The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien Read online

  In a stationery shop window, Maigret found some postcards showing the old church, which had been lower, squatter and completely black. One wing had been shored up with timbers. On three sides, dumpy, mean little houses backed up against its walls and gave the whole place a medieval look.

  Nothing was left of this Court of Miracles except a sprawl of old houses threaded with alleys and dead ends, all giving off a nauseating odour of poverty.

  A stream of soapy water was running down the middle of Rue du Pot-au-Noir, which wasn’t even two paces wide. Kids were playing on the doorsteps of houses teeming with life. And although the sun was shining brightly, its rays could not reach down into the alley. A cooper busy hooping barrels had a brazier burning right out in the street.

  The house numbers had worn away, so the inspector had to ask for directions to number 7, which turned out to be all the way down a blind alley echoing with the whine of saws and planes, a workshop with a few carpenter’s benches at which three men were labouring away. All the shop doors were open, and some glue was heating on a stove.

  Looking up, one of the men put down his dead cigarette butt and waited for the visitor to speak.

  ‘Is this the place where a man named Klein used to live?’

  The man glanced knowingly at his companions, pointed to the open door of a dark staircase and grumbled, ‘Upstairs! Someone’s already there.’

  ‘A new tenant?’

  The man gave an odd little smile, which Maigret would understand only later.

  ‘Go see for yourself … On the first floor, you can’t miss it: there’s only the one door …’

  One of the other workmen shook with silent laughter as he worked his long, heavy plane. Maigret started up the stairs, but after a few steps there was no more banister, and the stairwell was completely shrouded in darkness. He struck a match and saw up ahead a door with no lock or doorknob, and only a string to secure it to a rusty nail.

  With his hand in his revolver pocket, Maigret nudged the door open with his knee – and was promptly dazzled by light pouring in from a bay window missing a good third of its panes, a sight so surprising that, when he looked around, it took him a few moments to actually focus on anything.

  Finally he noticed, off in a corner, a man leaning against the wall and glowering at him with savage fury: it was Joseph Van Damme.

  ‘We were bound to wind up here, don’t you think?’ said the inspector, in a voice that resonated strangely in the raw, vacant air of the room.

  Saying nothing, staring at him venomously, Van Damme never moved.

  To understand the layout of the place, one would have had to know what kind of building – convent, barracks, private house – had once contained these walls, not one of which was smooth or square. And although half the room had wooden flooring, the rest was paved with uneven flagstones, as if it were an old chapel.

  The walls were whitewashed, except for a rectangular patch of brown bricks apparently blocking up what had once been a window. The view from the bay window was of a gable, a gutter, and beyond them, some crooked roofs off in the direction of the Meuse.

  But by far the most bizarre thing of all was that the place was furnished so incoherently that it might have been a lunatic asylum – or some elaborate practical joke.

  Strewn in disorder on the floor were new but unfinished chairs, a door lying flat with one panel repaired, pots of glue, broken saws and crates from which straggled straw or shavings.

  Yet off in one corner there was a kind of divan or, rather, a box spring, partly draped with a length of printed calico. And directly overhead hung a slightly battered lantern with coloured glass, the kind sometimes found in second-hand shops.

  Separate sections of an incomplete skeleton like the ones medical students use had been tossed on to the divan, but the ribs and the pelvis were still hooked together and sat slumped forward like an old rag doll.

  And then there were the walls! White walls, covered with drawings and even painted frescoes that presented perhaps the most arrestingly absurd aspect of the whole room: grinning, grimacing figures and inscriptions along the lines of Long live Satan, grandfather of the world!

  On the floor lay a bible with a broken back. Elsewhere were crumpled-up sketches and papers yellow with age, all thick with dust.

  Over the door, another inscription: Welcome, damned souls!

  And amid this chaos of junk sat the unfinished chairs, the glue pots, the rough pine planks, smelling like a carpenter’s shop. A stove lay on its side, red with rust.

