Maigret in Vichy (Harvest Book) Page 2

  Maigret got to his feet and, much to his own astonishment, heard himself saying, just as though he were any other patient of Pardon’s:

  “Agreed.”

  “When will you go?”

  “In a day or two, a week at the outside. Just long enough to catch up with my paper work.”

  “I’ll have to hand you over to a man on the spot who will be able to tell you more than I can… I could name half a dozen. Let me think… There’s Rian, a decent young fellow, not too full of himself… I’ll give you his address and telephone number. And I’ll drop him a line tomorrow, to put him in the picture…”

  “I’m much obliged, Pardon.”

  “I wasn’t too rough with you, I hope?”

  “You couldn’t have been more gentle.”

  Returning to the drawing room, he smiled at his wife, a reassuring smile. But nothing was said, illness not being considered a suitable topic for after-dinner conversation at the Pardons’.

  It was not until they reached Rue Popincourt, walking arm in arm, that Maigret remarked casually, as though it were a matter of no importance:

  “We’re going to Vichy for our holiday.”

  “Will you be taking the cure?”

  “I suppose I might as well while I’m there!” he said wryly. “There’s nothing wrong with me. In fact, I gather I’m exceptionally healthy, which is why I’m being packed off to take the waters, I daresay!”

  That evening at the Pardons’ had not really been the start of it. He had for some time been obsessed by the strange notion that everybody was younger than he was, from the Chief Commissioner and the examining magistrates to the prisoners brought in for questioning. And now there was Doctor Rian, fair-haired and affable, and well on the right side of forty.

  A kid, in other words, at any rate a young man, but none the less sober and self-assured for all that. And this was the man who was to be the arbiter of his, Chief Superintendent Maigret’s, fate. Well, more or less…

  Maigret was irritated and at the same time apprehensive, for he certainly did not feel old, nor even middle-aged.

  For all his youth, Doctor Rian lived in an elegant redbrick house in Boulevard des Etats-Unis. Maybe it was rather too Edwardian in style, but it had a certain grandeur, with its marble staircase, its handsome carpets, its highly polished furniture. There was even a maid in a lace-trimmed cap.

  “I presume your parents are dead? What did your father die of?”

  The doctor carefully wrote down his answers on a memo pad, in a neat, clerical hand.

  “And your mother?… Any brothers?… Sisters?… Childhood ailments?… Measles?… Chicken pox?…”

  Chicken pox no, measles yes, when he was very small and his mother was still living. It was, in fact, his warmest and most vivid memory of his mother, who died very shortly afterward.

  “How about games and sport?… Have you ever had an accident?… Are you subject to sore throats?… You’re a heavy smoker, I take it?…”

  The young doctor smiled, with a touch of mischief, by way of showing Maigret that he knew him by repute.

  “No one could say that you lead a sedentary life, exactly.”

  “It varies. Sometimes I don’t set foot outside my office for two or three weeks at a time, and then, all of a sudden, I’m running around all over the place for days on end.”

  “Regular meals?”

  “No.”

  “Do you watch your diet?”

  He was forced to admit that he liked rich food, especially highly seasoned stews and sauces.

  “Not just a gourmet, in fact, but a hearty eater?”

  “You could say so, yes.”

  “What about wine? A half-bottle, a bottle a day?”

  “Yes… No… More… As a rule I don’t have more than two or three glasses with my dinner… Occasionally I have a beer sent up to the office from the brasserie nearby.”

  “Spirits?”

  “I quite often have an apéritif with a colleague.”

  In the Brasserie Dauphine. It wasn’t the drink itself but the clubbable atmosphere, the cooking smells, the aroma of aniseed and Calvados, with which, by this time, the very walls were impregnated. Why should he feel ashamed, all of a sudden, in the presence of this neat, well-set-up young man in his luxurious consulting room?

  “In other words, you don’t drink to excess?”

  He had no wish to conceal anything.

