Madame Maigret's Friend

by Georges Simenon

  The police, though, drank at the Grand Turenne, through the windows of which they could see Steuvels’ workshop. That was their headquarters, of which Lucas’ office had become a kind of branch.

  The most surprising thing was that good old Lucas, spending all day in the office, was probably the only one who hadn’t yet set foot in the bookbinder’s since his first visit.

  And yet, of all of them, it was he who knew the area best. He knew that after the Grand Turenne (the café!) there was a shop selling fine wines, the Caves de Bourgogne, and he knew the owners. He only had to consult a file to see what answers they had given.

  No. They hadn’t seen anything. But on Saturday evening, they had left for the Chevreuse Valley, where they spent the weekend in the house they’d had built.

  After the Caves de Bourgogne came the cobbler’s shop, owned by a Monsieur Bousquet.

  He was quite different: he talked too much, but his great fault was that he didn’t tell everyone the same thing. It depended on what time of day he was questioned and the number of aperitifs and little drinks he’d had at one of the three cafés, it didn’t matter which one.

  Then there was the Frère stationer’s, a retail-wholesale business, and, in the courtyard behind, a cardboard factory.

  Above Frans Steuvels’ workshop, on the first floor of the former mansion, was a factory making cheap jewellery. This was the firm of Sass and Lapinsky, which employed some twenty female workers and four or five male workers with impossible names.

  Everyone had been questioned, some of them four or five times, by different inspectors, not to mention all the reporters. Two white wooden tables in Lucas’ office were covered in papers, maps and checklists, and he was the only one who could find anything in all that jumble.

  Tirelessly, Lucas would update his notes. This afternoon, too, Maigret came and stood behind him without saying anything, puffing gently on his pipe.

  A page headed ‘Motives’ was covered in notes which had been crossed out one after the other.

  They had looked for a political angle. Not the one mentioned by Maître Liotard, because that didn’t stand up. But Steuvels, who lived a solitary life, might have belonged to some subversive organization.

  They hadn’t found anything. The more they looked into his life, the more uneventful they realized it was. The books in his library, examined one by one, were by some of the greatest writers in the world, chosen by an intelligent and unusually cultivated man. Not only had he read and reread them, he had made annotations in the margin.

  Could it have been jealousy? Fernande never went out without him, except to do her shopping in the neighbourhood, and from where he sat he could see almost everything she did in the shops where she bought her supplies.

  They had wondered if there might be a connection between the supposed murder and the proximity of Sass and Lapinsky. Nothing had been stolen from the jeweller’s. Neither the bosses nor the workers knew the bookbinder, except for having seen him in his window.

  There was nothing from Belgium either. Steuvels had left at the age of eighteen and had never gone back. He wasn’t involved in politics and there was nothing to suggest that he belonged to any kind of Flemish extremist movement.

  Everything had been considered. Just to be on the safe side, Lucas accepted the craziest suggestions and would open the door of the inspectors’ office and call someone at random.

  They knew what that meant. A new check to be made, in Rue de Turenne or elsewhere.

  ‘I may have something,’ he said now to Maigret, pulling a sheet of paper from the scattered files. ‘I had a call put out to all the taxi-drivers. This came in, from a naturalized Russian. I’ll have it checked.’

  That was the fashionable word. Things had to be checked!

  ‘I wanted to know if a taxi had driven anyone to the bookbinder’s on the evening of Saturday, February 17th. The driver, whose name is Georges Peskine, was hailed by three men near Gare Saint-Lazare at about 8.15 that Saturday, and asked to be driven to the corner of Rue de Turenne and Rue des Francs-Bourgeois. So it was after 8.30 when he dropped them, which would confirm the concierge’s statement about the noises she heard. The driver doesn’t know his passengers. But he says that the one who seemed to be the leader, the one who spoke to him, looked Middle Eastern.’

  ‘What language did they use among themselves?’

  ‘French. One of the other men, a tall fair-haired man, quite stout, in his thirties, with a strong Hungarian accent, seemed worried, ill at ease. The third man was a middle-aged Frenchman, less well-dressed than his companions, who didn’t seem to belong to the same social circles.

  ‘When they got out, the Middle Eastern man paid, and all three walked up Rue de Turenne in the direction of the bookbinder’s.’

  Without this story of the taxi, Maigret might not have thought of his wife’s adventure.

  ‘While you’re dealing with taxi-drivers, you might perhaps try to find out about something that happened this morning. It has nothing to do with our case, but it intrigues me.’

  Lucas might not be so convinced that it had nothing to do with his case, because he was ready to connect the most remote and fortuitous events to it. As soon as he arrived in the morning, he would get in all the reports from local police stations to make sure they contained nothing that might be linked to his sphere of activity.

  Alone in his office, he was performing an enormous task, one which the public, reading the newspapers and following the Steuvels case as if it were a serial, were far from suspecting.

