Maigret at Picratt's

by Georges Simenon

  ‘Did you ever see her outside the club?’

  ‘In the street?’

  ‘No, I’m asking you if you ever met up with her.’

  Maigret had a feeling he hesitated, glancing towards the back of the room, where his wife was sitting.

  ‘No,’ he said finally.

  He was lying. That was the first thing Maigret discovered when he got to Quai des Orfèvres, where he was late and had missed the briefing. The inspectors’ office was bustling. He telephoned the chief first to apologize and tell him he would see him as soon as he had questioned his men.

  When he rang the bell, Janvier and Lapointe both appeared at his door.

  ‘Janvier first,’ he said. ‘I’ll call you in a minute, Lapointe.’

  Janvier looked as dazed as he did and had clearly been trailing around the streets for most of the night.

  ‘I thought you might come and see me at Picratt’s.’

  ‘I meant to. But the further I went, the more work I had. In the end I never got to bed.’

  ‘Found Oscar?’

  Janvier took a piece of paper covered with notes out of his pocket.

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t think so. I covered pretty much all the rooms to rent between Rue Châteaudun and the Montmartre boulevards. I showed the photo of the girl in every hotel. Some of the managers pretended not to recognize her or gave evasive answers.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘In ten of those hotels, at least, they knew her.’

  ‘Did you try to find out if she was ever with the same man?’

  ‘I made a point of asking that. Apparently she wasn’t. Most of the time, she went around four or five in the morning, with people pretty far gone on drink, probably customers from Picratt’s.’

  ‘Did she stay long?’

  ‘Never more than an hour or two.’

  ‘Did you find out if she got paid?’

  ‘When I asked, the hoteliers looked at me as if I was from another planet. Twice, at the Moderne, she went up with a young man with slicked-back hair carrying a saxophone case under his arm.’

  ‘Jean-Jean, the musician from the club.’

  ‘Possibly. The last time was about a fortnight ago. You know the Hôtel du Berry on Rue Blanche? It’s not far from Picratt’s and Rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette. She often went there. The owner is very forthcoming, because she’s already been in trouble with us over underage girls and wants to get in our good books. Arlette went in one afternoon, a few weeks ago, with a short, square-shouldered man who was greying at the temples.’

  ‘The woman doesn’t know him?’

  ‘She thinks she knows him by sight, but not who he is. She claims he’s almost definitely from the neighbourhood. They stayed in the room until nine in the evening. She was struck by that because Arlette almost never came in the day or evening but, most of all, because she usually left almost immediately.’

  ‘Get a photograph of Fred Alfonsi and show it to her.’

  Janvier, who didn’t know Picratt’s owner, frowned.

  ‘If it’s him, Arlette met up with him somewhere else as well. Hang on, I’ll check the list … At the Hôtel Lepic, Rue Lepic. A man was on reception there, a guy with one leg who spends his nights reading novels and says he can’t sleep because his leg hurts. He recognized her. She went there several times, in particular, he said, with someone who he’s often seen at the market on Rue Lepic, but whose name he doesn’t know. A short, burly man who would usually do his shopping in the late morning without bothering to put on a shirt collar, as if he was just going round the corner. That sounds right, doesn’t it?’

  ‘It’s possible. You’re going to have to go round again with a photograph of Alfonsi. There’s one in the file but it’s too old.’

  ‘Can I ask him for one?’

  ‘Just ask him for his identity card as if you’re going to check it and get the photo copied upstairs.’

  The office boy came in and announced that a lady wanted to speak to Maigret.

  ‘Ask her to wait. I’ll be there in a minute.’

  Janvier added:

  ‘Marcoussis is going through the post. Apparently there’s loads of letters about Arlette’s identity. This morning he got twenty or so telephone calls. We’re checking, but I don’t think there’s anything serious yet.’

  ‘Did you talk to everybody about Oscar?’

  ‘Yes. No one turns a hair. Or they run through the Oscars in the neighbourhood, none of whom fits the description.’

