Maigret at Picratt's Page 7

  He did his job with palpable satisfaction, as if he was fulfilling his life’s dream. He kept an eye on everything. His wife had already taken up position on a chair at the back of the room, behind the musicians, and that seemed to please both of them. They had probably dreamed of starting their own business for a long time, and it still felt like a sort of game to them.

  ‘Right, I’ll put you at table six, where Arlette and her lover were sitting. If you want to talk to Tania, wait until they play a java. Jean-Jean gets on the accordion for those, and she can have a break from the piano. We used to have a pianist before. Then, when we’d taken her on and I knew she played, I thought it would save us money using her in the band. Here’s Betty coming down. Shall I introduce her to you?’

  Maigret had sat down in the booth like a customer, and Fred brought over a young girl with reddish hair who was wearing a sequined dress that glinted blue in the light.

  ‘Detective Chief Inspector Maigret, who’s looking into Arlette’s death. You needn’t be afraid. He’s above board.’

  He might have found her pretty if he hadn’t sensed her body was hard and muscled like a man’s. It was disconcerting: she might almost have been mistaken for a teenager in drag. Even her voice was deep, slightly hoarse.

  ‘Do you want me to sit down at your table?’

  ‘Please. Will you have something?’

  ‘I’d rather not for now. Désiré will put a glass in front of me. That’ll do.’

  She seemed weary, anxious. It was hard to think she was there to excite men, and she can’t have been too optimistic herself.

  ‘Are you Belgian?’ he asked because of her accent.

  ‘I’m from Anderlecht, near Brussels. Before coming here, I was in an acrobatic troupe. I started very young; my father was in a circus.’

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Twenty-eight. I got too rusty for that line of work, so I started dancing.’

  ‘Married?’

  ‘I was, to a juggler who ditched me.’

  ‘Did Arlette leave with you last night?’

  ‘Same as every night. Tania lives over by Gare Saint-Lazare and takes Rue Pigalle. She’s always ready before us. I live just round the corner, and Arlette and me always used to say goodnight on the corner of Rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette.’

  ‘Did she go straight to her place?’

  ‘No. She did that sometimes. She’d pretend to turn right, then, as soon as I was out of sight, I’d hear her going back up the street to have a drink at the tabac on Rue de Douai.’

  ‘Why did she keep it secret?’

  ‘People who drink generally don’t like you seeing them chasing off after a last drink.’

  ‘Had she drunk a lot?’

  ‘She drank two brandies before leaving, with me, and she’d already had loads of champagne. I’m sure she’d started before she even came to work as well.’

  ‘Was she sad about anything?’

  ‘If she was, she didn’t tell me. I think she was just sick and tired.’

  Betty might have been a bit sick and tired herself because she said this gloomily, her voice an indifferent mono-tone.

  ‘What do you know about her?’

  Two customers had just come in, a man and a woman, whom Désiré was trying to manoeuvre to a table. Seeing the empty room, they hesitated, looked questioningly at each other. Then the man said, embarrassed:

  ‘We’ll come back.’

  ‘Some people who got the wrong floor,’ Betty remarked calmly. ‘Not for us.’

  She made an attempt at a smile.

  ‘It’ll be a good hour before it gets going. Sometimes we start our acts with only three customers watching.’

  ‘Why had Arlette chosen this line of work?’

  She looked at him for a long time, then muttered:

  ‘I often asked her that. I’ve no idea. Maybe because she liked it?’

  She glanced at the photographs on the walls.

  ‘You know what it was like, her act? I doubt they’ll ever find anybody who can bring it off the way she did. It looks easy. We’ve all tried it. But I can tell you it’s unbelievably hard. Because if it’s just done any old how, it looks sleazy straight away. You’ve really got to look as if you’re doing it because you get a kick out of it.’

  ‘Did Arlette give that impression?’

