‘Janvier is at home. It would take too long to go and fetch him.’
He lived in the suburbs, in the opposite direction to where they were going.
‘Can’t I come along?’ Vacher asked shyly.
‘Who’d stay on duty?’
‘Buchet’s in his office.’
‘We can’t leave him in charge of everything. Do you know Maisons-Laffitte?’
‘I’ve often driven through it. I’ve been to the races there a couple of times.’
‘Do you know the country around there, by the forest?’
‘I used to go there too in the old days, with the kids.’
‘Have you heard of a place called Au Bon Vivant?’
‘There are bistros called that all over the place. The easiest thing would be to ring the gendarmerie. Shall I call them?’
‘That’s the last thing you should do! Don’t call the local police either. Or anyone at all. Don’t even mention Maisons-Laffitte. Do you understand?’
‘Yes, chief.’
‘Goodnight, then, Vacher.’
‘Goodnight, chief.’
Maigret had hesitated, glancing at the cupboard where the bottle of brandy was kept, but his pockets were weighed down with the two revolvers as it was. Downstairs, he asked the officer driving the car:
‘Are you armed?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Do you have children?’
‘I’m only twenty-three.’
‘That shouldn’t stop you.’
‘I’m not married.’
He was one of the new breed of policeman, more like an Olympic champion than one of the paunchy, mustachioed officers you used to see on street corners.
A fairly strong, very cold wind had got up, giving the night an odd character. Two distinct layers of cloud were visible in the sky. The lower one, a mass of thick, dark clouds moving very fast before the wind, ensured it was pitch black for most of the time. But occasionally it would split open, and they could see, as though through a cleft between rocks, a lunar landscape where very high, fleecy, glittering clouds stood motionless.
‘Don’t drive too fast.’
They had to allow Lucas, who lived on the Left Bank, time to get to Avenue de la Grande-Armée. Maigret had debated whether to accept Vacher’s offer. For a moment he had even thought of taking Bonfils, who would have been delighted.
He was aware of the responsibility he was assuming, and of just how much trouble he could be getting into. For a start he had no authority to operate in Maisons-Laffitte, which was outside his jurisdiction. By rights he should have referred the matter to Rue des Saussaies, which would have sent men from the Sûreté Nationale, or got a rogatory commission for the Seine-et-Oise gendarmerie, which would have taken hours.
Prudence alone seemed to dictate a heavy police presence, given what he knew of his adversary and what had just happened on Rue Richer. But Maigret was convinced that would be asking for a fight.
That was why he had chosen Torrence and Lucas. He would have brought along Janvier too if he could, and maybe, to give him an opportunity, young Lapointe.
‘Turn into Rue Brunel. Stop when you see Torrence.’
There he was, stamping his feet.
‘Get in. Are you armed?’
‘No, chief. You know, the girl’s not dangerous.’
Maigret gave him one of the two revolvers as the car drew up at the corner of the avenue.
‘Have you had a tip-off? Are we going to arrest them?’
‘Probably.’
‘If I’d been a soft touch back there, you wouldn’t have found me.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘Because I would have been in the young lady’s bed. She was already at it when she left for the theatre, coming up to me and saying, “Why don’t you come in my taxi?” I didn’t see any reason why not, and she rubbed her thigh against mine. “Aren’t you coming to see the show?” I chose to stand guard outside her dressing room. We came back together.’
‘Did she talk at all?’
‘Only about Bill Larner. She really doesn’t seem to know the other two and she swore to me that she was afraid of them. She took a girlfriend to Rue Royale to have something to eat. She invited me as well, but I refused. Then we came back here on our own and stayed out on the doorstep for ages like lovers.
‘“You don’t think you’d keep a closer eye on me if you came upstairs?” she asked.
‘I knew what she was saying. What would you have done in my place? Mind you, I wouldn’t have objected . . .’
