To Catch a Thief Read online

  The newspapers gave the trial front-page coverage. He was good copy to the end. He admitted nothing, denied everything, and offered no information about himself, who he was, where he had come from, or what he had stolen. He had no identity papers. No friends came forward to speak for him at the trial. The reporters knew that he was a young man, suspected from his accent that he was an American, and were reasonably certain, as much from the muscular development of his body as from his technique as a thief, that he was a trained gymnast, possibly a professional acrobat. The evidence that was not admitted in court got into the newspapers easily, along with some imaginings not far from the truth; the story of Le Chat’s climb up the bare façade of a hotel in Villefranche to enter a third-story window and depart the way he came with a string of rose pearls around his neck; another story, exaggerated but sworn to by the servant girl who had seen it and raised the alarm, of his jump from the roof of a villa in Eze to the ground forty feet below, and his bounding leap from there over an eight-foot wall; another story, solemnly reported in the French way, of a woman who had lost diamonds worth twenty thousand dollars and wakened in time to see Le Chat, in dead black clothing, spread his arms and fly out the window with the stones, like a bat. He read the stories in his cell and said nothing.

  They sent him to serve his sentence at La Maison Centrale de Fontevrault-l’Abbaye, near Saumur. He arrived there a few months before the outbreak of World War II. He had been in prison less than a year when the German army arrived to take over the management of that part of the country.

  La Maison Centrale was full of cutthroats—a few thieves like himself, but more murderers, gangsters, and apaches, one step removed from the criminals who were sent to Devil’s Island. The Germans considered them good material to pass over into the care of what remained of the Third Republic. One night the entire population of La Maison Centrale was herded into trucks, driven into the Unoccupied Zone, and turned loose.

  It was one of several German errors. All the murderers, Frenchmen first and cutthroats only incidentally, went into the maquis and began practicing their trade on German soldiers. John, with no place else to go, joined the others.

  He met Bellini in the maquis. Bellini’s shoulder had just been fractured, and it pained him so badly that he could hardly keep the happy smile on his face, or giggle at the way his arm grew shorter and more useless day by day. When he learned the identity of Le Chat from John’s jailmates, he said, “It is a great pleasure to meet you, sir. A great pleasure indeed. I tried to make your acquaintance for several years.”

  “Why?”

  “I would have enjoyed betraying you to the Sûreté,” Bellini tittered. “Or having you strangled.”

  “Was I in your territory?”

  “You were. You were a great inconvenience to me. Every time you made a theft, my organization felt the heavy hand of the law.” Bellini chuckled at the memory. “You were clever not to try to dispose of the jewelry on the Mediterranean coast. I would have had you, as well as the stones.”

  “It wasn’t cleverness. The prices were better in Paris.”

  “You were lucky, then. Do you have plans to return to the Côte after this business is finished? Because if you do, I must, warn you—”

  “Not as a thief.”

  “You have reformed, then? A wonderful thing to hear. I have always contended that the French prison system had its points.”

  John shook his head and smiled. Bellini amused him.

  “Retired is a better word,” he said. “I have all the money I need. Now that they know my face, I’m no longer safe. I’ve seen all of the French prison system that I want to see.”

  “Good. Good. I am glad to hear it. I should not like to be your business rival.”

  They both laughed. John said, “We would make better partners, I think.”

  They made good partners in the maquis. Bellini, in spite of his Italian name, was French, a Niçois. He was not a jailbird like the others, only a businessman with useful connections in le milieu, the French underworld. The Germans wanted him to use his connections on their side. When he refused, they broke his shoulder instead of shooting him, another error.

  He organized his own band of maquisards, all boche killers. John, the only one among them without a Frenchman’s inborn hatred for German invaders, caught it in time from the others. They murdered according to individual talent. Guns, except those taken from the Germans themselves, were hard to come by in the early days, before the British and Americans began to parachute supplies into the maquis. Because of the strength in his arms and shoulders, John was most often called on to strangle sentries or to climb quickly and quietly when climbing was necessary. A thin, anemic boy named Jean-Pierre ran up a good score of stray soldiers using a sharpened rat-tail file for a weapon. Le Borgne was a one-eyed man whose specialty was sharpshooting through lighted windows at night. Coco was an expert with a casse-tête, a skull-cracker. La Mule, a hairy mountain of a man, used anything that came to hand. He was a peasant farmer whose farmhouse the band used as a headquarters from time to time. His wife had been killed or abducted by the Germans, he never knew which, and he was left with two children to care for, a boy and a girl nine or ten years old, who smuggled food and carried messages. When the Germans finally raided the farmhouse, La Mule stayed behind and died in his own doorway under a mound of dead soldiers while the rest of the band got away. The boy and the girl had disappeared when Bellini sent men back afterward to look for them, and their bodies were never found.

  But recruits always came to take the place of those who died. Bellini had nearly a hundred men in his gang, by then well armed and well supplied, when American troops landed near Saint Tropez in August of 1944 and the maquisards joined up with them in the drive north.

