Maigret 27: Maigret in New York’s Underworld (1987) by Georges Simenon

Author:Georges Simenon
Format: epub
Published: 1987-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

6

Maigret followed his clown up the creaking stairs and, because Dexter, God knows why, felt some need to walk on tiptoe, the Inspector caught himself doing the same.

The melancholy man, however, had slept off his gin and, if his eyes were dull and his tongue a bit thick, he had abandoned his wail for a slightly firmer tone.

It was he who had given the taxi driver an address in Greenwich Village and Maigret had discovered, in the heart of New York, a few minutes away from the skyscrapers, a little city set within a city. It was almost a provincial town, with houses no taller than those in Bordeaux or Dijon, with little shops, quiet streets along which one could stroll leisurely, and inhabitants who appeared to pay no heed to the monster metropolis surrounding them.

“Here we are,” he had announced.

Just then Maigret had noted something like fear in his voice and he had looked his companion in the shabby trench coat squarely in the face.

“You’re sure you said I was coming?”

“I said you might come.”

“And who did you say I was?”

He was expecting as much. The clown became upset.

“I was going to talk to you about that…I didn’t know how to handle it, because Germain has grown pretty cantankerous. When I came to see him the first time, he made me take one or two quick ones. I don’t know now just what I did tell him, that you were a very rich man, and were looking for a son you’d never seen. You mustn’t be mad at me…I did the best I could…to the point where he was touched and why, I’m sure, he hurried to see what he could find.”

It was silly. The Inspector could imagine what the clown, with a few drinks under his belt, had invented.

And now Dexter, the nearer they came to the house of the former Mr. Loyal, seemed hesitant. Wasn’t he capable of having lied the whole way down the line, even to Maigret? No, for there was the photograph and the program.

Light under a door. A slight murmur of voices. Dexter, stammering:

“Knock…there’s no bell.”

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

And then one got the impression, simply by stepping across a worn straw door mat, of taking an immense voyage in time and space! Of no longer being in New York, two steps from the skyscrapers that, at that hour, flung their fires across the Manhattan sky. Was this still the age of electricity?

The lighting in the room could have come from an oil lamp: this impression was caused by the thick, pleated red silk that shaded the floor lamp.

There was a single circle of light in the middle of the room, and within this circle of light sat a man in a wheel chair, an old man who must once have been very stout and was still corpulent, but who was now so flaccid that he looked as if he had been abruptly deflated.

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