‘Silence!’
Then, in a quieter tone, he continued:
‘Now the said Victor Gaillard, who is a cunning little lowlife, doesn’t want to give up the information for free. He wants 30,000 francs in return for the name. Let’s say he’ll settle for twenty-five. Silence, I say! Let me finish! Now the police are not in the habit of doling out such large sums of money, so all they can do for Gaillard is to pursue him on a charge of blackmail.
‘Let us consider the various suspects. As I said earlier, all the people who were at the Two-Penny Bar on the Sunday in question could be under suspicion. Some more than others, however. For example, it is a fact that Basso once knew Monsieur Ulrich. It is also a fact not only that Feinstein knew him, but that the moneylender’s death meant he didn’t have to repay the considerable sum of money he owed him.
‘Feinstein is dead. From what we have gathered, it is clear he was not a nice person to know. If he killed Ulrich, then the case is closed and no further action is required. Victor Gaillard could confirm this, but I am not in a position to accept his blackmail … Silence! You will have a chance to speak when you are questioned.’
Victor was getting quite worked up and was trying to interrupt the inspector at every opportunity. Maigret still did not look at any of them. He had been speaking in a monotonous tone, as if reciting a lesson. Suddenly he went to the door, murmuring:
‘I’ll be back in a minute. I have an important phone call to make.’
The door opened, then closed behind him. Then the sound of his steps faded away up the stairs.
11. Ulrich’s Murderer
Maigret was talking to the examining magistrate on the phone.
‘Hello! Yes! Just give me another ten minutes … His name? I don’t know yet … Yes, of course I’m serious. Do I ever joke about these things?’
He put down the receiver and started walking up and down his office. He went over to Jean.
‘By the way, I’ll be away for a few days. Here is the address for forwarding my mail.’
He kept looking at his watch, then finally decided to go back down to the cell where he had left the three men.
When he came in, the first thing he saw was Victor’s hate-filled face. He was no longer sitting on the bed, but was pacing angrily round the cell. Basso was sitting on the edge of the bunk with his head in his hands.
As for James, he was leaning against the wall with his arms folded, and he looked at Maigret with a strange smile.
‘I’m sorry for keeping you waiting. I …’
‘It’s over,’ said James. ‘You didn’t need to pull that stunt with the phone call.’
And his smile grew broader the more Maigret looked discomfited.
‘Victor Gaillard will not earn his 30,000 francs, either by talking or by keeping his mouth shut. I killed Ulrich.’
The inspector opened the door and called to an officer who was passing:
‘Lock this man up somewhere until I’m ready for him.’
He indicated Victor, who was still shouting:
‘Don’t forget it was me who led you to Ulrich! Without me, you’d be nowhere. And that’s worth …’
Maigret now found this obstinate persistence in trying to extract a profit from the case not so much contemptible as pathetic.
‘Five thousand! …’ he shouted as he was hauled up the stairs.
Now there were three of them in the cell. Basso was the most downcast of the three. He remained sitting a good while before standing up and facing Maigret.
‘I swear I was willing to pay the 30,000 francs, inspector. What is that to me? But James wouldn’t let me.’
Maigret looked from one to the other with an astonishment coloured by a growing sympathy.
‘You knew about this, Basso?’
‘I’ve known for a long time,’ he murmured.
James filled in the details:
‘He was the one who gave me the money those two tykes were extorting from me. So I told him the whole story.’
‘This is crazy. For just 30,000 francs we could have …’
‘No! No,’ James sighed. ‘You don’t understand. Nor does the inspector.’
He looked round as if he was searching for something.
‘Anyone got a cigarette?’
Basso gave him his cigarette case.
‘I suppose a Pernod’s out of the question? No matter. I’ll have to get used to it. All the same, it would have made this easier.’
He licked his lips like a drinker suffering withdrawal.
‘Actually, there’s not much to say. I was married. Nice peaceful little marriage, a quiet life. I met Mado. And stupidly I thought I’d hit the jackpot. Just like in the novels. My life for a kiss … Live life like there’s no tomorrow … Leave the world behind …’
The phlegmatic way he said all this made his confession sound dispassionate, not quite human, as if he was performing in a burlesque.
‘When you’re at that age it’s all very exciting. Secret trysts in rented rooms, glasses of port and petits fours. But that all costs money. I was earning a thousand francs a month. And therein lay the roots of the whole sorry, sordid mess. I couldn’t talk to Mado about money. I couldn’t tell her that I couldn’t afford the apartment in Passy. It was her husband, quite by chance, who put me on to Ulrich.’
‘Did you borrow a lot?’
‘Less than seven thousand. But that’s a lot when you’re only on a thousand a month. One evening, when my wife was away visiting her sister in the Vendôme, Ulrich came to see me. He started threatening me. If I didn’t pay at least the interest he would tell my employers, just for starters, then he’d send round the bailiffs. Can you see what a disaster that would have been? My bosses and my wife finding out at the same time?’
His tone was still calm and ironic.
