Maigret's Memoirs
Page 10
It may surprise you to hear that when we have him in front of us, crushed but still trying to brazen it out, we simply say to him, ‘You fool!’
It is rare for such young men not to pay with their lives. The least they get is twenty years, when they are lucky enough to get a leading lawyer interested in their case.
As for the killers of prostitutes, it is a miracle when we get our hands on them. Those are the longest, the most discouraging, and also the most sickening investigations I know.
It begins with a sack fished out of the Seine somewhere by a sailor with his boat hook. In it, there is almost always a mutilated body. The head is missing, or an arm, or the legs.
Often, weeks pass before any identification is possible. Generally, it is a prostitute of a certain age, the kind who no longer take their clients to a hotel or to their room, but make do with a doorway or the shelter of a fence.
People have stopped seeing her around the neighbourhood, a neighbourhood that is wrapped in mystery and silent shadows.
The women who know her do not want to have any dealings with us. When they are questioned, they just stare straight ahead of them.
Eventually, through patient work, we end up with the names of some of her regular clients, isolated, solitary, ageless men who leave little behind but a vague memory.
Was she killed for her money? Unlikely, given how little she had!
Did one of those old men suddenly go mad, or was it someone from elsewhere, from another neighbourhood, one of those madmen who, at regular intervals, feel the crisis coming, know exactly what they will do and, with incredible lucidity, take the kinds of precautions of which other criminals are incapable?
We do not even know how many of them there are. Every capital has its own. Once they have done their work, they plunge back into anonymity for an indefinite length of time.
They may be respectable people, family men, model employees.
What exactly they look like, nobody knows, and when by chance one of them is caught, it is almost always impossible to gain a satisfactory conviction.
We have fairly accurate statistics for all these kinds of crimes.
With one exception.
Poisoning.
And all approximations would inevitably be false, either too large or too small.
Every three to six months, in Paris or in the provinces, especially in the provinces, in a small town or in the countryside, a doctor happens, quite by chance, to examine a dead person more closely and is struck by certain features.
I say ‘by chance’, because it is usually one of his patients, someone who has been sick for a long time. This person has died suddenly in his bed, surrounded by his family, who show all the traditional signs of grief.
The relatives will not hear of an autopsy. The doctor only decides to do one if his suspicions are strong enough.
Alternatively, weeks after a funeral, the police receive an anonymous letter supplying details that seem unbelievable at first sight.
I am insisting in order to show all the conditions that have to come together for an investigation of this kind to be launched. The bureaucratic formalities are complicated.
Most of the time, it is a farmer’s wife who has been waiting years for her husband to die so that she can set up home with the servant and could wait no longer.
She has given nature a helping hand, as some rather crudely put it.
Sometimes, although this is rarer, it is a man getting rid of a sick wife who has become a dead weight in the house.
They are discovered by chance. But in how many other cases does chance not intervene? We have no idea. We can merely surmise. There are some, both in our house and the one in Rue des Saussaies, who think that of all crimes, especially those that go unpunished, this is the most frequent.
The others, those that interest novelists and so-called psychologists, are so uncommon that they take up only an insignificant part of our activities.
And yet it is those which the public knows best. It is those cases that Simenon has mostly written about and will, I assume, continue to write about.
I mean crimes that are suddenly committed in places where you would least expect them, and that are something like the end-product of a long-hidden period of fermentation.
An ordinary street, clean and cosy, in Paris or elsewhere. People who have a comfortable house, a family life, a respectable profession.
We have never had to cross their threshold before. Often it is a place where we would not normally be admitted, where we would stick out like a sore thumb and feel awkward to say the least.
And yet someone has died violently, and here we are knocking at the door, to be confronted by inscrutable faces, a family in which each member seems to have his secret.
Here, the experience acquired during years on the beat, at the railway stations, in the hotels squad, does not apply. Nor is there the kind of instinctive respect that poor people show towards authority, towards the police.
Nobody is afraid of being escorted to the border. Nor will anybody be taken to an office at the Quai to be subjected to hours of questioning.
Those we have in front of us are the same right-thinking people who would have asked us in other circumstances:
‘Don’t you sometimes feel disgusted?’
It is in a place like this that we do feel disgusted. Not immediately. Not always. Because the task is long and hazardous.
Provided there isn’t a telephone call from a minister, a deputy or some other important figure trying to take us off the case.
There is a whole veneer of respectability that has to be cracked little by little, there are family secrets, more or less repugnant, which everyone gets together to hide from us and which it is essential to bring into the light of day, unconcerned about protests or threats.
Sometimes, there are five, six, or more people telling the same lies, while at the same time trying insidiously to incriminate the others.
Simenon likes to describe me as being heavy and grouchy, ill at ease in my skin, looking at people in a shifty way, barking my questions bad-temperedly.
