Fatale (2 page)

Next she lifted the cover of the hot plate, revealing a choucroute. The young woman proceeded to stuff herself with pickled cabbage, sausage, and salt pork. She chewed with great chomps, fast and noisily. Juices dripped from the edge of her mouth. Sometimes a strand of sauerkraut would slip from her fork or from her mouth and fall to the floor or attach itself to her lower lip or her chin. The young woman's teeth were visible as she chewed because her lips were drawn back. She drank champagne. She finished the first bottle in short order. As she was opening the second, she pricked the fleshy part of a thumb with the wire fastening, and a tiny pearl of scarlet blood appeared. She guffawed, for she was already drunk, and sucked on her thumb and swallowed the blood.

She went on eating and drinking and progressively lost control of herself. She leaned over, still chewing, and opened the briefcase and pulled out fistfuls of banknotes and rubbed them against her sweat-streaked belly and against her breasts and her armpits and between her legs and behind her knees. Tears rolled down her cheeks even as she shook with silent laughter and kept masticating. She bent over to sniff the lukewarm choucroute, and she rubbed banknotes against her lips and teeth and raised her glass and dipped the tip of her nose in the champagne. And here in this luxury compartment of this luxury train her nostrils were assailed at once by the luxurious scent of the champagne and the foul odor of the filthy banknotes and the foul odor of the choucroute, which smelt like piss and sperm.

Nevertheless, when the young woman arrived in Bléville at eight o'clock that morning, she had retrieved all of her customary self-assurance.

[1]
Bléville is, literally, Wheatville, but
blé
in a slang sense means money. The town's name is thus something like Doughville.—
Trans.

W
HEN SHE
got off the train at Bléville, the young woman was blonde and her hair was as frizzy as a lamb's. She was wearing high boots in fawn leather with very high heels, a brown tweed skirt, a beige silk blouse, and a fawn suede car coat. On her right hand she wore two old rings with stones of no great market value and tarnished silver settings, on her left an engagement ring of white gold, and on her left wrist a small square Cartier watch with a leather strap. She hailed a porter and handed him her large traveling bag and her slim attaché case. She no longer held the green briefcase, but was now carrying a shoulder bag made of interwoven broad strips of beige and dark-brown leather. As she crossed the main hall of the station she glanced towards the bank of luggage lockers, which was impressively large.

In front of the station, the young woman handed the porter two francs and got into a taxi, a Peugeot 403. She told the driver to take her to the Résidence des Goélands—the Seagull Apartments. On the way she shivered and rolled up the window against the cold, damp sea breeze.

For her stay in Bléville, the young woman had chosen to call herself Aimée Joubert, and that is what I shall call her from now on. At the Seagull Apartments, Aimée Joubert's reservation had been duly noted. The girl at the reception desk, barely more than a kid at the awkward age, with acne and thoughtful, mean eyes, checked a register and then produced Aimée's keys and told her the floor and room number.

“You get two keys, okay?” she said as she handed them to Aimée. “This is to the front door. It's locked after ten at night. We ask our guests to make as little noise as possible after ten. In the off-season, I mean. We have mostly elderly people here, and they like quiet.”

“That's fine,” replied Aimée. “I like quiet myself.”

The girl did not show her to her room. Aimée carried her bags to the rear of the hall, took the elevator, and located her studio apartment on the fourth floor: a rather attractive room about twenty square meters in size, along with a wide balcony and a recessed kitchenette. An accordion-style sliding partition separated the cooking from the living area. There was also a narrow bathroom with a long tub and moss-green tiles. The furniture consisted of a double bed with a predominantly bright-red plaid spread, a bedside shelf with a telephone, a teak armoire, two easy chairs with blue velvet upholstery, a teak chest of six large drawers with brass handles, and a teak chair. The walls were white, the carpeting slate gray. In the center of each of three of the walls hung framed prints of eighteenth-century British ships of the line. A small Ducretet-Thomson television stood on the floor in front of the big picture window that took up the whole fourth side of the room. On the wide balcony were two more armchairs—garden chairs—and a round garden table, all in white-painted metal. The balcony overlooked the Promenade—a vast esplanade covered with yellowing grass and traversed by a pinkish roadway—and the choppy gray-green sea. All in all, fairly satisfactory lodgings.

Aimée unpacked and put away her clothes and other personal belongings, including a key-copying apparatus, a device for strengthening her hand muscles, and her chest expanders. Everything fit easily into the armoire. The young woman drew herself a bath. While the water was running she turned the television on, but nothing was being broadcast. She turned the set off and picked up a guidebook entitled
Bléville and Its Region
and a frilly clear-plastic shower cap. She pulled the cap over her hair and settled herself in the tub with the book. She opened the volume at random and began to read:
a whale, which in that millenarian period was believed to presage the end of the world
....(Aimée's lips moved slightly as she read. She skipped a few lines; in any case the text had been familiar to her for some time.)
But it was the advent of oceangoing vessels that supplied the real basis of the town's wealth. The sons of Bléville proceeded to distinguish themselves in wars with first the English and later the Portuguese, and they ventured as far away as Canada and the East Indies. Under Louis XIV, trade and the
guerre de course
were the mother's milk of Bléville's prosperity. Following the decline of the port in the nineteenth century, the town was to wait until the 1960s for a new boom time to come. In those years the chemical and food-processing industries moved into the valley and the working-class suburbs underwent rapid expansion. Today Bléville can boast
...(Aimée broke off her reading at this point. On the facing page was a depiction of the same jetty and lighthouse that could be seen from her studio's balcony if one looked to the right.)

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.

A
FTER
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
!