Maigret in New York (11 page)

‘Let's go!'

Maigret had abruptly resolved not to let his
definitely too-gloomy clown out of his sight and, after he made him eat something, he took him
back to his hotel and put him to bed on the green plush couch.

After that, as he had the previous evening, he
wrote a long letter to Madame Maigret.

Maigret followed his clown up the creaking
staircase and because Dexter, God knows why, felt he ought to walk on his tiptoes, the inspector
found himself doing so too.

The sad man had slept off his gin, however, and
although his eyes were still puffy and his speech a touch thick, he had abandoned his tone of
lamentation for a somewhat firmer voice.

He'd been the one to give the cabbie an address
in Greenwich Village, and Maigret was discovering, in the heart of New York, a few minutes from
its big modern buildings, a tiny city within the city, almost a provincial town, with its houses
no taller than in Bordeaux or Dijon, its shops, its quiet streets where people could stroll, its
inhabitants who seemed not to notice the monstrous city all around them.

‘We're here,' Dexter had announced.

Sensing something like fear in the voice of this
man in his grimy raincoat, Maigret had looked his companion straight in the face.

‘Are you sure you told him I was coming?'

‘I said that you might come.'

‘And what did you tell him I was?'

He had expected this. The clown became
troubled.

‘I was going to speak to you about that … I
didn't know
how to deal with the matter because
Germain, you see, has become quite unsociable. What's more, when I came to see him that first
time, he made me have a quick little drink or two. I don't precisely recall what I told him
… That you were a very rich man, that you were looking for a son you'd never seen …
You mustn't be mad at me, it was all for the best … He was moved, in the end, and I'm sure
that's why he started combing his files right away.'

It was ridiculous. The inspector thought about
what the clown could have concocted with a few drinks under his belt.

And now Dexter was becoming increasingly hesitant
the closer they came to the former ringmaster's door. Might he not have lied all up and down the
line, even to Maigret? No, after all: there was the photograph, and the handbill …

Light under a door. A faint murmuring. Dexter
stammering, ‘Knock … There's no doorbell.'

Maigret knocked. Silence fell. Someone coughed.
The sound of a cup set down on a saucer.

‘Come in!'

And they felt as if simply crossing the narrow
barrier of a dilapidated doormat had taken them on an immense voyage through time and space.
They were no longer in New York, next door to skyscrapers that at this hour were darting all
their lights up into the Manhattan sky. Was it even still the age of electricity?

Anyone in the room would have sworn it was lit by
a paraffin lamp, an impression created by the large shade of pleated red silk on a floor
lamp.

There was but a single circle of light in the centre of the room
and within it a man in a wheelchair, an old man who must once have been quite stout and was
still bulky enough to completely fill the chair, but who was now so flaccid that he seemed to
have suddenly deflated. A few white hairs of impressive length floated around his naked pate as
he craned his head forwards to see the intruders over the rims of his glasses.

‘Excuse me for disturbing you,' Maigret began,
while the clown hid behind him.

There was someone else in the room, as fat as
Germain, with a mauve complexion, unnaturally blonde hair and a small, smiling, lipstick-smeared
mouth.

Hadn't they stumbled into some corner of a wax
museum? No, for the figures were moving, and tea was steaming in the two cups sitting on a side
table next to a sliced cake.

‘Ronald Dexter told me that tonight I might
perhaps find here the information I'm looking for.'

You couldn't see the walls, they were so
plastered with posters and photographs. A lungeing whip, its shaft still wound with colourful
ribbons, was in a place of honour.

‘Would you provide chairs for these gentlemen,
Lucile?'

The voice had remained what it doubtless was in
the days when the man announced the entrance of the clowns and tumblers into the ring, and it
resounded strangely in this too-small room so cluttered that poor Lucile found it hard to clear
off two black chairs with red velvet seats.

‘This young man who knew me long ago …' the
old man was saying.

Was this phrase not a poem in itself? First, Dexter became a
young man in the old ringmaster's eyes. Then there was the ‘who knew me long ago' instead of
‘whom I knew long ago'.

‘… has informed me of your distressing
predicament. If your son had belonged to the circus world, if only for a few weeks, I can assure
you that you would have had only to come and tell me, “Germain, it was in such-and-such a year
that he appeared in such-and-such an act … He was like this and like that …” and
Germain would not have had to search through his archives.'

He gestured towards the piles of papers
everywhere, on the furniture, the floor, even on the bed, for Lucile had had to place some there
to clear the two chairs.

‘Germain had all that here.'

He pointed to his skull and tapped it with that
finger.

‘But where vaudeville and cabarets are concerned,
I say this to you: you must consult my old friend Lucile. She is here … Listening to you
… Speak, then, to her.'

Maigret had let his pipe go out and yet he needed
it to regain a foothold in reality. Holding the pipe in his hand, he must have looked
embarrassed, for the fat lady spoke to him with a fresh smile that resembled, thanks to her
innocently garish make-up, that of a doll.

‘You may smoke … Robson smoked a pipe, too.
I smoked one myself, during the years right after his death … Perhaps you wouldn't
understand, but it was still a bit of his presence.'

‘Your act was a very interesting one,' murmured
the inspector politely.

‘The best of its kind, I can only agree. Everyone will tell you: Robson was unique … His
imposing presence, above all, and you cannot imagine how much that counts in our kind of number.
He wore a frock coat, waistcoat, tight breeches with stockings of black silk. His calves were
magnificent …

‘Wait!'

