Death in the City of Light: The Serial Killer of Nazi-Occupied Paris (10 page)

Sartre had reviewed
The Stranger
in a mostly positive six-thousand-word essay; he was in fact one of the first people to do so, that is, except for the reviews by Camus’s friends or by journals owned by his publisher, Gallimard. The two thinkers, Sartre and Camus, shared many
interests, from literature and social justice, to explorations of freedom and absurdity. But the ice really broke, as Simone de Beauvoir put it, when they discussed the theater. Sartre was writing a new play, the future
No Exit
, and wanted Camus to act in and direct it. Sartre insisted.

As rehearsals began over Christmas 1943, Camus joined Sartre’s circle at Café de Flore, and their friendship grew quickly enough to evoke Beauvoir’s jealousy. Later, she acknowledged that she worried about how Sartre, “
the strongest heterosexual I knew,” could fall so completely for the charming stranger. “
We were like two dogs circling a bone,” she said of her rival. What Beauvoir did not mention, however, was that she had also been attracted to Camus and once tried to seduce him, only to be rebuffed. “
Imagine what she might say on the pillow afterwards,” Camus told his friend and fellow writer Arthur Koestler.

Another place Sartre, Camus, and Beauvoir could be seen that spring was at the restaurant the Catalan, on rue des Grands-Augustins, sometimes seated at the table of their new friend, Pablo Picasso. Despite many invitations to come abroad, the Spanish artist had remained in Paris during the Nazi Occupation, painting in his two-story studio on rue Saint-Augustin, on the Left Bank. The sixty-two-year-old Picasso, with long white hair falling onto his shoulders, was surrounded by his work and his women, including his latest lover, twenty-two-year-old painter Françoise Gilot.

In the eyes of Nazi authorities, Picasso was a highly suspect artist. He had supported Spanish republicans in the Civil War, raised money for their cause, and published caricatures of the military dictator in his
Dream and Lie of Franco
. He had commemorated the German firebombing raid of the Basque city of Guernica on the afternoon of April 26, 1937, on a three-hundred-square-foot canvas that had dramatically raised awareness of the tragedy. Hitler, of course, had placed the painter on a list of modern degenerates, and the Nazis banned all his exhibits in Paris.

The French police had actually collected a sizable file on the Spanish painter, a dossier that was only discovered in 2003, when 140 cardboard boxes were returned to Paris from Moscow. The Russians had seized
the archive in 1945 from the Germans, who in turn had taken it after the Liberation. As historians then learned, Picasso had applied for French citizenship in April 1940, but the state had rejected the application on grounds that he was suspected of being an anarchist or communist, or harboring sympathies leaning in that direction. “
He has no right to be naturalized,” an official wrote on the form, and “should even be considered suspect from a national viewpoint.”

Picasso had not told even his closest friends about this request. He had, however, let them know about his fears: namely, that his authorization to remain in the country was about to expire and he had sworn never to return to Spain as long as Franco was in power. Fortunately for Picasso, a sympathetic police official intervened. “
Very illegally,” Maurice Toesca wrote in his diary in September 1943, “I have prolonged his stay for three years.”

The Germans who visited Picasso’s studio during the Occupation were not the SS men who were rumored to be slashing his paintings, but instead a number of officials who admired his work. One frequent visitor was Lieutenant Gerhard Heller of the Referat Schriftum (Literature Section) of the Propaganda-Staffel. After his introduction in June 1942, Heller, a censor, would take a break from the
stacks of manuscripts overflowing on the shelves, tables, chairs, and floors at his office at 52 Champs-Élysées to climb the spiral staircase,
heart beating with excitement at another chance to observe the most infamous example of modern degenerate art at work.

As usual, Picasso was experimenting with color, texture, and form. In addition to woodcuts and pen-and-ink drawings, he worked on cardboard, matchboxes, cigarette boxes, even food, like a piece of bread—a reflection of his creative zeal as well as the shortage of canvases under the Occupation. Many of the objects of his paintings—sausages, legs of lamb, grand buffet tables, and the empty cooking pot—reflect the preoccupations and hardships of the period, as did the death’s-heads and grotesque monsters reminiscent of his early cubist days. Even his choice of colors, more black, gray, and beige, seemed to parallel
the drab palette of the Occupation.

