Caron finished writing and looked up.
‘Got it, chief. I can do that throughout the night. Which is the top priority?’
‘The telephone switchboard. I want a good man on that, the best they’ve got. Get on to Chief of Admin at his home, and again quote Bouvier for authority.’
‘Right. What do we want from them first?’
‘I want, as soon as they can get it, a direct link personally to the head of the Homicide Division of the criminal police of seven countries. Fortunately, I know most of them personally from past meetings of Interpol. In some cases I know the Deputy Chief. If you can’t get one, get the other.
‘The countries are: United States, that means the Office of Domestic Intelligence in Washington. Britain, Assistant Commissioner (Crime) Scotland Yard. Belgium. Holland. Italy. West Germany. South Africa. Get them at home or in the office.
‘When you get each of them one by one, arrange a series of telephone calls from Interpol Communications Room between me and them between seven and ten in the morning at twenty-minute intervals. Get on to Interpol Communications and book the calls as each Homicide chief at the other end agrees to be in his own communications room at the appointed time. The calls should be person-to-person on the UHF frequency and there is to be no listening in. Impress on each of them that what I have to say is for their ears only and of top priority not only for France but possibly for their own country. Prepare me a list by six in the morning of the schedule of the seven calls that have been booked, in order of sequence.
‘In the meantime, I am going down to Homicide to see if a foreign killer has ever been suspected of operating in France and not been picked up. I confess, nothing in that line comes to mind, and in any case I suspect Rodin would have been more careful on his selection than that. Now, do you know what to do?’
Caron, looking slightly dazed, glanced up from his several pages of scribbled notes.
‘Yes, chief, I’ve got it. Bon, I’d better get to work.’ He reached out for the telephone.
Claude Lebel passed out of the office and headed for the stairs. As he did so the clock of Notre Dame further down the island chimed midnight, and the world passed into the morning of August 12th.
11
COLONEL RAOUL SAINT-CLAIR DE VILLAUBAN ARRIVED HOME just before midnight. He had spent the previous three hours meticulously typing his report on the evening’s meeting in the Interior Ministry, which would be on the desk of the Secretary-General of the Elysée first thing in the morning.
He had taken particular pains over the report, tearing up two rough copies before he was satisfied, then carefully typing out the third into a fair copy by himself. It was irritating to have to engage in the menial task of typing, and he was not used to it, but it had the advantage of keeping the secret from any secretary, a fact that he had not hesitated to point out in the body of the report, and also of enabling him to have the document ready for production first thing in the morning, which he hoped would not go unnoticed. With luck the report would be on the President’s desk an hour after being read by the Secretary-General, and this also would do him no harm.
He had used extra care in selecting just the right phraseology to give a slight hint of the writer’s disapproval of putting a matter so important as the security of the head of state into the sole hands of a commissaire of police, a man more accustomed by training and experience to uncovering petty criminals of little brains or talent.
It would not have done to go too far, for Lebel might even find his man. But in the event that he did not, it was as well that there was someone sufficiently on his toes to have had doubts about the wisdom of the choice of Lebel at the time.
Moreover, he had certainly not taken to Lebel. A common little man had been his private judgement. ‘Possessed no doubt of a competent record’ had been his phrasing in the report.
Musing over the first two copies he had written in longhand, he had come to the conclusion that the most advantageous position for him to take would be not to oppose outright the appointment of this promoted constable at the outset, since the appointment had been agreed by the meeting as a whole, and if he opposed the selection he would be asked for specific reasons; but, on the other hand, to keep a close watch on the whole operation, on behalf of the presidential secretariat, and to be the first to point out, with due sobriety, the inefficiencies in the conduct of the investigation as and when they occurred.
His musings on how he could best keep track of what Lebel was up to were interrupted by a telephone call from Sanguinetti to inform him that the Minister had made a last-minute decision to preside over nightly meetings at ten each evening to hear a progress report from Lebel. The news had delighted Saint-Clair. It solved his problem for him. With a little background homework during the daytime, he would be able to put forceful and pertinent questions to the detective, and reveal to the others that at least in the presidential secretariat they were keeping wide awake to the gravity and urgency of the situation.
Privately he did not put the assassin’s chances very high, even if there were an assassin in the offing. The presidential security screen was the most efficient in the world, and part of his job in the secretariat was to devise the organisation of the President’s public appearances and the routes he would follow. He had few qualms that this intensive and highly planned security screen could be penetrated by some foreign gunman.
He let himself in by the front door of his flat and heard his newly installed mistress call him from the bedroom.
‘Is that you, darling?’
‘Yes, cherie. Of course it’s me. Have you been lonely?’
She came running through from the bedroom, dressed in a filmy black baby-doll nightie, trimmed at throat and hem with lace. The indirect light from the bedside lamp, shining through the open door of the bedroom, silhouetted the curves of her young woman’s body. As usual when he saw his mistress, Raoul Saint-Clair felt a thrill of satisfaction that she was his, and so deeply in love with him. His character, however, was to congratulate himself for the fact, rather than any fortunate providence that might have brought them together.
