The 13 Culprits: Shorts Vol I Read online

  The 13 Culprits

  Georges Simenon

  Copyright ® 2002 Estate of Georges Simenon

  All Rights Reserved

  Cover by Deborah Miller

  Crippen & Landru logo by Eric D. Greene

  ISBN (limited edition): 1-885941-78-1

  ISBN (trade edition): 1-885941-79-X

  FIRST EDITION 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, recycled paper

  Crippen & Landru, Publishers

  P.O. Box 9315

  Norfolk, VA 23505

  USA

  E-Mail: [email protected]

  Web: www.crippenlandru.com

  Contents

  Introduction

  ZILIOUK

  MONSIEUR RODRIGUES

  MADAME SMITT

  THE “FLEMINGS”

  NOUCHI

  ARNOLD SCHUTTRINGER

  WALDEMAR STRVZESKI

  PHILIPPE

  NICOLAS

  THE TIMMERMANS

  THE PACHA

  OTTO MÜLLER

  BUS

  Sources

  Notes

  INTRODUCTION

  “I haven’t written that much. I’m already 29 and I’ve only published 277 books…” a brash, young Georges Simenon explained to a famous journalist at the time. “It’s not my profession,” he explained.

  “By profession, I’m a traveler, or an explorer, if you will. I come in from the Baltic, and a month later I’m off again, maybe for Oceania.” 1 When Simenon was commissioned in 1929 to write his series of short stories — The 13 Mysteries, The 13 Enigmas and The 13 Culprits — for Détective, a magazine published by Gallimard under the editorship of his two friends, Joseph and Georges Kessel, he was traveling up and down the canals and ports of Europe in a cutter he had just had built for himself, The Ostrogoth. Simenon had even had it baptized by the abbot of Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris when it was moored at the Pont-Neuf. High on the money coming in from his successful crime and pulp novels, Simenon took to the seas with “Tigy” (his wife Régine’s nickname), “Boule” (his nickname for Henriette Liberge, a seventeen-year-old farm girl who became his loyal servant and mistress) and his Great Dane, Olaf. Tired of the sleepy, industrial towns of his childhood in Belgium, Simenon craved the freedom of the open seas where, with his typewriter on a folding table, and his backside on a folding chair, he could simultaneously lock himself up, write prolifically and travel to any destination he pleased.

  It was on the Ostrogoth that Simenon wrote The 13 Culprits, the third series of mystery stories for Détective magazine which were designed to be stopped a few paragraphs before the ending so that readers could guess at the solutions. The first series, The 13 Mysteries, brought in so much mail to the magazine, according to Simenon, “that mailmen had to haul it in by the sackful, and more than forty people had to be hired to check the answers.”2 When his publishers asked him to write a series that was harder to figure out, he wrote The 13 Enigmas. The “answers” to the stories in The 13 Culprits, the last series, were meant to be the most difficult to guess. Each story appeared in two parts, the mystery in one issue and the solution in a later one in order to insure that the reading experience felt like a magazine game. They were originally published under one of Simenon’s pseudonyms, Georges Sim, but when they were collected in book form in 1932, they were among the first works published under the name “Georges Simenon.” Prior to these ludic short stories, Simenon read many works of modern criminology in order to get into the detective’s thought process. While he was dutifully studying this methodology, he also published, under another pseudonym, J.K. Charles, a series of short, slightly fictionalized reports of police methods in a weekly magazine titled Ric et Rac.3

  An interesting adventure, worthy of a thriller, took place on the Ostrogoth during the writing of the

  “13” series. Stopping in Wilhelmshaven, a German port in Lower Saxony (which readers of The 13

