CHAPTER 8
UNFORTUNATELY FOR KOWALSKI there were no telephone calls to make at the post office on Wednesday morning; had there been he would have missed his plane. And the mail was waiting in the pigeon-hole for M. Poitiers. He collected the five envelopes, locked them into his steel carrier on the end of the chain, and set off hurriedly for the hotel. By half past nine he had been relieved of both by Colonel Rodin, and was free to go back to his room for sleep. His next turn of duty was on the roof, starting at seven that evening.
He paused in his room only to collect his Colt .45 (Rodin would never allow him to carry it in the street) and tucked it into his shoulder holster. If he had worn a well-fitting jacket the bulge of the gun and holster would have been evident at a hundred yards, but his suits were as ill-fitting as a thoroughly bad tailor could make them, and despite his bulk they hung on him like sacks. He took the roll of sticking plaster and the beret that he had bought the day before and stuffed them into his jacket, pocketed the roll of lire notes and French francs that represented his past six months’ savings, and closed the door behind him.
At the desk on the landing the duty guard looked up.
‘Now they want a telephone call made,’ said Kowalski, jerking his thumb upwards in the direction of the ninth floor above. The guard said nothing, just watched him as the lift arrived and he stepped inside. Seconds later he was in the street, pulling on the big dark glasses.
At the café across the street the man with a copy of Oggi lowered the magazine a fraction and studied Kowalski through impenetrable sunglasses as the Pole looked up and down for a taxi. When none came he started to walk towards the corner of the block. The man with the magazine left the café terrace and walked to the kerb. A small Fiat cruised out of a line of parked cars further down the street and stopped opposite him. He climbed in and the Fiat crawled after Kowalski at a walking pace.
On the corner Kowalski found a cruising taxi and hailed it. ‘Fiumicino,’ he told the driver.
At the airport the SDECE man followed him quietly as he presented himself at the Alitalia desk, paid for his ticket in cash, assured the girl on the desk that he had no suitcases or hand luggage, and was told passengers for the 11.15 Marseilles flight would be called in an hour and five minutes.
With time to kill the ex-legionnaire lounged into the cafeteria, bought a coffee at the counter and took it over to the plateglass windows from where he could watch the planes coming and going. He loved airports although he could not understand how they worked. Most of his life the sound of aero engines had meant German Messerschmitts, Russian Stormoviks, or American Flying Forts. Later they meant air support with B-26s or Skyraiders in Vietnam, Mysteres or Fougas in the Algerian djebel. But at a civilian airport he liked to watch them cruising in to land like big silver birds, engines muted, hanging in the sky as if on threads just before the touch-down. Although socially a shy man he liked watching the interminable bustle of an airport. Perhaps, he mused, if his life had been different, he would have worked in an airport. But he was what he was, and there was no going back now.
His thoughts turned to Sylvie and his beetle brows darkened with concentration. It wasn’t right, he told himself soberly, it wasn’t right that she should die and all those bastards sitting up in Paris should live. Colonel Rodin had told him about them, and the way they had let France down, and betrayed the Army, and destroyed the Legion, and abandoned the people in Indo-China and Algeria to the terrorists. Colonel Rodin was never wrong.
His flight was called, and he filed through the glass doors and out on to the burning white concrete of the apron for the hundred-yard walk to the plane. From the observation terrace the two agents of Colonel Rolland watched him climb the steps into the plane. He now wore the black beret and the piece of sticking plaster on one cheek. One of the agents turned to the other and raised a weary eyebrow. As the turbo-prop took off for Marseilles, the two men left the rail. On the way through the main hall they stopped at a public kiosk while one of them dialled a Rome local number. He identified himself to the person at the end with a Christian name and said slowly, ‘He’s gone. Alitalia Four-Five-One. Landing Marignane 12.10. Ciao .’
Ten minutes later the message was in Paris, and ten minutes after that it was being listened to in Marseilles.
