Maigret and the Lazy Burglar

by Georges Simenon

  ‘Sorry to bother you, madame. Have you seen this man recently?’

  Hotel records were checked. The Vice Squad questioned prostitutes. In the railway stations, travellers had no idea that anonymous eyes were inspecting them as they passed.

  The Cuendet murder wasn’t his case. He didn’t have the right to take his men away from what they were doing. He nevertheless found a way to reconcile his duty and his curiosity.

  ‘Go upstairs and ask for a photograph of Cuendet, the most recent one they have. Have a copy sent to all the men who are looking for Fernand, especially the ones visiting the bistros and the rooming houses.’

  ‘In every neighbourhood?’

  He hesitated, and almost replied:

  ‘Only in the wealthy neighbourhoods.’

  But then he remembered that mansions and luxury apartment houses can also be found in the older neighbourhoods.

  Once in his office, he called Moers.

  ‘Have you found anything?’

  ‘I don’t know if this is any use to you. Examining the clothes with a magnifying glass, my men discovered three or four hairs, which they then put under a microscope. Delage, who’s an expert on these things, says they’re wildcat hairs.’

  ‘What part of the clothes were they on?’

  ‘On the back, near the left shoulder. There are also traces of rice powder. We may be able to determine the brand, but that’ll take longer.’

  ‘Thanks. Has Fumel called you?’

  ‘He was just here. I told him what I’ve told you.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘In Records, engrossed in the Cuendet file.’

  Maigret wondered for a moment why his eyes were smarting, then remembered that he had been dragged from his bed at four in the morning.

  He had to sign a few papers, fill in a few forms and see two people who had been waiting to speak to him and to whom he listened with half an ear. Once alone, he called a big furrier in Rue La Boétie and had to insist before he was put through to him personally.

  ‘Detective Chief Inspector Maigret, Police Judiciaire. Sorry to bother you, but I’d like some information. Can you tell me roughly how many wildcat fur coats there are in Paris?’

  ‘Wildcat?’

  The man seemed annoyed by the question.

  ‘We don’t have any here. There was a time, in the early days of automobiles, when we did make them for some of our customers, especially male ones.’

  Maigret recalled old photographs of motorists looking like bears.

  ‘That was from wildcat fur?’

  ‘Not always, but the most beautiful ones were. They’re still worn in very cold countries, in Canada, Switzerland, Norway and the north of the United States.’

  ‘Are there any in Paris?’

  ‘I think some shops still sell them, but not many. It’s not easy to quote a precise figure. I’d be surprised if there were more than five hundred coats like that in the whole of Paris, and most of them must be quite old. These days …’

  An idea had occurred to him.

  ‘Are you only interested in coats?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because we very occasionally use wildcat for non-clothing purposes. For example, for throws on sofas. They can also be used in cars, as rugs.’

  ‘Are there many of them?’

  ‘Looking in our books, I’d be able to tell you how many have come from here in the last few years. Three or four dozen, I’d guess. But there are furriers who mass-produce them. The quality isn’t as good, of course … Wait, I just thought of something else. As I was speaking to you, I remembered the window of a pharmacy not far from here, displaying a wildcat skin that was being sold as a cure for rheumatism.’

  ‘Many thanks.’

  ‘Would you like me to draw you up a list of—’

  ‘If it’s not too much trouble.’

  It was quite discouraging. For weeks, they had been looking for Fernand without any certainty that he was mixed up in the recent hold-ups. It was an amount of work almost as considerable as compiling a dictionary, for example, or even an encyclopedia.

  And yet they knew Fernand, his tastes, his habits, his obsessions. There was one quite trivial detail, for example, that might help to track him down: he never drank anything but mandarin curaçaos.

  Now, as a possible clue that might lead them to Cuendet’s killers, they had a few wildcat hairs.

  Moers had said that these hairs had been found on the back of the jacket, near the left sleeve. If they were from a coat, wouldn’t they more likely have been found on the front of the suit?

