Maigret in New York Read Online Free PDF Page B

discovered
something.’
    ‘Ah!’
    ‘I’ve just discovered that Little John has cold
eyes …’
    Maigret was expecting another smile from his
American colleague. He was almost aggressively anticipating it, that smile. Agent O’Brien,
however, looked at him thoughtfully.
    ‘That’s awkward …’ he said slowly.
    And it was as if they had had a long
conversation. Suddenly there was something between them that resembled a shared uneasiness.
O’Brien held out a can of tobacco.
    ‘I prefer mine, thanks all the same.’
    They lit their pipes and fell silent once again.
O’Brien’s office was ordinary and rather bare. Only the smoke from the two pipes gave the place
any feeling of intimacy.
    ‘I suppose that after your eventful crossing you
must be tired and are no doubt looking forward to bed?’
    ‘Because you would have suggested a different
scenario?’
    ‘Oh, just that we go and have a nightcap …
in other words, one last whisky.’
    Why had he taken the trouble to bring Maigret to
his
office, where he’d simply left him alone for a
quarter of an hour?
    ‘Don’t you find it rather cold in here?’
    ‘Let’s go wherever you like.’
    ‘I’ll drop you off near your hotel … No, I
won’t come in; the front desk staff would start to worry if they saw me show up … But I do
know a little bar …’
    Another little bar, with a jukebox in a corner
and a line of solitary men leaning on the bar, drinking with stubborn concentration.
    ‘Try a whisky anyway, before bed. You’ll see,
it’s not as bad as you think … and it has the advantage of getting the kidneys working
… By the way …’
    Maigret understood that O’Brien was finally
getting to the point of this last nocturnal ramble.
    ‘Can you imagine, outside my office a little
while ago, I bumped into a colleague – and what do you know, he started talking about Little
John.
    ‘Mind you, he’s never had a thing to do with him,
officially … Not this colleague, not any of us. You understand? I can assure you that
respect for personal freedom is a beautiful thing … When you’ve understood that, you’ll be
real close to understanding America and its people.
    ‘Look: a man arrives here, a foreigner, an
immigrant. You Europeans, you take offence or make fun of us because we make him answer a bunch
of written questions, because we want to know, for example, if he has mental problems or has
come to the United States intending to assassinate the president.
    ‘We
require that he sign this document you find so laughable.
    ‘Afterwards, however, we ask nothing more of him.
The formalities for entering the US have perhaps been lengthy and meddlesome, but when they’re
over, at least our man is home free.
    ‘You get it?
    ‘So free that unless he kills, rapes, or steals,
we have no further right to pay any attention to him.
    ‘What was I saying again? …’
    There were moments when Maigret could have hit
him. That fake candour, that nuanced sense of humour he felt incapable of ever figuring out
completely …
    ‘Oh, yes … For example. In fact it was that
same colleague, while we were washing our hands, who was telling me this story. Thirty years
ago, two men got off a boat from Europe, the way you did this morning. In those days, a lot more
of them came over than do today, because we needed workers. They came over in the ships’ holds,
on the decks … They were mostly from Central and Eastern Europe. Some were so filthy and
vermin-ridden that our immigration services had to hose them down … I bet you’ll have
another nightcap?’
    Too interested to even think of saying no,
Maigret simply refilled his pipe and sat back a little because the fellow on his left kept
elbowing his ribs.
    ‘The point is, there were all kinds of them who
came. And they met with different fates. Today some of them are Hollywood moguls. You’ll find a
few in Sing-Sing but also in government offices in Washington. You must admit
we’re really a great country to