The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien Read online

  It finally dawned on him that something was wrong. Van Damme was staring stubbornly at the floor. Belloir was impatiently snapping his fingers.

  ‘Aren’t you the one who set himself up in Rue Hors-Château?’ asked the carpenter, turning to Jef Lombard. ‘I’ve a nephew worked with you. A tall blond fellow …’

  ‘Maybe,’ sighed Lombard, turning away.

  ‘You I don’t recognize … Were you with this lot?’

  Now the landlord was speaking to Maigret.

  ‘No.’

  ‘What a weird bunch! My wife didn’t want me to rent to them, and then she advised me to throw them out, especially since they didn’t pay up very often. But they amused me. Always looking to be the one wearing the biggest hat, or smoking the longest clay pipe. And they used to sing together and drink all night long! And some pretty girls would show up sometimes … Speaking of which, Monsieur Lombard, that one there, on the floor, do you know what happened to her? …

  ‘She married a shop walker at Le Grand Bazar and she lives about two hundred metres down the street from here. She has a son who goes to school with mine …’

  Lombard stood up, went over to the bay window, and retraced his steps in such agitation that the carpenter decided to beat a retreat.

  ‘Maybe I am disturbing you after all, so I’ll leave you to it. And you know, if you’re interested in anything here … Of course, I never held on to this stuff on account of the twenty francs! All I took was one landscape, for my dining room.’

  Out on the landing, he seemed about to start chatting again, but was summoned from downstairs.

  ‘Someone to see you, patron!’

  ‘Later, then, gentlemen. Glad to have met—’

  The closing door cut off his voice. Although inopportune, the carpenter’s visit had eased some of the tension, and while he’d been talking, Maigret had lit his pipe.

  Now he pointed to the most puzzling drawing on the wall, an image encircled by an inscription that read: The Companions of the Apocalypse.

  ‘Was this the name of your group?’

  Sounding almost like himself again, it was Belloir who replied.

  ‘Yes. I’ll explain … It’s too late for us, isn’t it – and tough luck for our wives and children …’

  But Lombard broke in: ‘Let me tell him, I want to …’

  And he began pacing up and down the room, now and then looking over at some object or other, as if to illustrate his story.

  ‘Just over ten years ago, I was studying painting at the Académie, where I used to go around in a wide-brimmed hat and a lavallière … Two others there with me were Gaston Janin, who was studying sculpture, and little Émile Klein. We would parade proudly around the Carré – because we were artists, you understand? Each of us thought he’d be at least another Rembrandt!

  ‘It all started so foolishly … We read a lot, and favoured the Romantic period. We’d get carried away and idolize some writer for a week, then drop that one and adopt another …

  ‘Little Klein, whose mother lived in Angleur, rented this studio we’re in, and we started meeting here. We were really impressed by the medieval atmosphere of the neighbourhood, especially on winter evenings. We’d sing old songs and recite Villon’s poetry …

  ‘I don’t remember any more who discovered the Book of Revelation – the Apocalypse of John – and insisted on reading us whole chapters from it.

  ‘One evening we met a few university students: Belloir, Lecocq d’Arneville, Van Damme, and a Jewish fellow named Mortier, whose father has a shop selling tripe and sausage casings not far from here.

  ‘We got to drinking and wound up bringing them back to the studio. The oldest of them wasn’t even twenty-two. That was you, Van Damme, wasn’t it?’

  It was doing Lombard good to talk. His movements were less abrupt, his voice less hoarse, but his face was still blotched with red and his lips swollen from weeping.

  ‘I think it was my idea to found a group, a society! I’d read about the secret societies in German universities during the eighteenth century. A club that would unite Science and Art!’

  Looking around the studio walls, he couldn’t help sneering.

  ‘Because we were just full of that kind of talk! Hot air that puffed up our pride. On the one side were Klein, Janin and me, the paint-pushers: we were Art! On the other side, our new university friends. We drank to that. Because we drank a lot … We drank to feel even more gloriously superior! And we’d dim the lights to create an atmosphere of mystery.

