Pietr the Latvian

by Georges Simenon

  Torrence then extracted from his wallet a folded piece of transparent paper inside which you could see a strand of brown hair.

  ‘Hand it over …’

  Maigret hadn’t stopped eating and drinking all the while.

  ‘A woman’s hair? Or a child’s?’

  ‘Forensics says it’s a woman’s hair. I left him a few strands that he’s promised to examine closely.’

  ‘And the autopsy?’

  ‘All done by 10 a.m. Probable age: thirty-two. Height 1 m 68 cm. No hereditary abnormalities. One of his kidneys was in poor shape, which could mean he was a boozer. Stomach contained tea and other digested matter that couldn’t be identified straight away. They’ll work on the analysis tomorrow. Now the examination is over the body is being kept on ice at the morgue.’

  Maigret wiped his mouth, stationed himself in his favourite position in front of the stove and held out his hand, which Torrence mechanically supplied with a packet of tobacco.

  ‘For my part,’ Maigret said eventually, ‘I saw Pietr, or whoever has taken over his role, check in at Hôtel Majestic and have dinner with the Mortimer-Levingstons, which seems to have been arranged in advance.’

  ‘The millionaires?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right. After the meal, Pietr went back to his suite. I warned the American. Mortimer then went to his room. They were obviously planning to go out as a threesome, since Mrs Mortimer came down straight after, in full evening gear. Ten minutes later, both men had vanished. Our Latvian had switched his evening wear for less swanky clothes. He’d put on a cap, and the guard just assumed he was a kitchen worker. But Levingston left as he was, in formal attire.’

  Torrence said nothing. In the long pause that ensued, you could hear the fire roaring in the stove and the window panes rattling in the storm.

  Torrence finally broke the silence.

  ‘Luggage?’ he asked.

  ‘Done. Nothing there! Just clothes and underwear … The usual accoutrements of a first-class traveller. Not a scrap of paper. The Mortimer woman is certain that her husband has been murdered.’

  • • •

  Somewhere a bell rang. Maigret opened the drawer in his desk where that afternoon he’d put all the telegrams about Pietr the Latvian.

  Then he looked at the map. He drew a line with his finger from Krakow to Bremen, then to Amsterdam, Brussels and Paris.

  Somewhere near Saint-Quentin, a brief halt: a man died.

  In Paris, the line came to a full stop. Two men vanish from the middle of the Champs-Élysées.

  All that’s left are suitcases in a suite and Mrs Mortimer-Levingston, whose mind is as empty as Pietr’s travelling chest.

  The gurgle from Maigret’s pipe was getting so annoying that the inspector took a swatch of chicken feathers from another drawer, cleaned the shaft, then opened the stove door and flung the soiled feathers in the fire.

  Four of the beer glasses were empty but for sticky froth marks on the rim. Somebody came out of one of the offices on the corridor, locked his door and went away.

  ‘Who’s a lucky man!’ Torrence observed. ‘That’s Lucas. Tonight he got a tip-off from some moneyed brat and arrested a pair of drug dealers.’

  Maigret was poking the fire, and when he stood up his face was crimson. In routine fashion he picked up the translucent paper, extracted the strand of hair and turned it over in the light. Then he went back to the map and studied the invisible track of Pietr’s journey. It made a sweeping arc of almost 180 degrees.

  If he had started out from Krakow, then why had he gone all the way north to Bremen before swerving back down to Paris?

  He was still holding the slip of paper. He muttered:

  ‘There must have been a picture inside this once.’

  In fact, the tissue was a glassine envelope, a slipcover of the kind photographers use to protect customers’ orders. But it was an obsolete size known as ‘album format’ that could only now be found in provincial backwaters. The photo that this cover must have protected would have been about half the size of a standard postcard, printed on off-white glacé paper on cardboard backing.

  ‘Is anyone still there at the lab?’ Maigret suddenly asked.

  ‘I guess so. They must still be processing the photos of the Étoile du Nord affair.’

  There was only one full glass left on the table. Maigret gulped it down and put on his jacket.