  ‘Send Lapointe in.’

  The latter looked anxious. He knew that the two men had just been talking about Arlette and wondered why, for the first time ever, he hadn’t been allowed to listen in on their conversation.

  The inquiring look he gave Maigret was almost beseeching.

  ‘Sit down, son. If there were any news, I would tell you. We’ve barely made any progress since yesterday.’

  ‘Did you spend the night there?’

  ‘In the same seat you were in the night before, yes. Incidentally, did she ever talk to you about her family?’

  ‘All I know is that she ran away from home.’

  ‘She didn’t tell you why?’

  ‘She told me that she loathed hypocrisy, that she’d felt she was suffocating all her childhood.’

  ‘Be straight with me: was she kind to you?’

  ‘What do you mean exactly?’

  ‘Did she treat you as a friend? Was she honest with you?’

  ‘At times, yes, I think so. It’s hard to explain.’

  ‘Did you flirt with her immediately?’

  ‘I told her I loved her.’

  ‘The first evening?’

  ‘No. The first evening, I was with my friend and practically didn’t open my mouth. It was when I went back on my own.’

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘She tried to treat me as a kid and I said that I was twenty-four and that I was older than her.

  ‘“It’s not the years that count, sweetheart,” she snapped. “I am so much older than you!”

  ‘You see, she was very sad: desperate even, I’d say. I think that’s why I loved her. She laughed and joked, but it was all so bitter. There were times …’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘I know you think I’m naive, like everybody else. She tried to push me away, made a point of being vulgar, using crude language.

  ‘“Why don’t you just sleep with me like the rest? Don’t I turn you on? I could teach you more than any ordinary woman. I bet you won’t find anyone as experienced as me, who can do it the way I can …”

  ‘Wait! It suddenly occurs to me what she said next:

  ‘“I was well schooled.”’

  ‘You never wanted to give it a try?’

  ‘I wanted her. At times I could have shouted it out. But I didn’t want her like that. It would have ruined everything, do you see?’

  ‘I do. And what did she say when you talked about her starting a new life?’

  ‘She laughed, calling me her little virgin, and began drinking even harder. I am sure it was out of despair. You haven’t found the man?’

  ‘Which man?’

  ‘The one she called Oscar.’

  ‘We haven’t got anywhere yet. Now, tell me about what you did last night.’

  Lapointe had brought a bulging folder containing the papers they had found at the countess’s. He had carefully sorted them and covered several pages with notes.

  ‘I’ve been able to piece together almost all the countess’s life,’ he said. ‘The Nice police reported to me by telephone this morning.’

  ‘Let’s hear it.’

  ‘First I know her real name: Madeleine Lalande.’

  ‘I saw that on the family register yesterday.’

  ‘That’s true. Sorry. She was born at La Roche-sur-Yon, where her mother was a domestic. She didn’t know her father. She came to Paris as a chambermaid, but somebody was already keeping her after a few months. She changed lover several times, climbing the
ladder a little with each one, and fifteen years ago she was considered one of the most beautiful women on the Côte d’Azur.’

  ‘Was she already on drugs?’

  ‘I’ve no idea but I haven’t found anything that would suggest it. She gambled, hung around the casinos. She met Count von Farnheim, from an old Austrian family, who was then sixty-five. The count’s letters are here, arranged by date.’

  ‘Have you read them all?’

  ‘Yes. He was passionately in love with her.’

  Lapointe blushed, as if he could have written the letters himself.

  ‘They are very moving. He realized that he was just an old, all but impotent man. The first letters are respectful. He calls her “madame”, then “my dear friend”, then finally “my darling little girl”, begs her not to abandon him, never to leave him on his own. He keeps telling her that she’s all he’s got in the world and that he can’t conceive of spending his last years without her.’

  ‘Did they sleep together immediately?’

