Madame Maigret's Friend

by Georges Simenon

  The only reason I insist on this greyness, this flatness, is not out of a taste for the picturesque, but to show how banal the thing was in itself, swamped by the unremarkable events of an ordinary day.

  It was about ten in the morning. The daily report had been over for nearly half an hour, having been a short one.

  Even the least informed members of the public now know more or less what the Police Judiciaire’s daily report consists of, but at that time, most Parisians would have been hard put to say even what offices were housed at the Quai des Orfèvres.

  On the dot of nine, a bell summons the various heads of department to the commissioner’s large office, whose windows look out over the Seine. There is nothing grand about the meeting. We go to it smoking our pipes or cigarettes, usually with files under our arms. The day has not yet got into gear and there is still a vague whiff of coffee and croissants in the air. We shake hands. We chat idly while waiting for everybody to arrive.

  Then we take turns bringing the chief up to date on what has been happening in our departments. Some remain standing, sometimes at the window, watching the buses and taxis crossing the Pont Saint-Michel.

  Contrary to what the public may imagine, the talk is not only about criminals. ‘How’s your daughter, Priollet? Is she over her measles?’

  I even remember hearing cooking recipes explained in some detail.

  We talk about more serious things too, obviously. About a deputy’s or minister’s son, for example, who has been getting into all kinds of trouble, seems unable to stop himself doing so, and needs to be reined in urgently before there is a scandal. Or else a wealthy foreigner who has recently been staying in a luxury hotel on the Champs-Elysées and about whom the government is starting to get worried. Or a little girl found a few days earlier in the street and so far unclaimed by any relative, even though all the newspapers have published her photograph.

  We are all professionals, and these events are considered from a strictly professional point of view, with no wasted words, so that everything becomes quite simple, even humdrum.

  ‘So, Maigret, haven’t you arrested that Pole of yours in Rue de Birague yet?’

  I hasten to declare that I have nothing against the Poles. Nor do I think, even though I may talk about them quite often, that they are an unusually violent or corrupt people. The fact, quite simply, is that at that time France, being short of workers, recruited thousands of Poles for the Northern mines. In their country, whole villages were scooped up willy-nilly, men, women, and children, and packed into trains, rather in the same way as black manpower was recruited at other times.

  Most proved to be excellent workers, and many became respectable citizens. Nevertheless, there were dregs, as was only to be expected, and for a while those dregs gave us a hard time.

  In speaking like this, in a somewhat disjointed manner, of my concerns of the moment, I am simply trying to give my reader some idea of the atmosphere.

  ‘I’d like to have him tailed for three or four more days, chief. So far, he hasn’t led us anywhere. He has to meet up with his accomplices eventually.’

  ‘The minister’s losing patience, because of the newspapers …’

  Always the newspapers! And always, in high places, the fear of the newspapers, and of public opinion. No sooner has a crime been committed that we are enjoined to find the culprit immediately, come what may.

  We would not be surprised to be told after a few days:

  ‘Stick someone, anyone, behind bars for now, to please public opinion.’

  I shall probably return to that. We did not just talk about the Pole that morning, but also about a robbery that had just been committed using a new method – a rare occurrence.

  Three days earlier, on Boulevard Saint-Denis, in the middle of the day, when most of the shops had just closed their shutters for lunch, a lorry had stopped outside a small jeweller’s. Some men unloaded a huge crate, which they placed right up against the door, and then drove off in the lorry.

  Hundreds of people passed that crate without being unduly surprised. But the jeweller, coming back from the restaurant where he had had a quick lunch, had been less sanguine.

  And when he had shifted the crate, which had become very light, he had seen that an opening had been cut in the side that was against the door, another opening in the door itself, and that of course, his shelves had been emptied, as had his safe.

  It was the kind of unprestigious investigation that can demand months of work and that requires the most men. The robbers had not left a single print, or any other clue that might give them away.

  The fact that the method was new made it pointless to concentrate on the usual categories of robbers.

  All we had was the crate, an ordinary although very large one, and for three days a good dozen inspectors visited all the crate manufacturers, as well as all the businesses using such large crates.

  Anyway, I had just got back to my office and had started writing a report when the internal telephone rang.

  ‘Is that you, Maigret? Do you mind dropping by my office for a moment?’

  Nothing surprising in that either. Almost every day, the big chief would call me at least once to his office, outside report times: I had known him since I was a child, he had often spent his holidays near us, in the Allier, and he had been a friend of my father’s.

  And that chief, in my eyes, really was the chief in every sense of the word, the one under whom I had started out in the Police Judiciaire, the one who, without exactly protecting me, had always kept a discreet eye on me, the one whom I had seen, dressed all in black, with a bowler hat on his head, walk alone, while bullets were flying, towards the door of the house in which Bonnot and his gang had been defying the police and the gendarmerie for two days.

