The Stone leopard

CHAPTER EIGHT

On 16 December the Soviet Commando crossed the Czech frontier into Austria. They came over at the obscure border post at Gmund in the Nieder-Osterreich province where Czech control towers loom over the landscape like gallows. Arriving just before nine in the morning, they presented their French passports for inspection.

The sleepy Austrian official-he had been up all night and was soon going off duty-was already prejudiced in their favour. A few minutes earlier he had seen his Czech opposite numbers giving the three tourists a thorough going-over. The battered old Peugeot had been searched while the three men stood in the road. Their documents had been carefully examined. Anyone who was no friend of the Czechs had to be all right for entry into Austria. He had no way of knowing that Vanek himself had phoned the Czech border post earlier to arrange this charade; nor could he know that their arrival had been timed to coincide with the moment just before he went off duty. A tired official is unlikely to check new arrivals with any great interest.

`Our papers are foolproof,' Vanek had explained to his two companions, 'but the way to succeed in this life is to load all dice in your favour…

The Austrian official stamped the French documents, the frontier pole was raised, the Peugeot with Vanek behind the wheel drove across the border into the narrow streets of the small Austrian town. If the sleepy official thought about them at all as he kicked snow off his boots he must have assumed they were French tourists returning from a winter sports holiday. The conclusion was easy to draw: Vanek and Brunner, sitting in the front of the car, with Lansky occupying the back, were all clad in French ski-clothes.

`First hurdle jumped,' Vanek said cheerfully.

Brunner grunted. 'Plenty more ahead of us…'

Vanek drove at speed for two hours along the lonely open road which leads to Vienna and where fields spread out across the plain for ever; where the only traffic you meet is the occasional ox-drawn farm wagon. Overhead it was cloudy and grey; on either side the fields were snowbound; ahead the highway was a pure white lane with Vanek's the first car to leave wheeled tracks in the snow. Beyond the small town of Horn he pulled up in the deserted countryside. Getting out of the car, Vanek burned the French papers the passport official had stamped and then, using a spade which Brunner handed him, he buried the remnants, carefully re-arranging the snow over the shallow hole. Getting back into the Peugeot, he handed round sets of French papers which were duplicates of those he had just burned; duplicates except for the fact that they carried no stamp linking them with Czechoslovakia.

Reaching Vienna at noon, he parked the Peugeot in the Opera Square; later it would be picked up by a minor official from the Czech Embassy. When they had crossed the frontier at Gmund their car registration number had been automatically noted, so now they severed this second link with their country of origin. With Vanek leading the way, shouldering his skis, the three men walked into the main entrance of the Hotel Sacher and turned through the doorway on the right which opens into a tea-room. They spent the next half-hour in leisurely fashion, drinking coffee and eating cakes while Vanek, chattering away in French, watched every person who followed them into the tea-room.

At 12.30 pm exactly, the three men left the tea-room by a door leading into a side street, still carrying their skis. The Mercedes waiting for them was parked outside the Hotel Astoria and the registration number confirmed to Vanek that this was their vehicle. The key was in the ignition and nearby a Czech official who had watched the car folded up his newspaper and walked away; when he had picked up the Peugeot waiting in Opera Square his job was done.

With Vanek again behind the wheel, they drove to the Westbahnhof, the terminus from which trains depart from Vienna for western Europe. Brunner-with Vanek's help-had worked out the schedule precisely. Arriving at the Westbahnhof before 1 pm gave them nice time to eat lunch in the station restaurant before they boarded the express due to depart at 2 pm. The train was moving out of the station when a Slovak climbed inside the Mercedes parked outside the Westbahnhof and drove off.

The Commando, all links with Czechoslovakia effectively severed, was on its way to Germany.

It was just before noon in the German city of Mainz-four hundred miles to the east the Soviet Commando had now arrived in Vienna-when Alan Lennox again met Peter Lanz of the BND in the station first-class restaurant. The Englishman, who had been sitting at the table for a few minutes, nodded as Lanz took a chair and dropped a copy of the magazine Der Spiegel on the chair between them. Lanz picked up the menu. 'The papers are inside,' he murmured. 'Sorry we've taken such a bloody long time over them. But they're good…' He ordered coffee from the waiter.

