On a plate was a huge slice of galette and, on top of it, a gold cardboard crown. The day before yesterday, with the arrest of the little priest, he had missed Epiphany. Yesterday, same story; he had spent the day at the Crillon with Tom and Angelina. That made two days now that he hadn’t held to tradition. On Friday night, before the weekend, the whole Fort had gathered without him to share the traditional cake and drink the champagne that ritually waters these occasions. His team knew he wasn’t overly fond of these get-togethers, which he generally referred to as “bloody stupid,” But Julie Gemoni also knew her Amédée and his special affection for frangipane. The added detail of the crown on top—well, that was Ken all over.
The telephone rang. His mouth full, it took Mallock a moment to answer it. It was the Secretary of the Interior.
“The two federal agents you met yesterday just left my office. I’ve been aware of the situation for several days now, but I was just given the details. Let’s not beat around the bush; our backs are to the wall.”
“I’m well aware of that,” said Mallock carefully, just as he bit down on a tiny figure of a hedgehog dressed like Santa Claus.
“I don’t need to tell you that I have every confidence in you, but we’re in really bad shape. With the regional elections coming up it’s going to become an issue, and . . . ”
“I know, I know. Rest assured, I have no intention of failing.”
Mallock didn’t want to hear any political talk. It, and bathroom-related stories, made him very uncomfortable when he was trying to eat.
“That’s exactly what I wanted to hear. What can I do to help you from my end? Don’t scrimp on men. Every single lead has to be investigated, without fail, for each murder. Do you remember the Yorkshire Ripper in England? They focused on his accent, and—”
“Don’t worry, I know my job. But if you can keep the media’s attack dogs away from me it would be beyond helpful.”
“Journalists aren’t my specialty. I’m one of their favorite targets myself. I can only assure you of all my sympathy and moral support. A fat lot of good that does you, I know.”
The secretary had a sense of humor, which was something, at least. Mallock smiled silently, waiting for him to continue.
“Seriously, and this is no empty promise, if you need anything, or if anyone bothers you, call me and I’ll try to clear the way for you. If anyone can get us out of this mess, it’s you. I’ll talk to you soon, and good luck.”
A bit dazed, Mallock continued nibbling carefully on his slice of cake—which was the right thing to do, because shortly, with a slight crunch, he extracted a second charm from his mouth, this one a tiny dinosaur wearing a Scottish kilt! He dropped it on the edge of his plate next to the hedgehog. Then he set to work writing up an assessment of the situation, an initial summary. But he didn’t get very far with it before he was interrupted.
Ken’s head popped around the door. “Should I come back tomorrow?”
“No, relax. We won’t be back on the hunt until Monday anyway, and you’re going to need all your strength. You haven’t stopped going for ten days now.”
Without needing to be asked twice, Ken was executing a perfect military about-face when Mallock stopped him.
“Hey! It’s still Saturday, and it’s only eleven A.M. You weren’t planning on leaving this early, were you?”
“Well, actually, yes, given my thousand and one overtime hours in hell. But since I don’t want to seem like I’m disobeying my superintendent, I’ll go sit in my little office, have a nice little cup of coffee, and accept your orders.”
“No, get out of here. You’re of no use to anyone anyway,” Mallock teased him.
“How true,” Ken agreed, smiling. “Thanks, Chief. You should try to relax a bit yourself.”
Just before leaving, he turned around again. “Hey, what’s this? You haven’t put on your beautiful crown, Your Majesty!”
Mallock threw the crumpled crown at him, which hit the door as Ken yanked it quickly shut behind him. Still smiling, he stood to pick it up. He would have to decide on Monday: bring his team into the loop, or keep the secret. He tried to weigh the pros and cons. Fifteen minutes later, he was forced to acknowledge that there was no ideal solution. This was exactly where the real art of decision-making came into play, of knowing how to accept a choice and deal with its negative aspects. For once, he decided to put his final decision off until later. He wanted to wait and hear what Marvin would tell him tomorrow.
Amélie’s condition tormented him and occupied a huge part of his mind. At two o’clock he made up his mind, got into his car, and drove straight through the crowd of journalists without stopping. His old Jaguar, which had previously belonged to a Chechen mafioso, was equipped with an ultra-powerful engine, puncture-proof tires, and an armored chassis. It had to weigh at least five tons. He surprised himself by hoping he had run over a foot or two in his escape.
He was out of the media’s reach in a very short time.
The smile that the thought of flattened toes had brought to his face faded away quickly. The closer he got to Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, the more his heart tightened in his chest. When he parked, he noticed that his hands, which were always dry and warm, were now damp and icy-cold. Shaking. In the elevator he found it hard to breathe. He felt as if he were suffocating. When he got to intensive care it took all his courage to ask for news of Amélie.
