Maigret's Little Joke and Other Stories

  Maigret’s Little Joke

  MAIGRET SE AMUSE

  THE 78TH EPISODE IN THE MAIGRET SAGA

  1956

  Georges Simenon

  Translated from the French by Richard Brain

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  A 3S digital back-up edition 1.0

  click for scan notes and proofing history

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  Contents

  |1|2|3|4|5|6|7|8|

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  MAIGRET CINQ,

  Georges Simenon

  MAIGRET CINQ,

  MAIGRET AND THE YOUNG GIRL

  MAIGRET’S LITTLE JOKE

  MAIGRET AND THE OLD LADY

  MAIGRET’S FIRST CASE

  MAIGRET TAKES A ROOM

  A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book

  Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc.

  NEW YORK

  Copyright 1951, 1955, © 1957, 1958 by Georges Simenon

  Copyright ©1960 by Hamish Hamilton Ltd.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any mechanical means, including duplicating machine and tape recorder, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  First American edition 1965

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 65-16954

  Printed in the United States of America

  All characters in this book are fictitious and are not intended to represent any actual persons living or dead.

  Originally published in Great Britain under the title The Second Maigret Omnibus.

  Maigret and the Young Girl (Maigret et la jeune morte), originally published in the United States as Inspector Maigret and the Dead Girl, was translated from the French by Daphne Woodward; Maigret’s Little Joke (Maigret s’amuse), originally published in the United States as None of Maigret’s Business, by Richard Brain; Maigret and the Old Lady (Maigret et la vieille dame), Maigret’s First Case (La première enquête de Maigret), and Maigret Takes a Room (Maigret en meublé), originally published in the United States as Maigret Rents a Room, by Robert Brain.

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  MAIGRET’S LITTLE JOKE

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  I

  ^ »

  The little old man with the small goatee beard was again emerging from the shadow of the warehouse, backwards, looking to left and right, with a movement of both hands as if to draw towards himself the heavy lorry whose manoeuvre he was guiding. His hands were saying :

  “A bit to the right… That’s it… Straighten up… Gently… To the left… now… Hold it…”

  And the lorry, also in reverse, was clumsily cutting across the pavement, turning into the street, where the little old man now was waving to the cars to stop a moment.

  This was the third lorry to come out in this fashion, within half an hour, from the vast pedimented depot on which was written Catoire & Potut, Metals, familiar words to Maigret, since he had looked down at them every day for more than thirty years.

  He was at his window, in the Boulevard Richard-Lenoir, smoking a pipe in slow puffs, without coat or tie on, and behind him in the bedroom his wife was starting to make the bed.

  He was not ill, and that was what made it unusual, for it was ten o’clock in the morning and this wasn’t even Sunday.

  Being at the window, right in the middle of the morning, able to let his eyes wander over the to-and-fro of the street, to watch the lorries entering and emerging from the warehouse opposite, gave him a sensation which took him back to certain days in his childhood, when his mother was still alive and he was not going to school, because of a cold, or because term had ended. The sensation, in a way, of discovering “what went on when he wasn’t there”.

  By now it was the third day—the second if Sunday didn’t count— and he was still experiencing a mixture of delight and vague uneasiness.

  He was making lots of discoveries, being interested not only in the movements of the little old man with the goatee beard who presided over the departure of the lorries, but also, for example, in the number of customers who made their way into the bistro next door.

  He had had occasion before to spend all day in his flat. Almost always it was because he was ill, and he would be in bed or in an armchair.

  This once, he was not ill. He had nothing to do. He could spend his time as he liked. He was learning the rhythm of his wife’s day, where she started her work, at what moment she would leave the kitchen for the bedroom, and the order in which she did her successive jobs.

  All of a sudden she called to mind his mother attending to her housework, whilst, there too, he used to hang about the window.

  Like her, Madame Maigret was saying to him :

  “Now you’ll have to move out of the light so that I can sweep.”

  Even the smell of the kitchen was changing too: this morning it was the, smell of fricandeau à l’oseille.

  He was beginning to notice again, like a child, certain tricks of the light, the advance on the pavement of the line between shadow and sunlight, the way things are distorted in the quivering atmosphere of a hot day.

  There would be another seventeen days of this.

  Of course there had to be a series of chances and coincidences for this to come about. And it all began in March when he had bronchitis rather badly. He had got up too soon, as always, because work was pressing at the Quai des Orfèvres. He had had to take to his bed a second time and for a while an attack of pleurisy was feared.

  Days of fine weather had restored his health, but he had remained worried, depressed, ill at ease with himself. He suddenly felt himself an old man and it seemed that the real illness, the one which wears you away for the rest of your days, was waiting for him just around the corner.

