To Catch a Thief Page 15

  She said it in the same way Paul had said it, half angrily.

  “I’m not sure of myself at all,” John answered. “I don’t even know that what I’m trying to do will work. If it doesn’t, if I slip somewhere and get caught, it won’t do you any good to be mixed up with me and a gang of ex-convicts.”

  “I’m not worried about it.”

  “There’s no sense in taking unnecessary risks.”

  “Maybe I want to.” She was defiant. “Maybe I’ve found what your friend Bellini would call a reason for existence.”

  “Excitement?”

  He regretted it immediately. Her expression changed. She said, “Let’s go back.”

  They did not speak again until they were back at the beach where Mrs. Stevens slept on the sand. Francie picked up her book.

  “The gala begins next Friday night, and the house guests will stay through Sunday,” she told him. She was again the girl he had known before she guessed his identity; withdrawn, disinterested. “If you intend to go, we’d better go together, since I had to explain to Mrs. Sanford that we were particularly close friends in order to get you the invitation. I’ll try not to bother you unnecessarily until then.”

  There was nothing he could say. He left her as he had found her, reading.

  The mistral began to blow again that night, springing up suddenly after he had reached his place in the stream bed and removed his padded shoes and harness. It was always an unpredictable wind. It came from the southwest when it blew, but nothing else about it was consistent. Sometimes it was cool, sometimes hot and dry, sometimes warm and moist, bringing rain. That night it was dry and warm, blowing out of a clear sky. It made a rushing noise over his head where he lay, whipped the scrub brush of the hillside, bent the trees, made the hanging light across the road from the villa dance on its pole, so that shadows fled sideways and jumped quickly back into position again. The stars overhead were bright, but the thin, fading moon would not rise until just before dawn. It was the kind of a night that Le Chat had always liked best; darkness, moving shadows to hide another moving shadow, a rush of wind and the scrape of rubbing branches to hide small noises. There was a charged, electric feeling in the air. All three of the watchers on the hill felt it.

  The light on the pole made a tinny creaking noise as it swung. Occasionally an automobile came up the road from the village below, but none stopped. From where John lay, he could see lights in the windows of the nearest houses. The music of a radio or phonograph came faintly from somewhere, but it did not continue for long. House lights gradually went out at ground-floor level, came on again upstairs, and winked out one by one as the households slept.

  He felt thirsty. The stream whispered in its bed a few feet behind him, but he did not trust the water. He broke a dry twig from a bush at his elbow and put it in his mouth to start the saliva running, then watched the shadows. Once or twice he changed his position to avoid crushing for too long the grass on which he lay.

  His mind followed the same track it had followed for two nights. He hardly felt even curiosity about the thief any more. He had thought his way completely around the closed circle which was the mystery of the thief’s identity, and was finished with it. All he could do now was wait for the moment of action, hope that it would come as he had planned it. In the meantime, his thoughts were of Paul, and Bellini, and Francie, and Oriol, and Danielle, and the discovery he had made about himself, that he was still a thief.

  He had had time to reason it out. The distinction between thief and non-thief was a state of mind, not a surreptitious entry through a skylight. Just as a burglar did not cease to be a burglar between actual house-breakings, he need not necessarily change his nature after age and stiffening joints made it impossible for him to climb to second-story windows. He himself was a thief because his attitude toward stealing had never changed. He was retired, not reformed. He was still Le Chat, with Le Chat’s mind.

  Or I wouldn’t be here doing the Sûreté’s work for them, he thought. Set a thief to catch a thief. Whoever had said it first must have been a thief himself, to see so clearly the thief’s mind.

  He changed his position on the grass.

  Souza and his wife came in at two. They were still on good terms. John heard the woman’s low, lazy laugh at something her husband said while he was locking the car. He thought, No arguments tonight—early to bed. And then, checking the time in his mind, calculating how long it would take them to fall into the first sound sleep, he thought, Three-thirty to four.

