Death in the City of Light: The Serial Killer of Nazi-Occupied Paris (21 page)

The STO was extended several times in 1943 and 1944, eventually making all men aged eighteen to sixty and childless women eighteen to forty-five liable to forced labor. As the number of defaulters increased dramatically in 1943 and 1944, and many law-abiding citizens came to their aid against this law widely regarded as arbitrary and unjust, the Germans threatened harsher punishment for evasion. “
All close male relatives, brothers-in-law, cousins over age of 18 will be shot; all women similarly related will be sentenced to hard labor.” Children under the age of seventeen would be packed away to an “approved school.” The brutality and exploitation at the heart of the Occupation was evident to an increasing number of Frenchmen.

By the time Petiot was locked up in the Gestapo prison, the Resistance had gradually moved beyond individual acts of opposition and sabotage to become, as the socialist Jean Texcier put it, “
a good occupation for the occupied.” Resistance newspapers and pamphlets all over Paris sounded the call to action. Albert Camus, who joined the editorial staff of
Combat
in the autumn of 1943, put it this way only days after the discovery
of Petiot’s crime in March 1944: “
Total war has been unleashed, and it calls for total resistance. You must resist because it does concern you, and there is only one France, not two.” Sympathizers, he warned, would be punished just as active Resistants. Now was the time to act.

A
S the story of Petiot’s “murder house” broke, Albert Camus was holding rehearsals for his first play,
Malentendu
(The Misunderstanding). The plot revolved around owners of a hotel who recruited, entertained, and then robbed and killed their guests—a Petiot-esque project that would debut in June, ironically at the Théâtre des Mathurins, just across the street from Fourrier’s hair salon.

The piece was in fact inspired nine years before when Camus read a short item in the Associated Press about a young man who returned home to Yugoslavia only to be killed by his mother. Camus added the element of the disguised return and the twist that the family had, in his absence, transformed the hotel into a profitable slaughterhouse. Camus set the story instead in the distant Bohemian town of České Budějovice (Czech Budweis), which he had visited eight years before. His new lover, the actress Maria Casarès, played the sister.

Camus was coming to terms with his new life in Paris. At first, he had found the occupied city a dismal gray, like its pigeons and statues, and a stark contrast to the sun, sea, and shimmer of his native Algeria.
He missed his favorite café, which was decorated with a guillotine and a skeleton and had a flamboyant manager who wandered the establishment with a dildo in his hand. And Camus also missed his wife, Francine, though he continued to have love affairs.

For a time, Camus had considered taking advantage of an escape agency to cross into Spain and then return to Algeria. He certainly had experience with clandestine departures. Before coming to France, Camus had helped men and women pass into Morocco with the hope of joining de Gaulle in London. Camus, however, soon abandoned the idea of leaving Paris, no matter how appalling the impact of the German
Occupation was on intellectual life—Henri Jeanson compared it to living in a “madhouse run by the lunatics.” Camus instead concentrated on his work, which in the spring of 1944 also included writing at night on his new novel,
The Plague
, which would be set in a city overrun by rats.

As Camus put the final touches on his play about the murderous hotel owners, Jean-Paul Sartre was preparing for the opening of his
No Exit
, a one-act play that would debut on May 27, 1944, at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier. The story took place, appropriately enough for the Occupation, in hell. Sartre had first picked Camus to direct and play the lead male role of Garcin. The rehearsals, which had begun at Christmas 1943 at Camus’s or Simone de Beauvoir’s apartment, were suspended in February, when the actor playing the lead female role, Olga Barbezat, was arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned at Fresnes. At this point, either Camus backed out of his commitment or Sartre decided to replace him. The result was the same.
No Exit
was staged with an established director and a professional cast.

The German-controlled press lambasted the play for its “immoralism,” but Sartre’s
No Exit
would prove to be a major success, particularly with the young. “Hell is other people” was the line most cited. Sartre later explained that he only meant that people judge themselves with criteria given by other people, and therefore, if and when relations sour, humanity falls into a state of “
total dependence” resembling hell. Sartre’s popularity soared. After this piece, he became, in the words of Jean Paulhan, “the
spiritual leader of thousands of young people.” The scholar Guillaume Hanoteau agreed. Looking back at the postwar flourishing of Parisian intellectual life, Hanoteau credited Sartre’s
No Exit
with inaugurating the “
golden age of Saint-Germain-des-Prés.”