  “It depends on what you mean by excess. I’m not averse to a glass or two of sloe gin after dinner. My sister-in-law sends it from Alsace… And then often, when I’m working on a case, I’m in and out of cafés and bars a great deal… How shall I put it? If, at the start of a case, I happen to be in a bistro where Vouvray is a specialty, as likely as not I’ll go on drinking Vouvray right through to the end.”

  “How much in a day?”

  It reminded him of his boyhood, the confessional in the village church, smelling of mildew and the cure’s snuff.

  “A lot?”

  “It would seem a lot to you, I daresay.”

  “For how long at a stretch?”

  “Anything from three to ten days, sometimes even longer. It’s a matter of chance…”

  There were no reproaches, no penances, but he had a pretty shrewd idea what the doctor thought of him, as he sat, elbows on his handsome mahogany desk, with the sun shining on his fair hair.

  “No severe indigestion? No heartburn or giddiness?”

  Giddiness, yes. Nothing serious. From time to time, especially of late, the ground seemed to tilt slightly, and everything about him appeared a little unreal. He felt off balance, unsteady on his feet.

  It was not bad enough to cause him any serious anxiety, but it was an unpleasant sensation. Fortunately, it never lasted more than a couple of minutes. On one occasion, he had just left the Law Courts and was about to cross the road. He had waited until it was over, before venturing to step off the pavement.

  “I see… I see.”

  What did he see? That he was a sick man? That he smoked heavily and drank too much? That it was high time, at his age, that he learned to watch his diet?

  Maigret was not letting it get him down. He smiled in the way his wife had grown used to, since they had come to Vichy. It was a self-mocking smile, if a little morose.

  “Come with me, please.”

  This time he was given the full treatment. He was made to climb up and down a ladder repeatedly for three full minutes. He had his blood pressure taken lying down, sitting up, and standing. Then he was X-rayed.

  “Breathe in… Deeper… Hold it… Breathe out… In… Hold it… Out…”

  It was comical yet somehow distressing, dramatic and at the same time slightly dotty. He had, perhaps, thirty years of life still to look forward to, and yet any minute now he might be tactfully informed that his life as a healthy, active man was over, and that henceforth he would be reduced to the status of an invalid.

  They had all been through this experience, all the people one saw in the park, under the spreading trees, at the mineral springs, on the lake shore. Even the members of the Sporting Club across the river, whom one could watch sunbathing, or playing tennis or bowls in the shade, had been through it.

  “Mademoiselle Jeanne.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The receptionist knew what was wanted. It was all part of a familiar routine. Soon the Maigrets would be following a routine of their own.

  First, the little needle or the prick on the finger tip, then the glass slides and phials for the blood smears.

  “Relax… Clench your fist.”

  He felt the prick of a needle in the crook of his elbow.

  “Right, that will do.”

  He had had blood samples taken before, but this time, it seemed to him, there was something portentous about it.

  “Thank you. You can get dressed now.”

  A few minutes later they were back in the consulting room, with its walls lined with books and bound volumes of medical journal
s.

  “I don’t think any very drastic treatment is needed in your case. Come and see me again at this time the day after tomorrow. By then I shall have the results of the tests. Meanwhile, I’m going to put you on a diet. I presume you’re staying in a hotel? Here is a diet sheet. All you have to do is to hand it to the headwaiter. He’ll attend to it.”

  It was a card with forbidden foods printed in one column and permitted ones in the other. It even went so far as to list sample menus on the back.

  “I don’t know if you are aware of the different chemical properties of the various springs. There is an excellent little handbook on the subject, written by one of my colleagues, but it may be out of print. For a start, I want you to alternate between two springs, Chomel and Grande Grille. You’ll find them both in the park.”

  Both men looked equally solemn. Maigret felt not the least inclination, as he watched the doctor scribbling notes on his pad, to shrug the whole thing off, or indulge in a little secret smile.