  He watched the shadows more carefully now, and did not change his position again or think too much. The lights came on in the house, burned for a time, and went out. Somewhere in the distance a dog barked two or three times. There was no other sound but the rush of the wind through the scrub and the tinny creak of the street light on its pole, no movement but the dancing shadows.

  Souza’s first shout, more than an hour later, was a wordless yell, meaningless. John thought the Brazilian must be having a nightmare. He had seen nothing, heard nothing but the normal night sounds, and neither Coco nor Michel had come from their posts to report anything unusual. Yet in an instant Souza was screaming, “A moi! Vite! Vite! A moi! A moi!” and there were other noises.

  A light came on in one of the bedrooms, where Souza was shouting. Almost immediately a woman screamed, and Souza gave a different kind of shout, this time of pain. Another male voice inside the house called urgently, words that John could not distinguish. The woman screamed again.

  The rest followed quickly. His position at the side of the villa kept him from seeing the fugitive until a man’s figure appeared suddenly on the roof of the portico, outlined by the glow of the light in the road. He hesitated there, looked back, then climbed a railing and jumped, disappearing from sight as he dropped into the garden below. Seconds later another man stood on the roof of the portico.

  He did not follow the first man over the railing. Something bright gleamed in his hand. John saw, from the strained tenseness of his figure and the way he stood, his extended arm following like a pointer the track of the invisible running man in the garden, that it was a pistol he held, and that he was waiting for a clear shot.

  The second man was not the right size for Souza. That much he saw as well before the pistol roared, steadied, and roared again. His mind cried silently, Don’t kill him! He’s no good to anyone, dead. But then he heard the scrape of running feet on gravel and knew the fugitive had safely reached the road. He was running for the sheltering scrub of brush across the road from the villa. John knew how quickly a man could disappear from sight and how safely he could hide in that protection. Only a maquisard could find another man in the maquis. If the runner ever reached it—

  He slid backward into the stream bed, ducked his head and shoulders, and crawled quickly through the mud and water of the culvert. He heard the gun roar again as he went in, then only the noise of his own splashing. There was no further sound when he came out on the far side of the road, neither running feet nor gunshots, nothing but the tinny creak of the hanging light on its pole, now almost over his head. But there was a ditch along the roadside, and a screen of grass to hide him. When the man with the gun came to roll the body in the road so he could see its face, and stood for a long minute silently looking down at it, John was close enough to hear his heavy breathing.

  Because he had never seen Commissaire Divisionnaire Lepic before, he did not recognize him. But the dead man was the dark-faced gypsy from whose knife thrust he had saved Coco, and when it was safe for him to move again he went back through the culvert and up the hillside to the rendezvous, to tell Coco and Michel that their patience had been for nothing. Another trap had failed.

  6

  “I know he wasn’t the man we were expecting,” he told Bellini, hours later. “It’s out of the question.”

  “I don’t see how you can be so certain,” Bellini said. “It seems to me that you are challenging your own judgment. I agree that mine is also open to c
hallenge, since it was my own man who betrayed us.” He chuckled. “Honor among thieves is not what it used to be. Still, the gypsy was a burglar, as we know.”

  “A burglar,” John agreed. “But not the burglar. He couldn’t have robbed Mrs. Stevens, any more than he could have climbed the marquee chain in Monte Carlo. Both of those thefts were done by a professional.”

  “He was not entirely an amateur, John.”

  “I mean that he didn’t have the physical ability to pull himself two stories up a hanging rope. It takes training, and more than average strength. He tried to cut Coco’s throat the first time I talked to them together. I stopped him. I had my hands on him, and I know he can’t be our man. It would be enough for me even without the other things, the clumsy way he jumped, and running under the light where Lepic could get a clear shot at him, and using his knife on Souza. He wasn’t our man. There isn’t a possibility I could be wrong.”

  “Lepic doesn’t seem to agree with you.”

  Bellini indicated the newspaper he had been reading.

