The Diamond Caper

by Peter Mayle

  She looked at him over the top of her sunglasses, and smiled. “Is that a hint?”

  “Not exactly,” said Sam. “It’s a business idea.” And he took her through what he had in mind.

  At first, Elena was skeptical. “Let me get this straight,” she said. “You want me to get Frank Knox to hire you as his chief claims inspector in Europe?”

  “Temporary, and unpaid. All I want is a letter from him, on Knox stationery, instructing me to pursue all lines of investigation relating to the Castellaci robbery. He needn’t worry about the business cards; I’ll get those done over here. With them and the letter, I’ll have something official to show Hervé and his police buddies.”

  Elena shrugged. “Well, I guess it might work, and it won’t do any harm.”

  She dropped her magazine, put her hand on the back of Sam’s neck, and began to guide his head back down to her stomach. “Now, where were we?”

  —

  When Sam explained his idea that evening, Reboul was amused, and less skeptical than Elena had been. “It’s true, of course, that we French love official-looking pieces of paper. But, my dear Sam, what do you expect to achieve with all this?”

  “I’m not sure exactly. But as you know, professional crime has been a hobby of mine for years, and I find those robberies fascinating. Three of them, all perfect. Were they all done by the same guy? How did he do it? What did he do with the jewels?”

  “And you don’t think the police have asked themselves the same questions?”

  “I’m sure they have. But they don’t seem to have come up with any answers. Of course, it may be that these robberies weren’t big enough to be interesting.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, don’t forget what else has been going on. In 2009—twenty million dollars’ worth of jewels stolen from Cartier in Cannes. In 2010—seven million stolen from a jewelry dealer near Marseille. In 2013—one hundred and thirty-six million stolen from a diamond exhibition in Cannes. I guess the police have been concentrating on the big numbers, and not those little jobs that were done for a measly two or three million.”

  Reboul shrugged. “Who knows? Anyway, once you have the letter from Knox, I’ll ask Hervé to see what he can do. Tell me again, where did your measly little robberies take place?”

  “According to what Hervé told us when he was here the other night, there was one in Monaco, two or three years ago; another one, eighteen months later, in Antibes; and now this one in Nice. So I’d imagine that they wouldn’t all come under the same police jurisdiction.”

  “That would be too easy.” Reboul smiled. “I can see this might get complicated. Are you sure you wouldn’t like to spend your time on something simple instead? Boules? Fishing? Deep-sea diving?”

  Chapter 11

  Fitzgerald was, as billionaires go, a simple and unpretentious man. But he had to admit that he relished the little ceremony of welcome performed on his arrival each summer by the staff of his house on Cap Ferrat. There were five of them: Monique, the cook; Odette, the housemaid; Jean-Pierre, the chauffeur; Émile, the head gardener; and Guillaume, his young assistant. Having been warned well in advance of the precise time of the Fitzgeralds’ arrival, these five would be waiting in line outside the house to duck their heads in greeting, wish monsieur and madame bonnes vacances, and deal with the small mountain of luggage that had accompanied them.

  A little later, Émile would escort Fitz and Kathy around the garden and point out the freshly shaved lawns, the freshly barbered palm trees, the year’s new plantings, and the spectacular flower beds scattered throughout the grounds. Roberta would be busy in the pool house checking the exercise equipment, Monique would be hard at work in the kitchen stuffing courgette flowers for dinner that evening, and Odette would be unpacking the Fitzgeralds’ clothes and hanging them in lavender-scented closets. This perfectly organized activity was a source of great pleasure to both Kathy and Fitz. It made them feel at home.

  The garden tour over, they were sitting on the main terrace, going over their plans for the next few days.

  “When are they all arriving?” asked Fitz. This year, there were three couples—their oldest and best friends from New York—who would be their houseguests for the summer.

  Kathy consulted her iPad. “The Hoffmans and the Dillons are traveling together, and they’ll be here next week; the Greenbergs are stopping off in London on the way, and they won’t be arriving until that weekend. So we have a few days to ourselves.”

