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he’d vanished for a few hours when Pietr was also absent?
That he’d had supper at Pickwick’s Bar and that his wife had dance...
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That a police sergeant had seen him go into a scruffy lodging house at the sign of the Roi de Sicile? It would all be torn to shreds! Apologies would have to be made and, to satisfy the Americans, there would have to be a scapegoat. Mai...
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She was moving quickly but when she got to the revolving door she couldn’t resist turning round. Maigret made a great effort to stand up so as to be certain she would see him. He was sure she had bitten her lip. Then she left even more hurriedly, waving her hands about and giving orders to her chauffeur.
The tough guys were staying behind: Pietr, who was taking ages to get dressed; Mortimer-Levingston, who had probably not lost an ounce of his aristocratic grandeur; and Pepito Moretto, the team’s hit-man.
The enemy was in their midst, in a wicker armchair, sitting quite still with his legs stretched out in the middle of the lobby as the hotel began to get busier.
The first to emerge was Pietr,
Maigret kept fairly close behind, making no effort to remain unseen.
‘What’s happened?’ ‘The Jewish woman …’ ‘She went out?’ ‘She’s here … And since you made me cross over, she can see us, right now …’ Maigret looked around. ‘Where from?’ ‘From Le Select … She’s sitting inside … Look! The curtain’s moving …’ ‘Carry on watching her …’
‘Openly?’ ‘Have a drink at the table next to hers, if you like.’ At this point in the game there was no point playing hide-and-seek.
The match was being played on a new pitch. The two sides could see each other. Pretty much all the cards were on the table now.
Ferocious will-power of the same kind could be seen in the grey-green eyes of Pietr the Latvian. But as soon as you thought you could pigeon-hole him in the category of intellectuals, you noticed other features that didn’t fit at all.
What was astounding was that, apart from a fairly striking physical resemblance, these two incarnations had absolutely nothing in common.
Fyodor Yurevich was a genuine Slavic vagrant, a sentimental and manic déclassé.
On the other hand there wasn’t a thread out of place in the character of the East European intellectual, breathing refinement from head to toe.
Pietr-Fyodor was both Pietr and Fyodor from inside.
He’d been living two quite different lives in alternation for many years, that was clear, and maybe all his life long.
He stared at Maigret, not straight on, but in the mirror at the back of the bar. That’s when the inspector noticed a quiver in Pietr’s lips and an almost imperceptible contraction of his nostrils.
Just as had happened to him in the hotel lobby, he could see one image superimposed on another: behind the current scene, he had a vision of the squalid bar in Fécamp. Pietr was going
double. Maigret could see him in his cinnamon suit and in his worn-out raincoat at the same time.
In the mirror Maigret saw now the guest of the Majestic, now the face of Anna Gorskin’s tormented lover. But the second visage didn’t emerge in full.
He was hanging on to the edge of the counter with his left hand. His body was swaying.
The waiter picked the photograph up and started wiping it clean, apologetically. Pietr was squeezing the glass in his hand. His face was rigid and his eyes were hard. Then suddenly there was an unexpected noise, a soft but sharp crack that made the barman at the cash register turn round with a start. Pietr opened his fist. Shards of broken glass tinkled on to the counter.
This encounter stopped him in his tracks. His confidence sagged: he felt unmoored, without a post to lean on.
‘Your moustache is coming unstuck’, Maigret said suddenly.
After a while he just stroked his lips with two fingers. Maigret was right, though it was hardly noticeable.
If he’d looked over his shoulder as he then sauntered towards Place de l’Opéra to have his aperitif he’d have realized that the figure behind him was made of tough, persistent
stuff. But he might also have sensed that the inspector was beginning to doubt his own judgement.
‘Did you see that?’
‘That’ was a cop trying to stop leading criminals from doing any more harm, a cop set on avenging a colleague who’d been murdered in that very same five-star hotel! ‘That’ didn’t have a tailor in London, he didn’t have time to get manicured every morning, and his wife had been cooking meals for him for three days in a row without knowing what was going on.
‘That’ was a senior detective earning 2,200 francs a month who, when he’d solved a case and put criminals behind bars, had to sit down with paper and pencil and itemize his expenses, clip his receipts and documentation to the claim, and then go and argue it out with accounts!
filled his pipe and suddenly realized with another smile that was somewhat more ironical than the first that for the last several hours he’d forgotten to have a smoke.
At a glance Maigret saw that he was not as cool as before, but he had enough self-control not to show how much that pleased him.
the fact is he was now tougher and weightier than ever. He was Maigret twice over, so to speak. Carved from a single piece of old oak, or, better still, from very dense stone.
‘Mortimer is back,’ he said.
The Latvian watched the paper burn, then slowly looked up. ‘I’m not aware …’ It did not escape Maigret’s eye that Pietr’s fists were clenched. It also did not escape him that there was a suitcase next to the bedroom door that had not been in the suite before. It was a common suitcase that cost 100 francs at most, and it clashed with the surroundings.
‘Where is Anna Gorskin?’ At last he felt he was making progress! ‘Look around …’
‘You mean she’s not in this suite … But she was here … She brought this suitcase, and a letter …’
Maigret was fully aware that this was no time for careless words. He was on the right track, but the slightest slip would give his advantage away.
Then he poured himself a tumbler and drank it straight off, looking at Maigret with the eyes of Fyodor Yurevich and a dribble of drink glinting on his chin.
I think this is who he REALLY is and Pietr is his persona as it were
Now there was just this bag of nerves tugged this way and that as if by a crazy puppeteer, with eyes like tempests set in a wan and twisted face. And he was laughing! But despite his laughter and his pointless excitement, he had his ear open and was bending over as if he expected to hear something coming up from underneath.
For the person who had just come in was Mortimer, in a fur coat, looking as hale and ruddy as a man who has just come from a gourmet dinner.
His expression altered as soon as he got into the lounge. Colour drained from his face. Maigret noticed he was asymmetrical in a way that was difficult to place but which gave him a murky look. You could sense he’d just come in from outside. There was still some cooler air in the folds of his clothes. There were two sides to the scene. Maigret couldn’t watch both simultaneously.
The man had taken too large a dose. He knew it himself, even as he desperately applied all his willpower to the task. His face was twisted. He could probably see people and things only through a distorting haze. When he let go of the table he tripped, came within a whisker of falling over but miraculously recovered his balance. ‘My dear Mor …’ he began. His eyes crossed Maigret’s and he spoke in a different voice: ‘Too bad, eh! Too …’ The door slammed. Rapid footsteps going away. Mortimer had beaten a retreat. At that point Pietr fell into an armchair.
He got to the first-floor landing just in time to bump into a woman who was running away. He smelt gunpowder. He grabbed the woman by her clothes with his left hand. With his right hand he hit her wrist hard, and a revolver fell to the floor. The gun went off, and the bullet shattered the glass pane in the lift. The woman struggled. She was exceptionally strong. Maigret had no means to restrain her other than twisting her wrist, and she fell to her knees, hissing: ‘Let go! …’ The hotel began to stir. An unaccustomed sound of excitement arose along all the corridors and filtered out all the
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Maigret decided to bend over and put handcuffs on his prisoner, who was none other than Anna Gorskin. She
The inspector didn’t need to open the door, it was swinging on its hinges. He saw a body on the floor, bleeding but still moving.
Pietr’s suite was empty!
An icy blast came from the open window. It gave on to a courtyard no wider than a chimney. Down below you could make out the dark rectangular shapes of three doors.
The doctor shook his head, and both men fell silent. The noise in the corridor was abating. The policeman was moving the insistent rubberneckers down the corridor one pace at a time.
