The Dancer at the Gai-Moulin (17 page)

‘So he is offered a first mission:
he has to go to Liège and steal some documents from a nightclub. This is one way to
test his nerve. It's a make-believe mission. They just send him to other
agents working for the same outfit, who will judge whether our man fits the bill.
And Graphopoulos
is afraid. He had
imagined espionage very differently. He'd seen himself walking into palaces,
asking ambassadors questions, being invited into every tinpot European court. He
doesn't dare refuse. But he asks the police to watch over him. Then he tells
his chief that he is being followed by the police: “I've got a French
police inspector tailing me. I'd better not go to Liège, had I?”
“Never mind that, just get yourself there!”

‘And now he really panics. He
tries to evade the surveillance he asked for. He books a seat on a plane for London,
buys a train ticket for Berlin and finally gets off here at the Guillemins station.
The Gai-Moulin! That's the club he's supposed to go to. He doesn't
realize that the owner is a member of the spy ring, that he's been notified,
that this is simply a test, and what's more, that there aren't any
documents at all in the club for him to steal.

‘A dancer sits down at his table.
He asks her to come to his room later that night, because he likes his pleasures. As
almost always happens, his libido is heightened by danger. At least, then he
won't be on his own. As a little earnest of things to come, he lets her have
his cigarette-case, which she had admired. He watches the people around him. He
doesn't know anything. Or rather he only knows one thing. He has to manage to
get himself shut into the club after hours, so that he can look for the documents
he's supposed to find.

‘Génaro has been warned, so he
watches him with a smile. Victor,
who also belongs to the ring
, is
obsequious and ironic as he pours his champagne.

‘And by chance, someone overhears
the address he gives
Adèle: Hôtel
Moderne, room 18. And at this point we have to move to a different story.'

Maigret looked at Monsieur Delfosse, and
at him alone.

‘You'll have to pardon me,
but now I'm going to talk about you. You're a rich man. You have a wife,
a son, mistresses. You lead a life of pleasure, without suspecting that your young
son, who is fragile and highly strung, is trying in his own little circle to imitate
you. He sees money being splashed out all around him. You give him at once too much
money and not enough. For years now, he's been stealing from you and he even
robs his uncles as well! When you're away, he drives your car. And he has
mistresses, too. In short, in every sense of the word he's a spoiled
daddy's boy. No, don't argue. Wait till you hear …

‘He needs a friend, a confidant.
He drags Chabot along with him. One day, they're both broke. They have debts
all along the line. And they decide to rob the till at the Gai-Moulin. It happens to
be the night Graphopoulos is there. Delfosse and Chabot hide on the cellar steps,
when they are assumed to have left. Without Génaro's knowledge? It
doesn't matter, but I doubt it. He really is an exemplary secret operator. He
owns a club. He is duly licensed, as he said just now. He has other people working
for him. And he feels all the safer since he acts as a police informer.

‘He knows perfectly well
Graphopoulos is planning to hide inside the club. He locks up and leaves with
Victor. Next day, all he has to do is report back to his chiefs about how the Greek
handled it.

‘You see, it's all getting a
bit complicated. We might say
that that
evening became the night when everyone was fooled.

‘Graphopoulos has been drinking
champagne to give himself courage. And now he's alone inside the Gai-Moulin,
in the dark. He still has to find the documents he's supposed to take. But he
hasn't made a move before a door opens. A match is struck. He's
terrified. He was probably terrified to start with anyway. He doesn't have the
guts to attack. He pretends to be dead instead. Then he sees his enemies. A couple
of kids who are even more scared than he is, and who take to their heels!'

Nobody moved in the room. Nobody seemed
to be breathing. All their faces showed the strain, as Maigret went on:

‘Graphopoulos, alone again, keeps
trying to find the documents requested by his new paymasters. Chabot and Delfosse
are so panic-stricken that they bolt down some mussels and chips and then say
goodbye to each other in the street.

