Maigret voit rouge
Pozzo
of the Manhattan Bar, an American, Luigi Pozzo.
A Chicago-style
killing on the street, with his car, by some Americans (another car picks up
the body).
Americans speak “américain”, FBI
is pronounced à l’américaine,
the target isn’t dead.
Maigret’s man is
beaten up for information. All there is to go on is a pair of sunglasses. not even French.
Americans talk
through their noses, among other things (Gabin apes their palaver).
Maigret sees red
not all at once, he taps the bar phone and goes there
for a chat with Pozzo (born in Palermo). He may be used to artists and
amateurs, but most Americans are professionals, he’s told. In that case, he
replies, it’s war. He prefers confessions to advice,
but “you’re never too old to learn.”
Guerre totale, he says. The cash register coughs up the
Americans’ phone number, “secret code”.
Maigret fills his
pipe. The department goes to work.
“Hélas, chère
madame, l’amour et la justice c’est pas la même chose.” The Belgian girl’s apartment is a mine of clues,
Maigret sizes them up rather fast, Grangier takes notice of everything (he has
put it all there).
Great
director, Grangier. Steady,
learned, devoted, brilliant (he achieves an éclat
in that apartment from within, as it were), entirely unknown to Yankee critics.
“The perfect crime does not exist,” Maigret says in American, “there are only
incompetent policemen.”
No witnesses,
they’re eliminated before the Walter Douglas gang in St. Louis can be brought
to trial, any of it. They shoot sheriffs, too, “the famous Commissioner
Maigret” is told by a friend no longer with the FBI but in the diplomatic
service (President Kennedy’s photograph is displayed at the embassy).
“THE CURSE OF THE
DRINKING CLASSES” at the Manhattan Bar where Maigret,
a bull who misses nothing, grazes placidly.
The boss is big
on algine tablets. A traitor in the gang’s a golfer,
“such a tiny ball,” it’s not a
hoodlum’s game, Maigret remarks.
Another murder
and it’s open war, the victim’s wife at the Hotel des Flandres by the covered market where he was shot and picked
up.
Lightning
director, Grangier. If he can
say it in a few words, better it should be compressed into the scene and speak
for itself en passant as the natural
rhythm takes it in stride, faster that way.
The hideout is L’enclos, Dr. Fezin’s estate, by a golf course. “L’univers de Kafka c’est pas du tout mon style,” says he. Congenital coxalgia, that’s the boss’s trouble,
Tony Cicero by name, “he’s maladjusted, neurotic, and a hypochondriac...”
“Assez de littérature,”
says Divisionnaire Maigret, “répondez-moi.” The doctor
is a considerable study, kindly, hospitable, anti-authoritarian, “always wanted
to be in big trouble, a dream, like going to China.”
Grangier is not
without his admirers, the capture of Tony Cicero goes very effectively into
Michael Winner’s Death Wish II.
“A mechanical and
barbarous age,” the doctor complains. Simply a protected witness, the wounded
man, wanted back in America to testify at the murder trial of Walter Douglas.
The phone rings,
Maigret ignores it, home to sleep.