The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien (11 page)

‘Madame Lombard is doing
well?'

Jef Lombard darted a glance all around,
as if seeking something to cling to, then stared at the stove and stammered,
‘Very well … Thank you.'

By the wall clock behind the counter,
Maigret counted five whole minutes without anyone saying a word.

Van Damme, who had let his cigar go out,
was the only man who allowed his face to burn with undisguised hatred.

Lombard was the most interesting one to
observe. Everything that had happened that day had surely rubbed his nerves raw, and
even the tiniest muscle in his face was twitching.

The four men were sitting in an absolute
oasis of silence in a café where everyone else was loudly chattering away.

‘And
belote
again!' crowed a card player on the right.

‘High
tierce
,' said
a fellow cautiously on the left. ‘We're all agreed on that?'

‘Three beers! Three!'
shouted the waiter.

The whole café was a beehive of noise
and activity except for that one table of four, around which an invisible wall
seemed to be growing.

Lombard was the one who broke the spell.
He'd been chewing on his lower lip when suddenly he leaped to his feet and
gasped, ‘The hell with it!'

After glancing briefly but piercingly at
his companions, he grabbed his hat and coat and, flinging the door violently open,
left the café.

‘I bet he bursts into tears as
soon as he gets off on his own,' said Maigret thoughtfully.

He'd sensed it, that sob of rage
and despair swelling inside the man's throat until his Adam's apple
quivered.

Turning to Van Damme, who was staring at
the marble tabletop, Maigret tossed down half his beer and wiped his lips with the
back of his hand.

The atmosphere was the same – but ten
times more concentrated – as in the house in Rheims, where the inspector had first
imposed himself on these three people. And the man's imposing bulk itself
helped make his stubborn presence all the more menacing.

Maigret was tall and wide, particularly
broad-shouldered, solidly built, and his run-of-the-mill clothes emphasized his
peasant stockiness. His features were coarse, and his eyes could seem as still and
dull as a cow's. In this he resembled certain figures out of children's
nightmares, those monstrously big blank-faced creatures that bear down upon sleepers
as if to crush them. There was
something
implacable and inhuman about him that suggested a pachyderm plodding inexorably
towards its goal.

He drank his beer, smoked his pipe,
watched with satisfaction as the minute hand of the café clock snapped onwards with
a metallic click. On a livid clock face!

He seemed to be ignoring everyone and
yet he kept an eye on the slightest signs of life to either side.

This was one of the most extraordinary
hours of his career. For this stand-off lasted almost one hour: exactly fifty-two
minutes! A war of nerves.

Although Jef Lombard had been
hors
de combat
practically from the outset, the other two men were hanging
on.

Maigret sat between them like a judge,
but one who made no accusations and whose thoughts could not be divined. What did he
know? Why had he come? What was he waiting for? A word, a gesture that would
corroborate his suspicions? Had he already found out the whole truth – or was his
confident manner simply a bluff?

And what could anyone say? More musings
on coincidence and chance encounters?

Silence reigned. They waited even
without any idea of what they were waiting for. They were waiting for something, and
nothing was happening!

With each passing minute, the hand on
the clock quivered as the mechanism within creaked faintly. At first no one had paid
any attention. Now, the sound was incredibly loud – and the event had even separated
into three stages: an initial click; the minute hand beginning to move; then another
click, as if to slide the hand into its new slot. And as an obtuse angle slowly
became an acute angle, the clock face changed: the two hands would eventually
meet.

The waiter kept looking over at this
gloomy table in
astonishment. Every once
in a while, Maurice Belloir would swallow – and Maigret would know this without even
looking. He could hear him live, breathe, wince, carefully shift his feet a little
now and again, as if he were in church.

Not too many customers were left. The
red cloths and playing cards were vanishing from the pale marble tabletops. The
waiter stepped outside to close the shutters, while the
patronne
sorted the
chips into little piles, according to their value.

‘You're staying?'
Belloir finally asked, in an almost unrecognizable voice.

‘And you?'

‘I'm … not
sure.'

Then Van Damme tapped the table sharply
with a coin and called to the waiter, ‘How much?'

‘For the round? Nine francs
seventy-five.'

The three of them were standing now,
avoiding one another's eyes, and the waiter helped each of them in turn into
his overcoat.

‘Goodnight, gentlemen.'

It was so foggy outside that the
streetlamps were almost lost in the mist. All the shutters were closed. Somewhere in
the distance, footsteps echoed along the pavement.

There was a moment's hesitation,
for none of the men wanted to take responsibility for deciding in which direction
they would go. Behind them, someone was locking the doors of the café and setting
the security bars in place.

Off to the left lay an alley of
crookedly aligned old houses.

‘Well, gentlemen,' announced
Maigret at last, ‘the time has come to wish you goodnight.'

He shook
Belloir's hand first; it was cold, trembling. The hand Van Damme grudgingly
extended was clammy and soft.

The inspector turned up the collar of
his overcoat, cleared his throat and began walking alone down the deserted street.
And all his senses were attuned to a single purpose: to perceive the faintest noise,
the slightest ruffle in the air that might warn him of any danger.

His right hand gripped the butt of the
revolver in his pocket. He had the impression that in the network of alleys laid out
on his left, enclosed within the centre of Liège like a small island of lepers,
people were trying to hurry along without making a sound.

He could just make out a low murmur of
conversation but couldn't tell whether it was very near or far away, because
the fog was muffling his senses.

Abruptly, he pitched to one side and
flattened himself against a door just as a sharp report rang out – and someone, off
in the night, took to his heels.

Advancing a few steps, Maigret peered
down the alley from which the shot had come but saw only some dark blotches that
probably led into blind side alleys and, at the far end 200 metres away, the
frosted-glass globe announcing a shop selling
pommes frites
.