  ‘You’ll come along? … Those kinds of portrait photos usually have the name and address of the photographer printed or embossed on them …’

  Torrence got the point. They set off through a labyrinth of passageways and stairs up into the attic floors of the Law Courts and finally found the forensics lab.

  An expert took the slipcover, ran it through his fingers, almost sniffed at it. Then he sat at an arc lamp and wheeled over a carriage-mounted multiplying glass.

  The principle is straightforward: blank paper that has been in protracted contact with another sheet that has been printed or written on eventually acquires an imprint of the letters on that other sheet. The imprint cannot be seen by the naked eye, but photography can reveal it.

  The fact that there was a stove in the lab meant that Maigret was destined to end up there. He stood watch for the best part of an hour, smoking pipe after pipe, while Torrence trailed the photographer as he came and went.

  At long last the darkroom door opened. A voice cried out:

  ‘We’ve got it!’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘The photo credit is: Léon Moutet, Art Photography, Quai des Belges, Fécamp.’

  Only a real expert could decipher the plate. Torrence, for instance, could only see a blur.

  ‘Do you want to see the post-mortem photos?’ the expert asked cheerfully. ‘They’re first-rate! But it was a tight fit inside that railway toilet! Would you believe it, we had to hang the camera from the ceiling …’

  ‘Have you got an outside line?’ Maigret asked, gesturing towards the phone.

  ‘Yes … the switchboard shuts down at nine, so before she goes off the operator connects me to the outside.’

  Maigret called the Majestic and spoke to one of the desk interpreters.

  ‘Has Mr Mortimer-Levingston come back in?’

  ‘I’ll find out for you, sir. To whom do I have the honour of …’

  ‘Police!’

  ‘No, sir, he’s not back.’

  ‘What about Mr Oswald Oppenheim?’

  ‘Not back either, sir.’

  ‘What is Mrs Mortimer up to?’

  A pause.

  ‘I asked you what Mrs Mortimer is doing.’

  ‘She is … I think she is in the bar …’

  ‘Do you mean she’s drunk?’

  ‘She has had a few cocktails, sir. She said she would not go up to her suite until her husband comes back … Do you …?’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Hello? … This is the manager speaking,’ another voice broke in. ‘Any progress? Do you think this will get into the papers? …’

  Cruelly, Maigret hung up. To please the photographer he took a look at the first proof photos laid out in the drying trays, still gleaming wet. While doing that he was talking to Torrence.

  ‘You’re going to settle in at the Majestic, old pal. The main thing is to take no notice whatsoever of the manager.’

  ‘What about you, patron?’

  ‘I’m going back to the office. There’s a train to Fécamp at 5.30, It’s not worth going home and waking up Mme Maigret. Hang on … The Dauphine should still be open. On your way, order me up a beer …’

  ‘Just one …?’ Torrence inquired, with a deadpan expression on his face.

  ‘As you like, old pal! The waiter’s smart enough to know it means three or four. Have him throw in a few sandwiches as well.’

  They traipsed down an unending spiral staircase in single file.

  The black-gowned photographer was left on his own to admire the prints he’d just made. He still had to number them. />
  The two detectives parted company in the freezing courtyard.

  ‘If you leave the Majestic for any reason, make sure one of our men holds the fort,’ Maigret instructed. ‘I’ll telephone the front desk if I need to get in touch …’

  He went back to his office and stoked the fire so vigorously he could have snapped the grate.

  4. The Seeteufel’s First Mate

  The station at La Bréauté, on the main line to Le Havre, where Maigret had to change trains at 7.30 a.m., gave him a foretaste of Fécamp.

  The ill-lit station buffet had grimy walls and a counter offering only a few mouldy pieces of cake alongside a miserable fruit stack made of three bananas and five oranges.

  The foul weather had even more impact here than in Paris. Rain was coming down in buckets. Crossing from one track to the other meant wading through knee-deep mud.

  The branch-line train was a rickety affair made up of carriages on their way to scrap. In the pale half-light of dawn you could hardly make out the fuzzy shapes of farmhouses through the pelting rain.

