The Carter of ’La Providence’ (13 page)

It was hauled out. A dozen hands grabbed for the badly torn corduroy jacket, which had been snagged on one of the gate's projecting bolts.

The rest unfolded like a nightmare. The telephone was heard ringing in the lock-keeper's house. A boy was despatched on a bicycle to fetch a doctor.

But it was no good. The body of the old carter was scarcely laid on the bank, motionless and seemingly lifeless, before a barge hand removed his jacket, knelt over the impressive chest of the drowned
man and began applying traction to his tongue.

Someone had brought the lantern. The man's body seemed shorter, more thick-set than ever, and his face, dripping wet and streaked with sludge, had lost all colour.

‘He moved! I tell you, he moved!'

There was no pushing or jostling. The silence was so intense that every word resounded as voices do in a cathedral. And underscoring it was the never-ending gush of water escaping through a badly closed sluice.

‘How's he doing?' asked the lock-keeper as he returned.

‘He moved. But not much.'

‘Best get a mirror.'

The master of the
Madeleine
hurried away to get one from his boat. Sweat was pouring off the man applying artificial respiration, so someone else took over, and pulled even harder on the waterlogged man's tongue.

There was news that the doctor had arrived. He had come by car along a side road. By then, everyone could see old Jean's chest slowly rising and falling.

His jacket had been removed. His open shirt revealed a chest as hairy as a wild animal's. Under the right nipple was a long scar, and Maigret thought he could make out a kind of tattoo on his shoulder.

‘Next boat!' shouted the lock-keeper, cupping both hands to his mouth. ‘Look lively, there's nothing more you can do here.'

One bargee drifted regretfully away, calling to his wife, who had joined some other women a little further off in their commiserations.

‘I hope at least that you didn't stop the engine?'

The doctor told the spectators to stand well back and scowled as he felt the man's chest.

‘He's alive, isn't he?' said the first life-saver proudly.

‘Police Judiciaire!' broke in Maigret. ‘Is it serious?'

‘Most of his ribs are crushed. He's alive all right, but I'd be surprised if he stays alive for very long! Did he get caught between two boats?'

‘Most probably between a boat and the lock.'

‘Feel here!'

The doctor made the inspector feel the left arm, which was broken in two places.

‘Is there a stretcher?'

The injured man moaned feebly.

‘All the same, I'm going to give him an injection. But get that stretcher ready as quick as you can. The hospital is 500 metres away …'

There was a stretcher at the lock. It was regulations. But it was in the attic, where the flame of a candle was observed through a skylight moving to and fro.

The mistress of the
Providence
stood sobbing some distance from Maigret. She was staring at him reproachfully.

There were ten men ready to carry the carter, who gave another groan. Then a lantern moved off in the direction of the main road, catching the group in a halo of light. A motorized barge, bright with green and red navigation lights, gave three
whistles and moved off on its way to tie
up at a berth in the middle of town, so that she would be the first to leave next morning.

Ward 10. It was by chance that Maigret saw the number. There were only two patients in it, one of whom was crying like a baby.

The inspector spent most of the time walking up and down the white-flagged corridor, where nurses ran by him, passing on instruction in hushed voices.

Ward 8, exactly opposite, was full of women who were talking about the new patient and assessing his chances.

‘If they're putting him in Ward 10 …'

The doctor was plump and wore horn-rimmed glasses. He walked by two or three times in a white coat, without speaking to Maigret.

It was almost eleven when he finally stopped to have a word.

‘Do you want to see him?'

It was a disconcerting sight. The inspector hardly recognized old Jean. He had been shaved so that two gashes, one on his cheek and the other on his forehead, could be treated.

He lay there, looking very clean in a white bed in the neutral glare of a frosted-glass lamp.

The doctor lifted the sheet.

‘Take a look at this for a carcass! He's built like a bear. I don't think I ever saw a skeletal frame like it. How did he get in this state?'

‘He fell off the lock gate just as the sluices were being opened.'

‘I see. He must have been caught between the wall and
the barge. His chest is literally crushed in. The ribs just gave way.'

‘And the rest?'

‘My colleagues and I will examine him tomorrow, if he's still alive. We'll have to go carefully. One wrong move would kill him.'

‘Has he regained consciousness?'

‘No idea. That's perhaps the most surprising thing. A while back, as I was examining his cuts, I had the very clear impression that his eyes were half open and that he was watching me. But when I looked straight at him, he lowered his
eyelids … He hasn't been delirious. All he does is groan from time to time.'

‘His arm?'

‘Not serious. The double fracture has already been reduced. But you can't put a whole chest back together the way you can a humerus. Where's he from?'

‘I don't know.'

‘I ask because he has some very strange tattoos. I've seen African Battalion tattoos, but they aren't like those. I'll show you tomorrow after they've removed the strapping so we can examine him.'

A porter came to say that there were visitors outside who were insisting on seeing the patient. Maigret himself went down to the porter's lodge, where he found the skipper and his wife from the
Providence
. They were in their Sunday
best.

‘We can see him, can't we, inspector? It's all your fault, you know. You upset him with all your questions. Is he better?'

‘He's better. The doctors will tell us more tomorrow.'

‘Let me see him. Just a peep round the door. He was such a part of the boat.'

She didn't say ‘of the family' but ‘of the boat', and was that not perhaps even more touching?

Her husband brought up the rear, keeping out of the way, ill at ease in a blue serge suit, his scrawny neck poking out of a detachable celluloid collar.

‘I advise you not to make any noise.'

They both looked in at him, from the corridor. From there all they could see was a vague shape under a sheet, an ivory oval instead of a face, a lock of white hair.

The skipper's wife looked as if she was about to burst in at any moment.

‘Listen, if we offered to pay, would he get better treatment?'

