The Little Man From Archangel

by Georges Simenon

  He had never calculated the total value of his collection, but it could not have been much less than ten million francs.

  The people of the Old Market had no suspicion of this wealth. He never spoke of it to anyone and he did not mind being thought a crank.

  One evening, however, when one of the catalogues was lying about on the desk, Gina had begun idly turning over its pages.

  'What does that mean, double surcharge?'

  He had explained it to her.

  'And sep-ol?'

  'Sepia and olive colour.'

  'And 2 p.?'

  'Two pesetas.'

  The abbreviations intrigued her.

  'It's very complicated!' she had sighed.

  She was on the point of shutting the catalogue when she had asked one last question.

  'And the figure 4000 in this column?'

  'The value of the stamp.'

  'You mean that stamp is worth four thousand francs?'

  He had smiled.

  'Certainly.'

  'Do all the figures in this column stand for the value of the stamps?'

  'Yes.'

  She had turned over the pages of the catalogue with renewed interest.

  'Here it says 700,000. Are there really stamps worth seven hundred thousand francs?'

  'Yes.'

  'Have you got one?'

  'I haven't got that one, no.'

  'Have you other ones as valuable?'

  'Not quite.'

  'Some very valuable ones?'

  'Some fairly valuable.'

  'Is that what you bought a steel safe for?'

  This happened the previous winter and he remembered that it was snowing outside, that he could see a white rim round the window panes. The stove was roaring in the little room. It must have been about eight o'clock in the evening. 'Goodness!'

  'What?'

  'Nothing. I'd never have thought it.'

  In the Place du Vieux-Marché he had the reputation of having money and it would have been difficult to trace the origin of this rumour. Perhaps it was due to the fact that he had remained a bachelor for a long time? Ordinary folk naturally imagine that a bachelor puts money to one side. Apart from that, before marrying Gina, he used to eat in the restaurant, at Pepito's, another Italian, in the first house in the Rue Haute, past the Grimoux-Marmion grocery, which stood on the corner of the square.

  Probably for these tradespeople who were in and out of his shop all day, he seemed something of an amateur. Could anyone really make a living buying, selling and hiring out old books? Weren't there times when an hour or even two went by without any customer going into his shop?

  So, since he was alive, and since, moreover, he had a woman in two hours a day and for the whole morning on Saturdays, he must have had money.

  Had Gina been disappointed that he didn't change any of his habits after marrying her? Had she been expecting a new existence?

  He hadn't asked himself the question, and only now did he realize that he had been living without noticing what was happening around him.

  If he looked in the drawer of the till, where he kept the money in a big wallet grey with use, would he find the right amount there? He was almost sure he would not. Gina had sometimes pilfered small amounts, rather in the manner of a child wanting to buy sweets. At first she contented herself with a few hundred franc pieces, which she took from the drawer with the compartments where he kept the change.

  Later on she had ventured opening the wallet and he had sometimes noticed that a thousand franc note would be missing.

  Yet he gave her plenty of money for housekeeping, never refused her a new dress, underclothes, or shoes.

  Perhaps at first she acted merely on a private whim, and he suspected that she had taken money in the same way from her parents' till when she lived with them. Only it must have been more difficult then, for Angèle, despite her jolly, motherly air, had a sharp eye for money. He had never mentioned it to Gina. He had thought a lot about it, and had finally come to the conclusion that it was for her brother that she stole in this way. She was five years older than he and yet people could sense an affinity between them of the kind that is normally only found between twins. There were times when one might have thought Frédo was in love with his sister, and that she reciprocated it.

  It was enough for them, wherever they were, to exchange a glance to understand one another, and if Gina frowned her brother became as anxious as a lover.

  Was that why he disliked Jonas? At the wedding he had been the only one not to congratulate him, and he had left right in the middle of the reception. Gina had run after him. They had whispered together a long time in the corridor of the Hotel du Commerce where the banquet had taken place. When she came back, still dressed in white satin, it was obvious that she had been crying, and she had at once poured herself out a glass of champagne.

  At the time Frédo was only seventeen. Their marriage had taken place two weeks before Clémence Ancel, their bridesmaid, had hers.

  Resigned, he opened the drawer with his key, picked up the wallet and discovered to his surprise that there was not a single note missing.

  It was explicable. He hadn't thought. The day before Gina had not left until after dinner and, up till the last moment, he might have had to open the cash drawer. With the stamps it was another matter, as sometimes he went a whole week without touching the steel box.

  There were still some details which he did not understand, but they were material details of no great importance. For example, he always carried his keys in his trouser pocket, attached to a silver chain. When had his wife managed to get hold of them without his knowing? Not at night, because he slept more lightly than she did, and besides he was the first one down in the morning. Occasionally, it was true, in order not to wake her, he would go downstairs in pyjamas and dressing-gown to make his coffee. It had not happened the day before, but the day before that, and he hadn't touched the safe since then.

  'Have you got a book about bee-keeping, please?'

  It was a boy about twelve years old, who had just come in, and spoken in an assured voice, his face covered in freckles, his copper-coloured hair streaked with sunlight.