  ‘No. It took months. He fell sick, in a furnished villa he lived in before buying The Oasis, and he got her to come and live there as a guest and grace him with a few hours of her presence. You feel that he is sincere in every line, that he is desperately clinging on to her, that he’ll do anything not to lose her. He talks bitterly about the age difference, tells her that he knows he’s not offering her an agreeable life. “It won’t be for long,” he writes at one point. ‘I am old, my health is bad. In a few years, you will be free, my little girl, still beautiful, and if you permit it, you will be rich …” He writes to her every day, sometimes schoolboyish little notes: “I love you! I love you! I love you!” Then suddenly it’s pure rapture, a sort of Song of Songs. The tone has changed, and he talks about her body with a mixture of passion and something like reverence. “I cannot believe that that body has been mine, that those breasts, those hips, that belly …”’

  Maigret looked thoughtfully at Lapointe and did not smile.

  ‘From then on he is haunted by the thought that he might lose her. At the same time, he is tortured by jealousy. He begs her to tell him everything, even if the truth is bound to hurt him. He asks what she did the night before, which men she talked to. There are references to a musician at the casino who he thinks is too good-looking and is terribly afraid of. He also wants to know about her past. “It’s ‘the whole you’ I need …” Finally he begs her to marry him. I haven’t got any of her letters. She seems not to have written back but either to have answered him in person or telephoned. In one of the last notes, where his age comes up again, the count bursts out: “I should have realized that your beautiful body has needs I cannot satisfy. It’s torture. Each time I think about it, it hurts me so much I think I am dying. But I’d rather share you than not have you at all. I swear I will never make a scene or reproach you. You will be as free as you are today and I, in my corner, I’ll be waiting for you to bring a little joy to your old husband …”’

  Lapointe blew his nose.

  ‘They went to Capri to get married, I don’t know why. There wasn’t a marriage contract, so they observed the laws of common property. They travelled for several months, went to Constantinople and Cairo, then set themselves up for several weeks in a luxury hotel on the Champs-Élysées. I know because I found some hotel bills.’

  ‘When did he die?’

  ‘The Nice police were able to fill me in. Barely three years after he got married. They had moved into The Oasis. For months on end people saw them in a chauffeur-driven limousine, shuttling between the casinos of Monte-Carlo, Cannes and Juan-les-Pins. She was sumptuously dressed, dripping in jewels. Their arrival would cause a sensation, because she was hard to miss, and her husband was always in her wake, small and sickly, with a black goatee and pince-nez. He was known as the rat. She gambled for high stakes, had no qualms about flirting, and people say that she had a certain number of affairs. Meanwhile he would wait, like her shadow, until the early hours of the morning with a resigned smile.’

  ‘How did he die?’

  ‘Nice is going to send you the report by post, because there was an inquiry. The Oasis is on the Corniche, and the terrace, which is lined with palm trees, overlooks a sheer drop of hundreds of metres, like most of the properties around there. The count’s body was found one morning at the foot of the cliff.’

  ‘Did he drink?’

  ‘He was on the wagon. His doctor stated that because of certain medicines he had to take he suffered from dizzy spells.’

  ‘Did the count and countess share a bedroom?’

  ‘Each of them had their own apartments. The previous evening they had gone to the casino as usual and come back around three in the morning, which, for them, was exceptionally early. The countess was tired. She gave a candid explanation of why to the police: it was her time of the month and she was in a lot of pain. She went straight to bed. Her husband, meanwhile, according to the chauffeur, first went down to the library, which has French windows giving on to the terrace. He sometimes did that when he had insomnia. He didn’t sleep much. The assumption is that he wanted to get some air and sat down on the stone parapet. It was his favourite spot because, from there, you could see the Baie des Anges, the lights of Nice and much of the coast. When he was found, the body bore no marks of violence and the subsequent post-mortem was inconclusive.’

  ‘What did she do after that?’

