The Crimes of Paris: A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection (31 page)

Bonnot avoided the collision, but the car jumped the curb, ran onto the sidewalk, and stalled. Garnier had gotten out to turn the crank that would restart the engine when a traffic policeman walked up to chide the driver for his reckless speed. By the accounts of witnesses, Bonnot never looked up at the man, staring ahead stone-faced, waiting for the engine to roar into life. As soon as it did, he put the car in gear, and Garnier had to rush to get back inside. The policeman, naturally incensed at this blatant disregard for his authority, stepped onto the running board and grabbed the steering wheel. Garnier didn’t hesitate: he leaned across Bonnot and fired three shots into the policeman, who fell, dying, onto the pavement as Bonnot hit the gas and roared off.

Now the car was hotter than ever, but the bandits, reluctant to abandon it, somehow hid it long enough to use for another attempted heist two days later. At midnight, they entered the town of Pontoise, northwest of Paris, somehow having learned the location of the home of a wealthy lawyer. They broke in through a side door and found a safe. Their efforts to try to move it — they apparently hoped to make off with it in the car — woke the lawyer and his wife. The lawyer looked out of an upstairs window and, as luck would have it, saw a baker going by on his way to work. He asked the baker to check to see if the door was locked. As he approached, Callemin and Garnier ran out, fired their guns into the air, and headed for the car, where Bonnot sat waiting for them. The lawyer had his own pistol and returned fire as they drove out of sight. Disgusted, the three men who had terrified all of Paris abandoned their magnificent automobile after setting fire to it.

What had been for the bandits a comedy of errors was portrayed in the newspapers as the triumph of lawlessness over order. The anarchist gang, which was now thought to number in the dozens, had shot down a police officer in cold blood in the heart of Paris and driven off unmolested. Politicians were not immune to criticism, and the minister of the interior instructed Guichard’s boss, Louis Lépine, the prefect of police, that he wanted results
tout de suite.
Anyone who had ever been suspected of anarchist leanings found themselves in jeopardy. The important thing was that arrests had to be made.

Perhaps predictably, the crackdown only heightened Parisians’ fears that a large, organized gang was roaming the streets, liable to attack anyone at any time. One right-wing newspaper declared that there were two hundred thousand criminals in the city, a horde of lawless individuals against whom the police were powerless. Such comments were echoed at the funeral of the policeman who had been shot by Garnier, where the prefect of police warned that “the criminals of Paris are numbered in their thousands.”
¹⁵

Even though Lorulot had tried to distance himself from the crime wave by adding the equivocal slogan “Neither for illegalism, nor for honesty” to the masthead of his new magazine, the police kept his offices under close surveillance. They also arrested a couple of the employees on weapons charges, including a man named Eugène Dieudonné, destined to play an unfortunate role in the case.

Still trying to turn the bonds they had stolen into cash, the auto bandits got in touch with two counterfeiters Bonnot had known earlier. They in turn found a shady stockbroker who offered them 5 percent of the face value of the bonds. Bonnot reluctantly agreed and sent the counterfeiters to Amsterdam, where the gang had earlier hidden the bonds. Returning to Paris, they temporarily deposited the haul in a luggage locker at the Gare du Nord. An informer tipped off the police, and when the two men returned to the locker, they were arrested. One of them, Alphonse Rodriguez, agreed to tell all that he knew about the gang in exchange for clemency. Shrewdly determining who the police wanted him to implicate, he identified Eugène Dieudonné, one of those rounded up at Lorulot’s magazine office, as one of the men who had taken part in the rue Ordener burglary.

Elated, the police decided to check his statement by bringing in the bank messenger, Caby, now released from the hospital. They showed him Dieudonné, handcuffed and sitting alone in an interview room. Caby promptly declared that
this
was the man who had shot him — a statement that should have embarrassed the police, since this was now the third suspect that Caby had positively identified as his assailant. But of course it also meant that at last the police had one of the robbers in custody, so the next day’s papers duly trumpeted the Sûreté’s announcement that one of the gang members was under lock and key.

