by David Dodge
“And I’ll give you a piece of my stretch at La Maison Centrale any time you like,” Coco said impatiently to the gypsy. “Or the whole thing. What are nine years in the jug to a young fellow like you? Move along, citizen.”
After they had gone, John closed the house and walked back down the Rue Georges Clemenceau to the yacht harbor and La Croisette. The illuminated face of the clock in the old stone tower on the hill overlooking the harbor said five minutes to eight.
He entered Le Petit Bar at eight sharp, obedient to the leash.
Francie was there with her mother and a man who sat with his back to the door. When the man turned his head to speak to Mrs. Stevens, John saw the tip of the fierce guardsman’s mustache. Mr. Paige’s path was crossing his with increasing regularity.
Francie waved to attract his attention. For the second time that day, he was introduced to the London insurance company’s agent. He said, “We’ve already met,” shaking hands, and Mr. Paige said, “Oh, yes. Quite. Quite,” as if he were not certain about it. He was clearly preoccupied with Mrs. Stevens’s display of jewelry.
She glittered even more brightly than usual. The diamond and emerald dog was pinned to the shoulder of her dress, she had diamonds in her ears, diamonds on her fingers, and diamonds on her wrists. Her lipstick was, as always, lopsided, and she drank champagne from a glass with red smears on the rim. She was dressed for a good time, and seemed to be having one.
She said, “Hi, Lucky. Come over here and sit by me.”
She patted the chair next to her invitingly.
Francie said, “We can’t stay. Mr. Burns is taking me to Monte Carlo.”
“Good.” Her mother tossed off the last of her champagne. “We’ll all go to Monte Carlo.”
“You can’t come.”
“Why can’t I?”
“You’ve had your share. If he’s as lucky as you say he is, I want him for myself.”
“Since when have you taken up gambling?” Mrs. Stevens winked at John. “You’ve done something to my daughter, Lucky. I don’t know what it is, but she’s almost human lately. Look at her, gambling and everything. She’s even wearing my beads. I don’t know what’s come over her.”
They all looked at the beads, which were hard to ignore. John had marked them from the doorway, a magnificent necklace of diamonds and sapphires. He had already appraised the necklace on Mrs. Stevens’s throat at the casino. It looked different on Francie.
She wore a black, strapless evening gown, very plain in the way that only Dior or Schiaparelli could make plain black dresses. She had done her hair so as to expose her ears, with sapphire earrings at the ear lobes. The blue of the stones at her throat and ears, matching and emphasizing the blue of her eyes, produced an effect that could not have been accidental. It was as if she had chosen deliberately to display the necklace and earrings, not as ornament but as they might be displayed on a model, for themselves.
Mrs. Stevens said cheerfully, “Well, if I can’t go with you, I’ll have to go somewhere else. I have a hunch I’m going to ruin the house tonight, Lucky. Saturday night has always been my best night. Do you gamble, Mr. Paige?”
Mr. Paige did not take the hint. He said absently that he did not enjoy gambling. Mrs. Stevens’s diamonds still had him hypnotized.
“Have to go by myself, then.” Mrs. Stevens jingled her bracelets. “Take good care of my child, Lucky. And the beads, of course.” She winked slyly, indicating Mr. Paige with a movement of her head. “They cost a lot of money.”
Mr. Paige looked unhappily at Francie’s necklace. John said, “I’ll bring them both back early.”
“I don’t care when you bring them back, just so long as you bring them. I’m going to stay up until breakfast myself. I’ve got a new roulette system to work out.” She snapped her fingers at a waiter. “Sure you won’t have one little drink for the road, Lucky?”
Francie said firmly, “Good night, Mother. Good night, Mr. Paige,” and took John’s arm.
He stopped her when they were in the foyer of the hotel. “What’s going on?” he said.
“What do you mean?” She was wide-eyed, innocent.
“You invited me for a drink. Now you want to go to Monte Carlo. Why?”
“I want to gamble.”
“You never gambled before. And you don’t have to go as far as Monte Carlo to start.”
“I want to go to Monte Carlo.”
