the Virgin of the Sign, an Annunciation, a Moses, a David, several representations of the Madonna and Child, and, in the center, a Christ Pantocrator and an astonishing Deisis, which included the recognizable faces of the two men Dôthem had murdered at the start of his quest and, as Mary, the little Modiano girl, whose gilded braids, pinned high on her head, formed the base of a halo.

  Nervously, Mallock drew on his cigar, but it had gone out. The whole display might well have been repugnant, but it exuded an intoxicating blend of spirituality and sensuality. A dazzling cocktail. He recognized certain scenes: a disemboweled saint holding his own head in his hands. A “Saint Mandé” with thighs spread wide and eyes covered in gold leaf. The baby in its sugared shell. The actress, like an empty-hulled boat on the shore of a black lake. A female Jesus, impaled atop a Golgotha made of seashells.

  He ran his tongue across his upper lip. There was a perverse pleasure in looking at these icons. He shut the closet door, thinking that you could have terrible suspicions about yourself.

  To the right, an odor wafted from the bathroom that was unpleasant, but not quite as bad as he had expected. Like the rest of the space, it was completely red. From the tiles down to the contents of the bathtub, which was filled to the brim with blood. Mallock knew he’d reached the end of his investigation. Here, finally, was the answer to the question of what the Makeup Artist had done with all the blood he took from his victims. He bathed in it.

  Mallock thanked his lucky stars and closed his eyes for a few seconds before putting on a pair of elbow-length rubber gloves, leaning over the tub, and pulling its plug. The liquid, which had still been red a month ago, had taken on the brown color and appearance of mud. As the fluid level began slowly to go down, his eyes riveted to the surface of the syrupy substance, Amédée relit his cigar—maybe in part to relax, but mainly to hide the stink coming off this sludge of water, formalin, and decomposing blood. When the tub had drained halfway a long, flat object began to be revealed. A smile of satisfaction and relief, slightly twisted with disgust, appeared on Mallock’s lips. He hadn’t been wrong.

  As always, he had doubted his own visions. He shouldn’t have. Feverishly, he heaved the heavy marble slab upward.

  It wasn’t as heavy as he had worried it would be, and beneath it he found what he had come looking for.

  The Makeup Artist hadn’t left it up to anyone else to seal the door to his tomb. Pulling the marble top of the chest of drawers from the living room over himself, he hadn’t given his body any chance of escaping the sacrifice. So that the smell of his decomposing body wouldn’t give away the location of his lair, he had added several liters of formalin to the blood, then zipped himself into one of the waterproof bags used to transport bodies during wars or major catastrophes. It was a terrible death, but a fitting suicide for the man, drowning in the blood of his last Faces.

  Above all, death cannot be gentle, the corpse seemed to whisper to Mallock.

  Maybe they would have found this hidden room eventually, and discovered the body, but it would have taken a very long time, and in the meantime his legend, and the uncertainty about his death, would have terrified the whole world. Mallock, fighting his repulsion, decided to open the plastic bag. Dôthem was inside, but he had to be sure. The zipper opened with a soggy ripping noise. It was him, and despite the dreadful death he had inflicted upon himself, despite what he had always thought of himself, he was still beautiful.

  So beautiful. Monstrously beautiful.

  Contrary to what he had believed all his life, on this point at least, his mother had never lied to him.

  Mallock switched on his mobile phone and made a few calls. The body had to be formally identified—not the slightest doubt could be allowed to remain—and autopsied, then cremated. He also called François Modiano, as he had promised to do. The man in loden thanked him. “Courage,” Amédée said, and hung up.

  Then he decided to wait for the team downstairs in the square, outside in the fresh air.

  His heart full, he closed the front door of the building behind him and went to sit down on the same bench he had occupied that morning. The pharmacy was closed. It would never open again.

  Amédée just sat. Breathed. Let his heart slow down. Felt himself grow calmer.

  The case was over. He had won. He could let it all go. Lie down and stretch out and sleep deeply at last.

  Empty.

  But he knew it didn’t work like that. The Mallock machine had a lot of momentum built up in it. The train would keep chugging and chugging, for days and hours, probably even years, carried along by the insane race he had just run. And so would his emotions and his terrors, which would smolder for months.

  Little blonde braids . . . a baby’s chest like an island of white sand. Amédée felt tears rising to the surface. The release of pressure after combat has its own dangers.

  To distract his mind and force it to dwell on happy things, he thought about Margot. Her loyalty had never faltered, and—it had to be said—she hadn’t exactly been well-rewarded for it. She’d been left empty-handed all throughout this case. He took out his phone and called her. She had earned exclusive rights to the story’s epilogue.

  Just as he hung up, a man sat down next to him. Raymond Grimaud had heard the call on his CB.

  “Fuck, it’s hard to find a parking space in this neighborhood! Anyway, bravo, Amédée. The knight has slain the dragon.”

  Mallock smiled at him. “I don’t know about a knight, but it was a fucking nightmare of a dragon.”

  He relit his cigar; RG lit a cigarette. There was a long silence.

  “You’re sure he’s dead?”

  “He is. Don’t worry.”

  A flock of angels went by. This time they were Styrofoam, floating along in the gutter.

  “And you’re sure it’s him?”

  “Positive.”

  Raymond lit another cigarette with the stub of the first. He shifted around on the bench, and finally asked:

  “Mind if I just have a look?”

  Realizing that Mallock still wasn’t understanding him—the bear could be dense sometimes—he went on:

  “Mallock, this guy has been haunting me for so long. He ended up convincing me that he was immortal.”

