The Cellars of the Majestic Read online

  ‘Are you sure it’s him?’

  ‘As sure as I am that I’m me!’

  ‘And would you recognize his handwriting?’

  ‘I’d recognize it myself,’ the deputy manager cut in, annoyed to be relegated to the background.

  Maigret handed them various papers, written by different people.

  ‘No! … No! … That’s not like it … Ah! … Wait! … That’s one of his 7s … He had a particular way of doing the 7s … The fs too … This is one of his fs …’

  What they had just pointed out was indeed from the hand of Donge, since it was one of the slips he scribbled on when he received orders for so many coffees with or without croissants, so many teas, slices of toast or hot chocolates.

  The telephone was silent. It was just after midday.

  ‘It only remains, gentlemen, for me to thank you!’

  What could Lucas possibly be doing at the Jem agency all this time? He was quite capable of having taken the bus, just to save six francs!

  9. Monsieur Charles’ Newspaper

  Taken separately, they might still have passed. But together, standing near the entrance to the Police Judiciaire, as if waiting outside a factory, they formed a grotesque, pitiful duo. Gigi perched on her thin legs, dressed in her worn rabbitskin coat, bright-eyed, looking defiantly at the officer on duty at the door, leaning over whenever she heard footsteps to see who was coming; poor Charlotte who hadn’t summoned up the will to arrange her hair, or to put on make-up, and whose broad, moonlike face was streaked with red because she had been crying and was still snivelling. Her nose, also red, was like a small ball in the middle of her face.

  She was wearing a very dignified black linen coat trimmed with astrakhan at the collar and hem and mechanically holding a comfortable glazed calfskin handbag. Without the presence of the long, crow-like Gigi, and without that little red nose in the middle of her face, she would have looked quite respectable.

  ‘It’s him! …’

  Charlotte hadn’t moved. It was Gigi, who was constantly coming and going. And Maigret had indeed arrived, in the company of a colleague. He noticed the two women too late. There was sunlight on the riverbank, a little foretaste of spring in the air.

  ‘Excuse me, inspector …’

  He shook his colleague’s hand. ‘Enjoy your meal …’

  ‘Could we have a word, inspector? …’

  And Charlotte burst into sobs, stuffing almost all her handkerchief, rolled into a ball, into her mouth. Passers-by turned round. Maigret waited patiently. As if to excuse her friend, Gigi said:

  ‘She’s just come from seeing the judge. He summoned her …’

  ‘Oh, yes, Judge Bonneau! It was his right, of course! But all the same …’

  ‘Is it true, inspector, that Prosper … confessed everything? …’

  This time, Maigret openly smiled. Was that all the examining magistrate had come up with? That old ploy used by all rookie police officers? And that silly goose Charlotte had fallen for it!

  ‘It isn’t true, is it? I thought as much! If only you knew everything he came out with! … To hear him, I’m the lowest of the low …’

  The officer on duty in front of the entrance raised an eyebrow as he looked at them. And it was indeed a curious sight, Maigret having to deal with the two women, the one crying and the other eyeing him with unconcealed suspicion!

  ‘As if I’d write an anonymous letter accusing Prosper, when I’m sure he didn’t kill anyone! … You see, if it had been with a revolver, I might still believe it … But not strangle someone … And especially not do the same thing the next day to a poor man who hadn’t done anything … What about you? Have you found out anything new, inspector? Do you think they’re going to keep him in prison? …’

  Maigret signalled to a taxi that was prowling.

  ‘Get in!’ he said to the two women. ‘I have an errand to perform, you can come with me …’

  It was true. He had finally received a phone call from Lucas, who hadn’t got anything from the Jem agency. He had arranged to meet him on Boulevard Haussmann. And the idea had just crossed his mind that …

  Both women wanted to sit on the jump seat, but he forced them to occupy the back seat, while he was the one who turned his back on the driver. It was one of the first fine days of the year. The streets of Paris sped by, looking spick and span, and the passers-by were more animated.

