by Mark Hebden
‘Much?’
‘Three shots. They hit the roof opposite.’
‘Not very good shots.’
‘They appear to be warnings to us to keep our distance. They obviously mean business. They’ve got hostages.’
Pel nodded. Hostages were the latest element in the everlasting game of cops and robbers. If your heist went wrong and you found yourself in trouble, you collared a hostage or two and used them to bargain for your freedom.
‘Ought we to get the CRS boys in?’ the Chief asked.
‘No,’ Pel said immediately. He didn’t like the special emergency groups. ‘We should handle it ourselves.’
‘They like to be called in for major events.’
‘This is a local event.’
The Chief nodded, lit a cigarette and offered the packet to Pel. Pel accepted, aware that, with Claudie Darel’s departure, Judge Polverari’s death and this new emergency, his stout assertion that he was giving them up had long since flown out of the window.
‘Anywhere we can talk?’ the Chief asked.
‘Café St Michel at the end of the street,’ Darcy said, appearing alongside.
‘Let’s go there.’
With the cold weather, the little bar was doing good business because a lot of people had turned up and wanted to see what was happening. Misset was among them, knocking back a café fine. He slunk out as he saw Pel. Despite his stealth, Pel didn’t fail to spot him.
Coffee and brandy appeared. Darcy tried to pay but the proprietor waved the offer aside.
‘Who do they claim to be?’ Pel asked. ‘Terrorists?’
‘Plain villains, I think,’ the Chief said. He looked as if he were about to explode. He was a big man who, although he was good at his job, tended to favour a bull-in-a-china-shop approach. ‘The concierge next door thinks they got in during the night so we feel that’s when the job started and it dragged on longer than expected. The first of the staff to arrive is Labarre, the undermanager. He opens up and he’s always early. We think they didn’t know that and intended to be away before anyone appeared. When he turned up there was only one thing they could do and that was take him hostage. After that, they had to take the others hostage too. They got them all except one of the secretaries, who arrived late.’
Pel frowned. ‘It doesn’t seem right somehow,’ he said. ‘You’d have thought with a job this big they’d have thought ahead a bit. How were they intending to get into the vaults?’
‘They must have smuggled in cutting equipment.’
‘How?’
Turgot appeared. His nose was red from the wind and he looked on edge, his mouth tight, his face drawn. ‘We’ve got every spare man we have here,’ he said. ‘Next door. On the roof. In the buildings opposite. Everybody’s armed and we have sharpshooters placed. Crack shots are due to arrive from Marseilles.’
‘They ought to know what to do,’ the Chief said.
‘The men on the roof have got into the building through the top storey windows,’ Turgot said. ‘Everything in the armoury’s here. Telescopic sights. Rifles. Sub-machine guns. Tear gas. Stun grenades. They can’t possibly get away.’
‘Have you made contact?’ Pel asked.
‘Yes. They’re demanding getaway cars, a safe passage to the airport, a plane and a ransom of a million for the manager, Gilbaud. They say they’ll take him with them to ensure their getaway. If the ransom doesn’t appear he’ll be dumped – dead.’
‘We picked up an abandoned car,’ Pomereu of Traffic put in. ‘It might have been intended as the getaway car. It was standing in the Rue Doctor-Chaveau. It was unlocked and pointing towards the Rue de la Liberté. It would be a good place for it. Fingerprints are going over it now.’
‘How did they get in?’
‘They must have acquired a key.’
‘Which makes it an inside job. What else?’
‘There are seven customers in there. They arrived before the manager and they had to hold them, too.’
‘That makes twenty three. How many villains?’
‘We’ve learned now there are six.’
‘A lot to crowd with the loot into a single getaway car. Could the car be a feint?’
The Chief looked quickly at Pel. Trust Pel to think of the unexpected. ‘A feint?’ he said.
‘Perhaps they’re not going to use it at all.’
Darcy produced his xeroxed copy of the diagram found in Meluc’s wallet. By this time it was beginning to look a little dog-eared from all the handling it had had.
