Pietr the Latvian

by Georges Simenon

  ‘With your husband?’

  ‘Yes … On our honeymoon, as well.’

  ‘He’s got fair hair, hasn’t he?’

  ‘Yes … Why do you ask?’

  ‘And a thin, close-cropped blond moustache?’

  ‘Yes … I can show you a picture of him if you like.’

  She opened a door and went out. Maigret could hear her moving about in the bedroom next door.

  She was out for longer than made sense, and the noises of doors opening and closing and of comings and goings around the house were just as illogical.

  At last she came back, looking somewhat perplexed and apologetic.

  ‘Please excuse me …’ she said. ‘I can’t manage to put my hand on that photo … A house with children is always upside down …’

  ‘One more question … To how many people did you give a copy of this photograph of yourself?’

  Maigret showed her the archive print he’d been given by the photographer. Madame Swaan went bright red and stuttered:

  ‘I don’t understand …’

  ‘Your husband presumably has one?’

  ‘Yes … We were engaged when …’

  ‘Does any other man have a print?’

  She was on the verge of tears. The quiver of her lips gave away her distress.

  ‘No, nobody.’

  ‘Thank you, madame. That will be all.’

  As he was leaving a little girl slipped into the hallway. Maigret had no need to memorize her features. She was the spitting image of Pietr the Latvian!

  ‘Olga! …’ her mother scolded, as she hustled her back through a half-open door.

  Maigret was back outside in the rain and the wind.

  ‘Goodbye, madame …’

  He caught a final glimpse of her through the closing door. He was aware that he had left her at a loss, after bursting in on her in the warmth of her own home. He picked up a trace in her eyes of something uncertain but undoubtedly akin to anxiety as she shut her front door.

  5. The Russian Drunkard

  You don’t boast about these kinds of things, they would raise a laugh if they were mentioned out loud, but all the same, they call for a kind of heroism.

  Maigret hadn’t slept. From 5.30 to 8 a.m. he’d been shaken about in draughty railway carriages. Ever since he’d changed trains at La Bréauté he’d been soaked through. Now his shoes squelched out dirty water at every step and his bowler was a shapeless mess. His overcoat and trousers were sopping wet.

  The wind was slapping him with more rain. The alleyway was deserted. It was no more than a steep path between garden walls. The middle of it had turned into a raging torrent.

  He stood still for quite a while. Even his pipe had got wet in his pocket. There was no way of hiding near the villa. All he could do was stick as close as possible to a wall and wait.

  Anyone coming by would catch sight of him and look round. He might have to stay there for hours on end. There was no definite proof that there was a man in the house. And even if he were there, why should he come out?

  Grumpy as he was, Maigret filled his wet pipe with tobacco all the same, and wedged himself as best he could into a cranny in the wall …

  This was no place for a detective chief inspector of the Police Judiciaire. At most it was a job for a new recruit. Between the age of twenty-two and thirty he’d stood this sort of watch a hundred times over.

  He had a terrible time getting a match to light. The emery board on the side of the box was coming off in strips. If one of the sticks hadn’t finally ignited, maybe even Maigret would have given up and gone home.

  He couldn’t see anything from where he was standing except a low wall and the green-painted railing of the villa. He had brambles at his ankles and a draught all down his neck.

  Fécamp was laid out beneath him, but he could not see the town. He could only hear the roar of the sea and now and again a siren or the sound of a car.

  After half an hour on watch he saw a woman with a shopping basket, who looked like a cook, making her way up the steep slope. She only saw Maigret when she passed close by him. His huge, unmoving shape standing next to the wall in a wind-swept alley so scared her that she started to run.

  Perhaps she worked for one of the villas at the top of the rise? A few minutes later a man appeared at the bend and stared at Maigret from afar. Then a woman joined him, and both went back inside.

  It was a ridiculous situation. The inspector knew there wasn’t one chance in ten that his surveillance would be of any use.