  John said, “I’m not convinced of that. What he believes and what he says for publication needn’t be the same thing. I think he must know as well as I do that his scheme missed fire. But he promised an arrest, and the gypsy can’t deny anything. And it makes Lepic look good.”

  The story did make Lepic look good. Although it had been written hurriedly to meet a deadline, and there had not been time for photographs, the commissaire divisionnaire had come into his own at last. The black scarehead said, Le Voleur Est Mort! The article that followed went on to credit Lepic with a clever scheme to trap the jewel thief who had been terrorizing the Côte for so many weeks. He was quoted as saying that the failures of the Sûreté Nationale’s most expert men to find and identify John Robie, the man once known as Le Chat, had led him to doubt that the thief they hunted was in fact Le Chat, in spite of a universal acceptance of this belief by others. At the same time that he had continued his search for John Robie, he had arranged an inviting trap for the actual thief with the cooperation of M. and Mme. Souza.

  Several sentences about M. Souza’s coffee plantations and Mme. Souza’s jewels followed. The Souzas had been approached by the commissaire divisionnaire and asked for their help shortly after the robbery, in Nice, of the wife of the Member of the Chamber of Deputies, on Lepic’s assumption, proved correct by the later theft from Mrs. Stevens, that the thief would move to Cannes. Lepic, working in the utmost secrecy so as not to betray his plans, had persuaded Mme. Souza to make a deliberate public display of her jewelry, and had passed several nights in the Souza villa, smuggling himself in each night from the back of Souza’s car. He was on hand when the thief at last made the expected attempt. The robber had apparently entered the house sometime after the servant went to bed and before the Souzas returned from an evening at Antibes, bringing Lepic with them. Souza, whose part it was to remain awake and give warning to Lepic, had instead grappled bravely with the burglar in Mme. Souza’s bedroom, and sustained a superficial but painful stab wound in the chest. Lepic, arriving on the scene too late to seize the thief before he could make his escape from the house, had shot, meaning to wound him and bring him down. The bullet, regrettably, had struck a vital spot. The unfortunate criminal had paid for his misdeeds with his life, hélas!

  Hélas! was conventional in any French newspaper report of violent death. It was the reporter’s contribution. Lepic had not expressed his own feelings, neither regret nor triumph. He was a faithful public servant reporting the successful performance of a disagreeable duty so that his detractors could judge for themselves what kind of a man they had been criticizing.

  “Do you think he really shot only to wound?” Bellini said.

  “I don’t know. He was aiming carefully, but it’s hard to tell what he was aiming at. He reminded me of the way Le Borgne looked when he used to sharpshoot at Germans through a window at night. He meant to get a hit. I don’t think it mattered to him where it was.”

  “If he believes the story himself, he must have wanted the gypsy alive, to talk. The whole thing will collapse unless he traces the stolen jewelry.”

  “The reporter makes the same point. It’s only a suggestion so far, but it will be made again, and somebody is bound to wonder about the difference in techniques, in time. Lepic will be in worse hot water than before.”

  “Still, even if he knows the truth himself, he has a breathing spell. He’s escaped further criticism, for the time being at least, he leaves the thief—meaning you—believing that all is in order for another operation, and he can still remain in the field of action with the excuse that he is tracing the jewelry. I think he may be even cleverer than we expect, John.”

  “If it’s clever to be able to make something out of a blunder,” John said. “Whatever he believes or doesn’t believe, he was a fool to try it alone. He must have wanted the personal glory badly. Two or three men there with him would have made it unnecessary to shoot.”

  Bellini chuckled slyly. “You watched Mrs. Stevens alone.”

  “That was a different thing.”

  “I know, I know. I was making a joke to express my relief that the gypsy is not alive to talk about us. Actually his death may help us by relieving the pressure. The Sûreté made several arrests yesterday in Toulon and Marseilles, including more of my own men.”

  “Jean-Pierre?”