  ‘I sometimes wondered if that wasn’t why she did it in the first place! I’m not saying because she desired men. She may easily not have. But she needed to turn them on, keep them in suspense. When she finished and came back into the kitchen – that’s our wings, because we go through there to go upstairs and change – when she’d finish, as I was saying, she’d open the door and peek through to see how she’d gone down, like an actor who looks through a peephole in the curtain.’

  ‘Was she in love with anyone?’

  She was silent for a while.

  ‘Maybe,’ she said finally. ‘Yesterday morning I would have said she wasn’t. But last night, when her young man left, she seemed on edge. She said that she was an idiot, really. I asked her why. She said it was completely up to her whether things changed or not. “What?” I asked.

  ‘“Everything! I’m sick of it.”

  ‘“Do you want to leave the club?”

  ‘We were whispering in case Fred heard. She answered:

  ‘“The club’s not the only thing in the world!”

  ‘She’d been drinking, I know, but I’m sure there was something to what she was saying.

  ‘“Has he said he wants to support you?”

  ‘She shrugged her shoulders and changed the subject.

  ‘“You wouldn’t even understand.”

  ‘We almost had an argument, and I told her to her face that I wasn’t as stupid as she thought, that I’d gone through the same thing myself.’

  This time the Grasshopper was triumphantly showing in some genuine customers. It was three men and a woman. The men were obviously foreigners, who, judging by their self-important air, were probably in Paris on business or for a conference. As for the woman, heaven knows where they had picked her up, sitting outside a café probably. She looked a little embarrassed.

  With a wink at Maigret, Fred sat them at number four and gave them an enormous menu on which was listed every conceivable type of champagne. The cellar can’t have contained a quarter of them, and Fred recommended a completely unknown brand which he must have marked up 300 per cent.

  ‘I’m going to have to get ready for my act,’ sighed Betty. ‘Don’t expect anything out of this world, but it’s still good enough for them. All they ask for is a little bit of thigh!’

  The band played a java, and Maigret signalled to Tania, who had stepped off the stage, to come and join him. Fred gave her a look indicating that she should go.

  ‘Do you want to talk to me?’

  She didn’t have a Russian accent, despite her name, and Maigret learned that she had been born in Rue Mouffetard.

  ‘Sit down and tell me what you know about Arlette.’

  ‘We weren’t friends.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I didn’t like her attitude.’

  The statement rang out like a slap. She clearly thought she was somebody, and Maigret didn’t remotely impress her.

  ‘Did you argue?’

  ‘It didn’t go that far.’

  ‘Did you talk sometimes?’

  ‘As little as possible. She was jealous.’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘Of me. She couldn’t get it into her head that another woman could be attractive. No one else existed except her. I don’t like that. She couldn’t even dance, had never had lessons. All she could do was take her clothes off, and if she hadn’t shown them everything, she wouldn’t have had an act.’

  ‘Are you a dancer?’

  ‘I was studying classical ballet by the time I was twelve.’

  ‘Is that what you dance here?’

  ‘No. Here I do Russian dances.’

  ‘Did Ar
lette have a lover?’

  ‘Yes, probably, but she must have had good reason not to be proud of the fact. That’s why she never talked about him. All I can tell you is that it was an old man.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘We all get changed together up there. I saw bruises on her body a few times. She tried to hide them under a layer of cold cream, but I’ve got good eyes.’

  ‘Did you talk to her about it?’

  ‘Once. She told me she had fallen down the stairs. But she can’t have fallen down the stairs every week. I figured it out from where the bruises were. Only old men have those vices.’

  ‘When did you first notice it?’

  ‘Six months ago, at least, almost straight after I started.’

  ‘And it carried on?’

  ‘I didn’t look at her every evening but I often saw bruises. Is there anything else you want to say to me? I’ve got to get back to the piano.’

  She had barely sat down before the lights went out and a spotlight lit up the dance-floor as Betty Bruce came bounding out. Maigret heard voices behind him: men’s voices trying to express themselves in French and a woman’s voice who was teaching them how to pronounce ‘Voulez-vous coucher avec moi?’

