Maigret in New York

by Georges Simenon

  ‘Hello? … It wasn’t you, I know. Will you stop telling me that it isn’t your fault! You had taken his place, and he came back. And instead of telling him the truth, instead of keeping the woman you claimed to have loved, you handed her back to him, which was cowardly and vile.

  ‘Oh yes, Joseph.

  ‘You were a dirty little coward. A lousy, gutless cheat.

  ‘And you didn’t dare tell him a child had been born. What are you saying?

  ‘That he wouldn’t have believed the child was his? Wait while I repeat your words: John wouldn’t have believed the child was his.

  ‘So, you, you knew that it wasn’t yours … What? Otherwise, you wouldn’t have left it with Child Welfare? And you can stand there and tell me that? … I forbid you to hang up, you hear? I can have you behind bars by this evening. Right!

  ‘Maybe you became an honest man or something that looks on the outside like an honest man but back then you were a nasty piece of work.

  ‘And all three of you continued to live on the same floor.

  ‘John took back the place you’d taken while he was gone.

  ‘Speak louder. I don’t want to lose a word … John wasn’t the same any more? What do you mean? … He was tense, worried, suspicious? Admit it – he had good reason to be! … And Jessie wanted to tell him everything? Good Lord, that would have been better for her, isn’t that so?

  ‘Well no, obviously, you couldn’t have known beforehand. You kept her from telling him.

  ‘And John was wondering what it was that seemed wrong all around him … What? She used to cry at the drop of a hat? I like that. You’ve got a way with words. She used to cry at the drop of a hat.

  ‘How did he find out?’

  Little John made as if to speak, but the inspector signalled him to be silent.

  ‘Let him talk! … No, I wasn’t speaking to you. You’ll find out soon enough … He found a bill from the midwife? … That’s true, it is hard to think of everything … He didn’t believe it was his?

  ‘Put yourself in his place … Especially handed over to Child Welfare.

  ‘Where were you during this scene? … Well, yes, since you heard everything. Behind the connecting door, yes. Because there was a door between the two rooms! And for … for how long, in fact? … Three weeks … for three weeks after his return, you slept in that room, next to the one where John and Jessie, Jessie who had been yours for months …

  ‘Finish up quickly, can you? … I’m sure you’re not a pretty sight right now, Monsieur Daumale … I’m not sorry any more to be questioning you over the phone, because I think if I were there I’d find it hard to keep from punching you in the face.

  ‘Be quiet! Just answer my questions. You were behind the door.

  ‘Yes … Yes … Yes … Go on …’

  He was staring at the tablecloth in front of him, no longer repeating what he heard. So tightly were his jaws clenched that his pipe stem finally snapped.

  ‘And after that? Get on with it, dammit! … What? … And you didn’t intervene sooner? … Liable to do anything, yes! … Put yourself in his place – or, rather, no, you couldn’t … On the stairs … Angelino was delivering a suit … Saw everything … Yes.

  ‘Well, no: you’re lying again. You did not try to enter the room, you tried to get away. Only, since the door was open … That’s right. He saw you.

  ‘I’m not surprised that it was too late!

  ‘This time, I have no trouble believing you. I’m sure you didn’t tell Parson that. Because you could have been accused of complicity, couldn’t you! And remember, you still can be … No, there is no statute of limitations, you’re wrong … I can just see the wicker trunk. And the rest … Thanks, I don’t need to know any more. As I told you at the beginning, Parson is here … He’s drunk, yes, as usual.

  ‘Little John is here, too. You don’t want to talk to him? I can’t force you to, naturally.

  ‘Or to MacGill, whom you so nicely sent off to Child Welfare? … Absolutely, he’s here in my room as well.

  ‘That’s all. The smell of the coffee prepared by Madame Daumale must be wafting up to you. You’ll be able to hang up, heave a great sigh of relief and go downstairs to breakfast with your family.

  ‘I bet I know how you’ll explain this telephone call. An American impresario who has heard of your talents as an orchestra conductor and who …

  ‘Adieu, Joseph Daumale. May I never run into you, you bastard!’

  And Maigret hung up, then sat still for a long time, as if drained of all energy.

  No one else had moved. The inspector rose heavily, picked up the bowl of his broken pipe and set it on the table. It just happened to be the pipe he’d bought on his second day in New York. He went to fetch another pipe from the pocket of his overcoat, filled it, lit it and poured himself a drink, not beer any more, which now seemed too bland, but a big glass of straight whisky.

  ‘And that’s that!’ he sighed at last.

  Little John still hadn’t moved, and it was Maigret who poured him a drink and placed it within his reach.

  Only after Maura had sipped from his glass and sat up a little straighter did the inspector speak again, in his normal voice, which suddenly sounded strange.

  ‘Perhaps we’d best first finish up with that one,’ he said, pointing at Parson, who was mopping his brow in the depth of his armchair.

  Another weakling, another coward, but of the worst kind, the aggressive kind. Yet in fact, didn’t Maigret prefer even that to the prudent and bourgeois cowardice of a Daumale?