  Had a woman helped to carry him, holding him by the shoulders?

  Maigret preferred the hypothesis of a cover, something like a travelling rug. And in that case, it wasn’t just any small car: fur rugs were hardly ever used in a 4CV.

  Hadn’t Cuendet been breaking into rich houses exclusively for the past few years?

  They would have to do the rounds of all the garages in Paris, tirelessly asking the same question.

  There was a knock at the door. It was Inspector Fumel, red-faced and red-eyed. He had slept even less than Maigret. In fact, having been on duty the previous night, he hadn’t slept at all.

  ‘I’m not disturbing you, am I?’

  ‘Come in, old friend.’

  There weren’t many officers with whom Maigret was so familiar, veterans mainly, men he had started his career with and who had been equally familiar with him but who now no longer dared call him anything but detective chief inspector or, sometimes, just chief. There was Lucas, too. Not Janvier, he didn’t know why. And finally the newer ones, like young Lapointe.

  ‘Take a seat.’

  ‘I read everything about him. To be honest, I don’t even know where to start. A team of two men wouldn’t be enough. I realized, reading the statement transcripts, that you knew him well.’

  ‘Quite well. This morning I went to see his mother, unofficially. I broke the news to her and told her that you’d soon be over to see her and take her to the Forensic Institute. Have you heard anything about the results of the post-mortem?’

  ‘Nothing. I phoned Doctor Lamalle. I was told through his assistant that he’d be sending his report to the examining magistrate this evening or tomorrow.’

  Doctor Paul had never waited for Maigret to call him. He had sometimes even asked:

  ‘What should I tell the examining magistrate?’

  True, in those days, the police had been in charge of the investigation, and most of the time the magistrate only got involved once the guilty party had confessed.

  There had been three distinct phases: the investigation, which, in Paris, was the business of Quai des Orfèvres; the examination; and finally, later, after the file had been studied by the prosecutor’s office, the trial.

  ‘Did Moers tell you about the hairs?’

  ‘Yes. Wildcat.’

  ‘I’ve just phoned a furrier. You’d do well to find out about wildcat covers or rugs that have been sold in Paris. Then question the garage owners …’

  ‘I’m all on my own.’

  ‘I’m aware of that, my friend.’

  ‘I sent in my preliminary report. Judge Cajou wants to see me at five this afternoon. There’s going to be no end of a fuss. As I was on duty last night, I was supposed to have a day off today, and there’s someone waiting for me. I’ll phone, but I know they won’t believe me, and it’ll cause all kinds of complications …’

  A woman, of course!

  ‘If I find anything, I’ll phone you. But don’t tell the examining magistrate I’m doing it.’

  ‘Understood!’

  Maigret went home for lunch. The apartment was as clean, the floors and furniture as well polished, as in old Madame Cuendet’s place.

  It was hot here, too, and there was a stove, in spite of the radiators, because Maigret had always loved stoves, and for a long time the administration had let him keep one in his office.

  There was a lovely, pervasive
smell of cooking. And yet it suddenly struck him that something was missing, he couldn’t have said what.

  In Honoré’s mother’s apartment, the atmosphere was even calmer and more enveloping, perhaps by contrast with the bustle of the street. Through the window, you could almost touch the stalls and hear the cries of the stallholders.

  The apartment had a lower ceiling and was smaller and more self-contained. The old woman lived there from morning to evening, from evening to morning. And even with Honoré absent, it was clear where her place was.

  He wondered for a moment if he, too, mightn’t buy a dog or a cat.

  It was stupid. He wasn’t an old woman, or a country boy who’d come to live alone in the most populous street in Paris.

  ‘What are you thinking about?’

  He smiled.

  ‘A dog.’

  ‘Are you planning to buy a dog?’

  ‘No. Anyway, it wouldn’t be the same. That one was found in the street, with two paws broken.’

  ‘Aren’t you going to have a nap?’

  ‘Unfortunately, I don’t have time!’

  ‘Anyone would say your concerns are both pleasant and unpleasant.’

