She was conscious, though a little line of blood ran down from her left temple. The deflated airbags covered the steering wheel and door frame. He pushed them out of the way and felt for her seat belt. “I’m fine,” she mumbled woozily.
“Yeah, right, you look like you’ve just returned from vacation.” He pulled her out of the seat belt. “What happened?”
“I rammed Lafont.”
Blanc didn’t reply, thinking he couldn’t have heard right. He still had the damn mistral rushing through the trees in his ears. The rustling branches. He felt faint.
“There was no way I could get past that fat crate of his,” Aveline continued. She was gradually coming back to reality. “I was afraid Lafont would sooner or later stop hurtling along blindly through the countryside, but would think it through. What would I have done in his position? I would have turned down the next forest track. In that four-by-four of his he could have carried on forever, while my sedan would eventually have got stuck in the ruts. So I just crashed into the rear of the Audi when he braked to take a corner. I rammed him into the ditch.”
“And damn near broke your neck in the process,” he exclaimed. “It’s not far to the patrol car. You can lie down in it. I’ll call paramedics and backup. Lafont is on the run on foot. He won’t get far.”
She shook her head and gave him a pained smile. “This isn’t the Jardin de Luxembourg in Paris, mon Capitaine.”
“The forest isn’t that big.”
“The forest is on fire,” she shouted at him. “Don’t you see the smoke? Don’t you smell anything? There’s a fire raging somewhere out there.”
He shrugged. “That’ll just cut off Lafont’s path.”
“And ours. If we aren’t lucky. The mistral fans the flames. They’ll rush through the undergrowth faster than you can run. A lot faster. We have half an hour at most to find Lafont, then we need to be out of here.”
Blanc stood up. He had heard a crackling noise in the forest, almost as loud as gunfire. “We don’t have half an hour,” he whispered. “The flames are almost here.”
* * *
The track stopped just a few yards beyond where the two wrecked cars had come to rest. Already the ground started to dip where the Citroën lay. A few paces beyond it fell steeply downward for maybe a hundred feet. The ground was covered with macchia bushes and knee-high thistles, with a few stunted oaks clinging to the slope. The red sandy soil had been blown away in places to reveal gray rock. The valley below was more thickly wooded and dropped away in terraces down to the Étang de Berre. The sky above them was still crystal clear and blue, but down below clouds of smoke were gathering like dirty cotton wool. The center was almost black while the mistral was blowing yellowish plumes into the air. Blanc noticed an old pine burst into flames. Then a bubble of resin exploded into a red ball of fire, the wind bringing the sound like a gunshot up the hill to them.
“There he is,” Blanc called out. Standing by the side of the road he had spotted Lafont’s massive shape halfway down the hill. He had discarded his linen jacket, and his white shirt stood out like a semaphore flag. The mayor was stumbling down the slope, not bothering to look around him. And ran straight into the cloud of smoke.
“Marcel has a habit of making mistakes under pressure,” Aveline Vialaron-Allègre said calmly. “The fire will have him.”
“He’s still only halfway down the slope.”
“The wind will soon blow the flames uphill.”
A second tree burst into a flaming torch: an oak, its leaves turning into black, oily smoke. Reddish-yellow flames were now glowing amidst the smoke. The first yellow plumes had risen so high into the air that they now obscured the sunlight above their heads. The bitter stench was getting worse by the moment. Blanc could feel the heat on his skin and a choking sensation in his throat. It was as if someone had opened a giant oven door, closed it, then reopened it and closed it again. And every time the oven remained open for a few seconds longer. He wasn’t even sweating anymore—the wind and the heat had dried his skin.
“Merde,” he said, pulling out his gun. “I’ll get the bastard.”
“We’ll get the bastard.”
“Lafont has killed twice.”
“All the more reason for there to be two of us.”
“But—”
“We’re not still living in the 1950s, mon Capitaine. I can look after myself.”
