Maigret in New York (7 page)

Well, another young man, a few days ago, had
feared for his father's life.

And this young man, with whom Maigret had been
talking a few minutes earlier on the deck of their ship, had vanished.

The inspector was searching for the tailor shop.
He looked at the windows of these houses, often disfigured by the contemptible iron fire escapes
that stopped short above the ground floor.

A clarinet and a violin …

Why did he press his nose, the way he'd done as a
boy, to the window of one of those stores that sell everything: vegetables, canned goods,
sweets? Right next door there was another shop, unlit but without shutters, and through its
window, thanks to the gleam from a nearby street lamp, one could see a pressing machine and some
suits on hangers.

Arturo Giacomi
.

Still following him, the two taxis had halted a few metres away,
and neither the drivers nor that thick lump Bill suspected the contact this man in the heavy
overcoat, pipe clenched between his teeth, was making as he turned towards the house across the
street: contact with two twenty-year-old Frenchmen who had come off a ship a long time ago, one
with his violin under his arm, the other with his clarinet.

It was touch and go that morning whether a man
lived or died, whether a repellent crime would be committed or no, and this slim margin depended
on only a few minutes more or less in how Maigret spent his time.

Unfortunately, he was unaware of this. Throughout
his thirty years with the Police Judiciaire it had been his habit, when an investigation did not
keep him out at night, of rising at around seven in the morning, and he loved the rather long
walk from his home at Boulevard Richard-Lenoir to Quai des Orfèvres.

At heart, despite his active life, he had always
been a flâneur. And once retired, in his house in Meung-sur-Loire, he'd been getting up even
earlier; in the summer, the sunrise often found him standing out in his garden.

On board the ship as well, he was almost always
the first passenger out pacing the deck, while the crew busily swabbed it down and polished the
brass railings.

His first morning in New York, however, because
he had drunk too much with Agent O'Brien, he got up at eleven.

The second day, in his room at the Berwick, he
woke early, as usual. But precisely because it was too early, because he could tell the streets
were empty even though the curtains were still closed, he decided to go back to
sleep. And he did, deeply. When he opened his eyes again, it was
past ten. Why did he behave like those people who have worked all week and whose great joy on
Sunday is to laze around? He dawdled. He took for ever to eat his breakfast. He went to the
window in his dressing gown to smoke a first pipe and was astonished not to see Bill in the
street.

True, the boxer-detective had needed sleep as
well. Had he arranged for a replacement? Were there two men relaying each other on Maigret's
trail?

He shaved carefully and spent still a little more
time organizing his things.

Well, it was on all those particular minutes,
wasted so trivially, that a man's life depended.

At the moment when Maigret was going down to the
street, there was – strictly speaking – still time. Bill was definitely not there, and the
inspector noticed no one who seemed assigned to follow him. An empty cab drove by. He raised his
arm automatically. The driver did not see him, and, instead of looking for another cab, Maigret
decided to walk for a while.

That is how he discovered Fifth Avenue and its
luxury stores. He stopped at their windows, lingered a long time in contemplation of some pipes,
then decided to buy one, even though Madame Maigret ordinarily gave him one for special
occasions and his birthday.

One more silly, preposterous detail: the pipe was
quite expensive. Leaving the store, remembering the taxi fare from the previous evening, Maigret
resolved to economize the same amount that morning.

That
is why he took the subway, in which he lost considerable time before finding the right corner at
Findlay Avenue.

The sky was a hard, luminous grey. The wind was
still blowing, but no longer as fiercely. Maigret turned at the corner of 169th Street and
immediately sensed disaster.

About two hundred metres down the street a crowd
was gathered outside a door and, although he did not know the area well and had seen it only at
night, he was almost certain the place was the Italian tailor's shop.

Moreover, everything or almost everything on the
street and in the neighbourhood was Italian. The children seen playing on the doorsteps had
black hair and those sharp-eyed faces, those long tanned legs of street urchins from Naples or
Florence.

