Maigret’s Pipe - Seventeen Stories by Georges Simenon

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

* * *

stan the killer

32nd episode

in the maigret saga

stan le tueur

Maigret, his hands behind his back, his pipe between his teeth, was walking slowly, thrusting his bulky form with some difficulty through the busy morning crowd in the Rue Saint-Antoine, while the sunshine poured down from a bright sky on to the little barrows loaded with fruit and vegetables and the stalls which took up almost the whole width of the pavement.

It was the time when housewives were shopping most busily, weighing artichokes in their hands and tasting cherries, while steaks and escalopes succeeded one another on the butcher’s scales.

“Best asparagus, five francs the big bundle!”

“Fresh whiting! Just come in!”

Shop assistants in white aprons, butchers in checked linen aprons, smells of cheese in front of a dairyman’s and, further on, the odour of roasting coffee; the bustling trade of food stores and the queues of canny housewives, the clang of cash registers, the heavy rumble of passing buses…

And Superintendent Maigret walked past, all unsuspected, and nobody guessed that one of the most distressing cases imaginable was involved.

Almost opposite the Rue de Birague there was a small café, the Tonnelet Bourguignon, with only three tables on its narrow terrace. This was where Maigret sat down, to all appearances the exhausted stroller. He did not even raise his eyes when a tall thin waiter came up to take his order.

“A small glass of white Mâcon,” growled the Superintendent.

And who would have guessed that the somewhat clumsy waiter of the Tonnelet Bourguignon was none other than Inspector Janvier?

He came back with the glass of wine uneasily balanced on a tray. With a napkin of doubtful cleanliness he wiped the table, and a scrap of paper fell to the ground. Maigret picked it up soon afterwards.

“The woman has gone out shopping. Not seen One-Eye. The Beard went out early. The other three must have stopped in the hotel.”

By ten o’clock the bustle was on the increase. Beside the Tonnelet a shop was offering bargains, and its touts stopped passers-by to make them taste biscuits being sold at two francs a tin.

Just at the corner of the Rue de Birague stood a seedy hotel, the type where you can take rooms “by the month, the week or the day”, but where payment in advance is required; its sign, perhaps ironically, bore the name Hôtel Beauséjour.

Maigret was savouring his glass of dry white wine, and he seemed to be looking for nothing in particular amid the motley crowd of people milling round him in the spring sunshine. And yet his gaze presently fastened on a window on the second floor of a house in the Rue de Birague, almost opposite that hotel. At that window a little old man was sitting beside a canary’s cage, and seemed to be concerned only with warming himself in the sun so long as God deigned to grant him life.

This was Lucas, Sergeant Lucas, who had skilfully added some twenty years to his appearance and who, although he had picked out Maigret on the terrace of the café, carefully avoided showing any signs of recognition.

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