The Day of the Jackal

19

CLAUDE LEBEL HAD A bad night. It was half past one, and he had barely got to sleep when Caron shook him awake.

‘Chief, I’m sorry about this, but I’ve had an idea. This chap, the Jackal. He’s got a Danish passport, right?’

Lebel shook himself awake.

‘Go on.’

‘Well, he must have got it from somewhere. Either he had it forged or he stole it. But as carrying the passport has entailed a change of hair colouring, it looks as if he stole it.’

‘Reasonable. Go on.’

‘Well, apart from his reconnaissance trip to Paris in July, he has been based in London. So the chances are he stole it in one of those two cities. Now what would a Dane do when his passport was lost or stolen? He’d go to his consulate.’

Lebel struggled off the cot.

‘Sometimes, my dear Lucien, I think you will go far. Get me Superintendent Thomas at his home, then the Danish Consul-General in Paris. In that order.’

He spent another hour on the phone and persuaded both men to leave their beds and get back to their offices. Lebel went back to his cot at nearly three in the morning. At four he was woken by a call from the Préfecture de Police to say that over nine hundred and eighty hotel registration cards filled in by Danes staying in Paris hotels had been brought in by the collections at midnight and 2 am, and sorting of them into categories of ‘probable’, ‘possible’ and ‘others’ had already started.

At six he was still awake and drinking coffee when the call came from the engineers at the DST, to whom he had given his instructions just after midnight. There had been a catch. He took a car and drove down through the early-morning streets to their headquarters with Caron beside him. In a basement communications laboratory they listened to a tape-recording.

It started with a loud click, then a series of whirrs as if someone was dialling seven figures. Then there was the long buzz of a telephone ringing, followed by another click as the receiver was lifted.

A husky voice said, ‘Allo?’

A woman’s voice said, ‘Ici Jacqueline.’

The man’s voice replied, ‘Ici Valmy.’

The woman said quickly, ‘They know he’s a Danish parson. They’re checking through the night the hotel registration cards of all Danes in Paris, with card collections at midnight, two and four o’clock. Then they’re going to visit every one.’

There was a pause, then the man’s voice said, ‘Merci.’ He hung up, and the woman did the same.

Lebel stared at the slowly turning tape spool.

‘You know the number she rang?’ Lebel asked the engineer.

‘Yup. We can work it out from the length of the delay while the dialing disc spins back to zero. The number was MOLITOR 5901.’

‘You have the address?’

The man passed him a slip of paper. Lebel glanced at it.

‘Come on, Lucien. Let’s go and pay a call on Monsieur Valmy.’

‘What about the girl?’

‘Oh, she’ll have to be charged.’

The knock came at seven o’clock. The schoolmaster was brewing himself a cup of breakfast food on the gas-ring. With a frown he turned down the gas and crossed the sitting room to open the door. Four men were facing him. He knew who they were and what they were without being told. The two in uniform looked as if they were going to lunge at him, but the short, mild-looking man gestured for them to remain where they were.

‘We tapped the phone,’ said the little man quietly. ‘You’re Valmy.’

The schoolmaster gave no sign of emotion. He stepped back and let them enter the room.

‘May I get dressed?’ he asked.

‘Yes, of course.’

It took him only a few minutes, as the two uniformed policemen stood over him, to draw on trousers and shirt, without bothering to remove his pyjamas. The younger man in plain clothes stood in the doorway. The older man wandered round the flat, inspecting the piles of books and papers.

‘It’ll take ages to sort through this little lot, Lucien,’ he said, and the man in the doorway grunted.

‘Not our department, thank God.’

‘Are you ready?’ the little man asked the schoolmaster.

‘Yes.’

‘Take him downstairs to the car.’

The Commissaire remained when the other four had left, riffling through the papers on which the schoolmaster had apparently been working the night before. But they were all ordinary school examination papers being corrected. Apparently the man worked from his flat; he would have to stay in the flat all day to remain on the end of the telephone in case the Jackal called. It was ten past seven when the telephone rang. Lebel watched it for several seconds. Then his hand reached out and picked it up.

‘Allo?’

The voice on the other end was flat, toneless.

‘Ici Chacal.’

Lebel thought furiously.

‘Ici Valmy,’ he said. There was a pause. He did not know what else to say.

‘What’s new?’ asked the voice at the other end.

‘Nothing. They’ve lost the trail in Corrèze.’

There was a film of sweat on his forehead. It was vital the man stay where he was for a few hours more. There was a click and the phone went dead. Lebel replaced it and raced downstairs to the car at the kerbside.

‘Back to the office,’ he yelled at the driver.

In the telephone booth in the foyer of a small hotel by the banks of the Seine the Jackal stared out through the glass perplexed. Nothing? There must be more than nothing. This Commissaire Lebel was no fool. They must have traced the taxi-driver in Egletons, and from there to Haute Chalonnière. They must have found the body in the château, and the missing Renault. They must have found the Renault in Tulle, and questioned the staff at the station. They must have …

He strode out of the telephone booth and across the foyer.

‘My bill, if you please,’ he told the clerk. ‘I shall be down in five minutes.’

The call from Superintendent Thomas came in as Lebel entered his office at seven-thirty.

‘Sorry to have been so long,’ said the British detective. ‘It took ages to wake the Danish consular staff and get them back to the office. You were quite right. On July 14th a Danish parson reported the loss of his passport. He suspected it had been stolen from his room at a West End hotel, but could not prove it. Did not file a complaint, to the relief of the hotel manager. Name of Pastor Per Jensen, of Copenhagen. Description, six feet tall, blue eyes, grey hair.’

‘That’s the one, thank you, Superintendent.’ Lebel put the phone down. ‘Get me the Prefecture,’ he told Caron.

The four Black Marias arrived outside the hotel on the Quai des Grands Augustins at 8.30. The police turned room 37 over until it looked as if a tornado had hit it.

‘I’m sorry, Monsieur le Commissaire,’ the proprietor told the rumpled-looking detective who led the raid, ‘Pastor Jensen checked out an hour ago.’

The Jackal had taken a cruising taxi back towards the Gare d’Austerlitz where he had arrived the previous evening, on the grounds that the search for him would have moved elsewhere. He deposited the suitcase containing the gun and the military greatcoat and clothes of the fictitious Frenchman André Martin in the left-luggage office, and retained only the suitcase in which he carried the clothes and papers of American student Marty Schulberg, and the hand-grip with the articles of makeup.

With these, still dressed in the black suit but with a polo sweater covering the dog-collar, he checked into a poky hotel round the corner from the station. The clerk let him fill in his own registration card, being too idle to check the card against the passport of the visitor as regulations required. As a result the registration card was not even in the name of Per Jensen.

Once up in his room, the Jackal set to work on his face and hair. The grey dye was washed out with the aid of a solvent, and the blond reappeared. This was tinted with the chestnut-brown colouring of Marty Schulberg. The blue contact lenses remained in place, but the gold-rimmed glasses were replaced by the American’s heavy-rimmed executive spectacles. The black walking shoes, socks, shirt, bib and clerical suit were bundled into the suitcase, along with the passport of Pastor Jensen of Copenhagen. He dressed instead in the sneakers, socks, jeans, T-shirt and windcheater of the American college boy from Syracuse, New York State.

By mid-morning, with the American’s passport in one breast pocket and a wad of French francs in the other, he was ready to move. The suitcase containing the last remains of Pastor Jensen went into the wardrobe, and the key of the wardrobe went down the flush of the bidet. He used the fire-escape to depart, and was no more heard of in that hotel. A few minutes later he deposited the hand-grip in the left-luggage office at the Gare d’Austerlitz, stuffed the docket for the second case into his back pocket to join the docket of the first suitcase, and went on his way. He took a taxi back to the Left Bank, got out at the corner of Boulevard Saint Michel and the Rue de la Huchette, and vanished into the maelstrom of students and young people who inhabit the rabbit warren of the Latin Quarter of Paris.

Sitting at the back of a smoky dive for a cheap lunch, he started to wonder where he was going to spend the night. He had few doubts that Lebel would have exposed Pastor Per Jensen by this time, and he gave Marty Schulberg no more than twenty-four hours.

‘Damn that man Lebel,’ he thought savagely, but smiled broadly at the waitress and said, ‘Thanks, honey.’

Lebel was back on to Thomas in London at ten o’clock. His request caused Thomas to give a low groan, but he replied courteously enough that he would do everything he could. When the phone went down Thomas summoned the senior inspector who had been on the investigation the previous week. ‘All right, sit down,’ he said. ‘The Frenchies have been back on. It seems they’ve missed him again. Now he’s in the centre of Paris, and they suspect he might have another false identity prepared. We can both start as of now ringing round every consulate in London asking for a list of passports of visiting foreigners reported lost or stolen since July 1st. Forget Negroes and Asiatics. Just stick to Caucasians. In each case I want to know the height of the man. Everybody above five feet eight inches is suspect. Get to work.’

