Pel and the Faceless Corpse

by Mark Hebden

  ‘That’s hardly the word to describe what she did.’

  ‘You knew her?’

  The Baron’s hand moved in a gesture. He had never seen the woman with Geistardt. Savoie was some distance away, but all the stories indicated that she was Geistardt’s woman. If he hadn’t lived with her, he had always been at her house, a green-painted one at the end of the village. It was still green, in fact, because he’d seen it as he’d driven through.

  Pel looked excited. ‘Is she still there?’ he asked.

  ‘I think so.’

  Pel’s heart leapt. ‘I think I’d better go and see her,’ he said.

  He was about to leave when the Baron stood up. ‘If Geistardt has returned,’ he said. ‘I hope you catch him. If you don’t, someone else will.’

  ‘They probably have already,’ Pel said. ‘I think he was the man shot and tortured at the Bussy-la-Fontaine calvary.’

  De Mougy’s eyes glittered. ‘I trust so,’ he said. ‘It would be poetic justice. He shot and tortured the Louhalle girl.’

  ‘You knew her?’ This seemed to be an unexpected bonus. The Baron nodded. ‘Very well.’

  ‘She was brave, I believe.’

  ‘Superlatively so. She was quite indifferent to danger and the real leader in that area, whatever Heutelet claims. The men would never admit it, of course, but she was. I was the one who recommended her for the posthumous Légion d’Honneur.’

  ‘Who received it for her?’

  ‘I did. There were no relatives. It’s in the Resistance Museum now.’

  There seemed to be a desperate need to know this legendary fighter.

  ‘Why was she so courageous?’ Pel asked.

  ‘Perhaps because she’d nothing to lose. She gave the Germans a lot of trouble at a time when nothing was organised round here and they took it out of her when they captured her. They did terrible things to her. Up there in the woods. Not to get information, you understand. Just because she’d been a nuisance to them.’

  ‘How do you know this?’

  The cold eyes flickered again. ‘I was there when they were found. She was lying separate from the rest.’ The thin face grimaced. ‘I wouldn’t like to say what they’d done to her. It was Geistardt who did it.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘We had our sources of information. Unfortunately, they weren’t firm enough when he was brought to trial and he got away with it. I was disgusted. He was a fastidious man and I think he made it worse for her because of what she was.’

  ‘What she was?’ Pel leaned forward. ‘What was she?’

  The Baron’s eyebrows rose. ‘Didn’t you know? She was a tart.’

  Pel’s jaw dropped. This didn’t seem to fit the picture of a heroine.

  ‘A tart?’

  The Baron smiled for the first time. ‘Every man round Orgny – every man in the group – had her. I had her. I expect old Heutelet had her. He had every girl for miles around who was willing and I believe he still does.’

  Pel found it hard to accept. ‘She was a prostitute?’

  ‘She took money for it.’

  Pel was silent and the Baron went on. ‘You look startled, Inspector. You needn’t be. The heroes of the Resistance weren’t all noble men and women. All too often they were the people who didn’t fit well into society and therefore fitted well into the Resistance.’

  ‘You were one, Baron.’

  The Baron smiled. ‘I was part of a privileged class. The wealthy never give a damn what people think and the poor can never afford to. It’s the middle classes that play safe, both now and during the war. Some of the best of the Maquis were either the aristocracy, who were indifferent to conventions, or the gangsters and small-time city thugs, who’d lived by their wits all their lives. For them the Resistance was merely an extension of their peacetime behaviour. Because Dominique Louhalle was a tart was no reason why she shouldn’t be brave. And, unlike the Charpentier woman and one or two others, she was never a German tart.’

  Seventeen

  The Charpentier woman still lived in the green house at the end of the town of Savoie St Juste. She was a plump little creature who ran a laundry. According to the police sergeant Pel questioned first, she rarely spoke to people and apparently didn’t wish to.

  ‘Why should I?’ she said when Pel visited her. ‘That was a difficult time and it’s best forgotten. We had a weight on our shoulders, a terror of the future, the constant worry about food, and the fear of being deported.’

