My rescuer grinned and shook his head. “He has pois chiches for brains, that one.” He repeated the insult. Chickpeas, from ear to ear.
I thanked him. Could I buy him a drink? We went into the café together and sat at a dark table in the corner, and I was there for the next two hours.
Robert was his name. He was not quite short, not quite fat, broad across the chest and stomach, thick-necked, dark-faced, dashingly moustached. His smile was a contrast in gold fillings and nicotine-edged teeth, and his brown eyes were lively with amusement. There was an air of faintly unreliable charm about him, the charm of an engaging scamp. I could imagine him in the Cavaillon market selling guaranteed indestructible crockery and almost genuine Levi’s, whatever might have fallen off the back of the camion the night before.
As it turned out, he had been a policeman, which was how he had come to know and dislike Georges. Now he was a security consultant, selling alarm systems to owners of second homes in the Lubéron. Cambrioleurs were everywhere nowadays, he said, looking for the open window or the unlocked door. It was wonderful for business. Did I have an alarm system? No? Quelle horreur! He slipped a card across the table. There was his name and a slogan that read Alarm Technology of the Future, a message that was somewhat at odds with his trademark—a small drawing of a parrot on a perch squawking “Au voleur!”
I was interested in his work with the police, and why he had left. He settled back in a cloud of Gitanes smoke, waved his empty glass at the barman for more pastis, and started to talk.
In the beginning, he said, it had been a little slow. Waiting for promotion, just like everyone else, trudging through the routine work, getting bored with the desk jobs, not the kind of excitement he had hoped for. And then came the break, one weekend in Fréjus, where he was taking a few days’ leave.
Every morning he went for breakfast to a café overlooking the sea, and every morning at the same time a man came down to the beach for windsurfing lessons. With the idle half-interest of a holidaymaker, Robert watched as the man got up on his windsurfer, fell off, and got up again.
There was something familiar about the man. Robert had never met him, he was sure, but he had seen him somewhere. There was a prominent mole on his neck and a tattoo on his left arm, the kind of small distinguishing marks that a policeman is trained to notice and remember. It was the windsurfer’s profile that stirred Robert’s memory, the mole on the neck and his slightly hooked nose.
After two days, it came to him. He had seen the profile in black and white with a number underneath it; an identity photograph, a police mug shot. The windsurfer had a record.
Robert went to the local gendarmerie, and within half an hour he was looking at the face of a man who had escaped from prison the year before. He was the leader of le gang de Gardanne, and known to be dangerous. Physical characteristics included a mole on the neck and a tattoo on the left arm.
A trap was set, which Robert described with some difficulty through his laughter. Twenty officers, disguised in swimming trunks, appeared on the beach bright and early and attempted to look inconspicuous despite the curious similarity of their bronzage—the policeman’s suntan of brown forearms, brown vee at the neck, and brown face, with everywhere else, from toes to forehead, an unweathered white.
Fortunately, the fugitive was too busy getting aboard his windsurfer to notice anything suspicious about twenty pale men loitering with intent until they surrounded him in shallow water and took him away. A subsequent search of his studio apartment in Fréjus produced two .357 Magnum handguns and three grenades. Robert was credited with the collar, and seconded to plainclothes duty at Marignane airport, where his powers of observation could be fully exploited.
I stopped him there for a moment, because I had always been puzzled by the apparent lack of official surveillance at Marseille. Arriving passengers can leave their hand luggage with friends while they go to the baggage claim area, and if all they have is hand luggage they don’t need to pass through customs at all. Given Marseille’s reputation, this seemed strangely casual.
Robert tilted his head and laid a stubby finger along the side of his nose. It is not quite as décontracté as it appears, he said. Police and douaniers, sometimes dressed as business executives, sometimes in jeans and T-shirts, are always there, mingling with the passengers, strolling through the parking areas, watching and listening. He himself had caught one or two petty smugglers—nothing big, just amateurs who thought that once they were in the car park they’d be safe, that they could slap each other on the back and talk about it. Crazy.