  Culprits will recognize as being the birthplace of Otto Müller), Simenon’s ship, which was brandishing a French flag, instantly drew the suspicions of the local authorities as Wilhelmshaven was also a repository for rusting, dry-docked World War I submarines. As Pierre Assouline has described it, Simenon, who was oblivious to politics at that time, found himself in a tense political situation without knowing it: “The economic crisis had just broken out, and the country was governed by a coalition led by a Social Democratic chancellor. The leader of the National People’s Party had recently formed an alliance with Adolf Hitler. Within a few months the fall of the Müller government would seal the fate of the parliamentary republic.”4 Within moments of his mooring, the police helped him get supplies which they even carried on board his ship as though they were porters. Later, a plainclothes counterespionage agent came aboard and questioned him for two hours. After searching the ship thoroughly, the agent “discovered a typewriter and an easel, tried to decipher one of Simenon’s novels as though cracking a secret code,”5 before bringing him to Police Headquarters. As Simenon has recounted in his Intimate Memoirs, the German police officers were particularly alarmed by his correspondence with his editors at Détective :

  “Why did you come in to Wilhelmshaven? Since the end of the war not a single French boat has put in here.”

  I kept trying to make sense out of the questions he threw at me, often unexpectedly, since he kept craftily switching the subject.

  “And how does it happen that you receive telegrams that are signed ‘Detective’?”

  This one spoke French well, in spite of his accent. He had probably been part of the occupation forces.

  “Are you a detective?”

  “No. That’s a weekly that publishes crime stories.”

  “Then, are you a policeman?”

  “No, but I write stories about detectives.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I get orders for them.”

  “In other words, you are carrying out orders?”

  Although Simenon was nervous, and sweating profusely in fear of being arrested, he was summarily ordered by the Polizeipräsidium to sign a deposition and leave the country at once.

  As Stanley G. Eskin has observed, although the “13” series was published a year before the birth of Maigret, who would make his first appearance in the 1930 novel Pietr-le-Letton, they were written in

  “a mode quite contrary to the Maigret spirit, as if he were zigzagging toward Maigret and this were a last zag in the opposite direction.”6 As Eskin understands it, the detectives featured in the series, Leborgne, G.7, and Froget, are “anti-Maigrets in being wholly, and frivolously, intellectual, in contrast with the intuitive Maigret, who keeps saying, ‘I never think.’ ”7 Yet, as one can see in The 13 Culprits, Froget, the formidable Examining Magistrate, is a master in criminology and psychology. With “the whiteness of his skin, of his old fashioned Bressant hair style, and of his starched linen” (as he is described in the opening sentences of “Ziliouk,” p. 19), Froget is an imposing character who is not only in rigid control of his own emotions, but also of the poor suspects who come before him and whom he is able to manipulate psychologically as though they were puppets. As the narrator explains, Froget is so effective because he lets the thirteen culprits disintegrate on their own in court: “Most Examining Magistrates accumulate series of questions, endeavor to confuse the accused from whom they often extract the sort of sentence which can pass for a confession. Monsieur Froget, on the other hand, gave his opponent time to think and even time to think too much” (p. 25). In The 13 Culprits, it is always the guilty ones who are ultimately responsible for setting up their own nooses.

  It is this rather icy, yet old
fashioned aspect of Froget’s character that we endeavored to convey in this translation at Crippen & Landru — the first translation into English, in fact, of The 13 Culprits in its entirety. Earlier, between 1942 and 1948, the famed critic and editor Anthony Boucher had translated a few of the stories for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine (as well as some stories from The 13 Enigmas and The 13 Mysteries) but never the entire collection which has been mysteriously overlooked until now. Contrary to Boucher’s translations which were very creative, but sometimes took liberties with Simenon’s writing, I have stuck quite loyally to the text, and tried to preserve Simenon’s elegant, sometimes labyrinthine, formal sentence structures which, I feel, are not only reflective of Froget’s thinking, and even of his personality, but also convey a period, the 1920’s, and an atmosphere of propriety that is no longer as present in the Paris of today.

  As such, I have tried to maintain the flavor of Simenon’s Paris at the time, a different Paris from the playground described by Hemingway, for example, in A Movable Feast, or the familiar image of the carefree universe evoked by Josephine Baker (with whom Simenon had been romantically involved).

