What surprised me the most, when this phenomenon occurred with such violence following the riots of 6 February, was the astonishment expressed the following day by most of the press.
This invasion of the centre of Paris for several hours, not by demonstrators, but by individuals who were all skin and bone, spread as much terror as a pack of wolves, and alarmed people who, by profession, have almost as great a knowledge of the underbelly of a large city as we do.
Paris really was afraid that time. But the very next day, once order had been restored, Paris forgot that this populace had not been wiped out, but had simply gone to ground again.
After all, the police are around to keep them there, aren’t they?
Is it generally known that there is a squad dealing exclusively with the roughly two to three hundred thousand North Africans, Portuguese and Romanians living, or rather, subsisting, in the slums of the twentieth arrondissement, barely knowing our language or not knowing it at all, obeying other laws, other instincts than ours?
At Quai des Orfèvres, we have maps on which various pockets are marked with coloured pencils: the Jews in Rue des Rosiers, the Italians around the Hôtel de Ville, the Russians in the Ternes and Denfert-Rochereau . . .
Many ask nothing but to assimilate, and they do not cause us any difficulties. But there are some who, in groups or as individuals, deliberately keep themselves on the margins and lead their own mysterious lives in the midst of a crowd that does not notice them.
It is almost always right-thinking people, with their carefully camouflaged little deceptions and vices, who ask me, with that slight trembling of the lips I know so well:
‘Don’t you sometimes feel disgusted?’
They are not talking about any one thing in particular, but those we deal with as a whole. What they would really like is for us to tell them some nice dirty secrets, some unheard-of vices, a whole world of squalor they can wax indignant over, while secretly revelling in it.
It is people like that who love to use the word slums.
‘The things you must see down there in the slums!’
I prefer not to answer them. I look at them in a certain way, without any expression on my face, and I assume they understand what that means, because they usually look embarrassed and do not insist.
I learned a lot on the beat. I learned things in the fairs and in the department stores, everywhere where crowds were gathered.
I have spoken about my experiences at the Gare du Nord.
But it was probably in the hotels squad that I gained most knowledge of the kinds of people who scare those from the nice neighbourhoods whenever the floodgates are opened.
The hobnailed boots were not necessary here, because I did not have to walk kilometres of pavement. I circulated, so to speak, at a higher level.
Every day, I would collect forms from dozens, hundreds of hotels, most of them rooming houses, where it was rare to find a lift and you had to climb six or seven floors, up stifling stairwells, where an acrid smell of poverty took you by the throat.
The grand hotels with their revolving doors flanked by uniformed valets also have their dramas and their secrets, into which the police are constantly sticking their noses.
But it is above all in the thousands of hotels with unknown names, barely noticed from the outside, that a floating population goes to ground, a population difficult to grab hold of elsewhere and seldom with their papers in order.
We would go in pairs. Sometimes, in dangerous neighbourhoods, there were more of us. We would choose an hour when most people were in bed, not long after the middle of the night.
Then a kind of nightmare would begin. Some details were always the same: the night porter or the owner asleep behind his desk, reluctantly waking up and trying to cover himself in advance.
‘You know we’ve never had any problems here . . .’
In the old days, the names were written in registers. Later, with the introduction of compulsory identity cards, there were forms to fill in.
One of us would remain downstairs. The other would go up. Sometimes, in spite of all our precautions, we would hear the house come alive like a beehive, frantic comings and goings in the rooms, furtive footsteps on the stairs.
We would sometimes find an empty room, the bed still warm, and the skylight looking out over the roofs open.
Usually, we were able to reach the top floor without alarming the guests and we would knock at the first door, to be answered with groans and questions in a language that was almost always foreign.
‘Police!’
They all understand that word. And people in nightshirts, others stark naked, men and women and children, moved about in the bad light, in the bad smell, unfastened incredible trunks looking for passports hidden under all their things.
You have to have seen the anxiety in those eyes, those sleepwalking gestures, and that quality of humility one finds only in the uprooted. Shall I call it a proud humility?
They did not hate us. We were the masters. We had – or they believed we had – the most terrible of all powers: the power to send them back across the border.
For some, the fact that they were here represented years of scheming or patience. They had reached the promised land. They had papers, true or false.
And as they held them out to us, always afraid we would put them in our pockets, they would try instinctively to cajole us with a smile, finding a few words of French to stammer:
‘M’sieu Inspector Sir . . .’
The women rarely made any attempt at modesty, and sometimes there was a look in their eyes, a hesitant gesture towards the unmade bed. Weren’t we tempted? Wouldn’t that give us pleasure?
And yet all these people were proud, with a special kind of pride I find hard to describe. The pride of animals?
Sure enough, they were rather like animals in cages as they looked at us, uncertain if we were going to hit them or encourage them.
