The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien (15 page)

‘He was a widower. He used to go
off to work in the morning at six o'clock, just when I was getting home. Well,
he took to setting out earlier so he wouldn't run into me, because my big
speeches frightened him. And he would leave me little notes on the table:
There's some cold meat in the cupboard. Father
 …'

Lombard's
voice broke for a moment. He looked over at Belloir, who was sitting on the edge of
a staved-in chair, staring at the floor, and then at Van Damme, who was shredding a
cigar to bits.

‘There were seven of us,'
said Lombard dully. ‘Seven supermen! Seven geniuses! Seven kids!

‘Janin's still sculpting,
off in Paris – or rather, he makes shop-window mannequins for a big factory. Now and
then he works off his frustration by doing something from a real model, his mistress
of the moment … Belloir's in banking, Van Damme's in business,
I'm a photoengraver …'

The fear in that silent room was now
palpable. Lombard swallowed hard but went on, and his eyes seemed to sink even
deeper into their dark sockets.

‘Klein hanged himself at the
church door … Lecocq d'Arneville shot himself in the mouth in
Bremen …'

Another silence. This time, unable to
sit still, Belloir stood up, hesitated, then went to stand by the bay window. A
strange noise seemed to be rumbling in his chest.

‘And the last one?' inquired
Maigret. ‘Mortier, I believe? The tripe dealer's son.'

Lombard now stared at him so frantically
that the inspector thought he might have another fit. Van Damme somehow knocked over
a chair.

‘It was in December, wasn't
it?'

As he was speaking, Maigret kept a close
eye on the three men.

‘In a month it will have been ten
years. The statute of limitations will come into effect.'

He went first to pick up Van
Damme's automatic, then collected the revolver Lombard had thrown away after
he arrived.

Maigret had seen
it coming: Lombard was breaking down, holding his head in his hands and wailing,
‘My children! My three little ones!'

And with renewed hysteria, unashamed to
show the tears streaming down his face, he yelled, ‘It's because of you,
you, only because of you, that I haven't even seen my newborn child, my little
girl! I couldn't even say what she looks like … 
Do you
understand?
'

There must have been a passing shower,
some swift low-lying clouds, because all the sunshine glinting off objects in the
room vanished in an instant. As if a switch had been flicked, the light turned
uniformly grey, while the clutter took on a glum look.

Maigret understood why those who'd
gathered there had felt the need to doctor the light with a lantern of many colours,
set their stage with mysterious shadows and muddle the atmosphere with drink and
tobacco smoke.

And he could imagine how Klein would
awaken in the morning after those sad orgies to find himself surrounded by empty
bottles, broken glasses and rancid odours, all bathed in the murk from the bay
window, which had no curtains.

Jef Lombard was too upset to go on, and
it was Maurice Belloir who took up the story.

Everything shifted, as if they'd
moved to a different register. Lombard had been shaken to his very core, his emotion
expressed through wrenching sobs, shrill, wheezing catches in his voice, nervous
pacing and periods of alternating agitation and calm that could have been plotted on
a medical chart, while Belloir's entire person – his voice, his gaze, his
every move – was under such taut control that it was painful to see, for it clearly
demanded a gruelling effort of will and concentration.

This man could
never have cried, or even tried to smile: he held himself completely still.

‘May I take over, inspector? It
will be dark soon and we'll have no light here.'

It was not Belloir's fault that
he'd brought up a practical detail, and it wasn't from lack of feeling,
for it was actually his own way of showing how he felt.

‘I believe that we were all
sincere in our arguments and endless discussions, and when we were dreaming out
loud. But there were different degrees of sincerity involved.

‘Jef has mentioned this. On the
one hand, there were the wealthy ones, who went home afterwards to recover their
balance in a stable environment: Van Damme, Willy Mortier and I. And even Janin, who
had everything he needed.

‘Willy Mortier was in a class by
himself, however. A case in point: he was the only one who chose his mistresses from
among professional nightclub singers and the dancers in second-rate theatres. He
paid them.

‘He was a practical, unsentimental
person, like his father, who arrived in Liège with empty pockets, matter-of-factly
chose the sausage-casing business – and made a fortune.

‘Willy received a monthly
allowance of 500 francs, which seemed a fabulous sum to the rest of us. He never set
foot inside the university, paid poorer students to take notes for him in lectures
and “arranged” to pass his exams through favours and bribes.

‘He came here simply out of
curiosity, because he never shared our tastes or ideas. Look at his father:
he'd buy paintings from artists even though he despised them, and
he “bought” city councilmen
and even aldermen as well, to get what he wanted. He despised them, too.

‘Well, Willy despised us in the
same way. He was a rich boy who came here to see just how different he was from the
rest of us.

‘He didn't drink. And those
who got drunk here disgusted him. During our epic discussions, he'd say only a
few words, but they were like ice water, the kind of words that hurt because
they're too blunt, because they ruined the fake poetic atmosphere we'd
managed to create.

‘He hated us! And we hated him! On
top of everything else, he was stingy – and cynical about it. Klein didn't
always get something to eat every day, so one or the other of us would help him out
now and then. Mortier? He'd announce, “I don't want any
difficulties about money to come between us. I don't want to be welcomed
simply because I'm well off.”

‘And he'd cough up
exactly
his share when we were all turning our pockets inside out to
buy something to drink.

