‘Why? Just because two young people starting out in life performed a duo cabaret act, this means they’re tied together for life?’
‘And Jessie?’
‘Mind you, I’m not saying she isn’t dead, or that Daumale isn’t, either. But the latter might well have kicked his bucket last year in Paris or Carpentras, and the former could now be parked in an old ladies’ home. This other case is just as possible.’
‘I suppose, inspector, that you’re joking?’
‘Barely.’
‘Follow my reasoning.’
‘Then you have been reasoning?’
‘All night long. We have, to start with, now twenty-eight years ago exactly, three people.’
‘The three Js.’
‘Pardon?’
‘I said: the three Js. That’s what we call them.’
‘Who besides you?’
‘The medium and the retired circus man.’
‘By the way, I’m having them watched, as you requested. So far, nothing has happened.’
‘Or will happen, probably, now that the clown has betrayed me, as he puts it. We were up to the three Js: Joachim, Joseph, Jessie. Twenty-eight years ago, as you say, there were those three, and a fourth who in this life was called Angelino Giacomi.’
‘Correct.’
He started taking notes again. It was a mania.
‘And today—’
‘Today,’ the American hastily interrupted, ‘we find ourselves again looking at three individuals.’
‘But they are no longer the same ones. Joachim, first, who with time has become Little John. MacGill. And another young man, who seems incontestably to be Maura’s son. The fourth individual, Angelino, existed as recently as two days ago, but, doubtless to simplify the problem, he was eliminated.’
‘To simplify the problem?’
‘Let me rephrase that … Three people twenty-eight years ago and three people today. In other words, the two gone missing from the first team have been replaced.’
‘And Maura seems to live in terror of his so-called secretary, MacGill.’
‘You think so?’
‘O’Brien told me that this was your impression as well.’
‘I believe I told him that MacGill was extremely self-confident and often spoke for his employer.’
‘It’s the same thing.’
‘Not exactly.’
‘I had thought, coming to see you this morning, that you would tell me frankly what you made of this business. Agent O’Brien shared with me—’
‘He spoke again of my impressions?’
‘No, of his own. He told me that he was convinced you had an idea that might well be the right one. So I was hoping that by comparing your ideas and mine …’
‘That we would arrive at the solution? Well, you heard my hired clown.’
‘You agree with everything he said?’
‘Not at all.’
‘You think he’s mistaken?’
‘He concocted a pretty story, almost a love story. Right now Little John, MacGill and perhaps a few others must be over the moon.’
‘I have proof of that.’
‘Can you reveal it?’
‘This morning MacGill reserved a first-class cabin on the liner sailing at four for France. In the name of Jean Maura.’
‘That’s only natural, don’t you think? This young man, in the middle of his university studies, suddenly leaves Paris to hurry to New York, where his papa feels he has no reason to be. He is therefore sent back where he came from.’
‘That’s one point of view.’
‘You see, my dear lieutenant, I understand your disappointment perfectly. You have been told, in error, that I am an intelligent man who, in the course of his career, has solved a certain number of criminal problems. My friend O’Brien, who is fond of irony, must have exaggerated a little. Now, in the first place, I am not intelligent.’
It was funny to see the lieutenant as vexed as if someone were making fun of him, when Maigret had never been more sincere.
‘In the second place, I try never to form an idea about a case before it’s closed. Are you married?’
‘Of course,’ replied Lewis, disconcerted by such a bizarre question.
‘For years now, no doubt. And I’m sure you’re convinced that your wife does not always understand you.’
‘Sometimes, in fact …’
‘And your wife, for her part, has the same conviction about you. Yet you live together, you spend evenings together, you sleep in the same bed, you have children … Two weeks ago, I had never heard of Jean Maura or Little John. Four days ago, I did not even know that Jos MacGill existed, and it was only yesterday, in the home of a helpless old gentleman, that a medium spoke to me about a certain Jessie.
‘And you would like me to have a definite idea about each of them?
‘I’m at sea, lieutenant … We probably both are. Except that you, you fight the waves, you mean to go in a definite direction, whereas I let myself drift with the current, clutching here and there on a passing branch.
‘I’m waiting for some cables from France. O’Brien must have mentioned them to you. I also await, like you, the results of the research your men have undertaken in such records as death certificates, marriage licences, etc.
‘Meanwhile, I know nothing.
‘By the way, what time was it again that the ship leaves for France?’
‘You want to sail on it?’
‘Not at all, although that would be the wisest course. But the weather is lovely. This is my first sunny day in New York. It would be a pleasant walk to go and see Jean Maura off, and I wouldn’t mind shaking hands with the boy, with whom I had the pleasure of making a most enjoyable crossing.’
He stood up and looked around for his hat and overcoat, while Lewis, disappointed, closed his notebook with regret and slipped it in his pocket.