‘I was an idiot. I only wanted to smash his face in to teach him a lesson. But once he’d got a bloodied nose, he started screaming. I grabbed him round the neck. I felt strangely calm. It’s not true that you lose your head at times like this. Quite the contrary. I don’t think I’ve ever been as lucid in my life. I went to hire a car. I propped up the body to make it look as if I was carrying a friend who’d drunk too much. You know the rest.’
He almost reached out a hand to pick up a non-existent drink.
‘So there it is. After that, you see life differently. Mado and I dragged on for another month or so. My wife got into the habit of having a go at me for my drinking. I had to give money to those two crooks. I told Basso everything. They say it’s good to talk. That’s just more fiction. The only thing that could help would be to start your life again from the beginning, right from the cradle.’
It was a droll remark, drolly expressed, and Maigret couldn’t help smiling. He noticed Basso was smiling too.
‘Stupid, I know, but it would have been even more stupid to have gone to the police and confessed that I’d killed a man.’
‘So you made a little bolt-hole for yourself,’ said Maigret.
‘You have to survive somehow.’
It was a dismal story rather than a tragic one, perhaps because of James’s strange personality. It was a point of honour for him not to lose his cool. He shied away from the slightest hint of emotion.
So much so that he was the calmest person in the room, and seemed puzzled by the long faces of the other two.
‘We men are such fools. Basso got himself into the same tangle – and with Mado again! Not even someone different! And of course it all went wrong. If I could have, I’d have confessed to killing Feinstein. Then we’d have been quits. But I wasn’t even there. He behaved like an idiot right to the end. He ran away. I did what I could to help him.’
In spite of himself, there was a quaver in James’s voice, so he stopped talking for a moment, until
he was able to carry on in his familiar monotone:
‘He should have told the truth from the start! Even now, he still wanted to hand over the 30,000 francs.’
‘It would have been easier,’ Basso grumbled. ‘But now …’
‘Now I’m free of it at last,’ James interrupted him. ‘Free of everything. This filthy mess of an existence, the office, the café, my …’
He was about to say ‘my wife’, his wife with whom he had not the slightest thing in common. His flat in Rue Championnet, where he sat reading any old thing just to pass the time. Morsang, where he would round up his companions for another drinking session.
He continued:
‘I will be at peace.’
In prison! Somewhere he wouldn’t be waiting for something that wasn’t going to happen.
At peace in his little bolt-hole, eating, drinking and sleeping at the prescribed hour, breaking rocks on a chain gang or sewing up mailbags.
‘What do you think, about twenty years?’
Basso was looking at him. He could hardly see him through the tears that welled up in his eyes and flowed down his cheeks.
‘Stop it, James!’ he cried out, his hands tensed into fists.
‘Why?’
Maigret wiped his nose and tried mechanically to light his pipe, which was empty.
He felt he had never experienced such dark despair.
Not even dark. It was a dull, grey despair. A despair with no words of lament, no grimaces of pain.
A drinker’s despair without the drunkenness – James never got drunk!
The inspector now understood what it was that brought them together every evening on the terrace of the Taverne Royale.
They would sit there together drinking, chatting aimlessly. And deep down James would hope that his companion would arrest him. He saw the suspicion emerging in Maigret and he nourished this suspicion, watched it grow. He waited.
‘Another Pernod, old chap?’
He loved him like a friend who he hoped would one day deliver him from himself.
Maigret and Basso exchanged unreadable glances. James stubbed out his cigarette on the white table top.
‘I just wish I could have done with it straight away. But there’s the trial, all the questions, the tears, the sympathy.’
A police officer opened the door.
‘The examining magistrate is here,’ he announced.
Maigret hesitated, not quite knowing how to bring things to an end. He came forward and offered his hand with a sigh.
‘Look, would you put in a good word for me? Just ask him if he can push it through quickly. I’ll confess to everything. I just want to get in my bolt-hole as soon as possible.’
Then, as if to lighten the atmosphere, he added a parting remark:
‘I’ll tell you who’ll be most upset. The waiter at the Taverne Royale. Will you go there and have one for me, inspector?’
Three hours later, Maigret was sitting on a train on his way to Alsace. Along the banks of the Marne he saw lots of bars just like the Two-Penny Bar, with their mechanical pianos in their wooden lean-tos.
He woke up early the next morning as the train pulled in. He saw a green-painted barrier in a little station bedecked with flowers.
Madame Maigret and her sister were anxiously scanning all the train doors.
And everything – the station, the countryside, his in-laws’ house, the surrounding hills, even the sky – looked as fresh as if it had been scrubbed clean every morning.
‘I bought you some varnished wood clogs yesterday in Colmar.’
Handsome yellow clogs that Maigret wanted to try on even before he had taken off his dark city clothes.
1. The Shadow Puppet
It was ten p.m. The iron gates of the public garden were locked and Place des Vosges was empty. Glistening tyre tracks on the asphalt, the continuous play of the fountains, leafless trees and the regular shapes of identical rooftops silhouetted against the sky.
There were few lights under the splendid arcades encircling the square. Only three or four shops. Inspector Maigret could see a family eating inside one of them, cluttered with beaded funeral wreaths.
He was trying to read the numbers above the doors, but he had barely passed the wreath shop when a diminutive form stepped out of the shadows.
