Maigret in New York Page 6

  Well, another young man, a few days ago, had feared for his father’s life.

  And this young man, with whom Maigret had been talking a few minutes earlier on the deck of their ship, had vanished.

  The inspector was searching for the tailor shop. He looked at the windows of these houses, often disfigured by the contemptible iron fire escapes that stopped short above the ground floor.

  A clarinet and a violin …

  Why did he press his nose, the way he’d done as a boy, to the window of one of those stores that sell everything: vegetables, canned goods, sweets? Right next door there was another shop, unlit but without shutters, and through its window, thanks to the gleam from a nearby street lamp, one could see a pressing machine and some suits on hangers.

  Arturo Giacomi.

  Still following him, the two taxis had halted a few metres away, and neither the drivers nor that thick lump Bill suspected the contact this man in the heavy overcoat, pipe clenched between his teeth, was making as he turned towards the house across the street: contact with two twenty-year-old Frenchmen who had come off a ship a long time ago, one with his violin under his arm, the other with his clarinet.

  4.

  It was touch and go that morning whether a man lived or died, whether a repellent crime would be committed or no, and this slim margin depended on only a few minutes more or less in how Maigret spent his time.

  Unfortunately, he was unaware of this. Throughout his thirty years with the Police Judiciaire it had been his habit, when an investigation did not keep him out at night, of rising at around seven in the morning, and he loved the rather long walk from his home at Boulevard Richard-Lenoir to Quai des Orfèvres.

  At heart, despite his active life, he had always been a flâneur. And once retired, in his house in Meung-sur-Loire, he’d been getting up even earlier; in the summer, the sunrise often found him standing out in his garden.

  On board the ship as well, he was almost always the first passenger out pacing the deck, while the crew busily swabbed it down and polished the brass railings.

  His first morning in New York, however, because he had drunk too much with Agent O’Brien, he got up at eleven.

  The second day, in his room at the Berwick, he woke early, as usual. But precisely because it was too early, because he could tell the streets were empty even though the curtains were still closed, he decided to go back to sleep. And he did, deeply. When he opened his eyes again, it was past ten. Why did he behave like those people who have worked all week and whose great joy on Sunday is to laze around? He dawdled. He took for ever to eat his breakfast. He went to the window in his dressing gown to smoke a first pipe and was astonished not to see Bill in the street.

  True, the boxer-detective had needed sleep as well. Had he arranged for a replacement? Were there two men relaying each other on Maigret’s trail?

  He shaved carefully and spent still a little more time organizing his things.

  Well, it was on all those particular minutes, wasted so trivially, that a man’s life depended.

  At the moment when Maigret was going down to the street, there was – strictly speaking – still time. Bill was definitely not there, and the inspector noticed no one who seemed assigned to follow him. An empty cab drove by. He raised his arm automatically. The driver did not see him, and, instead of looking for another cab, Maigret decided to walk for a while.

  That is how he discovered Fifth Avenue and its luxury stores. He stopped at their windows, lingered a long time in contemplation of some pipes, then decided to buy one, even though Madame Maigret ordinarily gave him one for special occasions and his birthday.

  One more silly, preposterous detail: the pipe was quite expensive. Leaving the store, remembering the taxi fare from the previous evening, Maigret resolved to economize the same amount that morning.

  That is why he took the subway, in which he lost considerable time before finding the right corner at Findlay Avenue.

  The sky was a hard, luminous grey. The wind was still blowing, but no longer as fiercely. Maigret turned at the corner of 169th Street and immediately sensed disaster.

  About two hundred metres down the street a crowd was gathered outside a door and, although he did not know the area well and had seen it only at night, he was almost certain the place was the Italian tailor’s shop.

  Moreover, everything or almost everything on the street and in the neighbourhood was Italian. The children seen playing on the doorsteps had black hair and those sharp-eyed faces, those long tanned legs of street urchins from Naples or Florence.

  The names over most of the shops were Italian, and their windows were full of mortadella sausages, pasta and salt-preserved meats from the shores of the Mediterranean.

  The inspector quickened his pace. Twenty or thirty people were clustered on the tailor’s threshold, which a policeman was defending against invasion, and a pack of more or less scruffy brats swarmed around them all.

  The whole thing smacked of an accident, a sordid tragedy that explodes abruptly in the street and etches the faces of passers-by with dismay.

  ‘What happened?’ he asked a fat man in a bowler hat standing on tiptoe at the back of the crowd.

  Although he had used English, the man simply examined him curiously before turning away with a shrug.

  Maigret heard snatches of talk, some in English, some in Italian.

  ‘… just as he was crossing the street …’

  ‘… for years and years, every morning at the same time, he’d take his walk … Fifteen years now I’m in the neighbourhood and I always saw him …’

  ‘… his chair’s still there …’

  Through the shop window they could see the steam clothes-press with a suit still laid out on it and, closer, next to the plate glass, a straw-bottomed chair with a rather low seat, the one belonging to old Angelino.