  Rather it is a marginal Paris, populated by what the French would label des ratés, society’s losers who, for one reason or another, are brought down by a petty vice, or a greedy aspiration, that invariably leads to a bitter sense of failure in their lives… and, of course, a crime they hubristically think they can get away with. It is the lonely city within all levels of the Parisian mosaic; a Paris made up of eccentric individuals who all, in some manner or another, feel as though they have been hung out to dry on the fringes of society: Monsieur Rodrigues, “an old male coquette”, whose seedy, decadent apartment on the rue Bonaparte is also somehow a reflection of his scheming, vengeful persona; on the southern tip of Paris, by the Porte d’Orléans metro station, Madame Smitt’s decrepit boarding house attempts to shelter her past and her fortune, along with the misfits who are temporarily housed there; the exotic Nouchi whose “painfully sought out elegance” reveals her irresistible urge to penetrate the generous Mrs. Crosby’s fancy apartment on the rue François-1er; the enigmatic Waldemar Strvzeski, eaten up by a biting regret at not having advanced in the Polish military, but who is relegated instead to the peripheries of the Polish criminal gangs hanging out at the sleazy Saint-Antoine Bar in the primarily working class sections of northern Paris; the fetishistic Enesco, nicknamed “The Pacha” by the prostitutes he enjoys burning within the confines of his luxurious suite in the Grand Hotel… Often coming from either romantic but murky locations such as “the Orient,” Eastern Europe, the Netherlands or Harlem, Simenon’s characters never fit in to the respective societies from which they crave acceptance. The spaces that the culprits create for themselves (or are condemned to) are often indicative of the inner turmoil that eventually dooms them, such as Philippe’s claustrophobic “strange lodging on the rue Bréa” with windows that had never been washed and “old carpets everywhere, pieces of discolored material, spread out along the walls”; the transient world of the failed circus performers, the Timmermans, who must live from one third rate hotel to another; or the especially depressing “Flemings” living as a sort of “Commune” on the outskirts of Paris in an isolated and miserable shanty in the middle of some fields

  Above all, Simenon captures the painful isolation and loneliness of these characters who despite occasionally maintaining pretenses of grandeur or outlandish ambitions are all in some way uncomfortable with themselves. Simenon’s Paris is indeed the same Paris he enjoyed wandering through as a young man, the Paris of street walkers, pimps and thieves that he often sought out to calm

  “a corner of his soul [which] was never still.”8 As Fenton Bresler has described it, it is this world that Simenon felt inexorably drawn to when the rest of Paris was tucked into their beds: “He used to spend nights wandering, unarmed, on the old defence works that still existed near La Villette […] He claims proudly that the infamous neighborhood of the Canal St. Martin held no secrets for him, nor did the alleys of Montmartre nor the narrow byways of the 12th Arrondissement. He made love in the streets and in the passageways, ‘where the unexpected arrival of a policeman could have changed my future.’”9 Searching for prostitutes, while his wife was safe at home, Simenon reveled in nocturnal transgressions and digressions which no doubt found their way into the sins of his shady, displaced and forever ungratified characters…

  Another stylistic device that I have maintained in this translation is Simenon’s potentially confusing switching of tenses. Indeed, he often jostles the present, the past, and the future within a paragraph, or even a sentence. This was a conscious decision on Simenon’s part in order to create a cinematic effect, and a suspenseful feeling of immediacy. As he explains it: “To my thinking, in my philosophy, past, present and future do not exist… It’s as though everything happens at the same time. Because everything depends on what we have experienced before and prepares us for what we are going to experience.”10 As Simenon wrote to André Gide, the “dean of letters” at that time, regarding a short story he had written in 1925, the issue of the tenses was almost a metaphysical one for him: “I was already haunted by a problem that has pursued me ever since: the three dimensions — the past, the present and the future — tying themselves together in a single action with a density of atmosphere and of complete verisimilitude.”11

  Related to the fluidity of tenses is Simenon’s frequent use of ellipses (…) as punctuation. Their indefiniteness, their hinting at things not quite said, is important in Simenon’s style, and I have retained them in almost all instances.

