Liberty Bar (8 page)

‘I think William Brown was
murdered!' he replied.

‘Obviously!'

They were wandering round the streets,
where the shops had already drawn canopies over their windows. The barber from that
morning was sitting outside his door, reading his newspaper. In Place Macé they spotted
the two women from Cannes and Joseph, waiting for the bus.

‘Fancy a quick one?' suggested
Boutigues, indicating the café terrace.

Maigret accepted. He was filled by an
almost overwhelming laziness. A succession of images flashed across his retinas, all
confused, and he made no attempt to sort them into any order.

On the terrace of the Glacier, for
example, he half closed his eyes. The sun was baking his eyelids. His intertwined
eyelashes formed a grill of shadow, behind
which people and objects
took on an almost fairy-tale appearance.

He saw Joseph helping Jaja to haul herself
up on to the bus. Then a small man dressed all in white, with a colonial helmet on his
head, walked by slowly, leading a chow chow with a purple tongue.

Other images became mixed up with the real
ones: William Brown, at the wheel of his old car, driving his women from shop to shop,
sometimes with only his pyjamas on under his overcoat and with stubble on his chin.

By this time the son would be back at the
Provençal, in his luxury suite, dictating cables, answering the telephone, pacing up and
down with his regular stride.

‘It's an odd business!'
sighed Boutigues, who had to fill every silence, as he crossed and uncrossed his legs
first one way, then the other. ‘What a shame they forgot to inform the
organist!'

‘Yes! William Brown was murdered
…'

It was for his own sake that Maigret
repeated this, to convince himself that, in spite of everything, a drama really had
occurred.

His detachable collar felt tight. His
forehead was damp. He looked with relish at the large cube of ice floating in his
drink.

‘Brown was murdered … He left
the villa, as he did every month, to go to Cannes. He left his car at the garage. He
visited a bank or some business to collect the monthly allowance that his son provided
for him. Then he spent a few days at the Liberty Bar.'

A few days of warm
laziness like the one that had overcome Maigret.

A few days in slippers, slouching from one
chair to another, eating and drinking with Jaja, watching a semi-naked Sylvie come and
go …

‘On Friday, at two o'clock, he
left … At five o'clock, he picked up his car and, a quarter of an hour
later, he collapsed, fatally wounded, on the steps of his villa, while his women,
thinking he was drunk, swore at him from the window … He had about two thousand
francs on him, as usual …'

Maigret didn't say any of this out
loud, he merely thought it as he watched the passers-by filing in front of the grill of
his eyelashes.

It was Boutigues who broke the
silence:

‘Who would have an interest in
seeing him dead?'

There it was: the dangerous question. His
two women? Didn't they, on the contrary, have an interest in keeping him alive as
long as possible since, out of the two thousand francs that he brought home each month,
they managed to save a small amount?

The women from Cannes? They will have lost
one of their few customers, someone who kept the whole household fed for a week and paid
for stockings for one of them and paid the gas and electricity bills of the other
…

No! In terms of material advantage, only
Harry Brown stood to gain anything, as he no longer had to pay out five thousand francs
a month.

But what is five thousand francs to a
family that sells wool by the shipload?

Boutigues sighed
again:

‘I'm beginning to think the
people round here are right, and it's a spying matter …'

‘Waiter! Same again!' said
Maigret.

He regretted it immediately. He wanted to
cancel the order, but didn't dare.

He didn't dare out of fear of
admitting to his weakness. He would remember this later, remember sitting on the terrace
of the Café Glacier, remember Place Macé …

It was one of his rare moments of
weakness! Total weakness! The air was warm. A little girl was selling mimosas at the
corner of the street in her bare feet, her legs tanned.

A fat grey torpedo with nickel accessories
slid past silently, carrying three women in summer pyjamas and a young man with a thin,
matinee-idol moustache on their way to the beach.

It smelled of holidays. The previous
evening Cannes harbour, with the setting sun, had also had that smell of holidays,
especially the
Ardena
, whose owner swaggered in front of two girls with
gorgeous figures.

Maigret was dressed in black, as was his
wont in Paris. He had his bowler hat with him, which didn't belong here.

A notice in blue letters right in front of
him announced:

And the ice cube melted slowly in the
opal-coloured glass.

Holidays! Watching the silken seabed,
leaning over
the side of a boat painted green or orange … Having
a nap under a stone pine, listening to the buzzing of large flies …

Above all, not worrying about some man
whom he didn't know who happened to get stabbed in the back!

Or about those women whom Maigret
didn't even know before yesterday evening and whose faces haunted him, as if he
had been the one who slept with them!

A terrible job! The air smelled of melting
bitumen, Boutigues had pinned a fresh red carnation to the lapel of his light-grey
jacket.

William Brown? … He was buried
… What else did he want? … Was it anything to do with Maigret? … Was
it he who once owned one of the biggest yachts in Europe? … Was it he who had
shacked up with the two Martini women, the mother with the plastered face and the
daughter with the callipygian figure? … Was it he who had immersed himself
blissfully in the crapulous laziness of the Liberty Bar? … There were small warm
puffs of wind that stroked your cheeks … The people walking past were on holiday
… Everyone was on holiday here! … Life was one long holiday!

Even Boutigues, who was unable to be
silent and who muttered:

‘Deep down, I'm happy that
they didn't want me to take responsibility for …'

Now Maigret stopped peering at the world
through his lashes. He turned to his companion, his face somewhat flushed by the heat
and by somnolence. His pupils seemed
a little confused, but after a few
seconds took on their usual sharpness.

‘That's right!' he said
as he stood up. ‘Waiter! How much is that?'

‘Allow me.'

‘No, I insist.'

He tossed a few notes on to the table.

Yes, it was an hour he would remember
well, because he was tempted simply not to bother, to let everything go, like everyone
else, to take things as they came.

And the weather was glorious!

‘Are you off? … Have you got
something in mind?'

No! His head was too full of sun, of
languor. He didn't have the slightest thing in mind. And, as he didn't want
to lie, he murmured:

‘William Brown was
murdered!'

And he thought to himself:

‘And none of them could give a
damn!'

None of these people basking in the sun
like lizards, who would be spending the evening at the Golden Rain Gala.

‘I'm off to work!' he
said.

He shook Boutigues' hand. He walked
off. He stopped as a 300,000-franc car drove past with a slip of an eighteen-year-old
girl at the wheel; she looked straight ahead and frowned.

‘Brown was murdered …'
he continued to repeat.

He was learning not to underestimate the
South. He turned his back on the Café Glacier. And, in order not to lapse into
temptation again, he started to dictate to himself, as if to a subordinate:

‘Find out what
Brown was doing on Friday afternoon between two and five.'

So he would have to go to Cannes! On the
bus!

And he stood waiting, his hands in his
pockets, pipe between his teeth, a grumpy look on his face, beneath a streetlamp.

For the next few hours, Maigret devoted
himself to some dreary legwork of the sort he normally delegated to junior officers. But
he felt the need to move, to give himself the illusion of decisive action.

In Vice they knew about Sylvie – she was
on their books.

‘I've never had any problems
with her,' said the sergeant who was in charge of her neighbourhood.
‘She's a quiet one. Has a check-up pretty regularly …'

‘And the Liberty Bar?'

‘You've heard about it? A
strange joint. It's intrigued us for a while, and indeed intrigues a lot of other
people. Almost every month we get an anonymous tip-off about it. At first we suspected
Big Jaja of selling narcotics. We put her under surveillance, and I can vouch for the
fact it isn't true … Others made out that the back room was used as a
meeting place for people with certain proclivities …'

‘I know that's not
true!' said Maigret.

‘Yes … The truth is even odder
… Jaja attracts these old types who don't want anything out of life except
to get drunk in her company. Besides, she has a small pension, as her husband died in an
accident …'

‘I know!'

In another department, Maigret got some
information on Joseph.

‘We're
keeping an eye on him, because he's a regular at the racetrack, but we've
never made anything stick.'

Maigret was drawing a blank right across
the board. He started to walk around town with his hands in his pockets and that
stubborn look that usually expressed that he was in a bad mood.

He began by visiting the luxury hotels,
where he checked the registers. In between, he had lunch at a restaurant next to the
station, and by three in the afternoon he knew that Harry Brown had not slept in Cannes
on either the Tuesday or the Wednesday night.

It was pathetic. Doing something for the
sake of doing something!

‘Brown Junior might have come from
Marseille by car and might have left the same day …'

Maigret went back to Vice, where he picked
up the photo of Sylvie they had on file. He already had the picture of William Brown in
his pocket, which he had taken from the villa.

And he entered a new milieu: the small
hotels, especially those around the harbour, which rented out rooms not just by the
night but also by the hour.

The landlords realized straight away that
he was from the police. They were the sort of people who feared that more than
anything.

‘Wait here. I'll ask the
chambermaid …'

And the inspector discovered a whole
decadent underworld in those dark corridors.

‘The big fellow? … No, I
don't recall seeing him here …'

Maigret showed William
Brown's photo first, followed by that of Sylvie.

Almost everyone knew her.

‘She came here … But it was a
long time ago …'

‘At night?'

‘Oh no! When she came with someone
it was always a “short stay” …'

Hôtel Bellevue … Hôtel du Port
… Hôtel Bristol … Hôtel d'Auvergne …

Then there were others, mostly in the
sidestreets, mostly very discreet, showing no sign of their existence to passers-by
other than marbled nameplates alongside open corridors saying: ‘Running water.
Reasonable prices'.

Sometimes Maigret went more upmarket,
found a carpet on the stairs … Other times he came across a furtive couple in the
corridor who turned their heads away …

And on the way out he would see the
harbour, where a number of international-class six-metre racing yachts were drawn up on
the beach.

Some sailors were painting them carefully,
watched by groups of curious onlookers.

‘No dramas,' they had said in
Paris.

Well, if it went on like this, they would
be satisfied. There would be no drama at all for the simple reason that Maigret would
find nothing!

He smoked pipe after pipe, filling one
before the other was even extinguished, for he always carried two or three in his
pockets.

And he took a real dislike to the place,
because a woman was bothering him to buy some shellfish and a small boy
ran up to him, barefoot, and jumped in front of his feet, then burst out laughing as
he looked at him.

‘Do you know this man?'

He was showing William Brown's photo
for the twentieth time.

‘He never came here.'

‘Or this woman?'

‘Sylvie? … She's
upstairs …'

‘Alone?'

The landlord shrugged his shoulders,
called upstairs: