A Man's Head (10 page)

The bartender flushed until even his ears were red. He was visibly unsure about serving this very strange customer.

‘I do hope that you're not going to make me pay in advance again. As you see, I'm with someone,' Radek went on.

And to Maigret he explained:

‘These people just do not understand … Imagine, when I got here, he refused to serve me. He didn't say anything but went and fetched the manager. The manager asked me to leave. I was forced to lay down money on the table.
Don't you find that amusing?'

He spoke the words solemnly, in a faraway voice.

‘You will note that if I were some common swindler type, like one of those gigolos you probably spotted here yesterday, I'd be given any amount of credit. But I'm not just anybody! So you get my drift, inspector? We'll have
to thrash it out one of these days, just the two of us. You probably won't understand it all. Still, you already think of yourself as one of the clever people.'

The bartender put the caviar sandwiches down on the table and said, not without a wink in Maigret's direction:

‘Sixty francs.'

Radek smiled. In his corner, Inspector Janvier was still crouching behind his newspaper.

‘A packet of Abdullahs,' ordered the red-haired Czech.

And while the cigarettes were being brought, he ostentatiously took from an outside pocket of his jacket a shabby 1,000-franc note, which he tossed on to the table.

‘Now what were we saying, inspector? … Would you excuse me a moment? I've just remembered I must call my tailor.'

The phone booth was located at the far end of the brasserie, from which there were several exits.

Maigret did not move from where he was. But Janvier, needing no urging, followed their man at a distance.

And then they both came back, one behind the other, as they had left. With a look, Janvier confirmed that the Czech had indeed phoned his tailor.

‘Would you like a valuable piece of advice, inspector?'

Radek had lowered his voice as he leaned towards his companion.

‘Actually I know what you'll think before you think it! But that is a matter of complete indifference to me. Here's my opinion anyway, my advice, if you prefer. Let it go! You are about to stir up a terrible hornets'
nest.'

Maigret remained stock still, looking straight ahead of him.

‘And you'll go on losing your way because you haven't a clue about any of it.'

Slowly the Czech was becoming excited, but in a muted way, so typical of the man. Maigret now noticed the man's hands, which were long, surprisingly white and dotted with freckles. They seemed to reach out and in their way be part, so to
speak, of the conversation.

‘Let's be clear that it's not your professionalism which I question. If you understand nothing, and I mean zero, it's because from the very start you've been working with facts which had been falsified. And once that
is conceded, everything that has flowed from them is false too, no? And everything you will discover will also be false, and so on all down the line.

‘On the other hand, the few points which might have given you something solid to work from you missed …

‘Just one example. Admit that you have not noticed the role played by the Seine in this case. The villa at Saint-Cloud overlooks the Seine. Rue Monsieur-le-Prince is 500 metres from the Seine. The Citanguette, where the papers say the
condemned man hid out after his escape, is by the Seine. Heurtin was born at Melun, on the Seine. His parents live at Nandy, which is on the banks of the Seine …'

The Czech's eyes were all laughter in a face which remained deadly serious.

‘That must make you feel pretty foolish, no? It looks as if I'm throwing myself into your net, no? You don't ask me anything, yet here I am talking about a crime which you'd love to charge me with … But how? Why? I
have no links with Heurtin, no links with Crosby, no links with Madame Henderson or her maid! All you have on me is that yesterday Joseph Heurtin came prowling round here and appeared to be staring at me.

‘Maybe he was, maybe he wasn't. But that doesn't alter the fact that I walked out of this place escorted by two policemen.

‘But what does that all prove?

‘I tell you: you don't understand any of it and never will.

‘And what am I doing in the midst of it all? Nothing! Or maybe everything!

‘Now suppose that there is an intelligent man, a very intelligent man, who has no call on his time and spends every day thinking, who is unexpectedly presented with an opportunity to study a problem with a direct bearing on his special
subject. Because criminality and medicine overlap …'

The unresponsiveness of Maigret, who did not even seem to be listening, was beginning to irk him. He raised his voice:

‘Eh? So what do you say to that, inspector? Have you started admitting to yourself that you are all at sea? No? Not yet? Well allow me to point out that you were wrong, when you had a guilty man under lock and key, to let him go. Because not
only might you be unable to find another suspect to put in his place, he might also slip through your fingers …

‘Just now I mentioned unreliable facts. Shall I give you a new piece of incriminating evidence? And at the same time would you also like me to provide you with the excuse you need to arrest me?'

He drank his vodka down in one, leaned well back against the wall-bench and thrust one hand in an outside pocket of his jacket.

When he withdrew it, it was full of 100-franc notes in bundles of ten each fastened with a pin. There were ten bundles.

‘You will observe that the notes are brand new. In other words, notes whose origin is easily traceable … Why not try? Go on, have fun! Unless you'd rather go home to bed, a course of action which I strongly advise.'

He stood up. Maigret remained seated and looked hard at Radek from head to foot as he produced a thick cloud of smoke from his pipe.

Customers began arriving.

‘Are you going to arrest me?'

The inspector did not hurry to reply. He picked up the notes and examined them carefully before putting them in his pocket.

Eventually he too got to his feet, but so slowly that the Czech's face began to twitch. Maigret put one hand lightly on his shoulder.

It was Maigret in his prime, a Maigret who was sure of himself, imperturbable.

‘Listen, little man …'

The words were in stark contrast with Radek's tone and with the nervy figure he cut and the tetchy look in his eyes, which shone with intelligence of an entirely different order.