It was impossible for Lanz to tell the Englishman the real cause of the delay, that he had just returned from the Palais Schaumburg in Bonn where Chancellor Hauser had given the go-ahead. 'That speech of Florian's at Lille last night disturbed me,' the chancellor had explained to Lanz. 'If he goes on building up this atmosphere of ferment he may leave behind him in Paris a situation ripe for a coup d'etat while he is in Moscow. We must find out whether there is a high-level Communist at work in Paris-and quickly…'

`Under that napkin near your hand,' Lennox said quietly, `you'll find my British passport. Hang on to it for me until I get back. It wouldn't be very clever if they found that on me when I'm inside France…'

Lanz put the folded napkin in his lap, paused while the waiter served coffee, and then pocketed the document. 'I suppose you will be driving into France?' he inquired. 'It will give you total mobility.'

`Probably. I want to be off in about twenty minutes. Is there anything else I need to know?'

`I'm afraid there is.' Lanz leaned across the table, smiling as though he were saying something of little consequence. 'We've just heard that some kind of alert has gone out from Paris. We've no idea why. But there is increased surveillance at all French frontier crossing points.'

`Thanks, I'll watch out.' Lennox made no mention of the fact that he already knew this. It wasn't that he distrusted the BND chief, but when he was working alone he made it a point to let no one know what he was doing next.

He rested his hand lightly on the copy of Der Spiegel. 'The papers seem a bit bulky,' he commented, drinking the rest of his coffee.

`We've included five thousand deutschmarks in high-denomination bills-for expenses. We don't expect you to be out of pocket on this thing…

`Thanks again. If I want to contact you, I use the Frankfurt number?'

`No, a different one. In Bonn, actually…' Lanz didn't explain that from now on he was staying in the German capital where he could have immediate access to Franz Hauser in case of a crisis. 'You'll find the new number written on the inside of the envelope,' he went on. 'You can reach me at that number at any hour of the day-or night. I shall stay in my office at that number, eat there, sleep there. If you phone I promise you it will be my hand which will lift the receiver.'

Lennox stared at the German. This kind of consideration he had not expected. 'Thanks once more,' he said. 'But this trip could take anything up to a fortnight if I run into trouble- and you could get pretty stiff staying locked up in one room for as long as that.'

`It's the least I can do, for Christ's sake.' Lanz spread his hands. 'I wouldn't want to take on the job myself, I can tell you. There's something stirring in the French security system, and it may not be healthy. If you get in a jam, call me. I can't promise one damned thing-not inside France-but I can at least try. If it gets hot, get out…'

Grelle was airborne in an Alouette helicopter, heading south for Lyon to attend the exhumation of the Leopard's grave, when he took another decision. He had been sitting silently for some time, not speaking to Boisseau who was beside him, staring down at the flooded landscape below. For large stretches it was more like travelling over Asian rice paddy- fields than the plains of France.

`Boisseau,' Grelle said eventually, 'there are two persons on that list Hugon supplied who live in France-excluding the man in Germany.. .'

`Two,' Boisseau agreed.

`I want you to set up close surveillance on both those people. It must be very discreet-the two men being watched must have no idea they are under surveillance.'

`They are to intercept the Englishman, Lennox, if he Shows up?'

`No! If Lennox appears I want the fact reported, then I want Lennox discreetly tailed. But he must not be intercepted.'

`I will have to quote your personal authority. It is out of our jurisdiction, of course.'

It was, indeed, out of Grelle's jurisdiction. Normally the power of the police prefect of Paris ends at the city's boundaries; he possesses not one shred of authority outside the capital. But Florian had expressly handed over to Grelle the responsibility for his own security to cover the whole of France since the assassination attempt.

`Of course,' Grelle agreed. 'So you tell them this concerns the safety of the president of the French Republic.'

To check passengers travelling from Vienna to Germany, passport officials sometimes board the train at Salzburg, but not often; this is one of the more open frontiers of Europe. The Soviet Commando crossed the Austro-German border without any check at all. With their ski equipment in the luggage van, travelling with French papers, carrying French francs and German marks in their wallets, the trio were to all outward appearances French tourists returning home from Austria via Germany.