  Finally, there was Joseph Van Damme, meticulously groomed in his well-tailored overcoat and impeccable shoes, Van Damme who in spite of everything was still the man-about-town with a modern office at a prestigious address, at home in the great brasseries of Bremen, a lover of fine food and aged Armagnac …

  … Van Damme who called and waved to the leading citizens of Liège from the wheel of his car, remarking that that man in the fur-lined coat was worth millions, that that one over there owned a fleet of thirty merchant ships, Van Damme who would later, serenaded by light music amid the clinking of glasses and saucers, shake the hands of all these magnates with whom he felt a growing fraternity …

  … Van Damme who suddenly looked like a hunted animal, still frozen with his back against the wall, with white plaster marks on his shoulder and one hand in his overcoat pocket, glaring steadily at Maigret.

  ‘How much?’

  Had he really spoken? Could the inspector, in that unreal atmosphere, have been imagining things?

  Startled, Maigret knocked over a chair with a caved-in seat, which landed with a loud clatter.

  Van Damme had flushed crimson, but not with the glow of health: his hypertensive face betrayed panic – or despair – as well as rage and the desire to live, to triumph at any cost, and he concentrated all his remaining will to resist in his defiant gaze.

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Maigret, going over to the pile of crumpled sketches swept into a corner by the bay window, where he began spreading them out for a look. They were studies of a nude figure, a girl with coarse features, unruly hair, a strong, healthy body with heavy breasts and broad hips.

  ‘There’s still time,’ Van Damme continued. ‘Fifty thousand? … A hundred?’

  When the inspector gave him a quizzical look, Van Damme, in a fever of ill-concealed anxiety, barked, ‘Two hundred thousand!’

  Fear shivered in the air within the crooked walls of that miserable room. A bitter, sick, morbid fear.

  And perhaps there was something else, too: a repressed desire, the intoxicating temptation of murder …

  Yet Maigret went on examining the old figure drawings, recognizing in various poses the same voluptuous girl, always staring sullenly into the distance. Once, the artist had tried draping her in the length of calico covering the divan. Another time, he had sketched her in black stockings. Behind her was a skull, which now sat at the foot of the box spring. And Maigret remembered having seen that macabre death’s-head in Jef Lombard’s self-portrait.

  A connection was arising, still only vaguely, among all these people, these events, across time and space. With a faint tremor of excitement, the inspector smoothed out a charcoal sketch depicting a young man with long hair, his shirt collar wide open across his chest and the beginnings of a beard on his chin. He had chosen a Romantic pose: a three-quarter view of the head, and he seemed to be facing the future the way an eagle stares into the sun.

  It was Jean Lecocq d’Arneville, the suicide of the sordid hotel in Bremen, the tramp who had never got to eat his last dinner.

  ‘Two hundred thousand francs!’

  And the voice added, even now betraying the businessman who thinks of every detail, of the fluctuations in the exchange rate, ‘French francs! … Listen, inspector …’

  Maigret sensed that pleading would give way to threats, that the fear quivering in his voice would soon become a growl of rage.

  ‘There’s still time, no official action has been
taken, and we’re in Belgium …’

  There was a candle end in the lantern; beneath the pile of papers on the floor, the inspector found an old kerosene stove.

  ‘You’re not here in an official capacity … and even if … I’m asking you for a month.’

  ‘Which means it happened in December …’

  Van Damme seemed to draw back even closer to the wall and stammered, ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It’s November now. In February, it will have been ten years since Klein hanged himself, and you’re asking me for only one month.’

  ‘I don’t understand …’

  ‘Oh yes you do!’

  And it was maddening, frightening, to see Maigret go on leafing through the old papers with his left hand – and the papers were crackling, rustling – while his right hand remained thrust into his overcoat pocket.

  ‘You understand perfectly, Van Damme! If the problem were Klein’s death, and if – for example – he’d been murdered, the statute of limitations would apply only in February, meaning ten years afterwards. Whereas you are asking me for only one month. So whatever happened … happened in December.’

