The Hotel Majestic (3 page)

“What's she saying?”

“She wants me to show her the body and . . .”

Maigret gently took the American girl's arm, to guide her towards the cloakroom. But he knew she would shy away from the contact. Just the kind of woman who exasperated him in American films! A terrifyingly brisk walk. All the kitchen staff were gaping at her through the glass partitions.

“Do come in,” murmured the superintendent, not without irony.

She took three steps forward, saw the body wrapped in a blanket on the floor, remained stock still and started jabbering away in English again.

“What's she saying?”

“She wants us to uncover the body . . .”

Maigret complied, without taking his eyes off her. He saw her start, then immediately recover her composure in spite of the horrifying nature of what she saw.

“Ask her if she recognizes Mrs. Clark . . .”

A shrug. A particularly disagreeable way of tapping her high heel on the floor.

“What's she saying?”

“That you know as well as she does.”

“In that case, please ask her to go up to your office and tell her that I have a few questions to ask her.”

The manager translated. Maigret took the opportunity of covering the dead woman's face again.

“What's she saying?”

“She says ‘no.'”

“Really? Kindly inform her of my position as head of the Special Squad of the Judicial Police . . .”

Ellen, who was looking straight at him, spoke without waiting for this to be translated. And Maigret repeated his interminable: “What's she saying?”

“
What's she saying?
” she repeated, imitating him, overcome by unjustifiable irritation.

And she spoke in English again, as if to herself.

“Translate what she's saying for me, will you?”

“She says that . . . that she knows perfectly well you're from the police . . . that . . .”

“Don't be afraid!”

“That one only has to see you with your hat on and your pipe in your mouth . . . I'm so sorry . . . You wanted me to tell you . . . She says she won't go up to my office and that she won't answer your questions . . .”

“Why not?”

“I'll ask her . . .”

Ellen Darroman, who was lighting a cigarette, listened to the manager's question, shrugged again and snapped a few words.

“She says she's not under any obligation to answer and that she will only obey an official summons . . .”

At which the girl threw a last look at Maigret, turned on her heel and walked, with the same decisive air, towards the staircase.

The manager turned somewhat anxiously towards the superintendent, and was amazed to see that he was smiling.

 

 

He had had to take off his overcoat, because of the heat in the basement, but he hadn't abandoned his bowler or his pipe. Thus accoutred, he wandered peacefully along the corridors, with his hands behind his back, stopping from time to time by one of the glass partitions, rather as if he were inspecting an aquarium.

The huge basement, with its electric lights burning all day long, did in fact strike him as being very like an oceanographical museum. In each glass cage there were creatures, varying in number, darting to and fro. You could see them constantly appearing and disappearing, heavily laden, carrying saucepans or piles of plates, setting service-lifts or goods-lifts in motion, forever using the little instruments which were the telephones.

“What would someone from another planet make of it all? . . .”

The visit from the DPP had only lasted a few minutes, and the examining magistrate had given Maigret a free hand as usual. The latter had made several telephone calls from Jean Ramuel's bookkeeper's cage.

Ramuel's nose was set so crookedly, that one always seemed to be seeing him in profile. And he looked as though he was suffering from a liver complaint. When his lunch was brought to him on a tray, he took a sachet of white powder from his waistcoat pocket and dissolved it in a glass of water.

Between one and three o'clock, the pace was at its most hectic, everything happening so fast that it was like seeing a film run off in fast motion.

“Excuse me . . . Sorry . . .”

People were constantly bumping into the superintendent, who continued his walk unperturbed, stopping and starting, asking a question now and then.

How many people had he talked to? At least twenty, he reckoned. The head chef had explained to him how the kitchens were run. Jean Ramuel had told him what the different coloured slips of paper meant.

And he had watched—still through the glass partitions—the guests' servants having their lunch. Gertrud Borms, the Clarks' nanny, had come down. A large, hard-faced woman.

“Does she speak French?”

“Not a word . . .”

She had eaten heartily, chatting to a liveried chauffeur who sat opposite her.

But what amazed him most of all was the sight of Prosper Donge, all this while, in his still-room. He looked exactly like a large goldfish in its bowl. His hair was a fiery red. He had the almost brick-red complexion redheads sometimes have, and his lips were thick and fish-like.

And he looked exactly like a fish when he came to press his face up against the glass, with his great, round, bewildered eyes, probably worried because the superintendent hadn't spoken to him yet.

Maigret had questioned everyone. But he had hardly seemed to notice Prosper Donge's presence, although it was he who had discovered the body, and he was therefore the principal witness.

Donge, too, had his lunch, on a little table in his still-room, while his three women bustled round him. A bell would ring about once a minute to indicate that the service-lift was coming down. It arrived at a sort of hatch. Donge seized the slip of paper on it, and replaced it with the order on a tray, and the lift went up again to one of the upper floors.

All these seemingly complicated operations were in fact quite simple. The large dining-room of the Majestic, where two or three hundred people would then be having lunch, was immediately over the kitchens, so most of the service-lifts went there. Each time one of them came down again, the sound of music was wafted down with it.

Some of the guests had their meals in their rooms, however, and there was a waiter on each floor. There was also a grill-room on the same floor as the basement, where there was dancing in the afternoons from about five o'clock.

The men from the Forensic Laboratory had come for the body, and two specialists from the Criminal Records Office had spent half an hour working on locker 89 with cameras and powerful lights, looking for fingerprints.

None of this seemed to interest Maigret. They would be sure to inform him of the result in due course.

Looking at him, you would have thought he was making an amateurish study of how a grand hotel functions. He went up the narrow staircase, opened a door, then immediately closed it again, because it led to the large dining-room, which was filled with the sound of clinking cutlery, music and conversation.

