Maigret Enjoys Himself

by Georges Simenon

  ‘A Bercy. For example, if you ask a cycling constable if he’s had a quiet night or if anything has happened on his beat, he’ll say: “Not a lot. Three Bercys.” ’

  He suddenly looked at his wife with a faint smile.

  ‘Do you think I’m silly?’

  She pretended she hadn’t understood. But he was sure that she knew what he meant. She put on her most naive look and asked him:

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m on holiday. Pardon let me stay in Paris on the firm understanding that I would not concern myself with anything but simply enjoy myself. For once, people can go around killing one another and it is none of my business.’

  ‘But you’re champing at the bit over this affair.’ She completed his sentence for him.

  ‘I’m not champing at the bit. I’ll even admit something to you: there are moments when I really enjoy playing amateur detective. You’ve seen soldiers firing little airguns in shooting galleries at fairs? Sometimes, maybe even that same day, they’ve complained about having to do shooting practice at the range with real rifles. Do you see what I’m getting at?’

  He rarely opened up in this way, which showed just how relaxed he was.

  ‘At the start this story intrigued me. It still interests me. Unfortunately, I reach a point where I can’t resist putting myself in other people’s shoes.’

  She was obviously thinking about Jave and Négrel when she asked:

  ‘Whose shoes?’

  Laughing, he replied:

  ‘Perhaps those of the victim. Let’s leave Janvier to get on with it and not think any more about it.’

  He kept his word for a while at least. When he got up, it wasn’t to take Madame Maigret home to Boulevard Richard-Lenoir, but rather he headed towards Quai de Charenton, where Paris suddenly starts to look suburban. He had always loved these wide unloading quaysides piled up with barrels and goods of all sorts and the grey-coloured houses between the new buildings that evoked a Paris of yesteryear.

  ‘I wonder why we never thought of finding an apartment next to the river.’

  From his window he would have seen the barges nestling cheek by jowl, the bargemen’s wives, the children with hemp-coloured hair, the washing drying on lines.

  ‘Do you see that house they are knocking down? A young man lived there who came to see me one day in my office with his mother and pinched one of my pipes.’

  There were few places in Paris that didn’t evoke some more or less difficult or notorious case he had conducted. Madame Maigret knew about them from hearsay. She asked:

  ‘Is this the place where you spent three days and three nights, in some restaurant or other, when they found an unknown man murdered on Place de la Concorde?’

  ‘It’s a bit further along. The restaurant has been converted into a garage. There, where you can see those two petrol pumps.’

  On another occasion, he had walked the full length of the quayside, from the lock at Charenton as far as Ile Saint-Louis, on the heels of a tug-boat owner whom he eventually sent to prison.

  ‘Are you thirsty?’

  Madame Maigret was never thirsty, but she was always willing to follow him.

  ‘In that bar too, the one on the corner, I spent hours watching someone.’

  They went in. There was no terrace and no one inside, apart from a thin blonde woman who was listening to the radio as she sat sewing behind the counter.

  He ordered an aperitif for himself and a fruit juice for his wife and sat down at a table while the landlady observed them with a frown.

  She wasn’t sure if she recognized him. It had been more than three years since he had last set foot in the bar. On the yellow-painted walls there were some posters like the ones you see in country cafés and inns, and a smell of stew emanated from the kitchen. To complete the picture a marmalade cat was purring on a straw-bottomed chair.

  ‘Still or sparkling?’

  ‘Sparkling.’

  She looked intrigued, as if trying to put a name to a face. When she had served their drinks she leaned over a newspaper on the bar, had an afterthought, picked up the paper and walked over to Maigret, a little embarrassed.

  ‘Is this you?’ she asked.

  She used her finger to underline a heading saying ‘Stop press’. It was the same paper that Maigret had in his pocket, but it was a later edition.

  HAS MAIGRET BEEN SUMMONED?

  It was his turn to frown as his wife leaned over his shoulder to read at the same time as him.

