To Catch a Thief Read online

  “There isn’t anything that can distract me from staying out of prison. What else should I be warned against?”

  “Several things, although the plan I have in mind is essentially simple. Tonight you will go to Marseilles with one of my men.”

  He talked on, chuckling as he outlined the risks John must run, giggling over the dangers to be avoided as if he were rehearsing some practical joke they meant to play on a friend. It was his way. He would giggle on his deathbed. But he was careful to overlook no detail that might be important, and John listened attentively. The knowledge that a slip would cost twenty years of his life kept his mind from wandering.

  2

  A Sûreté Nationale agent in plain clothes strolled along the sun-baked promenade of the Boulevard La Croisette. He was hot, his shirt stuck to his back, and he envied the seven-eighths-naked vacationers sporting on the strip of beach ten feet below the promenade, who swam or dived or played ball or sprawled on the sand, coloring the beach with brief, bright bathing suits and tanned bare arms and legs. Cannes in midsummer was no place for a man who had to wear clothes. The agent would have given his chances for promotion, which were not good as long as Le Chat remained at large, to be lying on the beach himself, with a cold bottle of beer in his hand and no troubles.

  Passing the impressive front of the Hotel Midi, he made his usual inspection of the small patch of roped-off sand which was the hotel’s private beach. Several people read books or newspapers in deck chairs under the beach umbrellas, others sunned themselves. A few were cooling off in the water. The plage privée was more sedate and less crowded than other parts of the beach. The Midi’s guests were generally sedate and exclusive.

  The agent saw nothing that interested him professionally. A girl who came across the boulevard from the hotel and went down to the beach wearing a zebra-striped bathing suit that was startling even for Cannes made him hesitate, but the man who followed her gave him a cold look. The agent walked on.

  John Robie, sitting in one of the shaded deck chairs on the plage privée, put down his newspaper after the agent had passed.

  He was used to the agents who strolled La Croisette. They were as methodical about it as patrolling sentries, and as much alike in their sport clothes as soldiers in uniform, or like the young men who came down to the beach in the afternoon with the girl in the startling bathing suit.

  He looks like an American today, John thought, watching the girl and her companion. It had been a Frenchman the day before, an Englishman the day before that, but they all looked much the same. None of them lasted very long.

  He watched the girl pull on a white bathing cap over her dark hair. When she had buttoned the strap of the bathing cap, she and the American waded into the water and struck out for the diving platform anchored a hundred yards out. She was a fine swimmer. The American, a husky boy, had to stroke hard to keep up with her.

  She was Francie Stevens, the girl he had seen on the bus. Since that night he had learned a few things about her, more about her mother, even more about the mother’s jewelry, which was insured for seventy-two thousand five hundred dollars with a London insurance company and fitted nicely into a small red leather jewel case. He was in the process of determining how the jewelry could most easily be stolen.

  He still did not know the reason for Francie Stevens’s existence, although the problem did not disturb him as much as it had seemed to disturb Bellini. Since he had already fallen into the old way of thinking of himself as a thief, she interested him only because she was a factor to be considered in the theft. She never wore jewelry herself.

  That puzzled him as much as it had puzzled Bellini. It was not modesty on her part. Her clothes, as well as her bathing suits, were always designed to attract attention. It was not lack of money. And it was too clearly a deliberate gesture of some kind on her part to be overlooked. The summer season on the Côte offered every woman an opportunity to make two displays—one of herself, on the beach during the day, the other of her dress and ornament in the evening. Francie was noticeable on both occasions; on the beach because of the bathing suits, at other times because she wore no personal ornament of any kind at any time, not even rings or a bracelet. This and her clear lack of interest in other things that brought most summer visitors to the Côte were puzzling. Otherwise she seemed like any other pretty girl. She had a good figure and the kind of Irish attractiveness that goes with blue eyes, a fair skin, and dark hair. He thought she might be really eye catching if she would make an effort to be.

