Fatale - Jean-Patrick Manchette [40]
Next to the young woman was Lorque’s body; a little farther away was Sonia’s. Aimée got to her feet, stumbled over to the Mercedes and turned the headlights off. Through the now-graying night she made out, in one direction, the dock and the trawlers moored there, and beyond them Bléville, where the respectable people slept; in the opposite direction was the other docking basin and, beyond it, the hillside with its working-class suburbs and its streets with names like Jean Jaurès, Gagarin, and Libération. Aimée got into the Mercedes. The keys were in the ignition. She started the car. Her head was continually lolling to one side or falling forward like a dead weight. All the same, she managed to drive away from the market area, over one of the bridges, up the hill through the suburbs where the workers were sleeping FOR JUST A WHILE LONGER, and head north. Blood gummed up one side of her body and clothes. On the other side, the small hole made by the 4.25-millimeter bullet was not bleeding. The young woman seemed to have forgotten the hundred and eighty thousand francs in the self-service luggage lockers and the Paris train. She drove north for seven or eight kilometers, then blacked out for a few seconds, which was long enough for the Mercedes to leave the road. When she came to after her brief syncope, it was too late to straighten up. She braked with all her might, standing up with her foot on the pedal. But at that moment one wheel of the powerful automobile slipped into the ditch, the Mercedes swung across the soft shoulder, skidded in an explosion of grass and earth, and landed up against a tree. The chassis and body were twisted in the middle. Aimée hit her head on a doorframe. For a short while she stayed in the wreck, coughing. Then she got out of the damaged machine. A dirt track led off from the main road about ten meters away. Aimée began walking along it, limping. The dawn was breaking. Aimée’s temples throbbed. After a moment, I don’t know whether it is part of a vision she had on account of the blood loss or for some other reason, but it seems to me that she was now wearing a splendid, possibly sequined scarlet dress; that there was a glorious golden dawn light; and that, in high heels and her scarlet evening gown, intact and exquisitely beautiful, Aimée was with great ease climbing a snow-covered slope like those in the Mont Blanc massif. SENSUAL WOMEN, PHILOSOPHICALLY MINDED WOMEN, IT IS TO YOU THAT I ADDRESS MYSELF.
—Clamart, Menton, 1976–1977
AFTERWORD
Nine Notes on Fatale
THIS IS a roman noir, so classified on the back jacket of the French edition, but what is a roman noir? As we know, the term originally referred to what were also called Gothic novels, a genre initiated in the eighteenth century. Eventually it came to apply only to the type of literature known as crime fiction, a form whose invention, as Walter Benjamin pointed out, coincided with the advent of photography, which meant the end of anonymity in that it made it possible, notably for the purposes of oppression, to identify individuals.
Is the crime novel the kind of novel where death is the prime mover? Where, aside from violence and evil, money is the motor and the stake of the action? Certainly as much may be said of Fatale, possibly the darkest of its author’s works. Indeed the tone is set as early as the end of the second paragraph, where a group of hunters is presented: “They had been hunting for a good three hours and still had not killed anything. Everyone was frustrated and crotchety.” One is tempted to ask whether this mood might not be that of the impatient reader: We have been reading for two