‘Go down there later,’ Maigret said. ‘Turn the tape back on.’
Strange noises, first of all, in the street, because there was the sound of passing cars. For a while Maigret wondered what the young man was trying to record, and it took him a moment to work out that it was the noise of water in the gutters. The sound was hard to identify, but all of a sudden it changed, and again they were in a public place, a café or a bar, with quite a lively atmosphere.
‘What did he say to you?’
‘That it was OK.’
Some voices, faint but quite distinct.
‘Did you go down there, Mimile?’
‘Lucien and Gouvion are taking turns … In this weather …’
‘With the car?’
‘As usual.’
‘Don’t you think it’s a bit too close?’
‘Close to what?’
‘To Paris.’
‘As long as he doesn’t go there until Friday.’
Glasses, cups, more voices. Silence.
‘Recorded at the Café des Amis, Place de la Bastille.’
It wasn’t far from Boulevard Beaumarchais, and from Rue Popincourt. Batille didn’t linger, probably to avoid being noticed, and set off through the rain to find a new place.
‘What about your wife? It’s easy to talk about other people, but you’d be better off keeping an eye on what’s happening at home.’
It must have been the butcher, the card game at Chez Jules.
‘Keep your nose out of my business, that’s my advice. It’s not because you’re winning.’
‘I’m winning because I don’t keep throwing my trumps away like an idiot.’
‘Would you two stop it.’
‘He started it.’
If the voices had been higher-pitched, it could have been two children arguing.
‘Can we get back to the game?’
‘I’m not going to play with someone who—’
‘He was talking generally, without getting at anyone in particular.’
‘Let him say it, if that’s how it is.’
Silence.
‘You see. He should keep his trap shut.’
‘I’m keeping my trap shut because it’s all too stupid. Now I’m going to play my cards. Maybe that’ll shut you up?’
The sound was poor. The people talking were too far from the microphone, and Janvier had to play that part of the tape several times. Each time they could make out one or two more words.
Eventually, Batille said:
‘Chez Jules, a little local bistro, Rue Popincourt.’
‘Is that all?’
‘That’s all.’
The rest of the tape was blank.
Batille must have said his last words on the pavement, a few moments before being assaulted by a stranger.
‘And the other two cassettes?’
‘They’re blank. They’re still in their original wrapping. I suppose he was going to use them later.’
‘Did you notice anything?’
‘The ones from Bastille.’
‘Yes. Play that bit again.’
Janvier jotted it down. Then he repeated the few lines that seemed to assume a more precise meaning as they listened.
‘It sounds as if there are at least three of them.’
‘Yes.’
‘And then the two they talked about, Gouvion and Lucien. A bit more than half an hour after his recording, Antoine had been attacked in Rue Popincourt.’
‘Except they didn’t take his tape recorder off him.’
‘Perhaps because the Pagliatis were approaching.’
‘I forgot something, in Rue Popincourt. Last night I spotted an old woman at an upstairs window, more or less opposite the scene of the attack.’
‘I’ve got it, chief. Shall I go there right now?’
Maigret, left on his own, went and stood by the window. The Batilles must have gone to Saint-Antoine Hospital, and the forensic doctor would soon take possession of the body.
Maigret still hadn’t seen the dead man’s sister, whom the family called Minou and who apparently kept strange company.
Convoys of barges glided slowly along the grey Seine, and tugs lowered their funnels as they passed under Pont Saint-Michel.
In the season of bad weather, the terrace was shielded by glazed partitions and heated by two braziers. Around the horseshoe-shaped bar, the room was quite large, the tables tiny, the chairs the kind that cram everybody close together in the evening.
Maigret sat down beside a pillar and, when one of the waiters passed close by, ordered a beer. He absently studied the faces around him. The clientele was quite mixed. At the bar, for example, there were mostly men in blue work overalls, or the local old people who had come for their glass of red wine.
As to the others, the ones who were sitting down, there was a bit of everything: a woman dressed in black, surrounded by her two children and a big suitcase, as if in a station waiting room; a couple holding hands and gazing passionately into each other’s eyes; boys with very long hair sniggering and watching after the waitress and teasing her every time she passed by.
Because, as well as the two waiters in the café, there was a waitress with a particularly coarse face. In her black dress, with her white apron, she was thin, her back bent with exhaustion, and she barely managed to raise a smile for the customers.
Some men and women were quite well-dressed, others less so. Some ate a sandwich and drank a coffee or a glass of beer. Others were having an aperitif.
The landlord was standing by the till, dressed in black with a white shirt and black tie, his brown hair carefully stuck to his bald patch, which it covered with an inadequate network of thin, dark lines.
It was his post, evidently, and nothing that happened in his establishment escaped him. He watched the comings and goings of the two waiters and the waitress, while at the same time keeping an eye on the trainee who was putting the bottles and glasses on the trays. Every time he received a token he pressed a button on the till, and a number appeared on the display.