A few moments later, as he was walking
past that shop, a girl emerged from it with a paper cone of golden
frites
.
After propositioning him for form's sake, she headed off to a brighter
street.

Grinding the pen-nib down on to the
paper with his enormous index finger, Maigret was peacefully writing, pausing from
time to time to tamp down the hot ashes in his pipe.

He was ensconced
in his room in the Hôtel du Chemin de Fer and according to the illuminated station
clock, which he could see from his window, it was two in the morning.

Dear old Lucas,

As one never knows what may
happen, I'm sending you the following information so that, if necessary,
you will be able to carry on the inquiry I have begun.

1. Last week, in Brussels, a
shabbily dressed man who looks like a tramp wraps up thirty thousand-franc notes
and sends the package to his own address, Rue de la Roquette, in Paris. The
evidence will show that he often sent himself similar sums but that
he did
not make any use of the money himself.
The proof is that charred
remains of large amounts of banknotes burned on purpose have been found in his
room.

He goes by the name of Louis
Jeunet and is more or less regularly employed by a workshop on his street.

He is married (contact Mme
Jeunet, herbalist, Rue Picpus) and has a child. After some acute episodes of
alcoholism, however, he leaves his wife and child under mysterious and troubling
circumstances.

In Brussels, after posting the
money, he buys a suitcase in which to transport some things he's been
keeping in a hotel room. While he is on his way to Bremen, I replace his
suitcase with another.

Then Jeunet,
who does not
appear to have been contemplating suicide and who has already bought
something for his supper
, kills himself upon realizing that the
contents of his suitcase have been stolen.

The stolen property is an old
suit that does not belong
to him and
which, years earlier, had been torn as if in a struggle and drenched with blood.
This suit
was made in Liège.

In Bremen, a man comes to view
the corpse: Joseph Van Damme, an import-export commission agent,
born in
Liège.

In Paris, I learn that Louis
Jeunet is in reality Jean Lecocq d'Arneville,
born in Liège
,
where he studied to graduate level. He disappeared from Liège about ten years
ago and no one there has had any news of him, but he has no black marks against
his name.

2. In Rheims, before he leaves
for Brussels, Jean Lecocq d'Arneville is observed one night entering the
home of Maurice Belloir, deputy director of a local bank and
born in
Liège
, who denies this allegation.

But the thirty thousand francs sent from Brussels were supplied by this same
Belloir.

At Belloir's house I
encounter: Van Damme, who has flown in from Bremen; Jef Lombard, a photoengraver
in Liège
; and Gaston Janin, who was also born
in that
city.

As I am travelling back to Paris
with Van Damme, he tries to push me into the Marne.

And I find him again
in
Liège
, in the home of Jef Lombard, who was an active painter around ten
years ago and has covered the walls of his home with works from that period
depicting hanged men.

When I consult the local
newspaper archives, I find that all the papers of 15 February in the year of the
hanged men have been stolen by Van Damme.

That evening, an unsigned letter
promises to tell me everything and gives me an appointment in a local café.
There I find not one man, but three: Belloir (in from Rheims), Van Damme and Jef
Lombard.

They are
not pleased to see me. I have the feeling that it's one of these men who
has decided to talk; the others seem to be there simply to prevent this.

Lombard cracks under the strain
and leaves abruptly. I stay with the other two men. Shortly past midnight, I
take leave of them outside, in the fog, and a few moments later a shot is fired
at me.

I conclude both that one of the
three tried to talk to me and that one of the same three tried to eliminate
me.

And clearly, given that this
last action amounts to a confession,
the person in question has no recourse
but to try again and not miss me
.

But who is it? Belloir, Van
Damme, Lombard?

I'll find out when he
tries again. Since accidents do happen, I'm sending you these notes on the
off chance, so that you will be familiar with the inquiry from the very
beginning.

To see the human side of this
case, look in particular at Mme Jeunet and Armand Lecocq d'Arneville, the
dead man's brother.

And now I'm going to bed.
Give my best to everybody back there.

Maigret

The fog had faded away, leaving beads of
pearly hoarfrost on the trees and every blade of grass in Square d'Avroy. A
chilly sun gleamed in the pale-blue sky as Maigret crossed the square, and with each
passing minute the melting frost fell in limpid drops to the gravel.

It was eight in the morning when the
inspector strode through the still-deserted Carré, where the folded sandwich boards
of film posters stood propped against closed shutters.

When Maigret stopped at a mailbox to
post his letter
to Sergeant Lucas, he took
a moment to look around him and felt a pang at the thought that somewhere in the
city, in those streets bathed in sunlight, a man was at that very moment thinking
about him, a man whose salvation depended upon killing him. And the man had the
home-ground advantage over the inspector, as he had proved the night before by
vanishing into the maze of alleys.

He knew Maigret, too, and was perhaps
even watching him where he stood, whereas the inspector did not know who he was.

Could he be Jef Lombard? Did the danger
lie in the ramshackle house in Rue Hors-Château, where a woman and her newborn lay
sleeping upstairs, watched over by her loving old mother, while her husband's
employees worked nonchalantly among the acid baths, hustled along by bicycle
messengers from the newspapers?

Joseph Van Damme, a bold, moody and
aggressive man, always scheming: was he not lying in wait for the inspector in a
place
where he knew Maigret would eventually appear
?

Because that fellow had foreseen
everything ever since Bremen! Three lines in a German newspaper – and he showed up
at the morgue! He had lunch with Maigret and then beat him to Rheims!

And beat him again to Rue Hors-Château!
Beat the investigator to the newspaper archives!

He was even at the Café de la Bourse!

True, there was nothing to prove that he
was the one who had decided to talk to Maigret. But there was nothing to prove that
he wasn't!