The Grand Banks Café (12 page)

No. He did none of those things. What he
did was quite different and a hundred times more unnerving. It was not just his hand
that was closing, but his whole being. He was shrivelling, shrinking into his
shell.

His eyes steadily turned as grey as his
face.

He did not move. Was he still breathing?
Not a tremor. Not a twitch. But his stillness, which grew more and more complete,
was mesmerizing.

‘… puts me in mind with another of my gentleman
friends, married he was, with three kids …'

Marie Léonnec, on the other hand, was
breathing quickly. She gulped down her chocolate to hide her confusion.

‘… now he was the most passionate
man on the planet. Sometimes, I refused to let him in and he'd stop outside on
the landing and sob, until the neighbours worked up a right old head of steam!
“Adèle my sweety pie, my pet, my own …” All the usual lovey-dovey stuff.
Anyway, one Sunday I met him out walking with his wife and kiddies. I heard his wife
ask him:

‘“Who's that
woman?”

‘And all pompous, he says to
her:

‘“Obviously a floozie. You
can tell from the ridiculous way she's dressed.”'

And she laughed, playing to the crowd.
She looked at the faces around her to see what effect her behaviour was having.

‘Some people are that slow on the
uptake you can't get a rise out of them.'

Again Gaston Buzier said something to
her quietly in an attempt to shut her up.

‘What's the matter? Not
turning chicken are you? I pay for my drinks, don't I? I'm not doing
anybody any harm! So nobody's got any right to tell me what to do … Waiter,
where are those peanuts? And bring another kümmel!'

‘Maybe we should leave,'
said Madame Maigret.

It was too late. Adèle was on the
rampage. It was clear
that if they tried
to leave, she would do anything to cause a scene, whatever the cost.

Marie Léonnec was staring at the table.
Her ears were red, her eyes unnaturally bright, and her mouth hung open in
distress.

Le Clinche had shut his eyes. And he
went on sitting there, unseeing, with a fixed expression on his face. His hand still
lay lifelessly on the table.

Maigret had never had an opportunity
like this to scrutinize him. His face was both very young and very old, as is often
the case with adolescents who have had difficult childhoods.

Le Clinche was tall, taller than
average, but his shoulders were not yet those of a man.

His skin, which he had not looked after,
was dotted with freckles. He had not shaved that morning, and there were faint blond
shadows around his chin and on his cheeks.

He was not handsome. He could not have
laughed very often in his life. On the contrary, he had burned large quantities of
midnight oil, reading too much, writing too much, in unheated rooms, in his
ocean-tossed cabin, by the light of dim lamps.

‘I'll tell you what really
makes me sick. It's seeing people putting on airs who're really no
better than us.'

Adèle was losing patience. She was ready
to try anything to get what she wanted.

‘All these proper young ladies,
for instance. They pretend to be lily-white hens but they'll run after a man
the way no self-respecting trollop would dare to.'

The hotel owner stood by the entrance,
surveying his
guests as if trying to
decide whether or not he should intervene.

Maigret now had eyes only for Le
Clinche, in close-up. His head had dropped a little. His eyes had not opened.

But tears squeezed out one by one from
under his clamped eyelids, oozed between the eyelashes, hesitated and then snaked
down his cheeks.

It wasn't the first time the
inspector had seen a man cry. But it was the first time he had been so affected by
the sight. Perhaps it was the silence, the stillness of his whole body.

The only signs of life it gave were
those rolling, liquid pearls. The rest was dead.

Marie Léonnec had seen nothing of all
this. Adèle was still talking.

Then, a split second later, Maigret
knew
. The hand which lay on the table had just imperceptibly opened.
The other was out of sight, in a pocket.

The lids rose no more than a millimetre.
It was enough to allow an eye-glance to filter through. That glance settled on
Marie.

As the inspector was getting to his
feet, there was a gunshot. Everyone reacted in a confused pandemonium of screams and
overturned chairs.

At first, Le Clinche did not move. Then
he started to lean imperceptibly to his left. His mouth opened, and from it came a
faint groan.

Marie Léonnec, who had difficulty
understanding what had happened, since no one had seen a gun, flung herself
on him, grabbed him by the knees and his
right hand and turned in panic:

‘Inspector! … What …?'

Only Maigret had worked out what had
happened. Le Clinche had had a revolver in his pocket, a weapon he had found God
knows where, for he hadn't had one that morning when he was released from his
cell. And he'd fired from his pocket. He'd been gripping the butt all
the interminable time Adèle had been talking, while he kept his eyes shut and waited
and maybe hesitated.

The bullet had caught him in the abdomen
or the side. His jacket was scorched, cut to ribbons at hip level.

‘Get a doctor! Ring for the
police!' someone somewhere was shouting.

A doctor appeared. He was wearing
swimming trunks. He'd been on the beach hardly a hundred metres from the
hotel.

Hands had reached out and held Le
Clinche up just as he began to fall. He was carried into the hotel dining room.
Marie, utterly distraught, followed the stretcher inside.

Maigret had not had time to worry about
Adèle or her boyfriend. As he entered the bar, he suddenly saw her. She looked
deathly pale and was emptying a large glass, which rattled against her teeth.

She had helped herself. The bottle was
still in her hand. She filled the glass a second time.

The inspector paid her no further
attention, but retained the image of that white face above the pink blouse and
particularly the sound of her teeth chattering against the glass.

He could not see Gaston Buzier anywhere. The dining-room
door was about to be closed.

