Liberty Bar Read online

  It was already hot outside. They passed in front of a hairdresser’s window as a barber in a white jacket was opening the shutters. A man was shaving before his open window. And the people on their way to work turned round astonished at the sight of this tiny cortège, where the derisory escort was so out of kilter with the pomp of the funeral carriage.

  The two women from Cannes and the two women from Antibes were still walking in a row, though they kept a metre apart. They were followed by an empty taxi. Boutigues, who had taken on the responsibility for this ceremony, was nervous.

  ‘Do you think there will be a scandal?’

  There wasn’t. The cemetery, with all its flowers, was as colourful as the market. At the open grave they found the priest and an altar boy, whom they hadn’t noticed arrive.

  Harry Brown was invited to cast the first handful of earth. Then there was a moment of uncertainty. The old woman in mourning dress pushed her daughter forwards and followed her.

  Brown had already gone striding off to the empty taxi that was waiting at the cemetery gate.

  Another moment of uncertainty. Maigret stood back, with Boutigues. Jaja and Sylvie didn’t dare leave without saying goodbye to him. Only the women in mourning got there before them.

  ‘That was his son, wasn’t it? … I suppose he’ll want to come to the villa?’

  ‘Perhaps. I don’t know …’

  But they had eyes only for Jaja and Sylvie. They alone grabbed their attention.

  ‘Where are they from? … People like that shouldn’t be allowed …’

  There were birds singing in all the trees. The gravediggers shovelled the earth into the grave in a regular rhythm, and, as it filled up, the sound became more muffled. They had placed the wreath and the two bouquets on the neighbouring grave while they worked. And Sylvie stood turned towards them, staring fixedly, her lips pale.

  Jaja was getting impatient. She was waiting for the other two to leave so that she could talk to Maigret. She wiped her brow, because it was hot. She must have been having difficulty standing.

  ‘Yes … I’ll be seeing you soon …’

  The black veils headed for the exit. Jaja approached with a huge sigh of relief.

  ‘Is that them? … Was he really married?’

  Sylvie held back, still watching the grave, which was now nearly filled in.

  And Boutigues was the same bag of nerves. He didn’t dare come to listen to the conversation.

  ‘Was it the son who paid for the coffin?’

  It was obvious that Jaja was ill at ease.

  ‘What a strange funeral!’ she said. ‘I don’t know why, but I’d never imagined it like that … I wouldn’t even have been able to cry …’

  Now the emotion hit her. She looked at the cemetery and succumbed to some undefined malaise.

  ‘It wasn’t even a sad occasion! … You’d have thought it was …’

  ‘You’d have thought it was what?’

  ‘I don’t know … It was as if it wasn’t a real funeral.’

  She stifled a sob, dried her eyes and turned towards Sylvie.

  ‘Come … Joseph is waiting for us …’

  The cemetery caretaker was sitting in his doorway, slicing an eel.

  ‘What do you think?’

  Boutigues was concerned. He too had the vague feeling that something wasn’t quite right. Maigret lit his pipe.

  ‘I think William Brown was murdered!’ he replied.

  ‘Obviously!’

  They were wandering round the streets, where the shops had already drawn canopies over their windows. The barber from that morning was sitting outside his door, reading his newspaper. In Place Macé they spotted the two women from Cannes and Joseph, waiting for the bus.

  ‘Fancy a quick one?’ suggested Boutigues, indicating the café terrace.

  Maigret accepted. He was filled by an almost overwhelming laziness. A succession of images flashed across his retinas, all confused, and he made no attempt to sort them into any order.

  On the terrace of the Glacier, for example, he half closed his eyes. The sun was baking his eyelids. His intertwined eyelashes formed a grill of shadow, behind which people and objects took on an almost fairy-tale appearance.

  He saw Joseph helping Jaja to haul herself up on to the bus. Then a small man dressed all in white, with a colonial helmet on his head, walked by slowly, leading a chow chow with a purple tongue.