  They were laughing, practising in turn:

  ‘Vo-lez vo …’

  Without saying a word, Fred, whose shirtfront stood out in the dark, came and sat down facing Maigret. More or less in time with the music, Betty Bruce lifted one leg at a perfect right angle while jiggling around on the other, her stockings stretched tight, her mouth frozen in a smile, then sank to the ground in the splits.

  5.

  When his wife woke him with his cup of coffee, Maigret immediately knew that he hadn’t slept enough and that he had a headache, then he opened his eyes and wondered why Madame Maigret was so cheery, like someone with a wonderful surprise up her sleeve.

  ‘Look!’ she said, when he had grasped the cup in a not yet very steady hand.

  She pulled the curtain cord, and he saw that it was snowing.

  ‘Aren’t you pleased?’

  Naturally he was pleased, but his furred tongue suggested he had drunk more than he had realized. This was probably because Désiré, the waiter, had opened the bottle of champagne, which was theoretically only there for show, and he had unthinkingly helped himself to it between brandies.

  ‘I don’t know if it will settle, but it’s still more cheerful than rain!’

  Actually, it didn’t really matter to Maigret whether it was cheerful or not. He liked all kinds of weather. He liked extreme weather the most, the sort that would earn a mention in the paper the following day, torrential rain, tornadoes, bitter cold or torrid heat. He enjoyed the snow too because it reminded him of his childhood, but he wondered how his wife could find it cheerful in Paris, especially on a morning like this. The sky was even more leaden than the day before, and the white snowflakes made the glistening black roofs even blacker, bringing out the sad, dirty colour of the houses, the questionable cleanliness of the curtains in the windows.

  It took him a while, as he had his breakfast and got dressed, to get his memories of the previous night in some sort of order. He had only had a few hours’ sleep. When he had left Picratt’s at closing time, it was at least half past four in the morning, and he had thought it necessary to imitate Arlette and go and have one last drink at the tabac on Rue de Douai.

  He would have found it hard to sum up what he’d learned in a few words. A lot of the time he had been alone in his booth, taking small puffs on his pipe, watching the dance-floor or the clientele, all bathed in that strange light that took you away from real life.

  All in all, he could have left earlier. He stayed on out of laziness, and also because there was something about the atmosphere that kept him there, because he enjoyed studying the people, the little tricks of the owner, Rose and the girls.

  It was a little universe living, as it were, in complete ignorance of the wider world. Everyone – Désiré, the two musicians, all the others – went to bed when alarm clocks were going off in regular homes and spent most of their days asleep. And that’s how Arlette had lived, only really starting to wake up under the reddish glow of Picratt’s lights and coming into contact with virtually no one other than drunk men who had been picked up by the Grasshopper as they were leaving other clubs.

  Maigret watched Betty’s performance. Aware of his attention, she seemed to make a point of pulling out all the stops for him, and occasionally tipped him a complicit wink.

  Two customers had arrived at about three o’clock after she had finished and gone upstairs to get dressed. They were roaring drunk and, as the club was a bit dead just then, Fred headed for the kitchen. Presumably he went up to tell Betty to come back down quick smart.

  She had started her act again, but this time she performed it just for the two men, lifting her leg right in front of their noses and rounding it off with a kiss on the bald patch of one of them. Before she went and changed, she sat on the other’s lap and drank a mouthful of champagne from his glass.

  Was that Arlette’s approach too? A subtler version, probably?

  The men spoke a little French, very little. She repeated, ‘Cinq minutes … Cinq minutes … Moi revenir …’

  She held up five fingers and did in fact then come back a few minutes later, in her sequined dress, and peremptorily called to Désiré to bring another bottle.

  Meanwhile Tania was busy with a solitary customer who had turned maudlin after a few drinks and, with a hand on her bare knee, was no doubt pouring out confidences about his marriage.

