The Hotel Majestic Page 5

  “Excuse me, sergeant,” he asked a festive-looking policeman, “can you tell me what it’s all about?”

  The man looked at him as though he had landed from the moon.

  “Not heard of the Battle of Flowers?”

  Other brass bands were winding through the streets, making for the sea, which could be seen from time to time, lying, pastel blue, at the end of a street.

  Later he remembered a little girl dressed as a pierrette, being dragged hurriedly along by her mother, probably in order to get a good place for the pageant. There would have been nothing unusual about it if the little girl hadn’t worn a strange mask over her face, with a long nose, red cheeks and drooping Chinese moustache. Trotting along on her chubby little legs . . .

  He had no need to ask the way. Going down a quiet street towards the Croisette he saw a sign: BRASSERIE DES ARTISTES. A door farther on: HOTEL. And he saw at a glance what kind of hotel it was.

  He went in. Four men dressed in black, with rigid bow ties and white dickeys, were playing belote, while waiting to go and take up their positions as croupiers in the casino. By the window, there was a girl eating sauerkraut. The waiter was wiping the tables. A young man, who looked as though he was the proprietor, was reading a newspaper behind the bar. And from outside, from far and near, on all sides, came echoes of the brass bands, and a stale whiff of mimosa, dust kicked up by the feet of the crowd, shouts and the honking of hooters . . .

  “A half!” grunted Maigret, at last able to take off his heavy overcoat.

  He found it almost embarrassing to be as darkly clad as the croupiers.

  He had exchanged glances with the proprietor as soon as he came in.

  “Tell me, Monsieur Jean . . .”

  And Monsieur Jean was clearly thinking . . .

  “That one’s probably a cop . . .”

  “Have you had this bar a long time?”

  “I took it over nearly three years ago . . . Why?”

  “And before that?”

  “If it’s of any interest to you, I was barman at the Café de la Paix, in Monte Carlo . . .”

  Barely a hundred metres away, along the Croisette, were the luxury hotels: the Carlton, the Miramar, the Martinez, and others . . .

  It was clear that the Brasserie des Artistes was a back-stage prop, as it were, to the more fashionable scene. The whole street was the same in fact, with dry-cleaning shops, hairdressers, drivers’ bistros, little businesses in the shadow of the grand hotels.

  “The bar’s open all night, is it?”

  “All night, yes . . .”

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

  “Anything else you want to know?” Monsieur Jean asked curtly.

  “I’d like you to tell me where I can find someone called Gigi . . .”

  “Gigi? . . . Don’t know her . . .”

  The woman eating sauerkraut was watching them wearily. The croupiers got up: it was nearly three o’clock.

  “Look, Monsieur Jean . . . Have you ever had any trouble over fruit machines or anything like that? . . .”

  “What’s that to do with you?”

  “I ask because if you’ve ever been convicted, the case will be much more serious . . . Charlotte’s a good sort . . . She telephones her friends to ask their help, but forgets to tell them what it’s about . . . So if one has a business like yours, if one’s already been in a spot of trouble once or twice, one generally doesn’t want to become incriminated . . . Well—I’ll telephone the vice squad and I’m sure they won’t have any difficulty telling me where I can find Gigi . . . Have you got a token?”

  He had got up, begun walking towards the telephone booth.

  “Excuse me! You spoke of becoming incriminated . . . Is it serious?”

  “Well, a murder’s involved . . . if a superintendent from the special squad comes down from Paris, you can take it . . .”

  “Just a minute, superintendent . . . Do you really want to see Gigi?”

  “I’ve come more than a thousand kilometres to do so . . .”

  “Come with me then! But I must warn you that she won’t be able to tell you very much . . . Do you know her? . . . She’s useless for two days out of three . . . When she’s found some dope, I mean, if you get me? . . . Well, yesterday . . .”

  “Yesterday, it so happened that, after Charlotte’s telephone call, she found some, didn’t she? Where is she?”

