The man in blue loden, after forcing his way past the security cordon, had come up to Mallock and grasped his arm.
“Where is my daughter? Has something happened to my wife?”
The two men were face to face. Mallock said:
“They’re dead.”
Two little puffs of breath. Two words. Two missiles. The man had just been killed in his turn. Of the person he had been, the man who believed in happiness, nothing remained now except a little head of sadness on a counterfeit body still gripping, by automatic reflex, a briefcase that had occupied his time. All the problems in that case, even the thorniest ones, no longer existed. François Modiano had worked for years as a chief engineer at Schlem. Now he was nothing more than an anguished planet frozen in a starry emptiness.
But how else could Mallock have said it? He asked himself the same question every time, always knowing that there was no answer. With time, the crushing superiority of questions over the horrible no-man’s-land of answers becomes understandable. How do you announce a thing like this? Approach another person bearing filth, sadness, the end of the world? One might say it slowly, progressively, or all at once, like ripping off a bandage. But it wasn’t bandage being torn away—it was the whole skin, and the heart with it. There was no other way—even though Mallock, obstinately, was still searching for one.
A few minutes earlier, François Modiano had been excited about finally getting home for Christmas Eve. In his head he had already been hugging both of his girls, and they were covering him with kisses.
“Hi, sweetheart. You’re not too tired, are you?” his wife would have asked him, smiling.
His little girl would have simply murmured, “Papa,” barely opening her eyes when he bent over her bed to kiss her goodnight.
Even if they hadn’t been those words exactly, they would have been others. Lovelier ones. Things about Christmas; the roast capon and the gifts from Saint Sylvester, and lots and lots of sweets. Mallock carried, more than escorted, François Modiano to the ambulance, which stood useless and flickering, its rear doors wide open. There would be no miracles for the dead. No remedies or bandages for those who were deceased at the scene.
It was only an ambulance, but it knew. So why did men persist in hoping?
His face twisted in pain, the unfortunate Modiano sat down on the rear tailgate. His hands were shaking, but he couldn’t cry. Amédée held back from questioning him. Later, maybe. As a medic pushed up his sleeve to give him an injection, the engineer slowly forced out a sentence.
“How did this happen?”
There was no way to answer that question. The man in loden should be spared for now, though of course he wouldn’t escape it forever. It was one more thing inflicted on the survivors: the complete and exhaustive rundown of the abuses the victims had suffered during the murders. Denying them the right to a lie, to the simple but soothing “No, they didn’t suffer.” Subjecting them instead to an abominable array of information. It seemed like this allowed them to begin the work of grieving. Maybe, but some details killed more than once.
Mallock spoke, but of other matters. There were things the inconsolable could say to one another. They could even share quality silences. This is what he did, before going off to find the man a cup of very hot coffee. Then he waited with him for the drug that had been injected into his veins to take effect. Afterward, talking softly to him, he watched for the sister to appear, weeping, followed by the grandparents.
As he was leaving, he gave them his card. “If you need anything, please don’t hesitate. I’m going to be heading the investigation personally, and I’ll keep you informed.”
Then, heavyhearted, he went to speak to Ken again: “You’re on your own. Watch them closely. They absolutely cannot see the bodies; not inside and not when they bring them out. I’m counting on you.”
The sun was beginning to rise. Everything was grey and depressing. Glacial. A garbage truck appeared in the street. The noise of garbage-bin lids clanged off sleeping façades. Wake up, good people. Bye-bye, off to your jobs. The banality of the sounds, more than anything else, brought home the demonic aspect of what had taken place in the very backyard, on the second floor of this suburban house with no history.
Mallock headed back toward Paris. His jaw, his whole body was rigid. At the Porte de Vincennes he took the ring road, his hands clenched tightly on the black Bakelite steering wheel. Staring straight ahead, he tried desperately to contain his rage and sadness.
After parking his old Jaguar in front of the flower market, Amédée sat down in a cafe to warm up and wait for eight o’clock to arrive.
“Coffee, double cream, and three croissants.” His throat felt as if it were being squeezed. The image of the tortured little girl had joined the monstrous jumble he had built up in the pit of his stomach. He thought of the mother as well, and then of the child’s father, and he watched his own right hand as it dunked the first croissant, trembling.
“Fuck,” he murmured.
There was a message waiting for Mallock when he got to the office: Call Judge Humbert back. He would be in charge of the case of the Makeup Artist 2.0, for the time being. Could be better; could also be worse. Thirtyish, thick mustache, rumpled suit. In line with the unions, more fundamentalist than upstanding, he was a prototypical young judge, highly ambitious, full of himself and self-righteous. A real asshole, according to Mallock’s criteria.
