Maigret Loses his Temper Read online

  Maigret Loses his Temper

  la colère de maigret

  the 89th episode of the maigret saga

  Georges Simenon

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  A 3S digital back-up edition 1.0

  click for scan notes and proofing history

  valid XHTML 1.0 strict

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  Contents

  |1|2|3|4|5|6|7|8|

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  Translated from the French by Robert Eglesfield

  Copyright © 1963 by Georges Simenon

  English translation copyright © 1965 by Hamish Hamilton Ltd

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be mailed to the following address: Permissions Department, Harcourt, Inc.,

  6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida32887-6777

  . www. HarcourtBooks. com

  Maigret is a registered trademark of the Estate of Georges Simenon.

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  Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  Simenon, Georges, 1903-1989.

  Maigret loses his temper.

  (A Harvest book)

  Translation of La colère de Maigret.

  “A Helen and Kurt Wolff book.”

  I. Title.

  [PZ3. S5892Mafa 1980] [PQ2637. I53]

  843'.912 80-14212

  ISBN 0-15-602847-6

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Harvest edition 1980

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  1

  ^ »

  It was a quarter past twelve when Maigret passed under the perpetually cool archway and through the gate flanked by two uniformed policemen who were standing right up against the wall to obtain a little shade. He gave them a casual wave and stood for a moment motionless and undecided, glancing first toward the courtyard, then toward the Place Dauphine, then back toward the courtyard.

  In the corridor upstairs, and then on the dusty staircase, he had stopped two or three times, pretending to be lighting his pipe again, in the hope that one of his colleagues or his inspectors would suddenly appear. It was unusual for the staircase to be deserted at that time, but that year, on June 2, a holiday atmosphere was already reigning at Police Headquarters.

  Some people had already left at the beginning of the month to avoid the rush in July and August, and others were getting ready for the annual exodus. That particular morning, after a wet spring, the weather had suddenly turned hot, and Maigret had worked in his shirt sleeves with the windows open.

  Except for his report to the Director and one or two visits to the inspectors’ room, he had remained on his own, getting on with the tiresome administrative task he had begun some days before. Files piled up in front of him, and from time to time he raised his head like a schoolboy, glancing toward the motionless foliage of the trees, and listening to the hum of Paris life, which had just taken on the special quality it has on hot summer days.

  For the past two weeks, he had not missed a single meal at Boulevard Richard-Lenoir and he had not been disturbed once during the evening or the night.

  Normally he would have had to turn left along the Quai, in the direction of the Pont Saint-Michel, to take a bus or a taxi. The courtyard remained empty. Nobody joined him.

  So, with a slight shrug of his shoulders, he turned right instead and walked into Place Dauphine, cutting across it diagonally. He had suddenly felt an urge, on leaving the office, to go to the Brasserie Dauphine and, in spite of the advice of his friend Pardon, the Rue Picpus doctor, at whose home he and Madame Maigret had dined the previous week, to treat himself to an apéritif.

  For several weeks now he had behaved himself, making do with a glass of wine at mealtimes, and sometimes, in the evening, when he and his wife went out, a glass of beer.

  Never mind! Pardon had recommended that he watch his liver, but he hadn’t forbidden him to have an apéritif, just one, after weeks of almost total abstinence.

  At the bar he found some familiar faces, at least a dozen men from Police Headquarters who had scarcely more work than he had, and who had left early. This happened at fairly long intervals: a pause lasting a few days, a dead calm, nothing but routine business, as they put it, then, all of a sudden, cases breaking at an ever-increasing rate, leaving nobody any time to draw breath.

  The others nodded to him and moved up to make room for him at the bar. Pointing to the glasses filled with an opaline drink, he muttered:

  “The same for me…”

  The patron had already been there thirty years before, when the Chief Superintendent had started at the Quai des Orfèvres, but at that time he had been the son of the owner. Now there was a son, too, wearing a chef’s white hat in the kitchen, and looking like the patron when he had been a boy.

  “How are things, Chief?”

  “All right.”

  The smell had not changed. Every little restaurant in Paris has its particular smell, and here, for example, against a background of apéritifs and spirits, a connoisseur would have distinguished the rather tart scent of the plain wines of the Loire. As for the kitchen, tarragon and chives were the predominant aromas.

  Maigret automatically ran his eyes over the menu on the slate: mackerel from Brittany and calf’s liver en papillottes. At the same moment, in the dining room with its paper tablecloths, he caught sight of Lucas, who seemed to have taken refuge there, not in order to lunch, for it was not yet mealtime, but to chat in peace with somebody Maigret did not know.

  Lucas now saw him, too, hesitated, got up, and came over to him.

  “Have you a moment to spare, Chief? I think that this might interest you…”

  The Chief Superintendent followed him with his glass in his hand. Lucas introduced the other man:

  “Antonio Farano… Do you know him?”