If the three actual robbers had really been nothing but unscrupulous killers, they would have been delighted by this latest development. They were not. Garnier and Bonnot had made a collection of newspaper clippings about their exploits and were annoyed that anyone else should receive credit for what they had done. Garnier sent the newspaper
Le Matin
an open letter addressed to the head of the Sûreté, Guichard. In a missive both solemn and ominously prescient, he declared:

Your inability for the noble offices you exercise is so obvious that a few days ago I had a mind to present myself at your offices in order to give you some fuller information and correct a few of your errors, whether intentional or not.

I declare Dieudonné to be innocent of the crime that you know full well I committed. I refute Rodriguez’ allegations; I alone am guilty.…

I know there will be an end to this struggle which has begun between me and the formidable arsenal at Society’s disposal. I know that I will be beaten; I am the weakest. But I sincerely hope to make you pay dearly for your victory.

Awaiting the pleasure of meeting you.

Garnier
¹⁶

Just to prove the letter was no hoax, Garnier enclosed a sheet onto which he had carefully placed his fingerprints, along with an inscription taunting Bertillon to put on his glasses and “watch out.” Bertillon duly checked the prints and reported that they were indeed Garnier’s.

As if that were not bold enough, Bonnot personally marched into the offices of a major newspaper,
Le Petit Parisien,
to complain about mistakes in one of the stories it had printed about the gang. At first no one recognized him — blond, without facial hair — until he sat down with a reporter named Charles Sauerwein and placed a 9-millimeter Browning automatic on the desk in front of him. Bonnot declared, “We’ll burn off our last round against the cops, and if they don’t care to come, we’ll certainly know how to find them.”
¹⁷
(The Demon Chauffeur intended to deliver on his promise. He had obtained four Winchester repeating rifles, accurate and deadly. By contrast, the French police were armed only with cavalry revolvers.)

Just as calmly, Bonnot strode out of the building without interference. Sauerwein claimed journalistic ethics prevented him from notifying the police, or perhaps he hoped he would get another such sensational scoop sometime. Sauerwein and
Le Petit Parisien
showed their gratitude by henceforth calling the criminals La Bande à Bonnot, which somehow stuck, probably to Garnier’s annoyance.

Other events must have convinced the gang that their dream of overturning the government was drawing nearer. Paris’s taxi drivers had been waging a strike for more than four months. The cab companies had brought in scab drivers from Corsica (who, unsurprisingly, were unable to comprehend the Paris street system), and the strikers began to bomb taxis. A striker leaving a union meeting was shot by one of the scabs, further raising tensions in a city already apprehensive about anarchist murderers who could apparently carry out their crimes with impunity.

Though the newspapers reported that the Bonnot Gang had scores of members, in reality it was quite small. For its next crime, however, it would be augmented by René Valet, Élie Monier, and a shy, tubercular eighteen-year-old named André Soudy, who had decided he was soon to die anyway because he could not afford treatment for his illness, so why not go out with a bang? Soudy defiantly flaunted his nickname, Pas de Chance (“Out of Luck”). Though publicity about the gang’s exploits had frightened Parisians, it also made it increasingly difficult to find unguarded automobiles waiting to be stolen outside the houses of wealthy citizens. The gang still wanted to accomplish their original goal of robbing a bank, so they developed yet another tactic: carjacking. Now six in all, they camped out all night in the Forest of Sénart, on the road between Paris and Lyons. By 7:00
A.M.
on March 25 they were awake and waiting for their prey, another luxury car: a blue and yellow De Dion-Bouton limousine, just purchased from a showroom on the Champs-Élysées. A De Dion employee was chauffeuring it to the Côte d’Azur, where its new owner, the comte de Rouge, was vacationing. The only passenger was the comte’s male secretary, who had come to Paris to make the eighteen-thousand-franc purchase. The De Dion company was known for the high quality of its engines; if Bonnot had somehow gotten wind of the delivery and chosen this car on purpose, it may have been because of his dissatisfaction with the way the previous Delaunay-Belleville had broken down.