“I don’t.”
The jewels at her throat winked blue and white with her breathing. She said softly, “But you’ll go, won’t you? You wouldn’t like me to go wandering around by myself wearing Mother’s nice beads, with all these thieves you read about in the newspapers waiting to steal them?”
“What are you up to?”
“I told you. I want to go to Monte Carlo. You’re taking me.”
“No.”
“Yes you are.” She had stopped smiling. “Otherwise we’ll go back to Mother and Mr. Paige and talk about Le Chat. You know who Mr. Paige is, don’t you?”
“No.”
“You ought to. He’s the agent of the London insurance company. He’d like very much to meet Le Chat. Shall I introduce you to him again?”
“Francie, you’re crazy! Even for a joke—”
“I’m not joking, Mr. Burns. Are you taking me to Monte Carlo, or back to Le Petit Bar?”
A hotel chasseur came through the foyer, holding over his head a piece of blackboard on both sides of which a name had been chalked. Somebody was wanted on the telephone. John wished that it had been his own name on the blackboard, anything to take him away from her. He felt the leash tight on his neck.
When the chasseur had passed, he said, “I’ll have to change my clothes.”
“I’ll wait for you here. Don’t be too long.”
Francie sat down in the nearest chair, spread her skirt, crossed her slim ankles, folded her hands, and smiled. Her eyes were very blue, the color of the sapphires.
He went to change his clothes. He did not know what Francie was planning, whether Monte Carlo was only a whim or something else, why she had put on her mother’s jewels, or what scheme she had in her head, if it was a scheme. He could do nothing about Francie except go where she led him. And only the accident of her mother’s decision to stay out all night to try a new roulette system saved him from having to leave his best bait for the thief waiting and unguarded.
He had been watching the bait for four nights. Mrs. Stevens ordinarily came in at one or two in the morning, Francie about the same time. According to his timing, they were both sound asleep by three. It left an hour or an hour and a half before the light of early summer dawn for a thief to get at the red leather jewel case that remained in Mrs. Stevens’s room only while she slept. Even while he was still spending night hours in Le Cannet and Californie to complete his sketches of the two houses that were to be his other traps, he managed to get back to his room for the vital hour and a half before dawn. He passed that time waiting patiently in the dark by the small window of his bathroom. If the thief came at all, John knew how he would come.
There was only one way. From the first, he had discarded the possibility of an approach through the front windows of the Stevens suite, which were not inaccessible to a good climber scaling the huge neon sign on the front of the building but were too well illuminated by the same sign to offer a safe means of entry. All of the hotel doors fastened with a spring lock and a strong inner bolt, and the thief was too cautious to attempt a break-in from a brightly lit hotel corridor in any event. He needed darkness in which to operate, like Le Chat. When John discovered the tiny lightwell that offered a safe, hidden passage up through the interior of the building, he made complaints to the hotel directeur about street noises and leaky plumbing fixtures until he at last got a room that would serve his purpose.
The room was on the third floor back, while the Stevens suite was fourth floor front, but the windows of both bathrooms opened into the lightwell. It was a narrow, rectangular shaft rising from the basement
level to a skylight in the roof, and it served better as a receptacle for used razor blades and bits of wastepaper than as a source of light. Two small windows, paned with frosted glass for the sake of the guests’ privacy, faced each other in opposite walls at each floor. The other two walls were blank. There was a hatch at the basement level by which the janitor could enter to clean out debris occasionally, although the hatch had not been opened in some time. During John’s first night in his new room, he waited until very late, then stripped to a pair of shorts and went up the lightwell as a mountain climber goes up a cleft in the rock, back and feet braced against the blank wall. He was careful not to disturb the dust on the window ledges, and he did not have to repeat the laborious climb. One exploration was enough to satisfy him that the thief could enter the shaft either from the skylight above or the hatch below.
He would have preferred the skylight himself, since there were means to fasten a rope, and it was possible for an agile man to move faster up and down a rope than by inching carefully along wedged between walls. But he was ready for an approach from either direction, and he was sure of his own ability to bottle the thief once he heard sounds of movement in the shaft. All of his preparations had gone toward that moment.
