The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien Page 3

  The local tobacco – rather yellow and too mild – had even killed his desire to smoke!

  He slept in the express, waking at the Belgian border as day was breaking, and passed through Liège thirty minutes later. He stood at the door of the carriage to stare half-heartedly out at the station, where the train halted for only thirty minutes, not enough time for a visit to Rue Haute-Sauvenière.

  At two that afternoon he arrived at Gare du Nord and plunged into the Parisian crowds, where his first concern was to visit a tobacconist.

  He was groping around in his pockets for some French coins when someone jostled him. The two suitcases were sitting at his feet. When he bent to retrieve them, he could find only one, and looking around in vain for the other, he realized that there was no point in alerting the police.

  One detail, in any case, reassured him. The remaining suitcase had its two keys tied to the handle with a small string. That was the suitcase containing the clothing.

  The thief had carried off the one full of old newspapers.

  Had he been simply a thief, the kind that prowl through stations? In which case, wasn’t it odd that he’d stolen such a crummy-looking piece of luggage?

  Maigret settled into a taxi, savouring both his pipe and the familiar hubbub of the streets. Passing a kiosk, he caught a glimpse of a front-page photograph and even at a distance recognized one of the pictures of Louis Jeunet he had sent from Bremen.

  He considered stopping by his home on Boulevard Richard-Lenoir to kiss his wife and change his clothes, but the incident at the station was bothering him.

  ‘If the thief really was after the second suit of clothes, then how was he informed in Paris that I was carrying them and would arrive precisely when I did?’

  It was as if fresh mysteries now hovered around the pale face and thin form of the tramp of Neuschanz and Bremen: shadowy forms were shifting, as on a photographic plate plunged into a developing bath.

  And they would have to become clearer, revealing faces, names, thoughts and feelings, entire lives.

  For the moment, in the centre of that plate lay only a naked body, and a harsh light shone on the face German doctors had done their fumbling best to make look human again.

  The shadows? First, a man in Paris who was making off with the suitcase at that very moment. Plus another man who – from Bremen or elsewhere – had sent him instructions. The convivial Joseph Van Damme, perhaps? Or perhaps not! And then there was the person who, years ago, had worn clothing B … and the one who, during the struggle, had bled all over him. And the person who had supplied the 30,000 francs to ‘Louis Jeunet’ – or the person from whom they had been stolen!

  It was sunny; the café terraces, heated by braziers, were thronged with people. Drivers were hailing one another. Swarms of people were pushing their way on to buses and trams.

  From among all this seething humanity, here and in Bremen, Brussels, Rheims and still other places, the hunt would have to track down two, three, four, five individuals …

  Fewer, perhaps? Or maybe more …

  Maigret looked up fondly at the austere façade of police headquarters as he crossed the front courtyard carrying the small suitcase. He greeted the office boy by his first name.

  ‘Did you get my telegram? Did you light a stove?’

  ‘There’s a lady here, about the picture! She’s in the waiting room, been there for two hours now.’

  Maigret did not stop to take off his hat and coat. He didn’t even set down the suitcase.

  The waiting room, at the end of the corridor lined with the chief inspectors’ offices, is almost completely glassed-in and furnished with a few chairs upholstered in green velvet; its sole brick wall displays the list of policemen killed while on special duty.

  On one of the chairs sat a woman who was still young, dressed with the humble care that bespeaks long hours of sewing by lamplight, making do with the best one has.

  Her black cloth coat had a very thin fur collar. Her hands, in their grey cotton gloves, clutched a handbag made, like Maigret’s suitcase, of imitation leather.

  Did the inspector notice a vague resemblance between his visitor and the dead man?

  Not a facial resemblance, no, but a similarity of expression, of social class, so to speak.

  She, too, had the washed-out, weary eyes of those whose courage has abandoned them. Her nostrils were pinched and her complexion unhealthily dull.

  She had been waiting for two hours and naturally hadn’t dared change seats or even move at all. She looked at Maigret through the glass with no hope that he might at last be the person she needed to see.