  Yet he stuck it out – just because of a vague feeling that didn’t even deserve to be called an intuition. In fact it was a pet theory of his that he’d never worked out in full and remained vague in his mind, but which he dubbed for his own use the theory of the crack in the wall.

  Inside every wrong-doer and crook there lives a human being. In addition, of course, there is an opponent in a game, and it’s the player that the police are inclined to see. As a rule, that’s what they go after.

  Some crime or offence is committed. The match starts on the basis of more or less objective facts. It’s a problem with one or more unknowns that a rational mind tries to solve.

  Maigret worked like any other policeman. Like everyone else, he used the amazing tools that men like Bertillon, Reiss and Locard have given the police – anthropometry, the principle of the trace, and so forth – and that have turned detection into forensic science. But what he sought, what he waited and watched out for, was the crack in the wall. In other words, the instant when the human being comes out from behind the opponent.

  At the Majestic he’d seen the player. But here, he had a premonition of something else. The tidy, quiet villa wasn’t one of the props that Pietr used to play his hand. Especially the wife and the children he’d seen and heard: they belonged to a different physical and moral order.

  That’s why he was waiting, albeit in a foul mood, for he was too fond of his big cast-iron stove and his office with glasses of frothy beer on the table not to be miserable in such awful weather.

  He’d started his watch a little after 10.30. At half past noon he heard footsteps scrunching the gravel and swift, practised movements opening the gate, which brought a figure to within three metres of the inspector. The lie of the land made it impossible for Maigret to retreat. So he stood his ground unwaveringly, or, to be more precise, inertly, standing on two legs that could be seen in the round through the sopping wet trousers that clung to them.

  The man leaving the villa was wearing a poor-quality belted trenchcoat, with its worn-out collar upturned. He was also wearing a grey cap. The get-up made him look very young. He went down the hill with his hands in his pockets, all hunched up and shivering because of the contrast in temperature.

  He was obliged to pass within a metre of the Detective Chief Inspector. He chose that moment to slow down, take a packet of cigarettes out of his pocket and light up. It was as if he’d positively tried to get his face into the light so as to allow the detective to study it in detail!

  Maigret let him go on a few paces, then set off on his tail, with a frown on his face. His pipe had gone out. His whole being exuded a sense of displeasure as well as an ardent desire to understand.

  The man in the trenchcoat looked like the Latvian and yet did not resemble him! Same height: about 1 m 68cm. At a pinch he could be the same age, though in the outfit he was wearing he looked closer to twenty-six than thirty-two. There was nothing to determine that this man was not the original of the ‘word-picture’ that Maigret knew by heart and also had on a piece of paper in his pocket.

  And yet … it was not the same man! For one thing, his eyes had a vaguer, more sentimental expression. They were a lighter shade of grey, as if the rain had scrubbed them. Nor did he have a blond toothbrush moustache. But that wasn’t the only thing that made him different.

  Maigret was struck by other details. His outfit was nothing like that of an officer of the merchant fleet. It didn’t even fit the vill
a, given the comfortable middle-class style of living that it implied.

  His shoes were worn and the heels had been redone. Because of the mud, the man hitched up his trouser legs, showing faded grey cotton socks that had been clumsily darned.

  There were lots of stains on the trenchcoat. Overall, the man fitted a type that Maigret knew well: the migrant low-lifer, predominantly of Eastern European origin, who slept in squalid lodging houses and sometimes in railway stations. A type not often seen outside Paris, but accustomed to travelling in third-class carriages when not riding the footboards or hopping freight trains.

  He got proof of his insight a few minutes later. Fécamp doesn’t have any genuine low dives, but behind the harbour there are two or three squalid bars favoured by dockhands and seamen. Ten metres before these places there’s a regular café kept clean and bright. The man in the trenchcoat walked right past it and straight into the least prepossessing of the bars, where he put his elbow on the counter in a way that Maigret saw right through.