He laid it on the table in front of the Chief. The Chief glared at it. ‘It doesn’t seem to mean anything,’ he growled.
‘It must mean something,’ Pel said. ‘Today’s date’s on it. It must be part of this affair at the Crédit Rural.’
‘Well, what?’
‘Wiring? No alarms have gone off.’
‘It doesn’t look like a diagram of any wiring I can imagine,’ Darcy said.
They argued round the diagram for a few minutes but none of them could suggest anything useful.
Eventually, it was Pel who brought them back to the facts.
‘Anybody hurt so far?’ he asked.
‘One of the staff tried to break away,’ Turgot said. ‘He was hit with an iron bar. He’s an old man, due for retirement – a brave old boy by the sound of him. He’s now unconscious. There’s a doctor in there, though. He was one of the customers who were trapped.’
‘How did we learn all this? From the telephone?’
‘It’s still open.’
‘How much money is involved?’
‘The girl who was late is the manager’s secretary. Name of Didon. Annette Didon. She’d been attending to her mother who’d had a fall and she had to get a doctor. She says around sixty to seventy million francs.’
‘They won’t give that up without a struggle. So it makes them dangerous.’
‘We’re facing ruthless men,’ Turgot agreed. ‘We’re keeping the Didon girl here. She’s in an office round the corner. She’s a hard-headed type and not the sort to be hysterical. She’s given us the names of all the bank staff and she’s telling all she knows about the premises. We’ve got an architect with her, drawing a rough plan for us to work from. They can’t get away.’
‘They’re obviously going to try,’ the Chief remarked. ‘If they’re demanding a safe passage to the airport.’
‘Has anything been done about that?’ Pel asked.
‘We’ve told them we’ll try to arrange it,’ the Chief said.
‘Will we?’
‘No.’
‘Then hadn’t we better make it seem that we will? If the telephone’s open hadn’t we better get the airport to ring the bank and tell them there’s an executive jet available with a flight plan already filed? Something like that. If they think they’re going to get away with it, they may drop their guard a bit.’
The Chief looked at Turgot. ‘Fix it,’ he said.
‘And,’ Pel added, ‘a car parked handily in the square where they can see it. Then we can tell them everything’s arranged for them.’
The Chief nodded. ‘Have it done,’ he told Turgot. He frowned. ‘Well, that’s the situation. We’ve set up a telephone exchange in the basement of the office next door. We’ve cleared both sides and nobody else’s in the building at all except the concierge who might be needed. We’ve also got men in the apartments opposite and one or two in cars and vans about the square. We’ve got the whole of the front covered.’
‘Sides?’
‘Covered. If they try to dig their way through the walls, we’ll be waiting.’
‘Back?’
‘Opens on to a yard with a gate that leads to an alley,’ Turgot said. ‘It pushes through to the Place St Bénigne. We have men there. They won’t get out that way. We’ve also clamped microphones to the adjoining walls and we have men listening out. The reception’s poor because the office where everybody’s being held has a corridor on either side. We can hear talking but only from time to time as
they go into the corridors. We can’t perform miracles. It’ll be better when the men above get their equipment in. They’re trying to lower cameras and microphones to listen to what they’re up to. They’ve threatened to shoot the manager in four hours’ time and after that someone every hour.’
The Chief looked ferocious. ‘There are innocent people in there,’ he snapped.
‘Can anything be done from underneath?’
‘The whole area underneath is the bank vault. Surrounded by reinforced concrete. To get at them through there would require a job as big as the Channel Tunnel.’
Darcy joined in. ‘They must be new boys,’ he said. ‘Or up from Marseilles. Everybody we have on our list is either in jail or about to be. We’ve been pretty successful just lately.’
‘We caught the name “Jacquot”,’ Turgot said. ‘Ring a bell?’
It didn’t.
‘It would have to include a local boy or two,’ Pel said. ‘They’d need to know their way about to get away cleanly.’
‘It looks like that,’ Darcy agreed. ‘This is a pretty complicated area of streets. With the main road blocked off they’ve got to go through the St Philibert district.’
