Fatale

16

The sound of the little automatic resembled the crack of a whip. Sonia took a step backwards, fell against the hood of the Mercedes and bounced off. She tumbled to the ground. Her extremities shook for ten or twenty seconds, then it was over. Nothing moved for about three minutes. It was approximately five past four. Aimée stirred on the ground, then sat up. With her torso erect, straight-backed, she swayed and was obliged to hold herself up with her arms stretched out behind her.

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.