  It was the straightforwardly vulgar body-language of a guttersnipe. Even if he’d tried, Maigret couldn’t have imitated it. The inspector followed the man into the bar. He’d ordered an absinthe substitute and was just standing there, wordless, with a blank stare on his face. He didn’t register Maigret’s presence, though the inspector was now right next to him.

  Through a gap in the man’s jacket Maigret could see that his linen was dirty. That’s not something that can be simulated, either! His shirt and collar – now not much more than a ribbon – had been worn for days, maybe for weeks on end. They’d been slept in – God knows where! They’d been sweated in and rained on.

  The man’s suit was not unstylish, but it bore the same signs and told the same miserable story of a vagrant life.

  ‘Same again!’

  The glass was empty, and the barman refilled it, serving Maigret a measure of spirits at the same time.

  ‘So you’re back in these parts again? …’

  The man didn’t answer. He downed his drink in one gulp and gestured for a refill straight away.

  ‘Anything to eat? … I’ve got some pickled herring …’

  Maigret had sidled up to a small stove, and stood in front of it to warm his back, now as shiny as an umbrella.

  ‘Come to think of it … I had a man in here last week from your part of the world … Russian he was, from Archangelsk … Sailing a Swedish three-master that had to put in to port because of the bad weather … Hardly had time to drink his fill, I can tell you! … Had a devil of a job on his hands … Torn sails, snapped yards, you name it …’

  The man, now on his fourth imitation absinthe, was drinking steadily. The barman filled his glass every time it was empty, glancing at Maigret with a conniving wink.

  ‘As for Captain Swaan, I ain’t seen him since you was here last.’

  Maigret shuddered. The man in the trenchcoat who’d now downed his fifth neat ersatz absinthe staggered towards the stove, bumped into the detective and held out his hands towards the warmth.

  ‘I’ll have a herring, all the same …’ he said.

  He had a quite strong accent – a Russian accent, as far as the detective could judge.

  There they were, next to each other, shoulder to shoulder, so to speak. The man wiped his face with his hand several times, and his eyes grew ever more murky.

  ‘Where’s my glass? …’ he inquired testily.

  It had to be put in his hand. As he drank he stared at Maigret and pouted with disgust.

  There was no mistaking that expression! As if to assert his opinion all the more clearly, he threw his glass to the ground, leaned on the back of a chair and muttered something in a foreign tongue.

  The barman, somewhat concerned, found a way of getting close to Maigret and whispering quietly in a way that was nonetheless audible to the Russian:

  ‘Don’t take any notice of him. He’s always like that …’

  The man gave a drunkard’s strangled laugh. He slumped into the chair, put his head in both his hands and stayed like that until a plate of herring was pushed over the table between his elbows. The barman shook his shoulder.

  ‘Eat up! … It’ll do you good …’

  The man laughed again. It was more like a bitter cough. He turned round so he could see Maigret and stare at him aggressively, then he pushed the plate of herring off the table.

  ‘More drink! …’

  The barman raised his arms and grunted as if it was an excuse:

  ‘Russians, I ask you!’

  Then he put his finger to his head and turned it, as if he was tightening a loose screw.

  • • •

  Maigret had pushed his bowler to the back of his head. His clothes were steaming, giving off a grey haze. He was only up to his second glass of spirits.

  ‘I’ll have some herring!’ he said.

  He was still eating it with a slice of bread when the Russian got up on unsteady legs, looked around as if he didn’t know what to do and grinned for the third time when he set eyes on Maigret.

  Then he slumped down at the bar, took a glass from the shelf and a bottle from the enamel sink where it was being kept cool in water. He helped himself without watching how much he was taking and smacked his tongue as he drank.

  Eventually he took a 100 franc note out of his pocket.

  ‘Is that enough, you swine?’ he asked the waiter.

  He threw the banknote up in the air. The barman had to fish it out of the sink.

  The Russian struggled with the door handle, which wouldn’t open. There was almost a fight because the barman tried to help his customer, who kept elbowing him away.

  At long last the trenchcoat faded away into the mist and rain along the harbour-side, going towards the station.