The daily meeting at the Ministry in Paris had been brought forward to two in the afternoon.

Lebel’s report was delivered in his usual inoffensive monotone, but the reception was icy.

‘Damn the man,’ exclaimed the Minister halfway through, ‘he has the luck of the devil!’

‘No, Monsieur le Ministre, it hasn’t been luck. At least, not all of it. He has been kept constantly informed of our progress at every stage. This is why he left Gap in such a hurry, and why he killed the woman at La Chalonnière and left just before the net closed. Every night I have reported my progress to this meeting. Three times we have been within hours of catching him. This morning it was the arrest of Valmy and my inability to impersonate Valmy on the telephone that caused him to leave where he was and change into another identity. But the first two occasions he was tipped off in the early morning after I had briefed this meeting.’

There was a frigid silence round the table.

‘I seem to recall, Commissaire, that this suggestion of yours has been made before,’ said the Minister coldly. ‘I hope you can substantiate it.’

For answer Lebel lifted a small portable tape-recorder on to the table and pressed the starter button. In the silence of the conference room the conversation tapped from the telephone sounded metallic and harsh. When it finished the whole room stared at the machine on the table. Colonel Saint-Clair had gone ashen grey and his hands trembled slightly as he shuffled his papers together into his folder.

‘Whose voice was that?’ asked the Minister finally.

Lebel remained silent. Saint-Clair rose slowly, and the eyes of the room swivelled on to him.

‘I regret to have to inform you … M. le Ministre … that it was the voice of … a friend of mine. She is staying with me at the present time … Excuse me.’

He left the room to return to the palace and write his resignation. Those in the room stared at their hands in silence.

‘Very well, Commissaire.’ The Minister’s voice was very quiet. ‘You may continue.’

Lebel resumed his report, relating his request to Thomas in London to trace every missing passport over the previous fifty days.

‘I hope,’ he concluded, ‘to have a short list by this evening of probably no more than one or two who fit the description we already have of the Jackal. As soon as I know, I shall ask the countries of origin of these tourists in London who lost their passports to provide photographs of those people, for we can be sure the Jackal will by now look more like his new identity than like either Calthrop or Duggan or Jensen. With luck I should have these photographs by noon tomorrow.’

‘For my part,’ said the Minister, ‘I can report on my conversation with President de Gaulle. He has refused point blank to change an item of his itinerary for the future to shield himself from this killer. Frankly, it was to be expected. However, I was able to obtain one concession. The ban on publicity may now be lifted, at least in this respect. The Jackal is now a common murderer. He has slain the Baroness de la Chalonnière in her own home in the course of a burglary of which the objective was her jewellery. He is believed to have fled to Paris and to be hiding here. All right, gentlemen?

‘That is what will be released for the afternoon papers, at least the last editions. As soon as you are quite certain as to the new identity, or choice of two or three alternative identities, under which he is now masquerading Commissaire, you are authorised to release that name or those names to the Press. This will enable the morning papers to up-date the story with a new lead.

‘When the photograph of the unfortunate tourist who lost his passport in London comes through tomorrow morning you can release it to the evening papers, radio and television for a second up-date to the murder-hunt story.

‘Apart from that, the moment we get a name, every policeman and CRS man in Paris will be on the street stopping every soul in sight to examine their papers.’

The Prefect of Police, chief of the CRS and Director of the PJ were taking furious notes. The Minister resumed:

‘The DST will check every sympathiser of the OAS known to them, with the assistance of the Central Records Office. Understood?’

The heads of the DST and the RG office nodded vigorously.

‘The Police Judiciaire will take every one of its detectives off whatever he is on and transfer them to the murder hunt.’

Max Fernet of the PJ nodded.

‘As regards the palace itself, evidently I shall need a complete list of every movement the President intends to take from now on, even if he himself has not been informed of the extra precautions being taken in his interest. This is one of those occasions when we must risk his wrath in his own interest. And, of course, I can rely on the Presidential Security Corps to tighten up the ring round the President as never before. Commissaire Ducret?’

Jean Ducret, head of De Gaulle’s personal bodyguard, inclined his head.

‘The Brigade Criminelle …’ the Minister fixed Commissaire Bouvier with his eye, ‘obviously has a lot of underworld contacts in its pay. I want every one mobilised to keep an eye out for this man, name and description to be supplied. Right?’

Maurice Bouvier nodded gruffly. Privately he was disquieted. He had seen a few manhunts in his time, but this was gigantic. The moment Lebel provided a name and a passport number, not to mention a description, there would be nearly a hundred thousand men from the security forces to the underworld scanning the streets, hotels, bars and restaurants for one man.

‘Is there any other source of information that I have overlooked?’ asked the Minister.

Colonel Rolland glanced quickly at General Guibaud, then at Commissaire Bouvier. He coughed.

‘There is always the Union Corse.’

General Guibaud studied his nails. Bouvier looked daggers. Most of the others looked embarrassed. The Union Corse, brotherhood of the Corsicans, descendants of the Brothers of Ajaccio, sons of the vendetta, was and still is the biggest organised crime syndicate in France. They already ran Marseilles and most of the south coast. Some experts believed them to be older and more dangerous than the Mafia. Never having emigrated like the Mafia to America in the early years of this century, they had avoided the publicity that had since then made the Mafia a household word.

Twice already Gaullism had allied itself with the Union, and both times found it valuable but embarrassing. For the Union always asked for a kickback, usually in a relaxation of police surveillance of their crime rackets. The Union had helped the Allies to invade the south of France in August 1944, and had owned Marseilles and Toulon ever since. It had helped again in the fight against the Algerian settlers and the OAS after April 1961, and for this had spread its tentacles far north and into Paris.

Maurice Bouvier, as a policeman, hated their guts, but he knew Rolland’s Action Service used Corsicans heavily.

‘You think they can help?’ asked the Minister.

‘If this Jackal is as astute as they say,’ replied Rolland, ‘then I would reckon that if anyone in Paris can find him the Union can.’

‘How many of them are there in Paris?’ asked the Minister dubiously.

‘About eighty thousand. Some in the police, Customs officers, CRS, Secret Service, and, of course, the underworld. And they are organised.’

‘Use your discretion,’ said the Minister.

There were no more suggestions.

‘Well, that’s it, then. Commissaire Lebel, all we want from you now is one name, one description, one photograph. After that I give this Jackal six hours of liberty.’

‘Actually, we have three days,’ said Lebel, who had been staring out of the window. His audience looked startled.

‘How do you know that?’ asked Max Fernet.

Lebel blinked rapidly several times.

‘I must apologise. I have been very silly not to see it before. For a week now I have been certain that the Jackal had a plan, and that he had picked his day for killing the President. When he quit Gap, why did he not immediately become Pastor Jensen? Why did he not drive to Valence and pick up the express to Paris immediately? Why did he arrive in France and then spend a week killing time?’

‘Well, why?’ asked someone.

‘Because he has picked his day,’ said Lebel. ‘He knows when he is going to strike. Commissaire Ducret, has the President got any engagements outside the palace today, or tomorrow, or Saturday?’

Ducret shook his head.

‘And what is Sunday, August 25th?’ asked Lebel.

There was a sigh round the table like wind blowing through corn.

‘Of course,’ breathed the Minister, ‘Liberation Day. And the crazy thing is, most of us were here with him on that day, the Liberation of Paris, 1944.’

‘Precisely,’ said Lebel. ‘He is a bit of a psychologist, our Jackal. He knows there is one day of the year that General de Gaulle will never spend elsewhere than here. It is, so to speak, his great day. That is what the assassin has been waiting for.’

‘In that case,’ said the Minister briskly, ‘we have got him. With his source of information gone, there is no corner of Paris that he can hide, no single community of Parisians that will take him in, even unwittingly, and give him protection. We have him. Commissaire Lebel, give us that man’s name.’

Claude Lebel rose and went to the door. The others were rising and preparing to leave for lunch.

‘Oh, there is one thing,’ the Minister called after Lebel, ‘how did you know to tap the telephone line of Colonel Saint-Clair’s private flat?’

Lebel turned in the doorway and shrugged.

‘I didn’t,’ he said, ‘so last night I tapped all your telephones. Good day, gentlemen.’

At five that afternoon, sitting over a beer at a café terrace just off the Place de l’Odéon, his face shielded from the sunlight by dark glasses such as everyone else was wearing, the Jackal got his idea. He got it from watching two men stroll by in the street. He paid for his beer, got up and left. A hundred yards down the street he found what he was looking for, a woman’s beauty shop. He went in and made a few purchases.

