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They had come to Paris as they always did, a merry party glad of bright streets and long dinners: Boy Pleydell with his American wife, Adèle; his sister Daphne with her husband, the irrepressible Berry; Jonah Mansel, calm as a barrister and sharp as a sleuth; and Jill, Jonah’s sister, with her husband, Piers, the Duke of Padua, radiant because of the twins waiting upstairs with their nurse. They had dined with old acquaintances who styled themselves the Count and Countess de Plaza, and later drank champagne in their suite with Casca de Palk, an urbane friend who had met them on the train. The next thing any of them knew was a morning of leaden mouths and splitting skulls, every window fast, every door bolted, the whole party sprawled where they had fallen. When they gathered themselves, fingers found naked wrists and throats: the pearls of Padua gone, Daphne’s emerald bracelets gone, every necklace, clasp and cufflink stripped from them while they slept. The humiliation bit as hard as the loss; someone had poured sleep down their throats and walked calmly among them, picking them clean.
The French police, summoned and bustling, were properly sympathetic and completely unhelpful. They made lists and clucked at the value of the pearls, promised to make inquiries, then politely warned that stolen jewels sink into the underworld in an hour and surface years later in a dozen settings. When the door shut on officialdom, Jonah lit a cigarette, looked at the ashtray, looked at Casca’s cigarette case left carelessly behind, and told them what he had seen the moment he woke: the reek of tobacco fresh in a room where none of them had smoked in the night; the one bottle whose outer glass still held a cold damp sheen; Casca’s neat trick of vanishing to “cool” it in the corridor before they drank again. The de Plazas had been a pleasant diversion, but the real hand, Jonah said, belonged to the man they had trusted. Casca de Palk was “above suspicion,” which is why he had counted on the police. Very well then, they would not rely on the police. They would rely on themselves.
From the moment they resolved to act, the pace altered. Jonah mapped out what Casca needed: time to move the hoard, a buyer bold enough to handle the Padua pearls, and a passage from France that kept him beyond reach. Boy and Berry swept Casca’s haunts in Paris, came up with the name of a courier, and by afternoon were in their car, pounding north toward Dieppe. Twice they thought they had him; twice he slipped them by a minute, and the second time a brutish group shouldered into the chase—rough Americans who watched the same doors and tailed the same taxis. The leader, a forbidding creature known in villainous circles as Auntie Emma, plainly wanted the haul for herself and had the muscle to take it. What had begun as a private hunt now had a rival hunt inside it; they would not only need to catch Casca, they would have to fend off another pack of thieves circling the same prey.
Jonah’s answer was to widen the cast. He sent for Fluff and Susie Dones, a lively pair of small-time crooks who had repeatedly chosen the better angels when Jonah asked nicely and paid fairly. With their help, the family set about eavesdropping on telephone booths, shadowing hotel porters, and slipping into upper balconies to look down on meetings that were not meant to be seen. Boy and Berry crossed a roof at dusk to peer into a garret where a suspected confederate wrote numbers on notepaper and burned the scraps; Susie acquired a maid’s cap and discovered a suitcase whose lining bulged with settings stripped from necklaces. Piece by piece, a picture formed. Casca was not selling in France; he was offering the jewels to a high-level dealer connected to American money, with go-betweens ready to move the case from town to town until the border could swallow it whole. That meant road work, and it meant speed.
Speed did not prevent surprises. Jonah sent Boy to parley with Auntie Emma under a flag of truce that looked like talk and smelled like a trap. The woman was vicious, iron in her jaw and laughter like a slap. She had the sense to admire Jonah’s nerve and the temper to destroy it; within minutes she had a pistol on the table, and two of her men lounged in a doorway with their hands nowhere Boy could see them. Berry arrived, blithe and maddening, and talked until the temperature in the room fell from boiling to sarcastic, then to bored. They left intact, but knew their adversary. After that, their methods were brisk and inventive. They set a wasps’ nest in a disused courtyard so that when Casca’s porter arrived to collect a parcel the guards were flailing and cursing, and the porter’s hat blew off to reveal hair dyed that very morning to match a description the hotel desk had given them. Later, on a lee slope above a narrow mountain lane, they dislodged a rim of loose scree to throw dust and stones down upon the bonnet of a pursuing car—not to wreck it, but to break its stride. They were not saints; they were simply in a hurry.
They shipped themselves along Casca’s trail: a hotel in Dieppe where a night porter remembered a well-dressed gentleman who kept his hat brim low; a café in Rouen where a waiter remembered the same gentleman asking for a timetable to Tours; a petrol station on the road south where a mechanic remembered an elegant man haggling for a fresh fan-belt in much too clean a suit for such work. Jill, cheery and practical, ran messages between apartments while the nurse minded the babies; Adèle, against all protective protests, slipped off her gloves and went where the men would be noticed, listening, smiling, and bringing back details no one else could gather. With each stop they planted a false scent for the Americans to follow and sent a true one another way, keeping Auntie Emma half a town behind and half a day cross. The de Plazas, they now understood, had been showy stooges—dined with, admired, and flattered into serving as screens while Casca did his quiet work. They would not see those faces again.
