Maigret and the Bum Read online

  “But you heard footsteps?”

  “Yes, monsieur.”

  “Two people’s footsteps?”

  “I saw two chaps coming back towards the car…”

  “You didn’t see them go towards the bridge?”

  “I was working down below, on the engine.”

  “Might these two men, one of whom was wearing a light-raincoat, have knocked out the vagrant as he lay asleep and then thrown him into the Seine?”

  “When I went up he was in the water already…”

  “The doctor’s report states that he could not have received that injury to his head while falling into the water…Not even if he had accidentally fallen on the edge of the quay…”

  Van Houtte stared at them as though to say that it was none of his business.

  “Can we question your wife?”

  “I don’t mind you talking to Anneke. Only she doesn’t understand you, she only speaks Flemish… ” . The Deputy Public Prosecutor glanced at Maigret as if to ask him whether he had any questions to put, and the Superintendent shook his head. If he had any, they would come later, when the gentlemen from the Parquet had gone away.

  “When shall we be able to leave?” the bargee asked.

  “As soon as you’ve signed your statement. On condition you let us know where you are going…”

  “To Rouen.”

  “You’ll have to keep us informed of your subsequent movements. My clerk will bring you the documents to sign.”

  “When?”

  “Probably in the early afternoon…”

  This clearly annoyed the bargee.

  “By the way, what time did your brother come back on board?”

  “Soon after the ambulance had left.”

  “Thank you…”

  Once again Jef Van Houtte helped him across the narrow gangway, and the little party made its way towards the bridge, while the down-and-outs withdrew a few yards.

  “What d’you think about it, Maigret?”

  “I think it’s odd. It’s pretty uncommon for a down-and-out to be attacked.”

  Under the arch of the Ponte Marie, up against the stone wall, a kind of nook had been contrived. It was shapeless and nameless, and yet it had apparently provided for some time past a resting-place for a human being.

  The stupefaction of the Deputy Public Prosecutor was comical to behold, and Maigret could not help telling him:

  “There are places like that under all the bridges. In fact you can see a shelter of this sort just opposite Police Headquarters.”

  “And the police do nothing about it?”

  “If we demolish them they spring up again a little further off… ”

  It was made of old boxes and pieces of tarpaulin. There was just enough room there for a man to lie curled up. The ground was covered with straw, torn blankets and newspapers, which exuded a strong smell in spite of the draught under the bridge.

  The Deputy Public Prosecutor carefully avoided touching anything and it was Maigret who bent down to make a rapid inventory.

  An iron cylinder with holes and a grill had served as a stove and was still covered with whitish ash. Beside it lay pieces of charcoal, picked up heaven knows where. Turning over the blankets, the Superintendent uncovered a secret hoard: two hunks of stale bread, a few inches of garlic sausage and, in another corner, some books whose titles he read out in an undertone.

  “Verlaine’s Sagesse… Boussuet’s Oraisons Funèbres... ”

  He picked up a journal which must have been lying about in the rain for a long time and which had probably been extracted from someone’s dustbin. It was an old number of La Presse Médicale.

  Finally, part of a book, the second half of Las Cases’s Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène.

  Dantziger, the magistrate, seemed just as stupefied as the man from the Parquet.

  “Funny sort of things he read,” he commented.

  “I don’t suppose he had much choice…”

  Still looking under the tattered blankets. Maigret discovered some garments: a much patched grey sweater, with paint stains on it, which had presumably belonged to a painter, a pair of yellowish twill trousers, some felt slippers with worn-out soles and five odd socks. Finally a pair of scissors with one of the points broken.

  “Is the man dead?” enquired Deputy Public Prosecutor Parrain, keeping at a safe distance for fear of catching fleas.

  “He was alive an hour ago, when I rang up the Hôtel-Dieu.”

  “Are they hoping to save him?”

  “They’re trying to…He’s got a fractured skull, and futhermore they’re afraid of pneumonia developing… ”

  Maigret was fingering the dilapidated pram which the man must have used when he went rummaging in dustbins. Turning toward the little group of watchful onlookers, he scanned their faces each in turn. Some of them looked away. Others expressed nothing but bewilderment.

  “Come here, you…!” he told the woman, beckoning to her.

  If it had happened thirty years earlier, when he was working on the Public Highways Squad, he could have put a name to each face, for at that period he had known most of the down-and-outs in Paris.

  They had not altered much, in fact, but they had become far fewer. “Where d’you sleep?”

  The woman smiled at him ingratiatingly.

  “Over there…‘ she said, pointing to the Pont Louis-Philippe.

  “Did you know the chap they fished out last night?”

  She had a puffy face and her breath smelt of sour wine. She stood with her hands on her stomach, nodding her head.

  “We used to call him Doc”

  “Why?”

  “Because he was an educated sort of chap…they say he really used to be a doctor once…”

  “Had he been living under the bridges a long time?”

  “Years…”

  “How many?”

  “I don’t know…I’ve stopped counting them…”

  This made her laugh and she tossed back a lock of grey hair that hung over her face. When her mouth was shut she looked about sixty. But when she spoke she disclosed an almost toothless jaw and she seemed much older. There was still a twinkle in her eyes, however. From time to time she turned towards the others as though calling them to witness.

