Maigret’s First Case by Georges Simenon

Author:Georges Simenon [Simenon, Georges]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-03-17T15:13:08+00:00

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Chapter VI

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Not until eight o’clock in the evening, when the gas-lamps were outlining the vistas of the avenues round the Arc de Triomphe, wreathing them in pearly light, did Maigret, who had almost given up hope, make contact with the object of his search.

He would keep a glowing memory of his afternoon, one of the loveliest Paris spring days, and such sweet, perfumed air that one stopped still to breathe it in. It must have been several days now that women had been going out without wraps during the warmer hours of the day, but he had only just noticed it, he felt he was witnessing a blossoming of gay dresses, and there were daisies, poppies, cornflowers in their hats, while the men were trying out their boaters.

He had done nothing for hours but tramp round a narrow area, bordered by the Étoile, the Place des Ternes and the Porte Maillot. In the Rue Brey, as soon as he rounded the corner, he bumped into three women, perched on high heels, tightly corseted, not talking, not even standing together, but ready to rush up the moment a man appeared. Their home-port was actually the hotel where the count was living, and near the threshold there was another woman, much fatter than the others, more placid, who waited, refusing to hunt out in the open.

Why had Maigret noticed there was a laundry opposite, where fresh-faced young girls were ironing? Was it because of the contrast?

“Is the count upstairs?” he asked at the reception desk.

They examined him from top to toe. The people he was to meet today all looked him over in this way, in slow motion almost, bored rather than disdainful, and only replied with reluctance.

“Go up and see.”

He thought he had already reached his first goal.

“Can you tell me the number of his room?”

The man hesitated. He had shown that he was not one of the count’s friends.

“Thirty-two…”

He went upstairs through a smell of human bodies and cooking. At the end of the corridor a chambermaid was making a pile of sheets, which still seemed damp with sweat. He knocked in vain at the door.

“Do you want Lucile?” the servant asked from the far end.

“The count.”

“He’s not there. Nobody’s in.”

“You don’t know where I could find him?”

The question must have been so absurd that she didn’t bother to answer.

“What about Lucile?”

“Isn’t she at the Coq?”

There, he had given himself away again; they mistrusted him at once. If he didn’t even know where to find Lucile, what was he doing coming here?

The Coq was one of the two cafés on the corner of the Avenue de Wagram. The terraces were wide. There were some women sitting there alone, and Maigret suspected there was little difference between these and the ones on the prowl at the corner of the Rue Brey. There was still another kind, those who strolled slowly up to the Étoile, then came back down to the Place des Ternes, window-shopping on the way, and some of them might have been taken for middle-class housewives out for a stroll.

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