The biggest robbery in Japanese history occurred on March 5, 2004, in Tokyo’s wealthy Ginza ward. It was carried out by a gang belonging to a loosely-knit criminal group of eastern Europeans who have come to be known as the ‘Pink Panther gang’. The loot — the Comtesse de Vendome — has never been recovered. This is a fictionalized reconstruction of the robbery.

Milo Simović brushed back the sleeve of his Armani suit and glanced at his Omega Speedmaster.

11:45 a.m.

The streets of Ginza were already filling with lunchtime crowds. He stepped to the curb and gazed across the street. The Serb was seated at a cafe window counter. She wore a red leather jacket and dark sunglasses and did not acknowledge him.

            Simović looked beyond the skyscrapers of Tokyo’s luxury shopping precinct and into the cloudless March sky. He wondered what the weather was like in Cetinje at that very moment, 4.45 a.m. Montenegro time. His mother would be milking their goats, or stoking the fire to bake ražani for the long day ahead. He felt a pang of homesickness strike at his gut.

            Something hit him on the shoulder.

            ‘Let’s go,’ came a smooth, unhurried voice behind him. It belonged to Dusko Popović, sharp in his Henry Bailey pinstripe and a half-smile softening his lantern jaw.

            ‘The wig looks stupid,’ Simović said.

            ‘Yours too, budalashe.’

No one ever knew who he would be working with. But it was a sure bet there’d be a Cetinje man in the crew; the best jewel thieves came from there. Popović had gone to the same high school but the two men were not close.

            The brief for the Tokyo job had come in late January; the target, logistics, the forged passports, and the Israeli stone cutter — all coordinated by hands higher up. The snatch team consisted of the Montenegrins, Simović and Popović. The Scot, having arrived two weeks earlier, had arranged hotel rooms, acquired four phones and two Russian-made Marakov pistols from a local contact. The Serb, a tall, fair-skinned woman with striking blue eyes, flew in from Paris soon after.

            It was her gaze which now trained on Simović and Popović as they applied their paper hay fever masks and made their way along the teeming sidewalk to the double glass doors of Le Supre-Diamant Coutre de Mamiko.

            At the precise moment Popović tugged on the chrome handle, the Serb’s manicured finger pressed ‘start’ on her Chopard timepiece.

0 seconds

            Inside, Popović moved towards the marble stairway leading to the showroom, acknowledging with a nod the two female attendants dressed in black who stood behind the counter on his left. He pulled a small camera from his pocket and pointed it at the only male employee standing at the foot of the stairs. A flash of light filled the room. ‘Nice, fantastic,’ he said, smiling broadly.

16 seconds

            Momentarily blinded, the attendant returned a weak smile. Simović slipped past him and made his way up the stairs.

25 seconds

At the rear of the showroom, enclosed in a large glass case, the Comtesse de Vendome blazed one hundred candle-strength beneath its display lighting. A week earlier, Simović and the Serb had entered the shop posing as husband and wife, asking to see it — a necklace of the most outrageous beauty, strung with 116 of the world’s purest diamonds and valued at US$31 million. Simović slipped from his belt a five-dollar rock hound’s hammer and with one deft movement smashed the case.

48 seconds

            The attendant uttered a cry and rushed forward. He ran right into the butt of Popović’s Marakov pistol. Again and again. The Montenegrin pulled a canister from his pocket and quickly sprayed the stunned clerk, pushing him coughing and gasping into a small bathroom reserved for customers’ use at the back of the showroom. Simović, meanwhile, lifted the necklace from the smashed glass and slipped it into his left pocket. From his right, he pulled out his Marakov.

73 seconds

            The two men descended the stairway at neither a run nor an amble, but were met at the bottom by the two female staff, alarmed by the commotion upstairs. At the sight of the pistols, both women froze. Fish in a barrel, Popović thought, filling the air with pepper spray. To the sound of their whimpers and cries, the two men pushed through the doors and out into lunch-hour of Tokyo’s busiest shopping precinct.

            The Serb straightened.

She watched the two foreigners, sartorial in their expensive suits, walk briskly off in opposite directions, melting into the throngs of office workers and masked hay fever sufferers. Her slender finger pushed the ‘stop’.

88 Seconds.

******************

This story originally appeared in the anthology Noir Nation: International Crime Fiction No. 3. More from Simon Rowe on Writers in Kyoto here or here.