  ‘You’ll never find out anything …’

  His voice quavered like a wobbly phonograph record.

  ‘Then why are you afraid?’

  The inspector lifted up the box spring, underneath which he saw only dust and a greenish, mouldy crust of something barely recognizable as bread.

  ‘Two hundred thousand francs! We could arrange it so that, later on …’

  ‘Do you want me to slap your face?’

  Maigret’s threat had been so blunt and unexpected that Van Damme panicked for a moment, raised his arm to protect himself and, in so doing, unintentionally pulled out the revolver he’d been clutching in his coat pocket. Realizing what he’d done, he was again overcome for a few seconds by that intoxicating temptation … but must have hesitated to shoot.

  ‘Drop it!’

  He let go. The revolver fell to the floor, near a pile of wood shavings.

  And, turning his back to the enemy, Maigret kept on rummaging through the bewildering collection of incongruous things. He picked up a yellowish sock, also marbled with mildew.

  ‘So tell me, Van Damme …’

  Sensing a change in the silence, Maigret turned round and saw the man pass a hand over his face, where his fingers left wet streaks on his cheeks.

  ‘You’re crying?’

  ‘Me?’

  He’d said this aggressively, sardonically, despairingly.

  ‘What branch of the army were you in?’

  Van Damme was baffled by the inspector’s question, but ready to snatch at any scrap of hope.

  ‘I was in the École des Sous-Lieutenants de Réserve, at Beverloo.’

  ‘Infantry?’

  ‘Cavalry.’

  ‘So you must have been between one metre sixty-five and one metre seventy. And you weren’t over seventy kilos. It was later that you put on some weight.’

  Maigret pushed away a chair he’d bumped into, then picked up another scrap of paper – it looked like part of a letter – with only a single line on it: Dear old thing …

  But he kept an eye on Van Damme, who was still trying to figure out what Maigret had meant and who – in sudden understanding, his face haggard – cried out in horror, ‘It wasn’t me! I swear I’ve never worn that suit!’

  Maigret’s foot sent Van Damme’s revolver spinning to the other side of the room.

  Why, at that precise moment, did he count up the children again? A little boy in Belloir’s house. Three kids in Rue Hors-Château, and the newest hadn’t even opened her eyes yet! Plus the son of the false Louis Jeunet …

  On the floor, the beautiful naked girl was arching her back, throwing out her chest on an unsigned sketch in red chalk.

  There were hesitant footsteps, out on the stairs; a hand fumbled at the door, feeling for the string that served as a latch.

  9. The Companions of the Apocalypse

  In what happened next, everything mattered: the words, the silences, the looks they gave one another, even the involuntary twitch of a muscle. Everything had great meaning, and there was a sense that behind the actors in these scenes loomed an invisible pall of fear.

  The door opened. Maurice Belloir appeared, and his first glance was for Van Damme, over in the corner with his back to the wall. The second glance took in the revolver lying on the floor.

  It was enough; he understood. Especially when he saw Maigret, with his pipe, still calmly going through the pile of old sketches.

  ‘Lombard’s coming!’ announced Belloir, without seeming to address anyone in particular. ‘I grabbed a taxi.’

  Hearing this was enough to tell Maigret that the bank deputy director had just given up. The evidence was slight: a gentle easing of tension in his face; a hint of shame in his tired voice.

  The three of them looked at one another. Joseph Van Damme spoke first.

  ‘What is he …?’

  ‘He’s gone crazy. I tried to calm him down, but he got away from me. He went off talking to himself, waving his arms around …’

  ‘He has a gun?’ asked Maigret.

  ‘He has a gun.’

  Maurice Belloir tried to listen carefully, with the strained look of a stunned man struggling in vain to recover control of himself.

  ‘Both of you were down in Rue Hors-Château? Waiting for the result of my conversation with …’

  He pointed to Van Damme, and Belloir nodded.

  ‘And all three of you agreed to offer me …?’

  He didn’t need to say everything; they understood right away. They all understood even the silences and felt as if they could hear one another think.

