To Catch a Thief Page 13

  He chuckled encouragingly. John said, “Nothing has happened to me yet.”

  In the street he saw the red-fezzed Moroccan on his way to answer the signal of Bellini’s window blind. He passed one of the patrolling agents on the promenade, and thought, It won’t take long to happen if it does happen.

  His common sense told him he could convince Francie that she had no cause to betray him. But he could not escape the premonition that, whether she meant to or not, she would somehow be the cause of his downfall. If not immediately, then in time.

  She was sitting under an umbrella on the plage privée, reading a book. The second chair under the umbrella was unoccupied.

  He said, “May I sit down?”

  “If you like.” She added coolly, “It isn’t necessary,” and indicated an open beach bag on the sand at her side. “You can drop it in there.”

  “I haven’t got it.”

  She leaned forward, deliberately, to look at the clock face in the old tower on the hilltop beyond the yacht harbor. He said, “It’s five-thirty. In a week or two I might be able to get it for you. I can’t do it in half an hour.”

  “You had the whole day.”

  “It wasn’t enough. If you’ll let me explain, I’ll tell you why.”

  “I don’t want an explanation. I want the dog, Mr. Burns.”

  It was a flat, cold demand. There was no lightness in her now, none of the friendly mockery with which she had tugged him by his invisible leash before. He knew she would not hesitate to carry out her threat if he did not win her over at once. He sat down beside her and said, “You gave me until six. I still have thirty minutes.”

  He began to talk, quickly, before she could deny him.

  Because he had never told anyone the story before, and did not have it formulated in his mind, he began with his escape from the Villa des Bijoux. But it was not the beginning. Neither was the maquis, nor the prison, nor his trial, nor even his first theft. The whole story was his biography. He found that he had to go back further and further, finally as far as his memory took him.

  He had been five years old when his father put him on the rings. There were only two of the Flying Robies to begin with, his father and mother, small-time acrobats in the small-time carnivals which played one-and two-day stands in the New England states. He became the third member of the troupe when he was big enough for his father to lie about his age. But he was ready long before then. He was naturally agile, and the constant grind of training his father kept him to from the first hardened his muscles and sharpened his sense of timing. Before he was twelve, he was a competent trapeze flyer. Later, when his weight and strength increased, he learned the rest.

  Trapeze performers in small carnivals were jacks of all trades, never the aristocrats of the big tents in the major circuses. He learned to rig his own apparatus, do a walk on the high wire, double as a tumbling clown, substitute as readily for the equilibrist juggler as for the man who turned somersaults off the trampoline.

  “I was always best at something that called for climbing,” he said. He had not looked at Francie since he began to talk, but he knew he was holding her. So far. “I was strong. I had a good head for heights, and confidence in myself. Acrobats need absolute faith in their own ability more than anything else. My father lost his when he missed a catch and let my mother go over the end of the net into a bank of empty chairs. I had thrown her myself, but my throw was a good one and we both knew it was his fault. He never went on a trapeze again.”

  He had died soon after his wife. John was left with a few suits of tights, the muscular development necessary to climb a rope hand over hand in a way that made it look simple, and a knowledge of the rest of his trade. When he was twenty-one, able to sign a binding contract, he got what seemed to be a good offer from a French troupe touring Europe, and did not wonder, until he reached France, why a European troupe needed to take recruits from a small American carnival. The troupe was a cooperative venture that had already ceased to cooperate before he arrived. In Nice, where he heard the news, a hotel thief stole what remained of his money, his passport, and all the other means of identification he had.

  “I didn’t resent it, particularly,” he said. He still had not looked in Francie’s direction. He kept his eyes on the diving raft that floated offshore, bobbing brightly in the sunlight. “In the carnivals, a mark was always a mark, a sucker, a john, somebody to be cheated. Pickpockets and short-change men were as much a natural part of the business as the clowns. I thought of myself as another mark in a strange territory. It never occurred to me that I could go to the American consul and borrow passage money home. Even without a passport I might have managed that, but my mind didn’t work that way. There were other marks around, plenty of them. I had only to find the right one.”

  It was the summer of 1936. The Côte had begun to glitter again, after the early dead years of the depression, and was regaining its place in Europe as an international playground for the rich and near rich. He struck up an acquaintance with a friendly British couple who drank too much. They owned a small villa on Cap Ferrat, not far from St. Jean, and they made the mistake of inviting him into their home, where he had an opportunity to look around. Shortly afterward an acrobatic thief climbed a drainpipe up the side of the villa, got in through an open bedroom window, and made off with the wife’s jewels while she and her husband slept off the effects of a late evening.

  He made a hundred and twenty thousand francs for the night’s work, then worth about four thousand dollars, not as much as he would have got later when he had learned the language and how to value stones properly, but enough to allow him to keep up a front until his next theft. The moral aspects of thievery never concerned him. The marks were there, and climbing drainpipes was an easier and more profitable way of using his skill to make a living than any other he had known. Le Chat came into being.

  To the newspapers who created him, he was a clever French thief who preyed on wealthy visitors to the Côte. John, himself one of the wealthy visitors during the summer, avoided the Côte out of season, studied French with a group of American students in Paris, read what there was available to him about the valuation of precious stones, and followed the society columns as well as lapidary trade journals which noted the manufacture or sale of outstanding gems. When he returned to the Côte the following season, he already knew whom he meant to rob, if the proper opportunities presented themselves. He was cautious, confided in no one, worked alone, and planned each theft carefully. Le Chat flourished.

  “Most of the rest of it was in the old newspapers, if you had bothered to look them up,” he said. “They caught me in 1939.”

  “Tell me the rest of it.”

  He did not know from Francie’s voice what she felt. It was toneless.

  “I tried to deal with the wrong fence,” he said. “He turned me in. They gave me a fair trial and twenty years at La Maison Centrale, a prison near Saumur. The German army emptied the prison later. I went into the maquis.”

  He told her about the maquis, and Bellini, and of Coco and Le Borgne and Jean-Pierre, his escape to America and his return to France under the amnesty. He said, “I was through stealing when I came back. I don’t say that it was a moral regeneration. I wasn’t a thief one minute, and not a thief the next. But I had enough money to live on here in France. I had learned to like the country, and I had been safe before only because no one knew who I was. It was too risky after they had my description and could recognize my style. They could send me back to do the prison sentence at any time, even on suspicion. So I retired. I bought a house near Vence and became a country gentleman.”

  They had been the best years of his life. He hesitated to tell her about them, but Paul and Oriol were part of the story, even Lisa, and he could not find a way to avoid the continuation. He made it as brief as he could, up until the publication of the article about Le Chat in the Paris edition of the Herald Tribune. From that point he told her everything, step by step, from his escape at
the villa down to Jean-Pierre’s escape, if it was an escape, from the police in Marseilles that same afternoon. When he had finished, he looked at his watch. It was six-fifteen. The sunlight had begun to fade.

  “I can prove enough of it to satisfy you, I think,” he said. “It’s in your own interest to keep quiet and let me go on with what I’m trying to do. If we catch him, I’ll see that your mother’s jewelry is the first returned.”

  “A bribe to keep quiet. Is that what you are offering me?”

  “If you want to put it that way.”

  “I wish you hadn’t thought it was necessary.”

  He looked at her then and knew he would not need to give any proof, only an apology for having felt it necessary to offer the bribe. He said in explanation, “I’ve been talking my way out of twenty years in prison, Francie. I wasn’t sure about you. I didn’t know how you would take it.”

  “You can’t have thought very highly of me.”

  “I didn’t know,” he repeated. “It wasn’t a question of thinking highly of you. You didn’t think highly of me when you believed I had tricked you. You would have given me to the police if I hadn’t told you the truth.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me before?”

  “It wasn’t necessary before.”

  “You didn’t want to trust me.”

  “I’m not trustful by nature.”

  “But you trust Bellini.”

  “He’s different. So are Jean-Pierre and the others. I had to learn to trust them to survive. Just as I’m trusting you now.”

  He did not want to talk further about it, or explain why there was an essential difference between his confidence in Bellini and his feeling toward her. He turned to look up at the promenade.

  The rug peddler was there, holding out his gimcrack wares to the passers-by, wheedling them to buy. But he did not follow anyone far, and he kept his eye on the beach. John raised his hand, palm out, then closed his fist. The peddler walked away.

  Francie said, “What was that for?”

  “I was sending word to my friends that I’m still available.”

  They did not talk again for some time. A speedboat roared by between the beach and the diving platform, trailing a long plume of white water. A man and a girl on water skis rode the wake. When the wave of the boat’s passage washed up on the beach almost to their feet, Francie said, “What are you going to do now?”

  “What I have been doing. Watch my traps and hope. I would have got him last night, if my luck had been better.”

  “It was my fault.”

  “No. Just bad luck. And at least I know he’s here in Cannes. I’m counting on the Brazilian woman to attract him, and the Sanford gala if that fails. If he doesn’t try one of those, I’ll have to quit.”

  “Can’t you set other traps?”

  “Not here. Not now. The season will be over. There won’t be anyone around the Côte worth robbing until next year. He’ll hole up until then.”

  “You sound positive of it.”

  “I’m not, but it’s what I used to do. He’s copied me in everything, as if he were signing my name to his thefts. The whole scheme is based on the assumption that he’ll continue to copy me, do just what I have done in his place.”

  “And if he doesn’t?”

  “Then I’m wasting my time.”

  “You can still get away.”

  “Yes. I think so. But they’ll get Jean-Pierre in time, probably Coco and Le Borgne as well, and give Bellini trouble. They’re the only reason I stayed in the first place.”

  The speedboat made another pass at the beach, weaving from side to side, so that the couple at the end of the towing lines was bounced around in the wake. The girl lost her balance, fell, disappeared for a moment, and came up to swim for shore. The man hung on.

  His feat of balance on the bucking water skis was wonderful to watch. John recognized the professional skill. He thought, I could be looking at the thief now. I wonder if I’ll ever know.

  Francie said, “You’re very fond of Bellini, aren’t you? I’d like to meet a man who commands that much loyalty.”

  “I think he’d like to meet you. You puzzle him.”

  “I puzzle him? How?”

