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By Root 1219 0

Paris, where Bonnot checked into a hotel under the name Lecoq (in homage to the fictional detective and crook made famous by Émile Gaboriau), the three men saw Garnier’s photograph on wanted posters everywhere. Instead of fleeing the city, however, he moved in with a friend named René Valet in a sixth-floor walk-up on, of all places, the rue Ordener, near the scene of the original crime, as if thumbing his nose at the police. Valet was also a friend of Serge’s, who recalled that they used to meet in little bars along the boulevard Saint-Michel and discuss literature and poetry. “I can see him there now,” Serge recalled thirty years later, “standing up like a young Siegfried… his fine, square-set ginger head, his powerful chin, his green eyes, his strong hands, his athlete’s bearing.” 11 Valet owned a locksmith’s shop but had an anarchist’s spirit. Inexorably he would be drawn into the gang’s orbit by Garnier, and he would die for it.

iv

Bonnot meanwhile retained fond memories of his mistress Judith Thollon, who was still in jail, and even drove to Lyons with his share of the car-theft loot to see if he could hire a lawyer to bail her out. The lawyer told him that the charges against her were serious (possession of stolen property) and also let him know that the Sûreté — having apparently been tipped off by a friend of Platano, Bonnot’s “mercy killing” victim — now suspected Bonnot of being one of the auto bandits. If Judith was released from jail, it would only be because the police hoped she would lead them to him.

Instead of lying low, however, Bonnot continued to travel around stealing cars with Garnier. Once, when a chauffeur refused to give up his automobile, Garnier clubbed the man with a log, killing him. They also shot a watchman, who survived and was later able to identify them from photographs. The newspapers didn’t shy from letting their readers know that the police continued to prove as helpless against the anarchists as their fictional counterpart, Inspector Juve, was against Fantômas in book after book.

If that weren’t bad enough, Victor Serge decided to show where his sympathies lay and demonstrate his credentials as an advocate of illegalism. His childhood friend Raymond-la-Science had paid him a visit just before Christmas, so Serge knew exactly who had carried off the robbery in the rue Ordener. At the beginning of the New Year, he published, under his pen name, Le Rétif, an article in l’anarchie that began:

To shoot, in full daylight, a miserable bank clerk proved that some men have at least understood the virtues of audacity.

I am not afraid to own up to it: I am with the bandits. I find their role a fine one; I see the Men in them.… I like those who accept the risk of a great struggle. It is manly. 12

Publishing sentiments like that only made Serge and the newspaper a prime target of police attention. At the end of January, the Sûreté staged a raid on l’anarchie’s office, arrested all eleven people inside, and seized two Browning automatics that had been stolen in an armory robbery. Rirette claimed that she had bought them from a comrade for personal protection, but the police regarded these as important evidence, since the auto bandits were the prime suspects in the theft of the cache of weapons.

Serge was questioned by Louis Jouin, deputy chief of the Sûreté and the nominal head of the force tracking the auto bandits. Jouin struck Serge as “a thin gentleman with a long, gloomy face, polite and almost likeable.” 13 He told Serge that he identified with his cause, for he too was a man of the people. He even quoted Sébastien Faure, an anarchist writer. Though Jouin claimed to admire the ideals of many anarchists, he pointed out that the brutal actions of the auto bandits were discrediting their comrades. What about the old man and his housekeeper in Thiais, slaughtered in their beds? Was that something that made anarchists proud? Jouin promised that if Serge gave him information about the bandits, no one need ever know. In his memoirs, Serge claimed to have been “embarrassed” by the