  John was wounded twice, neither time seriously. After the fighting had ended, he left France for the United States. The disrupted French border controls had not yet been re-established, and he had no difficulty getting out of the country. To enter the United States without papers, he had to show that he was an American citizen, which he did by proving that he had been born in New York State. His birth certificate was enough. After establishing his nationality, he applied for a passport and returned to France on the first boat.

  It was not recklessness. Bellini wrote that the Sûreté had made no attempt to round up the convicts of La Maison Centrale. The prison records had been destroyed by the Germans, and it was common knowledge in le milieu that no man who had killed Germans during the Occupation need worry about an unfinished prison term as long as he remained respectable. John intended to remain respectable. To do so, he needed the money that still stood to his credit in the French banks.

  The franc had deteriorated badly and was still tumbling. He found that he was worth less than fifty thousand dollars instead of a quarter of a million, and that rigid currency controls made it impossible for him to take the money out of the country. Still, eight million francs was a comfortable fortune in France, and he liked France. He stayed.

  He had used his own name on the passport. No one questioned him. He bought the villa on a hill above Vence, still using his own name, and called it the Villa of the Jewels because a name was needed on the mailbox, and the joke was a harmless one. He registered under his right name at the prefecture in Nice, where he had been convicted, and applied for a permis de séjour as a resident. The card came through, and still nobody asked if John Robie of the Villa des Bijoux was the thief of the same name who had been sentenced to twenty years at La Maison Centrale de Fontevrault-l’Abbaye for jewel robbery. Finally, after he had been at the villa for several months, the Vence commissaire de police came to call on him, riding a bicycle and puffing because of the steepness of the hill.

  The commissaire was a short, broad man with sharp eyes and a soft voice. His name was Oriol. John gave him a glass of wine. He took one sip, to be polite, and did not touch it again.

  “Your permis de séjour,” he said. “It came through in order?”<
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  “Yes.” He had made the first application through the Vence commissariat.

  “I am glad to hear it. You plan to live here indefinitely?”

  “Off and on. I like to travel.”

  “I see.” Oriol’s eyes wandered around the room. “You are very comfortable here, at the Villa des Bijoux.”

  From the way he said it, John realized that he knew. He went on slowly. “I hope you continue to be comfortable here, Monsieur Robie. I know of your record—with the maquis, I mean. I was in the maquis myself, for a time. Before that, I was a police clerk. At the cour d’assises, in Nice.”

  John waited. Oriol thought for a while, working out his sentences, before he said, “I recommended that the permis de séjour be given to you, Monsieur Robie. My recommendation was enough. There will be no further investigation of your background at present.”

  “I’m very grateful. What do you mean by ‘at present’?”

  Oriol turned over his hands, palms up. They had calluses on them. He worked in his garden and among his vines whenever he had time, like the good French peasant he was.

  “I mean that there is nothing I know of now which would require investigation. What you may do tomorrow or the next day is, of course, another thing. If you were to attract official attention to yourself in any way, then I, as commissaire for this district, would ask more questions than I have asked.”

  “I do not intend to do anything to attract attention to myself. I hunt a little in season, fish, swim when the weather is good, and dig in my garden. That’s all.”

  “You have adequate means to live on?”

  “All I need.”

  “You do not think you will find it necessary, then, to adopt some form of gainful employment while you are in France?”

  “No. I’ve retired.”

  “Then you should be very content here.”

  He stood up. They shook hands. Oriol motioned at the glass of wine and excused himself for not finishing it.

  “It is very good, but I do not drink while I am on official business,” he said. “I press a little wine from my own grapes. Not like yours, of course, but drinkable. Perhaps you would do me the honor some day soon—we will talk about the maquis—I live not far from here, myself.”

  John said he would be glad to do him the honor.

  They shook hands again.

  After Oriol had pedaled away down the hill, he drank the wine himself. He felt really secure for the first time since his return.

  He saw Bellini rarely, and his other friends of the maquis only by accident. But he did Oriol the honor of drinking his wine a few weeks after Oriol’s call, when the commissaire made the invitation specific, and through him met others of his neighbors, peasants and villagers and minor government functionaries like Oriol. He began playing boule with them in the village on Sundays. When the Grasse boule team challenged them to a match, he went up to Grasse to help defend the village honor, and was paired off against a big broad-shouldered man who introduced himself simply as Paul. He was the most popular man on the Grasse team, and their best player; likable, quiet, friendly. John thought he might be the village blacksmith. He was surprised to hear that Paul was le Comte du Pré de la Tour.

  They were friends from the beginning. Paul, several years younger than John, went by the name of Du Pré, rarely using his title, but the title was old and honored, and John learned from Oriol that Paul had been decorated by both the French and British governments for his war record with the Free French Army. He had a steel plate in place of one kneecap, besides the decorations. His home was in Lyons, but he owned a little domaine in the hills above Grasse which he pretended to farm for profit, although he was independently wealthy. Actually the domaine was a summer rest home for his wife, Lisa, who was dying of tuberculosis. They were hopelessly in love, they both knew she was dying, and they never spoke of it to each other. Paul spent as much of his time by her bedside as she would permit, until she sent him away, made him go out and play boule, or trim his vines. After she had met John, and became aware of his friendship for her husband, she begged him to take Paul with him whenever he went on a hunting or fishing trip, which he did frequently.

