Free The Hotel Majestic by Georges Simenon Page A

had a child?” Maigret asked, emptying his pipe into the coal bucket.
    â€œI didn’t know anything, except that she was living somewhere in America . . . It was only when Charlotte thought I was better . . . In time, you see, we had become a real couple . . . One evening, a neighbour burst into our house; he was beside himself . . . His wife was about to have a baby, much earlier than had been expected . . . He was frantic . . . He asked us to help . . . Charlotte went over . . . The next day, she said to me, ‘Poor old Prosper . . . What a state you would have been in, if . . .’
    â€œAnd then, I don’t know quite how it happened . . . bit by bit, she told me that Mimi had a child . . . Mimi had written to Gigi to tell her . . . She had explained that she had used the child as an excuse to make him marry her, although it was definitely mine . . .
    â€œI went to Cannes . . . Gigi showed me the letter, because she’d kept it, but she refused to give it to me and I think she burnt it . . .
    â€œI wrote to America . . . I begged Mimi to give me my son, or at the very least to send me a photograph of him . . . She didn’t reply . . . I didn’t even know it was the right address . . .
    â€œAnd I kept thinking: Now my son will be doing this . . . Now he’s doing that . . .”
    He was silent, choking with emotion, and Maigret pretended to be busy sharpening a pencil, while doors began to bang in the corridors.
    â€œDid Charlotte know you’d written?”
    â€œNo. I wrote the letter at the hotel . . . Three years passed . . . One day I was looking at some of the foreign magazines guests leave on their tables . . . I got a shock seeing a photograph of Mimi with a little boy of five . . . It was a newspaper from Detroit, Michigan, and the caption said something like: ‘The elegant Mrs. Oswald J. Clark and her son who have just returned from a cruise in the Pacific . . .’
    â€œI wrote again . . .”
    â€œWhat did you say?” Maigret asked, in an even tone.
    â€œI don’t remember. I was going mad. I begged her to reply. I said . . . I think I said I’d go over there, that I’d tell everyone the truth or that if she refused to give me my son, I’d . . .”
    â€œYes?”
    â€œI swear I wouldn’t have done it . . . Yes, I may have threatened to kill her . . . When I think that for a week she was living over my head, with the boy, and that I never suspected . . .
    â€œI only discovered by chance . . . You saw the guests’ servants’ hall . . . Names don’t exist for us, down in the basement . . . We know that Room no. 117 has chocolate in the morning and that no. 452 has eggs and bacon . . . We know the maid from Room no. 123 and the chauffeur from no. 216 . . .
    â€œIt was silly . . . I went into the guests’ servants’ hall . . . I heard a woman speaking English to a chauffeur and she said the name Mrs. Clark . . .
    â€œAs I don’t speak English, I got the bookkeeper to ask her . . . He asked her if she was talking about a Mrs. Clark from Detroit, and if she had her son with her . . .
    â€œWhen I learnt they were there, I tried, for a whole day, to catch sight of them, either in the foyer, or in the corridor on their floor . . . But it’s difficult for us to go where we want . . . I didn’t succeed . . .
    â€œDon’t get me wrong . . . I don’t know if you’ll understand . . . If Mimi had asked to come and live with me again, I couldn’t have . . . Don’t I love her any more? . . . That may be it . . . I only know that I wouldn’t have the heart to leave Charlotte, who’s been so kind to me.
    â€œWell, I didn’t want to upset things for her . . . I wanted her to find a way to give me back my son . . . I know Charlotte would be only too happy to bring him up . . .”
    Maigret looked at him at that moment, and was struck by the intensity of Prosper