Fatale (6 page)

“I have some calvados, and I must have the rest of a bottle of fairly decent scotch,” said the baron. “And perhaps you would like some tea?” Aimée nodded. “I'll make tea. And let me find some towels so you can rub yourself down.”

The man left through a small white door. Aimée took a few hesitant steps in the enormous room, which must have measured at least sixty or eighty square meters. It was crowded with sideboards, tables, cupboards, seats, sofas, knickknacks, and large cardboard boxes bearing such legends as
BLACK AND WHITE
and
HÉNAFF LUNCHEON MEAT—JACK TAR'S TREAT
. The pale paint on the walls and the plaster on the ceiling were all scaling off. The ceiling bore dirty brown circles above the shaded lamps. The furniture was thick with dust, and old breadcrumbs lay on the filth-ingrained Persian carpets. The baron returned carrying a tray laden with glasses and bottles. Slung over one shoulder was a hand towel with the logo of the SNCF, the French National Railways. He set the tray down and tendered the towel to Aimée. As the young woman rubbed her head he poured spirits from a crystal decanter into glasses bearing Mobil and Martini logos.

“When I break this decanter of mine,” he said, “I'll replace it with one with advertising on it.” He held out one of the glasses to Aimée, who reached for it with one hand as she continued toweling her hair with the other. “I am very interested in promotional items and free gifts,” continued the baron. “Also in trash. I have no income, you see, and a man with no income is bound to take a great interest in free gifts and trash.” He took a sip of brandy and clicked his tongue appreciatively. “Given the present state of the world, don't you know, with the increase of constant capital as compared with variable capital, a whole stratum of the poor is bound to be unemployed and live off free gifts and trash, and occasionally off various government subsidies. Do you know what I am saying?”

“I am not sure,” said Aimée.

“Nor am I,” said the baron. “But excuse me, please, I hear the kettle whistling.”

He went off again through the small white door, leaving it open behind him.

“I'm glad I picked you up on the road,” he shouted from the kitchen. “I wanted to see you again. I think you are mysterious. Are you mysterious?”

Aimée made no reply. The baron reappeared with another tray holding tea and cups.

“Alas, I have neither milk nor sugar at present,” he said. “I must apologize for the condition in which I first appeared before you, I mean to say with my prick in my hand. It is I who must seem mysterious to you.”

“Not really,” said Aimée. “No big deal.”

They drank their tea and glared at each other in silence, standing very close, with their noses in their cups.

“I am not mysterious,” declared the baron at last. “I am an astronomer. Come, let me show you.”

He went ahead of Aimée through the small white door and led her up a narrow staircase. They came to the second floor. Aimée, who had not finished her drink, an excellent calvados, was holding her glass. As they went down a passageway, the baron pointed into a bare room with a camp bed and covers, a naked bulb dangling from the ceiling, and cases of whiskey and cartons of cigarettes piled up against the walls.

“My bedroom,” he said. “I'm not going to invite you in there to copulate; we are not well enough acquainted for that.” And he continued on down the passageway. Here too there were boxes of spirits and cartons of cigarettes. “Would you like a few cartons of English cigarettes?” he asked. “I have various dealings with the Bléville seamen.”

“No, thank you,” replied Aimée.

“And I win stuff off them at cards,” added the baron as he started up a very narrow spiral staircase at the end of the corridor. “I'm a very good player. And, frankly, they let me cheat. Because I make them laugh.”

The spiral staircase led up an angle tower. Through leaded windows of colored glass Aimée looked down over the rear of the garden, where rabbits were running in and out of rain-soaked hutches. Then they came into a circular room directly beneath the tower's roof.

“Didn't I tell you I was an astronomer?” the baron cried triumphantly. Although they had climbed the staircase quickly, he was not out of breath. Nor was Aimée.

There were apertures in the roof, mirrors, a variety of glasses and telescopes, and, strewn on rolling enameled tables reminiscent of those used in hospitals, papers covered with notations in very tiny but very legible handwriting. So far as Aimée could tell, these were calculations and vaguely poetic thoughts on celestial bodies. Through a stained-glass window the blue-tinged rooftops of Bléville could be seen several kilometers away.