  'Are you thinking of keeping bees?'

  'I found a swarm in a tree in the vegetable garden and my parents are going to let me make a hive, provided I do it with my own money.'

  Jonas had fair ginger hair too, with freckles on the bridge of his nose. But at this child's age he must have already worn glasses as thick as the ones he was wearing now.

  He had wondered to himself sometimes whether on account of his short-sightedness he saw things and people differently from others. The question intrigued him. He had read, for example, that the various species of animals do not see us as we really are, but as their eyes show us to them, and that for some we are ten times as tall, which is what makes them so timid when we approach them.

  Does the same phenomenon occur with a short-sighted person, even though his sight is more or less corrected by spectacles? Without glasses the world was to him only a more or less luminous cloud in which floated shapes so insubstantial that he could not be sure of being able to touch them.

  His spectacles, on the other hand, revealed to him the details of objects and faces as if he had been looking at them through a magnifying glass or as if they had been engraved.

  Did this cause him to live in a separate sphere? Were these spectacles, without which he had to grope his way, a barrier between himself and the world outside?

  In a shelf of books about animals he finally found one on bees and bee-hives.

  'How about that one?'

  'Is it expensive?'

  He consulted, on the back cover, the pencilled price.

  'A hundred francs.'

  'Would you let me have it if I paid half next week?'

  Jonas didn't know him. He was not from the neighbourhood. He was a country boy whose mother had probably come into the market with vegetables or poultry.

  '
You can take it.'

  'Thank you. I will be in again next Thursday without fail.'

  Outside in the sun of the street and the shade of the covered market the clientele had changed insensibly. Early in the morning there was a preponderance of working-class women doing their shopping after taking their children to school. It was also the time for the vans from the hotels and restaurants.

  As early as nine o'clock, and especially around ten o'clock the shoppers were better dressed, and at eleven some of them brought their maids with them to carry the parcels.

  The shavings in the gutter, trampled underfoot, were losing their golden hue to turn brown and sticky, and were now becoming mixed with outer leaves of leeks, carrots and fish heads.

  Gina had taken no change of clothes with her, no underclothes, not even a coat, though the nights were still cool.

  If she had been intending to stay in the town, on the other hand, would she have had the nerve to take his most valuable stamps?

  After seven o'clock in the evening, there were no more buses to Bourges, nor for anywhere else, only a train at 8.52 which connected with the Paris train, and, at 9.40, the slow train from Moulins.

  The station employees knew her, but he didn't dare go and question them. It was too late. He had twice spoken of Bourges and he was obliged to stick to it.

  Why had he behaved in this way? He could not account for it. It was not from fear of ridicule, because everyone, not only in the Place du Vieux-Marché, but throughout the town, knew that Gina had had many lovers before marrying him. It could not have passed unnoticed, either, that since her marriage she had had several adventures.

  Was it a sort of shame that had prompted him to reply, first to Le Bouc, then to Palestri:

  'She has gone to Bourges.'

  Shame which was born of shyness? What happened between him and Gina did not concern anybody else, and he believed himself to be the last person to have any right to discuss it.

  But for the disappearance of the stamps he would have waited all day, then all night, hoping from one moment to the next to see her return like a dog which has run away.

  The room upstairs had not been done, and the strong box had not been closed, so he went up, made his bed as meticulously as when he was a bachelor and the maid was away.

  It was as a maid that Gina had come into the house. Before her there had been another, old Léonie, who at the age of seventy still put in her eight or nine hours a day with different employers. In the end her legs had swollen up. Latterly she could hardly manage to climb the stairs, and as her children, who lived in Paris, did not care to look after her, Doctor Joublin had put her in a home.

  For a month Jonas had been without anyone, and it didn't worry him unduly. He knew Gina, like everyone else, through having seen her pass by, or from selling her an occasional book. At that time she had behaved in a provocative manner with him as she used to with all men, and he blushed every time she came into his shop, especially in summer, when it seemed to him that she left behind her a trace of the smell of her armpits.

  'Haven't you got anyone yet?' Le Bouc had asked him one morning when he was having his coffee in the little bar.

  He had never understood why Le Bouc and the others from the Square did not use the familiar tu with him, for they nearly all used it among themselves, calling one another by their Christian names.

  They didn't call him Milk, however, almost as if it were not his name, nor Monsieur Milk, but, nearly always, Monsieur Jonas.

  And yet at the age of two he was living in the Square, just next door to Ancel's, the butcher's, and it was his father who had converted the fishmonger's, 'A La Marée,' now kept by the Chenus.

  It was not because he had not been to the communal school either, like most of them, but to a private school, then to the lycée. The proof was that they were already addressing his father before him as Monsieur Constantin.

  Fernand had asked him:

  'Haven't you got anybody yet?'

  He had replied no, and Le Bouc had leant over his counter.

  'You ought to have a word or two with Angèle.'

  He had been so surprised that he had asked, as if there could have been two Angèles:

  'The greengrocer?'

