William F. Buckley Jr. (34 page)

Simenon sat deep in a leather armchair, legendary pipe in mouth, wearing his glasses over what had so often been described as his hound-dog eyes. An olive-and-green bandana hung loosely but neatly around his neck.

Simenon took the initiative. His greeting in English was more guttural than, for some reason, Henry had expected, given the five years he had spent in northwestern Connecticut whence he supervised the training of his son at prep school. The boy’s instruction had been comprehensive, including, at age thirteen, sending him to New York City where, at the great Simenon’s request, a friend of his editor at Doubleday had arranged a night for the teenager with an accomplished and motherly whore, to “fix him up,” as Simenon had learned to put it. Henry would need to make some reference to Simenon’s extravagant sexual life, always the talk of the literary world, but he knew better than to dwell on it. Perhaps Simenon would say what was foremost on his mind? Simenon did:

“I see
Time
magazine has picked up the Nobel rumor in Stockholm. I will not believe it unless I see it in the newspapers. But perhaps it will happen—who knows? I suppose it is true there is no single writer alive who is better known than I am. Certainly none who is more productive. I correct that, monsieur. There are no
dozen
writers alive whose work, cumulatively, is as extensive
as my own. I do not deny that. And there is always this possibility too, that Sweden will rise above those dreary accusations—that I collaborated with the Nazis during the war. It is true that I continued to write in Paris during the war. What was I supposed to do? Take up music? In Sweden they should understand.

“Yes, Sweden. You will remember, Monsieur Chafee—you are so young—Sweden did not engage in the war. In that sense the whole of Sweden was, by fashionable ideological standards, a ‘collaborator,’ right?

“Did you know,” Simenon’s lips crackled into a smile as he reached into his pocket for a different pipe, “that when it was proposed, at the founding conference in San Francisco, that Sweden, Switzerland and Ireland be admitted into the United Nations, they were all three vetoed? On what grounds? Monsieur, guess. On what grounds?”

Henry said he could not remember.

“On the grounds that they were not
peace-loving nations!
” He let out a whoop of laughter. “Three nations that did
not
go to war were not
peace-loving!
”

Henry did not want to interrupt the soliloquy, and didn’t do so. A half hour went by before Simenon asked, “What do you want to talk to me about? I have told my wife I will no longer discuss with anybody the matter of fornication. What else?”

Henry popped the question. He said, “Beyond fornication there is imagination. Tell me about yours.”

Simenon welcomed the query. He spoke of his last three novels as handy reference points. Had Henry read
Le train de Venise? L’homme au petit chien? Le petit saint?

The first two, Henry said, not
Le petit saint.

“Well,” Simenon said with relish, “all three of them were based on events that happened between the first day of April last year, and the last day in April. And the one before,
Le rond point
—that one was not published in English—did you read my novel about the pornographic photographer, right here in Cannes?”

No, Henry said, he had not read it.

“Well,” Simenon explained, “a middle-aged—procurer?—no, he wasn’t a procurer, not exactly. He had two or three beautiful
women in his stable, one of them apparently a knockout and privately wealthy. His specialty was to find socially conspicuous men—somebody like me, for instance. He would represent himself as someone anxious to please that beautiful lady over there—this would be at the opera, at a nightclub, at a casino. He would tempt the person to bed with one of his ladies in a room especially equipped with a camera. You guessed it?”

Henry found himself leaning forward, listening acutely. “And then?”

“And then he would take the pictures and do one of two things. Either he would blackmail the man, or he would sell the pictures to the underground tabloids.” Simenon sighed. “It was an exciting life, but not a very long one.”

“What happened?”

“Somebody put handcuffs on him in his apartment over here”—he flexed his finger in the general direction of the sea—“and shot him. That was an intriguing one, because the police found one photographic negative—it had been separated from the roll. The lady was readily identifiable, one of the photographer’s regulars, but the man, you could see only his backside. All you could tell was that he was young and well shaped.

