by Peter Mayle
“Well, are we going to stand here all day?” The General slapped Jojo on the back. “Come on. I’ll buy you a drink.”
“Two seconds,” said Jojo. “Let me show you something first.” He took the General’s arm and led him over to the stone wall. “Look over there.” He nodded down at the water flowing below. “On the other side.”
On the opposite bank, the top of a stone arch cleared the surface of the water by three feet. The stone was dry and clean; obviously, the water hadn’t risen that high for years.
The General glanced at the arch, then threw the last morsels of croissant into the water and watched two ducks arguing over them. “So?” he said. “A hundred years ago, some con put the door in the wrong place.”
“You think so?” Jojo winked, and tapped the side of his nose. “Maybe not. That’s why I called you. Allez. Let’s go and have that drink.”
As they walked into the centre of town, they caught up with each other’s lives since their release from Les Baumettes, the jail in Marseille. They had been close then, they and a handful of others, all local petty criminals who had run out of luck at the same time. Jojo’s wife had left him while he’d been inside, gone up north somewhere with a Pernod salesman. Now he was living in a couple of rooms in Cavaillon, working like a donkey for a mason who specialised in restoring old houses. It was a young man’s work and he wasn’t young anymore, but what could he do except buy his Loto tickets every week and hope to God that his back didn’t give out?
The General was sympathetic, the sympathy that comes from relief that there are others worse off than you are. The General had been lucky. Not only had he kept his wife, but he’d lost his mother-in-law, and the money she’d left had been enough to buy a small pizza restaurant in Cheval-Blanc. Nothing fancy, but it was steady, and one ate and drank on the business. The General had laughed when he’d said that, and patted his stomach. Life could be worse. His wife kept a tight hand on the till, but otherwise he couldn’t complain.
They found a table under the shade of the plane trees outside the Café de France, opposite the old church.
“What are you drinking?” The General took off his sunglasses and waved them at a waiter.
“Pastis. Anything but Pernod.”
Jojo looked around, and edged his chair closer to the General’s. “I’ll tell you why I called.” He talked quietly, his eyes watching the crowd as he spoke, dropping his voice when anyone passed close to their table.
“My patron has an old friend who used to be a flic until he got into trouble and they kicked him out. Now he’s set himself up in the security business, selling alarm systems to all those people who buy second homes down here. They’re not short of a few sous, and they get nervous when they hear about empty houses being broken into every winter. Each house we work on, the patron always tells the owner there are more burglars than bakers in the Vaucluse, and then he recommends his copain. If the owner installs an alarm system, the patron gets an envelope.” Jojo rubbed his thumb and index finger together.
The waiter came with the drinks, and Jojo watched him go back inside the café before he spoke again.
“The other day, this guy—Jean-Louis, he’s called—comes to the chantier and he’s laughing like he’s heard the best joke of his life. I was working on the roof and they were talking right underneath me. I heard everything.”
“It wasn’t the one about the Parisian and the transvestite and the postman?”
Jojo lit a cigarette and blew smoke at a dog who was looking for sugar lumps under the table. “It was funny, but it wasn’t a joke. Listen to this: they’ve just put in a new security system at the Caisse d’Epargne—electronic eyes, pressure pads on the floor, metal detectors at the door, the works. One of the big companies from Lyon put it in. Millions, it cost.”
The General was puzzled. It was always a pleasure to hear about a bank having to spend millions of francs, but he’d heard things at funerals that had made him laugh more. “What was so funny? Did the bank’s cheque bounce?”
Jojo grinned and wagged his finger. “Better than that. What happened was they moved the strong room—all of the coffres-forts—right to the back of the bank for extra security. Five-centimetre steel bars on the door, triple locks …” Jojo paused for effect. “But no electronic eyes. Not one.”
“Ah bon?”
“No. And why? Because clients going through their strongboxes don’t want to be on TV in the manager’s office while they’re counting their cash.”
The General shrugged. “C’est normal, non?”