  He opened the door.

  ‘If you would care to follow me to my office, madame.’

  When he ushered her in ahead of him she appeared astonished at his courtesy and hesitated, as if confused, in the middle of the room. Along with her handbag she carried a rumpled newspaper showing part of Jeunet’s photograph.

  ‘I’m told you know the man who—’

  But before he could finish she bit her lips and buried her face in her hands. Almost overcome by a sob she could not control, she moaned, ‘He’s my husband, monsieur.’

  Hiding his feeling, Maigret turned away, then rolled a heavy armchair over for her.

  3. The Herbalist’s Shop in Rue Picpus

  ‘Did he suffer much?’ she asked, as soon as she could speak again.

  ‘No, madame. I can assure you that death was instantaneous.’

  She looked at the newspaper in her hand. The words were hard to say.

  ‘In the mouth?’

  When the inspector simply nodded, she stared down at the floor, suddenly calm, and as if speaking about a mischievous child she said solemnly, ‘He always had to be different from everyone else …’

  She spoke not as a lover, or even a wife. Although she was not yet thirty, she had a maternal tenderness about her, and the gentle resignation of a nun.

  The poor are used to stifling any expression of their despair, because they must get on with life, with work, with the demands made of them day after day, hour after hour. She wiped her eyes with her handkerchief, and her slightly reddened nose erased any prettiness she possessed.

  The corners of her mouth kept drooping sadly though she tried to smile as she looked at Maigret.

  ‘Would you mind if I asked you a few questions?’ he said, sitting down at his desk. ‘Was your husband’s name indeed Louis Jeunet? And … when did he leave you for the last time?’

  Tears sprang to her eyes; she almost began weeping again. Her fingers had balled the handkerchief into a hard little wad.

  ‘Two years ago … But I saw him again, once, peering in at the shop window. If my mother hadn’t been there …’

  Maigret realized that he need simply let her talk. Because she would, as much for herself as for him.

  ‘You want to know all about our life, isn’t that right? It’s the only way to understand why Louis did that … My father was a male nurse in Beaujon. He had set up a small herbalist’s shop in Rue Picpus, which my mother managed.

  ‘My father died six years ago, and Mama and I have kept up the business.

  ‘I met Louis …’

  ‘That was six years ago, did you say?’ Maigret asked her. ‘Was he already calling himself Jeunet?’

  ‘Yes!’ she replied, in some astonishment. ‘He was a milling machine operator in a workshop in Belleville … He earned a good living … I don’t know why things happened so quickly, you can’t imagine – he was in a hurry about everything, as if some fever were eating at him.

  ‘I’d been seeing him for barely a month when we got married, and he came to live with us. The living quarters behind the shop are too small for three people; we rented a room for Mama over in Rue du Chemin-Vert. She let me have the shop, but as she hadn’t saved enough to live on, we gave her 200 francs every month.

  ‘We were happy, I swear to you! Louis would go off to work in the morning; my mother would come to keep me company. He
stayed home in the evenings.

  ‘I don’t know how to explain this to you, but – I always felt that something was wrong!

  ‘I mean, for example … it was as if Louis didn’t belong to our world, as if the way we lived was sometimes too much for him.

  ‘He was very sweet to me …’

  Her expression became wistful; she was almost beautiful when she confessed, ‘I don’t think many men are like this: he would take me suddenly in his arms, looking so deeply into my eyes that it hurt. Then sometimes, out of the blue, he would push me away – I’ve never seen such a thing from anyone else – and he’d sigh to himself, “Yet I really am fond of you, my little Jeanne … ”

  ‘Then it was over. He’d keep busy with this or that without giving me another glance, spend hours repairing a piece of furniture, making me something handy for housework, or fixing a clock.

  ‘My mother didn’t much care for him, precisely because she understood that he wasn’t like other people.’

  ‘Among his belongings, weren’t there some items he guarded with particular care?’

  ‘How did you know?’