‘Is it you I just telephoned?’
She must have been watching out for a long time. Despite the November cold, she had not slipped on a coat over her apron. Her nose was red, her eyes anxious.
Less than 400 metres away, on the corner of Rue de Béarn, a uniformed police officer stood guard.
‘Didn’t you inform him?’ grumbled Maigret.
‘No! Because of Madame de Saint-Marc, who’s about to give birth … Oh look! There’s the doctor’s car, he was asked to come straight away.’
There were three cars drawn up alongside the pavement, headlamps on, red rear lights. The sky, with its drifting clouds against a moonlit backdrop, had an ambiguous paleness. It felt as if the first snows were in the air.
The concierge turned under the archway at the building’s entrance, from which hung a twenty-five-candlepower bulb covered in a film of dust.
‘Let me explain. This is the courtyard – you have to cross it to get to all parts of the building, except for the two shops. This is my lodge on the left. Take no notice, I didn’t have time to put the children to bed.’
There were two of them, a boy and a girl, in the untidy kitchen. But the concierge didn’t go inside. She pointed to a long building, at the far end of the vast and beautifully proportioned courtyard.
‘It’s there. You’ll see.’
Maigret was intrigued by this curious little woman, whose restless hands betrayed her febrility.
‘There’s someone on the phone asking for a detective chief inspector!’ he had been told earlier at Quai des Orfèvres.
The voice on the other end was muffled. Several times he had repeated, ‘Please speak up, I can’t hear you.’
‘I can’t. I’m calling you from the tobacconist’s. So—’
And a garbled message followed.
‘You must come to 61, Place des Vosges right away … Yes … I think it’s a murder, but don’t tell anyone yet!’
And now the concierge was pointing at the tall first-floor windows. Behind the curtains, shadows could be seen coming and going.
‘It’s up there.’
‘The murder?’
‘No! Madame de Saint-Marc who’s giving birth … Her first … She’s not very strong. You understand?’
And the courtyard was even darker than Place des Vosges. It was illuminated by a single lamp on the wall. A staircase could just be made out on the other side of a glazed door, and there was the occasional lighted window.
‘What about the murder?’
‘I’m coming to that! Couchet’s workers left at six o’clock—’
‘Wait a moment. What is Couchet?’
‘The building at the far end. A laboratory where they make serums. You must have heard of Doctor Rivière’s Serums.’
‘And that lighted window?’
‘Wait. Today’s the 30th, so Monsieur Couchet was there. He’s in the habit of staying behind on his own after the offices have closed. I saw him through the window, sitting in his armchair. Look—’
A window with frosted-glass panes. A strange shadow, like that of a man slumped forward on his desk.
‘Is that him?’
‘Yes. Around eight o’clock, when I was emptying my rubbish bin, I glanced over in that direction. He was writing. You could clearly see the penholder or pencil in his hand.’
‘What time did the murder—’
‘Just a minute! I went upstairs to see how Madame de Saint-Marc was doing. I glanced over again when I came back down, and there he was, as he is now. Actually I thought he’d dozed off.’
Maigret was be
ginning to lose patience.
‘Then, fifteen minutes later—’
‘Yes! He was still in the same position! Get to the point.’
‘That’s all. I decided to check. I knocked on the office door. There was no answer so I went in. He’s dead. There’s blood everywhere.’
‘Why didn’t you go to the police? The police station is round the corner, in Rue de Béarn.’
‘And they’d all have arrived in uniform! They’d have turned the place upside down! I told you that Madame de Saint-Marc—’
Maigret had both hands in his pockets, his pipe between his teeth. He looked up at the first-floor windows and had the impression that the birth was imminent, as there was even more to-ing and fro-ing. He heard a door opening, and footsteps on the stairs. A tall, broad shape appeared in the courtyard and the concierge, touching the inspector’s arm, murmured reverentially, ‘Monsieur de Saint-Marc. He’s a former ambassador.’
The man, whose face was in shadow, paused, started walking again and stopped once more, constantly glancing up in the direction of his own windows.
‘He must have been sent outside to wait. Already, earlier on … Come … Oh no! There they go again with their gramophone! And right above the Saint-Marcs, too!’
A smaller window, on the second floor, not so brightly lit. It was closed, and you could imagine, rather than hear, the music from a gramophone.
The concierge, all obsequious, jittery, red-eyed, her fingers twitching, walked to the far end of the courtyard, pointed to a short flight of steps, a half-open door.
‘You’ll see him, on your left. I’d rather not go in there again.’
An ordinary office. Light-coloured furniture. Plain wallpaper.
And a man in his mid-forties, sitting in an armchair, his head on the scattered papers in front of him. He’d been shot in the chest.
Maigret listened attentively: the concierge was still outside, waiting for him, and Monsieur de Saint-Marc was still pacing up and down the courtyard. From time to time, an omnibus rumbled past and the racket made the ensuing silence seem all the more absolute.
The inspector touched nothing. He simply made sure that the gun had not been left lying around the office, stood surveying the scene for three or four minutes, puffing on his pipe, then he left, with a determined air.
The Two-Penny Bar Page 12