  Pel nodded. Even now he could recall how nobody had dared to do the things they wanted, nursing hatreds and fears, mistrusting people who seemed better off than they were themselves, despising the black marketeers yet, at the same time, having to accept that they were necessary. It had seemed as if the whole of France had lived in slow motion. It had been the darkest, emptiest, most anguished hour in the history of France.

  ‘They shaved my head,’ Denise Charpentier said. ‘They cut off my hair and tattooed me.’

  Pel looked up. ‘A tattoo?’ he asked, his interest caught at once. Would it match the one in the jar in Leguyader’s laboratory?

  ‘Can I see this tattoo?’ he asked.

  She gave him a bitter look. ‘No, you can’t,’ she snapped. ‘And there are two of them. Swastikas. One on each breast.’

  The reply shook Pel and he went on uncertainly. ‘You’d been –’ he paused, and ended with a rush ‘ – friendly with the Germans?’

  ‘With one of them.’ The angry look deepened. Her husband had been murdered, she considered, by French politicians of the Third Republic who had sent him off to war half-trained and ill-equipped. He had been called up in September 1939, and by June 1940, he was dead. But she hadn’t become friendly with the Germans because of that.

  ‘Then why did they tattoo you, Madame?’

  ‘That was when Hannes came.’

  ‘Hannes?’

  ‘That’s what I called him. He said it was his name. We fell in love. He was good-looking and needed mothering.’

  ‘Mothering?’ It didn’t sound like Geistardt. ‘Please go on, Madame.’

  She sighed and shrugged. ‘He was a weak sort of man. Perhaps that’s why I liked him. He wasn’t like the other Germans. They were all arrogant and expected the girls to fall for them merely because they were conquerors. They never understood the hatred. It always puzzled them. He was different. He understood.’

  This was a view of Geistardt Pel hadn’t expected. But it took all sorts, and criminals, murderers and torturers often had some hidden depths.

  She gave another sigh. ‘He said it was because he’d fallen foul of the police in Koblenz when he was young.’

  It was because of this that he’d grown bitter, she went on. All he’d done was steal a few vegetables when he’d been working in a warehouse between sessions at the Polytechnic. He’d been a student then and needed the money to live on. He’d considered the middlemen were making too much profit and, thinking he should have a little, too, had slipped an occasional crate to one side to be sold privately.

  The old, old story, Pel thought. It was always somebody else’s fault.

  ‘Have you ever seen him since the war, Madame?’

  She gave him a wary look. A few times, she admitted. The last time about a fortnight ago.

  Pel began to feel that at last they were really getting somewhere. The false starts and the false trails they’d pursued seemed to have come to an end at last.

  ‘Were you intimate with him, Madame?’

  She gave him another sharp look. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Only as a girl.’

  Then, she’d just been married and enjoyed what happened between a man and a woman. When her husband had been killed, sometimes she had cried herself to sleep for want of a man. Pel made no comment and she went on angrily.

  ‘It didn’t last long. Then he left the village. He was posted to Ste Monique. To the Château de Mougy.’

  It had pleased him, she went on, because he thought it gave him an
opportunity for promotion. ‘He was only here for a few months,’ she ended, ‘but it was enough for me to have my head shaved.’

  Pel shifted uncomfortably in his chair. ‘Do people here remember you?’ he asked.

  She shrugged. A few, she admitted. But she had let the house and gone to Paris to work. When the people she let it to had died, she came back. She had never asked for friendship, and she had never forgotten what had been done to her.

  ‘I only came back,’ she ended, ‘because my son had qualified and left home.’

  ‘There was a son?’

  ‘Yes. He was a good boy. He’s thirty-five now and in Argentina. I’m waiting for him to send for me.’

  ‘Does he know his father was a German?’

  She shrugged. ‘I never told him. He thinks his father was killed in the invasion. He thinks he was one of de Gaulle’s men.’

  ‘Did his father know he had a son?’

  ‘Not then. Later.’

  ‘When later?’

  ‘This year. He was driving to the south and he came through here. He saw me in the garden. I told him then.’

  ‘Did he suggest marriage?’

  ‘No. There was a woman in Germany and I didn’t love him any more. Too many years had gone by.’

  ‘Why did he come, Madame? To see you?’

