Free Three to Kill by Jean-Patrick Manchette Page B

boar’s lair. At all events, if Gerfaut was to go on in any direction at all, he would now have to climb.
    He made several false starts that ended in pathetic and painful tumbles. At last, he had the idea of crawling and using his fingers for purchase. In this way, he dragged himself up a short incline and reached ground that was all broken up and distinctly discouraging: nothing but sharp rises, patches of bare granite, tangled branches brought down by lightening or avalanche, and vertiginous overhangs. From an aesthetic point of view, the landscape was highly romantic. From Gerfaut’s point of view, it was absolute shit.
    He continued to make headway, still on his belly, but his strength was on the ebb. Above, the sky was lowering. Then it began to rain.
    It rained hard and long. Yellow water ran down the red gullies. Gerfaut hauled himself to a chaos of uprooted trees, curled up beneath them, and turned his shirt collar up. Water trickled between the fallen tree trunks and into his clothes. It was cold. Gerfaut began crying softly. Night fell.
    At the break of day he had been asleep for only a short time. Anxiety, and a certain morose enjoyment of his misery, had kept him awake for many hours. Showers had followed one another at short intervals. Even when rain was not falling, water continued to run down the hillside, dripping from the branches above, percolating into Gerfaut’s niche under the fallen trees and soaking him. When he opened his eyes, he felt as if he had only just closed them. His teeth were chattering. His grimy forehead was burning. He felt his injured foot and found it swollen and more painful than the day before. Laboriously he removed his mud-encrusted city shoe. When he stripped off his cotton sock, it ripped at the heel and instep. With a perverse satisfaction, Gerfaut contemplated the inflamed and purple flesh and the large, hard, unhealthy-looking protuberances on the front and side of his foot. He was unable to get his shoe back on, even after he tore out the lace and hurled it away from him with all his strength; it landed in the mud all of two meters away. He wanted to consult his Lip watch—which he had bought directly from the Lip workers when they had occupied their factory and which had never worked very well—but he discovered that he no longer had it. Then he recalled having already discovered this shortly after falling from the freight train.
    The clouds no longer formed a uniform and somber vault. They had lost altitude and broken up on the mountainside. Gerfaut even saw some passing below him and reckoned that he must be at two or three thousand meters. He crawled out of his den on all fours. For five or six minutes he advanced furiously, ignoring the pain. He grunted like an animal—not without a measure of satisfaction.
    This brief effort exhausted him utterly. Thereafter he took long, panting halts, moving forward only five or six meters between each. The weather had turned fair. The larches had thinned out. The sun started beating down madly. Steamy mist rose among the trees. Flying insects filled the air. Soon it was very, very hot. Gerfaut was burning up with fever. The whole business no longer gave him the feeling that he was in a novel.
    As the day wore on and absolutely nothing in the situation changed, Gerfaut became frankly serious. He laid plans for long-term survival alone. He inventoried his possessions, which now comprised a dirty handkerchief, the keys to his Paris apartment, a scrap of squared paper bearing the telephone number of LTC Laboratories in Saint-Cloud, and six soaked Gitane filters in a crumpled pack. No lighter, no means of making a fire, no weapon, nothing to eat. Yet somehow Gerfaut got his second wind. He contrived to tear off a half-broken low branch of a tree and use it as a crutch. He began once more to walk on his two feet and even achieved a speed of four kilometers an hour. He entertained, then rejected, the idea of finding