Blanc just shrugged, grabbed hold of the branch of a stunted oak, and began to make his way down the slope. He had to pause for breath. It was as if all the oxygen was being sucked out of the valley. The heat increased with every step he took. He was in danger of losing consciousness, and then the flames would take him. He shook himself. Keep going! Lafont was older than him, overweight, and clearly already exhausted. Blanc would catch him up before long. Keep going!
The roar of the mistral got worse, or maybe it was a different sort of roar: flames burning wood. Or there again, maybe it was the blood boiling in his head. Keep going. Behind him he heard the crack of a branch, and a suppressed cry from Aveline. Don’t turn round. Keep going. Blanc reached the bottom of the slope. The shrubbery was thicker, thornier, and gray trails of smoke billowed among the branches. A scorpion ran across his shoe, fleeing the flames, up the hill he had just come down. A snake as long as his forearm slid down the branch of a rosemary bush and stared at him with dark green eyes for a second. Keep going.
He heard another crack; a pine tree branch next to him broke. Blanc ducked to avoid the splinters. He was afraid the tree’s resin would explode any second, but then he realized that the tree had not burst into flames. It had been a gunshot. He threw himself down into the undergrowth. Down, onto the ground. The smell of old wood and pine needles.
“Get down,” he shouted to Aveline. He had no idea if she could hear his voice over the noise. The earth trembled. Panicking ants ran around dragging white eggs behind them. He peered through the undergrowth. There was no sign of Lafont amidst the confusion of wood, leaves, and smoke. Don’t let him pin you down, the flames are coming this way, he told himself. In any case it was better to have Lafont shooting at him rather than Aveline. He sprang to his feet and made a long dash to the next shrub. Another gunshot, from somewhere out there. Where was the bastard?
Blanc pressed his face to the ground again, trying to breathe more regularly. The earth was trembling more than ever. He could hear a buzzing like that of a swarm of bees. It got louder, deeper. Motors, he thought, confused. Then he recalled an image from his first year of service. Water cannons on their way to deal with a student demonstration in Paris, colossal machines rolling along slowly, making the shop windows and even the asphalt surface of the boulevards vibrate. Were they about to tackle the blaze with water cannons? He looked around nervously, but all he could see was smoke and branches. Pull yourself together!
The buzzing got louder. He could feel the vibrations now not just beneath his feet but throughout his body. Where was Lafont? Where was Aveline? The sky above his head turned dark. A giant shadow obscured the sun, cutting through the plumes of smoke like the wings of some immense pterodactyl. The droning had become so loud his hands were shaking. He looked up in shock: A huge yellowy-orange aircraft was flying just above the treetops, a cumbersome propeller aircraft, its wings bobbing in the rising hot air. All of a sudden a hatch in the rear opened out and he thought that at any moment a hail of bombs would begin to fall, like he had seen in old war films. But instead a great cloud emerged from the aircraft. Blanc pressed his face to the ground. A second later he was soaked. A wall of water descended on him, smashing branches, ripping apart leaves. For one surreal second he saw millions of drops battering down onto the rock-hard dry earth and bouncing up again, little pearls of glass in the air, before falling down again and turning the red soil to mud.
Blanc began coughing. For a few seconds he was shivering with cold until the heat dried out his clothing. Then he heard a fresh rumbling. Fire engines, he thought, when his head finally cleared
. He should have got the picture straightaway. The fire-extinguishing aircraft down at Marignane, capable of carrying hundreds of gallons of water in their holds for dumping on flames. He’d seen their spectacular feats of low flying often enough on the television news. He tried to remember how many of the aircraft they had. Five? Six? Seven?
He saw the next shadow approaching. This time he was prepared. He kneeled down, his left arm shielding his head, his right hand holding the Sig-Sauer pistol in an attempt to keep the gun dry. When the droning became almost unbearable just before the water was released he sprang to his feet and looked around him. There was something white visible behind the trunk of a pine tree to his right, just slightly farther down the now gentle slope, no more than twenty yards away. Lafont. Blanc ducked down again and let the wall of water rush over him. He could hear it hissing as it fell on trees that were already alight.
