And yet here, too, we were dealing with a regular clientele. Whether at the Bon Marché, the Louvre or the Printemps, you would again see certain familiar faces, mostly middle-aged women who would stuff incredible amounts of merchandise into special pockets between their dresses and their petticoats.
Looking back now, a year and a half does not strike me as very long. At the time, each hour felt as long as an hour spent in a dentist’s waiting room.
‘Are you at the Galeries this afternoon?’ my wife would sometimes ask me. ‘I have to do a bit of shopping there.’
We did not speak. We pretended not to recognize each other. It was wonderful. I loved watching her as she walked brashly from counter to counter, occasionally throwing me a discreet wink.
I doubt she has ever asked herself if she could have married anyone other than a police inspector. She got to know the names of all my colleagues, spoke familiarly about those she had never seen, their obsessions, their successes and failures.
It took me years before I finally made up my mind, one Sunday morning when I was on duty, to introduce her to the famous house on Quai des Orfèvres. She was not surprised in any way. She walked about as if she were at home, searching out the details she knew so well by hearsay.
Her only reaction was: ‘It’s not as dirty as I imagined.’
‘Why should it be dirty?’
‘Places where there are only men are never all that clean. And they smell.’
I did not take her to the cells, where, as far as smells went, she would have had her fill.
‘Whose seat is this here, on the left?’
‘Torrence.’
‘The really fat one? I should have guessed. He’s like a child. He still enjoys carving his initials on the desk.
‘What about the one who did all that walking, old Lagrume?’
Since I have spoken so much about shoes, I might as well tell the story that had moved my wife.
Lagrume, old Lagrume as we called him, was the eldest of us all, although he had never reached a rank above that of inspector. He was a tall, sad-looking man. In summer he suffered from hay fever, and as soon as it got cold again, his chronic bronchitis gave him a cavernous cough that could be heard from one end of the Police Judiciaire’s offices to the other.
Fortunately, he was not often there. He had been careless enough to say one day, talking about his cough, ‘My doctor has advised me to get a lot of fresh air.’
Since then, he had had his fill. He had long legs and big feet, and it was to him that we entrusted the most unlikely inquiries throughout Paris, those that oblige you to cross the city in all directions, day after day, without even the hope of a result.
‘Just give it to Lagrume!’
Everyone knew what that meant, except the man himself, who would solemnly write down a few points in his notebook, take his rolled-up umbrella under his arm and leave after a little wave to everyone.
I wonder now if he was not perfectly aware of the role he was playing. He was resigned to his lot. For years and years, he had had a sick wife who waited for him to do the housework in their suburban home in the evenings. And when his daughter got married, I think it was he who would get up in the night to deal with the baby.
‘Lagrume, you still smell of baby’s poo!’
An old woman had been murdered in Rue Caulaincourt. It was a banal crime, which caused no stir in the press, because the victim was a woman with a small private income and no friends or family.
Those are almost always the most difficult cases. Confined to the department stores – and kept busy by the approach of Christmas – I did not have to deal with it, but like everyone in the house, I knew the details of the investigation.
The crime had been committed with the help of a kitchen knife, which had been left at the scene. That knife was the only clue. It was a perfectly ordinary knife, the kind sold in ironmongers’, general stores and the smallest neighbourhood shops, and the manufacturer, who had been located, claimed that he had sold tens of thousands in the Paris region.
It was new. It had clearly been bought for the occasion. It still bore the price on the handle in indelible ink.
It was that detail that gave us a vague hope of finding the shopkeeper who had sold it.
‘Lagrume! Deal with the knife.’
He wrapped it in a piece of newspaper, put it in his pocket and left.
He left for a journey through Paris that was to last nine weeks. Every morning, he continued to present himself on time in the office, and every evening, he would come back and put the knife away in a drawer. Every morning, you would see him put the weapon in his pocket, grab his umbrella and leave with the same wave to everyone.
I later found out the number of shops – the story has become legendary – that might have sold a knife of that kind. Without going beyond the fortifications, just keeping within the twenty arrondissements of Paris, it was breathtaking.
There was no question of using any kind of transport. It was a matter of going from street to street, almost from door to door. In his pocket, Lagrume had a map of Paris, on which, hour after hour, he would cross off a certain number of streets.
I think that by the end his superiors had forgotten which task they had given him.
‘Is Lagrume available?’
Someone would answer that he was out on an assignment, and they would no longer bother to inquire about him. It was just before the holidays, as I have said. The winter was rainy and cold, and the streets slippery, and yet Lagrume continued to walk about with his bronchitis and his cavernous cough from morning to evening, never tiring, never wondering if it still had any meaning.
In the ninth week, well after New Year, when everything was frozen hard, they saw him come in at three in the afternoon, as calm and grim-faced as ever, without the slightest spark of joy or relief in his eyes.
‘Is the chief here?’
‘Did you find it?’
