Fatale

by Jean-Patrick Manchette

  The young woman got out of the bath and used the handbasin to wash her tights, panties and bra with bar soap, then hung them up to dry on the chrome towel rack. She dressed in the same clothes she had worn on her arrival, except that she pulled a brown crew-neck sweater over her silk blouse. She left the apartment, put the keys in her bag, and went downstairs.

  The streets of Bléville bore such names as Surcouf, Jean Bart, Duguay-Trouin, or alternatively such names as Turgot, Adolphe Thiers, Lyautey, and Charles de Gaulle.[1] Aimée walked up and down these streets for a while, occasionally consulting her guidebook, making sure that she was perfectly familiar with the town’s topography. The young woman was almost exclusively interested, however, in the old town, dwelling place of the local bourgeoisie on the left bank of the river and well away from the port with its cafés overflowing with mussels and fries, with whores and seamen. To the rear of the affluent neighborhood quasi-expressways had made their appearance, along with swaths of greenery and brand-new civic buildings adorned with abstract friezes. On the right bank a profusion of parallelepipedal dwellings with cream-colored rough-cast walls and tiled roofs bristling with television antennas spread up the hillside, their ranks interrupted by the occasional Radar, Carrefour, or Mammouth supermarket. Pushing eastward, and inland, one came to refineries, then to a plant producing canned fish, baby food, and cattle feed in three adjacent factory buildings, each operation bearing its own company name so as not to alarm consumers.

  Aimée did not push eastward. In fact she took no more than a few steps on the right bank, venturing not far at all beyond the asphalted moving bridges that link the port and the inner docks. Neither the poor, the workers, nor their neighborhoods interested Aimée. It was the rich that interested her, and she went only where there was money. So she turned and went back over the bridges. At a newspaper shop she bought those national papers that gave space to small news items, as well as two local sheets, namely the Dépêche de Bléville and Informations Blévilloises. She thumbed through the Paris papers but failed to find what she was looking for. She turned to the local publications. One of them championed a left-capitalist ideology; the other championed a left-capitalist ideology. Both organs concerned themselves with the shipping news and reported on parish fairs, boule tournaments, minor car and motorcycle accidents, cattle fairs, and grain prices. In the Dépêche, a certain Dr. Claude Sinistrat railed in an opinion column about the pollution of the valley by L and L Enterprises. On this particular day the inauguration of a new covered fish market was announced for the late afternoon. Standing outside the newspaper shop, Aimée noted the names of several local luminaries and committed them to memory. Then she tossed both the local and the national newspapers into a wastebasket painted a garish green and bearing the legend KEEP YOUR TOWN CLEAN!

  The young woman directed her steps toward the southwest part of the old town. Along the way she bought a Raleigh touring bicycle—heavy, expensive, and reliable—for the trips she was planning to make. She rode it to the offices, on the edge of old Bléville, of an attorney and realtor with whom she had made an appointment a month earlier under the name she was now using.

  Maître Lindquist was tall and thin. He had large, dry hands, and large ears, and pale blue eyes in a long head with a balding pate the color of rare roast beef. He wore a black three-piece suit and a white cotton shirt and a loud green tie bearing a tiny red-and-gold coat of arms.

  “I am so terribly sorry to hear that,” he said when Aimée contrived to inform him that her husband had passed away. “I am a widower myself, so I know how you feel.” He spread his hands and cocked his head. “And so you are thinking of moving to Bléville for the peace and quiet, of course. I can’t see why that shouldn’t be quite possible.” He half smiled.

  “Nor can I,” said Aimée.

  Lindquist looked at her a little stricken, hesitated, smiled, and cleared his throat. “You have no children, so the issue of school is moot. I feel sure we can find suitable properties for you to look at in the vicinity, by the sea—or there are charming villages around here, you know. Or right here in town. It all depends on how much you are looking to spend.”

  “That doesn’t matter at all,” said Aimée. “That’s one thing at least I don’t have to worry about. Just so long as the place is right.”

  “Yes, yes, I see.” The realtor was visibly warming to Aimée.

  “And the price has to be fair.”

  “Absolutely! Absolutely!” said Lindquist, wagging his head vigorously, his tone becoming even warmer, for he liked people who took money seriously.

