Jean was as stupid as his master. The prince burst out laughing.
“No, you will surely be of no assistance. After all, is it absolutely necessary to understand? If I have a good chauffeur, everything will be all right.”
But at least the convenience and comfort of the car appealed to him.
He jumped into it and seated himself in the driver’s place. He seemed to enjoy being there.
“Perfect! Perfect!” he said. “Nothing could be more comfortable. But the canopy; there is a canopy?”
Of course there was.
Jean and I put up the canopy, not without difficulty.
Then all the accessories were necessary, the hampers, the umbrella stand, the lamps.
“And there’s plenty of room for two. Come up here beside me, Jean. Why, there’s a lot of elbowroom.”
He examined the steering wheel, the brakes, the various controlling parts, and asked me:
“Then to start, you say that you must do this — and that?”
“This first, then that,” I answered.
He did this first, then that. The machine trembled, took a rapid turn that evinced the skill of an experienced chauffeur, and flew away at full speed, leaving me standing there, petrified.
From that day to this I have never seen Prince Metcherski — nor my twenty-four horse-power, either.
The Tracy Enigma
by Georges Simenon
(Translated by Anthony Boucher)
’Tec tintype of Georges Simenon: Born in Liege, Belgium; reporter on the Liège “Gazette” at the age of sixteen; published his first novel, AU PONT DES ARCHES (ABOARD THE ARK), at seventeen; married at twenty and moved to Paris. In the next ten years, between the ages of twenty and thirty, Georges Simenon published no less than two hundred popular novels under sixteen pseudonyms! Imagine that — twenty novels a year for a full decade! And they said Edgar Wallace was prolific! Why, no English or American writer, past or present, holds a candle to Simenon on sheer productivity! True, these two hundred novels were not detective stories — his first detective boo\ was written after (shall we call it?) the apprenticeship of ten score novels; but once Georges Simenon began to invade the Coast of Criminalia, he produced a full-length Inspector Maigret novel at the incredible rate of one each month! What Simenon did in his spare time is not recorded, and while some of his books reveal the unavoidable singe of jet-propulsion, the great body of his detective work in print is of a high order of excellence. Simenon is a master of mood, as even the following episode in the career of detective G.7 so clearly proves...
From the book “Les 13 Enigmes,” copyright 1932, by A. Fayard et Cie.
The telephone rang one night around eleven, and we decided to take the train an hour later. These are, in brief, the facts that led G.7 to this sudden decision:
That very day, at four in the afternoon, the inhabitants of Tracy, a very small village on the banks of the Loire, saw the body of a young girl floating down the river.
They fished it out from a small boat. Though there was no sign of life, a vineyard worker drove off to Pouilly to fetch a doctor, who worked in vain at artificial respiration for two hours.
The girl did not revive. No one recognized her. The mayor was away. The Rural Guard was not available, there were no police. The police corporal from Pouilly was on his rounds through the region and couldn’t arrive until the next day.
The railroad watchman had a small unused shack behind his house. They put the body there. At sundown the crowds dispersed.
Around ten in the evening the watchman left his house to signal a freight train. As he passed by the shack where the body had been laid, he was astonished to observe that the door, which he himself had closed, was ajar.
Frightened, he sought out his wife. They approached with a lantern, peered through the opening...
The body had vanished! There was nothing in the shack!
We reached the town by six in the morning, and from the station we could see the shack and the peasants excitedly clustered about it.
The village of Tracy lies on the right bank of the Loire, at a spot where the river widens and is bestrewn with large sand islands. Across from the village you can see the chateau of Sancerre; but it’s a long way around to the suspension bridge which leads to the chateau and to Saint-Satur, so that the village is relatively isolated.
The people whom we could see were almost all workers from the vineyards. Some of them, alerted by the watchman, had spent the night on the road on the lookout for the police.
The Pouilly police had arrived shortly before us. Now they were engaged in general questioning which was producing confused results.
One fact was certain: The girl, after two hours of artificial respiration, had shown no sign of life, and the doctor had unhesitatingly signed the death certificate.
But one old boatman had troubled the spirits of his listeners by relating the story of a curious event he had once witnessed: The daughter of a river boatman had fallen into the stream during her father’s absence and had not been fished out till an hour later; two doctors had declared her dead; the father had come back, hurled himself on his child’s body, and devoted himself to rhythmic movements for all of ten hours; the girl finally, bit by bit, had come back to life...
It would be impossible to describe the effect of this narrative. Suddenly the people began to tremble, and the watchman kept his eyes fearfully averted from the shack.
G.7 had seen no reason to announce his official position. We were there simply as curious spectators — to listen to everything and see everything. Though it was August and the weather had been dry for two weeks, a few from the crowd were persistently trying to find prints in the hard-baked dirt of the road.
The corporal of police had no notion what to do. He kept taking notes on whatever anyone wished to tell him, and had blackened page after page of his notebook.
Around ten in the morning came the first startling development. A carriage arrived from Loges, another village much like Tracy, situated four kilometers upstream. A large woman emerged in great distress.
She cried out. She wept. She groaned. An old peasant followed her in silence.
“It was my daughter, wasn’t it?”
Someone began to describe the drowned girl and her clothes. The people argued; they couldn’t agree on the color of her hair. But there was no possible doubt: The drowned girl was Angélique Bourriau, whose parents had just arrived from Loges.
The father was so crushed by the discovery that he could not speak a word. He stared about stupidly. But the mother talked enough for two, her voice shrill and voluble.
“It’s a trick of that Gaston’s, for sure...”
People began to listen. They learned that Angélique, who was nineteen, had been smitten with a clerk in the tax office at Saint-Satur, a youth who hadn’t a sou to his name, hadn’t even performed his military service yet.
Of course the Bourriaus opposed the marriage. They had their eye on another bridegroom, a worker from the Pouilly vineyards, a solid rustic of thirty.
The marriage was to have taken place two months later.
G.7 and I were the first to reach Saint-Satur, leaving police, parents, and spectators still clustered around the empty shack.
It was eleven when we entered the Tax Collector’s office. The clerk who greeted us at the window was Gaston himself — Gaston Verdurier, to give him his proper name.
He was a tall young man of twenty, with feverish eyes and lips that trembled at the slightest emotion.
“Please come outside for a moment.”