A Man's Head (7 page)

‘Do you mind if I …?' asked a young Swedish girl with hair that was more yellow than blonde.

The place was crawling with people. A hatch in the rear wall was constantly opening and closing, and from the kitchen came a stream of olives, potato chips, sandwiches and hot drinks.

Four waiters shouted orders constantly amid a clatter of plates and the rattle of glasses, while customers called out to each other in a variety of languages.

And the overall impression was that customers, barmen, waiters and décor fused and formed a single, homogeneous identity.

The crowd intermingled as if they knew each other, and everybody – from the young woman, the big industrialist who had stepped out of his limousine with a group of high-spirited friends to the Estonian art student – called the head bartender
Bob.

People talked to each other without being introduced, like old friends. A German spoke English with an American, and a Norwegian used a mix of three different languages as he tried to make himself understood by a Spaniard.

There were two women whom everyone knew, and one of them Maigret recognized, though she was less slender now, older, but dressed in furs, as the young girl he'd once been ordered to escort to Saint-Lazare women's prison after the police
had carried out a raid in Rue de la Roquette.

Her voice was hoarse, her eyes looked tired, and people shook her hand as they passed. She held court at her table, as if she embodied in her sole person the uneasy mix that surged around her.

‘Do you have anything I can write with?' Maigret asked a barman.

‘Not when we're serving aperitifs. You'll have to try in the brasserie.'

Among the noisy groups were a few customers who were alone. It was perhaps the most striking aspect of the place.

On the one hand, there were people who talked in loud voices, were never still, ordered round after round of drinks and drew attention to themselves in clothes which were as luxurious as they were eccentric.

On the other, there were individuals who seemed to have come from the four corners of the earth solely to be part of this brilliant company.

There was, for example, one young woman who could not have been more than twenty-two. She wore a slim-fitting black suit, well cut and comfortable, but it had obviously been pressed many times.

She cut an odd figure, weary and unsure of herself. She had put a sketch pad down beside her. And in the middle of all those people drinking aperitifs costing ten francs each, she sipped a glass of milk and nibbled a croissant.

This at one o'clock in the afternoon! It was obviously her lunch. She made the most of being there to read a Russian newspaper which the management made available for customers.

She neither heard nor saw anything. She ate her croissant slowly and from time to time drank a mouthful of milk, oblivious of the group sitting at her table, who were on to their fourth cocktail.

No less conspicuous was a man whose hair alone could not fail to attract attention. It was red, curly and exceptionally long.

He wore a dark suit which was shiny and tired, and a blue shirt with no tie. His collar was undone, and the shirt open on his chest.

He was ensconced at the far end of the bar, and the way he sat marked him out as a fixture, a regular whom no one would dare disturb. He was eating a pot of yogurt, spoonful by spoonful.

Were there even five francs in his pocket? Where had he come from? Where was he going? And how did he manage to get hold of the few coins he needed to pay for the yogurt, which was probably his only meal of the day?

Like the Russian girl, he had an eager gleam in his eyes and tired-looking eyelids, but there was also something infinitely disdainful and haughty in the cast of his features.

No one went out of their way to shake his hand or speak to him.

Suddenly, the revolving door admitted a man and woman, and in the mirror Maigret recognized the Crosbys, who had just got out of an American car worth at least 250,000 francs.

He could see it parked at the kerb. It was all the more eye-catching because the bodywork was entirely nickel-plated.

William Crosby held his hand over the mahogany counter between two customers who stood to one side, shook the bartender's fingers and said:

‘How are you today, Bob?'

Meanwhile Mrs Crosby rushed over to the blonde Swedish girl, kissed her cheek and started speaking volubly in English.

None of them needed to order. Bob steered a whisky and soda in Crosby's direction, made a Jack Rose for the girl and asked:

‘Back from Biarritz so soon?'

‘We only stayed three days. It rains down there even more than it does here.'

Then Crosby caught sight of Maigret and nodded to him.

He was a tall man of about thirty, with brown hair, and he moved with loose-limbed grace.

Of all those assembled in the bar at that moment, he was the one whose elegant appearance was freest of bad taste.

He shook hands perfunctorily and asked friends:

‘What'll you have?'

He was rich. At the door was a sports car, which he used for driving to Nice, Biarritz, Deauville or Berlin, as the fancy took him.

He had lived in a palace in Avenue Georges-V for a number of years and from his aunt had inherited, in addition to the villa at Saint-Cloud, fifteen or twenty million francs.

Mrs Crosby was petite but vivacious and she never stopped talking, mixing English and French with an inimitable accent all in a high-pitched voice which was enough for anyone to identify her without actually having to see her.

Maigret was separated from them by a number of customers. A member of parliament he knew walked in and shook the young American's hand warmly.

‘Shall we have lunch together?'

‘Not today. We've been invited out.'

‘Tomorrow then?'

‘Fine. Let's meet here.'

A messenger boy came in and called: ‘Telephone for Monsieur Valachine!'

A man stood up and made for the phone booths.

‘Two Jack Roses, two!'

The clatter of plates. Background noise which grew louder.

‘Can you change some dollars for me?'

‘Check the exchange rate in the paper.'

‘Suzy not here?'

‘She just left. I think she's having lunch at Maxim's.'

Maigret had a thought for the fugitive with the hydrocephalic head and long arms who was submerged in the madding crowd of Paris with just a little over twenty francs in his pocket and was even then being hunted high and low by the entire police
force of France.