Everybody knew the St Philibert area. It was one of the oldest parts of the city, a district of sagging roofs, swaybacked walls and unbelievably narrow streets.
Turgot looked worn out already. God knew what he’d look like before the affair was over. Pel’s eyes caught Darcy’s. Their place wasn’t here at the site of the siege. With every uniformed cop in the city concentrated round the Church of St Philibert, somebody ought to be at the Hôtel de Police to look after the shop. After all, Pel was supposed to be the Chief’s deputy and a siege wasn’t really his affair at the moment.
As they left the press arrived. Sarrazin, the freelance, as usual acted as spokesman. ‘What’s happened, Chief?’ he asked.
‘What’s it look like? It’s a bank hold-up.’
‘Guns?’ Henriot of Le Bien Public, the local rag, asked. ‘We’ve been told shots were fired.’
‘They were. But not at anybody. Just warnings. There are sixteen staff in there and seven customers. They’re being held hostages. They’re demanding a car to take them to the airport and a plane to get them out of the country.’
‘Will they get them?’
‘I can hardly discuss that with you.’
‘Okay, Chief. What else?’
‘How much do you want?’
‘Who’s running the show?’
‘The Chief.’
Sarrazin made a note on the back of a newspaper. ‘Will he talk to us?’
‘I think he’s more likely to clap you in jail just now. If I were you I’d keep out of his way. Stick to what you’ve got, which is about as much as we know. Confine yourselves to eyewitnesses and your powers of imagination. You’ve got plenty of that, as I’ve noticed from past fairy stories you’ve written.’
Sarrazin grinned and they went off satisfied, the cogs and wheels in their brains whirring as their ideas took hold.
‘We’ll check the staff and their friends,’ Pel said to Darcy as they prepared to head for their cars. ‘After that, all we can do is wait and see what happens. If they get away with it–’
‘They won’t,’ Turgot said dramatically. ‘Never.’
Pel thought it unwise to count your chickens before they were hatched. A lot could happen – and often did.
‘If they get away with it,’ he repeated, ‘that’s when I’ll be interested.’
Four
At just about the time the police were taking the first steps towards solving the identities of the bank robbers, a girl was sitting painting in one of the long galleries of the Musée des Arts Modernes in the Rue Lacoste near the University.
The Musée des Arts Modernes was not a big place and its director was Arthur Leygues. The building belonged to the city, as did many of the exhibits, but there were also many privately owned exhibits belonging to Leygues himself. He had inherited an enormous fortune from his father who had made it from chemicals, but he also had a degree from the Sorbonne in art and history and some skill of his own as a painter. He had started off by opening a small gallery in Paris, but he wasn’t very interested in the buying and selling of pictures, preferring simply to show them.
By offering his own collection and agreeing to act as curator, he had approached the City Fathers with the suggestion that they use the Château de Nohailles near the University as their new museum. The Château had once been in the country but the sprawl of a modern city and the expansion of the University had engulfed it so that, in the end, it had proved to be in a perfect position for a museum. The City Fathers had agreed to Leygues’ proposal and he had happily moved his personal collection into the Château. Grants and gifts had enabled him to enlarge the collection until it was now not only quite extensive but also well balanced and valuable. In one quiet corner where it was hardly noticed Leygues had placed a modest example of his own work. The suggestion that he should do so had come from the City Fathers, as much as anything to indicate to visitors that the director at least knew what he was talking about.
The 1900 Room was on the second floor of the building. The light was good, coming as it did from long windows that looked over the better, greener half of the city. At one side of the room two pictures rested on easels – one a Douanier Rousseau of a woodland scene with green, yellow and red trees in the background under a cloudy sky; the other a Gustave Paot, an artist of no great note until recent years but a Burgundian who had painted in and around the city. The prices for his works had been creeping steadily up and when one of them had unexpectedly fetched half a million francs in London his name was made. Douanier Rousseau’s paintings were already of great value.