  'Yes. She's having trouble with Gina. She can't do anything with her. I think she wouldn't be sorry to see her working outside so that someone else could break her in.'

  Up till then Gina had been more or less helping her mother in the shop, and slipping off at every opportunity.

  'You wouldn't like to talk to her yourself?' Jonas had suggested.

  It seemed to him incongruous, indecent almost, on his part, as a bachelor, although he had no ulterior motives, to go and ask a woman like Angèle to let him have her daughter for three hours a day.

  'I'll have a word with her father. No! I'd better see Angèle. I'll give you her reply tomorrow.'

  To his great surprise, the reply next day was yes, or as good as yes, and he was almost frightened by it. Angèle had told Le Bouc, to be precise:

  ' Tell that Jonas I'll come round and see him.'

  She had come, late one afternoon during a slack period, had insisted on seeing over the house, and had discussed wages.

  That meant changing his habits, and it was not without reluctance that he gave up going at half-past twelve and sitting in Pepito's little restaurant, where he had his own pigeon-hole for his table-napkin and his bottle of mineral water.

  'After all, if she's going to work at all, it might as well be worth her while. It's high time she got down to some cooking, and we hardly have time in our place at midday to eat more than a piece of sausage or some cheese.'

  Didn't Gina resent his having engaged her, at first? Anyone would have thought she was doing everything possible to make herself unbearable so that he would throw her out.

  After a week with him she was working from nine o'clock in the morning until one. Then Angèle had decided:

  'It's absurd to cook for one person alone. It costs no more to do it for two. She might just as well have lunch with you and do the washing-up before leaving.'

  Suddenly his life had changed. He didn't know everything, because he didn't hear the gossip, perhaps also because people didn't speak freely in front of him. He didn't understand, at first, why Gina was always in low spirits and why she would suddenly turn aggressive only, soon afterwards, to burst into tears in the middle of her housework.

  It was then three months since Marcel Jenot had been arrested and Jonas hardly ever read the papers. He had heard his name mentioned at Le Bouc's, for it had created quite a sensation. Marcel Jenot, the son of a dressmaker who worked for most of the women of the Market, including the Palestris, was under-cook at the Commercial Hotel, the best and most expensive in town. Jonas must have seen him at some time or other without paying any attention. His photograph, in the papers, showed a young man with a high forehead and a serious expression with, however, a rather disquieting curl to his lip.

  At twenty-one he had just finished his military service in Indo-China and was once more living with his mother in the Rue des Belles-Feuilles, the street beyond Pepito's restaurant.

  Like most young men of his age he owned a motor-cycle. One evening on the Saint-Amand road, a large car-load of Parisians had been stopped by a motor-cyclist who seemed to be asking for help and then, brandishing an automatic, had demanded money from the occupants, after which he had punctured the four tyres of the car and made off.

  The motor-cycles number plate, at the time of the hold-up, was covered with a layer of black paint. How had the police managed to trace it to Marcel? The papers must have explained it, but Jonas didn't know.

  The investigation was under way when Gina had gone into service with him, and a month later the trial had taken place at Montluson.

  It was Le Bouc who had told the bookseller about it.

  'How is Gina?'

  'She does her best.'

  'Not too upset?'

  'Why?'
/>   'Marcel is being tried next week.'

  'Which Marcel?'

  'The one in the hold-up. It's her boy friend.'

  She actually had to stay away for a few days and when she came back to resume work, it was a long time before she opened her mouth.

  That had been nearly three years ago now. A year after she had joined him as a housemaid Jonas married her, surprised at what was happening to him. He was thirty-eight and she twenty-two. Even when, in the sunlight, her body almost naked under her dress, she used to move to and fro around him and he breathed her smell, he had never made a single ambiguous gesture.

  At Le Bouc's they had adopted the habit of asking him, with a smile at the corner of the mouth: 'Well, well! And how's Gina?' He would reply, naively: 'She's very well.'

  Some of them went so far as to give him a wink, which he would pretend not to see, and others seemed to suspect him of keeping something up his sleeve.

  By keeping his ears pricked and asking a few questions here and there, he could easily have found out the names of all the lovers Gina had had since she had begun to knock about with men at the age of thirteen. He could also have found out about what had happened between her and Marcel. He was not unaware that she had been questioned several times by the police in the course of the inquiry and that Angèle had been summoned by the magistrate.

  What would be the use? It was not in his character. He had always lived alone, without imagining that he would one day be able to live otherwise.

  Gina did not keep house as well as old Leonie. Her tablecloths, when she took the trouble to use them, were seldom clean and, if she sometimes sang as she worked, there were days when her face remained set, her mouth truculent.

  Often, in the middle of the morning, she would disappear on the pretext of doing some shopping up the road and come back, with no apology, two hours later.

  Even so, hadn't her presence in the house become essential to Jonas? Had there been a conspiracy, as some people claimed, to force his hand?

  One afternoon Angèle had called in the clothes she always wore during the day in her shop, for she only really dressed up on Sundays. 'Well now, Jonas!'