  “It’s true, isn’t it?” she asked them.

  They nodded, although ill at ease in the presence of the Law and these overdressed gentlemen.

  “Did he live alone?”

  That made her laugh afresh.

  “Who’d he have lived with?”

  “Has he always lived under this bridge?”

  “Not always…I used to know him under the Pont-Neuf…and before that in the Quai de Bercy… ”

  “Did he do the Halles?” For that was where most down-and-outs forgathered at night.

  “No,” she replied.

  “Did he forage in dustbins?”

  “Sometimes…”

  In spite of the child’s pram, therefore, he could not have been a collector of old papers and rags, and this would account for his already being abed at nightfall.

  “He was mostly a sandwich-man…”

  “What else do you know?”

  “Nothing…”

  “Did he never talk to you?”

  “Of course he did…In fact it was me that used to cut his hair now and then… Folks must help one another… ”

  “Did he drink much?”

  Maigret knew that the question was meaningless, since practically all of them drank.

  “Red wine?”

  “Like we all do.”

  “A lot?”

  “I’ve never seen him sozzled…Not like me…”

  And she began laughing again.

  “I know you, you know, and I know you’re not a bad chap. You had me up for questioning once in your office, a long time ago, twenty years ago maybe, when I was still on the job at the Porte Saint-Denis…”

  “Did you hear nothing last night?”

  She flung
out her arm to point at the Pont Louis-Philippe, as though to show what a distance it was from the Pont Maire.

  “It’s too far off…”

  “You saw nothing?”

  “Only the headlights of the ambulance…I came a little closer, not too close for fear of being picked up, and I recognised it was an ambulance… ”

  “And the rest of you?” Maigret asked the three down-and-outs.

  They shook their heads, still ill at ease.

  “Suppose we went to see the skipper of the Poitou?” suggested the Deputy Public Prosecutor, who felt uncomfortable in these surroundings.

  The man was expecting them. He was very unlike the Fleming. He, too, had his wife and children on board, but the barge did not belong to him and it almost always did the same journey, between the sandpits of the upper Seine and Paris. His name was Justin Goulet; he was forty-five. He was short and squat, with shrewd eyes, and an unlit cigarette clung to the corner of his lips.

  Here, they had to speak loud because of the noise from the nearby crane which went on unloading sand.

  “It’s queer, isn’t it?”

  “What’s queer?”

  “That people should bother to do in a bum and chuck him in the water… ”

  “Did you see them?”

  “I didn’t see anything at all.”

  “Where were you?”

  “When they beat up the fellow? In my bunk…”

  “What did you hear?”

  “I heard somebody yelling…”

  “No car?”

  “I may have heard a car, but there are cars going by all the time up there on the embankment and I didn’t pay attention…”

  “Did you go up on deck?”

  “In pyjamas…I didn’t waste time putting on my trousers… ”

  “And your wife?”

  “She said in her sleep: Where are you going?…”

  “Once you were on deck what did you see?”

  “Nothing…The Seine flowing by as usual, with eddies…I shouted ‘Ahoy!’ so that the chap might answer and so’s I could find out whereabouts he was… ”

  “Where was Jef Van Houtte at this point?”

  “The Fleming?…I finally caught sight of him on the deck of his barge…He started to unfasten his punt…When the stream brought him level with me, I jumped in…The chap in the water kept surfacing and then disappearing again… The Fleming tried to catch him with my boathook…”

  “A boathook with a big iron hook at the end?”

  “They’re all like that…”

  “Couldn’t he have incurred that injury to his head when you were trying to catch hold of him?”

  “Surely not…in the end we got him by the seat of his trousers…I leaned over at once and caught him by one leg… ”

  “Had he fainted?”

  “His eyes were open.”

  “Did he say nothing?”

  “He sicked up some water…Afterwards, on the Fleming’s boat, we saw that he was bleeding…”

  “I think that’s all?” muttered the Deputy Public Prosecutor, who seemed to find the story rather tedious.

  “I’ll look after the rest,” Maigret replied.

  “Are you going to the hospital?”

  “I’ll go there presently. The doctors say it’ll be several hours before he’s in a fit state to speak…”

  “Keep me informed…”

  “I certainly will…”

  As they went back under the Pont Marie, Maigret said to Lapointe:

  “Go and ring up the district police station and ask them to send me an officer.”

  “Where shall I find you, Chief?”

  “Here…”

  “And he solemnly shook hands with the people from the Department of Public Prosecution.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 2

  « ^ »

  Are those judges?” queried the fat woman as she watched the three men walking away.

  “They’re magistrates,” Maigret corrected her.

  “It’s the same thing, isn’t it?”

  And, after giving a faint whistle: “They’re taking as much trouble as if he’d been one of the nobs, aren’t they? Was he a real doctor, then?”

  Maigret did not know. He seemed in no hurry to find out. He was living in the present, with a persistent sense of having experienced these things before, a long time ago. Lapointe had disappeared at the top of the ramp. The Deputy Public Prosecutor, flanked by the little magistrate and the clerk, was picking his steps carefully for fear of soiling his shoes.