  Other images became mixed up with the real ones: William Brown, at the wheel of his old car, driving his women from shop to shop, sometimes with only his pyjamas on under his overcoat and with stubble on his chin.

  By this time the son would be back at the Provençal, in his luxury suite, dictating cables, answering the telephone, pacing up and down with his regular stride.

  ‘It’s an odd business!’ sighed Boutigues, who had to fill every silence, as he crossed and uncrossed his legs first one way, then the other. ‘What a shame they forgot to inform the organist!’

  ‘Yes! William Brown was murdered …’

  It was for his own sake that Maigret repeated this, to convince himself that, in spite of everything, a drama really had occurred.

  His detachable collar felt tight. His forehead was damp. He looked with relish at the large cube of ice floating in his drink.

  ‘Brown was murdered … He left the villa, as he did every month, to go to Cannes. He left his car at the garage. He visited a bank or some business to collect the monthly allowance that his son provided for him. Then he spent a few days at the Liberty Bar.’

  A few days of warm laziness like the one that had overcome Maigret.

  A few days in slippers, slouching from one chair to another, eating and drinking with Jaja, watching a semi-naked Sylvie come and go …

  ‘On Friday, at two o’clock, he left … At five o’clock, he picked up his car and, a quarter of an hour later, he collapsed, fatally wounded, on the steps of his villa, while his women, thinking he was drunk, swore at him from the window … He had about two thousand francs on him, as usual …’

  Maigret didn’t say any of this out loud, he merely thought it as he watched the passers-by filing in front of the grill of his eyelashes.

  It was Boutigues who broke the silence:

  ‘Who would have an interest in seeing him dead?’

  There it was: the dangerous question. His two women? Didn’t they, on the contrary, have an interest in keeping him alive as long as possible since, out of the two thousand francs that he brought home each month, they managed to save a small amount?

  The women from Cannes? They will have lost one of their few customers, someone who kept the whole household fed for a week and paid for stockings for one of them and paid the gas and electricity bills of the other …

  No! In terms of material advantage, only Harry Brown stood to gain anything, as he no longer had to pay out five thousand francs a month.

  But what is five thousand francs to a family that sells wool by the shipload?

  Boutigues sighed again:

  ‘I’m beginning to think the people round here are right, and it’s a spying matter …’

  ‘Waiter! Same again!’ said Maigret.

  He regretted it immediately. He wanted to cancel the order, but didn’t dare.

  He didn’t dare out of fear of admitting to his weakness. He would remember this later, remember sitting on the terrace of the Café Glacier, remember Place Macé …

  It was one of his rare moments of weakness! Total weakness! The air was warm. A little girl was selling mimosas at the corner of the street in her bare feet, her legs tanned.

  A fat grey torpedo with nickel accessories slid past silently, carrying three women in summer pyjamas and a young man with a thin, matinee-idol moustache on their way to the beach.

  It smelled of holidays. The previous evening Cannes harbour, with the setting sun, had also had that smell of holidays, especially the Ardena, whose owner swaggered in front of two girls with gorgeous figures.

  M
aigret was dressed in black, as was his wont in Paris. He had his bowler hat with him, which didn’t belong here.

  A notice in blue letters right in front of him announced:

  Casino of Juan-les-Pins

  Golden Rain Grand Gala

  And the ice cube melted slowly in the opal-coloured glass.

  Holidays! Watching the silken seabed, leaning over the side of a boat painted green or orange … Having a nap under a stone pine, listening to the buzzing of large flies …

  Above all, not worrying about some man whom he didn’t know who happened to get stabbed in the back!

  Or about those women whom Maigret didn’t even know before yesterday evening and whose faces haunted him, as if he had been the one who slept with them!

  A terrible job! The air smelled of melting bitumen, Boutigues had pinned a fresh red carnation to the lapel of his light-grey jacket.

