‘Goodbye, inspector,’ said the young man, quickly shaking Maigret’s hand.
He added, with what seemed complete sincerity, ‘I’m not afraid any more, you know.’
He smiled. A smile still a touch pale, like the smile of a convalescent. Then he disappeared after his father into the next room.
The cheque was already filled out in the chequebook lying on the desk. Without sitting down, MacGill detached it and handed it to Maigret, expecting, perhaps, that he would refuse it.
Instead, Maigret looked calmly at the amount: two thousand dollars. Then he carefully folded the slip of paper and placed it inside his wallet, saying, ‘Thank you.’
That was all. The oppressive scene was over. He was leaving. He had not said goodbye to MacGill, who had followed him to the door and finally closed it behind him.
Despite his horror of cocktails and foolishly luxurious places, Maigret stopped at the bar and tossed down two Manhattans, one after the other.
Then he headed on foot towards his hotel and as he walked he nodded his head from time to time, moving his lips like someone having a long discussion with himself.
Hadn’t the clown promised him to be at the Berwick at the same time as before?
He was there, on the sofa, but his eyes were so sad and his expression so anguished that it was clear he’d been drinking.
‘I know you’re going to call me a weak coward,’ he began, standing up. ‘And it’s true, you see, that I’m a coward. I knew what would happen and I still couldn’t resist.’
‘Have you had lunch?’
‘Not yet … But I’m not hungry. No, strange as that may seem, I’m not hungry, because I’m too ashamed of myself. I’d have done better not to let you see me like this. And yet I only had two little drinks. Gin … Mind you, I chose gin because it’s the weakest spirit. Otherwise, I would have drunk scotch. I was very tired and told myself, “Ronald, if you have a gin, just one …”
‘Only, I had three … Did I say three? … I don’t know any more … I’m disgusting, and I did this with your money.
‘Throw me out on my ear…
‘Wait, no, don’t do that yet, because I have something for you … Hang on … Something important, it will come back to me … If we were out in the fresh air, at least … How about going outside for some air?’
He sniffled, blew his nose.
‘I wouldn’t mind a bite, after all … Not before I’ve told you … One moment – yes – I saw my friend again, yesterday evening … Germain. You remember Germain? Poor Germain! Imagine a man who’s had an active life, who has followed circuses around the entire world and who’s nailed to a wheelchair.
‘Admit it, he’d be better off dead … What am I saying? Never think that I wish him dead. But if I were the one it was going to happen to, I would rather be dead. That’s what I meant.
‘Well … I was right to claim that Germain would do anything for me … He’s a man who would give his right arm for others.
‘He doesn’t look like much. He’s grumpy. You’d think he was a selfish old man. And yet, he spent hours going through his files, looking for traces of J and J. Look, I’ve got another paper.’
He blanched, turned green, searched through his pockets in anguish and seemed almost about to burst into tears.
‘I deserve to be …’
Well, no. He deserved nothing, because he had finally found the document, beneath his handkerchief.
‘It isn’t very clean. But you’ll understand.’
This time it was the programme for a road company that had toured the American hinterland thirty years earlier. In big letters, the name of a chanteuse whose photograph graced the cover; then other names: a couple of tightrope walkers, a comic named Robson, Lucille the Seer and at last, at the very bottom of the list, the musical cabaret artistes J and J.
‘Take a good look at those names. Robson died in a train accident ten or fifteen years ago, I forget … Germain was the one who told me. You remember I mentioned yesterday that Germain had an elderly lady friend who came to see him every Wednesday? Don’t you find that touching, hmm? … And you know, there was never anything between the two of them, not a thing!’
He was getting teary again.
‘I’ve never seen her. It seems she was very thin and pale in those days, so pale that they called her the Angel. Well! Now she’s so fat that … We are going to eat, aren’t we? I don’t know if it’s the gin, but I’ve got cramps … It’s disgusting to ask you for more money … What was I saying? The Angel, Lucile … Germain’s old friend … Today’s Wednesday. She ought to be at his place at around five o’clock. She’ll bring a little cake, as she does every week … I swear to you that if we go, I won’t touch it … because this old woman they called the Angel and who brings a cake every week to Germain …’
‘Have you told your friend we were coming?’
‘I told him we might … I could come by for you at half past four … It’s quite far, especially on the subway, because he’s not on a direct line.’
‘Let’s go!’
Maigret had abruptly resolved not to let his definitely too-gloomy clown out of his sight and, after he made him eat something, he took him back to his hotel and put him to bed on the green plush couch.
After that, as he had the previous evening, he wrote a long letter to Madame Maigret.
6.
Maigret followed his clown up the creaking staircase and because Dexter, God knows why, felt he ought to walk on his tiptoes, the inspector found himself doing so too.
The sad man had slept off his gin, however, and although his eyes were still puffy and his speech a touch thick, he had abandoned his tone of lamentation for a somewhat firmer voice.
He’d been the one to give the cabbie an address in Greenwich Village, and Maigret was discovering, in the heart of New York, a few minutes from its big modern buildings, a tiny city within the city, almost a provincial town, with its houses no taller than in Bordeaux or Dijon, its shops, its quiet streets where people could stroll, its inhabitants who seemed not to notice the monstrous city all around them.
‘We’re here,’ Dexter had announced.
Sensing something like fear in the voice of this man in his grimy raincoat, Maigret had looked his companion straight in the face.
‘Are you sure you told him I was coming?’
‘I said that you might come.’
‘And what did you tell him I was?’
He had expected this. The clown became troubled.
‘I was going to speak to you about that … I didn’t know how to deal with the matter because Germain, you see, has become quite unsociable. What’s more, when I came to see him that first time, he made me have a quick little drink or two. I don’t precisely recall what I told him … That you were a very rich man, that you were looking for a son you’d never seen … You mustn’t be mad at me, it was all for the best … He was moved, in the end, and I’m sure that’s why he started combing his files right away.’
It was ridiculous. The inspector thought about what the clown could have concocted with a few drinks under his belt.
And now Dexter was becoming increasingly hesitant the closer they came to the former ringmaster’s door. Might he not have lied all up and down the line, even to Maigret? No, after all: there was the photograph, and the handbill …
Light under a door. A faint murmuring. Dexter stammering, ‘Knock … There’s no doorbell.’
Maigret knocked. Silence fell. Someone coughed. The sound of a cup set down on a saucer.
‘Come in!’
And
they felt as if simply crossing the narrow barrier of a dilapidated doormat had taken them on an immense voyage through time and space. They were no longer in New York, next door to skyscrapers that at this hour were darting all their lights up into the Manhattan sky. Was it even still the age of electricity?
Anyone in the room would have sworn it was lit by a paraffin lamp, an impression created by the large shade of pleated red silk on a floor lamp.
There was but a single circle of light in the centre of the room and within it a man in a wheelchair, an old man who must once have been quite stout and was still bulky enough to completely fill the chair, but who was now so flaccid that he seemed to have suddenly deflated. A few white hairs of impressive length floated around his naked pate as he craned his head forwards to see the intruders over the rims of his glasses.
‘Excuse me for disturbing you,’ Maigret began, while the clown hid behind him.
There was someone else in the room, as fat as Germain, with a mauve complexion, unnaturally blonde hair and a small, smiling, lipstick-smeared mouth.
Hadn’t they stumbled into some corner of a wax museum? No, for the figures were moving, and tea was steaming in the two cups sitting on a side table next to a sliced cake.
‘Ronald Dexter told me that tonight I might perhaps find here the information I’m looking for.’
You couldn’t see the walls, they were so plastered with posters and photographs. A lungeing whip, its shaft still wound with colourful ribbons, was in a place of honour.
‘Would you provide chairs for these gentlemen, Lucile?’
The voice had remained what it doubtless was in the days when the man announced the entrance of the clowns and tumblers into the ring, and it resounded strangely in this too-small room so cluttered that poor Lucile found it hard to clear off two black chairs with red velvet seats.
‘This young man who knew me long ago …’ the old man was saying.
Was this phrase not a poem in itself? First, Dexter became a young man in the old ringmaster’s eyes. Then there was the ‘who knew me long ago’ instead of ‘whom I knew long ago’.
‘… has informed me of your distressing predicament. If your son had belonged to the circus world, if only for a few weeks, I can assure you that you would have had only to come and tell me, “Germain, it was in such-and-such a year that he appeared in such-and-such an act … He was like this and like that …” and Germain would not have had to search through his archives.’
He gestured towards the piles of papers everywhere, on the furniture, the floor, even on the bed, for Lucile had had to place some there to clear the two chairs.
‘Germain had all that here.’
He pointed to his skull and tapped it with that finger.
‘But where vaudeville and cabarets are concerned, I say this to you: you must consult my old friend Lucile. She is here … Listening to you … Speak, then, to her.’
Maigret had let his pipe go out and yet he needed it to regain a foothold in reality. Holding the pipe in his hand, he must have looked embarrassed, for the fat lady spoke to him with a fresh smile that resembled, thanks to her innocently garish make-up, that of a doll.
‘You may smoke … Robson smoked a pipe, too. I smoked one myself, during the years right after his death … Perhaps you wouldn’t understand, but it was still a bit of his presence.’
‘Your act was a very interesting one,’ murmured the inspector politely.
‘The best of its kind, I can only agree. Everyone will tell you: Robson was unique … His imposing presence, above all, and you cannot imagine how much that counts in our kind of number. He wore a frock coat, waistcoat, tight breeches with stockings of black silk. His calves were magnificent …
‘Wait!’
She searched, not through a handbag, but in a silk reticule with a silver clasp, and pulled out a publicity photograph of her husband attired as she had described, with a black velvet mask over his eyes, a waxed moustache, ‘making a leg’ and brandishing a magician’s wand at his invisible audience.
