Maigret in New York (9 page)

Maigret could tell what kind of a man Ronald
Dexter was and knew that there was no point in rushing him.

‘You'll go back there every day …'

‘I've got other places to visit as well. You'll
see, I'll find you all the information you're looking for. Except, I have to ask you for another
small advance on expenses. Yesterday you gave me ten dollars, and I've recorded your payment.
Look! … No, no, I want you to see …'

And he showed him a grimy notebook, on one page
of which he had written in pencil:

‘Today I'd rather you gave me only five, because
I spend everything I get anyway, so it would all go too fast. So then I wouldn't dare ask you
for any more, and with no money, I wouldn't be able to help you. It's too much? What about
four?'

Maigret took out five dollars and for no reason,
when he handed them over, he looked intently at the clown.

Well fed, the man in the trenchcoat wearing an
acid green ribbon for a necktie did not look any jollier, but in his eyes there was infinite
gratitude, infinite submission mixed with something anxious and trembling. He was like a dog
that has finally found a good master and searches humbly for a sign of satisfaction in his
face.

It was then that Maigret remembered what O'Brien
had said. He remembered old Angelino, too, who that morning had set out on his daily walk and
been cruelly killed.

He wondered if he had the right to …

But
only for a moment: wasn't he sending the former clown into a perfectly quiet part of the
city?

‘If they ever kill him on me …' he
thought.

Then he recalled the office in the St Regis, the
letter opener that had snapped in the nervous grip of Little John, and MacGill, busy talking
about him to his American girl in the bar.

He had never undertaken an investigation in such
uncertain and almost crazy circumstances. In reality, no one had instructed him to pursue any
investigation. Even old Monsieur d'Hoquélus, so insistent in the house at Meung-sur-Loire, now
asked him politely to return to France and mind his own business. Even O'Brien …

‘I'll drop by to see you tomorrow at around the
same time,' said Ronald Dexter, picking up his hat. ‘Don't forget that I have to return the
handbill.'

J and J …

Maigret found himself alone again out on the
pavement of an avenue he did not know, and he wandered a good while with his hands in his
pockets, his pipe between his teeth, before he glimpsed the lights of a cinema he recognized on
Broadway, which set him on the right path.

Suddenly, just like that, he took a notion to
write to Madame Maigret and went back to his hotel.

It was between the third and fourth floors that
Maigret reflected, without attaching too much importance to it, that he would not want a man
such as Special Agent O'Brien, for example, to see what he was up to that morning.

Even people who had worked with him for years and
years, like Sergeant Lucas, did not always understand him when he was in this state.

And did he even know himself what he was looking
for? For example, at the moment when he stopped for no reason on that step between two floors,
staring straight ahead with wide-open but now empty eyes, he must have looked like a man forced
by heart trouble to stay stock still wherever he might be and who tries to seem calm to avoid
alarming passers-by.

Judging from the number of children younger than
seven the inspector was seeing on the stairs, the landings, in the kitchens and bedrooms, the
apartment house must have been a swarming mass of kids outside of school hours. Besides, toys
lay around in every corner: broken scooters, old soapboxes precariously equipped with wheels,
collections of random objects that made no sense for grown-ups yet for their creators must have
represented treasures.

There was no concierge, as in French apartment
buildings, which complicated Maigret's task. Nothing but
numbered, brown-painted letterboxes in the ground-floor corridor,
a few with a yellowed visiting card or a name badly engraved on a metal strip.

It was ten in the morning, doubtless the hour
when this sort of barracks was most characteristically alive. One out of every two or three
doors stood open. Women who hadn't yet combed their hair were doing housework, washing
youngsters' faces, shaking none-too-clean carpets out of windows.

‘Excuse me, madame …'

They looked askance at him. Who could they think
he was, this tall man with his heavy overcoat, his hat that he always took off when he spoke to
women, whoever they were? Probably someone selling insurance or a new model of electric vacuum
cleaner?

And then there was his accent, but it did not
stand out here, where there were not only Italians just off the boat, he thought, but Poles and
Czechs as well.

‘Do you know if there are any tenants left here
who moved in about thirty years ago?'

They frowned, because it was just about the last
question they expected. In Paris – in Montmartre, for example, or in his old neighbourhood
between the République and Bastille Métro stations – there probably wasn't a single decent-sized
building where he would not easily have found an elderly man, woman or couple who had lived
there for thirty or forty years.