The extern looked at him like he was an idiot. “Maurel? You’re sure? No, we don’t have anyone with that name here,” he affirmed.
Mallock was speechless for ten seconds, then persisted. “She might have been moved to another department.”
“Maybe,” said White-coat, in a tone meant to be reassuring.
“Maybe you could have a look?” Mallock asked.
“Maybe,” the man repeated, smirking.
Mallock exploded, and the extern feared briefly for his life. Five minutes later, almost completely calm, Amédée knocked on the door of an old room, one that Professor Ménard had turned into an office so he could be closer to his patients.
He ushered Amédée in and reassured him:
“I believe she’s out of the most critical phase,” he said to Mallock, who almost cried with gratitude. “I attempted to assess her level of consciousness as soon as I could. But we have to be careful, and wait to be completely sure that the various sedatives have had time to be metabolized.”
“Your intern told me about your initial results. Frankly, it wasn’t very encouraging.”
“You know, Superintendent, nothing is simple or definite in medicine, apart from the patient’s will to get better, and the doctor’s desire to help that happen. And even then, it’s not always clear-cut. They say sometimes that medicine consists of helping a sick person be patient while nature does its healing work, and that’s not entirely untrue. The physiopathology of coma is one of the most complex things in our field. The lack of alertness may, in this case, result from both visible traumatic causes and the psychological effects of mental trauma, which are closely intertwined. There’s only one thing that will help us get a clearer idea of what’s going on here, and it’s not easy. We just have to wait.”
Mallock thanked him for his directness, and for a humility that high-level clinicians rarely possessed. Then he asked if he could see Amélie. The extern, still in shock from the telling off he had received, escorted him to her room and obsequiously opened the door for him.
Inside, an affecting scene greeted him. Still unconscious but breathing without the help of a ventilator, Amélie was lying in bed. A teenage boy bent carefully over her prone body appeared to be praying. When Mallock coughed discreetly to announce his presence, the young man turned to him with tears streaming down his face. Amédée was struck by the boy’s beauty. It was her neighbor, the pharmacist’s son, and one of Amélie’s very first clients. She had taken care of him since he was very small. Between sobs the boy confided in Mallock, as if the older man had the power to console him.
“She moved into our building right after she passed her exams. She was twenty years old, and I was three or four. She was so nice, and she smelled so good. I really think I fell a little bit in love with her . . . or maybe a lot.” The last confession made the boy smile.
“Isn’t your mother here with you?”
“She was supposed to come instead and see if there was any news, but she had a problem at the pharmacy at the last minute, so she gave me the flowers—and here I am.”
“Want a ride home?”
The pharmacist’s son nodded silently. When you were his age, the first significant loss of someone in your life was hard to bear. But Amélie seemed to be through the worst now, and there was hope. Mallock shared this news with the boy. As they drove back, the young apprentice pharmacist talked about nothing but Amélie. She had babysat him often when he was younger. She had always been so attentive to him. She wore such pretty dresses. She . . .
Mallock was only half-listening. He savored the feeling of euphoria coursing through him. Even if not tomorrow, Amélie was going to live, and they could go back to seeing each other, to their lunches and their budding love affair. Amélie was alive, and so life would resume again. When he dropped the boy off in front of the pharmacy, the latter asked:
“Would you keep us updated, please?”
Mallock promised that he would. “What’s your phone number?”
The boy fought back fresh tears. “The same as Mademoiselle Maurel’s, with an eleven instead of a ten at the end. We used to get her phone calls all the time, and she’d get ours.”
Mallock was preparing to head straight back to the office when Julie popped up in front of him.
“Peekaboo, Superintendent!”
“What brings you here? Nothing serious, I hope.”
“Nope! We have something for you.”
Jules came up behind her. “It’s really hard to find a parking place in your neighborhood, boss.”
Remembering the presence of the building manager’s son, Amédée turned around to introduce him—and abruptly realized that he didn’t remember the boy’s first name. It was one of his special talents, which he called patronymic amnesia.
Julie, quick on the uptake as always, introduced herself first, which would force the young man to give his name. “I’m Julie Gemoni, chief lieutenant, and a friend of the superintendent.”
“Didier Dôthem,” offered the boy, making it possible for Mallock to jump in.
“Didier is my pharmacist’s son,” he said.
“Then he must know you very well indeed,” teased Julie gently.
All four of them laughed heartily. Didier seemed transfixed by Julie; he gaped at her as if she were a holy apparition. She was used to making conquests, though, and pretended not to notice.
“Can we sit out here on the terrace for a minute, boss?”
“Of course. See you soon, Didier. I’ll keep you posted about Amél—Mademoiselle Maurel.”
Didier said good-bye to them and went into the pharmacy.
“Three beers!” called Jules.
Women don’t like beer, as a rule—but Julie did.
“What can I do for you, my little ones?”
“Oh, it isn’t what you can do for us; it’s what we can do for you.” Julie took an object wrapped in tissue paper out of her purse. It was a large dark-green gorilla, made out of some delicately woven material. It was a superb piece of work, and Amédée adored it immediately.
“When Jules and I saw it, we knew you absolutely had to have it.”
“It looks like me, is that it?” asked Mallock, smiling.
“Let’s just say it made us think of you,” said Jules. “Do you like it?”
“I love it. Really. But you must have broken the bank. It’s incredibly sweet of you, but why give it to me here?”
“Er . . . well, we weren’t quite flush enough to buy something for everyone. So since we didn’t want to make anyone jealous, we picked you. Thought we might as well suck up a little.”
“I knew it!”
Mallock was touched by their kindness. Jules and Julie sensed his emotion, and hurried to lighten the mood.
“Come on, let’s get out of here. If we’re late to the office our grouch of a superintendent will yell at us again.”
“You’re not wrong. I know him, and he’s completely pitiless. Hurry up; I’m sure he’ll be there soon.”
They all laughed again, and headed to their own cars to return to Number 36
The rest of the day was devoted to everything Mallock had shoved aside since the beginning of the case. He worked with another group, which he called his nursery, and he was pleased to find them motivated and conscientious—or maybe it was just his good mood making him see the world through rose-colored glasses.
When he got home at around eleven o’clock that night, the sky was a light chestnut color and the air had a sharp, peppery quality. In the square next to his apartment building, lit and warmed by tall outdoor lamps, people were dining outside. Mallock realized he was hungry—and that he couldn’t be bothered to cook anything.
He went home and put the Beatles’ third anthology on the CD player. Yesterday he would have liked to ask Marvin for more details about the Fab Four’s first visit to the United States, but it wasn’t the right time. He tore a large hunk off a baguette and took one of his homemade goose-liver terrines out of the fridge. No diet tonight, he told himself firmly.
The Beatles had been a big part of his life in the past, and they always would be in the future.
Amédée’s passion for the Beatles had really begun in 1965. He’d been a teenager living deep in the countryside, an hour outside of Caen. His father, Ferdinand, had rented land owned by his brother Aristide. Born in Béarn in 1930, Amédée’s father lived his life as if it were an ordeal, an obstacle course that he already knew he would fail. He wasn’t a cowardly man, but every day he woke up defeated, and every night he went to bed aching. Well—that wasn’t entirely true. Ferdinand did have his triumphant mornings. Sometimes they even lasted a whole week. At these times he was full of projects and optimism. Too much, even, because he tended to spend “willy-nilly,” as his brother warned him. A new tractor, the latest combine harvester, or new show chickens: Mille Fleur and Pekin Bantams, Dark Indian Games, Sebrights, Dwarf Marans . . .
Later the sickness that ate away at Ferdinand would be given a name: manic depression. People with his symptoms would be diagnosed as bipolar, but it came too late. After failing to make a profit from his own land, located between the two big “B”s, Bayonne and Biarritz, Ferdinand had decided to join his brother Aristide Mallock, nicknamed Aristote, who had established himself successfully in Normandy.
Amédée was ten years old when he discovered Calvados. Everything was gray and muddy in Normandy, even the sun. Just a huge, confusing stretch of plain, full of wheat that surrounded everything. Sometimes there were glorious sunsets, so beautiful they were nauseating. They lacked the weighty power of the southwestern skies, in which you could still see God’s Nabist brushstrokes.
In 1966, Mallock received two hits from a revolver. The first shot was fired by his mother, right after she tried to hang herself. Amédée had found her in time and held her legs up for more than an hour before his father came to the rescue. Marie, born with the maiden name of Ferré on February 29th, 1932, in a small port town in Brittany, promised she would never do it again. Two weeks later, on her birthday, she’d blown her brains out with her grandfather’s old ordnance revolver. In fact it hadn’t exactly been her birthday. Since that year wasn’t a leap year, she didn’t even have one.
It was in the morbid and tragic aftermath of this that the second revolver shot came.
For his thirteenth birthday on June fourteenth, Aristote had come over for lunch. He had brought two things with him: a Grundig pickup radio for his younger brother, whose birthday was June twenty-first, and a record of modern music for his nephew Amédée. The cover was a curious mixture of photos and drawings. The group was called the Beatles, and the album was . . . Revolver. Mallock would learn later, of course, that the title had nothing to do with the weapon. Paul had wanted to play on the word’s double meaning in English, a mystical meaning connected to the motion of the earth, to karma, and everything that was just starting to emerge then and would later become the New Age movement—and a second, much more concrete meaning: the spinning of the record itself.
