Fatale - Jean-Patrick Manchette [30]
“It wasn’t viable in any case,” muttered the baron. He seemed to be having difficulty holding his head up straight. Being very preoccupied, Aimée did not notice the state he was in. “You can’t kill them one at a time,” he grunted. “You were bound to stop at some point. Sooner or later you would have been cornered. And even if you weren’t. The accepted and established laws are defended against the law of a single individual because they are not empty necessity, unconscious and dead, but are spiritual substance and universality, in which those in whom this spiritual substance is realized live as individuals, and are conscious of their own selves. Hence, even when they complain...” The baron paused to cough. A bloody froth had appeared in his nostrils. “Even when they complain of this ordinance,” he went on, “as if it went contrary to their own inmost law, and maintain in opposition to it the claims of the ‘heart,’ in point of fact they inwardly cling to it as being their essential nature; and if they are deprived of this ordinance, or put themselves outside the range of this influence, they lose everything.”
“I don’t understand a word you’re saying and I completely disagree!” cried Aimée. “All I am saying is that I cannot kill a man like you!”
“Right now, perhaps,” said the baron with a tired pout. “But your first shot caught me in the upper belly. Shit! What idiocy!” he cried with sudden ire. “You’ve killed me!”
His head lolled as far as it could. His whole body toppled sideways until it was lying along the wall. Since the piled-up boxes no longer concealed him, Aimée saw that the man’s pajamas and the lower portion of his torso were full of holes and covered with blood, and that the baron was dead. The young woman started to get up and go over to the body, but she abandoned the idea and went on sitting where she was, expressionless. She smoked a cigarette.
“You poor old guy,” she said at last. “Just wait and see what I’m going to do. Things are going to heat up around here. Just wait and see what I do to them, that bunch of pigs!”
She got to her feet and left the house.
14
“WELL, well, well, my little lady,” said Commissioner Fellouque when he saw Aimée. “You’re going to break your neck. Where are you off to like that? Is something wrong?”
“I have just killed Baron Jules with a sporting gun,” said Aimée.
“My God!”
The dandified policeman drew the back of his hand across his mouth in indecision. He was on the sidewalk with one hand on his car, a Citroën DS21. Despite the biting cold he was wearing only a jacket; in his other hand he held his car keys; the front door of the car on the sidewalk side was open. Aimée had just appeared pedaling like mad, swung in towards the curb, and braked at the last moment; her bicycle had gone into a skid, the rear wheel banging into the sidewalk and the front one fetching up with a slight thud against the bumper of the DS21. The young woman had scrambled off her bike, almost falling to the ground, hopping aside. She let go of the bike, which tumbled onto its side with a clatter. Aimée’s face was streaming with sweat. She tried to get past the commissioner and make for the door to the police station, which was fifteen or twenty meters farther on. The man caught her by the upper arm.
“Where are you going?”
“To the cops,” Aimée told the commissioner. She shook her head impatiently. “Let me past. Come with me. I’m going to turn myself in. I’m going to confess.”
“You are not in a normal state,” said Fellouque, keeping a firm grasp on her arm. It was two thirty in the morning. The street was deserted. The tall lamps on low power bathed it in an orange half-light.
“What the fuck is it