The Crimes of Paris: A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection (32 page)

v

That was the high point of the auto bandits’ career. Their exploits had thrown the government into turmoil and the population into panic. Prime Minister Raymond Poincaré (a cousin of the mathematician) called an emergency meeting of his cabinet to discuss how to deal with the situation. After conferring with President Fallières, Poincaré announced that the police would be given additional powers and better equipment. For the first time, they would have a motorized unit, consisting of eight automobiles and armed with automatic pistols and repeating rifles. Two hundred men were added to the Sûreté and six hundred to the Parisian police force — all assigned to hunt down what was in reality half a dozen men. Equipped with lists of the addresses of known anarchists, even the most peaceful ones, police swooped down on working-class neighborhoods, rounding up suspects. The Société Générale offered a 100,000-franc reward for information leading to the gang’s capture. Hundreds of reports flowed into the Sûreté from all over Paris and the countryside. Faced with the necessity of checking them out, the police were continually chasing phantoms. As in the
Mona Lisa
case, they had too many potential suspects.

Aware of the intense manhunt, the gang had split up. Each of the members found hiding places, sometimes changing them every night. Despite the huge reward on their heads, they found no lack of sympathizers and comrades who would shelter them. But of course the more people who knew of their whereabouts, the greater the likelihood that someone would betray them.

André Soudy, who had taken part in only one of the gang’s robberies, fled to the coastal town of Berck. There he found a haven in an isolated cottage, home of Bartholémy Baraille, an elderly man who had lost his job on the railway when he joined a strike in 1910. Baraille was well known to the local community for his anarchist sympathies — he subscribed to
l’anarchie
— and apparently someone informed the Sûreté of his visitor. (Soudy’s description, given by those who had seen him with a rifle in Chantilly’s main square, had been widely circulated.) Inspector Jouin and some of his associates arrived from Paris and staked out the cottage. When Soudy emerged, they followed him to the railway station. After he purchased a ticket, they placed him under arrest. He surrendered meekly, even though the police found on him a loaded Browning automatic and a vial of potassium cyanide, along with a thousand francs, presumably from the Chantilly heist. But Soudy refused, or was unable, to give the police any information on the whereabouts of the other gang members.

Meanwhile, Raymond Callemin found a hiding place in a small apartment occupied by two friends in the nineteenth arrondissement. Having turned twenty-two the day after the gang’s most recent theft, Raymond-la-Science bought himself a birthday present with his share of the loot: a new bicycle, specially built for racing, and a cycling outfit that suited his taste in elegant dress.

Jean Belin, a young detective at the Sûreté (who would one day be the agency’s head), later wrote admiringly of Inspector Jouin, who was leading the effort to find the bandits.

Jouin… had great personal charm — especially for women.… Perhaps it was because he had an eye for a pair of pretty ankles that he first stumbled on the track of the nefarious Callemin.

He greatly admired a very attractive young woman who was in the habit of flirting under the trees of the outer boulevards with a commonplace man altogether unworthy of her obvious charms. The couple turned out to be Callemin and his current inamorata.
¹⁹

Jouin followed them home and then called a squad of detectives to stake out the place. When Callemin left the apartment with his new bicycle, he found himself surrounded and swiftly handcuffed by Jouin and the detectives. Though the police found two Browning automatics and ninety-five bullets in his saddlebag, Callemin had not been able to get off a shot. Even so, he taunted his captors as they took him away: “My head’s worth a hundred thousand francs, and yours just seven centimes — the price of a bullet.”
²⁰

Garnier had also come to earth in Paris, with another old comrade, in the eighteenth arrondissement, the site of the working-class insurrection of 1871. Compelled to remain inside, he set down on paper some justifications for his actions. “If I became an anarchist,” he wrote, “it’s because I hated work, which is only a form of exploitation.”

Answering the criticism from some anarchist circles that the gang had killed ordinary employees, potential comrades in the struggle, Garnier wrote, “Why kill workers? — They are vile slaves, without whom there wouldn’t be the bourgeois and the rich.