Even so, Vanek was still taking precautions. Deciding that two travellers were less conspicuous than three, he sat with Brunner in one first-class compartment while Lansky travelled alone in a different coach. As they moved through the snowbound countryside of Bavaria beyond Salzburg after dark they caught glimpses in the moonlight of the white Alps to the south.

Later, when approaching Munich, they passed close to Pullach, the home of the BND headquarters. Reaching Munich at eight in the evening, Vanek and Brunner took a cab to the Four Seasons Hotel, the most expensive hostelry in the city.

`No one,' as Vanek explained earlier, 'looks for assassins in the best hotels…

Privately, Brunner had a more simple explanation. Vanek, he felt sure, believed that only the best was good enough for a man of his talents. While they proceeded to their own hotel. Lansky left the station by himself and booked a room at the Continental. To adjust themselves to the western atmosphere they went out in the evening after Vanek had phoned Lansky from an outside call-box to make sure he had arrived. 'Don't sit in the hotel room,' Vanek ordered his subordinate. 'Get out and sniff the place. Circulate…' But he did not invite Lansky to join himself and Brunner.

At a beer hall Vanek picked up a couple of girls, using his fluent German to pull off the introduction, and later the four of them ate a very expensive dinner. When Brunner, hurrying after his leader to the lavatory, questioned these tactics, Vanek was brusque. 'Don't you realize that two men with a couple of girls are far less conspicuous than two foreigners on their own? In any case,' he said as he adjusted his flies, 'they are nice girls…'

At the end of the evening, drinking absurdly-priced champagne in a night-club, Vanek persuaded his girl friend to take him back to her flat. Outraged, Brunner cornered Vanek in the foyer, saying he was going back to the hotel to get a good night's sleep.

`A good night's sleep?' Vanek queried. 'My dear comrade, I can spend a little time with a girl, sleep for four hours and face the morning with the physique of an athlete…'

`We are catching the early morning train to France,' Brunner reminded him.

`So don't oversleep,' Vanek replied.

Lennox, who was always a lone wolf, waited until Lanz had left the Mainz Hauptbahnhof restaurant, then he picked up the copy of Der Spiegel, went into the lavatory and locked the door of the cubicle. Sitting on the seat, he extracted the French papers, put the five thousand deutschmarks into his wallet, memorized the Bonn telephone number and tore up the envelope which he flushed down the pan. Emerging from the lavatory, he made no move to leave the station to collect his car. He had, in fact, already handed it in to the car-hire branch in Mainz.

At 12.38 p.m. he boarded the Trans-European express Rheingold which had just arrived from Amsterdam. Finding an empty compartment-there are few people on the Trans- European express in mid-December-he settled down in a corner seat and lit a Benson and Hedges cigarette. He had waited until the last second to board the train and no one had followed him. The people he was worried about were the French Secret Service agents attached to their embassy in Bonn. They would hardly know about him yet, but the second in command of the BND was an obvious target for them to follow.

As the express picked up speed he took hold of his suitcase and went along to the spacious lavatory.

The man who went inside was Alan Lennox, British. The man who emerged ten minutes later was Jean Bouvier, French. Settling down again in his empty compartment, Lennox was dressed in French clothes and smoking a Gitane. He was also wearing the hat he had purchased in Metz and a pair of horn- rim glasses. Normally hatless, Lennox knew how much the wearing of headgear changes the appearance of a man. When the ticket collector arrived a few minutes later and he had to purchase the TEE supplement, Lennox conversed with him in French and a little ungrammatic German.

When the express reached Freiburg, the last stop before the Swiss border, Lennox had a moment's hesitation. One of the three people on Lasalle's list of witnesses-Dieter Wohl-lived in Freiburg. Shrugging his shoulders like a Frenchman, Lennox remained in his seat. At the moment the important thing was to get clear of Germany, to break his trail; Freiburg was just across the Rhine from Alsace and he could visit Wohl later, after he had seen the Frenchmen. Promptly at 3.36 pm the Rheingold stopped at Basel Hauptbahnhof where Lennox got off.

He had now arrived in Switzerland.

