Pel Among The Pueblos

by Mark Hebden

The librarian turned more pages and came up again with a bright fluttery smile. ‘It seems that what was lost was about a quarter of the normal war chest. What remained were the remaining three-quarters. That would be held at Querétaro, I suppose, and, because Maximilian was besieged there, it would remain there.’

  ‘Was it ever found?’

  She looked startled. ‘Found?’

  ‘Is there any record of it appearing after the surrender?’

  Another book appeared. By this time they could barely see Señora Méndez for books.

  ‘I think there is,’ she said. ‘There is a list made out by General Escobedo of the spoils collected after Maximilian’s defeat. It lists the number of rifles and cannon, the amount of ammunition, the gunpowder, the horses –’ she frowned ‘ – but not the war chest. That’s strange. Normally they always stated the amount found, and even at Querétaro they mention the money found in Maximilian’s personal possession. It wasn’t much. But no mention of any 75,000 pesos which must have been there.’

  ‘And that,’ Pel said, ‘would be worth how much today?’

  The librarian shrugged, frowned, thought for a while, then shrugged again. ‘I have no idea. It would undoubtedly have been in gold and silver. It’s impossible to estimate. With the rise in the price of gold and the present inflation rates – millions of pesos. It could be two or three million dollars. Perhaps more – much more.’

  ‘At the present rate of exchange,’ Pel said slowly. ‘Around several million dollars. Donck wouldn’t hesitate to murder for that.’ He frowned. ‘We begin at last to see some reason for all that happened. Why Donck was interested in Martin. Why Hervé betrayed Navarro. Why Navarro is dead. Martin discovered something and somehow Navarro found out – perhaps Martin asked his advice. Navarro made enquiries of his own. Through Hervé, Donck found out what he was up to and went to see him, probably to persuade him to allow him to join in. Navarro didn’t want that. He wanted the money for himself. There was a quarrel. Navarro and his bodyguard, Desgeorges, were shot and Donck and Hervé turned up in Mexico, which is a sensible place to turn up if the treasure they’re after’s there. They found out – or already knew – where Martin was, and followed him.’

  He paused. ‘It’s my guess,’ he went on, ‘that they arranged somehow to meet him at Chapadores – although the village’s handy, the film set’s deserted, and it would be at night. They torture Martin to get the facts, then murder him and bury him there. They unearth the treasure. Having got what they want, all they have to do now is leave for somewhere safe like Brazil. But they’d left France in a hurry and the money they’d managed to bring wasn’t enough and even in Mexico you need money – especially if you need an airline ticket to Brazil. So Donck picks up Borillas and tries to knock off a bank in Mexico City. He pulls it off all right, but he doesn’t allow for the fact that there are bad drivers everywhere in the world. There’s a collision and he ends up in gaol with Borillas.’

  De Troq’ frowned. ‘And while he’s there,’ he said, ‘Hervé gets the wind up and bolts.’

  Pel sighed and rubbed his nose, trying to marshal his thoughts.

  ‘That’s the way it seems, mon brave,’ he agreed. ‘But, unfortunately, it leaves one question unanswered. Why did she shop Donck to the police for Martin’s murder?’

  That evening they received an agitated and excited telephone call from Señora Méndez. ‘I have found out about the disappearance of the war chest,’ she said cheerfully. ‘It seems to have vanished before Maximilian reached Querétaro and was besieged there. I grew quite worried and looked up our records. Quite a job. Very dusty. There’s a lot of dust in Mexico and most of it seems to be in our papers. There is a reference in a letter from Miramón to Mejia – they were the imperialist generals who were captured with Maximilian and shot alongside him. It’s dated 20 February 1867, soon after Maximilian left Mexico City to join his troops at Querétaro and roughly a month before the Juáristas started their siege. It states quite firmly, “Twenty-five thousand pesos to Escobedo at San Jacinto. The other 75,000 – where? The Emperor has nothing and, now, neither have we. We can expect desertions.” I’ve looked through other letters and turned up no reference to it being found and it’s well known that the Emperor had no money of his own because attempts were made to bribe his captors to bargain for his life, but it was impossible to raise the money because he had none.’

