Maigret and the Fortuneteller Read online

  Maigret and the Fortuneteller

  Georges Simenon

  The 44th Inspector Maigret Novel

  * * *

  EBook Design Group digital back-up edition v1 HTML

  April 10, 2003

  This file is valid XHTML 1.0 Strict

  * * *

  Contents

  | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |

  * * *

  Copyright © 1944 by Editions Gallimard English translation copyright © 1989 by Georges Simenon

  All rights reserved.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Simenon, Georges, 1903-Maigret and the fortuneteller.

  Translation of: Signé Picpus

  I. Title.

  PQ2637.I53S5413 - 1989 - 843‘.912 - 88-16301

  ISBN 0-15-155571-0

  * * *

  Chapter One

  ^ »

  It was three minutes to five. On the enormous map of Paris that covered a large part of the wall, a small white disk lighted up. Seeing it, a man put down his sandwich and thrust a plug into one of the thousand sockets of the switchboard.

  “Hello!… Fourteenth?… Your car’s just left?…”

  Maigret, who was doing his best to look unconcerned, stood, with the sun shining full on him, mopping his brow.

  The man at the switchboard grunted something, removed the plug, and picked up his sandwich. It was for the superintendent’s benefit that he murmured: “A bercy.”

  This meant, in their professional jargon, a drunk.

  It was August, and Paris smelled of warm asphalt. Through the wide-open windows, the roar of the traffic on the Ile de la Cité penetrated this room that was the brain of the police emergency center. Below, in the courtyard of Police Headquarters, two vans packed with men stood ready and waiting to go.

  Another disk lighted up, this time in the Eighteenth Arrondissement. Once again, down went the sandwich, in went the plug.

  “Yes?… Gérard?… How are you?… What’s going on?… Is that all?…”

  Someone had fallen out of a window—or had thrown himself out. It seemed to be the current choice for suicide—by the poor and the old especially, and mainly in the Eighteenth.

  Maigret knocked out his pipe on the windowsill and refilled it, glancing at the clock. It was two minutes past the hour.

  Two minutes past! Had they killed the fortuneteller or hadn’t they?

  The door opened, and Lucas, short, round, and bustling, appeared, also mopping his brow.

  “Well, Chief, nothing yet?”

  Like Maigret, he had crossed the street that separated the Police Judiciaire from Police Headquarters to be on the spot if any news came in.

  “By the way, that fellow’s here again…”

  “Mascouvin?”

  “Yes, and white as a sheet. He wants to talk to you. He says the only thing now is to kill himself.”

  Another disk lighted up. Might this be what they were waiting for?… No. Not yet. Only a fight at Porte de Saint-Ouen.

  A telephone call. The director of the Police Judiciaire asking for the superintendent.

  “Hello! Is that you, Maigret?… Anything happened?… Nothing so far?…”

  A slight emphasis on the last two words, and the sarcasm wasn’t lost on Maigret, who looked savagely at the receiver as he put it down. He was hot and would have given a lot for a tall glass of cold beer. For the first time in his life, he was not far from hoping that a crime had been committed.

  For if the fortuneteller had not been killed on the stroke of five, he’d been made a fool of, and it would be weeks, if not months, before his colleagues got tired of teasing him about it.

  All because of a few words written backward on a piece of blotting paper!

  “Go get Mascouvin.”

  Certainly nobody could have looked less like a practical joker than this Mascouvin. He had turned up at the Police Judiciaire the evening before, and had insisted on seeing Superintendent Maigret in person. Nobody else would do, and he had waited obstinately, his face twitching from time to time with a nervous tic.

  “It’s a matter of life or death,” he had said.

  A thin, dull man with glasses, approaching middle age, who could never have been taken for anything but a somewhat seedy bachelor, which indeed was what he was. He fidgeted the whole time he was telling his story.

