Death Threats

Georges Simenon Death Threats

1

"Hello! Is that you, Maigret? Would you step into my office for a moment?"

The windows were open onto the Seine, for it was a splendid June. Maigret took advantage of the call to put an end to the confidences of a rather equivocal individual, who tried to have his more or less clandestine activities forgiven by coming each week to the Police Judiciaire to tell what he knew about his colleagues in Montmartre.

A few minutes later, the Chief Inspector pushed open the padded door of the office of the Director of the Criminal Investigation Department, and there too, the high windows were opened, giving a cheerful feeling to the place where all the crimes of Paris came to conclusion.

"Come in, Maigret. Let me present…"

The Chief Inspector had not yet seen the customer who was about to be introduced to him, but already, by the glance which had accompanied the first words of his chief, with whom he had already worked on the Bonnot affair^[1], he realized that it would be a fairly banal business.

"…M. Émile Grosbois, the well-known rag and scrap merchant of the Rue du Chemin-Vert."^[2]

His brief wink meant, "You'll appreciate this one!"

Maigret turned, and found himself facing a small, dull-looking man, pale and timid, who endeavored to smile as he offered him a freckle-covered hand. His hair must have been reddish as well, but it was so sparse that the color was indeterminate.

"I'm honored, Chief Inspector. I've heard so much about you."

"Please sit down."

As for the Chief, he held out to Maigret a bit of paper on which a text had been constructed from words and letters cut out of newspapers.

"Read that, my friend."

Poor M. Grosbois could never have guessed that to these two, who had worked together so long and met every type imaginable, that all really meant: "Well, this one seems a sly old fox!"

It is true that out loud the chief uttered quite to the contrary, "M. Grosbois, who is highly connected, has been warmly recommended to us by a city councilman whom he saw before coming here."

"I had thought…" began Grosbois.

"No need to excuse yourself. You've done quite rightly. When one is well-connected with influential people, it is very natural to avail oneself of them."

Maigret read:

You old scoundrel,

Finally, your time is up. Whether you go to Coudray or not, even if you arrange to be accompanied by a regiment of Republican guards, you will die on Sunday before six o'clock in the afternoon.

It will be, for everyone, good riddance!

No signature, of course. With some difficulty Maigret managed not to smile as he observed his pale client.

"Evidently," said the chief, "M. Grosbois is unaware of who could have addressed such a letter to him. He has no knowledge of any enemy."

"We have always been highly regarded." M. Grosbois affirmed.

The chief began again, "I pointed out to him that the jurisdiction of the Criminal Investigation Department does not extend beyond Paris. If a crime is committed in the city, it's a case for us. But if someone is killed in Coudray… M. Grosbois so strongly insisted that I agreed, since so far there has not yet been a crime, to look into the business. What do you think about it, Maigret? Would it trouble you very much to pass the weekend at Coudray?"

"Isn't that at the edge of the Seine, a little beyond Corbeil? If so, I know the area vaguely. A few years ago, I was occupied with a murder at the lock at La Citanguette."^[3]

"So you'll take care of it?"

"If you wish."

"M. Grosbois tells me that he does not have a car. He himself doesn't drive, and chauffeurs have become impossibly demanding." A significant wink.

"The entire family will take the train Saturday after lunch. The railway line even passes through their property, and the station is hardly fifty meters away."

M. Grosbois rose, nodded, shook the hands of the two men and left, after having stammered his thanks. The door was hardly closed again when the Director of the P. J. and Maigret could finally relax their features.

"You noticed, Chief?"

"That depends on what."

"That the small pocket of his vest was on the right. In other words, inside out."

"I was satisfied to note that he used rubber heel-pieces so as not to wear out his shoes."

"Very rich?"

"It's said that Grosbois has accumulated about thirty million."

"What do you think of this threat?"

"I don't think anything of it yet. In any case, I warned our man that if it were a trick to collect on an insurance policy, we would inform the company and it wouldn't work. You remember that Russian who made his suicide look like murder, so that his daughter could collect the insurance?"

"I was the one who did the investigation,"^[4] said Maigret modestly.

"Sorry, I'd forgotten."

The chief picked up the telephone at the first ring. "Hello, yes. M. Grosbois? Oscar Grosbois? The brother of M. Émile? I see. Let me pass you to Chief Inspector Maigret, who has agreed to take care of this business."

Maigret took the receiver.

"Hello. Excuse me for disturbing you, Chief Inspector, but I know that my brother went to see you this morning. It is necessary that I have a discussion with you. Yes. Can I come to your office? You prefer to come to see me? In that case, may I ask you to come between eleven and noon, for that is when my brother goes to the bank. Thank you, Chief Inspector. Ring at the small door in the wall on the right. Thank you. Thank you."

Maigret hung up, and sighed, "And I'd just promised my wife we'd go to the countryside!"