  Pel put the telephone down and looked at De Troq’. ‘Seventy-five thousand pesos in gold. Worth three million francs or more,’ he said. ‘It disappeared sometime between the battle at San Jacinto and the time when Maximilian was captured at Querétaro.’ He lit a cigarette. ‘This Maximilian doesn’t seem to have taken care of things very well, does he?’

  De Troq’ grinned. ‘My great-great-grandfather considered he wasn’t very clever, patron. He felt he had an idea that because he was a member of a European monarchy he only had to appear and the Mexicans would worship him. He ended up pretty well disillusioned and fell back on fathering a child by the wife of one of his gardeners, while his own wife, who was probably bored stiff with him by that time, had the affair with this General van der Smissen we heard about and returned to France where she appealed for help, and finally went off her head.’

  Pel was silent for a while. After a moment or two he looked up. ‘Donck and Hervé came here,’ he said. ‘To San Miguel de Allende. So did Martin. Why?’

  ‘The library, patron?’ De Troq’ looked excited. ‘To look things up? To check where the war chest went to?’

  ‘Señora Méndez looked things up. For us. She says there’s no indication of what happened to the war chest. So they didn’t get very far.’

  ‘Perhaps Martin had found out elsewhere and knew where to look.’

  ‘Señora Méndez could find nothing.’

  ‘They might have removed it, patron. Cut it out with a razor blade from a book. It’s been done before.’

  Señora Méndez was delighted to see them back, and gave a giggle of excitement.

  ‘I’m growing quite interested,’ she said. ‘I’ve been spending all my spare time checking.’ Her face fell. ‘Unfortunately, ‘I’ve found nothing.’

  ‘Have you had anybody else in here recently enquiring about Maximilian’s last weeks?’ Pel asked.

  She looked puzzled. ‘Mostly they check in Querétaro. That’s where he was shot. They have a lot of material there.’ She frowned. ‘But there was a man who came in. Just over a month ago. I can check.’

  ‘Please do.’

  She disappeared and came back with a box of request cards. ‘Five weeks ago,’ she said.

  ‘He sounds like our man. What was his name?’

  ‘Martin. Professor Martin. Henri Martin. It’s here on the cards. Can you talk to him?’

  Pel frowned. ‘I doubt it, Madame,’ he said. ‘He’s dead.’ He fished out the photographs Pilar Hernandez had taken at Tula. ‘Is that him, do you think?’

  Señora Méndez went into a flutter of excitement. ‘I really couldn’t say. I expect so. I’ll check. I wasn’t here at the time, you see, so I don’t know. I also don’t know what he was after. I see he requested a book called Da Miramar a Mexico. Viaje del Emperador Massimiliano y de la Emperadora Carlota. Miramar to Mexico. The journey of Maximilian and Carlota. It’s a privately printed work. He also asked to see the papers of General Calles, who was an imperialist who survived the siege, and the diary of Prince Felix Salm. He was a Prussian officer who was captured with Maximilian. He also survived. Perhaps he found some clues there.’

  ‘Did any of these people ever mention San Miguel? This place?’

  ‘I don’t think so. It was quite a long way from Querétaro in those days. Not nowadays, of course, with motor cars. But with only coaches and bad roads, it would be quite a journey. Maximilian came here before being besieged at Querétaro. We know that. There’s a stone set in the wall of the Posada San Miguel. You can see it. It mentions that he did.’

  They decided they were in need of
a drink and that the best place to have it was in the Posada San Miguel, which was at the other side of the square from their own hotel.

  It was a similar place to the Posada San Francisco with a square courtyard, a fountain, creepers, trees, shrubs and bougainvillea. As they drank, they searched about them and eventually, on one of the walls, half-hidden by the creepers, they came on a small marble plaque. It was in Spanish and Pel saw the name, Maximilian.

  ‘What’s it say?’ he asked.

  De Troq’ squinted upwards. ‘“In this courtyard”,’ he translated, ‘“the Emperor Maximilian I, puppet ruler of Mexico, 1863–1867, stopped on February 26th to take a glass of wine before proceeding to Querétaro where he was besieged, captured and on June 19th shot by a firing-squad”.’