  I am talking about Xavier Guichard, with his mischievous eyes and long white hair like a poet’s.

  The daylight was so dull that morning that the lamp with the green shade was lit on his desk. Next to the desk, in an armchair, I saw a young man, who stood up and held out his hand when we were introduced.

  ‘Inspector Maigret. Monsieur Georges Sim, a journalist—’

  ‘Not a journalist, a novelist,’ the young man protested with a smile.

  Xavier Guichard also smiled. He had a range of smiles that could express all the shades of his thought. He also had at his disposal a quality of irony perceptible only to those who knew him well and which made others think of him as an innocent.

  He spoke to me with the greatest seriousness, as if this was an important case, and the visitor a figure of some note.

  ‘For his novels, Monsieur Sim needs to know how the Police Judiciaire works. As he’s just been pointing out, a large proportion of human dramas end up here. He’s also said that it’s not as much the mechanism of the police that he’d like to have explained to him, because he’s already had the opportunity to gather information elsewhere, as the atmosphere in which operations are carried out.’

  I threw only brief glances at the young man, who must have been about twenty-four, thin, with hair almost as long as the chief’s, and of whom the very least I can say is that he did not appear to have any doubts about anything – least of all about himself.

  ‘Will you do him the honours of the house, Maigret?’

  And, just as I was about to head for the door, I heard Sim himself say, ‘I beg your pardon, Monsieur Guichard, but you forgot to tell the inspector …’

  ‘Oh, yes, you’re right. Monsieur Sim, as he himself has pointed out, is not a journalist.
We don’t run any risk that he’ll reveal to the newspapers things that shouldn’t be published. Without my even having to ask, he’s promised that whatever he hears and sees he’ll only use in his novels and in a sufficiently different form for it not to cause us any problem.’

  I can still hear the chief adding gravely as he bent to look through his mail, ‘You can trust him, Maigret. He’s given me his word.’

  Be that as it may, Xavier Guichard had let himself be bamboozled: I already sensed that, and was to have proof of it subsequently. Not only by his visitor’s youth and boldness, but for a reason which I only discovered later. Outside his work, the chief had one passion: archaeology. He belonged to a number of learned societies, and had written a large tome (which I have never read) on the distant origins of the Paris region.

  This fellow Sim knew all about that – probably not by chance – and had made a point of talking to him about it.

  Was that why I was personally entrusted with the task? Almost every day, someone at the Quai is put on ‘visitor duty’. Most of the time, the visitors are foreign VIPs, often with some connection or other to the police force of their country. Sometimes, they are simply influential voters from the provinces, proudly exhibiting their local deputy’s business card.

  It has become routine. And as with historical monuments, there is a little speech that everyone has learned more or less by heart.

  But usually, an inspector will do, and a visitor has to be of major importance for the head of a department to be assigned to deal with him.

  ‘If you like,’ I suggested, ‘we can go up first to the anthropometric section, where suspects are measured and photographed.’

  ‘If it’s not too much of a bother, I’d prefer to start with the waiting room.’

  That was my first surprise. He said it quite gently, with a disarming look, and went on to explain:

  ‘You see, I’d like to follow the route your customers usually follow.’

  ‘In that case, we should start with the cells, because most of them spend the night there before being brought to us.’

  To which he calmly replied, ‘I visited the cells last night.’

  He did not take any notes. He did not even have a notebook or pen with him. He spent several minutes in the waiting room with the glass partitions, where black-framed photographs are displayed of those members of the police who have fallen in the line of duty.

  ‘How many die per year on average?’

  Then he asked to see my office. As luck would have it, workers were busy refurbishing it at the time, and I was temporarily using an office on the mezzanine. It was an old office in the purest bureaucratic style, as dusty as you could wish for, with black wooden furniture and a coal stove of the kind you still find in some provincial railway stations.

  It was the office where I had started out, where I had worked for some fifteen years as an inspector, and I admit I retained a certain fondness for that big stove. In winter, I loved to see the cast iron turn red, and I had got into the habit of filling it to the brim.

  It was not so much a habit, more a front, almost a ploy. In the middle of a difficult interrogation, I would stand up and start to poke the fire for a long time, then pour in noisy shovelfuls of coal, all with a good-natured air, while the suspect would watch me, disorientated.

  And it is true that, when I finally had a modern office, fitted with central heating, I missed my old stove. But I did not obtain permission to take it with me to my new location. I did not even ask for that permission, because I knew it would have been refused.

