Friend of Madame Maigret (13 page)

“When Frans told me his brother was unfortunate, it seemed to me that he wasn't using the word ‘unfortunate' in its usual sense. Do you think that Alfred would have been capable of kidnapping a child?”

“I tell you again I have no idea. By the way, have you ever heard of Countess Panetti?”

“Who's she?”

“A very rich Italian woman who lived at Claridge's.”

“Has she been killed too?”

“It's possible, and it's also possible that she's simply away spending the carnival season at Cannes or Nice. I'll know tonight. I'd like to take another look at your husband's account books.”

“Come this way. I've got loads of questions to ask you, but they've slipped my mind. It's when you're not here that I think of them. I ought to write them down like the young man playing detective.”

She let him precede her upstairs, fetched from a shelf a big black book that the police had examined five or six times.

At the very end an index contained the names of the bookbinder's clients, old and new, in alphabetical order. The name Panetti was not listed. Neither was Krynker.

Steuvels had tiny, jerky handwriting, with some letters overlapping others, a peculiar way of making the
r
's and
t
's.

“You've never heard the name Krynker?”

“Not that I remember. Look, we would be together the whole day, but I never assumed the right to ask him questions. Sometimes you seem to forget, chief inspector, that I'm not just an ordinary wife. Remember where he found me. His action has always amazed me. And now it suddenly occurs to me, as a result of our conversation, that the reason he did it may have been that he remembered what his mother had been.”

Maigret, as if he were no longer listening, was striding toward the door, flinging it open and seizing Alfonsi by the collar of his camel-hair coat.

“Come here, you. You're at it again. Have you decided to spend your days dogging my heels?”

The other man tried to brazen it out, but the chief inspector had a strong grip on the scruff of his neck, was shaking him like a puppet.

“What are you doing here, just tell me that?”

“I was waiting for you to leave.”

“To come pestering this woman?”

“I have a right to. Provided she chooses to receive me . . .”

“What are you after?”

“Ask Maître Liotard.”

“Liotard or no Liotard, let me tell you one thing: if I catch you following me again, I'll have you pinched for living off a prostitute, mark my words!”

This wasn't an empty threat. Maigret knew very well that the woman Alfonsi lived with spent most of her evenings in Montmartre nightclubs and that she was not unwilling to accompany visiting foreigners to their hotels.

When he came back to Fernande, he looked relieved, and the figure of the ex-detective could be seen making off in the rain toward the place des Vosges.

“What sort of questions does he ask you?”

“Always the same. He wants to know what you ask me, what I've answered, what you're interested in, what objects you've examined.”

“I think he'll let you alone in future.”

“Do you think Maître Liotard is harming my husband?”

“Whether he is or not, we can't do anything about it at this point.”

He had to go back downstairs, because he had left the photograph of Moss on the kitchen table. Instead of making for the Quai des Orfèvres, he crossed the street and entered the cobbler's shop.

The latter, at nine in the morning, already had several drinks under his belt and reeked of white wine.

“Well, chief inspector, everything fine and dandy?”

The two shops were exactly opposite one another. The cobbler and the bookbinder could not help seeing each other every time they raised their eyes, both hunched over their work, with only the width of the street between them.

“Can you remember some of the bookbinder's clients?”

“A few, yes.”

“This one?”

He held the photograph under his nose, while Fernande, opposite, watched them anxiously.

“I call him the clown.”

“Why?”

“I don't know. Because I think he looks like a clown.”

Suddenly he scratched his head, seemed to make a welcome discovery.

“Look here, buy me a drink, and I'll make it worth your while. It was a bit of good luck that you showed me that picture. I mentioned a clown and all of a sudden the word made me think of a suitcase. Why? But of course! Because clowns usually come into the ring with a suitcase.”

“You mean the stooges, don't you?”

“Stooge or clown, it's the same thing. How about the drink?”

“Later.”

“You don't trust me? You're wrong. Honest as a newborn babe, that's what I always say. Well, anyhow, there's no doubt that the fellow with the suitcase is your man.”

“What fellow with the suitcase?”

The cobbler gave him a wink that was meant to be knowing.

“You're not going to try any tricks with me, are you? I suppose I don't read the papers, do I? Well, what were the papers concerned with, right at the start? Didn't people come asking me whether I'd seen Frans go out with a suitcase, or his wife, or anyone else?”

“And you did see the man in the photo go out with the suitcase?”

“Not that day, anyhow, not that I noticed. But I'm thinking of the other times.”

“Did he come here often?”

“Yes, often.”

“Once a week, for example? Or once a fortnight?”

“Maybe. I don't want to make anything up, because I know what a rough time the lawyers'll give me if this ever comes up in court. He used to come here often that's all I'm saying.”

“In the morning? Afternoon?”

“My answer to that is: the afternoon. Do you know why? Because I can remember seeing him when the lights were on, so it must have been afternoon. He always had a small suitcase with him.”

“Brown?”

“Probably. Aren't most suitcases brown? He would sit down in a corner of the workshop, waiting for the job to be finished, and he'd leave again with the suitcase.”

“Did that take long?”

“I don't know. More than an hour in any case. Sometimes it seemed to me that he stayed the whole afternoon.”

“Did he always come on the same day?”

“I can't tell you that either.”

“Think before you answer. Did you ever see this man in the studio at the same time as Madame Steuvels?”

“At the same time as Fernande? Wait. I can't call it to mind. Once, at least, the two men went out together, and Frans closed his shop.”

“Recently?”

“I'll have to think. When are we going to have that drink?”

