Maigret's Childhood Friend Read online

  ‘Can I make a phone call?’

  They watched with surprise as he walked towards the telephone on the wall, beside the zinc bar and the rows of bottles.

  ‘Hello … Is that the station of the eleventh arrondissement?’

  It was a stone’s throw away, at Place Léon-Blum, formerly Place Voltaire.

  ‘Hello. This is Maigret. There’s an injured man in Rue Popincourt. Towards Rue du Chemin-Vert. We need an ambulance.’

  The four men grew animated, like figures in a painting coming to life. They kept the cards in their hands.

  ‘What is it?’ asked someone in shirt-sleeves, who must have been the owner. ‘Who’s injured?’

  ‘A young man.’

  Maigret set some change down on the counter and headed towards the door.

  ‘A tall, thin guy in a suede jacket?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He was here a quarter of an hour ago.’

  ‘On his own?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did he look nervous?’

  The owner, probably Jules, glanced quizzically at the others.

  ‘No. Not especially.’

  ‘Did he stay for long?’

  ‘About twenty minutes.’

  When Maigret was outside, he saw two officers on bicycles, capes dripping, standing near the injured man. Pardon had got back to his feet.

  ‘There’s nothing I can do. He’s been stabbed several times. They missed his heart. And none of his arteries has been cut either, at first glance, or there would have been more blood.’

  ‘Will he regain consciousness?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t dare to move him. Until we get him to a hospital they won’t be able to …’

  The two vehicles, the police car and the ambulance, arrived almost simultaneously. The card-players, rather than getting wet, stood in the doorway of the little café and watched from a distance. Only the owner came over, with a sack over his head and shoulders. He recognized the man’s jacket straight away.

  ‘That’s him.’

  ‘He didn’t say anything to you?’

  ‘No. Except to order a cognac.’

  Pardon gave instructions to the orderlies who were bringing their stretcher.

  ‘What’s that?’ asked one of the police officers, pointing to a black object that looked like a camera.

  The injured man wore it across his body. It wasn’t a camera, but a tape recorder. It was drenched with rain, and when the man was being slipped on to the stretcher, Maigret took advantage of the fact to release the strap.

  ‘To Saint-Antoine.’

  Pardon got into the ambulance with one of the orderlies while the other one took the wheel.

  ‘Who are you?’ he asked Maigret.

  ‘Police.’

  ‘If you want to get in beside me …’

  The area was deserted, and, less than five minutes later, the ambulance, followed by one of the police vans, reached Saint-Antoine Hospital.

  Here too, Maigret found old memories: the globe-shaped light above reception, the long, badly lit corridors where two or three people were waiting on benches in silent resignation, giving a start every time a door opened and closed, or when a man or a woman in white moved from one place to another.

  ‘Do you have his name or address?’ asked a matron enclosed in her glass cage with a counter in front of it.

  ‘Not yet.’

  A doctor, alerted by a bell, approached from the end of the corridor, reluctantly stubbing out his cigarette. Pardon introduced himself.

  ‘Have you done anything?’

  The injured man, lying on a trolley, was being pushed into a lift, and Pardon, who followed it, made a vague gesture to Maigret from a distance as if to say: ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’

  ‘Do you know anything, inspector?’

  ‘No more than you do. I was having dinner with a friend in the area, when someone came and told my friend, who is a doctor, that there was an injured man lying on the pavement in Rue Popincourt.’

  The officer jotted this down in his notebook. Less than ten minutes passed in a disagreeable silence, and Pardon reappeared at the end of the corridor. It was a bad sign. The doctor’s face was anxious.

  ‘Dead?’

  ‘Even before they had time to undress him … Haemorrhage in the pleural cavity. I feared as much when I heard his breathing.’

  ‘Was he stabbed?’

  ‘Yes. Several times. Quite a thin blade. In a few minutes we’ll bring you the contents of his pockets. Then, I suppose they’ll send them to the Forensic Institute.’

  This version of Paris was familiar to Maigret. He had experienced it over the years and yet he had never completely got used to it. What was he doing here? A knife blow, several knife blows, that didn’t concern him. That happened every night, and in the morning it would be summed up in three or four lines in the daily reports.

  By chance he had had a ringside view, and he also felt somewhat involved. The Italian pasta-maker hadn’t had time to tell him what he had seen. He must have gone home with his wife. They slept on the first floor, above the shop.

  A nurse came towards the little group, holding a basket.

  ‘Who’s in charge of the investigation?’

  The plainclothes officers looked at Maigret, and she spoke to him:

  ‘This is what I found in his pockets. You’ll have to sign for it.’

  There was a small wallet of the kind that can be slipped into the back pocket, a ball-point pen, a pipe, a tobacco pouch containing some very pale Dutch tobacco, a handkerchief, some change and two cassette tapes.

  The wallet contained an identity card and a driver’s licence in the name of Antoine Batille, twenty-one, with an address at Quai d’Anjou in Paris. It was on the Ile Saint-Louis, not far from Pont Marie. There was also a student card.

  ‘Now then, Pardon, will you ask my wife to go home without me and go to bed?’

  ‘Are you going over there?’