Leaving the station he crossed the street and went into the Hotel Victoria where he booked a room for one night only. He had plenty of time then to find the right shop and purchase a second suitcase. Taking it back to his room, he re-packed, putting his British clothes into his own case; the French items he had purchased in Metz-all except those he was wearing- went into the Swiss case he had just bought. Going out again with the British case, he walked into the Hauptbahnhof and locked it away in a luggage compartment. As he shut the door he knew it was by no means certain he would ever see that case again.

Grelle arrived late for the exhumation of the grave of the Leopard. Involved as he was in three major operations- probing the attempt to assassinate the president; investigating the mystery of the Leopard; perfecting the security surrounding Guy Florian-he needed every spare minute he could find in a day. Already he was keeping going on only four hours' sleep a night while he cat-napped during the day when he could-in cars, in aircraft, even in his office when he could snatch time between interviews.

With Boisseau behind the wheel, Grelle was dozing as they turned off the main road into the forest along a muddy track. A gendarme with a torch had signalled them at the obscure entrance, which they would otherwise have missed. Long after dark-the exhumation was being carried out at night to help keep it secret-it was pouring with rain and the rutted track showed two gullies of water in their headlights. The prefect opened his eyes. 'If this goes on much longer,' he grumbled, 'the whole of France will be afloat…'

It was a fir forest they were moving into. A palisade of wet trunks rippled past the headlights as the track twisted and turned, as the tyres squelched through the mud and the storm beat down on the car roof. About two kilometres from where they had left the road Boisseau turned a corner and the headlights, shafting through the slanting rain, shone on a weird scene.

Arc-lights glared down on the excavation which was protected with a canvas tent-like erection. Heaps of excavated soil were banked up, and men with shovels were shoulder-deep inside the pit, still lifting hard-packed soil. Through the fan- shapes cleared by the wipers Grelle saw they were inside a wide clearing. Parked police vehicles stood around on carpets of dead bracken. Under the arc-lights a deep-scored mud-track ran away from the grave. Following the track with his eyes, Grelle saw a few metres away the blurred silhouette of the stone leopard effigy which had been hauled off the grave. It looked eerily alive in the beating rain, like a real animal crouched for a spring.

`I'll see how they're getting on,' said Boisseau, who had stopped the car. 'No point in both of us getting wet…'

An agent de la paix, his coat streaming with water, peered in at the window and his peaked brim deposited rain inside the car. Embarrassed, he took off the cap. 'Put it on again, for God's sake,' Grelle growled. 'Are you getting anywhere?'

`They have found the coffin…' The man was boyish- faced, excited at addressing the police prefect of Paris. 'They will have it up within a few minutes.'

`At least there is a coffin,' Grelle muttered. He was anything but excited. Even if there were a body inside he was dubious of what this might prove; after all, 1944 was a long time ago. Pessimistic as he was, he had still arranged for the forensic department at Lyon to be ready to get to work at once when the remains were delivered to them. A pathologist; a man with a fluoroscope who could assess the age of the bones; various other experts.

Grelle followed Boisseau out into the rain, hands tucked inside his raincoat pockets, hat pulled down. He would have to get wet sooner or later, and it looked bad for the prefect to sit in a warm car while the other poor devils toiled in the mud. He had taken the precaution of putting on rubber boots and his feet sank ankle-deep into the slippery mud. He stood under the glow of an arc-light while a drop of rain dripped from his nose-end, staring at the stone leopard crouched in the rain.

Above the noise of the pounding rain, the distant rumble of thunder, a new sound was added as they fastened chains round something in the depths of the pit. The tent was moved away so a breakdown truck could back to the brink. The driver moved a lever and the crane apparatus leaned out over the pit. In case of an accident the men were climbing up out of the pit now, smeared with mud. A filthy job. Probably all for nothing.

It was a disturbing scene: the wind shifting the tree tops, the endless rain, the glare of the arc-lights. And now the men in shiny coats fell silent as they waited expectantly, huddled round the grave. The chained coffin had been fixed to the hoist; the only man doing anything now was the truck driver, sitting twisted round in his seat as he operated levers. The coffin came up out of the shadows slowly, tilting at an acute angle as the machinery whirred, as the rain slanted down on the slowly-turning box. Everyone was very still. Grelle inserted a cigarette in the corner of his mouth and then didn't light it as he saw a gendarme glance at him severely. 'Bloody hell,' he thought, 'does he expect me to take off my hat?'

