The Crimes of Paris: A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection by Dorothy Hoobler, Thomas Hoobler Page B

approached, Garnier waved his arms, indicating to the driver that there had been some kind of accident. When the car stopped, Garnier, Bonnot, and Callemin walked toward it, each of them carrying automatic pistols. Shouting, “It’s only the car we want,” Garnier raised his weapon to indicate that the driver should surrender. The driver, prepared for such a situation, drew a pistol of his own, but before he could use it, Bonnot shot him. The secretary, unarmed, raised his hands in surrender, but Garnier fired at him anyway. The bandits rolled both men into the ditch along the road; the secretary, unknown to them, was only wounded and later was able to identify pictures of the men.
    After turning the car around, the bandits were soon heading back toward Paris. Elated at the feeling of power driving always gave him, Bonnot began to sing “Le temps des cerises” (“Cherry Blossom Time”), and the others, recognizing the words, joined in. It had been an anthem of the Communards, a song of eerie poignancy, since it implied that good times were always as short-lived as the spring blossoming of cherry trees — followed by death.
    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