  ‘We’d lounge around right here, look: some of us on the divan, the others on the floor. We’d smoke pipe after pipe, until the air became a thick haze. Then we’d all start singing. There was almost always someone feeling sick who’d have to go and throw up in the courtyard. We’d still be going strong at two, three in the morning, working ourselves up into a frenzy. Helped along by the wine, some cheap rotgut that upset our stomachs, we used to soar off into the realm of metaphysics …

  ‘I can still see little Klein … He was the most excitable one, the nervous type. He wasn’t well. His mother was poor and he lived on nothing, went without food so he could drink. Because when we’d been drinking, we all felt like real geniuses!

  ‘The university contingent was a little more level-headed, because they weren’t as poor, except for Lecocq d’Arneville. Belloir would swipe a bottle of nice old Burgundy or liqueur from his parents, and Van Damme used to bring some charcuterie …

  ‘We were convinced that people used to look at us out in the street with fear and admiration, and we chose an arcane, sonorous, lofty name: The Companions of the Apocalypse. Actually, I don’t think any of us had read the Book of Revelation all the way through … Klein was the only one who could recite a few passages by heart, when he was drunk.

  ‘We’d all decided to split the rent for the room, but Klein was allowed to live here.

  ‘A few girls agreed to come pose for us for free … Pose and all the rest, naturally! And we tried to think of them as grisettes from La Bohème! And all that half-baked folderol …

  ‘There’s one of the girls, on the floor. Dumb as they come. But we painted her as a Madonna anyway.

  ‘Drinking – that was the main thing. We had to ginger up the atmosphere at all costs. Klein once tried to achieve the same effect by pouring sulphuric ether on the divan. And I remember all of us, working ourselves up, waiting for intoxication, expecting visions … Oh God Almighty!’

  Lombard went over to cool his forehead against a misty windowpane, but when he came back there was a new quaver in his voice.

  ‘Chasing after this frenzied exaltation, we wound up nervous wrecks – especially those of us who weren’t eating enough, you understand? Little Klein, among others: a poor kid going without food to over-stimulate himself with drink …

  ‘And it was as if we were rediscovering the world all on our own, naturally! We were full of opinions on every great problem, and full of scorn for society, established truths and everything bourgeois. When we’d had a few drinks and smoked up a storm, we’d spout the most cock-eyed nonsense, a hodgepodge of Nietzsche, Karl Marx, Moses, Confucius, Jesus Christ …

  ‘Here’s an example: I don’t remember which one of us discovered that pain doesn’t exist, the brain’s simply imagining it. One night I became so enthralled with the idea that, surrounded by my excited audience, I stabbed myself in the upper arm with a pocket knife and forced myself to smile about it!

  ‘And we had other wild inspirations like that … We were an elite, a coterie of geniuses who’d come together by chance and were way above the conventional world with its laws and preconceived opinions. A gathering of the gods, hey? Gods who were sometimes dying of hunger but who strode through the streets with their heads high, crushing passers-by with their contempt.

  ‘And we had the future completely in hand: Lecocq d’Arneville would become a new Tolstoy, while Van Damme, who was taking boring courses at our university business school, would fundamentally
redefine economics and upend all the accepted ideas about the social workings of humanity. And each one of us had a role to play, as poets, painters and future heads of state.

  ‘All fuelled by booze! Or just fumes! Because by the end we were so used to flying high here that simply by walking through that door, into the alchemical light of the lantern, with a skeleton in the shadows and the skull we used as a communal drinking bowl, we’d catch the little fever we craved, all on our own.

  ‘Even the most modest among us could already envision the marble plaque that would one day adorn this house: Here met the famous Companions of the Apocalypse … We all tried to come up with the newest great book or amazing idea. It’s a miracle we didn’t all wind up anarchists! Because we actually discussed that question, quite seriously. There’d been an incident in Seville; someone read the newspaper article about it aloud, and I don’t remember any more who shouted, “True genius is destructive!”

