The Night at the Crossroads (14 page)

‘And Monsieur Oscar?' he added.

‘What about him?'

‘Another lover?'

‘You'll have to find all that out by yourself. Me, I know exactly what's waiting for me. I've got five years to do in Denmark: accessory to armed robbery and resisting arrest. That's when I caught this
bullet.'

And she pointed to her right breast.

‘As for the rest, this lot here will cope on their own!'

‘Where did you meet Isaac Goldberg?'

‘I've got nothing to say.'

‘You'll have to talk at some point …'

‘And just how do you think you can make me?'

She was answering while eating some rock lobster without any bread, because there was none left in the kitchen. They could hear a policeman walking up and down in the
drawing room while he kept an eye
on Michonnet, slumped in an armchair.

Two cars pulled up at the same time outside the front gate, which was opened to allow them to come up the drive and around to the front steps.

In the first car sat an inspector, two gendarmes, Monsieur Oscar and his wife.

The other car was the taxi from Paris, in which an inspector was guarding a third person.

The three prisoners were wearing handcuffs, but they kept up a good front, except for the garage owner's wife, whose eyes were red.

Maigret took Else into the drawing room, where Michonnet tried yet again to rush towards her.

The prisoners were brought inside. Monsieur Oscar behaved almost as casually as an ordinary visitor, but he did wince when he saw Else and Michonnet. The other man, who might have been an Italian, decided to brazen it out.

‘Great! A family reunion! Are we having a wedding, or reading a will?'

‘Luckily, we brought them in without any trouble,' the officer explained to Maigret. ‘On the way through Étampes, we picked up two gendarmes who had been informed of the situation and seen the car go past without being able to
stop it. Fifty kilometres from Orléans the fugitives had a flat tyre, halted in the middle of the road and trained their revolvers on us … The garage owner was the first one to think better of it – otherwise we'd have had quite a gun battle.

‘We started towards them; the Italian did fire at us twice with his Browning, but missed.'

‘Well, now,' observed Monsieur Oscar. ‘In my house, I served you a drink, so allow me to point out that it's rather parched around here …'

Maigret had had the mechanic fetched from the garage and seemed to be counting heads.

‘All of you go and line up against the wall!' he ordered. ‘At the other end, Michonnet … No use trying to get near Else.'

The little man glared at him and went to stand at the end of the line, with his drooping moustache and his eye still swelling from all those punches.

Next came the mechanic, whose wrists were still bound by the electric wire. Then the garage owner's wife, thin and woebegone, and the garage owner himself, who was much annoyed at being unable to put his hands into the pockets of his baggy
trousers. Finally, Else and the Italian, who must have been the ladies' man of the gang and had a naked woman tattooed on the back of one hand.

Maigret looked them over slowly, one by one, with a satisfied little smile, then filled his spare pipe, strode over to the front steps to open the French windows and called out, ‘Take their surnames, given names, occupations and addresses,
Lucas … Let me know when you're done.'

The six of them stood all lined up. Pointing to Else, Lucas asked, ‘Should I cuff her as well?'

‘Why not?'

At which Else responded hotly, ‘That's really rotten of you, inspector!'

The grounds were brimming with sunshine. Thousands of birds were singing. On the horizon, the weathercock of a little village church steeple was glistening as if it were solid gold.

When Maigret returned to the drawing room, where the wide-open French windows were welcoming the spring air, Lucas was wrapping up his interrogation in an atmosphere not unlike that of a barrack room.

The prisoners were still lined up against a wall, albeit in a less orderly fashion. And at least three of them were acting distinctly unimpressed by their police captors: the garage owner, his mechanic Jojo and the Italian Guido Ferrari.

Monsieur Oscar was dictating to Lucas.

‘Occupation: garage proprietor and mechanic. Add on former professional boxer, licensed in 1920. Middleweight champion of Paris in 1922 …'

Some officers brought in two new recruits: garage employees who'd just shown up as usual for work. They were placed in the lineup with the others. One of them, who had the mug of a gorilla, simply drawled, ‘That's it?
We're busted?'

They were all talking at once, like children when their teacher is out of the room. They nudged one another with their elbows and cracked jokes.

Only Michonnet still presented a sorry sight, hunched over and glowering at the floor.

As for Else, she watched Maigret almost as if he were
her accomplice. Hadn't they understood each other remarkably well? Whenever Monsieur Oscar made a bad pun, she smiled discreetly at the
inspector.

As far as she was concerned, she was a cut above all this.

‘Let's have some silence, now!' thundered Maigret.

But at that same moment, a small sedan drew up at the front steps. The driver was well dressed and carried a leather instrument case under his arm with an air of importance. He came briskly up the steps only to stare in astonishment at the row of
suspects that suddenly confronted him.

‘The patient?'

‘Would you take care of this, Lucas?'

It was an eminent surgeon from Paris, called in to attend to Carl Andersen. He went off with a worried look while the sergeant led the way.

‘D'ja catch the look on that doc's kisser?'

Only Else had frowned, and her eyes had gone a little less blue …

‘I called for silence!' said Maigret clearly. ‘Save the wisecracks for later. What you seem to be forgetting is that at least one of you looks likely to pay for this with his head.'

And he looked slowly up and down the line. His speech had produced the desired effect.

The sun was the same; there was spring in the air. The birds kept on chirping in the trees and the shade from the foliage still trembled on the gravel path.

In the drawing room, though, one felt that mouths had gone drier, that cheekiness was draining away …

Still, Michonnet was the only one who moaned, and so
unwittingly that he was himself the most surprised of all and turned his head aside, embarrassed.