  ‘Tell me, Charlotte, does Donge still put his savings in the bank? …’

  He almost laid into Gigi, who frowned every time he opened his mouth, as if suspecting a trap. It was obvious she was having to restrain herself from telling her friend:

  ‘Careful! … Think before you answer …’

  Charlotte, meanwhile, exclaimed:

  ‘Savings, poor thing? … It’s a long time since we last managed to make any savings! … Especially since we’ve had this house on our backs! … According to the estimates, it was supposed to cost no more than forty thousand francs … First of all, the foundations cost three times what we’d planned, because they discovered an underground stream … Then, when the walls started to go up, there was a building strike that stopped the works just before winter set in … Five thousand francs here … Three thousand francs there … A gang of thieves, really! … If I told you how much the house all adds up to now! … I don’t know the exact figure, but it’s surely more than eighty thousand, and there are things that haven’t been paid yet …’

  ‘So Donge has no more money in the bank?’

  ‘He hasn’t even had an account … wait! … for about three years … I remember, because one day the postman came with a money order for eight hundred and something francs … I didn’t know what it was … When Donge came home, he told me he’d written to the bank to close his account and ask for the balance …’

  ‘Would you happen to remember the date?’

  ‘What business is it of yours?’ Gigi asked, unable to stop herself adding her dose of vinegar.

  ‘I know it was winter, because I was busy breaking up the ice around the pump when the postman arrived … Wait … I went to the market in Saint-Cloud that day … I bought a goose … So it must have been a few days before Christmas …’

  ‘Where are we going?’ Gigi muttered, looking through the window.

  Just then, the taxi stopped on Boulevard Haussmann, just before Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Lucas was on the pavement, and his eyes opened wide when he saw Maigret get out after the two women.

  ‘One moment …’ the inspector said to them.

  He pulled Lucas aside.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Look … You see that sort of narrow shop, between the luggage seller and the ladies’ hairdresser? … That’s the Jem agency … It’s run by a repulsive old character I couldn’t get anything out of … He wanted to close his shop and go and have lunch, claiming it was his usual time … I forced him to stay open … He’s really angry … He claims I don’t have the right without a warrant …’

  Maigret entered the barely lit shop, cut in half by a black wooden counter. Little wooden pigeonholes, also black, adorned the walls, filled with letters.

  ‘I’d like to know …’ the old man began.

  ‘If you don’t mind,’ Maigret growled, ‘I’ll ask the questions. It’s true, isn’t it, that you receive letters with initials, which is forbidden at the poste restante? I guess that means you must have quite an interesting clientele …’

  ‘I pay my licence!’ was the old man’s only response.

  He wore thick glasses beneath which lurked a pair of watery eyes. His jacket was dirty, his shirt collar frayed and greasy. A rancid odour came off his body and became the odour of the shop.

  ‘I need to know if you keep a register in which you note down the names of your customers opposite the initials …’

  The old man sniggered. ‘You think they’d still come here if they had to give their names? … Might as well ask them for identity cards …’

  It was a little
sickening to think that pretty women slipped furtively into this shop which had served as an agency for so many adulteries and so many other dubious transactions.

  ‘Yesterday morning you received a letter addressed to the initials J. M. D. …’

  ‘That’s quite possible. I already told your colleague. He even insisted on making sure the letter wasn’t here any more …’

  ‘So someone came to collect it. Can you tell me when?’

  ‘I have absolutely no idea and, even if I knew, I don’t think I’d tell you …’

  ‘You do know, don’t you, that one of these days I might have your shop closed down?’

  ‘There are others who’ve told me the same thing, and my shop, as you call it, has been here for forty-two years … If I kept count of all the husbands who’ve come here, kicking up a fuss and even threatening me with their sticks …’

  Lucas hadn’t been wrong to say that the man was repulsive.

