Maigret in New York by Georges Simenon Page A

face.
    ‘Are you sure you told him I was coming?’
    ‘I said that you might come.’
    ‘And what did you tell him I was?’
    He had expected this. The clown became
troubled.
    ‘I was going to speak to you about that … I
didn’t know
how to deal with the matter because
Germain, you see, has become quite unsociable. What’s more, when I came to see him that first
time, he made me have a quick little drink or two. I don’t precisely recall what I told him
… That you were a very rich man, that you were looking for a son you’d never seen …
You mustn’t be mad at me, it was all for the best … He was moved, in the end, and I’m sure
that’s why he started combing his files right away.’
    It was ridiculous. The inspector thought about
what the clown could have concocted with a few drinks under his belt.
    And now Dexter was becoming increasingly hesitant
the closer they came to the former ringmaster’s door. Might he not have lied all up and down the
line, even to Maigret? No, after all: there was the photograph, and the handbill …
    Light under a door. A faint murmuring. Dexter
stammering, ‘Knock … There’s no doorbell.’
    Maigret knocked. Silence fell. Someone coughed.
The sound of a cup set down on a saucer.
    ‘Come in!’
    And they felt as if simply crossing the narrow
barrier of a dilapidated doormat had taken them on an immense voyage through time and space.
They were no longer in New York, next door to skyscrapers that at this hour were darting all
their lights up into the Manhattan sky. Was it even still the age of electricity?
    Anyone in the room would have sworn it was lit by
a paraffin lamp, an impression created by the large shade of pleated red silk on a floor
lamp.
    There was but a single circle of light in the centre of the room
and within it a man in a wheelchair, an old man who must once have been quite stout and was
still bulky enough to completely fill the chair, but who was now so flaccid that he seemed to
have suddenly deflated. A few white hairs of impressive length floated around his naked pate as
he craned his head forwards to see the intruders over the rims of his glasses.
    ‘Excuse me for disturbing you,’ Maigret began,
while the clown hid behind him.
    There was someone else in the room, as fat as
Germain, with a mauve complexion, unnaturally blonde hair and a small, smiling, lipstick-smeared
mouth.
    Hadn’t they stumbled into some corner of a wax
museum? No, for the figures were moving, and tea was steaming in the two cups sitting on a side
table next to a sliced cake.
    ‘Ronald Dexter told me that tonight I might
perhaps find here the information I’m looking for.’
    You couldn’t see the walls, they were so
plastered with posters and photographs. A lungeing whip, its shaft still wound with colourful
ribbons, was in a place of honour.
    ‘Would you provide chairs for these gentlemen,
Lucile?’
    The voice had remained what it doubtless was in
the days when the man announced the entrance of the clowns and tumblers into the ring, and it
resounded strangely in this too-small room so cluttered that poor Lucile found it hard to clear
off two black chairs with red velvet seats.
    ‘This young man who knew me long ago …’ the
old man was saying.
    Was this phrase not a poem in itself? First, Dexter became a
young man in the old ringmaster’s eyes. Then there was the ‘who knew me long ago’ instead of
‘whom I knew long ago’.
    ‘… has informed me of your distressing
predicament. If your son had belonged to the circus world, if only for a few weeks, I can assure
you that you would have had only to come and tell me, “Germain, it was in such-and-such a year
that he appeared in such-and-such an act … He was like this and like that …” and
Germain would not have had to search through his archives.’
    He gestured towards the piles of papers
everywhere, on the furniture, the floor, even on the bed, for Lucile had had to place some there
to clear the two