  “Great. I can do that meeting in Monaco before the fun starts.” He saw that Kathy looked puzzled. “The guys from the bank need to go over some stuff that they didn’t want to put in an e-mail. I guess I forgot to tell you because I know it’s not your kind of thing; a few hours of numbers and not many jokes.”

  Kathy tried not to shudder at the thought. While she approved wholeheartedly of Fitz being rich, it was the end result she liked. The process of getting there, with its endless meetings and orgies of calculation, she found extremely boring. She leaned over and patted his cheek. “You’re a sweetheart. Tell me when you’re going, and I’ll do my lunch with Coco.”

  —

  The cards were printed on thick, buff-colored stock:

  KNOX INSURANCE

  Sam Levitt

  European Claims Inspector

  Sam ran his thumb over one of them, feeling the subtle engraving. The printer in Marseille that Reboul had recommended had done a first-class job, luxurious but tasteful, and perfect for a senior insurance executive. Once the letter from Frank Knox arrived, Sam could start work.

  He knew that his main problem was going to be language. Although his French was improving daily, it wasn’t good enough to deal with the various police officers whom he hoped to talk to, or to fully understand crime scene reports. These, as he knew from past experience in Los Angeles, were likely to be filled with official phraseology that was often difficult to understand even in English. It wasn’t long before he realized that what he needed was an interpreter. Someone bilingual, obviously, and also smart, and preferably sympathetic to the investigation.

  It had to be Philippe.

  He picked up on the first ring. “Philippe, it’s me. Sam.”

  “My friend, you don’t have to tell me. We’re living in the twenty-first century. Your name’s on the screen. What can I do for you?”

  “You can let me buy you lunch. I have an idea.”

  They agreed to meet at Chez Marcel the next day, which gave Sam a little time to work on his sales pitch. Philippe was a busy man, cruising up and down the coast to cover the doings of the beautiful people, and it would take something special to distract him.

  Sam had asked Elena if she wanted to join them for lunch, but she told him she was far too busy. She was meeting Coco at the house to go over the choice of colors for floors, walls, and shutters. In any case, she said, it would do Sam and Philippe good to have a boys’ lunch. They could leer at the girls and swap risqué jokes.

  Sam had by now become a regular at Chez Marcel, and he was treated to a regular’s welcome. There was a double kiss from Julie, the chef’s wife, and personal greetings from Serge, the chef himself, who had emerged from the kitchen, wiping his hands on his apron and full of enthusiasm for the dish of the day. Julie’s Italian cousin from the Piedmont was visiting, and in his honor Serge had prepared vitello tonnato, which, he said, was so good it could make a grown man weep with pleasure.

  Sam still had his nose in the wine list when Philippe appeared, cell phone planted in his ear and sunglasses perched on top of his head. Today he had abandoned his jeans and white jacket in favor of black silk sweatpants and a Salut! T-shirt.

  “What do you think?” he asked Sam as he finished his call and pointed to the scarlet logo on his chest. “We’re going to give sets of these T-shirts to the club bartenders along the coast, one white, one black, one blue. Pretty cool, eh?”

  Julie came over to their table with menus, but Sam had already decided for
both of them. “How could we resist? We’ll have the plat du jour, and maybe something to drink. What would you suggest for the wine?”

  “Arneis, if you want to drink Italian. It’s perfect with the vitello.”

  “Arneis it is.”

  Philippe looked up from his cell phone, eyebrows raised. “OK, my friend. What’s this idea?”

  “I’m hoping I’ve got an exclusive story for you, but you’re going to have to work for it. First, let me give you a little background. I guess you’ve read about all these jewel robberies along the coast? And I imagine that jewelry is something that interests your readers?”

  “Of course. The bigger the better.”

  “Well, there are three robberies that you won’t have read about. Three perfect crimes, all unsolved. One in Antibes, one in Monaco, one in Nice. In other words, all in your patch.”

  The wine came, and was duly tasted and admired.

