The Cellars of the Majestic Read online

  ‘And before that?’

  ‘If it’s any of your business, before that I was a barman at the Café de la Paix in Monte Carlo …’

  Less than a hundred metres away, the length of the Croisette, the grand hotels stood in a row: the Carlton, the Miramar, the Martinez, and others …

  It was clear that the Brasserie des Artistes was something like the backstage area of that elegant life. The same was true of the whole street: dry cleaners’, hairdressers’, bistros for chauffeurs, all kinds of little trades in the shadow of the big hotels.

  ‘The brasserie’s open all night, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, all night …’

  Not for the winter visitors, but for the staff of the casino and the hotels, for the dancers, the hostesses, the bellboys, the go-betweens of all kinds, pimps, horse race tipsters, nightclub touts.

  ‘Do you still need me?’ Monsieur Jean asked quite curtly.

  ‘I’d like you to tell me where I can find a woman named Gigi …’

  ‘Gigi? … Never heard of her …’

  The girl with the sauerkraut was watching them with weary eyes. The croupiers stood up: it was almost three.

  ‘Tell me, Monsieur Jean … Have you ever been in trouble over slot machines or anything like that? …’

  ‘What business is it of yours?’

  ‘I ask the question because, if you’ve already got a record, the case would become much more serious … Charlotte’s a nice woman … She phones her friends to ask them a favour, but forgets to tell them what it’s all about … Now when you have a business like yours, and you’ve already been in a bit of trouble, you generally don’t want to get your feet wet … Anyway, I’m going to phone the Vice Squad and I don’t think they’ll have any problem telling me where I can find Gigi … Do you have a token?’

  He had stood up and was already heading for the phone booth.

  ‘Hold on! You mentioned getting my feet wet … Is it serious?’

  ‘Actually, it’s a murder … When a detective chief inspector from Special Branch comes expressly all the way from Paris, you’d be right to think that …’

  ‘Wait a second, sir … Are you sure you want to see Gigi?’

  ‘That’s what I came a thousand kilometres for …’

  ‘Come with me! But I warn you, she won’t be able to tell you much … Do you know her? … Two days out of three she’s no good for anything … When she’s got hold of drugs, you know what I mean? … Well, yesterday …’

  ‘Yesterday, after Charlotte’s phone call, as if by chance, she found some, didn’t she? Where is she?’

  ‘Through here! … She has a room somewhere in town, but last night she couldn’t even walk …’

  A door led to the staircase of the hotel. The owner pointed to a room on the mezzanine.

  ‘Someone for you, Gigi!’ he cried.

  And he waited on the landing until Maigret had closed the door behind him. After which, shrugging his shoulders, he went back to his counter and, a trifle worried in spite of everything, resumed his newspaper.

  The closed curtains let only a halo of light through. The room was in a mess. On the iron bedstead, a woman was lying, fully dressed, her hair dishevelled, her face in the pillow. In a thick voice she began by asking:

  ‘’t is it? …’

  Then an eye appeared, a grim-looking eye.

  ‘… you already here? …’

  Pinched nostrils. A waxy complexion. Gigi was thin and angular and as brown as a prune.

  ‘… time is it? … Aren’t you getting undressed? …’

  She raised herself on one elbow to drink a sip of water, looked at Maigret as she made an effort to recover her composure and, seeing him sitting solemnly on a chair beside her bed, asked:

  ‘Are you the doctor? …’

  ‘What did Monsieur Jean tell you last night?’

  ‘Jean? … He’s a decent sort, Jean … He gave me … But what business is it of yours?’

  ‘He gave you cocaine, I know … Don’t get up … And he talked to you about Mimi and Prosper …’

  Outside, there were still brass bands coming closer then moving away, and there was still that distinctive sickly smell of mimosas, a smell like no other.

  ‘Good old Prosper! …’

  She spoke as if in a dream. At times, her voice sounded almost childlike. Then suddenly she would screw up her eyes, and her forehead would crease as if at some fleeting but sharp pain. She had a coated tongue.

  ‘Hey, you got any?’