Sometimes you would see one who would brandish his papers in a kind of panic and start speaking volubly in his language, gesticulating, calling the others to his aid, making an effort to convince us that he was an honest man, that things were not as they seemed, that . . .
Some wept and others huddled in their corners, hostile, as if ready to pounce, but actually resigned.
An identity check. That is what the operation is called in official language. Those whose papers are unquestionably in order are left in their rooms, and you hear them locking their doors with a sigh of relief.
The others . . .
‘Come downstairs!’
When they do not understand, you have to add a gesture. They get dressed, talking to themselves. They have no idea what to take with them. Sometimes, as soon as our backs are turned, they look for their money in some hiding place and stuff it in their pockets or under their shirts.
On the ground floor, they form a little group. Nobody speaks, each person is thinking only of his own case and the way he is going to plead it.
In the Saint-Antoine district, there are hotels where I have sometimes found seven or eight Poles in a single room, most of them sleeping on the floor.
Only one was mentioned in the register. Did the owner know? Did he get money for the extra sleepers? More than likely, but that is the kind of thing it is pointless to try and prove.
Of course, the others’ papers were not in order. What did they do when they were forced to leave the shelter of their room early in the morning?
Without work permits, it was impossible for them to earn their living regularly. They were clearly not dying of starvation. Which meant they ate.
And there were, there still are thousands, tens of thousands in the same position.
If we find money in their pockets, hidden on top of a wardrobe, or, more often, in their shoes, we then have to find out how they got it, and that is the most exhausting kind of interrogation.
Even when they understand French, they pretend not to, looking you in the eyes with an air of good
will, tirelessly repeating their protestations of innocence.
It is pointless to question the others about them. They will not betray each other. They will all tell the same story.
But on average, sixty-five per cent of crimes committed in the Paris region are committed by foreigners.
Stairs, stairs and more stairs. Not only at night, but by day, and everywhere girls, some professional prostitutes, others not. Some are so young and beautiful, you wonder why they have come all the way from their countries.
I knew one, a Polish girl, who shared a hotel room in Rue Saint-Antoine with five men and told them which places to rob. She would reward those who succeeded in her own way, while the others champed at the bit in the room, then usually threw themselves angrily on the exhausted winner.
Two of them were enormous, powerful brutes, but she was not afraid of them, she kept them at a respectful distance with a smile or a frown. When I interrogated them in my own office, I saw her calmly slap one of the giants after something he had said in their language.
‘You must have seen all sorts!’
And indeed, you see men and women, all sorts of men and women, in all kinds of unlikely situations, at all levels of the scale. You see them, you record them, and you try to understand.
Not to understand some kind of human mystery. That may be the romantic idea I most firmly, even angrily, object to. That is one of the reasons for this book: to correct that kind of misconception.
Simenon has tried to explain it, I admit that. And yet I have been embarrassed to see myself smile in a certain way in his books, express certain attitudes I have never had, attitudes that would have made my colleagues shrug.
The person who has felt it most keenly is most probably my wife. And yet when I get home from work, she never questions me, whatever case I am dealing with.
For my part, I never make what are called confidences.
I sit down at the table like any other civil servant coming back from his office. I may then, in a few words, as if to myself, talk about an encounter, an interrogation, the man or woman I have been investigating.
If she asks me a question, it is almost always a technical one.
‘In what district?’
Or else:
‘How old?’
Or even:
‘How long has she been in France?’
Because, over time, these details have become as revealing to her as they are to us.
She does not ask me about any of the sordid or pitiful aspects.
God knows it is not indifference on her part!
‘Did his wife go to see him in the cells?’
‘Yes, this morning.’
‘Did she bring the child with her?’
She is particularly interested, for reasons on which I do not have to insist, in those who have children, and it would be a mistake to think that illegals, gangsters or criminals do not have any.
We took one in once, a little girl whose mother I had sent to prison for the rest of her days, but we knew that the father would come and collect her as soon as he returned to normal.
She still comes to see us. She is a young woman now, and my wife is quite proud to take her shopping in the afternoon.
What I am trying to emphasize is that in our behaviour towards those we deal with, there is neither sentimentality nor harshness, neither hatred nor pity in the usual sense of the word.
We handle human beings. We observe their behaviour. We record facts, try to establish others.
Our knowledge is, in a way, technical.
When I was a young man and would visit a shady hotel, entering each cell-like room from the cellar to the attic, surprising people in their sleep, in all their crude intimacy, examining their papers with a magnifying glass, I could almost have said what would become of each of them.
Firstly, some faces were already familiar to me, because Paris is not so large that, within a given milieu, you do not constantly meet the same individuals.
Secondly, some cases were reproduced almost identically, the same causes bringing about the same results.
