‘Thanks a lot!’ muttered the garage owner.
‘Who wrote the letter to Goldberg?’
‘She did.’
‘Let’s keep going … He arrives during the night. Who’s at the garage at that point? … And most importantly, whose job is it to kill him?’
Silence. The sound of Lucas coming downstairs to speak to an officer.
‘Hop it to Arpajon,’ he told the officer, ‘and bring back the first doctor you can find to help the professor, along with some camphorated oil. Got that?’
Lucas headed back upstairs while Maigret, his brow furrowed, studied his flock.
‘We’ll jump back a little in time … I think that will be simpler. You: when did you become a fence?’
He was looking hard at the garage owner, who seemed to find this question less prickly than the previous ones.
‘That’s it! Now you’re talking! You admit yourself that I’m nothing but a fence. And maybe not even that …’
He was an incredible ham. He looked from one to another of the others, trying to make them smile.
‘My wife and I, we’re practically honest folks. Right, honey? … It’s quite simple: I was a boxer. I lost my title in 1925 – and all I got offered was a job at the Foire du Thrône fairgrounds in Paris! Not nearly enough for me. We had some friends who were legit and some who weren’t. One guy – he was arrested two years later – was raking it in at the time, selling stuff he’d got on credit.
‘I thought I’d try that, but since I’d been a mechanic when I was younger, I decided to start with garages, thinking I’d get my hands on cars, tyres, spare parts, sell it all on the quiet and clear off. I was counting on making 400,000 or so!
‘Trouble was, I was late out of the gate. The big places were thinking twice before letting the goods leave home on credit.
‘I got brought a stolen car to freshen up … A guy I’d met in a bar near the Bastille. You can’t imagine how easy it is!
‘Word got around in Paris. I was in a cushy spot, seeing as I’d hardly any neighbours. I turned ten or twenty cars around … Then one turned up, I can still see it today: full of silverware stolen from a villa around Bougival. We squirrelled that lot away, got in touch with second-hand dealers in Étampes, Orléans and even farther away.
‘We got used to this routine … A sweet racket …
‘Has he found out about the tyres yet?’ he asked, turning towards Jojo, who sighed.
‘He sure has …’
‘You know how wacky you look with your electric wire? Add a plug and you’d be a blinking lamp!’
Maigret cut him off.
‘Isaac Goldberg arrived in his own car, a Minerva. There was a welcoming party, because the idea wasn’t to buy his diamonds, even on the cheap, but to steal them. And to do that you had to bump him off. So there was a bunch of you in the garage, that’s to say in the house behind it …’
Absolute silence. This was the sore spot. Once again Maigret looked them all in the face one by one … and saw a few drops of sweat on the Italian’s forehead.
‘You’re the killer, right?’
‘No! It’s … It’s …’
‘Who?’
‘It’s them, it’s …’
‘He’s lying!’ yelled Monsieur Oscar.
‘Who got the nod?’
Shrugging cockily, the garage owner said, ‘The guy upstairs, so there!’
‘Say that again!’
‘The guy upstairs!’
But he didn’t sound as sure of himself this time around.
‘Else, come over here!’
Maigret pointed to Else, with the confidence of a conductor with the most diverse instruments at his command who knows his motley orchestra will still perform in perfect harmony.
‘You were born in Copenhagen?’
‘If you keep using my name, chief inspector, everyone will think we slept together …’
‘Answer me.’
‘Hamburg!’
‘What was your father’s occupation?’
‘Docker.’
‘He’s still alive?’
Her whole body shuddered. She looked at her companions with a sort of uneasy pride.
‘They cut his head off, in Düsseldorf.’
‘Your mother?’
‘A drunk.’
‘What were you doing in Copenhagen?’
‘I was a sailor’s girl. Hans! A handsome fellow I’d met in Hamburg. He took me along with him. He belonged to a gang. One day we decided to knock over a bank, had it all set up. We were supposed to get millions in a single night. I was the lookout … But someone snitched on us, because just when the men started in on the safes, the cops surrounded us.
‘It was at night, you couldn’t see a thing … We were scattered … There were shots; people yelling, chasing us. I got hit in the chest and began to run. Two policemen grabbed me. I bit one of them, kicked the other in the stomach and he let me go …
‘But I was still being chased. And then I saw a wall: I hauled myself up … I literally fell off the other side and when I came to there was a tall young man, very chic, upper-class, looking at me with bewilderment and pity …’
‘Andersen?’
‘That isn’t his real name. He’ll tell you that only if it suits him to. It’s a well-known name … They’re people with entrée to the royal court, who spend half the year in one of the most lovely castles in Denmark and the other half in a great mansion with grounds as large as an entire city neighbourhood.’
An officer arrived accompanied by a short, flushed, pop-eyed man. It was the doctor requested by the surgeon. He stopped short before the strange gathering, especially at the sight of handcuffs on almost everyone’s hands, but he was hustled on up to the first floor.
‘After that …’
Monsieur Oscar snickered. Else gave him a fierce, almost venomous look.