She didn't dare open her handbag there and then but she kept fidgeting with it.

‘There are hospitals, aren't there, where if you pay? … The other patients haven't got anything catching, I hope?'

‘Are you staying at Vitry?'

‘We're not going home without him that's for sure! Blow the cargo! What time can we come tomorrow morning?'

‘Ten o'clock!' broke in the doctor, who had been listening impatiently.

‘Is there anything we can bring for him? A bottle of champagne? Spanish grapes?'

‘We'll see he gets everything he needs.'

The doctor directed them towards the porter's lodge.
When she got there, the skipper's wife, who had a good heart, reached furtively into her handbag and pulled out a ten-franc note and
slipped it into the hand of the porter, who looked at her in astonishment.

Maigret got to bed at midnight, after telegraphing Dizy with instructions to forward whatever communications might be sent to him there.

At the last moment, he'd learned that the
Southern Cross
, by overtaking most of the barges, had reached Vitry-le-François and was moored at the end of the queue of waiting boats.

The inspector had found a room at the Hotel de la Marne in town. It was a fair way from the canal. There he was free of the atmosphere he had lived in for the last few days.

A number of guests, all commercial travellers, sat playing cards.

One of them, who had arrived after the others, said:

‘Seems like someone got drowned in the lock.'

‘Want to make a fourth? Lamperrière's losing hand over fist. The man's dead, is he?'

‘Don't know.'

And that was all. The landlady dozed by the till. The waiter scattered sawdust on the floor and, last thing, banked up the stove for the night.

There was a bathroom, just one. The bath had lost areas of its enamel. Even so, next morning at eight, Maigret used it, and then sent the waiter out to buy him a new shirt and collar.

But as the time wore on, he grew impatient. He was
anxious to get back to the canal. Hearing a boat hooting, he asked:

‘Was that for the lock?'

‘No, the lift-bridge. There are three in town.'

The sky was overcast. The wind had got up. He could not find the way back to the hospital and had to ask several people, because all roads invariably led him back to the market square.

The hospital porter recognized him. As he walked out to meet him, he said:

‘Who'd have believed it? I ask you!'

‘What? Is he alive? Dead?'

‘What? You haven't heard? The super's just phoned your hotel …'

‘Out with it!'

‘Gone! Flown the coop! The doctor reckons it's not possible, says he can't have gone a hundred metres in the state he was in … Maybe, but the fact is he's not here!'

The inspector heard voices coming from the garden at the rear of the building and hurried off towards the sound.

There he found an old man he had never seen before. It was the hospital superintendent, and he was speaking sternly to the doctor from the previous evening and a nurse with ginger hair.

‘I swear! …' the doctor said several times. ‘You know as well as I do what it's like … When I say ten broken ribs that's very likely an underestimate … And that's leaving aside the
effects of submersion, concussion …'

‘How did he get out?' asked Maigret.

He was shown a window almost two metres above ground level. In the soil underneath it were the prints of two bare feet and a large scuff mark which suggested that the carter had fallen flat on the
ground as he landed.

‘There! The nurse, Mademoiselle Berthe, spent all night on the duty desk, as usual. She didn't hear anything. Around three o'clock she had to attend to a patient in Ward 8 and looked in on Ward 10. All the lights were out. It
was all quiet. She can't say whether the man was still in his bed.'

‘How about the other two patients?'

‘There's one who's got to be trepanned. It's urgent. We're waiting now for the surgeon. The other one slept through.'

Maigret's eyes followed the trail, which led to a flower-bed where a small rose bush had been flattened.

‘Do the front gates stay open at night?'

‘This isn't a prison!' snapped the superintendent. ‘How are we supposed to know if a patient is going to jump out of the window? Only the main door to the building was locked, as it always is.'

There was no point in looking for footprints or any other tracks. For the area was paved. In the gap between two houses, the double row of trees lining the canal was visible.

‘To be perfectly frank,' added the doctor, ‘I was pretty sure we'd find him dead this morning. Once it was clear there was nothing more we could try … that's when I decided to put him in Ward 10.'

He was belligerent now, for the criticisms the superintendent had directed at him still rankled.

For a while, Maigret circled the garden, like a circus
horse, then suddenly, signalling his departure by tugging the brim of his bowler, he strode away in the direction of the lock.

The
Southern Cross
was just entering the chamber. Vladimir, with the skill of an experienced sailor, looped a mooring rope over a bollard with one throw and stopped the boat dead.

Meanwhile, the colonel, wearing a long oilskin coat and his white cap, stood impassively at the small wheel.

‘Ready the gates!' cried the lock-keeper.

There were now no more than twenty boats to be got through.

Maigret pointed to the yacht and asked: ‘Is it their turn?'

‘It is and it isn't. If you class her as a motorboat, then she has right of way over horse-drawn boats. But as she's a pleasure boat … Truth is, so few of them pass this way that we don't go much by the
regulations. Still, since they saw the bargees right …'

The bargees in question were now operating the sluices.

‘And the
Providence
?'

‘She was holding everything up. This morning she went and moored a hundred metres further along, at the bend this side of the second bridge. Any news of the old feller? This business could set me back a pretty penny. But I'd like to
see you try it! Officially, I'm supposed to lock them all myself. If I did that, there'd be a hundred of them queuing up every day. Four gates! Sixteen sluices! And do you know how much I get paid?'

He was called away briefly when Vladimir came to him with his papers and the tip.

Maigret made the most of the interruption to set off along the canal bank. At the bend he saw the
Providence
, which by now he could have picked out from any distance among a hundred barges.

A few curls of smoke rose from the chimney. There was no one about on deck. All hatches and doors were closed.

He almost walked up the aft plank which gave access to the crew's quarters.

But he changed his mind and instead went on board by the wide gangway which was used for taking the horses on and off.