  She wanted more drugs. Maigret had the unpleasant impression that he was dragging secrets out of a sick, delirious woman.

  ‘You liked Prosper, didn’t you?’

  ‘He isn’t like other men … He’s too good … He should never have ended up with a woman like Mimi, but that’s always the way … Have you met him?’

  On with it! After all, wasn’t this Maigret’s role?

  ‘That was when he was at the Miramar, wasn’t it? … The three of you were dancers at the Belle Étoile … Mimi, Charlotte and you …’

  Solemnly, she stammered:

  ‘You shouldn’t speak badly of Charlotte … She’s a good girl … And she was in love with Prosper … If he’d listened to me …’

  ‘I suppose you used to meet up at the brasserie, when you weren’t working … Prosper was Mimi’s lover …’

  ‘He was so much in love with her, it turned him stupid … Poor Prosper! … And afterwards, when she …’

  Suddenly she sat up, suspicious:

  ‘Are you really a friend of Prosper?’

  ‘When she had a child, is that it? …’

  ‘Who told you that? I’m the only one she wrote to … But that’s not how it started …’

  She pricked up her ears at the music, which had come closer again.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Nothing …’

  The floats parading along the Croisette, their departure announced with cannon shots. A blazing sun, the calm sea, motor-boats tracing rings on the water, little sailing boats gracefully tilting …

  ‘Are you sure you don’t have any? … Couldn’t you go and ask Jean for some? …’

  ‘Did she leave with the American first?’

  ‘Is it Prosper who told you that? … Give me another glass of water, if you’re a decent sort … A Yankee she met at the Belle Étoile, who fell in love with her … He took her to Deauville, then Biarritz … Mind you, Mimi knew how to behave … She wasn’t like us … Does Charlotte still work at the Pélican? … As for me, well …’

  She laughed, a horrible laugh that revealed bad teeth.

  ‘One fine day, she wrote out of the blue that she was going to have a baby and that she was fixing it so the American would believe the child was his … What was his name again? … Oswald. Then, another time, she wrote that it had almost gone wrong because the baby had hair as red as a carrot … Can you imagine? … I didn’t want anyone to tell Prosper …’

  Was it the effect of the two glasses of water she had drunk? She lifted her legs out of the bed, first one, then the other, long, thin legs that were unlikely to attract looks from men. When she was on her feet, you saw how tall and skeletal she was. How many hours she must have spent pacing the dark pavements or lingering at a café table until she got any kind of result!

  Her gaze had become more fixed. She was looking Maigret up and down.

  ‘You’re police, aren’t you?’

  Anger was rising in her. But there was still a haziness in her memory and she was making an effort to dispel it.

  ‘What did Jean tell me? … Wait! … Who let you in anyway? … He made me promise not to tell anyone … Admit it! … Admit you’re police … And me … Why should the police care if Prosper and Mimi …’

  The outburst came all of a sudden, violent and sickening:

  ‘You bastard! … You swine! … You took advantage of me when I was …’

  She had opened the door and the noises came in even more di
stinctly from outside.

  ‘If you don’t go right now, I … I …’

  It was ridiculous, pitiful. Maigret was almost hit on the legs with a water jug, and she was still yelling insults at him as he descended the stairs.

  The brasserie was empty. It was still the slack time of day.

  ‘Well?’ Monsieur Jean asked, from his counter.

  Maigret put his coat and hat back on and left some coins for the waiter.

  ‘Did she tell you what you wanted?’

  A voice, from the hotel staircase:

  ‘Jean! … Jean! … Come here, I need to talk to you …’

  It was Gigi, pathetic as ever, who had come down in her stockinged feet, hair dishevelled, and half opened the door to the brasserie.

  Maigret preferred to leave.

  Out on the Croisette, in his black overcoat and his bowler hat, he must have looked like a provincial making his first visit to the Cote d’Azur for carnival. Masked figures jostled him. He freed himself with difficulty from the lines of dancers. On the beach, a few winter holidaymakers were sunbathing, indifferent to the festivities: almost naked bodies, already tanned, covered in oil …

  The Miramar was there, a huge yellow mass, with its two or three hundred windows, its porter, its doormen, its touts … He almost went in … What was the point?

