The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien (13 page)

But by far the most bizarre thing of all
was that the place was furnished so incoherently that it might have been a lunatic
asylum – or some elaborate practical joke.

Strewn in disorder on the floor were new
but unfinished chairs, a door lying flat with one panel repaired, pots of glue,
broken saws and crates from which straggled straw or shavings.

Yet off in one corner there was a kind
of divan or, rather, a box spring, partly draped with a length of printed calico.
And directly overhead hung a slightly battered lantern with coloured glass, the kind
sometimes found in second-hand shops.

Separate
sections of an incomplete skeleton like the ones medical students use had been
tossed on to the divan, but the ribs and the pelvis were still hooked together and
sat slumped forward like an old rag doll.

And then there were the walls! White
walls, covered with drawings and even painted frescoes that presented perhaps the
most arrestingly absurd aspect of the whole room: grinning, grimacing figures and
inscriptions along the lines of
Long live Satan, grandfather of the
world!

On the floor lay a bible with a broken
back. Elsewhere were crumpled-up sketches and papers yellow with age, all thick with
dust.

Over the door, another inscription:
Welcome, damned souls!

And amid this chaos of junk sat the
unfinished chairs, the glue pots, the rough pine planks, smelling like a
carpenter's shop. A stove lay on its side, red with rust.

Finally, there was Joseph Van Damme,
meticulously groomed in his well-tailored overcoat and impeccable shoes, Van Damme
who in spite of everything was still the man-about-town with a modern office at a
prestigious address, at home in the great brasseries of Bremen, a lover of fine food
and aged Armagnac …

… Van Damme who called and waved to
the leading citizens of Liège from the wheel of his car, remarking that that man in
the fur-lined coat was worth millions, that that one over there owned a fleet of
thirty merchant ships, Van Damme who would later, serenaded by light music amid the
clinking of glasses and saucers, shake the hands of all these magnates with whom he
felt a growing fraternity …

… Van Damme who suddenly looked
like a hunted
animal, still frozen with
his back against the wall, with white plaster marks on his shoulder and one hand in
his overcoat pocket, glaring steadily at Maigret.

‘How much?'

Had he really spoken? Could the
inspector, in that unreal atmosphere, have been imagining things?

Startled, Maigret knocked over a chair
with a caved-in seat, which landed with a loud clatter.

Van Damme had flushed crimson, but not
with the glow of health: his hypertensive face betrayed panic – or despair – as well
as rage and the desire to live, to triumph at any cost, and he concentrated all his
remaining will to resist in his defiant gaze.

‘What do you mean?' asked
Maigret, going over to the pile of crumpled sketches swept into a corner by the bay
window, where he began spreading them out for a look. They were studies of a nude
figure, a girl with coarse features, unruly hair, a strong, healthy body with heavy
breasts and broad hips.

‘There's still time,'
Van Damme continued. ‘Fifty thousand? … A hundred?'

When the inspector gave him a quizzical
look, Van Damme, in a fever of ill-concealed anxiety, barked, ‘Two hundred
thousand!'

Fear shivered in the air within the
crooked walls of that miserable room. A bitter, sick, morbid fear.

And perhaps there was something else,
too: a repressed desire, the intoxicating temptation of murder …

Yet Maigret went on examining the old
figure drawings, recognizing in various poses the same voluptuous girl, always
staring sullenly into the distance. Once, the artist had tried draping her in the
length of calico covering the
divan.
Another time, he had sketched her in black stockings. Behind her was a skull, which
now sat at the foot of the box spring. And Maigret remembered having seen that
macabre death's-head in Jef Lombard's self-portrait.

A connection was arising, still only
vaguely, among all these people, these events, across time and space. With a faint
tremor of excitement, the inspector smoothed out a charcoal sketch depicting a young
man with long hair, his shirt collar wide open across his chest and the beginnings
of a beard on his chin. He had chosen a Romantic pose: a three-quarter view of the
head, and he seemed to be facing the future the way an eagle stares into the
sun.

It was Jean Lecocq d'Arneville,
the suicide of the sordid hotel in Bremen, the tramp who had never got to eat his
last dinner.

‘Two hundred thousand
francs!'

And the voice added, even now betraying
the businessman who thinks of every detail, of the fluctuations in the exchange
rate, ‘French francs! … Listen, inspector …'

Maigret sensed that pleading would give
way to threats, that the fear quivering in his voice would soon become a growl of
rage.

‘There's still time, no
official action has been taken, and we're in Belgium …'

There was a candle end in the lantern;
beneath the pile of papers on the floor, the inspector found an old kerosene
stove.

‘You're not here in an
official capacity … and even if … I'm asking you for a
month.'

‘
Which means it happened in
December
 …'

Van Damme seemed
to draw back even closer to the wall and stammered, ‘What do you
mean?'

‘It's November now. In
February, it will have been ten years since Klein hanged himself, and you're
asking me for only one month.'

‘I don't
understand …'

‘Oh yes you do!'

And it was maddening, frightening, to
see Maigret go on leafing through the old papers with his left hand – and the papers
were crackling, rustling – while his right hand remained thrust into his overcoat
pocket.

‘You understand perfectly, Van
Damme! If the problem were Klein's death, and if – for example – he'd
been murdered, the statute of limitations would apply only in February, meaning ten
years afterwards. Whereas you are asking me for only one month. So
whatever
happened
 … happened in December.'