  In a few words, Maigret told him the story of the woman in the white hat and the little boy.

  ‘You might also phone the police in the 9th arrondissement. The fact that she was on the same bench in Square d’Anvers every morning suggests she lives locally. Maybe they can check the shops, hotels and apartment houses in the area.’

  More checking! You would normally find up to ten inspectors at a time in the next office, smoking, writing reports, reading the papers or even playing cards. Now, it was rare to see two at the same time. No sooner had they come in than the Grand Turenne would open its doors.

  ‘Are you free? Come here a minute.’

  And another one would be sent to check out a lead.

  They had looked for the missing suitcase in the left-luggage offices of all the stations and in all the second-hand shops.

  Lapointe may have been inexperienced, but he was a conscientious young man, and he couldn’t have made it up.

  That meant that there had indeed been a suitcase in Steuvels’ workshop on the morning of 21 February, a suitcase that was no longer there by the time Lucas had arrived at five o’clock.

  As far as the neighbours could remember, Steuvels hadn’t left his home that day, and nobody had seen Fernande leave with a suitcase or a package.

  Had anybody come to take delivery of bound books? That too had been ‘checked’. The Argentine embassy had sent for a document for which Steuvels had produced a sumptuous binding, but it wasn’t large and the courier had come out with it under his arm.

  Martin, the most cultured man in the Police Judiciaire, had spent nearly a week in the bookbinder’s workshop, studying the jobs he had done over the past few months, contacting customers by phone.

  ‘He’s an amazing man,’ he had concluded. ‘He has the most select clientele you can imagine. Everybody has complete confidence in him. He even works for quite a few embassies.’

  But there was nothing mysterious about that either. The reason embassies entrusted him with w
ork was that he was a heraldist and had the stamps for a large number of coats of arms, which allowed him to put the arms of various countries on the books or documents he bound.

  ‘You don’t look happy, chief. Something will come out of all this in the end, you’ll see.’

  And good old Lucas, who hadn’t lost heart, pointed to the hundreds of papers he was cheerfully amassing.

  ‘We found teeth in the stove, didn’t we? They didn’t get there by themselves. And someone did send a telegram from Concarneau to get Steuvels’ wife there. The blue suit hanging in the wardrobe had human bloodstains someone had tried to get rid of. Whatever Maître Liotard might say or do, I can’t get past that.’

  But all that paperwork, with which Lucas was so intoxicated, depressed Maigret, who looked at it glumly.

  ‘What are you thinking about, chief?’

  ‘Nothing. I’m wondering.’

  ‘About letting him go?’

  ‘No. That’s up to the examining magistrate.’

  ‘If it wasn’t, would you let him go?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m wondering whether to start all over from the beginning.’

  ‘That’s up to you,’ Lucas replied, somewhat hurt.

  ‘That doesn’t stop you carrying on with your work. On the contrary, if we delay too long we’ll never find our way again. It’s always the same: once the press get involved, everybody has something to say and we’re submerged.’

  ‘All the same, I found the driver, just as I’ll find Madame Maigret’s.’

  Maigret filled another pipe and opened the door. There wasn’t a single inspector next door. They were all out somewhere, dealing with the Steuvels case.

  ‘Have you made up your mind?’

  ‘I think so.’

  He didn’t even go into his office. He left Quai des Orfèvres and immediately hailed a taxi.

  ‘The corner of Rue de Turenne and Rue des Francs-Bourgeois!’

  Words that had been heard so often, from morning to night, they had become loathsome.

  • • •

  The locals had never had it so good. All of them had had their names in the papers at one time or another. Shopkeepers and artisans just had to drop by the Grand Turenne for a drink to bump into policemen and, if they crossed the street to the Tabac des Vosges, where the white wine was famous, the reporters were there to greet them.

  Ten, twenty times, they had been asked what they thought of Steuvels and Fernande, and what details they could give about their doings.

  As there wasn’t even a corpse, when it came down to it, but only two teeth, there was no sense of tragedy. It was more of a game.

  Maigret got out of the taxi outside the Grand Turenne, glanced inside, didn’t see any of his men, walked a few steps and found himself in front of Steuvels’ workshop, where, for the past three weeks, the shutters had been up and the door closed. There was no doorbell, and he knocked, sure that Fernande was at home.

  It was in the morning that she went out. Every day since Frans had been arrested, she had left home at ten o’clock, carrying three small stacked saucepans held together by a hinge ending in a handle.

  It was her husband’s meal, which she took to him in the Santé prison, travelling there by Métro.

  Maigret had to knock a second time, and saw her emerge from the stairs that joined the workshop and the basement. She recognized him, turned to speak to someone he couldn’t see, and finally came and opened the door.

  She was wearing a check apron and slippers. Seeing her like that, a little fatter now, no make-up on her face, no one would have recognized the woman who had once been a prostitute in the little streets around the Boulevard de Sébastopol. She looked every inch the conscientious housewife, and in normal times, she must have been good-humoured.

