Chapter Ten

THEY SAT ON FOR ANOTHER HOUR IN THE ROOM, WHICH,

like the office on the Quai des Orfèvres, filled, little by little
with the smoke of pipes and cigarettes.
“I apologize,” Little John had begun by saying, "for the
way my son and I have tried to put you off.”
He, too, was tired, but a great release, an infinite, almost
physical relief could be sensed in him.
For the first time Maigret saw him other than tense, with-
drawn, checking with painful energy his impulse to lash
out.
"I've been holding out against them for six months now,
giving ground only by inches. There are four, two of them
Sicilians.”
"That part of the affair is not my business," Maigret
declared.
“I know. Yesterday, when you came to the hotel, I nearly
spoke to you and Jos stopped me.”
His face hardened, his eyes grew more inhuman than ever
--but now Maigret knew what anguish gave them that ter-
rible coldness.
"Can you imagine,” he said in a low voice, "what it is
to have a son whose mother you have killed and to love her
still?”
MacGill had discreetly gone to sit in the corner arm-
chair, the one Parson had occupied, as far away from the
two men as possible.
“I won't speak to you of what happened then: I'm not
seeking excuses for myself. I don't want any. Do you under-
stand? I am not Joseph Daumale. It's he I should have
killed. But you must know.”
"I do know."
“That I loved, that I love still as I think no man has ever
loved. Confronted with total collapse, No, it's no
use.
And Maigret repeated gravely:
"It's no use."
spector, that you believe me?",
scandal."
99
mankind would have made me pay. A little while ago you
stopped Daumale from going on to the end. I think, In-
“I believe I have paid more dearly than the justice of
And Maigret nodded twice
in an affirmative gesture.
"I wanted to go with her. Then I decided to give myself
up. He prevented me, for fear of being involved in a
"I understood that."
"He was the one who went to get the wicker trunk in his
room. He suggested we throw it in the river. I couldn't.
There is one thing you cannot have guessed. Angelino had
come. He had seen. He knew. He might denounce me.
Joseph wanted us to go away immediately. Well! For two
days ..."
"Yes. You kept her."
"And Angelino didn't talk. And Joseph was nearly out of
his mind with fear. And I was in such a state that I en-
dured his being there, and gave him the last money I had to
do what had to be done.
"He bought a secondhand truck. We pretended to be
moving and we loaded everything we owned
"We went out into the countryside, about fifty miles
away, and there in a woods near the river, I—"
"Father, don't," begged MacGill's voice.
“That's all. I say that I paid, paid in every way. Even
with doubt. And that was the most frightful. For months I
continued to doubt, saying to myself that the child was per-
haps not mine, that Jessie perhaps had lied to me.
"I put him in the care of a decent woman I knew and I
did not want to see him ... Even later, I believed I had no
right to see him ... One hasn't the right to see the son of—”
"Could I tell you all this when Jean brought you to New
York?
"He is my son, too.
“But he is not the son of Jessie.
"I confess, Inspector, and Jos knows it, that after a few
years I hoped I might become again a man like any other,
and no longer a kind of automaton.
"I married. without love the way one takes a
medicine ... I had a child... and I was never able to live
with the mother. She's still alive. It was she who asked for
a divorce. She's living somewhere in South America, where
she has made a new life for herself.
“You know that Jos disappeared, when he was about twenty. He was running around in
Montreal, with a gang
which was rather like the one Parson was mixed up with.
"Old Mrs. MacGill died. I lost track of Jos and I never
suspected he was living a half block away from me, on
Broadway, among the people you know.
"My other son, Jean, as he admitted to me, showed you
the letters I used to write him and you must have been
surprised.
"It was, you see, because I thought only of the other one,
of Jessie's son.
"I forced myself to love Jean . . . I did it with a kind of
rage . . . I wanted at all costs to give him an affection that
in my heart I devoted to another.
"And one day, about six months ago, I saw that boy turn
up."
What infinite tenderness in that word "boy,” in that ges-
ture toward Jos MacGill!
"He had just learned, through Parson and the others, the
truth. I remember his first words when we met face to face:
"Sir, you are my father..."
And MacGill, at that, pleadingly:
"Dad, don't!”
"All right, Jos. I'm only saying what must be said. Since
then, we've lived together, we've worked together to save
what can be saved, and that explains the transfer of funds
that Monsieur d'Hoquélus spoke to you about ... because
I felt the catastrophe to be inevitable sooner or later. Our
enemies, who had been Jos's friends, were quite heavy-
handed and, when you arrived, one of them, Bill, staged an
act to put you off.
"You thought Bill was working for us, when it was he
who was ordering us about. They couldn't persuade you to
leave ...