‘But Delfosse is haunted by a
memory. Hôtel Moderne, room 18. The words he overheard. That stranger looked as if
he was rich. And the young man badly needs money for all the wrong reasons. To get
into a hotel at night is child's play. The room key will still be on the hook.
And since Graphopoulos is dead, he won't be coming back!

‘So he goes to the hotel. The
night porter is nodding off and doesn't challenge him. He gets upstairs, and
searches the traveller's suitcase. Then he hears steps in the corridor, the
door opens.

‘And it's Graphopoulos
himself! Who is supposed to be
dead!
Delfosse is so terrified that without thinking, he hits him with all his might, in
the shadows, with his cane, the cane with the gold pommel belonging to his father,
which he had borrowed as usual that evening.

‘He's beside himself, hardly
responsible for his actions. He takes the wallet, and flees. Perhaps he checks its
contents under a street lamp. He sees thousands of francs, and has the idea of
getting Adèle to run away with him, Adèle whom he's always fancied.

‘To live the high life abroad!
With a woman! Like a real man! Like his father!

‘But Adèle is fast asleep. She has
no desire to go. He hides the wallet in her room, because he's scared. He
doesn't suspect that for months, or perhaps for years, Génaro and Victor have
been using the same hiding place for the documents they handle for their spy ring.
Because she's part of it! They're all in it!

‘Delfosse has only kept the
Belgian banknotes, two thousand francs' worth, from the wallet. The rest, in
French currency, is too compromising.

‘Next day, he reads the papers.
The victim,
his
victim, has been found not in the hotel, but in a public
park. He can't understand this. He's on tenterhooks. He finds Chabot
again and drags him along with him. He pretends he's robbed his uncle to
explain the two thousand francs he's carrying. He has to get rid of them
somehow. So he gets Chabot to do it, because he's a coward. Worse than a
coward, actually. Rather there's something pathological about it. In his
heart, he envies his friend for not sharing the guilt. He'd like to compromise
him. Without daring to do it openly.

‘Hasn't he always held something against his
friend? Envy, hate, rather complex feelings. Because Chabot's hands are clean,
or at least they were. Whereas young Delfosse is plagued by disturbing desires. That
must be the explanation for their strange friendship, and the need Delfosse feels to
be constantly accompanied by his sidekick.

‘He kept on going round to
Chabot's house to haul him out. He couldn't stand to be alone. And he
got his friend entangled in his compromises, his little thefts within the family
that will never come to court.

‘But Chabot doesn't come
back from the washroom: he's been arrested. Delfosse doesn't try to find
out what's happened to him. He starts drinking. He needs someone else to drink
with him. Because if there's one thing he can't stand it's being
on his own. He gets drunk, goes home with the dancer, and falls asleep.

‘At dawn, he panics again, at the
situation he's in. He probably sees the police inspector in the street
outside. He doesn't dare touch Graphopoulos's money on top of the
wardrobe. There are only French notes there, too easy to identify. So he prefers to
rob Adèle.

‘What is he hoping for at this
stage? Nothing. And from now on, everything he does fits that logic.

‘He realizes dimly that he
isn't going to escape from the law. But he dares not give himself up. Ask
Chief Inspector Delvigne where the police go to look – nine times out of ten
successfully – for criminals like this. In some seedy bar! Delfosse needs a drink,
noise, girls. He picks a bar near the station at random. He tries to get the
waitress to go
upstairs with him. When
she refuses, he drags in a girl from the street. He pays for drinks all round. He
flashes his banknotes about, gives them away. He's frantic. When he's
arrested, he tells totally preposterous lies. He lies hopelessly. He tells lies just
for the sake of it, like a vicious child. He's prepared to say anything, give
a mass of detail. Another characteristic which seems to fit the profile.

‘But then they tell him the
murderer has been arrested. (That was me, by the way!) He's allowed to go
home. And he learns a little later that the assassin has killed himself, after
confessing.