She threw her bare arms round his neck and gave him a long open-mouthed kiss. He responded as best he could while still clutching his briefcase and the evening paper.
‘Come,’ he said when they separated, ‘get into bed and I’ll join you.’ He gave her a slap on the bottom to speed her on her way. The girl skipped back into the bedroom, threw herself on the bed and spread out her limbs, hands crossed behind her neck, breasts upthrust.
Saint-Clair entered the room without his briefcase and glanced at her with satisfaction. She grinned back lasciviously.
During their fortnight together she had learned that only the most blatant suggestiveness coupled with an assumption of crude carnality could produce any lust from the juiceless loins of the career courtier. Privately Jacqueline hated him as much as on the first day they had met, but she had learned that what he lacked in virility he could be made to make up in loquacity, particularly about his importance in the scheme of things at the Elysée Palace.
‘Hurry,’ she whispered, ‘I want you.’
Saint-Clair smiled with genuine pleasure and took off his shoes, laying them side by side at the foot of the dumb waiter. The jacket followed, its pockets carefully emptied on to the dressing-table top. The trousers came next, to be meticulously folded and laid over the protruding arm of the dumb waiter. His long thin legs protruded from beneath the shirt-tails like whiskery white knitting needles.
‘What kept you so long?’ asked Jacqueline. ‘I’ve been waiting for ages.’
Saint-Clair shook his head sombrely.
‘Certainly nothing that you should bother your head with, my dear.’
‘Oh, you’re mean.’ She turned over abruptly on to her side in a mock-sulk facing away from him, knees bent. His fingers slipped on the tie-knot as he looked across the room at the chestnut hair tumbling over the shoulders and the full hips now uncovered by
the shortie nightdress. Another five minutes and he was ready for bed, buttoning the monogrammed silk pyjamas.
He stretched his length on the bed next to her and ran his hand down the dip of the waist and up to the summit of her hip, the fingers slipping down towards the sheet and round the swell of the warm buttock.
‘What’s the matter, then?’
‘Nothing.’
‘I thought you wanted to make love.’
‘You just don’t give me any explanation. I can’t ring you at the office. I’ve been lying here for hours worrying that something might have happened to you. You’ve never been this late before without ringing me.’
She rolled over on to her back and looked up at him. Propped on his elbow he slipped his free hand under the nightie and started to knead one of her breasts.
‘Look, darling, I’ve been very busy. There was something of a crisis, something I had to sort out before I could get away. I’d have rung but there were people still working, popping in and out of the office the whole time. Several of them know my wife is away. It would have seemed odd for me to ring home through the switchboard.’
She slipped a hand through his pyjama fly to encircle the limp penis, and was rewarded with a light tremor.
‘There couldn’t have been anything so big you couldn’t have let me know you’d be late, darling. I was worrying all night.’
‘Well, there’s no need to worry any more. Go down on me, you know I like that.’
She laughed, reached up with her other hand to pull his head down and bit him on the ear-lobe.
‘No, he doesn’t deserve it. Not yet anyway.’ She squeezed the slowly hardening prick in rebuke. The Colonel’s breathing was noticeably shallower. He started kissing her open-mouthed, his hand kneading first one and then the other nipple so hard that she wriggled.
‘Go down on me,’ he growled.
She shifted slightly and undid the pyjama cord. Raoul Saint-Clair watched the mane of brown hair fall forward from her head to shroud his belly, lay back and sighed with pleasure.
‘It seems the OAS are still after the President,’ he said. ‘The plot was discovered this afternoon. It’s being taken care of. That’s what kept me.’
There was a soft ‘plop’ as the girl withdrew her head a few inches.
‘Don’t be silly, darling, they were finished long ago.’ She went back to her task.
‘They’re bloody well not. Now they’ve hired a foreign assassin to try to kill him. Aeegh, don’t bite.’
Half an hour later Colonel Raoul Saint-Clair de Villauban lay asleep, face half-buried in the pillow, snoring gently from his exertions. Beside him his mistress lay staring up through the darkness at the ceiling, dimly lit where the lights from the street outside filtered through a tiny crack where the curtains joined.
What she had learned had left her aghast. Although she had had no previous knowledge of any such plot she could work out for herself the importance of Kowalski’s confession.
She waited in silence until the bedside clock with the luminous dial registered two in the morning. Easing herself out of the bed, she slid the plug of the bedroom telephone extension out of its socket.
Before walking to the door she bent over the Colonel, and was grateful he was not the sort of man who liked to sleep in embrace with his bedmate. He was still snoring.
Outside the bedroom she quietly closed the door, crossed the sitting room towards the hall and closed that door after her. From the phone on the hall table she dialled a Molitor number. There was a wait of several minutes until a sleepy voice answered. She spoke rapidly for two minutes, received an acknowledgement and hung up. A minute later she was back in bed, trying to get to sleep.