‘You'll never find out
anything …'

His voice quavered like a wobbly
phonograph record.

‘Then why are you
afraid?'

The inspector lifted up the box spring,
underneath which he saw only dust and a greenish, mouldy crust of something barely
recognizable as bread.

‘Two hundred thousand francs! We
could arrange it so that, later on …'

‘
Do you want me to slap your
face?
'

Maigret's threat had been so blunt
and unexpected that Van Damme panicked for a moment, raised his arm to protect
himself and, in so doing, unintentionally pulled out the revolver he'd been
clutching in his coat pocket. Realizing what he'd done, he was again overcome
for a
few seconds by that intoxicating
temptation … but must have hesitated to shoot.

‘Drop it!'

He let go. The revolver fell to the
floor, near a pile of wood shavings.

And, turning his back to the enemy,
Maigret kept on rummaging through the bewildering collection of incongruous things.
He picked up a yellowish sock, also marbled with mildew.

‘So tell me, Van
Damme …'

Sensing a change in the silence, Maigret
turned round and saw the man pass a hand over his face, where his fingers left wet
streaks on his cheeks.

‘You're crying?'

‘
Me
?'

He'd said this aggressively,
sardonically, despairingly.

‘What branch of the army were you
in?'

Van Damme was baffled by the
inspector's question, but ready to snatch at any scrap of hope.

‘I was in the École des
Sous-Lieutenants de Réserve, at Beverloo.'

‘Infantry?'

‘Cavalry.'

‘So you must have been between one
metre sixty-five and one metre seventy. And you weren't over seventy kilos. It
was later that you put on some weight.'

Maigret pushed away a chair he'd
bumped into, then picked up another scrap of paper – it looked like part of a letter
– with only a single line on it:
Dear old thing …

But he kept an eye on Van Damme, who was
still trying to figure out what Maigret had meant and who – in sudden
understanding, his face haggard – cried
out in horror, ‘It wasn't me! I swear I've never worn that
suit!'

Maigret's foot sent Van
Damme's revolver spinning to the other side of the room.

Why, at that precise moment, did he
count up the children again? A little boy in Belloir's house. Three kids in
Rue Hors-Château, and the newest hadn't even opened her eyes yet! Plus the son
of the false Louis Jeunet …

On the floor, the beautiful naked girl
was arching her back, throwing out her chest on an unsigned sketch in red chalk.

There were hesitant footsteps, out on
the stairs; a hand fumbled at the door, feeling for the string that served as a
latch.

In what happened next, everything
mattered: the words, the silences, the looks they gave one another, even the
involuntary twitch of a muscle. Everything had great meaning, and there was a sense
that behind the actors in these scenes loomed an invisible pall of fear.

The door opened. Maurice Belloir
appeared, and his first glance was for Van Damme, over in the corner with his back
to the wall. The second glance took in the revolver lying on the floor.

It was enough; he understood. Especially
when he saw Maigret, with his pipe, still calmly going through the pile of old
sketches.

‘Lombard's coming!'
announced Belloir, without seeming to address anyone in particular. ‘I grabbed
a taxi.'

Hearing this was enough to tell Maigret
that the bank deputy director had just given up. The evidence was slight: a gentle
easing of tension in his face; a hint of shame in his tired voice.

The three of them looked at one another.
Joseph Van Damme spoke first.

‘What is he …?'

‘He's gone crazy. I tried to
calm him down, but he got away from me. He went off talking to himself, waving his
arms around …'

‘He has a
gun?' asked Maigret.

‘He has a gun.'

Maurice Belloir tried to listen
carefully, with the strained look of a stunned man struggling in vain to recover
control of himself.

‘Both of you were down in Rue
Hors-Château? Waiting for the result of my conversation with …'

He pointed to Van Damme, and Belloir
nodded.

‘And all three of you agreed to
offer me …?'

He didn't need to say everything;
they understood right away. They all understood even the silences and felt as if
they could hear one another think.

Suddenly footsteps were racing up the
stairs. Someone tripped, must have fallen, then moaned with rage. The next moment
the door was kicked open and framed the figure of Jef Lombard, stock still for an
instant as he gazed at the three men with terrifying intensity.

He was shaking, gripped by fever,
perhaps by some kind of insanity.

What he saw must have been a mad vision
of Belloir backing away from him, Van Damme's congested face, and then
Maigret, broad-shouldered and absolutely immobile, holding his breath.

And there was all that bewildering junk
to boot, with the lantern and the broken-down divan and the spread-out drawings
covering all but the breasts and chin of the naked girl in that sketch …

The scene lasted for mere fractions of a
second. Jef Lombard's long arm was holding out a revolver. Maigret watched him
quietly. Still, he did heave a sigh when Lombard threw the gun to the floor, grabbed
his head with both hands and burst into great raw sobs.

‘I
can't, I can't!' he groaned. ‘You hear me? God damn it, I
can't!'

And he turned away to lean both arms
against the wall, his shoulders heaving. They could hear him snuffling softly.

The inspector went over and closed the
door, to shut off the noise of sawing and planing downstairs and the distant cries
of children out in the street.

Jef Lombard wiped his face with his
handkerchief, tossed back his hair and looked around with the empty eyes of someone
whose nerves have just given way. He was not completely calm; his fingers were
flexing like claws, he was breathing heavily, and when he tried to speak he had to
bite his lip to suppress the sob welling in his throat.

‘To end up like this!' he
finally said, his voice dark and biting.