  She stared at her fingers then she gave a sigh. ‘No. I didn’t even have that pleasure. He was going to Orgny, that’s all. He was doing some business. Some property or something.’

  ‘Who with?’

  ‘A Monsieur Piot, he said. He wanted to buy some land.’

  ‘Bussy-la-Fontaine’s forest land. Was he interested in forestry? Was he an expert at it?’

  ‘No. He didn’t seem to do anything special. He just said he thought it would be very profitable.’

  Pel took out a copy of the map of Bussy-la-Fontaine Darcy had obtained from Dôle.

  ‘Ever seen that before?’ he asked.

  She glanced at it. ‘No. Should I have done?’

  ‘It’s a map of Bussy-la-Fontaine. It’s marked, you’ll notice, with crosses, and there are comments in German.’

  She looked puzzled, and Pel went on briskly. ‘I think – or shall we say your German friend thought – that it indicates the whereabouts of the de Mougy plate. You’ve heard of that, of course?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I think your friend had one of these. Did he ever show it to you?’

  ‘No.’ She looked puzzled.

  ‘Did he say he’d come and see you again?’

  She hesitated then she nodded. ‘Yes. In a day or two, he said. I was pleased. I was flattered that he wanted to. He gave me some money. Quite a lot because he didn’t seem poor.’ She hesitated. ‘Perhaps it wasn’t honest money. I don’t know, but it pleased me that he wished to give it to me. I looked forward to seeing him again.’

  ‘But he never came?’

  ‘No.’

  Pel studied his notebook. ‘Was he involved in the theft at Baron de Mougy’s place during the war?’ he asked.

  She shrugged. ‘Perhaps. I don’t know.’

  ‘Did he mention it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Could he have done it?’

  ‘Well, he wasn’t entirely honest. I knew that.’

  Pel shifted in his seat. ‘Not entirely honest’ were hardly the words for Geistardt. Geistardt was not only a swindler, he was a murderer, even a torturer. Perhaps she’d never realised just what he was because she’d been only just out of childhood at the time.

  He paused. ‘Did he have a bullet wound in his calf, Madame?’ he asked.

  She nodded. ‘Yes. Right calf. Somebody waylaid the truck he was on in 1943 and he was wounded. It wasn’t much.’

  ‘And a tattoo?’ Pel touched his right forearm. ‘Here?’

  ‘Yes. It was a regimental badge with his number. He tried to get rid of it with pumice stone. People used it to get their hands clean in those days and he always used to carry a piece in his pocket and work at it as we talked.’

  Pel produced a photograph. ‘Would that be how you remember it, Madame?’

  She stared at it. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That’s how it looked. There was more of it then, of course.’ She looked at Pel, with agony in her eyes. ‘He’s the man they found in the forest, isn’t he?’

  Pel sighed. ‘I’m afraid he is, Madame. Would you still have a photo?’

  She fished in a drawer and produced a faded picture of a young German soldier in his shirt sleeves with his arm round a girl. The girl was slim and fair and bore no resemblance to Madame Charpentier, but the man could well have been the victim at the calvary.

  ‘That is you, Madame?’

  ‘Yes. And that’s Hannes.’

  ‘Heinz Geistardt?’

  ‘No. Hannes Gestert?’

  ‘Geistardt, Madame,’ Pel said. ‘Heinz Geistardt. Same man, I think. An officer in the SS.’

  She stared. ‘Then you can think again,’ she said sharply. ‘I wouldn’t have been seen dead with one of them. Hannes was never in the SS. He wasn’t even a Nazi. He despised them. He despised them all. From Hitler downwards. Because of the hatred they’d brought on Germany. He used to say it would take a dozen generations to break down what they’d built up. He’d never have joined the SS. He was in a sicherungsbataillon. He was an engineer and not even an officer.’

  Eighteen

  Pel was shaken.

  He’d been absolutely certain this time. Even the tattoo had seemed to suggest Geistardt. Many of the SS men had had skulls and crossbones tattooed on their arms, sometimes even their numbers, and it would make sense after the war that they’d want to get rid of them to hide what they’d been.

