I have done my best. Only, there are a whole heap of things that seemed to me essential at first, points I had vowed to develop and which I abandoned as I went on.
For example, there is one whole shelf of my bookcase devoted to Simenon’s books, which I have patiently annotated in blue pencil, and I was looking forward to rectifying all the errors he made, either because he did not know, or in order to increase the picturesque aspect – or, often, because he did not have the courage to call me and check a detail.
But what would be the point? That would make me look like a pernickety old man, and I too am starting to think that it does not really matter.
One of the things that has most irritated me from time to time is his habit of mixing up dates, of putting at the beginning of my career investigations that took place later, and vice versa, so that sometimes my inspectors are quite young when in fact they already had families and had settled down at the period in question, or the opposite.
I even intended – I can admit it now that I have given up the idea – to establish a chronology of the main cases in which I have been involved, with the help of the exercise books filled with press cuttings that my wife has been keeping up to date.
‘Why not?’ Simenon replied. ‘Excellent idea. My books could be corrected for the next edition.’
He added without any irony:
‘Only, my dear Maigret, you’ll have to be so kind as to do the work yourself. I’ve never had the courage to reread my books.’
In short, I have said what I had to say, and too bad if I have not said it well. My colleagues will understand, and all those who are more or less in the trade. It was for them above all that I was determined to get things right, to speak not so much about myself as about our profession.
But apparently I have neglected an important question. I hear my wife carefully open the door of the dining room, where I am working, and tiptoe in.
She has just placed a little piece of paper on the table, before leaving as stealthily as she entered.
I read, in pencil: Place des Vosges.
And I cannot help smiling to myself with a sense of satisfaction, because it proves that she too has details to rectify, or at least one – and for the same reason as me, when it comes down to it: fidelity.
In her case, it is fidelity to our apartment on Boulevard Richard-Lenoir, which we have never abandoned, and which we still have, even though we have only used it for a few days a year since we moved to the country.
In several of his books, Simenon had us living on Place des Vosges without giving any explanation.
I am therefore carrying out my wife’s request. Yes, we did live on Place des Vosges for a few months. But we were not there with our own furniture.
That year, our landlord finally made up his mind to undertake the refurbishment the building had needed for a long time. Workers set up scaffolding on the façade, enclosing our windows. Inside, others started breaking through walls and floors in order to install central heating. We were promised it would all take three weeks at most. After two weeks, they had got nowhere. Just then, a strike was declared in the building trade, and it was impossible to predict how long it would last.
Simenon was leaving for Africa, where he would spend nearly a year.
‘Why don’t you come and live in my apartment on Place des Vosges until the work is finished?’
That is how we came to live there, at Number 21, to be precise, and nobody could have accused us of being disloyal to our good old boulevard.
There was also a time when, without telling me in advance, he retired me, even though I was still several years away from retirement.
We had just bought our house in Meung-sur-Loire, and we spent every free Sunday I had doing it up. He came to see us there. He liked the place so much that in the next book he anticipated events, shamelessly aged me and settled me there for good.
‘It makes a nice change of scenery,’ he said when I spoke to him about it. ‘I was starting to get tired of Quai des Orfèvres.’
I find that sentence extraordinary, which is why I have put it in italics. It was he, you understand, who was starting to get tired of the Quai, of my office, of the daily work of the Police Judiciaire!
Which did not prevent him subsequently, and will probably not prevent him in the future, from writing about older investigations, always without providing dates, sometimes making me sixty, sometimes forty-five.
My wife again. I do not have an office here. I have no need of one. Whenever I want to work, I sit down at the dining-room table, and Louise just has to stay in the kitchen, which she does not mind. I look at her, assuming that she wants to say something. But she is holding another piece of paper, which she timidly puts down in front of me.
A list this time, as when I go to town and she writes what she wants me to bring back for her on a page torn out of a notebook.
My nephew is top of the list, and I understand why. He is her sister’s son. I helped him to join the police, at an age when he thought he had a vocation.
Simenon wrote about him, then the boy suddenly vanished from his books, and I understand Louise’s qualms. She must be thinking that some readers may have found this odd, as if her nephew had done something stupid.
The truth is quite simple. He was not as brilliant as he had hoped. And he did not long resist the urging of his father-in-law, a soap manufacturer, who offered him a job in his factory.
Next on the list is Torrence, fat Torrence, noisy Torrence (I think Simenon once killed him off instead of another inspector, who was actually killed by my side in a hotel on the Champs-Élysées).
Torrence did not have a father-in-law in soap. But he did have a great appetite for life as well as a feeling for business that was not really compatible with the life of a civil servant.
He left us to start a private detective agency – a perfectly serious agency, I hasten to add, because such is not always the case. And for a long time he continued coming to the Quai to ask us for help, a piece of information, or simply to breathe the air of the house for a while.
