To Catch a Thief Read online

  Sixty miles of jewels, he thought, and the hope that had carried him failed utterly. With a thousand opportunities at hand, it was beyond reason to expect the thief to come to the Combe d’Or.

  But he built his confidence again with the thought that he had reasoned correctly about the theft from Mrs. Stevens. The fabulous pearls were a far greater temptation. In all his career he had never brought off a theft that would pay as well as the pearls. He had known of them in his time, marked them for an attempt if the opportunity presented itself, but until the prince presented them to his American bride they had never come into his territory. He knew with certainty that he would have taken any risk to steal them, given an opportunity. And they would be beyond reach after Sunday night, gone from the Côte and from France. The thief had to come.

  He held to the belief. It was the reason for his existence.

  He did not doubt that he could last until Sunday night if it became necessary. He would have to remain exposed on the tower top during the following day and most of the next night, but it would not be impossible to leave the château during the height of the gala and return before dawn. There were farms in the hills back of the Combe d’Or where he could find food and water, and a dozen ways to scale the outside walls even without the ivy. Lepic would have his net laid by morning, but it would cover roads and borders, not the near countryside. Oriol was the man he had most to fear.

  The thought of Oriol made him turn from the lights of the coast line to watch the roof tops again.

  Windows were darkening, one by one. As time passed, he could mark the tide of sleep rising in the castle by the way in which darkness came first to the lower floors, then to the master bedrooms and guest rooms, last of all to the dormer windows in the roof, where the servants slept. A few lights, mostly in the dormers, still burned when a distant church bell pealed a single note. He did not know if it marked one o’clock or the half hour.

  When the bell rang to mark the passage of another half hour, it was again a single chime. One dormer was still alight. He avoided looking directly at the glowing pane, to prevent his eyes from adjusting themselves to brilliance. After the window darkened at last, there was only starlight to show him the faint sheen of the gray slate roofs.

  The church bell rang two o’clock. The Combe d’Or slept, dark and soundless. He watched the roof, the eaves, the gutters for a shadow. He could not see into the blackness of the dark courtyard of the moat, but there was no need for it. The château, built to withstand strong ground assaults, was vulnerable only to a climber who, like Le Chat, worked down from the high places. If he came, he would come over the roof tops.

  The bell pealed two-thirty. The air had begun to cool perceptibly. A breeze rustled the ivy.

  He changed his cramped position without taking his eyes from the roof. He was beginning to feel thirsty. If the parching mistral began to blow he would dry out quickly. Rain would be even worse. He could not hope to last a day and a night in the rain without shelter and still retain the free use of his muscles. When a breeze rustled the ivy again, he turned to look at the southwest sky, searching for a sign of clouds blotting out the stars.

  There were no clouds. There was no sign of the mistral, not even a breeze in his face. But the ivy rustled again.

  He thought, quite calmly, Careful. Don’t make any mistakes now. Let him come.

  The ivy whispered, and whispered again. He could not see beyond the overhang of the rampart walk without exposing the outline of his head and shoulders against the sky. He felt his pulses beat with the intermittent movements of the climber on the vine. He began to breathe deeply through his open mouth, steadying himself for the effort to come. He bent to test the ties of his slippers, scuffed the soles against the stone on which he stood, rubbed his palms on the rock of the parapet to dry them and roughen the skin, tightened his belt, flexed his fingers. The ivy whispered more loudly now—rustle, pause, rustle again, finally a pause that was not followed by another rustle. Only then he looked down from the parapet and saw the shadowy figure below make its way along the rampart walk and unhesitatingly, surely, confidently out on the sharp peak of the roof top.

  He swung down the ivy to the rampart in a surge of released tension. There was no need to wait longer, nothing left to plan, no need to hope. The time had come.

  The shadow was visible several yards ahead when he followed it. He had not been able to conceal the sounds of his descent from the tower top. He knew he had been seen, as much as anything could be seen in the starlit darkness. There was no identity to the shadow ahead except a dim grayness. He saw it only for a moment before it faded into blackness.

  The disappearance did not worry him. He was between the shadow and the ladder of ivy. To escape, the thief would have to leave the roof and make his way to the ground by some other means. He was confident that he could descend as fast, or faster, by any path. The thief might dodge him for a while in the angles of the roof gables and turrets, but he could not begin a descent without appearing on the eaves or attempting to work back toward the tower. John stood in his way.

  He moved to the end of the peak where the shadow had disappeared. The angle of a joining dormer went down, the corner of a gable went up. There was no other path, nothing but impassable slates. He went up and caught sight of the shadow at the far end of the gable before it disappeared again.

