As if his vaunted presence could change anything, Jean-Paul thought bitterly, as he hid among a stand of oaks. He stared at the plain white coffin and choked back his sobs lest anybody should hear him. He didn’t want to disturb the funeral. Had the police known their missing Le Chat would be there, they would have sent more than a single uninterested gendarme. And the Bostonian in his frayed, pinstriped suit? What would he have done?

The stiff breeze off the Mediterranean whipped tears from Jean-Paul’s eyes. Thomas Blackburn, he thought, would have done nothing.

Gisela had been a favorite on the Riviera. Her suicide forty-eight hours earlier had caught everyone by surprise and abruptly ended Le Chat’s welcome on her beloved Côte d’ Azur. For weeks, his presence had lent a spirit of romance and adventure to an otherwise ordinary season. With visions of Cary Grant in their heads, eager young heiresses, jet-setters and bored wives of American tycoons had ignored warnings not to wear their valuable, albeit heavily insured, jewels to crowded cafés, parties and casinos. In truth, they had vied to tempt Le Chat to commit one of his daring robberies, each longing for the excitement and attention of being his next victim. After all, he never hurt anyone.

Even Gisela had emerged from her brush with the Riviera jewel thief physically unscathed.

If it had ever occurred. Fact and fancy were often inseparable in Gisela’s quirky mind, an eccentricity that prompted more amusement than outrage among those who knew her. To be sure, her encounter with Le Chat-real or imagined-would never have happened if he hadn’t been stalking the Côte d’ Azur for victims.

Jean-Paul knew that the graveside mourners and the gossips and the snobs would blame Le Chat entirely for her suicide, without looking to themselves for culpability. He believed, however, that they, as much as their now-despised jewel thief, were responsible for her death.