‘I found it.’
Not in an ironmonger’s, or a general store, or a shop selling household goods. He had been through them all in vain.
The knife had been sold by a stationer on Boulevard Rochechouart. The shopkeeper recognized his own handwriting and remembered a young man in a green scarf who had bought the weapon from him more than two months earlier.
He provided quite an accurate description, and the young man was arrested and executed the following year.
As for Lagrume, he died in the street, not from his bronchitis, but from a heart attack.
• • •
Before talking about railway stations, and especially about the Gare du Nord, with which it seems I have an old bone to pick, I must say a little about a subject I find somewhat disagreeable.
I have often been asked, when talking about my early days and my various posts, ‘Were you ever in the vice squad?’
The fact is, I was, like most of my colleagues. Not for very long. Barely a few months.
And although I realize now that it was necessary, I nevertheless retain a memory of that period that is both vague and a little embarrassed.
I have spoken about the familiarity which naturally grows up between the police and those on whom it is their task to keep an eye.
By force of circumstance, it exists just as much in that area as in the others. Even more in that area. In fact, each inspector’s clientele, if I can call it that, is composed of a relatively restricted number of women who are almost always found in the same places, at the door of the same hotel or under the same gas lamp, and for those of a slightly higher level, on the terraces of the same brasseries.
I did not yet have the solid build I have acquired with the years, and apparently I looked younger than my age.
Just recall the petits fours in that apartment on Boulevard Beaumarchais, and it should be obvious that, when it came to certain matters, I was somewhat shy.
Most officers in vice were on first-name terms with the girls. They knew not just their first names, but their nicknames too,
and it was a tradition, when they loaded them into the Black Maria after a raid, to exchange the most foul-mouthed remarks, the most obscene and insulting words, laughing all the while.
Another habit these ladies had acquired was to pull up their skirts and show their backsides in a gesture they no doubt considered the ultimate insult, accompanied with words of defiance.
At the start, I sometimes blushed, because I still blushed quite easily. My embarrassment did not go unnoticed: the least one can say of these women is that they have a certain knowledge of men.
Consequently, I became, if not their pet hate, at the very least their whipping boy.
At Quai des Orfèvres, I have never been called by my first name, and I am convinced that a lot of my colleagues do not even know it . . . I would not have chosen it if I had been asked for my opinion. But nor am I ashamed of it.
Was it an act of revenge on the part of an inspector who knew it?
My main patch was the Sébastopol area, which, especially around Les Halles, was then frequented by a low class of prostitute, in particular a number of very old ones, whose refuge in a way it had become.
It was there, too, that young girls who had just arrived from Brittany or elsewhere learned their trade, so that you had the two extremes: sixteen-year-olds whom the pimps – popularly known as Jules – would fight over, and ageless harpies who could well take care of themselves.
One day, the refrain began – because it immediately became a refrain. I was passing one of these old women, who was standing at the door of a filthy hotel, when I heard her say, smiling through her rotten teeth:
‘Good evening, Jules!’
I thought she had uttered the name off the top of her head, but a little further on I was greeted by similar words.
‘Well, Jules?’
After which, whenever they were in a group, they would burst out laughing and make comments I cannot bring myself to write down.
I knew what some officers would have done in my place. They would have needed no other excuse to arrest a few of the women and lock them up in Saint-Lazare to think it over.
Making an example like that would have sufficed, and I would probably have been treated with a certain respect.
But I did not do so. Not necessarily out of a sense of justice. And not from pity either.
Probably because it was a game I did not want to play. I preferred to pretend that I had not heard. I hoped that they would tire of it. But those kinds of women are like children who can never have enough of a joke.
The famous Jules was put into a song which they started singing at the tops of their voices as soon as I appeared. Others would say, when I checked their cards:
‘Don’t be a swine, Jules! You’re so cute!’
Poor Louise! Her great fear during that period was not that I would give in to temptation, but that I would bring a nasty illness into the house. I had already caught fleas. When I got home, she would make me undress and take a bath, while she went and brushed my clothes on the landing or outside the open window.
‘You must have touched something today. Brush your nails carefully!’
Was it not common knowledge in those days that you could catch syphilis just by drinking from a glass?
It was not pleasant, but I learned what I had to learn. After all, I had chosen the profession of my own free will.
I would not have asked to change post for anything in the world. It was my superiors who did that, more out of a concern for getting their money’s worth, I suppose, than out of consideration for me.
I was assigned to the railway stations. To be more precise, I was assigned to a certain dark and sinister building known as the Gare du Nord.
• • •
As with the department stores, there was the advantage that you were sheltered from the rain. Not from the cold and wind, because I doubt that there is a draughtier place anywhere in the world than the concourse of a railway station, the concourse of the Gare du Nord for example, and, for months, as far as colds went, I gave old Lagrume a run for his money.
I would not like anyone to think that I am complaining, or that I am deliberately depicting the dark side of things as an act of revenge.