"They killed Angelino on account of you, because they
felt you were on the right track and they didn't want to be
deprived of their best business.
"I'm worth three million dollars, Mr. Maigret . . . In
six months, I've paid off almost half a million, but it's the
whole of it they want."
"Go explain that to the police.”
Why did Maigret think just then of his sad clown? It was
Dexter, much more than Maura, who suddenly stood as a
symbol, he and, paradoxically, Parson, who had just been
shot down on the street at the moment when he had finally
earned, almost honestly, two thousand dollars.
touched.
Ronald Dexter, in the Inspector's eyes, embodied the bad
luck and all the misery that can overwhelm humanity,
Dexter, who also had made a small fortune, five hundred
dollars, by betrayal, and who had come to lay the money
on this table where the beer bottles and the whiskey glasses
stood side by side now with the sandwiches no one
“You might perhaps go abroad," Maigret suggested with-
out conviction.
"No, Inspector ... A Joseph would, but not I...I
have fought alone for almost thirty years against my
worst enemy: myself and my own suffering. A hundred
times I've wished the thing would break wide open, you
understand? ... I have truly, sincerely wished to make an
accounting.”
“What would that accomplish?”
And Little John spoke a phrase that truly expressed his
innermost thought, now that he had permitted his nerves to
relax:
"It would allow me to rest. ..."
.
"Hello ... Lieutenant Lewis?”
Maigret, alone in his room, at five in the morning, had
called the officer at his home.
"You have something new?" the other man asked. "A
crime was committed last night, not far from you, in the
middle of the street, and I wonder-
"Parson?"
"You know about it?”
"It's so unimportant, you see!"
"What?"
"It is not important. He would have died anyhow in two
or three years of sclerosis of the liver and he'd have suffered
more.
"I don't understand..."
"It doesn't matter. I'm calling you, Lieutenant, because I
believe there's an English ship sailing for Europe this morn-
ing and I plan to take it.”
“You know that we haven't found any death certificate in
the young woman's name?”
"You won't find any."
“What?"
"Nothing. In short, there has been only one murder com-
mitted. No, I'm sorry, the one last night makes two! AngeIn France, we call them crimes of
lino and Parson
milieu."
“What milieu?”
“Of people who care nothing for human life.”
"I don't follow.”
"It doesn't matter! I wanted to say good-by to you, Lieu-
tenant, because I am going back to my home in Meung-sur-
Loire, where I will always be very happy to welcome
you
if you come to visit our old country.”
“You're giving up?"
“Yes.”
"Discouraged?”
"No."
“I don't mean to annoy you."
"Certainly not.
"But we'll get them."
"I'm convinced of that.”
Moreover, it was true, for three days later, at sea, Mai-
gret heard over the radio that four dangerous criminals,
two of them Sicilians, had been apprehended by the police
for the murder of Angelino and Parson, and that their
lawyer was denying the evidence.
At sailing time there had been a few people on the pier
who pretended not to know each other but who kept look-
ing in the direction of Maigret.
Little John, in a blue suit and a dark overcoat.
MacGill, nervously smoking cork-tipped cigarettes.
A gloomy person attempting to slip through and whom
the stewards treated with sovereign disdain: Ronald Dexter.
There was also a curly-haired redhead, who stayed on
board until the last moment and to whom the police showed
the greatest courtesy.
It was O'Brien, too, who inquired over a last drink in the
ship's bar:
"In other words, you give up?"
His face was its most innocent and Maigret tried hard to
match that innocence in replying:
"As you say, I give up."
"At the moment when-
“At the moment when people could be forced to talk who
have nothing interesting to say, but when, in the valley of
the Loire, it is high time to thin the melon plants in the hot
beds ... And I've become a gardener, you see.'
“Satisfied?”
"No."
"Disappointed?"
"Not that, either."
“Checkmate?”
"I don't know about that.”
At that moment it still depended on the Sicilians. Once
arrested, they would or would not talk.
They judged it more prudent and perhaps more profit-
able not to talk.
And ten days later Madame Maigret inquired:
"Actually, what did you go to America for?”
"Nothing.'
"You didn't even bring back a pipe, as I wrote and asked
It was his turn to play Joseph and he replied like a
coward:
"Over there, you see, they're much too expensive ...
and not well made..
“You could at least have brought me a little something,
a souvenir, I don't know..
As a result of which, he permitted himself to cable Little
John:
53
you to ..."
>
Please send phonograph.
It was all he kept, together with a few pennies and a
couple of nickels, from his trip to New York,
Sainte-Marguerite-du-Lac-Masson, P.Q.