  Parson’s story was easy to reconstruct. He knew, from the Donkey Bar or elsewhere, some gangsters who could use the information he’d chanced upon during his trip to Europe.

  ‘How much did you get?’ Maigret asked him wearily.

  ‘What’s that to you? You’d be only too happy to know I’d been swindled.’

  ‘A few hundred dollars?’

  ‘Barely.’

  Then the inspector pulled his cheque from his pocket, the cheque for two thousand dollars that MacGill had given him from Little John. He took a pen from the table, endorsed the check over to Parson.

  ‘This will be enough for you to disappear while there’s still time. I needed to have you on hand in case Daumale had refused to talk, or in case I had been mistaken. You shouldn’t have mentioned your trip to France, you see. I would have found out anyway, in the end, perhaps much later, because I was aware that you knew MacGill and that you also frequented those people who killed Angelino. You’ll note that I’m not even asking you for their names.’

  ‘Jos knows them just as well as I do.’

  ‘True enough. That’s none of my affair. What I am trying to spare you, I don’t know why, perhaps out of pity, is having you appear before a jury.’

  ‘I’d shoot myself first!’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because of a certain person.’

  It sounded like sentimental slop, and yet Maigret would have bet that Parson meant his mother.

  ‘I don’t think it would be safe for you to leave the hotel now. Your friends certainly think that you’ve turned snitch, and in your crowd that’s not good. I’ll call downstairs to get you a room near mine.’

  ‘I’m not afraid.’

  ‘I’d rather nothing happened to you tonight.’

  Parson shrugged, swigged some whisky straight from the bottle.

  ‘Don’t worry about me.’

  He took the cheque and staggered towards the door, where he turned around.

  ‘So long, Jos!’
r />   And then his attempt at a parting shot: ‘Bye-bye, Mister Maygrette …’

  Presentiment? The inspector almost called him back to make him stay the night at the hotel, locking him in a room if necessary. He did not. But he could not keep from going over to the window, where he pulled aside the curtain in a gesture typical not of him, but of Little John.

  A few minutes later came some muffled detonations: an unmistakeable burst of machine-gun fire.

  And Maigret, walking back towards MacGill and Little John, heaved a sigh.

  ‘I don’t think it’s any use going down. They’ve put paid to him!’

  10.

  They stayed for another hour in the room, which gradually filled, as at the office at Quai des Orfèvres, with the smoke of pipes and cigarettes.

  ‘I apologize,’ Little John began by saying, ‘for the way my son and I tried to brush you off.’

  He was tired, too, but now seemed to experience a great release, an infinite, almost physical relief.

  For the first time since Maigret had met him, gone was the tension of a man coiled up within himself, striving painfully to keep from striking out.

  ‘For six months now I’ve been holding my own against them, or, rather, giving ground only bit by bit. There are four, two are Sicilian.’

  ‘That aspect of the case does not concern me,’ Maigret observed.

  ‘I know. Yesterday, when you came to the hotel, I almost spoke to you, and Jos stopped me.’

  His face hardened, his eyes became more inhuman than ever, but now Maigret knew what suffering gave them that dreadful coldness.

  ‘Can you imagine,’ said Little John in a low voice, ‘what it’s like to have a son whose mother you have killed, and still to love her?’

  MacGill had gone quietly to sit in the corner armchair, the one Parson had used, as far from the two men as possible.

  ‘I won’t tell you about what happened back then. I’m not trying to excuse myself. I want none of that. You understand? I am not Joseph Daumale. He’s the one I should have killed. Still, it’s important that you know …’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘That I loved, that I still love the way I believe no man has loved. Faced with the collapse of everything, I … No, it’s no use.’

  And Maigret repeated gravely, ‘It’s no use.’

  ‘I believe I’ve paid more dearly than man’s justice would ever have cost me. A short while ago you stopped Daumale from going all the way to the end. I think, inspector, that you trust what I say?’

  And Maigret nodded, twice.

  ‘I wanted to disappear with her. Then I decided to accuse myself … He’s the one who prevented me, he was afraid of getting mixed up in an ugly scandal.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘He’s the one who fetched the wicker trunk from his room. He said we ought to throw it in the river. I couldn’t do it. There’s one thing you could not possibly have guessed. Angelino had come over. He had seen. He knew. He could tell the police. Joseph insisted that we had to leave immediately. Well, for two days …’

  ‘Yes. You kept her.’

  ‘And Angelino didn’t talk. And Joseph was half mad with fury. And I was in such a state that I could endure his presence and gave him the last of my money to do what needed to be done.

  ‘He bought a second-hand truck. We pretended to move out and loaded everything we owned …

  ‘We drove fifty miles out into the countryside, and I was the one, in a wood near the river …’

  MacGill’s voice, pleading: ‘Father, be quiet …’

  ‘That’s all. I say that I have paid, paid in every possible way. Even through doubt. And that was the most dreadful. Because for months, I continued to doubt, to tell myself that maybe the child wasn’t mine, that Jessie might have lied to me.