It was 11:15 when Maigret arrived at the Rue du Chemin-Vert, a narrow and animated street in the Bastille district, filled primarily with workshops and warehouses. He easily found Grosbois et Paget, an immense wall with a metal gate, a vast courtyard filled with trucks and encircled by loading platforms. He noticed at a glance that all the windows were fitted with bars, which led one to suppose that trust did not reign in the house, and he rang at the small door which had been indicated to him. A maid of about forty, of doubtful cleanliness, came to open it, and before he could say a word, announced, "Go up to the first floor. M. Oscar is waiting for you."

M. Oscar was already at the top of the staircase, so similar to his brother that for a brief moment the Chief Inspector believed himself to be dealing with the same man.

"I am sorry to have disturbed to you, Chief Inspector. I would readily have gone to see you at your office."

Maigret didn't explain to him that if he'd chosen to come in person, it was because he preferred to get the scent of the air of the household.

"Come in. These old houses are not very comfortable but, seeing as one was born here…"

Maigret could have answered him that it wasn't sufficient, just because one was born there, to leave it in the same state for ages. Already the walls of the false marble staircase had become an unpleasant tobacco-juice brown. As for the carpets, they had no color at all, having being reduced to a threadbare gray.

"You are here in a household of single people, which explains a certain disorder."

But no, not disorder! It was filthiness, lassitude! The dusty pieces of furniture seemed to have been bought at a flea market, and the profusion of unpleasant vases and dreadful curios evoked the back room of a second-hand dealer in a poor district.

"Please sit down, Chief Inspector. Can I offer you a cigar?"

He extended a small tissue-paper packet, which showed that in preparation for Maigret's visit he had gone to the corner tobacconist to buy a half dozen cigars. This gesture of Grosbois Oscar was serious, almost solemn. For him to offer a cigar, wasn't this almost a step towards buying a clear conscience?

1

In Chapter 1 of Les mémoires de Maigret [Maigret's Memoirs], Maigret reminisced that "this particular Chief was, in my eyes, the real Chief in the fullest sense of the word, the Chief under whom I had served my first term at Police Headquarters, who, without actually protecting me, had kept a discreet eye on me from above, and whom I had watched, in his black coat and bowler hat, walking alone under fire towards the door of the house in which Bonnot and his gang had for two days been resisting police and gendarmes. I am referring to Xavier Guichard, with his mischievous eyes and his white hair, as long as a poet's." In Chapter 8 of La maison du juge [Maigret in Exile] Maigret referred to this case, recalling that "…back in the days of the Bonnot case, when he had been thin, and had sported a waxed mustache and a little pointed beard, and worn four-inch-high starched collars and a top hat… his boss, Chief Chief Inspector Xavier Guichard, later to become Chief Commissioner of the Police Judiciaire, had said to him, 'all this talk of flair… is just a publicity stunt… what really matters is evidence.'"

Jules Joseph Bonnot (born Oct. 14, 1876, Pont-de-Roide, Doubs, E France), led of a band of French anarchists, "tragic bandits", who robbed banks in the spirit of redistribution of the wealth, credited with being the first to put the motor-car to use in crime. The gang mounted major terroristic blows at society, especially from December 1911-April 1912, and were finally stopped on April 27, 1912, after a 5-hour armed siege at Choisy-le-Roi (SSE suburb of Paris on the left bank of the Seine), in which the public was armed and the Republican guard called in. It ended with the dynamiting of the garage in which they were hiding. Bonnot died of his wounds in the hospital the next day; four surviving members his band were sentenced to death the following year.

2

The Rue du Chemin-Vert, in the 11^e, between Boulevard Beaumarchais and the Avenue de la République, was close to Maigret's apartment in the Boulevard Richard-Lenoir, and is frequently mentioned in Maigret cases. For example, Louis Jeunet, who shot himself in Maigret and the Hundred Gibbets (1930-31), had rented a room for his wife's mother there; Julien Foucrier, the man who shot Janvier in Maigret takes a Room (1951) lived in the Boulevard Richard-Lenoir, on the corner of Rue de Chemin-Vert, a few houses along from Maigret; Loraine Martin, whose niece was the little girl with the broken leg in Maigret's Christmas (1950), lived across the street from Maigret, and did her shopping in the Rue du Chemin-Vert; Victor Cadet, the diver who came up with the body parts in Maigret and the Headless Corpse (1955) lived there. In Maigret has Doubts (1959), Dr. Pardon often received wrong number calls for the nearby Bal des Vertus, a dancehall in the Rue du Chemin-Vert which had a similar phone number, and Gino Pagliati, who first came upon the body in Maigret and the Killer (1969) had his small grocery store on the corner of Rue du Chemin-Vert and the Rue Popincourt.

3

In La péniche aux deux pendus [Two Bodies on a Barge], (written October 1936) Maigret had been called to the lock at Le Coudray, where a barge, the Astrolabe, had drifted, with two dead bodies aboard. He went upstream to La Citanguette, where the drama had started, and investigated in the bistro there.

4

This case does not appear in any of the published Maigret chronicles. However, if it had not been a Russian, it would have fit well with M. Gallet décédé [Maigret Stonewalled].