Maigret and the Pickpocket

  Maigret and the Pickpocket

  Georges Simenon

  The Maigret Saga - episode 94

  LE VOLEUR DE MAIGRET

  TRANSLATION BY NIGEL RYAN

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  Contents

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  Maigret and the Pickpocket - The Maigret Saga - episode 94

  Le voleur de Maigret copyright ©1967 Presses de la Cité.

  translation by Nigel Ryan

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  CHAPTER ONE

  ^ »

  SORRY…”

  “Don’t mention it…”

  It was at least the third time, since the corner of Boulevard Richard-Lenoir, that in lurching she had thrust her bony shoulder into him and pressed her string shopping bag against his thigh.

  She mumbled her excuses, neither embarrassed nor apologetic, after which she resumed staring straight ahead, with a settled and resolute air.

  Maigret did not bear her any ill will. Anyone might have thought he found it entertaining to be jostled. He was in a mood to take everything lightly that morning.

  He had chanced to see a bus with an open platform coming, which was already a source of satisfaction. This kind of transportation was becoming more and more rare, as such buses were being drawn from circulation; soon he would be obliged to empty out his pipe before being swallowed up inside one of these enormous modern conveyances in which the passenger feels like a prisoner.

  There were the same open-platform buses when he had arrived in Paris nearly forty years before, and in those early days he never tired of riding up and down the main boulevards on the Madeleine-Bastille line. It had been one of his first discoveries.

  And the café terraces. He never grew tired of the café terraces either, from which he could survey the ever changing street scene over a glass of beer.

  Yet another marvel, that first year: you could go out of doors, from the end of February, without an overcoat. Not always, but occasionally. And the blossom was starting to come out along some of the avenues, in particular Boulevard Saint-Germain.

  These memories were coming back to him, bit by bit, because this year once again spring had come early, and that morning he had left home without a coat.

  He felt a lightness about himself, like the sparkle in the air. The colors of the shops, the groceries, the women’s dresses, were gay and lively.

  He was not really thinking. Only scraps of thoughts which didn’t add up to a coherent whole. His wife would be taking her third driving lesson at ten o’clock that morning.

  It was funny, unexpected. He couldn’t have said exactly how it had been decided. When Maigret had been a young clerk, there was no question of affording a car. At the time it was unthinkable. And later on, he had never seen the need for one. It was too late for him to learn to drive. Too many other thoughts were always passing through his head. He wouldn’t see the red lights, or else he would mistake the brake for the accelerator.

  But it would be pleasant to drive to their cottage, at Meung-sur-Loire, on Sundays…

  They had just made up their minds, all of a sudden. His wife had protested, laughing.

  “Just imagine… Learning to drive, at my age…”

  “I’m sure you’ll do very well…”

  She was having her third lesson and was every bit as nervous as a young girl studying for her exams.

  “How did it go?”

  “The instructor is very patient.”

  His fellow passenger in the bus couldn’t have been a car driver. Why had she come to do her shopping in the Boulevard Voltaire neighborhood, when she lived in another part of town? It was one of those little mysteries that tend to fasten themselves in one’s mind. She was wearing a hat, an increasingly rare spectacle, especially in the morning. There was a chicken in her shopping bag, butter, eggs, leeks and celery…

  The harder object, at the bottom, which pressed into his thigh at every jolt, must be the potatoes…

  Why take the bus to buy perfectly ordinary provisions miles away from home, when they were readily available anywhere? Perhaps she had once lived on Boulevard Voltaire, grown used to her local tradesmen, and remained faithful to them?

  The young man with the slight build, to his right, was smoking a pipe that was too short in the stem and too large in the bowl, badly balanced, thus forcing him to clamp his teeth. Young people nearly always choose a pipe both too short and too heavy.

  The passengers standing on the platform were packed tightly together. The woman ought to have sat inside. In a fishmonger’s in Rue du Temple, he spotted some whiting. He hadn’t eaten whiting for ages. Why did whiting, too, all of a sudden take on a springlike quality?

  Everything was springlike, like his own mood, and it was just too bad if the woman with the chicken was sullenly staring ahead of her, a prey to problems beyond the ken of the common mortal.

  “Sorry…”

  “Don’t mention it…”

  He hadn’t the courage to say:

  “Instead of making everybody out here miserable, why don’t you take that wretched string bag of yours and go and sit inside?”

  He read the same thoughts in the blue eyes of a large man wedged between him and the conductor. They understood one another. So did the conductor, who imperceptibly shrugged his shoulders. A sort of freemasonry, between men. It was amusing.

  The stalls, especially those with vegetables and fruit, were overflowing onto the sidewalks. The green and white bus carved its way through the crowd of cleaning women, secretaries, and clerks hurrying to work. Life was good.

  Another jolt. That bag again, with its hard lump at the bottom, potatoes or something of the sort. As he stepped back, he in turn jostled somebody behind him.