At six the evening papers changed their headlines. The late editions carried a screaming banner across the top. Assassin de la Belle Baronne se refugie à Paris.’ There was a photo beneath it of the Baronne de la Chalonnière, taken from a society picture of her five years ago at a party in Paris. It had been found in the archives of a picture agency and the same photo was in every paper. At 6.30, with a copy of France-Soir under his arm, Colonel Rolland entered a small café off the Rue Washington. The dark-jowled barman glanced at him keenly and nodded towards another man in the back of the hall.

The second man came over and accosted Rolland.

‘Colonel Rolland?’

The head of the Action Service nodded.

‘Please follow me.’

He led the way through a door at the back of the café and up to a small sitting room on the first floor, probably the owner’s private dwelling. He knocked, and a voice inside said, ‘Entrez.’

As the door closed behind him, Rolland took the outstretched hand of the man who had risen from an armchair.

‘Colonel Rolland? Enchanté. I am the Capu of the Union Corse. I understand you are looking for a certain man …’

It was eight o’clock when Superintendent Thomas came through from London. He sounded tired. It had not been an easy day. Some consulates had co-operated willingly, others had been extremely difficult.

Apart from women, Negroes, Asiatics and shorties, eight foreign male tourists had lost their passports in London during the previous fifty days, he said. Carefully and succinctly he listed them all, with names, passport numbers and descriptions.

‘Now let’s start to deduct those whom it cannot be,’ he suggested to Lebel. ‘Three lost their passports during periods when we know that the Jackal, alias Duggan, was not in London. We’ve been checking airline bookings and ticket sales right back to July first as well. It seems on July 18th he took the evening flight to Copenhagen. According to BEA he bought a ticket at their counter in Brussels, paying cash, and flew back to England on the evening of August 6th.’

‘Yes, that checks,’ said Lebel. ‘We have discovered that part of that journey out of London was spent in Paris. From July 22nd until July 31st.’

‘Well,’ said Thomas, his voice crackling on the London line, ‘three of the passports were missed while he was not here. We can count them out, yes?’

‘Right,’ said Lebel.

‘Of the remaining five, one is immensely tall, six feet six inches, that’s over two metres in your language. Besides which, he’s Italian, which means that his height on the fly-leaf of his passport is given in metres and centimetres, which would be immediately understood by a French Customs officer who would notice the difference, unless the Jackal is walking on stilts.’

‘I agree, the man must be a giant. Count him out. What of the other four?’ asked Lebel.

‘Well, one is immensely fat, two hundred and forty-two pounds, or well over a hundred kilos. The Jackal would have to be so padded he could hardly walk.’

‘Count him out,’ said Lebel. ‘Who else?’

‘Another is too old. He’s the right height, but over seventy. The Jackal could hardly look that old unless a real expert in theatrical make-up went to work on his face.’

‘Count him out too,’ said Lebel. ‘What about the last two?’

‘One’s Norwegian, the other American,’ said Thomas. ‘Both fit the bill. Tall, wide-shouldered, between twenty and fifty. There are two things that militate against the Norwegian being your man. For one thing he is blond; I don’t think the Jackal, after being exposed as Duggan, would go back to his own hair-colouring, would he? He would look too much like Duggan. The other thing is, the Norwegian reported to his consul that he is certain his passport slipped out of his pocket when he fell fully clothed into the Serpentine while boating with a girlfriend. He swears the passport was in his breast pocket when he fell in, and was not there fifteen minutes later when he climbed out. On the other hand, the American made a sworn statement to the police at London Airport to the effect that his hand-grip with the passport inside it was stolen while he was looking the other way in the main hall of the airport building. What do you think?’

‘Send me,’ said Lebel, ‘all the details of the American Marty Schulberg. ‘I’ll get his photograph from the Passport Office in Washington. And thank you again for all your efforts.’

There was a second meeting in the Ministry at ten that evening. It was the briefest so far. Already an hour previously every department of the apparatus of the security of state had received mimeographed copies of the details of Marty Schulberg, wanted for murder. A photograph was expected before morning, in time for the first editions of the evening papers that would be appearing on the streets by ten in the morning.

The Minister rose.

‘Gentlemen, when we first met, we agreed to a suggestion by Commissaire Bouvier that the identification of the assassin known as the Jackal was basically a task for pure detective work. With hindsight, I would not disagree with that diagnosis. We have been fortunate in having had, for these past ten days, the services of Commissaire Lebel. Despite three changes of identity by the assassin, from Calthrop to Duggan, Duggan to Jensen, and Jensen to Schulberg, and despite a constant leak of information from within this room, he has managed both to identify and, within the limits of this city, to track down our man. We owe him our thanks.’ He inclined his head towards Lebel, who looked embarrassed.

‘However, from now on the task must devolve upon us all. We have a name, a description, a passport number, a nationality. Within hours we shall have a photograph. I am confident that with the forces at your disposal, within hours after that, we shall have our man. Already every policeman in Paris, every CRS man, every detective, has received his briefing. Before morning, or at the latest tomorrow noon, there will be no place to hide for this man.

‘And now let me congratulate you again, Commissaire Lebel, and remove from your shoulders the burden and the strain of this enquiry. We shall not be needing your invaluable assistance in the hours to come. Your task is done, and well done. Thank you.’

He waited patiently. Lebel blinked rapidly several times, and rose from his seat. He bobbed his head at the assembly of powerful men who commanded thousands of underlings and millions of francs. They smiled back at him. He turned and left the room.

For the first time in ten days Commissaire Claude Lebel went home to bed. As he turned the key in the lock and caught the first shrill rebuke of his wife, the clock chimed midnight and it was August 23rd.

20

THE JACKAL ENTERED the bar an hour before midnight. It was dark and for several seconds he could hardly make out the shape of the room. There was a long bar running down the left-hand wall, with an illuminated row of mirrors and bottles behind it. The barman stared at him as the door swung closed with unveiled curiosity.

The shape of the room was long and narrow down the length of the bar, with small tables set on the right-hand wall. At the far end the room broadened into a salon, and here there were larger tables where four or six could sit together. A row of bar stools were against the bar counter. Most of the chairs and stools were occupied by the night’s habitual clientele.

The conversation had stopped at the tables nearest the door while the customers examined him, and the hush spread down the room as others further away caught the glances of their companions and turned to study the tall athletic figure by the door. A few whispers were exchanged, and a giggle or two. He spotted a spare bar-stool at the far end and walked between the tables on the right and the bar on the left to reach it. He swung himself on to the bar-stool. Behind him he caught a quick whisper.

‘Oh, regarde-moi ça! Those muscles, darling I’m going out of my mind.’

The barman slipped down the length of the bar to stand opposite him and get a better look. The carmined lips widened in a coquettish smile.

‘Bonsoir … monsieur.’ There was a chorus of giggles from behind, most of them malicious.

‘Donnez-moi un Scotch.’

The barman waltzed away delighted. A man, a man, a man. Oh there was going to be such a row tonight. He could see the ‘petites folles’ on the far side of the corridor sharpening their claws. Most were waiting for their regular ‘butches’, but some were without a date and had turned up on spec. This new boy, he thought, was going to create an absolute sensation.

The client next to the Jackal turned towards him and gazed with unconcealed curiosity. The hair was a metallic gold, meticulously groomed down on to the forehead in a series of pointed spikes like a young Greek god on an ancient frieze. There the likeness ended. The eyes were mascara’ed, the lips a delicate coral, the cheeks dusted with powder. But the make-up could not conceal the tired lines of an ageing degenerate, nor the mascara the arid hungry eyes.

‘Tu m’invites?’ The voice was a girlish lisp.

The Jackal slowly shook his head. The drag shrugged and turned back to his companion. They went on with their conversation in whispers and squeaks of mock dismay. The Jackal had taken off his windcheater, and as he reached for his drink proffered by the barman, the muscles down the shoulders and back rippled under the T-shirt.

The barman was delighted. A ‘straight’? No, he couldn’t be, he wouldn’t be here. And not a butch looking for a nance, or why had he snubbed poor little Corinne when she asked for a drink. He must be … how marvellous! A handsome young butch looking for an old queen to take him home. What fun there was going to be tonight.

The butches started homing in just before midnight, sitting at the back, surveying the crowd, occasionally beckoning the barman for a whispered conversation. The barman would return to the bar and signal to one of the ‘girls’.

‘Monsieur Pierre wants to have a word with you, darling. Try and look your best, and for God’s sake don’t cry like you did last time.’

The Jackal made his mark shortly after midnight. Two of the men at the back had been eyeing him for several minutes. They were at different tables and occasionally shot each other venomous glances. Both were in late middle age; one was fat, with tiny eyes buried in obese lids and rolls on the back of his neck that flowed over his collar. He looked gross and piggish. The other was slim, elegant, with a vulture’s neck and balding pate across which the few strands of hair were elaborately plastered. He wore a beautifully tailored suit with narrow trousers and a jacket whose sleeves showed a hint of lace at the cuffs. There was a flowing silk foulard artfully knotted at the throat. Something to do with the world of the arts, fashion or hair-styling, the Jackal thought.