  “I’ve worked for fifteen years at Proud and Drouin—you know, the real-estate agent on Boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle. I live alone in a little two-room apartment on Place des Vosges. Number 21… Every evening I go and play bridge at a club on Rue des Pyramides… During the last two months I’ve had such bad luck. It’s swallowed up all my savings… I owe the countess eight hundred francs…”

  Maigret listened with only half an ear, thinking that at that moment half of Paris was on vacation, while the rest were sitting under the awnings of café terraces sipping cool drinks.

  A countess? Who would she be?… The wretched visitor made haste to explain that she had once been rich but had fallen on hard times. With almost no assets except a fine apartment on Rue des Pyramides, she had made use of it to start a bridge club. A handsome woman, according to Mascouvin, and it wasn’t hard to guess he was in love with her.

  “This afternoon, at four o’clock, Superintendent, I took a thousand francs of my firm’s money…”

  He couldn’t have looked more tragic if he had killed a whole family. Still fidgeting and twitching, he went on with his confession. When he left his office, he wandered around the streets with the thousand-franc note in his pocket, tormented by remorse. He entered the Café des Sports, at the corner of Place de la République and Boulevard Voltaire, where he was in the habit of dropping in for an apéritif before dinner.

  “Nestor, bring me some writing paper, will you?”

  He always called the waiter by his Christian name. Yes, he would write to his employers and tell them everything, and at the same time send them back their thousand francs. It would be easier than telling them face to face, and he could explain the whole thing—his run of bad luck for two whole months and the countess’s pressing him to pay his debt.

  Though he adored the countess, she had a soft spot only for a retired army officer who frequented the club.

  Nestor duly returned with pen and ink and a folder that contained a few sheets of paper and a blotter.

  Mascouvin opened the folder and sat staring at it, not knowing how to begin. Because he was nearsighted and didn’t need his glasses for writing, he had put them down on the blotter, and they lay there, the lenses vertical to the blotter. It was in fact the way he’d put them down that was the cause of everything. With the play of light, one of the lenses acted as a mirror, reflecting—the right way, of course—something that had been blotted. It was the phrase am going to kill, and his curiosity was immediately aroused. Who was going to kill whom?

  Shifting the glasses, he was gradually able to piece together the whole sentence, in fact the whole note—for it was a note someone had written and signed.

  Tomorrow afternoon on the stroke of five I am going to kill the fortuneteller. Picpus.

  Five past five. The man at the switchboard had had time to finish his sandwich, which smelled of garlic, for the little white disks all over the map of Paris remained obstinately unlighted. Steps could be heard on the stairs. It was Lucas, with the wretched Mascouvin.

  The latter hadn’t written to his employers after all. The previous evening, after hearing his story, Maigret had advised him to go to work as usual and put the thousand-franc note back where it belonged, without saying anything about it. It had been thought just as well, however, to keep an eye on him, and Lucas was given the job. About half past nine Mascouvin went to Rue des Pyramides and hung around for a while, without going up to the countess’s apartment.

  He spent the night in his own apartment on Place des Vosges and was at his office at the usual time next morning. He had lunch in a cheap restaurant on Boulevard Saint-Martin.

  It was only at half past four that he suddenly decided he could bear it no longer and, leaving the dingy offices of Proud and Drouin, made once again for the Quai des Orfèvres.

  “I couldn’t hold out any longer, Superintendent. I couldn’t look anybody in the face, least of all my employers… I had the feeling…”

  “Sit down… and keep quiet…”

  Eight after five. A triumphant sun blazed down on Paris, which seemed to be crawling with humanity, the men walking around in their shirt sleeves, the women nearly nude under their thin dresses. Meanwhile, the police were watching over four hundred eighty-two fortunetellers and clairvoyants!

  “Do you think, Maigret, it’s a hoax?” Lucas sighed. He was worried, for his chief risked being made ridiculous.

  A disk in the Third lighted up.

  “Hello!… Right!…”

  The man on the switchboard sighed too, in sympathy. “Only another bercy… You’d think it was Saturday!”