She searched, not through a handbag, but in a
silk reticule with a silver clasp, and pulled out a publicity photograph of her husband attired
as she had described, with a black velvet mask over his eyes, a waxed moustache, ‘making a leg'
and brandishing a magician's wand at his invisible audience.

‘And here I am at that same time.'

An ageless woman, slender, sad, diaphanous, with
her hands crossed under her chin in the most artificial pose imaginable, staring vacantly into
the distance.

‘I can say that we toured throughout the world.
In certain countries Robson wore a red silk cape over his outfit and in a red spotlight he
looked truly diabolical in the magic coffin number … I trust you believe in mental
telepathy?'

The room was stifling. Although Maigret was
desperate for a rush of fresh air, thick drapes of faded plush masked the windows, as heavy as
an old stage curtain. Who knows? He had the feeling they had perhaps been cut out of that very
thing.

‘Germain told me that you were looking for your
son or your brother.'

‘My brother,' replied the inspector hastily,
suddenly
realizing that neither of the J and J
artistes could plausibly be his son.

‘That's what I thought … I hadn't
completely understood … That's why I expected to see an older man. Which of the two was
your brother? The violin or the clarinet?'

‘I do not know, madame.'

‘What do you mean, you don't know?'

‘My brother disappeared when he was a baby. It's
only recently, by chance, that we've picked up his trail again.'

This was ludicrous. This was unbearable. And yet,
it was impossible to tell the simple truth to these two, who revelled in fantasy. Forbearance
was almost Christian charity towards them, and the cream of the jest was, that imbecile Dexter,
despite knowing the truth, seemed to believe the make-believe and was already beginning to
sniffle.

‘Step into the light, so I can see your face
…'

‘I do not believe there was any resemblance
between my brother and me.'

‘How do you know, when he was kidnapped so young
…'

Kidnapped! Honestly! Now they had to play this
farce out to the very end.

‘In my opinion, it must have been Joachim …
No, wait: there's a suggestion of Joseph in the forehead … But … Haven't I got their
names mixed up, in fact? Just imagine, I used to do that all the time … There was one with
long blond hair like a girl, about the same colour as mine …'

‘Joachim, I think,' said Maigret.

‘Let me remember … How would you know?
… The
other one had slightly broader
shoulders and wore glasses. It's funny. We all lived together for almost a year, and there are
things I can't recall, others that come back to me as if it were yesterday … We'd all
signed on for a tour through the Southern states: Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas. It was very
hard, because the people down there were still practically savages. Some of them rode to the
show on horses. Once, they killed a Negro during our number, I don't remember why any more.

‘What I'm wondering is, which one of the two was
Jessie with.

‘Was it Jessie or Bessie? … Bessie, I think
… No, Jessie! I'm sure it was Jessie, because I mentioned one time that it made three Js:
Joseph, Joachim and Jessie.'

If only Maigret had been able to ask questions,
calmly, to elicit precise answers! But he had to let her ramble through the complicated
meanderings of her thoughts, an old woman who had probably always been a trifle
scatterbrained.

‘Poor little Jessie. She was touching. I'd taken
her under my protection, because she was in a delicate situation.'

What could that delicate situation have been?
This would probably become clear in time.

‘She was small and slender. I was small and
slender, too, in those days, fragile as a flower. They called me the Angel, did you know?'

‘I know.'

‘It was Robson who gave me that name. He didn't
say “my angel”, which is banal, but “the Angel” – I don't know whether you see the nuance
… Bessie – no, Jessie – was
quite young. I
wonder if she was even eighteen. And you could sense that she'd been unhappy. I never learned
where they'd found her … I say “they” because I don't remember whether it was Joseph or
Joachim. Since those three were always together, naturally you wondered.'

‘What was her role in your tour?'

‘She didn't have one. She was not a performer.
She was an orphan, surely, because I never saw her write to anyone. They must have plucked her
from beside her mother's deathbed.'

‘And she followed the company?'

‘She followed us everywhere. A hard life. The
manager was a brute. Did you know him, Germain?'

‘His brother is still in New York. I heard some
talk about him last week. He sells programmes at Madison Square Garden.'

‘He used to treat us like dogs. Robson was the
only one who stood up to him … I think that if he could have got away with it, he'd have
fed us like beasts on animal mash to economize on food. We stayed in dirty holes full of bedbugs
… He wound up abandoning us fifty miles from New Orleans, ran off with the cashbox, and
once again it was Robson …'

Fortunately, she suddenly decided to nibble a
piece of cake. That provided a brief respite, but she swiftly continued, wiping her lips with a
lace hankie.

‘J and J, pardon me for telling you so, since one
of the two is your brother (I bet that it's Joseph), but J and J were not artistes like us, with
star billing, they came at the tail end of the programme. There's no dishonour in
that … Please don't be angry at me if I've
hurt your feelings!'

‘No, no, of course not!'

‘They earned very little, nothing, so to speak,
but their travel expenses were paid, and the food, if you could call it that. Only, there was
Jessie … They had to pay for Jessie's train tickets. And the meals. Not always for the
meals … Hold on, it's coming back to me … I believe I am in contact with
Robson.'

And her enormous bosom swelled within her bodice
as she wiggled her chubby little fingers.

‘Forgive me, sir … I assume that you
believe in the afterlife? If not, you would not be so passionately searching for your brother,
who may well be dead. I sense that Robson has just entered into communication with me … I
know it, I'm sure of it. Allow me to turn my thoughts to him, and he will tell me himself all
that you need to know.'

The clown was so awed that he gave a kind of
moan. Or perhaps it was because of the cake, which no one had thought to offer him?