-“It’s in killing such contemptible slaves that slavery will be destroyed.”
²¹

Bonnot, whose photograph as the mastermind of the gang appeared almost daily in the newspapers, had holed up in the back of a secondhand-clothes shop. Like Garnier, he avidly read
l’anarchie,
which was still printing provocative sentiments. On April 4, one of its writers lectured the bourgeoisie: “If you apply your wicked laws, then too bad for you; social violence legitimates the most bloody reprisals, and following on from the muffled voice of Brownings, you will hear another, more powerful voice: that of dynamite!”
²²

Bonnot composed a letter in response to sentiments like these, reflecting on what life had brought him: “I am a famous man. My name has been trumpeted to the four corners of the globe. All those people who go through so much trouble to get others to talk about them, yet don’t succeed, must be very jealous about the publicity that the press has given my humble self.

“I am not appreciated in this society. I have the right to live, and while your imbecilic criminal society tries to stop me, well too bad for it, too bad for you!”

He recalled some of his life’s few happy moments, the times when he made love to Judith in the cemetery at Lyons: “I didn’t ask for much. I walked with her by the light of the moon.… It was there that I found the happiness I’d dreamed about all my life, the happiness I’d always run after and which was stolen from me each time.”

Unlike Garnier, his partner in crime, Bonnot expressed some regrets: “At Montgeron I didn’t intend to kill the driver, Mathillet, but merely to take his car. Unfortunately when we signaled him to stop, Mathillet pointed a gun at us and that finished him. I regretted Mathillet’s death because he was a prole like us, a slave of bourgeois society. It was his gesture that was fatal.

“Should I regret what I’ve done? Yes, perhaps, but I will carry on.…”
²³

vi

The police were slowly tightening the net around the fugitives. Élie Monier, who had been identified by bank clerks as one of those who had taken part in the Chantilly robbery, was unwise enough to meet one of the editors of
l’anarchie
for dinner. Since the staff members of the radical paper were under continual surveillance, Monier’s cover was blown. Instead of making an immediate arrest, the tail on the newspaper editor followed Monier to his hideout — the Hôtel de Lozère on the boulevard de Menilmontant, near the Père Lachaise Cemetery.

Jouin, the agency’s second-in-command, had now been appointed to head the “flying brigade” created to use the motor bandits’ own tactics to bring them down. He lost no time in apprehending Monier. In a predawn raid, he led his squad to the hotel, where they burst into Monier’s room, catching him asleep. There were two more loaded Brownings on the night table, but Monier was unable to reach them. Jouin triumphantly released the news that yet another member of the gang had been apprehended.

Among Monier’s effects were some letters with addresses of other possible hiding places, including the secondhand shop in Ivry where Bonnot had gone to ground. It was, recalled Belin, “a desolate region of the city… dotted with hundreds of tumble-down shacks where criminals, and down and outs, and every kind of undesirable used to live. In this melancholy region of huts and ruined houses… was a miserable second-hand clothes store.”
²⁴

Antoine Gauzy, the owner of the shop, was an unlikely anarchist: middle-aged, with a wife and three children to feed. His political inclinations were indicated only by the fact that he had named his youngest child Germinal, after Zola’s novel about a coal miners’ strike. Unluckily for him, his brother had been a friend of Monier’s, which was how Bonnot had come to be staying in one of the tiny rooms above Gauzy’s shop. Gauzy had sent his wife and children to the countryside, a wise precaution, though Bonnot said he planned to move on soon.

Four men whose bowler hats marked them as plainclothes policemen arrived while Gauzy was talking to a friend downstairs. Jouin, who led the group, said they had come to search the premises for stolen goods. Leaving one of his men downstairs with the visitor, Jouin led the way to the upper floor. Finding the door to the bedroom locked, he ordered Gauzy to open it. The shutters over the single window were closed, and Jouin, the first one through the door, saw only a vague shape in the darkness, which suddenly stood up and revealed itself as a man. Jouin carried a stick and struck out with it, seemingly stunning Bonnot. But as a second policeman, Inspector Colmar, entered the room, Bonnot managed to pull a small revolver from his pocket. At close range, he shot Jouin three times, once through the neck, killing him. He then turned his weapon on Colmar, who managed to shout, “Attention, c’est Bonnot,” before being cut down as well.
²⁵

The third policeman on the stairway rushed into the room and, he later testified, found three bodies on the floor. Only one was moving: Colmar. He dragged Colmar out of the room and carried him down the narrow stairs, shouting for help.