  Sam could tell that he now had the attention of his audience, because Philippe had finally put away his cell phone. “What I’ve decided to do is to take a close look at these robberies. They were obviously done by professionals; maybe the same professionals did all three. Anyway, I’m intrigued. I’d like to talk to the police, check out their reports, and see if I can find anything.”

  Philippe was shaking his head. “What makes you think the police will talk to you?”

  Sam took out one of his new business cards and slid it across the table. “I am the officially accredited representative of a major U.S. insurance company, with clients in France.”

  Philippe studied it and shrugged. “That’s a start, I guess.”

  “But it’s not enough. My French is still worse than shaky, and so I’ll need an interpreter.” He raised his glass to Philippe. “And who better than you?”

  Philippe sat back, his head cocked to one side, his brow furrowed, hardly the picture of enthusiasm.

  “Here’s the interesting part,” said Sam. “What’s in it for you. For a start, you get to make friends with three sets of cops along the coast. I don’t have to tell you how useful they could be as sources of inside information when your celebrities get caught doing something dumb—dope, booze, car crashes, fistfights in nightclubs, that kind of thing. The stuff your readers love.”

  Sam paused to let the thought sink in.

  “Even if that’s all you get, it would be worth your time. But let’s say we get lucky, and we come up with something that helps to solve the robberies.” He raised his glass again. “You will have the exclusive to a story that will make waves all the way from here to Monaco.”

  Over the vitello tonnato, which prompted Philippe to make a quick trip to the kitchen, where he kissed his fingers several times to the chef, Sam filled in more details. Over the pain perdu, with sliced strawberries and a healthy hint of Grand Marnier, he mentioned the possibility of help from Hervé. By the time they had finished coffee, Sam had a partner.

  When he got back to Le Pharo, he found Elena and Reboul sitting on the terrace, a selection of color charts and fabric swatches on the table in front of them. Reboul had a slightly bemused expression, and was visibly relieved to be able to take a break from the subtleties of interior decoration.

  “Ah, Sam. How was your lunch?”

  “Very good. Philippe’s agreed to work with me.” He bent down to kiss the top of Elena’s head. “Isn’t that great?”

  Elena looked up at him, her mind clearly elsewhere. “Don’t you think a very pale beige would be just right for the bedroom?”

  Chapter 12

  After his lunch with Sam at Chez Marcel, Philippe found himself with conflicting thoughts. He felt that there was next to no chance of Sam succeeding where three police forces had failed. Yet over the years he had seen his friend plunge into several unpromising situations—a couple of times in Marseille, and once in Corsica. Each time, he had come out on top. Why not this time? And, Philippe had to admit, it would make a hell of a story. A Salut! exclusive, syndicated worldwide, wherever diamonds were worn and stolen. It certainly wouldn’t hurt his career.

  There was, of course, the problem of his regular job as chronicler of the fabulous activities of les people. The season had begun, and before long the usual mixture of wretched excess—drunkenness, cocaine overdoses, fornication in the men’s room—would start to yield promising material. He couldn’t afford to miss that, as he had pointed out at lunch. Sam had been most understanding, although a little flippant. Who am I, he had said, to interfere with the sacred bond between journalist and reader? So they had agreed that Salut! came first, and Philippe’s duties as interpreter and collaborator would have to fit in.

  As a first step Philippe decided to pick the brains of Louis, a trusted contact from his previous job as a newspaper reporter for La Provence. Louis was one of those old-fashioned policemen who believed in old-fashioned methods. He preferred face-to-face conversations to e-mails and phone calls, and claimed that there was nothing more effective, when gathering information, than pounding the streets, collecting gossip picked up from bartenders and ladies of the night, and generally, as he put it, “sniffing the air.” It was a technique that had served him well during his twenty-seven years on the force.

  He and Philippe had agreed to meet at the Bar Saint-Charles, near the train station. It was dark and discreet, and the bartender’s generous hand when pouring pastis had made it a popular spot for Marseille’s thirsty policemen. When Philippe arrived, Louis was already leaning against the bar, studying a copy of L’Équipe to see if the Tour de France was likely to be won, yet again, by an impertinent foreigner.