“But the best of it—” Jojo sipped his pastis and looked round the other tables before leaning forward—“the best of it is that the new strong room is exactly over the old river drain. But exactly.”
“The old river drain?”
“That arch we just looked at. That’s where it comes out. Twenty, twenty-five metres up that, and you’re under the floor of the strong room. A little plastique, and boum! You’re through.”
“Formidable. And then you can dance on the pressure pads until the flics arrive.”
Jojo shook his head, and grinned again. He was enjoying this. “No, that’s the other funny thing. There aren’t any pressure pads. The floor isn’t wired. They reckoned the door was enough. Jean-Louis couldn’t believe it.”
The General pulled unconsciously at his moustache, a habit his wife said made him look lopsided. Isle-sur-Sorgue, he knew, was a rich little town, full of antique dealers who did most of their business in cash. A few hours looking through their strongboxes wouldn’t be wasted. He felt the first stirrings of interest. More than interest, he had to admit: it was the old tickle of excitement he always used to feel when he was planning a job. That was his skill, planning. That was why the others called him the General, because he could use his head.
Jojo looked at him like a cuckoo waiting for a worm, his eyes bright and dark in his lean brown face. “Alors? What do you think?”
“How do we know it’s true? The whole thing stinks.” He looked round for a waiter. “But we might as well have another drink.”
Jojo smiled. He was like that, the General—a real pessimist, always looking for problems. But he hadn’t said no.
As the crowds thinned and started to make their way home for lunch, the two men talked on and the square became quiet except for the striking of the church clock.
Chez Mathilde, the pizzeria-grill on the road leading into Cheval-Blanc, was closed on Sundays. The General’s wife liked to spend the day with her sister in Orange, and the General was happy to be left to play boules. This Sunday, however, his boules stayed in their case in the garage. The General was expecting visitors.
He had done his homework and made his plans and passed the word around. The old bunch from Baumettes—or most of them, the ones who had managed to stay out of jail—were coming to listen to a proposition.
The General took the chairs off the big round table where they’d been left after cleaning up on Saturday night, and bought out pastis and wine and glasses, a bowl of olives, and a couple of the large pizzas. They were cold but still good. Anyway, nobody was coming for the food. He counted the chairs. Eight. He’d hoped they would be ten, but Raoul and Jacques had been careless one night and the police had caught them, during a routine check for drunk drivers, with guns and a vanload of stolen carpets. They wouldn’t be going anywhere for a few years. The thought of it made the General shake his head. He’d always told them to avoid guns. Guns doubled the sentence.
He heard the sputter of a Mobylette and went to the back door. Jojo, in a clean T-shirt and a Sunday shave, came across the dusty parking area, nodding his head and grinning.
“Salut!” They shook hands. Jojo peered over the General’s shoulder. “Mathilde?”
“It’s okay,” said the General. “She’s in Orange until this evening.”
“Bon. A big day, eh? What do you think? Is it going to work?”
The General clapped Jojo on the back and felt the solid p
ad of muscle developed by ten-hour days shifting stones and sacks of cement. “If they’re all as fit as you, it can work.”
Jojo knew the General well enough not to ask any more questions. The General liked his moment of drama, and a full audience. They went through the narrow passage stacked with beer kegs and into the restaurant. Jojo looked around at the rough-cast plaster walls and the wrought-iron wall lamps in the shape of gondolas, the posters of Venice and Pisa, the small tiled bar with the parchment scroll hanging behind it—“The House Does Not Extend Credit”—and the framed photograph of Mathilde and the General posing stiffly with a man in a tie.
“Nice place, very sympa.” Jojo pointed at the photograph. “Who’s he?”
“That’s the mayor. He loves pizza. His father came from Italy.” There was the sound of cars outside, and the General squeezed his bulk past Jojo. “Help yourself to a drink.”
A Renault van and a dirty white Peugeot had parked in the shade, and the passengers were standing in a noisy group as one of them relieved himself against a tree. The General counted them. All here.
