Cécile is Dead (20 page)

A car door slamming. That was always the
first noise of the day. The engine still running outside. Charlotte was presumably
shaking the driver's hand. Then the taxi drove away. Footsteps. The key in the
lock and the click of a light switch.

A match was struck in the kitchen, and
the gas stove made a
phjfft
sound as it came on.

Slowly, like someone who has spent all
night standing up, Charlotte climbed the overly new staircase. She came noiselessly
into the bedroom. Another light switch. A bulb came on, with a pink handkerchief
over it as a lampshade and wooden tassels at the four corners of the
handkerchief.

Prosper Donge had not opened his eyes.
Charlotte looked at herself in the wardrobe mirror as she undressed. When she got
down to her girdle and brassiere, she sighed. She was as fat and pink as a Rubens,
but she was obsessive about squeezing herself in. Once naked, she rubbed the flesh
where there were marks.

She had an unpleasant way of getting
into bed, kneeling on it first, which made the base tilt to one side.

‘Your turn, Prosper!'

He got up. She quickly huddled into the
warm hollow he had left behind, pulled the blankets up to her eyes and stopped
moving.

‘Is it
raining?' he asked as he flushed the toilet.

A vague grunt. It didn't matter.
The water for shaving was ice cold. Trains could be heard passing.

Prosper Donge got dressed. From time to
time, Charlotte sighed, because she couldn't get to sleep while the light was
on. He had one hand already on the doorknob and was stretching his right arm towards
the light switch when he heard a thick voice:

‘Don't forget to go and pay
the instalment for the wireless.'

On the kitchen stove, the coffee was
hot, too hot. He drank it standing up. Then, like all those who make the same
gestures at the same time every day, he wrapped a knitted scarf around his neck and
put on his coat and cap.

Finally, he took his bicycle, which was
in the passage, and pushed it outside.

Invariably, at that hour, he was greeted
by a breath of cold, damp air, and there was wetness on the cobbles, even though it
hadn't rained; the people asleep behind the closed shutters would probably
know only a warm, sunny day.

The street, lined with detached houses
and little gardens, sloped steeply downwards. Sometimes, between two trees, the
lights of Paris could be glimpsed, as if at the bottom of a chasm.

It was no longer night, but it
wasn't yet day. The air was mauve. The lights were coming on in a few windows,
and Prosper Donge braked before he got to the level crossing, which was closed. He
had to get across through the gates.

After the Pont de Saint-Cloud, he turned
left. A tugboat
followed by its string
of barges was whistling furiously, asking for the lock gate to be opened.

The Bois de Boulogne … The lakes
reflecting a paler sky, with swans waking up …

Just as he reached Porte Dauphine, the
ground suddenly felt harder beneath Donge's wheels. He went a few more metres,
then got off and had a look. His rear tyre was flat.

He looked at his watch. It was ten to
six. He began walking quickly, pushing his bicycle, and there was a slight mist in
front of his lips, while the heat of the effort burned his chest inside.

Avenue Foch … Closed shutters in all the
mansions … A high-ranking officer, followed only by his orderly, was trotting along
the bridle path …

Light behind the Arc de Triomphe … He
was hurrying now … He felt really hot …

Just at the corner of the
Champs-Élysées, a policeman in a cape, standing near the news stand, cried out:

‘Flat tyre?'

He nodded. Three hundred metres to go.
The Hotel Majestic, on the left, with all its shutters closed. The street-lamps were
no longer giving out much light.

He turned into Rue de Berri, then Rue de
Ponthieu. A little bar was open. Two buildings further on, a door that passers-by
never noticed, the service entrance of the Majestic.

A man was just coming out. A suit could
be glimpsed under his grey coat. He was bare-headed. He had slicked-back hair, and
Prosper Donge assumed it was the dancer, Zebio.

He could have
glanced into the bar to make sure, but the thought never occurred to him. Still
pushing his bicycle, he entered a long grey passage lit by a single light. He
stopped by the clocking-on machine, turned the wheel, inserted the card into his
number, 67, and as he did so glanced at the little clock on the machine, which
showed ten past six. A click.

It was now an established fact that he
had entered the Majestic at ten past six in the morning, ten minutes later than
usual.

Such, at least, was the official
statement of Prosper Donge, the head coffee maker for the luxury hotel on the
Champs-Élysées.

As for what happened next, he claimed
that he had continued to act as he did every morning.

At that hour, the vast basement areas
with their complicated corridors, their multiple doors, their walls painted grey
like the gangways of a freighter, were deserted. Through the glass partitions, all
you could see, here and there, were the dim bulbs with their yellowish filaments
which constituted the night lighting.

Everything had glass partitions, the
kitchens on the left, then the bakery. Opposite, the room known as the
couriers' room, where the higher-ranking staff ate, along with the
guests' private domestics, their chambermaids and chauffeurs.

A bit further along, the dining room for
the lower-grade staff, with its long white wooden tables and its benches like the
kind you find in schools.

Finally,
dominating the basement like the bridge of a ship, a smaller glass cage, where the
bookkeeper sat, the man whose job it was to check everything that came out of the
kitchens.

As he opened the door to the coffee
room, Prosper Donge had the impression that someone was climbing the narrow
staircase that led to the upper floors, but paid no attention. That at least was
what appeared subsequently in his statement.

Just as Charlotte had done on entering
their suburban house, he now struck a match, and the gas made a
phffji
sound under the smallest of the percolators, the one that came on first for the few
guests who got up early.