Maigret suspected Torrence was chattering away on purpose to release some of his tension. A taxi stopped just behind the police car, a door slammed, then Lucas came towards them with a jaunty spring in his step.
‘Shall we be off?’ he asked.
‘You didn’t forget your gun, did you?’ Maigret asked, then said to the driver:
‘Maisons-Laffitte.’
They drove through Neuilly and Courbevoie. It was three thirty in the morning, and there were still lorries heading towards Les Halles – heavy goods vehicles, overnight deliveries – but hardly any cars.
‘Do you know where they’re hiding out, chief?’
‘Maybe. It’s not definite. The Baron hasn’t called me back as he promised to. I’m afraid he might have had the same bright idea as Lognon and decided to work alone.’
‘Has he been drinking?’
‘Apparently.’
‘Did he have his car?’
Maigret frowned.
‘Has he got a car?’
‘He’s had one for about a fortnight, a convertible he bought second-hand. He drives around everywhere.’
Didn’t that explain the inspector’s silence? When he left Luigi’s bar, after a few too many drinks, and found his car at the door, wouldn’t he have wanted to take a spin out to Maisons-Laffitte to check his lead?
It was Lucas who asked:
‘Have you called the gendarmerie?’
Maigret shook his head.
‘Does Rue des Saussaies know?’
‘I didn’t do that either.’
They understood one another. For a while, there was a weighty silence.
‘Are there still three of them?’
‘Unless they’ve split up, which I don’t think they have. Charlie’s wounded. As far as we can tell, he’s been hit in the shoulder.’
Maigret gave a brief summary of the Rue Richer affair, to which they listened in knowledgeable silence.
‘He seems to have come to Paris on his own. Do you think he went to get the woman?’
‘It looks that way. Apparently he was too late.’
‘If he planned to do the job without his pals, he can’t have thought it would be that difficult.’
They were each as uneasy as the other, because they didn’t feel on familiar ground. Usually, on a case, they could accurately predict how their adversary would react. They knew virtually the full range of criminals.
But these ones’ methods threw them. They acted faster. In fact the speed with which they made decisions seemed their main characteristic. At the same time, they didn’t think twice about showing themselves, as if the fact the police knew their identities and their every move struck them as irrelevant.
‘Do we shoot?’ asked Torrence.
‘If there’s no alternative. I wouldn’t want someone to die on me.’
‘Do you have an idea how we’re going to play it?’
‘No.’
All he knew was that he’d had enough of it all and he wanted to put a stop to it one way or another. These people had crossed the Atlantic and killed a man in the centre of Paris, then given Lognon a beating and fired point-blank at a police officer, not to mention abducted a woman opposite the Folies-Bergère.
Despite their photographs being in all the newspapers, despite every police force having their descriptions, they were moving around a city they barely knew as if they were at home, stealing random cars whenever they needed them as easily
as hailing a taxi.
‘What shall I do?’ asked the driver, as they crossed the bridge and saw the lights of Maisons-Laffitte.
They made out the chateau, the pale splash of the racetrack in the moonlight. The streets were deserted, with only the odd light in a window now and then. They needed to find the Bon Vivant and, as they were driving past the blue light of the police station, the easiest way obviously would be to ask in there.
‘Keep going. There’s a level crossing a little further on.’
Luckily there was a light on in the level-crossing keeper’s hut. A train must have been due any moment. Maigret got out of the car, went into the hut and found a man with a bushy moustache alone with a bottle of wine.
‘Do you know a guesthouse called the Bon Vivant?’
Endless explanations followed. Unable to make head or tail of the crossroads and left and right turns the man was listing, Maigret had to call the driver.
‘You take the second level crossing and head towards l’Étoile-des-Tetrons. You know the one I mean? Whatever you do, don’t take the road to Château de la Muette, but the one just before it . . .’
The driver seemed to understand. Nevertheless, ten minutes later they were lost in the forest and had to get out at each crossroads to decipher the names on the signposts. The clouds had closed over again, and they had to use a flashlight.
