Maigret in New York by Georges Simenon

with his hands in his
pockets, his pipe between his teeth, before he glimpsed the lights of a cinema he recognized on
Broadway, which set him on the right path.
    Suddenly, just like that, he took a notion to
write to Madame Maigret and went back to his hotel.

5.
    It was between the third and fourth floors that
Maigret reflected, without attaching too much importance to it, that he would not want a man
such as Special Agent O’Brien, for example, to see what he was up to that morning.
    Even people who had worked with him for years and
years, like Sergeant Lucas, did not always understand him when he was in this state.
    And did he even know himself what he was looking
for? For example, at the moment when he stopped for no reason on that step between two floors,
staring straight ahead with wide-open but now empty eyes, he must have looked like a man forced
by heart trouble to stay stock still wherever he might be and who tries to seem calm to avoid
alarming passers-by.
    Judging from the number of children younger than
seven the inspector was seeing on the stairs, the landings, in the kitchens and bedrooms, the
apartment house must have been a swarming mass of kids outside of school hours. Besides, toys
lay around in every corner: broken scooters, old soapboxes precariously equipped with wheels,
collections of random objects that made no sense for grown-ups yet for their creators must have
represented treasures.
    There was no concierge, as in French apartment
buildings, which complicated Maigret’s task. Nothing but
numbered, brown-painted letterboxes in the ground-floor corridor,
a few with a yellowed visiting card or a name badly engraved on a metal strip.
    It was ten in the morning, doubtless the hour
when this sort of barracks was most characteristically alive. One out of every two or three
doors stood open. Women who hadn’t yet combed their hair were doing housework, washing
youngsters’ faces, shaking none-too-clean carpets out of windows.
    ‘Excuse me, madame …’
    They looked askance at him. Who could they think
he was, this tall man with his heavy overcoat, his hat that he always took off when he spoke to
women, whoever they were? Probably someone selling insurance or a new model of electric vacuum
cleaner?
    And then there was his accent, but it did not
stand out here, where there were not only Italians just off the boat, he thought, but Poles and
Czechs as well.
    ‘Do you know if there are any tenants left here
who moved in about thirty years ago?’
    They frowned, because it was just about the last
question they expected. In Paris – in Montmartre, for example, or in his old neighbourhood
between the République and Bastille Métro stations – there probably wasn’t a single decent-sized
building where he would not easily have found an elderly man, woman or couple who had lived
there for thirty or forty years.
    Here they were telling him, ‘We moved in only six
months ago …’
    Or a year, or two. At most, four years ago.
    Without realizing it, instinctively, he would linger at the open
doors to observe a Spartan kitchen encumbered by a bed, or a bedroom inhabited by four or five
people.
    Few tenants knew any others on another floor.
Three children, the oldest of whom was a boy of perhaps eight (who doubtless had mumps, given
the immense bandage around his head), had begun following him. Then the little boy had grown
bolder and was now dashing ahead of Maigret.
    ‘The man wants to know if you were here thirty
years ago!’
    Still, there were a few elderly people, in
armchairs, by the windows, often near a caged canary, the old folks brought over from Europe
once a job had been found. And some of them did not understand one word of English.
    ‘I would like to know …’
    The landings were large and formed a kind of
neutral territory where tenants piled up everything not in use in the apartments; on the
third-floor landing, a thin woman with blonde hair was doing her wash.
    It was here, in one of these