Now, for one night at least, the watch was unnecessary. He could forget Mrs. Stevens temporarily. The invisible leash kept him from forgetting Francie.
She was waiting where he had left her. She said, “Mother just left for Palm Beach. She tried to invite herself along with us again, but I discouraged her.”
“Why didn’t you want her to come with us?”
Francie hooked her arm through his, smiling up at him. “I hate chaperones, Mr. Burns. And I’m sure I’m safe in your hands.”
The magnificent necklace sparkled at her throat like an invitation.
He hired a car at the taxi stand across the boulevard from the hotel, a huge, old, heavy Hispano-Suiza, open in back behind a glass wind screen that separated passengers from driver. The hiring process, a sign-language discussion of hours and distance and price, was only a routine to be gone through, part of Mr. Burns’s camouflage. The car belonged to Bellini, and the driver was Bellini’s man, the same one who had taken John to Marseilles.
He drove them to Monte Carlo by way of the Middle Corniche. The road, high up on a cliff after they had left Nice behind, followed the curves of the coast, in and out and around above the sparkling lights of Beaulieu-sur-Mer and Villefranche and Cap d’Ail below. The stars were bright, the night air pleasantly warm, the view magnificent. Francie thought it was all lovely beyond words.
He said, “You’ve changed your mind about a lot of things, haven’t you? Two days ago you wouldn’t have seen the stars.”
“I told you why. Things aren’t the same when your escort for the evening is a famous jewel thief.”
“Tell me why you wore the necklace tonight. Do you expect me to steal it?”
“Not right away. I thought you might like to examine it first. It’s worth eleven thousand dollars. Shall I take it off?”
Her hands went to the clasp at the back of her neck.
He said, “I can’t see it in this light. I’ll take your word for it. I meant why did you wear it tonight, when you never wear even a ring, ordinarily?”
“I don’t like jewelry, ordinarily.”
“Why?”
She shrugged. “Just one of those things. Some people don’t like parsnips.”
“That’s not a reason.”
She did not speak again for some time. The car hummed along quietly, roared for a minute as they passed through a tunnel bored into the rocky cliff, then hummed again in the open. Starlight dappled the sea below the cliff.
“Mother owns seventeen oil wells,” Francie said abruptly. “I’ll inherit them.”
“Are we still talking about the reason you don’t like jewelry?”
“Yes.” She spoke without looking at him. “I told you once that I had to travel with her because she’s so trusting. Every thief and confidence man who sees her makes some kind of an effort. She’s an invitation to them. They’d steal her blind, if it weren’t for me. I’ve got so I don’t trust anyone, not even an inoffensive, friendly man like Mr. Burns of New York. It’s an unpleasant state of mind, when the slightest friendly gesture from a stranger only makes you suspicious.”
“So with that necklace around your throat, you’re eleven thousand dollars worth of diamonds and sapphires to any man who smiles at you, and not just a pretty girl at all. Is that it?”
She nodded. “Eleven thousand dollars worth of diamonds and sapphires and seventeen oil wells.”
“It must make it difficult for you to listen to any man who might really be more interested in the color of your eyes.”
“It does. Especially if he compares them with sapphires.” She laughed humorlessly. “It happened two weeks ago. I left him and rode home alone on the bus. I’m sure the poor man had only been trying to pay me a compliment, and wasn’t really interested in the oil wells at all. I felt horrible about it afterward. And of course it’s nothing you can explain.”
“Why did you put on the necklace tonight?”
“Because I don’t have to worry about ulterior motives in your case. You’re an honest thief. We both know what you’re after. I can enjoy your company without nasty, suspicious thoughts in my mind. I don’t like feeling nasty and suspicious.”
“I see.”
She was silent again. In time, she said more brightly, “You’ll be able to go ahead with the theft in a few days. I told Mother she ought to have the diamond dog insured as soon as possible, to be safe, and since Mr. Paige was there at the hotel, we called him over for a drink. He’s having a something-or-other put on the policy. As soon as it’s confirmed by London, I’ll let you know.”