  It became a three-dimensional chess game, each move according to prescribed rules, following definite lines. Short cuts were impossible. A misstep on the slates would have sent either of them sliding helplessly, with only the gutters at the eaves to stop a fall. They could pass along the roof peaks, diagonally in the angle of joining gables, up and down the slope of roof corners, or by way of the gutter. John did not move as rapidly as the thief. He was at a disadvantage in that he had to explore each shadow, study each pocket of darkness when he came to it so that he might not overrun his quarry, opening an escape to the tower behind. He meant to force the shadow ahead of him and down to the roof of the west wing, where there were no corners to hide in, no rising gables or descending angles to dodge across, nothing but a single roof peak, a straight line ending in sheer fall to the moat and the end of the chessboard.

  He almost missed the shadow lying flat and motionless at the outer end of a dormer he was about to pass. The thief’s ruse, failing, trapped him in the same way John hoped to trap him on the wing, but in a smaller space. There was nothing behind him but a drop to the courtyard, nothing on either side but the slope of dormer into another steep slope of slate.

  John moved out on the dormer peak, cautiously. He expected the thief to risk a swing down from the end of the dormer to the eave below and from there along the gutter or down the wall to the courtyard. He was prepared for both moves, either of which would put him at an advantage. He was not prepared for the soaring jump the thief made instead to an adjoining dormer.

  It was a tremendous leap, one he would have hesitated to attempt himself. His own muscles tensed in an unconscious effort to assist the jumper. The thief failed to reach secure footing, came down heavily on the slates, slipped, and saved himself by catching at the peak of the dormer. Tiles split, slid, and went clattering off the eave into the courtyard, to shatter on the terrace.

  Oriol heard them fall. He had made another round of the château since it quieted down for the night, and was considering taking his post at a window in the east wing from which he could watch the windows of the Princess Lila’s bedroom and Mimi Sanford’s bedroom. When the slates fell, he was instantly alert. There was no reason for slates to fall on a windless night.

  The chance of his position let him see the light that came on immediately in one of the roof dormers. He marked the position of the dormer and hurried up the stairs, cursing the castle builders for having made the stairs so steep and winding, his own shortness of breath for making them more difficult.

  An angry man in a nightshirt answered his knock when he found the room he wanted. He was one of the cooks, who had to
be up at five o’clock and needed his rest.

  “How do I know what happened?” he grumbled. “Merde, what a household! As many guests to cook for as there are worms in the potatoes, no sleep—”

  “What woke you?”

  “A thump, dirt in my face, stars peeking at me through a hole in the roof. Right over the sack full of soup bones they give me for a bed, too. What do I do when it rains, eh? It’s a situation calling for thought when a student of Escoffier and a citizen of the French Republic—”

  He shrugged and went back to bed, muttering. Oriol was already running down the hall.

  His wind was gone when he climbed the last flight of stairs and unbarred the door at the base of the tower. He stopped to breathe on the narrow rampart, peering off across the roof tops.

  The light in the cook’s window had gone out. He could see nothing except the beginning of a sharp roof peak leading off into darkness, but he knew how far the fall was on either side. He did not have a head for heights. His earlier exploration of the precarious rampart walk had made him dizzy at the thought of the drop he could not see. But while he hesitated, still breathing hard, he heard slates slide and clatter again.

  He had no light, no time to hunt for a light, and no stomach for roof tops in the dark, nothing to drive him but stubbornness and a mistake he meant to redeem. He set his jaw, lowered himself from the rampart until he was astride the roof peak, and began to inch forward into the darkness.

  John had dislodged the second fall of slates. He was being driven to take increasing risks to keep the fleeing shadow ahead of him. The thief had seen his intention, and was making every effort to escape the trap.

  He felt a reluctant admiration for the other man’s sureness of foot. The chase would have been a test even in daylight. In darkness, with visibility extending only as far as the next step along a knife edge of ridge peak or up the steep climb of a gable corner, it was a feat. Except for the unavoidable fall on the dormer, the thief had made no sound to indicate a misstep. John had slipped twice, once saving himself only by the friction of his palms flat on the slates and a scramble that dislodged the tiles before he could get back to the peak he was protecting.

  The thief had not yet attempted to escape by going over the eaves, but there would be nothing else left for him once they were on the roof of the wing. Nimbleness of foot would not help him then. Only sureness of grip and strength of arms and shoulders counted on a wall. Still forcing toward that end, John lost sight of the shadow again.

  He stopped, searching for it along the eaves, unwilling to move farther until he saw that he was not opening another way of escape. When he heard the scrape on the roof far behind him, he thought for a black moment that the escape had already been made. But immediately he caught sight of the shadow again, almost to the drop-off that would take it down to the wing, and knew that someone else was on the roof.

  Oriol moved by hitching himself along the ridge peaks with his hands. He came like a turtle, with a turtle’s steadiness of purpose. He could not keep his heels from scraping the slates, but he was not trying to be quiet. He knew Le Chat was ahead of him. He wanted Le Chat to know that he was coming.

  He called into the darkness, “John!”

  John recognized the voice, but even before Oriol called his name he had guessed who it was. As surely as Oriol knew that the noise on the roof top meant Le Chat was there, so John knew that only one man had the dogged determination to hunt him there in the dark on his own ground. He moved forward, driving the shadow toward the end of the roof.

  Oriol called, “John Robie!”

  His voice came clearly across the roof top.

  “Lepic has the net out for you. If you get away from me, you’ll never escape him. Give yourself up.”

  There was silence. Then the patient scraping noise began again.

  John moved ahead of it. The shadow was now at the extreme end of the roof, on the eave. There was no way to go from there except down to the wing.

  Oriol’s voice came again. “I know you’re here, John. I’d rather take you myself than let Lepic do it, but you’re finished, either way. Give yourself up.”

  Because John was moving along the roof peak and had his back turned, he did not see the flash of the shot when Oriol worked a pistol out of his pocket and fired it into the air. The bright red pencil of flame went straight up.

  Oriol meant to arouse the household, not kill another thief.

  All John saw with the echoing report of the shot was his own shadow outlined for an instant on the tiles. The flare that showed him to Oriol let him see that the other shadow was gone. Expecting the roar of another shot and the shock of a bullet in his back, he raced along the peak, down the slope of the last roof corner. The gun banged again while he ran, but he was over the eave before the third shot. He swung from the gutter and dropped, not hoping to land on the safe perch of the roof peak below but prepared to fall flat to either side, according to the angle of slate his feet met.

  He did not fall. Hands reached out to steady him. He turned instantly to seize and hold the figure beside him, and knew in the immediate moment of contact, unmistakably, that he had caught a woman.

  Tight in the grip of his arms, not struggling, she whispered, “Let me go, John Robie. We have to help each other now.”

  “Danielle!”

  He thought she started at the sound of his voice. It might have been only his own muscular reaction to the shock. He released her. Before he could even attempt to think, bring his mind to accept the stunning fact of the discovery, she said quickly, “There’s the first light now. He’ll be able to see us as soon as he reaches the eave. We have to get off the roof. I’ve got a rope.”

  She crouched on the peak where they stood. Another light came on somewhere above them. He saw that she was exploring the roof top with her hands, rapidly, although without sign of panic.

  He still could not think.

  An angry voice shouted from a window. More lights were coming on. He heard the scrape of Oriol’s approach on the roof above.

  It released him from the momentary paralysis of thought and action. He took Danielle’s arm and brought her erect beside him.

  “There’s no time to fix a rope,” he said. “We’ll have to go over the eave. The wall isn’t difficult.”

  “I can’t reach from the eave. I would have tried it before if it was possible. I’ll have to—”

  “I’ll make a bridge for you. Stay close behind me, and when I go over watch my hands for a signal. Quick!”

  He went down the angle between roof and wall and along the gutter, no longer with the need to accept a reality he still could not grasp, all of his mind now on the escape. The thought did not enter his head that he might get away more easily alone, or that he should try. Afterward he could not remember any conscious change of attitude in himself, from pursuer of a thief to the thief’s ally. One identity had merged into another while he was both hunter and hunted, so that it seemed wholly natural to find himself providing a path of escape for the girl he had risked his liberty to give to the police. It was not because she was someone he knew and liked, nor because of her sex. She was a thief, he was a thief. Oriol threatened them both.

  He swung down from the eave at what he judged was the point he had come up. It took him a moment to find the hand hold and toe hold he knew to be there. He was firmly braced between wall and eave when he felt Danielle’s light touch on his fingers clinging to the gutter. He lifted one finger against her palm as a signal.

  She came down from the eave and across his body to the wall like a squirrel, found a grip, held her own weight. He swung in behind her.

  The angry voice was shouting again. They heard Oriol call back, urgently, the angry voice replying, other voices.

  He said, “Are you all right?”

  “Yes.” Danielle was flat against the wall by his side. “Shall I go first?”

  “We don’t have time to make it to the ground before they head us off. The first windo
w is about twenty feet straight down, two yards to your left.”

  As if in response to a cue, the slit window below them lighted. Danielle said, “Someone is awake in the room.”

  “The whole place will be awake in a minute. It’s Paul’s room. He’s our only hope.”

  A second window on the same floor with Paul’s room showed a light, then another a floor below. Oriol was shouting urgently from the roof top. They began to descend.

  The room was empty when they squeezed in through the narrow slit window. Paul was outside, in the corridor. They heard his voice and the voices of other guests aroused by the shots and the shouting. But no one passed the open doorway to see them before they had crossed the room, so when Paul, in pajamas and a dressing gown, came in, he found them there behind it.

  He had not quite shut the door when he caught sight of them. He stood that way, motionless, his hand on the doorknob. The color drained slowly out of his face as he looked at them. Danielle was dressed, like John, in gray slacks and jersey and soft leather slippers. She wore a dark beret which hid her bright hair, and a length of strong light line was wound around her slim waist like a belt. Even without the dust of the roof staining her clothes and John’s to show where they had been and the way they had come, their clothing alone would have betrayed them for what they were, two thieves.