The Alitalia Viscount swung out over the bay of impossibly blue water and turned on to final approach for Marignane Airport. The pretty Roman air hostess finished her smiling walk down the gangway, checking that all seat belts were fastened and sat down in her own corner seat at the back to fasten her own belt. She noticed the passenger in the seat ahead of her was staring fixedly out of the window at the glaring off-white desolation of the Rhône Delta as if he had never seen it before.
He was the big lumbering man who spoke no Italian, and whose French was heavily accented from some motherland in Eastern Europe. He wore a black beret over his cropped black hair, a dark and rumpled suit and a pair of dark glasses which he never took off. An enormous piece of sticking plaster obscured one half of his face; he must have cut himself jolly badly, she thought.
They touched down precisely on time, quite close to the terminal building, and the passengers walked across to the Customs hall. As they filed through the glass doors a small balding man standing beside one of the passport police kicked him lightly against the ankle.
‘Big fellow, black beret, sticking plaster.’ Then he strolled quietly away and gave the other the same message. The passengers divided themselves into two lines to pass through the guichets. Behind their grilles the two policemen sat facing each other, ten feet apart, with the passengers filing between them. Each passenger presented his passport and disembarkation card. The officers were of the Security Police, the DST, responsible for all internal state security inside France, and for checking incoming aliens and returning Frenchmen.
When Kowalski presented himself the blue-jacketed figure behind the grille barely gave him a glance. He banged his stamp down on the yellow disembarkation card, gave the proffered identity card a short glance, nodded and waved the big man on. Relieved, Kowalski walked on towards the Customs benches. Several of the Customs officers had just listened quietly to the small balding man before he disappeared into a glass-fronted office behind them. The senior Customs officer called to Kowalski.
‘Monsieur, votre bagage.’
He gestured to where the rest of the passengers were waiting by the mechanical conveyor belt for their suitcases to appear from the wire-frame barrow parked in the sunshine outside. Kowalski lumbered over to the Customs officer.
‘J’ai pas de bagage ,’ he said.
The Customs officer raised his eyebrows.
‘Pas de bagage? Eh bien, avez-vous quelque chose à déclarer?’
‘Non, rien ,’ said Kowalski.
The Customs man smiled amiably, almost as broadly as his sing-song Marseilles accent.
‘Eh bien, passez, monsieur .’ He gestured towards the exit into the taxi rank. Kowalski nodded and went out into the sunshine. Not being accustomed to spending freely, he looked up and down until he caught sight of the airport bus, and climbed into it.
As he disappeared from sight several of the other Customs men gathered round the senior staffer.
‘Wonder what they want him for,’ said one.
‘He looked a surly bugger.’
‘He won’t be when those bastards have finished with him,’ said a third jerking his head towards the offices at the back.
‘Come on, back to work,’ chipped in the older one. ‘We’ve done our bit for France today.’
‘For Big Charlie you mean,’ replied the first as they split up, and muttered under his breath, ‘God rot him.’
It was the lunch-hour when the bus stopped finally at the Air France offices in the heart of the city and it was even hotter than in Rome. August in Marseilles has several qualities, but the inspiration to great exertions is not one of them. The heat lay on the city like an illness, crawling into every fibre, sapping strength, energy, the will to do anything but lie in a cool room with the jalousies closed and the fan full on.
Even the Cannebière, usually the bustling bursting jugular vein of Marseilles, after dark a river of light and animation, was dead. The few people and cars on it seemed to be moving through waist-deep treacle. It took half an hour to find a taxi; most of the drivers had found a shady spot in a park to have their siesta.
The address JoJo had given Kowalski was on the main road out of town heading towards Cassis. At the Avenue de la Libération he told the driver to drop him, so that he could walk the rest. The driver’s ‘si vous voulez ’ indicated plainer than text what he thought of foreigners who considered covering distances of over a few yards in this heat when they had a car at their disposal.