  Black and white in the sunshine, the Zwarte Zwaan was as spotless outside as its kitchen must have been. The tall Fleming, standing beside the steering wheel, was looking in his direction, and a small, slender woman, a real child-wife with hair so fair as to be almost white, was bending over the cradle, changing the child’s napkin.

  Despite the unceasing noise of the cars along the Quai des Célestins, and of the crane unloading sand from the Poitou, Maigret could hear birds singing and the lapping of the water.

  The three down-and-outs still kept out of the way, and only the stout woman followed the Superintendent under the bridge. Her blouse, which must once have been red, was now a faded pink.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Lea. Big Lea, they call me… ”

  This set her laughing and her enormous breasts shook.

  “Where were you last night?”

  “I told you.”

  “ Was there nobody with you?”

  “Only Dédé, the smallest of them, over there with his back to you. ”

  “Is he your friend?”

  “They’re all my friends.”

  “Do you always sleep under the same bridge?”

  “I sometimes move around…What are you looking for?”

  For Maigret was once again bending over the queer collection of objects which consituted the worldly goods of the Doc. He felt more at ease now that the magistrates had left. He took his time, and brought out from under the rags a frying pan, a billy-can, a spoon and fork.

  Then he tried on a pair of spectacles with steel rims, one glass of which was cracked, and everything became a blur.

  “He only uses them for reading,” explained the fat woman.

  “What surprises me,” he began, looking at her intently, “is not to find… ”

  She did not let him finish, but moved a couple of yards away and from behind a big stone pulled out a litre bottle still half full of purplish wine.

  “Have you drunk some of it?”

  “Yes. I was going to finish it up. It won’t be any good, after all, when the Doc comes back.”

  “When did you take it?”

  “Last night, after the ambulance had taken him off… ”

  “You’ve touched nothing else?”

  She spat on the ground, with a solemn face. “I swear I haven’t!”

  He believed her. He knew from experience that the down-and-out do not rob one another. Indeed it is unusual for them to rob anybody at all, not only because they would be spotted immediately but through a kind of indifference.

  Across the river, on the Ile Saint-Louis, open windows revealed cosy flats, and a woman could be seen brushing her hair at her dressing table.

  “Do you know where he bought his wine?”

  “I’ve seen him more than once coming out of a bistrot in the

  Rue Ave

  -Maria… It’s quite close by…at the corner of the Rue des Jardins…”

  “How did the Doc get on with the others?”

  She thought hard, trying to please him.

  “I couldn’t really say…He wasn’t all that different…”

  “Did he never speak about his life?”

  “None of us do…Not without being really boozed up…”

  “Was he never boozed up?”

  “Not really…”

  Out of the pile of old newspapers that served to keep the dosser warm, Maigret had just pulled out a small painted
toy horse with one leg broken. He was not surprised to see it, neither was Big Lea.

  Someone had just come down the ramp with silent, springy steps, wearing rope-soled sandals, and was making for the Belgian barge. In each hand he carried a string bag full of provisions, from which protruded two long loaves and some fishes’ tails.

  This was undoubtedly the brother, for he was like a younger version of Jef Van Houtte, with less pronounced features. He was wearing blue jeans and a white-striped jersey. Once on board the boat, he spoke to the other man, then glanced in Maigret’s direction.

  “Don’t touch anything…I may need you again…If you should hear anything…”

  “Can you see me turning up at your office, looking like this?”

  That set her laughing again. Pointing to the bottle, she asked:

  “May I finish it off?”

  He nodded, and went to meet Lapointe, who was now returning accompanied by a uniformed policeman. He gave the latter instructions: to watch over the heap of rubbish that constituted the Doc’s fortune until the arrival of a specialist from the Police Records Office.

  After which, with Lapointe by his side, he made his way towards the Zwarte Zwaan.

  “You are Hubert Van Houtte?”

  The youth, more taciturn or more suspicious than his brother, merely nodded. “Did you go dancing last night?”

  “Is there anything wrong about that?” His accent was less pronounced. Maigret and Lapointe, standing on the bank, had to raise their heads to speak to him.

  “What dance hall were you at?”

  “Near the Place de la Bastille…A narrow street where there are half-a-dozen of them…This one was called Chez Léon…”

  “Did you know it already?”

  “I’d been there a number of times… ”

  “So you know nothing about what has happened?”

  “Only what my brother told me…” Smoke was rising from a brass funnel on the deck. The woman had gone down into the cabin with her child, and from where they stood the Superintendent and the inspector could smell cooking. “When shall we be able to leave?”

  “Probably this afternoon…As soon as the magistrate has got your brother to sign the statement… ”

  Hubert Van Houtte, clean-looking and well-groomed, had the same pink skin and pale blond hair as his brother.

  A little later, Maigret and Lapointe crossed the Quai des Célestins, and at the corner of the Rue de L’Ave-Maria they found a bistrot bearing the sign Au Petit Turin. The proprietor, in his shirt sleeves, was standing in the doorway. There was nobody inside.