Pietr the Latvian

by Georges Simenon

  The wind blew his hat off his head. He chased after it but couldn’t stop it from falling into the sea. Sea-gulls screeched overhead, and every now and again he could make out a white wing flapping against the black sky.

  Maybe Madame Swaan had found nobody waiting for her at the appointed place. Maybe her assignation had had time to get away? Maybe he was dead.

  Maigret was hopping up and down, he was sure that every second counted.

  He reached the green light and went round the steel platform on which it stood.

  Nobody there! Waves raised their crests high, tottered, crashed down and retreated from the foamy hollow before renewing their attack on the breakwater. The sound of grinding shingle reached his ears in bursts. He could make out the vague outline of the deserted Casino.

  Maigret was looking for a man!

  He turned back and wandered along the shore among stones that in the dark all looked like huge potatoes. He was down at the waterline. Sea spray hit his face.

  That was when he realized it was low tide, and that the pier stood on black rocks with swirling seawater in the hollows between them.

  It was a complete miracle that he caught sight of the man. At first glance he looked like an inanimate object, just a blur among other blurry shapes in the dark.

  He strained his eyes to see. It was something on the outermost rock, where breakers rose to their proudest height before collapsing into thousands of droplets.

  But it was alive.

  To get there Maigret had to slither through the struts holding up the walkway he’d run along a few minutes previously.

  The rocks underfoot were covered in seaweed and Maigret’s soles kept slipping and sliding. Hissing sounds came from all around – crabs fleeing in their hundreds, or air bubbles bursting, algae popping, mussels quivering on the wooden beams they’d colonized halfway to the top.

  At one point Maigret lost his footing, plunging knee-deep into a rock pool.

  He’d lost sight of the man but he knew he was going in the right direction. Whoever it was must have got to his spot when the tide had been even lower, because Inspector Maigret found himself held back by a pool that was now over two metres wide. He tested the depth with his right foot and nearly tipped right over. In the end he got across by hanging on to the ironwork supporting the stilts.

  These are times when it’s better not to be watched. You try out movements you’ve not been trained to do. You get them wrong every time, like a clumsy acrobat. But even so you make headway, pushed forwards by your own mass, so to speak. You fall and you get up again. There’s no skill and no grace to it, but you splash on nonetheless.

  Maigret got a cut in his cheek but he could never work out whether it was from a fall on the rocks or a graze from a nail in one of the beams.

  He caught sight of the man again but wondered if he was seeing things: the man was so perfectly still that he could have been one of those rocks that from afar take on the shape of a human being.

  He got to the point where he had water slapping about between his legs. Maigret was not the sea-going type.

  He couldn’t help himself but hurry on forwards.

  At last he reached the outcrop where the man was sitting. He was one metre higher than his target, and three or four metres away.

  He didn’t think of getting his gun out, but insofar as the terrain allowed it he tiptoed forwards, knocking stones down into the water, whose roar covered the noise.

  Then, suddenly, without transition, he pounced on the stationary figure, put his neck in an arm-lock and pulled him down backwards.

  The pair of them almost slipped and disappeared into one of the big rollers that break over those rocks. They were spared by sheer chance.

  Any attempt to repeat the exploit would surely have ended in disaster.

  The man hadn’t seen who was attacking him, and he slithered like a snake. He could not free his head, but he wriggled with what must surely be counted in those circumstances as superhuman agility.

  Maigret didn’t want to strangle him. He was only trying to overpower him. He’d hooked one of his feet behind a stilt, and that foot was all that was keeping the pair of them from falling off.

  His opponent didn’t struggle for long. He’d only fought out of spontaneous reaction, like an animal.

  As soon as he’d had time to think, at any rate once he’d seen it was Maigret, whose face was right next to his, he stopped moving.

  He blinked his eyes to indicate surrender and when his neck was freed, he nodded towards the shifting and mountainous sea and blurted out in a still unsteady voice:

  ‘Watch out …’

  • • •

  ‘Would you like to talk, Hans Johannson?’