  “Get him away from me, John.” There were tears in her eyes. “Keep him occupied. Don’t let him think about me. I’m afraid of what will happen to him when I die.”

  “You’re not going to die, Lisa. Don’t talk that way.”

  “Yes. Soon.” She squeezed her eyelids together against the tears. “I’m not afraid for myself. I’m afraid for Paul. Help him to find something, somebody, to take my place, John. Be his friend for me.”

  “I am his friend.”

  “I know.” She pressed his hand in her thin fingers. “Don’t forget.”

  For her sake, and because he genuinely liked Paul, he cultivated Paul’s company. They hunted together, went on fishing trips, and, during a trying period when Lisa was confined in a Swiss sanitarium and Paul was unable to visit her, attempted the stony peak of the Jungfrau. Paul and the guide who took them were experienced mountain climbers, but John, who had never been on a rock face before, surprised them both. His strength, climbing skill, and immunity to the vertigo that bothers beginners made Paul question him later. He evaded an explanation. Paul, seeing his reluctance to talk about himself, did not ask again.

  After the first experience, mountain climbing became the exercise he enjoyed most. Sometimes he went with Paul, sometimes alone. Between times he dug in his garden, read, played boule at the village, and enjoyed living. He was content. He did not look ahead to the day when he might no longer be content.

  It was three years before Lisa died in the Swiss sanitarium where Paul had taken her again for treatment. He did not learn about it until Paul came back to the domaine alone. Paul was quieter than before, and smiled less often, but otherwise seemed the same. He continued to spend several months of the summer at the domaine. John did not know if it was because he himself was near by, or because Paul’s best memories of Lisa were there. But he remembered his promise to Lisa. Although he never spoke of his own background to Paul, they talked about everything else, a bottle of wine between them to wet their mouths and sharpen their wits and the whole universe to discuss—life, and death, and why, and what made Provence more beautiful than any other place in the world. And war.

  When the Russians first moved in Asia, Paul saw the ultimate end of Europe and everything it stood for. He was blackly pessimistic about the future of the world. After he had gone to Lyons to volunteer for the French contribution to the United Nations troops, and was rejected because of the plate in his knee, he wrote John that he was leaving France, that he would not come back to the domaine for an indefinite period. He did not feel that he was good company for anyone.

  It was a curt, unhappy note. But John had no time to worry about Paul. Oriol paid him a second official visit on the same day that Paul’s letter arrived.

  He had been on a solitary fishing trip. It was a good day. He was covered with fish scales and sunburn, and had brought back enough of a catch for Germaine to make a bouillabaisse. He had not seen the newspapers.

  He gave Oriol a glass of wine, according to custom. Oriol had been at the villa several times by invitation, and always enjoyed drinking what John gave him. This time he barely touched the glass to his lips, as he had done on his first visit. He looked solemn.

  With no preliminaries, he said, “Did you ever, during your time with the maquis, hear of a man named Le Chat, John?”

  John felt the sweat start along his ribs and on his back. After all that time it was a shock.

  He said, “I know the name.”

  Oriol took a folded newspaper out of his pocket and held it out, his sharp eyes watching John’s face.

  “He was a famous jewel thief. We think he may be operating here, on the Côte. He began here, before the war. I wonder if he has returned.”

  John looked at the paper.

  A Mme. Lisieux, staying at one of the resort hot
els in Menton, had lost jewels valued at three million francs to a thief who got in through the window of her top-floor suite during the night by swinging himself down from the cornice of the roof. Nobody had seen him, but from all the signs he had gone out the same way, pulling himself back up over the cornice from a window ledge four stories above the street. The police suspected inside help and were questioning Mme. Lisieux’s maid, because the jewels ordinarily remained in the hotel strongbox and were accessible to the thief that night only because Mme. Lisieux had worn them to a gala. Most of the article was about the thief’s boldness and physical agility. The man who wrote it clearly had never heard of Le Chat, because the comparison was a natural one to make. Le Chat’s name was not mentioned.

  He returned the paper to Oriol. Oriol looked at him woodenly as he folded it.

  John said, “I remember reading about Le Chat, years ago. This man’s technique seems much the same. But it isn’t the same thief.”

  “Can one ever be positive?”

  “I can. Le Chat was killed during the Resistance. I was there when he died.”

  Oriol said nothing. John wanted to take him by the arm and say, “I swear it. I like being an honest man. I wouldn’t steal again if I starved. All I want is to live my life, drink my wine, dig in my garden, and be let alone.” But he could not say anything so bald. The amnesty that let him live peacefully at the Villa des Bijoux was not an official one. Legally, he was still an escaped convict, and Oriol a commissaire de police.

  They talked about other things. Oriol still did not touch his wine glass. Before he left, John said, “I give you my word that Le Chat is dead, Oriol. He will never come back.”