The fat one beckoned to the barman and whispered in his ear. A large note slipped into the barman’s tight trousers. He returned across the bar floor.

‘The monsieur wonders if you would care to join him for a glass of champagne,’ whispered the barman, and regarded him archly.

The Jackal put down his whisky.

‘Tell the monsieur,’ he said clearly, so the pansies round the bar could hear, ‘that he does not attract me.’

There were gasps of horror, and several of the flick-knife-thin young men slipped off their bar-stools to come nearer so that they would not miss a word. The barman’s eyes opened wide with horror.

‘He’s offering you champagne, darling. We know him, he’s absolutely loaded. You’ve made a hit.’

For reply the Jackal slid off his bar-stool, took his glass of whisky and sauntered over to the other old queen.

‘Would you permit that I sit here?’ he asked. ‘One is embarrassing me.’

The arty one almost fainted with pleasure. A few minutes later the fat man, still glowering from the insult, left the bar, while his rival, his bony old hand indolently placed across that of the young American at his table, told his new-found friend what absolutely absolutely shocking manners some people had.

The Jackal and his escort left the bar after one o’clock. Several minutes before, the queer, whose name was Jules Bernard, had asked the Jackal where he was staying. With a show of shamefacedness the Jackal admitted that he had nowhere to stay, and that he was flat broke, a student down on his luck. As for Bernard, he could hardly believe his good fortune. As chance would have it, he told his young friend, he had a beautiful flat, very nicely decorated, and quite quiet. He lived alone, no one ever disturbed him and he never had anything to do with the neighbours in the block, because in the past they had been terribly, terribly rude. He would be delighted if young Martin would stay with him while he was in Paris. With another show, this time of intense gratitude, the Jackal had accepted. Just before they left the bar he had slipped into the lavatory (there was only one) and had emerged a few minutes later with his eyes heavily mascara’ed, powder on his cheeks, and lipstick on his mouth. Bernard looked very put out, but concealed it while they were still in the bar.

Outside on the pavement he protested, ‘I don’t like you in that stuff. It makes you look like all those nasty pansies back in there. You’re a very good-looking young boy. You don’t need all that stuff.’

‘Sorry, Jules, I thought it would improve things for you. I’ll wipe it all off when we get home.’

Slightly mollified, Bernard led the way to his car. He agreed to drive his new friend first to the Gare d’Austerlitz to pick up his bags, before going home. At the first cross-roads a policeman stepped into the road and flagged them down. As the policeman’s head came down to the driver’s side window, the Jackal flicked the inside light on. The policeman stared for a minute, then his face drew back with an expression of revulsion.

‘Allez,’ he commanded without further ado. As the car rolled away he muttered, ‘Sales pédés.’

There was one more stop, just before the station, and the policeman asked for papers. The Jackal giggled seductively.

‘Is that all you want?’ he asked archly.

‘Sod off,’ said the policeman and withdrew.

‘Don’t annoy them like that,’ protested Bernard sotto voce. ‘You’ll get us arrested.’

The Jackal withdrew his two suitcases from the left-luggage office without more than a disgusted glance from the clerk in charge; and hefted them into the back of Bernard’s car.

There was one more stop on the way to Bernard’s flat. This time it was by two CRS men, one a sergeant and the other a private, who flagged them down at a street junction a few hundred metres from where Bernard lived. The private came round to the passenger door and stared into the Jackal’s face. Then he recoiled.

‘Oh my God. Where are you two going?’ he growled.

The Jackal pouted.

‘Where do you think, duckie?’

The CRS man screwed up his face in disgust.

‘You bloody pooves make me sick. Move on.’

‘You should have asked to see their identity papers,’ said the sergeant to the private as the tail-lights of Bernard’s car disappeared down the street.

‘Oh, come on, Sarge,’ protested the private, ‘we’re looking for a fellow who screwed the arse off a Baroness and did her in, not a couple of raving nances.’

Bernard and the Jackal were inside the flat by two o’clock. The Jackal insisted on spending the night on the studio couch in the drawing room and Bernard quelled his objections, although he peeked through the bedroom door as the young American undressed. It was evidently going to be a delicate but exciting chase to seduce the iron-muscled student from New York.

In the night the Jackal checked the fridge in the well-appointed and effeminately decorated kitchen, and decided there was enough food for one person for three days, but not for two. In the morning Bernard wanted to go out for fresh milk, but the Jackal detained him, insisting that he preferred tinned milk in his coffee. So they spent the morning indoors talking. The Jackal insisted on seeing the midday television news.

The first item concerned the hunt for the killer of Madame la Baronne de la Chalonnière forty-eight hours earlier. Jules Bernard squealed with horror.

‘Oooh, I can’t stand violence,’ he said.

The next second the screen was filled with a face: a good-looking young face, with chestnut-brown hair and heavy-rimmed glasses, belonging, so the announcer said, to the killer, an American student by the name of Marty Schulberg. Would anybody having seen this man or having any knowledge …

Bernard, who was sitting on the sofa, turned round and looked up. The last thing he thought was that the announcer had not been right, for he had said Schulberg’s eyes were blue; but the eyes looking down at him from behind the steel fingers that gripped his throat were grey …

A few minutes later the door of the hall coat-cupboard closed on the staring distorted features, hair awry and tongue protruding, of Jules Bernard. The Jackal took a magazine out of the rack in the drawing room and settled down to wait for two days.

During those two days Paris was searched as it never had been before. Every hotel from the smartest and most expensive to the sleaziest whorehouse was visited and the guest-list checked; every pension, rooming house, doss-house and hostel was searched. Bars, restaurants, night-clubs, cabarets and cafés were haunted by plain-clothes men, who showed the picture of the wanted man to waiters, barmen and bouncers. The house or flat of every known OAS sympathiser was raided and turned over. More than seventy young men bearing a passing resemblance to the killer were taken for questioning, later to be released with routine apologies, even these only because they were all foreigners and foreigners have to be more courteously treated than indigenes.

Hundreds of thousands in the streets, in taxis and on buses were stopped and their papers examined. Road-blocks appeared on all the major access points for Paris, and late-night strollers were accosted several times within the space of a mile or two.

In the underworld the Corsicans were at work, silently slipping through the haunts of pimps, prostitutes, hustlers, pickpockets, hoodlums, thieves and conmen, warning that anyone withholding information would incur the wrath of the Union, with all that that could entail.

A hundred thousand men in the employ of the state, in various capacities from senior detectives to soldiers and gendarmes, were on the look-out. The estimated fifty thousand of the underworld and its fringe industries vetted the passing faces. Those making a living off the tourist industry by day or night were briefed to keep their eyes open. Students’ cafés, bars and talking clubs, social groups and unions were infiltrated with youthful-looking detectives. Agencies specialising in placing foreign-exchange students with French families were visited and warned.

It was on the evening of August 24th that Commissaire Claude Lebel, who had spent the Saturday afternoon pottering about his garden in a cardigan and patched trousers, was summoned by telephone to report to the Minister in his private office. A car came for him at six.

When he saw the Minister he was surprised. The dynamic chief of the whole of France’s internal security apparatus looked tired and strained. He seemed to have grown older inside forty-eight hours, and there were lines of sleeplessness round his eyes. He gestured Lebel to a chair opposite his desk, and seated himself in the swivel chair in which he liked to be able to spin round from the window with its view of the Place Beauvau back to the desk. This time he did not look out of the window.

‘We can’t find him,’ he said briefly. ‘He’s vanished, just disappeared off the face of the earth. The OAS people, we are convinced, just don’t know where he is any more than we do. The underworld hasn’t had sight nor sound of him. The Union Corse reckons he can’t be in town.’

He paused and sighed, contemplating the little detective across the desk, who blinked several times but said nothing.

‘I don’t think we ever really had any idea what kind of a man you have been pursuing these past two weeks. What do you think?’

‘He’s here, somewhere,’ said Lebel. ‘What are the arrangements like for tomorrow?’

The Minister looked as if he was in physical pain.

‘The President won’t change a thing or permit any of his planned itinerary to be altered. I spoke to him this morning. He was not pleased. So tomorrow remains the same as published. He will re-kindle the Eternal Flame under the Arc de Triomphe at ten. High Mass in Notre Dame at eleven. Private meditation at the shrine of the martyred resistants at Mont-Valérien at 12.30, then back to the palace for lunch, and siesta. One ceremony in the afternoon, presentation of Médailles de la Libération to a group of ten veterans of the Resistance whose services to the resistance are being rather belatedly recognised.