He went up to the next floor. A corridor, with doors numbered to infinity and a red carpet stretching into the distance.

It was clear that any of the guests could open the door and make their way to the basement. It was the same as with the entrance in the Rue de Ponthieu. Two car attendants, a porter, and commissionaires guarded the revolving door leading from the Champs-Élysées, but any stray passer-by could get into the Majestic by using the staff entrance and no one would probably have noticed he was there.

It is the same with most theatres. They are rigidly guarded at the front, but wide open on the stage-door side.

From time to time people went into the cloakroom in their working clothes. Shortly afterwards they could be seen leaving, smartly dressed, in their hats and coats.

They were going off duty. The head chef went to the back room for a nap, which he did every day between the lunch and dinner shifts.

Soon after four there was a loud burst of music from near at hand in the grill-room, and the dancing began. Prosper Donge, looking exhausted, filled rows of minute teapots, and microscopic milk jugs, and then came anxiously up to the glass partition once more, casting nervous glances in Maigret's direction.

At five o'clock his three women went off duty and were replaced by two others. At six he took a wad of bills and a sheet of paper, which was obviously his accounts for the day, to Jean Ramuel. Then he in turn went into the cloakroom, came out in his street clothes and fetched his bicycle, the puncture having been repaired by one of the bellboys.

Outside it was now dark. The Rue de Ponthieu was congested. Prosper Donge made for the Champs-Élysées, weaving his way between taxis and buses. When he was almost at the Étoile, he suddenly did an about-turn, bicycled back to the Rue de Ponthieu, and went into a radio shop, where he handed over three hundred odd francs to the cashier as one of the monthly instalments which he had contracted to pay.

Back to the Champs-Élysées. Then on to the regal calm of the Avenue Foch, with only the occasional car gliding silently past. He pedalled slowly, with the air of one who has a long way to go yet—an honest citizen pedalling along the same route at the same time every day.

A voice from behind, speaking quite close to him: “I hope you don't mind, Monsieur Donge, if I go the rest of the way with you?”

He braked so violently that he skidded and almost collided with Maigret on his bicycle. For it was Maigret who was bicycling along beside him, on a bike which was too small for him, which he had borrowed from a bellboy at the Majestic.

“I can't think,” Maigret continued, “why everyone who lives in the suburbs doesn't go by bicycle. It's so much more healthy and agreeable than going by bus or train!”

They were entering the Bois de Boulogne. Soon they saw the shimmer of street-lights reflected in the lake.

“You were so busy all day that I didn't like to disturb you in your work . . .”

And Maigret, too, was pedalling along with the regular rhythm of someone who is used to bicycling. Now and then there was the click of a gear.

“Do you know what Jean Ramuel did before he came to the Majestic?”

“He was a bank accountant . . . The Atoum Bank, in the Rue Caumartin . . .”

“Hmm! . . . The Atoum Bank . . . Doesn't sound too good to me . . . Don't you think he has rather a shifty look about him?”

“He's not very well . . .” Prosper Donge mumbled.

“Look out . . . You were nearly on the pavement . . . There's something else I'd like to ask you, if you won't think it impertinent . . . You're the still-room chef . . . Well, I was wondering what made you take up that profession . . . I mean . . . I feel it isn't a vocation, that one doesn't suddenly say to oneself at fifteen or sixteen: ‘I'm going to be a still-room chef . . .'

“Look out . . . If you swerve like that you'll get mown down by a car . . . You were saying? . . .”

Donge explained, in a dejected voice, that he had been a foster child, and that until he was fifteen he had lived on a farm near Vitry-le-François. Then he had gone to work in a café in the town, first as an errand-boy and then as a waiter.

“After doing my military service, I wasn't very fit, and I wanted to live in the South of France . . . I was a waiter in Marseilles and Cannes. Then they decided, at the Miramar, that I didn't look right to wait at table . . . I looked ‘awkward, ' was the word the manager used . . . I was put in the still-room . . . I was there for years and then I took the job of still-room chef at the Majestic.”

They were crossing the Pont de Saint-Cloud. After turning down two or three narrow streets they reached the bottom of a fairly steep incline, and Prosper Donge got off his bike.

“Are you coming any farther?” he asked.

“If you don't mind. After spending a day in the hotel basement, I can appreciate even more your desire to live in the country . . . Do you do any gardening?”

“A little . . .”

“Flowers?”

“Flowers and vegetables . . .”

Now they were going up a badly surfaced, badly lit street, pushing their bicycles; their breath came more quickly, and they didn't talk much.

“Do you know what I discovered while I was nosing about in the basement and talking to everyone I could see? That three people, at least, slept in the hotel basement last night. First, Jean Ramuel . . . It appears . . . it's rather amusing . . . it appears that he has an impossibly difficult mistress and that she periodically shuts him out of the house . . . For the last three or four days she's done it again and he's been sleeping at the Majestic . . . Does the manager know?”

“It's not officially allowed, but he turns a blind eye . . .”

“The professional dancing-partner slept there too . . . the one you call Zebio . . . A strange bloke, isn't he? To look at, he seems too good to be true . . . He's called Eusebio Fualdès on the studio portraits in the grill-room . . . Then, when you read his identity papers you discover that he was born in Lille, in spite of his dark skin, and that his real name is Edgar Fagonet . . . There was a dance, yesterday evening, in honour of a filmstar . . . He was there until half past three in the morning . . . It seems that he's so poor that he decided to sleep at the hotel rather than get a taxi . . .”

Prosper Donge had stopped, near a lamppost, and stood there, his face scarlet, his expression anxious.

“What are you doing?” Maigret asked.

“I'm there . . . I . . .”

Light filtered under the door of a little detached house of millstone grit.