  Aimée added that she needed at least four rooms, and some land to ensure quiet, but that she had no wish to be isolated. She had been alone since the death of her poor husband, and it was time for that to end.

  “Absolutely! Absolutely!” cried the realtor again, positively enthusiastic by this time.

  “It’s a sad thing, perhaps,” said Aimée, “but it’s only human: I am feeling the need to get involved in life again. Renew contact with other people. Make new friends.”

  “But my dear Madame Joubert,” exclaimed Lindquist, “I feel sure you will make plenty of friends!” The man took his eyes off one of Aimée’s knees that was exposed to view. “There is no shortage of excitement around here, you know.” He hesitated. “We have fairs, we have the casino, we have...well, plenty of excitement!” He seemed to tire for a moment, but suddenly his features lit up once more. “Why,” he exclaimed, “this very day we are opening the new fish market.”

  “How wonderful!” said Aimée. “Would you mind very much if I smoked in your office?”

  “Not at all. Wait, perhaps you would care for one of mine?”

  “Thank you, but no. I only smoke Virginia.” Aimée produced a pack from her bag and placed a Dunhill between her lips.

  The realtor was thinking what a charming little person she was, so fragile, so feminine, and he rose and leaned across the desk, emitting a tiny high-pitched grunt, unexpected and involuntary, as his muscles stretched; and he lit Aimée’s cigarette with a silver table lighter in the form of an ancient urn.

  “I shouldn’t do this,” said Aimée. “It’s a vice. But you know what they say: the only reason we don’t surrender completely to a vice is that we have so many others.”

  “Oh, really? They say that? How amusing! And indeed how true!” Lindquist smiled in a bemused way.

  Eventually, once they had looked over the files of several properties for sale in the vicinity and arranged to visit one the very next day, the realtor warmly urged Aimée to attend the opening of the fish market a little later. The ceremony was to be followed by cocktails, and he would be delighted to introduce Aimée to some of Bléville’s most eminent citizens.

  [1] Surcouf, Jean Bart, and Duguay-Trouin were celebrated French corsairs and admirals. Turgot was an eighteenth-century French statesman and economist; Thiers was known as the Butcher of the Paris Commune; General Lyautey fought in the French colonies and later became a Fascist.—Trans.

  4

  AFTER leaving the real-estate office, Aimée rode back to her studio on her Raleigh along streets with such names as Kennedy, Churchill, and Wilson, and others called Magellan, Jacques Cartier, or Bougainville.[1] She stopped twice along the way, once at a pharmacy to check her weight on an automatic scale and once at a bookstore, where she bought a crime novel. In her clothes, she weighed 46.7 kilos. Without heels, she was 1.61 meters tall. On the scale was an enameled plaque bearing the message KEEP YOUR TOWN CLEAN!

  As Aimée was going back to her studio apartment she noticed that a door some twenty meters farther down the corridor was ajar; peering out curiously from it was a little old lady, wearing a great deal of jewelry, who disappeared as Aimée entered her own room and closed herself in.

  Once inside, Aimée drew the predominantly red plaid curtains and stripped naked. For nearly an hour she did exercises standing up and lying down on the floor, toning her muscles and making use in particular of her chest
expanders. She streamed with sweat. She took out a thick piece of corkboard, placed it on the bed, and struck it repeatedly with the edge of first her right and then her left hand, likewise with each of her elbows. Setting aside the corkboard, she picked up a foam cylinder twenty centimeters long and twelve in diameter. Holding it in one hand, she adopted the lotus position. After a moment of relaxation, she kneaded it for a few minutes. Then, with both hands, she squeezed the cylinder tightly, reducing its diameter to just a few centimeters at the points where she was grasping it; she locked her muscles in this position and stayed quite still. A nervous twitch tugged at the sweaty skin at the corner of her mouth. Finally she put everything away and took a bath.

  Lying in her hot bath, she opened the crime novel she had bought. She read ten pages. It took her six or seven minutes. She put the book down, masturbated, washed, and got out of the water. For a moment, in the bathroom mirror, she looked at her slim, seductive body. She dressed carefully; she aimed to please.

