The Two-Penny Bar (13 page)

Then the luck came into it. The police had searched all the inns and kept watch on the streets without success. They had even questioned a hundred or so people in the town, but had drawn a blank.

Then, on this same day, a policeman named Piquart came home for lunch as usual. His wife was feeding the baby, so she said to him:

‘Could you nip down to the grocer's for some onions? I forgot to buy them earlier.'

A small-town grocer's shop on the market square. There were four or five shops in total. The policeman, who didn't much like these errands, stood by the door, looking uninterested, while the grocer served an old woman known in
the town as old Mathilde. He overheard the grocer say to her:

‘You're pushing the boat out. Twenty-two francs' worth of ham! Are you going to eat that all by yourself?'

Automatically, Piquart looked at the old woman, who was obviously very poor. And as the ham was being sliced, his brain began to whirr. Even at his house, where there were three of them, they never bought twenty-two francs' worth of ham at
one go.

He followed the woman when she left the shop. She lived in a little house on the Bellancourt road, with hens pecking round in the small garden out the front. He let her go inside, then he knocked and asked to be let in in the name of the law.

Madame Basso was working at the kitchen stove, an apron tied round her waist. In the corner, sitting on a rush chair, Basso was reading the newspaper that the old woman had just brought him. The child was sitting on the floor, playing with a
puppy.

The police had phoned Maigret's apartment in Boulevard Richard-Lenoir, then a few other places where he might have been found. They hadn't thought to try Basso's offices on the Quai d'Austerlitz.

For that is where he had gone after he had left James. He was in good humour. With his pipe in his mouth and his hands in his pockets he chatted and joked with the firm's employees, who, in the absence of instructions to the contrary, had
carried on with business as usual. The barges were loaded and unloaded every day as normal.

The offices weren't especially up-to-date. But they weren't old-fashioned either. A quick look around was enough to get a sense of how the place was run.

The boss didn't have his own office, but had a desk in the corner, next to the window.
The chief accountant sat opposite him, and his secretary was at a desk nearby.

Obviously, this wasn't a hierarchical place. People seemed free to chat, and many of them worked with a pipe or a cigarette in their mouth.

‘An address book?' the accountant responded to the inspector's request. ‘Yes, of course we have one, but it only contains the addresses of our customers in alphabetical order. If you wish to see it …'

Maigret had a quick look at the letter U, but, as he had expected, the name of Ulrich wasn't there.

‘Are you sure Monsieur Basso doesn't have a private address book? … Hold on, who was working here when his son was born?'

‘I was,' the secretary replied, a little reluctantly, for she was a thirty-five-year-old who wanted to pass herself off as twenty-five.

‘Good. Monsieur Basso must have sent out announcements.'

‘He did. I took care of that.'

‘Then he must have given you a list of his friends' names.'

‘Yes, that's right, he gave me a little notebook! I filed it away with his personal items.'

‘Where is the file?'

She hesitated, looked to her colleagues for guidance. The chief accountant shrugged as if to say: ‘I don't see that we have any choice.'

‘It's up at the house,' she said. ‘Would you care to follow me?'

They walked across the yard. On the ground floor of the house, there was a simply furnished study that looked as if it was never used. In fact, it was known as the library.

The library of a family for whom reading came well down the list of distractions. A family library, used as the dumping-ground for a whole host of disparate objects.

For example, on the lower shelves were the prizes Basso had won at school. Then some bound volumes of
Magazine des Familles
dating back fifty years.

Some books for young girls that Madame Basso must have brought with her when she got married. Then a number of serious novels bought on the strength of favourable newspaper reviews.

Finally some brand-new picture books belonging to the child and some toys stored on the remaining empty shelves.

The secretary opened the drawers of the desk, and Maigret noticed a fat yellow envelope that was sealed.

‘What's that?'

‘Monsieur's letters to madame when they were engaged.'

‘Have you found the notebook?'

She discovered it at the bottom of a drawer that contained a dozen or so old pipes. It looked at least fifteen years old. It was in Basso's hand, though his writing had changed over time, and the ink had faded.

It was like the lines of seaweed on a beach, showing
which tide had washed them up by how dried out they were.

The addresses were fifteen years old, addresses of friends now no doubt forgotten. A few had been crossed out, perhaps because of some falling out, or because the person in question had died.

There were a number of addresses of women, such as:

Lola, Bar des Églantiers, 18, Rue Montaigne.

But Lola had been erased from Basso's life by a blue pencil.

‘Have you found what you're looking for?' the secretary asked.

He had indeed! A name the coal merchant was ashamed of, for he hadn't written it out in full:

Ul. 13 bis, Rue des Blancs-Manteaux.

The ink and the handwriting suggested this was an old entry. It was one of those addresses with a blue line through it, though it was still legible underneath.

‘Can you tell me approximately when these words were written?'

The secretary bent over to take a closer look.

‘It was when Monsieur Basso was a young man, and his father was still alive.'

‘How can you tell?'

‘Because it is written in the same ink as the woman's
address on the other page. He once told me he had a fling with her in his younger days.'

Maigret closed the notebook and slipped it into his pocket, despite the disapproving look he received from the secretary.

‘Do you think he will come back?' she asked, after a slight hesitation.

The inspector gave a non-committal shrug.

When he got back to the Quai des Orfèvres, Jean, the office clerk, ran up to meet him.

‘We've been looking for you for the last two hours. They've found the Bassos.'

‘Ah!'

He gave a mighty sigh, which almost sounded like a sigh of regret.

‘Has Lucas phoned?'

‘He calls in every three or four hours. Your man is still at the Salvation Army hostel. They wanted to turf him out after they had fed him, but he offered to sweep up around the place.'

‘Is Janvier here?'