‘There’s a car parked in front of us with all its lights off.’
‘We’d better go and have a look.’
It was parked in the middle of the road in the heart of the forest. The four of them started walking, as Maigret told them to draw their guns. It was a side road, and dead leaves rustled at their every step.
Such precautions may have been absurd, but Maigret didn’t want to put his men’s lives in danger, and it took them almost ten minutes to close in on the abandoned car.
It was empty. The nameplate inside bore the name of a manufacturer and an address on Rue de Rivoli. The flashlight, pointed at the driver’s seat, showed bloodstains, still wet. Another stolen car!
‘Can you understand why he left it here? There isn’t a house in sight. If we are where I think we are and the level-crossing keeper wasn’t mistaken, the Bon Vivant is at least half a kilometre away.’
‘Do you want to check the petrol, Lucas?’
That was it, the most simple, banal explanation imaginable. Charlie had grabbed the first car he had come across and suddenly run out of petrol. The car interior still smelled of cigarettes.
‘Let’s go! They mustn’t hear us.’
‘Do you think the Baron came this way?’
The road was muddy in places, but the dead leaves were too thick to make out footprints or tyre tracks. Besides, they had to be careful not to use their flashlights now.
They finally reached a bend, beyond which stretched a clearing to the left. In the clearing they saw lights feebly gleaming from behind two curtained windows. Maigret whispered his instructions:
‘You,’ he said to the driver, ‘stay here and only go closer if there’s fighting. Torrence, you go round to the back of the house in case they try to get out that way.’
‘Shall I aim at their legs?’
‘Ideally. Lucas will come with me near the shack, but will hang back a little to watch the windows.’
They were all intimidated, even though every one of them had carried out harder arrests. Maigret thought in particular of a Pole who had terrorized a series of farms in the north for months and ended up hiding out in a little hotel in Paris, armed to the teeth. He was another killer, someone who, if he felt you were on to him, could shoot into a crowd of people and wreak absolute carnage just so he could go out with a bang.
What was so exceptional about these men? It was as though Pozzo and Luigi had given Maigret some sort of complex.
‘Good luck, boys!’
‘Break a leg,’ grunted Torrence, touching wood.
Lucas, who claimed not to be superstitious, repeated in an almost reluctant whisper, ‘Break a leg!’
As far as they could judge, the Bon Vivant was a former gamekeeper’s house with at most three rooms on the ground floor and the same number on the first. It had a pointed, slate-covered roof, which they could make out thanks to a shaft of moonlight.
Maigret and Lucas silently approached the lights on the ground floor. When they were only about twenty metres away, Maigret touched his inspector on the arm, indicating he should turn left.
Maigret himself waited a few minutes without moving, so as to be sure that everyone was in position. Luckily the wind, which was stronger here than in Paris, was shaking the tree branches and rustling the leaves on the ground. For about two minutes they were all at risk because a break in the clouds meant the moon was so bright that Maigret could see the buttons on Torrence’s overcoat and Lucas’ gun, even though he was further away from him than the house was. The minute the clouds closed over again he took his chance and crossed the space between him and one of the lit-up windows. It had red-checked curtains, like at Pozzo’s, but they were clumsily drawn, and he could see inside through the gap between them.
He found himself looking at the main room, which had a zinc bar and half a dozen polished wooden tables. The whitewashed walls were covered with bad colour prints. There were no chairs in the room, just rustic benches, and on one of them Charlie Cinaglia was sitting with his profile to Maigret.
His chest was bare and flabby, and tufts of very dark hair stood out against his white skin. A large woman with bleached-blonde hair came out of the kitchen with a steaming saucepan. Her lips were moving. She was saying something, but her voice didn’t carry outside.
Tony Cicero was there too, without a jacket. On the table, next to a bottle of what must have been pure alcohol or some sort of disinfectant, were two automatic pistols.
Looking at the floor, Maigret saw a basin of pinkish water with pieces of cotton wool floating in it.
