Maigret on the Riviera Read online

  Maigret on the Riviera

  LIBERTY BAR

  THE 17TH EPISODE IN THE MAIGRET SAGA

  1931

  Georges Simenon

  translated by Geoffrey Sainsbury

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  MKM XHTML edition 1.0

  click for scan notes and proofing history

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  CONTENTS

  1. The Dead Man and His Two Women

  2. A Talk about Brown

  3. William’s Goddaughter

  4. Gentian

  5. The Funeral

  6. A Round of Hotels

  7. The Will

  8. The Four Heiresses

  9. Haguenau

  10. The Couch

  11. A Love Story

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  1

  THE DEAD MAN AND HIS TWO WOMEN

  It began with the feeling one has at the beginning of a vacation. When Maigret got off the train at Antibes, half the station was bathed in a blaze of sunlight, through which people moved like shadows—shadows in straw hats and white trousers, with tennis rackets in their hands. Spring had burst out suddenly, and the air hummed with the heat. On the other side of the platform were cactuses and palm trees and, farther off, a strip of blue sea.

  Someone dashed up to him.

  “Superintendent Maigret? I recognized you at once from a photograph in the papers. I’m Inspector Boutigues.”

  Boutigues. What a name.

  The young inspector had already relieved Maigret of his luggage and was leading him toward the exit. He wore a pearl-gray suit and boots with half-cloth uppers; he had a red carnation in his buttonhole.

  “Is this your first visit to Antibes?”

  Maigret mopped his forehead and tried to keep up with his guide, who threaded his way nimbly through the crowd. Finally, they climbed into a cab—not a taxi, but a good old-fashioned fiacre, with a cream-colored top fringed by little tassels.

  The dandling of the springs, the crack of the driver’s whip, the dull sound of the horse’s hoofs on the hot, soft asphalt brought back a long-forgotten sensation.

  “We’ll have a drink first… Oh, yes! After a journey like that… Driver! Stop at the Café Glacier, will you?”

  The Café Glacier was right around the corner.

  “The center of Antibes,” the inspector explained.

  It was a charming square, with a garden in the middle, cream- or orange-colored awnings on every building. Under one of them, on the terrace of the café, the two men sat down and sipped anisette. Opposite was a shop window filled with bathing outfits, beach robes, and other such articles; on their left, a window full of cameras. Beautiful cars were parked along the curb.

  Yes, it was more like a vacation than…

  “Would you rather see the prisoners first or the house where he was killed?”

  “The house,” answered Maigret, hardly more conscious of what he was saying than if Boutigues had asked him “How are you?”

  The vacation feeling continued. Maigret smoked the cigar Boutigues had offered him. The horse trotted along the road by the seashore. To the right were villas hidden among pine trees; to the left, rocks, then the expanse of blue sea uninterrupted except for two or three white sails.

  “Shall I tell you where we are? We’ve left Antibes behind us and from here on it’s Cap d’Antibes. Nothing but villas, most of them pretty grand.”

  Maigret, blissful, was ready to accept anything that was said. His head seemed to be full of sunshine. His companion’s carnation made him blink.

  “Boutigues, you said?”

  “Yes. I come from Nice… A Niçois, or, rather, a Nicéen!

  In other words, the real thing—a Niçois to his fingertips, to the marrow of his bones.

  “Lean over this way a little. You see that white house? That’s it.”

  Maigret wasn’t taking it seriously; he couldn’t bring himself to believe that he was on a job, that he was here because somebody had been killed.

  True, his instructions had been somewhat unusual:

  “A man named Brown was murdered at Cap d’Antibes. The newspapers are blowing it up. It’s a case that needs tactful handling and no trouble.”

  Understood.

  During the war, Brown had worked for French intelligence, the Deuxième Bureau.

  Doubly understood.

  So here he was, with his head full of sunshine, having traveled almost six hundred miles to be tactful. The fiacre stopped. Boutigues took a key from his pocket, opened a gate, and led the way up a gravel path.

  “This is one of the poorest villas on the Cap.”

  Even so, it wasn’t bad. The air was heavy with the sweet smell of mimosa. Small orange trees still bore a few oranges. There were some queer-shaped flowers that Maigret had never seen before.

  “The place across the way belongs to a maharajah. He’s probably here now… Farther along on the left is a famous writer, a member of the FrenchAcademy. And beyond him is a ballet dancer who lives with an English lord.”

  Yes! But what Maigret wanted more than anything was to sit down on the bench by the house and have a nap. After all, he’d been traveling the whole of the previous night.

  “I’d better explain the household first.”

  Boutigues had opened the door, and they were standing in a cool room with windows looking out on the sea.

  “Brown lived here for at least ten years.”

  “What did he do?”

  “Nothing. He must have had private means… Lived here with two women. ‘Brown and his two women’: that’s how people spoke of them.”

  “Two?”

  “Only one was his mistress: Gina Martini.”

  “Has she been arrested?”

  “Yes. Her mother, too… The three of them lived here without a servant.”