The names over most of the shops were Italian,
and their windows were full of mortadella sausages, pasta and salt-preserved meats from the
shores of the Mediterranean.

The inspector quickened his pace. Twenty or
thirty people were clustered on the tailor's threshold, which a policeman was defending against
invasion, and a pack of more or less scruffy brats swarmed around them all.

The whole thing smacked of an accident, a sordid
tragedy that explodes abruptly in the street and etches the faces of passers-by with dismay.

‘What happened?' he asked a fat man in a bowler
hat standing on tiptoe at the back of the crowd.

Although he had used English, the man simply
examined him curiously before turning away with a shrug.

Maigret heard snatches of talk, some in English, some in
Italian.

‘… just as he was crossing the street
…'

‘… for years and years, every morning at
the same time, he'd take his walk … Fifteen years now I'm in the neighbourhood and I
always saw him …'

‘… his chair's still there …'

Through the shop window they could see the steam
clothes-press with a suit still laid out on it and, closer, next to the plate glass, a
straw-bottomed chair with a rather low seat, the one belonging to old Angelino.

Maigret was beginning to understand. Patiently,
with that grace big men have, he worked his way slowly in to the heart of the crowd and pieced
together the scattered information he overheard.

It had been at least fifty years since Angelino
Giacomi had come from Naples and set himself up in this shop, well before the invention of the
steam press. He was practically the patriarch of the street, of the whole neighbourhood, and
during municipal elections not a single candidate failed to pay him his respects.

His son Arturo ran the shop now, and this son was
almost sixty, himself the father of seven or eight children, most of them married.

In the winter, old Angelino spent his days
sitting on that straw-bottomed chair in the front window of the shop, as if part of the display,
smoking from morning to night those poorly made Italian cigars of black tobacco that smell so
harsh.

And in the spring, just as one sees the swallows
return,
everyone up and down the street watched as
old Angelino set his chair out on the pavement, next to the door.

Now he was dead, or dying, Maigret did not yet
know exactly.

Different versions of his fate swirled around the
inspector, but soon an ambulance siren was heard, and a vehicle with a red cross pulled over to
the kerb.

The crowd rippled, then parted slowly for two men
in white coats, who walked into the shop and out again a few moments later, removing a stretcher
on which nothing could be seen but a body beneath a sheet.

The vehicle's rear door closed. A casually
dressed man, doubtless Angelino's son, having simply put a jacket on over his work clothes,
climbed in next to the driver, and the ambulance pulled away.

‘Is he dead?' people asked the policeman, still
at the door.

He didn't know. He didn't care. It wasn't his job
to bother with such details.

A woman was crying inside the shop, with her
dishevelled grey hair falling over her face, and sometimes she let out such moans that you could
hear her in the street.

One person, two, three decided it was time to
leave. Housewives hunted for their youngsters so as to finish their shopping in the
neighbourhood.

The crowd was slowly shrinking, but it was still
blocking the shop door.

Now it was a barber, comb tucked behind his ear,
who was holding forth in a strong Genoese accent.

‘I saw everything like I see you, because it's
that slow time, and I happened to be right in my doorway.'

And
a few houses along, in fact, there was a traditional barber-shop pole striped with red and
blue.

‘Almost every morning he'd stop a bit outside my
place to chat. It's me who shaved him, Wednesdays and Saturdays. I always shaved him. Not my
assistant, me personally. And I've always known him to be just as he still was this morning.
Though he must have been eighty-two … No, wait … Eighty-three. When Maria, his last
granddaughter, got married four years ago, I remember he told me …'

And the barber began calculations to determine
the exact age of old Angelino, who had just been brutally taken far away from the street where
he had lived for so long.

