Pel Among The Pueblos

by Mark Hebden

  Arkwright muttered to himself and dragged at a bell pull. When the old woman appeared, he gestured with his glass. ‘Pilar,’ he said. ‘Tell Pilar to come here.’

  The girl entered quickly then, as she saw the three policemen, she seemed to sense danger. Her quick stride faltered and she entered the room slowly. Arkwright, who was busy filling himself a fresh glass, gestured.

  ‘You damn floozie!’ he said. ‘You got me into trouble with the police!’

  ‘Police?’ She looked at the three policemen. ‘What I do?’

  ‘What didn’t you do?’ Arkwright exploded. ‘I wish to Christ I’d never seen you.’

  ‘I do nothing wrong. I’m a good girl.’

  ‘Tell that to the Marines.’

  Barribal interposed his big frame between them. ‘Sit down, señorita,’ he said. ‘You speak English?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She speaks it well,’ Arkwright said. ‘I guess all the guys she’s been with taught her.’

  ‘Be quiet,’ Barribal snapped. He gestured at Pel.

  ‘Henri Martin,’ Pel said quietly to the girl. ‘French. A professor of history. Did you know him?’

  Her eyes flickered to Arkwright, then to Barribal, to De Troq’, and back to Pel. ‘Yes,’ she said warily. ‘I have meet this man.’

  ‘Did you know he’s been found dead?’

  ‘On the film set at Chapadores,’ Arkwright said. ‘These guys found him.’

  ‘I have not see him for five weeks. I not know where he is.’ She didn’t seem upset and Pel guessed she found it easy to transfer her affections.

  ‘When did you see him last?’

  ‘Long time ago. He give me his luggage to look after.’

  ‘What sort of luggage?’

  ‘Jus’ a suitcase and a holdall.’

  ‘He also had a camera. I think it was a good one. What happened to that?’

  Her eyes flickered and he guessed she’d sold it and kept the money. ‘I don’ see no camera,’ she said.

  ‘What happened to Martin?’

  ‘He say he has business. We come here. In a car. Then he put me down, give me his bag to look after, and say he will be back later in the day. He give me money for a meal and say, “Buy yourself something.”’

  ‘Tell me exactly what happened. From the time you met him in the restaurant at Tula.’

  She sighed. ‘I work there. Just for the time being, you understand. Until I get a job in films. One day I am going to be an actress. I know about films. I act in one once.’

  ‘A walk-on part,’ Barribal said cruelly.

  ‘That is just a beginning. I have learn a lot.’

  ‘How?’ Pel asked. ‘Acting?’

  ‘I have read the magazines. Films. Film Stars. I know how to act.’

  Pel doubted it. She couldn’t even lie convincingly. ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘Why did you go to the Mayan remains at Tula?’

  ‘Because I have never see them. I have live in Tula all my life and I have never see them. So we go. Enrico – Henri – he is quite happy. He take photographs of me. He promise to send them to a friend of his who is a film producer. Then we go on to Chapadores.’

  ‘Because it was a film set and you wanted to see it?’

  ‘Yes. One day, I think. One day, this will be me. We are very happy. We come to San Miguel and we stay at the Motel La Ermita. But we also go to other places. We eat a good meal at a hotel on the road west out of San Miguel. Enrico is much excited there, because it has things there which he is interested in.’

  ‘What things?’

  She shrugged indifferently. ‘Furniture. The hotel register which was once the family visitors’ book. Nothing I understand. He make notes. Then later he say he must go back to Mexico City. To pick up some books, he say. I think he dumps me. But he does not. He comes back in two days. Then he tell me he has to meet a man. Business, he say. He go off in the evening and this time he never come back. He dumps me after all.’

  ‘What was your relationship with Martin?’

  She tossed her head defiantly. ‘What you think?’

  ‘Have you reported his absence to the police?’

  ‘Why? He leave me. I think he has gone back to Mexico City.’

  ‘Weren’t you interested?’

  ‘Men have leave me before. Other men.’

  ‘Why was he killed? Do you know?’

  ‘I not know this.’

  ‘What happened to the notebook he had?’