Sartre, Camus, Beauvoir, and the literary world of the Left Bank were gearing up for a novel event: a new play scheduled to debut on March 19, 1944. The author was Pablo Picasso. The Nazis had refused to allow him to exhibit his paintings in Paris, but they had said nothing about plays.

A
FTER leaving Villeneuve-sur-Yonne, Massu and his colleagues reached Auxerre on Monday, March 13, about one o’clock in the afternoon. Along the way, they had stopped by
a roadside restaurant, where they encountered a scarcity of food options and jokingly complained about the difficulty, as policemen, of cashing their ration tickets on the black market.

After finishing their coffee, or “
roasted barley,” the officers visited the police station, informing the local authorities of the objectives of their mission and obtaining reinforcements to watch railway stations and quays for possible escape. Both Dr. Petiot and Madame Petiot were officially “in flight.”

The rue des Lombards address listed on the note attached to the door at rue Le Sueur belonged to Marcel Petiot’s younger brother, Maurice, who owned a number of properties. He lived, however, in an apartment above his electronics shop on 56 rue du Pont with his wife and two kids, thirteen-year-old Ghylaine and eight-year-old Daniel. A third minor was staying in there: Marcel and Georgette’s son, Gérard, who was studying at the nearby sixteenth-century school, Lycée Jacques Amyot.

The home address was the one that police discovered had first been scribbled on the note and then erased. The detectives were eager to visit, but they first checked out the owner, Maurice Petiot, a thirty-seven-year-old electrician by trade who, in his photograph, looked like a taller, darker, and more handsome version of his older brother. Maurice had struggled financially for a number of years and had declared bankruptcy. More recently, his business had improved dramatically and he had begun investing in properties in the region.

When police arrived at his shop, its shelves stocked with a range of radio and electronic goods in high demand due to the popularity of the BBC and Radio Berlin,
Maurice Petiot was not there. His wife, the
thirty-one-year-old Marie Angèle Le Guyader Petiot, or Monique, received the officers cordially. She allowed them to look around the premises without a permit. She also agreed, when asked, to escort the detectives three blocks away, to the property at 18 rue des Lombards.

What Massu and his team found was a small château. Built atop a hill, with a gate and metal grilles over the windows, the estate had a labyrinthine cellar with two long corridors that connected into a series of Roman catacombs. How could Maurice Petiot afford this property? Clearly the profits from selling radio and electronics equipment would not have sufficed. Monique explained that the building had been purchased by her father-in-law, Felix Petiot, in the name of her son Daniel.

No one lived at the estate, Monique Petiot said. Indeed, despite its grand exterior, the inside was dusty and untidy, with broken panels and furniture sometimes piled in heaps in the corners, strangely reminiscent of rue Le Sueur. Upstairs, the state of disuse also resembled the Paris town house. There was, as Pierre Malo of
Le Matin
would later describe it, “
the most extraordinary collection of works of art and garbage that it is possible to imagine.” The property, however, did not seem as uninhabited as Monique Petiot claimed.

In a small room on the ground floor near the staircase was a bed with the covers pulled back and the sheets ruffled. Massu asked who had slept there. Was it Marcel or Georgette Petiot? Monique shook her head, saying only that the guest was a family friend, a forty-seven-year-old businessman named
Albert Neuhausen, who lived in Courson-les-Carrières, a small town about ten miles south. She had forgotten to mention that.

The inspectors made the short drive to verify the claim. Neuhausen, also in the electronics business, admitted that he knew Maurice and Monique Petiot well. Yes, he had recently stayed with them, he said, as he often did when he took the train to Paris.

Neuhausen had something else to tell the detectives. Although he did not know Dr. Petiot well and certainly had no information on
his whereabouts, Neuhausen admitted seeing the murder suspect on the morning of Saturday, March 11. Neuhausen had been in Paris on business, and as a favor for Monique, he had stopped by Petiot’s apartment on rue Caumartin about eleven o’clock to fetch a pair of shoes for Gérard.