‘They can’t understand,’ she murmured. ‘Carl hid me in his parents’ mansion and took care of me himself, with a friend who was studying medicine. He had already lost an eye in that plane crash. He wore a black monocle … I think he considered himself permanently disfigured. He was convinced that no woman could love him, that whenever he had to remove his black eyeglass, revealing his sewn-up eyelid and fake eye, he would become repulsive …’
‘Did he love you?’
‘It wasn’t exactly that. I didn’t understand at first … and they,’ she added, pointing to her accomplices, ‘will never understand. It was a Protestant family. Carl’s first impulse was to save a soul, as he put it … He made long speeches, read me chapters from the Bible. Yet at the same time, Carl was afraid of his parents. Then one day, when I was almost well again, he suddenly kissed me on the mouth – and ran away. I didn’t see him for almost a week. Well, I was able to watch him from the dormer window of a servant’s room where I was kept hidden … He walked for hours in the garden with his head hanging, visibly unhappy.’
Monsieur Oscar was actually slapping his thighs in delight.
‘It’s just like a novel!’ he exclaimed. ‘Keep going, honeybunch!’
‘That’s all there is … When he came to see me again he said he wanted to marry me, that he couldn’t do that in his country, that we were going abroad … He claimed that he had understood at last what life was all about, that he had found his reason for living and would no longer be a useless human being … And stuff like that …’
Her voice was becoming more common again.
‘We got married in Holland under the name of Andersen. I was enjoying myself. I think I even fell for his fairy tale, too. He would tell me the most amazing things … He made me dress like this, like that, learn table manners, ditch my accent … He had me read books. We used to visit museums.’
�
��How about that, my angel!’ Monsieur Oscar exclaimed to his wife. ‘When we’re sprung from the big house, we’ll go and visit museums too, won’t we? And hold hands, making sheep’s eyes at the Mona Lisa …’
‘We came to live out here,’ Else went on quickly, ‘because Carl was always afraid of running into one of my old accomplices. He had to work because he’d renounced his parents’ fortune. As a precaution, he passed me off as his sister, but he still worried … Whenever anyone rang at the front gate it made him jump, because Hans managed to escape from prison and no one knows what happened to him … Carl loves me, that’s for sure.’
‘And yet …’ said Maigret thoughtfully.
‘I’d like to see what you’d have done here!’ snapped Else. ‘Alone, always alone! With nothing but talk about goodness, beauty, the salvation of the soul, human destiny and being worthy of the Lord … And those lessons in deportment! And when he went anywhere he locked me in, supposedly to save me from temptation. The truth is he was ferociously possessive … and passionate, too!’
‘Now no one can say I don’t know a good thing when I see it!’ crowed Monsieur Oscar.
‘And what did you do?’ Maigret asked him.
‘I spotted her, for God’s sake! It was easy: I could tell she was putting on all those fancy manners. For a while I even wondered if the Danish fellow wasn’t a fake as well. But I didn’t trust him. I preferred to sniff around the tart … Oh, now honey, don’t get upset, you know I’ve always come back to you in the end! The other stuff is just business. Anyway, I used to prowl around that dump when ol’ One-Eye wasn’t there. We started talking one day, her at the window, being as the bird was in a cage. She saw right away how matters stood. I tossed her a ball of wax to take an impression of her lock … The next month we met at the far end of the grounds to talk shop. No magic needed! She was sick of that blue-blood of hers … She had a hankering for her old life is all!’
‘And since then,’ said Maigret slowly to Else, ‘you’ve been regularly slipping veronal into Carl Andersen’s food at night?’
‘Yes …’
‘And you would go to meet Oscar?’
The garage owner’s wife had red eyes but was holding back her tears.
‘They deceived me, chief inspector! At first my husband told me she was just a pal, that rescuing her from that hole was really a good deed! Then he used to take us both for evenings out in Paris, we’d have wild times with our friends … I never suspected a thing until the day I … found them …’
‘And so what? All men aren’t monks … She was wasting away, poor dear.’
Else was quiet. There was a sad look in her eyes, and she seemed uneasy.
Suddenly Lucas came back downstairs.
‘Are there any methylated spirits in the house?’
‘What for?’
‘To disinfect the instruments.’
It was Else who rushed to the kitchen and looked through all the bottles.
‘I found it! … Are they going to save him? Is he in any pain?’
‘Filthy bitch!’ growled Michonnet, who had been dead to the world since the beginning of this interrogation.
Looking Michonnet straight in the eye, Maigret asked the garage owner, ‘And this one?’
‘You haven’t figured that out yet?’
‘Just about … There are three houses at the crossroads. Every night was suspiciously full of comings and goings: the vegetable lorries, coming back unloaded from Paris, were bringing in the stolen goods. The Three Widows house posed no threat, but the villa …’
‘Not to mention that we needed someone respectable to sell certain items out in the countryside.’
‘So Else was assigned to rope in Michonnet?’
‘Why waste a pretty girl? He was swept off his feet! She brought him along one night and we reeled him in with champagne. Another time we took him to Paris for one of our best blow-outs, while his wife thought he was off on a tour of inspection. He was done for! Take it or leave it, we told him. The best part was that he thought she’d fallen for him and he turned as jealous as a schoolboy. Isn’t that the limit? And him with the mug of a department store cashier!’