‘And here I am at that same time.’
An ageless woman, slender, sad, diaphanous, with her hands crossed under her chin in the most artificial pose imaginable, staring vacantly into the distance.
‘I can say that we toured throughout the world. In certain countries Robson wore a red silk cape over his outfit and in a red spotlight he looked truly diabolical in the magic coffin number … I trust you believe in mental telepathy?’
The room was stifling. Although Maigret was desperate for a rush of fresh air, thick drapes of faded plush masked the windows, as heavy as an old stage curtain. Who knows? He had the feeling they had perhaps been cut out of that very thing.
‘Germain told me that you were looking for your son or your brother.’
‘My brother,’ replied the inspector hastily, suddenly realizing that neither of the J and J artistes could plausibly be his son.
‘That’s what I thought … I hadn’t completely understood … That’s why I expected to see an older man. Which of the two was your brother? The violin or the clarinet?’
‘I do not know, madame.’
‘What do you mean, you don’t know?’
‘My brother disappeared when he was a baby. It’s only recently, by chance, that we’ve picked up his trail again.’
This was ludicrous. This was unbearable. And yet, it was impossible to tell the simple truth to these two, who revelled in fantasy. Forbearance was almost Christian charity towards them, and the cream of the jest was, that imbecile Dexter, despite knowing the truth, seemed to believe the make-believe and was already beginning to sniffle.
‘Step into the light, so I can see your face …’
‘I do not believe there was any resemblance between my brother and me.’
‘How do you know, when he was kidnapped so young …’
Kidnapped! Honestly! Now they had to play this farce out to the very end.
‘In my opinion, it must have been Joachim … No, wait: there’s a suggestion of Joseph in the forehead … But … Haven’t I got their names mixed up, in fact? Just imagine, I used to do that all the time … There was one with long blond hair like a girl, about the same colour as mine …’
‘Joachim, I think,’ said Maigret.
‘Let me remember … How would you know? … The other one had slightly broader shoulders and wore glasses. It’s funny. We all lived together for almost a year, and there are things I can’t recall, others that come back to me as if it were yesterday … We’d all signed on for a tour through the Southern states: Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas. It was very hard, because the people down there were still practically savages. Some of them rode to the show on horses. Once, they killed a Negro during our number, I don’t remember why any more.
‘What I’m wondering is, which one of the two was Jessie with.
‘Was it Jessie or Bessie? … Bessie, I think … No, Jessie! I’m sure it was Jessie, because I mentioned one time that it made three Js: Joseph, Joachim and Jessie.’
If only Maigret had been able to ask questions, calmly, to elicit precise answers! But he had to let her ramble through the complicated meanderings of her thoughts, an old woman who had probably always been a trifle scatterbrained.
‘Poor little Jessie. She was touching. I’d taken her under my protection, because she was in a delicate situation.’
What could that delicate situation have been? This would probably become clear in time.
‘She was small and slender. I was small and slender, too, in those days, fragile as a f
lower. They called me the Angel, did you know?’
‘I know.’
‘It was Robson who gave me that name. He didn’t say “my angel”, which is banal, but “the Angel” – I don’t know whether you see the nuance … Bessie – no, Jessie – was quite young. I wonder if she was even eighteen. And you could sense that she’d been unhappy. I never learned where they’d found her … I say “they” because I don’t remember whether it was Joseph or Joachim. Since those three were always together, naturally you wondered.’
‘What was her role in your tour?’
‘She didn’t have one. She was not a performer. She was an orphan, surely, because I never saw her write to anyone. They must have plucked her from beside her mother’s deathbed.’
‘And she followed the company?’
‘She followed us everywhere. A hard life. The manager was a brute. Did you know him, Germain?’
‘His brother is still in New York. I heard some talk about him last week. He sells programmes at Madison Square Garden.’
‘He used to treat us like dogs. Robson was the only one who stood up to him … I think that if he could have got away with it, he’d have fed us like beasts on animal mash to economize on food. We stayed in dirty holes full of bedbugs … He wound up abandoning us fifty miles from New Orleans, ran off with the cashbox, and once again it was Robson …’
Fortunately, she suddenly decided to nibble a piece of cake. That provided a brief respite, but she swiftly continued, wiping her lips with a lace hankie.
‘J and J, pardon me for telling you so, since one of the two is your brother (I bet that it’s Joseph), but J and J were not artistes like us, with star billing, they came at the tail end of the programme. There’s no dishonour in that … Please don’t be angry at me if I’ve hurt your feelings!’
‘No, no, of course not!’
‘They earned very little, nothing, so to speak, but their travel expenses were paid, and the food, if you could call it that. Only, there was Jessie … They had to pay for Jessie’s train tickets. And the meals. Not always for the meals … Hold on, it’s coming back to me … I believe I am in contact with Robson.’
Maigret in New York Page 9