‘I believe he's just got back.'

Maigret went to Janvier's office.

‘I've got just the sort of awkward job you like, my friend. I want you to track down a certain Lola, who gave her postal address as the Bar des Églantiers, Rue Montaigne, about ten to fifteen years ago.'

‘And since then?'

‘Who knows? She could have died in hospital. She could have married an English lord … Get cracking.'

On the train journey to La Ferté-Allais he examined the address book, smiling every now and again at certain entries that seemed so evocative of how it felt to be young, free and single.

A police lieutenant was waiting for him at the station. He drove the inspector to old Mathilde's house, where they found Piquart gravely standing guard in the small front garden.

‘We've made sure that there is no way of escape at the back,' the lieutenant explained. ‘It's just so small inside that my officer has to stand out the front. Do you want me to come in with you?'

‘Perhaps it would be better if you stayed out here.'

Maigret knocked at the door, which opened immediately. It was late. It was still light outside, but the window was so narrow that inside the house he could see little more than moving shadows.

Basso was straddling a chair in the pose of a man who had been waiting for a long time. He got to his feet. His wife and child must have been in the adjoining room.

‘Could we have some light?' Maigret asked the old woman.

‘I'll have to see if there's any oil in the lamp,' she replied tartly.

It turned out that there was. The glass was replaced with a clink, the wick began first to smoke, then to burn with a yellow flame that gradually filled the corners of the room with light. It was quite hot inside the house. A smell of the
countryside, of poverty.

‘Do sit down,' Maigret told Basso. ‘If you wouldn't mind leaving us alone, madame.'

‘What about my soup?'

‘Off you go. I'll keep an eye on it.'

She went away grumbling to herself and shut the door behind her. In the adjoining room she could be heard speaking in a low voice.

‘Are there just the two rooms?' the inspector asked.

‘Yes. The room at the back is the bedroom.'

‘Is that where the three of you have been sleeping?'

‘The two women and my son. I've been sleeping in here on a straw bale.'

There were bits of straw still lodged in the cracks between the uneven floor tiles. Basso was calm, but it was the sort of calm that follows on from several days of fever. It was as if he were somehow relieved to be arrested. Indeed, the first
thing he said was:

‘I was going to turn myself in.'

He was probably expecting Maigret to be surprised by this, but the latter showed no reaction. The inspector didn't even say a word. He merely looked at Basso from head to toe.

‘Isn't that one of James's suits?'

It was a grey suit, too tight. Basso had broad shoulders and was as sturdily built as Maigret. Nothing can diminish a man in the prime of his life as much as a set of ill-fitting clothes.

‘Obviously you know already …'

‘I know lots of things besides … But do you think we should take this soup off the stove?'

The pan was belching out steam, and the lid was rattling under the pressure. Maigret removed the pan from the heat, and his face was momentarily lit up by the red flames.

‘You knew old Mathilde before?'

‘I wanted to talk to you about her. I don't want her to get into trouble because of me. She used to be my parents' servant. She's known me since I was a boy. When I came here looking for a place to hide, she couldn't
turn me away.'

‘Of course not. It's just a shame she made the mistake of buying twenty-two francs' worth of ham at one go.'

Basso had lost a lot of weight. He hadn't shaved for four or five days. In all, he looked a bit of a mess.

‘I also trust that my wife has nothing to answer for …' he sighed.

He stood up, looking stiff and awkward, like someone trying to find the right way to broach a weighty topic.

‘I was wrong to run away, to stay in hiding for so long. But maybe that shows that I am not a real criminal. Do you understand? I lost my head. I saw my life in ruins because of this stupid affair. I thought I would go abroad, have my wife
and child come out to join me and try to start a new life.'

‘And you got James to bring your wife here, to withdraw 300,000 francs from the bank and to bring you a change of clothes.'

‘Yes.'

‘Only, you realized that you were being pursued.'

‘Old Mathilde told me there were policemen at every crossroads.'

There was still some noise coming from next door. The child must have been moving about. Madame Basso was probably listening at the door because every now and again they heard her say ‘Shush!' to the child.

‘Today I came to the only possible conclusion: I had to give myself up. But fate decreed otherwise, and the policeman turned up …'

‘Did you kill Feinstein?'

Basso looked Maigret straight in the eye.

‘I did,' he said quietly. ‘It would be mad to deny it, wouldn't it? But I swear on my son's life that I will tell you the whole truth.'

‘Just a moment.'

Maigret now got to his feet. And they stood there, both more or less the same build, under the low ceiling, in a room that was too small for them.

‘Did you love Mado?'

Basso's lip curled in bitterness.

‘You're a man, you should understand. I've known her for six or seven years, maybe more. I'd never given her a second glance before. Then one day, about a year ago, I don't know what happened. It was a party, like
the one you came to. We were drinking, dancing … I ended up kissing her … then we slipped off to the bottom of the garden.'

‘And then?'

He gave a tired shrug.

‘She took it all seriously. She swore she'd always been in love with me, that she couldn't live without me. I'm no saint. I admit that I started it. But I didn't want to get that involved, I didn't want to
jeopardize my marriage.'

‘So you've been seeing Madame Feinstein in Paris two or three times a week for the last year …'

‘And she's been phoning me every day! I've pleaded with her to be more careful, but it's no use. She's always come up with some ridiculous excuse. I was sure we'd be discovered any day. You can't imagine
what that was like … If only she wasn't so sincere. But no! I think she really did love me.'

‘And Feinstein?'

Basso looked up suddenly.

‘Oh yes,' he groaned. ‘That's why I couldn't bear the thought of having to defend myself in court. There are limits in these compromising situations. There's only so much the public will swallow. Can you see
me, Mado's lover, standing up in court, accusing her husband of …'