There was some kind of noise upstairs and Maigret saw Else go dead white. From then on she ignored the interrogation and listened intently to the proceedings overhead.
They heard the surgeon’s voice.
‘Hold him …’
Outside, two sparrows were hopping around on the white gravel path.
Filling a pipe, Maigret reviewed the prisoners once again.
‘Now all we need to know is, who the killer was … Quiet!’
‘In my case, for fencing, I shouldn’t get more than—’
The inspector silenced Monsieur Oscar with an impatient glare.
‘Else learns from the papers that the jewellery stolen in London and valued at two million must be in the possession of Isaac Goldberg, whom she met when she belonged to the gang in Copenhagen. She writes to him to set up a meeting at the garage, with a promise to purchase the diamonds at a good price … Goldberg, who remembers her from before, does not suspect trouble and arrives in his car.
‘Champagne is served, in the house … Reinforcements have been called in – in other words, you are all there. The problem is getting rid of the corpse, once the murder has been committed …
‘Michonnet must be nervous, because, for the first time, he’ll be involved in a real crime … But he is probably given more champagne than the others.
‘Oscar’s probably for dumping the body in a ditch someplace far away.
‘It’s Else who comes up with an idea … Quiet! … She’s had enough of living locked in during the day and having to hide at night. She’s had enough of the speeches about virtue, goodness and beauty! She’s also had enough of her boring life, and of counting each sou …
‘She’s come to hate Carl Andersen. But she knows he loves her enough to kill her rather than lose her.
‘She’s drinking! She’s flying high! She has a bold, exciting idea: to pin the crime on Carl! On Carl, who is so blinded by love that he will never even suspect her.
‘Isn’t that so, Else?’
For the first time, she turned her head away.
‘The Minerva, disguised by Oscar’s crew, will be sent far away to be sold or abandoned. The real culprits must be placed beyond suspicion. And Michonnet is the most afraid! His car will therefore be “stolen”, which is the best way to camouflage him. He’ll be the one to complain first to the police, fretting about the disappearance of his six-cylinder car. But the police must also go looking for the corpse over at Carl’s place. And that’s when someone has the bright idea of switching the cars.
‘The corpse is installed at the wheel of Michonnet’s car. Andersen, as usual, has been drugged and is fast asleep. The car is driven into his garage. The little jalopy is placed inside Michonnet’s.
‘The police will be flummoxed! And even better, this aloof Danish fellow passes among the locals for half mad … The country folk are spooked by his black monocle.
‘Suspicion will fall on him! And everything about this case is so bizarre that it will fit his appearance and reputation like a glove. Besides, after his arrest, won’t he kill himself to avoid the scandal that might reflect upon his family if his true identity were ever discovered?’
The little doctor from Arpajon poked his head around the half-open door.
‘Another man, to hold him … We’re having trouble putting him to sleep …’
The doctor was flushed, impatient. There was an officer out in the garden.
‘You go!’ Maigret shouted to him.
And at that same moment received an unexpected blow to the chest.
11. Else
It was Else, who had flung herself on him, sobbing conv
ulsively, pleading with him.
‘I don’t want him to die!’ she stammered. ‘Please! … I … This is awful …’
The moment was so gripping and she seemed so truly sincere that the others, those sinister men lined up against the wall, neither sneered nor even smiled.
‘Let me go upstairs! I’m begging you! You can’t understand …’
But Maigret pushed her aside! She went to collapse on the dark divan where he’d seen her that first time, an enigmatic figure in her high-necked black velvet dress.
‘I’m nearly done! … Michonnet played his part perfectly. And all the more believably in that he had to act like a ridiculous little fellow caught up in a bloody crime who thinks only of his car. The police investigation begins; Carl Andersen is arrested. And it just so happens that he does not commit suicide and is even released.
‘Not for a moment has he suspected his wife. He will never suspect her. He would defend her even against all evidence.
‘But now we learn that Madame Goldberg, who might know and reveal who drew her husband into this trap, is coming here.
‘The same man who shot the diamond merchant lies in wait for her …’
The chief inspector looked at his audience one by one, then pressed on as if in a hurry to be done with it.
‘The murderer has put on Carl’s shoes, which will be found here covered in mud from the field … That’s overdoing things! But Carl must be found guilty or else the real murderers will soon be unmasked. Now panic sets in.
‘Andersen has to go to Paris because he needs money. The same man who committed the first two crimes waits for him along his route and, posing as a policeman, gets into his car beside him.
‘It isn’t Else who came up with that … I have the feeling it’s Oscar.
‘Does he talk to Andersen about escorting him to the border, or confronting him with some witness in a town up north?
‘Andersen is made to drive across Paris. The Compiègne road goes through dense woods. The murderer shoots, again at point-blank range. No doubt he hears another car behind them … and in a rush he pushes the body out into the roadside ditch. On the way back he’ll conceal the body more carefully.
The Night at the Crossroads Page 11