  ‘She had a big fight with a great nephew, who turned up from Austria and sued her, and it took her almost two years to win the day. She carried on living in Nice, in The Oasis. She entertained a lot. Her house was very wild, and the drinking used to go on all night. Often the guests would sleep there, and the party would start up again when they woke up. According to the police there was a succession of gigolos, and they relieved her of a good chunk of her money. I wondered if that was when she starting taking drugs heavily, but they couldn’t tell me anything specific. They’re going to try to find out, but all this is already pretty old news. The only report they’ve found so far leaves lots of gaps, and they’re not sure they’ll be able to track down the file. What we know is that she drank and gambled. When she was drunk she’d take everyone back to her house. You get the picture? Apparently there’s a fair few oddballs like her down there. She must have lost a lot of money at roulette, where she’d sometimes bet the same number for hours at a time. Four years after her husband died, she sold The Oasis and, as it was in the middle of the crash, she didn’t get a good price for it. I think that it’s a sanatorium or a rest home these days. At any rate it’s not a private house any more. That’s all Nice knows. Once the estate was sold, the countess dropped out of sight and she was never seen on the Côte d’Azur again.’

  ‘You should stop by the Gambling Squad,’ Maigret advised. ‘Drugs may have something to tell you too.’

  ‘Aren’t I on Arlette’s case?’

  ‘Not for now. I’d like you to call Nice again as well. They may be able to give you a list of everyone who was living at The Oasis when the count died. Don’t forget the staff. Even though it was fifteen years ago, we might still be able to track some of them down.’

  It was still snowing fairly thickly, but the flakes were so light and wispy that they melted the moment they touched a wall or the ground.

  ‘Anything else, chief?’

  ‘Not at the moment. Leave me the file.’

  ‘You don’t want me to write up my report?’

  ‘Not until it’s over. Off you go!’

  Maigret stood up, drowsy from the heat of the office, still with a bad taste in his mouth and a dull pain at the base of his skull. He remembered that a woman was waiting for him in the anteroom, and to stretch his legs decided to fetch her himself. If he’d had time, he would have nipped down to the Brasserie Dauphine for a glass of beer, which would have perked him up.

  Several people were sitting in the glassed-in waiting room, where the green of the chairs looked more garish than usual and an umbrella was stand
ing in a puddle of water in the corner. He looked to see who was waiting for him and spotted a middle-aged woman in black, sitting very upright on a chair, who stood up when he came in. No doubt she had seen his picture in the papers.

  Lognon, meanwhile, who was there too, didn’t get up, didn’t move, but just looked at Maigret with a sigh. Typical. He needed to feel intensely unfortunate, intensely hard-done-by, to see himself as a victim of cruel fate. He had worked all night, splashing through the rainswept streets while hundreds of thousands of Parisians slept in their beds. The investigation was no longer his, since the Police Judiciaire had taken over, but he had still done his utmost, knowing others would take the glory, and he had come up with something.

  He had been there for half an hour, waiting with a strange young man with long hair, pallid skin and pinched nostrils, who was staring straight ahead and looking as if he was about to pass out.

  Naturally no one was paying any attention to him. They were just letting him stew. Nobody even asked him who his companion was or what he knew. Maigret simply muttered, ‘In a minute, Lognon!’

  He allowed the woman to go first, opened the door of his office and stepped aside:

  ‘Would you be so kind as to take a seat?’

  Maigret quickly realized he had been mistaken. Because of his conversation with Rose and the respectable, slightly stiff aspect of his visitor, her black clothes, her air of disdain, his first thought had been that she was Arlette’s mother, who had recognized her daughter’s photograph in the newspapers.

  Her opening remark did not set him straight.

  ‘I live in Lisieux and I took the first morning train.’

  Lisieux is not far from the sea. As far as he could remember, there was a convent round there.

  ‘I saw the newspaper yesterday evening and immediately recognized the photograph.’

  She looked upset, thinking that was the appropriate expression to wear in the circumstances, but she wasn’t sad at all. If anything, there was a glint of triumph in her little black eyes.

  ‘Obviously in four years the girl’s had time to change, and her hairstyle in particular makes her look different. Nonetheless I am certain that it’s her. I would have gone to see my sister-in-law, but we haven’t spoken for years, and it’s not for me to make the first move. You understand?’