  ‘I’ll have to. He probably lives with his parents and I have to inform them.’

  He turned towards the policemen.

  ‘You could question Pagliati, the Italian grocer in Rue Popincourt, and the four men who were playing cards at Chez Jules, if they’re still at the café.’

  As always, he regretted not being able to do everything by himself. He would have liked to go back to Rue Popincourt and go into the little café, were there was something like a fog around the globe light, and where the card-players had probably resumed their game.

  He would have liked to question the Italian, his wife, perhaps a little old woman that he had only glimpsed at a lit window on a first floor. Had she already been there when the tragedy had occurred?

  But first of all the parents had to be informed. He called the duty inspector at the eleventh arrondissement and told him what had happened.

  ‘Did he suffer a lot?’ he asked Pardon.

  ‘I don’t think so. He lost consciousness straight away. There was nothing I could do, there on the pavement.’

  The wallet was of excellent-quality crocodile skin, the ball-point pen was silver, the handkerchief hand-embroidered with an A.

  ‘Would you be so kind as to call me a taxi?’ he asked the nurse.

  She did so, from her cage, without a hint of courtesy. Admittedly it couldn’t have been pleasant spending whole nights in so gloomy a place, waiting for local tragedies to wind up at the hospital.

  Miraculously, the taxi arrived less than three minutes later.

  ‘I’ll drop you off home, Pardon.’

  ‘I don’t want to hold you up.’

  ‘You know, with this news I have to deliver …’

  He knew the Ile Saint-Louis from when they had lived on Place des Vosges, and at that time they had often walked arm in arm around the island in the evening.

  He rang at a green door. Cars were lined up along the pavements, most of them luxury models. A narrow door opened up in the larger one.

  ‘Monsie
ur Batille, please?’ he asked, stopping by a kind of skylight.

  A sleepy woman’s voice replied simply:

  ‘Second on the left.’

  He took the lift, and some of the rain drenching his overcoat and trousers formed a puddle at his feet. The building, like most of the ones on the island, had been restored. The walls were white stone, the lighting came from torches in carved bronze. On the marble landing, the doormat bore a big red letter B.

  He pressed the button and heard an electric bell ringing very far away, but a very long time passed before the door opened silently.

  A young parlour-maid in a fashionable uniform looked at him curiously.

  ‘I’d like to talk to Monsieur Batille.’

  ‘The father or the son?’

  ‘The father.’

  ‘Monsieur and madame haven’t come home, and I don’t know when they’ll be back.’

  He showed her his badge. She asked him:

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Detective Chief Inspector Maigret, of the Police Judiciaire.’

  ‘And you’ve come to see monsieur at this time of night? Does he know what it’s about?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Is it that urgent?’

  ‘It’s important.’

  ‘It’s almost midnight. Monsieur and madame have gone to the theatre.’

  ‘In that case, it’s possible that they’ll be back soon.’

  ‘Unless, as they often do, they go for supper with friends afterwards.’

  ‘Didn’t the younger Monsieur Batille go with them?’

  ‘He never goes with them.’

  She sounded embarrassed. She didn’t know what to do with him, and he must have looked pitiful, dripping with water. He saw a vast hall, its parquet floor covered with a rug, light blue tending slightly towards green.

  ‘If it’s really urgent.’

  She resigned herself to letting him in.

  ‘Give me your hat and your overcoat.’

  She glanced anxiously at his shoes. She still couldn’t ask him to take them off.

  ‘This way.’

  She hung the coat up in a cupboard, and hesitated to bring Maigret into the big drawing room that opened up on the left.

  ‘Would you mind waiting here?’

  He understood very clearly. The apartment was luxurious in a way that was almost excessively refined, and rather feminine. The armchairs in the drawing room were white, and the paintings on the wall were from Picasso’s blue period, and by Renoir and Marie Laurencin.

  The maid, young and pretty, was clearly wondering whether she was supposed to leave him on his own or keep an eye on him, as if she didn’t place very much trust in the badge that he had shown her.

  ‘Is Monsieur Batille a businessman?’

  ‘Don’t you know him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So you don’t know that he’s the owner of Mylène Perfumes and Beauty Products?’

  He knew so little about beauty products! And Madame Maigret, who only used a small amount of powder, couldn’t have kept him up to date.

  ‘How old is he?’

  ‘Forty-four. Forty-five. He looks very young and …’

  She blushed. She must have been more or less in love with her boss.

  ‘What about his wife?’

  ‘That’s her portrait that you’ll see if you bend down a little, above the mantelpiece.’

  In a blue evening gown. Blue and pale pink seemed to be the colours of the house, as in the paintings of Marie Laurencin.

  ‘I think I hear the lift.’

  And in spite of herself she gave a faint sigh of relief.

  She talked to them in an undertone, near the door that she had rushed to open. They were a young couple, elegant, apparently carefree, coming home after an evening at the theatre. They each looked in turn, from a distance, at this intruder with the wet shoes and trousers, who had risen clumsily from his chair and was trying to keep his composure.

  The man removed his grey coat, beneath which he wore a dinner-jacket, and his wife, beneath her leopard-skin coat, was wearing a cocktail dress of a fine silver mesh. They had about ten metres to walk, maybe less. Batille came over first, taking quick and nervous steps. His wife followed him.