  ‘Now if you don’t mind, I’m going to close the shutters and go to lunch …’

  Where could this creep have lunch? Was it possible that he had a family, a wife, children? He was much more likely to be a bachelor and probably had his place reserved for him, with his napkin in a ring, in some seedy restaurant in the neighbourhood.

  ‘Have you ever seen this man?’

  Unfazed, Maigret once again held out the photograph of Donge, and curiosity won out over the old man’s ill humour. He leaned forwards and had to bring the paper up to less than twenty centimetres from his face. His features didn’t move. He shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘Never seen him before …’ he murmured, as if regretfully.

  The two women had remained outside, in front of the narrow window. Maigret called Charlotte in.

  ‘What about this woman, do you recognize her?’

  If Charlotte was acting, she was startlingly good, because she looked about her with a mixture of surprise and embarrassment, two feelings these premises were well placed to inspire.

  ‘What …?’ she began.

  She was panicking. She was wondering why she had been brought here. She looked instinctively for help from Gigi, who had come in of her own accord.

  ‘Are you going to bring many more people in here?’

  ‘Don’t you recognize either of them? … Can’t you tell me if it was a man or a woman who asked for the letter addressed to J. M. D., or when that letter was collected? …’

  Without answering, the old man had taken hold of a wooden shutter which he went and hung in front of the door. There was nothing to do except retreat. Maigret, Lucas and the two women found themselves back on the pavement, beneath the chestnut trees, whose buds would soon be bursting.

  ‘You can go, you two! …’

  He watched them walk away. Gigi hadn’t gone ten metres before she started speaking vehemently to her companion, whom she was pulling along with her at a pace which the plump Charlotte had difficulty keeping up with.

  ‘Anything new, boss?’

  What could Maigret have replied? He was anxious and tetchy. It was as if the spring weather, instead of cheering him up, were making him more irritable.

  ‘I don’t know … Listen … Go and have lunch … This afternoon, don’t leave the office … Inform the banks, both in France and in Brussels, that if a cheque for two hundred and eighty thousand francs is presented …’

  He wasn’t far from the Majestic. He turned on to Rue de Ponthieu and entered the bistro next to the hotel’s service entrance. You could have a snack there, and he ordered a cassoulet, which he ate alone, still sullen, at a little table at the back, not far from two customers who were having a quick lunch before going to the races and were talking about horses.

  Anyone following him would have found it difficult to say what he did that afternoon. When his meal was over, he had a coffee and bought some tobacco, which he stuffed into his pouch. Then he left the bistro and stood for a while on the pavement, looking around.

  He clearly didn’t have a firm plan. It was with a sluggish gait that he entered the corridor of the Majestic and came to a halt by the clocking-in machine. He was like a traveller with hours to wait in a station fiddling with the automatic sweet dispensers.

  People passed behind him, especially cooks, napkins around their necks, running to knock back a quick drink at the bistro next door.

  As he advanced into the corridor, the heat became heavier and he received blasts of air from the kitchen in his face.

  Nobody in the locker room. He washed his hands at the basin, for no reason, just to kill time, and spent a good ten minutes cleaning his nails. Then, as it was too hot, he took off his coat and hung it in locker number 89.

  Jean Ramuel sat enthroned in his glass cage. Opposite, in the coffee room, the three women were bustling about at an accelerated pace, along with a new employee in a white coat who was filling in for Prosper.

  ‘Who’s that?’ Maigret asked Ramuel.

  ‘An assistant they’ve hired until they find someone … Monsieur Charles, they call him … So, inspector, you’ve come for a little stroll, have you? … Do you mind? …’

  It was the lunch rush. Rich customers have lunch late, and the slips were piling up in front of Ramuel, the waiters parading past, the telephones ringing all at once, the dumb waiters working without respite.

  Maigret, who had kept his hat on his head, came and went, his hands in his pockets, stopping behind a cook who was stirring a sauce as if it interested him enormously, then standing by the sinks, or with his face up against the windows of the couriers’ room.