‘That’s at four o’clock on the square in front of the Gare de Montparnasse. He chose the place himself. As you know work has already started on the foundations for the new station, which will be set back five hundred metres from the present site. Where the station buildings now stand is due to become an office block and shopping precinct. If construction goes ahead according to plan it may be the last Liberation Day that the old façade of the station remains untouched.’

‘What about crowd control?’ asked Lebel.

‘Well, we’ve all been working on it. Crowds are to be kept back at every ceremony further than ever before. Steel crowd barriers go up several hours before each ceremony, then the area inside the barrier ring is searched from top to bottom, including the sewers. Every house and flat is to be searched. Before each ceremony and during it there will be watchers with guns on every nearby roof-top surveying the opposite roofs and windows. Nobody gets through the barriers except officials, and those taking part in the ceremonies.

‘We’ve gone to some extraordinary lengths this time. Even the cornices of Notre Dame, inside and out, will be infiltrated by policemen, right up on the roof and among the spires. All the priests taking part in Mass will be searched for concealed weapons, and the acolytes and choirboys. Even the police and CRS are having special lapel badges issued tomorrow morning at dawn, in case he tries to masquerade as a security man.

‘We’ve spent the past twenty-four hours secretly slipping bullet-proof windows into the Citroën the President will ride in. Incidentally, don’t breathe a word of that; not even the President must know. He’d be furious. Marroux will drive him as usual, and he’s been told to speed up the pace faster than usual, in case our friend tries for a snap shot at the car. Ducret has drafted in a posse of especially tall officers and officials to try and hedge the General round without him noticing.

‘Apart from that, everybody who comes within two hundred metres of him is going to be frisked—no exceptions. It will create havoc with the Diplomatic Corps, and the Press is threatening a revolt. All press and diplomatic passes are going to be suddenly changed at dawn tomorrow in case the Jackal tries to slip in as one of them. Obviously, anyone with a package or a lengthy-looking object will be hustled away as soon as spotted. Well, have you any ideas?’

Lebel thought for a moment, twisting his hands between his knees like a schoolboy trying to explain himself to his headmaster. In truth he found some of the workings of the Fifth Republic rather overpowering for a cop who had started on the beat and had spent his life catching criminals by keeping his eyes open a bit wider than anyone else.

‘I don’t think,’ he said at length, ‘that he will risk getting killed himself. He is a mercenary, he kills for money. He wants to get away and spend his money. And he has worked out his plan in advance, during his reconnaissance trip here in the last eight days of July. If he had any doubts, either about the success of the operation or of his chances of getting away, he would have turned back before now.

‘So he must have something up his sleeve. He could work out for himself that on one day of the year, Liberation Day, General de Gaulle’s pride would forbid him staying at home, no matter what the personal danger. He could probably have worked out that the security precautions, particularly after his presence had been discovered, would be as intensive as you describe, Monsieur le Ministre. And yet he didn’t turn back.’

Lebel rose and, despite the breach of protocol, paced up and down the room.

‘He didn’t turn back. And he won’t turn back. Why? Because he thinks he can do it, and get away. Therefore he must have hit on some idea that nobody else has ever thought of. It has to be a bomb triggered by remote control, or a rifle. But a bomb could well be discovered, and that would ruin everything. So it’s a gun. That was why he needed to enter France by car. The gun was in the car, probably welded to the chassis or inside the panelling.’

‘But he can’t get a gun near De Gaulle!’ cried the Minister. ‘Nobody can get near him, except a few, and they are being searched. How can he get a gun inside the circle of crowd barriers?’

Lebel stopped pacing and faced the Minister. He shrugged.

‘I don’t know. But he thinks he can, and he’s not failed yet, despite having some bad luck and some good. Despite being betrayed and tracked by two of the best police forces in the world, he’s here. With a gun, in hiding, perhaps with yet another face and identity card. One thing is certain, Minister. Wherever he is, he must emerge tomorrow. When he does he must be spotted for what he is. And that comes down to one thing—the old detective’s adage of keeping your eyes open.

‘There’s nothing more I can suggest as regards the security precautions, Minister. They seem perfect, indeed overwhelming. So may I just wander round each of the ceremonies and see if I can spot him? It’s the only thing left to do.’

The Minister was disappointed. He had hoped for some flash of inspiration, some brilliant revelation from the detective whom Bouvier had described a fortnight earlier as the best in France. And the man had suggested he keep his eyes open. The Minister rose.

‘Of course,’ he said coldly. ‘Please do just that, Monsieur le Commissaire.’

Later that evening the Jackal laid out his preparations in Jules Bernard’s bedroom. On the bed were the pair of scuffed black shoes, grey woollen socks, trousers and open-necked shirt, long military greatcoat with a single row of campaign ribbons, and black beret of the French war veteran André Martin. He tossed on top the false papers, forged in Brussels, that gave the wearer of the clothes his new identity.

Beside these he laid out the light webbing harness he had had made in London, and the five steel tubes that looked like aluminium and which contained the stock, breech, barrel, silencer and telescopic sight of his rifle. Lying beside them was the black rubber stud into which were stuffed five explosive bullets.

He took two of the bullets out of the rubber, and using the pliers from the tool-box under the kitchen sink carefully prised the noses off them. From inside each he slid the small pencil of cordite they contained. These he kept; the cases of the now useless cartridges he threw in the ash-can. He still had three bullets left, and these would suffice.

He had not shaved for two days, and a light golden stubble covered his chin. This he would shave off badly with the cut-throat razor he had bought on his arrival in Paris. Also lying on the bathroom shelf were the flasks of after-shave that in fact contained the grey hair-tint he had once used already for Pastor Jensen, and the solvent spirit. He had already washed out the chestnut-brown tint of Marty Schulberg, and sitting in front of the bathroom mirror he cut his own blond hair shorter and shorter, until the tufts stuck up from the top of the head in an untidy brush-cut.

He made one last check to see that all the preparations for the morning were in order, then cooked himself an omelette, settled in front of the television and watched a variety show until it was time for bed.

Sunday, August 25th, 1963, was scorching hot. It was the height of the summer heatwave, as it had been just one year and three days previously when Lieutenant-Colonel Jean-Marie Bastien-Thiry and his men had tried to shoot Charles de Gaulle at the roundabout at Petit-Clamart. Although none of the plotters of that evening in 1962 realised it, their action had set off a chain of events that were only to terminate once and for all on the afternoon of the summer Sunday that now blazed down on a city on holiday.

But if Paris was on holiday to celebrate its own liberation from the Germans nineteen years earlier, there were seventy-five thousand among them who sweated in blue-serge blouses and two-piece suits trying to keep the rest in order. Heralded by ecstatic columns of press publicity, the ceremonies to mark the day of liberation were massively attended. Most of those who came, however, hardly had a glimpse of the Head of State as he stalked through solid phalanxes of guards and policeman to officiate at the commemorations.

Apart from being boxed in from public view by a cohort of officers and civil servants who, although delighted to be asked to be in attendance, failed to notice that their one common characteristic was their height, and that each in his way served as a human shield for the President, General de Gaulle was also surrounded by all four of his bodyguards.

Fortunately his short-sightedness, accentuated by his refusal to wear glasses in public, prevented him from noting that behind each elbow and flanking him on each side were the huge bulks of Roger Tessier, Paul Comiti, Raymond Sasia and Henri d’Jouder.

They were known to the Press as ‘gorillas’ and many thought this was simply a tribute to their looks. In fact there was a practical reason for their manner of walking. Each man was an expert in combat of all forms, with heavily muscled chest and shoulders. With muscles tensed, the dorsals forced the arms out from the sides so that the hands swung well away from the body. To add to this, each man carried his favourite automatic under his left armpit, accentuating the gorilla-like stance. They walked with hands half-open, ready to sweep the gun out from its shoulder-holster and start firing at the first hint of trouble.

But there was none. The ceremony at the Arc de Triomphe went off exactly as planned, while all along the great amphitheatre of roofs that overlook the Place de I’Etoile hundreds of men with binoculars and rifles crouched behind chimney stacks, watched and guarded. As the presidential motorcade finally swept down the Champs Elysées towards Notre Dame, they all breathed a sigh of relief and started to come down again.

At the cathedral it was the same. The Cardinal Archbishop of Paris officiated, flanked by prelates and clergy, all of whom had been watched as they robed. In the organ loft two men perched with rifles (not even the Archbishop knew they were there) and watched the gathering below. The worshippers were heavily infiltrated by plain-clothes police, who did not kneel, nor close their eyes, but who prayed as fervently as the rest the old policeman’s prayer: ‘Please, dear Lord, not while I’m on duty.’

Outside, several bystanders, even though they were two hundred metres from the door of the cathedral, were hustled away when they reached inside their jackets. One had been scratching his armpit, the other going for a cigarette case.

