The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By

by Georges Simenon

  But what did all that matter to him? He had to take an important decision and he was letting himself be distracted by these things, even stopping to look at the river, which seemed to be dividing itself in two, at the junction with a canal.

  Another empty stretch of embankment. Then some tall buildings with lighted windows, and a café, its owner shivering as he started the coffee machine.

  He shrugged his shoulders. Always the same. Of course he could go in, walk up to the counter, looking innocent, knock out the proprietor when he turned round, and run away with the money in the till.

  But to do that there was no need to be Kees Popinga!

  No! It just wasn’t worth thinking about that sort of thing. He had gone through his options, one by one, all afternoon, he had considered what he might do, and it was as if the slate had been wiped clean with a damp sponge.

  It was too late. In fact, it had always been too late, because he had started off badly.

  He was more intelligent than Landru, or all the other criminals whose crimes were spoken of with awe, but those other men had been prepared for what they were about to do, they had taken all the necessary steps, which he too would have been able to do, if he had wished to.

  But it wasn’t his fault. If only Pamela hadn’t gone off into that hysterical laughter! Apart from that, he did not think he had made any mistakes, and people would have to recognize that one day.

  Groups of men were walking past, heading for a large factory, and Popinga was obliged to be careful not to attract attention, because now he had a duty not to be caught.

  He had a task to accomplish. After that, things would move quickly. But for the moment, he must hold firm, and above all avoid giving himself away.

  But it is hard for a man who has been walking for over ten hours in the rain not to attract attention.

  It would be best to go on walking, to go through Ivry, then Alfortville.

  It was still not light, and daybreak only started to appear when he found himself in what seemed to be the countryside, on the banks of the Seine where there were bollards for mooring boats.

  The water was yellowish, the current rapid, and the river was ferrying along rubbish and branches of trees. A hundred metres further on was a low-built house with lights showing on the ground floor, and Popinga could read a sign: The Laughing Carp. He did not at first understand what it meant, but when he did he shrugged. How odd to call a carp ‘laughing’, when it is a fish that actually has a very small mouth!

  The building was surrounded with arbours, or rather metal stands which must in summer turn into arbours, and a dozen small rowing-boats were pulled up on the bank.

  Popinga walked on past at first, trying to be inconspicuous, just to take a look, and saw a sturdy woman stoking the stove in a roomy café, while a man, the owner no doubt, was eating at a table covered with brown oilcloth.

  He made up his mind, put on an almost jovial expression, and said as he went in: ‘Terrible weather, isn’t it!’

  The woman gave a start: he was sure she was frightened and had feared some kind of aggressor. And indeed she went on looking at him suspiciously when he came to sit near the stove.

  ‘Is it possible to have a cup of coffee?’

  ‘Course you can.’

  A cat was curled up on a chair.

  ‘And can I trouble you for some bread and butter?’

  These people couldn’t know who they were dealing with, and little suspected that the following day . . .

  He ate the food, although he did not feel hungry. Then as the day dawned fully and the electric lights were switched off, he asked for some writing paper.

  At last he was sitting in front of a sheet of poor-quality squared paper, such as you find in village groceries, and, after looking out of the window at the sullen river, he wrote:

  Dear Sir,

  As your newspaper reported yesterday, a certain Chief Inspector Lucas, who has been saying for two weeks now that my arrest is only a matter of hours, has released some common criminals and former prisoners in order to send them to track me down.

  Would you be good enough to publish this letter, which will put an end to a pointless manhunt, and to a situation without glory or honour.

  This is the last time I shall be writing to you, and the last that anyone will hear from me.

  I have now found a way to achieve the goal I set myself on leaving Groningen and breaking with everyday rules.

  By the time you receive this letter, I will no longer be called Kees Popinga, and I shall no longer be in the situation of a criminal fleeing the police.

  I shall have an honourable name, an unchallengeable identity, and I shall be in the category of men who can do what they please because they possess money and cynicism.

  You will forgive me for not vouchsafing whether it will be in London, America or even simply in Paris that my future activities will be carried on, but you must understand that discretion is absolutely essential.

  All you need to know is that I shall be in high finance, and instead of going to see the likes of Pamela or Jeanne Rozier, I shall choose my official mistresses from the stars of stage and screen.

  That, my dear sir, is what I wished to convey to you, and if I have given you this exclusive insight, it is because your collaborator Saladin, to whom for a while I took a dislike, was most helpful to me in yesterday’s article.

  Let me repeat – and I know what I am saying – that by the time you receive this letter, I shall be completely invulnerable, and Monsieur Lucas will have to close the investigation that he has been so brilliantly and elegantly conducting.

  I shall have proved that simply by using his native wits, a man who was a mere employee as long as he observed the rules of convention, may aspire to any position when he seizes his freedom.

  Please receive, my dear sir, the formal salutations of one who is signing for the last time

  Kees Popinga

  He almost added ironically ‘paranoiac’. Then, as the café owner was standing in the doorway watching the rain fall, and since Popinga could see the little green-painted boats outside, he felt the need to say:

  ‘You know, I’ve got a boat too.’