  Suddenly footsteps were racing up the stairs. Someone tripped, must have fallen, then moaned with rage. The next moment the door was kicked open and framed the figure of Jef Lombard, stock still for an instant as he gazed at the three men with terrifying intensity.

  He was shaking, gripped by fever, perhaps by some kind of insanity.

  What he saw must have been a mad vision of Belloir backing away from him, Van Damme’s congested face, and then Maigret, broad-shouldered and absolutely immobile, holding his breath.

  And there was all that bewildering junk to boot, with the lantern and the broken-down divan and the spread-out drawings covering all but the breasts and chin of the naked girl in that sketch …

  The scene lasted for mere fractions of a second. Jef Lombard’s long arm was holding out a revolver. Maigret watched him quietly. Still, he did heave a sigh when Lombard threw the gun to the floor, grabbed his head with both hands and burst into great raw sobs.

  ‘I can’t, I can’t!’ he groaned. ‘You hear me? God damn it, I can’t!’

  And he turned away to lean both arms against the wall, his shoulders heaving. They could hear him snuffling softly.

  The inspector went over and closed the door, to shut off the noise of sawing and planing downstairs and the distant cries of children out in the street.

  Jef Lombard wiped his face with his handkerchief, tossed back his hair and looked around with the empty eyes of someone whose nerves have just given way. He was not completely calm; his fingers were flexing like claws, he was breathing heavily, and when he tried to speak he had to bite his lip to suppress the sob welling in his throat.

  ‘To end up like this!’ he finally said, his voice dark and biting.

  He tried to laugh, but sounded desperate.

  ‘Nine years! Almost ten! I was left all alone, with no money, no job …’

  He was talking to himself, probably unaware that he was staring hard at the figure drawing of the nude with that bare flesh …

  ‘Ten years of slogging away, every day, with difficulties and disappointments of all kinds, but I got married anyway, I wanted kids … I drove myself like an animal to give them a decent life. A house! And the workshop! Everything – you saw that! But what you didn’t see is what it cost me to b
uild it all, and the heartbreaks … The bills that kept me awake at night when I was just getting started …’

  Passing his hand over his forehead, he swallowed hard, and his Adam’s apple rose and fell.

  ‘And now look: I’ve just had a baby girl and I can’t remember if I’ve even seen her! My wife is lying in bed unable to understand what’s going on, she sneaks frightened looks at me, she doesn’t recognize me any more … My men ask me questions, and I don’t know what to tell them.

  ‘All gone! Suddenly, in a few days: wrecked, ruined, done for, smashed to pieces! Everything! Ten years of work! And all because …’

  Clenching his fists, he looked down at the gun on the floor, then up at Maigret. He was at the end of his rope.

  ‘Let’s get it over with,’ he sighed, wearily waving a hand. ‘Who’s going to do the talking? It’s so stupid!’

  And he might have been speaking to the skull, the heap of old sketches, the wild, outlandish drawings on the walls.

  ‘Just so stupid …’

  He seemed on the verge of tears again, but no, he was all done in. The fit had passed. He went over to sit on the edge of the divan, planted his elbows on his bony knees, his chin in his hands, and sat there, waiting.

  He moved only to scrape a bit of mud off the bottom of a trouser leg with a fingernail.

  ‘Am I disturbing you?’ asked a cheery voice.

  The carpenter entered, covered in sawdust, and, after looking around at the drawings decorating the walls, he laughed.

  ‘So, you came back to look at all this?’

  No one moved. Only Belloir tried to look as if nothing were wrong.

  ‘Do you remember about those twenty francs you still owe me for that last month? Oh, not that I’ve come to ask you for them. It just makes me laugh, because when you left without taking all this old junk, I recall you saying, “Maybe one day a single one of these sketches might well be worth as much as this whole dump.” I didn’t believe you. Still, I did put off whitewashing the walls. One day I brought up a framer who sells pictures and he went off with two or three drawings. Gave me a hundred sous for them. Do you still paint?’