“
We spoke of things without importance,” Neuhausen said. “The doctor gave me the shoes for his son and a quarter of an hour later, I left.” He took the 5:20 train at Gare de Lyon, arriving at Auxerre at 9:40, and while he had intended to bike home, it was raining and he decided to stay the night at rue des Lombards, just as Monique said. He told detectives that this was all he knew about the matter.

O
N Tuesday, March 14, an investigator spotted an attractive woman in a black skirt and a black astrakhan coat, carrying an expensive yellow leather suitcase. She was standing on the platform waiting for a train at the Auxerre station. Slim and petite, she had deep brown eyes and black shoulder-length hair with a few locks falling onto her forehead. She was just four months shy of her fortieth birthday, though she looked much younger. When the policeman approached, the woman did not deny her identity.
“I have done nothing wrong,” Georgette Petiot protested,
before collapsing on the platform. Two gendarmes carried her out of the station.
One young man assisted the police, crying all the while. This was her son, Gérard.

Massu, informed of the arrest, returned at once to the Auxerre police station. Georgette was taken to his car. Already in the vehicle was her brother-in-law
Maurice, who had been apprehended the previous night when he returned home from the nearby villages of Cheney and Joigny. Georgette rested her head on his shoulder. Her “
short sobs” broke up the otherwise silent ride back to Paris.

N
EWS of the arrests spread quickly, and when Massu’s car approached his office on the Quai des Orfèvres, a crowd of reporters and photographers was already waiting. Commissaire Massu helped Georgette and Maurice Petiot out of the car, trying to shield them from the cameras popping and flashing in a disorienting barrage of blue magnesium light.

Massu was particular about how he wanted to question suspects. For one thing, he preferred to interrogate them alone, or in the company of a deputy who remained silent. A room full of police officers and observers posed far too many problems. Countless interrogations, Massu knew, had been derailed by an untimely interruption from an aggressive yet inexperienced officer.

Above all, Massu believed in dealing mainly in hard evidence and rational deductions grounded in fact. He would first attempt to gain an early admission, however insignificant, that would penetrate the defenses a suspect had almost invariably constructed. Then he would proceed as soon as possible to the moment that he called “
the intrusion of an elephant into a porcelain shop”—that is, the awkward question, based on evidence and the suspect’s previous admissions, that simply could not be parried without making a major contradiction or otherwise losing credibility.

The commissaire showed Georgette Petiot to her seat in his office
and asked her if she would like a drink, which she refused. Then, as customary,
Massu stalled a few minutes before launching into his questions. He tidied the papers on his desk, walked to the window, and gazed out onto the Pont Neuf. He saw cyclists crossing the bridge, some of the
two million bicycles in Paris, the new ones then selling for almost as much as an automobile had only five years before. Massu wondered if Marcel Petiot had also biked across the bridge, towing who knows what in his cart.

Massu turned back to face the suspect’s wife. “
Well, Madame Petiot, what do you know? No need to rush, we have a lot of time. Begin where you would like.”

“
I must say that I was unaware of his business,” Georgette Petiot said, referring to her husband. She sat with her elbows on his desk, staring aimlessly ahead. In her right hand was a small handkerchief. Speaking
in a low, barely audible voice, Petiot explained that she knew that her husband had purchased a property at 21 rue Le Sueur two or three years before (it was three years). Massu, settling into a chair near her, noted the beads of sweat on her forehead. He asked if she was warm and wanted to take off her coat. She did, revealing a tight red-and-white checkered sweater.

She had only been to rue Le Sueur one time, about two years before, Georgette Petiot said, but she had not gone inside. She had never liked the house. It was too large and expensive, costing nearly half a million francs. Moreover, it would mean that her husband would be home even less. Still, despite her misgivings, she had not protested at the purchase of the property because, as she put it, her husband attracted a large clientele at his medical practice and made a lot of money.

As for the renovations to the property, Georgette knew that Dr. Petiot was skilled enough to perform much of the interior work himself, such as the painting, the installations, and the decorations. She then bragged about his talent at sculpture, particularly working in wood, but did not provide any specific information about possible renovations to rue Le Sueur.