  William Brown? … He was buried … What else did he want? … Was it anything to do with Maigret? … Was it he who once owned one of the biggest yachts in Europe? … Was it he who had shacked up with the two Martini women, the mother with the plastered face and the daughter with the callipygian figure? … Was it he who had immersed himself blissfully in the crapulous laziness of the Liberty Bar? … There were small warm puffs of wind that stroked your cheeks … The people walking past were on holiday … Everyone was on holiday here! … Life was one long holiday!

  Even Boutigues, who was unable to be silent and who muttered:

  ‘Deep down, I’m happy that they didn’t want me to take responsibility for …’

  Now Maigret stopped peering at the world through his lashes. He turned to his companion, his face somewhat flushed by the heat and by somnolence. His pupils seemed a little confused, but after a few seconds took on their usual sharpness.

  ‘That’s right!’ he said as he stood up. ‘Waiter! How much is that?’

  ‘Allow me.’

  ‘No, I insist.’

  He tossed a few notes on to the table.

  Yes, it was an hour he would remember well, because he was tempted simply not to bother, to let everything go, like everyone else, to take things as they came.

  And the weather was glorious!

  ‘Are you off? … Have you got something in mind?’

  No! His head was too full of sun, of languor. He didn’t have the slightest thing in mind. And, as he didn’t want to lie, he murmured:

  ‘William Brown was murdered!’

  And he thought to himself:

  ‘And none of them could give a damn!’

  None of these people basking in the sun like lizards, who would be spending the evening at the Golden Rain Gala.

  ‘I’m off to work!’ he said.

  He shook Boutigues’ hand. He walked off. He stopped as a 300,000-franc car drove past with a slip of an eighteen-year-old girl at the wheel; she looked straight ahead and frowned.

  ‘Brown was murdered …’ he continued to repeat.

  He was learning not to underestimate the South. He turned his back on the Café Glacier. And, in order not to lapse into temptation again, he started to dictate to himself, as if to a subordinate:

  ‘Find out what Brown was doing on Friday afternoon between two and five.’

  So he would have to go to Cannes! On the bus!

  And he stood waiting, his hands in his pockets, pipe between his teeth, a grumpy look on his face, beneath a streetlamp.

  6. The Shameful Companion

  For the next few hours, Maigret devoted himself to some dreary legwork of the sort he normally delegated to junior officers. But he felt the need to move, to give himself the illusion of decisive action.

  In Vice they knew about Sylvie – she was on their books.

  ‘I’ve never had any problems with her,’ said the sergeant who was in charge of her neighbourhood. ‘She’s a quiet one. Has a check-up pretty regularly …’

  ‘And the Liberty Bar?’

  ‘You’ve heard about it? A strange joint. It’s intrigued us for a while, and indeed intrigues a lot of other people. Almost every month we get an anonymous tip-off about it. At first we suspected Big Jaja of selling narcotics. We put her under surveillance, and I can vouch for the fact it isn’t true … Others made out that the back room was used as a meeting place for people with certain proclivities …’

  ‘I know that’s not true!’ said Maigret.

  ‘Yes … The truth is even odder … Jaja attracts these old types who don’t want anything out of life except to get drunk in her company. Besides, she has a small pension, as her husband died in an accident …’

  ‘I know!’

  In another department, Maigret got some information on Joseph.

  ‘We’re keeping an eye on him, because he’s a regular at the racetrack, but we’ve never made anything stick.’

  Maigret was drawing a blank right across the board. He started to walk around town with his hands in his pockets and that stubborn look that usually expressed that he was in a bad mood.

  He began by visiting the luxury hotels, where he checked the registers. In between, he had lunch at a restaurant next to the station, and by three in the afternoon he knew that Harry Brown had not slept in Cannes on either the Tuesday or the Wednesday night.

  It was pathetic. Doing something for the sake of doing something!

  ‘Brown Junior might have come from Marseille by car and might have left the same day …’

  Maigret went back to Vice, where he picked up the photo of Sylvie they had on file. He already had the picture of William Brown in his pocket, which he had taken from the villa.