It is in such cases that he has seen me like that, faced with what could be called amateur crimes which you always end up discovering are crimes of self-interest.
Not crimes of money. I am not talking about crimes committed out of a pressing need for money, as with those young thugs who murder old ladies.
No, behind those façades there are more complicated long-term interests, combined with concerns for respectability. Often, it all goes back years, through whole lifetimes of trickery and deception.
When people are finally forced to confess, there is a foul stream of revelations, and above all, almost always, an absolute terror of the consequences.
‘Our family can’t possibly be dragged through the mud, can it? We have to find a solution.’
That happens, I regret to say. There are those who should only have left my office for a cell in the Santé, but who have simply dropped out of sight, because there are spheres of influence against which a police inspector, even a detective chief inspector, is powerless.
‘Don’t you sometimes feel disgusted?’
I never felt disgusted when, as an inspector in the hotels squad, I spent my days or nights climbing the stairs of filthy, overcrowded rooming houses, where each door opened on to a world of misery and tragedy.
Nor does the word disgust apply to my reactions to those thousands of professional criminals of all kinds I have had to deal with.
They played their game and lost. Almost all of them were determined to show that they were good players, and some, once sentenced, would even ask me to go and see them in prison, where we chatted like friends.
I could mention several who asked me to be present at their execution, who wanted me to be the last person they saw before they died.
‘I’ll be fine, you’ll see!’
They did their best. They did not always succeed. I carried their last letters away with me i
n my pocket and made sure I delivered each with a little note from me.
When I got home, my wife only had to look at me without asking any questions to know how things had gone.
As for the others, on whom I prefer not to linger, she also knew the meaning of certain bad moods, of a certain way of sitting down at the table when I got home in the evening and shovelling food on to my plate, and she would not insist.
Which is perfect proof that she was not intended for someone in the Highways Department!
7.
About a morning as triumphant as a bugle call and a young man who was no longer thin but not yet completely fat
I can still recall the taste, the colour of the sun that morning. It was in March. Spring had come early. I was already in the habit of walking whenever I could from Boulevard Richard-Lenoir to Quai des Orfèvres.
I had no work to do outside that day, only files to sort in the offices of the hotels squad – probably the darkest offices in the whole of the Palais de Justice, located on the ground floor, with a little door, which I had left open, leading to the courtyard.
I kept as close to that door as my work allowed. I remember the sun cutting the courtyard exactly in two, including a waiting Black Maria. Its two horses tapped their hooves on the cobbles from time to time, and behind them there was a fine heap of golden dung, steaming in the still chilly air.
For some reason, the courtyard reminded me of certain playtimes at school, at that same time of year, when the air suddenly starts to have a scent and your skin, when you have been running, smells like the spring.
I was alone in the office. The telephone rang.
‘Will you tell Maigret that the chief wants him?’
The voice of the office boy from upstairs – not a boy any more, since he had spent nearly fifty years in the same post.
‘This is Maigret.’
‘Then come up.’
Even the always dusty main staircase seemed a cheerful place, with slanting rays of sunlight as if in a church. The morning report had just finished. Two chief inspectors were still in conversation, their files under their arms, outside the chief’s door, on which I was about to knock.
Once inside the office, I could smell the pipes and cigarettes of those who had just left it. A window was open behind Xavier Guichard, who had plumes of sunlight in his silky white hair.
He did not hold out his hand. He almost never did so in the office. All the same, we had become friends or, to be more precise, he was kind enough to honour my wife and me with his friendship. The first time, he had invited me alone to his apartment on Boulevard Saint-Germain. Not the rich, snobbish part of the boulevard. On the contrary, he lived just opposite Place Maubert, in a large new apartment block surrounded by rickety houses and seedy hotels.
The second time, I had gone there with my wife. The two of them had immediately got on well.
He certainly felt affection for her, and for me, and yet he often hurt us without meaning to.
In the beginning, as soon as he saw Louise he would look at her figure insistently and, if we appeared not to understand, he would cough and say, ‘Don’t forget I want to be the godfather.’
He was a confirmed bachelor. Apart from his brother, who was head of the municipal police, he had no family in Paris.
‘Don’t keep me waiting too long . . .’
Years had passed, and he still had not caught on. I remember that when he had announced my first pay rise to me, he had added, ‘Maybe now you can give me a godson.’
He never understood why we blushed, why my wife lowered her eyes while I reached out my hand to console her.
That morning, standing against the light, he seemed very grave. He did not ask me to sit, and I felt embarrassed by the insistence with which he looked me up and down, like an adjutant in the army examining a recruit.
‘You know you’re putting on weight, Maigret?’
I was thirty. I had gradually stopped being thin, my shoulders had grown broader, my chest had swelled, but I had not yet reached my true build.
It was obvious, though. I must have looked flabby at the time, with something of the baby about me. I was struck by it myself whenever I passed a shop window and threw an anxious glance at my reflection.
