‘So it was in his place that you found it?’
‘No, he’d passed it to Alfonsi.’
‘So to sum up, where are we now?’
‘Nowhere. I mean we still don’t know anything about the most important thing, in other words, the two murders. A man was killed in Rue de Turenne, and before that, the Countess Panetti was killed in her car, we don’t know where. You must have received Dr Paul’s report by now. There was a bullet in the old woman’s skull.
‘But I have just had a bit of information from Italy. More than a year ago, the Krynkers got divorced in Switzerland, because there’s no divorce in Italy. The Countess Panetti’s daughter got married again, to an American, and the two of them are now living in Texas.’
‘She didn’t reconcile with her mother?’
‘On the contrary. Her mother was more upset than ever. Krynker is Hungarian, from a good family, but poor. He spent part of the winter in Monte Carlo, trying, without success, to make a fortune from gambling.
‘He arrived in Paris three weeks before the death of his former mother-in-law and stayed first at the Commodore, then in a little hotel in Rue Caumartin.’
‘How long had Gloria Lotti been working for the old lady?’
‘Four or five months. We’re not entirely sure yet.’
They heard noises in the corridor, and the usher came to announce that Steuvels had arrived.
‘Shall I tell him all this?’ Judge Dossin asked, once again embarrassed by his responsibilities.
‘Two things may happen. Either he’ll talk, or he’ll continue to keep quiet. I’ve had to deal with a few Flemish people in my time, and I’ve learned that they keep things close to their chests. If he keeps quiet, things may drag on for weeks or even longer. We may not find out anything until we track down one of the four people who’ve gone to earth somewhere or other.’
‘Four?’
‘Moss, Levine, the woman and the boy. We may have most chance of finding the boy.’
‘Unless they’ve got rid of him.’
‘The fact that Gloria went to collect him from my wife suggests he means a lot to her.’
‘Do you think he’s her son?’
‘I’m convinced he is. The mistake is to believe that criminals aren’t people like anyone else, people who might have children and love them.’
‘Is Levine the father?’
‘Probably.’
As Dossin stood up, he gave a weak smile that was not lacking in either mischief or humility. ‘I think this might be time for the third degree, don’t you? Unfortunately, I’m not very good at that kind of thing.’
‘If you’ll allow me, I can try having a word with Liotard.’
‘To get him to advise his client to talk?’
‘Given where we are now, it’s in both their interests.’
‘So I shouldn’t ask them in immediately?’
‘Just wait a bit.’
Maigret went out. To the man seated to the right of the door, on a bench worn smooth by use, he said cordially, ‘Good morning, Steuvels.’
Just then, Janvier appeared in the corridor, accompanied by Fernande, who looked quite emotional. For a moment, Maigret hesitated over whether or not to let her join her husband. But then he said to both of them, ‘You have time for a chat. The judge isn’t quite ready yet.’
He motioned to Liotard to follow him, and they spoke in low voices, walking up and down the grey corridor, where there were gendarmes in front of most of the doors. The discussion lasted barely five minutes.
‘When you’re ready, just knock.’
Maigret went back into the judge’s office alone, leaving Liotard, Steuvels and Fernande in conversation.
‘What happened?’
‘We’re going to find out. Liotard is happy to go along with it, obviously. I can cook up a nice little report for you in which I talk about the suitcase without bringing him into it.’
‘That’s not very legal, is it?’
‘Do you want to get your hands on the murderers?’
‘I understand you, Maigret. But my father and grandfather were both on the bench, and I think that’s where I’m going to end up too.’
His face was red as he waited with a mixture of impatience and fear for a knock at the door.
The door finally opened.
‘Shall I bring Madame Steuvels in at the same time?’ Liotard asked.
Fernande had been crying and was holding her handkerchief in her hand. Immediately, she turned to Maigret and threw him a look of distress, as if she was still expecting him to sort things out.
Steuvels hadn’t changed. He still had that mild yet stubborn look of his, and he went and sat down meekly on the chair to which he was motioned.
When the clerk tried to take his seat, Judge Dossin said, ‘Later. I’ll call you when the interrogation becomes official. Do you agree, Maître Liotard?’
‘Absolutely. Thank you.’
Only Maigret was still standing facing the window, down which droplets of rain were falling. The Seine was as grey as the sky, and the barges, the roofs and the pavements all glistened with wetness.
Then Judge Dossin coughed two or three times and said hesitantly, ‘I think, Monsieur Steuvels, that the detective chief inspector would like to ask you a few questions.’
Maigret, who had just lit his pipe, was forced to turn, attempting as he did so to wipe an amused smile from his face.
‘I assume,’ he began, still standing, with the air of teaching a class, ‘that your defence counsel has brought you up to date? We know what you and your brother were up to. As far as you personally are concerned, we may have nothing else against you.