  ‘I leave it with his luggage. There is not much in it. I look. I think perhaps there is an address where I can find him. But there is not. Just a lot of lines I can’t understand. I buy myself a shawl.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘He does not come back. I think when it is late I must find somewhere to sleep.’

  ‘Didn’t you go to the police and report his disappearance?’

  ‘I think he will not want this.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I think he is doing something he do not want them to see?’

  ‘Why did you think that?’

  She shrugged. ‘The way he talk. The things he does. He has this notebook. A new one. A fresh one. For new discoveries, he says. He puts things in it.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘I think I go to the hotel, but then I think I have not much money. So I find somewhere more cheap. I must have somewhere. I go there with the suitcase. I sleep there. And wait. He doesn’t come back. I think he leave me. I get a job at Posada San Francisco.’

  ‘Until this guy –’ Barribal jerked a hand at Arkwright ‘–persuaded you to move in here.’

  ‘I think so, yes.’

  ‘What happened to his luggage? This suitcase you said he left.’

  ‘I leave it at the house where I find to sleep. Before I get work at Posada San Francisco.’

  ‘Where is it? Here? In San Miguel?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Address?’

  ‘Calle Julian de los Reyes, 14. It is small house. Not good. I don’ like.’

  ‘You’d better show us.’

  She looked at Arkwright. ‘I go?’

  ‘You go,’ he said. ‘Get the hell outa here! I don’t want no involvement with the fuzz. Beat it. Take your things and go. I can soon get someone else.’

  Barribal smiled. ‘When you do, señor, make sure she comes willingly, and that she is of mature age and sound mind. It would give me great pleasure to arrest you.’

  Thirteen

  They checked Pilar Hernandez’s story at the Motel La Ermita. Sure enough, there was no sign of Martin’s luggage there but the register showed a Señor y Señora Enrico Martin, of Mexico City, as having stayed there, which seemed to indicate she had told them the truth.

  Number 14, Calle Julian de los Reyes looked exactly like Number 7, Calle Vicenza, in Tula, where Pilar Hernandez had grown up. It was small, flat-fronted, flat-roofed, with a plank door painted with peeling green paint that opened on to the street, so that you stepped from the living room into any traffic that happened to be passing. Nearby was a little square with a stand where women were filling gaudy plastic buckets with water, and a few children sat round with their feet in the puddles they made.

  The woman who opened the door saw Pilar Hernandez first and gave her a glare. She seemed on the point of setting about her, in fact, but Barribal pushed her back. As he made clear what they were after, the woman disappeared, returning with a suitcase and a canvas holdall.

  ‘Todo?’ Barribal asked. ‘This is everything?’

  ‘Todo!’ The woman gestured them away. ‘There is nothing more!’

  Barribal refused to be put off and pushed his way inside, into a room exactly like the one in Tula, with walls full of pictures and just four chairs and a table on which was stretched a gaudily coloured runner centred by a plastic container holding a single flower. The barrage of questions was beyond Pel and it seemed to produce nothing.

  Barribal shrugged and they headed for the street, followed by the imprecatio
ns of the woman against Pilar Hernandez.

  They opened the suitcase in the car. There was nothing of any particular interest. Once more, mostly it was clothes. Then, at the bottom under the clothes, they unearthed what looked like a pair of tweezers. They were very long and narrow and the pincer end worked like scissors with a wire attached to a trigger on the handle. The hinged part was short, hooked and with prongs that had been roughened, presumably to make their grip better.

  Barribal held them up. ‘What are these for?’

  The girl shrugged. ‘I have never see them before.’

  ‘For barbecuing steaks? For pulling teeth? For extracting nails from planks?’ Barribal handed them to Pel who noticed that they looked as though they had been hurriedly and crudely made.

  Again the girl shrugged. ‘I don’ know,’ she said. ‘He does not show them to me.’

  There were also several books. Barribal picked one up.

  ‘La Intervención Francesa,’ he read. He looked at the girl. ‘Did he get you to read this to him?’

  ‘Some of it. He does not speak much Spanish.’

  ‘Which part did you read?’