  “Do you usually have an early breakfast? I see… Is your wife here with you?… In that case, I don’t want to send you halfway across town on an empty stomach. Let’s see. You’d better start at about ten thirty in the morning at the Grande Grille. There are plenty of chairs, so you won’t have to stand about, and if it rains there’s a huge glass enclosure for shelter… I want you to have three half-pints of water at half-hourly intervals, and it should be drunk as hot as you can take it.

  “I want you to repeat the process in the afternoons at about five, at the Chomel spring.

  “Don’t worry if you feel a bit languid the first day. It’s a purely temporary side effect of the treatment… Anyway, I shall be seeing you…”

  Those early days, before his initiation into the mysteries of each individual spring, seemed very far away now. Now, as for thousands of others, as for tens of thousands of others, with whom he rubbed shoulders every hour of the day, the cure had become a part of his life.

  Just as in the evening, when there was a concert, every one of the little yellow chairs around the bandstand was occupied, so, at certain times of day, there was not a chair to be had, so great was the crowd gathered around the springs, all waiting for a second, third, or fourth glass of the waters.

  Like everyone else, they had brought measuring glasses, Madame Maigret having insisted on getting one for herself.

  “But you’re not taking the waters!”

  “Why shouldn’t I? Where’s the harm? It says in one of the pamphlets that the waters are slimming…”

  Each glass had its own case of plaited straw, and Madame Maigret carried both of theirs slung over one shoulder like binoculars at a race meeting.

  They had never walked so much in their lives. Their hotel was in the France district, a quiet part of the town near the Célestins spring. They were out and about by nine every morning, when, apart from the delivery man, they had the streets almost to themselves.

  A few minutes’ walk from their hotel there was a children’s playground with a wading pool, swings, play apparatus of all sorts, even a puppet theater, more elaborate than the one in the Champs-Elysées.

  “Your tickets, sir?”

  They had bought two one-franc tickets, and strolled among the trees, watching the half-naked children at play. Next day they had come again.

  “We sell books of twenty tickets at a reduced rate.”

  They were reluctant to commit themselves so far ahead. They had come upon the playground by chance and, for want of anything better to do, had fallen into the habit of returning there every day at the same hour.

  Regularly, they went on from there to the bowling club, where they would watch two or three games being played, with Maigret attentively following every throw, especially those of the tall, thin, one-armed man, always to be found under the same tree, who was, in spite of his disability, the finest player of all. Another regular player was a dignified old gentleman with pink cheeks, snow-white hair, and a southern accent, always addressed by his companions as “Senator.”

  It was not far from there to the lifeguards’ station and the beach, with buoys bobbing in the water to mark the limits of the bathing area. Here, too, they would find the same familiar faces under the same familiar beach umbrellas.

  “You’re not bored, are you?” she had asked him on their second day.

  “Why on earth should I be?” he had retorted in surprise.

  For indeed he was not bored. Little by little his habits, his tempo of living, were changing. For instance, he caught himself filling his pipe on the Pont de Bellerive and realized, to his amazement, that he always smoked a pipe just at this time and place. There was also the Yacht Club pipe, which he smoked while watching the young people skimming over the water on skis.

  “It’s a dangerous sport, wouldn’t you say?”

  “In what way?”

  Finally the park, the attendant filling their glasses from the spring, the two of them drinking the water in little sips. It was hot and salty. The water from the Chomel spring tasted strongly of sulphur, and after drinking it Maigret could hardly wait to light his pipe.

  It amazed Madame Maigret that he should take it all so calmly. It was most unlike him to be so docile. It quite worried her at times, until it dawned on her that he was amusing himself by playing at detection. Almost in spite of himself he watched people, classifying them, taking note of everything about them, down to the smallest detail. He had, for instance, already discovered which of their fellow guests in the Hôtel de la Bérézina—more a family pension than a hotel—had liver trouble and which diabetes, simply by observing what they had to eat.

  What was this one’s life history? What did that one do for a living? These were his preoccupations, in which he sometimes invited his wife to share.