Here they were telling him, ‘We moved in only six
months ago …'

Or a year, or two. At most, four years ago.

Without realizing it, instinctively, he would linger at the open
doors to observe a Spartan kitchen encumbered by a bed, or a bedroom inhabited by four or five
people.

Few tenants knew any others on another floor.
Three children, the oldest of whom was a boy of perhaps eight (who doubtless had mumps, given
the immense bandage around his head), had begun following him. Then the little boy had grown
bolder and was now dashing ahead of Maigret.

‘The man wants to know if you were here thirty
years ago!'

Still, there were a few elderly people, in
armchairs, by the windows, often near a caged canary, the old folks brought over from Europe
once a job had been found. And some of them did not understand one word of English.

‘I would like to know …'

The landings were large and formed a kind of
neutral territory where tenants piled up everything not in use in the apartments; on the
third-floor landing, a thin woman with blonde hair was doing her wash.

It was here, in one of these honeycomb cells,
that J and J had settled in after arriving in New York; here that Little John, now living in a
luxurious suite at the St Regis, had spent months, perhaps years.

It would have been hard to concentrate more human
lives in so little space, yet that space was without warmth, a place where more than anywhere
else one had the feeling of hopeless isolation.

The milk bottles proved it. On the fourth floor,
Maigret stopped short in front of a door, when he
saw eight untouched bottles of milk lined up on the straw mat outside it.

He was about to question the boy who had decided
to be his benevolent guide when a man of about fifty emerged from the room next door.

‘Do you know who lives here?'

The man shrugged without answering, as if to say
it was no concern of his.

‘You don't know if there's anyone in there?'

‘How would you expect me to know?'

‘Is it a man, a woman?'

‘A man, I think.'

‘Old?'

‘Depends on what you mean by that. Maybe my age
… I don't know. He only moved in a month ago.'

Nobody cared what nationality he was or where he
came from, and his neighbour, not in the least curious about the bottles of milk, headed down
the stairs, only to look back with a frown at this odd visitor asking bizarre questions. Then he
went on his way.

Had the tenant of this room gone off on a trip
but forgotten to tell the milkman? It was possible. But those who live in such barracks are poor
people for whom a penny is a penny. Was he behind that door, perhaps? Living or dead, sick or
dying, he could stay there a long time before anyone thought to worry about him.

Even if the tenant had shouted, called for help,
would anyone have bothered to check?

A small boy, somewhere, was learning to play the
violin.
It was almost excruciating to hear the same
phrase clumsily and endlessly repeated, to imagine the awkward bowing unable to draw from the
instrument anything but that wretched noise.

Top floor.

‘Excuse me, madame: do you know anyone in the
house who …'

He heard about an old woman whom no one knew,
supposedly a long-time tenant there and who had died two months earlier while climbing the
stairs with her shopping bag. But she might not have lived there for thirty years …

In the end it became annoying to be heralded by
this eager kid, who kept scrutinizing him, as if trying to solve the mystery of the stranger who
had turned up unexpectedly in his universe.

Enough! Maigret could go back downstairs. He
stopped to relight his pipe and continued to sniff the atmosphere around him, imagining a
slender, blond young man climbing those same stairs with a violin case under his arm; another
young man, with already thinning hair, was playing the clarinet near a window, looking out at
the street.

‘Hello!'

Maigret scowled instantly. No doubt startled by
that reaction, the usually subtly smiling O'Brien – for it was the redhead climbing the stairs
to find the inspector – burst into hearty laughter.

The inspector was masking his feelings, in a way,
and grumbled awkwardly, ‘I thought you weren't having anything to do with this business.'

‘Who says I am?'

‘Are you going to tell me you've come to visit
relatives?'

‘First off, that's not in the least impossible,
because we all have all kinds of relatives.'

He was in a good mood. Had he figured out what
Maigret had been seeking there? He had realized, in any case, that his French colleague was
experiencing certain emotions that morning that had touched him in turn, and there was a
friendlier look in his eyes than usual.

‘I'm not here to have a battle of wits. It's you
I'm looking for. Let's go outside, shall we?'

Maigret had already gone down one floor when he
changed his mind and went back up a few steps to give a small coin to the little boy, who looked
at it without thinking to say thank you.

‘Are you beginning to understand New York? I bet
you've learned more about it this morning than you would have in a month at the St Regis or the
Waldorf.'