  “This way . . . She’s got a room somewhere in town, but last night she was incapable of walking . . .”

  A door led to the staircase of the hotel. The proprietor pointed to a room on the landing.

  “Someone for you, Gigi!” he shouted.

  And he waited at the top of the stairs until Maigret had shut the door. Then went back to his counter, shrugged, and picked up his newspaper, looking a little worried despite himself.

  The closed curtains let in only a luminous glow. The room was in a mess. A woman lay on the iron bed, with her clothes on, her hair awry, her face buried in the pillow. She began asking in a thick voice: “. . . d’you want?”

  Then a very bleary eye appeared.

  “. . . been here before?”

  Pinched nostrils. A wax-like complexion. Gigi was thin, angular, brown as a prune.

  “. . . time is it? . . . Aren’t you going to get undressed? . . .” She propped herself up on one elbow to drink some water, and stared at Maigret, making a visible effort to pull herself together, and, seeing him sitting gravely on a chair by her bed, asked: “You the doctor? . . .”

  “What did Monsieur Jean tell you, last night?”

  “Jean? . . . Jean’s all right . . . He gave me . . . But what business is it of yours?”

  “Yes, I know. He gave you some snow . . . Lie down again . . . And he spoke to you about Mimi and Prosper.”

  The bands still blaring outside, coming closer and then dying away, and still the stale scent of mimosa, with its own indefinable smell.

  “Good old Prosper! . . .”

  She spoke as if she were half asleep. Her voice occasionally took on a childish note. Then she suddenly screwed up her eyes and her brow became furrowed as if she were in violent pain. Her mouth was slack.

  “You got some, then?”

  She wanted some more of the drug. And Maigret had the unpleasant feeling that he was extracting secrets from someone who was sick and delirious.

  “You were fond of Prosper, weren’t you?”

  “. . . He’s not like other people . . . He’s too good . . . He shouldn’t have fallen for a woman like Mimi, but that’s always the way . . . Do you know him?”

  Come on now! Make an effort. Wasn’t that what he, Maigret, was there for?

  “It was when he was at the Miramar, wasn’t it? . . . There were three of you dancing at the Belle Étoile . . . Mimi, Charlotte and you . . .”

  She stuttered solemnly: “You mustn’t say unkind things about Charlotte . . . She’s a good girl . . . And she was in love with Prosper . . . If he’d listened to me . . .”

  “I suppose you met at the café, after work . . . Prosper was Mimi’s lover . . .”

  “He was besotted, he was so much in love with her . . . Poor Prosper! . . . And afterwards, when she . . .”

  She sat up suddenly, suspicious: “Is it true that you’re a friend of Prosper’s?”

  “When she had a baby, you mean? . . .”

  “Who told you that? I was the only person she wrote to about it . . . But it didn’t start like that . . .”

  She was listening to the music, which was drawing nearer once more.

  “What’s that?”

  “Nothing . . .”

  The flower-decked wagons filing along the Croisette as guns were fired to announce the start. The blazing sun, calm sea, motorboats cutting circles through the water and small yachts gracefully swooping . . .

  “Are you sure you hav
en’t got any? . . . You won’t go and ask Jean for some? . . .”

  “It began when she left with the American?”

  “Did Prosper tell you that? . . . Give me another glass of water, there’s a good bloke . . . A Yank she met at the Belle Étoile, who fell in love with her . . . He took her to Deauville, then Biarritz . . . I must admit Mimi knew how to do things properly . . . She wasn’t like the rest of us . . . Is Charlotte still working at the Pélican? . . . And look at me! . . .”

  She gave a dreadful laugh, disclosing villainous teeth.

  “One day, she just wrote that she was going to have a baby and that she was going to make the American think it was his . . . What was he called now? . . . Oswald. Then she wrote again to tell me that it nearly went wrong because the baby had hair the colour of a carrot . . . Can you imagine it! I wouldn’t want Prosper to know that . . .”

  Was it the effect of the two glasses of water she had drunk? She pulled one leg after the other out of bed, long, thin legs which would attract few male glances. When she was standing upright, she appeared tall, skeleton-like. What long hours she must spend pacing up and down the dark pavements or loitering at a café table before she got any results . . .

  Her stare became more fixed. She examined Maigret from head to toe.

  “You’re from the police, eh?”

  She was getting angry. But her mind was still cloudy and she was making an effort to clear her thoughts.

  “What did Jean tell me? . . . Ah! . . . And who brought you here anyway? . . . He made me promise not to talk to anyone . . . Admit it! . . . Admit you’re from the police . . . And I . . . Why should it matter to the police, if Prosper and Mimi . . .”

  The storm broke, suddenly, violently, sickeningly: “You dirty bastard! . . . Swine! . . . You took advantage of me being . . .”

  She had opened the door, and the sounds from outside could be heard even more clearly.

  “If you don’t get out at once, I’ll . . . I’ll . . .”

  It was ridiculous, pathetic. Maigret just managed to sidestep the jug she threw at his legs, and she was still hurling abuse after him as he went down the stairs.

  The bar was empty. It was too early still.

  “Well?” Monsieur Jean asked, from behind his counter.

  Maigret put on his coat and hat, and left a tip for the waiter.

  “Did she tell you what you wanted?”

  A voice, from the stairs: “Jean! . . . Jean! . . . Come here—I must tell you . . .”

  It was poor wretched Gigi, who had padded down in her stockings and now pushed a dishevelled head round the door of the bar.

  Maigret thought it better to leave.

  On the Croisette, in his black coat and bowler hat, he must have looked like a provincial come to see the carnival on the Côte d’Azur for the first time. Masked figures bumped into him. He had difficulty disentangling himself from the brass bands. On the beach, a few winter visitors ignored the festival and were sunbathing: their near-naked bodies already brown, covered with oil . . .

  The Miramar was down there, a vast yellow structure with two or three hundred windows, with its doorman, car attendants and touts . . . He nearly went in . . . But what was the use?

  Didn’t he already know everything he needed to know? He no longer knew if he was thirsty or drunk. He went into a bar.

  “Have you got a railway timetable?”

  “Trains to Paris? There’s an express—first, second and third class—at 20:40 hours . . .”

  He drank another half litre. There were hours to fill in. He couldn’t think what to do. And later, he had nightmare memories of those hours spent in Cannes, amidst the carnival.

  At times, the past became so real to him that he could literally see Prosper, with his red hair, great candid eyes, pitted skin, coming out of the Miramar by the little back door and hurrying across to the Brasserie des Artistes.

  The three women, who would be eight years younger then, would be there having lunch or dinner. Prosper was ugly. He knew it. And he was passionately in love with Mimi, the youngest, and prettiest, of the three.

  His burning glances must have made them laugh heartlessly, at first.

  “You shouldn’t, Mimi,” Charlotte must have intervened. “He’s a good sort. You never know how it may turn out . . .”

  Then the Belle Étoile, in the evening. Prosper never set foot inside. He knew his place. But he met them in the early morning to eat onion soup at the café . . .

  “If a man like that loved me, I would . . .”

  Charlotte must have been impressed by his humble devotion. And Gigi wasn’t yet on cocaine.

  “Don’t take any notice, Monsieur Prosper! . . . She pretends to make fun of you, but at heart . . .”

  And they had been lovers! Had lived together perhaps. Prosper spent most of his savings on presents. Until the day when a passing American . . .

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

  Good, kind Charlotte—she knew he didn’t love her, that he still loved Mimi, and yet she was living with him, happily, in their little house in Saint-Cloud.

  While Gigi slipped farther and farther . . .

  “Some flowers, monsieur? . . . To send to your little girlfriend . . .”

  The flowerseller spoke ironically, because Maigret didn’t look like a man who has a little girlfriend. But he sent a basket of mimosa to Madame Maigret.