‘Move along, please,' the
hotel-owner was telling guests. ‘Keep calm! The doctor has asked us to keep
the noise down.'

Maigret pushed the door open. He found
the doctor kneeling and Madame Maigret restraining the frantic Marie, who was trying
desperately to rush to the wounded man's side.

‘Police!' the inspector
muttered to the doctor.

‘Can't you get those women
out of here? I'm going to have to undress him and …'

‘Right.'

‘I'll need a couple of men
to help me. I assume someone has already phoned for an ambulance?'

He was still wearing his trunks.

‘Is it serious?'

‘I can't tell you anything
until I've probed the wound. You do of course understand …'

Yes! Maigret understood all too well
when he saw the appalling, lacerated mess, a coalescence of flesh and fabric.

The tables had been laid for dinner.
Madame Maigret took Marie Léonnec outside. A young man in white trousers asked
shyly:

‘If you'll allow me, I could
help … I'm studying pharmacy.'

A burst of fierce red sunlight slanted
through a window and was so blindingly bright that Maigret closed the Venetian
blind.

‘Will you take his
legs?'

He recalled the words he had said to his wife that
afternoon as he lounged in his folding chair watching the gangling figure move
across the beach with the smaller and livelier outline of Marie Léonnec at his
side:

‘Easy meat.'

Captain Fallut had died as soon as he
had docked. Pierre Le Clinche had fought long and hard, perhaps had even still been
fighting as he sat eyes closed, one hand on the table, the other in his pocket,
while Adèle went on talking, endlessly talking and playing to the gallery.

It was a little before midnight when
Maigret left the hospital. He had waited to see the stretcher being wheeled out of
the operating theatre. On it lay the prone figure of a tall man swathed in
white.

The surgeon was washing his hands. A
nurse was putting the instruments away.

‘We'll do our best to save
him,' he said in reply to the inspector. ‘His intestine is perforated in
seven places. You could say it's a very, very nasty wound. But we've
tidied him up.'

He gestured to receptacles full of
blood, cotton-wool and disinfectant.

‘Believe me, it took a lot of
damned hard work!'

They were all in high good humour,
surgeons, assistant-surgeons and theatre nurses. They had been brought a patient as
near to death's door as he could be, bloodstained, abdomen not only gaping but
scorched too, with scraps of clothing embedded in his flesh.

And now an ultra-clean body had just
been carried out on a trolley. And the abdomen had been carefully stitched up.

The rest would be for later. Maybe Le
Clinche would regain consciousness, maybe not. The hospital did not even try to find
out who he was.

‘Does he really have a chance of pulling
through?'

‘Why not? We used to see worse
than that during the War.'

Maigret had phoned the Hôtel de la Plage
at once, to set Marie Léonnec's mind at rest. Now he set out to walk back by
himself. The doors of the hospital closed behind him with the smooth sound of
well-oiled hinges. It was dark. The street of small middle-class houses was
deserted.

He had only gone a few metres when a
figure stepped away from the wall and the light of a street lamp illuminated the
face of Adèle. In a mean voice she asked:

‘Is he dead?'

She must have been waiting for hours.
Her features were drawn, and the kiss-curls at her temples had lost their shape.

‘Not yet,' replied Maigret
in the same tone of voice.

‘Will he die?'

‘Maybe, maybe not.'

‘Do you think I did it on
purpose?'

‘I don't think
anything.'

‘Because it's not
true!'

The inspector continued on his way. She
followed him and to do so she had to walk very quickly.

‘Basically, it was his own fault,
you must see that.'

Maigret pretended he wasn't even
listening. But she was stubborn and persisted:

‘You know very well what I mean.
On board he nearly got to the point of asking me to marry him. Then once we'd
docked …'

She would not give up. She seemed driven by an
overmastering need to talk.

‘If you think I'm a bad
woman, it's because you don't know me. Only, there are times … Look,
inspector, you've got to tell me the truth. I know what a bullet can do,
especially in the belly from point-blank range. They performed a laparotomy on him,
right?'

She gave the impression that she was no
stranger to hospitals, that she had heard how doctors talked and knew people
who'd been shot more than once.

‘Was the operation a success? … I
believe it depends on what the patient has been eating before …'

Her distress was not acute. More a raw,
stubborn refusal to take no for an answer.

‘Aren't you going to say?
But there, you know, don't you, why I sounded off like that this afternoon.
Gaston is a cheap crook. I never loved him. But the other one …'

‘He may live,' said Maigret
carefully, looking the girl straight in the eyes. ‘But if what happened on the
Océan
is not cleared up, it won't do him much good.'

He paused, expecting her to say
something, to have a reaction. She dropped her eyes.

‘Of course, you think that I know
everything … From the moment both men were my lovers … But I swear …! No, you
don't know what sort of man Captain Fallut was, so you'll never
understand … He was in love with me, it's true. He used to come to Le Havre to
see me. And falling, I mean really falling, for a woman at his age turned his brain
… But that did not stop him being pernickety about everything, very controlled, very
faddy about wanting
everything just so …
I still can't work out why he ever agreed to let me hide on board … But what I
do know is the minute we were out on the open sea he regretted it and because he
regretted it he began to hate me … His character changed just like that.'

‘But the wireless operator
hadn't spotted you yet?'

‘No. That didn't happen
until the fourth night, like I told you …'

‘Are you quite sure that Fallut
was already in a strange mood before then?'