‘Shall we go and have a drink?’ the inspector suggested.
‘No offence, but I never drink spirits.’
A tiny twinkle in Maigret’s wide eyes. He almost remarked, but caught himself in time: I would have bet on it!
They left the hotel together.
‘Look! My Sicilian is no longer at his post. They must think, now Dexter has turned informer, that they don’t need to keep an eye on my doings any more.’
‘I have my car, inspector. Shall I drop you somewhere?’
‘No, thank you.’
He felt like walking. He reached Broadway with no trouble, then the street where he hoped to find the Donkey Bar again. After some confusion, he finally recognized the façade and entered to find the place almost deserted at that hour.
At one end of the bar, however, the journalist with the yellow teeth with whom MacGill and the boxer-detective had talked that first day was busy writing an article while nursing a double whisky.
Looking up, he recognized Maigret, made an unpleasant face but in the end nodded in greeting.
‘A beer!’ ordered the inspector, because the air smelled already of spring, and that made him thirsty.
He savoured it peacefully, like a man who has before him long hours of strolling around the city.
8.
At Quai des Orfèvres, as recently as a year earlier, at such moments everyone said, ‘Here we go … The chief is in a trance.’
And cheeky Inspector Torrence, who in fact worshipped Maigret, used to say bluntly, ‘The chief has jumped in the deep end …’
‘In a trance’ or ‘in the deep end’ was in any case a development the chief inspector�
�s men welcomed with relief. They had learned to intuit its approach through small tell-tale signs and to foresee before Maigret himself when the critical moment would arrive.
What would someone like Lieutenant Lewis have thought of his French colleague during the hours that followed? He would never have understood, that’s for sure, and would doubtless have pitied him, in a way. Could Agent O’Brien himself, with his fine sense of irony behind that stolid façade, have followed the inspector that far?
The change would come in a rather peculiar manner, which Maigret had never cared enough to analyse yet had learned to recognize, having heard his colleagues at the Police Judiciaire discuss it in great detail.
For days, sometimes weeks, he would flounder along in a case, doing what there was to do, no more, giving orders, gathering information about this or that person, apparently with only an average interest in the investigation and sometimes none at all.
The reason was that throughout this period he was still seeing the problem only in a theoretical way. Some man was killed in such and such a circumstance. Whosis and So-and-so are suspects.
Those people, deep down, did not interest him. Did not interest him yet.
Then suddenly, when least expected, when he seemed discouraged by the complexity of his task, things would click.
Who was it who claimed that at that moment he actually became heavier? Wasn’t it a former commissioner of the Police Judiciaire who had watched him work for years? The remark was only a joke, but it was the truth. Maigret, suddenly, would appear weightier, more compact. He’d have a different way of gripping his pipe between his teeth, of smoking it in short, widely spaced puffs, of looking around him almost furtively, when in reality he was completely absorbed in his thinking.
It meant, in short, that the characters in the drama had just ceased to be things, pawns, puppets and had become human beings.
And Maigret put himself in their place. He struggled to get inside their skin.
Whatever a fellow human being had thought, lived, suffered, was he not capable of thinking, reliving, suffering it as well?
An individual, at a certain moment in his life, in particular circumstances, had reacted … Now the inspector had essentially to put himself in the other’s place and thereby experience the same reaction.
Only, it was not a conscious effort. Maigret was not always aware of it. For example, he thought he was still Maigret and thoroughly Maigret while he ate lunch alone at a counter.
Yet had he looked in the mirror, he would have noticed some of Little John’s expressions. Among others, the one on the former violinist’s face in the St Regis when, having come unseen from the far end of his apartment, from that austere room he had arranged as a kind of refuge, he had first caught sight of the inspector through that half-open door.
Was it fear? Or in a way, an acceptance of his fate?
That same Little John, walking to the window in difficult moments, drawing aside the curtain with a nervous hand and gazing outside, while MacGill automatically took charge of the situation …
It was not enough to decide, ‘Little John is this or that …’
One had to feel it, to become Little John. And that is why, as he walked through the streets, as he hailed a taxi for the passenger ship terminal, the outside world did not exist.
There was the Little John of long ago, who had arrived from France on the Acquitaine with his violin under his arm, along with Joseph the clarinettist.
The Little John who, during his miserable theatrical tour of the American South, shared his dinner with a thin, sickly girl, this Jessie nourished on bits of the two men’s meals.
Maigret barely noticed the two policemen he recognized on the boarding dock. He smiled vaguely. Clearly Lieutenant Lewis had sent them just in case; he was doing his job properly, so he could not be faulted for that.
Only fifteen minutes before departure time, a long limousine pulled up in front of the customs buildings. MacGill jumped out first, then Jean Maura, in a light-coloured tweed suit he must have purchased in New York, and lastly Little John, who appeared to have definitively restricted his clothing to black or navy blue.