“You’re very thoughtful.”
“I’m not very thoughtful about Mr. Paige. He’s being awfully British and tactful with Mother, trying to get up the nerve to tell her she oughtn’t to go around sparkling like a Christmas tree. She knows it, and she teases him by slathering on more diamonds. He’s going to feel terrible when you rob her practically under his nose. Have you decided how you’re going to manage it?”
“I haven’t worked out the details.”
“Are you going to need any help from me?”
“I don’t think so. If you don’t mind Francie, could we pretend for tonight that I’m not really a burglar at all? Just Mr. Burns, on a vacation? I’d like to forget about business for a while, if I could.”
“All right. No business.”
They did not talk again. The car came at last off the Corniche, down the wide, winding road from the cliffs to the neat houses and pleasant gardened streets of the little principality of Monaco, to draw up at last before the ornate summer casino on its hill overlooking the bay of Monte Carlo.
He had not been in Monte Carlo since 1939. Twelve years and a war had passed it by without changing anything. The uniformed attendant who came to open the door of the car made the same bow and offered the same words of welcome as before. The quiet, sharp-eyed men in the foyer stood in the same positions opposite the door, watching the people who entered the gambling salons. Inside, everything was as he remembered it—the flowered wallpaper, the faded gilt, the ornate crystal chandeliers, all the atmosphere of decayed Victorian splendor, were unchanged. The expressionless croupiers looked the same, and he thought he even recognized the dead, burned-out faces of some of the ancient system players at the roulette wheels, hunched over their charts marking down endless chains of figures, rouge and noir, pair and impair, manque and passe, until the proper moment came for the inevitable hundred-franc bet, the satisfied nod when it won and the blank stare when it lost, but always another mark on the system chart. Nothing that he remembered had changed by as much as a single prism on the chandeliers. The American dice tables were new, but they were set unobtrusively back in an alcove, out of the way. Even American dice tables could not affect Monte Carlo. It was
timeless.
Francie said, “What are you staring at?”
“The casino at Monte Carlo.” He added the explanation, “In my character of Jack Burns, of course. He’s never seen it before. He’s read about it—the gambling place of kings, fortunes won and lost on the turn of the wheel, broken hearts, lost hopes, a pistol on the terrace to end it all. Now he’s here in the flesh. He’s impressed.”
“He doesn’t want to overdo it, though,” Francie said critically. “I’m not as impressed as all that. It looks like any other casino, only more moth-eaten. What do we do first?”
“Buy counters, I suppose. If you really want to gamble.”
“I want to gamble.”
They bought counters at the nearest wheel. Francie put fifty thousand francs on the red, and drew a quick, impersonal glance from the lookout on his high chair at the end of the table. Black won. While Francie was reaching to place another bet, John looked around the salon. His only immediate worry was that Paul might be there, but he did not see Paul. He had only to mark time, obey the leash. It was ten o’clock.
They left at four in the morning. Francie had won six hundred thousand francs at roulette, lost nearly as much at baccarat, experimented without much result either way at the dice tables, and was still genuinely puzzled how anyone could get a thrill out of gambling.
“I just don’t understand it,” she said. They were driving back along the Corniche. Dawn was beginning to pale the dark sky in the east, and the morning breeze was cool. “Every time I try it, I think it might be different, but it’s always the same. You win, you lose, and it makes no difference one way or the other.”
“Some people get excitement out of winning or losing.”
“I know. Mother does. That’s what I don’t understand. The money doesn’t mean anything to her. I could understand someone who needs a hundred thousand francs badly being excited if he won it, and could put it in his pocket and run away with it. But people like Mother don’t care. If they really needed a hundred thousand francs they wouldn’t be gambling. It’s only the people who don’t care about the money who can afford to gamble that way. That couple I introduced you to tonight, the Americans, were both betting two and three and four hundred thousand francs at a time, all over the table. It didn’t mean a thing to them whether they won or lost.” Minutes later she added, “Did you notice her emeralds, or are we still not discussing business?”