Throughout the night crime chiefs of the police forces of five European countries, America and South Africa were being woken with long-distance calls from Paris. Most of them were irritated and sleepy. In Western Europe the time was the same as Paris, the small hours of the morning. In Washington the time was nine in the evening when the call from Paris came through, and the chief of FBI Homicide was at a dinner party. It was only at the third attempt that Caron could get him, and then their conversation was marred by the chatter of guests and the clink of glasses from the next room where the party was in progress. But he got the message and agreed to be in the communications room of the FBI headquarters at two in the morning, Washington time, to take a call from Commissaire Lebel who would be ringing him from Interpol at 8 am Paris time.
The crime chiefs of the Belgian, Italian, German and Dutch police were all apparently good family men; each was awoken in turn and after listening to Caron for a few minutes agreed to be in their communications rooms at the times Caron suggested to take a person-to-person call from Lebel on a matter of great urgency.
Van Ruys of South Africa was out of town and would not be able to get back to headquarters by sunrise, so Caron spoke to Anderson, his deputy. Lebel, when he heard, was not displeased for he knew Anderson fairly well, but Van Ruys not at all. Besides, he suspected Van Ruys was more of a political appointment while Anderson had once been a constable on the beat like himself.
The call reached Mr Anthony Mallinson, Assistant Commissioner Crime for Scotland Yard, in his home at Bexley shortly before four. He growled in protest at the insistent clanging of the bell beside his bed, reached out for the mouthpiece and muttered ‘Mallinson’.
‘Mr Anthony Mallinson?’ asked a voice.
‘Speaking.’ He shrugged to clear the bedclothes from his shoulders, and glanced at his watch.
‘My name is Inspector Lucien Caron, of the French Sûreté Nationale. I am ringing on behalf of Commissaire Claude Lebel.’
The voice, speaking good but strongly accented English, was coming over clearly. Obviously line traffic at that hour was light. Mallinson frowned. Why couldn’t the blighters call at a civilised hour?
‘Yes.’
‘I believe you know Commissaire Lebel, perhaps, Mr Mallinson.’
Mallinson thought for a moment. Lebel? Oh, yes, little fellow, had been head of Homicide in the PJ. Didn’t look much but he got results. Been damn helpful over that murdered English tourist two years back. Could have been nasty in the Press if they hadn’t caught the killer in double-quick time.
‘Yes, I know Commissaire Lebel,’ he said down the phone. ‘What’s it about?’
Beside him his wife Lily, disturbed by the talking, grumbled in her sleep.
‘There is a matter of very considerable urgency, which also requires a great degree of discretion, that has cropped up. I am assisting Commissaire Lebel on the case. It is a most unusual case. The Commissaire would like to place a person-to-person call to you in your communications room at the Yard this morning at nine o’clock. Could you please be present to take the call?’
Mallinson thought for a moment.
‘Is this a routine enquiry between co-operating police forces?’ he asked. If it were they could use the routine Interpol network. Nine o’clock was a busy time at the Yard.
‘No, Mr Mallinson, it is not. It is a question of a personal request by the Commissaire to you for a little discreet assistance. It may be there is nothing that affects Scotland Yard in the matter that has come up. Most probably so. If that is the case, it would be better if there were no formal request placed.’
Mallinson thought it over. He was by nature a cautious man and had no wish to be involved in clandestine enquiries from a foreign police force. If a crime had been committed, or a criminal had fled to Britain, that was another matter. In that case why the secrecy? Then he remembered a case years ago where he had been sent out to find and bring back the daughter of a Cabinet Minister who had gone astray with a handsome young devil. The girl had been a minor, so charges of removing the child from parental authority could have been brought. A bit marginal. But the Minister had wanted the whole thing done without a murmur reaching the Press. The Italian police had been very helpful when the couple was found at Verona playing Romeo and Juliet. All right
, so Lebel wanted a bit of help on the Old Boy network. That was what Old Boy networks were for.
‘All right, I’ll take the call. Nine o’clock.’
‘Thank you so much, Mr Mallinson.’
‘Good night.’ Mallinson replaced the receiver, re-set the alarm clock for six-thirty instead of seven, and went back to sleep.
In a small and fusty bachelor flat, while Paris slept towards the dawn, a middle-aged schoolmaster paced up and down the floor of the cramped bedsitter. The scene around him was chaotic: books, newspapers, magazines and manuscripts lay scattered over the table, chairs and sofa, and even on the coverlet of the narrow bed set into its alcove on the far side of the room. In another alcove a sink overflowed with unwashed crockery.
What obsessed his thoughts in his nocturnal pacings was not the untidy state of his room, for since his removal from his post as headmaster of a Lycée at Sidi-bel-Abbes and the loss of the fine house with two manservants that went with it, he had learned to live as he now did. His problem lay elsewhere.
As dawn was breaking over the eastern suburbs, he sat down finally and picked up one of the papers. His eye ran yet again down the second lead story on the foreign news page. It was headlined: ‘OAS Chiefs Holed Up in Rome Hotel.’ After reading it for the last time he made up his mind, threw on a light mackintosh against the chill of the morning, and left the flat.
He caught a cruising taxi on the nearest boulevard and ordered the driver to take him to the Gare du Nord. Although the taxi dropped him in the forecourt, he walked away from the station as soon as the taxi had left, crossed the road and entered one of the all-night cafés of the area.