Jean-Patrick Manchette - Fatale

Lorque was frustrated.

“Rougneux!” he cried in the clear night. “Was that you calling?”

He strained his ears, but no reply came. Lorque was still, his mouth open and his nerves jangled, standing beside his Mercedes. Next to him, the car’s left front window, operated by an electric motor, descended silently. Sonia Lorque leaned over and stuck her head halfway through the opening.

“Give me the revolver,” said her husband. “Give it to me!” he insisted, when she grimaced anxiously.

Her anxiety unallayed, Sonia rooted in the glove compartment and handed the weapon over. It was not a revolver but a little Austrian 4.25-millimeter pearl-handled automatic. Lorque relieved himself of his nutria fur coat, rolled it up, and stuffed it inside the Mercedes before taking the little automatic and putting it in his pocket.

“Close your window,” he ordered. “Don’t budge for any reason whatsoever. If you see her, sound the horn.”

“Please,” begged Sonia. “What are you going to do to her?”

“Close your window,” said Lorque again, impatiently.

He glanced west, towards the sea, to the point where the twin bridges led away from the market area. He saw nothing. The various lamps and floodlights of the port gave a deceptive impression of clarity. Indeed the air seemed almost to be filled with a luminous dust. It was not dark at all in the street or on the waterfront but you could not see more than fifteen meters ahead. The humidity must have had something to do with this haziness. Dr. Sinistrat made a sudden appearance amidst the luminous dust. He was covered in sweat. His lips were quivering.

“Have you f-found her y-yet?” he asked.

Lorque shook his head and set off east. He heard Sinistrat hurrying to catch up with him. The two men walked with short lively steps for thirty meters or so down the dirty roadway. Then they came upon a body stretched out on the sidewalk. It was the realtor Lindquist. Lorque and Sinistrat leaned over him. The realtor was dead. He had no visible injuries. Lorque heard the doctor’s teeth chattering alongside him and caught the smell of sweat coming off him. Sinistrat switched on a flashlight and played its beam over the entrance, a few meters away, to an alley that connected the street to the quayside. He uttered a tense exclamation when he saw Rougneux’s corpse with its throat slit crumpled against the wall at the opening to the alley. Lorque and the doctor hurried over to this second body.

“M-My God!” said Sinistrat. “What did she use to do that?”

“Could have been anything. We’ve been idiots. She really is a killer. We failed to consider that. She is truly dangerous. Put that thing out!”

Sinistrat complied. The moment the light was switched off, the night’s powdery glow seemed more opaque and menacing than ever.

Some fifty meters away, over by the quay, a commotion had broken out because Aimée had just attacked the pharmacist Tobie and her attack had failed in its purpose. The man had taken a notion to open a cold room, thinking, rather idiotically, that Aimée might have hidden there. Coming up behind him, confused by moving shadows, Aimée had bungled an attempted rabbit punch. She had struck too low. Pain flooded the pharmacist’s neck, and he fell flat on his face into a pile of fresh fish. He rolled over amidst the fish, kicking, flailing with his fists, and yelling.

“Help! Help!” he cried. “She’s here!” Absurdly, he was grabbing fish and hurling them at Aimée. “Wa! Wa! Wa!” he screamed in wild terror.

Aimée delivered a toe kick to his chest; he went quiet and lost consciousness; she bent over him and killed him briskly; then she moved off noiselessly towards the western end of the market area.

A minute later Lorque and Sinistrat, proceeding very cautiously, reached the vicinity of the cold room with its half-open door where Tobie lay dead among the fish. They had come to find the source of the commotion and shouting. They poked around for a moment or two, then thought to look inside the cold room and discovered the pharmacist’s body.

“I’ve had it,” declared Sinistrat.

He stood up straight and left at a run.

“Let’s stick together-don’t be a fool,” ordered Lorque, but it was quite useless.

The doctor ran off into the luminescent night and vanished. Lorque withdrew the little Austrian automatic from his pocket and took the safety off. He looked worried but at the same time calm. He went to the middle of the quay and headed east, looking about him frequently. He found Sinistrat lying near a bollard. One of the mooring ropes of a trawler tied up at dockside was wrapped around his neck and had strangled him. As Lorque contemplated the dead man, the rising tide shifted the small fishing boat. The bow of the vessel moved significantly away from the side of the dock. The mooring rope tautened. Sinistrat’s corpse was dragged across the quay, then it toppled over the side and fell into the water between the trawler and the wharf. Lorque heard the dead man’s skull bumping with dull thuds against the hull of the small craft. Sweating slightly with fear, he continued east. After the killer leaped through the window and disappeared, Lorque had taken charge of operations and dispatched men to both ends of the market area. Now, when he reached the eastern end, the place where the kind of peninsula joined the mainland, he found the two individuals whom he had posted there, namely Lenverguez and the engineer Moutet, dead. Panting a little, the fat man with the brownish eyelids turned and set off to walk back the full length of the area in the opposite direction. He kept to the center of the quay and his finger did not leave the trigger.

He proceeded so cautiously that it took Lorque seven or eight minutes to reach his car. His heart sank when he saw no movement inside the vehicle. He hastened his step. A window rolled down and Sonia’s worried countenance appeared. Lorque drew a sigh of relief. His heart was beating wildly in his rib cage.

“You didn’t see anything?” he asked.

“No. Did you find her?”

“No.”

“She has managed to get away then.”

“She had the chance to,” nodded Lorque. “Perhaps she did run away. Perhaps not. Perhaps she is still around here somewhere.”

“I would almost prefer to think she has escaped.”

“Not me,” said Lorque.

“What difference does it make?” said Sonia. “You are fifty-nine. You are an honorable man. You have resources. Maybe you’ll spend two or three years in prison. Maybe less. I know you, and I know you’ll make it. And I’ll be waiting for you. I have money put aside. When you get out we’ll go to the south. We can end our days in Nice or Roquebrune in peace and quiet.”

“No,” replied Lorque furiously. “No, I don’t want to end up like that. I won’t roll over. I’m taking this to the finish and not rolling over.” He handed the little automatic to Sonia. “Take this. If you see her, shoot.”

“You’re crazy!”

“No. She has killed Sinistrat. She has killed Henri. She has… She is absolutely insane and she’s a killer. I have to go and see what is happening at the bridge entrance.”

“She has what? Henri Lenverguez…?” Sonia swallowed hard. Her eyes widened. “That can’t be true, can it?” She shook her head. “I just can’t imagine…I could never shoot her, it’s absurd.”

“Keep that to defend yourself,” said Lorque. “I’m going to the bridge.”

“Wait!” called Sonia. But her husband was already fading into the powdery glow.

As he passed a warehouse, he hesitated, then went over to a heavy door mounted on runners and opened it by sliding it along its rails. He switched on the flashlight, which he had retrieved from next to Sinistrat’s body. Its powerful beam played over piled-up toolboxes and crates. On a rack hung cargo hooks of the sort used by longshoremen, dockhands, and the like. Lorque grabbed one. Raising his coat behind him, he attached the hook to his crocodile-skin belt at the small of his back. He turned the flashlight off and left the warehouse. He set out again for the bridge. The hook altered his gait slightly.