  She seems to be eye-catching enough without an effort, he thought. He had seen the agent on the promenade stop to stare. The next agent would not come by for another hour.

  He opened his paper to read the war news.

  It was a week since his talk with Bellini. He had gone from Bellini’s office to Marseilles in a car driven by a man who asked no questions and would not have recognized his passenger as the respectable middle-aged gentleman who returned to Cannes by train three days later. John’s normally straight brown hair, now black and curly, receded sharply over the temples and was beginning to gray at the sides. His eyebrows were darker and bushier, and he was moderately convex through the middle instead of concave. Pads in his shoes increased his height and made him toe out when he walked, enough to give him a flat-footed, slightly clumsy appearance. The strolling police agents, each of whom had a copy of a poor twelve-year-old photograph and a physical description of Le Chat, acrobat, thief, and jailbird, never gave a second look at the balding, thick-bodied man who sat reading a newspaper in a deck chair on the beach in front of the Hotel Midi. He wore tinted glasses occasionally, but so did most of the other hotel guests while they were on the beach. The sun glare from the water was strong.

  “It’s a matter of camouflage, not disguise,” Jean-Pierre had told him in Marseilles. “As we did in the maquis, one adopts the coloration of one’s surroundings. One blends. In your case, we blend you into a clot of tourists, like a cook blending fish in a bouillabaisse. You no longer exist as an individual. You merely contribute to the background.”

  The blending process had taken three days. Jean-Pierre could not give him a permanent wave or put pads in his shoes, but he had friends who came with their equipment and went away afterward as uncurious as they had come. Jean-Pierre continued the transformation with hair dye, a razor to create the balding temples, and some of the shaved hair to make bushy eyebrows. Jean-Pierre’s wife sewed the light harness John wore next to his skin to change his body contours, and Jean-Pierre’s sons bought his new wardrobe and luggage piece by piece on the Marseilles flea market. When it was all done, Jean-Pierre, using a fine German camera stolen from its original owner only a week before, took the photograph that went on ahead to Bellini to replace the original in John’s passport.

  “The harness will bother you for a time, but you will get used to it,” Jean-Pierre said. “It is a necessary evil, like the shoes. There is nothing we can do with the face. The flics will be on watch for a green beard, so we must leave the face out in the open, except for a touch here and there. I do not approve of mustaches. The eyebrows are better. You have average features and average coloring, luckily. We do not need to hide an eagle nose. You should wear sun glasses when the other fish wear sun glasses, but not habitually. As for the rest, I am an impressioniste, like Papa Picasso. I do not make you older and fatter, with grease paint and false hair and a tub of lard in the middle. I create the impression that you are older and fatter, subtly. I am an artiste.”

  “You are an artiste,” John agreed, looking at himself in the mirror. The illusion of middle age and physical softness was perfect.

  Jean-Pierre said, “The main thing is to disguise the body. The boche did you a favor when they burned your prison photographs, but the body is known. That is what they will watch for, so no disclosures on the beach. You must wear the harness at all times in public, but even without the harness you would give yourself away if you took off your shirt. You have too much meat in t
he arms and shoulders, too little around the middle.” He added innocently, “Where did you earn the muscles, John?”

  “You didn’t ask me when we were in the maquis.”

  “I withdraw the question. To return to business. Be careful on the beach, but appear there regularly. You must take the sun, all Americans do that at Cannes, but never the water. You have in your baggage modest shorts, knee-length in the British style, and loose shirts with sleeves to the elbow. Wear those during the day. Be unobtrusive, but do not slink. When you meet an agent on the street, do not look at his eyes or at his feet, but over his shoulder, past his ear. It gives one an honest, unconcerned air. Lock your door at night before you take off your clothes, and give plenty of time to thought about your appearance before you leave your room. Keep your shades drawn. Use the dye I have given you at the roots of your hair as necessary and shave your temples daily, without fail. Let them have sun gradually. Finally”—Jean-Pierre lowered his voice, looking over his shoulder to be sure his wife was not within earshot—“catch the salop of a thief for us, and quick. I have not said it to anyone but you, but I am afraid for my neck. This latest business, with the newspapers digging needles into the flics, will have them tearing their hair, arresting everyone in sight. I have twelve years yet to go at La Maison Centrale, John.”