  She started, a touch frightened, and blurted out, ‘An old suit! Once he came home when I’d taken it from a cardboard box on top of the wardrobe and was brushing it. The suit would have been still good enough to wear around the house. I was even going to mend the tears. Louis grabbed it from me, he was furious, shouting cruel things, and that evening – you’d have sworn he hated me!

  ‘We’d been married for a month. After that …’

  She sighed and looked at Maigret as if in apology for having nothing more for him than this poor story.

  ‘He became more and more strange?’

  ‘It isn’t his fault, I’m sure of that! I think he was ill, he worried so … We were often in the kitchen, and whenever we’d been happy for a little while, I used to see him change suddenly: he’d stop speaking, look at things – and me – with a nasty smile, and go and throw himself down on his bed without saying goodnight to me.’

  ‘He had no friends?’

  ‘No! No one ever came to see him.’

  ‘He never travelled, received any letters?’

  ‘No. And he didn’t like having people in our home. Once in a while, a neighbour who had no sewing machine would come over to use mine, and that was guaranteed to enrage Louis. But he didn’t become angry like everyone else, it was something shut up inside … and he was the one who seemed to suffer!

  ‘When I told him we were going to have a child, he stared at me like a madman …

  ‘That was when he started to drink, fits of it, binges, especially after the baby was born. And yet I know that he loved that child! Sometimes he used to gaze at him in adoration, the way he did with me at first …

  ‘The next day, he’d come home drunk, lie down, lock the bedroom door and spend hours in there, whole days.

  ‘The first few times, he’d cry and beg me to forgive him. Maybe if Mama hadn’t interfered I might have managed to keep him, but my mother tried to lecture him, and there were awful arguments. Especially when Louis went two or three days without going to work!

  ‘Towards the end, we were desperately unhappy. You know what it’s like, don’t you? His temper got worse and worse. My mother threw him out twice, to remind him that he wasn’t the lord and master there.

  ‘But I just know that it wasn’t his fault! Something was pushing him, driving him! He would still look at me, or our son, in that old way I told you about …

  ‘Only now not so often, and it didn’t last long. The final quarrel was dreadful. Mama was there. Louis had helped himself to some money from the shop, and she called him a thief. He went so pale, his eyes all red, as on his bad days, and a crazed look in those eyes …

  ‘I can still see him coming closer as if to strangle me! I was terrified and screamed, “Louis!”

  ‘He left, slamming the door so hard the glass shattered.

  ‘That was two years ago. Some neighbourhood women saw him around now and again … I went to that factory in Belleville, but they told me he didn’t work there any more.

  ‘Someone saw him, though, in a small workshop in Rue de la Roquette where they make beer pumps.

  ‘Me, I saw him once more, maybe six months ago now, through the shop window. Mama is living with me and the child again, and she was in the shop … she kept me from running to the door.

  ‘You swear to me that he didn’t suffer? That he died instantly? He was an unhappy, unfortunate man, don’t you see? You must have understood that by now …’

  She had relived her story with such intensity, and her husband had had such a strong hold on her, that, without realizing it, she had been reflecting all the feelings she was describing on her own face.

  As in his first impression, Maigret was struck by an unnerving resemblance between this woman and the man in Bremen who had snapped his fingers before shooting a bullet into his mouth.

  What’s more, that raging fever she had just evoked seemed to have infected her. She fell silent, but all her nerves remained on edge, and she almost gasped for breath. She was waiting for something, she didn’t know what.

  ‘He never spoke to you about his past, his childhood?’

  ‘No. He didn’t talk much. I only know that he was born in Aubervilliers. And I’ve always thought he was educated beyond his station in life; he had lovely handwriting, and he knew the Latin names of all the plants. When the woman from the haberdashery next door had a difficult letter to write, he was the one she came to.’

  ‘And you never saw his family?’

  ‘Before we were married, he told me he was an orphan. Chief inspector, there’s one more thing I’d like to ask you. Will he be brought back to France?’