‘Does he guess it's a trap?
He may have done, at some level. But now he is in any case driven by the need to
suppress any evidence of his involvement. That's why I invented this little
game, which may have seemed childish. There were two ways of driving Delfosse to
confess: the one I've used, or else leaving him alone for hours in the dark,
which he fears as much as he does being alone. He'd have broken down and
confessed anything you like, even adding extra details.

‘I realized he was guilty the
moment I learned that the two thousand francs didn't come from the chocolate
shop. After that, everything he said and did only strengthened my opinion.
It's a banal case, in spite of its morbid nature and apparent complexity.

‘But I still needed to get to the
bottom of something else: the other case, the Graphopoulos case. Consequently, there
were other people guilty of something. The announcement of my death, that is the
death of the supposed murderer, brought them out of their holes. Delfosse
came to get the compromising wallet.
Victor came to look for—'

Maigret looked slowly round those
present.

‘How long has Génaro been using
your lodgings to hide dangerous papers, Adèle?'

She shrugged her shoulders with
indifference, a woman who had long been expecting disaster to strike.

‘Years! It was Génaro that brought
me here from Paris, where I was starving.'

‘Do you confess,
Génaro?'

‘I will speak only in the presence
of my lawyer.'

‘Ah, you too, like
Victor?'

Delfosse senior said nothing: his head
was lowered, his eyes fixed on his cane, the very cane that had killed
Graphopoulos.

‘My son isn't responsible
for his actions,' he murmured suddenly.

‘I'm aware of
that!'

And as the father looked at him, both
embarrassed and disturbed, Maigret said:

‘You'll tell me now he has
inherited from you certain flaws liable to reduce his sense of
responsibility—'

‘Who told you that?'

‘Look at yourself and him in the
mirror!'

And that was all. Three months later,
Maigret was at home in Boulevard Richard-Lenoir going through his mail, which the
concierge had just brought up.

‘Anything interesting?'
asked Madame Maigret, who was shaking a rug from the open window.

‘A card
from your sister, saying she's going to have a baby.'

‘Another one!'

‘And a letter from
Belgium.'

‘Who from?'

‘Nothing very fascinating. My
friend, Chief Inspector Delvigne, says he's going to send me a pipe in the
post, and is giving me news of some sentences that have been passed.'

And he read out in an undertone:

‘Génaro got five years' hard
labour, Victor three, and the girl Adèle was acquitted, for lack of
evidence.'

‘Who are those people?'
asked Madame Maigret. For all that she was married to a detective chief inspector of
the Police Judiciaire, she had kept all the innocence of a true daughter of rural
France.

‘They're of no interest.
These men ran a nightclub in Liège. It didn't have many customers, but it was
the hub of a spy ring.'

‘And “the girl
Adèle”?'

‘She was the dancer at the club.
Run-of-the-mill dancer.'

‘And you knew her?'

There was suddenly a hint of jealousy in
Madame Maigret's voice.

‘I went to her room, just the
once.'

‘Well, well.'

‘Now you're talking like
Monsieur Delvigne himself! I did go to her place, but in the company of about half a
dozen other people.'

‘Is she pretty?'

‘She's not bad. The
youngsters were mad about her.'

‘Just the youngsters?'

Maigret opened
another letter with a Belgian stamp.

‘Here we are, here's a photo
of one of them.'

And he held out a snapshot of a young
man, whose thin shoulders looked even more frail in his uniform. The background was
the funnel of a steamer.

… 
and I'm taking the
liberty of sending you a photograph of my son, who left Antwerp this week on
board the SS
Élisabethville
, bound for the Congo. I hope that the
tough life in the colonies
 …

‘Who's that?'

‘One of the youngsters who was in
love with Adèle.'

‘Did he commit a crime?'

‘He drank some glasses of port in
a nightclub where he would have done better never to set foot.'

‘Was he her lover?'

‘Absolutely not! The nearest he
came to it was that he once watched her getting dressed.'

And Madame Maigret concluded: