Fatale - Jean-Patrick Manchette [19]
“Commissioner, is something unusual going on?” asked Aimée.
“What do you mean? What do you mean, something unusual?”
“Well, you are the commissioner, and you have taken the trouble to come out here,” said Aimée. “The emergency services could have handled this. But perhaps...” She hesitated. “I saw a baby die in the same kind of way early this afternoon.”
The commissioner rose from the bed, where he had sat down without being invited. He began gesturing with both arms and hunched his head back into his shoulders.
“I don’t want people going crazy and spreading wild rumors!” he cried. “There’s some kind of food poisoning going around, that’s all.” He dropped his arms and suddenly seemed calm and disdainful. “I have another dead person on my hands, the third, and there are a dozen or so people in the hospital, if you must know. I want no panic. You’re not going to get on the phone, I hope?”
“The phone?”
“Yes, yes,” said the commissioner. “You know how you women are amongst yourselves.”
Aimée and the policeman looked wordlessly at each other for a moment. Fellouque seemed suspicious and exasperated. Aimée’s attitude was contemptuous.
“Do you have any canned goods here?” asked the commissioner. The door to the studio, which had been pushed shut, was now opened wide by someone who was simultaneously knocking on it. “Ah, not you!” cried the commissioner. “Get the hell out of here! Leave us be!”
“This is a private residence,” observed the intruder, a small man in his fifties with blue eyes and iron-gray hair as spiky as a bird’s nest. He was wearing a long, beat-up leather jacket. “You have no right to kick me out, Fellouque,” he added, turning to Aimée. “Press, my dear little lady. DiBona, Dépêche de Bléville. Might I speak with you?”
“You can not! You can not!” said Commissioner Fellouque, attempting to bar the fifty-year-old’s way as he moved smiling towards Aimée.
“Lorque and Lenverguez are busy poisoning half the town, my dear madame,” said DiBona. “We have cattle dying too. I must appeal to your public spirit. Don’t tell me you are going to let this cop cover it all up?”
“It’s not about covering anything up!” exclaimed Fellouque. “Malice is leading you astray, DiBona. You are raving.” He turned to Aimée. “He is raving!”
“He wants to cover it up!” insisted DiBona.
“People are waiting for me to play bridge, gentlemen,” said Aimée. “You must excuse me.”
It took her a few minutes to get rid of the two men, but eventually Aimée found herself on her bicycle in the streets of Bléville. Her appointment was at five o’clock at the Moutets, for tea and a rubber of bridge with the couple and Sonia Lorque. She was not quite sure, in point of fact, considering the baby’s death and the other alarms, that the game would take place. But she smiled as she pedaled. She liked crises.
In the end they did play bridge.
“We are completely shattered by this business,” said the voluptuous Christiane Moutet, and indeed she seemed somewhat worried and overwrought. (Her husband was on the telephone in his study down the hallway, and his anxious and disgruntled exclamations could be heard.)
Sonia Lorque arrived one or two minutes after Aimée. The factory owner’s wife also seemed tense and worried. But she was strikingly well turned out. Her eyebrows had been plucked recently, possibly that very afternoon. Her makeup had been applied with the greatest care, as though she had purposely sought to dazzle at this particular moment.
At first everyone agreed that it would be unthinkable to play a game of cards as if everything was normal after the ghastly event of the early afternoon.
“At least we can have a drink,” said senior manager