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Library of Congress Control Number: 2017951124
ISBN: 978-1-56858-988-6 (hardcover) ISBN: 978-1-56858-989-3 (e-book)
E3-20170921-JV-NF
For Peter McPhee
PROLOGUE
At 8:45 in the morning on December 21, 1911, in Paris, Ernest Caby, a
thirty-two-year-old employee of the Societe Generale wearing the uniform of the
bank and a blue bicorn hat with a tricolor cocarde, stepped off the tramway at its
stop at Carrefour Damremont-Ordener in the eighteenth arrondissement beyond
Montmartre. The stop stood about one hundred yards from the branch office of
that bank at 146 rue Ordener at the corner of Cite Nollez. Over his left shoulder,
Caby carried a cloth sack, and in his hand, another. This morning, it was filled
with 5,266 francs in silver. In his left hand he carried 318,772 francs in titres
(securities), some of which were negotiable. Inside his coat was an envelope
containing twenty thousand francs in bank notes and five thousand francs in
cash.
Passersby in the busy morning hour in a neighborhood of modest means
gaped at a Delaunay-Belleville parked near the bank, some approaching the
luxury automobile to have a closer look. Alfred Peemans, a bank official, walked
out the door of the Societe Generale to meet Caby as he approached the bank,
and together they headed toward the bank. When they reached the corner of the
Cite Nollez, near the front door of the bank, a man stepped out of the luxury car
holding a revolver in his left hand. From just a few feet away, he shot Caby
point-blank in the chest, and then shot him twice more. The courier collapsed at
the base of a tree.
The automobile used in the robbery.
The holdup at the Societe Generale, rue Ordener, Paris. The courier Ernest
Caby is shot by one of the bandits.
Peemans was unharmed and ran into the bank, shouting, “They are
attacking our courier!” Several bank employees followed Peemans out into the
street in time to see the man fire a fourth shot, which lodged near Caby’s spine.
The gunman then grabbed one of Caby’s bags; another man grabbed a second
sack. Both men jumped back into the waiting car, leaving Caby lying in a pool
of blood.
Two municipal policemen (gardiens de la paix) arrived from different
directions and moved toward the automobile, but they were met by a barrage of
shots fired from inside the Delaunay-Belleville as it sped off. A bus arrived,
blocking the street at the corner of the rue du Cloys, and a tram was crossing the
road, but the driver of the speeding automobile skillfully avoided both and
turned onto rue Montcalm and then onto rue Vauvenargues and headed out of
Paris via the porte de Clichy. No one managed to stop them before they made
their escape.
News of the holdup and shooting at the Societe Generale exploded in Paris.
Although it was the first holdup in France using an automobile, it confirmed
public worries about the use of automobiles in burglaries to elude the police. In
this case the thieves were better armed and better equipped than the authorities.
The police had very few automobiles at their disposal. Caby, who survived, was
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the only casualty, but the holdup was an embarrassment for the police.
From his office on the Ile de la Cite, Louis Lepine, who had been the
prefect of police since 1893, moved quickly to coordinate the massive police
operation intended to find the bandits. Born in Lyon in 1846 into a family of
modest origin, Lepine had quickly given up law for administration, serving in
Saint-Etienne as prefect of the Loire. The Prefecture of Police of Paris had been
created in 1800 and charged “with all that concerns the police,” in the widest
possible sense. Louis Lepine’s post was therefore an important position in the
hierarchy of power in France. This position enabled him, as it had his
predecessors, to intervene arbitrarily, forcefully, and sometimes secretly on the
edge of illegality in the investigation of crimes, ordering arrests and searches as
he pleased, dipping into an enormous drawer of secret funds that enabled him to
pay off informers and police spies. Lepine knew how to manipulate the
municipal council of Paris; he had staked his reputation on his ability to prevail
in negotiations with anyone who might check his power. He imagined himself to
be “the king of Paris,” or the commander “by divine right,” imposing military
discipline on “his” agents, “his” brigades, and “his” administration. As he sat
behind his large desk—with his mustache and short beard, invariably wearing a
dark suit and tie, matched by a black top hat when he went out—Lepine had no
idea who might have carried out the audacious attack on the courier who worked
for Societe Generale. But his attention soon turned to the possibility that
anarchists were involved.
The next morning, in their small apartment in plebeian Belleville, Victor
Kibaltchiche, the Brussels-born anarchist son of Russian emigres, and his
companion Rirette Maitrejean, a fellow anarchist who had come to Paris from
her village in central France, read in the newspapers about the dramatic, bloody
theft and getaway. Victor immediately thought of someone who might have done
it: a certain Jules Bonnot, whom Victor and Rirette had recently met in anarchist
circles—“He is crazy enough to have done that!” Victor and Rirette read the
descriptions of the perpetrators. For her part, Rirette doubted that a man whom
eyewitnesses described as being small with a thin mustache could have been
Bonnot. Victor disagreed. And another accomplice had been described as
“seeming very young, not very big, wearing a martingale raincoat, a melon-
shaped hat, binocles, and with a face of baby-like rose complexion.” Victor
immediately recognized Raymond Callemin, once a close friend from his youth
in Brussels. Eyewitness accounts led Victor to believe that another Belgian, a
violent anarchist named Octave Garnier, was one of the four—or five—men
whom passersby had seen in the car. Victor and Rirette realized that although
they had had absolutely nothing to do with the holdup, completely disagreed
with such violent acts, and had long since distanced themselves from this small
faction of anarchists, this could be bad for them. They were already known to the
authorities because of the anarchist paper they ran, L’Anarchie. The police had
been on to them for years, waiting for an opportunity to silence them. And
Victor and Rirette knew that if Callemin, Garnier, and Bonnot were behind the
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brazen holdup, there would be more violent attacks in Paris.
PART ONE