  Then, as he still had half an hour before the train left, a kind of intuition made him telephone Paris. He was in a little bar near the station. The musicians from the bands now had dusty trousers. Whole carriage-loads of them were leaving for nearby stations, and the fine Sunday afternoon was drawing drowsily to a close.

  “Hello! Is that you, chief? . . . You’re still in Cannes?”

  He could tell from Lucas’s voice that he was excited.

  “Things have been happening here . . . The examining magistrate is furious . . . He’s just telephoned to know what you are doing . . . Hello? They made the discovery only threequarters of an hour ago . . . It was Torrence, who was on duty at the Majestic, who telephoned . . .”

  Maigret stood listening to his account in the narrow booth, and grunted from time to time. Through the window, he could see, in the light from the setting sun which filled the bar, the musicians in their white linen trousers and silver-braided caps, and now and then one of them would jokingly sound a long note on his bombardon or trombone, while the golden liquid sparkled in their glasses.

  “Right! . . . I’ll be there tomorrow morning . . . No! Of course . . . Well if the magistrate insists, you’ll have to arrest him . . .”

  It had only just happened, then. Downstairs at the Majestic . . . Thé dansant time, with music drifting along the passageways . . . Prosper Donge like a great goldfish in his glass cage . . . Jean Ramuel, yellow as a quince, in his . . .

  From what Lucas said—but the inquiry had not yet begun—the night porter had been seen going along the corridors, in his outdoor clothes. No one knew what he was doing there. Everyone had enough to do himself without bothering about what was happening elsewhere.

  The night porter was called Justin Colleboeuf. He was a quiet, dull little man, who spent the night alone in the foyer. He didn’t read. There was no one to talk to. And he didn’t go to sleep. He sat there, on a chair, for hour after hour, staring straight ahead of him.

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

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

  Zebio, the dancer, had gone to the cloakroom to put on his dinner-jacket. Everyone was going about his business. Ramuel had come out of his booth several times.

  At five o’clock, Prosper Donge had gone along to the cloakroom. He took off his white jacket and put on his own jacket and coat, and collected his bicycle.

  Then a few minutes later a bellboy went into the cloakroom. He noticed that the door of locker 89 was slightly open. The next minute the wh
ole hotel was alerted by his yells.

  In the locker, folded over itself, in a grey overcoat, was the body of the night porter. His felt hat was at the back of the cupboard.

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

  Meanwhile, Prosper Donge, on his bike, peacefully passed through the Bois de Boulogne, crossed the Pont de Saint-Cloud, and got off his bicycle to go up the steep road to his house.

  “A pastis!” Maigret ordered, as there didn’t seem to be anything else on the counter.

  Then he got into the train, his head as heavy as it had been when he was a child, after a long day in the country, in the blazing sun.

  5

  SPIT ON THE WINDOW

  They had been travelling for some time. Maigret had already taken off his jacket, tie and stiff collar, as the compartment was once again too hot; it was as though hot air, and the smell of the train, was oozing from everywhere—woodwork, floor, seats.

  He bent to unlace his shoes. Not content with his free first class pass, he had taken a couchette; too bad if anyone objected. And the guard had promised him that he would have his compartment to himself.

  Suddenly, as he was still bending over his shoes, he had the unpleasant feeling that someone was looking at him, from close to. He looked up. There was a pale face peering through the window from the corridor. Dark eyes. A large mouth, badly made up, or rather enlarged, by two streaks of red applied at random, which had then run.

  But the most noticeable thing about the face was its expression of dislike, hatred. How had Gigi got there? Before Maigret could put on his shoe again, the girl’s face puckered in disgust and she spat on to the window, in his direction, then went back down the corridor.

  He remained impassive, and got dressed. Before leaving the compartment, he lit a pipe, as if for moral support. Then he went down the corridor, from carriage to carriage, assiduously looking in each compartment. The train was a long one. Maigret walked through at least ten coaches, bumped into the partitions, had to disturb fifty or more people.

  “Sorry . . . Sorry . . .”