Fatale - Jean-Patrick Manchette [37]
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.
A delayed reaction to the death of his business partner and the others, and to the mad situation in which he found himself, sparked a sudden surge of emotion in him. He was bathed in sweat. He halted, panting. Mechanically, he rubbed his left arm, where a kind of muscle pain was affecting him. Then he set off once more.
Lorque reached the western end of the promontory. A fog was getting up, pierced by the silhouettes of the moving bridges and the machinery and superstructures needed for their operation. In the open area where the twin bridges met the market area, the roadway, slick with moisture, was deserted. Lorque crouched by a wall. To his left he heard a dull thud, which after a moment of thought he identified: someone had just leaped nimbly from the wharf and landed on the deck of a vessel moored parallel to the market hall. Moving with great caution, Lorque made his way along the quay in the direction of the sound, his neck rigid and his mouth half open. His own somewhat labored breathing hindered his ability to hear clearly. From the quay he discerned a figure prone on the deck of a little trawler and another leaning over the first. The leaning figure straightened up. Lorque recognized Commissioner Fellouque. The policeman had a revolver in his hand. Lorque walked along the quay towards him.
“It’s me,” he hissed. “Did you get her?”
He came abreast of the trawler and with difficulty jumped onto the deck himself. Fellouque seemed stricken. The prone body was DiBona’s.
“He’s had it,” said Fellouque. “He wandered over here to take a piss.”
“What an idiot,” said Lorque.
Fellouque asked Lorque how things were. Lorque told him that Aimée had killed all the others. The commissioner found it hard to accept this news. He gazed at DiBona’s corpse and shook his head.
“He suggested to me that we leave you to it,” he said reflectively. “Just before going off for a piss, he suggested that we let you sort it out with her, you and the others. In the meantime, he wanted us to go the baron’s and get the papers, the documents. I said that that was stupid, that she might well make her getaway over a bridge if we didn’t keep watch. Then he suggested that I should guard the bridges while he went to the baron’s for the documents. He said that the two of us would then be masters of Bléville. It was tempting.”
“I bet it was,” said Lorque.
Fellouque nodded.
“Well, it’s a moot point now.” There was a tinge of regret in the commissioner’s tone, and of weariness. “Do you really think she is still around here?” he asked, raising his head.
Lorque opened his mouth to reply. A hawser came looping down from the quay above and settled around the commissioner’s shoulders. Immediately the hawser tautened and the wire noose tightened about the policeman’s neck.
“Oh, no, no!” the man shouted in tones of distress and terror.
Somebody pulled vigorously on the hawser. The commissioner was dragged along, taking a few steps on the trawler’s deck before falling between the boat and the wharf. The tension in the cable arrested his descent halfway, just as his lower legs entered the water, which was streaked with fuel oil and full of trash. The man dropped his revolver and it was swallowed up by the water of the dock. He put both hands to his throat. A gurgling sound escaped from his open mouth. Lorque bent down in a frantic attempt to pull the policeman back up, grasping him under the armpits, but just at that moment the