By the time they reached Tours, the game had sharpened. Twice in twenty-four hours Boy glimpsed Casca across a street, only for a bus or a van to intervene, only for the man to be gone by the time he gained the curb. Jonah bought maps of the south and drew thick pencil lines. Casca was running out of safe towns. He would need isolation, a border and a buyer who liked the strong scent of risk. That, Jonah declared, meant the high country: the Pyrenees, passes that threaded like string, and an edge where France fell away into Spain. Piers made enquiries and confirmed what Jonah suspected: a certain track east of a small village led toward the Spanish line near a tooth of rock men called the Pic du Midi d’Ossau, and rumours among commercial drivers said that smugglers liked that place because the roads were bad enough to keep the curious away and good enough to carry a heavy car if you were not too proud to grind your gears.
They went up into the mountains at dawn, the air keen as steel. The party split: Jonah and Fluff to the high switchbacks where they could watch the pass; Boy and Berry to a lower lane that joined the main road; Piers with a local constable who could be trusted to play deaf; Daphne and Adèle at the village, ready to move messages and supplies as needed. In that cruelly beautiful country, every noise traveled: a lorry’s cough sounded like a thunderclap, a voice like a shot. Around midday Auntie Emma’s car wheezed itself into a long lay-by and stopped. An hour later a sun-flash winked from a car climbing toward Spain. Jonah signaled; Berry and Boy came up from their post, set their makeshift avalanche in motion—a peel of rubble that rolled and rattled, stopping short of true collapse but enough to startle—and by the time the men in the first car had caught their breath, the second had braked, men had leapt out to shout and wave their arms, and confusion had opened a door for the next act.
That next act was theater. If brute force made a muddle, then comedy would make a victory. Berry, Boy, and Piers had come primed with gowns and frocks that would make a saint snort. The plan was lunacy and thus guaranteed to work: they would descend upon the village road as ladies collecting for a charitable cause, fluttering, coaxing, and demanding coins from every motorcar that passed. If the villains drove into the scene, they would either stop and be delayed or blunder through and be unloved by the crowd; if Casca tried to sneak by, he would meet three painted faces and an overflowing tin rattled beneath his nose. Berry took the lead with a concoction of lemon and apple-green lace, a smile that could stop a parish fête, and a voice that could coax money from a stone. Piers tripped artfully; Boy spread his skirts and his charm. They stopped trucks, blessed drivers, and in the fuss and flirtation managed what they needed most: time and proximity.
Casca arrived with his jaw set and his eyes hooded, trapped by circumstance and by his own cleverness. He tried hauteur; the ladies begged for a note, just a note, sir, and if not a note, a coin; he tried to push on; the tin was in his way; he tried anger; the crowd—now very real, for villagers had appeared curious and delighted—turned cool. Jonah slipped out from a doorway, Fluff cut off the rear wheel, and in a heartbeat the doors were opened and the case that mattered most was under Boy’s arm. Auntie Emma’s crew, delayed by the scree and a stalled lorry, came upon the scene too late, only to discover that when a duchess’s husband is wearing a hat with a quarter-inch brim and a bolero and still looks like a duke, one’s appetite for a fight grows smaller. Casca, seeing the pearls in the light again and his car hemmed in, lost the last scrap of style. He threw himself not on mercy but on knees, and even in that ridiculous costume Berry’s face could be stern. The case was snapped shut, the pearls were counted and recognized, and every bracelet and brooch laid out until Daphne found her emeralds with a hand she could not keep from trembling.
What came after was as tidy as Jonah could make it. The local constable, who had heard nothing and seen everything, took notes with an innocent expression and a helpful memory for number plates. The Americans, outbluffed and outmaneuvered, decided to remember that they had business on the other side of the range and drifted away with bad grace. Casca was not beaten with fists; he was beaten with his own game. The family had no desire for scandal; they wanted restitution and peace. Arrangements were made that left Casca very clear that France would not be friendly to him, nor Spain, nor any dealer who wished to avoid Jonah’s attentions. The de Plazas, if those names were true, evaporated into the air from which they had been conjured. The party, bruised and triumphant, came down from the high roads with their cases heavier and their hearts lighter than when they had gone up.
Back in Paris, and then back in England, the mood was a different kind of quiet. Jill’s twins gurgled in their cots, and Piers—no longer in borrowed lace—watched them with a face that made even Berry go soft. Daphne wore her bracelets to breakfast; Adèle slipped the Padua pearls around Jill’s throat for one delighted minute before the case went into the safe again. Boy, who had told every turn of the story with a grin and a wince, found himself looking across a table at Adèle and thinking how quickly a man can lose the things he thinks are his until he proves he deserves them. Jonah, who had kept his counsel and steered the ship, took an evening alone with a map and a pen and traced the roads they had taken: Paris to Dieppe to Rouen to Tours to the last rough tracks near the Spanish line. It was not the sort of course a sensible traveler would draw; and yet it brought them home with what mattered. There had been danger, farce, and a friend’s betrayal. There had also been resolve, quick wits, and the joy of seeing a wrong set right by those who suffered it. For people such as these, that was almost a creed.