And still nothing happened. There was no crack of a rifle from a roof-top, no muffled crump of a bomb. The police even scanned each other, making sure that their colleagues had the indispensable lapel badge issued that very morning so that the Jackal could not copy it and masquerade as a policeman. One CRS man who lost his badge was arrested on the spot and hustled to a waiting van. His submachine carbine was taken from him, and it was not until the evening that he was released. Even then it took twenty of his colleagues, who personally recognised the man and vouched for him, to convince the police that he was who he said he was.

At Mont-Valérien the atmosphere was electric, although if the President noticed it he gave no sign. In this working-class suburb the security men had estimated that while actually inside the ossuary the General would be safe. But while his car was wending its way through the narrow streets approaching the prison, slowing down for the corners, the assassin might make his attempt.

In fact, at that moment, the Jackal was elsewhere.

Pierre Valremy was fed up. He was hot, his blouse was sticking to his back, the strap of his submachine carbine chafed his shoulder through the soaking material, he was thirsty and it was just on lunchtime, which he knew he was going to miss. He was beginning to regret joining the CRS at all.

It had been all very well when he was laid off redundant from his factory job at Rouen and the clerk at the Labour Exchange had pointed to the poster on the wall of a beaming young man in the uniform of the CRS who was telling the world that he had a job with a future and prospects of an interesting life. The uniform in the picture looked as if it had been tailored by Balenciaga himself. So Valremy had enlisted.

No one had mentioned the life in the barracks that looked like a prison, which was just what it had once been. Nor the drill, nor the night exercises, nor the itchy serge blouse, nor the hours of waiting on street corners in bitter cold or blazing heat for the Great Arrest that never took place. People’s papers were always in order, their missions inevitably mundane and harmless, and it was enough to drive anyone to drink.

And now Paris, the first trip out of Rouen he had ever made. He had thought he might see the City of Lights. Not a hope, not with Sergeant Barbichet in charge of the squad. Just more of the same. ‘See that crowd barrier, Valremy. Well, stand by it, watch it, see it don’t move, and don’t let nobody through it unless they’re authorised, see? Yours is a responsible job, me lad.’

Responsible indeed! Mind you, they had gone a bit wild over this Paris Liberation Day, bringing in thousands from the provinces to supplement the Paris troops. There had been men from ten different cities in his billet last night, and the Paris men had a rumour someone was expecting something to happen, else why all the fuss. Rumours, there were always rumours. They never came to anything.

Valremy turned round and looked back up the Rue de Rennes. The crowd barrier he was guarding was one of a chain stretched across the street from one building to the other, about two hundred and fifty metres up the street from the Place du 18 Juin. The façade of the railway station was another two hundred metres beyond the square, fronted by the forecourt in which the ceremony was to take place. In the distance he could see some men inside the forecourt, marking out the places where the old veterans would stand, and the officials, and the band of the Garde Républicaine. Three hours to go. Jesus, would it never end?

Along the line of barriers the first of the public were beginning to assemble. Some of them had fantastic patience, he thought. Fancy waiting in this heat for hours just to see a crowd of heads three hundred metres away and know that De Gaulle was in the middle of that lot, somewhere. Still, they always came when Old Charlie was about.

There were about a hundred or two hundred scattered along the barriers when he saw the old man. He was hobbling down the street looking like he was never going to make it another half-mile. The black beret was stained with sweat and the long greatcoat swished below his knee. There was a row of medals dangling and clinking on his chest. Several of the crowd by the barrier cast him glances full of pity.

These old codgers always kept their medals, Valremy thought, like it was the only thing they had in life. Well, maybe it was the only thing left for some of them. Especially when you had had one of your legs shot off. Maybe, thought Valremy watching the old man hobbling down the street, he had run around a bit when he was young, when he had two legs to run on. Now he looked like a smashed-up old seagull the CRS man had seen once on a visit to the seaside at Kermadec.

Christ, fancy having to spend the rest of your days limping about with one leg, propping yourself up on an aluminium crutch. The old man hobbled up to him.

‘Je peux passer?’ he asked timidly.

‘Come on, Dad, let’s have a look at your papers.’

The old war veteran fumbled inside his shirt, which could have done with a wash. He produced two cards which Valremy took and looked at. André Martin, French citizen, aged fifty-three, born at Colmar, Alsace; resident in Paris. The other card was for the same man. Written across the top of it were the words: ‘Mutilé de Guerre.’

Well, you’re mutilated all right, mate, thought Valremy.

He studied the photographs on each card. They were of the same man, but taken at different times. He looked up.

‘Take off your beret.’

The old man took it off and crumpled it in his hand. Valremy compared the face in front of him with those in the photograph. It was the same. The man in front of him looked sick. He had cut himself shaving, and small bits of toilet paper were stuck on the cuts where specks of blood still showed. The face was grey-coloured and greasy with a film of sweat. Above the forehead the tufts of grey hair stuck up at all angles, disarranged by the act of sweeping off the beret. Valremy handed the cards back.

‘What do you want to go down there for?’

‘I live there,’ said the old man. ‘I’m retired on my pension. I have an attic.’

Valremy snatched the cards back. The identity card gave his address as 154 Rue de Rennes, Paris 6 ème. The CRS man looked at the house above his head. Written over the door was the number 132. Fair enough, 154 must be further down the road. No orders against letting an old man go home.

‘All right, pass through. But don’t get into no mischief. Big Charlie’s going to be along in a couple of hours.’

The old man smiled, putting away his cards and nearly stumbling on his one leg and crutch, so that Valremy reached out to steady him.

‘I know. One of my old mates is getting his medal. I got mine two years ago …’ he tapped the Médaille de la Libération on his chest … ‘but only from the Minister of the Armed Forces.’

Valremy peered at the medal. So that’s the Libération Medal. Hell of a small thing to get a leg shot off for. He remembered his authority and nodded curtly. The old man hobbled away down the street. Valremy turned to stop another chancer who was trying to slip through the barrier.

‘All right, all right, that’s enough of that. Stay back behind the barrier.’

The last thing he saw of the old soldier was the flash of the greatcoat disappearing into a doorway at the far end of the street next to the square.

Madame Berthe looked up startled as the shadow fell over her. It had been a trying day, what with policemen looking in all the rooms, and she didn’t know what the tenants would have said if they had been there. Fortunately all but three were away for the August holidays.

When the police had gone she had been able to settle back in her usual place in the doorway for a bit of quiet knitting. The ceremony due to take place a hundred yards away across the square in the station forecourt in two hours interested her not in the slightest.

‘Excusez-moi, madame … I was wondering … perhaps a glass of water. It is terribly hot waiting for the ceremony …’

She took in the face and form of an old man in a greatcoat such as her long-dead husband had once worn, with medals swinging below the lapel on the left breast. He leaned heavily on a crutch, one single leg protruding from beneath the greatcoat. His face looked haggard and sweaty. Madame Berthe bundled up her knitting and stuffed it into the pocket of her apron.

‘Oh, monpauv’, monsieur. Walking around like that … and in this heat. The ceremony is not for two hours yet. You are early … Come in, come in …’

She bustled off towards the glass-fronted door of her parlour at the back of the hall to get a glass of water. The war veteran hobbled after her.

Above the running of the water from the kitchen tap she did not hear the door close on the outer lobby; she hardly felt the fingers of the man’s left hand slide round her jawbone from behind. And the crash of the bunched knuckles under the mastoid bone on the right side of her head just behind the ear was completely unexpected. The image of the running tap and the filling glass in front of her exploded into fragments of red and black, and her inert form slid soundlessly to the floor.

The Jackal opened the front of his coat, reached for the waist and unbuckled the harness that kept his right leg strapped up under his buttocks. As he straightened the leg and flexed the cramped knee his face tightened with pain. He spent several minutes allowing the blood to flow back into the calf and ankle of the leg before putting any weight on it.

Five minutes later Madame Berthe was trussed up hand and foot with the clothes line from beneath the sink, and her mouth was covered with a large square of sticking plaster. He put her in the scullery and shut the door.

A search of the parlour revealed the keys of the flat in the table drawer. Re-buttoning the coat, he took up the crutch, the same on which he had hobbled through the airports of Brussels and Milan twelve days earlier, and peered outside. The hall was empty. He left the parlour, locked the door after him, and loped up the stairs.

On the sixth floor he chose the flat of Mademoiselle Beranger and knocked. There was no sound. He waited and knocked again. From neither that flat nor the next door one of M. and Mme Charrier came a sound. Taking the keys he searched for the name Beranger, found it and entered the flat, closing and locking the door after him.