Maigret was twenty years older than him, and it was obvious.

‘
Listen, little man …
'

Janvier, who had overheard, tried hard not to laugh and also to contain his delight in rediscovering the chief he knew.

Maigret merely added, in the same off-hand good humour:

‘We'll meet again one of these days, you'll see.'

Whereupon he nodded to the bartender, thrust both hands into his pockets and left.

‘I think that they're the ones, but I'll go and check,' said the clerk in the Georges V as he inspected the banknotes which Maigret had just handed to him.

A moment later he was talking down the phone to the bank.

‘Hello? Would you have the serial numbers of the hundred 100-franc notes which I sent a messenger round to collect yesterday morning?'

He wrote them down with a pencil, hung up and turned to the inspector.

‘It's them, all right. I hope there's no problem, is there?'

‘Not at all … Are Monsieur and Madame Crosby in their suite?'

‘They went out half an hour ago.'

‘Did you see them leave personally?'

‘As clearly as I see you now.'

‘The hotel has several exits, does it?'

‘Two. But the second one is the service entrance.'

‘You told me that Monsieur and Madame Crosby got back last night at around three. Have they had any visitors since then?'

They questioned the porter, the maid and the doorman.

In this way, Maigret had proof that the Crosbys had not left their suite between the hours of three and eleven o'clock in the morning, and that no one had had access to their rooms.

‘And they did not send any letters via the messenger-boy either?'

A blank.

But there was also the fact that from four the previous afternoon until seven o'clock next morning, Jean Radek had been locked in the cells at Montparnasse police station, from which he could not have communicated with the outside.

But at seven that morning he had found himself in the street without a penny to his name. At around eight, he had shaken Janvier off his tail at Montparnasse station.

By ten, he had turned up at the Coupole, carrying a sum of at least 11,000 francs, 10,000 of which had certainly been in the pocket of William Crosby the previous evening.

‘Mind if I have a look round upstairs?'

The manager hesitated at first, but in the end gave his authorization, and a lift whisked Maigret up to the third floor.

It was the standard luxury suite: two bedrooms, two bathrooms, sitting room and a dressing room.

The bed had not yet been made, and the breakfast things had not been cleared away. William Crosby's valet was brushing the American's dinner-jacket. In the next room an evening gown had been thrown over a chair.

Various objects had been left lying around: cigarette cases, a woman's handbag, a walking stick, a novel with the pages still uncut.

Maigret went back down and out on to the street, where he found a taxi to take him to the Ritz. There, the head-waiter confirmed that the Crosbys, accompanied by Miss Edna Reichberg, had been sitting at table 18 the night before. They had arrived
around nine o'clock and had not left until two-thirty. The head-waiter had noticed nothing unusual.

‘And the banknotes?' grunted Maigret to himself as he crossed Place Vendôme.

Suddenly he stopped and almost got caught by the mudguard of a passing limousine.

‘Why the devil did Radek show them to me? But that's not all: I'm the one who's got them now and I'd be hard put to come up with a legal explanation why … And then this connection with the
Seine …'

Suddenly, without stopping to think twice about it, he hailed a cab.

‘How long would you take to get to Nandy? It's a little further out than Corbeil.'

‘An hour. The roads are slippery.'

‘Let's go! But first stop at a tobacconist's.'

And Maigret, settling back comfortably into the car seat while the windows steamed up inside and gathered raindrops outside, spent an hour in the way he liked best.

He smoked constantly, snug and warm in the great black overcoat which was famous on Quai des Orfèvres.

The outskirts slipped past, and then the October countryside, which allowed an occasional glimpse of the grey-green ribbon of the Seine between leafless trees.

‘Radek could have had only one reason for talking and showing me the banknotes: he wanted to throw the investigation momentarily off track by entangling me in a new mystery.

‘But why? To give Heurtin time to get away? To compromise Crosby?

‘But in doing so he compromised himself!'

The words of the Czech came back to him:

‘
… from the very start you've been working with facts which had been falsified.
'

By God! Wasn't it because he'd realized that Maigret had been given extra time to investigate even though the Assize court had delivered its verdict?

But how many facts had been ‘falsified' and how had it been done? There was material evidence which could not possibly have been tampered with!

At a pinch, whoever murdered Mrs Henderson and her maid could have borrowed Heurtin's shoes in order to leave the marks of his soles in the villa.

The same could not be said about the fingerprints. Some had been found on items which had not moved from the crime scene during the night, such as curtains and bed linen!

So what facts had been falsified? Heurtin had unquestionably been seen at midnight in the Pavillon Bleu. And he had unquestionably got home in Rue Monsieur-le-Prince at four in the morning.

‘You understand nothing and you will understand less and less!' announced Radek, who had surfaced at the heart of the case, while for months no one had even known he existed.

The day before, at the Coupole, William Crosby had not given the Czech a second glance.

And when Maigret had mentioned him by name, he had shown no reaction.

And that despite the fact that the bundles of 100-franc notes had moved from the pocket of one of them into the pocket of the other!

And Radek had made a point of telling the police about it! But there was more. It now seemed that Radek was pushing himself centre stage and casting himself for the leading role!

‘He was free for exactly four hours between the moment he left the police station and the time I found him at the Coupole. During those four hours, he shaved and changed his shirt. And it was at some point during those few hours that the
banknotes came into his possession.'