A Killer's Game

by Luca Tahtieazym

  No.

  On the contrary. The following is the most significant thing I’ve read so far, which came out shortly after the crime was discovered:

  Midi Libre – Wednesday, 12 November 1986

  THE ARTIST IS BEHIND THE MURDER OF CAROLINE BERTHIER

  By B.M.

  The killer known as The Artist, who has been spreading terror throughout France for more than five years, has now been formally identified by the police as the perpetrator of the crime committed in Montpellier on 5 November.

  Last week, the lifeless body of Caroline Berthier was discovered at her home by her mother. Experts within the judicial police examined the premises and quickly concluded that this was an act of homicide.

  Caroline Berthier was attacked in her own home. Her killer stripped her naked, slit her throat in her shower and then dragged her into the living room. He then used a knife to draw a reproduction of the Fontaine des Trois Grâces on her chest and belly. This is one of the most famous monuments in the Place de la Comédie and was built at the end of the eighteenth century.

  This modus operandi perfectly matches that of the killer known as The Artist [. . .]. Since 11 May 1981, The Artist has committed at least five murders across the country. There are no witnesses and investigators have yet to identify a serious suspect.

  Caroline Berthier was a cheerful young woman, very much liked by her neighbours. No one knows why she should have been chosen by the country’s most wanted criminal. It seems that he sets his sights on his prey at random.

  Until now, the inhabitants of the Montpellier region were hoping that this crime might merely be an act of jealousy rather than the actions of a cold-blooded killer prowling around the city [. . .]. One of the detectives in charge of the investigation, however, Jacques Lambert from the Central Directorate of the Judicial Police in Paris, made a full statement to Antenne 2 TV news last night:

  ‘We have had a number of people contacting us claiming to be The Artist. However, we have in our possession several pieces of information that have not been revealed to the press but which are helping us to separate fact from fiction, meaning we have been able to eliminate several suspects from our enquiries. Caroline Berthier was killed by The Artist. We are absolutely sure of that and are hoping to apprehend him as soon as possible.’

  Interior Minister Charles Pasqua yesterday urged citizens to come forward with any information that could help guide the investigation in the right direction . . .

  And why exactly are the police so sure? What is this evidence they’re keeping to themselves and not disclosing to the public? The Artist is not responsible for this: I am The Artist, although if they’re so convinced of it, it’s either because they’re trying to lure me into a trap, or because someone wants me to take the rap.

  Let’s be methodical about this. The possibility that someone might be copying my working methods cannot be ruled out – a great number of details concerning my previous crimes have been revealed in the press. But who could it be? Who would be capable of copying my modus operandi to the point of deceiving the police? An admirer? Someone who might see me as an opponent? Someone who’s envious of me or who idolises my own little crime wave?

  Why didn’t this imposter come up with his own way of doing things then? I know there are other people out there with a similar nature to mine, and who, like me, operate in complete anonymity. Is it possible that one of them could be laying down the gauntlet by copying my precise methodology?

  If so, I’m interpreting it as provocation rather than a tribute. It remains to be seen whether I’ll be able to engage in such a duel. Under no circumstances will I enter into a competition. I won’t be lining up the corpses to see who cuts the fastest . . . or the best.

  If someone in France has chosen to challenge me in this way, I’ll find him and eliminate him.

  I’d like to know more, but there are few definite conclusions to be drawn from the articles I’ve read. I’m going to have to use my own judgement. For example, I’d like to see the drawing on the victim with my own eyes. I guess they called in an expert to compare this plagiarist’s work with my own compositions.

  First of all, though, I need to make absolutely sure that this isn’t some kind of trick. Making my way to Caroline Berthier’s building, breaking down the door of her apartment, messing around with the seals put in place by the police would be stupid – if it is a trap, the premises will be being monitored, although I do have other leads at my disposal that might help me uncover a clue.