He had plainly been in the restaurant business for a long time, and had probably started out as a waiter himself. Maigret would discover later, when he went down to the toilet, that there was a second, smaller, low-ceilinged room downstairs, where a few customers were drinking.
Here nobody was playing cards or dominoes. It was a place of passing trade, and there couldn’t have been many locals. The ones who had been sitting at the table for ages were waiting until it was time for a meeting they were having somewhere nearby.
At last Maigret got to his feet and walked over to the till, without any illusions about the reception he would have.
‘Excuse me, sir.’
He discreetly held out his badge in the hollow of his hand.
‘Detective Chief Inspector Maigret of the Police Judiciaire.’
The manager’s eyes kept their suspicious expression, the same one that he reserved for the waiters and the customers as they went in and out.
‘What do you want to know?’
‘Were you here yesterday, at about nine thirty?’
‘I’d gone to bed. In the evening it’s my wife who takes care of the till.’
‘Were the same waiters on duty?’
He went on watching after them.
‘Yes.’
‘I would like to ask them two or three questions about some customers that they might have noticed.’
The man’s black eyes stared at him, not very encouragingly.
‘We only serve decent people here, and the waiters are very busy at this time of day.’
‘I will only need a minute with each of them. Was the waitress here too?’
‘No. There aren’t so many people in the evening. Jérôme!’
One of the waiters stopped abruptly by the till, holding his tray. The manager turned towards Maigret.
‘Go on! Ask your question.’
‘Did you notice, last night at around nine thirty, quite
a young customer, twenty-one years old, wearing a brown jacket and with a tape recorder around his neck?’
The waiter turned towards the manager, then towards Maigret, and shook his head.
‘Do you know a regular who is known to his friends as Mimile?’
‘No.’
When it was the turn of the second waiter the results were no more illuminating. They were reluctant to reply, as if they were afraid of the manager, and it was hard to tell if they were being sincere. Maigret, disappointed, returned to his table and ordered a second glass of beer. It was then that he went down to the toilets and, downstairs, found a third waiter, younger than the two up above.
He decided to sit down and order a drink.
‘Tell me, do you ever work on the ground floor?’
‘Three days out of four. We take turns to be downstairs.’
‘Last night?’
‘I was upstairs.’
‘In the evening too? At about half past nine?’
‘Until closing time, at eleven. They closed early, because with this weather there weren’t many people in.’
‘Did you happen to notice a young man with quite long hair, wearing a suede jacket and with a tape recorder around his neck?’
‘Are you sure it was a tape recorder?’
‘Did you notice it?’
‘Yes. It isn’t tourist season yet. I thought it was a camera like the Americans wear. Then a customer asked a question.’
‘Which customer?’
‘There were three of them at the next table. When the young man left, one of them watched after him with a annoyed, uneasy expression. He called me over:
‘“Tell me, Toto.”
‘Of course, my name isn’t Toto, but it’s a thing some people say, particularly around here.
‘“What did that guy have to drink?”
‘“A cognac.”
‘“You didn’t happen to notice if he used his tape machine?”
‘“I didn’t see him taking photos.”
‘“Photos my eye! It’s a tape recorder, you idiot. Have you ever seen that guy before?”
‘“It’s the first time.”
‘“What about me?”
‘“I think I’ve served you three or four times.”
‘“Fine. Same again.”’
The waiter left, because a customer was knocking on his table with a coin to attract his attention. The customer paid. The waiter gave him his change and helped him to put on his overcoat.
Then he came back and paced around Maigret.
‘You said there were three of them?’
‘Yes. The one who shouted over to me, and who seemed to be the most important, is a man of about thirty-five, built like a PE teacher, with brown hair and black eyes under thick eyebrows.’
‘Is it true that he only came two or three times?’
‘I only noticed him those times.’
‘What about the others?’
‘The redhead with the scar is often in the neighbourhood and comes in to drink a rum at the bar.’
‘And the third one?’
‘I heard his companions calling him Mimile. I know that one by sight, and I know where he lives. He’s a picture-framer with a shop in Faubourg Saint-Antoine, almost on the corner of Rue Trousseau. Rue Trousseau is where I live.’
‘Does he come here a lot?’
‘I’ve seen him a few times, I wouldn’t say often.’
‘With the other two?’
‘No. With a little blonde who looks like she’s from around here too, a shop-girl or something like that.’
‘Thank you. Do you have anything else to tell me?’
‘No. If anything comes back to me, or if I see them again …’
‘In that case call me at the Police Judiciaire. Me or, if I’m not there, one of my colleagues. What’s your name?’
‘Julien. Julien Blond. My workmates call me Blondinet, because I’m the youngest. When I’m their age, I hope I’ll be doing something else for a living.’
Maigret was too close to home to go for lunch at the Brasserie Dauphine. He was almost sorry. He would have liked to take Janvier there and tell him what he had just found out.
‘Have you discovered something?’ his wife asked him.
‘I don’t yet know if it’s interesting. I have to keep looking.’
At two o’clock he called three of his favourite inspectors into the office, Janvier, Lucas and young Lapointe, who would probably still be called that when he was fifty.
