‘I thought gangsters existed only in pulp novels and films. Isn’t that what you told me?’
‘I’m not talking about gangsters. I’m giving you some advice. By the way, what have you done with my melancholy clown?’
‘I put him to work, and he’s supposed to call me or come to see me at the Berwick today.’
‘Unless he has an accident, too.’
‘You think so?’
‘I don’t know a thing. I’ve no right to get mixed up in anything. I’ve a good mind to tell you not to either, but it would clearly be useless.’
‘True.’
‘Good luck. Call me if there’s any news. I might just happen to run into whichever of my colleagues in the city police is in charge of this case. I don’t yet know who’s been assigned to it. It’s also possible that, during our conversation, he might tell me a few little things that might interest you. I’m not inviting you to lunch today because I’ll be having lunch shortly with two of my superiors.’
It was a far cry from the two men’s first meeting and their good-humoured, even joking conversation.
Now they both had heavy hearts. That street up in the Bronx, with its Italian shops, its neighbourly life, the children running around, where an old man toddled along on his walk and a car shot savagely forwards …
Maigret almost went into a cafeteria for a bite, but, as he was not far from the St Regis, he suddenly thought of the bar. He was not expecting anything to happen, except perhaps to see MacGill, who’d seemed fond of going there at cocktail time.
And he was there, in fact, with quite a pretty woman. Catching sight of the inspector, he rose halfway in greeting.
Then he must have said something to his companion, because she began staring curiously at Maigret while smoking her lipstick-stained cigarette.
Either MacGill knew nothing or he was remarkably cool-headed, for he seemed very relaxed. As Maigret sat on alone at the bar with his drink, MacGill abruptly decided to excuse himself to his companion and go over to the inspector, holding out his hand.
‘I’m rather glad to see you, actually, because after what happened yesterday, I’d intended to speak to you.’
Maigret had pretended not to see the proffered hand, which the secretary finally put in his pocket.
‘Little John’s behaviour towards you was rude and very clumsy. That’s in fact what I wanted to say: he’s more tactless than mean-spirited. For a long time he’s been used to everyone’s complete obedience, and the slightest obstacle or opposition irritates him. And then where his son is concerned, his feelings are very private – if you like, they’re the intimate, secret part of his life he keeps jealously to himself. That’s why he became angry watching you take an interest in this business despite his objections.
‘I can tell you in confidence that ever since your arrival, he’s been moving heaven and earth trying to find Jean Maura.
‘And he will find him, because he has the means to do so.
‘In France, no doubt, where you could be of some help to him, he would accept your assistance. Here, in a city you don’t know …’
Maigret was absolutely still. He seemed as impassive as a wall.
‘So, I do hope that you—’
‘Will accept your apologies,’ the inspector added calmly.
‘… And his.’
‘Was he the one who told you to offer them to me?’
‘What I mean is—’
‘That the two of you are anxious, for the same reasons or for different ones, to see me go somewhere else.’
‘If you’re going to take it like that …’
And, turning back to the bar to pick up his glass, a surly Maigret replied, ‘I’ll take it any way I please.’
When he looked in their direction again, he saw MacGill sitting next to the blonde American, who was asking him questions he obviously had no desire to answer.
The young man looked gloomy, and when the inspector left he felt MacGill gazing after him with both anguish and resentment.
So much the better!
Sent on from the St Regis, a cable awaited him at the Berwick. Ronald Dexter was there as well, waiting patiently for him on a bench in the lobby. The message read:
Received cable excellent news Jean Maura stop will explain situation your return stop investigation pointless now stop expect you next boat stop
Yours sincerely
François d’Hoquélus
Maigret folded the yellow paper into a small rectangle that he slipped inside his wallet with a sigh. Then he turned to the sad clown.
‘Have you eaten?’
‘Well, I had a hot dog not long ago. But if you want me to keep you company …’
And that allowed the inspector to discover another unexpected aspect of his unusual detective. So thin that, even in the smallest sizes, clothes hung loosely on him, Dexter possessed a stomach of outstanding capacity.
Hardly had he sat down at the counter of a cafeteria than his eyes gleamed like those of a man starving for days and he murmured, pointing to some ham-and-cheese sandwiches, ‘May I?’
He was asking permission to eat not one sandwich, but the whole stack, and while he proceeded to do so, he kept looking nervously around as if in fear someone would come and put a stop to his meal.
He ate without drinking. Huge mouthfuls disappeared into his astonishingly elastic mouth, and each mouthful pushed the previous one down without causing him the least discomfort.
‘I’ve already found something …’ he managed nevertheless to say.