Curiously, for a police officer responsible for enforcing order and justice, Amédée was distrustful of rules and laws. Neither god nor master; an anarchist without a label; a kindly misanthrope; he abhorred religious posers and pasteurized cheese, conformism and repeat offenders, dominant thought and lack of comfort with equal fervor, just as he did all reductions, whether in sentence or price; fashion and celebrities; bad faith and anchovies; and the hypocritical semantics and repression of a democracy ashamed of itself but much too politically correct to be honest.
Add to all of that his exaggerated sense of justice, his enormous heart that fell in love easily, his profound compassion for his victims, and 50 percent fat, and the result was this curious creature: a depressive, anarchist upholder of the law with small ears and white stubble who could have had “death to assholes” as his motto—if he hadn’t also had a sense of moderation, and of battles lost in advance.
Mallock cast a satisfied eye over his department. He had inherited, if not the nicest offices in Number 36, then at least the least ugly. Five rooms: two of them doubles for his four inspectors, a smaller office for Bob by himself, and a wonderful common area, given the smallness of the premises, for briefings and technical material. Finally, adjoining this, was his Chief Superintendent’s office, with a view of the ocean—or practically, at least in Amédée’s head, since the Seine flowed toward the English Channel with the speed of a sustained current.
Taken as a whole, the department was something of an oddity; comfortable and modern at the same time. At his request everything had been painted off-white except, the sole concession imposed by National Heritage, the gold leaf on the rare wood and plaster moldings miraculously surviving here and there. The overall result had nothing in common with the traditional image of a police bureau—a stroke of luck of which Mallock and his men were fully aware. They even felt a bit guilty when they thought about their less fortunate comrades, condemned to linoleum and plywood. The country treated its police officers very shabbily indeed. Most of the station was a joke, resembling nothing so much as a sad chicken coop. Mallock had fought hard for high-quality feed and fodder for his department, and he had gotten what they needed—plus a good deal extra.
The replacement computers arrived with great fanfare at around ten o’clock and Mallock signed the release form. Francis ran over to the new toys like a small boy. “Hello there, you beauties,” he crooned at them.
A certificate in electronics engineering haphazardly acquired in his younger days had earned Francis the designation of head of the department’s IT service, under the unofficial surveillance of Ken. Though not as clever or highly trained as him, Francis had eventually managed very well. Two years of night classes in coding combined with a dogged determination to learn had turned him into the king of the database, user-friendly or not. These days he even went so far as to walk around armed with automatic code executors, intrusion test platforms, and other security flaw exploitation tools like IP spoofing or buffer overflow, in FBI or Intelligence Service files. Administrative files just weren’t quite enough for him anymore, and there were too few of them. So, while they waited for something to be decided, Ken, Francis, and Mallock had cobbled something together, with Amédée promising to cover for the others if a problem came up.
“But make sure one doesn’t come up,” he had emphasized. “For now, Francis, start putting together everything you find in the file. Digitize and touch up the best crime scene photos, and also the photos of each victim, in the same format. I want five copies of everything. Each one of us has to have a complete and consistent series to look at and think about.”
“I’m on it, boss!”
“Five,” repeated Mallock, thinking of Dublin and Grimaud. “No more than that.”
Then he had a bathroom break, got himself a coffee, and spent a few minutes watching Francis struggle valiantly with USB, Ethernet, and FireWire cords. When the young chief inspector finally switched on the first screen, he turned to the superintendent: “It’s too bad we don’t have enough elements yet to attempt a portrait of the Makeup Artist, or I would have tried the new biometric morphing program we got from the Federal Bureau in New York.”
Mallock’s ideas often came to him in packs, like in billiards. His strength was to see or hear trajectories before anyone else did. For him, the whole universe was murmuring with clues, and his only talent was that he could hear them. This time, it was Francis’s denial that gave him the idea for a suggestion:
“What if you started by doing a portrait of the victims?”
“A portrait? But we already have photos of them.”
“Not portraits—one portrait. Singular.”
“A composite sketch of a series of victims? That’s a first.”
“Maybe. Not really. I don’t care. Try to see if they have something in common. Features, mouth, eye color, race . . . ”
“You want them on different overlays, but the same file?”
“Yes, and synchronize the color correction, so it looks like they were all taken with the same light. And with equal proportions so we can superimpose them. It’s possible that he’s attracted by a certain facial symmetry, or a different structure: wide-set eyes, mouth close to the nose, a certain shape of eyes-mouth triangle. Look into that angle; look for common points, and make me a list.”
