She can’t keep from smiling slightly.
“You turning me down? Isn’t it enough?”
“It’s too much and not enough. I’m not very good at figures. The job you pulled off last night brought you some eight hundred thousand francs’ worth of jewels. The one last month, on the Rue de la Paix, two million. The one on the Boulevard Poissonnière—”
“I’m asking you one last time: YES OR NO?”
Then, falling all over himself with gallantry, he whispers, “I’m just enjoying your company too much.”
“You’ll be sorry.”
She pretends no longer to pay any attention to him. She crosses the bridge, hails a taxi. He climbs in right behind her, without waiting for an invitation. The cab stops in front of a fancy boutique on the Rue St.-Honoré.
“I don’t imagine you expect to—”
“Oh, I love women’s clothing,” he assures her.
He follows her from department to department. When she reaches the cashier’s desk, the salesgirl asks:
“Where should we send the purchases?”
And she gets a sudden bright idea and blurts out, “Just give them to my husband’s valet here.”
Shoes. Silk stockings. From time to time, she looks sarcastically over toward him, but he is not the least bit fazed and hangs on to the packages, except when he has to wipe off the lenses of his spectacles.
“Haven’t you had enough yet?” she demands.
“Oh, it doesn’t bother me. It’s just that the taxi won’t be able to hold it all.”
Five P.M. Six P.M. The taxi driver, when they have him wait at a particularly crowded intersection, looks daggers at them and follows them to the door of the store.
“What hotel? Well, let’s see. Hôtel du Louvre.”
And, at the hotel, she asks for a room. Emile keeps behind her.
“Twin beds?”
“No. A single. Just for me,” she replies.
“And for you, monsieur?”
“Nothing for me,” Emile mumbles.
She is exasperated. Up in the room, the packages piled up on the bed, she is almost livid with fury.
“How long are you going to go on like this?”
“I think it would be best if we went down to the bar for a cocktail. They have an excellent American bar in this hotel,” Emile replies.
“Oh, now you’re an expert on bars, are you?”
“Just as much as on silk stockings, Mrs. Baxter.”
That is the name under which she registered at the hotel.
“And even more of an expert on jewel thieves. You are really making a mistake in not coming to join me for a Manhattan.”
She follows him, flabbergasted. It is hard to picture the self-effacing Monsieur Emile in an American bar, yet he seems completely at his ease there, even correcting the bartender on the proportions for the cocktail.
“As you can see, my little lady.”
“I forbid you to call me ‘my little lady.’ ”
“As you can see, my good friend.”
She opens her mouth as if to protest again, but she realizes she’ll never have the last word with him. Even if he were slapped in the face till he was red as a lobster, trampled on, cursed out ferociously, he would never lose any of his cool or his strange self-assurance, the latter all the stranger for being accompanied by such amazing apparent modesty.
“You are young,” he goes on.
“What about you?”
“Me? Oh, if you only knew! Anyway, you have selected the toughest trade to follow, the one that on the surface pays the biggest dividends, to be sure, when you consider the value of the jewels. But what risks you run!... And besides, how much can you get for stolen jewelry from even the most honest of fences, if there are any? It’s so tough a trade that only a few of the rare specialists ever make a go of it, and the police are on to all their ways of operating...”
“Do you mean that last night’s burglary—”
“Last night’s burglary and the twelve jobs before it here in Paris during the last few months... well, I would have sworn to you, until just a few days ago, that they had to be the work of Baldhead Teddy... Bartender! Let us have another round, please!”
“Why do you say you would have sworn they were, until just a few days ago?”
“Well, because I — no, excuse me, my boss, Monsieur Torrence, who is a most extraordinary man in his own way, was smart enough to contact the New York police and found out that Baldhead Teddy was still in jail. The answer just got to us yesterday. But there’s no doubt about it.”
“Do you have any proof that I’m not Baldhead Teddy, or an accomplice of his?” she sneers.
“Baldhead Teddy, little girl—”
“Before, you called me your little lady.”
“Yes, and I might even get to just calling you ‘little one’! Now, drink up. Baldhead Teddy, as I was saying, never worked with any accomplice, either male or female. The only jewel thieves that ever got away with it, the ones that might be considered of international stature, have always worked alone. But Baldhead Teddy carried that policy to an extreme of perfection.”
She laughs, icily.
“You sound like a schoolteacher.”
“A country schoolteacher, right?”
At times, she can no longer be sure. There is about him such a strange mixture of humility and pride, of authority and modesty. And his eyes...
“What do you think,” he asks, “is the most dangerous time for a jewel thief?”
“You seem to know more about it than I do.”
“It’s when he sells the jewels. All valuable jewels have an identity, a description by which they can be traced wherever they go. That is why Baldhead Teddy never went in for pinch-penny jobs. When he pulls a heist, it’s on a grand scale. For three months, or maybe six, he robs the jewelry stores of just one city, say, Paris, London, Buenos Aires, or Rome. He does a neat job, quickly completed, and always done in the same modus operandi. But just as long as he stays in the country he is in, he makes sure never to flog a single one of the stolen jewels.
“Baldhead Teddy, in his way, is a wholesaler. He has enough capital to be able to hold on for a while, as the common saying goes. When he’s accumulated enough loot, he disappears. No more trace of him around. The international police forces are all alerted to his possible resurfacing, but no dice.
“He makes his sale very far away, say, on another continent, and much, much later. Baldhead Teddy then has enough on hand to be able to live peacefully for several years. I would bet that somewhere in the world he is known under a different name, honored and respected, perhaps even the mayor of his town or village.
“And then, when he starts running out of money, he makes plans for a new campaign. He takes a six- or twelve-months’ leave of absence...”
Emile downs his drink and orders some more.
“So!” he concludes, “if the American police did not vouch to me — oh! I mean, didn’t vouch to my boss, former Inspector Torrence — that Baldhead Teddy is currently behind bars, well, I for one would swear that—”
At that moment, something unusual happens. The young woman puts her hand on his wrist, and questions him:
“Just who are you?”
“Don’t you think I should be the one who is asking you that? You know I’m just a legman at Agency O.”
“Well, if the legmen are all like you, I wonder what the boss would be like.”
“So do I.”
“But, then, if you are the boss, why do you try to pass yourself off as—”
“Look, at the point we’ve reached — and I’ve now drunk three Manhattans, not to mention two cognacs at the Four Sergeants and that beer in the café on the lie St.-Louis — at this point, I might as well confess that this is my own modus operandi. If, this morning, I had been the one who had interviewed you—”