Looking to his right again he saw the stone leopard, its mouth open, caught in the arc-light, as though enraged at the desecration. The officer in charge of the whole business shouted an order. The coffin, now above ground, swivelled in mid-air, was carried by the steel arm over to the canvas tent, gently eased and dropped just inside, under cover from the rain. Another shouted order. A man with a power saw appeared, examined the coffin and then began work, slicing the lid above where it had originally been closed. Boisseau made an inquiry, came back to the prefect.

`The screws are rusted in. They were advised not to use chisels and crowbars-any clumsiness might have shivered the remains to powder. ..'

Grelle said nothing, standing quite still with the unlit cigarette now becoming soggy in the corner of his mouth. On Boisseau's orders a light was brought closer, shining directly through the tent's mouth on to the coffin.

`Is it going to tell us anything, I wonder?' Boisseau murmured and there was a hint of excitement in his voice.

`I wouldn't bet on it…'

`They said as far as they could tell it hasn't been disturbed for many years. The earth is packed like concrete.'

`What about that damned statue?'

`Well bedded in. Again, not touched for years…'

The man with the power saw stopped. They were ready. A couple of men stooped at either side of the coffin, began sliding the lid off with care, out of the tent, so until they had removed the whole lid it wasn't possible to see what might lie inside. They seemed to take an age, bent as they were under the canvas roof; and they had to watch their footing; the ground was becoming a quagmire. Then they had moved aside and under the glare of the arc-light everyone could see. There was a gasp of horror.

Grelle stood as immovable as the stone statue a few metres away.

`My God!' It was Boisseau speaking.

Inside the coffin was stretched the perfect skeleton of an enormous hound, lying on its haunches, its huge skull rested between its skeletal paw-bones, its eye-sockets in shadow so that it seemed to stare at them hideously with enormous black pupils.

`Cesar…' The prefect grunted. 'Macabre-and brilliant. He couldn't take his dog with him because that would identify him. And he needed something to weight the coffin. So he killed the dog and provided his own corpse.'

Boisseau bent over the skeleton, examined it briefly. 'I think there is a bullet-hole in the skull.'

`I wonder if the bastard shot his own dog?' Once Grelle had owned a British wire-haired terrier which had eventually been knocked down in the Paris traffic. He had never replaced the animal. He spoke in a monotone, then stiffened himself. 'Tell them to replace the lid and get the whole thing to Lyon. Come on!'

They left the men in the wood lifting the coffin and its contents into the breakdown truck and drove back along the muddy track. The statue would remain in the wood, close to the grave it had guarded so long, which was already filling up with water. Boisseau, noting the frown of concentration on his chief's face, said nothing until they turned on to the main road.

`Surprised?' he asked as they picked up speed.

`Not really-although I didn't anticipate the dog. The whole thing has worried me since I read the file-it was out of pattern. He took all those precautions to make sure he couldn't be identified and then, when it's nearly all over, he walks into Lyon and gets himself shot. If he'd survived up to then, he should have gone on surviving-which he did.'

`So he's about somewhere?'

`I know exactly where he is. He's in Paris. The trouble is I don't know who he is.'

`Danchin or Blanc-according to Gaston Martin. It's a nightmare.'

`It will get worse,' Grelle assured him.

Grelle remained in Lyon just long enough to make a few more inquiries and to hear the result of the fluoroscope test on the skeleton. 'I estimate the age of the bones as being somewhere between thirty and forty years,' the expert told the prefect. `That is, they have lain in the forest for that period of time.' Which meant the animal could easily have been shot and buried in August 1944.

Flying back to Paris aboard the helicopter, Grelle told Boisseau about his other inquiries. 'They gave me the details about the sculptor who made the statue. He was found shot in his house soon after he had finished the statue. The place had been ransacked and it was assumed he had disturbed a burglar. It gives you some idea of the ruthlessness of the man we're looking for. He covered his tracks completely-or so he thought. Until Lasalle resurrected him.'

`What the hell are we going to do?' Boisseau asked. `Track him down.'