Maigret did not hide. The three men had to pass close to him. Their reactions differed. MacGill, walking ahead with Jean’s light travel bag, frowned and then, perhaps out of bravado, put on a bit of a sneer.
Jean Maura hesitated, looked at his father, stepped over to the inspector and shook his hand.
‘You’re not sailing for France? … Once again, I apologize … You should have taken the boat with me. It was all nothing, you know … I behaved like a fool.’
‘It’s all right.’
‘Thank you, inspector.’
As for Little John, he kept walking and waited a little farther on, then nodded slightly, discreetly, to Maigret.
The inspector had seen him only in his apartment. Outdoors, rather to his surprise, Maigret found him even shorter than he had thought. And older, more careworn. Was that a recent development? A pall seemed to hang over the man, yet one could still feel his extraordinary energy.
None of those things mattered. They were not even thoughts. The last passengers were embarking. Relatives and friends remained lined up along the pier, looking upwards. A few of them, English, threw their customary coloured paper streamers up at the rails, where passengers caught and held the ends with solemn faces.
The inspector spotted Jean Maura on the first-class gangway. He viewed him from below and for an instant thought he saw, not the son, but the father; he felt that he was watching not that day’s sailing, but the one so long ago, when Joachim Maura had returned to France, where he would remain for almost ten months.
And Joachim Maura had not travelled first class, but third. Had he come alone to the ship? Had there not been, for him as well, two people on the pier?
Maigret looked reflexively around for them, imagining the clarinettist and Jessie, who must have waited as he did, gazing upwards, to see the moving wall of the ship pull away from the pier.
Then … Then the both of them left … Did Joseph take Jessie’s arm? Was it Jessie who automatically clung to Joseph’s arm? … Was she crying? Did Joseph tell her, ‘He’ll be back soon’?
In any case, there were only the two of them then in New York, while Joachim, standing on the deck, watched America shrink and finally vanish in the evening fog.
This time as well two people remained, Little John and MacGill. They left side by side, walking evenly to their waiting car. MacGill opened the rear door, then moved aside.
One should not try to go too fast, like Lieutenant Lewis, chasing after the truths one is hunting. It’s best to let the pure and simple truth arrive on its own.
And that is why Maigret headed, hands in his pockets, for an unfamiliar neighbourhood. What did it matter … In his mind, he was following Jessie and Joseph into the subway. Did the subway exist back then? Probably. They must have gone straight home to the building on 169th Street. And there, had they separated on the landing? Hadn’t Joseph consoled his companion?
Why did a quite recent memory now occur to the inspector? At the time, he had not paid attention …
At noon, he had nursed his beer for a long while at the Donkey Bar. He had ordered another, because it was good. Just as he was leaving, Parson, the journalist with the rotten teeth, had looked up and exclaimed, ‘Good day to you then, Monsieur Maigret!’
But he had said it in French, with a strong accent, and had pronounced his name as ‘Maygrette’. He had an unpleasant voice, too sharp and shrill, with crude, even nasty inflections.
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Definitely a bitter man, a resentful troublemaker. Maigret had looked at him, a touch surprised. He’d muttered a vague ‘Good day’ and left, thinking no more of it.
He remembered suddenly that the first time he had gone to the Donkey Bar with MacGill and the gum-chewing detective, his name had not been mentioned. Nor had Parson said that he knew French.
It probably wasn’t important. Maigret left it at that. Yet this detail filed itself away in the mass of his unconscious preoccupations.
When he found himself at Times Square, he naturally looked up at the Times Square Building, which dominated the horizon. And he recalled that Little John had his business offices in this skyscraper.
He went inside. He wasn’t looking for anything in particular. But all he knew about the Little John of the present was his private residence at the St Regis. Why not take a look at this setting?
He found the Automatic Record Company in the building directory, and an express elevator whisked him to the forty-third floor.
It was without interest. There was nothing to see. All those jukeboxes, those dream-boxes found in most bars and restaurants, they led here, in the end. It was here, in any case, that those hundreds of thousands of nickels disgorged by the machines were transformed into bank accounts, share certificates, book-keeping entries.
A title on a glass door:
General Manager: John Maura
Other glass doors, numbered, bearing the names of an entire management staff and, finally, a vast room with metal desks and bluish lighting, where a good hundred men and women were busy working.
When asked what he wanted, he replied calmly, turning on his heel after knocking his pipe against it, ‘Nothing.’
To take a look, quite simply. Wouldn’t Lieutenant Lewis understand that?
And he walked on down the street, stopped in front of a bar, hesitated, shrugged. Why not? It never hurt him, at such times, and he was not a weeper like Ronald Dexter. All alone at a corner of the bar, he downed two drinks in quick succession, paid and left as he had arrived.
Maigret in New York Page 12