Three to Kill
Jean-Patrick Manchette
Translated from the French
by Donald Nicholson-Smith
CITY LIGHTS BOOKS
SAN FRANCISCO
Original text © 1976 by Éditions Gallimard
This translation © 2002 by Donald Nicholson-Smith
All rights reserved.
Cover design and photo: Stefan Gutermuth
Book design and typography: Small World Productions
Editor: James Brook
This work, published as part of the program of aid for publication, received support from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Cultural Service of the French Embassy in the United States. Cet ouvrage publié dans le cadre du programme d’aide à la publication bénéficie du soutien du Ministère des Affaires Etrangères et du Service Culturel de l’Ambassade de France représenté aux Etats-Unis.
Ourvrage publié avec l’aide du ministère français chargé de la culture—Centre national du livre.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Manchette, Jean-Patrick, 1942-
[Petit bleu de la côte ouest. English]
Three to kill / by Jean-Patrick Manchette ; translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-87286-395-6
I. Title: 3 to kill. II. Nicholson-Smith, Donald. III. Title.
PQ2673.A452 P4713 2002
843’.914—dc21
2001042123
CITY LIGHTS BOOKS are published at the City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94133. Visit us on the Web at www.citylights.com.
Contents
1
And sometimes what used to happen was what is happening now: Georges Gerfaut is driving on Paris’s outer ring road. He has entered at the Porte d’Ivry. It is two-thirty or maybe three-fifteen in the morning. A section of the inner ring road is closed for cleaning, and on the rest of the inner ring road traffic is almost nonexistent. On the outer ring road there are perhaps two or three or at the most four vehicles per kilometer. Some are trucks, many of them very slow moving. The other vehicles are private cars, all traveling at high speed, well above the legal limit. This is also true of Georges Gerfaut. He has had five glasses of Four Roses bourbon. And about three hours ago he took two capsules of a powerful barbiturate. The combined effect on him has not been drowsiness but a tense euphoria that threatens at any moment to change into anger or else into a kind of vaguely Chekhovian and essentially bitter melancholy, not a very valiant or interesting feeling. Georges Gerfaut is doing 145 kilometers per hour.
Georges Gerfaut is a man under forty. His car is a steel-gray Mercedes. The leather upholstery is mahogany brown, matching all the fittings of the vehicle’s interior. As for Georges Gerfaut’s interior, it is somber and confused; a clutch of leftwing ideas may just be discerned. On the car’s dashboard, below the instrument panel, is a mat metal plate with Georges’s name, address, and blood group engraved upon it, along with a piss-poor depiction of Saint Christopher. Via two speakers, one beneath the dashboard, the other on the back-window deck, a tape player is quietly diffusing West Coast–style jazz: Gerry Mulligan, Jimmy Giuffre, Bud Shank, Chico Hamilton. I know, for instance, that at one point it is Rube Bloom and Ted Koehler’s “Truckin’” that is playing, as recorded by the Bob Brookmeyer Quintet.
The reason why Georges is barreling along the outer ring road, with diminished reflexes, listening to this particular music, must be sought first and foremost in the position occupied by Georges in the social relations of production. The fact that Georges has killed at least two men in the course of the last year is not germane. What is happening now used to happen from time to time in the past.
2
Alonso Emerich y Emerich had also killed people, a good many more people than Georges Gerfaut. There is no common measure between Georges and Alonso. Alonso was born in the nineteen-twenties in the Dominican Republic. His repetitious Germanic family name tells us, just like that of his friend and close comrade-in-arms General Elías Wessin y Wessin, that his family belonged to the island’s white elite and sought to signal it in this way, to underline the purity of their blood, their complete innocence of any intermixing with inferior races, Indian, Jewish, black, or other.
In the last days of his life, Alonso was a fiftyish man with a dark complexion, a middle-age spread, and hair dyed at the