He owns a big American car, which stops from time to time outside our door and each time he is accompanied by a pretty woman, never the same one, whom he introduces in all sincerity as his fiancée.
I read the third name: young Janvier, as we have always called him. He is still at the Quai. No doubt they still call him young.
In his last letter, he announced to me, not without a certain sadness, that his daughter is about to marry a former student of the École Polytechnique.
Last but not least, Lucas, at this hour, is probably sitting as usual in my office, in my place, smoking one of my pipes, which he asked me with tears in his eyes to leave him as a memento.
There are two more words at the bottom of the list. I thought at first it was a name, but I cannot read it.
I have just been all the way to the kitchen, which I was quite surprised to see bathed in bright sunshine, because I had closed the shutters to work in the kind of half-light I find congenial.
‘Finished?’
‘No. There are some words I can’t read.’
She was quite embarrassed. ‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘What is it?’
‘Nothing. Don’t pay any attention.’
Of course I insisted.
‘The sloe gin!’ she finally admitted, turning away her head.
She knew I was going to burst out laughing, and I did not fail her.
When it came to my famous bowler hat, my overcoat with the velvet collar, my coal stove and my poker, I knew she found my insistence on setting the record straight somewhat childish.
Nevertheless, she scribbled the words ‘sloe gin’ at the bottom of the list, deliberately making them illegible, I’m sure, out of a kind of shame – rather as when she adds a very feminine article to the list of errands to be run in town, an article she feels embarrassed asking me to buy.
Simenon has written about a certain drink, a bottle of whic
h was always on the dresser in the apartment on Boulevard Richard-Lenoir – and is now here. My sister-in-law, following a tradition that has become sacred, brings us a supply from Alsace on her annual visit.
He wrote carelessly that it was sloe gin.
In fact, it is raspberry liqueur. For someone from Alsace, there is apparently a very big difference.
‘I’ve rectified it, Louise. Your sister will be pleased.’
This time I left the kitchen door open.
‘Anything else?’
‘Tell Simenon I’m just knitting some bootees for—’
‘Come on now, this isn’t a letter!’
‘That’s true. Make a note of it for when you write to them. And make sure they don’t forget the photograph they promised.’
Then she added:
‘Can I lay the table?’
And that is all.
1
For Officer Jussiaume, whose beat took him to the same places at almost exactly the same time every night, these comings and goings were such a part of his routine that he registered them unconsciously, a little as people living next to a station register the arrivals and departures of trains.
It was sleeting, and Jussiaume had taken shelter for a moment in a doorway on the corner of Rue Fontaine and Rue Pigalle. Picratt’s red sign was one of the few in the neighbourhood still to be on, its reflection leaving what looked like splashes of blood on the wet cobbles.
It was Monday, a slack day in Montmartre. Jussiaume could have told you the order in which most of the nightclubs had shut. He saw Picratt’s neon sign go out in its turn, and the proprietor, short and stout, a beige raincoat over his dinner jacket, came out on to the pavement to wind down the shutters with the crank.
A figure – a street urchin, it looked like – slid along the walls and went down Rue Pigalle towards Rue Blanche. Then two men, one of them with a saxophone case under his arm, headed up towards Place Clichy.
Almost immediately another man set off towards Carrefour Saint-Georges, his overcoat collar turned up.
Officer Jussiaume didn’t know their names, he barely knew their faces, but these figures, and hundreds of others, meant something to him.
He knew that a woman would come out next, wearing a light-coloured, very short fur coat, perched on exaggeratedly high heels, and break into a very fast walk as if she were afraid to find herself alone on the street at four in the morning. She only had a hundred metres to go to get to her apartment block. She had to ring the bell, because at that time of night the front door was locked.
Finally the last two women came out together, as they always did, walked to the corner of the street, talking in low voices, and went their separate ways a few metres from where he was standing. One of them, the older, taller one, strutted back up Rue Pigalle to Rue Lepic, where he had sometimes seen her go into her apartment block. The other hesitated, looked at him as if she wanted to talk to him, and then, instead of going down Rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, as she should have, made for the café-tabac on the corner of Rue de Douai, which still had its lights on.
She had been drinking by the looks of it. She was bareheaded. He could see her golden hair gleam when she went under the streetlights. She walked slowly, stopping from time to time as if she were talking to herself.
‘Coffee, Arlette?’ the café owner asked familiarly.
‘With a shot.’
The characteristic smell of rum heated by coffee immediately filled the air. Two or three men were drinking at the bar, but she didn’t look at them.
The owner said later that she had seemed very tired.
That was probably why she had a second coffee with a double shot of rum, and her hand fumbled a little as she took the coins out of her bag.
‘Good night.’
‘Good night.’