‘The fact is, the bloodstained suit wasn’t yours, it was your brother’s. He left his in your house and took yours away with him.’
‘My brother didn’t kill anyone either.’
‘That may be so. Do you want me to question you, or would you prefer to tell us what you know?’
Not only did he now have an ally in Maître Liotard, but Fernande was looking beseechingly at Frans, encouraging him to speak.
‘Question me. I’ll see if I can answer.’
He wiped his thick glasses and waited, shoulders rounded, head bent forward a little as if it were too heavy.
‘When did you find out that the Countess Panetti had been killed?’
‘On the Saturday night.’
‘You mean the night Moss, Levine and a third person who was probably Krynker came to see you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Was it you who thought of having a telegram sent to your wife to get her out of the house?’
‘I didn’t know anything about it.’
That was plausible. Alfred Moss knew enough about the habits of the household and the couple’s lifestyle.
‘So when you heard a knock at your door at about nine in the evening, you had no idea who it was?’
‘That’s right. In fact I didn’t want to let them in. I was reading peacefully in the basement.’
‘What did your brother tell you?’
‘That one of the people with him needed a passport that same evening, that he had brought what was required, and that I had to get to work immediately.’
‘Was it the first time he’d brought strangers to your house?’
‘He knew I didn’t want to see anyone.’
‘But you knew he had accomplices?’
‘He told me he worked with someone named Schwartz.’
‘The man who went under the name Levine in Rue Lepic? Quite a fat man, dark-skinned?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you all go down to the basement?’
‘Yes. I couldn’t do anything in the workshop at that hour. The neighbours would have been suspicious.’
‘Tell me about the third man.’
‘I don’t know him.’
‘Did he have a foreign accent?’
‘Yes. He was Hungarian. He seemed anxious to leave and insisted on knowing he wouldn’t get into any trouble with a false passport.’
‘For what country?’
‘The United States. They’re the most difficult to imitate, because of certain special marks known only to consulates and the immigration services.’
‘Did you start work on it?’
‘I didn’t have time.’
‘What happened?’
‘Schwartz was walking around the apartment, as if to make sure we couldn’t be caught by surprise. All of a sudden, when I had my back turned – I was leaning over the suitcase, which had been placed on a chair – I heard a gunshot and saw the Hungarian collapse.’
‘Was it Schwartz who’d fired?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did your brother seem surprised?’
A second’s hesitation. ‘Yes.’
‘What happened next?’
‘Schwartz told us it was the only possible solution and he had no choice. He said Krynker was in too nervous a state and was bound to get caught. And when that happened, he’d talk.
‘“I was wrong to think he was a man,” he added.
‘Then he asked me where the stove was.’
‘He knew there was one?’
‘I think so.’
Through Moss, obviously, just as it was obvious that Frans didn’t want to incriminate his brother.
‘He ordered Alfred to light the stove, and asked me to bring the sharpest tools I had.
‘“We’re all in the same boat, my friends. If I hadn’t killed this idiot, we would have been arrested within the week. Nobody’s seen him with us. Nobody knows he’s here. He has no family to ask after him. Get rid of him and we’re safe.”’
Now wasn’t the moment to ask Steuvels if they had all helped in cutting up the body.
‘Did he tell you about the death of the old woman?’
‘Yes.’
‘Was it the first time you’d heard about it?’
‘I hadn’t seen anybody since they’d all gone off in the car.’
He was becoming more reluctant to speak. Fernande kept looking from her husband to Maigret.
‘Out with it, Frans. They got you into this and then ran away. What’s the point of keeping quiet?’
‘As your defence lawyer,’ Maître Liotard chimed in, ‘I can tell you it’s not only your duty to speak, but in your own best interests. I think the law will applaud you for your honesty.’
Frans looked at him, his big eyes blurry now, and gave a slight shrug. ‘They spent most of the night there,’ he said at last. ‘It took a long time.’
Fernande raised her handkerchief to her mouth to stop herself retching.
‘Schwartz, or Levine, or whatever his name was, had a bottle of brandy in his coat pocket, and my brother drank a lot.
‘At one point, Schwartz lost his temper and said, “This is the second time you’ve done this to me!”
‘And that was when Alfred told me about the old woman.’
‘Just a moment,’ Maigret cut in. ‘What exactly do you know about Schwartz?’
‘That he’s the man my brother was working for. He’d told me about him a number of times. He said he was very good, but dangerous. He has a child by a pretty Italian girl he lives with most of the time.’
‘Gloria?’
‘Yes. Schwartz worked mainly in grand hotels. He’d spotted a rich, eccentric old woman he thought he could get something from, and he’d persuaded Gloria to work for her.’
‘And Krynker?’