  “I have twenty,” John said. “I’ll catch him, or they’ll catch me first. You won’t have to worry about La Maison Centrale, either way. Au revoir, and many thanks.”

  “Au revoir, John.”

  The name that went with his new identity was Jack Burns. Bellini had done a good forgery on the passport. It said that Mr. Burns was in the insurance business, that he came from New York City, that he was forty-four years old, and that he had no distinguishing physical characteristics worth being noted. He had entered France through the port of Marseilles on a three-month tourist permit, without a visa. His baggage bore the proper customs labels, and his wardrobe matched the wardrobes of several dozen other visitors of Mr. Burns’s approximate age and financial status enjoying the pleasures of the summer on the Côte d’Azur. As Jean-Pierre had said, he contributed to the background.

  He was not afraid of being recognized, unless by Oriol. Paul would certainly know his face, and any of the Vence boule players, even half-blind Germaine, might still identify him. But Paul had left France, and neither Germaine nor the boule players had any reason to visit the tourist resorts of the Côte. As for Oriol, John had read Nice-Matin and L’Espoir carefully—in private; Mr. Burns did not read French—without finding any mention of the disappearance of John Robie from the Villa des Bijoux near Vence, or anything to connect his name with the thefts. He hoped that Oriol was keeping quiet to protect his own position. A police commissaire who knew Le Chat’s face not only as it had looked at the time of his trial but as it was twelve years afterward could be of great help to the Sûreté. He would first have to confess to the Sûreté that he had had Le Chat in his hands and let him go free, and he might not continue to hold his post as commissaire afterward. John counted on Oriol’s peasant caution to keep him from the confession.

  In any event, Mr. Burns was staying at the Hotel Midi, and small-town police officials did not often pass through the Midi’s impressive doorway. The list of hotel guests included an Arabian demigod with his entourage of bodyguards and dancing girls, an exiled ex-dictator, an East Indian princess, several members of the British peerage, and a number of wealthy Americans, including Mrs. Maude Stevens, with Francie and the red leather jewel case.

  Maude Stevens was in her early fifties, friendly, plump, nice-looking except for a tendency to be haphazard with her makeup, and a heavy gambler at roulette. She would have preferred to play cards, but there were no poker tables in the Riviera casinos, and she did not understand baccarat. She had done her own washing and housework for the first thirty years of her life, helping her husband to scrape a living on a quarter section of worthless land in northern Texas. Her husband had died, her only child had been born, and the first of several oil wells had come in on the quarter section almost simultaneously. Since then, she had been repaying herself for the first thirty years. She liked her jewelry florid, preferring diamonds to other stones because of their sparkle, and she changed the pieces she wore from evening to evening, giving the world an opportunity to admire her entire collection, of which she was enormously proud.

  John had no intention of making her acquaintance. But he wanted to be certain that the jewels she wore were those covered by the insurance policy, and not copies. He spent an evening standing behind her chair at a roulette wheel in the casino at Juan-les-Pins, leaning forward to make small bets on red or black whenever she placed her own counters so he could look unobtrusively at her rings. He won consistently on the red and black. Mrs. Stevens, who had been losing until then, began to cap his hundred-franc counters with her own larger bets, first ten thousand francs and then, as the luck held with them, up to the table limit of a hundred thousand. She won nearly two million francs. They were great friends before their luck changed.