Carefully Blanc crept forward through the undergrowth, hoping Lafont would not have moved, pinned to the ground by a combination of water, fire, and fear. He could hear the third aircraft approaching. This time he didn’t dare to try standing up again but got down on his knees and glanced toward the pine tree: Lafont, his face as red as a lobster, his shirt ripped, partly blackened. Behind him a bush was on fire. He could go no farther. He was only ten yards away now. Then the next wall of water hit.
More droning. A fourth aircraft on the way. A movement to his left. Blanc turned in confusion. Aveline! She was still bleeding from her temple, had lost her left shoe, and was limping. She was heading for an old tree to shelter from the next deluge of water, but she was slow. Blanc turned his head quickly and stared ahead of him into the smoke. Something had changed. Suddenly he saw Lafont’s huge frame emerge from behind the pine tree: an arm, a hand, a gun.
He sprang to his feet and fired, again and again and again, as the deluge of water poured over him.
Le Midi
The cicadas took up again around 8:30 in the evening. The mistral had suddenly stopped in the middle of the afternoon, as if somebody had turned off a fan up on Mont Blanc where the wind came from. By suppertime the air was pleasantly cool, and the water Blanc gulped down from the plastic bottle deliciously cold. He had showered for what seemed like hours to get the stench of smoke and blood from his pores. He realized he had missed the cicadas.
He had been flying on autopilot for the last few hours. He couldn’t remember the noise the Sig-Sauer had made, just the kickback from each shot, a dull punch to the outside of the elbow. He couldn’t remember Lafont’s screams, just the red splashes that appeared on his shirt growing ever larger until they covered his whole torso. He couldn’t remember what Aveline had said to him, only her hands as she grabbed his right arm and pushed it up. He couldn’t remember what the mayor yelled at him, just the spittle flying from his mouth.
The first sound Blanc actually recalled hearing was a curse and a deep male voice, curiously muffled. “Goddamn tourists!” Three pompiers in full kit and breathing masks beneath their silver helmets had broken through the undergrowth while Aveline and he were kneeling next to Lafont trying to stem the bleeding with some strips of cotton torn from Blanc’s T-shirt. Then the firemen saw the wounded man. Blanc responded by jumping to his feet and showing his police badge, a rather absurd gesture in the middle of a burning forest.
If the firemen hadn’t put rubber masks over their faces, from which they greedily sucked in a flow of oxygen, they might well have suffocated. But in the end they made it back up the hill to the roadside where the blue lights of large fire engines, two ambulances, and half a dozen blue Méganes were waiting. Lafont was taken into the back of one of the ambulances. Suddenly Commandant Nkoulou was there and ordered two gendarmes to sit next to the stretcher in the ambulance, which then set off with a patrol car escort.
Eventually Blanc had found himself back at his desk, staring out of the window, waiting for a call from the emergency department from the Hôpital Nord in Marseille, where they had taken Lafont. Aveline was at the court in Aix. Tonon had shown him the Kalashnikov they had found in the steel cabinet in the town hall. Fabienne was writing notes for the file, staring for hours on end at her computer, avoiding looking at him. Then the call from the hospital came and Tonon opened a bottle of rosé and Fabienne had kissed him on both cheeks, and Nkoulou came in and said he could go home.
* * *
Amongst the bits and pieces he had brought from his Paris apartment was a radio alarm clock, a promotional gift in a box that Geneviève and he had never even opened. Now Blanc had set it up to the rear of the house, so its aerial might receive a signal. While the digital display still showed a blinking 00:00 because he had never bothered to set the time, the nine o’clock news was droning out of the plastic loudspeaker. The forest fire had just managed to make the penultimate item on the national news: almost thirty acres wiped out, the mistral gusting at up to fifty-five miles an hour, the speedy intervention of the firefighters. The gendarmes in Miramas had arrested a man who had been too lazy to take an old mattress down to the garbage dump and instead had set fire to it on the roadside on the route départementale. The very final item was the arrest of Lafont “in connection with investigations into a murder case and local corruption.”