  The house had certainly not been kept any too well. There were a few beautiful things in it, perhaps, a few pieces of good furniture, and here and there some objects that had had a moment of splendor. But everything was dirty, and the good things and the bad were jumbled together indiscriminately. There were too many carpets, antimacassars, and hangings; too many dust collectors.

  “Now, here are the facts. There’s a garage next to the house, where Brown used to keep his old-fashioned car. He used it mostly for shopping in Antibes.”

  “Yes,” sighed Maigret, who was watching a man with a split reed fishing in the clear water for the sea urchins that lay on the bottom.

  “For three days, however, the car was left standing in front of the house. People noticed, but nobody bothered about it. It was nobody’s business… And it wasn’t till Monday evening—”

  “Just a moment. It’s Thursday now, isn’t it?… Go on.”

  “On Monday evening, a butcher was driving back to Antibes in his van. He saw the old car start—you can read his statement. As he came up behind it, he thought Brown must be drunk. The car was lurching forward. Then it went along steadily for a while. But at the first bend, it crashed into the rock at the side of the road.

  “The butcher stopped, but before he could do anything, two women got out of the car and started running.”

  “Were they carrying anything?”

  “Three suitcases… It was getting dark. The butcher didn’t know what to do. Finally, he simply drove past the women and reported what he’d seen to the first policeman he found— the one in Place Macé. Word was sent out. Before long, the women were spotted making for the station at Golfe-Juan. That’s a couple of miles from here in the other direction, over toward Cannes.”

  “Did they still have the suitcases?”

  “They’d dropped one on the way. It was found yesterday in a clump of tamarisks… They were upset, and found it hard to explain their conduct. They said they were hurrying to see a sick relative in Lyon. But the man who caught them was smart enough to ask them to open their bags. And what did he find but a pack of bonds, some large-denomination notes, and other valuables!

  “It was apéritif time, and a large crowd was gathering. It escorted the two women, first to the police station and then to the local jail, where they were locked up for the night.”

  “The house was searched?”

  “First thing next morning. Nothing was found. The two women pretended they didn’t know what had become of Brown. Around noon, a gardener pointed out a place where the earth had recently been dug up. And a couple of inches deep they found Brown’s body, fully dressed.”

  “What did the two women say to that?”

  “They changed their tune at once. What they said now was that, three days before, Brown had driven up to the house. They were surprised when he didn’t put the car away at once. Gina looked out the window and saw him staggering up the garden path. She thought he was drunk… Then he fell full length on the front steps.”

  “Dead, of course.”

  “As dead as could be. When we examined the body, we found he’d been stabbed between the shoulder blades.”

  “And they kept him in the house with them for three days?”

  “Yes. And they can’t give any plausible reason for it. They claim that Brown hated everything to do with the police.

  “They buried him and took to their heels, with the money and the bonds and all the valuables they could carry… I understand why the car stood there on the road for three days. Gina could hardly drive. She’d had a few lessons, but wasn’t up to backing the car into the garage.”

  The two men moved into the living room.

  “Was
there any blood in the car?”

  “Not a sign. They swear they washed it off.”

  “Is that all?”

  “Yes. Except that they’re furious and demand to be released. They’ve been moved to Antibes now.”

  The horse outside neighed. Maigret, who had smoked his cigar almost to the end, looked around for a place to get rid of it.

  “Have some whiskey while you’re here,” said Boutigues as his eye lighted on a liquor cabinet.

  No. Somehow the story fell flat. For the life of him, Maigret could not take it seriously. It was the fault of the sunshine and the oranges and mimosa, and that fisherman, who was still plunging his reed into the clear water, aiming at the sea urchins so far below.

  “Can you leave the keys with me?”

  “Certainly, now that you’re taking over the investigation.”

  Maigret swallowed his whiskey, looked idly at the record on the phonograph, and fiddled with the knobs of the radio, which at once responded:

  “… wheat at the close… November…”

  At the same moment he caught sight of a photograph next to the radio. He picked it up to study it.

  “Is this he?”

  “Yes… though I never saw him alive myself.”

  Maigret switched off the radio with a touch of impatience. Something had clicked inside him. Interest? More than that. A confused sensation, and disagreeable besides. Before, Brown had been merely Brown, an unknown stranger who had come to a bad and somewhat mysterious end. The sort of man he had been, what he had thought, felt, and suffered, were questions that had not come up.

  And now, suddenly, looking at the photograph, Maigret was troubled by the feeling that the person it showed him was someone he knew. Yet someone he had never set eyes on— of that he felt quite sure.

  The broad face gave an impression of health; the complexion must have been ruddy. The hair was getting thin; the mustache was close-clipped; the eyes were large and clear…

  But it wasn’t the features in themselves that struck him. It was something vaguer, more general. It was the expression. There was something in the expression that resembled Maigret himself. The same look of almost exaggerated calm. The same good-natured irony about the mouth. And the line of the shoulders, slightly hunched…

  Brown the corpse was forgotten. Here was a man who intrigued Maigret, whether Maigret liked it or not, a man he must know more about.