And with his free hand, he reached into a pocket of his trenchcoat, which he had not taken the time to remove. He placed a folded paper on the counter. While the inspector unfolded it, he asked, ‘Would you mind if I order something hot? It isn’t expensive here, you know …’
The paper was a handbill of the kind actors once hawked to the audience after their performances.
Get your photos of the artistes here!
And Maigret, who in those days had been a devotee of the Petit Casino at the Porte Saint-Martin, could still hear the eternal refrain.
‘Each one costs me ten centimes!’
It wasn’t even a postcard like the ones the important acts splurged on, but a simple sheet of poster paper, now a faded yellow.
J and J, the celebrated musical cabaret artistes who have had the honour of playing before all the crowned heads of Europe and the Shah of Persia.
‘I must ask you not to get it too dirty,’ said the clown as he tackled his bacon and eggs. ‘He didn’t give it to me, it’s only a loan.’
It was laughable, the idea of lending a paper like that when no one would have bothered to pick it up off the street …
‘He’s a friend of mine … Well, someone I’ve known a long time, who used to be a circus ringmaster. It’s a lot harder than people think, you know. He was a ringmaster for over forty years, and now he never leaves his armchair, he’s very old … I went to see him last night because he hardly sleeps at all any more.’
He had his mouth full the whole time he was talking and was gazing longingly at the sausages someone nearby had just ordered. He would be getting some of those, no question, and probably one of those enormous cakes lacquered with a livid icing that turned Maigret’s stomach.
‘My friend didn’t know J and J personally … He was strictly a circus man, you understand? But he has a unique collection of posters, programmes and newspaper articles about circus and vaudeville families. He can tell you that such and such an acrobat, who is now thirty years old, is the
son of a particular trapeze artiste who married the granddaughter of the bottom strong man in a pyramid act who got himself killed at the Palladium in London in 1905.’
Maigret listened with one ear and studied the photograph on the slick yellow paper. Could one call it a photograph? The reproduction, a coarse photo-engraving, was so bad that you could hardly distinguish the faces.
Two men, both young, both thin. The biggest difference between them was that one had very long hair. He was the violinist, and Maigret was convinced that he had become Little John.
The other, with sparser hair and, even though young, already going bald, wore glasses; rolling his eyes, he was blowing into a clarinet.
‘Of course, go ahead and order some sausages,’ Maigret said before Ronald Dexter even opened his mouth.
‘You must think I’ve been hungry all my life, right?’
‘Why?’
‘Because it’s true. I have always been hungry … Even when I was earning good money, because I never had enough to eat as much as I’d have liked. You’ll have to get that paper back to me because I promised my friend to return it.’
‘I’ll have it photographed as soon as I can.’
‘Oh, I’ll have other information, but not right away. Already for that handbill, I had to insist that my friend look for it then and there. He lives in an armchair mounted on wheels, comes and goes in his place cluttered with papers. He assured me that he knew people who could tell us things but he wouldn’t say who … Because he can’t remember for sure, I’d bet on that. He needs to rummage around in his clutter.
‘He has no telephone. Since he cannot go out, that doesn’t help any.
‘“Don’t worry, people come see me. People come see me,” he kept saying. “There are enough artistes who remember old Germain and are happy to come and have a chat in this dump …
‘“I have an old friend who used to be a tightrope walker, then a medium in a spiritualism act and who wound up telling fortunes. She comes every Wednesday.
‘“Stop by now and then. When I’ve got something for you, I’ll tell you. But now you must tell me the truth. This is for a book on vaudeville and cabaret acts, isn’t it! There’s already one on circus folks. For that people used to come here, worm things out of me, carry off my memorabilia and then, when the book came out, my name wasn’t even in it …”’
Maigret could tell what kind of a man Ronald Dexter was and knew that there was no point in rushing him.
‘You’ll go back there every day …’
‘I’ve got other places to visit as well. You’ll see, I’ll find you all the information you’re looking for. Except, I have to ask you for another small advance on expenses. Yesterday you gave me ten dollars, and I’ve recorded your payment. Look! … No, no, I want you to see …’
And he showed him a grimy notebook, on one page of which he had written in pencil:
Received advance for J and J
investigation: ten dollars.
‘Today I’d rather you gave me only five, because I spend everything I get anyway, so it would all go too fast. So then I wouldn’t dare ask you for any more, and with no money, I wouldn’t be able to help you. It’s too much? What about four?’
Maigret took out five dollars and for no reason, when he handed them over, he looked intently at the clown.
Well fed, the man in the trenchcoat wearing an acid green ribbon for a necktie did not look any jollier, but in his eyes there was infinite gratitude, infinite submission mixed with something anxious and trembling. He was like a dog that has finally found a good master and searches humbly for a sign of satisfaction in his face.
