Fatale - Jean-Patrick Manchette [29]
“I am through,” said Aimée. “Up to now, this was my thing, you see.” She used the familiar second-person pronoun to address the baron. “But of course, you can have no idea.” She began to cry again, but softly now. “The first one, my husband, it was a revelation, you can have no idea. I was an idiot, you see. An engineer. I lived with the guy for seven years. A normal guy. In the suburbs, back there.” Aimée gestured vaguely in the general direction of the Paris metropolitan area, but perhaps she was referring to some other city. “Just a normal guy,” she said again. “Six Ricards a day. He slapped me about. Normal. I didn’t feel anything.”
She nodded as if to convince herself. Then all of a sudden she recounted how one evening she had grabbed the carving knife from an open drawer. Not that it was the first time her husband had abused her. On the contrary, it had been going on for several years. In any case she grabbed the knife, which was in a rectangular cardboard sheath, and plunged it into her husband’s liver without bothering to slip it out of the cardboard. She told the police and the judge that the man had accidentally fallen on the knife. It did not take them long to decide that her account was not implausible. The young judge, who prided himself on his subtlety, found the matter of the cardboard sheath most significant: When you are going to stab someone, he maintained, you bare the blade first. Furthermore, nearly all the fingerprints on the knife were the husband’s, for he was the one who always carved the meat or the bird, and who sharpened the knife. (He used to say that the young woman did not know how to sharpen it.) The husband, meanwhile, offered no version of the incident. This despite the fact that it took him ten hours to die. During that time he appeared to be conscious, but he never uttered a word. He seemed detached, and eventually he died. The young woman was not charged.
“It was a genuine revelation, you see,” said Aimée to the baron. “They can be killed. The real assholes can be killed. Anyway, I needed money but I didn’t want to work.”
“Seems reasonable,” said the baron.
“Mind you, this is work too, what I do,” said Aimée, reverting to the polite form of address. (And her delivery, somehow deadened during her last remarks, now almost completely regained its usual precision and trenchancy, and its rather elegant tones.)
But she appeared to be distracted. She seemed to be looking at the baron but not seeing him. The man was resting his chin on the stack of cardboard boxes behind which he had retreated. His lips were pale and his cheekbones protruded. Aimée gave him a quick summary of her work, telling how she would go from town to town, each time assuming a different personality, and how she would insinuate herself into the most elevated social circles, meaning rich people. And how she observed individuals, and their activities, and the conflicts that invariably arose among them.
“You always end up finding what you are looking for,” said the young woman. “There is always one fat real asshole who wants to kill another. The rest is a question of skill. Worming yourself into the client’s private life. Putting the idea of killing into his head, where in fact it already is. Then offering your services, ideally at a moment of crisis. I don’t tell them I’m a killer. I’m a woman, and they wouldn’t take me seriously. I tell them that I know a killer. Sometimes I let them assume that he is my lover. That makes them jealous. It’s fun.” She sighed audibly. “But now—now it has all gone to hell.”
A vague “Huh?” came from the baron.
“From the start, here in Bléville, things haven’t been working for me,” Aimée said. “I’ve been wasting time. I didn’t know whom to kill. For a moment I thought of suggesting to Sinistrat’s old lady that her wretch of a husband could be done in. Or proposing to Sinistrat and his little Julie that old Lenverguez be bumped off. But it was no good.