  It was obvious that what she had read had not sunk in. ‘I don’ know,’ she said. ‘Something about an emperor. He want to pay his soldiers and he cannot. At Querétaro.’ She dismissed him with a shrug. ‘He is a silly man, I think, this emperor.’

  Pel picked up another book. ‘Expédition du Mexique,’ he read. ‘In French. It’ll bear studying.’

  The notebook they found, like the one they had found in Mexico City, seemed of little value. There was a great deal more of the shorthand writing, several of the ‘ASS’ letters in the margin, and ‘cama de matrimonio, de madera, de nupcias’.

  Barribal looked puzzled. ‘Double bed, wooden bed, marriage bed?’ He looked up at Pel. ‘What’s he trying to find out? He seems very interested in beds.’

  The girl was unable to help them and knew no reason why the dead Henri Martin should have been interested in double beds.

  ‘Perhaps for me?’ she asked.

  They dropped the girl in the town. ‘What am I to do?’ she asked.

  ‘Go home to Tula,’ Barribal said shortly.

  He slipped her a small denomination note, but she stared at it contemptuously, stuffed it into her skirt pocket, then turned on her heel and strode away, a fine, defiant figure, her black hair floating in the warm breeze.

  Studied again over beers in a bar off the main street, the notebooks produced nothing.

  ‘He wasn’t interested in the Mayans, patron,’ De Troq’ said, deciphering some of the shorthand. ‘He seems to be entirely interested in the Emperor Maximilian. It’s all down here. How he was put on the throne of Mexico but was later captured by the Mexicans under Juárez and after the siege and capture of Querétaro, was forced to surrender and finally shot by a firing-squad. It’s just a lot of notes about his travels.’

  ‘Nothing else?’

  ‘It’s a new notebook. There’s very little in it. Perhaps Donck and Hervé have another notebook.’

  ‘Any reference to “treasure”?’

  ‘No, patron. There are the notes on “bed” and the words “Las Rosas” again. “Pilar” is here again, too. Just the word… Nothing more. As well as ‘‘ASS’’.’

  ‘Well, we’ve explained “Pilar” and “bed” and probably “roses”,’ Barribal said. ‘They seem to go together. But what does “ASS” mean and what was this “treasure” Borillas heard Donck and Hervé talking about?’

  ‘Patron –’ De Troq’s expression was faraway, as if he were deep in thought ‘ – treasure.’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘In those days, armies carried their pay around with them. Would Maximilian have had a war chest with him? To pay his troops?’

  ‘Would he? Inform me.’

  ‘I think it would be fairly normal. If he did, in 1861 it would surely be in silver or gold. Pesos, napoleons, dollars or Maria Theresas. Something like that.’

  Pel’s eyes met De Troq’s. ‘It’s not impossible,’ he agreed quietly. ‘What would be the value of such a war chest?’

  De Troq’ shrugged. ‘Hard to say. How do we know what a gold peso piece, a napoleon, a silver dollar or a Maria Theresa’s worth? A lot these days, I imagine. A war chest full of coins like that could be worth a million francs or more. There’d have to be enough to pay his soldiers, and an army – even a small one – would need a lot. And it would be in silver or gold, patron. It could be worth a fortune these days.’

  ‘Worth getting your hands on?’

  ‘Martin might well have come across documents mentioning it.’

  ‘And if he had, to Donck it would be well worth taking a risk for. He’s known to be willing to take risks, and gold or silver to that value would be worth chancing your arm for.’

  ‘I think we ought to find out more about this war chest of Maximilian’s,’ Pel said.

  ‘If there was one.’

  Pel agreed. ‘If,’ he agreed. ‘At the moment, though, I can’t think what else it could be.’

  There was not only an American art school in San Miguel, there was also an American library for the use of American visitors. What was more, on its staff it had a Frenchwoman who twenty years before had married a Mexican called Méndez, an elderly lady with a face deeply lined by the sun but with hair dyed so red it looked as if it had been chosen from a decorator’s colour chart. However, she knew everything the library contained and spoke French, Spanish and English perfectly.

  What was more, because they were so close to Querétaro, where Maximilian had made his last stand and finally met his death, she was sound on her history of the French intervention in Mexico.