  ‘That’s an odd ’un,’ the barman sighed, intending to be heard by Maigret, who was paying his bill.

  ‘Is he often in?’

  ‘Now and again … Once he spent the whole night here, on the bench where you’re sitting … He’s a real Russian! … Some Russian sailors who were here in Fécamp at the same time as he was told me so … Apparently he’s quite educated … Did you look at his hands? …’

  ‘Don’t you think he’s got the same looks as Captain Swaan? …’

  ‘Oh! So you know him … Well, of course he does! But not so much as you’d mistake one for the other … All the same … For ages I thought it was his brother.’

  • • •

  The beige silhouette vanished round a corner. Maigret started to walk faster. He caught up with the Russian just as he was going into the third-class waiting room at the station. The man slumped onto a bench and once again put his head in his hands.

  An hour later they were in the same railway compartment with a cattle trader from Yvetot who launched into shaggy-dog stories in Norman dialect. Now and again he nudged Maigret to draw his attention to the other passenger.

  The Russian slipped down little by little and ended up in a crumpled heap on the bench. His face was pale, his chin was on his chest, and his half-open mouth stank of cheap spirits.

  6. Au Roi de Sicile

  The Russian woke up at La Bréauté and stayed awake from then on. It has to be said that the express from Le Havre to Paris was completely packed. Maigret and his travelling companion had to stand in the corridor, stuck near a door, watching random scenery fly by as the darkness swallowed it bit by bit.

  The man in the trenchcoat seemed entirely unflustered at having a detective by his side. On arrival at Gare Saint-Lazare, he didn’t try to use the milling crowd to throw Maigret off his tail. On the contrary: he went down the great staircase in leisurely fashion, realized that his packet of cigarettes was wet through, bought another one at a station stall and was on the verge of going into a bar. Then he changed his mind and began to loiter along the pavement. He made a sorry sight: a man so absent from the world and in such low spirits that he was no longer capable of reacting to anything.

  • • �
�

  It’s a long way from Gare Saint-Lazare to Hôtel de Ville, there’s the whole city centre to get through. Between six and seven in the evening, pedestrians flood the pavements in ocean waves, and traffic pulses along the streets like blood pumping down an artery.

  With his mud- and grease-stained coat belted at the waist and his recycled heels, the narrow-shouldered pauper waded on through the bright lights and the bustle. People elbowed and bumped into him, but he never stopped or looked over his shoulder.

  He took the shortest route, by way of Rue du 4-Septembre and then through Les Halles, which proved he’d gone this way before.

  He reached the ghetto of Paris, that’s to say, the area around Rue des Rosiers, in the Marais. He sidled past shop fronts with signs in Yiddish, kosher butchers and window displays of matzot. At one corner, giving on to a passageway so dark and deep it looked like a tunnel, a woman tried to take him by the arm, but let go without his saying a word. Presumably he had made a strong impression on her.

  At last he ended up in Rue du Roi-de-Sicile, a winding street giving on to dead-end alleys, narrow lanes and overpopulated courtyards – a half-Jewish, half-Polish colony. Two hundred metres along, he dived into a hotel entrance.

  • • •

  The hotel’s name, Au Roi de Sicile, was written out on ceramic tiles. Underneath the nameplate were notices in Yiddish, Polish, maybe also Russian and other suchlike languages that Maigret didn’t know.

  There was a building site next door where the remains of a house that had needed buttressing to keep it standing were still visible. It was still raining, but in this rat-trap there was no wind.

  Maigret heard a window closing with a sharp clack on the third floor of the hotel. No less resolutely than the Russian, he went inside.

  There was no door in the entrance hall, just a staircase … At the mezzanine level there was a kind of glass box where a Jewish family was having dinner.

  Inspector Maigret knocked, but instead of opening the door the concierge raised a hatch, like at a ticket counter. A rancid smell wafted from it. The man was wearing a skullcap. His overweight wife carried on with her meal.