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everywhere.
    â€˜Jeunet!’ rumbled the
     inspector, pushing open the door of the hotel office on the ground floor.
    â€˜Not here!’
    â€˜He’s still got his
     room?’
    He’d been spotted for a policeman,
     and got a reluctant reply.
    â€˜Yes, room 19!’
    â€˜By the
     week? The month?’
    â€˜The month!’
    â€˜You have any mail for
     him?’
    The manager turned evasive, but in the
     end handed over to Maigret the package Jeunet had sent himself from Brussels.
    â€˜Did he receive many like
     this?’
    â€˜A few times …’
    â€˜Never any letters?’
    â€˜No! Maybe he got three packages,
     in all. A quiet man. I don’t see why the police should want to come bothering
     him.’
    â€˜He worked?’
    â€˜At number 65, down the
     street.’
    â€˜Regularly?’
    â€˜Depended. Some weeks yes, others,
     no.’
    Maigret demanded the key to the room. He
     found nothing there, however, except a ruined pair of shoes with flapping soles, an
     empty tube of aspirin and some mechanic’s overalls tossed into a corner.
    Back downstairs, he questioned the
     manager again, learning that Louis Jeunet saw no one, did not go out with women and
     basically led a humdrum life, aside from a few trips lasting three or four days.
    But no one stays in one of these hotels,
     in this neighbourhood, unless there’s something wrong somewhere, and the
     manager knew that as well as Maigret.
    â€˜It’s not what you
     think,’ he admitted grudgingly. ‘With him, it’s the bottle! And
     how – in binges. Novenas, my wife and I call them. Buckle down for three weeks, go
     off to work every day, then … for a while he’d drink until he passed
     out on his bed.’
    â€˜You never
     saw anything suspicious about his behaviour?’
    But the man shrugged, as if to say that
     in his hotel everyone who walked through the door looked suspicious.
    At number 65, in a huge workshop open to
     the street, they made machines to draw off beer. Maigret was met by a foreman, who
     had already seen Jeunet’s picture in the paper.
    â€˜I was just going to write to the
     police!’ he exclaimed. ‘He was still working here last week. A fellow
     who earned eight francs fifty an hour!’
    â€˜When he was working.’
    â€˜Ah, you already know? When he was
     working, true! There are lots of them like that, but in general those others
     regularly take one drink too many, or they splurge on a champion hangover every
     Saturday. Him, it was sudden-like, no warning: he’d drink for a solid week.
     Once, when we had a rush job, I went to his hotel room. Well! There he was, all
     alone, drinking right out of a bottle set on the floor by his bed. A sorry sight, I
     swear.’
    In Aubervilliers, nothing. The registry
     office held a single record of one Louis Jeunet, son of Gaston Jeunet, day labourer,
     and Berthe Marie Dufoin, domestic servant. Gaston Jeunet had died ten years earlier;
     his wife had moved away.
    As for Louis Jeunet, no one knew
     anything about him, except that six years before he had written from Paris to
     request a copy of his birth certificate.
    But the passport was still a forgery,
     which meant that the man who had killed himself in Bremen – after
marrying the herbalist woman in Rue Picpus and having a
     son – was not the real Jeunet.
    The criminal records in the Préfecture
     were another dead end: nothing indexed under the name of Jeunet, no fingerprints
     matching the ones of the dead man, taken in Germany. Evidently this desperate soul
     had never run afoul of the law in France or abroad, because headquarters kept tabs
     on the police records of most European nations.
    The records went back only six years. At
     which point, there was a Louis Jeunet, a drilling machine operator, who had a job
     and lived the life of a decent working man.
    He married. He already owned clothing B,