  Maigret was beginning to understand. Patiently, with that grace big men have, he worked his way slowly in to the heart of the crowd and pieced together the scattered information he overheard.

  It had been at least fifty years since Angelino Giacomi had come from Naples and set himself up in this shop, well before the invention of the steam press. He was practically the patriarch of the street, of the whole neighbourhood, and during municipal elections not a single candidate failed to pay him his respects.

  His son Arturo ran the shop now, and this son was almost sixty, himself the father of seven or eight children, most of them married.

  In the winter, old Angelino spent his days sitting on that straw-bottomed chair in the front window of the shop, as if part of the display, smoking from morning to night those poorly made Italian cigars of black tobacco that smell so harsh.

  And in the spring, just as one sees the swallows return, everyone up and down the street watched as old Angelino set his chair out on the pavement, next to the door.

  Now he was dead, or dying, Maigret did not yet know exactly.

  Different versions of his fate swirled around the inspector, but soon an ambulance siren was heard, and a vehicle with a red cross pulled over to the kerb.

  The crowd rippled, then parted slowly for two men in white coats, who walked into the shop and out again a few moments later, removing a stretcher on which nothing could be seen but a body beneath a sheet.

  The vehicle’s rear door closed. A casually dressed man, doubtless Angelino’s son, having simply put a jacket on over his work clothes, climbed in next to the driver, and the ambulance pulled away.

  ‘Is he dead?’ people asked the policeman, still at the door.

  He di
dn’t know. He didn’t care. It wasn’t his job to bother with such details.

  A woman was crying inside the shop, with her dishevelled grey hair falling over her face, and sometimes she let out such moans that you could hear her in the street.

  One person, two, three decided it was time to leave. Housewives hunted for their youngsters so as to finish their shopping in the neighbourhood.

  The crowd was slowly shrinking, but it was still blocking the shop door.

  Now it was a barber, comb tucked behind his ear, who was holding forth in a strong Genoese accent.

  ‘I saw everything like I see you, because it’s that slow time, and I happened to be right in my doorway.’

  And a few houses along, in fact, there was a traditional barber-shop pole striped with red and blue.

  ‘Almost every morning he’d stop a bit outside my place to chat. It’s me who shaved him, Wednesdays and Saturdays. I always shaved him. Not my assistant, me personally. And I’ve always known him to be just as he still was this morning. Though he must have been eighty-two … No, wait … Eighty-three. When Maria, his last granddaughter, got married four years ago, I remember he told me …’

  And the barber began calculations to determine the exact age of old Angelino, who had just been brutally taken far away from the street where he had lived for so long.

  ‘There’s one thing he would never have let himself admit for the whole wide world: it’s that he couldn’t see much at all, if anything. He still wore his glasses, thick lenses in old silver frames … He passed the time polishing them with his big red handkerchief and putting them back on. But the truth is they didn’t help him much … That’s the reason why – and not that he had bad legs, because he still had the legs of a twenty-year-old – he’d taken to walking with a cane …

  ‘Every morning at ten thirty on the dot …’

  Now, logically, Maigret should have been at his shop around that time. He had promised himself this the night before. Old Angelino was the one he wanted to see and question. What would have happened if Maigret had arrived there on time, if he had not gone back to sleep, if he hadn’t dawdled at his room window, if the taxi he hailed had stopped, if he hadn’t bought the pipe on Fifth Avenue?

  ‘His folks always tied a thick, knitted woollen scarf around his neck, a red one. A little while ago I saw a boy, the vegetable woman’s son, bringing it back to the shop. He never wore an overcoat, not in the worst winter weather. He toddled along with small even steps, sticking close to the houses, and me, I knew his cane helped him find his way …’

  There were no more than five or six left around the barber, and as Maigret seemed the most seriously interested listener, the man had begun to speak directly to him.

  ‘In front of every shop, or just about, he’d greet people with a wave, because he knew everybody. At the street corner, he’d pause for a moment at the edge of the pavement before crossing, because his walk always covered three blocks …

  ‘This morning, he did what he always did. I saw him. I can definitely say I saw him take the first steps into the street … Why did I turn around just then? I don’t know. Maybe my assistant, back in the shop, called to me through the open door? I’ll have to ask him, because I can’t figure it out …

  ‘I clearly heard the car coming. It happened less than a hundred metres from my place. Then a strange, funny noise, a soft noise … It’s hard to describe – but in any case, a noise that tells you right away there’s been an accident.

  ‘I turned back and I saw the car speeding on its way; it was already passing by me … At the same time, I was looking at the body lying there.

  ‘If I hadn’t been doing those two things at the same time, I’d have taken a better look at the two men in the front seat of the car … A big grey car. More like a dark grey. I’d almost be tempted to say black, but I think it was grey … Or else it was coated with dust.

