My Friend Maigret (15 page)

“Certainly not that piece of creeping sickness.”

“Would you leave the house at Nice?”

“Without a moment's hesitation, I assure you.”

“What would you do?”

“I'd go and live in the country, anywhere. I'd keep chickens and rabbits.”

“What did Marcellin say to you on the telephone?”

“You'll say I'm lying again.”

He stared at her for a long while, and then said quietly:

“Not anymore.”

“Good! It's not a moment too soon. He said he had accidentally discovered an extraordinary thing. Those are the words he used. He added that it could mean big money, but he wasn't yet sure.”

“Did he make any reference to anyone?”

“No. I have never known him to be so mysterious. He needed some information. He asked if we had a big
Larousse
, the one in I don't know how many volumes, in the house. I said we didn't keep one. Then he insisted on my going to the town library to look it up.”

“What did he want to know?”

“It's just too bad, isn't it? Now you've got so far, I haven't a chance of course.”

“None at all.”

“Even though I didn't understand a thing about it. I thought I'd get some idea when I reached here.”

“Who died in 1890?”

“You've seen my telegram? Didn't he destroy it?”

“The post office, as usual, kept a copy.”

“A certain van Gogh, a painter. I read that he committed suicide. He was very poor and today people fight over his pictures, which are worth I don't know what. I wondered if Marcel had got hold of one.”

“And it wasn't that?”

“I don't think so. When he telephoned me he didn't even know the gentleman concerned was dead.”

“What did you think?”

“I don't know, I promise. Only I told myself that if Marcel could make money with this information, it was possible that I could do so too. Especially when I learned that he had been killed. People don't kill for fun. He had no enemies. There was nothing to steal from him. You understand?”

“You assume the crime has a connection with the van Gogh in question?”

Maigret spoke without a trace of irony. He took small puffs at his pipe and gazed out of the window.

“No doubt you were right.”

“Too late, since you're here and it's no more use to me. Is there any further reason to keep me on the island? You see it's a holiday for me here, and as long as you keep me here, the old cat can't say anything.”

“In that case, stay.”

“Thank you. You are becoming almost like you were when I knew you in Paris.”

He didn't trouble to return the compliment.

“You have a rest.”

He went downstairs, passed near to Charlot who surveyed him with a bantering eye, and went and sat beside Lechat, on the terrace.

It was the most luscious hour of the day. The whole island was relaxed, and the sea around it, the rocks, the ground of the square, which seemed to breathe to another rhythm after the heat of the daytime.

“Have you found out anything, chief?”

Maigret's first thought was to order a drink from Jojo, who was passing nearby and who looked as if she were cross with him for having closeted himself with Ginette in the bedroom.

“I'm afraid so,” he sighed finally.

And, as the inspector was looking at him in surprise:

“I mean that I shall probably not have much longer to stay here. It's a good place, don't you think? On the other hand, there's Mr. Pyke.”

Wasn't a quick success better, on account of Mr. Pyke, and what he would say at Scotland Yard?

“There's a call from Paris for you, Monsieur Maigret.”

It was probably the information from Ostend.

Sunday lay so heavily in the air as to become almost nauseating. Maigret used to claim openly, half seriously, half in fun, that he had always had the knack of sensing a Sunday from his bed, without even having to open his eyes.

Here there was an unprecedented noise of bells. They were not proper church bells, but small, high-pitched ones, like chapel or convent bells. One was led to the belief that the quality, the density of the air was not the same as elsewhere. One could distinctly hear the hammer striking the bronze, which gave out some sort of a note, but it was then that the phenomenon would begin: a first ring would carry into the pale and still cool sky, would extend hesitantly, like a smoke ring, becoming a perfect circle out of which other circles would form by magic, ever increasing, ever purer. The circles passed beyond the square and the houses, stretched over the harbor and a long way out to sea where small boats were anchored. One felt them above the hills and rocks, and they hadn't ceased to be perceptible before the hammer struck the metal once more and other circles of sound were born so as to reproduce themselves, then others, which one listened to in innocent amazement, as one watches a firework.

Even the simple sound of footsteps on the rough surface of the square had something paschal about it, and Maigret, glancing out of the window, was expecting to see first communicants with their small legs becoming caught up in their veils.

As on the previous day he put on his slippers and trousers, and slipped his jacket over his nightshirt with the red embroidered collar, went downstairs and, going into the kitchen, was thoroughly disappointed. Subconsciously he had been hoping to repeat the previous early morning, to find himself beside the stove again with Jojo preparing the coffee, and the clear rectangle of the door open to the outside. But today there were four or five fishermen there. They must have been given some liquor, which was strongly pervading the air. On the floor of the room a basket of fish had been upset: pink hogfish, blue and green fish of which Maigret didn't know the name, a sort of sea serpent with red and yellow blotches, which was still alive and coiling itself round the foot of a chair.