  I’m not totally ruling out an ambush, but I’m always smart and careful. It’s the best combination, I find. My first initiative was to contact Jean-Paul and ask him to serve as my guide. I fed him a whole load of rubbish to make him believe that I wanted to develop my business in Montpellier. He agreed to meet me there and to introduce me to two high-profile local businessmen. The first one runs a luxury biscuit factory and is looking to expand his distribution. The second one makes scented soaps. Neither of them interests me in the slightest, but I now have a pretext to be mooching around Occitanie. I’ve made it clear that if I sign up these suppliers, I will transfer part of my commission to Jean-Paul for twelve months.

  I meet with Jean-Paul near the Comédie, in a restaurant he recommended. My old comrade in arms has booked a table in a quiet corner and we enjoy a pleasant lunch together. I haven’t seen him for ten years and now I’ve seen him twice over the last couple of weeks.

  He orders the sole meunière with a delightful straw-coloured vintage Chablis, while I have duck breast roasted in honey. I order a bottle of Gigondas and am quite cross with myself for doing so: I need to stay sharp and alert. I’ll only drink a couple of glasses. Control is key. I must remain on guard under all circumstances and anything that could reduce my vigilance must be avoided.

  After the meal, Jean-Paul takes me to the biscuit factory. It physically pains me to try to look interested in the business manager’s pitch, but I succeed with a series of affirmative nods. It’s my job to court people using great eloquence, but it’s not necessary on this occasion. This man likes the sound of his own voice; he doesn’t converse, he holds forth. It must be pretty obvious that I have little interest in him or his product because I’m staring blankly out the window behind him. I just have to hope he doesn’t notice.

  We leave after a seemingly endless hour. I take my pulse to make sure he didn’t actually bore me to death. There’s a faint beat – a few more minutes and I reckon I’d have been in a coma.

  On the Comédie, nothing much has changed since my last visit. We cross the square and stop in front of the Fontaine des Trois Grâces. It’s stunning. As always, I find myself astounded by the beauty of a true work of art. We artists see things with a third eye and time stands still for a moment as I gaze at the monument as if in a dream. It’s magnificent, but soon I remember that it’s only a resin casting and then the magic fades. The original sculpture by Étienne Dantoine is now in the entrance hall to the Opéra. The copy in front of me is sumptuous, but it’s a fake. I’m not seduced.

  A copy, yes. Just like the murder of Caroline Berthier.

  ‘You’ll never guess what that lunatic drew on the body of the girl he killed . . .’

  Jean-Paul’s voice brings me back to earth, and I come down with a pretty dizzying bump, believe me . . .

  ‘What?’

  ‘This. The Trois Grâces. That’s what The Artist carved into the girl with his knife.’

  ‘Is that so?’

  ‘Didn’t you know that?’

  ‘I don’t . . .’

  ‘Didn’t you know? It’s all over the headlines . . .’

  ‘Yes, yes . . . I must have read it.’

  Jean-Paul kicks a pebble in front of him and then moves forward and picks it up again. ‘And to think I was here when he killed her . . . You know I was here when it happened, right?’

  I’m anxious and can’t find a way to steer the conversation. We continue our walk before going back to our hotel to take
a shower and change. This hotel is a mere stone’s throw from the street in which Caroline Berthier lived.

  We head out again a little while later. It’s dark now and has been for a couple of hours. We leave on foot and have dinner in a nearby restaurant. Pan-fried foie gras for both of us and a bottle of 1972 Pauillac to wash it down. I pay for the meal and ask Jean-Paul if he’d like to join me for a drink elsewhere.

  ‘You know any good bars?’ he asks me.

  ‘No.’

  ‘We could hail a taxi and ask the driver to take us somewhere nice.’

  ‘Why don’t we just find a bar near the hotel?’

  ‘Near the hotel? If you like. But if you don’t have a specific address in mind, we might be going around in circles for a while.’

  ‘It’s mild out and I feel like walking a little. Is that all right with you?’