  “Loulou! Sorry I’m late. How are things? Ça va?”

  The big policeman straightened up, smiled and nodded. “Oui, oui, ça va. Good to see you. Now, is this business or pleasure?”

  “Business,” said Philippe. “So I’m buying. What’s it to be?”

  Loulou allowed himself to be persuaded to have a pastis, and the two men settled at a table in the corner.

  Philippe went through it all—the three perfect robberies, the lack of clues, the baffled policemen, and his friend Sam, the insurance executive from the States—while Loulou listened intently.

  “So that’s where we are at the moment,” said Philippe. “We’re going to get the crime scene reports, but I don’t think they’re going to tell us much. So I’m wondering if you know one of the guys in Antibes or Monaco or Nice who could help. We’d love to talk to someone involved with the investigations.”

  Loulou grunted. “That’s like asking if I know any of the guys on Mars. We usually stick to our own turf. God knows there’s enough trouble here without getting involved in other people’s problems.” He rubbed his chin, looked at his empty glass, and sighed. “Evaporation. The older I get, the more quickly it happens.”

  A second pastis was ordered, which seemed to stimulate Loulou’s memory. “Come to think of it,” he said, “I did have some dealings with some guys in Nice a couple of years ago. I’ll make a few calls.”

  —

  Sam reread the letter that had just arrived, written on official Knox Insurance paper and signed by Frank A. Knox, identified as the president. It was a small masterpiece of bureaucratic pomposity, instructing Sam to use his best efforts to establish the precise details of the robberies that were causing “such concern in American insurance circles.” Perfect. He made a mental note to have a case of Champagne delivered to Knox. Now that he had his fake credentials, he could start work.

  He showed the letter to Reboul, who shared Sam’s fascination with the robberies. “This letter is fine,” he said, “but it would help if we had something official from the French side. How would you like a letter from a senior officer of the Marseille police requesting that his colleagues provide you with all possible information and assistance?”

  “Hervé? Would he do that for me?”

  Reboul grinned. “He’ll do it for me. And you could show your gratitude in a way that he’d find most acceptable. Those cigars th
at you brought back from Jamaica and we put in the humidor in the wine cellar?”

  “The Belicosos Finos?”

  “Hervé loves a good cigar. A box would make him extremely happy. And cooperative.” Reboul shrugged. “We all have our little faiblesses.”

  As it happened, Hervé didn’t need much persuasion when he came by that evening. He had already met Sam and liked him, and he found Sam’s interest in the robberies amusing, even if his ambitions of solving them were wildly optimistic. But then, he was American, and it was well known—and perhaps envied by the pessimistic French—that all Americans were optimists.

  The rosé was served. Sam produced and opened a box of cigars, and passed it to Hervé, who chose a cigar, inspected the band, squeezed the cigar gently, and sniffed it. Then he held it up against one ear and rolled it between his fingers. “Listening to the band,” he said. “One can always hear if a cigar is too dry. This is excellent.” He trimmed off the end and lit the cigar, inspecting the tip to make sure that it was an even, glowing red. The ritual concluded to his satisfaction, he leaned back, wreathed in smiles and fragrant smoke.

  Sam went through his story, with Hervé nodding but saying nothing, which gave Sam the feeling that he was somehow being interrogated. He finished by showing Hervé the letter from Knox. “Francis suggested that I could use another letter, perhaps from an eminent senior member of the Marseille police, requesting cooperation.”

  Hervé nodded again. “I see. And you feel that would make a difference?”

  “Absolutely. It would establish me as someone to be taken seriously here in France.”

  Hervé took a long, thoughtful pull of his cigar. “Well, I’d be happy to do that, as long as you keep me informed of any progress that you make. To be frank, I don’t think you’ll get anywhere.” He shrugged. “But if you should turn up anything, I want to be the first to know, d’accord?”