  ‘I entrusted him to an honest woman I knew and I didn’t want to see him … Even later, I felt I had no right to see him … You haven’t the right to see the son of the …

  ‘Could I have told you all that when Jean brought you over to New York?

  ‘He is my son too.

  ‘But he is not Jessie’s son.

  ‘I admit, inspector, and Jos knows this, that after a few years I hoped to again become a man like any other instead of a kind of automaton.

  ‘I married … Without love … As if taking medicine … I had a child … And I was never able to live with the mother. She’s still alive … She is the one who asked for a divorce. She’s somewhere down in South America, where she has made a new life for herself.

  ‘You know that Jos disappeared when he was around twenty … He was in Montreal, involved with a milieu rather like – on a lesser scale – the one where you found Parson.

  ‘Old Mrs MacGill died … I lost track of Jos and never suspected that he was living so close by, at Broadway, among those people you know about.

  ‘My other son, Jean, as he admitted to me, has shown you the letters I sent him, and you must have been surprised …

  ‘You understand, it was because all I could think of was the other one, Jessie’s son …

  ‘I forced myself to love Jean … I did this with a kind of rage … Whatever the cost, I wanted to give him an affection that, deep inside, I felt for another …

  ‘And one day, about six months ago, I saw this boy appear.’

  What infinite tenderness when he said the word boy, when he gestured towards Jos MacGill!

  ‘He had just learned the truth from Parson and his friends. I remember his first words when we found ourselves face to face: “Sir, you are my father …”’

  And at that moment, MacGill begged him, ‘Papa, be quiet!’

  ‘I am being quiet. I am saying only what is necessary … Since then, we live together, we are working together to save what can be saved, and that explains the transfers of funds Monsieur d’Hoquélus mentioned to you … Because I felt that sooner or later catastrophe was inevitable. Our enemies, who had been Jos’s friends, were entirely without scruples and, when you arrived, it was one of them, Bill, who put on quite an act to deceive you.

  ‘You thought that Bill took orders from us, when we were following his … But you could not be persuaded to leave.

  ‘They killed Angelino because of you, because they felt you were on the right track and they did not want to be done out of their biggest haul …

  ‘I’m worth three million dollars, inspector. In six months, I’ve given up half a million, but they want it all.

  ‘Go explain that to the FBI.’

  Why was Maigret thinking at that very moment of his melancholy clown? It was Dexter, much more than Maura, who suddenly took on a symbolic aura, Dexter and, strangely enough, Parson, who had just got himself shot down in the street right after he had finally, and almost honestly, come into two thousand dollars.

  Ronald Dexter, in the inspector’s eyes, embodied all the bad luck, hardship and sorrow that can burden humanity. Dexter, who had also been paid a small fortune, and who had come to leave the five hundred dollars on this table where the beer and whisky bottles now stood near the sandwiches no one had touched.

  ‘You might perhaps go abroad?’ suggested Maigret halfheartedly.

  ‘No, inspector. Someone like Joseph would, but not I. I’ve fought on alone for almost thirty years … Against my worst enemy: myself and my suffering … I’ve wished a hundred times that the whole thing would crack wide open, you understand? I have really, sincerely wished to make an accounting.’

  ‘What good would that do?’

  And what Little John said truly expre
ssed his deepest thought, now that he had allowed himself to breathe again.

  ‘It would let me rest …’

  ‘Hello … Lieutenant Lewis?’

  Maigret, alone in his room at five in the morning, had called the lieutenant at his home.

  ‘Do you have some news?’ he asked the inspector. ‘A crime was committed last night, not far from your hotel, in the middle of the street, and I wonder …’

  ‘Parson?’

  ‘You know?’

  ‘It’s so unimportant, in the end!’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It isn’t important! He would have died anyway of cirrhosis in two or three years and would have suffered a lot more.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. I’m calling you, lieutenant, because I believe there’s an English ship sailing for Europe tomorrow morning and I intend to be on it.’

  ‘You know that we haven’t found any death certificate in that young woman’s name?’

  ‘You aren’t going to find any.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing … In short, there has been only one murder committed – pardon me, two, as of tonight! Angelino and Parson. In France, we call such things crimes of le milieu.’

  ‘What milieu is that?’

  ‘The underworld: where no one cares at all about human life.’

  ‘I don’t follow you.’

  ‘No matter! I wanted to say goodbye to you, lieutenant, because I am going home to my house in Meung-sur-Loire, where I shall always be glad to welcome you if you ever visit our old country.’

  ‘You’re giving up?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Discouraged?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Don’t take this the wrong way …’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘But we’ll get them.’

  ‘I am convinced of it.’

  And it was true, moreover, for three days later, at sea, Maigret heard on the radio that four dangerous crooks, two of them Sicilians, had been arrested by the police for the murders of Angelino and Parson, and that their lawyer was disputing the evidence.