  “He doesn’t understand your raison d’être. He classifies everybody according to their reasons for existing—pleasure, murder, thievery, notoriety, money-making, gambling, something. He doesn’t recognize yours.”

  “Does everyone have to have a reason?”

  “As he sees it, yes. It’s logical enough.”

  He was saved from having to explain further by Mrs. Stevens, who called to them from the promenade, then came down the steps and trudged through the sand toward them.

  “Texas was never like this,” she said cheerfully. “Hello, Lucky. Don’t get up. I’ll just flop down here on the sand. My, it’s hot, isn’t it?”

  She sat down on the sand under the umbrella, sighing comfortably.

  “Did you hear about the excitement this morning?” she said, after she had settled herself. “I got my picture in the papers.”

  “I was one of the crowd. You didn’t see me.”

  “I didn’t see anyone, I guess. I was too busy yelling about my beads.” Mrs. Stevens laughed at herself. “I feel better now. Mr. Paige and I just finished sending a cable off to London. I’ll get my money in a few days, he says. Except for the lucky dog, of course. You’ll have to help me win another dog some evening, Lucky. Whenever Francie can spare you, of course.”

  She gave them both an arch look.

  He said, “My luck hasn’t been so good lately. You’d better hope for the police to catch the thief before he has a chance to get rid of the original.”

  “The police!” Mrs. Stevens made a face. “That Lepic couldn’t find the telephone in a telephone booth. I hate to think how close I came to letting my insurance run out before we came here. You know, if that robber had only waited another couple of days, I’d have had the dog covered with the rest of it. That’s what makes me really mad. But I’m going to win another one. I’ve got a new roulette system. A man I met at Antibes told me that if you just play odd or even—”

  She ran on about what the man at Antibes had said. John was able to excuse himself a few minutes later. When he stood up to leave, Francie said, “Don’t forget that I want to meet your friend.”

  “I’ll arrange it.”

  “What friend?” Mrs. Stevens asked.

  “Just a friend.”

  “I’d like to know what’s going on between you two,” Mrs. Stevens said shrewdly. “You’ve been cooking something for a couple of days now. You aren’t planning to elope, I hope.”

  Francie blushed. John said, “We haven’t got that far yet. We’re cooking up a scheme to win you a lucky dog.”

  He kept his rendezvous with Coco and Michel at midnight on the hillside above the cottage in Le Cannet. He was on time, but both men were ahead of him. When he came down from the hilltop to the patch of scrub that was their meeting place, Coco reached out of the darkness with both arms and embraced him so hard his ribs cracked.

  “I’ve been sweating silver five-franc pieces wondering if you would make it,” he whispered. “Merde alors, I would have conked the girl if she had sold you, John. What did you tell her?”

  “Everything.”

  “She is on our side, then?”

  “Yes.”

  “Whatever that means, in the case of a woman. Michel! Sst! Michel, where are you, man?”

  “Here.” Michel’s voice came out of the dark.

  “Here is our replacement for the gypsy, Le Chat himself. The thief is as good as in the bag right now.”

  “If he comes,” Michel said, in his practical way. “But I am glad we got rid of the gypsy. Did he give any trouble?”

  John said, “Bellini took him off. I don’t know what he told him. Did you get word about Jean-Pierre and the flics, Coco?”

  “Bellini sent a message for us to burrow back into the maquis and stay t
here. Le Borgne and I set up housekeeping this afternoon in a cave back of Vallauris.” Coco snickered in the darkness. “Poor old One Eye, he is not the man he used to be. He does not like caves any more. He is accustomed to sleeping in a warm bed with a nightcap pulled well over his glass peeper.”

  “A cave is better than a prison. You’ll both have to stay under cover until something happens to turn Lepic’s attention. He has promised in print to make arrests, which means you and Le Borgne and Jean-Pierre if he can’t find me.”

  “I saw the papers. I spit in his face.”

  Michel said, “Do it more quietly, then. We sound like a cabinet meeting.”

  Without animosity, Coco whispered, “I spit in your face, too. Quietly.”

  They left Michel in the clump of scrub, which commanded a view of the back of the villa and its surrounding garden. Coco’s point of watch was farther down the hillside. John’s was still farther below, where a small stream entered a culvert that passed beneath the road in front of the villa. The road came up from the town below, winding to take advantage of the natural slope of land, and continued on over the hilltops toward Mougins. The villa they watched was one of half a dozen widely separated houses at the extreme upper edge of the town limits, beyond sidewalks and pavement except for the single road, which was poorly illuminated at night by lights hanging from poles at intervals of two or three hundred meters. The roadway was mainly in darkness except for areas of relative brilliance directly under the lights.

  One of these areas was not quite in front of the villa. It made the darkness at the back of the house more pronounced by contrast. The garden, a jungle of shrubs and vines, was marked off from the surrounding scrub mimosa of the hillside only by a low stone wall, and offered good cover to anyone approaching the house from any side but the front itself. John did not entirely discard the possibility of an approach even from the front, because he had himself robbed a house near Menton which was similarly placed with respect to a street light. But he had attended to the light first, and he knew that as long as this one continued to burn, the front was safe.