Only once he had done that did he go
into the locker room. This was quite a large room along one of the corridors. There
were several wash-basins, a greyish mirror and, along the walls, tall, narrow metal
lockers, each bearing a number.

With his key, he opened locker 67. He
took off his coat, scarf and hat. He changed shoes: for his day's work he
preferred elastic-sided shoes, which were softer. He put on a white jacket.

A few more minutes … At half past six,
the basement areas started coming to life …

Up above, everything was asleep, apart
from the night porter, who was waiting in the deserted lobby to be relieved.

The percolator hissed. Donge filled a
cup with coffee and set off up the staircase, which was like one of those mysterious
staircases you find backstage in theatres that lead to the most unexpected
places.

When he opened a
narrow door, he found himself in the lobby cloakroom. Nobody would have guessed the
door was there, covered as it was with a large mirror.

‘Coffee!' he announced,
placing the cup on the cloakroom counter. ‘How's it going?'

‘Fine!' the night porter
grunted as he approached.

Donge went back downstairs. His three
women, the Three Fat Ladies as they were known, had arrived. They were lower-class
women, all three ugly, one of them old and bad-tempered. They were already washing
cups and saucers in the sink, making a great clatter.

As for Donge, he did what he did every
day, arranged the silver coffee pots in order of size: one cup, two cups, three cups
… Then the little milk jugs … the teapots …

In the bookkeeper's glass cage, he
glimpsed Jean Ramuel, his hair dishevelled.

‘He must have slept here
again!' he observed.

For three or four nights now, the
bookkeeper, Ramuel, had been sleeping at the hotel rather than going home, which was
somewhere in Montparnasse.

As a rule, that was forbidden. At the
very end of the corridor, near the door concealing the stairs to the lower basement,
where the wines were kept, there was indeed a room with three or four beds. But
theoretically they were reserved for those members of staff who needed a breather
between busy periods.

Donge waved a brief hello to Ramuel, who
responded with a similarly vague gesture.

Next, it was the turn of the head chef,
huge and self-important, who had just returned from Les Halles with a
lorry that parked in Rue de Ponthieu to
be unloaded by his assistants.

By half past seven, at least thirty
people were bustling about in the basements of the Majestic. Bells started ringing,
the dumb waiters came down, stopped and went back up with trays, while Ramuel stuck
white, blue and pink slips on the iron spikes lined up on his desk.

At that hour, the day porter, in his
light-blue uniform, was just taking over the lobby and the mail clerk was sorting
through the mail in his box room. It must be sunny in the Champs-Elysees but, in the
basement, the only thing you were aware of was the rumbling of the buses making the
glass partitions vibrate.

A few minutes after nine – at exactly
9.04, as they were able to establish – Prosper Donge left the coffee room and a few
seconds later entered the locker room.

‘I'd left my handkerchief in
my coat!' he stated when he was questioned.

Be that as it may, he now found himself
alone in the room with its hundred metal lockers. Did he open his own? Nobody was
there to witness it. Did he get his handkerchief? It was possible.

There weren't a hundred, but
exactly ninety-two lockers, all numbered. The last five were empty.

Why did it occur to Prosper Donge to
open locker 89, which, not belonging to anyone, wasn't locked?

‘I did it without thinking
…' he asserted. ‘The door was ajar … I never imagined …'

What was in this locker was a body which
must have been pushed into it in an upright position and had collapsed in
on itself. It was the body of a woman
of about thirty, very blonde – artificially blonde, in fact – wearing a thin black
woollen dress.

Donge did not cry out. Looking quite
pale, he approached Ramuel's glass cage and bent down to speak through the
opening.

‘Come and have a look …'

The bookkeeper followed him.

‘Stay here … Don't let
anyone get too close …'

Ramuel rushed upstairs, emerged in the
lobby cloakroom and spotted the porter in conversation with a chauffeur.

‘Has the manager
arrived?'

The porter gestured with his chin
towards the manager's office.

Standing by the revolving door, Maigret
was on the point of knocking his pipe against his heel to empty it. Then he shrugged
and put it back between his teeth. It was his first pipe of the morning, the best
one.

‘The manager's expecting
you, sir …'

The lobby was not very busy yet. There
was only an Englishman arguing with the mail clerk, and a young girl walking on her
long grasshopper legs, carrying a hatbox, which she was presumably delivering.

Maigret walked into the manager's
office. The manager shook his hand without a word and indicated an armchair. A green
curtain concealed the glass door, but you just had to pull it slightly to see
everything that was happening in the lobby.

‘Cigar?'

‘No,
thanks …'

They had known each other for a long
time. They didn't need many words. The manager was wearing striped trousers, a
dark jacket with edging and a tie that seemed to have been cut out of some stiff
material.

‘Here …'

He pushed a registration form across the
table.

Oswald J. Clark, industrialist, of
Detroit, Michigan (USA). Coming from Detroit.

Arrived 12 February

Accompanied by: Mrs Clark, his
wife; Teddy Clark, 7, his son; Ellen Darroman, 24, governess; Gertrud Borms, 42,
maid.

Suite 203.

Phone calls. The manager answered
impatiently. Maigret folded the form in four and slipped it into his wallet.

‘Which one is it?'

‘Mrs Clark …'

‘Ah!'

‘The hotel doctor, whom I
telephoned immediately after alerting the Police Judiciaire, and who lives nearby,
in Rue de Berri, is downstairs. He says Mrs Clark was strangled between six and six
thirty in the morning.'

The manager was glum. Pointless telling
a man like Maigret that it was a disaster for the hotel and that if there was any
way of hushing the whole thing up …