It was too much or too little, and no suit would fit me.
‘Yes, I think I’m putting on weight.’
I almost felt like apologizing. I had not yet grasped that he was amusing himself, as he liked to do.
‘I think I should give you a change of department.’
There were two squads I had not yet been part of, the gambling section and the financial squad, and the latter was my nightmare, just as the end-of-year trigonometry exam had long been my nightmare at school.
‘How old are you?’
‘Thirty.’
‘A good age! It’s perfect. Young Lesueur will take your place in hotels, as of today, and you’ll make yourself available to Chief Inspector Guillaume.’
He had deliberately said it in a half-hearted tone, as if it were unimportant, knowing that my heart would leap in my chest. Standing in front of him, I heard something like a fanfare of trumpets in my ears.
All at once, on a morning that seemed to have been chosen deliberately – and I cannot say for sure that Guichard did not do so – the great dream of my life had come true.
I was finally joining the Special Squad.
A quarter of an hour later, I moved upstairs, with my old office jacket, my soap, my towel, my pencils and a few papers.
There were five or six men in the large room reserved for inspectors of the homicide squad, and before sending for me, Chief Inspector Guillaume let me settle in, like a new pupil.
‘Shall we have a drink?’
I was hardly going to say no. At midday, I proudly took my new colleagues to the Brasserie Dauphine.
I had often seen them there, at another table to the one I occupied with my former colleagues, and we would look at them with the envious respect granted, at school, to the final-year pupils, who are as tall as the teachers and are treated by them almost as equals.
The comparison was an accurate one, because Guillaume was with us, and we were joined by the chief inspector from the police intelligence service.
‘What will you have?’ I asked.
In our corner, we had been in the habit of drinking beer, or very occasionally an aperitif. Obviously, the same could not apply at this table.
Someone said, ‘Mandarin-curaçao.’
‘Mandarins all round?’
As nobody objected, I ordered mandarins – I do not remember how many. It was the first time I had tasted it. In the intoxication of victory, it struck me as barely alcoholic.
‘Another round?’
If now was not a time to be generous, when would be? We had a third round, then a fourth. My new chief also stood us a round.
The city was full of sunlight. The streets were bathed in it. The women in their bright dresses were an enchantment. I weaved my way between the pedestrians. I looked at myself in the shop windows and did not think I was as fat as all that.
I ran. I flew. I leaped for joy. I was still at the foot of the stairs when I started the speech I had prepared for my wife.
And on the last flight of stairs, I fell headlong. I did not have time to pick myself up before our door opened: Louise must have been worried by my lateness.
‘Did you hurt yourself?’
The funny thing is that from the moment I got back on my feet, I knew I was dead drunk and it was a complete surprise to me. The stairs were spinning around me. My wife was just a blurred figure. She seemed to have at least two mouths and three or four eyes.
Believe it or not, it was the first time it had ever happened in my life, and I felt so humiliated that I did not dare look at her. I slipped into the apartment like a guilty person, completely forgetting the words of triumph I had so carefully prepared.
‘I think . . . I think I’m a little drunk . . .’
It was in an almost lugubrious voice that I said, ‘It’s happened.’
‘What’s happened?’
Maybe she was expecting me to tell her that I had been thrown out of the police force!
‘I’ve been moved.’
‘Moved to what?’
Apparently I had big tears in my eyes, of vexation, but doubtless also of joy, as I blurted out, ‘The Special Squad.’
‘Sit down. I’ll make you a cup of very black coffee.’
She tried to put me to bed, but I was hardly going to abandon my new post on the first day. I do not know how many cups of strong coffee I drank. In spite of Louise’s insistence, I could not swallow anything solid. I took a shower.
At two o’clock, when I set off back to Quai des Orfèvres, my complexion was unusually pink, and my eyes were shining. I felt slack, my head empty.
I went and took my seat in my corner and spoke as little as possible, because I knew my voice was unsteady and I would probably mix up the syllables.
The next day, as if to put me to the test, they gave me my first arrest. It was in a rooming house in Rue du Roi-de-Sicile. The man had already been tailed for five days. He had several murders to his name. He was a foreigner, a Czech, if I remember correctly, very well-built, always armed, always on the alert.
The problem was to immobilize him before he had time to defend himself, because he was the kind of person who would shoot into the crowd and kill as many people as possible before letting himself be killed.
He knew that he had reached the end of the road, that the police were on his trail and were about to pounce.
Out on the streets, he always made sure he was surrounded by crowds, aware that we could not take any risks.
I was assigned to Inspector Dufour, who had been dealing with him for several days and knew all his comings and goings.
It was also the first time I disguised myself. Going to that wretched rooming house dressed as we usually were would have thrown everyone into a panic, and our man might have taken advantage of it to get away.