  Maigret was hanging on to a piece of slippery seaweed by his fingernails. When it was all over he confessed that at this precise moment his opponent could have easily kicked him into the water. It was only a second, but Johannson, squatting beside the last stilt of the pier, didn’t take advantage of it. Later still, Maigret confessed with great honesty that he had had to hang on to his prisoner’s foot to haul himself back up the slope.

  Then the two of them began the return journey, without a word between them. The tide had risen further. A few metres from shore they were cut off by the same rock pool that had blocked the inspector on his way out, but it was deeper now.

  Pietr went down first, stumbled when he was three metres in, slipped over, coughed up seawater, then stood up. It was only waist-deep. Maigret plunged in. At one point he closed his eyes as he felt he couldn’t keep the huge weight of his body above the surface any more. But the two of them eventually found themselves dripping on the pebbles of the shore.

  ‘Did she talk?’ Pietr asked in a voice so blank that it seemed to be devoid of anything that might still harbour a will to live.

  Maigret was entitled to lie but instead he declared:

  ‘She told me nothing … But I know …’

  They could not stay where they were. The wind was turning their wet clothes into an ice-jacket. Pietr’s teeth started chattering. Even in the faint moonlight Maigret could see that the man’s lips had turned blue.

  He’d lost his moustache. He had the worried face of Fyodor Yurevich, the look of the little boy in Pskov gazing at his brother. But though his eyes were the same cloudy grey as before, they now stared with a harsh and unyielding gaze.

  A three-quarters turn to the right would allow them to see the cliff and the two or three lights that twinkled on it. One of them came from Madame Swaan’s villa.

  Each time the beam of the harbour light went round, you caught a glimpse of the roof that shielded Madame Swaan, the two children and the frightened maid.

  ‘Come on …’ Maigret said.

  ‘To the police station?’

  Maigret sounded resigned, or rather, indifferent.

  ‘No …’

  • • •

  He was familiar with one of the harbour-side hotels, Chez Léon, where he’d noticed an entrance that was used only in the summer, for the handful of holidaymakers who spend the season by the sea at Fécamp. The entrance gave onto a room that was turned into a fairly grand dining room in high season. In winter, though, sailors were happy to drink and eat oysters and herring in the main bar.

  That was the door Maigret used. He crossed the unlit room with his prisoner and found himself in the kitchen. A maid screamed in stupefaction.

  ‘Call the patron …’

  She stood still and yelled:

  ‘Monsieur Léon! … Monsieur Léon! …’

  ‘Give me a room …’ the inspector said when Léon came in.

  ‘Monsieur Maigret! … But you’re soaking! … Did you? …’

  ‘A room, quickly! …’

  ‘There’s no fire made up in any of the rooms! … And a hot-water bottle will never …’

  ‘Don’t you have a pair of bathrobes?’

  ‘Of course … My own … but …’

  He was shorter than
the inspector by three heads!

  ‘Bring them down.’

  They climbed a steep staircase with quaint bends in it. The room was decent. Monsieur Léon closed the shutters himself before suggesting:

  ‘Hot toddy, right? … Full strength! …’

  ‘Good idea … But get those bathrobes first …’

  Maigret realized he was falling ill again, from the cold. The injured side of his chest felt like a block of ice.

  For a few minutes he and his prisoner got on like room-mates. They got undressed. Monsieur Léon handed them his two bathrobes by stretching his arm around the door when it was ajar.

  ‘I’ll have the larger one,’ the inspector said.

  Pietr compared them for size. As he handed over the larger one to Maigret he noticed the wet bandage, and a nervous twitch broke out on his face.

  ‘Is it serious?’

  ‘Two or three ribs that’ll have to be removed sooner or later …’

  A silence ensued. It was broken by Monsieur Léon, who shouted from the other side of the door:

  ‘Everything all right? …’

  ‘Come in!’