The unfortunate who has come from central Europe, who has saved for months, perhaps years, to afford to buy a false passport from a clandestine agency in his country, and who thought it was all over when he crossed the border without any problems, will inevitably fall into our hands within six months or a year at most.
Better still: we can predict his every move from the border, know exactly in which area, in which restaurant, in which hotel, he will end up.
We know from whom he will try to acquire the indispensable work permit, whether genuine or fake. We just have to go and pick him up from the queues that form every morning outside the big factories in Javel.
Why get angry or resentful when he finishes up exactly where he was bound to finish up?
It is the same with the fresh-faced young parlour maid we see dancing for the first time in some bal musette. Should we tell her to go home to her employers and avoid her flashily dressed companion from now on?
It would be pointless. She will go back to him. We will see her in other bal musettes, then, one fine evening, standing in the doorway of a hotel around Les Halles or the Bastille.
Every year, ten thousand pass that way on average, ten thousand who leave their villages and arrive in Paris as domestic servants, and who only take a few months, or even a few weeks, to go downhill.
Is it so different when a young man of eighteen or twenty, who has been working in a factory, starts dressing and behaving in a particular way, propping up the counters of particular bars?
We will soon see him in a new suit, with artificial silk socks and tie.
He will end up with us, too, looking shifty or contrite, after an attempted burglary or an armed robbery, unless he signed on to join the legion of car thieves.
Some signs are unmistakable, and when all is said and done it is those signs we learned to recognize when we were made to go from squad to squad, to tramp kilometres of pavement, to climb floor after floor, to go into every kind of slum and through every kind of crowd.
That is why the nickname ‘Hobnailed Boots’ has never bothered us. Quite the contrary.
By the age of forty, there are few of us at Quai des Orfèvres who are not familiar, for example, with all the pickpockets. We even know where to find them on such and such a day, on the occasion of such a ceremony or such a gala.
Just as we know, for example, that a jewel robbery will soon be taking place, because a specialist whom we have seldom caught red-handed is starting to get to the end of his tether. He has left his hotel on Boulevard Haussmann for a more modest hotel near Place de la République. For the past fortnight, he has not paid his bills. The woman he lives with is starting to kick up a fuss and has not been able to afford any new hats for a long time.
We cannot follow his every step: there will never be enough police officers to tail all suspects. But we keep him on a short leash. The beat officers are alerted to keep a particular eye on jewellers’ shops. We know how he operates.
It does not always work. That would be too good to be true. But we do sometimes catch him in the act. And sometimes this is after a discreet conversation with his companion, to whom we make it clear that her future would be less problematic if she kept us informed.
There is a lot written in the newspapers about gangsters settling scores in Montmartre or around Rue Fontaine, because gunshots in the night always thrill the public.
But it is these cases that give us the fewest problems at the Quai.
We know the rival gangs, their interests, the points of contention between them. We also know their hatreds and their personal resentments.
One crime leads to another. Was Luciano shot down in a bar in Rue de Douai? The Corsicans will inevitably retaliate within a relatively short time. And almost always, one of them will tip us off.
‘Someone’s planning to take down Flatfoot Dédé. He knows it and always has two bodyguards with him when he goes out
.’
The day Dédé is shot down in his turn, there are nine chances out of ten that a more or less mysterious telephone call will bring us up to date with the story in all its details.
‘One less to worry about!’
We arrest the culprits all the same, but it does not really matter, because these people only kill each other, for reasons that are theirs alone, according to a code they apply to the letter.
That is what Simenon was referring to when, in the course of our first conversation, he declared so categorically:
‘I’m not interested in the crimes of professional criminals.’
What he did not yet know, but has learned since, is that there are very few other crimes.
I am not talking about crimes of passion, which for the most part are lacking in mystery, being merely the logical outcome of an acute crisis between two or more individuals.
Nor am I talking about a knife fight on a Saturday or Sunday night between two drunks in some area.
Apart from these accidents, the most common crimes are of two kinds:
The murder of some solitary old woman by one or several young thugs, and the murder of a prostitute on a stretch of waste ground.
For the former, it is extremely rare for the culprit to get away. Almost always, he is a young man, one of those I spoke about earlier, who stopped working in a factory a few months ago and is eager to play the tough guy.
He homes in on a tobacconist’s, a haberdasher’s, or some other little business in a deserted street.
Sometimes he buys a revolver. Other times, he makes do with a hammer or a spanner.
He almost always knows the victim, and in at least one case out of ten the victim was good to him in the past.
He does not intend to kill. He puts a scarf over his face in order not to be recognized.
The handkerchief slips, or else the old woman starts screaming.
He shoots her, if he has a gun, or hits her. If he shoots, he empties the whole barrel, which is a sign of panic. If he hits her, he does so ten, twenty times – what is called a savage attack, although actually it is because he is driven mad with fear.
Maigret's Memoirs Page 9