  ‘Well, our kiddy club debated this subject for hours. We came up with ways to make bombs. We cast about for interesting things to blow up.

  ‘Then little Klein, who was on his sixth or seventh glass, became ill, but not like the other times. This was some kind of nervous fit: he was writhing on the floor, and all we could think of any more was what would happen to us if something happened to him! And that girl was there! Henriette, her name was. She was crying …

  ‘Oh, those were some nights, all right … It was a point of honour with us not to leave until the lamplighter had turned off the gas streetlamps, and then we’d head out shivering into the dreary dawn. Those of us who were better off would sneak home through a window, sleep, eat and more or less recover from our nightly excesses, but the others – Klein, Lecocq d’Arneville and I – would drag ourselves through the streets, nibbling on a roll and looking longingly into shop windows …

  ‘That year I didn’t have an overcoat because I wanted to buy a wide-brimmed hat that cost a hundred and twenty francs, and I pretended that, like everything else, cold was an illusion. And primed by all our discussions, I announced to my father, a good, honest man, a gunsmith’s assistant – he’s dead, now – that parental love is the worst form of selfishness and that a child’s first duty is to reject his family.

  ‘He was a widower. He used to go off to work in the morning at six o’clock, just when I was getting home. Well, he took to setting out earlier so he wouldn’t run into me, because my big speeches frightened him. And he would leave me little notes on the table: There’s some cold meat in the cupboard. Father …’

  Lombard’s voice broke for a moment. He looked over at Belloir, who was sitting on the edge of a staved-in chair, staring at the floor, and then at Van Damme, who was shredding a cigar to bits.

  ‘There were seven of us,’ said Lombard dully. ‘Seven supermen! Seven geniuses! Seven kids!

  ‘Janin’s still sculpting, off in Paris – or rather, he makes shop-window mannequins for a big factory. Now and then he works off his frustration by doing something from a real model, his mistress of the moment … Belloir’s in banking, Van Damme’s in business, I’m a photoengraver …’

  The fear in that silent room was now palpable. Lombard swallowed hard but went on, and his eyes seemed to sink even deeper into their dark sockets.

  ‘Klein hanged himself at the church door … Lecocq d’Arneville shot himself in the mouth in Bremen …’

  Another silence. This time, unable to sit still, Belloir stood up, hesitated, then went to stand by the bay window. A strange noise seemed to be rumbling in his chest.

  ‘And the last one?’ inquired Maigret. ‘Mortier, I believe? The tripe dealer’s son.’

  Lombard now stared at him so frantically that the inspector thought he might have another fit. Van Damme somehow knocked over a chair.

  ‘It was in December, wasn’t it?’

  As he was speaking, Maigret kept a close eye on the three men.

  ‘In a month it will have been ten years. The statute of limitations will come into effect.’

  He went first to pick up Van Damme’s automatic, then collected the revolver Lombard had thrown away after he arrived.

  Maigret had seen it coming: Lombard was breaking down, holding his head in his hands and wailing, ‘My children! My three little ones!’

  And with renewed hysteria, unashamed to show the tears streaming down his face, he yelled, ‘It’s because of you, you, only because of you, that I haven’t even seen my newborn child, my little girl! I couldn’t even say what she looks like … Do you understand?’

  10. Christmas Eve in Rue du Pot-au-Noir

  There must have been a passing shower, some swift low-lying clouds, because all the sunshine glinting off objects in the room vanished in an instant. As if a switch had been flicked, the light turned uniformly grey, while the clutter took on a glum look.

  Maigret understood why those who’d gathered there had felt the need to doctor the light with a lantern of many colours, set their stage with mysterious shadows and muddle the atmosphere with drink and tobacco smoke.

  And he could imagine how Klein would awaken in the morning after those sad orgies to find himself surrounded by empty bottles, broken glasses and rancid odours, all bathed in the murk from the bay window, which had no curtains.

  Jef Lombard was too upset to go on, and it was Maurice Belloir who took up the story.