  Pel reached for a cigarette. ‘So he did come to San Miguel,’ he said thoughtfully.

  He sat for a while in silence then he held up his thumb. ‘Known facts. Seventy-five thousand pesos – between three or more million French francs – in gold disappeared somewhere after the massacre at San Jacinto on 13 February 1867, and the defeat at Querétaro on 15 May.’

  He lifted his first finger. ‘Nobody seems to know where it went.’

  Up went his middle finger. ‘But Maximilian stopped here. On 26 February after San Jacinto and before reaching Querétaro, in this very courtyard, I suppose.’

  Up went his third finger. ‘It was after that when this General Miramón mentioned that the money had disappeared.’

  His little finger rose. ‘So it’s more than likely that the money was handed over to someone for safe keeping at that meeting here, was hidden, perhaps buried, and has remained so ever since, until Martin found out something somewhere in his reading about where it was and set out to find it.’

  Fourteen

  There was another telephone call that evening. Señora Méndez had taken the trouble to go round to the home of the assistant who had been on duty when Martin had appeared to request books, and he had identified the photograph. She was delighted with her success and in a twitter of excitement.

  ‘It’s all so thrilling. A sort of detective search through history.’

  Pel preferred to call it simply a detective search. Yet she was right. For the first time since they had found Navarro and his bodyguard, Desgeorges, dead on the floor of his library at Sorgeay two months before, they had finally begun to understand why it had happened. It explained why Donck and Jacqueline Hervé had fled not to Brazil where they might have been safe, but to Mexico, and why Professor Martin had been found dead under the stoop of the film set at Chapadores.

  Pel was so pleased with their progress he felt he had to post a letter to his wife to tell her how right she was in her estimate of the reason for Donck’s flight. He was homesick for Burgundy – even, damn it, for Madame Routy. He was also sick of the sight of De Troq’. Good as he was, he was inclined to be a little humourless and Pel missed Darcy’s sharp comments and the asides of Judge Polverari. In addition, having been well brought up as a baron should be, De Troq’ was always polite, never rude, always calm, never in a panic, always in control – in a way Pel could never hope to be – and it had begun to irritate. Pel had worked with De Troq’ before but had never been thrown into such close contact, and by this time he was almost wishing he could be run over by one of the Mexican buses that sounded so much like spacecraft taking off.

  On the other hand – he tried to be fair – down now to his last packet of French cigarettes, Pel had been offered two more by De Troq’, so he couldn’t be all that bad. And – Pel had to admit it to himself – no other member of his team could have been so useful. De Troq’ had been what he liked to call ‘expensively uneducated’ but, uneducated or not, he had a knowledge of the world, had travelled, spoke three or four languages more or less fluently, and seemed also to have a knowledge of art, music, literature and history which had proved immensely useful on many occasions. It wasn’t much good looking for something that had happened in the past when you had no idea what century it had happened in, or where, or to whom. And, Pel felt, the fact that his great-great-grandfather, the General Baron de Troquereau Tournay-Turenne, whom God preserve, had served in Mexico during the French intervention, seemed to give his great-great-grandson a sort of in-built awareness of the period, a feeling for it which had more than once been very valuable. Thank God for barons, Pel thought. Though he liked to think it made no difference how a man was born, he was a snob at heart and had often thought how nice it would be to be elevated himself to the nobility.

  The following day Pel was back at the library. Señora Méndez, who by this time was in a tizzy of excitement at the thought that she was involved in a murder enquiry, produced evidence that Maximilian’s treasure in his war chest was indeed in Austrian Maria Theresas, napoleons, American silver dollars and gold peso pieces.

  ‘The evidence is here,’ she said. ‘In the book by Prince Felix Salm. He was a prisoner with Maximilian at Querétaro and would have been shot but for his wife, the princess. She was American but she had a French background and she started life as a circus bareback rider. She engineered his release and he published his mémoirs the following year. In English in London. Two volumes. My Diary in Mexico.’ Señora Méndez indicated a passage in the book in front of her. ‘He writes that Maximilian was very upset that nothing could be done for him. “He told me”, he says, “that he had deposited his treasure in a safe place.” He had always felt that he might be defeated and had hoped to bargain with it for his life because he knew the Juáristas were in desperate need of money. He goes on, “I don’t think they would ever have bargained, but Maximilian thought so. I was about to ask him where the money was, so my wife could find it and use it on his behalf, but just then there was an alarm that the Juáristas were breaking through the defences and from that moment we were engaged in a wild fight and I never got the chance again to ask him.”’