  ‘Maximilian came here towards the end of his reign in Mexico,’ she said, reaching for files. ‘Early in 1867. The French were on the point of evacuating the country. Paris had come to the conclusion that nothing further was to be gained from the Mexican adventure and the French troops were being withdrawn. That meant that Maximilian was trying to support the Mexican Empire solely with a few loyal Mexican troops, and that was hopeless because on the whole the Mexicans – apart from a few wealthy families who hoped to gain from it – didn’t want an emperor, and Juárez had passed a law which said that any Mexican offering help or assistance to an enemy of the country was liable to the death sentence. It didn’t encourage anybody to give assistance.’

  ‘Anything known about the last days, Madame?’ Pel asked.

  ‘Quite a lot. Plenty was written. There’s José Blasio, Blanchot, Buffin, Emmanuel Dommenech, Luisa Gasperini, Kératry, Baron de Troquereau Tournay-Turenne –’

  ‘We have De Troquereau,’ De Troq’ said.

  ‘Oh!’ The librarian stopped. ‘I’m surprised. There can’t be many copies. His mémoirs were privately printed and only about fifty copies found their way into libraries. It was produced chiefly for members of his family.’

  Pel could guess why, too. The Baron de Troquereau Tournay-Turenne, if he were anything like his descendant, would assume that the French intervention in Mexico, despite the fact that it concerned thousands of French soldiers, was really only a private matter that concerned the De Troquereaus.

  He indicated De Troq’ with a small feeling of pride. ‘This is the present Baron de Troquereau,’ he said. ‘He is the General’s great-great-grandson.’

  ‘Oh!’ Señora Méndez went pink and became flustered. ‘I’m so pleased to meet you. A splendid writer, the General.’

  ‘I always thought him a crashing bore,’ De Troq’ said solemnly.

  ‘Oh! Oh, did you? Oh! Well, perhaps he was. People were in those days, weren’t they? All the same –’ the librarian struggled to recover her composure ‘ – we’ve got lots of material here. They all put their thoughts on paper about what happened. We have a pretty clear picture.’

  ‘What we’re interested in,’ Pel said, ‘is how Maximilian paid his troops.’

  ‘With gold, I expect.’
r />   ‘Did this gold disappear?’

  The woman stared at Pel for a moment then she gestured. ‘One moment,’ she said.

  She vanished through a door behind her desk and re-emerged some minutes later with a book.

  ‘Baron Alfred van der Smissen,’ she said. ‘He was a soldier. It’s said he became the lover of the Empress Carlota when Maximilian neglected her. It was quite a scandal.’

  She began turning pages, then looked up. ‘He refers to Walton – Souvenirs d’un Officier Belge au Mexico.’

  Another book appeared and she riffled through it and looked up again. ‘One moment more. I must find something else. You see, the Mexicans wrote very little themselves on the subject.’

  Another leather-bound book appeared and she looked up again.

  ‘5th February 1867,’ she said. ‘The French troops departed from Mexico City, leaving Maximilian on his own.’ Her finger traced the words down the page. ‘But the same day he received news from Miguel de Miramón, one of his generals, that he had attacked Zacatecas and forced the Juárez Government to flee.’

  Her spectacles slid down her nose as she peered excitedly at the print. ‘It seems Maximilian was delighted by the news but within hours he learned that Miramón and his troops had in fact been outflanked by General Escobedo and cut to pieces. It was known as the Massacre of San Jacinto.’

  She looked up apologetically. ‘It was a battle of unparalleled ferocity with all the worst elements of a civil war. Juárez ordered that no mercy should be shown and over 100 Frenchmen who had volunteered to remain behind after the French Army left were summarily executed. Miramón’s fight had cost Maximilian over 3,000 men and – ’ she paused, her finger on the print, then she looked up ‘ – and part of his war chest, a sum of 25,000 pesos.’

  ‘Which would go where?’

  Señora Méndez smiled. ‘Who knows? Escobedo was a Juárista general and would turn it over to Juárez, I suppose. Probably he kept a little back for himself, of course. It wasn’t unknown. It never has been in Mexico’s history.’

  ‘What about the rest of the war chest?’