  “Jean-Pierre is safe for a while yet, as long as he does not come out of his hole.” Bellini giggled. “Although he says he finds the inactivity depressing, as well as bad for his business. One thing I do not understand is how the gypsy hoped to succeed with the robbery, John. He knew you were watching the house.”

  “I gave him what amounted to a blueprint showing how to do it. I told him just what to expect from the thief, when we would wait for him and where we would watch. He did it the other way. He got in before we were there, and I suppose he meant to leave the house after we had gone, before anyone awoke. It might have worked, except for Lepic.”

  “I should have suspected the gypsy when he offered no protest at being taken off a job promising such a good reward.” Bellini shook his head. “My judgment is failing. What shall we do now?”

  “We still have the Sanford gala. Do you have anyone who can get close to Lepic?”

  “Possibly. What do you want to know?”

  “Whether or not he really believes the story himself. I’d like to make sure. If he doesn’t he’ll certainly cover the gala, and that means you’ll have to take Le Borgne and his men off before they stumble over a flic in the dark.”

  “Who will watch the Combe d’Or in the event that Lepic does not?”

  “I will. As a guest. Francie Stevens got me an invitation, which I declined and which I’m now going to accept after excusing myself for hurting her feelings by refusing her help.”

  Bellini said, “It is always dangerous.”

  “To go to the gala as a guest? Not as dangerous as it would be for Le Borgne and his men outside.”

  “That danger is the same one you have been in since you became Mr. Burns. I was referring to the danger you risk when you hurt a woman’s feelings by rejecting that which she offers voluntarily, whatever it may be.” Bellini beamed wisely through his glasses, looking more like an owl than ever. “My judgment is still good about women. I think I should meet Miss Stevens and talk to her myself before you go any further.”

  “She’s no mystery, Bellini. You’ve imagined her to be something she isn’t.”

  “Nevertheless, do me the favor.”

  John shrugged. “I’ll bring her this afternoon. After I’ve knocked my head on the ground for her, first.”

  Bellini tittered. “Pride, John?”

  “I don’t know. I’m having trouble understanding what it is I feel, these days. All I’m sure of is that I wish I could finish it off, one way or another.”

  Mr. Paige also wanted to finish off, one way or another. He had a check from the London insurance company for sixty-two
thousand dollars in his pocket, payable to Mrs. Stevens, when he read the newspaper story with his lunchtime cup of tea. The size of the settlement check made him more than ordinarily careful. After he had finished his tea, he went to the local commissariat and asked for an interview with Lepic, who did not want to see anyone but knew better than to refuse to talk to a man who was able to go over his head.

  Mr. Paige came right to the point.

  “Sixty-two thousand dollars,” he said. “That’s twenty-two hundred pounds, nearly twenty-two million francs. I’ve the check in my pocket now. Speaking in confidence, of course”—he pulled at his mustache—“I’m very much disinclined to deliver it if a recovery of the stolen jewelry appears imminent. Thought I’d speak with you about it first.”

  Lepic said, “I haven’t been able to trace her jewelry yet, or any of the jewelry. It will take time.”

  Mr. Paige thoughtfully teased his mustache tips to needle points. “Shooting the thief wasn’t wise, if I may say so.”

  “No one regrets his death more than I do,” Lepic said stonily. “It was an unfortunate accident.”

  “Quite. You’re positive he was the man?”

  “I have no reason to change the story I gave to the newspapers.”

  “That’s hardly a direct answer, Commissioner,” Mr. Paige said mildly.

  “It’s the only one I can give you.”

  Mr. Paige knew when he was wasting his time. He stood up to leave.

  “You know your business.” He spoke as mildly as before, “I won’t try to interfere. But my principals are not going to be satisfied for a minute until the jewelry comes to light, and my principals have influence in Paris. Disposing of the thief may be enough for your superiors. It won’t be for the insurance company. The jewels, Commissioner, the jewels. The total is now one hundred and twenty-two million francs, if you have forgotten.”

  When he had gone, Lepic locked the door, sat down loosely, and looked blankly at the floor.