  In 2002, Simenon’s Paris may seem like a thing of the past, a museumification perhaps of an element of society that had fallen through the cracks of history, or even of everyday life, but whose slippery existence did not escape the night watch of Simenon’s tourism through the at times invisible underbelly of the Parisian landscape. It is this Paris that the thirteen culprits haunt, a Paris captured by Simenon in 1929, at the time the great Depression had brought down the frolicking gaiety of America’s “roaring twenties.” Perhaps the discovery of these short stories today will allow them to continue to haunt the dark Parisian streets and boulevards through this translation, which, like the many other works that the prolific Simenon produced, will further corroborate why both Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler considered him to be their favorite mystery writer.

  Peter Schulman

  Old Dominion University

  Norfolk, VA

  June 5, 2002

  The First Culprit:

  ZILIOUK

  THE OPPONENTS were evenly matched. In fact, the general word in the public prosecutor’s office was that Monsieur Froget, the Examining Magistrate,1 would finally fall on his face, which would not be entirely displeasing to every one.

  He sat in front of his desk in a seemingly uncomfortable position. One of his shoulders was higher than the other, his head hunched forward. As usual, he was all black and white — the whiteness of his skin, of his old fashioned Bressant hair style, and of his starched linen; the blackness of his formal three-piece suit. He was, in short, slightly anachronistic. There had been many a time when others had wondered whether age had finally crept up on him, as there was a certain aspect to him that made him look sixty years old.

  I had been a frequent visitor to his house on the Champ-de-Mars and I would like to offer my personal impressions of him. No man had ever been able to crush me, or had me doubt my own opinion of myself as much as Monsieur Froget. I would tell him a story, for example. He would look at me in a way that might appear slightly encouraging. I would finish. I would wait for an opinion, a comment, a smile. He would always stare at me fixedly as though he were focusing on a landscape or a piece of evidence, then he would finally let out a little sigh. Well, I swear to you, there’s such an intensity in a moment like that it would give one enough humility to last a lifetime. Nothing but a sigh! A breath of air! This is how I would interpret
his response: “And you went through so much trouble just to tell me that?”

  This was an example, by the way, of only the most superficial aspect of his personality and I will no doubt get a chance to speak about what I might have gleaned about his true nature.

  Nonetheless, that day in his office, a struggle was taking place in the manner that I have just described that one could not even qualify as icy. He was dealing with Ziliouk, that world-renowned adventurer who had been in all the papers for weeks, a Hungarian (or Polish, or Lithuanian, or Latvian, nobody knew exactly) Jew who, at twenty-five, had already been expelled from five or six countries in Europe.

  He had been arrested in his luxurious Paris residence (was he now thirty-five years old — or forty — or thirty — or less — or more?) after a warrant issued by the President of the Council to whom he had proposed a business arrangement in his usual commodity: diplomatic documents.

  Genuine or fraudulent? General opinion was split. Ziliouk had already sold Soviet documents to England which had caused a ministerial crisis and a breaking off of diplomatic relations between the two countries. He had sold Japanese papers to America and American ones to the Japanese. There were signs of his activities in Bulgaria, in Serbia, in Rome and in Madrid.

  He was quite handsome. He was more than elegant: he was almost opulent, and yet he sported, on the whole, a heavy flashy foreign accent.

  Monarchs, Heads of State had all written to him. He had infiltrated most of the world’s diplomatic circles.

  As soon as he was arrested, he had become aggressive. “Eventually you will be forced to release me, and then you’ll be in hot water!”

  He would insinuate that he was in fact working for the Deuxième Bureau2 (against and on behalf of everyone) and that he had close ties to the British Secret Service.

  Not one single magistrate had wanted anything to do with this case. It was the kind of case that would break the back of an honest Examining Magistrate and put a sad end to his career.

  There was Ziliouk, dressed in his three-piece suit from the best tailor in London, immaculate, with a vague smile on his face. An hour had gone by and Monsieur Froget still would not speak to him. With the minute and precise gestures of a mouse nibbling at food, he read the mobile squad’s report, at the top of which the accused could make out, in upside down letters: The Ziliouk Affair.