  “Sorry…

  He also mumbled the word, tried to turn around, and saw the face of a youngish man on which he read an emotion he did not understand.

  He must have been less than twenty-five years old; he was bareheaded, with disheveled brown hair, and unshaven. He looked like someone who had not slept all night and who had just been through a trying or painful experience.

  Threading his way to the platform step, he jumped from the bus as it was moving. It was at the corner of Rue Rambuteau, not far from the Central Market, the powerful smell of which hung in the air. The man walked fast, turned around as if he were apprehensive about something, then was swallowed up in Rue des Blancs-Manteaux.

  For no precise reason, Maigret suddenly put his hand to his hip pocket where he kept his wallet.

  He just stopped himself from starting off in his turn and leaping from the bus, for the wallet had vanished.

  He had reddened, but he managed to keep his head. Only the big man with blue eyes appeared to have noticed anything amiss.

  Maigret smiled ironically, not so much because he had just been the victim of a pickpocket as because it was quite impossible to catch him, and all because of the spring, and the champagne sparkle in the air, which he had begun breathing the day before.

  Another habit, a mania, which dated back to his infancy: shoes. Every year, with the first day of fine weather, he bought himself a new pair of shoes, as light as possible. This had occurred the day before.

  And this morning he was wearing them for the first time. They pinched. It was torture just to walk the length of Boulevard Richard-Lenoir, and it had been a relief to reach the bus stop on Boulevard Voltaire.

  He would have been quite unable to pursue his thief. And anyway the latter had had time to lose himself in the narrow streets of the M
arais.

  “Sorry…”

  Her again! That woman with her shopping! He just managed to stop himself from snapping at her:

  “Will you kindly take yourself off with your potatoes and leave us in peace.”

  But all he did was nod and smile.

  In his office, too, there was the same light as he remembered from those first days with a haze hanging over the Seine, less dense than mist, made up of thousands of tiny brilliant, living particles, peculiar to Paris.

  “How are things. Chief? Anything doing?”

  Janvier was wearing a light suit which Maigret had never seen before. He, too, was celebrating spring early, for it was only the fifteenth of March.

  “Nothing. Or rather, yes, there is something. I’ve just been robbed.”

  “Your watch?”

  “My wallet.”

  “In the street?”

  “In the back of a bus.”

  “Did it have much money in it?”

  “About fifty francs. I seldom carry more.”

  “And your papers?”

  “Not only my papers, but my badge too.”

  That famous badge of the Police Department, the nightmare of all Inspectors. In theory they should have it always with them, to identify them as Crime Squad officers.

  It was a handsome silver badge, or to be more precise plated copper, for with age the thin silver coating wears through to a reddish metal underneath.

  On one side the badge showed the Republic’s Marianne with her Phrygian cap, the letters. “R.F.” and the word “Police” outlined in red enamel.

  On the reverse were the arms of Paris, a serial number, and, engraved in small lettering, the holder’s name.

  Maigret’s badge had the number 0004, number 1 being reserved for the Prefect, number 2 for the Director-General of the Police Department, and number 3, for some obscure reason, for the Head of the Special Branch.

  Some officers hesitated to carry their badges in their pockets, because the same regulation also provided for suspension of one month’s salary in case of loss.

  “Did you see the thief?”

  “Very clearly. A young fellow, thin, tired-looking, with the eyes and complexion of a person who hasn’t slept.”

  “Did you recognize him?”

  When he had worked on the beat, Maigret knew all the pickpockets by sight, not only the ones from Paris, but those who came from Spain or London for the big fairs or open-air festivals.

  It is a fairly closed profession, with its own hierarchy. The top operators bestir themselves only when it is worth their while, and they do not think twice about crossing the Atlantic for a world exhibition or, for example, the Olympic Games.

  Maigret had lost sight of them somewhat. He was ransacking his memory. He was not making a tragedy out of the incident. The lightness of the morning was still affecting his mood and, paradoxically, he laid all the blame on the woman with the shopping bag.

  “If she hadn’t been constantly jostling me… Women ought to be banned from bus platforms… Especially when she didn’t even have the excuse of wanting to smoke…”

  He was more annoyed than angry.

  “Are you going to look for him in the files?”

  “That’s what I have in mind.”

  He spent nearly an hour examining photographs, front view and profile, most of them pickpockets. There were some he had arrested twenty years before, and who after that passed through his office again ten or fifteen times, almost becoming old friends.

  “You again?”

  “One has to live. And you, you’re still there. Chief. It’s quite a while since we last met, isn’t it?”

  Some were well dressed and others, the shabby ones, dossed down in junkyards, the steps of Saint-Ouen, and the Métro corridors. None of them remotely resembled the young man on the bus, and Maigret knew in advance that his search would be a waste of time.

  A professional doesn’t have that tired, anxious look. He works only when he knows his hands won’t start to tremble. And anyway they all knew Maigret’s face and profile, if only from seeing it in the newspapers.