  Jean-Paul agrees out of politeness. I know he’d much rather rely on the locals than on some random discovery, but I have one aim only in mind: to immerse myself in the atmosphere of the neighbourhood in which I’m supposed to have operated. Chatting with local bartenders could tell me so much more than I know already.

  We stroll along a few pedestrianised streets and I see a small sign with the name of the road on which Caroline Berthier lived. A bright sign displaying a well-known beer catches my eye and I point it out to Jean-Paul. He’s a little reluctant when he sees that it’s rather a rough little bar, but he follows me in.

  I order a bottle of champagne and the manager serves me some sort of disgusting dishwater in a bottle that I think I’m supposed to mistake for the real thing. He’s clearly not used to purveying pure pleasure.

  I invite three young women to join us. They think we’re sad old bastards, of course, but our designer clothing and the presence of champagne convince them to stay, especially as they’ve clearly been on the beer all night.

  I want to talk without Jean-Paul listening in, so I gently pull the youngest woman off to the side and give Jean-Paul a knowing wink. Her name is Isabelle. We sit a little way off, on a couple of stools marked with cigarette burns.

  She’s nattering on with some nonsense or other.

  Isabelle is vulgar and common. Her lipstick is too bright and under her ponytail her neck is a dirty grey. I respond to her enthusiasm with a forced smile and have no trouble in directing the conversation where I want it to go. The murder of Caroline Berthier is the hot topic around here. I quickly learn that Isabelle doesn’t know much about the victim, but she assures me that Marianne, one of the young women standing with Jean-Paul at the bar, knows one of Caroline’s neighbours. That comes as no surprise. The murder monopolises a heck of a lot of conversation these days, and everyone knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who knew the deceased.

  I bring the chit-chat to an end and we head back to the other three. I have a little trouble getting Marianne’s attention, but manage it in the end. I invite her, rather clumsily, to come for a private chat. Jean-Paul raises his eyebrows at me. His meaning is clear: ‘If you don’t like this one, don’t even think about coming back and stealing the third.’

  Marianne is a lot less talkative than her friend. It takes about ten minutes to worm it out of her. Some people are just so bland. She does know a woman who lives in the victim’s building. The whole neighbourhood is talking about the death of Caroline Berthier. It’s rumoured that there are no serious leads. Several homeless people have been interviewed. Dozens of officers have been scouring the area to gather statements and anything else that might help them. It seems they’ve been doing their jobs properly then.

  I get a few more snippets of information from the barman and all in all, what I learn here tonight confirms what I already know. If it were a trap set by the police to force me out into the open, none of these people would have been involved.

  We leave the establishment in the middle of the night. Jean-Paul is drunk. On the way back to our hotel, he has no control over his volume level. He shouts out overexcited insults at passers-by. I don’t like people who lose control of themselves. Generally speaking, people who’ve lost composure make me sick. You might find it odd that I’m offended by such nonsense, but that’s just the way it is.

  Tomorrow, we’ll leave each other to our own devices. He’ll head back to Lyon. I’ll go back to Nice, but only stay a couple of days and then I intend to go to Paris. If I want to gauge the threat correctly, I need to find out what the police know about the murder I didn’t commit.

  I’m impatient. There are so many grey areas here and if I want to master all the ins and outs of this case, I’m going to have to take a few risks, though I really don’t fancy the idea of exposing myself.

  All my trip here has taught me is that Caroline Berthier was killed by The Artist.

  Except that The Artist is me.

  8.

  Wednesday, 10 December 1986

  I’m The Artist, not the ‘other one’, and I intend to get to the bottom of this conundrum.

  The soft glow of the streetlights is reflected on the frosted windscreens of cars lined up along the edge of the pavement. I imagine myself as pale as the moon. My nose is running, which is irritating, and it’s cold. I shiver at the very thought of the task that awaits me in such conditions.