  Mascouvin couldn’t keep still. He kept jumping around in his seat, pulling his fingers, and opening his mouth.

  “Excuse me, Superintendent, I really must tell you…”

  “Don’t talk!” snapped Maigret.

  Had the man named Picpus decided to kill or not?

  A lighted disk. Again in the Eighteenth.

  “Hello?… Superintendent Maigret?… Yes, he’s here. Hold on a moment…”

  Maigret’s heart beat a little faster as he took the re
ceiver.

  “Hello… Yes… Rue Damrémont police station… What’s that?… 67 bis Rue Caulaincourt… Mademoiselle Jeanne… What? A fortuneteller?”

  His voice had risen to a roar. His eyes glowed.

  “Come on, Lucas. Quick!… Yes, bring him along too… You never know.”

  Looking rather like a sleepwalker, a sad sleepwalker, Joseph Mascouvin followed the two men down dusty stairs to where a police car was waiting in the courtyard.

  “67 bis Rue Caulaincourt… Quickly!”

  On the way Maigret looked at the list of fortunetellers and clairvoyants that had been compiled, for discreet surveillance, the evening before. Naturally, Mademoiselle Jeanne’s name was not among them.

  “Can’t you go any faster?”

  And that fool of a Mascouvin asked timidly: “Is she dead?”

  For a moment Maigret wondered whether he was as naïve as he appeared.

  We’ll see about that! he said to himself.

  “Revolver?” murmured Lucas.

  “Knife.”

  There was no need to look for the numbers. A crowd had collected outside the house, which faced Place Constantin Pecqueur.

  “Shall I wait down here?” stammered Mascouvin.

  “No. Come up… Come on. Follow us.”

  Policemen controlling the crowd made a way through it for Maigret and his sergeant.

  “Fifth floor. The door on the right.”

  There was no elevator. The house was well kept, however, and the horrified tenants gathered on the landings looked respectable and prosperous. On the fifth floor, the police superintendent of the Eighteenth held out his hand to Maigret.

  “Come in… The body’s not yet cold… It was only by luck that we got here so soon, as you’ll see.”

  One entered a little room bathed in sunshine, which poured in through a wide bay window opening onto a balcony that looked southward right across the city. It was a pretty little room, neat and cozy, with pale-colored curtains, Louis XVI chairs, and charming ornaments.

  A local doctor turned around to greet them with “There’s nothing to be done… The second blow was fatal…”

  The room was too small for all the people gathered there. Maigret, after filling his pipe, took off his jacket, revealing the mauve suspenders his wife had bought for him the week before. They were even made of silk, and brought a smile to the local superintendent’s face. That smile, in turn, brought a scowl to Maigret’s.

  “Come on… Tell us… What happened?”

  “I haven’t had time to collect much information yet, particularly since the concierge is anything but talkative. You have to drag the words out of her one by one… This Mademoiselle Jeanne—her real name’s Marie Picard, and she was born in Bayeux…”

  Maigret lifted up the sheet that had been thrown over the body. She had been a good-looking woman. Fortyish. Plump and well preserved. Fair hair whose color might not be altogether natural.

  “She wasn’t registered as a fortuneteller and she never advertised. Still she seems to have had quite a number of people coming to consult her.”

  “How many this afternoon?”

  “I asked Madame Baffoin—Eugénie Baffoin—but she said she didn’t know. She said it was no business of hers and that concierges weren’t half as nosy as they were made out to be… A few minutes past five this lady…”

  A lively little woman, also middle-aged, jumped up from her chair. She was wearing a rather absurd hat.

  “I knew Mademoiselle Jeanne quite well,” she explained. “From time to time she came and spent a few days with us at Morsang… Do you know Morsang?… On the Seine, by the barrage a little above Corbeil… I have an inn there, the Pretty Pigeon… And since Isidore had caught some fine tench, and I was coming to Paris, I said to myself…”

  The tench were there in a basket, packed in grass to keep them fresh.