  ‘People had already rushed over. I came here first to tell Arturo. He was pressing a pair of trousers. They carried old Angelino in with a dribble of blood coming out of his mouth and one arm hanging down, a shoulder of his jacket torn … There wasn’t anything else to see at first glance, but I knew right away that he was dead.’

  They were in the office of Special Agent O’Brien, who, because of his long legs, had tipped his chair back while he took tiny puffs on his pipe, caressing the stem with his lips and watching, with heavy-lidded eyes, as Maigret talked.

  ‘I suppose,’ he was saying in conclusion, ‘that you won’t claim any more that personal freedom prevents you from taking some action against those bastards?’

  After more than thirty years of police work, during which he had seen all there was to see of human cruelty, cowardice and depravity, Maigret could still be as infuriated by some things as on his first day in the force.

  The concurrence of old Giacomi’s death with Maigret’s intended visit that morning to the elderly tailor, the fact that this visit, made in time, would probably have saved the man’s life, and even that purchase of a pipe he now avoided smoking had all put him in an even darker mood.

  ‘Unfortunately, this matter concerns not the FBI, but the New York police, at least for the time being.’

  ‘They killed him in a lowdown, dirty way,’ growled the former inspector.

  At which O’Brien murmured pensively, ‘It’s not so much the way they killed him that strikes me, but the fact that they killed him just in time …’

  Maigret had already thought about that, and it was hard to see it as a coincidence.

  For years and years, no one had paid any attention to old Angelino, who had been able to spend his days on a chair, seen by everyone passing by, and take his usual little morning walk like a good old dog.

  Only the previous night, Maigret had stopped for a few moments in front of the tailor’s shop. He had resolved, without mentioning this to anyone, to return in the morning to speak to the old fellow.

  Yet when he arrived, someone had taken care to make absolutely sure the man would never speak again.

  ‘They had to work fast,’ he grumbled, looking at O’Brien with a bitterness he could not hide.

  ‘It doesn’t take long to organize that kind of accident when one already knows all the vital details. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that there are agencies that handle that sort of job, but it’s almost as if there were. In short, it’s enough to know whom to contact, to gain their trust, agree on a price … and pay it, you understand? They’re what are called killers for hire. Only, the killers couldn’t have known that old Angelino would cross 169th Street every morning at the same time, at the same place …’

  ‘Someone must have told them; in theory, the one who ordered the hit …’

  ‘And that person must have known these details for a long time.’

  They looked solemnly at each other, for they were both drawing the same conclusions from what had happened.

  Someone, for an undetermined length of time, had known that Angelino had something to say, something that threatened his quiet existence.

  Maigret could not help thinking of the wiry but almost slight figure of Little John, with his pale, cold eyes devoid of the least flicker of humanity.

  Was he not precisely the man capable of hiring killers, without batting an eye, to carry out the assignment they had completed this morning?

  And Little John had lived at 169th Street, right across from the tailor’s shop!

  What’s more, if you were to believe his letters to his son – and they had the troubling ring of truth – it was Little John who felt threatened,
who no doubt feared for his life!

  And it was his son who had disappeared before setting foot on American soil!

  ‘They kill,’ said Maigret after a long silence, as if that were the sum of his thoughts.

  And that is just about what it was. Moments before, he had mentioned Jean Maura and, now that he knew he was dealing with people capable of murder, he felt remorseful.

  Shouldn’t he have kept a closer guard on the young man who had asked for his help?

  Shouldn’t he have taken the boy’s fears much more seriously, no matter what Monsieur d’Hoquélus had said?

  ‘In short,’ announced the red-headed FBI agent, ‘we’re facing people who are defending themselves, or, more precisely, who attack in their own defence. And I wonder, my dear Maigret, what you’ll be able to do. The New York police will have no desire to see you get involved in their investigation … By what authority, anyway? The crime has been committed on American soil. Angelino has been an American citizen for a long time. As have the murderers, no doubt. Maura is a naturalized citizen … I checked: MacGill was born in New York. Anyway, you won’t find those two mixed up in this business. As for young Maura … No one has filed a complaint, and his father doesn’t seem eager to do so.’

  He stood up with a sigh.

  ‘That’s all I can tell you.’

  ‘Do you know that my bulldog wasn’t at his post this morning?’

  O’Brien knew he meant Bill.

  ‘You hadn’t mentioned that, but I would have bet on it … Between last night and this morning, someone had to have been informed of your visit to 169th Street, right?’

  ‘… So that from then on I could go back there without any danger to anyone.’

  ‘You know, if I were you, I’d be extra careful about crossing the street … And while I was at it, I’d avoid deserted places, particularly in the evening … Running people over isn’t always necessary … It’s easy enough to blast them with a machine gun as you drive by.’