  The name meant nothing to the Chief Superintendent, but it seemed to him that he had already seen the handsome face of this Italian who might have been a film star. No doubt the red sports car outside the door belonged to him. It went with his appearance, with his light-colored clothes, which were rather too well cut for Maigret’s taste, and with the heavy signet ring on his finger.

  Lucas went on, while the three men were sitting down:

  “He called at the Quai to see me just after I’d left. Lapointe told him that he might find me here…”

  Maigret noticed that while Lucas was drinking the same apéritif that he was, Farano was just having fruit juice.

  “He’s Émile Boulay’s brother-in-law. He manages one of Boulay’s night clubs, the Paris-Strip, on Rue de Bern…”

  Lucas winked discreetly at his chief.

  “Repeat what you’ve just told me, Farano.”

  “Well, my brother-in-law has disappeared…”

  He had kept his native accent.

  “When?” asked Lucas.

  “Last night, probably. We don’t know exactly…”

  He was overawed by Maigret, and to keep himself in countenance he took a cigarette case out of his pocket.

  “Mind if I smoke?”

  “Go right ahead.”

  Lucas explained for the Chief Superintendent’s benefit:

  “You know Boulay, Chief. He’s that little man who arrived from Le Havre four or five years ago…”

  “Seven years ago, ” corrected the Italian.

  “All right, seven years ago. He bought a night club on Rue Pigalle, the Lotus, and now he owns four…”

  Maigret wondered why Lucas
wanted to involve him in this case. Since he had taken over the Crime Squad, he had rarely had anything to do with that world, which he had known very well in the old days, but now had rather lost sight of.

  It was at least two years since he had last set foot in a night club. As for the criminals of Pigalle, he knew only a few of them now, mainly old hands, for that was a closed society that was constantly changing.

  “I was wondering, ” Lucas broke in again, “whether this might have some connection with the Mazotti case…”

  Ah! he was beginning to understand. When was it that Mazotti had been eliminated while he was coming out of a bar on Rue Fontaine about three o’clock in the morning? About a month ago. It had happened in mid-May.

  Maigret remembered a report from the police in the Ninth Arrondissement that he had passed to Lucas, saying, “Probably a settling of old scores… Do what you can…”

  Mazotti had not been an Italian, like Farano, but a Corsican who had started on the Côte d’Azur before coming up to Paris with a little gang of his own.

  “My brother-in-law didn’t kill Mazotti, ” Farano was saying in tones of conviction. “You know very well, Monsieur Lucas, that that isn’t his line… Besides, you questioned him twice in your office…”

  “I’ve never accused him of killing Mazotti. I questioned him just as I questioned everybody Mazotti had it in for… That’s quite a crowd…”

  And to Maigret he added:

  “As a matter of fact I sent him a summons for today at eleven o’clock, and I was surprised not to see him…”

  “He never sleeps out, does he?” the Chief Superintendent asked innocently.

  “Never!… It’s easy to see that you don’t know him. He isn’t like that at all. He loves my sister, home life. He never came home later than four in the morning…”

  “And last night he didn’t come home? That’s it, is it?”

  “That’s it…”

  “Where were you?”

  “At the Paris-Strip. We didn’t close till five… the season is in full swing for us, because Paris is already full of tourists. Just as I was counting the takings, Marina phoned me to ask if I’d seen Émile… Marina’s my sister… I hadn’t seen my brother-in-law all night… He didn’t often come down to the Champs-Élysées…”

  “Where are his other night clubs?”

  “All in Montmartre, a few hundred yards from each other. That was his idea and it paid off. With night clubs more or less next door to each other, you can move your performers from one place to the next during the night and cut down on your overhead…

  “The Lotus is right at the top of Rue Pigalle, the Train Bleu practically next door, on Rue Victor-Masse, and the Saint-Trop’ a little lower down, on Rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette…

  “Émile was doubtful about opening a night club in another part of Paris, and it’s the only one he didn’t look after himself, you might say. He let me run it for him…”

  “So your sister phoned you shortly after five?”

  “Yes. She’s so used to being woken up by her husband…”

  “What did you do?”

  “First of all I called the Lotus, where they told me that he had left about eleven. He also looked in at the Train Bleu, but the cashier can’t say exactly when. As for the Saint-Trop’, it was closed when I tried to get it on the phone.”

  “As far as you know, your brother-in-law didn’t have an appointment last night?”

  “No. As I’ve already said, he was a quiet man, very regular in his habits. After dinner at home…”

  “Where does he live?”

  “On Rue Victor-Masse…”

  “In the same building as the Train Bleu?”

  “No. Three houses farther on… After dinner, he used to go first of all to the Lotus to supervise the preparations. That’s the biggest night club and he looked after it himself… Then he went down to the Saint-Trop’, where he stayed a little while, after that to the Train Bleu, and then he started his tour all over again. He used to do it two or three times in the course of the night, because he kept an eye on everything…”

  “Was he wearing a dinner jacket?”