So Lafont will only be charged with the murder of Moréas, Blanc thought. He was too weak to be interrogated, the doctors at Marseille’s Hôpital Nord had said. Maybe they owed him a favor or two. One way or the other, it would give Lafont time to think up a strategy. If he denied having anything to do with the death of the building contractor, they would be unlikely to dispute his defense. After all, what did they have to prove he had killed Fuligni? And then what would happen? At the trial at the courthouse in Aix, Aveline wouldn’t want to get involved in a charge that had no hope of success. She would let Fuligni’s death pass as an accident, if she even mentioned it at all. None of the lawyers would mention Fuligni, and no verdict would be pronounced by a judge. Lafont would pass as merely the man who had taken out a violent guy everybody had been afraid of. All the old allegations against Moréas would come up again, the files Tonon had kept up all those years would be opened again. Who knew, maybe Marius himself would have to take the witness stand. A clever defense lawyer could do something with that. In the end Lafont could come out as the man who got rid of a thug the police had failed to put away in twenty years. Maybe even the good guy.
He heard the knocking of a diesel engine coming from the little road. A white, modest C3 he had never seen before drove through his gate. Blanc shot to his feet, suddenly nervous. The oblique rays of the evening sun reflected off the windshield so he couldn’t make out who was in the driver’s seat. Whoever it was drove up to the old olive oil mill so fast that the tires sent up clouds of dust. Instinctively he reached for his belt, but he had left the Sig-Sauer on a shelf in the bedroom. The driver’s door opened.
Aveline.
It took him a moment to recognize her. She was wearing a simple white T-shirt and jeans and, despite the late hour, large sunglasses, covering a wide plaster on the side of her forehead. Her hair was hidden by a blue baseball cap with the words NOVA SCOTIA on it.
“What sort of car is that?” he asked, walking toward her.
“It’s a rental, from the garage. Until the new C5 is delivered.”
“At the state’s expense, I assume.”
“It was an accident incurred while working.”
“It’s a good thing our juges d’instruction don’t have too many accidents while working.”
She took off her sunglasses and smiled. “Are you worried about the financial drain on the French taxpayer, mon Capitaine?”
“I’m worried about you, Madame le juge.” He came a few steps closer to her.
“You would have done better to worry about yourself.”
“Does your husband intend to send me to the guillotine?”
“He’s already sharpened the blade and hoisted it.”
“I can already feel a twitching in my neck.” He w
as standing right next to her now, but she didn’t seem to have noticed.
“Then my husband realized that the scandal surrounding Lafont was not only unavoidable, but potentially useful. The elections are imminent. The minister will personally make sure the ‘Affaire Lafont’ is the basis to launch a campaign against local corruption. La ville propre. Clean up the town. A good slogan, don’t you think.”
“And what role am I expected to play in this?”
“None at all. Commandant Nkoulou will play the leading role in this little comedy. You should be glad your head is still on your shoulders.”
“I am indeed,” said Blanc, taking her in his arms and kissing her.
She allowed him a long embrace, then she leaned back a bit and looked him in the eyes. It was a look that seemed to be simultaneously cold and passionate. “Let’s be quite clear on one thing,” she said in a soft voice. “I have no intention of ever leaving my husband.” Then she kissed him again.
My life just keeps getting more complicated, Blanc thought.
About the Author
CAY RADEMACHER studied Anglo-American history, ancient history, and philosophy in Cologne and Washington, D.C. He has been an editor at Geo magazine since 1999 and was instrumental in setting up the renowned history magazine Geo-Epoche. He first novel, The Murderer in Ruins, was shortlisted for the CWA International Dagger award. He now lives in Southern France with his wife and children. You can sign up for email updates here.
Thank you for buying this
St. Martin’s Press ebook.
To receive special offers, bonus content,
Murderous Mistral Page 24