‘I only ever really saw him dead. He’d only been there for a few moments when he was shot. There are some things I only realized later, when I thought about it.’
‘For example?’
‘That Schwartz had carefully planned it all. He wanted to get rid of Krynker and he’d found a way to do it without running any risks. He knew what was going to happen when he came to my place. He’d sent Gloria to Concarneau to send the telegram to Fernande.’
‘What about the old woman?’
‘I wasn’t involved in any of that. All I know is that since his divorce, Krynker, who spent time on the Riviera, had been trying to get close to her. Lately, he’d actually succeeded, and she sometimes gave him little sums of money. It soon got frittered away, because he liked to live the high life. What he wanted was enough money to go to the United States.’
‘Did he still love his wife?’
‘I don’t know. He made the acquaintance of Schwartz, or rather Schwartz, who’d been alerted by Gloria, arranged things so that they met in a bar, and they got quite friendly.’
‘And it was on the night Krynker died and ended up in the stove that they told you all this?’
‘We had to wait several hours for …’
‘I understand.’
‘I wasn’t told if the idea was Krynker’s or if Schwartz suggested it to him. The old woman was apparently in the habit of travelling with a little case that contained a fortune in jewellery.
‘It was just about the season when she went every year to the Riviera. They just had to persuade her to leave in Krynker’s car.
‘On the way, at a given moment, the car would be attacked and the case would be taken.
‘In Krynker’s mind, it was supposed to happen without bloodshed. He was convinced he wasn’t running any risk, because he’d be in the car with his former mother-in-law.
‘For some reason, Schwartz fired, and I think he did it deliberately. It was a way for him to have the others at his mercy.’
‘Including your brother?’
‘Yes. The attack took place on the road to Fontainebleau, after which they went to Lagny to get rid of the car. Schwartz had once lived around there and knew the area. What else do you want to know?’
‘Where are the jewels?’
‘They found the case, but the jewels weren’t in it. I guess the countess must have been suspicious after all. Gloria had no idea either, even though she’d worked for her. Maybe she’d deposited them in a bank.’
‘That was when Krynker panicked.’
‘His first idea was to cross the border, with his real papers, but Schwartz told him he’d be arrested. He couldn’t sleep, started drinking a lot. He was beginning to panic, and Schwartz decided that the only way to keep things quiet was to get rid of him. He brought him to me on the pretext of getting him a false passport.’
‘How is it that your brother’s suit …’
‘I know what you mean. In the middle of it all, Alfred slipped, just where …’
‘So you gave him your blue suit, and you kept his and cleaned it the next day?’
Fernande’s head must have been full of blood-soaked images. She was looking at her husband as if seeing him for the first time, no doubt trying to imagine him during the days and nights he had subsequently spent alone in the basement and the workshop.
Maigret saw her shudder, but a moment later she hesitantly reached out a hand, which came to rest on Steuvels’ big hand.
‘Maybe they have a bookbinding workshop in prison,’ she murmured, making an effort to smile.
• • •
Levine, whose real name was neither Schwartz, nor Levine, but Sarkistian, and who was wanted by the prosecutor’s departments of three countries, was arrested a month later in a little village just outside Orléans, where he had been spending his time fishing.
Two days later, Gloria Lotti was found in a brothel in Orléans. She always refused to reveal the names of the country people to whom she had entrusted her son.
As for Alfred Moss, his description remained in the police bulletins for four years.
One night, a seedy clown hanged himself in a little circus that travelled from village to village in the North, and it was when the local gendarmes examined the papers found in his suitcase that they learned his identity.
The Countess Panetti’s jewels hadn’t left Claridge’s – they were still in one of the trunks she had deposited there – and the cobbler in Rue de Turenne never admitted, even when he was dead drunk, that he had written the anonymous letter.
1.
In which I am not displeased to have the opportunity to at last say something about my relations with a man named Simenon
It was in 1927 or 1928. I have no memory for dates, and I am not one of those people who carefully keep written records of everything they do: a not uncommon activity in our profession, and one that has proved quite useful to some, even occasionally profitable. And it is only quite recently that I remembered the exercise books into which my wife – for quite a long time without my knowing it, and even on the sly – stuck press cuttings about me.
Because of a particular case that caused us some difficulty that year … I could probably find the exact date, but I do not have the courage to start rummaging among those exercise books.
Not that it matters. When it comes to the weather, on the other hand, my memories are very clear. It was a nondescript day at the beginning of winter, one of those colourless days, in grey and white, the kind I am tempted to call an administrative day, because you have the impression that nothing interesting can happen in such a dull atmosphere and you are so bored that all you want to do in the office is bring files up to date, finish off reports that have been lying around for a long time, and determinedly but half-heartedly dispose of day-to-day work.
Madame Maigret's Friend Page 15