“Salut les copains!” He walked out to meet them, men he hadn’t seen for years. As he shook their hands, he looked them over. They all seemed to be in good health, and he led them into the restaurant with a sense of anticipation. This was just like the old days. It was all very well, the respectable life; but after a while a man needed a little excitement.
“Allez! Sit down, sit down.” They pulled up chairs, Jojo as second-in-command being careful to stay next to the General. Bottles were passed, glasses filled, cigarettes lighted. The General looked round the table, smiling and tugging on his moustache. “Well, it’s been a long time. Tell me how you’ve all become milliardaires.” Nobody was anxious to be first. “Alors? Do you think there’s a cop hiding behind the bar? Tell me.”
It was not a series of success stories. Fernand the plastiqueur, two fingers missing and a cheek puckered with scar tissue from a mistimed explosion, worked in a garage. Bachir, with his narrow Arab face and his fondness for flick knives, had found less dangerous work as a waiter in an Avignon café. Claude, as big as ever, was using his broad back and massive arms as a maçon, working with Jojo. The Borel brothers, two short, square men with weathered skin, had given up stealing cars to work for a landscape gardener near Carpentras. Of them all, the only one still practising his trade was Jean, the silent one with the deft hands, who made a borderline living picking pockets at railway stations and country markets.
The General listened closely to each of them. It was as he had hoped. They could all use a windfall.
The glasses were refilled and he started to talk. At first, he said, when Jojo had come to him with the idea, he hadn’t taken it too seriously. But for old times’ sake, and out of curiosity, he had made a few calls, done some research—all very casual, all very discreet—and, little by little, he had started to believe that it could be done. It would take time, many months, but it could be done.
The faces round the table reflected cautious interest. Claude looked up from rolling a cigarette and asked the question they all wanted to ask: “So? What is it?”
“A bank, my friend. A nice rich little bank.”
“Merde.” Bachir shook his head. “You’re the one who always told us to stay away from guns.”
“No guns,” said the General. “You won’t even need that nail file of yours.”
“Ah bon? We just go in and tell them we’re broke, is that it?”
“They won’t be there. We’ll have the bank to ourselves for six, maybe eight hours.”
The General leaned back, smiling. This was the part he always liked, when they were hooked and waiting. He took a drink and wiped his moustache carefully with the back of his hand. “Now,” he said, “imagine that it is Saturday night in Isle-sur-Sorgue, the weekend of the Foire des Antiquaires.” He wagged a finger at the attentive faces. “It happens next year to fall on the fourteenth of July—the town en fête, hundreds of antique dealers, their cash tucked up for the night in the Caisse d’Epargne.” He paused for an instant. “A shitload of fric, my friends. All for us.”
There was the carrot, out on the table. The men were quiet as the General told them how they could take it.
Some time before midnight on the Saturday, while the town was celebrating, they would slip into the river and up the drain tunnel. The July weather would be perfect for a quick paddle. Fernand would use his plastique to blow through the floor of the strong room. Among the fireworks of the fête, nobody would think twice about another muffled thump. Blowing the strongboxes was nothing, a few pops. And then they would have an entertaining night among the contents.
Fernand rubbed the scar on his cheek, the scar that still itched after all these years. “What about the alarm system? Normalement, it would be linked to the gendarmerie.”
The General was enjoying himself, letting out the details one by one. “Beh oui.” He shrugged. “It is. But they haven’t wired the strong room floor—only the two doors. One leads into the bank, and the other out to the back, into a little park.”
The men smoked and thought about money, and the General cut himself a slice of pizza. Next to him, Jojo fidgeted impatiently. Getting into the bank was the part he knew about; getting out and getting away, that was the big problem.
“Alors,” the General went on, “we have amused ourselves in the strong room, cleaned out all the boxes. It is now Sunday morning, and there is the market. The town is packed; the cars are stuck like nuts in nougat. But, as agreeable as it is in the strong room, we must leave.”
