Fatale

15

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.

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 hawser unreeled slightly and Fellouque fell completely into the water. Still gurgling, he clung to the trawler’s hull and tried to clamber back on board. Lorque held a hand out to him. At the same time, the fat man with the brownish eyelids kept looking up in high alarm at the quay, at the place where the other end of the hawser disappeared in the luminous night. But he could see no one.

Grasping Lorque’s hand tightly, Fellouque almost succeeded in getting back onto the fishing boat. But at that instant an electric motor started up noisily somewhere on the quay. The commissioner grasped what was about to happen and screeched in horror. He was done for in any case, for the wire had cut into his neck, and Lorque was aghast to see spurting arterial blood drench the policeman’s throat. The power purchase on the quay was now operating. Its cable and the attached wire tensed. Commissioner Fellouque was hoisted aloft, his feet kicking at the air. When he was dangling three or four meters above the trawler, a hanged man with his throat slit, Fellouque’s feet stilled and Aimée cut the motor of the purchase. On the double, she left the quay and stationed herself in a room inside the fish market, a room with two exits, one to the quay and the other to the dirty roadway where the Mercedes was standing.

In the darkness the young woman was not visible. Had she been visible, she would not have been beautiful to behold; or perhaps she would have been beautiful to behold, depending on one’s taste. She was utterly disheveled. Gummy with sweat, her hair stuck to her skull and fell in damp strands over her brow and the nape of her neck, like the hair of ladies who make love relentlessly for hours at a time. Streaks of coagulated blood varnished her elbows and one side of her head and a whole forearm. Her long wool-knit coat was soiled in places by dust, fuel oil, and fish guts. Her silk blouse was bloodstained, its ribbing slightly torn on one side. Her nose was smudged with dirt. She heard Lorque’s voice.

“Let’s get it over with!” cried the fat man with the brownish eyelids. “I’m the only one left. Tell me where you are. I’m not going to spend all night looking for you.”

By leaning forward a little, Aimée was able, through the door that gave onto the quay, to see Lorque, who had come off the trawler back onto the peninsula and was shouting and wandering about on the concrete with his arms dangling.

“I don’t give a shit,” he cried. “If you don’t tell me where you are, I’m leaving. Perhaps you like playing hide-and-seek. I’ve had it with this. I’m fifty-nine years old. I’m too old to play around. What happens, happens. Screw it! I’m out of here. I’ll spend a few years in prison, big deal!”

He fell silent, waited for a moment, shrugged, and turned on his heel.

“Over here!” shouted Aimée.

Lorque froze. His head twisted this way and that. He was trying to tell where the voice had come from. He massaged his left arm ruefully. He took two or three steps, away from Aimée.

“You’re getting cold!” called Aimée.

Lorque stopped again. Turning around right away, he took three long but hesitant strides.

“Getting warmer!” cried Aimée. She chuckled delightedly.

Lorque headed straight for the doorway through which Aimée was watching his approach. He halted once more on the threshold.

“Now you’re hot!” said Aimée.

“I am unarmed,” said Lorque. “I want to talk to you. Listen here, I don’t deserve to die. What have I done except follow the natural impulses of the human race? And even that is saying a lot. We are choirboys compared with our ancestors. Does the sack of Cartagena ring any bells with you? Some of Bléville’s bold seafarers were there. I’m not talking about the first sack of Cartagena, that was Sir Francis Drake, but the second, when the French did the sacking. What I’ve done is nothing alongside the sack of Cartagena. Okay, so I worked a bit on the Atlantic Wall, I had to keep a low profile in South America for a while, then I came back and I’ve been giving employment to workers and making land productive. I’ve made my pile in the usual way. Just tell me one outrageous thing, one truly criminal thing, in what I have done, in what the baron had in his files, just name me one!”

“I haven’t read the baron’s files,” said Aimée. Lorque tensed and listened hard, apparently striving to determine the precise source of the young woman’s voice. “I couldn’t care less,” Aimée observed. “Do you really imagine I’m interested in your crimes and misdemeanors? You must be joking!”

Having pinpointed the source of Aimée’s voice, Lorque lit his flashlight. Its beam revealed Aimée, sitting and laughing. The fat man with the brownish eyelids reached behind his back and appeared to be rooting in his trousers. Then, suddenly, brandishing the longshoreman’s hook, he ran at Aimée with a shriek.

Lorque swung the hook like an ax. Caught short, Aimée was slow to dodge the blow and the hook plunged into her shoulder. At the impact, the handle slipped from Lorque’s moist grip. The man fell to one knee as Aimée cried out in pain and staggered against a wall with the hook still buried in her shoulder. Blood spurted; the whole side of her upper body was inundated.

“You asshole! You stinking bastard!” she said. “You’ve hurt me.”

She was tottering. She looked at Lorque, who was still on one knee. He was pale and he was biting his lip. Both his hands were clasped to the left side of his chest. He was short of breath.

“My ticker!” he said. “It’s my ticker.”

He struggled back to his feet. He made his way to the back of the room, still clutching his chest, still panting and groaning. He went out through the door that led to the dirty street. He seemed to be having great difficulty placing one foot in front of the other. Aimée followed him nonchalantly. Blood was coursing down her whole side as far as her ankle. As she went through the doorway she had to reach out for support and cling to the jamb. She wrenched the hook from her shoulder and threw it to the pavement, where it landed with a clang. The flow of blood increased. Meanwhile, outside, it was possible to tell from the blue tinge to the sky that though the dawn had not yet broken, it would soon do so. Slowly, Lorque made for the Mercedes, dragging his feet. Aimée followed.

“Sonia!” cried Lorque. “Sonia! A heart attack!”

Since he could no longer control his voice, Lorque’s words sounded almost boastful, his tone almost triumphant. Then he gave a sharp cry, his knees buckled, he fell on the asphalt, and, rolling over among the discarded shells, died.

Dragging her own feet, Aimée went over to Lorque’s body and made sure that the man was dead. The beams of the Mercedes came on. Aimée was caught in the center of their yellow light. Nonplussed, she did not move. She heard the door of the big car open, then Sonia Lorque appeared in the yellow light holding the little Austrian automatic in her hand. The woman advanced towards Aimée. Her cheeks were streaming with tears.

“Is he dead?” she asked.

“Yes,” replied Aimée. “He is dead.”

“Bitch!” said Sonia Lorque.

Aimée pushed her palms out towards Sonia, as if to repel her.

“I beg you,” said Aimée. “I beg you. Please go away. My only quarrel is with the real assholes. I have nothing against you. You do the best you can. It’s over now. Please, please, go away.”

“But I,” said Sonia, “I have things to settle with you. You little shit!” She fired with the small automatic and missed Aimée by a mile. It was a rudimentary weapon, with a very short barrel. Accuracy could not be expected from it. “Couldn’t you have left us the hell alone?” Sonia shouted at Aimée. “I don’t care what he was. I loved him. I loved him. You damn bitch.” Sonia fired again. She was now three meters from Aimée, who was on her knees. The small-caliber round struck Aimée full in the chest. Aimée toppled backwards. The back of her head hit the roadway with a soft thump. “Serves you right, you cow,” observed Sonia Lorque. “I loved him, my little guy; I lived only for him.” She placed the barrel of the little automatic next to her eye and blew her brains out.