“I know,” I said, grimacing. “That worries me, too. But I can’t lose this job. It might be years before another airline picked me up, if at all. I was on Pan Am’s waiting list for three years.” I paused, then exclaimed, “Flying jet liners is all I ever wanted to do!”
Kitty Corbett nodded sympathetically, lost in thought.
Then she pursed her mouth. “Pete, get me a telephone over here.”
Pete signaled and a waiter brought a telephone to the table and plugged it into a nearby wall jack. Kitty Corbett picked it up, jiggled the hook and then began talking to the operator in Spanish. It required several minutes, but she was put through to whomever she was calling.
“Sonja? Kitty Corbett here,” she said. “Listen, I’ve got a favor to ask…” She went on and detailed my predicament and then listened as the party on the other end replied.
“I know all that, Sonja,” she said. “And I’ve got it figured out. Just issue him a temporary passport, just as you would if his had been lost or stolen. Hell, when he gets back to New York he can tear up the temporary passport, or tear up the old one and get a new one.”
She listened again for a minute, then held her hand over the receiver and looked at me. “You don’t happen to have your birth certificate with you, do you?”
“Yes, I do,” I said. “I carry it in my wallet. It’s a little worn, but still legible.”
Kitty Corbett nodded and turned again to the phone. “Yes, Sonja, he has a birth certificate… You think you can handle it? Great! You’re a love and I owe you. See you next week.”
She hung up and smiled. “Well, Frank, if you can get to the American Consulate in Mexico City by ten o’clock tomorrow, Sonja Gundersen, the assistant consul, will issue you a temporary passport. You’ve lost yours, understand? And if you tell anyone about this, I’ll kill you.”
I kissed her and ordered a bottle of the best champagne. I even had a glass myself. Then I called the airport and found there was a flight leaving in an hour. I made a reservation and turned to Pete. “Listen, I’m going to leave a lot of my stuff here. I don’t have time to pack. Have someone pack what I leave and store it in your office, and I’ll pick it up in a couple of weeks, maybe sooner. I’m going to try and come back through here.”
I stuffed one suitcase with my uniform and one suit, and my money. Pete had a cab waiting when I went down to the lobby. I really liked the guy, and I wished there were some way to thank him.
I thought of a way. I laid one of my phony Pan Am checks on him. On the hotel he managed, anyway.
I cashed another one at the airport before boarding the flight to Mexico City. In Mexico City, I stowed my bag in a locker after changing into my Pan Am pilot’s garb and walked into Miss Gundersen’s office at 9:45 a.m.
Sonja Gundersen was a crisp, starched blonde and she didn’t waste any time. “Your birth certificate, please.”
I took it from my wallet and handed it to her. She scanned it and looked at me. “I thought Kitty said your name was Frank Williams. This says your name is Frank W. Abagnale, Jr.”
I smiled. “It is. Frank William Abagnale, Jr. You know Kitty. She had a little too much champagne last night. She kept introducing me to all her friends as Frank Williams, too. But I thought she gave you my full name.”
“She may have,” agreed Miss Gundersen. “I had trouble hearing a lot of what she said. These damned Mexican telephones. Anyway you’re obviously a Pan Am pilot, and part of your name is Frank William, so you must be the one.”
As instructed, I had stopped and obtained two passport-sized photographs. I gave those to Miss Gundersen, and walked out of the consulate building fifteen minutes later with a temporary passport in my pocket. I went back to the airport and changed into a suit and bought a ticket for London at the British Overseas Airways counter, paying cash.
I was -told the flight was delayed. It wouldn’t depart until seven that evening.
I changed back into my pilot’s uniform and spent six hours papering Mexico City with my decorative duds. I was $6,500 richer when I flew off to London, and the Mexican federates joined the posse on my tail.
In London I checked into the Royal Gardens Hotel in Kensington, using the name F. W. Adams and representing myself as a TWA pilot on furlough. I used my alternate alias on the premise that London police would soon be receiving queries on Frank W. Abagnale, Jr., also known as Frank Williams, erstwhile Pan Am pilot.
I stayed only a few days in London. I was beginning to feel pressure on me, the same uneasiness that had plagued me in the States. I realized in London that leaving the U.S. hadn’t solved my problem, that Mexican police and Scotland Yard officers were in the same business as cops in New York or Los Angeles -that of catching crooks. And I was a crook.
Given that knowledge, and the small fortune in cash I had stashed away in various places, it would have been prudent of me to live as quietly and discreetly as possible under an assumed name in some out-of-the-way foreign niche. I recognized the merits of such a course, but prudence was a quality I didn’t seem to possess.
I was actually incapable of sound judgment, I realize now, driven by compulsions over which I had no control. I was now living by rationalizations: I was the hunted, the police were the hunters, ergo, the police were the bad guys. I had to steal to survive, to finance my continual flight from the bad guys, consequently I was justified in my illegal means of support. So, after less than a week in England, I papered Piccadilly with some of my piccadillies and flew off to Paris, smug in the irrational assumption that I’d resorted to fraud again in self-defense.
A psychiatrist would have viewed my actions differently. He would have said I wanted to be caught. For now the British police began to put together a dossier on me.
Perhaps I was seeking to be caught. Perhaps I was subconsciously seeking help and my subliminal mind told me the authorities would offer that help, but I had no such conscious thoughts at the time.
I was fully aware that I was on a mad carrousel ride, a merry-go-round whirling ungoverned from which I seemed unable to dismount, but I sure as hell didn’t want cops to stop the whirligig.
I hadn’t been in Paris three hours when I met Monique Lavalier and entered into a relationship that was not only to broaden my venal vistas but, ultimately, was also to destroy my honey hive. Looking back, I owe Monique a debt of thanks. So does Pan Am, although some of the firm’s officials might argue the point.
Monique was a stewardess for Air France. I met her in the Windsor Hotel bar, where she and several dozen other Air France flight-crew people were giving a party for a retiring captain pilot. If I met the honoree, I don’t remember him, for I was mesmerized by Monique. She was as heady and sparkling as the fine champagne being served. I was invited to the party by an Air France first officer who saw me, dressed in my Pan Am attire, checking in at the desk. He promptly accosted me, hustled me into the bar, and my real protests evaporated when he introduced me to Monique.
She had all of Rosalie’s charms and qualities and none of Rosalie’s inhibitions. Apparently I affected Monique the same way she affected me, for we became inseparable during the time I was in Paris and on subsequent visits. Monique, if she had any thoughts of marrying me, never mentioned it, but she did, three days after we met, take me home to present me to her family. The Lavaliers were delightful people, and I was particularly intrigued with Papa Lavalier.
He was a job printer, operator of a small printing shop on the outskirts of Paris. I was immediately seized with an idea for improving upon my check-swindling scam involving phony Pan Am vouchers.
“You know, I have some good connections in the Pan Am business office,” I said casually during lunch. “Maybe I can get Pan Am to give you some printing business.”