Authors: Geoffrey Household
The older woman was rotund, swathed in black silk, just like an old-fashioned lodging-house landlady except that every inch of her, every sleekness, every flow proclaimed that she had been
dressed by some artist who, unable to give beauty to such exuberance of flesh, had rightly settled for distinction. Her companion, young enough to allow bosom and backside to be discreetly
emphasised, leaned towards her across the table as intently as an ant milking its queen. On the floor at the side of the queen’s chair was a black bag of crocodile leather with silver
fittings.
Leaving them to their enjoyable discussion of the scandalous behaviour of modern youth, I moved away unnoticed. As a first thought, it occurred to me that the older woman deserved to lose the
crocodile bag; as a second thought, that the risk of picking it up myself was acceptable. About a foot of the shoulder strap was clear of the bag and on the floor; if I could time my approach for a
moment when their attention was completely absorbed by their mutual vivacity there was a chance that neither of them might notice the gentle foot of a passer-by stretched out to catch in the loop
and the hand which lifted the bag quickly and silently off the floor. If any of them did notice I could pretend to have tripped over the strap. The unavoidable danger lay in the twenty seconds or
so it would take me to reach the nearest exit and disappear.
The foot and hand skilfully obeyed. The following twenty seconds were the worst. I was sure I had not been seen by the two women. But from some other table? Not daring to hurry, I listened for
the yell of STOP HIM. I had never stolen anything in my life and so had none of the technique and experience of the pickpocket. I had been mad, I screamed to my panicking self, to trust
beginners’ luck. Theft could not be so easy. I waited for the rush of an attendant or policeman. I had a flashed vision of the waiting cell. I swear I even heard the door close on me. Then I
was through the exit, dripping cold sweat. The bag must surely have been missed by now.
To get rid of it was the next task. I hadn’t thought that out, and it didn’t occur to me that the terror which seemed timeless to me was still only twenty seconds to the two
chatterers. At the end of the department was the sign GENTLEMEN. I nearly broke into a run, but forced myself to march straight ahead for safety, like a gentleman indeed. I locked a door on myself
and collapsed on to the friendly seat.
I now had privacy in which to think undisturbed. With my heart beginning to slow its beat, I opened the bag to see if it contained any money. Money was all I wanted. In a pocket at the top was a
wallet stuffed with a wad of notes which I took with a relief which overwhelmed all feelings of fear and guilt. Below were three flatfish cases of expensive leather. When I opened the smallest I
found, to my horror, that on a nest of blue velvet lay a tiara of diamonds and exquisite emeralds. She can hardly have been strolling in public with that. My guess was that she had been met on
arrival by her daughter and had sat down with her for coffee, cakes and a gossip, before placing her jewellery in Harrods’ safe deposit.
I left the other cases unopened. I had landed myself in real trouble. She must have missed the bag by now and alerted the lounge with her screams. In those twenty seconds I might with luck have
drawn no attention to myself for there was nothing exceptional about a man carrying large business documents in an oversized portfolio. On my way to my present refuge, however, I had been seen by
dozens of shoppers. Could one of them describe me? Very vaguely. The black bag would be clearly remembered once the alarm had gone out, but nothing recognisable about the individual who was
carrying it through a moving crowd. An attendant in the gents’ lavatory would have been deadly, but none had been visible.
The next move was to get clear of Harrods as soon as possible. I placed the bag by the side of the seat – an outlandish home for that tiara – unlocked the door and cleared off. Then
morality took over. I had what I needed. Had I any right to deprive the old girl of immensely valuable jewels, leaving them where anyone could pick them up? My conscience was evil. She could
obviously spare the cash I had pinched; she could not spare the tiara. On my way out I glanced into the coffee parlour. The loss had been discovered. Two managers, the waitresses and the occupants
of neighbouring tables were all standing up in a huddle and all squealing at once. I left them to it, descended the stairs with dignity and found myself next door to the sports department. My eye
was caught by a range of canvas cricket bags. Inside one of those the jewel cases could be hidden and probably even the bag itself would fit. Why not? If it was left in its place, the chap who
found it would have the hell of a time clearing himself. Hypocrisy? Yes, my true motive in recovering the swag was a thought of the reward that would be offered for its return. I bought a canvas
bag and, for good measure, a bat. Then I went cautiously back to GENTLEMEN. Apparently, nobody had chosen my compartment for a visit. I locked the door, filled my cricket bag and left Harrods with
the light steps and squared shoulders of a county bowler.