Charlie was still bleeding, which seemed to worry him. The bullet had hit the tip of his left shoulder and without going in, as far as Maigret could tell, had torn off a piece of flesh.
None of the three individuals seemed to be on their guard. The woman poured some hot water into a saucer and added a little of the contents of the bottle. She dipped in a piece of cotton wool, then swabbed the wound as Charlie gritted his teeth.
Tony Cicero, cigar in mouth, grabbed a bottle of whiskey from one of the tables and handed it to his friend, who took a swig from the bottle. Bill Larner was nowhere in sight. Maigret wasn’t able to see Cicero from the front at first, but when he did, he was surprised to see he had a black eye.
What followed was such a blur that no one knew exactly what was happening.
As he handed the bottle back to Cicero, Charlie looked over at the window. Maigret was presumably not as invisible from inside as he had thought because, without a feature of Charlie’s face betraying that he was on the alert, he reached out with his good arm, and his hand closed on one of the two pistols.
At the same instant Maigret pulled the trigger of his pistol, and, just like in a Hollywood film, Charlie’s gun tumbled to the ground as his hand dangled uselessly from his wrist.
Moving with equal speed, without turning round, Cicero had tipped over the table, which now shielded him. Taking a couple of steps, the woman pressed herself against the wall by the window, where she couldn’t be hit.
Maigret ducked just in time as a bullet shattered one of the windowpanes, then another blew off part of the frame.
He heard footsteps to his left, Lucas’, who came running.
‘Did you get him?’
‘I got one of them. Watch out!’
Cicero was still firing. Lucas got down on all fours and crawled to the door.
‘What shall I do?’ yelled the driver, whom they had left behind.
‘Stay where you are.’
Maigret raised his head to try to see inside, and a bullet went through his hat.
He was wondering where B
ill Larner was and whether he would join in. They had no idea where he might be, which made it even more dangerous. He could attack them on the flank, firing from one of the first-floor windows, say, or surprise them from behind.
Lucas kicked open the door.
As he did so, a voice inside let out a sort of war cry. It was Torrence, screaming:
‘Go to it, chief!’
The woman was screaming too. Lucas ran in. Maigret straightened and saw two men fighting on the floor, on the other side of the overturned table, and the landlady grabbing an andiron in the fireplace.
Lucas got to her in time to stop her hitting Torrence, and it was funny seeing him, so tiny, pinioning the American woman, who was a head taller than him, by the wrists.
The next moment Maigret was in the room as well. On the floor, Charlie was trying to reach one of the revolvers which was only about twenty centimetres from his hand. Maigret did something he had never done in his entire career. For once, he furiously gave vent to his rage, crushing the hand of the killer under his heel.
‘Dirty brute!’ spat the woman, whom Lucas was still restraining. Torrence was pinning Cicero to the ground with his full weight, as the American tried to dig his fingers into his eyes, and Maigret had to make several attempts before he fitted handcuffs on him.
When Torrence got back to his feet, he was beaming. Dust from the floor had stuck to his sweaty face, and Cicero had torn the collar of his shirt and given him a nasty scratch on the cheek.
‘Don’t you want to put her in handcuffs too, chief?’
Lucas, completely worn out, asked for help, and Maigret ended up putting Torrence’s handcuffs on the landlady of the Bon Vivant.
‘Aren’t you ashamed, manhandling a woman?’
The driver stood framed in the door.
‘Do you need me?’
Lifting up Charlie, who was grimacing with pain, by the shoulders, Torrence asked:
‘What shall I do with him, chief?’
‘Sit him in a corner.’
‘When I heard the shots, I decided to go in by the back. The door was closed. I broke a window and found myself in the kitchen.’
Maigret filled his pipe slowly, meticulously, as he caught his breath. Then he went over to a glass cabinet containing glasses.
‘Who wants a whiskey?’
Maigret, Lognon and the Gangsters Page 11