“Do you want a cup of coffee, Monsieur Maigret?”

It wasn't Jojo who served him but the
patron
. Perhaps because it was Sunday. Maigret felt like a thwarted child.

 

It sometimes happened to him, especially in the morning, especially when he approached the mirror to shave. He would look at the broad face, the huge eyes often underlined with pouches, the thinning hair. He would become stern, deliberately, as though to frighten himself. He would tell himself:

“That's the divisional chief inspector!”

Who would have dared not to take him seriously? Heaps of people, who did not have easy consciences, trembled at the mention of his name. He had the power to question them until they cried out with anguish, to put them in prison, send them to the guillotine.

In this very island, there was now someone who, like himself, heard the sound of the bells, who breathed the Sabbath air, someone who was drinking in the same room as himself the previous evening and who, in a few days, would be shut up once and for all within four walls.

He swallowed down his cup of coffee, poured himself out another, which he carried up to his room, and he had some difficulty in realizing that all this could be serious: it was not so very long ago that he was wearing short trousers and walking across his village square, on chilly mornings, his fingertips numb with cold, to go and serve Mass in the small church lit only by wax candles.

Now he was a grown-up: everyone believed what he said, and there was only himself whom, from time to time, it was hard to convince.

Did other people have the same experience? Did Mr. Pyke, for example, sometimes wonder how other people could take him seriously? Did he, be it ever so rarely, have the impression that it was all a game, that life was just a joke?

Was the major anything more than an overgrown schoolboy, like the ones there are in every class, one of those fat and sleepy boys whom the master cannot resist making fun of?

Mr. Pyke had said a terrible thing the previous evening, shortly before the Polyte episode. It was downstairs, at the moment when, as on the evening before and every other evening, almost everybody was gathered at the Arche. Naturally, the Yard inspector had sat at the major's table, and at that moment, despite the difference in age and rotundity, they had a sort of family resemblance.

They must have been drinking, late in the afternoon, when Mr. Pyke had been to see his fellow countryman at the villa. Enough to have a dulled eye and thick tongue, but too little to lose their dignity. Not only had they been taught the same manners at school, but later, heaven knows where, they had learned to hold liquor in the same way.

They were not sad, but nostalgic rather, a little faraway. They gave the impression of being two gods gazing down on the agitation of the world with a condescending melancholy, and, just as Maigret sat down next to him, Mr. Pyke had sighed:

“
She's been a grandmother since last week
.”

He did not look at the person in question, whose name he always avoided mentioning, but it could only be Mrs. Wilcox. She was there, on the far side of the room, sitting on the bench in Philippe's company. The Dutchman and Anna were at the next table.

Mr. Pyke had allowed a certain time to elapse, then had added in the same neutral voice:

“Her daughter and son-in-law don't allow her to set foot in England. The major knows them extremely well.”

Poor old woman! For all of a sudden, Mrs. Wilcox was revealed as really an old woman. One stopped laughing at her makeup, her dyed hair—with the white roots visible—and her artificial animation.

She was a grandmother, and Maigret remembered that he had conjured up his own in his thoughts; he had tried to imagine his reactions as a child if he had been shown a woman like Mrs. Wilcox and told:

“Go and kiss your granny!”

She was forbidden to live in her own country and she made no protest. She knew perfectly well that she wouldn't have the last word, that it was she who was in the wrong. Like drunkards, who are given a bare minimum of pocket money, and who try to cheat, and cadge a drink here and there.

Did she, like drunks too, sometimes become emotional over her misfortunes, weep in a corner by herself?

Perhaps when she had had a lot to drink? For she used to drink as well. Her Philippe saw to the filling of her glass whenever the need arose, while Anna, on the same bench, was only thinking of one thing: the moment when she could finally go off to bed.

 

Maigret was shaving. He hadn't been able to get into the only bathroom, which Ginette was occupying.

“In five minutes!” she had called out to him through the door.

 

From time to time he glanced out on to the square, which was not the same color as on other days, even now that the bells had ceased. The priest was in the middle of saying the first Mass. The one in his village used to rattle it off so quickly that young Maigret had scarcely time to get in the responses as he ran about with the cruets.

An odd sort of job, his! He was only a man like the others, and he held the fate of other men in his hands.

He had looked at them one by one, the evening before. He hadn't drunk much, just enough to exaggerate his feelings ever so slightly. De Greef, with his clear-cut profile, stared at him from time to time in silent irony and seemed to be challenging him. Philippe, despite his fine name and his ancestors, was of a coarser stock, and he tried hard to cut a figure each time Mrs. Wilcox ordered him about like a servant.