He crossed to the window and looked out. Across the road, on the roof-tops of the blocks opposite, men in blue uniforms were moving into position. He was only just in time. At arm’s length he unclipped the window lock and swung both halves of the frame quietly inwards until they came back against the inside of the living-room wall. Then he stepped well back. A square shaft of light fell through the window on to the carpet. By contrast the rest of the room appeared darker.

If he stayed away from that square of light, the watchers opposite would see nothing.

Stepping to the side of the window, keeping to the shadows of the withdrawn curtains, he found he could look downwards and sideways into the forecourt of the station a hundred and thirty metres away. Eight feet back from the window and well to one side, he set up the living-room table, removing the tablecloth and pot of plastic flowers and replacing them with a pair of cushions from the armchair. These would form his firing rest.

He stripped off his greatcoat and rolled up his sleeves. The crutch came to pieces section by section. The black rubber ferrule on the end was unscrewed and revealed the shining percussion caps of his three remaining shells. The nausea and sweating inspired by eating the cordite out of the other two was only beginning to leave him.

The next section of the crutch was unscrewed, and from it slid the silencer. The second section came away to disgorge the telescopic sight. The thickest part of the crutch, where the two upper supports merged into the main stem, revealed the breech and barrel of the rifle.

From the Y-shaped frame above the join, he slid the two steel rods which, when fitted together would become the frame of the rifle’s stock. Lastly the padded armpit support of the crutch; this alone concealed nothing except the trigger of the rifle embedded in the padding. Otherwise the armpit support slid on to the stock of the gun as it was, to become the shoulder-guard.

Lovingly and meticulously he assembled the rifle—breech and barrel, upper and lower component of the stock, shoulder-guard, silencer and trigger. Lastly he slid on the telescopic sight and clipped it fast.

Sitting on a chair behind the table, leaning slightly forward with the gun barrel resting on top of the upper cushion, he squinted through the telescope. The sunlit square beyond the windows and fifty feet down leapt into focus. The head of one of the men still marking out the standing positions for the forthcoming ceremony passed across the line of sight. He tracked the target with the gun. The head appeared large and clear, as large as a melon had looked in the forest glade in the Ardennes.

Satisfied at last, he lined the three cartridges up on the edge of the table like soldiers in a row. With finger and thumb he slid back the rifle’s bolt and eased the first shell into the breech. One should be enough, but he had two spare. He pushed the bolt forward again until it closed on the base of the cartridge, gave a half-twist and locked it. Finally he laid the rifle carefully among the cushions and fumbled for cigarettes and matches.

Drawing hard on his first cigarette, he leant back to wait for another hour and three-quarters.

21

COMMISSAIRE CLAUDE LEBEL FELT AS if he had never had a drink in his life. His mouth was dry and the tongue stuck to the roof of it as though it were welded there. Nor was it just the heat that caused this feeling. For the first time in many many years he was really frightened. Something, he was sure, was going to happen during that afternoon, and he still could find no clue as to how or when.

He had been at the Arc de Triomphe that morning, and at Notre Dame and at Mont-Valérien. Nothing had happened. Over lunch with some of the men from the committee which had met for the last time at the Ministry that day at dawn he had heard the mood change from tenseness and anger to something almost of euphoria. There was only one more ceremony to go, and the Place du 18 Juin, he was assured, had been scoured and sealed off.

‘He’s gone,’ said Rolland, as the group who had lunched together at a brasserie not far from the Elysée Palace while General de Gaulle lunched inside it, emerged into the sunlight. ‘He’s gone, pissed off. And a very wise thing too. He’ll surface somewhere, sometime, and my boys will get him.’

Now Lebel prowled disconsolately round the edge of the crowd held two hundred metres down the Boulevard de Montparnasse, so far away from the square that no one could see what was going on. Each policeman and CRS man he spoke to on the barriers had the same message. No one had passed through since the barriers went up at twelve.

The main roads were blocked, the side roads were blocked, the alleys were blocked. The roof-tops were watched and guarded, the station itself, honeycombed with officers and attics facing down on to the forecourt, was crawling with security men. They perched atop the great engine sheds, high above the silent platforms from which all trains had been diverted for the afternoon to the Gare Saint-Lazare. Inside the perimeter every building had been scoured from basement to attic. Most of the flats were empty, their occupants away on holiday at the seaside or in the mountains.

In short, the area of the Place du 18 Juin was sealed off, as Valentin would say, ‘tighter than a mouse’s arsehole’. Lebel smiled at the memory of the language of the Auvergnat policeman. Suddenly the grin was wiped off. Valentin had not been able to stop the Jackal either.

He slipped through the side streets, showing his police pass to take a short cut, and emerged in the Rue de Rennes. It was the same story; the road was blocked off two hundred metres from the square, the crowds massed behind the barriers, the street empty except for the patrolling CRS men. He started asking again.

Seen anyone? No, sir. Anyone been past, anyone at all? No, sir. Down in the forecourt of the station he heard the band of the Garde Républicaine tuning their instruments. He glanced at his watch. The General would be arriving any time now. Seen anybody pass, anyone at all? No, sir. Not this way. All right, carry on.

Down in the square he heard a shouted order, and from one end of the Boulevard de Montparnasse a motorcade swept into the Place du 18 Juin. He watched it turn into the gates of the station forecourt, police erect and at the salute. All eyes down the street were watching the sleek black cars. The crowd behind the barrier a few yards from him strained to get through. He looked up at the roof-tops. Good boys. The watchers of the roof ignored the spectacle below them; their eyes never stopped flickering across the roof-tops and windows across the road from where they crouched on the parapets, watching for a slight movement at a window.

He had reached the western side of the Rue de Rennes. A young CRS man stood with his feet planted squarely in the gap where the last steel crowd barrier abutted the wall of number 132. He flashed his card at the man, who stiffened.

‘Anybody passed this way?’

‘No, sir.’

‘How long have you been here?’

‘Since twelve o’clock, sir, when the street was closed.’

‘Nobody been through that gap?’

‘No, sir. Well … only the old cripple, and he lives down there.’

‘What cripple?’

‘Oldish chap, sir. Looked sick as a dog. He had his ID card, and Mutilé de Guerre card. Address given as 154 Rue de Rennes. Well, I had to let him through, sir. He looked all in, real sick. Not surprised with him in that greatcoat, and in this weather and all. Daft, really.’

‘Greatcoat?’

‘Yessir. Great long coat. Military like the old soldiers used to wear. Too hot for this weather, though.’

‘What was wrong with him?’

‘Well, he was too hot, wasn’t he, sir?’

‘You said he was a war-wounded. What was wrong with him?’

‘One leg, sir. Only one leg. Hobbling along he was, on a crutch.’

From down in the square the first clear peals from the trumpets sounded. ‘Come, children of the Motherland, the day of glory has arrived …’ Several of the crowd took up the familiar chant of the Marseillaise.

‘Crutch?’ To himself, Lebel’s voice seemed a small thing, very far away. The CRS man looked at him solicitously.

‘Yessir. A crutch, like one-legged men always have. An aluminium crutch …’

Lebel was haring off down the street yelling at the CRS man to follow him.

They were drawn up in the sunlight in a hollow square. The cars were parked nose to tail along the wall of the station façade. Directly opposite the cars, along the railings that separated the forecourt from the square, were the ten recipients of the medals to be distributed by the Head of State. On the east side of the forecourt were the officials and diplomatic corps, a solid mass of charcoal-grey suiting, with here and there the red rosebud of the Legion of Honour.

The western side was occupied by the serried red plumes and burnished casques of the Garde Républicaine, the bandsmen standing a little out in front of the guard of honour itself.

Round one of the cars up against the station façade clustered a group of protocol officials and palace staff. The band started to play the Marseillaise.

The Jackal raised the rifle and squinted down into the forecourt. He picked the war veteran nearest to him, the man who would be the first to get his medal. He was a short, stocky man, standing very erect. His head came deafly into the sight, almost a complete profile. In a few minutes, facing this man, about one foot taller, would be another face, proud, arrogant, topped by a khaki képi adorned with two gold stars on the front.

‘Marchons, marchons, à la Victoire …’ Boom-ba-boom. The last notes of the National Anthem died away, replaced by a great silence. The roar of the Commander of the Guard echoed across the station yard. ‘General Salute … Prese-e-e-ent arms.’ There were three precise crashes as white-gloved hands smacked in unison across rifle-butts and magazines, and heels came down together. The crowd around the car parted, falling back in to halves. From the centre a single tall figure emerged and began to stalk towards the line of war veterans. At fifty metres from them the rest of the crowd stopped, except the Minister of Ancient Combattants, who would introduce the veterans to their President, and an official carrying a velvet cushion with a row of ten pieces of metal and ten coloured ribbons on it. Apart from these two, Charles de Gaulle marched forward alone.

‘This one?’

Lebel stopped, panting, and gestured towards a doorway.