‘I can see you've understood!' continued Maigret, beginning to pace the room with his hands behind his back. ‘We'll try to save time. If we're unsuccessful here, we'll keep going at Quai des
Orfèvres … You must know the place, right? Good! … First crime: Isaac Goldberg is shot at point-blank range. Who brought Goldberg to the Three Widows Crossroads?'

They were silent, all looking at one another with no love lost, while over their heads the surgeon could be heard moving around.

‘I'm waiting! I repeat: we'll continue this at police headquarters – and there, you'll be grilled one by one … Goldberg was in Antwerp. There was about two million in diamonds to unload … Who got the
ball rolling?'

‘I did!' said Else. ‘I'd met Goldberg in Copenhagen. I knew stolen jewels were his specialty. When I read about the burglary in London and the papers said the diamonds had to be in Antwerp, I assumed Goldberg was in on it.
I talked to Oscar about it …'

‘Thanks a lot!' muttered the garage owner.

‘Who wrote the letter to Goldberg?'

‘She did.'

‘Let's keep going … He arrives during the night. Who's at the garage at that point? … And most importantly, whose job is it to kill him?'

Silence. The sound of Lucas coming downstairs to speak to an officer.

‘Hop it to Arpajon,' he told the officer, ‘and bring back
the first doctor you can find to help the professor, along with some camphorated oil. Got that?'

Lucas headed back upstairs while Maigret, his brow furrowed, studied his flock.

‘We'll jump back a little in time … I think that will be simpler. You: when did you become a fence?'

He was looking hard at the garage owner, who seemed to find this question less prickly than the previous ones.

‘That's it! Now you're talking! You admit yourself that I'm nothing but a fence. And maybe not even that …'

He was an incredible ham. He looked from one to another of the others, trying to make them smile.

‘My wife and I, we're practically honest folks. Right, honey? … It's quite simple: I was a boxer. I lost my title in 1925 – and all I got offered was a job at the Foire du Thrône fairgrounds in Paris! Not nearly enough
for me. We had some friends who were legit and some who weren't. One guy – he was arrested two years later – was raking it in at the time, selling stuff he'd got on credit.

‘I thought I'd try that, but since I'd been a mechanic when I was younger, I decided to start with garages, thinking I'd get my hands on cars, tyres, spare parts, sell it all on the quiet and clear off. I was counting on
making 400,000 or so!

‘Trouble was, I was late out of the gate. The big places were thinking twice before letting the goods leave home on credit.

‘I got brought a stolen car to freshen up … A guy I'd met in a bar near the Bastille. You can't imagine how easy it is!

‘Word got around in Paris. I was in a cushy spot, seeing as I'd hardly any neighbours. I turned ten or twenty cars around … Then one turned up, I can still see it today: full of
silverware stolen from a villa around Bougival. We squirrelled that lot away, got in touch with second-hand dealers in Étampes, Orléans and even farther away.

‘We got used to this routine … A sweet racket …

‘Has he found out about the tyres yet?' he asked, turning towards Jojo, who sighed.

‘He sure has …'

‘You know how wacky you look with your electric wire? Add a plug and you'd be a blinking lamp!'

Maigret cut him off.

‘Isaac Goldberg arrived in his own car, a Minerva. There was a welcoming party, because the idea wasn't to buy his diamonds, even on the cheap, but to steal them. And to do that you had to bump him off. So there was a bunch of you in
the garage, that's to say in the house behind it …'

Absolute silence. This was the sore spot. Once again Maigret looked them all in the face one by one … and saw a few drops of sweat on the Italian's forehead.

‘You're the killer, right?'

‘No! It's … It's …'

‘Who?'

‘It's them, it's …'

‘He's lying!' yelled Monsieur Oscar.

‘Who got the nod?'

Shrugging cockily, the garage owner said, ‘The guy upstairs, so there!'

‘Say that again!'

‘The guy upstairs!'

But he didn't sound as sure of himself this time around.

‘Else, come over here!'

Maigret pointed to Else, with the confidence of a conductor with the most diverse instruments at his command who knows his motley orchestra will still perform in perfect harmony.

‘You were born in Copenhagen?'

‘If you keep using my name, chief inspector, everyone will think we slept together …'

‘Answer me.'

‘Hamburg!'

‘What was your father's occupation?'

‘Docker.'

‘He's still alive?'

Her whole body shuddered. She looked at her companions with a sort of uneasy pride.

‘They cut his head off, in Düsseldorf.'

‘Your mother?'

‘A drunk.'

‘What were you doing in Copenhagen?'

‘I was a sailor's girl. Hans! A handsome fellow I'd met in Hamburg. He took me along with him. He belonged to a gang. One day we decided to knock over a bank, had it all set up. We were supposed to get millions in a single
night. I was the lookout … But someone snitched on us, because just when the men started in on the safes, the cops surrounded us.

‘It was at night, you couldn't see a thing … We were scattered … There were shots; people yelling, chasing us.
I got hit in the chest and began to run. Two policemen
grabbed me. I bit one of them, kicked the other in the stomach and he let me go …

‘But I was still being chased. And then I saw a wall: I hauled myself up … I literally fell off the other side and when I came to there was a tall young man, very chic, upper-class, looking at me with bewilderment and
pity …'

‘Andersen?'

‘That isn't his real name. He'll tell you
that
only if it suits him to. It's a well-known name … They're people with entrée to the royal court, who spend half the year in one of the most lovely
castles in Denmark and the other half in a great mansion with grounds as large as an entire city neighbourhood.'