Policeman's Lesson

"Love," announced a disillusioned gendarme of Toulouse last week, "is like a banana peel. The best of us is sure to slip on it." "One must draw a lesson," agreed his colleague in a fast change of metaphor, "and the lesson is that for the police, love is a two-edged weapon. We must use it, yes, but we must be careful of it."

These sage remarks were retrospective, and referred to the case of handsome young Inspector Pierre Debard, counterespionage agent of the Surveillance du Territoire. A onetime reporter who often chafed under the routine discipline of police work, Pierre had considered himself as adept at the tactics of love as he was with the ruder weapons of the policeman's arsenal. Many a softly lit nightspot on the affluent right bank of the Garonne could testify to his prowess in that direction. It was on the right bank, in fact, that Pierre had wooed and won his exotically beautiful Eurasian Bathilde. Bathilde (whose last name, oddly, was Schmidt) was a prize worth winning. If some of Pierre's luckless rivals sneered that Bathilde was given to temperament and must have made life in the Debard household pretty hectic, that could be readily put down to sour grapes.

The Consul. It was-not Bathilde, however, but another girl to whom Pierre Debard's thoughts were turned last month when his superiors assigned him to the case of the Polish vice consul. There are few Poles in Toulouse, where Aleksander Skrzynia had only recently set up a Polish consulate. For this reason, it occurred to the local authorities that the new vice consul, who was said to have served with the International Brigade in Spain, was less interested in Poles than in establishing contacts with old Communist friends among the Spanish refugees thronging Toulouse. Inspector Pierre Debard was set to spy upon Vice Consul Skrzynia, and Debard remembered a pretty 17-year-old country girl of Polish extraction. He tried to induce her to apply for a job as secretary to the consulate where she could act as a spy for him.

The Notebook. Day after day Pierre visited her. Day after day, like a good policeman, he made notes of his calls in a little notebook. Then one day last week Bathilde of the quick temper found the notebook.

Eyes flaming, Bathilde marched with the notebook to the Polish consulate. Then she confronted Pierre and told him triumphantly that she had told Skrzynia all about Pierre's espionage. Pierre gasped in horror and raced to headquarters. Bathilde was arrested. The Polish vice consul fled town and was arrested in Orleans. His Franco-Polish chauffeur was threatened with deportation by the Polish embassy. Then the Polish government arrested the French consul at Stettin. And finally, Inspector Debard himself was thrown into a French jail.

By week's end the consuls had each been released, and Skrzynia was allowed to return to Poland. The 17-year-old blonde "spy" was back on the farm, and the chauffeur was free to stay in France. Still in jail (for endangering the safety of the state) were Pierre and Bathilde, who learned too late that love was a two-edged weapon, especially for cops.

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