Chapter One -- Unexpected Events in a Paris Bank Vault
"Oh, come off it, Bunny," Raffles sighed. He pressed his ear to the door, listening in the brief anxious silence that followed. Bunny stopped his pacing and frowned, only to settle back into it a moment later. "Honestly. Your footsteps are throwing me off."
"Sorry," Bunny murmured, sheepishly. Raffles wrapped his white-gloved hand around the handle of the vault's enormous tumbler wheel and began to turn it again with deliberate slowness, listening for the tell-tale click of the interior mechanism falling into place.
Bunny slid to the floor and sat with his knees drawn up to his chest, watching Raffles at his work. Twenty minutes, at the outside -- that's all they had. It was nerve-wracking, able to do nothing but wait while Raffles went about his safe-cracking; Bunny wondered, with a grim self-deprecating smile, why Raffles had brought him along in the first place. To keep watch, Raffles had told him. Bunny did not see the point of the exercise -- if someone did happen to come upon them, the sterile hallway where they were currently occupying, there would be nowhere for them to hide...
Raffles continued to turn the knob; Bunny sat and listened to the grinding of the internal mechanism, trying to decipher the one aberrant noise that alerted Raffles' trained ear to the lock's correct configuration. Earlier that week, Bunny had deposited a trunk of supposed valuables and withdrawn it a day later, giving Raffles a chance to inspect the vault from the inside; Raffles had withdrawn himself from the trunk to announce that he had discovered that one of the vault locks had an imperfection in the mechanism that caused it to click audibly when it fell into the correct configuration. Bunny hated the trick -- the last time Raffles had used it, he had used Bunny as an unwilling dupe -- but he had to admit that it had been quite effective in this case. The lady Valois' collection of bronze statuary was almost in their grasp. Left with little else to do, Bunny fished his pocket watch out of his waistcoat pocket and watched the second hand tick its way around the face.
"The needle on which our success hangs," Raffles murmured. After a moment's reflection, Bunny realized he was probably referring to the hands of Bunny's watch, glimpsed out of the corner of his eye. Raffles was in a poetic mood...Bunny had known Raffles for long enough to know that when Raffles was in a poetic mood, dreadful things lay ahead. Not failure -- no, Raffles seemed to Bunny to be living a charmed life, free from the petty concerns of ordinary criminals whose schemes might have a chance of failure -- but grandiose, artistic plotting that succeeded against all reason. Poetic moods caused Raffles to send unsalable golden cups to the Queen anonymously. Bunny suspected that Lady Valois' bronze statuary would be similarly unsalable -- a charming collection of trinkets for Raffles to marvel at on his mantelpiece. Art was all very well and good, but it was money they needed, not sentiment.
Ten minutes since they'd drugged the guards. Finally, Raffles let out a small laugh of triumph and began to pull on the vault door. The heavy barrier began to creak open with agonizing slowness; Bunny leapt to his feet to assist, and after a minute's work the vault stood open before them, a great dusty expanse of impenetrable blackness.
"We've bypassed a foot and a half of steel and brass machinery, Bunny," Raffles said, running his fingers along the great gears and captured weights exposed on the vault door's back side. "Not bad. Not bad at all." He struck a match on the side of the door and held it out into the darkness. "Well, shall we?"
Bunny nodded. "We've come all this way, haven't we?"
"You've only come from London, Bunny," Raffles said, with a slight, enigmatic smile. "I've come all the way back from Hades." And with that, Raffles stepped into the inky expanse of the bank vault, his grinning face illuminated by the flicking flame like the Devil preparing to drag an unlucky sinner down to the depths of Hell. Bunny was suddenly reminded of his school days, reading the sly lines of Mephistopheles in Dr Faustus and imagining Raffles' sardonic voice and ironic smile.
Bunny swallowed, dug around in his pocket for a match of his own, and lit it awkwardly on the matchbook cover. "Once more unto the breach," he whispered, and stepped over the threshold.
It was cool inside the vault, the air heavy with the staleness of a long closed room. Bunny stifled a cough as their passage stirred up a thin layer of dust that flickered like stardust in the attenuated light of their pair of matches. "Raffles, won't they see our footprints in the dust? Or our hand prints, at least?"
"Don't worry, Bunny. Lady Valois paid a visit to the bank just yesterday in order to show off her collection to an amateur archaeologist. The bank attendant's footprints have already disturbed the dust well enough."
"You didn't mention that."
"I had assumed you would keep to your part and trust that I had everything under control." Raffles' match sputtered and went out; Bunny saw Raffles palm the remains of the match before his own light source failed and, slipping the used match into his pocket, he fished his match book back out of his interior jacket pocket and fumbled with another match.