  Fécamp! The air was laden with the smell of herring and cod. Mountains of casks. Ships’ masts peering over the locomotive. Somewhere a siren blared.

  ‘Quai des Belges?’

  Straight ahead. All he had to do was walk through slimy puddles gleaming with fish scales and rotting innards.

  The photographer was also a shopkeeper and a newspaper vendor. He stocked oilskins, sailcloth pea-jackets and hempen rope alongside New Year’s greeting cards.

  A weakling with very pale skin: as soon as he heard the word ‘police’ he called his wife to the rescue.

  ‘Can you tell me what photo was in this slipcover?’

  It dragged on. Maigret had to squeeze words out of him one by one and do his thinking for him.

  In the first place, the technician hadn’t used that format for eight years, ever since he’d acquired new equipment to do postcard-sized portraits.

  Who might have had his or her photograph taken eight or more years ago? Monsieur Moutet took a whole fifteen minutes to remember that he’d got an album with archive copies of all the portraits done in his establishment.

  His wife went to get it. Sailors came and went. Kids came in to buy a penny’s worth of sweets. Outside, ships’ tackle scraped on the dock. You could hear the waves shifting shingle along the breakwater.

  Maigret thumbed through the archive album, then specified what he was looking for:

  ‘A young woman with extremely fine brown hair …’

  That did it.

  ‘Mademoiselle Swaan!’ the photographer exclaimed. He turned up the snapshot straight away. It was the only time he’d had a decent subject to photograph.

  She was a pretty woman. She looked twenty. The photo fitted the slipcover exactly.

  ‘Who is she?’

  ‘She’s still living in Fécamp. But now she’s got a clifftop villa five minutes from the Casino …’

  ‘Is she married?’

  ‘She wasn’t then. She was the cashier at the Railway Hotel.’

  ‘Opposite the station, I suppose?’

  ‘Yes, you must have seen it on your way here. She was an orphan from some small place around here … Les Loges … Do you know where I mean? … Anyway, that’s how she got to meet a traveller staying at the hotel … They got married … At the moment she’s living in the villa with her two children and a maid …’

  ‘Mr Swaan doesn’t live in Fécamp?’

  There was a pause. The photographer and his wife exchanged glances. The woman answered:

  ‘Since you’re from the police, I suppose we’d better tell you everything. Anyway you’d find it all out in the end, but … They’re only rumours, but … Mr Swaan almost never stays in Fécamp. When he does come he stops for a few days at the most … Sometimes it’s just a flying visit … He first came not long after the war … The Grand Banks were being reorganized, after five years’ interruption. He wanted to look into it properly, so he said, and to make investments in businesses that were being started up again. He claimed to be Norwegian … His first name is Olaf … The herring fishermen who sometimes go as far as Norway say there are plenty of people over there who have that name … Nonetheless, people said he was really a German spy. That’s why, when he got married, his wife was kept at arm’s length. Then we discovered he really was a sailor and was first mate on a German merchantman, and that was why he didn’t show up very often … Eventually people stopped bothering about him, but we’re still wary …’

  ‘You said they had children?’

  ‘Two … A little girl of three and a baby a few months old …’

  Maigret took the photograph out of the album and got directions to the villa. It was a bit too early to turn up. He waited in a harbour café for two hours, listening to fishermen talking about the herring catch, which was at its height. Five trawlers were tied up at the quay. Fish was being unloaded by the barrelful. Despite the wind and rain, the air stank.

  To get to the villa he walked along the deserted breakwater and around the shuttered Casino still plastered with last summer’s posters. At last he got to a steep climb that began at the foot of the cliff. As he plodded up he got occasional glimpses of iron railings in front of villas. The one he was looking for turned out to be a comfortable-looking red-brick structure, neither large nor small. He guessed that the garden with its white-gravel paths was well tended in season. The windows must have had a good view into the far distance.