The General eased his stomach away from the table, belched, and picked a shred of anchovy from his teeth with a matchstick. “There are two little inconveniences.” He held up a stubby finger. “The first is that some time between noon and one o’clock every Sunday there is a security check. I’ve watched it four Sundays in a row. Two cops, just routine, but they always come as the market is finishing, count the flowerpots on the bank steps, and go home to lunch. Anyway, we need to be out well before noon. And évidemment, we can’t leave the way we came in. Even in July, it would look odd to see men coming out of the river waving bundles of five hundred–franc notes.” He paused for a drink. “No, the way out is through the back, into the park.”
Jojo’s glass stopped halfway to his mouth. “Through the door?”
“Of course through the door.” The General raised two fingers. “Voilà le deuxième problème. Because, as we know, the door is wired.”
“And the alarm will go off,” Bachir said. “And we’ll be back in the pissoir for ten years. No thanks.”
The General smiled. “You haven’t changed, mon vieux—still the happy optimist. But you’re forgetting something. We have time to get away. Not much—two or three minutes, maybe more if the traffic’s as bad as it usually is on market day.”
Claude’s moon face crumpled with the effort of thought. “But if the traffic’s that bad …”
“It will be bad,” said the General. “Bad for a car. But we won’t be using a car. Who wants some pizza? It’s good.”
Jean the pickpocket made his longest speech of the morning. “Merde to the pizza. How do we get away?”
“Simple. By vélo.” The General brought up his left hand and smacked it with his right. “In two minutes we’ll be through the traffic and out of town while the cops are still sitting on their klaxons.” He gave his moustache a satisfied tug. “It works.”
He held up his hands to stop the babel of questions and did some more explaining. Each of them would take into the strong room his tenue de vélo—the shoes and shorts and caps and brightly coloured, multipocketed jerseys that all serious cyclists wear. Their pockets would be bulging, but a cyclist’s pockets are often bulging. Who would suspect that the bulges were bank notes? Who would even bother to look? With thousands of cyclists out on the road every Sunday, they would be anonymous. They would disappear. It was the perfect disguise, one of the most common sights of summer.
And it was fast.
“Mais attention.” The General wagged a warning finger. “There is one detail: you must be en forme—fit enough to ride twenty or thirty kilometres at top speed without puking over the handlebars. But that’s nothing, just training.” He waved a hand airily. “We have months for that. One hundred kilometres every Sunday and you’ll be ready for the Tour de France.”
The pastis was finished, and the General went behind the bar for another bottle while the men round the table looked at each other, then started to talk. He’d let them chew it over, commit themselves before he suggested the split he’d worked out.
“General?” One of the Borel brothers was grinning. “When was the last time you did one hundred kilometres?”
“The other day. The way I always do—in a car. God made some arses for saddles, but not mine. Let me ask you a question.” The General unscrewed the cap and pushed the bottle across the table. “When was the last time you had some money in your pocket? Some real money?”
“A shitload of fric,” said Jojo.
Borel said nothing.
The General reached over and patted his cheek. “Drink up,” he said. “One day it’ll be champagne.”
4
Simon left the hotel early to do battle with the Parisian rush-hour traffic, the kamikaze pilots in their Renault 5s, wired on caffeine and determined to assert French superiority over anyone foolish enough to be driving a car with foreign plates. He had chosen the most relaxed of his three cars for the trip, the Congo-black Porsche convertible with a top speed of 160. It was, as he knew, a ridiculous machine to have in London, where it rarely got out of second gear—an advertising man’s toy. But out on the autoroute he could let it go, and with luck and a heavy foot on the accelerator he should be down in the south in six hours.
The cars gave way to trucks as he cleared Paris and left the jam of the périphérique behind him, and he nudged the speed up to 120. The phone, which in London would be almost continuously beeping to announce news of a client crisis or a changed meeting, was silent. He pressed the call button to see if he could reach Liz. No Service. There was nothing to do except drive and think.
