When Marele Day boarded a catamaran in Darwin in 1979 she could not have known the skipper was an international fugitive, on the run from an infamous 8m franc bank heist in Paris.
In the pungent heat of that November, she did think, she says now: “Here’s a man from beyond the horizon.”
As the boat headed out into open sea, bound for Sri Lanka, and the safety of Australia receded into the distance, she and a tiny crew of “hippies” were in the hands of Jean Kay, a wanted man. A man who had disappeared so completely that many presumed he was dead. “While everyone was looking for him, a warrant out for his arrest, I knew exactly where he was,” she writes in her memoir Reckless which weaves Kay’s dramatic story in with her own. “I knew, because I was with him.”
Over about three months they would almost starve, be nearly shipwrecked, encounter pirates, exchange possessions for food, be constantly pumping out the bilge from a badly damaged boat and would forge a friendship that would last until the end of his life in 2012. Kay too had seen something in the young woman who had so recklessly stepped on to his boat and sailed away from her life. He saw that she was broken, that they were both lost, and there was an immediate “elemental empathy” between them.
By her own description, Marele Day is a “quiet, self-contained person, a dedicated introvert”. Her life has been one of literary endeavour as an author of the series of Claudia Valentine crime novels and the bestselling Lambs of God that was made into a TV series; and as a mentor and teacher of creative writing. For the past decades she has lived in an old house in the northern rivers region of New South Wales, near where we meet for breakfast. When she is writing, she says, it is a “stoic, monastic” life.
But for all these decades she has been sitting on the epic story of a heedless younger self, “a ghost” she catches sight of when looking back. Day, now, is “horrified” by some of things she did. When she boarded Kay’s boat, she was 32 and in a “wraith-like state” of grief following the death of her partner Tony in a car accident. “I wanted,” she says, “to feel anything except what I was feeling. I probably didn’t care if I died at that point.” Kay, she writes, represented “a call to adventure” at a time when she was distraught.
Jean Kay, on the other hand, was reckless by nature – seemingly invincible. By the time he met Day, the 36-year-old Frenchman had been a soldier in the French army, a mercenary fighting in Yemen and Biafra, a hijacker, one of the last great radical activists, a crusader and a criminal.
Later he would be a “brother to the poor”, setting up soup kitchens in Calcutta with his American heiress third wife.
Kay is still a hero in Bangladesh, after his audacious hijacking of a Pakistan Airlines flight in 1971 to demand medical supplies – 20 tonnes of anti-cholera vaccine – for Bangladeshi refugees. The bomb he said he was carrying in a bag was actually a Bible. While the medicine was being loaded on to the plane, police disguised as airport workers overwhelmed him and he was arrested. That vaccine would eventually be sent to the refugee camps by the Red Cross, and at his trial, writer, activist and former French minister for cultural affairs André Malraux would speak on his behalf: “This man has saved 600,000 lives.”
Kay would tell this story, Days says, “like Humphrey Bogart with a sort of funny half smile”.
His soft spot for Day would be evident in the letters they exchanged over the years after they parted ways in Sri Lanka – she was his “dear little sister”. It was never romantic, she says. It was “from a good distance. If I had been married to him I think it would have been a disaster” – like his other four marriages. Was he charismatic? “Not really.” And then she adds: “I guess you have to have a certain charm to counteract the other things he did.”
In 2010 Kay asked her if she would write about the bank heist he carried out in the mid-70s and the political scandal that followed. He had written books about his life, but was too “biased” to write about this and “a little ashamed” of it. As a crime writer, Day says, “I love a nice bank job.”
The grand larceny had begun as a political act. They had planned to throw the money off the Eiffel Tower as a protest against fiscal corruption. That plan changed. Hervé de Vathaire had been a respectable bourgeois Parisian financial director for the Dassault aviation company, headed by Marcel Dassault, one of France’s richest men. His mistress, a nightclub hostess, and Kay’s girlfriend had shared an apartment where the men played chess and discussed philosophy. Like Day, De Vathaire’s association with Kay reached its apotheosis when he was in a state of grief after the death of his wife. That grief would cause him to cross a line and walk out of his comfortable life.
The plan the four concocted was this: with access to the accounts of Marcel Dassualt, De Vathaire would withdraw 8m francs. He would compile a dossier of company fraud, corruption, bribes to politicians, tax dodging and underhand dealings that would ensure Dassualt would not report the theft to the police. They would stick it to the establishment. Then they would all disappear with Dassault’s money.
But from the beginning of the day on 6 July 1976, when De Vathaire cashed a cheque for 8m francs at the BNP bank, everything went wrong: the suspicious bank manager who followed De Vathaire in his car as he drove away with the money, causing him to dump his vehicle in the middle of the Champs-Élysées; the crucial phone call designed to warn Dassault off reporting the crime which was instead answered by his wife; the rendezvous Kay failed to show at, causing De Vathaire to panic.
“The appeal to me,” says Day, “was the foolproof plan that went wrong. And then the big betrayal of friendship – it scattered those four characters across the world.” She was interested, too, “in what it takes for people to cross the line”.
The press would find out about the dossier and the scandalised headlines would last for a long time. A political scandal would erupt, De Vathaire would go to jail and Kay would sail aimlessly across the seas on his catamaran for four years in order to evade authorities. Nowhere on land was safe. A large chunk of his haul, which he had put in a Swiss bank account, had been frozen.
Fluent in French, Day would diligently follow the trail, overcoming her introversion, collecting documents, arriving unannounced at people’s houses, including following the trail to Brazil. “I think my writing self is the bravest self I have.” She would and did, “go to the ends of the earth for the story. I just kept discovering so many interesting little things.”
She was becoming more and more ambivalent about her old friend Kay. “I wanted to be quite clear-eyed about him, but he’s a complicated character, traumatised by war and things he had gone through. There were loads of times when I was questioning his friendship and even thinking that he was remotely controlling me. The ambivalent feelings came when I started to research the crime and realised, ‘You’re not the nice guy I thought you were.’”
Day had never intended to write about her early adventures. Travelling back to a painful, frightening time, however, “wasn’t as traumatic as I thought, especially Tony’s death. The memories were in my bones, but it was a sweetened wine, it has become bearable and part of my fabric now.”
Reckless is Day’s first book in 10 years. It was interrupted by the serious illness of her partner. She is “squeezed out”, she says. “If this is my last book I am happy to sign off on that.”
That would be a great shame. The story of the Australian novelist and the French hijacker is a humdinger.
Reckless by Marele Day is out now through Ultimo Press