A taxi drew up at the side door and discharged its passenger as I came out. I jumped into it and told the driver to go to Lords. If and when the police saw a possible connection between the
missing black bag and the cricket bag and traced the taxi-driver, my destination would indicate that the theory was wrong. As soon as the taxi had driven away from Lords I took another to Soho, and
there, guarding my bag between my feet, recovered with a half-bottle of claret and an ample meal.
At last, with a full and grateful belly, I counted the money in the wallet which came to over six hundred pounds. The next task was to buy an ordinary suitcase together with pyjamas, clean shirt
and underwear, and in another invaluable public lavatory pack into it the contents of the cricket bag, which was no longer a saviour but a clue. I deposited it in the left luggage office at
King’s Cross station, and then found a room and bath – safer and cheaper than a hotel – in the respectable neighbourhood of Gower Street.
God, it was heaven to feel clean! Bathed and behind a locked door, I opened the two remaining jewellery cases. The first contained a curious golden disk of filigree work, attached to a golden
chain, to be worn as a pendant. It reminded me of Inca work, what little remains of it, though it was far too small, only about fourteen inches in circumference. The rays round the edge showed that
it was an image of the sun, but on the face was a circle of little golden disks. What it was I did not then know, but I sensed some mystical quality which did not spring wholly from the beauty of
the design. In the centre of the sun was a large emerald which had been clumsily added to the lovely work of the goldsmith. That told me a lot about its owner. She lacked natural taste. She could
be the wife or mistress of a multi-millionaire, possibly an industrialist, possibly a politician. The third case contained comparative trivialities: necklace and ear-rings to match the tiara. Given
the evidence of the sun, I would have been prepared to bet that the original owner or his wife or both had met the usual fate of leaders of the opposition. With the comforting thought that the lady
of the crocodile bag might have, strictly speaking, no more right to the acquisitions of another Father of his Country than I had, I slipped between spotless sheets and slept for fourteen
hours.
I woke up in the morning very conscious of one mistake. I was faced with a problem which must be very common among professional thieves who know how to plan for its solution beforehand. I did
not like to leave my suitcase, with its cheap and unsatisfactory lock, unattended in my room. When the girl came in to clear away the breakfast things and make the bed she found me just sitting in
my new pyjamas and doing absolutely nothing.
She asked if I had anything to send to the wash, and I replied that when I had unpacked I would sort it out. That sounded as if I had quite a lot of dirty linen left from travel.
‘And if you would like your suit dry-cleaned, it will be back by this evening.’
‘Does it look shabby?’ I asked.
‘Well, not exactly shabby, but it does look as if you had been on a long journey.’
This wouldn’t do at all. I was slightly suspect. I guessed that she had been prompted by the proprietress to find out whether the suitcase was full of clothes or empty. There was nothing
for it but to re-equip myself from top to toe, then pack what I was wearing plus a few extras and leave my one piece of baggage unlocked.
Meanwhile, what was I to do with the three jewellery cases which would not fit in any of my pockets? The laundry bag was the obvious answer. If they found it temporarily missing from the
bathroom they could think what they bloody well pleased.
What was certain was that I had to economise until I could lay my hands on the reward. At least another £150 had to be spent. When I had found the £600 in the black crocodile bag I
was nearly crazy with relief for it seemed to me that my troubles were at an end. They were not; they were just beginning. I was sitting on a vast sum of capital which I dared not use. All
jewellers and pawnbrokers would have been warned to look out for those unmistakeable treasures.