  The two Dutchmen’s hands were never still, always somewhere else on Betty’s body. They laughed loudly, becoming ever redder in the face, as bottle after bottle appeared on their table, was drunk and then stashed underneath it. Eventually Maigret realized that some of these empty bottles had never been full in the first place. That was the scam, as Fred admitted with a look.

  At one point, Maigret went to the toilet. There was an outer room with combs, brushes, face-powder and make-up in a row on a shelf. Rose followed him in there.

  ‘I’ve thought of something that might be of use to you,’ she said. ‘Just now when I saw you come in here, in fact. This is generally where the girls confide in me, while they’re smartening themselves up. Arlette wasn’t a talker, but she still told me some things, and I guessed others.’

  She handed him the soap and a clean towel.

  ‘She couldn’t have been from the same background as the rest of us. She didn’t talk to me about her family, I don’t think she did to anyone, but she mentioned the convent where she was educated several times.’

  ‘Do you remember what she said?’

  ‘If ever a hard, mean woman came up in conversation, especially one of those ones who seem kind and then stick the knife in on the sly, she’d mutter – and you could tell she was really upset – “She sounds like Mother Eudice.” I asked her who that was, and she said she was the person she hated most in the whole world, the one who had hurt her more than anyone else. She was the Mother Superior of the convent, and she’d suddenly taken against Arlette. I remember her also saying: “I would have gone bad just to annoy her.”’

  ‘She didn’t say which convent it was?’

  ‘No, but it can’t have been far from the sea, because she talked about the sea a few times like someone who had grown up by it.’

  It was funny. As she was talking, Rose treated Maigret as a customer, automatically brushing his back and shoulders.

  ‘I think she loathed her mother too. That’s vaguer. It’s one of those things a woman senses. One evening, we had some very well-to-do people in who were painting the town red, especially a minister’s wife who really looked like a very grand lady. She seemed sad, preoccupied, took no interest in the show, sipped at her drink and barely listened to what her friends were saying. I knew her story, so I said to Arlette, again in here, while she was fixing her make-up, “You’ve got to give her
her due, because she’s had one terrible thing happen to her after another.”

  ‘Then she replied spitefully, “I don’t trust people who’ve had troubles, especially women. They use it as an excuse to trample all over everyone else.”

  ‘It’s only a hunch, but I’d swear she meant her mother. She never talked about her father. When you said that word, she’d look the other way.

  ‘That’s all I know. I always thought she was a girl from a good family who had rebelled. They’re the worst, when they get the bit between their teeth, and it explains a lot of things.’

  ‘You mean her urge to arouse men?’

  ‘Yes. And the way she went about it. I wasn’t born yesterday. I was in this game in the past, and worse, as you probably know. But not like her. That’s exactly why she’s irreplaceable. The real ones, the professionals, never put as much passion into it. Have a look at the other girls. Even when they let rip, you can feel their heart isn’t really in it …’

  Now and then Fred would come and sit down at Maigret’s table for a moment and exchange a few words with him. Each time, Désiré would bring two brandies and water, but Maigret noticed that the owner’s was always a lighter colour. He drank and thought about Arlette, and Lapointe, who had been sitting in that booth with her the night before.

  Inspector Lognon was dealing with the countess, who didn’t interest Maigret much at all. He had known too many of her kind, women past their prime, almost always single, almost always trailing a glittering past, who were mixed up with drugs and sinking into abject ruin. There were maybe 200 like her in Montmartre, and on the next rung up, a few dozen in the swish apartments of Passy and Auteuil.

  Arlette was the one who interested him, because he still hadn’t managed to place her or really understand her.

  ‘Was she passionate?’ he asked Fred once.

  The latter shrugged.

  ‘You know, I don’t bother my head too much about them. My wife told you that yesterday, and it’s true. I meet up with them in the kitchen, or I go upstairs when they’re changing. I don’t ask them what they think about it, and it never means anything.’