  He was struck by the accuracy of the observation. The death of Cuendet had made him melancholy and sorrowful. He felt a personal anger at his killers, as if Honoré had been a friend, a colleague, an old acquaintance anyway.

  He was angry at them, too, for having disfigured him and thrown him, like a dead animal, on to a path in the Bois de Boulogne, where the body must have bounced on the frozen ground.

  At the same time, he couldn’t help smiling when thinking about Cuendet’s life and obsessions, which he was making such an effort to understand. Oddly, even though they were so different from each other, he had the impression he was succeeding.

  Of course, at the beginning of his career, if it could be called that, when he was merely an apprentice, Honoré had cut his teeth in the most banal way possible, the way chosen by all petty crooks born in humble circumstances, stealing whatever he could find, without discrimination.

  He didn’t even sell the objects he acquired in this way, but hoarded them in his garret, like a puppy hoarding crusts and old bones under its sleeping mat.

  Why, when he was considered a model soldier, had he deserted twice? Naively! Stupidly! Both times, he had let himself be caught without trying to get away or resist.

  In Paris, in the Bastille neighbourhood, he had perfected his work, and his style had started to become apparent. He didn’t belong to a gang. He had no friends. He worked alone.

  He had been a locksmith, a boilermaker, an odd job man, and he was good with his hands, meticulous. He learned how to break into shops, workshops, warehouses.

  He wasn’t armed. He had never owned a weapon, not even a flick knife.

  Not once had he raised an alarm, or left a trace. He was the silent man par excellence, in life as in his work.

  What were his relations with women? There didn’t seem to have been any in his life. He had only ever lived with his mother and, although he sometimes paid for prostitutes, he must have done so discreetly, in neighbourhoods far from home, where nobody would recognize him.

  He could spend hours sitting in a café, near the window, over a bottle of white wine. He could also watch, for days on end, at the window of a furnished room, just as, in Rue Mouffetard, he would spend hours reading by the fire.

  He had almost no needs. And yet the list of stolen jewels – considering only those thefts that could reasonably be attributed to him – amounted to quite a fortune.

  Did he occasionally go somewhere outside Paris, where he led a different life and spent his money?

  ‘I’m thinking’, Maigret said to his wife, ‘about a strange character, a burglar …’

  ‘The one who was murdered this morning?’

  ‘How did you know that?’

  ‘It’s in the midday paper that was just brought up.’

  ‘Let me see.’

  ‘There are only a few lines. I came across them by chance.’

  A BODY IN THE BOIS DE BOULOGNE

  Last night, at about three o’clock, two police officers on bicycles from the sixteenth arrondissement discovered the body of a man with a fractured skull lying on a path in the Bois de Boulogne. The man has been identified as Honoré Cuendet, born in Switzerland, fifty years old and a known criminal. According to the examining magistrate, Judge Cajou, who has been put in charge of the case and who visited the scene in the company of Deputy Prosecutor Kernavel and the pathologist, it is most likely to have been a gangland killing.

  ‘What were you saying?’

  The mention of a ‘gangland killing’ really upset him, because it meant that, as far as those gentlemen in the Palais de Justice were concerned, the case was practically buried. As a prosecutor had said:

  ‘Let them kill each other, down to the last man. It’s less work for the executioner and money saved for the taxpayer.’

  ‘What was I saying? … Oh, yes! Imagine a burglar who deliberately chooses houses or apartments that are occupied …’

  ‘To break into?’

  ‘Yes. Every year, in Paris, every season so to speak, there are apartments that remain empty for several weeks, while their tenants are by the sea, in the mountains, in their chateaus or abroad.’

  ‘And those apartments get burgled, is that right?’

  ‘That’s right, they get burgled. By specialists who would never dream of breaking into a place where they might find someone there.’

  ‘What are you getting at?’

  ‘This burglar of mine, Honoré Cuendet, is only interested in apartments that are occupied. Often, he waits until the masters have got back from the theatre or somewhere else, and the wife has taken off her jewels and put them in an adjoining room or even, sometimes, on a piece of furniture in the bedroom.’

  Madame Maigret replied, logically:

  ‘If he broke in when the wife was at a party, he wouldn’t find the jewels, if, as you say, she’s wearing them.’

  ‘He’d probably find other objects of value: paintings, cash.’

  ‘You mean that, with him, it’s a kind of vice?’

  ‘That may be too strong a word, but I suspect it was an obsession. He felt some sort of pleasure in breaking into other people’s lives as they were being lived. Once, he took a stopwatch from the bedside table of a man who was sleeping. The man didn’t hear a thing.’

  She was smiling, too.

  ‘How many times did you catch him?’

  ‘He was only sentenced once, although at the time he hadn’t yet adopted that technique and was stealing the same way as everyone else. But in the office we have a list of burglaries that were almost certainly his work. In some cases, he rented a room for several weeks opposite the burgled premises and had no plausible explanation for it.’

  ‘Why was he murdered?’

  ‘That’s what I’m wondering. To know that, I need to discover what house he broke into, probably last night …’

  He had rarely said so much to his wife about a case in progress, doubtless because, for him, it wasn’t a case like any other. In fact, it wasn’t even his case.

  Cuendet interested him as a man and as a specialist, fascinated him almost, as did old Justine.

  ‘I’m sure he won’t leave me without anything,’ she had said confidently.

  And yet Maigret was convinced she didn’t know where her son hid the money.

  She had blind faith in her son: Honoré was incapable of leaving her penniless.

  How would that money get to her? What measures had her son – a man who had never had accomplices in his life – taken to see that she was provided for?

  And could he have foreseen that one day he would be murdered?

  The most curious thing was that Maigret almost shared the old woman’s confidence. He, too, believed that Cuendet had envisaged all possible eventualities.

  He sipped at his coffee. Lighting his pipe, he
glanced at the dresser. As in Rue Mouffetard, there was a carafe of spirits: in this case, sloe gin.

  Madame Maigret had understood, and she poured him a little glass of it.

  4.

  At 3.55, bent over an annotated file beneath the circle of light from his desk lamp, Maigret was hesitating as to which pipe to fill next when the telephone rang. It was the police emergency switchboard on Boulevard du Palais.

  ‘Hold-up in Rue La Fayette, between Rue Taitbout and Chaussée d’Antin. Gunshots exchanged. Some dead.’

  It had happened at 3.50, and already a general alert had gone out, the radio cars had been alerted, and a van full of uniformed officers was leaving the courtyard of the municipal police, while, in his quiet office in the Palais de Justice, the general prosecutor, in accordance with the orders he had given, was receiving the news in his turn.

  Maigret opened the door, signalled to Janvier, muttered a few more or less distinct words, and the two men descended the stairs, putting on their overcoats as they did so, and climbed into a police car.

  Because of the yellowish fog that had begun to descend over the city just after lunch, it was as dark as if it were six o’clock in the evening, and the cold, instead of diminishing, had become more penetrating.

  ‘Tomorrow morning, we’ll have to look out for ice,’ the driver remarked.

  He put his siren on, and his flashing light. Taxis and buses were parked at the kerbs, and the pedestrians watched the police as they passed. From the Opéra onwards, the traffic was disrupted. Tailbacks had formed. Officers who had arrived as reinforcements were blowing whistles and gesticulating.

  In Rue La Fayette, near the Galeries and the Printemps, this was the busiest time of day, with a dense crowd, mainly of women, on the pavements; it was also the most brightly lit place in Paris.

  The crowd had been channelled, and barriers set up. One portion of the street was deserted, with only a few dark-clad officials coming and going.

  The chief inspector of the tenth arrondissement had arrived with several of his men. Technicians were taking measurements and making chalk marks on the ground. There was a car with its two front wheels up on the pavement and its windscreen shattered, and two or three metres away was a dark patch, around which people were conferring in low voices.