I was perfectly happy. I had been happy tramping the streets, and no less happy when I was keeping an eye out for so-called kleptomaniacs in the department stores.
Each time I had the impression I was going up a notch, learning a trade which seemed ever more complex with each passing day.
Whenever I see the Gare de l’Est, I can never help feeling sad, because it conjures up the image of men going off to war. The Gare de Lyon, on the other hand, like the Gare Montparnasse, makes me think of holidays.
The Gare du Nord, the coldest and busiest of all, mainly evokes for me a bitter struggle for daily bread. Is it because it leads to the regions of mines and factories?
In the morning, the first night trains from Belgium and Germany generally contain a few smugglers, a few traffickers, their faces as hard as the daylight seen through the windows.
They are not always small fry. Some are professionals in international trafficking, with their agents, their men of straw and their henchmen, people who play for high stakes and are ready to defend themselves by every means possible.
No sooner has that crowd dispersed than it is the turn of the suburban trains, coming not from pleasant villages like those in the west or the south, but from dark, unhealthy conurbations.
But those who, for whatever reason, are attempting to flee leave in the opposite direction, towards Belgium, the nearest border.
Hundreds of people wait in a grey murk smelling of smoke and sweat, or bustle about, running from ticket office to left-luggage, checking the arrivals and departures boards, eating and drinking, surrounded by children, dogs and suitcases, and almost always they are people who have not slept enough, who are made irritable by the fear of being late, or sometimes simply the fear of what the future will bring in whichever place they are going.
I spent hours every day watching them, searching among those faces for a face that was more inscrutable, eyes that were more vacant, the eyes of a man or woman risking all on one last chance.
The train is there, waiting to leave in a few minutes. They just have to walk a hundred metres and hold out the ticket they are clutching. The hands on the huge yellow face of the clock advance jerkily.
Double or quits! A matter of freedom or prison. Or worse.
Me with a photograph in my wallet, or a description, sometimes only a technical description of an ear.
Sometimes we spot each other at the same moment, and our eyes meet. Almost always, the man realizes immediately.
What happens next depends on his character, the risk he is running, his nerves, even some small material detail, a door that is open or closed, a trunk that just happens to be between us.
Some try to get away, and there is a desperate chase through groups that protest or move aside, through stationary carriages, the tracks, the points.
I have known two, including one very young man, who, at an interval of three months, did an identical thing.
They both plunged their hands in their pockets as if to get a cigarette. And a moment later, right there in the middle of the crowd, their eyes fixed on me, they shot themselves in the head.
They did not bear me any grudge, any more than I bore them a grudge.
We were each doing our job.
They had lost the game, that was all, and now they bowed out.
I had also lost, because my role was to catch them alive and bring them to justice.
I have seen thousands of trains leave. I have seen thousands of others arrive, with the same crush each time, the long line of people rushing to one thing or another.
For me, as for my colleagues, it has become a habit. Even when I am not on duty, even when, by some miracle, my wife and I are setting off on holiday, my eyes move from face to face, and it is quite rare that they do not eventually linger on someone who is
afraid, however hard he may be trying to hide it.
‘Aren’t you coming? What’s the matter?’
Not until we are settled in our compartment – no, not until the train has left – is my wife sure that the holiday will really happen.
‘What are you looking at? You’re not on duty!’
I have sometimes followed her with a sigh, turning my head one last time – always regretfully – to a mysterious face disappearing into the crowd.
And I do not think it is solely out of professional concern, nor out of a love of justice.
I repeat: it is a game that is being played, a game that has no end. Once it has started, it is quite difficult, if not impossible, to leave it.
The proof of that is that those of us who finally retire, often reluctantly, almost always end up starting a private detective agency.
Of course that is nothing but a stopgap, and I do not know a single officer who, after complaining for thirty years about the miseries of a policeman’s life, is not ready to go back on duty, even unpaid.
I have retained a sinister memory of the Gare du Nord. For some reason I always see it filled with the damp, sticky fog of early morning, with its crowds of people barely awake walking towards either the platforms or Rue de Maubeuge.
The specimens of humanity I have met there are among the most desperate, and some arrests I have made there have left me rather with a feeling of remorse than one of professional satisfaction.
If I had to choose, though, I would rather take up my position tomorrow at the entrance to the platforms than set off from a grander station for some sunny corner of the Riviera.
6.
Stairs, stairs and more stairs!
From time to time, almost always at times of political unrest, there are disturbances in the streets, which are no longer simply a manifestation of popular discontent. It is as if at a certain moment a breach occurs, invisible floodgates are opened, and all of a sudden people appear in rich neighbourhoods whose existence is generally ignored there, people who seem to have come straight from some medieval den of iniquity, and who are watched as they pass beneath the windows as if they were rogues and cut-throats from the remote past.
Maigret's Memoirs Page 8