  Maigret’s bathrobe barely covered his knees, leaving his thick, hairy calves for all to see.

  Pietr, on the contrary, who was slim and pale with fair hair and feminine ankles, looked like a stylish clown.

  ‘The toddy’s on its way! I’ll get your clothes dried, yes?’

  Monsieur Léon gathered up the two soggy and dripping heaps on the floor and then shouted down from the top of the stairs:

  ‘Come on then, Henriette … Where’s that toddy?’

  Then he tracked back to the bedroom and gave this advice:

  ‘Don’t talk too loud in here … There’s a travelling salesman from Le Havre in the room next door … He’s catching the 5 a.m. train …’

  17. And a Bottle of Rum

  It would be an exaggeration to say that in most criminal inquiries cordial relations arise between the police and the person they are trying to corner into a confession. All the same, they almost always become close to some degree (unless the suspect is just a glowering brute). That must be because for weeks and sometimes months on end the police and the suspect do nothing but think about each other.

  The investigator strives to know all he can about the suspect’s past, seeks to reconstitute his thinking and to foresee his reactions.

  Both sides have high stakes in the game. When they sit down to a match, they do so in circumstances that are dramatic enough to strip away the veneer of polite indifference that passes for human relations in everyday life.

  There have been cases of detectives who’d taken a lot of trouble to put a criminal behind bars growing fond of the culprit, to the extent of visiting him in prison and offering emotional support up to the moment of execution.

  That partly explains the attitude that the two men adopted once they were alone in the hotel bedroom. The hotelier had brought up a portable charcoal stove, and a kettle was whistling on the hob. Beside it stood two glasses, a dish of sugar cubes and a tall bottle of rum.

  Both men were cold. They huddled in their borrowed dressing gowns and leaned as close as they could to the little stove, which wasn’t nearly strong enough to warm them up.

  They were as casual with each other as if they were stuck in a dorm-room or a barracks, with the informality that arises between men only when social proprieties have become temporarily irrelevant.

  In fact, it might have been simply because they were cold. Or more likely because of the weariness that overcame them at the same moment.

  It was over! No words were needed to say that.

  So each slumped into a chair and gazed at the blue enamel cooking stove that linked them together.

  The Latvian was the one who took the bottle of rum and expertly mixed the toddy.

  After taking a few sips, Maigret asked:

  ‘Did you mean to kill her?’

  The reply came straight away and it was just as straightforward:

  ‘I couldn’t do it.’

  His face was all screwed up with nervous tics that gave the man no rest. His eyelids would bat up and down, his lips would go into spasms, his nostrils would twitch. The determined and intelligent face of Pietr started to dissolve into the face of Fyodor, the intensely agitated Russian vagrant. Maigret didn’t bother to watch.

  • • •

  That’s why he didn’t realize that his opponent kept on taking the bottle of rum, filling his glass, and drinking it down. His eyes were beginning to shine.

  ‘Was she married to Pietr? … He was the same as Olaf Swaan, wasn’t he?’

  The man from Pskov couldn’t sit still, so he got up, looked for a packet of cigarettes but couldn’t find any and seemed put out by that. As he came back past the table with the stove he poured himself some more rum.

  ‘That’s not the right starting point!’ he said.

  Then he looked Maigret straight in the eye:

  ‘In a nutshell: you know the almost whole story already, don’t you?’

  ‘The two brothers of Pskov … Twins, I suppose? You’re Hans, the one who was looking lovingly and tamely at the other one …’

  ‘Even when we were kids he found it amusing to treat me as his servant … Not just between ourselves, but in front of classmates … He didn’t call me his servant – he said: slave … He’d noticed I liked that … Because I did like it, I still don’t know why … He was everything to me … I’d have got myself killed for his sake … When, later on …’

  ‘Later on, when?’

