Fatale - Jean-Patrick Manchette [10]
“I won’t let you touch me then,” said Aimée.
“That’s a good one,” observed Lorque.
“Pay no attention to him,” said the woman who was with the two men. “He loves to play the gangster.”
“My wife,” declared Lorque without turning his head.
Lenverguez looked around and shook his head.
“Where has mine gone?” he asked vaguely. He had a lisp and spoke rarely. He went off grumbling in search of the pale-eyed blonde, but she was no longer in the room. Nor, for that matter, was Dr. Sinistrat.
“Ah! Monseigneur!” cried Lorque suddenly.
Spreading his arms, he almost jostled Aimée in his haste to get to the entrance door, where a bishop had just appeared along with a young priest, both in business suits.
“He is a little bit nutty,” observed Mme Lorque, smiling and following her husband with her eyes. “Do you play bridge, Madame Joubert?”
Christiane Moutet broke in to explain that she had already asked that question. Everyone burst out laughing. Everyone chattered. Sonia Lorque was affable, blonde, excessively thin, excessively tanned. Her white knitted dress set off her tan and her well-maintained body. She was a good twenty-five years younger than Lorque. One sensed that she took very good care of herself. Physically, she was like an aging starlet seeking desperately to preserve her beauty capital. That being said, she seemed neither highly strung nor stupid. She and Christiane Moutet invited Aimée to play bridge one day soon at the Moutets. Aimée accepted, then asked where she might powder her nose. They told her. She left the reception room and went up the grand staircase to the second floor. She was on the qui vive.
On the second floor was a long bronze-green hallway punctuated by white-painted doorways and reproductions of plates from the Encyclopédie of Diderot et al. depicting dock and industrial operations. No sound emerged from behind the white doors. Nor could anything be heard from the ground floor, thanks to the very thick walls and floors.
Near the door to the toilets was a settee with bronze-green upholstery. Aimée sat on it for a moment’s pause. She needed a clear mind to process the information she had just acquired.
But at that instant Baron Jules emerged from the bathroom with his male member in his hand, crossed the corridor, and began to urinate against the wall just below an industrial print.
6
“FUCK! That feels good!” cried the baron once.
He had not seen Aimée, who was sitting motionless on the settee. The urine could be heard continuously battering the wallpaper. A dark puddle was forming on the bronze-green carpet between the two booted legs of this interloper. The man was tall, with a slight paunch, wearing jodhpurs and a brick-colored, roll-neck sweater that was too big for him and darned in several spots. He had a large pink head with a big nose and pale gray eyes and a tangled mass of graying platinum-blond hair. He must have been over fifty. He turned his head and saw Aimée.
“Hell’s bells! A lady!” he remarked.
He turned towards her, still buttoning his fly.
“Let me introduce myself,” he said. “Baron Jules. I must assure you that I am not in the habit of pissing on the floor in the presence of members of the fair sex. All hail beauty!” He shouted the last words. “Respect for the ladies!” He seemed to be calming down. “The fact is,” he went on in a worldly tone, “that I have been holding it in since this morning, when I was released from the psychiatric clinic. I was saving it for the carpet of that fat Lorque, you see what I mean?”
Aimée nodded, nonplussed but hardly bothered.
“You don’t see at all!” exclaimed Baron Jules. “You are a stranger to all this, and young! And very desirable, I might add, even though I prefer a little bit more flesh on the bone.”
“Is that so?” said Aimée.
The baron smiled at