“They did track down the lady. There was no way for her to deny what she had been up to. I mean, a screw is a screw, is it not, monsieur? But she insisted that she and her lover were entirely unaware what the pornographer was up to, said she didn’t know anything about the cameras, said she kept no record of who her lover was.

“Of course they cannot fool my Inspector Maigret. He pieces it all together, with his characteristic skill and delicacy and self-effacement.” Henry knew that the fabled creation of Georges Simenon, the Inspector Maigret who figured in sixty-five novels, was a special enthusiasm of his creator. “Yes, Maigret of course penetrates the operation and comes up with the identity of the killer. It happened that it was a young man who was in these parts to frolic. He was the grandson of Franklin Delano Roosevelt—”

“Excuse me.” Henry’s impulse had been to shoot up from his chair. He clenched his left hand on his steno pad and continued
to write, controlling his voice. “But how did you come up with
that?
”

“Simple. I told you, I have no imagination. But I read everything. I looked at the society columns during the period and there were two references to a grandson of President Roosevelt, who apparently frequented the same casino the dead man operated in.”

“Do you have, for instance”—Henry struggled to affect only a journalist’s interest—“the date of the murder?”

“Not in my memory, and I’d have disguised the date in the book. But in fact it was,” he closed his eyes for a moment, “it was in early September 1949, I believe. Maigret of course assembles the evidence.”

“What”—Henry’s voice was remote, as if he were speaking to himself—“what happens in the book to Roosevelt’s grandson?”

Simenon laughed. “Oh, he beats the rap. Of course I change his identity, I make him out to be a young Arab prince, and the French authorities succumb to pressures from Saudi Arabia. But Maigret’s record, I am happy to say, is unspoiled. That’s what counts, you know, monsieur. The reader has no doubt that Maigret was right when he fingered the grandson as the killer.”

Much later, Simenon rose. It was time, he said, to prepare for dinner. Yes, he would agree to see Monsieur Chafee again tomorrow or the day after, if there were more questions to be asked. And yes, the morning would be satisfactory for the
Time
photographer. “But not more than one hour. Tell him eleven to twelve. Photographers rule the world. They tell kings and queens and prime ministers what to do. But they do not tell Georges Simenon what to do. They take more time shooting a portrait than I require to write a book. Good day, Monsieur Chafee.”

A
T NINE, Henry was at the Bureau de Police in Cannes. The sergeant at the desk rang a supervisor, relayed the request, received back instructions, and told Henry to proceed to the second floor. In Room C, Inspector Gilbert would be waiting for him.

Henry was surprised and pleased that the older man, tall, slim, balding, well-dressed, was cordial from the start. This was unusual in his experience with old crime cases and brusque and bored police officials asked to look into archives.

“My son is also a reporter,” Gilbert said after a few minutes, during which he offered tea or coffee to his guest.” Roland is with
Paris Match
, studying English at night. He hopes to be sent to New York for a tour of duty.

“Of course I will help you in any way I can.
Time
magazine is a very distinguished publication. I do wish they would come out with a French edition, like
The Reader’s Digest
Because—I am ashamed of this, but I have the excuse that I fought in two wars which … engrossed my attention … consumed a great deal of time—I don’t speak any English, or read it. A most difficult language!”

Henry sympathized, and then told him that in connection with a very important story planned by
Time
on Georges Simenon, Henry was doing research on some of the plots used by M. Simenon in his novels, and that yesterday the famous author had told him about the background used in the novel
Le rond point.
Henry’s request was to examine the police files. Henry had got the date he was looking for, the day the
Continental
sailed from Nice with Danny and Henry aboard in September of 1949. He got the exact date not from Caroline—the last thing Henry would do at this moment was speak to Caroline, not knowing what if anything had come up between her and police investigators. He supposed it likely that the police from Poughkeepsie had approached her, or would at any moment. He had got Margie, Danny’s secretary, to do him the little favor of calling Caroline, who had always kept a diary. Caroline reported to Margie, after digging back in her files, that the
Continental
had picked her up on September 8, 1949, at Southampton.