They had stopped automatically on the front step,
and were both looking at the shop across the street – and at the tailor, old Angelino's son,
working at his steam press, because the poor do not have time to dwell on their grief.

A car marked with the police shield was parked a
few metres away.

‘I dropped by your hotel. When they told me you'd
left early, I thought I'd find you here. What I didn't know was that I'd have to plod up to the
fifth floor.'

One tiny little jab of irony, an allusion to a
certain sensibility – perhaps a certain sentimental streak – that he'd just discovered in this
stocky French inspector.

‘If
you had concierges, as we do, I wouldn't have had to climb all those stairs.'

‘You think you wouldn't have done that
anyway?'

They got into the car.

‘Where are we going?'

‘Wherever you want. As of now, it doesn't matter
any more. I'll simply drop you off in a more central neighbourhood, less depressing for your
mood.'

He lit a pipe. The driver pulled away.

‘I have some bad news for you, my dear
inspector.'

Why, in that case, was his voice full of sweet
satisfaction?

‘Jean Maura has been found.'

Maigret turned with a frown and stared at
him.

‘You don't mean that it's your men who
…'

‘Come, now! Don't be jealous.'

‘It isn't jealousy, but …'

‘But?'

‘That wouldn't fit with the rest,' he said more
softly, as if to himself. ‘No, there's something wrong there.'

‘Well, well!'

‘What's so surprising?'

‘Nothing. Tell me what you think.'

‘I don't think. But if Jean Maura has reappeared,
if he's alive …'

O'Brien nodded in affirmation.

‘I wager they simply found him up in the St Regis
with his father and MacGill.'

‘Bravo, Maigret! That's exactly what happened. In
spite of the personal freedom I spoke to you about, perhaps exaggerating a tad to tease you, we
do have a few small
ways of finding things out,
especially in a hotel like the St Regis. Well, this morning, an extra breakfast was ordered for
Little John's apartment. Jean Maura was there, settled in the large bedroom adjoining his
father's bedroom office.'

‘He wasn't questioned?'

‘You're forgetting that we have no reason to
question him. No law, federal or otherwise, requires passengers disembarking from a ship to dash
headlong into their father's arms, and this father never filed a complaint or notified the
police of his son's disappearance.'

‘One question.'

‘If it's a discreet one.'

‘Why does Little John – who pays for an elegant
suite at the St Regis, as you say, a four- or five-room apartment – personally occupy what we'd
call a maid's room and work at a plain pine table, while his secretary sits enthroned behind a
fancy mahogany desk?'

‘Does it really surprise you?'

‘A bit.'

‘Here, you see, it doesn't surprise anyone, no
more than it does to know that a certain millionaire's son insists on living in the Bronx, which
we are now leaving, and on taking the subway every day to his office, when he could easily have
at his disposal as many luxury cars as he wanted.

‘That detail you mentioned about Little John is
well known. It's part of his legend. Every successful man has a legend, and his works very well;
the popular press publications refer to it often.

‘The man who has become rich and powerful recreates, at the St Regis, the room of his youthful
beginnings and lives there simply, disdaining the luxury of the other rooms.

‘As for knowing whether Little John is sincere or
managing his public relations, that is a different question.'

For some reason Maigret found himself responding
without hesitation, ‘He is sincere.'

‘Ah!'

Then they were silent for a while.

‘Perhaps you would like to learn the pedigree of
MacGill, of whom you do not seem inordinately fond? I just happen to have been told these
things, remember, this is not police information.'

Even though O'Brien was only joking, Maigret
found this constant doublespeak exasperating.

‘I'm listening.'

‘He was born in New York twenty-eight years ago,
probably in the Bronx, of unknown parentage. For a few months, I'm not sure exactly how many, he
was cared for by a children's aid society in a suburb of the city.

‘He was removed by a man who stated that he
wished to take responsibility for him and who provided the requisite moral and financial
guarantees for such cases.'

‘Little John …'

‘Who was not yet called Little John and who had
recently established a small business in second-hand phonographs. The child was entrusted to a
certain Mrs MacGill, a Scotswoman, the widow of a funeral-home employee. The woman and child
left the country to go and live in Canada,
in St
Jerome. As a young man, MacGill studied in nearby Montreal, which explains why he speaks French
as well as he does English. Then, when he was around twenty, he disappeared from circulation to
resurface six months ago as Little John's private secretary. That's all I know and I can't
guarantee that this hearsay is accurate.