  He went down to his office again, and when he ran into Janvier he gave a shrug.

  “You didn’t find him?”

  “I’d swear he’s an amateur. I even wonder if he knew, a minute earlier, what he was going to do. He must have seen my wallet sticking out. My wife never stops telling me I oughtn’t to carry it in that pocket. He must have thought of it when there was a jolt and those confounded potatoes almost knocked me over…”

  His tone changed.

  “What’s new this morning?”

  “Lucas has got flu. The Senegalese was killed in a bistrot on Porte d’Italie…”

  “Knife?”

  “Of course. Nobody’s able to give us a description of the assailant. He came in around one o’clock in the morning, just as the boss was going to close down. He took a few steps in the direction of the Senegalese, who was having a last drink, and he struck so fast that…”

  Routine. Someone would finally turn him in, maybe in a month, maybe in two years. Maigret went to the Director’s office for the daily conference, and he was careful not to mention his little adventure.

  The day promised to be a quiet one. Some red tape. Some papers to sign. Routine matters.

  He went home for lunch and scrutinized his wife, who didn’t talk to him about her driving lesson. For her it was a little as if, at her present age, she had gone back to school. She felt some pleasure, a certain pride even, but also some embarrassment.

  “Well then, you didn’t drive up onto the sidewalk?”

  “Why do you ask me that? You’ll give me an inferiority complex…”

  “On the contrary. You’ll make an excellent driver and I can hardly wait for you to drive me along the banks of the Loire…”

  “That won’t be for at least another month.”

  “Is that what the instructor says?”

  “The examiners are getting more and more strict and it’s best not to be failed the first time. Today we went on the outer boulevards. I would never have believed there was so much traffic on them, or that people drove so fast. Anybody would think…”

  Imagine, they were eating chicken, as, no doubt, they would be doing in the house of the woman on the bus.

  “What are you thinking about?”

  “My pickpocket.”

  “Did you arrest a pickpocket?”

  “I didn’t arrest him, but he relieved me of my wallet.”

  “With your badge?”

  She, too, thought of it at once. A serious hole in the budget. True, he would get a new badge without the copper showing through.

  “Did you see him?”

  “As plainly as I see you.”

  “An old man?”

  “A young one. An amateur. He looked as if…”

  Maigret was thinking about it more and more, without really wanting to. The face, instead of becoming blurred in his memory, was becoming clearer. He was recapturing details which he was unaware he had recorded in the first place, such as the fact that the unidentified man had thick eyebrows forming an absolute hedge above his eyes.

  “Would you recognize him?”

  He thought about it more than a dozen times during the course of the afternoon, lifting his head and staring at the window as though some problem were puzzling him. There was something about the episode, the face, the getaway, that wasn’t quite natural; he didn’t know just what.

  Each time it seemed that a new detail, which would convey something to him, was on the point of coming back, then he would turn again to his work.

  “Good night, boys…”

  He left at five minutes to six, when there were still half a dozen Inspectors left in the next office.

  “Good night, Chief…”

  They went to the movies. In a drawer he had found his old brown wallet, too large for his hip pocket, so he put it in his coat.

  “If you’d kept it in that po
cket…”

  They went home arm in arm, as usual, and the air was still warm. Even the smell of gasoline was not disagreeable that evening. It, too, was part of the spring in the air, in the same way as the smell of melting tar is part and parcel of summer.

  In the morning he found the sun still there and had the window open for his breakfast.

  “It’s funny,” he said. “There are women who go halfway across Paris in a bus to do their shopping…”

  “Perhaps because of the T.V. sales guide…”

  He looked at his wife with a puzzled frown.

  “Every night they tell you on television where you can get the best values…”

  It had never occurred to him. It was as simple as that. He had wasted hours on a little problem which his wife had solved in an instant.

  “Thank you.”

  “Does that help you?”

  “It saves me having to go on thinking about it.”

  He added, philosophically, grabbing his hat:

  “One doesn’t think about the things one wants to…”

  The mail was waiting for him at the office; on top of the pile there was a large brown envelope on which his name, his rank, and the Quai des Orfèvres address were written in block capitals.

  He knew before he opened it. It was his wallet, being returned. And a moment later he discovered that there was nothing missing, neither the badge, nor the papers, nor the fifty francs.

  Nothing else. No message. No explanation.

  It irked him.

  It was just after eleven when the telephone rang.

  “There’s someone who insists on speaking to you personally but refuses to give his name. Chief Inspector. It seems you are expecting the call and would be angry if I didn’t put it through. What do I do?”

  “All right, put it through…”

  Using one hand to strike a match to relight his pipe, he said:

  “Hello!”

  There was a longish pause, and Maigret might have thought he had been cut off if he hadn’t heard breathing at the other end of the line.

  “Hello!” he said again.

  Another silence, then:

  “It’s me…”