Francis was writing everything down carefully. When he looked up to ask another question, his boss had already gone into the next room.
On the large conference table, other than his two large files, Mallock had half a dozen boxes brought by RG’s assistant, filled mostly with the contents of the female victims’ handbags.
“This is one of the thoughts I had recently,” Grimaud had said. “Even though they were all killed in their homes, I asked the families for permission to borrow their purses. I hoped their address books and other personal details might help us establish a relationship between them. I haven’t had the time to do it, so it’s yours to follow up with. Don’t forget to give all these things back to the families; I personally agreed to that.”
Mallock spread everything out on the conference table. These personal things, exhibited anonymously and with detachment, made for a sad tableau. Key-rings, mobile phones, lipstick used with private dreams of seduction, shiny face powder: the last witnesses to see the victims alive. Coin purses and wallets, fine batiste handkerchiefs containing the final lip-print, a kiss sent from the beyond. To whom? Odors of perfume and rice powder mingled with ink and leather—the irreplaceable, inimitable scent of women’s handbags.
Off to one side there were also the contents of the male victims’ wallets—and, even more horribly, those of the children’s schoolbags.
Ken had arrived at the office with dark bags under his eyes, which were puffy “as a cat’s asshole,” he thought it appropriate to specify. “I’ve come straight from Saint-Mandé. I stopped by for your viewing pleasure, and also to make a good impression, but I’m knackered. So just listen to me without rushing me, and then I’m going to go off and go beddy-bye, okay?”
“Sure, go on. I’m all ears.”
Of Japanese and Italian heritage, Ken referred to himself as a peasant. He had lived in France since the age of eight. A stocky man of five foot nine with black hair and a mug like Jackie Chan’s, his was a mixture of race and blood which, he gleefully admitted, he’d never completely understood. His origins and the tumult of his school years had made him a fairly odd character. Extremely clever, and of redoubtable physical strength, he was a good companion no matter the circumstances. To compensate occasionally for a slight lack of strictness in his work, he used dry wit and a good mood that nothing seemed able to alter. He and his wife, a pretty, voluptuous blonde called Anne and nicknamed Ninon, were expecting their first child. It was a girl whom they were calling Nina. Ken had chosen “Niwi” at first, but Ninon had objected, and no more had been said about the matter.
“I stayed until the end to sign the report,” he began. “It was just a flash of intuition that I should—à la Mallock. As you know, it’s standard procedure for a body to be turned over in case there’s something hidden under it. And guess what was there?”
Sure of his effect, Ken let three seconds of silence go by.
“I don’t know . . . a syringe?”
Robbed of his bombshell, Ken gasped. “How did you know?”
“Just intuition . . . à la Mallock,” chuckled Amédée.
“You really are a goddamn wizard!”
“Where’s your respect, Monsieur Inspector?”
“It went home to bed, and I plan to join it very soon. Anyway, they say ‘captain’ now. And since I was a senior detective, I’m actually a chief inspector—with all due respect, Monsieur Chief Superintendent . . . I mean General!”
“Yes, yes, I know. My captains are chief inspectors now; it’s much simpler. So, the fingerprinting?”
“We tried at the scene, but nothing. Nada. Not even one partial fingerprint. Keep dreaming, boss.”
“Okay. Before you go off to recharge your batteries, I have something to show you. I’ve got practically all the contents of the handbags here. Notice anything?”
Mallock was addressing not only Ken but also Bob, who had just joined them in the conference room.
“Out of the half-dozen handbags present here,” he continued, not waiting for a response, “five contain a public transportation card and four have metro tickets. Same thing for one of the wallets and one of the schoolbags.”
“Seems normal, boss. We’re in Paris.”
“You’re going to look into it anyway. Call the families and ask them if the victim happened to have a usual route, maybe a daily one. If they all say it was on the same metro line, would that still seem normal to you?”
“Gotcha. I should have kept my trap shut, right?”
“Right. And if the metro’s our common denominator, you get your ass down there and check it out, okay?”
Mallock had dictatorial tendencies: a kind of imperialism, watered down for everyday life. He observed all the formalities, of course, but he imposed a fanatical professionalism on his colleagues. The atmosphere in the Fort became very strained during investigations. Amédée, when stressed, was inflexible and severe in a way that only his constant kindness and attentiveness at all other times made acceptable.
He stood up and walked out the door, saying: “Call me when you have anything. I’ll be back at three o’clock.”
It was one o’clock in the afternoon on Tuesday, and the superintendent was exhausted and starving.