  Didn’t he know all he wanted to know? He was no longer sure if he was thirsty or if he had drunk too much. He went into a bar.

  ‘Do you have the railway timetable?’

  ‘Are you going to Paris? There’s an express at eight forty …’

  He had another beer. He still had hours to kill. He didn’t know what to do. Subsequently, he was left with a nightmarish memory of those hours spent in the festive atmosphere of Cannes.

  At times, the past became so real to him that he literally saw Prosper, with his red hair, big kindly eyes and pockmarked face, emerge from the Miramar through the little back door and drop by the Brasserie des Artistes.

  The three women, who were eight years younger at the time, were there, having lunch or dinner. Prosper was ugly. He knew it. And he was madly in love with Mimi, the youngest and prettiest of the three.

  Hadn’t they laughed at first at his passionate glances?

  ‘You’re wrong, Mimi,’ Charlotte must have said. ‘He’s a nice man. You never know what might happen …’

  Then the Belle Étoile in the evening. Prosper never set foot there. It wasn’t his place. But in the early hours, he would meet up with them again over an onion soup at the brasserie …

  ‘If a man like that was in love with me …’

  Because Charlotte must have been susceptible to such a humble passion. Gigi wasn’t yet taking cocaine.

  ‘Don’t be too upset, Monsieur Prosper! … She pretends to make fun of you, but deep down …’

  And they had been lovers! They may even have started living together! Prosper spent most of his savings on gifts! Until the day a passing American …

  Had Charlotte told him, later, that the child was definitely his?

  Good old Charlotte! She knew he didn’t love her, that he still loved Mimi, and yet she lived pleasantly enough with him in the little house in Saint-Cloud!

  While Gigi had continued to decline …

  ‘Flowers to send, monsieur … For your girlfriend …’

  The florist was being ironic, because Maigret couldn’t have looked much like a man who has a girlfriend. All the same, he sent a basket of mimosas to Madame Maigret.

  Then, as there was still half an hour before the train left, a kind of intuition led him to ask to be put through to Paris. It was in a little bar near the station. The musicians from the brass bands now had dusty trousers. They were leaving, carriages full of them, for the neighbouring towns, and there was a weariness in the air, the kind you feel at the end of a sunny Sunday.

  ‘Hello! Is that you, boss? … Are you still in Cannes?’

  Lucas was emotional, you could hear it in his voice.

  ‘There have been developments here … Judge Bonneau is furious … He just phoned to find out what you were doing … Hello? It was only discovered three-quarters of an hour ago … It was Torrence, who was on duty at the Majestic, who phoned …’

  Maigret, motionless in the narrow booth, listened, grunting from time to time. In the setting sun flooding the bar through the skylight, he could see musicians in their white cotton trousers and silver-braided caps, and occasionally, as a joke, one of them drew a long-held note from his helicon or his trombone, while an opaline liquid glistened in the glasses.

  ‘All right! … I’ll be there tomorrow morning … No! … Obviously … Well, if the judge is set on it, let him arrest him …’

  It had only just happened, so to speak … The cellars of the Majestic … The tea dance in full swing, music seeping through all the partitions … Prosper Donge, like a big goldfish in his glass cage … Jean Ramuel, as yellow as a quince, in his …

  From what Lucas said – although the investigation hadn’t begun yet – the night porter had been seen passing along the corridors, in his city clothes. Nobody knew what he had been doing there. Everyone had enough to occupy themselves with not to worry about what was happening opposite.

  The night porter’s name was Justin Collebœuf. He was a small, calm, colourless man who spent his nights all alone in the lobby. He didn’t read. He had nobody to talk to. He didn’t sleep either. For hours on end, he waited, sitting on a chair, looking straight ahead.

  His wife was the concierge of a new apartment block in Neuilly.

  What was Collebœuf doing there at half past four in the afternoon?

  Zebio, the dancer, had gone to the locker room to get his dinner jacket. Everyone had moved around. Several times, Ramuel had emerged from his cage.