  • • •

  Maigret rang the bell. A great Dane came to sniff at him through the railings, and its lack of bark made it seem all the more ferocious. At the second ring, a maid appeared. First she took the dog back to his kennel, and then asked:

  ‘What is it about?’

  She spoke with the local accent.

  ‘I would like to see Mr Swaan, please.’

  She seemed hesitant.

  ‘I don’t know if sir is in … I’ll go and ask.’

  She hadn’t opened the gate. Rain was still pouring down, and Maigret was soaked through. He watched the maid go up the steps and vanish inside the house. Then a curtain shifted at a window. A few moments later the maid reappeared.

  ‘Sir will not be back for several weeks. He is in Bremen …’

  ‘In that case I would like to have a word with Madame Swaan …’

  The maid hesitated again, but ended up opening the gate.

  ‘Madame isn’t dressed. You will have to wait …’

  The dripping detective was shown into a neat lounge with white curtains and a waxed floor. The furniture was brand new, but just the same as you would find in any lower-middle-class home. They were good-quality pieces, in a style that would have been called modern around 1900.

  Light oak. Flowers in an ‘artistic’ stone vase in the middle of the table. Crochet-work place-mats. On the other hand, there was a magnificent sculpted silver samovar on a side-table. It must have been worth more than the rest of the room’s contents put together.

  Maigret heard noises coming from the first floor. A baby could be heard crying through one of the ground-floor walls; someone else was mumbling something in a soft and even voice, as if to comfort it. At last, the sound of slippered feet gliding along the corridor. The door opened. Maigret found himself facing a young woman who had dressed in a hurry so as to meet him.

  She was of medium height, more plump than slim, with a pretty and serious face that betrayed a pang of anxiety. She smiled nonetheless and said:

  ‘Why didn’t you take a seat?’

  Rivulets of rainwater flowed from Maigret’s overcoat, trousers and shoes into little puddles on the polished floor. In that state he could not have sat down on the light-green velvet of the armchairs in the lounge.

  ‘Madame Swaan, I presume? …’

  ‘Yes, monsieur …’

  She looked at him quizzically.

  ‘I’m sorry to disturb you like this … It’s just a formality … I’m with the Immi
gration Service … We’re conducting a survey …’

  She said nothing. She didn’t seem any more or less anxious than before.

  ‘I understand Mr Swaan is a Swede. Is that correct?’

  ‘Oh no, he’s Norwegian … But for the French I guess it’s the same thing … To begin with, I myself …’

  ‘He is a ship’s officer?’

  ‘He’s first mate on the Seeteufel, out of Bremen …’

  ‘As I thought … So he is in the employ of a German company?’

  She blushed.

  ‘The ship-owner is German, yes … At least, on paper …’

  ‘Meaning? …’

  ‘I don’t think I need to keep it from you … You must be aware that the merchant fleet has been in crisis since the war … Even here you can find ocean-going captains who’ve been unable to find commissions and who have to take positions as first or even second mates … Others have joined the Newfoundland or the North Sea fishing fleets.’

  She spoke quite fast, but in a gentle and even tone.

  ‘My husband didn’t want to take on a commission in the Pacific, where there’s more work, because he wouldn’t have been able to come back to Europe more than once every two years … Shortly after we got married, some Americans bought the Seeteufel in the name of a German shipping firm … Olaf first came to Fécamp looking specifically for more schooners to buy … Now you must see … The aim was to run booze to the USA … Substantial firms were set up with American money … They have offices in France, Holland, or Germany … The truth is that my husband works for one of these companies. The Seeteufel sails what’s called Rum Alley. It doesn’t really have anything to do with Germany.’

  ‘Is he at sea at the moment?’ Maigret asked, keeping his eyes on that pretty face, which struck him as an honest and even at times a touching one.

  ‘I don’t think so. You must realize that the sailings aren’t as regular as those of a liner. But I always try to keep abreast of the Seeteufel’s position. At the moment he ought to be in Bremen, or very nearly there.’

  ‘Have you ever been to Norway?’

  ‘Never! I’ve actually never left Normandy, so to speak. Just a couple of times, for short stays in Paris.’