“It's a fine pastime, astronomy,” said the baron, as he adjusted a telescope mounted at an almost vertical angle and pointing at an opening in the roof, a kind of skylight. “It's a fine pastime that harms no one and corresponds to my social rank and tastes. I love to observe.” He looked at Aimée, who did not respond. He turned away and abruptly slapped the telescope down into a horizontal position. “Not just the stars, though—fine gentlemen too!” he cried. “Bléville is also worth observing. Not with this instrument, of course. But through cracks in the walls, through the chinks in people themselves, through keyholes.” The baron turned away from the stained-glass window. “I have been watching this town for dozens of years,” he explained. “I know everything there is to know about it.” His expression was now frozen, empty. Muscles pulled his lips taut against his teeth. “So just fight bravely on, most gracious masters of capital!...you shall be allowed to rule for a short time. You shall be allowed to dictate your laws, to bask in the rays of the majesty you have created, to spread your banquets in the halls of kings, and to take the beautiful princess to wife—but do not forget that ‘Before the door stands the headsman!'”

“What are you talking about?” demanded Aimée.

A little later, a little calmer now, as the pair went back down into the hall (on a wall of which hung a Weatherby Regency under-and-over double-barrel shotgun), Baron Jules further informed Aimée that, although the movements of men are not analogous to the movements of the stars, it sometimes seemed to him that they were, this on account of the posture that he had adopted, or rather that he had been obliged to adopt. These strange remarks made Aimée a little nervous, and she wanted to get away from this place. It was not long before the baron drove her back to Bléville. Yet when he left in his banged-up old 4CV, Aimée was sorry.

O
NE OR
two minutes after alighting from Baron Jules's 4CV in front of the Seagull Apartments, Aimée was opening the door of her studio when she heard a kind of strangled groan which made her shudder. Standing before her half-open door, she quickly turned her head. Some way down the corridor, another door was ajar. In the opening a little old lady could be seen. Aimée shook her head in irritation. Twice or three times a week she had noticed the old lady spying on her as she passed. She was an especially repulsive old woman by Aimée's lights, with her pendulous cheeks caked with white face powder and her purplish lipstick. This time, though, she seemed to be trying to address the young woman. Clutching the doorframe with one hand, she cleared her throat in a disgusting way. Aimée opened the door to her studio wide, went in, and slammed it behind her.

She put her bag down on a chair and went over to hang her woolen jacket in the armoire. Rustling sounds came from down the corridor, and then from right outside her apartment; a scratching noise seemed to emanate from the crack beneath the door, followed by snorts, a belch, and a cough. Aimée went back to the door and opened it in exasperation.

“What the hell do you want?” she demanded.

Only then did she see the old woman, silent now, lying on her stomach just outside her door, her face in a pool of vomit. Aimée grimaced in disgust. After a moment of hesitation, she went down on one knee and felt for the little old lady's pulse. She found none. With the tip of a fingernail she pulled back one of the woman's eyelids in search of some retinal reflex. Then she stood up, and, leaving the door open, went and picked up the telephone receiver and made an emergency call. Six or seven minutes later a police car and an ambulance pulled up in front of the building. Shortly thereafter, Police Commissioner Fellouque's personal car also drew up. A bald-headed doctor of about fifty, whom Aimée did not know, examined the old woman. She was dead. They took her away on a stretcher.

“She must have dragged herself along to your room to ask for help,” said Commissioner Fellouque. Tall and dark, with a light mustache and dazzling white teeth, Fellouque was the cop whom Aimée had seen tossing Baron Jules out of Lorque's house. The young woman now poured him a cup of tea that she had just made. “Then,” he went on, “she turned around intending to go back to her room and phone. Which is what she should have done in the first place. I doubt it would have made much difference though.”

“Commissioner, is something unusual going on?” asked Aimée.

“What do you mean? What do you mean, something unusual?”

“Well, you are the commissioner, and you have taken the trouble to come out here,” said Aimée. “The emergency services could have handled this. But perhaps...” She hesitated. “I saw a baby die in the same kind of way early this afternoon.”