  “No. He wore a dark suit, midnight blue, but never a dinner jacket. He didn’t bother much about looking smart…”

  “You talk about him in the past tense…”

  “That’s because something must have happened to him…”

  At several tables people had begun eating, and every now and then Maigret found his gaze wandering toward the plates and the carafes of Pouilly. Although his glass was empty, he resisted the temptation to order another.

  “What did you do next?”

  “I went to bed, after asking my sister to ring me if there was any news.”

  “Did she phone you again?”

  “About eight o’clock…”

  “Where do you live?”

  “Rue de Ponthieu.”

  “Are you married?”

  “Yes, to an Italian girl. I spent the morning phoning the staff of the three night clubs. I was trying to find out where and when he had last been seen. It isn’t as simple as you might think… for a good part of the night the clubs are packed to capacity and everybody is busy doing his job. What’s more, Émile didn’t stand out in a crowd… he’s a skinny little man whom none of the customers ever took to be the boss, and sometimes he spent a long time outside with the doorman…”

  Lucas nodded to indicate that all this was true.

  “It seems that nobody saw him after half past eleven…”

  “Who was the last to see him?”

  “I haven’t been able to question everybody… some of the waiters, barmen and musicians have no telephone. As for the girls, I don’t know the addresses of most of them… I won’t be able to make any serious inquiries before tonight, when everybody will be at his post…

  “So far, the last person to have spoken to him seems to be the doorman of the Lotus, Louis Boubée, a little fellow no bigger or heavier than a jockey, and better known in Montmartre by the nickname of Mickey…

  “Between eleven o’clock and half past eleven, Émile came out of the Lotus and stood for a while on the sidewalk near Mickey, who kept rushing forward to open the door every time a car drew up…”

  “Did they talk to each other?”

  “Émile didn’t talk much. It seems that he looked at his watch several times before going off toward the bottom of the street… Mickey thought that he was making for the Saint-Trop’…”

  “Has your brother-in-law got a car?”

  “No. Not since the accident…”

  “What accident?”

  “It was seven years ago… he was still living at Le Havre, where he had a little night club, the Monaco. One day when he was driving to Rouen with his wife…”

  “He was already married to your sister?”

  “No. I’m talking about his first wife, a French girl from the country near Le Havre, Marie Pirouet. She was expecting a baby… in fact they were going to Rouen to consult a specialist… It was raining… The car skidded on a bend and hit a tree. Émile’s wife was killed on the spot…”

  “And what about him?”

  “He got off with a gash in the cheek that left him with a scar. In Montmartre most people imagine it was done by a knife…”

  “Did he love his wife?”

  “He was crazy about her. He had known her since he was a boy…”

  “He was born at Le Havre?”

  “In a village nearby, I forget which… She came from the same village. After she died, he never touched a driving wheel again, and as far as possible he avoided getting into a car. In Paris, for instance, he hardly ever took a taxi. He walked a lot and, when he had to, he used the Métro. Besides, he didn’t like to leave the Ninth Arrondissement…”

  “You think somebody’s got rid of him?”

  “All I can say is that, if nothing had happened to him, he’d have come home a long time ago…”

  “Does he liv
e alone with your sister?”

  “No. My mother lives with them, and also my other sister, Ada, who works as his secretary… not to mention the two children, a boy of three, Lucien, and a little girl of ten months…”

  “Have you any suspicions?”

  Antonio shook his head.

  “You think your brother-in-law’s disappearance has some connection with the Mazotti case?”

  “What I’m sure about is that Émile didn’t kill Mazotti…”

  Maigret turned toward Lucas, who had been in charge of the inquiry.

  “What about you?”

  “That’s what I think too, Chief… I questioned him twice, and I got the impression that he was telling the truth… As Antonio says, he’s a puny little fellow, almost shy, not the sort you would expect to find running a set of night clubs… And yet, when he had to deal with Mazotti he knew how to tackle him…”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Mazotti and his gang had organized a racket which had nothing original about it but which they’d perfected. Under the pretext of offering protection, they demanded more or less considerable sums every week from every nightclub proprietor.

  “Most of them, to begin with, refused to pay. Then a well-organized little comedy was put on for their benefit When the night club was full, Mazotti would arrive with one or two of his toughs. They would sit down at a table if there was a table free, or at the bar if there wasn’t, order some champagne, and then, in the middle of a show, start a brawl. First there’d be some muttering, then voices would be raised. The barman or the headwaiter would be bawled out and called a thief…

  “The whole thing would end up with glasses being broken and a more or less general free-for-all, and of course most of the customers left swearing that they’d never set foot in the place again…

  “The next time Mazotti called, the owner usually decided to pay up.”

  “Émile didn’t?”

  “No. He didn’t call in the local bouncers like some of his colleagues, who weren’t any the better for it, because Mazotti ended up by buying them off. His idea was to send to Le Havre for a few dockers to settle Mazotti’s hash.”