He remembered the pale face he had seen slowly climbing up the dark wall of the Santé.

Then Dufour's voice on the phone:

‘
He's sleeping
 …'

He'd slept for a whole day!

Where was he now? And why, yes, why on earth would he have killed this Mrs Henderson, whom he'd never met and from whom he had stolen nothing?

‘Do you drop by here sometimes for an aperitif?'

The voice was William Crosby's. He had approached Maigret and was offering him his cigarette case.

‘No thanks. I only smoke a pipe.'

‘But you'll have something to drink? Whisky?'

‘I've got a drink, as you see.'

Crosby looked slightly put out.

‘Do you speak English, Russian and German?'

‘Just French.'

‘So the Coupole must sound like the tower of Babel to you! I've never seen you here before. By the way, is there any truth in what they're saying?'

‘What do you mean?'

‘You know … the murderer …?'

‘Oh there's no need to worry.'

Crosby let his eyes settle on him for a moment.

‘Come on! Won't you give us the pleasure of your company and have a drink with us? My wife would be delighted. Allow me to introduce Mademoiselle Edna Reichberg, daughter of a paper manufacturer in Stockholm. She was skating champion
last year at Chamonix. Edna, Detective Chief Inspector Maigret.'

The Russian girl in the black suit still had her nose deep in her newspaper, and the man with red hair was meditating, with his eyes shut, in front of the stone pot he'd scraped to get at the very last smudge of yogurt.

Through a forced smile, Edna said:

‘So pleased to meet you.'

She gripped Maigret's hand firmly then returned, in English, to her conversation with Mrs Crosby while William said apologetically:

‘Do you mind? I'm wanted on the phone. Two whiskies, Bob … You will excuse me, won't you? …'

Outside, the nickel-plated motor gleamed in the grey light and a pitiful figure shuffled round it, approached the Coupole, dragging one leg, and paused a moment outside the revolving door.

Red-rimmed eyes peered in while a waiter was already walking over to order this seedy tramp to move on.

The police, in Paris and elsewhere, were still hunting for the prisoner who had gone over the wall at the Santé prison.

And here he was, within hailing distance of the inspector!

Maigret did not move. He did not even give a start. At his side, Mrs Crosby and the Swedish girl were chatting away in English, sipping cocktails. The inspector was so close to the latter, because the bar room was so small, that with every movement
she made her supple body brushed against his.

Maigret managed somehow to grasp that they were talking about someone named José, who had flirted with her at the Ritz and offered her cocaine.

They were both laughing. William Crosby, rejoining them from the phone booth, apologized again to the inspector:

‘You really must excuse me. It was about my car. I want to sell it and buy another one.'

He squirted a splash of soda water into their glasses.

‘Cheers!'

Outside, it seemed that the curious silhouette of the convicted criminal was being literally blown around the terrace of the bar.

In getting away from the Citanguette, Joseph Heurtin had apparently lost his cap, with the result that he was now bare-headed. His hair had been cropped very short in prison so that his ears now stuck out even more than ever. His shoes no longer
had either colour or shape.

And where had he slept that his suit should be so creased and covered with so much dust and mud?

If he had been holding his hand out to passers-by, that would have explained his presence there, for he looked like the most pitiful specimen of human flotsam. But he was not begging. And he wasn't selling shoe-laces or pencils.

He shambled up and down, tossed this way and that by the ebb and flow of the passing crowd, sometimes drifting away for a few metres then returning as though he were fighting against a strong current.

His cheeks were covered with brown stubble. He looked thinner.

But it was mainly the eyes which made him so unnerving, for he never took them off the bar and went on trying to see through the steamed-up windows.

Then he got as far as the entrance once more, and Maigret thought he was about to push the door open.

The inspector was smoking anxiously. His forehead was damp with sweat. His nerves were stretched so tight that he had the feeling that his senses had been heightened by a factor of ten.

It was a special moment. Only minutes before he had had the appearance of a man defeated, of being out of his depth. The case had slipped through his fingers, and there was nothing to reassure him that he could pick up the pieces.

He sipped his whisky slowly while Crosby, out of politeness, half turned towards him while participating in the conversation between his wife and Edna.

Strangely enough, without trying, without even being aware of doing so, Maigret was missing no part of this complex scene.

There were many people milling restlessly all round him. There was such a multiplicity of different sounds that they all blended into a single noise which was as indistinct as the surge of the sea. There were people talking, gesticulating,
posing …

He saw it all: the man sitting in front of his yogurt pot, the tramp who kept being irresistibly drawn back to the door, Crosby's smile, the face which his wife made as she applied her lipstick, the energetic movements of the bartender as he
made egg-nog in his cocktail shaker …

And customers leaving one after the other … The remarks they exchanged:

‘Tonight? Here?'

‘Try to bring Léa.'

Gradually the bar emptied. It was half past one. From the adjoining room came the sound of forks.

Crosby laid a 100-franc note on the counter.

‘Are you staying?' he asked Maigret.

He had not yet noticed the man outside but he would come face to face with him when he left.

Maigret was waiting so impatiently for that moment it almost hurt.

Mrs Crosby and Edna said goodbye with nods and smiles.

It so happened that Joseph Heurtin was then less than two metres from the door. One of his shoes had lost its lace. It seemed likely that at any moment a policeman would ask to see his papers or tell him to move on.