Crimes of Paris_ A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection - Dorothy Hoobler [113]
Bonnot skirted the capital city and took the main road north. By ten o’clock that morning they reached Chantilly, a rather sleepy town famous for its lace making. The bandits were not there to purchase cloth; what interested them was that it was the location of another branch of the Société Générale bank. The car stopped in the town’s main square, and Garnier, Callemin, Valet, and Monier went inside the bank. Outside, Soudy stood on the sidewalk with one of the Winchester rifles and Bonnot sat chain-smoking in the driver’s seat.
The bank clerks looked up in surprise as the four armed men appeared. Callemin shouted, “Messieurs, not a word,” but one of the clerks dropped to the floor, and Garnier, nervous and trigger-happy, fired six shots into a cashier. Callemin shot a third employee; Valet followed his lead but proved a poor shot, merely hitting a fourth clerk once in the shoulder. Monier remained at the door. Garnier leaped over the counter and ran for the safe. This time, he had said, they would take only cash and leave the worthless bonds alone.
The bank manager, as it happened, had gone across the street for a coffee. Hearing shots, he started back, and Soudy fired several times at him, missing his target but certainly alerting everyone near the square that something was going on. People from shops and restaurants began to gather outside, keeping at a safe distance, all eyes on the idling automobile and the preternaturally calm man at the wheel.
Maurice Leblanc, creator of the fictional thief Arsène Lupin, wrote a dispatch for an American newspaper describing the scene:
But where is Bonnot? At the steering wheel. All the danger centers on him, isolated in the middle of the street, the center of a gathering crowd.… He does not move an inch. My informants have told me he was terrible to look upon. His whole body was contracted under the fearful strain of his muscles, rendered rigid by the anxiety of the moment. His face was distorted, almost disfigured.… His sense of hearing and of sight were concentrated to the last degree. And there he stood, huddled up behind the wheel, his foot on the clutch pedal, his right hand on the gear lever, every tendon straining, ready to spring — the tiger bandit! 18
The four robbers emerged from the bank with bags filled with money and piled into the car. Soudy, who must have felt even more tension than Bonnot on this, his first job, collapsed on the pavement, and his comrades had to lift him inside before Bonnot could drive off, starting with one of those signature tire-squealing U-turns that astonished everyone who watched.
Bonnot headed south, once more with guns blazing from the seat behind him to scatter anyone who tried to block the car’s path. Someone in Chantilly used a telephone to alert the police in the next town south, but since their only transportation was a bicycle and a horse, they were unable to stop the powerful De Dion-Bouton as it roared through. The automobile was finally found abandoned in the town of Asnières, northeast of Paris. Because it was near a railway station, the police who discovered it assumed the gang had boarded a train. The Sûreté, on receiving this report, sent agents to the Gare du Nord, hoping to meet the bandits as they arrived in Paris. Unfortunately for them, the robbers had stayed on foot. Casually, they walked into the suburb of Lavallois-Perret, which was swarming with police because it was the site of the taxi drivers’ union headquarters. The bandits soon disappeared in the crowds of demonstrators, richer by some fifty thousand francs, the largest haul they had ever made.
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.