Maigret had no alternative but to follow him to the Grand Turenne, where the cobbler assumed a triumphant manner.

“Two old marcs. On the chief inspector!”

He drank three, one after another, and was trying to start telling about the clown all over again by the time Maigret managed to get rid of him. When he passed the bookbinder's workshop, Fernande was watching him, through the glass door, with an air of reproach.

But he had to keep on with his job to the end. He entered the concierge's lodge, where she was busy peeling potatoes.

“Well! So you're around again!” she observed tartly, offended at having been neglected for so long.

“Do you know this man?”

She went to fetch her glasses from the drawer.

“I don't know his name, if that's what you mean, but I've seen him before. Didn't the cobbler give you the information?”

She was jealous because other people had been questioned first.

“Have you seen him often?”

“I've seen him, that's all I know.”

“Was he a client of the bookbinder?”

“I suppose so, seeing he came to his shop.”

“He didn't come on any other occasion?”

“I think he occasionally came to dinner with them, but I pay so little attention to my tenants!”

The stationer across the street, the cardboard manufacturer, the umbrella seller, in short, the routine, always the same question, the same gesture, the picture, which people examined gravely. Some hesitated. Others had seen the man without remembering where or in what circumstances.

Just as he was leaving the neighborhood, Maigret had an impulse to push open the door of the Tabac des Vosges one last time.

“Have you ever seen that mug before,
patron
?”

The barkeeper did not hesitate.

“The man with the suitcase!” he said.

“Explain.”

“I don't know what he sells, but he must be a door-to-door salesman. He used to come in quite often, always a little while after lunch. He'd drink strawberry syrup with Vichy water and he explained to me that he had a stomach ulcer.”

“Would he stay long?”

“Sometimes a quarter of an hour, sometimes longer. Look, he always sat there, near the door.”

From where you could keep an eye on the corner of the rue de Turenne!

“He must have been waiting till it was time for an appointment with a customer. Once, not so long ago, he stayed almost an hour and finally asked for a telephone
jeton.
”

“You don't know whom he rang up?”

“No. When he came back it was only to leave again straight away.”

“In which direction?”

“I wasn't paying attention.”

As a reporter was coming in, the
patron
asked Maigret in an undertone:

“Is it all right to talk about it?”

Maigret shrugged. There was no point in making mysteries, now that the cobbler was in the know.

“If you want to.”

When he entered Lucas's office, the latter was coping with two telephones, and Maigret had to wait quite a while.

“I'm still hunting for the countess,” sighed the sergeant, mopping his forehead. “The Wagons-Lits Company, who know her quite well, haven't seen her on any of their lines for several months. I've had most of the big hotels at Cannes, Nice, Antibes and Villefranche on the line. Nothing doing. I've also rung the casinos, where she hasn't set foot. Lapointe, who speaks English, is telephoning Scotland Yard at this moment, and someone or other is taking care of the Italians.”

Before going in to see Judge Dossin, Maigret went upstairs to have a word with Moers and return the useless photographs.

“No results?” asked poor Moers.

“One out of three, that's not bad; now we only have to round up the other two, but it's possible that they've never been through an identification check.”

At noon, they were still not on the track of Countess Panetti, and two Italian journalists who had been tipped off were waiting, greatly excited, outside the door to Maigret's office.

Madame Maigret had been rather surprised when on Saturday, about three o'clock, her husband had telephoned to find out whether dinner was cooking.

“Not yet. Why? . . . Yes, of course I'd like to. If you're sure you'll be free. Quite sure? All right. I'll get dressed. I'll be there. Near the clock, yes. No, no sauerkraut for me, but I'd love a
potée lorraine.
What? You're not joking, are you? Are you serious, Maigret? Anywhere I like? That's too good to be true, and I feel sure you're going to ring again in an hour to tell me you won't be home to dinner or till morning. Oh well! I'll get ready anyway.”

So that instead of smelling of cooking, that Saturday, the flat on the boulevard Richard-Lenoir had smelled of bath water, eau-de-cologne, and the sweetish scent which Madame Maigret kept for special occasions.

Maigret was at the meeting place almost on time, within five minutes, at the Alsatian restaurant in the rue d'Enghien where they had sometimes been to have dinner, and, relaxed, with the air of thinking about the same things as other men, he had eaten sauerkraut prepared just the way he liked it.

“Have you decided on the cinema?”

Because, and this was what had made Madame Maigret so incredulous just now on the telephone, he had invited her to spend the evening at any cinema she chose.

They went to the Paramount on the boulevard des Italiens, and the chief inspector queued up for the tickets without grumbling, emptied his pipe in an enormous spittoon as they went in.

They heard the electric organ, saw the orchestra emerge from the floor on a platform while a curtain transformed itself into a sort of synthetic sunset. It was not until after the cartoons that Madame Maigret understood. The trailer of the next film had just been shown, then some short reels advertising some kind of sweet snack and furniture on hire-purchase.

It was the first time she had seen this announcement on the screen, and immediately afterward an identification photograph was projected, first full face, then in profile, showing Alfred Moss, whose successive aliases were listed.

 

“So that was it?” she said, out in the street again, while they were going part of the way home on foot in order to get some fresh air.

“That wasn't the only reason. The idea, by the way, isn't mine. It was suggested to the prefect ages ago, but there had never been an opportunity to try it out until now. Moers had noticed that photographs published in the papers are always more or less distorted because of the halftone screen and the inking. Film projection, on the other hand, by enlarging the smallest characteristics, makes a more striking impression.”