  “You see, I knew she was fond of fish, and I thought it would be a little treat for her…”

  “How long have you known her?”

  “For the last five years or so… Once, she came and stayed with us a whole month…”

  “Alone?”

  “What sort of a person do you take her for?… As I was saying, I just dropped in, between errands. I found the door ajar. Just an inch or two—like this… So I simply called out ‘Mademoiselle Jeanne! It’s me—Madame Roy!’ Then, when there was no answer, I came in, and… she was sitting at that little table, leaning forward. I thought she’d fallen asleep. I went over to give her a shake and…”

  Thus, at about seven minutes past five Mademoiselle Jeanne, the fortuneteller, was already dead, with two knife wounds in her back.

  “Has the weapon been found?” asked Maigret, turning to the local superintendent.

  “No.”

  “Was the place ransacked?”

  “No. As you see, everything seems to be in perfect order… I doubt if the murderer even went into the bedroom. Look…”

  He opened a door that led to a bedroom, prettier than the living room. A little boudoir, a feminine nest, with frills and pastel colors.

  “And you say that the concierge…”

  “Knows nothing about it… It was Madame Roy here who called us, from the bar over there… We found her on the doorstep… There’s just one thing… Ah! Here’s the locksmith I sent for… Come in, will you?… Open this door for us…”

  Maigret happened to glance at Mascouvin, sitting miserably on the edge of a chair, and the Proud and Drouin clerk whined: “I don’t think I can bear it, Superintendent.”

  “Too bad!”

  It would be much worse when the Crime Squad experts came on the scene. Maigret wished he had time first to down a beer.

  “As you see,” explained the local superintendent, “the apartment consists of this room, the simple dining room over there, the bedroom, a storeroom, and…”

  He pointed to the door on which the locksmith was already at work.

  “I suppose that’s the kitchen.”

  The locksmith found a skeleton key that did the trick. The door swung open.

  “Well, and who are you?… What are you doing there?…”

  It was so unexpected as to be almost comic. In a clean and tidy little kitchen, in which there wasn’t a single dirty plate or glass, an old man was sitting on the edge of the table, where he appeared to be waiting meekly and patiently.

  “Answer! What are you doing there?”

  The old man gazed blankly at the men who filed into the room, but he seemed unable to answer. The oddest thing of all was that, on this boiling August day, he was wearing an overcoat, one that had turned green with age. His cheeks were covered with an unkempt beard. His shoulders sagged; his look was evasive.

  “How long have you been there?”

  He seemed to be making an effort, as though the question was difficult to understand. Finally he took a watch out of his pocket, studied it, and said: “Forty minutes.”

  “So you were here at five o’clock?”

  “I arrived just before.”

  “Then you must have witnessed the crime.”

  “What crime?”

  He was a bit deaf and kept turning one ear toward the local superintendent.

  “What? You don’t know that…?”

  In the sitting room, the sheet was lifted up to show him the body. He gazed at it in stupefaction.

  “Well?”

  He didn’t answer. He stood as though petrified. Then his hand went up to wipe his eyes. That didn’t necessarily mean he was crying, however; Maigret had already noticed that his eyes watered continually.

  “What were you doing in that kitchen?”

  Again the old man stared blankly at them, as though the words had no meaning for him.

  “How did you come to be locked in that kitchen?” he was asked again. “And where’s the key?”

  There was no sign of it on either side of the door.

  “I don’t know,” sighed the old man, like a child who expects a beating.

  “What don’t you know?”

  “Anything.”

  “Let’s see your papers.”

  The old man rumbled in his pockets, wiped his eyes again, sniffed, and finally held out a wallet with silver initials. Maigret and the local superintendent exchanged glances.

  Was the old man really not very bright, or was he acting the part? If the latter, he was certainly doing it to perfection. Opening the wallet, Maigret extracted an identity card, which he proceeded to read out loud.