‘I think so, sir. Yes, this was it, second from the end. This was where he came in.’

The little detective was gone down the hallway, and Valremy followed him, not displeased to be out of the street, where their odd behaviour in the middle of a serious occasion was attracting disapproving frowns from the higher brass standing at attention against the railings of the station yard. Well, if he was put on the carpet, he could always say that the funny little man had posed as a Commissaire of Police, and that he had been trying to detain him.

When he got into the hall the detective was shaking the door of the concierge’s parlour.

‘Where’s the concierge?’ he yelled.

‘I don’t know, sir.’

Before he could protest, the little man had smashed the frosted-glass panel with his elbow, reached inside and opened the door.

‘Follow me,’ he called, and dashed inside.

Too bloody right I’m going to follow you, thought Valremy. You’re off your chump.

He found the little detective at the door of the scullery. Looking over the man’s shoulder he saw the concierge tied up on the floor, still unconscious.

‘Blimey.’ Suddenly it occurred to him the little man was not joking. He was a police commissaire, and they were after a criminal. This was the big moment he had always dreamed of, and he wished he was back in barracks.

‘Top floor,’ shouted the detective, and was gone up the stairs with a speed that surprised Valremy, who pounded after him. unslinging his carbine as he ran.

The President of France paused before the first man in the line of veterans and stooped slightly to listen to the Minister explain who he was and what was his citation for valour shown on that day nineteen years before. When the Minister had finished he inclined his head towards the veteran, turned towards the man with the cushion, and took the proffered medal. As the band began a softly played rendering of ‘La Marjolaine’ the tall General pinned the medal on to the rounded chest of the elderly man in front of him. Then he stepped back for the salute.

Six floors up and a hundred and thirty metres away the Jackal held the rifle very steady and squinted down the telescopic sight. He could see the features quite clearly, the brow shaded by the peak of the képi, the peering eyes, the prow-like nose. He saw the raised saluting hand come down from the peak of the cap, the crossed wires of the sight were spot on the exposed temple. Softly, gently, he squeezed the trigger …

A split second later he was staring down into the station forecourt as if he could not believe his eyes. Before the bullet had passed out of the end of the barrel, the President of France had snapped his head forward without warning. As the assassin watched in disbelief, he solemnly planted a kiss on each cheek of the man in front of him. As he himself was a foot taller, he had had to bend forward and down to give the traditional kiss of congratulation that is habitual among the French and certain other nations, but which baffles Anglo-Saxons.

It was later established the bullet had passed a fraction of an inch behind the moving head. Whether the President heard the whipcrack from the sound barrier, travelling on a narrow line down the flight path of the bullet, is not known. He gave no sign of it. The Minister and the official heard nothing: neither did those fifty metres away.

The slug tore into the sun-softened tarmacadam of the forecourt, its disintegration taking place harmlessly inside more than an inch of tar. ‘La Marjolaine’ played on. The President, after planting the second kiss, straightened up and moved sedately on towards the next man.

Behind his gun, the Jackal started to swear, softly, venomously. He had never missed a stationary target at a hundred and fifty yards in his life before. Then he calmed down; there was still time. He tore open the breech of the rifle, ejecting the spent cartridge to fall harmlessly on to the carpet. Taking the second one off the table he pushed it home and closed the breech.

Claude Lebel arrived panting on the sixth floor. He thought his heart was going to come out of his chest and roll all over the landing. There were two doors leading towards the front of the building. He looked from one to the other as the CRS man joined him, submachine carbine held on his hip, pointing forward. As Lebel hesitated in front of the two doors, from behind one of them came a low but distinct ‘Phut’. Lebel pointed at the door lock with his forefinger.

‘Shoot it off,’ he ordered, and stepped back. The CRS man braced himself on both feet and fired. Bits of wood, metal and spent, flattened slugs flew in all directions. The door buckled and swung drunkenly inwards. Valremy was first into the room, Lebel on his heels.

Valremy could recognise the grey tufts of hair, but that was all. The man had two legs, the greatcoat was gone, and the forearms that gripped the rifle were on a strong young man. The gunman gave him no time; rising from his seat behind the table, swinging in one smooth motion at a half-crouch, he fired from the hip. The single bullet made no sound; the echoes of Valremy’s gun-burst were still ringing in his ears. The slug from the rifle tore into his chest, struck the sternum and exploded. There was a feeling of tearing and ripping and of great sudden stabs of pain; then even they were gone. The light faded as if summer had turned to winter.

A piece of carpet came up and smacked him on the cheek, except that it was his cheek that was lying on the carpet. The loss of feeling swept up through the thighs and belly, then the chest and neck. The last thing he remembered was a salty taste in the mouth, like he had had after bathing in the sea at Kermadec, and a one-legged old gull sitting on a post. Then it was all dark.

Above his body Claude Lebel stared into the eyes of the other man. He had no trouble with his heart; it did not seem to be pumping any more.

‘Chacal,’ he said. The other man said simply, ‘Lebel.’ He was fumbling with the gun, tearing open the breech. Lebel saw the glint as the cartridge case dropped to the floor. The man swept something off the table and stuffed it into the breech. His grey eyes were still staring at Lebel.

He’s trying to fix me rigid, thought Lebel with a sense of unrealism. He’s going to shoot. He’s going to kill me.

With an effort he dropped his eyes to the floor. The boy from the CRS had fallen sideways: his carbine had slipped from his fingers and lay at Lebel’s feet. Without conscious thought he dropped to his knees, grabbed the MAT 49, swinging it upwards with one hand, the other clawing for the trigger. He heard the Jackal snap home the breech of the rifle as he found the trigger of the carbine. He pulled it.

The roar of the exploding ammunition filled the small room and was heard in the square. Later press enquiries were met with the explanation that it had been a motor-cycle with a faulty silencer which some ass had kicked into life a few streets away at the height of the ceremony. Half a magazine full of nine-millimetre bullets hit the Jackal in the chest, picked him up, half-turned him in the air and slammed his body into an untidy heap in the far corner near the sofa. As he fell, he brought the standard lamp with him. Down below, the band struck up ‘Mon Régiment et Ma Patrie’.

Superintendent Thomas had a phone call at six that evening from Paris. He sent for the senior inspector of his staff.

‘They got him,’ he said. ‘In Paris. No problems, but you’d better get up to his flat and sort things out.’

It was eight o’clock when the inspector was having a last sort-through of Calthrop’s belongings that he heard someone come into the open doorway. He turned. A man was standing there scowling at him. A big-built, burly man.

‘What are you doing here?’ asked the inspector.

‘I might ask you just the same thing. What the hell do you think you’re doing?’

‘All right, that’s enough,’ said the inspector. ‘Let’s have your name.’

‘Calthrop,’ said the newcomer, ‘Charles Calthrop. And this is my flat. Now what the hell are you doing to it?’

The inspector wished he carried a gun.

‘All right,’ he said quietly, warily. ‘I think you’d better come down to the Yard for a little chat.’

‘Too bloody right,’ said Calthrop. ‘You’ve got a bit of explaining to do.’

But in fact it was Calthrop who did the explaining. They held him for twenty-four hours, until three separate confirmations came through from Paris that the Jackal was dead, and five landlords of isolated taverns in the far north of Sutherland County, Scotland, had testified that Charles Calthrop had indeed spent the previous three weeks indulging his passion for climbing and fishing, and had stayed at their establishments.

‘If the Jackal wasn’t Calthrop,’ asked Thomas of his inspector when Calthrop finally walked out of the door a free man, ‘then who the hell was he?’

‘There can be no question, of course,’ said the Commissioner of Metropolitan Police the next day to Assistant Commissioner Dixon and Superintendent Thomas, ‘of Her Majesty’s Government ever conceding that this Jackal fellow was an Englishman at all. So far as one can see there was a period when a certain Englishman came under suspicion. He has now been cleared. We also know that for a period of his … er … assignment in France, the Jackal feller masqueraded as an Englishman under a falsely issued English passport. But he also masqueraded as a Dane, an American and a Frenchman, under two stolen passports and one set of forged French papers. As far as we are concerned, our enquiries established that the assassin was travelling in France under a false passport in the name of Duggan, and in this name he was traced to … er … this place Gap. That’s all. Gentlemen, the case is closed.’

The following day the body of a man was buried in an unmarked grave at a suburban cemetery in Paris. The death certificate showed the body to be that of an unnamed foreign tourist, killed on Sunday August 25th, 1963, in a hit-and-run accident on the motorway outside the city. Present was a priest, a policeman, a registrar and two grave-diggers. Nobody present showed any interest as the plain deal coffin was lowered into the grave, except the single other person who attended. When it was all over he turned round, declined to give his name, and walked back down the cemetery path, a solitary little figure, to return home to his wife and children.

The day of the Jackal was over.