  ‘Is it me you want to see?’ she asked, not without a touch of weariness.

  ‘Is there someone with you?’

  As she didn’t reply, Maigret went to the staircase, walked a little way down, leaned over and frowned.

  He had already been told that Alfonsi was in the area, having an aperitif with the reporters in the Tabac des Vosges, but not setting foot in the Grand Turenne.

  Now here he was, standing in the kitchen – where something was simmering on the stove – and looking for all the world like a regular. Embarrassed as he might have been, he gave Maigret an ironic smile.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘As you can see: paying a visit, like you. It’s my right, isn’t it?’

  Alfonsi had been in the Police Judiciaire, although never in Maigret’s team. For some years, he had worked in the vice squad, where he had finally been given to understand that in spite of his political contacts he was no longer wanted.

  He was short, and in order to look taller wore built-up heels – some insinuated that he also put a pack of cards in his shoes. He always dressed in an excessively elegant manner, with a big diamond ring, which might have been real or fake, on his finger.

  He had started a private detective agency in Rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, of which he was both boss and the one employee, assisted only by a woman who was less his secretary than his mistress, and with whom he was often seen in nightclubs.

  When Maigret had been told of his presence in Rue de Turenne, he had thought at first that Alfonsi was trying to dig up the odd bit of information that he could then sell to the papers.

  Then he had discovered that Philippe Liotard had hired him.

  It was the first time he had run into him personally and he grunted, ‘I’m waiting.’

  ‘Waiting for what?’

  ‘For you to go.’

  ‘That’s a pity, because I haven’t finished.’

  ‘As you wish.’ Maigret pretended to head for the exit.

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘Call one of my men and have him tail you day and night. That’s my right too.’

  ‘All right, I get the idea! No need to get nasty, Monsieur Maigret!’

  He walked up the stairs, swaggering like a gangster and winking at Fernande as he left.

  ‘Does he come here often?’ Maigret asked.

  ‘This is the second time.’

  ‘I advise you not to trust him.’

  ‘I know. I know those people.’

  Was that a discreet allusion to the time when she had been dependent on the men in the vice squad?

  ‘How’s Steuvels?’

  ‘Fine. He reads all day. He’s confident.’

  ‘What about you?’

  Was there really a hesitation?

  ‘So am I.’

  All the same, it was obvious she was tired.

  ‘What books are you taking him at the moment?’

  ‘He’s rereading Proust all the way through.’

  ‘Have you also read Proust?’

  ‘Yes.’

  So Steuvels had educated the woman he had once picked up on the street.

  ‘You’re wrong to think of me as your enemy. You know the situation as well as I do. I want to understand. Right now, I don’t understand any of it. Do you?’

  ‘I’m sure Frans didn’t commit any crime.’

  ‘Do you love him?’

  ‘The word doesn’t mean anything. There ought to be another one, a word invented specially, but it doesn’t exist yet.’

  He had come back upstairs to the workshop where Steuvels’ tools lay on the long table by the window. Behind, in the shadows, were the presses a
nd on the shelves, books waiting their turn among others already started.

  ‘He had regular habits, didn’t he? I’d like you to give me his daily schedule, in as much detail as possible.’

  ‘I’ve already been asked the same thing.’

  ‘Who by?’

  ‘Maître Liotard.’

  ‘Did it ever occur to you that Maître Liotard’s interests might not be the same as yours? Nobody knew who he was three weeks ago. He’s trying to attract as much attention to himself as he can. He doesn’t really care if your husband is innocent or guilty.’

  ‘But if he proves that Frans is innocent, he’ll get a lot of publicity and his reputation will be established.’

  ‘What if he gets your husband released without actually proving his innocence? Everybody will say how clever he is. People will start going to him. And about your husband, they’ll say, “He was lucky Liotard got him off!”

  ‘In other words, the guiltier Steuvels appears, the more credit Liotard will get. Do you understand that?’

  ‘Frans understands it, and that’s what matters.’

  ‘Did he tell you that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Doesn’t he like Liotard? Why did he choose him?’

  ‘He didn’t choose him. It was Liotard who—’

  ‘Hold on a moment. You’ve just told me something important.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Did you do it deliberately?’

  ‘Maybe. I’m tired of all this fuss about us and I know where it’s coming from. I don’t feel I’m hurting Frans by saying what I’m saying.’

  ‘When Sergeant Lucas came to search the premises at about five o’clock on February 21st, he didn’t leave on his own, but took your husband with him.’

  ‘And you questioned him all night long,’ she said reproachfully.

  ‘It’s my job. At that point, he didn’t yet have a lawyer, since he didn’t know he was going to be charged. And since then he’s been in custody. He only came back here with some of my inspectors, and not for very long. But when I asked him to choose a lawyer, he gave me the name of Maître Liotard without any hesitation.’