Pietr the Latvian (Inspector Maigret, #1)

by Georges Simenon

Behind Maigret’s desk there was a huge map pinned to the wall. The inspector was a broad and heavy man. He stood staring at the map with his hands in his pockets and his pipe sticking out the side of his mouth.

There were a few drops of blood on the linoleum. Maigret looked around. The railway staff were standing on the platform or on the running board. The stationmaster was still talking. So Maigret clenched his pipe between his teeth even harder and turned the man’s head over. If 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.

The woman answered: ‘Since you’re from the police, I suppose we’d better tell you everything. Anyway you’d find it all out in the end, but … They’re only rumours, but …

Grumpy as he was, Maigret filled his wet pipe with tobacco all the same, and wedged himself as best he could into a cranny in the wall … 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. He had a terrible time getting a match to light. The emery board on the side of the box was coming off in strips. If one of the sticks hadn’t finally ignited, maybe even Maigret would have given up and gone home.

It was a ridiculous situation. The inspector knew there wasn’t one chance in ten that his surveillance would be of any use.

The man in the trenchcoat looked like the Latvian and yet did not resemble him!