Skeletons in the Closet by Jean-Patrick Manchette

Author:Jean-Patrick Manchette [Manchette, Jean-Patrick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-11-07T00:00:00+00:00

10

AFTER a moment, let’s say somewhere between forty seconds and a minute, I realized no one was bothering with me at all. What’s good about the ring road is that it’s lit up: I looked toward the Porte de Vanves. There were now cars stopped along two or three hundred meters and, at the head of the traffic jam, I could vaguely make out the SM. It had rammed the central median and all its windows were shattered. There were policemen on the ramp. Shots had stopped ringing out. Since it’s my job to understand everything, I understood that the SM had attempted to take the same turn as I had, and missed. And then I thought maybe the cops had fired at the SM, or else the people in the SM had fired at me, and the cops thought that it was at them, or who knows.

I looked up and saw I was under the bridge. Actually, I was under two bridges because I was under city traffic, which was itself under a railroad bridge. The police blockade was over my head. I walked across the inner ring road, westward. I got to the bottom of the access ramp to Porte Brancion. I took the ramp. No one was there to interrogate me or fire at me. It was restful.

On the other hand, there was quite a crowd on the level of city traffic: stopped cars, rubberneckers, and cops running in every direction.

“What’s going on?” a little old man with a leashed dog asked me. He was wearing a dirty beret with a brownish cigarette butt in his mouth. His tone was sullen and disaffected.

“I don’t know. It’s over that way.” (I pointed toward Porte de Vanves, to the other side of the railroad bridge.) “I think there was an accident.”

“Gunshots!” the old guy exclaimed dryly. “I heard gunshots!”

“Don’t ask me,” I said. “I just got here.”

He shrugged. I walked around him and headed north. He followed me with his eyes. I took the Métro at the Porte de Vanves stop. I got back to Jules’s place around 11:00 p.m. Haymann was in the living room, on the leather couch, reading Jack London’s John Barleycorn and sipping from a large glass of pink vodka. The radio was playing softly on the glass coffee table.

“I wouldn’t mind a glass myself,” I remarked.

“I finished the vodka,” said Haymann. “There’s scotch in the kitchen. The girl’s gone to bed,” he added because I was looking around questioningly. “She was exhausted. You look exhausted too.”

I nodded and went to make myself a scotch and water, very diluted, that I brought into the living room. I sat down with a grunt of satisfaction.

“I wrecked your car.”

“Oh,” said Haymann.

I filled him in on the details.

“How is it they were waiting for you outside the café?” Haymann asked. “Coccioli didn’t have time to warn them, did he?”

“I don’t know. I think they were just tailing Coccioli.”

“Okay,” said Haymann. “On the other hand, maybe he’s been with them since Marseille, since the beginning.

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