Officer Jussiaume saw her head back his way, and, coming down the street, her gait was even less steady than when she had gone up. As she drew level with him, she noticed him in the shadows, turned to face him and said:
‘I want to make a statement at the station.’
‘That’s easy. You know where it is.’
It was almost directly opposite, more or less behind Picratt’s, in Rue La Rochefoucauld. From where they were standing, both of them could see the blue light and the police bicycles lined up against its wall.
He thought she wouldn’t go at first. But then he saw her crossing the road and entering the station.
It was 4.30 when she walked into the dimly lit office, which was empty except for Sergeant Simon and a young trainee officer.
‘I want to make a statement,’ she repeated.
‘I’m listening, sweetheart,’ replied Simon, who had been in the area for twenty years and knew its ins and outs.
She was wearing a lot of make-up, which had run a little, and a black satin dress under a faux mink coat. She staggered slightly and held on to the handrail dividing the police officers from the public area.
‘It’s about a crime.’
‘There’s been a crime committed?’
A large electric clock hung on the wall, and she gazed at it as if the position of the hands held some significance.
‘I don’t know if it has been committed.’
‘Then it’s not a crime,’ the sergeant said, winking at his young colleague.
‘It’s probably been committed. I’m sure it’s been committed.’
‘Who told you?’
She seemed to be laboriously following her train of thought.
‘The two men, just now.’
‘Which men?’
‘Customers. I work at Picratt’s.’
‘I thought I’d seen you somewhere. You’re the one who gets her clothes off, aren’t you?’
The sergeant hadn’t seen Picratt’s floorshows, but he passed the club every morning and evening and had seen the large-format photograph in the window of the woman standing in front of him, as well as the smaller photographs of the other two dancers.
‘So, just like that, some customers told you about a crime, did they?’
‘They didn’t tell me.’
‘Who did they tell?’
‘They were talking about it among themselves.’
‘And you were listening?’
‘Yes. I didn’t hear everything. There was a partition between us.’
This was something else Sergeant Simon understood. If he walked past the club when it was being cleaned, its door would be open. You could see a dark room, entirely painted red, with a glossy dance floor and tables along the walls, which were partitioned off into booths.
‘Go on, then. When was this?’
‘Tonight. About two hours ago. That’s right, it must have been two in the morning. I’d only done my act once.’
‘What did the two customers say?’
‘The older one said he was going to kill the countess.’
‘Which countess?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘When?’
‘Today, probably.’
‘He wasn’t afraid you’d hear?’
‘He didn’t know I was the other side of the screen.’
‘Were you on your own?’
‘No. With another customer.’
‘Who you knew?’
‘Yes.’
‘Who was that?’
‘I only know his first name. He’s called Albert.’
‘Did he hear it too?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because he was holding my hands and talking to me.’
‘About love?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you were listening to what was being said in the next booth? Can you remember their exact words?’
‘Not the exact ones.’
‘Are you drunk?’
‘I have been drinking, but I still know what I’m talking about.’
‘Do you drink like this every night?’
‘Not this much.’
<
br /> ‘Did you drink with Albert?’
‘We just had a bottle of champagne. I didn’t want him to splash out.’
‘He’s not rich?’
‘He’s a young man.’
‘Is he in love with you?’
‘Yes. He’d like me to leave the club.’
‘So, you were with him when the two customers came in and sat down in the next booth.’
‘Exactly.’
‘You didn’t see them?’
‘I saw them later, from behind, as they left.’
‘Did they stay for a long time?’
‘Maybe half an hour.’
‘Did they have champagne with the women you work with?’
‘No. I think they ordered brandy.’
‘And they started talking about the countess right away?’
‘Not right away. At the beginning, I didn’t pay any attention. The first thing I heard was something like: “You understand, she’s still got most of her jewellery, but at the rate she’s going it won’t be for long.”’
‘What sort of voice?’
‘A man’s voice. A middle-aged man’s. When they left, I saw that one of them was short and burly, with grey hair. It must have been him.’
‘Why?’
‘Because the other one was younger, and it wasn’t a young man’s voice.’
‘How was he dressed?’
‘I didn’t notice. I think he was wearing dark clothes, maybe black.’
‘Did they leave their coats in the cloakroom?’
‘I suppose.’
‘So, he said the countess still had most of her jewellery but at the rate she was going it wouldn’t be for long?’
‘That’s right.’
‘What did he say about killing her?’
She was very young, really; certainly far younger than she wanted people to think. For a second she looked like a little girl on the verge of panicking. At moments like this she would fix her gaze on the clock, as if seeking inspiration. Her body shook imperceptibly. She must have been very tired. The sergeant picked up a slight whiff of sweat from her armpits mixed with the smell of her perfume.
‘What did he say about killing her?’ he repeated.
‘I can’t remember. You know I wasn’t on my own. I couldn’t listen the whole time.’
Maigret's Memoirs Page 12