  ‘Ah!’ said the other man politely.

  ‘But it’s a very different model. I don’t think you have them in France.’

  He explained how his little craft was built, as the owner’s wife fetched the buckets ready to sluice down the café floor.

  The most extraordinary thing was that when he was talking about the Zeedeufel, he suddenly felt his eyes stinging and had to turn aside. He could see his boat, as spick and span as a toy, moored on the canal, and all at once . . .

  ‘How much do I owe you? By the way, what is the best way to get to Paris from here?’

  ‘There’s a tram stop five hundred metres away.’

  ‘And to get to Juvisy?’

  ‘You have to take a train from Alfortville. Or else go right into Paris and get the bus.’

  He found it hard to leave. He looked at the table he had been using to write on, the stove, the cat sleeping cosily on a straw-seated chair, the old woman getting down on her knees to wash the floor, and the man who was smoking a curved pipe and wearing a blue seaman’s jersey.

  The Laughing Carp, he muttered to himself.

  He would have liked to say something to them, letting them know that they had just witnessed, without realizing it, a very important event, and advising them to look carefully at the newspapers next day.

  He lingered in the café. He would also have liked a glass of something alcoholic, but he needed to keep careful track of his twenty francs.

  ‘I’ll be on my way, then,’ he sighed.

  And the people there were indeed waiting for him to leave, since they found his behaviour odd.

  His original idea had been rather different. He had planned to make his way to Juvisy on foot, along the Seine, in a leisurely way, since he had the whole day ahead of him. But what proves that he had kept a c
ool head was that he had just thought, as he wrote his letter, that if it bore a postmark from a place near Juvisy, they would make a connection, and then his epistle would not have served its purpose.

  It would be better to go back into Paris. He took the tram and its shuddering made him feel sick, as happens when you are very tired. Near the Louvre, he bought a postage stamp and put his letter into the post box, after holding it for a long moment over the slot.

  Now he had no need to think any more. It was enough to carry out what he had decided, point by point, without making any mistakes.

  It was still raining. Paris was grey, dirty, and as confusing as a nightmare, full of people who didn’t know where they were going, full of streets, around the central market, Les Halles, where your foot slipped on discarded vegetables, and where the shop windows were full of shoes. It was the first time that he had noticed the extraordinary number of shoe-shops with hundreds of pairs in the displays.

  He might perhaps have said in his letter that . . .

  But no! For them to believe him, it was important not to overdo it. In any case, it was too late. Too late for everything! He hadn’t even had the courage to take the man’s clothes.

  Because he needed clothes, whatever it cost. And during the night, near a Métro bridge, he had come across a drunk, fast asleep on a bench.

  All it would have taken was to knock him out with a blow to the head, and undress him. What harm could it do? The man had vomited and an empty litre bottle lay alongside him.

  Popinga was sure that it wasn’t because he had felt sorry for the man. No, it wasn’t that. He alone could understand: it was too late, and that was all.

  Even if he had done things differently from the start, he knew now that it would never have worked. One of the newspapers had provided him with the key to the drama, and on first reading, Kees had not noticed, but had put the article in his pocket with the others, considering it one of the less interesting ones.

  It is evident, the reporter had written, over the signature Charles Bélières, that we are dealing with an amateur.

  And now he had got the message. He had understood it the moment the barman had told him that he had been robbed of his wallet. He was an amateur! That was why Chief Inspector Lucas was treating him with disdain. That was why the journalists were not taking him seriously, and why Louis was alerting the ‘underworld’ against him.

  An amateur! To become something else would have been within his power, but only on condition of setting about it earlier and above all differently.

  Why was he bothering to think about this, since it was over? He shouldn’t do it. It disturbed his mind the same way his stomach was now feeling disturbed, and he mustn’t forget about the clothes. For this, he had to find a street he had discovered the week before, a narrow alleyway behind a local bank, where they sold second-hand clothes.

  He was trudging through a strange neighbourhood of Paris, crossing Rue des Rosiers, which reminded him of Jeanne – and what would she say? – when the idea briefly occurred to him of selling his watch. But what was the point? What would anyone give him for a watch that had only cost eighty francs?

  He should not be yearning for comforts, or rolling his eyes outside cafés like a child who is refused a sweet. Alcohol would change nothing! What mattered was his letter, and he repeated its sentences, deciding in the end that it wasn’t too bad an effort, although there were some details he had forgotten to add.

  What headline would they give it? And how would they comment on it?

  Above all, he must stop glancing at himself in the mirrors of the shopfronts. It was ridiculous. It could attract attention. And most of all, it made him feel sorry for himself.

  Keep on walking. Now at last, he had reached Rue des Blancs-Manteaux, and here was the little shop on the right he had noticed the other week. The main thing was to look natural, and manage to smile.

  ‘Excuse me, madame . . .’

  Since it was an old woman who appeared, among the shabby clothes deep inside the shop.

  ‘Can you help me? I thought it would be fun to dress up as a tramp for a fancy-dress ball. An amusing idea, don’t you think?’

  Yet he could see, in a bamboo-framed mirror, an image of a Popinga pale in the face, perhaps from weariness.

  ‘How much would it cost, an old suit like this one?’

  It was even more worn out than the ones Mama saved, back in Groningen, to give to a poor old man who came by every Easter.

  ‘For you, sir, just fifty francs! What do you say? Good condition, look. The lining has been replaced.’

  This was one of the great events of his life. He had never imagined that an old second-hand suit could cost so much, and he was being asked to pay another twenty francs for a pair of shapeless shoes.

  ‘Thank you, I’ll think about it. I’ll be back.’

  She caught up with him in the street to shout:

  ‘Come back! You can have the whole lot for sixty francs, special price for you, sir! And I’ll throw in a cap as well!’

  He fled, his shoulders hunched. He didn’t have sixty francs, not even fifty. Well, that was that. He’d do something else. He had another idea, one that brought a sarcastic smile to his lips, because this time, now that fate had taken a hand, events would go beyond what might be imagined.

  He would see it through to the end. The end of his idea and his logic.

  And too bad if . . .

  He stopped himself just in time. He should not talk to himself in the street. In his situation, it would be stupid to be arrested now.

  He walked further. He went into another church, but a wedding was taking place, so he preferred to go out again.

  ‘Can’t you look where you’re going, you fool!’

  The fool was himself, almost knocked down by a car. He didn’t even turn round.

  Would it really have been pointless to give himself up, to refuse the services of a lawyer, and to stand up calmly in front of the court, open a file and begin to speak in a smooth voice:

  ‘You all believed that . . .’

  Too late. He really should not keep going back over the past all the time. By this evening, the newspaper would have received his letter and the first thing they would do would be to show it to Chief Inspector Lucas.

  This weariness was strange, it felt like a hangover. At the same time, he was clear-headed – and yet not. He saw the passers-by as ghosts, and bumped into them, stammering apologies and moving off again quickly. But he forgot no detail of what he intended to do, and found his way without difficulty to Porte d’Italie, where he asked the times and prices of buses for Juvisy.

  After buying his ticket, he had eight francs fifty left and he wondered whether to eat or drink, ended up doing both, eating two croissants with a coffee, and drinking a glass of spirits, after which there was no question of going back, or eating or drinking anything else.

  Nobody suspected anything. The waiter served him as if he were a normal human being, and someone even asked him for a light.

  On the bus, at about five in the afternoon, he was seated alongside people who had no idea.

  And yet a few days earlier, when he still had some money, he could have got into a bus carrying a bomb, and blown the vehicle and everyone in it to smithereens! Or he could have derailed a train, which is not difficult.

  So if he was there now, it was because he wished to be there, because he had decided it was too late, and because he had found an even better solution.

  Everyone would be furious! As for Jeanne Rozier . . . Who knows? He had always thought she was in love with him without knowing it. From now on, she would be even more so, and her Louis would seem a very pathetic individual.

  He recognized the downhill slope and the first houses of Juvisy, got off the bus and found his legs trembled so much that he had to wait a moment before he dared to walk on.

  One detail gave him pause. He could see the Goin & Boret garage and a light in the bedrooms on the first floor. Had the police
let Goin go as well? It seemed unlikely. The papers would have mentioned it. Anyway, if Goin was around, there would have been a light in the garage.

  No, it must be Rose that they had released, perhaps on bail. This thought almost spoiled all his plans, since Popinga had to resist his desire to go in and frighten her, and perhaps . . .

  Only then, nothing would exist any more, not the letter or anything else. In the same way, he had no right to go into the café where he had played the fruit machine, and where he could see through the steamed-up windows several of the railwaymen.

  Perhaps it had been a mistake to eat. And yet it hadn’t been much. But it still lay heavy on his stomach. He walked through the deserted streets, went round the station by the level crossing and looked from a distance at the light in the window which had been his, and through which he had escaped from the garage.

  If he didn’t get a move on, his courage might fail him. The time didn’t matter, as long as it was dark. But he needed to find the Seine, and Popinga realized that he had been mistaken about the geography of this place, because he kept walking along the railway line but still without seeing any sign of the river.

  He pressed on through waste patches, allotments, disused sandpits, and once almost fell into a water-filled ditch. Perhaps it was because he was so tired that the journey seemed so long? No, that wasn’t it, because he could see clusters of lights which signified villages or housing estates, so he could guess the distance he had travelled.

  Trains went past. He would jump and look at the other side of the tracks and whisper:

  ‘It’s nothing really . . .’

  Then he wiped his face, pretending it was because of the rain, but he knew that the drops reaching the corner of his mouth were salty.

  A trap, pulled by a trotting horse, came towards him. From a distance, all you could see was its lantern; closer up, he could see a couple under a heavy rug, a man and woman huddled together, and imagined he could feel the warmth of the two bodies, hip to hip.

  ‘It’s nothing really . . .’

  All the same, if he had had sixty francs, he would have had a suit. At last, he found the Seine, not far from a railway bridge, and he had the feeling he must have walked several kilometres.