He must have got his revenge at other moments, granted, but he was nonetheless obliged to swallow insults in public.

The one he swallowed was fair-sized, so much so in fact that everyone felt uncomfortable about it. Poor Paul, who fortunately didn't know where the source of the trouble had been, took infinite pains afterwards to bring the party back to life.

They must be talking about it, down there. They would talk about it on the island all day. Would Polyte keep the secret? Just then it hardly mattered.

Polyte was at the counter, his captain's cap on his head, and he had already consumed a good many short drinks; he spoke so loud that his voice was drowning the various conversations. On Mrs. Wilcox's orders, Philippe had crossed the room to start up the gramophone, as often happened.

Then, with a wink at Maigret, Polyte had headed in turn toward the machine and stopped it.

Then he had turned to Moricourt and looked at him sarcastically, straight in the eye.

Philippe, without protesting, had pretended not to notice.

“I don't like people looking at me like that!” Polyte had then shouted out, advancing a few paces.

“But…I'm not even looking at you…”

“So you're too grand to look at me?”

“I didn't say that.”

“You think I don't understand?”

Mrs. Wilcox had murmured something in English to her companion. Mr. Pyke had frowned.

“I'm not good enough for you, perhaps, you little rat?”

Very red in the face, Philippe still didn't move, making an effort to look elsewhere.

“Try saying again that I'm not good enough for you.”

At the same moment de Greef had looked at Maigret, sharply, in a particularly pointed way. Had he understood? Lechat, who had understood nothing at all, had wanted to get up and interrupt, and Maigret had been obliged to seize his wrist under the table.

“What would you say if I pushed your pretty face in, eh? What would you say?”

Polyte, who judged that the ground was sufficiently prepared, then brought his fist flying over the table, at Philippe's face.

The latter put his hand up to his nose. But that was all. He didn't try to defend himself, nor to attack in his turn. He stammered:

“I've done nothing to you.”

Mrs. Wilcox was calling out, facing the bar:

“Monsieur Paul! Monsieur Paul! Will you throw this hooligan out? It's an outrage.”

Her accent gave a special flavor to the words “hooligan” and “outrage.”

“As for you…” Polyte began, turning to the Dutchman.

The reaction was different. Without leaving his place, de Greef stiffened, growled:

“That's enough, Polyte!”

One could feel that he wouldn't let himself be trifled with, that he was ready to spring, with all his muscles tensed.

Paul finally interposed.

“Calm down, Polyte. Come into the kitchen for a moment. I want a word with you.”

The captain let himself be led off, protesting for the sake of appearances.

Lechat, who still hadn't understood, had however asked, dreamily:

“Was it you, chief?”

Maigret had not replied. He had assumed as benign an air as possible when the Scotland Yard inspector had looked him in the eye.

Paul had made his apologies in the correct way. Polyte was put out of the back door and seen no more. Today he would act like a hero.

The fact remained that Philippe hadn't defended himself, that his face, for one moment, had sweated with fear, a physical fear which seizes the pit of the stomach and is not to be overcome.

After that he had drunk to excess, with a cloudy look on his face, and Mrs. Wilcox had finally taken him off.

Nothing else had happened. Charlot and his dancing girl had gone up to bed rather early, and when Maigret had in turn gone up, they were still not asleep. Ginette and Monsieur Émile had chatted in undertones. No one had offered drinks all round, perhaps on account of the incident.

“Come in, Lechat,” the chief inspector called out through the door.

The inspector was already fully dressed.

“Has Mr. Pyke gone for a swim?”

“He's downstairs, busy eating his bacon and eggs. I went down to see the
Cormorant
off.”

“Nothing to report?”

“Nothing. It seems that on Sundays lots of people come over from Hyères and Toulon, people who rush for the beaches and strew them with sardine tins and empty bottles. We'll be able to see them landing in an hour.”

The information from Ostend contained nothing unexpected. Monsieur Bebelmans, Anna's father, was an important figure, who had been mayor of the town for a long time and had once stood for Parliament. Since his daughter's departure, he had forbidden her name to be mentioned in his presence. His wife was dead, and Anna hadn't been told of it.

“It seems that everyone who has come off the rails for one reason or another has landed up here,” Maigret observed as he put on his coat.

“It's the climate that's responsible!” riposted the inspector, who was not troubled by such questions. “I went to see another revolver this morning.”

He carried out his job conscientiously. He had taken pains to find out all the revolver owners. He went to see them one after the other, examined their weapons, without too much hope, simply because that was part of the routine.