Fatale (11 page)

“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 together.”

“Not me,” said Sinistrat in a stricken voice. “I am merely an observer here.”

“Shut up, Sinistrat,” commanded DiBona. “You are pissing us off.”

“Yes, quite,” said Lorque. “Besides, these subtleties are of no concern to Madame Joubert.” He took another step towards Aimée. The young woman could clearly discern the features of the fat man with the brownish eyelids. His expression was concerned and sleepy. “I have arranged for the two million old francs you are short to be brought,” he said, “and they are here in this room. So you can still take them and go to the station. The commissioner will be delighted to drive you there. You can collect the hundred and eighty thousand francs from the lockers and get on the train to Paris with your plentiful booty. As for the documents, since you didn't take them they are still there at the baron's; the commissioner will have to pay a visit to the scene of the tragic event and take possession of them, then make his initial report concluding that the death was accidental. So even though you have failed to comply fully with the terms of the contract, everything can still be worked out if you wish. But do you wish it? From what I hear, you do not.”

A match was struck in the darkness. By its light Aimée saw the calm face of Lenverguez as he lit a cigar. Near the young woman, Lorque remained silent and thoughtful for a moment, his eyes lowered. From the group of men came a cough and the sound of shuffling feet. Having nothing to say, Aimée said nothing.

“In any event,” said Lorque, “how can you be trusted now?”

“I can't,” said Aimée.

There were two desks in the room, cluttered with papers, along with metal filing cabinets and two chairs. Aimée grabbed one of the chairs, jumped onto a filing cabinet, and, holding the chair out in front of her, leaped through the closed window. She fell from the second story in a shower of broken glass. She landed on all fours; the chair, which she was still holding, shattered into pieces beneath her. A long splinter of wood from the seat broke off and penetrated the left forearm of the young woman, who rolled onto her side, bruising her shoulder and causing the glass fragments beneath her to snap and crackle. She also twisted an ankle slightly.

“Don't shoot, Fellouque!” cried Lorque.

Aimée got to her feet. In the half-light she could see the glassed-in room above, a gaping hole on one side, and the white patches of the faces peering down at her. She wrenched the splinter of wood from her arm and made off as fast as she could, limping a little, towards a dark corner. She slipped into a narrow alley and emerged into the dirty street that runs behind the market. She followed it for some twenty meters, tripping over the piles of empty shells. Then she turned off again down another alley between warehouses. There, in the dark, she stopped and felt herself all over. No bones broken. The glass had cut her superficially on both elbows and one side of her head. Her scalp was bleeding, as was the wound from the wood splinter. But still, she was not losing a great deal of blood. She heard the sound of people running at top speed. At the end of the alleyway where the young woman was lying low two figures passed quickly, breathing heavily, running along the street. Farther away other racing footsteps on the asphalt were audible. After a moment silence returned. Aimée stayed still where she was. She was barely bleeding now. She massaged her painful ankle and her shoulder.

“Madame Joubert?” Lorque called out.

He must have been about fifty meters away. He was not shouting very loudly. Aimée had to listen hard to make out his words.

“We know you are there,” he was saying. “You can't get out of this area. We have both ends covered. You can still make a deal with us.” The source of his voice shifted, moving farther off. Lorque obviously had no clear idea of exactly where she was. “We are not murderers. It is essential that we come to terms. Answer me!”

The blustering voice continued for a few more moments, less and less intelligibly. Aimée was no longer listening, being taken up with closer sounds. Someone was advancing cautiously down the street, getting close to the entrance to the alley. Aimée groped around silently on the ground. She found and got hold of an empty shell, a large shell, a scallop or the like. Bent double, she crept towards the end of the alley. Against the clear night sky the bookseller Rougneux suddenly appeared in silhouette. For a moment the man peered into the obscurity of the alley, then a flashlight in his hand came on, its beam casting a rather weak light into the shadows.

“She is here!” the man cried in a high-pitched voice.

He took a step back. At the same moment, Aimée stood up straight and, taking three steps forward, struck the man with the shell. Though the shell had not been sharpened, the single blow cut Rougneux's throat.

L
ORQUE
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.