  At four o’clock she left the Seagull Apartments and went shopping in the center of town for various items of clothing, all simple, all pretty, all rather expensive. She then proceeded to the Jules Ferry Leisure and Culture Center, on the east side of town, in the middle of a kind of municipal complex of recent vintage. There she signed up for fencing and Oriental martial-arts classes. She was directed to places where she could go to play golf, play tennis, ride horseback, and the like. Then, pedaling furiously, the young woman returned to her studio apartment and dropped off her purchases before leaving right away on foot, heading for the harbor, where the inauguration of the new fish market had already been under way for a few minutes.

  Long and low, the gray cement structures of the market stood on a kind of peninsula flanked by two docking basins of unequal size. When Aimée arrived, a miniature throng had gathered at the entrance to the market precinct. From inside the market hall came bursts of monotone speech, then applause, and some of the folk outside applauded too, though not very loudly and not for very long. Aimée threaded her way through the knots of people peering inside with amused if not derisive looks. The people outside were poor, and odors of sweat and wine-laden breath rose into the brisk, briny, salubrious breeze.

  The well-to-do were inside the building, or more accurately beneath a sort of immense curved awning overhanging the quayside. Two gloved policemen stood yawning at the entrance to the complex. They did not stop Aimée as she passed them and went under the immense awning. A platform had been set up in front of the cold-storage rooms, and on it a table with a large green canopy draped above. At the table sat middle-aged men in three-piece suits, with red faces and hair slick with lotion. In front of the table a local official, who had a little black mustache and was wearing pinstriped pants and a red-white-and-blue scarf, stood reading (or rather mumbling) a speech from five or six sheets of typescript.

  “We have come together,” this town worthy was saying, “to hail the dawn of a beautiful era! I have combed the archives of Bléville, gentlemen, and combed them thoroughly! And believe me, my dear fellow citizens, I had to go very far back in time before I found a record of a coming together, such as this one, of all the vital forces of Bléville in order to accomplish a task of general interest, a task capable of toppling the barriers of social class because it genuinely contributes to the prosperity of all, of workers, of business owners, of those in the service sector—all tightly bound together.”

  Aimée made her way through the scattered audience. She scanned the various groups and easily spotted Lindquist. She approached discreetly, not looking directly at him. He did not notice her. The place smelt of eau de cologne, tobacco, salt, and cement dust. There were few society women present. All the men wore ties except for three or four fish porters in freshly ironed shirts and cloth caps with large peaks. In a corner were twenty or so women workers in yellow blouses and little caps that made them look like nurses or exploited female labor in China. Lindquist suddenly recognized Aimée. Without hesitation he beckoned to her. She joined him. He introduced her to two couples who were with him, the Rougneux and the Tobies.

  “Indeed I was obliged,” said the worthy, “to go as far back as the sad year of 1871! In 1871 the Bléville chamber of commerce, whose centenary coincided—how could I forget it?—with the assumption of my own municipal duties, in 1871, I say, the chamber of commerce enthusiastically underwrote the construction...”

  “Delighted, a great pleasure, how nice, how very nice to meet you,” Aimée and the Rougneux and the Tobies were saying meanwhile, their forearms crisscrossing as hands were thrust forward for shaking. “Well, well, how very charming, do you play bridge? Yes? Ah ha! some new blood at last!” They went on for some time in this vein.

  “...the construction of the old market hall,” the worthy continued, “which today makes way in turn for this new hall in the center of which I stand at this very moment.”

  The Rougneux owned the bookstore where Aimée had bought her crime novel. The wife was thin and pale and wore a violet suit with a large gold brooch at the lapel and a string of cultured pearls around her neck. Her husband was thickset, the back of his neck close-shaven, his head large and cylindrical with a hairline low on his brow, and behind thick-lensed spectacles he had big glassy eyes. The Tobies were pharmacists, tall, thin, gray, and affable in a timid sort of way.

  “Oh, look,” said Lindquist to Aimée, “here is someone your age.” And with that he introduced her to the senior manager Moutet, who had a good ten years on Aimée, sported a red mustache and a tobacco-brown suit, and worked at L and L Enterprises.

  Aimée was far from bored. She distributed smiles; she offered opinions. Nobody was listening to the town worthy on the platform, who was now paying tribute to the New Fish Market Initiative Committee, whose members he named, beginning with Messrs. Lorque and Lenverguez of L and L Enterprises, and including M. Tobie, M. Rougneux, and M. Moutet.