  ‘I’m told you are Detective Chief Inspector Maigret?’ he murmured with a frown.

  ‘That’s correct.’

  ‘If I am not mistaken, you are the head of the Crime Squad?’

  There was a brief and quite unpleasant silence during which Madame Batille tried to guess what was happening; already she had shed the relaxed mood with which she had passed through the door a few moments before.

  ‘Strange time of night to … Might this have anything to do with my son?’

  ‘Were you expecting bad news?’

  ‘Not at all. Let’s not stay here. Let’s go into my office.’

  It was the last room, which opened up on to the drawing room. Batille’s real office must have been elsewhere, in the Mylène building, which Maigret had often noticed in Avenue Matignon.

  The wood of the bookshelves was very light, lemon or sycamore, and the walls were covered with books. The leather armchairs were a very light beige, like the desk accessories. On the desk stood a photograph in a silver frame, showing Madame Batille, with the faces of two children, a boy and girl.

  ‘Have a seat. Have you been waiting for me for a long time?’

  ‘Only ten minutes or so.’

  ‘Can I offer you a drink?’

  ‘No thank you.’

  It seemed as if now the man was putting off the moment of hearing what Maigret had to say to him.

  ‘You aren’t worried about your son?’

  He seemed to think about it for a second.

  ‘No … He’s a calm and reserved boy, perhaps too calm and reserved.’

  ‘What do you think about the company he keeps?’

  ‘He hardly sees anybody. He’s quite the opposite of his sister, who is only eighteen and makes friends easily. He has no friends, no colleagues … Has something happened to him?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘An accident?’

  ‘If you could put it that way. He was attacked this evening, on the dark pavement of Rue Popincourt.’

  ‘Is he injured?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Seriously?’

  ‘He’s dead.’

  He would have preferred not to see them, not to witness their abrupt collapse. The chic couple, full of ease and confidence, disappeared. Their clothes no longer came from the grand stylist, the smart tailor. The apartment itself lost its elegance and charm.

  Now there was only a man and a woman still struggling to believe in the reality that they were being told about.

  ‘Are you sure that it’s my—’

  ‘Antoine Batille, isn’t that right?’

  Maigret held out the wallet, still drenched with water.

  ‘That’s his, yes.’

  He automatically lit a cigarette. His hands were trembling. His lips too.

  ‘How did it happen?’

  ‘He came out of a little local bar. He walked about fifty metres through the squalling rain and someone stabbed him several times from behind.’

  The woman grimaced as if she was the one who had been stabbed, and her husband put his arm around her shoulders. He tried to speak but wasn’t immediately able to do so. And to say what, in any case? What was running through his head, even if it wasn’t his current concern:

  ‘Have they arrested the …’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did he die straight away?’

  ‘Upon arrival at the Saint-Antoine Hospital.’

  ‘Can we go and see him?’

  ‘I would advise you not to go there tonight, but tomorrow morning.’

  ‘Did he suffer?’

  ‘The doctor says not.’

  ‘You should go to bed, Martine. At least lie down in your bedroom.’

  He led her away gently but firmly.


  ‘I’ll be with you in a moment, inspector.’

  Batille was away for almost a quarter of an hour, and when he came back he was very pale, his features drawn, his face expressionless.

  ‘Please, have a seat.’

  He was small, thin and nervous. It was as if Maigret’s big, heavy bulk made him uneasy.

  ‘You still don’t want anything to drink?’

  He opened a small bar and took out a bottle and two glasses.

  ‘I won’t pretend I don’t need it.’

  He served himself a whisky and poured some into the second glass.

  ‘A lot of soda?’

  And, straight away:

  ‘I don’t understand. I can’t understand. Antoine was a boy who hid nothing from me, and besides, there was nothing to hide in his life. He was … I find it hard to talk about him in the past tense, and yet I’ll have to get used to it … He was a student. He was studying literature at the Sorbonne. He wasn’t part of any group. He didn’t have the slightest interest in politics.’

  He stared at the tan carpet, arms dangling, and said to himself:

  ‘They’ve killed my boy. Why? But why?’

  ‘That’s what I’m here to find out.’

  He looked at Maigret as if for the first time.

  ‘Why did you take the trouble to come here in person? For the police, it’s just a run-of-the-mill event, isn’t it?’

  ‘Just by chance I was almost at the scene.’

  ‘Did you see anything?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did anyone see anything?’

  ‘An Italian grocer, who was going home with his wife. I have brought you the objects I found in your son’s pockets, but I forgot his tape recorder.’

  The boy’s father didn’t seem to understand straight away, then he murmured:

  ‘Ah! Yes.’

  He nearly smiled.

  ‘That was his passion. You will probably laugh. His sister and I joked with him about it. Other people are wild about photography and go hunting for photogenic faces even under bridges.

  ‘Antoine collected human voices. Often he spent whole evenings doing it. He went into cafés, stations, all kinds of public places and switched on his tape recorder.

  ‘He wore it around his neck, and lots of people thought it was a camera. He had a miniature microphone hidden in his hand.’