‘There's one thing he would never have let
himself admit for the whole wide world: it's that he couldn't see much at all, if anything. He
still wore his glasses, thick lenses in old silver frames … He passed the time polishing
them with his big red handkerchief and putting them back on. But the truth is they didn't help
him much … That's the reason why – and not that he had bad legs, because he still had the
legs of a twenty-year-old – he'd taken to walking with a cane …

‘Every morning at ten thirty on the dot
…'

Now, logically, Maigret should have been at his
shop around that time. He had promised himself this the night before. Old Angelino was the one
he wanted to see and question. What would have happened if Maigret had arrived there on time, if
he had not gone back to sleep, if he hadn't dawdled at his room window, if the taxi he hailed
had stopped, if he hadn't bought the pipe on Fifth Avenue?

‘His folks always tied a thick, knitted woollen scarf around his neck, a red one. A little while
ago I saw a boy, the vegetable woman's son, bringing it back to the shop. He never wore an
overcoat, not in the worst winter weather. He toddled along with small even steps, sticking
close to the houses, and me, I knew his cane helped him find his way …'

There were no more than five or six left around
the barber, and as Maigret seemed the most seriously interested listener, the man had begun to
speak directly to him.

‘In front of every shop, or just about, he'd
greet people with a wave, because he knew everybody. At the street corner, he'd pause for a
moment at the edge of the pavement before crossing, because his walk always covered three blocks
…

‘This morning, he did what he always did. I saw
him. I can definitely say I saw him take the first steps into the street … Why did I turn
around just then? I don't know. Maybe my assistant, back in the shop, called to me through the
open door? I'll have to ask him, because I can't figure it out …

‘I clearly heard the car coming. It happened less
than a hundred metres from my place. Then a strange, funny noise, a soft noise … It's hard
to describe – but in any case, a noise that tells you right away there's been an accident.

‘I turned back and I saw the car speeding on its
way; it was already passing by me … At the same time, I was looking at the body lying
there.

‘If I hadn't been doing those two things at the
same
time, I'd have taken a better look at the two
men in the front seat of the car … A big grey car. More like a dark grey. I'd almost be
tempted to say black, but I think it was grey … Or else it was coated with dust.

‘People had already rushed over. I came here
first to tell Arturo. He was pressing a pair of trousers. They carried old Angelino in with a
dribble of blood coming out of his mouth and one arm hanging down, a shoulder of his jacket torn
… There wasn't anything else to see at first glance, but I knew right away that he was
dead.'

They were in the office of Special Agent
O'Brien, who, because of his long legs, had tipped his chair back while he took tiny puffs on
his pipe, caressing the stem with his lips and watching, with heavy-lidded eyes, as Maigret
talked.

‘I suppose,' he was saying in conclusion, ‘that
you won't claim any more that personal freedom prevents you from taking some action against
those bastards?'

After more than thirty years of police work,
during which he had seen all there was to see of human cruelty, cowardice and depravity, Maigret
could still be as infuriated by some things as on his first day in the force.

The concurrence of old Giacomi's death with
Maigret's intended visit that morning to the elderly tailor, the fact that this visit, made in
time, would probably have saved the man's life, and even that purchase of a pipe he now avoided
smoking had all put him in an even darker mood.

‘Unfortunately, this matter concerns not the FBI,
but the New York police, at least for the time being.'

‘They killed him in a lowdown, dirty way,' growled the former inspector.

At which O'Brien murmured pensively, ‘It's not so
much the way they killed him that strikes me, but the fact that they killed him just in time
…'

Maigret had already thought about that, and it
was hard to see it as a coincidence.

For years and years, no one had paid any
attention to old Angelino, who had been able to spend his days on a chair, seen by everyone
passing by, and take his usual little morning walk like a good old dog.

Only the previous night, Maigret had stopped for
a few moments in front of the tailor's shop. He had resolved, without mentioning this to anyone,
to return in the morning to speak to the old fellow.

Yet when he arrived, someone had taken care to
make absolutely sure the man would never speak again.