That meant that it had sailed out of Nice on September 6.

Henry Chafee was looking for police files recording the murder of a man who, if Georges Simenon was talking about the same man, had been murdered on September 6. “M. Simenon reports that the murderer was never apprehended. Would that mean that the file on the victim is still live?”

“Live?”

“Open. I mean, still open.”

“Technically, yes,” Inspector Gilbert said. “But after five years, if the case is not active, the file goes into a separate division. But with the details you give me, there should be no problem in finding it. You are comfortable where you are sitting? Here,” he handed them over, “are the morning papers.”

Inspector Gilbert was back in fifteen minutes. “It is not too thick a file. You are most welcome, if you desire to peruse it in detail, to do so over there.” He pointed to an empty desk. “M. Raymond is off duty today, so help yourself to his facilities.”

Henry sat down at the battered heavy desk of M. Raymond, with the overflowing
IN
and
OUT
boxes and the two telephones and two ashtrays. He opened the fifteen-year-old file.

It began with a typed six-page police report. The typist hadn’t made an effort to avoid typographical errors. Several of the words were XXX’d out, and there were emendations in a large circular hand. Attached was an autopsy, written in dense medical language. Several clippings from the local newspapers were in the next folder. And, after them, a folder containing a half-dozen photographs of the dead man, taken in his apartment, as he was discovered.

He was Paul Hébert. And, Henry stared at the picture, transfixed, he was exactly as Henry and Danny had left him, hands handcuffed, the heavy desk leg resting within the loop of his arms. The difference was that when Henry left, Hébert was merely shackled; here, Hébert’s head lay flat on the carpet, stained with blood.

Henry inspected another photograph, stapled to a sheet of paper, and translated the caption, which read: “
Photo retrieved from deceased’s atelier. Found on floor of cabinet with developing solution. Possible suspect. See appended material for interview with woman.
”

Henry stared at it. The angle of the camera highlighted the face of a full-featured woman, her blond hair disheveled, her eyes half closed, a gratified smile on her lips. Her lover was presumably fondling her breasts. Was she Danny’s woman?

Henry looked even more carefully. The lover’s buttocks were tightly drawn, his shoulders slightly lifted.

Henry had often seen Danny’s backside, walking into and out of their common shower; swimming, in the old days, at the gymnasium at Yale. He could not identify Danny from the picture, but Danny had said enough to suggest it could have been he, the night before—the photographer had caught a lover in a copulative thrust. When they had retrieved the pictures, that day in
September fifteen years ago, Danny had snatched them up, the print and the negatives, and stuffed them into his jacket pocket; he had no wish to let them be seen, even by his co-conspirator.

Still, if it was Danny that Henry was looking down on, not another young man in bed with a whore, it was a deduction, not a positive identification, though a deduction backed by overwhelming circumstantial detail.

Henry wanted more. He turned to the coroner’s report with the autopsy.

The estimated time of death was given as 1400, September 6.

Henry closed his eyes.

How was it possible?

His memory then relived the moment.

Danny turned the car key, started up the motor; the air was very hot Then suddenly Danny said
—yes, the memory was now vivid—
Damn! He had to go back up to the apartment; he had left his dark glasses.
He had left the motor running.

Danny—it was now as clear to Henry as though he had seen it all done on film. Danny had gone up in the elevator and shot Paul Hébert.

How had he got into the apartment?

He must have pocketed the key when he and Henry left the apartment to go down to the car. Either that, or he had contrived to leave the apartment door unlocked when they slipped out. Either way, it could only mean that Danny planned all along to go back, after Henry was safely out of the way, to carry out the capital sentence.

And during the drive back to Nice—it all came back now—Danny had been exultant over the success of what Henry now knew was a mission much more ambitious than the mission in which Henry had collaborated. That mission was simply to retrieve the photographs. Danny had a larger view of it. It was to kill the blackmailer.

Back in the hotel, Henry called Barbara. It was 8
A.M.
in New York.