  “Nor should we forget these gentlemen’s lovely wives,” he added.

  About ten meters from the group with whom Aimée was chatting, a guy of about thirty was looking at the young woman and smiling. He went on smiling as he came over to her.

  “Sinistrat,” he told Aimée. “Dr. Claude Sinistrat. Let me introduce myself, because I know that that old Huguenot is not going to do it.”

  “Oh, come off it, Sinistrat,” said Lindquist.

  “Delighted,” said Aimée.

  Sinistrat was tall and broad-shouldered, and by no means devoid of charm; his gestures were brusque and he had a big face, curly blond hair, and even teeth.

  “I saw your opinion piece in the Dépêche de Bléville,” said Aimée.

  “I didn’t pull any punches, did I?” Sinistrat puffed his chest out.

  “Sinistrat,” said Lindquist, “you are a scoundrel. And let me tell you—”

  The realtor broke off. He was staring at something that his interlocutors could not see, somewhere in the crowd. He pursed his lips.

  “Shit!” he exclaimed, and coming from him the profanity was startling. “Shit! That lunatic!”

  The Rougneux, the Tobies, and senior manager Moutet all turned around at his words and scrutinized the crowd. Their attitudes bespoke anxiety and disgust. Aimée turned around too, her eyebrows slightly raised, and surveyed the gathering without seeing anything out of the ordinary. Sinistrat was all smiles. He lit a Craven A with a Zippo lighter.

  “I don’t see anything,” said Mme Rougneux.

  “No! No!” responded Lindquist. “He was there—outside.”

  “I don’t see him.”

  “He’s not there now. He must have gone off to plan more mischief.”

  “It’s simply outrageous,” said Rougneux. “I don’t understand how they could have let him out. Those doctors are idiots. Their clinics are a joke.” He spluttered after every sentence. He seemed mean, and pleased with himself.

  “They are all drug addicts, leftists and that sort of thing,” said Tobie.

  “Next time
they ought to put him in an asylum,” said Mme Tobie.

  “Be that as it may,” said Sinistrat, “don’t count on me to have him locked up.”

  “But my dear man,” exclaimed Lindquist, irritated and contemptuous, “you might as well certify him as sane while you’re about it.”

  “I’ll consider it.”

  “What are you talking about?” asked Aimée.

  Lindquist and the doctor turned towards her, both somewhat at a loss. For a moment neither said a word.

  “Oh, nothing very interesting,” said Lindquist.

  “A little conflict,” said Sinistrat with a slight flick of the hand.

  “I love conflicts,” said Aimée, but just then applause erupted, for the town worthy had concluded his speech and everyone was facing the platform.

  Immediately after this, the talk turned to other things, and, leaving the vin d’honneur to the porters and small fry, the big fish repaired to the cocktail party they had arranged.

  [1] The last three were all renowned navigators and explorers.—Trans.

  5

  “THAT LITTLE doctor really has his nerve, it’s unconscionable,” said Lindquist as his sea-green Volvo slowly traversed the town with the realtor behind the wheel and Aimée seated at his side. The man shook his head. “Coming to the inauguration like that! And I bet you any money he’ll be at the cocktail party too! He used to work at L and L, you know. The company doctor, or some such. They were obliged to let him go. And now he spews out his nonsense in the newspaper.”

  “He seems like a very rude man,” said Aimée sweetly.

  “He’s a sort of nihilist,” answered Lindquist. “He votes for that Trotskyite Krivine, you know.”

  “You don’t say,” answered Aimée.

  “He’s crazy,” Lindquist explained in a definitive tone.

  He parked the Volvo in a small triangular plaza. There was a fountain in the middle. The building façades on all three sides were cream and brown, with visible beams, or at least with illusory visible beams painted on them, and windows with little panes of thick glass and pots or planters of geraniums on their sills. One of the façades was that of a brasserie operating on two floors with its name, Grand Café de l’Anglais, painted in cream Gothic lettering on a brown background. Another was that of a private house, both halves of whose carriage entrance were open. There was much animation in the lobby, where two servants were relieving guests of their hats and coats. Lindquist and Aimée went through the hall and entered a large reception room crowded with people. A long trestle table had been set up, draped with a white cloth and set with a great many plates full of canapés. A white-jacketed server behind the table with his back to the wall busied himself with the spread.