  Especially intriguing to them were the couple whom they called “the happy pair,” the dumpy little man who seemed always on the verge of coming up to shake his hand, and his diminutive wife who looked like something out of a confectioner’s shop. What was their station in life? They seemed to recognize the Chief Superintendent, but was this not perhaps merely because they had seen his picture in the papers?

  Not many people here did, in fact, recognize him, many fewer than in Paris. Admittedly, his wife had insisted on buying him a light mohair jacket, almost white in fact, of the kind that elderly men used to wear when he was a boy. But even allowing for this, it would probably not have occurred to most people that the head of the Paris C.I.D. could be here, in Vichy. When anyone peered at him with a puzzled frown, or turned back to look at him, he felt sure that they were thinking:

  “Good heavens! That might almost be Maigret!”

  But they did not think that it was Maigret. And no wonder. He scarcely recognized himself!

  Another person who intrigued them was the lady in lilac. She too was taking the waters, but only at the Grande Grille, where she could be seen every morning. She always sat a little removed from the crowd, near the newspaper stand. She never drank more than a mouthful of the water. Afterward, with her usual air of remote dignity, she would rinse out her glass, and put it away carefully in its straw case.

  There were usually one or two people in the crowd who seemed to know her well enough to greet her. The Maigrets never saw her in the afternoon. Was she perhaps undergoing hydrotherapy? Or had she been ordered by her doctor to take an afternoon rest?

  Doctor Rian had said:

  “E.R.S., perfect. Average sed rate: 6 mm. per hour… Cholesterol, a little on the high side, but well within the normal range… Urea normal… You’re a bit low on iron, but there’s no cause for anxiety… No need to worry about uric acid, either… just keep off game, shellfish, and variety meats. As to your blood count, it could scarcely be better, with 98 per cent hemoglobin.

  “There’s nothing wrong with you that a thorough clean-out won’t cure… Any headaches or unusual fatigue?… Right, then, we’ll keep on with the same treatment and diet for the next few days… Come and s
ee me again on Saturday.”

  There was an open-air band concert that night. They did not see the lady in lilac leave, because, as usual, they themselves left early, well before the end. The Hôtel de la Bérézina, in the France district of the town, gleamed with fresh paint, and its double doors were flanked on either side by flowering shrubs in ums. The Maigrets enjoyed walking back to it through the deserted streets.

  They slept in a brass bed, and all the furniture in their room was in the style of the early 1900s—like the bath, which was raised on legs, and had old-fashioned gooseneck taps.

  The hotel was well kept and very quiet, except when the Gagnaire boys, who had rooms on the first floor, were let loose in the garden to play at cowboys and Indians.

  Everyone was asleep.

  Was it the fifth day? Or the sixth? Of the two, it was Madame Maigret who was the more confused, waking up as she did every morning to the realization that she need not get up to make the coffee. Their breakfast was brought in on a tray at seven o’clock, coffee and fresh croissants, and the Journal de Clermont-Ferrand, which devoted two pages to news and features about life in Vichy.

  Maigret had got into the habit of reading the paper from cover to cover, so that by now there was precious little he did not know about local affairs. He even read the obituaries and the small ads.

  “Desirable residence, in excellent repair. Three rooms, bathroom, all mod. cons. Uninterrupted view…”

  “Are you thinking of buying a house?”

  “No, but this is interesting. I can’t help wondering who will buy it. A family coming regularly for the cure, who won’t live in it for more than a month each year? An elderly couple from Paris who want to retire here? Or…”

  They got dressed, taking turns in the bathroom, and went down the staircase, with its red carpet held in place by triangular brass clips. The proprietor was there in the hall, always ready with a friendly greeting. He was not a local man, as was obvious from his accent, but came from Montélimar.

  They nibbled the hours away. The children’s playground… The bowling greens…

  “I see, by the way, that Wednesdays and Saturdays are market days. It’s a big market. We might go and have a look around…”