Mallock ordered three croque-monsieurs1 and three beers at the bar, to be sent to the office for his team. For himself he chose a croque-madame2 and sat down by himself in the back of the cafe. Three Santa Clauses were leaning on the bar, talking about salaries and pay raises and their lack of job security. They had stuffed their long white beards into their pockets so as not to spill anything on them. Mallock thought that public gatherings of Santa Clauses should be forbidden; they could do too much damage to children’s imaginations. He thought about getting up and ordering them to circulate, but attacked his sandwich instead. A couple sat near him, talking and holding hands. He’d had that, once. Maybe he would again one day, with Amélie . . .
He thought of Margot again, too. Margot Murât. Where was she now? He’d always had a major weakness for the petite journalist. She was a hell of a reporter.
Following his train of thought, he picked up his phone. “Ken, when are our lovebirds supposed to be back?”
“Jules and Julie? They should be back on Monday morning, after New Year’s Eve. I guess they have plane tickets booked. You want me to—”
“No, no, we’ll leave them alone! It’ll be just fine to have them back in good form on Monday. Now, on a different note, we’re going to need to do a complete inventory of all the handbags, item by item, and then make up a sort of table, with everything laid out like a puzzle, as Audiard would say.”
“When you say ‘we,’ for some reason I feel like you really mean me. Am I imagining things?”
“Not really. You’ve always showed good analytical ability, which is a great thing!”
The men chuckled softly on both ends of the line.
“Now, what am I doing, exactly?” Ken asked eventually.
“I’ll explain it. Draw a table and call one row ‘lipstick,’ for example, and next to that you write ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ If yes, specify the color and the brand. ‘Mobile telephone,’ yes or no, operator, etc. Do the same thing with the photos, seeing if there are any of the same people in them. List every item; don’t leave a single thing out. Pens, brushes, crosswords, pencil sharpeners, sex toys, Bibles—I want everything. Then move on to address books and bank cards.”
Mallock paused just long enough to gulp down a large bite of his croque-madame and think for a couple of seconds about his next instruction and all the work it would involve.
“You’re going to hate me, but we also have to put everything in the address books, mobile phones, and any iPhones or iPods in the computer, and analyze the bank statements from the victims’ homes, and their handbags and pockets. You can’t use your ‘items’ table for this, and you can’t do it alone. We’re going to need a drudge or two to do data entry. We have to be able to look at everything in a database, with as many fields as possible so we can cross-reference the data in every possible way. We have to find out if there’s a friend or lover common to the victims, or if they did their shopping at the same place, had the same butcher or hairdresser, and that’s the kind of job we need a computer for.”
“I understand that, but it’s going to take at least four days with three data-entry people working full time. And because of New Year’s Eve and January first, we’ve got two days less.”
Ken wasn’t wrong. Getting civil servants to work was already hard enough, but during the holidays they moved slower than molasses in January. “Well, how about we say you hire six operators and I expect my results next Wednesday?”
“And when does poor Ken get to sleep, exactly?”
“Right now, if you want. Go in my office and stretch out on the sofa. In two hours you’ll feel like a new man. This is war, my boy. You can sleep when we’ve thrown the trash away—or when you’re dead.”
Ken sighed on the other end of the line. It was pointless to argue with the boss when he was like this.
“After your nap, I want you to get to work. I want those listings on my desk by Thursday morning at the latest. We all need to jump on this case, and there’s no more money in the budget. As of now you’re on overtime ad libitum,” Mallock said mercilessly. “As soon as you have the listings, fill out your own paper table. The Machin truc chouette lipstick you’ve just noticed—where was it bought? By whom? Fruits and vegetables: where were they purchased, and so on. In a nutshell, you’re going to take all the information and chart it out by brand, race, shape, store, or religion.”
“In a nutshell,” repeated Ken, “I’m looking for the slightest thing all these things from everyday life have in common.”
“Yep! But you’ve got to get to the very bottom of the concept.”
“Meaning?”
“The very bottom of each handbag, for example. You’ll find dust there. Have it analyzed, individually and then each sample against the others. Two fibers from the same carpet, matching pubic hairs, sand or gravel from the same place—we’d be incredibly pleased with any of that.”
“Got it, boss! Bon appétit, see you soon,” said Ken philosophically, already overwhelmed by the task in front of him.
At two o’clock Amédée returned to the office with Eskimo Pies for his team, partly out of kindness, but largely as a way of apologizing for his next idea. He noticed that Francis hadn’t touched his croque-monsieur. The young inspector was finishing up his basic retouches on the various photos in the file. He was bent over the screen, lips parted, using the “stamp” tool.
“You’ll have better luck with the healing brush or the patch. And also, don’t make yourself too crazy. I don’t need you to give me a work of art,” fibbed Mallock, who couldn’t abide botched work.
“I know you, and I don’t want to have to start over.”
Bob, for his part, had crammed the rest of his sandwich into his mouth so he could attack the ice cream before it melted. “Thanks for the snack, guv.”
“One last thing. It’s not how I usually do things, but RG has brought my attention to the necessity of keeping this information secret. So when we’ve got our five copies with conclusions and everything, have each one of us sign every page. I want a signature on every image and every table. If there’s leak we’ll know which packet it’s from, and the culprit will have to answer to me.”
Deafening silence. Mallock knew he might have gone a bit too far, and that he’d probably expressed himself poorly as well.
“Listen. I trust you all completely, but I’ve given this a lot of thought. This system will protect us as much as it will the investigation. Any copy that turns up in broad daylight and isn’t signed by the Fort will exonerate us de facto. I’ll sign my own personal copy too. Other people have been able to maintain the embargo and it’s out of the question for one of us to fuck it up by being irresponsible.”
Bob, Ken, and Francis had all begun crunching quietly on their Eskimo Pies. The sight was comical.
“So . . . you can cram your sensitivity up your own asses, okay?” Mallock tossed the words off as he stalked out of the room, not sure exactly who he was angry at—his men or Dublin, who had put him in this situation. No—it was himself he was furious with, and he didn’t quite know how to handle it.
“Goddammit,” grumbled Bob. His Eskimo Pie, neglected too long, had begun sliding down its stick toward his fist.