The Wehrmacht, the Luftwaffe, the Kriegsmarine, the SS, and other elite Nazi officers and selected collaborators, meanwhile, were enjoying their own day in the sun. It was a sumptuous world far removed from the privations of everyday life replete with shortages and regular power outages. The officers were also avoiding the carnage of the Eastern Front: sipping champagne in the silk-lined suites of the Crillon or at the Ritz, dining by candlelight under the chandeliers of Palais du Luxembourg;
and of course enjoying the fashionable soirees at the German embassy hosted by its Francophile ambassador, Otto Abetz. The spectacle of his social events prompted Céline to dub him King Otto I.

Germany’s waning fortunes in war, if anything, strengthened the desire of its officers and soldiers to enjoy Paris. German officers were regular visitors to the cabarets and brothels. Madame Fabianne Jamet (real name Georgette Pélagie) remembered them at hers, One Two Two, with fondness:
handsome young SS men showing perfect manners; Wehrmacht soldiers shouting “Heil Hitler” as they raised their champagne glasses; Luftwaffe pilots coming in for a last drink and fling before embarking on a bombing mission in the Battle of Britain. She recalled the latter passing around a tube of a stimulant designed to increase their concentration and confidence to face the Spitfires and anti-aircraft guns, and confessed that she started using the drug herself.

The French criminal gangs, on the other hand, were “
horrible creatures.” The gangsters in their fashionable jackets bulging with concealed weapons would lounge around downstairs with their women, “emptying magnum after magnum and boasting to one another about their exploits.” Worse, they were unpredictable and often unruly, like the hooligan who got drunk and started juggling hand grenades. These “vile, disgusting thugs,” Jamet added, “threw their money about on champagne and girls as though there was no tomorrow.”

D
ETERMINED to catch the killer, Commissaire Massu was dreaming of the moment he would place the handcuffs on Marcel Petiot. He would show the suspect to his seat near the window overlooking the green square below, offer him a cigarette, and then launch into what he called “
the most passionate interrogation of [his] entire career.” By the end of this battle of wits, he would be able to put together the many loose pieces of the puzzle and ensure that cruelty, malice, and deviousness on such a horrific scale would not go unpunished.

But far from being close to a resolution, the case seemed only to be expanding. After François the Corsican and Jo the Boxer had “passed” to the new world, as it was called, news of the escape organization had circulated around rue de l’Echiquier and the many cafés, bars, and other hot spots of Faubourg Saint-Martin. Soon Pintard was approached by several of Jo’s associates, including the notorious gangster Adrien Estébétéguy, known as “
Adrien the Basque,” “The Cold Hand,” or “The Right Hand.”
A forty-five-year-old from Bayonne, Adrien had worked much of southwestern France, particularly Toulouse, racking up some eight prison sentences and seven current warrants for arrest, not to mention a string of assault charges over the years, four of them recently, against French policemen.

Packing two standard automatics, which he was said to draw at the slightest dispute in a poker game, Adrien had a reputation as a tough guy with a biting wit and a penchant for fine clothes. He particularly liked new suits, this at a time when one on the black market cost the equivalent of the annual salary of a ticket collector on the métro.

By early 1943, Adrien the Basque had many reasons for wanting to leave France. As part of his work with the
Devisenschützkommando, an outfit that tracked down people selling currency and gold illegally, a highly profitable enterprise virtually annexed by Henri Lafont’s criminal gang, Adrien was accused of reselling for personal profit some of the gold he seized and then turning in an inferior gilt substitute. He was apparently making significant omissions in his reports of confiscated goods.

Some of the unreported profits probably also came from his work with Kurt von Behr of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) office, which was removing art and cultural property from “ownerless” Jewish homes. Adrien was involved in particular in the
Möbel Aktion
, or “Furniture Operation,” that involved retrieving furnishings in apartments where Jews had been deported, and then sending the loot to newly formed German administrations in the east. Later, after the Allied bombing of Cologne on the night of May 30, 1942, ERR authorities changed the stated mission, claiming that the seized property would be used to compensate German victims of the air raids. By the end of the Nazi Occupation,
some thirty-eight thousand apartments in Paris alone would be looted by this organization.

Adrien the Basque was guilty of yet other omissions. Like Jo the Boxer, he had been using his German security identity card (a
Sicherheitsdienst
, or SD, card) and Gestapo uniform to impersonate a policeman and commit a number of robberies. This kind of crime, unfortunately, was on the rise.
Approximately one thousand cases of false Gestapo agents were known, many of them targeting the most exposed residents with the least recourse, such as foreign-born Jews or small-time black marketers believed to have hidden away cash. Profits could be substantial. And Lafont was not one to tolerate being defrauded, or insulted, by men in his gang.

Adrien needed to leave Paris in a hurry, but he did not want to travel alone. He recruited one of his subordinates to join him: Joseph Didioni Sidissé Piereschi, known variously as Zé, Dionisi, or Joseph the Marseillais. This surprisingly handsome man,
with a scar two inches long and one inch wide running from the base of his nose to his left cheek, came from a similar background. He had been imprisoned at age eighteen for his first murder. During World War I, he deserted twice and progressed to other crimes, such as stealing military supplies and selling arms on the black market. By the fall of 1940, he had been released from the Marseille prison by the Germans, and he soon began running a series of brothels for German soldiers.

As with Jo and François before them, Adrien and Zé brought along their mistresses. Adrien’s was Gisèle Charlotte Rossmy, a petite brunette, aged thirty-four, who had worked as a typist and performed on stage as “
Gine Volna.” Zé sported Joséphine, or Paulette, Grippay, “
La Chinoise,” a star from an exclusive brothel in Marseille and a recent arrival in Paris. Planning to open a new brothel in South America, they were believed to have carried some 800,000 francs in cash.

The gangsters again traded lovers to ensure honesty. On the last Sunday of March 1943, Adrien left with Paulette; a few days later, Zé followed with Gisèle. The group used a sign for communicating their safe arrival in Argentina: they took a
100-franc note, drew a flaming sun on it, and ripped it into two, each group taking a half. Adrien and Paulette would send their piece back through the organization to prove that they had arrived in South America. Not long after their departure, Petiot handed Fourrier the half note. “My men got them through,” he said.

In March 1944, Massu’s detectives found the other half of the note in a drawer at Petiot’s office on rue Caumartin.

P
ETIOT’S closest friend, the forty-nine-year-old René Nézondet, was now brought into custody. Tall and slender, with his dark hair slicked back over his high forehead, Nézondet had known Petiot longer and arguably more intimately than anyone else outside his family.

As Massu already knew, Petiot and Nézondet had often dined together in their bachelor days in Yonne. They had been arrested together, twenty years later, by the Gestapo. In between, Nézondet had left his position as a clerk after injuring his arm. He started breeding trout and growing watercress at a ranch outside of Villeneuve-sur-Yonne. He also operated a restaurant and entertainment center, La Fontaine-Rouge. The Petiots liked to attend his Saturday night dances, invariably on Georgette’s urging. Marcel Petiot hated dancing.

By 1936, after the end of his first marriage and losing his investment in a fire, Nézondet had moved to Paris and begun working as a concierge for
Le Figaro
. He had started to see Petiot again after consulting him for a throat condition that developed in the First World War. Nézondet was also in a new relationship with a nurse at Hôpital Cochin named Aimée Lesage, and they soon began to dine often with the Petiots. The Nazi Occupation, however, prompted
Le Figaro
to move to Lyon; Nézondet followed, only to be sacked shortly afterward for his alleged black market dealings. In 1942, he had returned to Paris and reconnected a third time with Petiot. It was his old friend who helped him obtain a job with the father of one of Petiot’s patients, Victor Braun, who ran a pharmaceutical company that sold many supplies to the German army.