  As he had done during his first inspection, he set off up the service staircase and this time climbed all the floors, without hurrying, as surly as ever. As he was coming back down, he was joined by the manager, who was out of breath.

  ‘They’ve only just told me you’re here, inspector … I assume you haven’t had lunch yet? … If you’ll allow me …’

  ‘I’ve eaten, thanks …’

  ‘Then may I ask you if you have any news? I was so upset when they arrested that Prosper Donge … But are you sure you won’t have anything? … A little brandy, at least? …’

  More than anything else, the manager was embarrassed to find himself sharing a narrow staircase with a Maigret who manifested no feeling. At such moments, the inspector had the inertia of a pachyderm.

  ‘I had hoped that the press wouldn’t get hold of this business … You know how much, for a hotel … As for Donge …’

  It was hopeless. Maigret was offering nothing to cling on to. He had started walking down the stairs and found himself again in the basement.

  ‘A young man I would have cited as a model only a few days ago … Because, as I’m sure you can imagine, in a place like this we get all sorts …’

  Maigret’s gaze went from one partition to another, from one fish tank to another, as he put it. And it ended up in the locker room, in the now infamous locker 89, where two human lives had really come to an end.

  ‘As for that poor Collebœuf … Forgive me if I’m boring you … I just thought of something … Don’t you think it must take above-average strength to strangle a man in broad daylight, a few metres away from lots of other people, in other words without the victim being able to cry out or struggle? … At an hour like now, it might still be possible, because everyone’s very busy and there’s a lot of noise … But about half past four or five in the afternoon …’

  ‘I assume you were eating?’ Maigret murmured.

  ‘It doesn’t matter … We’re used to eating at odd times …’

  ‘Do me a favour and finish your lunch … I’m just coming and going … Excuse me …’

  And once again he walked along corridors, opened doors, closed them again, lit a pipe, which he soon let go out.

  His steps took him back most often to the coffee room, and he was starting to know all the moves of its occupants. He kept muttering between his teeth, unconnected phrases such as:

  ‘OK … So Donge is here … H
e’s here every day, from six in the morning … OK … At home, he had a cup of coffee that Charlotte heated for him when she got back … OK … Here, I suppose he pours himself one of the first cups from the percolator … OK …’

  Did it make any sense?

  ‘He’s in the habit of taking a cup of coffee to the night porter … OK … Actually, that day, it must have been because it was after ten past six and Donge hadn’t yet gone up that Justin Collebœuf came downstairs … OK … Well … Because of that or for some other reason … Hmm!’

  Actually, it wasn’t the same silver coffee pots as at breakfast that were being filled now, but little coffee pots of glazed earthenware, each surmounted by a tiny filter.

  ‘All morning, the breakfasts follow each other at an ever faster pace … OK! … Then Donge has a bite to eat … A meal that’s brought to him on a tray …’

  ‘Would you mind moving a little to your right or your left, inspector? … You’re stopping me from counting the cups …’

  That was Ramuel, who was supposed to keep an eye on everything from his glass cage. Well, well! He also counted the cups in the coffee room.

  ‘Sorry to have to ask you that …’

  ‘Not at all! Not at all! …’

  Three o’clock. The pace was slowing. One of the chefs had just got dressed to go outside.

  ‘If anyone asks for me, Ramuel, I’ll be back about five … I have to go and pay my taxes.’

  The little brown coffee pots had almost all come back down. Monsieur Charles left the coffee room and turned into the passage that led to the street, not without casting a curious look at the inspector. The women must have told him who he was.

  He came back a few moments later with an afternoon paper. It was just after three. The women were at the sinks, up to their elbows in hot water.

  As for Monsieur Charles, he sat down at his little table, as comfortably as he could. He spread out the newspaper in front of him, put on a pair of glasses, lit a cigarette and began to read.

  There was nothing remarkable about this, and yet Maigret opened his eyes wide.

  ‘So,’ he said, smiling at Ramuel who was sorting his slips, ‘this is the break?’