Read Liberty Bar for Free Online Page B

letters of its sign in yellow.
    Inside the window there was a vase of
     flowers and, next to it, a sleeping cat.
    Jaja must be sleeping somewhere too, in the
     back room, alone with the alarm clock, which was counting the minutes …
    At the end of the narrow street normal life
     resumed: shops, people dressed in everyday clothes, cars, a tram, a policeman
     …
    Then, to the right, the Croisette, which at
     this time of day looked like one of those watercolour adverts that the Cannes tourist
     office puts out in luxury magazines.
    It was a mild, pleasant evening …
     People walking, in no hurry … Cars gliding by without a sound, as if theydidn’t have an engine … And all those light yachts in the
     harbour …
    Maigret felt tired and sluggish, and yet he
     had no desire to return to Antibes. He walked around aimlessly, stopping for no
     particular reason, heading off again in no particular direction, as if he had left the
     conscious part of himself behind in Jaja’s lair, next to the cluttered table
     where, at lunchtime, a prim Swedish steward had sat facing Sylvie and her bare
     breasts.
    For ten years William Brown had spent
     several days a month there, in a state of warm lassitude, next to Jaja, who would start
     whining after a few drinks and would then go to sleep on her chair.
    ‘The gentian, of course!’
    Maigret was delighted to have found what he
     had been looking for for the last half-hour without even realizing it! Since he had left
     the Liberty Bar he had been struggling to pin it down, to strip away the surface image
     to get to its essence. And he had found it! He remembered what a friend had said when he
     had offered him an aperitif:
    ‘What will you have?’
    ‘A gentian.’
    ‘Is that a fashionable new
     drink?’
    ‘It’s not a fashion! It’s
     the drunk’s last resort, my friend! You know the gentian. It’s bitter.
     It’s not even that alcoholic. When you’ve drunk every strong drink under the
     sun for the past thirty years, it’s the only vice left: only that bitter kick has
     what it takes to stimulate the taste buds …’
    That was it! A place without vice, without
     wickedness!
A bar where you went straight into the kitchen to be
     greeted like an old friend by Jaja!
    And you drank while she prepared the food.
     You went to the neighbouring butcher yourself to find a nice joint. Sylvie would come
     down, eyes full of sleep, half naked, and you’d kiss her on the forehead, without
     even looking at her meagre breasts.
    It wasn’t very clean or very light.
     Nobody talked much. Conversation meandered somewhat, without conviction, like the people
     …
    No more outside world, no bustle. Just a
     small rectangle of sunlight …
    Eating, drinking … Snoozing, then
     drinking some more while Sylvie got dressed, pulling her stockings over her legs before
     setting off to work …
    ‘See you later, Godfather!’
    Wasn’t it exactly the same as his
     friend’s gentian? Wasn’t the Liberty Bar the last port of call, when you had
     seen everything, tried everything by way of vices?
    Women without beauty, without charms,
     without desire, whom you don’t desire and kiss on the forehead while giving them a
     hundred francs to go and buy some stockings and then ask on their return:
    ‘How was work?’
    Maigret felt a bit oppressed by it all. He
     wanted to think about something else. He had stopped before the harbour, where a light
     mist was starting to spread out a few centimetres above the surface of the water.
    He had gone past the small boats and the
     racing yachts. Ten metres away, a sailor was lowering a red flag with acrescent insignia on a huge white steamship that must have belonged to some pasha or
     other.
    Somewhat nearer, he read the name of a
     forty-metre yacht picked out in gold lettering:
Ardena
.
    No sooner did he bring to mind the face of
     the Swede he had met at Jaja’s than he looked up and spotted him on the bridge, in
     white gloves, placing a tea tray