Maigret is on a stakeout at a café, the Tonnelet Bourguignon, in front of the Hôtel Beauséjour, Rue de Birague and Rue Saint-Antoine. The waiter is Janvier, and the old man on the second floor across the way is Lucas. They believe the Polish gang of Stan the Killer is holed up there, a gang which has committed brutal murder-robberies of isolated farms in the North. While Maigret is sitting, Michael Ozep, a Pole who'd been begging Maigret to let him help with the capture, sits down beside him. Maigret sends him up when the woman of the gang, Olga Tserewska, is alone in the room, with a message that a raid is planned. When he goes in she draws the shade, and nothing happening within is visible to Maigret and Lucas in the room across the way. Finally Maigret goes over and finds the woman's body, her throat slashed. Though it seems to the others that Ozep was Stan, Maigret realizes that it was the woman herself. He locates the files, where she is identified as Stéphanie Polintskaïa, who'd already been known at 18 in Warsaw, and who had run a similar gang in America. Ozep had been her husband, and she'd slashed the throat of their child. The other gang members are rounded up, and Ozep is found to have hanged himself in the hotel.
Click here to see the rest of this review...
The review of this Book prepared by Dana Samson