  We asked our correspondent at Les Sables-d’Olonne to go to the Hôtel des Roches Noires, where Detective Chief Inspector Maigret is supposed to be on holiday. We wanted to share with our readers the opinion of the famous inspector on one of the most troubling affairs of the last few years.

  The owner of the Roches Noires seemed a bit embarrassed.

  ‘The inspector has gone out,’ was his initial response.

  ‘What time will he be back?’

  ‘He may not be back today.’

  ‘Is his wife in the hotel?’

  ‘She went out too.’

  ‘When?’

  In short, after much beating about the bush, the owner eventually admitted that Maigret had not been in the hotel for at least the last twenty-four hours.

  Our correspondent was unable, despite his best efforts, to get any further information.

  Has Inspector Janvier, who has never before been in charge of such a delicate case, called his chief for help, and has Maigret dashed back to Paris?

  We telephoned him straight away. We managed to get him on the other end of the line. He confirmed to us that he has not been in contact with the detective chief inspector at any point and, as far as he was aware, the latter was still in the Vendée.

  We also attempted to ring Maigret’s apartment in Boulevard Richard-Lenoir, but we were answered by the telephone message service.

  This is just one minor mystery to add to the much more terrible one of the dead woman in Boulevard Haussmann.

  The landlady in the bar was looking at him quizzically.

  ‘It’s you, isn’t it? You’ve been here before, two or three years ago. It was definitely you, I remember you were with a short fat man with a skip in his step.’

  She was talking about Lucas.

  ‘It’s me, yes,’ he owned up, unable to deny it. ‘We have come back to Paris for a few hours, my wife and I, but we are still on holiday.’

  ‘You should never believe what you read in the papers,’ she concluded as she went back to resume her position behind the counter.

  There was another piece of information in the newspaper.

  Early this afternoon, Examining Magistrate Coméliau summoned Doctor Négrel to his chambers for questioning. The young doctor steadfastly refused to answer questions without his lawyer present. But Maître Chapuis, who is both his future father-in-law and his lawyer, is still in Concarneau, where he is creating quite a stir among the local populace. According to latest reports, he is satisfied by the results of his trip to the Breton port and will be returning by train to Paris this evening.

  Has he been in phone contact with his daughter? Or did she act on her own initiative? Either way, she turned up at the Police Judiciaire, without being summoned, and asked to speak to Inspector Janvier.

  The inspector is more forthcoming now than at the start of the affair and made no secret of the reason for the young woman’s visit.

  She wanted to declare that she was aware of the relationship that had existed between Négrel and Éveline Jave and that she attached no great importance to it.

  ‘Gilbert,’ she said vehemently, ‘took pity on her. She literally threw herself into his arms two years ago. He didn’t love her. He saw her as little as possible. He’s been very open about the fact that, since we’ve known each other, he has seen her again three or four times and that she has pursued him back to his place. I’m sure that Jave, who knew what his wife was like, was quite aware of it and wasn’t jealous.’

 
Since the young woman left Quai des Orfèvres has been a hive of activity, and further developments are expected imminently. At the time of writing, two inspectors, Lapointe and Neveu, have just left the building, destination unknown.

  In Maigret’s office, currently occupied by Inspector Janvier, the phone has been ringing constantly.

  That put an end to the relaxed mood. A few minutes earl­ier, Maigret had been walking peacefully along the river with his wife, telling her tales of old investigations. Now his face had darkened again, and he seemed to be staring at the yellow walls covered with posters without seeing them.

  ‘Do you think,’ his wife asked, ‘they will be keeping an eye on Boulevard Richard-Lenoir?’

  He wasn’t thinking about that at that precise moment and he gave a start; it took a few seconds for the words he had just heard as if through a fog to sink in.

  ‘Possibly. Yes. It’s quite likely.’

  Lassagne, who was still in Concarneau, must be in constant contact with his newspaper and he would surely send some young reporter to stand guard in front of Maigret’s apartment.