Bonnot had been lying under Jouin’s body and now staggered to his feet, blood flowing from his arm. He made his way across the corridor to the apartment of an old woman who shared the house with Gauzy. Bonnot demanded her bedsheet, planning to lower himself from the window, but she told him she had none. Telling her, “Shut up or I’ll burn you,” he opened her window, which overlooked a small shed. Bonnot jumped onto its roof, slid into the backyard, and ran down an alley, leaving a trail of blood.
²⁶

The news electrified Paris. Jouin’s superior, Xavier Guichard, was enraged. When he arrived at the scene, he beat Gauzy with his fists, threatening dire consequences if the shopkeeper did not reveal where Bonnot had gone. Of course he could not, even if he had wanted to. However, Guichard now had the support of the government — and the press — in carrying out almost any plan to apprehend the remaining members of the gang. Prime Minister Poincaré visited Colmar in the hospital and authorized an elaborate funeral for Jouin, whom he proclaimed one of France’s great heroes. Newspaper editorials urged the police to “shoot first,” and orders were given for all detectives to be armed on duty, something that had rarely been authorized in France before.

Guichard started his own campaign of terror, rounding up anyone he could claim was even suspected of anarchist sympathies. His hope was to find someone who would betray the remaining fugitives. Even poor Mme. Gauzy, returning from the countryside with her children, was taken from the train station to police headquarters, where Guichard reportedly told her that her husband was destined for the guillotine and that the police would make sure she had no way of earning a living other than as a prostitute.

For three days, Bonnot continued to elude capture. He made his way down the Seine to Choisy-le-Roi, where a millionaire philanthropist named Alfred Fromentin had donated some property as a refuge for pacifists, anarchists, and others loosely described as libertarians. Jean Dubois, who had sheltered Bonnot and stolen cars with him in the summer of 1911, was still living in what neighbors called Le Nid Rouge (“the Red Nest”). Dubois’ garage, which doubled as a chop shop, had already been searched twice by police looking for some trace of the Bonnot Gang.

The garage was still under twenty-four-hour surveillance, and the report that a man had arrived there on the night of April 27, without arousing any barking from a dog Dubois kept, made Guichard suspicious. (Shades of Conan Doyle and “the dog that did not bark in the night-time.”) So on the morning of the twenty-eighth, Guichard arrived, personally in charge of sixteen armed detectives. That would not be nearly enough. As it happened, Dubois was an early riser, and they found him working in the yard on a motorcycle. With him was a boy of about six, and the police held their fire as they stealthily approached. As he saw them, Dubois pushed the boy aside and drew a pistol. One of the policemen had trained his gun on the mechanic but failed to release the safety. Dubois shot him through the arm and ran for the garage.

The face of Bonnot — said to be “grinning with rage” — -appeared at an upstairs window.
²⁷
Dubois had been forced to take cover behind an automobile in the yard, and Bonnot fired a volley of bullets at the police, trying to give his friend a chance to reach the building. Guichard shouted, “Come out with your hands up. You won’t be harmed,” to which Dubois responded, “Murderers! Murderers!”
²⁸
He left his shelter and ran for the door, but was hit in the back of the neck as he reached it.

Bonnot had assembled a substantial arsenal of firearms and ammunition and was determined not to be taken without a fight. He returned fire so persistently that Guichard was forced to send for reinforcements, and he got plenty. Local paramilitary Republican Guards arrived, along with a fire brigade and the town mayor. When news of the gunfire spread, civilians began to assemble to gawk at the scene; as the morning wore on, some brought picnic baskets, and others carried pitchforks. Prefect of Police Lépine arrived from the city, bringing with him the investigating magistrate and the public prosecutor for the case. Everyone wanted to be present for the kill. Taxi drivers, whose strike had finally ended, began to bring onlookers from as far away as Paris. According to the newspapers, the crowd eventually swelled to ten thousand people. Movie crews arrived to film the whole affair.