  “But we got him, your piece of shit immortal! You and me, and our teams! He’s up there in his bathtub, underneath a black marble tombstone!”

  “So it would bother you if I . . . ”

  “No, no! Go ahead!”

  RG stood up and went to the little green door on the left of the pharmacy. He felt slightly ridiculous, but he needed to see the body.

  Just as he was about to open the door, Mallock called out to him:

  “You do have your gun, right? Now that I think about it, he might still have been moving a little!”

  Raymond was laughing as he entered the Makeup Artist’s lair.

  It was almost noon. A new squadron of city employees had arrived to clean up the last remnants of the Christmas tree. A big black man in an orange parka whistled “Marlborough s’en va-t-en guerre, mironton, mironton, mirontaine,” as he swept up little blue angels, the corpses of red balls, and green needles. The clock of the Saint-Gervais church chimed twelve times. Serve
rs in the cafes lining the square began lighting tall torches and setting out tables for the lunch crowd. The clinking of glasses and steel cutlery, punctuated by the regular passage of cars on the Rue de Rivoli, were like a sort of modern symphony.

  In Mallock’s head, a phrase repeated itself over and over: Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image.

  EPILOGUE

  Tuesday, April 1st

  Two months passed without Mallock, almost despite him. Mallock, who couldn’t go forward anymore, couldn’t walk toward an emptiness of things and feelings anymore. This always happened to him after a good collar, as the police jargon went. First there was a happiness that was almost painful; then a calmer sense of relief. But the mind kept seeking and worrying, running on empty, like a bicycle on a hamster wheel. And then, three or four days later, came the rebound effect, the decompensation. At those times, the only thing to do was to get away, go off to some island with a lover, or the kids. Mallock no longer had either of those. Thomas was gone, and Amélie, it seemed, didn’t want to wake up.

  So he turned into the ghost of Mallock; a sharp, terse man, a stone, who didn’t give a damn about anyone, or the rain and the wind, or the path he was traveling.

  But for Easter, he made the heroic effort of going away to his cottage in Normandy. His friends had decided to join him for ten days or so, “to watch the idiot tourists and eat until we make ourselves sick.” He had agreed, but only because he was in no condition to argue.

  Besides, he had a strong suspicion that they were really doing it for him. And that it might do him some good.

  As he drove toward the highway, he made a detour to see Amélie one more time. Her condition had improved slightly; she was more reactive. But could she hear him, from the depths of her coma? Did she feel even the slightest sensation when Mallock slipped his mother’s ring onto the third finger of her left hand, a diamond as insignificant and solitary as its owner?

  Confession. He spoke to her softly, told her about his overwhelming sadness; his son, lost forever, and her, gone as well. He whispered in her ear:

  “You’re the only one I love.”

  After navigating the tollbooths on the Normandy highway, Mallock opened the shutters of his cottage, turned on the heating, and went out to the beach.

  It was seven o’clock in the evening. On the seawall, the sunset had broken out its choicest palette. The Channel was milky, beige and blue-green by turns, a vast and liquid sea of hope. The air smelled of iodine. The last tide had formed an army of black dunes made of heaped mussel shells. He walked between them to the water’s edge, where the tongues of salty water murmured to those who knew how to hear their tales of scuppered vessels and dastardly pirates.

  Mallock, who was an expert at listening to the waves, settled down on the damp sand and, despite the cold, exhausted by too much Paris, too many drugs, and too much savagery, fell asleep.

  In his dream, he was walking hand in hand with Thomas along this same beach, on this very night. He told his son about the pain that can lead to horror, about the hideously beautiful apprentice pharmacist, and about his dysmorphophobia, the sickness that had driven him to do such terrible things. And then he talked about forgiveness and compassion, even for a murderer like that.

  The Mallock of his waking hours would never have thought or said this; he wasn’t even truly opposed to the death penalty for cold-blooded killers and repeat murderers. But the sleeping papa teaching his son about clemency and mercy for young pharmacists believed it with all his heart.

  Night had fallen and the moon was full. His cottage was waiting for him, warm and cozy. Amédée stood up with difficulty, noting that God still hadn’t done anything about his back. Well, He wasn’t perfect either.

  Observing the ground behind him, next to his big footprints he saw traces of a small child with bare feet, the prints exactly parallel. Were they from his dream; were they his Tom’s?

  He looked up toward the stars, toward God, and he laughed.

  That crafty little boy of his would get him to love God one of these days, even though He didn’t exist.

  Amédée made his way back up the beach, careful not to step on the miraculous prints of his son. Tomorrow his friends would be there for lunch. He had a sudden urge to stew two nice chickens, the old-fashioned way, like he’d done last month. He’d need to buy cognac and some chicken livers for the stuffing. But this time, since it was for his friends, he would also use the wonderful truffles he had in a jar, the tuber melanosporum, which Jules had bought directly from some people he knew who hunted them. He would cut them into wide, thin rounds with a mandoline and slide them between the skin and the flesh. His friends would love it. The idea brought the beginnings of a smile back to the superintendent’s face.

  As for the little bare footprints next to his on the beach, Mallock had come to a conclusion of his own:

  You don’t need shoes in Heaven.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Jean-Denis Bruet-Ferreol, who writes under the pseudonym Mallock, was born in Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1951. He is an author, painter, photographer, designer, inventor, artistic director, and composer. Since 2000, he has dedicated himself to digital painting and crime novels.