  ‘Same again, please, madame.’

  ‘Have you read it?’

  ‘Yes. Thank you.’

  He wasn’t in that little bar any more. His wife was as familiar with that look as his colleagues. At Quai des Orfèvres, when he was in this mood, everyone walked on eggshells and talked in whispers, because he could suddenly fly off into a temper as violent as it was short-lived, and that afterwards he would be the first to regret.

  Madame Maigret thought it wisest not to look at him and instead pretended to peruse the women’s pages of the newspaper while remaining on alert for her husband’s reactions.

  Maigret himself probably couldn’t have put a finger on what he was thinking. Perhaps because he wasn’t thinking at all? It wasn’t a process of reasoning. It was a bit as if the three characters in the drama had started inhabiting him, and the supporting cast, such as Josépha, Antoinette, the little fiancée, Mademoiselle Jusserand, were no longer mere entities but flesh-and-blood human beings.

  Unfortunately, they were still incomplete, sketchy beings. Maigret was having great difficulty in making them emerge from the half-light in which they resided. He could sense that the truth was almost within reach, but he was powerless to grasp it.

  Two men, one guilty, the other innocent. Occasionally his lips moved, as if he were trying to pronounce a name, but after a hesitation, he would give up on it.

  There wasn’t, as in the majority of cases, a single possible solution. There were at least two.

  However, only one was the good one, only one was the human truth. It wasn’t a matter of discovering it through careful reasoning, through a logical reconstruction of the facts, but of feeling it.

  On Friday Éveline had telephoned Négrel, who was more or less resigned to being her lover.

  Did she tell him that she would be catching the plane to Paris the next morning?

  Or was it rather the young doctor’s coldness towards her that had inspired her to make this trip?

  Barely had she left on Saturday morning when Jave rushed to the airport and, missing the flight to Paris, got on a plane to London so as not to have to wait any longer.

  ‘Do you believe that?’ he suddenly asked, talking to himself rather than to Madame Maigret.

  ‘What?’

  ‘A coincidence. Éveline Jave is in love with Négrel and, after a few weeks apart from him, can’t stand it any more and rushes back to Paris. Her husband is in love with Antoinette Chauvet and, the same day, feels an urgent need to fly home and take her in his arms.’

  Madame Maigret thought about this.

  ‘Wasn’t he simply taking advantage of his wife’s absence?’

  Maigret’s instincts told him no. He didn’t much care for chance events.

  ‘In Paris, without his car, he had to take at least two taxis, one to get from Boulevard des Capucines, where the airport bus dropped him, to Rue Washington, and another to go to the station in the evening. If I know Janvier, he will have questioned all the taxi-drivers.’

  ‘Do you think that will lead to something?’

  ‘It has led to results in the past, but it takes a lot of time.’

  After a fairly long pause, during which he drank another mouthful and lit a new pipe, he sighed:

  ‘She was naked ...’

  That image of Éveline, naked, bent double in the cupboard, was constantly playing on his mind.

  To his surprise, his wife overcame her natural modesty, which he often teased her about.

  ‘Given what she had been up to in Boulevard Haussmann, it was normal enough, wasn’t it?’

  He wanted to reply:

  ‘No.’

  It didn’t hang together. Was it because of Négrel’s character that this version of events didn’t ring true? The young doctor was standing in for a colleague in one of the most luxurious surgeries in Paris. He had a certain number of appointments with patients – five were mentioned. Others could turn up at any moment, since it was in surgery hours, and Josépha was just across the landing.

  Even if Éveline had undressed in the bedroom, even if he had killed her, deliberately or not, wasn’t Négrel just the sort of man who would have put her clothes back on?

  Not necessarily to allay suspicion, more as a sort of reflex.

  The radio was on in the background, but Maigret wasn’t listening to it. He sat there with his eyes half closed and continued to replay the events of Saturday afternoon.