There was a snap and a hiss in the darkness, and Bunny saw Raffles illuminated from the flame in his hand, sitting calmly on a large leather-covered trunk as though he were relaxing on an ottoman in his drawing room. "Come on, Bunny, we've got nothing to gain by hesitating now. This is the very thing we're after -- take one end of it and I'll haul up the other."
"Are you sure we're going to be able to get it out in time? It looks awfully big."
"Antique bronze votives are hollow. There're a lot of them in there -- enough for a whole pantheon and their children, I'll warrant -- but it shouldn't be too difficult to carry. After all, we've got the cab right outside. It won't be very far." Raffles was being unusually reassuring. Bunny was not sure how to react. "Well, come on."
Obediently -- because time was of the essence, and once one was inside a bank vault in the middle of the night there was really no turning back -- Bunny wrapped his hands around the handle closest to him. Raffles extinguished his match and grabbed the opposite handle, and with a whispered "One...two...three..." they lifted the trunk with a minimum of struggle.
"Heavier than I'd anticipated," Raffles said as they backed out of the vault with their prize. "But no matter." Raffles bore his end of the trunk with surprising aplomb -- for someone who was recently presumed dead from a gunshot wound to the head, Raffles was surprisingly hale and healthy. Bunny had not pressed Raffles for the story of how he had managed to cheat death a second time...if, indeed, he had cheated death at all and not simply pulled some elaborate trick on the rest of the world. An anonymous telegram insisting that Bunny come to Paris immediately was all it took -- just two words, my rabbit, and he knew. There was only one person on earth who would bother to send an anonymous telegram to an ex-convict no-account newspaper poet.
Two weeks after the telegram arrived, Harry Manders -- Bunny again, for the first time in two long years -- found himself in France, staring breathlessly at the sharp, ironical face he had never hoped, or dreamed, that he would see again.
"It's been a long time, Bunny," was all the explanation Raffles had given. Just a schoolboy nickname and a charming smile, and here Bunny was again, hauling someone else's treasure out of a bank vault with a trail of unconscious guards behind him.
Retracing their steps was short work. Out of the hallway, though the back entrance, and into the waiting cab that stood just outside in the alleyway, waiting for its cargo. There was no one in the alley -- Raffles had seen to that. A thorough check of the bobby's beat schedules, a bit of misdirection, and a great deal of timing.
The driver was one of Raffles' associates. He seemed to have collected a cloud of them in the two years since he had shipped off to the Foreign Legion. He explained them as brothers-in-arms, although privately Bunny doubted that Raffles had been stationed with so many soldiers willing to drive a get-away cab.
It was a moment's work to slip the trunk into the back of the cab and conceal it beneath a trap door in the cab floor. Bunny and Raffles then adroitly discarded their coats, shoes, and hats for entirely new sets that Raffles had thoughtfully left in the cabin of the cab before heading, on foot, in the exact opposite direction of the cab.
"Always change your shoes, Bunny, once your sport is done," Raffles admonished as they picked their way through the flickering lamplight weaving effortlessly between the drunken party-goers and cat-calling streetwalkers of downtown Paris at midnight. Raffles lit a cigarette with an air of self-satisfaction.
It was a relief when they finally reached their hotel room -- even after years with Raffles, Bunny seemed to see detectives in every passing glance and hear police whistles in the screeches of alley cats after a job. Raffles locked the door with a self-satsified sigh as Bunny sat heavily on the threadbare couch with his head in his hands.
"Cold feet, Bunny? Wait 'till we see the loot." Raffles took out his cigarette case with the ease of a magician palming cards and lit up one of his Sullivan cigarettes. "Have a drink, my rabbit. It'll be a moment yet." With only a slight tremble, Bunny reached for the flask of port and poured himself a glass.
"Sorry...it's just...it's been quite a bit of..."
"Quite a bit of time since you went straight, eh? I'm dreadfully sorry to have dragged you into such an overwhelming job on your first day back on the job, but Bunny...oh, Bunny, I can't ever hope to find a second even a fraction as good as you. Reliable as always!" Raffles poured his own glass of port and held it up to the light. "A toast to us," he said. Bunny clinked his glass with Raffles'.
A knock interrupted their toast. "Ah, right on schedule," Raffles said, and opened the door cautiously. The hallway was empty save for a single black leather covered trunk -- Lady Valois' collection.
Raffles reached out and pulled the trunk by one handle into the door. It came through with surprising ease -- it seemed to weigh fraction of what it had in the bank vault, bumping through the door frame with a hollow thump. As Bunny watched, stunned, Raffles shattered the lock with a brass candlestick and tore open the lid.
Inside, there was nothing but the soft velvet lining and a small card the size of a gentleman's calling card on which someone had written in an elegant hand:
My most generous thanks for your assistance in this theft, Mssrs.
I do hope our paths will cross again and, when that day comes, our profit will instead be mutual.
Warmest regards,
Arséne Lupin, Gentleman Burglar