The commissioner rose from the bed, where he had sat down without being invited. He began gesturing with both arms and hunched his head back into his shoulders.

“I don't want people going crazy and spreading wild rumors!” he cried. “There's some kind of food poisoning going around, that's all.” He dropped his arms and suddenly seemed calm and disdainful. “I have another dead person on my hands, the third, and there are a dozen or so people in the hospital, if you must know. I want no panic. You're not going to get on the phone, I hope?”

“The phone?”

“Yes, yes,” said the commissioner. “You know how you women are amongst yourselves.”

Aimée and the policeman looked wordlessly at each other for a moment. Fellouque seemed suspicious and exasperated. Aimée's attitude was contemptuous.

“Do you have any canned goods here?” asked the commissioner. The door to the studio, which had been pushed shut, was now opened wide by someone who was simultaneously knocking on it. “Ah, not you!” cried the commissioner. “Get the hell out of here! Leave us be!”

“This is a private residence,” observed the intruder, a small man in his fifties with blue eyes and iron-gray hair as spiky as a bird's nest. He was wearing a long, beat-up leather jacket. “You have no right to kick me out, Fellouque,” he added, turning to Aimée. “Press, my dear little lady. DiBona,
Dépêche de Bléville
. Might I speak with you?”

“You can not! You can not!” said Commissioner Fellouque, attempting to bar the fifty-year-old's way as he moved smiling towards Aimée.

“Lorque and Lenverguez are busy poisoning half the town, my dear madame,” said DiBona. “We have cattle dying too. I must appeal to your public spirit. Don't tell me you are going to let this cop cover it all up?”

“It's not about covering anything up!” exclaimed Fellouque. “Malice is leading you astray, DiBona. You are raving.” He turned to Aimée. “He is raving!”

“He wants to cover it up!” insisted DiBona.

“People are waiting for me to play bridge, gentlemen,” said Aimée. “You must excuse me.”

It took her a few minutes to get rid of the two men, but eventually Aimée found herself on her bicycle in the streets of Bléville. Her appointment was at five o'clock at the Moutets, for tea and a rubber of bridge with the couple and Sonia Lorque. She was not quite sure, in point of fact, considering the baby's death and the other alarms, that the game would take place. But she smiled as she pedaled. She liked crises.

In the end they did play bridge.

“We are completely shattered by this business,” said the voluptuous Christiane Moutet, and indeed she seemed somewhat worried and overwrought. (Her husband was on the telephone in his study down the hallway, and his anxious and disgruntled exclamations could be heard.)

Sonia Lorque arrived one or two minutes after Aimée. The factory owner's wife also seemed tense and worried. But she was strikingly well turned out. Her eyebrows had been plucked recently, possibly that very afternoon. Her makeup had been applied with the greatest care, as though she had purposely sought to dazzle at this particular moment.

At first everyone agreed that it would be unthinkable to play a game of cards as if everything was normal after the ghastly event of the early afternoon.

“At least we can have a drink,” said senior manager Moutet, who had finished his phoning. He wore a worried, slightly stupid expression. He nibbled at his reddish mustache.

They had drinks in the living room. The Moutets occupied a five-room apartment in the old town, completely refurbished. There was modern furniture, wall-to-wall carpeting, and reproductions of abstract paintings.

Since everyone was present, and no one knew what to say, the voluptuous Christiane Moutet ended up suggesting that after all they might play a little bridge. And play they did. But their hearts were not in it. Players were continually making remarks or engaging in chatter quite unrelated to the cards.

“One no trumps.”

“No bid.”

“No bid.”

“Two spades,” said Aimée.

“DiBona is an ass,” said Sonia Lorque when Aimée told her about the reporter bursting into her studio earlier. “He takes himself for an American-style tabloid journalist,” the blond woman went on. “Always unearthing scandals that don't exist.”

“But this time,” said Christiane Moutet in a soft voice, her eyes fixed on her cards, “there have been three deaths. A strange mixture of deaths: cows, babies, adults.” She looked up. “This is really screwed up!” she cried. “Does nobody have any conception of what has happened?”