  And he entered a new milieu: the small hotels, especially those around the harbour, which rented out rooms not just by the night but also by the hour.

  The landlords realized straight away that he was from the police. They were the sort of people who feared that more than anything.

  ‘Wait here. I’ll ask the chambermaid …’

  And the inspector discovered a whole decadent underworld in those dark corridors.

  ‘The big fellow? … No, I don’t recall seeing him here …’

  Maigret showed William Brown’s photo first, followed by that of Sylvie.

  Almost everyone knew her.

  ‘She came here … But it was a long time ago …’

  ‘At night?’

  ‘Oh no! When she came with someone it was always a “short stay” …’

  Hôtel Bellevue … Hôtel du Port … Hôtel Bristol … Hôtel d’Auvergne …

  Then there were others, mostly in the sidestreets, mostly very discreet, showing no sign of their existence to passers-by other than marbled nameplates alongside open corridors saying: ‘Running water. Reasonable prices’.

  Sometimes Maigret went more upmarket, found a carpet on the stairs … Other times he came across a furtive couple in the corridor who turned their heads away …

  And on the way out he would see the harbour, where a number of international-class six-metre racing yachts were drawn up on the beach.

  Some sailors were painting them carefully, watched by groups of curious onlookers.

  ‘No dramas,’ they had said in Paris.

  Well, if it went on like this, they would be satisfied. There would be no drama at all for the simple reason that Maigret would find nothing!

  He smoked pipe after pipe, filling one before the other was even extinguished, for he always carried two or three in his pockets.

  And he took a real dislike to the place, because a woman was bothering him to buy some shellfish and a small boy ran up to him, barefoot, and jumped in front of his feet, then burst out laughing as he looked at him.

  ‘Do you know this man?’

  He was showing William Brown’s photo for the twentieth time.

  ‘He never came here.’

  ‘Or this woman?’

  ‘Sylvie? … She’s upstairs …’

  ‘Alone?’

  The landlord shrugged his shoulders, called upstairs:
r />   ‘Albert! … Come downstairs a moment …’

  A scruffy valet, who looked right through the inspector.

  ‘Is Sylvie still up there?’

  ‘Number 7 …’

  ‘Have they ordered any drinks?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘In that case, they won’t be long!’ said the landlord. ‘If you want to talk to her, you just need to wait …’

  The place was called the Hôtel Beauséjour, and it was on a street running parallel to the harbour, directly opposite a bakery.

  Did Maigret want to see Sylvie again? Did he have one or two questions to ask her?

  He didn’t even know himself. He was tired. There was something threatening about his demeanour, as if he had almost had enough.

  He wasn’t going to wait outside the hotel, for the baker’s wife opposite was watching him through her window with a knowing look.

  Did Sylvie have so many lovers that occasionally one of them would be waiting his turn downstairs? That was it! Maigret was furious that he should be taken for one of the girl’s clients.

  He walked to the corner of the street with the idea of touring the block to kill time. As he arrived on the quayside, he turned round to look at a taxi parked along the pavement whose driver was pacing up and down.

  He couldn’t put his finger on what had caught his attention. He did a double take. It wasn’t so much the taxi as the man who reminded him of something, and suddenly his image connected to the memory of that morning’s funeral.

  ‘You’re from Antibes, aren’t you?’

  ‘Juan-les-Pins!’

  ‘You followed a funeral procession to the cemetery this morning …’

  ‘That’s right! Why the interest?’

  ‘Is it the same customer you’ve brought here?’ The taxi-driver looked at him from head to toe, unsure whether or not he should reply.

  ‘Why are you asking me this?’

  ‘Police … Well, then?’

  ‘Yes, same one … He booked me yesterday midday, on a day rate.’

  ‘Where is he right now?’

  ‘I don’t know … He went off that way …’

  The man pointed to a street, then suddenly asked anxiously: