Dufour and I dressed in old rags and, to make it even more convincing, did not shave for forty-eight hours.
A young inspector who specialized in locks had got into the building and made us an excellent copy of the door key.
We took another room on the same landing, before the Czech came back to sleep. It was just after eleven when a signal from outside told us he was coming up the stairs.
The tactic we followed was not mine, but Dufour’s. After all, he had been around a lot longer than me.
Not far from us, the man was locking himself in and lying down fully clothed on his bed, probably with at least one loaded gun within reach.
We did not sleep. We waited for dawn. If I am asked why, I will say what my colleague said when, in my impatience to get moving, I asked him the same question.
The murderer’s first reflex, on hearing us, would no doubt have been to smash the gas lamp in his room. We would have found ourselves in the dark, thus giving him an advantage over us.
‘A man always puts up less resistance early in the morning,’ Dufour asserted: something I was able subsequently to verify.
We slipped out into the corridor. Everyone was asleep around us. With infinite care, Dufour turned the key in the lock.
As I was taller and heavier, it was up to me to rush in first, and I did so, in one bound, and found myself lying on top of the man in the bed, grabbing him by whatever I could grab.
I do not know how long the struggle lasted, but it seemed endless. I felt us rolling to the ground. I saw his rage-filled face close to mine. I particularly remember his big, dazzling white teeth. A hand grabbed my ear and tried to tear it off.
I was not aware of what my colleague was doing, but I saw an expression of pain and fury on my opponent’s features and felt him gradually relax his grip. When I was able to turn, I saw Inspector Dufour sitting cross-legged on the floor with one of the man’s feet in his hands, and could have sworn he had already twisted it at least twice.
‘Handcuffs!’ he ordered.
I had already put handcuffs on less dangerous individuals, on recalcitrant prostitutes. This was the first time I had carried out such a violent arrest and the sound of the handcuffs put an end to a fight that could have gone badly.
• • •
When people talk about a policeman’s nose, his sixth sense, his intuition, I always feel like retorting, ‘What about your cobbler’s intuition, or your pastry maker’s?’
Both have had years of apprenticeship. Each knows his trade, and everything that pertains to his trade.
It is no different with someone from Quai des Orfèvres. And that is why all the stories I have read, including those of my friend Simenon, are inaccurate to a greater or lesser degree.
We are in our office, writing reports. Because this too, as is all too often forgotten, is part of the profession. I would even say that we spend much more time dealing with paperwork about cases than working on the cases themselves.
Someone comes in and announces that a nervous-looking middle-aged man is in the waiting room. He says he wants to speak to the commissioner immediately. Needless to say, the commissioner does not have time to see all the people who show up and demand to speak to him personally, because as far as they are concerned their little problem is the only one that matters.
There is a sentence used so often it has become a refrain, which the office boy recites like a litany: ‘It’s a matter of life and death.’
‘Will you see him, Maigret?’
There is a little office next to the inspectors’ office for that kind of interview.
‘Please take a seat. Cigarette?’
Most of the time, even though the visitor has not yet had time to tell us his profession, his social status, we have already guessed it.
‘It’s a very delicate, very personal matter.’
A bank clerk, or an insurance agent, a man with a quiet, calm life.
‘Your daughter?’
It is either his son or his daughter or his wife. And we can predict what he is going to tell us, practically word for word. No, his son has not taken money from his boss’s till. And his wife has not run away with a young man.
No, this is all about his daughter, a young girl who has had the best upbringing, who has never done anything untoward. She has not been seeing anyone, has always lived at home and helped her mother with the housework.
Her friends are as dependable as she is. She has almost never gone out alone.
All the same, she has disappeared, taking some of her things with her.
What can you say in reply? That every month six hundred people disappear in Paris, and only about two thirds of them are ever found again?
‘Is your daughter very pretty?’
He has brought several photographs, convinced they will be useful in the search. It is unfortunate if she is pretty, because then the chances of finding her decrease. If she is ugly, on the other hand, she will probably be back in a few days or a few weeks.
‘Count on us. We’ll do all we can.’
‘When?’
‘Immediately.’
He will telephone us every day, twice a day, and there is nothing to tell him, except that we have not yet had time to look for the girl.
Almost always, a brief inquiry indicates that a young man living in the same building, or the grocer’s assistant, or the brother of one of her girlfriends, has disappeared on the same day as she did.
We cannot search Paris and France with a fine-tooth comb for a runaway girl, and the following week her photograph will simply be added to the collection of photographs that are sent to police stations, to the different police departments and the borders.
• • •
Eleven o’clock at night. A phone call from the police emergency centre opposite, in the buildings of the municipal police, where all calls are centralized and are shown on a luminous board that takes up a whole wall.
The station at Pont-de-Flandre has just been informed that things are turning nasty in a bar in Rue de Crimée.
That means crossing the whole of Paris. Today, the Police Judiciaire has several cars at its disposal, but in the old days, we had to take a carriage or, later, a taxi, and we were not always sure we would be reimbursed.
The bar is on the corner of the street. It is still open. The window has been smashed. There are people outside, keeping a cautious distance, because around here it is better not to be noticed by the police.
Uniformed officers are already there, along with an ambulance, and sometimes the local chief inspector or his secretary.
On the floor, amid the sawdust and spittle, lies a man, bent double, one hand on his chest. Blood has trickled onto the floor and formed a pool.
‘Dead!’
Beside him, on the floor, is the small case he was holding in his hand when he fell. It has come open, and pornographic postcards have spilled out.
The owner is anxious to show himself in a good light.
‘Everything was calm, as it always is. This is a quiet place.’
‘Have you seen him before?’
‘Never.’
That was to be expected. He probably knows him like the back of his hand, but he will claim to the end that this was the first time the man had ever come into his bar.
‘What happened?’
The dead man is nondescript, middle-aged, or rather, ageless. His clothes are old and not very clean, and his shirt collar is black with grime.
No point looking for a family, an apartment. He must have lived from day to day in low-class rooming houses, from where he set off to ply his trade around the Tuileries and the Palais-Royal.
‘There were three or four customers . . .’
No point either in asking where they are. They have run away and will not be back to make statements.
‘Do you know them?’
‘Vaguely. Just by sight.’
My God, we could give his answers for him!
‘A stranger came in and
sat down at the other end of the bar, just opposite that one.’
The bar is horseshoe-shaped, with upturned little glasses and a strong odour of cheap alcohol.
‘They didn’t say anything to each other. The first one looked scared. He put his hand in his pocket to pay . . .’
That was true, because there was no weapon on him.
‘Without a word, the other man took out his gun and fired three times. He would probably have continued if his gun hadn’t jammed. Then he calmly stuck his hat on his head and left.’
It is almost a signature. No need for intuition. The circles we have to look into are quite restricted.
There are not as many people as all that involved in the pornographic postcard trade. We know almost all of them. Periodically they pass through our hands, do a short term in prison and start again.
The shoes of the dead man – who has dirty feet and socks with holes in them – bear a trademark from Berlin.
He is a newcomer. Maybe they were trying to make it clear to him that he was not wanted in the area. Or maybe he was just an underling entrusted with the merchandise, who had kept the money for himself.
It will take three days, maybe four. It is unlikely to take more. The hotels squad will immediately be alerted, and by the following night they will have found out where the victim was living.
Equipped with his photograph, the vice squad will investigate on their side.
That afternoon, in the area of the Tuileries, we will arrest some of the individuals who ply the same trade, going up to passers-by with a mysterious air to offer their merchandise.
We will not be gentle with them. In the old days we were even less gentle than now.
‘Have you ever seen this man?’
‘No.’
‘Are you sure you’ve never come across him?’
There is a very dark, very narrow little cell not much larger than a cupboard on the mezzanine, where we put people of that kind to help them to remember. It usually only takes a few hours before they start banging on the door.
‘I think I’ve seen him.’
‘What’s his name?’
‘I only know his first name: Otto.’
The tangle will gradually unwind, but unwind it will, like a solitary worm.
‘He’s a queer!’
Good! The fact that he is homosexual restricts the field even more.
‘Did he hang around Rue de Bondy?’
It is almost inevitable. There is a little bar there that is frequented by practically all the homosexuals of a certain social level – the lowest. There is another one in Rue de Lappe, which has become a tourist attraction.
‘Who did you see him with?’
That is pretty much it. All that remains, when we have the culprit within four walls, is to get him to make and sign a confession.
Not all cases are so simple. Some investigations take months. Some culprits are only arrested years later, sometimes by chance.
But in practically every case, the process is the same.
It is a question of knowing.
Knowing the milieu in which a crime is committed, knowing the lifestyle, habits, behaviour and reactions of the people involved in it, whether victims, perpetrators or mere witnesses.
Entering fully into their world, unperturbed, and speaking its language naturally.
This holds true if we are talking to a bar owner in La Villette or Porte d’Italie or Arabs in the slums, Poles or Italians, nightclub hostesses in Pigalle or young thugs in the Ternes.
It is equally true of the denizens of race-courses and gambling dens, safecrackers or jewel thieves.
That is why it is not a waste of time to pound the streets for years, or to climb the stairs of rooming houses, or to keep an eye open for shoplifters in department stores.
Like cobblers and pastry cooks, we do our apprenticeship, the only difference being that our apprenticeship may last our whole lives, because the number of circles we have to deal with is practically infinite.
The prostitutes, the pickpockets, the three-card-trick players, the conmen or the passers of false cheques recognize each other.
The same could be said of policemen after a certain number of years on the job. And it has nothing to do with hobnailed boots or moustaches.
I think it is the look in the eyes that gives the game away, a certain way of reacting – or rather, not reacting – to certain individuals, certain wretched situations, certain anomalies.
Whatever writers of novels may think, the policeman is above all a professional. He is a civil servant.
He is not there to solve clever puzzles or launch into exciting chases.
When he spends a night in the rain, watching a closed door or a lighted window, when he searches patiently for a familiar face on the terrace of a boulevard café, or prepares to give the third degree to a man pale-faced with terror, he is simply doing his job.
He is making a living, trying to earn, as honestly as possible, the money the government gives him at the end of every month as a reward for his services.
I know that when my wife reads these lines, she will shake her head, give me a reproachful look and perhaps say:
‘You always exaggerate!’
She will probably add:
‘You’re going to give a false idea of yourself and your colleagues.’
She is right. It is possible I am exaggerating somewhat in the opposite direction. It is a reaction against the set ideas that have so often irritated me.
The number of times, after the appearance of a book by Simenon, my colleagues have watched me sardonically as I walked into my office!
I could read what they were thinking in their eyes: ‘Ah, there goes God the Father!’
That is why I am so determined to use the words civil servant, which others consider reductive.
I have been a civil servant for almost my entire life. Thanks to Inspector Jacquemain, I became one when I was just out of my teens.
Just as my father, in his day, became an estate manager. With the same pride. With the same desire to learn everything about my trade and do my job as conscientiously as possible.
The difference between other civil servants and those on Quai des Orfèvres is that the latter hover between two worlds, so to speak.
In their clothes, their backgrounds, their apartments, their lifestyles, they are in no way different from other middle-class people, and share the same middle-class dream of a little house in the country.
And yet most of their time is spent in contact with the underside of that world, with the dregs, the scum, even the enemies of organized society.
I have often been struck by that. It is a strange situation, and one that has sometimes given me a sense of unease.
I live in a bourgeois apartment, where nice smells of simmering food await me, where everything is neat and tidy, clean and comfortable. Through my windows, I see only houses like mine, mothers walking their children on the boulevard, housewives off to do their shopping.
I belong to that environment, of course, to the so-called honest people.
But I know the others too, I know them well enough for a certain contact to have been established between them and me. The whores I pass on Place de la République know that I understand their language and the meaning of their gestures. The hooligan threading his way through the crowd, too.
And all the others I have met, whom I meet each day in the most intimate situations.
Is that enough to create a kind of bond?
It is not a question of excusing them, approving of them or absolving them. Nor is it a question of dressing them in some kind of halo, as was the fashion for a time.
It is a question of looking at them simply as realities, of looking at them with the eyes of knowledge.
Without curiosity, because curiosity is soon blunted.
Without hatred, of course.
Of looking at them, in short, as people who exist, people who, for the health of society, for the maintenanc
e of the established order, need to be kept within certain boundaries, whether they like it or not, and punished when they go beyond those boundaries.
They know that perfectly well, and they do not bear us any grudge. As they so often put it:
‘You’re just doing your job.’
As for what they think of that job, I would rather not know.
Is it surprising that after twenty-five years, thirty years on the job, your gait is a little heavy, and your eyes heavier too, sometimes empty?
‘Don’t you sometimes feel disgusted?’
No! Why should I? It is probably thanks to this job that I have acquired a fairly staunch kind of optimism.
Paraphrasing a maxim from my catechism teacher, I am prepared to say: a little knowledge distances us from people, a lot of knowledge brings us closer.
It is because I have seen dirty deeds of all kinds that I have come to realize how often they were compensated for by many acts of simple courage, goodwill or resignation.
Complete villains are rare, and most of those I have encountered were unfortunately out of my reach, outside our sphere of activity.
As for the others, I have done my best to prevent them from causing too much harm and to make sure that they pay for what they have done.
Once they do, I think the score has been settled.
There is no reason to come back to it.
8.
Place des Vosges, a young lady who is going to get married and Madame Maigret’s little papers
‘When it comes down to it,’ Louise said, ‘I don’t see so much difference.’
I always look at her rather anxiously when she reads what I have just written, prepared to reply in advance to the objections she will make.
‘Difference between what?’
‘Between what you say about yourself and what Simenon says.’
‘Oh!’
‘Maybe I’m wrong to give my opinion.’
‘Not at all!’
All the same, if she is right, I have gone to a lot of trouble for no purpose. And it is quite possible that she is right, that I have gone about it the wrong way and have not presented things as I vowed I would.
Or else that famous speech about fabricated truths being truer than naked truths is not just a paradox.
Maigret's Memoirs Page 11