La Belle Telephone

When the telephone jingles at the headquarters of Marseille's police judiciaire, everybody scrambles to answer, for the caller may well be somebody with a thick French southern accent saying: "If you go to such and such a place, you will find a bundle of valuable stolen merchandise." A few years ago, the voice directed the cops to an $800,000 cache of jewels, stolen from the Aga Khan's wife, that had been returned, thoughtfully enough, to the front steps of police headquarters.

On February 14 of last year, an anonymous caller told the police to be on the lookout for a letter that contained a railroad baggage check which led to the recovery of 20 modern paintings, worth $600,000, stolen from the Riviera's Colombe d'Or Inn in St.-Paul-de-Vence on April Fool's Day, 1960. Last week, la belle telephone rang again, with even more spectacular news.

Said a heavily accented voice: "Hurry over to No. 80 Avenue Camille Pelletan and you will find a blue-green 404 Peugeot with interesting stolen property in it." The flics located the car, and in an excess of cunning watched it for 24 hours in the hope that its owner would show up. Naturally, no one appeared, so the police decided to search the car. There on the back seat, wrapped in newspapers, were eight rolled-up canvases by Cezanne that had been taken from an exhibition in Aix-en-Provence last August. Valued at $2,000,000, the Cezannes were the loot in the most daring art theft since the Mono, Lisa disappeared from the Louvre 50 years ago.

The recovery also confirmed the motive for the recent rash of French art thefts, which was the major reason Riviera Resident Somerset Maugham sold his collection (see col. 1). In the Colombe d'Or case, Francis Roux had privately paid out a reported $20,000 to get his paintings back. In the Cezanne affair, insurance companies paid out a reported $100,000.

Worse yet. to hold the cops at bay the artnapers had coolly let it be known that they possessed still a third trove of stolen paintings--57 works lifted last July in St.-Tropez. The St.-Tropez paintings had proved to be uninsured and hard to get ransom for, but the gang's threat to destroy them stopped police from interfering with the Cezanne extortion.

Said one melancholy police officer to a U.S. reporter, "You say crime does not pay in America. Well, in Marseille, crime pays very well."

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