  He had said nothing of this to his wife, and it therefore irritated him to see her watching him out of the corner of her eye. One evening he had been to see his friend Pardon, the doctor in the Rue Picpus, at whose house they regularly dined once a month.

  Pardon had given him a lengthy examination, had even, to satisfy his conscience, sent him to a heart specialist.

  The medicos had found nothing, beyond a slightly high blood pressure, but they had jointly agreed on the same advice:

  “You ought to take a holiday.”

  For three years he had not enjoyed a real holiday. Each time he was on the point of setting out, an enquiry arose which he was obliged to take up, and once when he had already arrived at his sister-in-law’s, in Alsace, he had received, on the first day there, a frantic telephone call summoning him back to Paris.

  “All right,” he had promised his friend Pardon, grumbling. “This year I will take a holiday, whatever happens.”

  In June, he had fixed the date for it: August 1st. His wife had written to her sister. The latter, who lived in Colmar with her husband and their children, owned a chalet on the Col de la Schlucht, where the Maigrets had been fairly often and where life was pleasant and restful. Alas! Charles, the brother-in-law, had just gained possession of his new car and had decided to take his family on a trip to Italy.

  How many evenings had they spent, Madame Maigret and he, discussing which place to go to? To start with, they had thought of somewhere on the banks of the Loire, where Maigret would be able to fish, then of the Hôtel des Roches Noires at Les Sables d’Olonne where they had once spent an excellent holiday. They had finally plumped for Les Sables. Madame Maigret had written in the last week of June, only to be told that all the rooms were booked until August 18th.

  In the end mere chance had prompted the chief-inspector’s decision. One Saturday evening, in the middle of July, he had been called, at about seven o’clock, to the Gare de Lyon, on a case of no great importance. From t
he Quai des Orfèvres to the station had taken half an hour in one of the squad cars, such was the packed mass of vehicles.

  Eight relief trains were announced to be running and the crowd in the ticket-hall, on the platforms, everywhere, with suitcases, trunks, bundles, children, dogs and fishing-rods, suggested an exodus.

  The whole lot were on their way to the country or to the seaside, where they would invade the smallest hotels, the simplest inns, not to mention those who would be pitching their tents as soon as they could discover an available space.

  It was a hot summer. Maigret had returned home jaded, as if he had himself been immured in an overnight train.

  “What’s wrong with you?” asked his wife, who had continued to be concerned about him since his bronchitis.

  “I’m beginning to wonder whether we shall go away for a holiday.”

  “Have you forgotten what Pardon told you?”

  “I’ve not forgotten.”

  He was picturing with horror the hotels, the boarding-houses crammed with visitors.

  “Wouldn’t we do better to spend our holiday in Paris?”

  She had thought at first that he was joking.

  “We practically never go for a walk together in Paris. We’re lucky if we manage once in the week to find time to go as far as one of the cinemas on the Boulevards. In August we shall have the empty town to ourselves.”

  “And the first thing you’ll do will be to rush off to the Quai des Orfèvres to get mixed up in some case or other!”

  “I swear not to.”

  “That’s what you say now.”

  “We could go off together wherever we liked, in parts where we normally never set foot, have lunch and dinner in funny little restaurants…”

  “If they know you’re here, Police Headquarters will be telephoning you at the first opportunity.”

  “Headquarters won’t know, or anyone else, and I’ll tell the telephone messages service that we’re away.”

  He was really falling in love with the idea and in the end his wife was won over loo. As a result the telephone, in the dining-room, was silent, another detail which it was hard to get used to. Twice he had reached out his hand to the receiver before remembering that he mustn’t do so.

  Officially, he was not in Paris. He was at Les Sables d’Olonne. That was the address he had left with Police Headquarters, and if an urgent message arrived for him down there, it would be forwarded on to him.

  He had left the Quai des Orfèvres on Saturday evening and everyone thought he was off to the seaside. On Sunday they had not been out until near the end of the afternoon, to have dinner at a brasserie in the Place des Ternes, a good way from home, as if to move on to strange ground.

  On Monday morning, around half-past ten, Maigret had gone down as far as the Place de la République, while his wife was finishing the housework, and had read his newspapers on a more or less deserted café terrace. They had lunched later on at the Villette, had dined at home and gone to the cinema.

  They didn’t know yet, either of them, what they would do today, Tuesday, except that they were going to eat the fricandeau at home and afterwards go out for a stroll.

  It was a rhythm of life to which it took some time to grow accustomed, since it seemed strange not to be driven by various obligations, not to have to reckon the hours and minutes.

  He was not bored. To tell the truth, he was really slightly ashamed of not doing anything. Was his wife aware of it?

  “Aren’t you going to fetch your papers?”

  A habit was already being formed. At half-past ten, he would go and fetch his newspapers, probably read them at the same café terrace on the Place de la République. He enjoyed this. After all, he had only just escaped from contingencies that forced him to be a maker of news himself.

