Fatale - Jean-Patrick Manchette [33]
Aimée followed the commissioner, who made for the door. They emerged onto the sidewalk across from the port and braved the damp cold of the night. Fellouque set off towards the bridges and the inner docks.
“Why did you decide to turn yourself in?” he asked.
“I can’t do it anymore,” said Aimée. “And this time I can take down half a dozen of the real assholes with me.”
They crossed the tracks of the railroad that runs the length of the port and started over a bridge. They were headed towards the fish market. This is located, remember, on a sort of promontory flanked by two docking basins, and the pair of moving bridges are attached to the promontory’s tip, so that this kind of peninsula constitutes an area accessible from two directions, either across the bridges or, at the other, eastern end, from the mainland of France. Dimmed streetlamps bathed everything in an orange-tinted or perhaps rather a deep coppery light. Aimée spotted DiBona’s WSK motorbike in a dark corner in the vicinity of the market. But she did not notice the tobacco-colored Mercedes of the fat Lorque parked in the dirty roadway that runs alongside the market hall, nor the blond Sonia Lorque sitting stiff and tense inside the car. Aimée and Fellouque entered the market precinct.
“Is the magistrate somewhere in here?” asked Aimée.
“What?” responded Fellouque. “Oh, yes, yes...”
He veered towards a warehouse. He and Aimée went inside through an open wicket in a vast door on runners. They were in darkness. Fellouque took Aimée’s elbow.
“This way,” he murmured. “Careful, there are steps.”
They climbed a wooden staircase in the obscurity and emerged into a glassed-in room not unlike a harbor-master’s lookout or an airport control tower. Outside, dimmed streetlights were visible on every side, and, much brighter, the dazzling white glare of floodlights set up here and there along the wharves beyond the docking basins. In the shadows of the glassed-in room several people were standing, at least seven or eight. Behind Aimée, Commissioner Fellouque closed and bolted the door at the head of the stairs.
“Don’t put the lights on,” said Lorque’s voice, “or we’ll be in a fishbowl here.”
“Yes, I mean no, okay,” said Fellouque.
Aimée took two or three steps into the glassed-in room. She was half smiling, disdainful and weary.
“I was rather expecting this,” she remarked in a low voice. The others remained silent. In the yellowish half-light they exchanged embarrassed glances. Commissioner Fellouque was leaning against the bolted door with a detached expression. “It didn’t take you long to get together,” said Aimée.
“I have a telephone in my car,” said Lorque. He took a step towards Aimée. He drew his palm across his cheek, the gesture making no sound and thus showing that he had shaved a second time that evening. “You had a pretty good plan. Risky, though. We could easily have spoken to one another and found out that several of us were paying you off. There’s a tidy sum waiting for you at the station.”
“Two hundred thousand francs.”
“Only a hundred and eighty thousand. Our good friend the doctor here got cold feet at the last minute.”
“I have nothing to do with all this,” declared Sinistrat in a high-pitched, quavering voice. “I tried to telephone at one o’clock in the morning to tell you, but there was no answer. I’m not going along anymore. The baron has nothing—he didn’t have anything against me, in any case.”
“But you were in a blue funk, weren’t you, Sinistrat, when you opened that envelope?” came a loud voice that probably belonged to senior manager Moutet.
“It was about an abortion,” said Sinistrat. “I don’t care if it comes out. In fact I’m proud of it.”
“There must be some inconvenient facts in there,” grumbled Lorque. “Medical complications, or money matters. Because it’s true, you were in a funk, my dear doctor. And you still are. But that’s not the point. The baron is dead because we ordered him killed. We are all in this mess