I dressed, put the black bag and its contents into the laundry bag and started off to the shops. My first purchase was a largeish briefcase with a formidable lock to which I transferred the
valuables, less one emerald ear-ring which I kept to identify myself as the correct possessor of the jewellery and able to return it. After depositing the briefcase at a bank, I bought smart
trousers and a gentlemanly coat, a dressing-gown, a few paperbacks, paper and envelopes to fill up space, and set off with my parcels to Gower Street, managing to reach my room unseen. With the
laundry bag now holding the foul remains of my forty-eight hours’ distress and my suit laid out for cleaning, I could now face the landlady and search the advertisement columns of the more
expensive dailies for the expected offer of a reward.
It was the third day of living with my criminality, and I was becoming accustomed to it. Half of me was ashamed; the other half not without pride in accomplishing, as an
amateur, an act which would have dismayed a professional. An act, yes. It irrevocably separated the self which had stolen from the self which would not dream of doing any such thing. Right and
wrong had little to do with it. My pride was in action.
I rang for breakfast and the newspapers. When the girl arrived I gave her my suit to be cleaned and my wash to be washed with proper geniality. She did not seem to have noticed the temporary
absence of the laundry bag. Clad in my new dressing-gown like any mature student on a postgraduate course at London University round the corner, I opened the paper for a leisurely look through the
advertisements. I was amazed to see, occupying a quarter of the front page, a picture of my lady of Harrods in her resplendent youth. She was Juana Romero, daughter of a Mexican father and a
Californian mother.
It was not the theft of the jewellery which was news, but the victim. In her youth she had been a famous film actress; the toast of the two Americas they called her. One reporter only had
recognised her married name from the police reports, and he deserved his scoop. The beautiful brown eyes had been swimming with tears as she told him of her loss. She had been dreaming of her past
without a thought for the bag at her little feet. In her time she had been squashed into shape by the arms of Rudolph Valentino himself – the reporter put it more delicately – for her
figure was then of the type which fascinated teenagers, Hollywood producers and the American military. She had been, wrote the emotional hack, the envy of all women. I doubt it. The exuberant
display probably started the later craze for weight reduction. And there she was on the front page in a ‘revealing’ swimsuit; it hadn’t a chance of being anything else.
She had married the Father of her Country. He was then only a colonel, but the pair of them were so popular that the cathedral had been packed with the press, the generals and the politicians,
all of them haunted by a foreboding of what this marriage of celebrities might bring about. It took him three more years to reach the top by a revolution rather less bloody than usual. She had done
well for her husband and herself. The paper listed her loss as the tiara of emeralds and diamonds, the ear-rings and necklace. She had not said a word of the golden sun. I remembered my earlier
conjecture that it could have been acquired from a museum. Now that I knew who she was, that was indeed possible.
I shall call the lady’s country the Republic of Malpelo, for it would be shameful to brand a charming and impoverished little state with meekly tolerating a Father of the Country. Fatherly
methods of government are much the same in Africa and Latin America, and I had learned them by experience. I had been surprised that the African had bothered to denounce corruption and supposed
that it was for the benefit of international financiers, for nobody within the country would ever have believed that the American firm had won that contract on reliability alone. All the same I
liked that great, black, bemedalled bugger until the last time I came in contact with him. He had passed through Sandhurst and remained an officer and a gentleman with a respect for power and none
at all for life. He was at his best when he had an excuse to appear British and would chat to me as if we were sitting in a London club while I was stimulated by the added thrill that I might be
about to leave Government House on a stretcher for a faultlessly arranged post-mortem. He should have known that I was accustomed to fatherly administration and trusted me to keep my mouth shut; it
had been quite unnecessary to give me twenty-four hours’ notice to leave the country.
So my earlier instinctive conjecture of the reason why the lady of Harrods had not revealed the loss of the golden sun to the police had not been far wrong. It must be well known to historians
of the Spanish Conquest and had to be returned, minus the tasteless central emerald, to the shrine from which it had been borrowed. Of course the loan might have had an indefinite term. Requests
from a Father of the Country are generally obeyed without argument.