What could you say about this music? That it tore down the dark and dusty curtains smothering his childhood? That it opened the doors to rooms full of mirrors and rain? The best way to put it might be that it woke Amédée up, bogged down as he was in the Norman moors of his adolescence. Like a wild buffalo deciding to live, he dragged himself out by pulling on the music as if it were so many life-saving ropes. The essence of the sounds, the sense of vibration—all of it, from the shocking flatness of the bass drum to the blaring sharpness of the brass—all of this said life.
Amédée needed it. Desperately.
Three months after Marie Mallock’s death, Amédée’s father was institutionalized. Aristote, that kindly misanthrope, knew his duty. He took the boy into his home. Saint-Aubin was a small village by the sea. Though devastated and lost, Amédée put on a brave face. Pride, and the desire not to be a burden on someone else, made him keep his troubles to himself. It was a kind of reserve and unwavering dignity that would stay with him always.
In the face of so much sadness and loss, “What’s the point?”s and “Why me?”s could easily have won out over his good nature. It’s hard to stay standing, to stay upright, when the ground falls out from under your feet.
Luckily there was the sea. She and Amédée had an immediate connection. They shared the same gentleness, the same quick temper. They were both mercurial but generous; quiet but full of stories.
Every evening after he came home from school on the bus from Caen, the young Mallock headed directly for the seawall, often stopping at his best friend’s house on the Rue Aumont. On the beach he would take off his socks and clunky shoes to bury his toes in the sand, and gaze out at the soothing horizontal line of the horizon. Contact was made.
Then Amédée would tell the waves about his day.
The days and nights passed in this way. Convalescing by the sea, Amédée healed gradually from the wound of his mother’s death. With his father it was more complicated, and more painful. Every visit to Ferdinand ripped off the scabs, and the boy’s heart would start bleeding all over again. He wished for many things, including, one day, his father’s death.
He was still wishing for it.
Aristide Mallock was what you might call a man of few words, but he had a good heart, and though he never told his nephew as much, he had a great deal of compassion for Amédée. It was a feeling that turned bit by bit into friendship and then affection, encouraged by the young man’s proud and responsible attitude—in which the uncle, never having had children of his own, saw something of himself. It even made him smile sometimes: watching his nephew be confronted by the indifference and nastiness of wealthy classmates or muscle-bound bullies, poor people who were scornful because they were less poor, and poor people who were violent because they were more poor. Right before Aristide’s eyes it turned Amédée into a younger version of him—a kindly misanthrope.
At the end of June 1967, to reward Amédée for finishing the school year with teacher commendations and a spot on the honor roll, Aristote brought back from London a kind of blazing sun, a colorful and dazzling thing: Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
This new Beatles album was like the crashing of a giant gong all over the world, exhorting the earth to wake up and sing, to look at the beauty and brilliance of things, to rediscover color after decades of gray. Paul, at the peak of his creativity, had converted George and then John and Ringo, and the whole world after them.
Mallock would always be grateful to them, because he had been one of those millions of people whose lives had been changed forever.
For dessert, Amédée put together an omelette au rhum. He blended whipped egg whites with three yolks he had beaten together with powdered sugar until pale. After tasting his foie gras, he ignited the omelette. Despite his fatigue, the eternal gourmet in him had won out again.
Just before going to bed he swallowed a sugar cube onto which he had squeezed a few drops of one of his magic potions. Lying down, he calmly allowed thoughts of the Makeup Artist to overcome him, closed his eyes, and went off to his meeting.
Seven times he woke up, body drenched in sweat and head throbbing with migraine. Seven times he went back into enemy territory. The insanity of others, as terrible as it is, lives somewhere deep inside all of us, in one of those secret rooms that we never open except in the presence of evil, or an ill wind. That night, once again, Mallock accepted the risk that his madness would awaken and take him where both his parents had gone.
This oppressive legacy only made the courage he showed at times like this more admirable.
But, ill-prepared and driven more by impatience than strategy, he didn’t bring back much from this particular voyage. A few sensations of terror, smells and visions of thick walls, much too high, covered in brambles and bright scarlet vomit. A bunch of large red puddles at the bottom of a valley, held down by big carpet nails. In his dream, Mallock managed to rip out one of the nails. Imprisoned in one of these pools was the ethereal body of the little girl with blonde braids, which then rose up into the sky, while the Makeup Artist howled with rage as he watched one of the pieces in his collection get away from him.
It was a sad victory.