  But the man murdered at the calvary was not Heinz Geistardt, though he’d been of the same nationality, build and colouring, and possessed roughly the same name, and the gossip the Baron had heard had been wrong. The woman at Savoie St Juste had been the mistress of a mere corporal.

  On the way back to the city, Pel decided to see Piot.

  He was driving a digger in the valley behind the house when Pel arrived and Pel had to walk down the winding muddy paths to find him.

  ‘What are you digging?’ he asked.

  Piot smiled. ‘A dam.’

  ‘Why? You have a spring to supply water. The place’s even called Bussy-la-Fontaine.’

  Piot smiled again. ‘I’m going to stock it with perch and a few trout. There’s nothing like a fresh trout, Inspector.’

  ‘You already have a dam on your land.’

  Piot shrugged. ‘That’s to supply the eastern end with water. This one’s to supply the western end.’

  ‘And the digging to the north? What’s that?’

  Piot didn’t hesitate. ‘Road,’ he said briskly. ‘To make it easier to get the logs away when the contractors come.’

  There was a pause as Piot climbed from the digger. Alongside the car he offered Pel a cigarette. Gloomily, Pel took it and lit it.

  ‘I’ve found out who the young lady is who was staying here,’ he said. ‘Madame Grévy was right. It wasn’t your cousin, was it? It was the Baronne de Mougy.’

  For a second – just for a second – Piot’s face became hard.

  ‘How do you get on with her husband?’

  ‘How does any man get on with the man he’s cuckolded?’ Piot’s smile came back. ‘Warily, Inspector. I take care.’

  Pel drew at his cigarette, sadly studying the smoke as he blew it out. ‘Do business with him?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes. I have shops in Paris. I buy frozen food from him.’

  ‘Have you ever discussed with him the looting of his château during the war?’

  Piot’s lips tightened and Pel was aware of a sudden withdrawal. Then he smiled and shrugged. ‘I told your sergeant,’ he said. ‘It would be nice to find it. If only to return it to the Baronne.’

  Pel paused, then switched the direction of his questions. ‘You know a man called Gestert?’

/>   Piot’s eyes became veiled. ‘Should I?’

  ‘You’re doing a deal with him. He’s interested in buying some of your land.’

  ‘Oh, him!’ Piot’s gesture was unconvincing. ‘Yes, I know him. He fancied he could make more out of my land than I could. He’d been here with the German engineers during the war and he liked the look of it.’

  ‘But you didn’t accept his offer?’

  Piot shrugged. ‘I don’t need his money. But I’m a businessman, Inspector, and if someone wants my property I like to know why. When I find out, I ask myself “Can I do what he wants to do with it, only better?” Usually I can. So I don’t sell. That’s what I decided in this case.’

  ‘Because of the de Mougy plate?’

  Piot shrugged.

  ‘And that was the reason for your interest in the Baronne?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Did she ever tell you of the value of the plate?’

  Piot smiled. ‘It’s surprising what you talk about in bed.’

  Pel put on his police face.

  ‘Your father was shot by SS Sturmbannführer Heinz Geistardt, wasn’t he?’

  There was a long pause before Piot answered. ‘Yes,’ he said at last. ‘He was.’

  ‘At Grenoble?’

  ‘No.’ Piot frowned. ‘Near here. The other side of Arzy, to be exact. My father was one of those who escaped from the Vercors plateau. There weren’t many. He came back to his home. That’s where Geistardt found him.’

  ‘How did Geistardt know he was there?’

  ‘I expect someone told him?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Rumour has it that it was Matajcek. But I don’t know. There’ve been a lot of funny stories about him. He never joined the Resistance, for instance, though you might have thought that, being a Czech, he’d be one of the first to do so. In fact, I believe there was a lot of suspicion about him being a German spy. It was probably just gossip, but he was never trusted.’

  It had been a bad morning. The German police had come up with a few more answers, but none of them the right one. They knew Hannes Gestert all right. He had a record as long as your arm and they weren’t sorry that he was unlikely to bother them any more. He’d been in and out of jail ever since youth, had spent several years in Argentina, working for a German firm and getting himself mixed up with a lot of shady characters, and had eventually had to head back to Europe.