Maigret and the Man on the Boulevard Read Online Free PDF Page A

Everybody did. Most people didn’t even know his surname. If you wouldn’t mind waiting a moment…”
    She returned to the mail, murmuring to herself as she sorted the last few letters:
    â€œMonsieur Louis murdered! I wouldn’t have believed it possible! A man of such…”
    Having slotted the letters into the various pigeonholes, she wrapped a woolen shawl about her shoulders, and turned down the anthracite stove.
    â€œCome and I’ll show you.”
    When they were under the archway, she explained:
    â€œThis building was due to be pulled down three years ago, to make way for a cinema. At that time, the tenants were given notice, and I myself made arrangements to go and live with my daughter in the Nièvre region. That was the reason why Monsieur Kaplan gave up the business. Though the fact that business was none too brisk may also have had something to do with it. Young Monsieur Kaplan, Monsieur Max as we called him, didn’t see eye to eye with his father. This way…”
    Beyond the archway was a courtyard, at the end of which could be seen a large building with a glass roof which looked like the entrance hall of a railway station. On the rough-cast wall only a few letters of the name Kaplan et Zanin were still legible.
    â€œThere were no longer any Zanins in the firm, when I came to this place twenty-six years ago. At that time old Monsieur Kaplan was running the business single-handed. Children would stop in the street and stare at him, because he had the look of an Old Testament patriarch.”
    The door was not shut. The lock had been wrenched out. Everything around him was now in decay, though a few years earlier it had been part of a living world, the world of Louis Thouret. What precisely the place had been used for, it was hard to tell. It was a huge room, rising to a very high glass roof, the panes of which were now either missing or opaque with grime. Two galleries, one above the other, such as are often to be seen in big stores, ran right round the room, and there were marks on the wall where there had once been rows of shelves.
    â€œWhenever he came to see me…”
    â€œDid he come often?”
    â€œEvery two or three months, I’d say, and he never came empty-handed. And each time, I may tell you, Monsieur Louis insisted on coming in here to take a look round, and you could tell that his heart was heavy. I’ve known there to be as many as twenty girl packers in here, even more towards the end, and especially around about Christmas time, and, quite often, they worked late into the night. This wasn’t a retail business. Monsieur Kaplan sold direct to the cheap multiple stores up and down the country, and to market traders of all sorts. There was so much stuff in here that one could scarcely move. Monsieur Louis was the only one who knew where everything was. Heaven knows, there was variety enough, false beards, cardboard trumpets, Christmas tree decorations of every sort, paper streamers, carnival masks, and seaside holiday souvenirs.”
    â€œWas Monsieur Louis in charge of the stock?”
    â€œYes. He always wore a gray overall. Over there in the right-hand corner, see, Monsieur Kaplan sat in his glass-walled office. The young Monsieur Kaplan, I mean, after his father had his first heart attack, and stopped coming in. He had a secretary, Mademoiselle Léone, and an elderly bookkeeper, who worked in a little cubby hole upstairs. No one had the least inkling of what was in store for them. One day, without warning—I’m not sure exactly when, but it must have been in October or November, because there was a nip in the air already—Monsieur Max Kaplan called his staff together, and told them that the firm was to be closed down, and that he had found a buyer for the stock.
    â€œEveryone believed at the time that the building was to come down the following year, to make way for a cinema, as I told you.”
    Maigret