  He saw enough of her jewelry that evening to satisfy himself that she wore the originals, and he meant to avoid her afterward. He found it almost impossible to do. On the evening of the day after their stroke of luck at roulette he went into the Midi’s Petit Bar for the single cocktail which Mr. Burns allowed himself before dinner. She shouted at him from the table where she sat with Francie and Francie’s admirer of the moment.

  “Lucky! Lucky Burns! Come over here! I want to buy you a drink.”

  He had to join them. Introducing him, she said, “This is the man I was telling you about, Francie. Mr. Lucky Burns, my daughter Francie, this is Leon, don’t bother getting up, Leon, sit down, Lucky, we’re all in the family, what will you drink? Waiter, bring the man something. Look!”

  She showed him a pin she was wearing. It was a small diamond dog with emerald eyes and a diamond leash ending in an emerald safety clasp. He did not have to look at it closely. Even at a snap guess, it represented an investment of five or six thousand dollars.

  She said proudly, “I bought it this morning, at Cartier’s. It took all my winnings. The house will never get its money back now.”

  “I should have let you make my bets for me. I was too timid.”

  “Have to bet ’em big to win big, my husband always said, poor man. He never had anything to bet with. How long are you going to be here in Cannes, Lucky?”

  “A few weeks. I’m not sure, exactly. It depends on whether my business can get along without me.”

  “What is your business?”

  “Insurance.”

  “Give me your card, and I’ll try to send some customers your way. I owe you something for the dog.”

  He shook his head. “Thanks. I’m on my first vacation in ten years. I don’t want any business.”

  Francie did not enter into the conversation. He could not tell if she was bored, or preoccupied with her thoughts, or sulky because Leon paid more attention to the diamond dog than he did to her. She was there at the table with them, nothing more.

  Mrs. Stevens, happy with her new jewel, kept moving the dog to new positions on her dress, until Leon said something about thieves, Le Chat in particular. The Herald Tribune article was still a popular subject for discussion.

  Mrs. Stevens scoffed at the suggestion that she had anything to worry about.

  “I keep my beads in the hotel safe,” she said. “Besides, they’re insured. And I’ve got my lucky dog to sic on any cat that comes around me.”

  She made a gesture of petting it, and laughed. So did John and Leon. Francie smiled.

  He avoided the Petit Bar after that. He was very busy in the evenings, too busy to let himself be waylaid by Mrs. Stevens.

  In the afternoons, after he had taken his daily sunning on the beach, he visited Bellini. Bellini had many callers, including summer visitors who wanted to arrange motor tours or hotel reservations. Mr. Burns was one among many. He was the only one who regularl
y took the key out of the door lock and carried it with him into Bellini’s cubbyhole.

  “Mrs. Stevens will do,” he told Bellini, the day after she bought the diamond dog. “The others you had in mind won’t attract a thief like this one. The stones aren’t worth the risk. I’ll have to find some that are.”

  “I agreed before that you would have to make the final choices,” Bellini said. “We know this thief steals as you did. He has either read about you and copied your technique, or arrived at it on his own. Either way, you must identify yourself with him, plan the thefts he will make before he makes them, so that we can be ready and waiting for him. There can be only a certain number of possibilities profitable enough and safe enough to attract him, and we need to anticipate only one of those. It is true that he has the whole of France to range in, even the whole of Europe.”

  “He will move either in Nice or here in Cannes next.”

  Bellini raised his eyebrows.

  John said flatly, “I would. I have to believe that he’ll think the way I do, if the scheme is going to work at all. I never went outside the Côte, and he hasn’t, so far. He’s covered Menton, Cap Ferrat, and Monte Carlo and Monaco, to date. There are still other possibilities, but the wealthiest people come to Nice and Cannes, and the season will be over here in another few weeks. There’ll be nothing to tempt him out of season. In the meantime, he won’t pass up the two most popular resorts. He can’t.”

  “Good. Good. I am glad to hear you say it like that. You are confident. I leave it in your hands. Call on me whenever you are ready for help.”