  He left the window, put on a tie and shoes, then fetched his hat.

  “You needn’t be back before half-past twelve.”

  Even for her, he was no longer altogether Maigret, now that he was not going off to the Quai des Orfèvres, and once more he thought of his mother calling out to him:

  “Go off and play for an hour, but be back in time for lunch.”

  Even the concierge looked at him in surprise, not without a hint of disapproval. A great man big like him, is he entitled to wander about without anything to do?

  A municipal water-cart was driving slowly past and he watched, as if it were something never seen before, the way the water spurted through a multitude of tiny holes and then spread out over the roadway.

  The windows, at Police Headquarters, must have been wide open to face the view of the Seine. Half the offices were empty. Lucas was at Pau, where he had relations, and would not return until the 15th. Torrence, who had lately bought a second-hand car, was touring Normandy and Brittany.

  There was scarcely any traffic, very few taxis. The Place de la République seemed as motionless as on a picture post-card and only one coachful of tourists lent it animation.

  He stopped at the kiosk, bought all the morning newspapers which he usually found in his office and skimmed through before starting work.

  As it was, he had time to read them, and the day before he had even read a good deal of the personal column.

  He took a seat on the same terrace, in the same place, ordered a beer, and after removing his hat and wiping his brow, since it was already hot, he unfolded his first newspaper.

  The two main headlines dealt with international events and a serious motor accident in which eight people had been killed, for a bus had fallen down a ravine not far from Grenoble.

  Straight away his eye was caught by another heading, in the right-hand corner of the page.

  CORPSE IN A CUPBOARD

  If his nostrils did not exactly twitch, he none the less felt a certain excitement.

  Police Headquarters are maintaining a good deal of secrecy concerning a gruesome discovery made yesterday morning, Monday, in the flat of a well-known doctor, in the Boulevard Haussmann. The doctor in question is said to be at present on the Côte d’Azur with his wife and daughter.

  When she went to work yesterday morning, after spending Sunday with her family, the maid is reported to have been struck by a suspicious smell, and on opening a cupboard from which this smell seemed to be issuing, she discovered the corpse of a young woman.

  Contrary to their traditional attitude, Police Headquarters are showing themselves particularly grudging with information, which leaves us to suppose that they attach unusual importance to this case.

  The doctor involved, Dr. J—, has been urgently recalled and another doctor, his locum-tenens during his holiday, is reported to be implicated.

  We hope tomorrow to be in a position to furnish the details of this peculiar story.

  Maigret unfolded the other two morning papers he had bought.

  One of them had missed this piece of news. The other, informed at the last minute, summarized it in a few lines, but under a heading in heavy type.

  A CORPSE AT THE DOCTOR’S

  Police Headquarters have since yesterday been conducting an investigation into a case which might easily become a second Petiot case, but for the difference, this time, that two doctors instead of only one appear to be involved. The fact is that the corpse of a young woman has been discovered in the surgery of a well-known Boulevard Haussmann practitioner, but so far we have not been able to obtain any further information.

  Maigret caught himself muttering :

  “Idiot!”

  It wasn’t the journalists he was annoyed with but Janvier, who for the first time had the weight of the police force’s responsibilities on his shoulders. The detective-inspector had been waiting for ages for this opportunity, since at the times of Maigret’s previous holidays there had always been a detective of longer service to replace the chief-inspector. This year, for nearly three weeks, he was chief, and Maigret had scarcely departed from Police Headquarters when a case had burst into the light, an important one, to judge from the little
the newspapers could so far say about it.

  But Janvier had already committed his first mistake : he had put the journalists’ backs up. Maigret too had in the past had occasion to conceal information from them, but he would always do so gently, and even when he was telling them nothing, he still seemed to be taking them into his confidence.

  His first urge was to go to the telephone box and ring Janvier. He remembered in time that he was officially at Les Sables d’Olonne.

  The discovery of the corpse, according to the papers, occurred the morning of the day before. The police had at once been apprised of the affair, and so had the Public Prosecutor’s office. In the normal course of events Monday afternoon’s papers should have published the news.

  Had someone in high places intervened? Or had Janvier taken it upon himself to impose silence?

  “A well-known doctor in the Boulevard Haussmann. …” Maigret knew the district well, and when he had first arrived in Paris, it was probably that part which had most impressed him with its staid handsome buildings, its gateways giving glimpses of old stables at the end of courtyards, the lovely shade of chestnut-trees and the limousines parked all along the pavements.

  “May I use the telephone?”

  Not to ring up Police Headquarters, since that was forbidden him, but to call Pardon, who had stayed at the seaside during July and was the only person acquainted with Maigret’s Parisian holiday.