Pietr the Latvian (Inspector Maigret, #1)

by Georges Simenon

ICPC to PJ Paris Xvzust Krakow vimontra m ghks triv psot uv Pietr-le-Letton Bremen vs tyz btolem.

Krakow police report sighting Pietr the Latvian en route to Bremen.

ICPC,

Broadly speaking, it oversees the struggle against organized crime in Europe, with a particular responsibility for liaison between the various national police forces on the Continent.

Pietr the Latvian reported en route Amsterdam and Brussels.

Pietr the Latvian boarded Étoile du Nord, compartment G. 263, car 5, destination Paris.

Pietr the Latvian on board Étoile du Nord via Brussels 2 a.m. in compartment reported by Amsterdam.

The inspector was a broad and heavy man.

Maigret

opened onto a closet, washed his hands in an enamel basin, ran a comb through thick dark-brown hair flecked with only a few silver strands around the temple,

Pietr

The principal features were the first to emerge: the man was short, slim, young and fair-haired, with sparse blond eyebrows, greenish eyes and a long neck.

Somebody was running somewhere. Beside one of the carriages of the Étoile du Nord there was a small group waiting for something. Three of them, in railway company livery.

On the floor, in a heap, was a body, bent double in a strangely contorted posture.

first he could only see the back of the man’s neck. But when he tipped his cap off its oblique angle, he could see the man’s left ear. Maigret mumbled to himself: lobe large, max cross and dimension small max, protuberant antitragus …

he hadn’t seen the traveller in the green cloak leave the station, if he hadn’t seen him taken to a car by an interpreter from the Majestic, he could have had doubts. It was the same physiognomy. The same fair toothbrush moustache under a sharply defined nose. The same sparse blond eyebrows. The same grey-green eyes. In other words: Pietr the Latvian!

Inevitably Maigret was a hostile presence in the Majestic. He constituted a kind of foreign body that the hotel’s atmosphere could not assimilate.

But his frame was proletarian. He was a big, bony man. Iron muscles shaped his jacket sleeves and quickly wore through new trousers. He had a way of imposing himself just by standing there. His assertive presence had often irked many of his own colleagues.

It was something more than self-confidence but less than pride. He would turn up and stand like a rock with his feet wide apart. On that rock all would shatter, whether Maigret moved forward or stayed exactly where he was.

On the stroke of eight Pietr the Latvian came out of his room, looking even slimmer and smarter than before, in a classically tailored dinner jacket that must have come from Savile Row.

He was smoking again – another papirosa. He walked right up to Maigret, stopped for a moment, looked at him as if he felt like saying something, then walked on towards the lift as if lost in thought.

Inspector Maigret asked reception to show him the guest list. He wasn’t surprised to see that Pietr had signed in under the name of Oswald Oppenheim, ship-owner, from Bremen.

It was a foregone conclusion that he had a genuine passport and full identity papers in that name, just as he no doubt did in several others. It was equally obvious that he’d met the Mortimer-Levingstons previously, whether in Berlin, Warsaw, London or New York.

There was another rumour doing the rounds of European police departments: Pietr, as the ring-leader and money-launderer of one or more gangs, was said to be sitting on several million that had been split up under different names in different banks and even invested in legitimate industries.

Mortimer didn’t have the athletic look of a Yank. He was more of the Mediterranean type.

‘So? … Vanished, has he? Levingston as well! Is that right?’ ‘Now there’s no need to go overboard. Neither of them is in his room, but we’ll probably find them somewhere else in the hotel.’ ‘How many exits are there?’ ‘Three. The main entrance on the Champs-Élysées … Then there’s the entrance in the covered mall, and the service entrance on Rue de Ponthieu …’

The word crime, dreaded like the plague by hoteliers the world over from the humblest lodging-house landlord to the manager of a luxury resort, just would not pass his lips.

The look that then fell upon her was Maigret through and through! Completely calm! Completely unruffled! It was as if he’d just noticed the buzzing of a bee. As if what he had before him was something quite ordinary. She was not accustomed to being looked at in that way.

Inspector Maigret was forty-five and his junior was barely thirty years old. Even so, there was something solid and bulky about Torrence that made him an almost full-scale model of his boss.

They’d conducted many cases together without ever saying an unnecessary word.

‘So we can’t be sure that the dead man is someone other than Pietr.’ ‘But there’s no guarantee that it is him, either!’

There’s definite proof that someone was on board without a ticket.

‘For my part,’ Maigret said eventually, ‘I saw Pietr, or whoever has taken over his role, check in at Hôtel Majestic and

have dinner with the Mortimer-Levingstons, which seems to have been arranged in advance.’

The Mortimer woman is certain that her husband has been murdered.’

Somewhere near Saint-Quentin, a brief halt: a man died. In Paris, the line came to a full stop. Two men vanish from the middle of the Champs-Élysées.

he went back to the map and studied the invisible track of Pietr’s journey. It made a sweeping arc of almost 180 degrees.

the tissue was a glassine envelope, a slipcover of the kind photographers use to protect customers’ orders.

‘The photo credit is: Léon Moutet, Art Photography, Quai des Belges, Fécamp.’ Only a real expert could decipher the plate. Torrence, for instance, could only see a blur.

‘Quai des Belges?’

The Old Port of Marseille (French: Vieux-Port de Marseille, [vjøpɔʁ də maʁsɛj]) is at the end of the Canebière, the major street of Marseille. It has been the natural harbour of the city since antiquity and is now the main popular place in Marseille. It became mainly pedestrian in 2013.

‘Mademoiselle Swaan!’ the photographer exclaimed. He turned up the snapshot straight away. It was the only time he’d had a decent subject to photograph. She was a pretty woman. She looked twenty. The photo fitted the slipcover exactly.

His first name is Olaf … The herring fishermen who sometimes go as far as Norway say there are plenty of people over there who have that name … Nonetheless, people said he was really a German spy. That’s why, when he got married, his wife was kept at arm’s length. Then we discovered he really was a sailor and was first mate on a German merchantman, and that was why he didn’t show up very often … Eventually people stopped bothering about him, but we’re still wary

The furniture was brand new, but just the same as you would find in any lower-middle-class home. They were good-quality pieces, in a style that would have been called modern around 1900.

On the other hand, there was a magnificent sculpted silver samovar on a side-table. It must have been worth more than the rest of the room’s contents put together.

Now you must see … The aim was to run booze to the USA … Substantial firms were set up with American money … They have offices in France, Holland, or Germany … The truth is that my husband works for one of these companies. The Seeteufel sails what’s called Rum Alley. It doesn’t really have anything to do with Germany.’

‘Please excuse me …’ she said. ‘I can’t manage to put my hand on that photo … A house with children is always upside down …’ ‘One more question … To how many people did you give a copy of this photograph of yourself?’ Maigret showed her the archive print he’d been given by the photographer. Madame Swaan went bright red and stuttered: ‘I don’t understand …’ ‘Your husband presumably has one?’ ‘Yes … We were engaged when …’ ‘Does any other man have a print?’ She was on the verge of tears. The quiver of her lips gave away her distress. ‘No, nobody.’ ‘Thank you, madame. That will be all.’

As he was leaving a little girl slipped into the hallway. Maigret had no need to memorize her features. She was the spitting image of Pietr the Latvian!

‘...

This was no place for a detective chief inspector of the Police Judiciaire. At most it was a job for a new recruit. Between the age of twenty-two and thirty he’d stood this sort of watch a hundred times over.

the theory of the crack in the wall. Inside every wrong-doer and crook there lives a human being. In addition, of course, there is an opponent in a game, and it’s the player that the police are inclined to see. As a rule, that’s what they go after.