It was then that Maigret remembered what O’Brien had said. He remembered old Angelino, too, who that morning had set out on his daily walk and been cruelly killed.
He wondered if he had the right to …
But only for a moment: wasn’t he sending the former clown into a perfectly quiet part of the city?
‘If they ever kill him on me …’ he thought.
Then he recalled the office in the St Regis, the letter opener that had snapped in the nervous grip of Little John, and MacGill, busy talking about him to his American girl in the bar.
He had never undertaken an investigation in such uncertain and almost crazy circumstances. In reality, no one had instructed him to pursue any investigation. Even old Monsieur d’Hoquélus, so insistent in the house at Meung-sur-Loire, now asked him politely to return to France and mind his own business. Even O’Brien …
‘I’ll drop by to see you tomorrow at around the same time,’ said Ronald Dexter, picking up his hat. ‘Don’t forget that I have to return the handbill.’
J and J …
Maigret found himself alone again out on the pavement of an avenue he did not know, and he wandered a good while with his hands in his pockets, his pipe between his teeth, before he glimpsed the lights of a cinema he recognized on Broadway, which set him on the right path.
Suddenly, just like that, he took a notion to write to Madame Maigret and went back to his hotel.
5.
It was between the third and fourth floors that Maigret reflected, without attaching too much importance to it, that he would not want a man such as Special Agent O’Brien, for example, to see what he was up to that morning.
Even people who had worked with him for years and years, like Sergeant Lucas, did not always understand him when he was in this state.
And did he even know himself what he was looking for? For example, at the moment when he stopped for no reason on that step between two floors, staring straight ahead with wide-open but now empty eyes, he must have looked like a man forced by heart trouble to stay stock still wherever he might be and who tries to seem calm to avoid alarming passers-by.
Judging from the number of children younger than seven the inspector was seeing on the stairs, the landings, in the kitchens and bedrooms, the apartment house must have been a swarming mass of kids outside of school hours. Besides, toys lay around in every corner: broken scooters, old soapboxes precariously equipped with wheels, collections of random objects that made no sense for grown-ups yet for their creators must have represented treasures.
There was no concierge, as in French apartment buildings, which complicated Maigret’s task. Nothing but numbered, brown-painted letterboxes in the ground-floor corridor, a few with a yellowed visiting card or a name badly engraved on a metal strip.
It was ten in the morning, doubtless the hour when this sort of barracks was most characteristically alive. One out of every two or three doors stood open. Women who hadn’t yet combed their hair were doing housework, washing youngsters’ faces, shaking none-too-clean carpets out of windows.
‘Excuse me, madame …’
They looked askance at him. Who could they think he was, this tall man with his heavy overcoat, his hat that he always took off when he spoke to women, whoever they were? Probably someone selling insurance or a new model of electric vacuum cleaner?
And then there was his accent, but it did not stand out here, where there were not only Italians just off the boat, he thought, but Poles and Czechs as well.
‘Do you know if there are any tenants left here who moved in about thirty years ago?’
They frowned, because it was just about the last question they expected. In Paris – in Montmartre, for example, or in his old neighbourhood between the République and Bastille Métro stations – there probably wasn’t a single decent-sized building where he would not easily have found an elderly man, woman or couple who had lived there for thirty or forty years.
Or a year, or two. At most, four years ago.
Without realizing it, instinctively, he would linger at the open doors to observe a Spartan kitchen encumbered by a bed, or a bedroom inhabited by four or five people.
Few tenants knew any others on another floor. Three children, the oldest of whom was a boy of perhaps eight (who doubtless had mumps, given the immense bandage around his head), had begun following him. Then the little boy had grown bolder and was now dashing ahead of Maigret.
‘The man wants to know if you were here thirty years ago!’
Still, there were a few elderly people, in armchairs, by the windows, often near a caged canary, the old folks brought over from Europe once a job had been found. And some of them did not understand one word of English.
‘I would like to know …’
The landings were large and formed a kind of neutral territory where tenants piled up everything not in use in the apartments; on the third-floor landing, a thin woman with blonde hair was doing her wash.
It was here, in one of these honeycomb cells, that J and J had settled in after arriving in New York; here that Little John, now living in a luxurious suite at the St Regis, had spent months, perhaps years.
It would have been hard to concentrate more human lives in so little space, yet that space was without warmth, a place where more than anywhere else one had the feeling of hopeless isolation.
The milk bottles proved it. On the fourth floor, Maigret stopped short in front of a door, when he saw eight untouched bottles of milk lined up on the straw mat outside it.
He was about to question the boy who had decided to be his benevolent guide when a man of about fifty emerged from the room next door.
‘Do you know who lives here?’
Maigret in New York Page 7