  Josépha, by her own account, had left Boulevard Haussmann around six o’clock to go to her daughter’s apartment, where she met Doctor Jave.

  At her first interrogation she had lied, claiming that she hadn’t seen her employer since he had left for Cannes. That could be put down to a desire not to compromise her daughter. But there were other possible explanations.

  He thought that he was just beginning to see a faint glimmer through the mist, but it was still too vague for him to get hold of. He thought about the landing, with the two doors leading off it ... What did that landing ...?

  At that moment, Madame Maigret laid her hand on his wrist.

  ‘Listen!’

  He hadn’t noticed that the radio had stopped playing music and that there was someone talking:

  ‘Latest news this afternoon. It appears that the Boulevard Haussmann affair is entering its closing phase ...’

  The voice was monotonous. The speaker must be reading from a note that had just been put under his nose and he stumbled over certain words:

  ‘At three o’clock this afternoon two inspectors from the Police Judiciaire turned up at the residence of Doctor Jave in Boulevard Haussmann and emerged a few minutes later accompanied by the doctor.

  ‘The latter seemed to have lost weight over the last four days and he walked across the pavement without a sideways glance at the journalists who were trying to extract a quote from him.

  ‘At more or less the same time another inspector was bringing another person in a taxi to Quai des Orfèvres, a person who has remained a bit of a mystery up until now, since she has been impossible to get hold of in the last few days: we are referring to Mademoiselle Antoinette Chauvet, the doctor’s mistress.

  ‘Holding her head higher than Jave, she crossed the courtyard of the Police Judiciaire behind the inspector, mounted the steps of the large staircase and was ushered in to see Inspector Janvier immediately.

  ‘Jave was to arrive a few minutes later. The same door opened to let him in and shut behind him.

  ‘The questioning of the doctor and Antoinette Chauvet has been going on for two hours now with no sign of it ending any time soon. On the contrary, the atmosphere in the corridors and offices, where police officers are bustling in and out, suggests that Inspector Janvier is intent on bringing this to a conclusion.

  ‘Only one new detail has come to our attention: in the bedroom behind the consulting room at Boulevard Haussmann the police discovered a button
that seems to have been torn off Gilbert Négrel’s jacket.

  ‘And now for the political news of the last twelve hours, and ...’

  The bar owner turned the radio off.

  ‘Am I right in thinking you’re not interested in this?’

  Maigret looked at her as if he hadn’t heard a word she had said. He had just felt his chest tighten, because the words spoken by the radio announcer had a quite different resonance for him than for the general audience.

  Just as they say a soldier can smell the gunshot, he could sense something coming to a head in his own office. That feverish activity that the radio mentioned was very familiar to him, as he had initiated it himself on hundreds of occasions.

  An investigation treads water, or seems to tread water, for days, sometimes weeks. Then suddenly, when you least expect it, something slots into place, maybe as the result of an anonymous telephone call or the discovery of some apparently insignificant detail.

  ‘Bring Jave in ...’

  He could imagine Janvier, looking a little pale, like an actor seized by stage fright just before making his entrance, pacing up and down in his office as he awaited Antoinette and the doctor.

  Why had they been brought in together? What new questions were they going to be asked?

  When he had left on holiday Maigret hadn’t taken all his pipes with him. There must still be four or five lying next to his blotting pad by the lamp with the green shade. There was even a half-bottle of cognac in the cupboard where he usually washed his hands in the enamel sink and where he hung one of his old jackets.

  How would Janvier perform? He was twenty years younger than Maigret but he had attended most of the latter’s investigations and knew his methods better than anyone.

  Did he have broad enough shoulders for the role he was taking on? Or what in the movies they call ‘presence’? Jave was older than him, a man of some importance, who had seen a lot and experienced a lot.

  ‘Are we going?’ asked Madame Maigret when he stood up and went to the counter to pay for the drinks.

  ‘Yes.’

  This time he didn’t force her to walk. He stood at the edge of the kerb to hail a taxi, and eventually one pulled up.