‘It was Lecocq d'Arneville
who used to take lecture notes for him, and I once overheard Willy refuse to give
him an advance on his payment.

‘He was the alien, hostile element
that crops up almost every time when men get together. We put up with him. Klein,
though, when he was drunk, used to attack him savagely, really let everything that
bothered him come pouring out. Mortier would go a bit pale bur he'd just
listen, with a faint sneer …

‘I mentioned various kinds of
sincerity. Klein and Lecocq d'Arneville were definitely the most forthright,
unpretentious members of our group. They were close,
like brothers. They'd both had difficult
childhoods, with their mothers watching every sou … Both these fellows
were desperate to better themselves and agonized over anything that stood in their
way.

‘Klein had to work during the day
as a house painter to pay for his evening classes at the Académie, and he did tell
us that it made him dizzy when he had to climb a ladder. Lecocq took lecture notes
for others, gave French lessons to foreign students; he often came here to eat. The
stove must still be around here somewhere …'

It was lying on the floor near the
divan, where Lombard gave it a gloomy kick.

Not one hair was out of place on
Maurice Belloir's sleek head, and his voice was flat, stripped down.

‘Since those days, I've
heard people in the middle-class drawing rooms of Rheims ask jokingly, “In
such-and-such a situation, would you be able to kill someone?” Sometimes
it's the mandarin question, you know the one:
If all you had to do was
push a button to kill a wealthy mandarin way off in China to inherit his riches,
would you do it?

‘We took up the weirdest ideas
here and talked for nights on end, so we inevitably came around to the enigma of
life and death …

‘It was almost Christmas; it had
been snowing. A short item in a newspaper started us off. We always had to challenge
the status quo, right? So we went all out on this idea: mankind is just a patch of
mould on the earth's crust. So human life and death don't matter, pity
is only a sickness, big animals eat the little ones, and we eat the big ones.

‘Lombard told you about the pocket
knife: stabbing himself to prove that pain didn't exist!

‘Well,
that night, shortly before Christmas, with three or four empty bottles lying around
on the floor, we seriously debated the idea of killing someone. After all,
weren't we off in the realm of pure theory, where anything goes? All
bright-eyed, we kept quizzing one another with shivers of guilty excitement.

‘“Would
you
be
brave enough?”

‘“Why not? If life is
nothing, just some accident, a blemish on the face of the
earth … ”

‘“A stranger, passing in the
street?”

‘And Klein – so pale, with those
dark rings under his eyes – he'd drunk the most. And he yelled,
“Yes!”

‘We were afraid to take another
step: it felt like being at the edge of a cliff. We were dicing with danger, joking
around with this murder we'd conjured up, and now that murder seemed to be
stalking
us
 …

‘Someone who'd been an altar
boy – I think it was Van Damme – started singing the
Libera nos
, which the
priest chants over a coffin, and we all took up the chorus, playing this ghoulish
game with real relish.

‘But we didn't kill anyone
that night! At four a.m. I went over the garden wall to sneak home. By eight I was
having coffee with my family. The whole thing was only a memory, you understand?
Like remembering being scared watching a play in a theatre.

‘But Klein stayed here, at Rue du
Pot-au-Noir, where all those ideas kept seething in his sickly, swollen head. They
were eating him alive. We could tell what was worrying him from the questions he
kept popping at us over the next few days.

‘“Do you really think
it's hard to kill someone?”

‘We weren't drunk any more
but we didn't want to
back down,
so we blustered, we said, “Of course it isn't!”

‘Maybe we were even getting a
thrill out of his childish excitement, but get this straight: we had no intention of
causing a tragedy! We were still seeing how far we could go …

‘When there's a fire,
onlookers can't help wanting it to last, to be a
spectacular
fire,
and when the river is rising, newspaper readers hope for
major
flooding
they can talk about for the next twenty years.
They want
something interesting, and it doesn't matter what!

‘Christmas Eve arrived. Everybody
brought some bottles. We drank, we sang, and Klein, already half-soused, kept
pulling one after another of us aside.

‘“Do you think I'd be
able to kill someone?”

‘We weren't worried about
it. By midnight no one was sober. We talked about going out for more bottles.

‘That's when Willy Mortier
showed up, in a dinner jacket, with a broad white shirt front that seemed to soak up
all the light. His face was rosy, he was wearing scent, and he announced that
he'd just come from a fancy society reception.

‘“Go and get some
booze!” Klein yelled at him.

‘“You're drunk, chum!
I just came along to pay my respects.”

‘“No, to look down your nose
at us!”

‘There still wasn't any
reason to suspect that something might happen, although Klein's face was more
frightening than it had ever been during his other drunken spells. He was so small,
so thin next to the other man … His hair was a mess, his forehead was all
sweaty, and he'd yanked his tie off.

‘“Klein,” said Willy, “you're stinking
drunk!”

‘“So what! This stinking
drunk's telling you to go and get some booze!”

‘I think that scared Willy.
He'd begun to sense that this was no laughing matter, but he still tried to
bluff his way out … His black hair had been curled and perfumed …

‘“You fellows don't
seem to be having much fun here,” he told us. “It was livelier back with
the stuffed shirts I just left!”

‘“Go and get some
booze …”

‘Now Klein was circling him,
staring at him, all wound up. A few of us were off in a corner, talking about some
Kantian theory or other. Someone else was weeping and swearing that he wasn't
fit to live.