  He froze up. His eyelids flapped up and down. A swig of rum. Then he shrugged as if to say, what the hell. Then, controlling himself:

  ‘When later on I came to love a woman, I don’t think I was capable of any greater devotion … Probably less! I loved Pietr like … I can’t find the word! … I got into fights with classmates who wouldn’t grant that he was better than any of them, and as I was the least muscular boy in my class I got beaten up, and I got a kick out of it.’

  ‘That kind of domination isn’t uncommon between twins,’ Maigret commented as he made himself a second glass of toddy. ‘May I just take a moment?’ He went to the door and called down to Léon to bring up the pipe he’d left in his clothes, together with some tobacco. Hans added:

  ‘Can I have some cigarettes, do you mind?’

  ‘And some cigarettes, Léon … Gauloises!’

  He sat down again. They said nothing until the maid had brought up the supplies and withdrawn.

  ‘You were both students at the University of Tartu …’ Maigret resumed.

  The other man couldn’t sit still or stop moving around. He nibbled the end of his cigarette as he smoked and spat out scraps of tobacco, jiggled from side to side, picked up a vase from the mantelpiece and put it down somewhere else, and got more and more excited as he talked.

  ‘Yes, that’s where it all began! My brother was top of the class. All the professors paid attention to him. Students came under his spell. So although he was one of the youngest, he was made Captain of Ugala.

  ‘We drank lots of beer in the taverns. I did, especially! I don’t know why I started drinking so young. I had no special reason. In a word, I’ve been a drinker all my life.

  ‘I think it was mainly because after a few glasses I could imagine a world to my own liking in which I would play a splendid part …

  ‘Pietr was very hard on me. He called me a “dirty Russian”. You can’t know what that means. Our maternal grandmother was Russian. But in our part of the world, especially in the post-war years, Russians were treated as drunken dreamers and layabouts.

  ‘At that time the communists were stoking up riots. My brother led the Ugala Fraternity. They went to get weapons from a barracks and faced the communists head-on in the centre of town.

  ‘I was scared … It wasn’t my fault … I was frightened … I couldn’t use my legs … I stayed in the tavern with the shutters closed and drank my way th
rough the whole thing.

  ‘I thought I was destined to become a great playwright, like Chekhov. I knew all his plays by heart. Pietr just laughed at me.

  ‘“You … You’ll never make it!” he said.

  ‘The disturbances and riots lasted a whole year, turning life upside down. The army wasn’t up to maintaining order, so citizens got together in vigilante groups to defend the town.

  ‘My brother, Captain of the Ugala Fraternity, became an important person, and he was taken seriously by people of substance. He didn’t yet have any hair on his lip, but he was already being talked about as a potential leader of Free Estonia.

  ‘But calm returned, and then a scandal erupted that had to be hushed up. When the accounts of the Ugala Club were done, it turned out that Pietr had used the group mainly to enrich himself.

  ‘He was on several of the subcommittees and he’d fiddled all the books.

  ‘He had to leave the country. He went to Berlin and wrote to ask me to join him there.

  ‘That’s where the two of us began.’

  • • •

  Maigret watched the man’s face. It was too agitated by half.

  ‘Which of you was the forger?’

  ‘Pietr taught me how to mimic anybody’s handwriting, and made me take a course in chemistry … I lived in a little room, and he gave me 200 marks a week to live on … But he soon bought himself a car, to take girls out for rides …

  ‘Mainly, we doctored cheques … I could turn a cheque for ten marks into a cheque for ten thousand, and Pietr would cash it in Switzerland or Holland or even, one time, in Spain …

  ‘I was drinking heavily. He despised me and treated me spitefully. One day I nearly got him caught accidentally, because one of my forgeries wasn’t quite up to the mark.

  ‘He beat me with his walking stick …

  ‘And I said nothing! I still looked up to him … I don’t know why … He impressed everyone, actually … At one point, if he’d wanted to, he could have married the daughter of a Reichsminister …

  ‘Because of the dud forgery we had to get to France. To begin with I lived in Rue de l’École-de-Médecine …