‘Turn on the tape recorder, will you, Janvier? You two, listen carefully.’
Lucas and Lapointe pricked up their ears, of course, as soon as the recording made at the Café des Amis began.
‘I was there just now. I know the profession and the address of one of the three men who met around a table and talked in an undertone. The one nicknamed Mimile. He’s a picture-framer with a shop in Rue du Faubourg Saint-Antoine, two or three houses away from Rue Trousseau.’
Maigret didn’t dare to get too excited. It had all gone a bit too quickly for his liking.
‘You two, go and organize a stakeout in front of the framer’s shop. Get two colleagues to take over from you this evening. If Mimile leaves, someone’s got to follow him, ideally two. If he meets somebody, one of you tail him. Similarly, if someone who doesn’t look like a customer comes to the shop. In other words, I’d like to know who he might come into contact with.’
‘Got it, chief.’
‘You, Janvier, look through the files for pictures of men of about thirty-five, well-built, handsome fellows, brown hair, thick brown eyebrows and black eyes. There must be a few, but this is someone who isn’t in hiding, who has never been in trouble, or who may have served his sentence.’
Once he was alone in his office he called the Forensic Institute. Dr Desalle came to the phone.
‘Maigret here. Have you finished the post-mortem, doctor?’
‘Half an hour ago. You know how many times this boy was stabbed? Seven. All in the back. All more or less level with the heart, and yet they missed it.’
‘The knife?’
‘I was getting to that. The blade isn’t wide, but long and pointed. My guess is that it was one of those Swedish knives where the blade comes out when you press a button.
‘Only one of those wounds was deadly, the one that perforated the right lung and caused a fatal haemorrhage.’
‘Did you notice anything else?’
‘The boy was healthy, fit, not very athletic. Egghead type, doesn’t take any exercise. All the other organs in excellent condition. His blood contained a certain quantity of alcohol, but he wasn’t drunk. He must have drunk two or three glasses of what I think was cognac.’
‘Thank you, doctor.’
‘You’ll get my report tomorrow morning.’
All that was left was routine work. The prosecutor had appointed an examining magistrate, Poiret, with whom Maigret had never worked. Another young man. It struck him that the legal staff had been changing with disconcerting speed for some years. Might it seem that way because of his own age?
He called the magistrate, who told him to come up straight away if he was free. He brought the texts that Janvier had typed up from the conversations recorded on the tape recorder.
Poiret had had to settle for one of the older offices. Maigret sat down on an uncomfortable chair.
‘Pleased to meet you,’ said the magistrate, who was tall with fair hair in a crew cut.
‘Likewise. Of course, I have come to talk to you about young Batille.’
The magistrate unfolded an afternoon newspaper, with a three-column headline on the front page. Beneath it was the photograph of a young man who hadn’t yet grown his hair long, and who looked very much like the son of a ‘good family’.
‘I gather you’ve seen the father and mother.’
‘I told them the news, yes. They were coming back from the theatre, both in evening dress. If I remember correctly they were practically sing
ing when they came in through the door of their apartment. I have seldom seen two people go to pieces so quickly.’
‘Only child?’
‘No. There’s a sister, an eighteen-year-old girl who sounds like a bit of a handful.’
‘Have you seen her?’
‘Not yet.’
‘What’s their apartment like?’
‘Very spacious, luxurious and cheerful too. Some old items of furniture, it seemed to me, but not many. The overall effect was modern, but not aggressively so.’
‘They must be extremely rich,’ the examining magistrate sighed.
‘I suppose so.’
‘The newspaper story about what happened seems quite fanciful to me.’
‘Does it mention the tape recorder?’
‘No. Why? Does a tape recorder play an important part?’
‘Perhaps. I’m not sure yet. Antoine Batille had a passion for recording conversations in the street, in restaurants and cafés. He saw them as human documents. He led quite a lonely life and often, particularly in the evening, he set off hunting like that, particularly in working-class areas.
‘Yesterday he started in a restaurant on Boulevard Beaumarchais, where he recorded scraps of a marital dispute.
‘Then he went to a café in Bastille, and this is the text of his recording.’
He held out the piece of paper to the magistrate, who frowned.
‘This seems quite compromising, doesn’t it?’
‘It’s obviously about arranging to meet on Thursday evening, somewhere outside a house around Paris. Probably a second home, because the owner won’t arrive until Friday and will have to leave on Monday morning.’
‘That’s what the text suggests, yes.’
‘To be sure that the villa will be empty, the gang has it put under surveillance by two of its men in turn. I also know who Mimile is and I have his address.’
‘In that case …’
The magistrate seemed to be saying that it was all done and dusted, but Maigret was less optimistic.
‘If it’s the gang I think it is …’ he began. ‘For two years, a number of important villas have had visits from robbers while their owners were in Paris. They almost always took paintings and precious knick-knacks. In Tessancourt they ignored two paintings that were only copies, which indicates—’
Maigret and the Killer Page 4