  I am sorry to linger over these details, but I know more or less what I am leading up to.

  My guest was looking at my pipes, my ashtrays, the black marble clock on the mantelpiece, the little enamel washstand behind the door, the towel that always smells of wet dog.

  He did not ask me any technical questions. The files did not seem to interest him in the slightest.

  ‘We can take these stairs to get to the lab.’

  There too, he contemplated the partly glazed ceiling, the walls, the floors, the dummy used for reconstructions, but did not bother with the laboratory itself, its complicated apparatus, the work that was done there.

  Out of habit, I tried to explain, ‘By enlarging any written text hundreds of times and comparing—’

  ‘I know. I know.’

  That was when he asked me casually, ‘Have you read Hans Gross?’

  I had never heard the name. I subsequently discovered that he was an Austrian examining magistrate who, in about 1880, became the first professor of scientific criminology at the University of Vienna.

  My visitor had read both of his two large tomes. He had read everything, all kinds of books I never even knew existed, the titles of which he would mention in a detached tone.

  ‘Follow me into this corridor, and I’ll show you the records department, where all the—’

  ‘I know. I know.’

  He was starting to get on my nerves. Anyone would have thought that the only reason he had disturbed my daily routine was in order to look at walls, ceilings and floors, and to look at all of us as if compiling a list.

  ‘At this hour, it’ll be crowded in the anthropometric section. They must have finished with the women and are starting on the men …’

  There were about twenty of them, picked up during the night and now waiting their turn, stark naked, to be measured and photographed.

  ‘So,’ the young man said, ‘all I still have left to see is the special infirmary.’

  I frowned. ‘Visitors aren’t allowed.’

  It is one of the least-known places, where criminals and suspects have to undergo a certain number of mental tests for the medical examiners.

  ‘Paul Bourget used to attend sessions,’ my visitor replied calmly. ‘I’ll ask for authorization.’

  All told, I retained only a banal memory of it all, as banal as the weather that day. There were two reasons I did not try to cut short the visit. One was that I was doing it at the chief’s request. The second was that I had nothing important to do and it managed to kill a certain amount of time.

  When we got back to my office, he sat down and held out his tobacco pouch, saying, ‘I see you’re a pipe smoker too. I like pipe smokers.’

  There were, as usual, a good half-dozen pipes on display, and he examined them like a connoisseur.

  ‘What case are you dealing with at the moment?’

  In my most professional tone, I told him about the jewel robbery, with the crate left outside, and remarked that this was the first time this method had been used.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘It was used eight years ago in New York, outside a shop on Eighth Avenue.’

  He must have been pleased with himself, but I have to say he did not seem to be boasting. He smoked his pipe gravely, as if to make himself look ten years older than he was, as if to put himself on a level footing with the already mature man that I was then.

  ‘You see, inspector, I’m not interested in professional criminals. Their psychology is quite straightforward. They’re simply doing their job, that’s all.’

  ‘What are you interested in?’

  ‘The others. Those who are just like you and me, and who end up committing a murder one fine day without having planned it.’

  ‘There are very few.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Apart from crimes of passion.’

  ‘Crimes of passion don’t interest me either.’

  That is more o
r less everything I recall of that encounter. I must have told him in passing about a case that had required my attention some months earlier, precisely because it did not concern professionals, a case involving a young girl and a pearl necklace.

  ‘I’m very grateful, inspector. I hope I’ll have the pleasure of meeting you again.’

  To myself, I said, ‘I hope not.’

  • • •

  Weeks passed, then months. Only once, in the middle of winter, did I have the impression I saw the man named Sim, pacing up and down in the main corridor of the Police Judiciaire.

  One morning, I found on my desk, beside my mail, a small book, printed on bad paper, with a horrible illustration on the cover, the kind you see on news vendor’s stands and in the hands of shop girls. The title was The Girl with the Pearl Necklace, and the name of the author was Georges Sim.

  I was curious enough to read it. I do not read much, and never that kind of pulp novel. I do not even know where I put the book, probably in the waste-paper basket, and for some days I thought no more about it.

  Then, another morning, I found an identical book in the same place on my desk, and now, every morning, a new copy made its appearance next to my mail.

  It took me a while to realize that my inspectors, particularly Lucas, were sometimes glancing at me in an amused way. At last, one lunchtime when we went and had an aperitif together at the Brasserie Dauphine, Lucas, after beating about the bush for a long time, said:

  ‘So now you’ve become a fictional character, chief.’

  He took the book from his pocket.

  ‘Have you read it?’

  He admitted that it was Janvier, the youngest in the squad at the time, who had been putting a copy of the book on my desk every morning.

  ‘In some ways it’s quite like you, you’ll see.’