The gang had earlier stopped two horse-drawn carts at gunpoint and forced their drivers to block the road. As the De Dion-Bouton approached, Garnier waved his arms, indicating to the driver that there had been some kind of accident. When the car stopped, Garnier, Bonnot, and Callemin walked toward it, each of them carrying automatic pistols. Shouting, “It’s only the car we want,” Garnier raised his weapon to indicate that the driver should surrender. The driver, prepared for such a situation, drew a pistol of his own, but before he could use it, Bonnot shot him. The secretary, unarmed, raised his hands in surrender, but Garnier fired at him anyway. The bandits rolled both men into the ditch along the road; the secretary, unknown to them, was only wounded and later was able to identify pictures of the men.

After turning the car around, the bandits were soon heading back toward Paris. Elated at the feeling of power driving always gave him, Bonnot began to sing “Le temps des cerises” (“Cherry Blossom Time”), and the others, recognizing the words, joined in. It had been an anthem of the Communards, a song of eerie poignancy, since it implied that good times were always as short-lived as the spring blossoming of cherry trees — followed by death.

Bonnot skirted the capital city and took the main road north. By ten o’clock that morning they reached Chantilly, a rather sleepy town famous for its lace making. The bandits were not there to purchase cloth; what interested them was that it was the location of another branch of the Société Générale bank. The car stopped in the town’s main square, and Garnier, Callemin, Valet, and Monier went inside the bank. Outside, Soudy stood on the sidewalk with one of the Winchester rifles and Bonnot sat chain-smoking in the driver’s seat.

The bank clerks looked up in surprise as the four armed men appeared. Callemin shouted, “Messieurs, not a word,” but one of the clerks dropped to the floor, and Garnier, nervous and trigger-happy, fired six shots into a cashier. Callemin shot a third employee; Valet followed his lead but proved a poor shot, merely hitting a fourth clerk once in the shoulder. Monier remained at the door. Garnier leaped over the counter and ran for the safe. This time, he had said, they would take only cash and leave the worthless bonds alone.

The bank manager, as it happened, had gone across the street for a coffee. Hearing shots, he started back, and Soudy fired several times at him, missing his target but certainly alerting everyone near the square that something was going on. People from shops and restaurants began to gather outside, keeping at a safe distance, all eyes on the idling automobile and the preternaturally calm man at the wheel.

Maurice Leblanc, creator of the fictional thief Arsène Lupin, wrote a dispatch for an American newspaper describing the scene:

But where is Bonnot? At the steering wheel. All the danger centers on him, isolated in the middle of the street, the center of a gathering crowd.… He does not move an inch. My informants have told me he was terrible to look upon. His whole body was contracted under the fearful strain of his muscles, rendered rigid by the anxiety of the moment. His face was distorted, almost disfigured.… His sense of hearing and of sight were concentrated to the last degree. And there he stood, huddled up behind the wheel, his foot on the clutch pedal, his right hand on the gear lever, every tendon straining, ready to spring — the tiger bandit!
¹⁸

The four robbers emerged from the bank with bags filled with money and piled into the car. Soudy, who must have felt even more tension than Bonnot on this, his first job, collapsed on the pavement, and his comrades had to lift him inside before Bonnot could drive off, starting with one of those signature tire-squealing U-turns that astonished everyone who watched.

Bonnot headed south, once more with guns blazing from the seat behind him to scatter anyone who tried to block the car’s path. Someone in Chantilly used a telephone to alert the police in the next town south, but since their only transportation was a bicycle and a horse, they were unable to stop the powerful De Dion-Bouton as it roared through. The automobile was finally found abandoned in the town of Asnières, northeast of Paris. Because it was near a railway station, the police who discovered it assumed the gang had boarded a train. The Sûreté, on receiving this report, sent agents to the Gare du Nord, hoping to meet the bandits as they arrived in Paris. Unfortunately for them, the robbers had stayed on foot. Casually, they walked into the suburb of Lavallois-Perret, which was swarming with police because it was the site of the taxi drivers’ union headquarters. The bandits soon disappeared in the crowds of demonstrators, richer by some fifty thousand francs, the largest haul they had ever made.