No Room at the Morgue by Jean-Patrick Manchette

Author:Jean-Patrick Manchette
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2020-08-11T00:00:00+00:00

14

WHEN PAPPY Ruger opened the door again, I still hadn’t recovered. Craziness is catching. I was making up theories in my head: Was Haymann an Israeli agent? And was it in fact Memphis Charles they’d tried to assassinate the other night? My theories were collapsing one by one, but I started constructing them all over again. At the same time, I was dreaming of steak frites. And it was getting mixed up in my theories. Béarnaise sauce was dripping down the faces of Palestinians. In my head, I mean. In my head.

“You come with us,” said Pappy Ruger.

I asked where to. He shook his head, smiling.

“Another conversation with the crying man?” I asked.

He shrugged. I took Memphis Charles by the arm. It was nice to touch her. She was trembling nervously.

“They’re going to bury us in the yard,” she stated.

“Shut up,” I said. “You’re not letting me think.”

Pappy Ruger’s automatic pivoted while we went out. His friend, the guy with the Mauser, was waiting for us on the landing. If I’d really thought they were going to kill us, I would have done something crazy right then. But I thought I’d gone mad only to a point. I went down the stairs in a disciplined way, still holding the girl by the arm. The gun-toters walked down behind us.

The stairway ended in a short hallway. At one end, an opaque door (back door, I thought); at the other end, the front door with its frosted panes. The long foyer, with two closed side doors. They shoved us toward the front door, and I don’t know how things would have gone if I’d let them run their course. What happened next was that I heard an animal’s groan in the foyer, like a wounded rabbit. It was coming from one of the two closed doors, and we were level with it. I didn’t think. I opened a door.

The room had no windows. Lit by a bulb in a cage on the ceiling, it was some kind of workshop, with exposed pipes. The two bearded guys were attached to the pipes and they were as white as sheets. The Arab was attached to a workbench. He had one hand in a vise, and he was the one moaning like a wounded rabbit. His fingers were black and red.

I had let go of Memphis Charles. I turned around in the doorway. Pappy Ruger had grabbed the girl and was backing up, holding her tightly against him so she couldn’t move. His teammate was taking his charming Mauser out of his pocket. Half my body was inside the workshop, and a tool rack against one of the walls was in my field of vision to my right. I wasn’t aware of what I was doing because my arm worked faster than my brain. All I saw was my fist coming down with a hammer in it on Mauser Man’s wrist.

I broke his forearm. He let out a kind of growl, a cry of pain

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