  When Maigret hesitated to reply, she turned her face away to hide her embarrassment.

  ‘Now the shop belongs to my mother. And the money, too. I know she won’t want to pay anything to bring the body home – or give me enough to go and see him! Would it be possible, in this case …’

  The words died in her throat, and she quickly bent down to retrieve her handkerchief, which had fallen to the floor.

  ‘I will see to it that your husband is brought home, madame.’

  She gave him a touching smile, then wiped a tear from her cheek.

  ‘You’ve understood, I can tell! You feel the same way I do, chief inspector! It wasn’t his fault … He was an unhappy man …’

  ‘Did he ever have any large sums of money?’

  ‘Only his wages. In the beginning, he gave everything to me. Later on, when he began drinking …’

  Another faint smile, very sad, and yet full of pity.

  She left somewhat calmer, gathering the skimpy fur collar tightly round her neck with her right hand, still clutching the handbag and the tightly folded newspaper in the other.

  Maigret found a seedy-looking hotel at 18, Rue de la Roquette, right where it joins Rue de Lappe, with its accordion-band dance halls and squalid housing. That stretch of Roquette is a good fifty metres from Place de la Bastille. Every ground floor hosts a bistro, every house a hotel frequented by drifters, immigrants, tarts and the chronically unemployed.

  Tucked away within these vaguely sinister haunts of the underclass, however, are a few workshops, their doors wide open to the street, where men wield hammers and blowtorches amid a constant traffic of heavy trucks.

  The contrast is striking: these steady workers, busy employees with waybills in hand, and the sordid or insolent creatures who hang around everywhere.

  ‘Jeunet!’ rumbled the inspector, pushing open the door of the hotel office on the ground floor.

  ‘Not here!’

  ‘He’s still got his room?’

  He’d been spotted for a policeman, and got a reluctant reply.

  ‘Yes, room 19!’

  ‘By the week? The month?’

  ‘The month!’

  ‘You have any mail for him?’

  The manager tu
rned evasive, but in the end handed over to Maigret the package Jeunet had sent himself from Brussels.

  ‘Did he receive many like this?’

  ‘A few times …’

  ‘Never any letters?’

  ‘No! Maybe he got three packages, in all. A quiet man. I don’t see why the police should want to come bothering him.’

  ‘He worked?’

  ‘At number 65, down the street.’

  ‘Regularly?’

  ‘Depended. Some weeks yes, others, no.’

  Maigret demanded the key to the room. He found nothing there, however, except a ruined pair of shoes with flapping soles, an empty tube of aspirin and some mechanic’s overalls tossed into a corner.

  Back downstairs, he questioned the manager again, learning that Louis Jeunet saw no one, did not go out with women and basically led a humdrum life, aside from a few trips lasting three or four days.

  But no one stays in one of these hotels, in this neighbourhood, unless there’s something wrong somewhere, and the manager knew that as well as Maigret.

  ‘It’s not what you think,’ he admitted grudgingly. ‘With him, it’s the bottle! And how – in binges. Novenas, my wife and I call them. Buckle down for three weeks, go off to work every day, then … for a while he’d drink until he passed out on his bed.’

  ‘You never saw anything suspicious about his behaviour?’

  But the man shrugged, as if to say that in his hotel everyone who walked through the door looked suspicious.

  At number 65, in a huge workshop open to the street, they made machines to draw off beer. Maigret was met by a foreman, who had already seen Jeunet’s picture in the paper.

  ‘I was just going to write to the police!’ he exclaimed. ‘He was still working here last week. A fellow who earned eight francs fifty an hour!’

  ‘When he was working.’

  ‘Ah, you already know? When he was working, true! There are lots of them like that, but in general those others regularly take one drink too many, or they splurge on a champion hangover every Saturday. Him, it was sudden-like, no warning: he’d drink for a solid week. Once, when we had a rush job, I went to his hotel room. Well! There he was, all alone, drinking right out of a bottle set on the floor by his bed. A sorry sight, I swear.’