  I love Paris. Every time I come to the capital for a few days, my time here is memorable. You’ll never convince me that Paris is not the place to be. It’s here that we drink the most exceptional wines, savour the most refined dishes and meet the most beautiful women, and I’m just fine with all three of those. The whole of Paris sparkles and everything that sparkles thrills my senses. I’m a unique species of butterfly that feeds on light without burning its wings. I enjoy Paris both day and night . . .

  Everyone likes the tawdry side of life, but few admit it. I, on the other hand, have no desire to deny myself pleasure. I have money and I have taste and that, believe me, is a happy union indeed. Those who embrace their true nature always win.

  I need to find out what the police know. There’s a murderer somewhere out there who’s copying me. Two questions: is he doing this on purpose and who is he? If the answer to the first one is negative, the second one will no longer be of any concern to me.

  Let me tell you something that might surprise you. I sometimes refer to this copycat as a murderer, and sometimes as an assassin. Whatever. He’s a killer. There are subtle differences between these words, but it makes little difference to me. We call someone an assassin when the act is premeditated, unlike a murderer who may kill on a whim. A homicide is not necessarily intentional and it’s not always a crime.

  I use all these terms as I see fit and without much distinction. I assume that the true nature of a person is an obscure broth of emotions and that what is bubbling away under the surface is not easy to read. No one can ever know if a murder was or wasn’t planned long before it occurred.

  I’m a killer, an assassin, a murderer, a criminal. A true agent of horror, although I don’t tend to define myself thus, because, above all, I’m an artist.

  As usual, I need a pretext to justify my presence away from home. Lesson number one, two and three of the killer’s code: always prepare a concrete alibi, keep up appearances. I’ve made a few business appointments – not many, one or two meetings a day, for a week or so, just enough to ensure that, should a major event arise, any suspicion that might fall on me would be scattered to the four winds like the leaves of a plane tree in autumn.

  I will try to get close to the investigators working on the Montpellier case. There’s a team down there that’s busy collecting evidence from the field, but everything else is centralised here in Paris, and my case requires national attention. This is one of the first times in my life that I’m going in blind. I have no precise plan. I hate that. I’m paranoid. I’m a stickler for organisation, but now I’m diving in with both eyes squeezed tight. It’s true that any man taking the same sort of risks as me ought to be able to improvise, but that’s no reason not to have a b
ackup plan. I know I can’t always come out squeaky clean, but to limit my chances of being caught, I calculate everything. So I’m now in the capital with the outrageous idea of infiltrating the inner circle of the law to look for any clues of interest and then disappear without a trace. It’s vain, pretentious and doomed to failure.

  And how do I plan to do this exactly? Well, I don’t really know. I’m counting on sheer luck. That’s what I’m reduced to.

  I’ve rented a nice room in the hotel where I always stay when I’m in Paris. The establishment is located in the 4th arrondissement, overlooking the Seine, in the Marais. I am not far from Ile de la Cité, where the police prefecture is located.

  I’ve tried to find out who’s in charge of my case at 36 Quai des Orfèvres. That’s a hard one. For lack of a better choice, I focus on the famous Jacques Lambert. He’s given interviews to the press and I deduce that even if he’s not the head of the unit, he must have an important role.

  This is presumptuous to say the least. I know that vanity is one of my main flaws, but what do you expect me to do? I’m not going to sit back quietly and just wait to be apprehended. I’m going to become friends with Jacques Lambert, and then he’ll tell me what he knows. It may not come off, but I have nothing to lose so long as I remain vigilant.

  Yes, it’s ridiculous and this reckless plan is not me. I’ve just spent two sleepless nights thinking over all the various ways I could go about this, but there’s nothing. So, faced with no other choice, I’m going to try to intrude into the private lives of the police. I will act with caution, but there’s no other way around it.

  On my way up to Paris, I stopped off in Lyon to buy a wig. Not one of those low-quality counterfeits – a real wig that cost two months of your average worker’s salary, carefully crafted by people like me, namely artists.