  At five o’clock, Prosper Donge had made his way to the locker room. He had swapped his white uniform jacket for his civilian jacket, put on his coat and collected his bicycle.

  A few minutes later, one of the bellboys had gone into the locker room. He had noticed that the door of locker 89 was slightly ajar. A moment later, he had alerted everyone with his yelling.

  In the locker, a slumped body in a grey overcoat, that of the night porter. His soft hat was at the bottom of the locker.

  Like Mrs Clark, Justin Collebœuf had been strangled. The body was still warm.

  During that time, Prosper Donge had been riding peacefully on his bicycle through the Bois de Boulogne, crossing the Pont de Saint-Cloud, getting off to climb the sloping street that led to his house.

  ‘A pastis!’ Maigret ordered, because that was the only thing he saw on the counter.

  After which, he took the train, his head as heavy as when, as a child, he had gone on a picnic that had lasted too long in the oppressive sun.

  5. The Spittle on the Window

  The train had been in motion for a while now. Maigret had already taken off his jacket, his tie and his false collar, because once again the compartment was overheated, or rather you had the impression that a special kind of heat, smelling of train, was oozing from everywhere, the walls, the floor, the seats.

  He bent forwards to untie his shoelaces. Too bad if his superiors kicked up a fuss: not content with his free first-class ticket, he had paid for a couchette. In addition, the ticket inspector had promised him that he would be on his own in the compartment.

  Suddenly, as he was still stooped over his shoes, he had the unpleasant impression that someone was watching him from close by. He looked up. Out there in the corridor, behind the glass, was a pale face. Two dark eyes. A big, badly made-up mouth, made all the bigger by two haphazardly traced lines of red lipstick that seemed to have run.

  But the most striking thing was the expression of contempt, of hate. How had Gigi got here? Maigret hadn’t even had time to put his shoe back on when she made a disgusted face and spat in his direction, on to the window, then moved away along the corridor.

  Impassively, he dressed again. Befo
re leaving his compartment, he lit a pipe, as if to compose himself. Then he set off along the corridors, going from carriage to carriage, looking into every compartment. The train was a long one. Maigret crossed at least ten vestibules, bumped into walls, disturbed fifty people.

  ‘Excuse me … Excuse me …’

  The carpeting came to an end. He was now in third class. People were dozing, six to a bench. Others were eating. Children stared straight ahead.

  In a compartment containing two sailors from Toulon on a furlough to Paris and an old couple nodding their heads gently, their mouths open, the woman not letting go of the basket on her knees, he found Gigi huddled in a corner.

  Earlier, in the corridor, he hadn’t noticed how she was dressed. Nor had he realized, startled as he was, that this was no longer the Gigi of the Brasserie des Artistes with her blurry eyes and flabby lips.

  Wrapped in a two-thousand-franc fur coat, her legs crossed, displaying well-turned heels and a large ladder in her stocking, she was looking straight ahead of her. Had she managed all alone to drag herself out of the comatose state in which he had found her that afternoon? Had she been given some medicine? Or was it a new dose of cocaine that had put her back on her feet?

  She became aware of Maigret’s presence in the corridor, but did not move. He stood looking at her for a while, trying to signal to her; she still took no notice of him. So he opened the door.

  ‘Will you come out here for a moment?’

  She hesitated. The two sailors were watching her. Should she make a scene? With a shrug, she stood up and joined him. He closed the door behind her.

  ‘Haven’t you had enough yet?’ she said grudgingly. ‘You must be pleased, eh? You must be proud! You took advantage of a poor girl like me being in that state …’

  He realized that she was on the verge of tears, that her badly painted mouth was swelling, and he turned his head away.

  ‘And you wasted no time in locking him up, did you?’

  ‘Tell me, Gigi. How do you know that Prosper’s been arrested?’

  A weary gesture. ‘Don’t you know about it yet? I thought you tapped phones these days … I might as well tell you, you’ll find out soon enough … Charlotte phoned Jean … Prosper had just got back from work when a taxi filled with cops arrived and took him away … Charlotte’s beside herself … She wanted to know if I’d talked … And I did talk, didn’t I? … I said enough for you to …’