  Everything shifted, as if they’d moved to a different register. Lombard had been shaken to his very core, his emotion expressed through wrenching sobs, shrill, wheezing catches in his voice, nervous pacing and periods of alternating agitation and calm that could have been plotted on a medical chart, while Belloir’s entire person – his voice, his gaze, his every move – was under such taut control that it was painful to see, for it clearly demanded a gruelling effort of will and concentration.

  This man could never have cried, or even tried to smile: he held himself completely still.

  ‘May I take over, inspector? It will be dark soon and we’ll have no light here.’

  It was not Belloir’s fault that he’d brought up a practical detail, and it wasn’t from lack of feeling, for it was actually his own way of showing how he felt.

  ‘I believe that we were all sincere in our arguments and endless discussions, and when we were dreaming out loud. But there were different degrees of sincerity involved.

  ‘Jef has mentioned this. On the one hand, there were the wealthy ones, who went home afterwards to recover their balance in a stable environment: Van Damme, Willy Mortier and I. And even Janin, who had everything he needed.

  ‘Willy Mortier was in a class by himself, however. A case in point: he was the only one who chose his mistresses from among professional nightclub singers and the dancers in second-rate theatres. He paid them.

  ‘He was a practical, unsentimental person, like his father, who arrived in Liège with empty pockets, matter-of-factly chose the sausage-casing business – and made a fortune.

  ‘Willy received a monthly allowance of 500 francs, which seemed a fabulous sum to the rest of us. He never set foot inside the university, paid poorer students to take notes for him in lectures and “arranged” to pass his exams through favours and bribes.

  ‘He came here simply out of curiosity, because he never shared our tastes or ideas. Look at his father: he’d buy paintings from artists even though he despised them, and he “bought” city councilmen and even aldermen as well, to get what he wanted. He despised them, too.

  ‘Well, Willy despised us in the same way. He was a rich boy who came here to see just how different he was from the rest of us.

  ‘He didn’t drink. And those who got drunk here disgusted him. During our epic discussions, he’d say only a few words, but they were like ice water, the kind of words that hurt because they’re too blunt, because they ruined the fake poetic atmosphere we’d managed to create.

  ‘He hated us! And we hated him! On top of everything else, he was stingy – and cynical about it. Klein didn’t always get someth
ing to eat every day, so one or the other of us would help him out now and then. Mortier? He’d announce, “I don’t want any difficulties about money to come between us. I don’t want to be welcomed simply because I’m well off.”

  ‘And he’d cough up exactly his share when we were all turning our pockets inside out to buy something to drink.

  ‘It was Lecocq d’Arneville who used to take lecture notes for him, and I once overheard Willy refuse to give him an advance on his payment.

  ‘He was the alien, hostile element that crops up almost every time when men get together. We put up with him. Klein, though, when he was drunk, used to attack him savagely, really let everything that bothered him come pouring out. Mortier would go a bit pale bur he’d just listen, with a faint sneer …

  ‘I mentioned various kinds of sincerity. Klein and Lecocq d’Arneville were definitely the most forthright, unpretentious members of our group. They were close, like brothers. They’d both had difficult childhoods, with their mothers watching every sou … Both these fellows were desperate to better themselves and agonized over anything that stood in their way.

  ‘Klein had to work during the day as a house painter to pay for his evening classes at the Académie, and he did tell us that it made him dizzy when he had to climb a ladder. Lecocq took lecture notes for others, gave French lessons to foreign students; he often came here to eat. The stove must still be around here somewhere …’

  It was lying on the floor near the divan, where Lombard gave it a gloomy kick.

  Not one hair was out of place on Maurice Belloir’s sleek head, and his voice was flat, stripped down.

  ‘Since those days, I’ve heard people in the middle-class drawing rooms of Rheims ask jokingly, “In such-and-such a situation, would you be able to kill someone?” Sometimes it’s the mandarin question, you know the one: If all you had to do was push a button to kill a wealthy mandarin way off in China to inherit his riches, would you do it?