  ‘So there was a treasure?’ Pel said.

  ‘It looks like it.’

  Pel frowned. Was Professor Martin after the money? Had he learned of it, as they believed, and had Navarro also learned? And was that why Navarro and Martin were dead? Because Donck had learned through Jacqueline Hervé, Navarro’s mistress, who was also Donck’s mistress? Where, though, was Donck now? Come to that, where was Jacqueline Hervé?

  And that brought up another question: Why, if they were in the thing together, hadn’t Jacqueline Hervé helped Donck to escape? Was it after all just as he had thought, that she had lost her nerve and bolted? Surely, after three murders and with the ‘treasure’ within reach, she would be able to steel herself sufficiently to carry the plan through? Or was it because, knowing where the treasure was, she had deliberately left Donck in the penitentiary and gone off to collect the treasure herself? It suddenly seemed a possibility.

  ‘I think,’ he said, ‘that Hervé dumped Donck for the loot. When he made his attempt on the bank to raise honest-to-God cash to pay for airline tickets to Brazil or somewhere and it went wrong and he was put behind bars, it dawned on her that she was suddenly on to a good thing. She wasn’t going to have to share the spoils with him. They were hers – all of them. That’s why she shopped him for the murder of Martin. So the police would hang on to him and make it safer for her. Unfortunately, she didn’t allow for him escaping. However, she had plenty of time before then to bolt for Brazil and he’ll not find it easy to turn her up again there. And neither will we. I supposed we can write “Finish” to it all. We’ve lost Hervé and Donck and the treasure and it doesn’t look to me now as though we’re going to find any of them.’

  Back at the Posada San Francisco, Pel was brooding over a beer when Barribal appeared.

  ‘Information,’ he said. ‘I find a young cop here called Fontano, whose grandfather fight with Pancho Villa.’

  ‘Against Maximilian or for him?’ Pel asked.

  Barribal gave him a cold look. ‘Villa is born long after Maximilian is shot,’ he said. ‘Villa is an ex-bandit and
one of the leaders in the revolution of 1910 to 1920.’

  ‘If Villa wasn’t born until years after Maximilian was killed, how does he interest us?’

  ‘Because the revolution of 1910 is to overthrow a man called Porfirio Díaz who manages to remain dictator and President of Mexico for over thirty years. And Díaz, as a young soldier, fights for Juárez against Maximilian.’

  ‘And what does this cop have to tell us?’

  ‘He says his grandfather was one of Villa’s Dorados – ’

  Pel looked puzzled and Barribal explained. ‘Villa is always impressed by Napoleon’s Old Guard so he creates an elite force of his own. They are called Dorados – the Golden Boys – because of the gold badges on their uniforms. Most of them are killed in Villa’s last battles before the revolution ends.’

  ‘But not this one?’

  ‘This one wisely keeps his head down and survives. He later acquires land and becomes a wealthy farmer.’

  ‘And – ?’ Pel was wondering where it was leading to.

  ‘The cop, the guy called Fontano, say he’s hear the old man talk about being one of a party which go to search for Maximilian’s treasure.’

  The old grandfather, a patriarch with a white beard and a lean straight figure still, was a handsome old man remarkably alert despite his ninety-one years. He lived in a splendid large house furnished in magnificent style.

  ‘There was a lot of property going spare after the revolution,’ he explained to Barribal. ‘A lot of it was abandoned and nobody wanted this place because it had been burned. I got it for a song and worked hard. Now I am rich.’ His mouth widened in a grin. ‘I pray there will be no more revolutions.’

  ‘Agente de Policía Fontano says you were one of Villa’s Dorados who were sent to pick up Maximilian’s treasure.’

  ‘That’s right. Villa had heard of it and, like all rebels, he was always desperate for money to buy guns.’