  “Another shot of whiskey, Superintendent? It’s not too bad.”

  Boutigues was in a relaxed mood. But if Maigret had been none too responsive before, he was less so now, looking around with an absent stare. Boutigues did not know what to make of him.

  “Shall we give the driver a glass?”

  “No. We’re leaving.”

  “You won’t look through the house?”

  “Another time.”

  He’d go over the place alone, and when his brain wasn’t humming with sunshine. On the way back, he was silent, merely nodding at Boutigues’ remarks. Boutigues began to wonder what he’d done to offend him.

  “You must see the OldTown… The jail’s next to the market… Early morning is really the best time for…”

  “Which hotel?” asked the driver, turning around.

  “Perhaps you’d like to be right in the center,” Boutigues suggested.

  “Leave me here. This’ll do.”

  They were just coming to a modest hotel, more a family pension. It was halfway between Antibes and the Cap.

  “Will you be coming to the jail tonight?”

  “Tomorrow, more likely, but I’ll see.”

  “Should I pick you up? But perhaps you’d like to go to the casino at Juan-les-Pins. After dinner, I mean. I’d be…”

  “Thanks, but I’m too tired.”

  He wasn’t really tired. He simply wasn’t in the mood. He was hot, sweaty. In his room, which faced the sea, he turned on the water for a bath, then changed his mind and went downstairs again, his pipe between his teeth, his hands in his pockets.

  As he went out, he had a glimpse of the dining room— little white tables, napkins folded like fans and stuck into the glasses, bottles of wine and mineral water, a waitress sweeping.

  Brown had been killed by a knife thrust in the back, and his “two women” had made off with the money…

  But this still formed no image in his mind. Instead, his eyes wandered aimlessly to where the sun was slowly sinking, and then along the whole stretch of the horizon to Nice, where the Promenade des Anglais was just visible as a white line. Turning his back on the sea, he stared at the mountaintops still covered with snow.

  Facing the sea once more, he silently recited his lesson:

  “Nice on the left, about fifteen miles away; Cannes on the right, to the west, less than seven…”

  It was a little world, a narrow strip between the mountains and the Mediterranean—a world of simmering sunshine, strange flowers, feverish flies, the scent of mimosa, cars gliding on soft asphalt; a world whose center for him was the villa where Brown had lived with his women.

  Maigret couldn’t face the half-mile walk into town. So he went back into the Hotel Bacon, and from there telephoned the jail.

  “Can I speak to the warden?”

  “He’s on vacation.”

  “His deputy, then?”

  “There isn’t one. There’s only me.”

  “All right. Bring the two women prisoners to their villa— say, an hour from now.”

  The guard’s head must have been full of sunshine, too, or perhaps he’d been drinking, because he forgot to ask Maigret for a warrant.

  He merely said: “Yes… And you’ll return them to us… ?”

  Maigret yawned, stretched, and refilled his pipe. Even the pipe didn’t taste the same down here!

  Brown had been killed, and the two women… It was becoming a refrain.

  He strolled toward the villa. When he came to where the car had crashed, he almost laughed. Just the place for a beginner. The struggle with the gears, the car jerking forward, and then the sharp bend coming before she’d had time to recover.

  He could see it perfectly. The butcher coming up behind in the twilight… The two women trying to run with three suitcases and finally abandoning the heaviest among some tamarisks by the roadside.

  A limousine passed, driven by a chauffeur. In the back an Indian face—no doubt the maharajah. The blue of the sea was darkening, except at the sunset, where it became orange and then red. Lights were switched on, pale in the dusk.

  Maigret, alone in the evening vastness, quietly walked up to the garden gate like a man returning home. He unlocked it, left it open, and went to the front door. The trees were full of birds. The creak of the door must have been a familiar sound to Brown.

  Inside, Maigret sniffed. Every house has its own peculiar smell. What predominated in this one was a strong perfume, probably musk, though it was somewhat obscured by the cigars he and Boutigues had smoked that afternoon. He went into the living room, switched on the light, and sat down between the radio and the phonograph. The chair must have been Brown’s, because it was the one that showed the most signs of wear.

  He had been stabbed, and the two women…

  The light was dim, but Maigret saw there was another lamp, one with a huge pink silk shade. When he switched that on, too, the room came to life.

  During the war Brown had worked for the Deuxième Bureau. That’s why the local papers had pounced so eagerly on the affair. For the public, espionage was always mysterious and full of glamour. Maigret had looked at some of the absurd headlines during the last part of his journey:

  INTERNATIONAL PLOT

  A SECOND KOTIOUPOFF AFFAIR

  SPY DRAMA

  Some papers thought they could detect the hand of the KGB; others that of the CIA or the SIS.

  Maigret looked around. Something seemed wrong with the room. Of course: The large bay window, with the blackening night outside. He got up and closed the curtains.

  He tried to picture an ordinary evening in this room.

  Say, one of the women sewing over there…

  There was, in fact, some embroidery lying on a little table.

  And the other in that corner… where a book was lying— The Passions of Rudolph Valentino.