The two paintings had been removed from their frames. They were quite small – both about sixty by forty centimetres. Alongside them were two other easels bearing what appeared to be identical paintings. The girl who worked on the copies was tall, beautiful and surprisingly elegant, even in her paint-stained smock. The uniformed gardien, who sat on a chair in the doorway, smiled at her with affection. She had been working on the copies for some time now and he had got to know her well. His job was to watch the gallery like a hawk. Other gardiens sat in the doorways of other rooms and galleries. Marc Distaing considered himself lucky. He liked the paintings in the 1900 Room – Rousseaus, Utrillos, a Chagall, a Bernier, two Bonnards and the vivid Paot. The Paot was similar in style to the Rousseaus but it was the colours that hit you in the eye – reds, yellows, blues, all the primary colours, with a whole host of others that literally dazzled. Distaing loved the Paot.
The girl’s name was Colette Esterhazy and she was taking a degree in History of Art at the University, keeping herself at the same time by doing occasional painting commissions. Distaing considered her good enough to need no degree and quite beautiful enough to be her own model. She had taken instruction from Arthur Leygues himself and, Distaing believed, had become his mistress. Distaing couldn’t imagine Leygues allowing pictures to be taken from their frames for any other reason.
The girl started to put her things together and clean her brushes.
‘Don’t you find it hard work painting two at once?’ Distaing asked.
‘No. And it saves time. They’re similar in style and colours and it’s easy to switch from one to the other. While one dries, I work on the other. Monsieur Leygues is very happy about it.’
‘What’ll you do with them when you’ve finished them?’
‘They’re to be part of my degree course. I think two paintings like these speak for themselves. They’ll carry far more weight than a long essay.’
Distaing nodded enthusiastically and was treated to a smile. He wished he were younger, had a lot of money and owned a picture gallery. Apart from the fact that Arthur Leygues was a lot older than he was, he even wouldn’t have minded being Arthur Leygues.
‘Time to lock up,’ he said. It was his duty to walk round th
e gallery checking everything and switching on the alarms before he went off duty but, as he’d been there all day watching the beautiful Colette Esterhazy, his inspection was a casual one.
‘When do you take them away?’ he asked.
‘Now,’ she said. ‘They’re finished. I’ve just been touching them up. They’ll be dry in no time.’
As she gathered her belongings together the telephone at the end of the gallery rang and Distaing answered a query about the Douanier Rousseau. It came from a man who said he was speaking for Editions Lafayette, a Paris publisher who was producing a coffee table edition of turn of the century paintings. He was wondering if he could get permission to reproduce.
Distaing knew Editions Lafayette well. ‘You’d have to ask Monsieur Leygues,’ he said. ‘It’s nothing to do with me.’
‘Of course. I realise that. I’m just checking that you’re displaying. I asked them to put me through to you. I want to know about the Rousseaus you have.’
‘We have two. Bois de Boulogne and Scene Near Enghien.’
‘Ah, that’s what I wanted to know. We’d misplaced the Scene Near Enghien. We’d placed it in Aix. It’s a wonderful painting, that, isn’t it?’
The caller sounded enthusiastic and kept Distaing chatting for a good five minutes. Distaing didn’t mind. He enjoyed talking about the paintings under his care and there was no one in the gallery. Only Colette Esterhazy.
As he put the telephone down, he saw her coming towards him. She carried the paintings – squares of canvas on wooden stretchers – one in each hand. Her equipment was in a huge sling bag on her back.
‘Good night,’ she said cheerfully.
‘Finished?’ Distaing was disappointed.
‘Only for the time being. I shall be back again in the autumn. Monsieur Leygues says I can come any time. I’ve only to ask and he’ll get whatever I want put on an easel.’
‘Will you sell them eventually?’
‘Why not? Pity they don’t pay the real prices for them. Good night, Monsieur Distaing.’
‘Good night, mademoiselle. I’ll look forward to seeing you again.’
The gallery was empty so he walked with her to the staircase and stood watching her as she tripped down. A car was waiting outside. As the door closed behind her, he heard the engine start and the car draw away at speed.