Kowalski watched the taxi turn back into town until it was out of sight. He found the side street named on the piece of paper by asking a waiter at a terrace café on the sidewalk. The block of flats looked fairly new, and Kowalski thought the JoJos must have made a good thing of their station food trolley. Perhaps they had got the fixed kiosk that Madam JoJo had had her eye on for so many years. That at any rate would account for the increase in their prosperity. And it would be nicer for Sylvie to grow up in this neighbourhood than round the docks. At the thought of his daughter, and the idiotic thing he had just imagined for her, Kowalski stopped at the foot of the steps to the apartment block. What had JoJo said on the phone. A week? Perhaps a fortnight? It was not possible.
He took the steps at a run, and paused in front of the double row of letter-boxes along one side of the hall. ‘Grzybowski’ read one. ‘Flat 23.’ He decided to take the stairs since it was only on the second floor.
Flat 23 had a door like the others. It had a bell push with a little white card in a slot beside it, with the word Grzybowski typed on it. The door stood at the end of the corridor, flanked by the doors of flats 22 and 24. He pressed the bell. The door in front of him opened and the lunging pickaxe handle swung out of the gap and down towards his forehead.
The blow split the skin but bounced off the bone with a dull ‘thunk’. On each side of the Pole the doors of flats 22 and 24 opened inwards and men surged out. It all happened in less than half a second. In the same time Kowalski went berserk. Although slow-thinking in most ways, the Pole knew one technique perfectly, that of fighting.
In the narrow confines of the corridor his size and strength were useless to him. Because of his height the pickaxe handle had not reached the full momentum of its downward swing before hitting his head. Through the blood spurting over his eyes he discerned there were two men in the door in front of him and two others on each side. He needed room to move, so he charged forward into flat 23.
The man directly in front of him staggered back under the impact; those behind closed in, hands reaching for his collar and jacket. Inside the room he drew the Colt from under his armpit, turned once and fired back into the doorway. As he did so another stave slammed down on his wrist, jerking the aim downwards.
The bullet ripped the kneecap off one of his assailants who went down with a thin screech. Then the gun was out of his hand, the fingers rendered nerveless from another blow on the wrist. A second later he was overwhelmed as the five men hurled themselves at him. The fight lasted three minutes. A doctor later estimated he must have taken a score of blows to the head from the leather-wrapped coshes before he finally passed out. A part of one of his ears was slashed off by a glancing blow, the nose was broken and the face was a deep-red mask. Most of his fighting was by reflex action. Twice he almost reached his gun, until a flying foot sent it spinning to the other end of the sitting-room. When he did finally go down on to his face there were only three attackers left standing to put the boot in.
When they had done and the enormous body on the floor was insensible, only a trickle of blood from the slashed scalp indicating that it was still alive, the three survivors stood back swearing viciously, chests heaving. Of the others, the man shot in the leg was curled against the wall by the door, white-faced, glistening red hands clutching his wrecked knee, a long monotonous stream of obscenities coming through pain-grey lips. Another was on his knees, rocking slowly back and forwards, hands thrust deep into the torn groin. The last lay down on the carpet not far from the Pole, a dull bruise discolouring his left temple where one of Kowalski’s haymakers had caught him at full force.
The leader of the group rolled Kowalski over on to his back and flicked up one of the closed eyelids. He crossed to the telephone near the window, dialled a local number and waited.
He was still breathing hard. When the phone was answered he told the person at the other end:
‘We got him … Fought? Of course he bloody fought … He got off one bullet, Guerini’s lost a kneecap. Capetti took one in the balls and Vissart is out cold … What? Yes, the Pole’s alive, those were the orders weren’t they? Otherwise he wouldn’t have done all this damage … Well, he’s hurt, all right. Dunno, he’s unconscious … Look, we don’t want a salad basket [police van] we want a couple of ambulances. And make it quick.’
He slammed the receiver down and muttered ‘Cons’ to the world in general. Round the room the fragments of shattered furniture lay about like firewood, which was all they would be good for. They had all thought the Pole would go down in the passage outside. None of the furniture had been stacked in a neighbouring room, and it had got in the way. He himself had stopped an armchair thrown by Kowalski with one hand full in the chest, and it hurt. Bloody Pole, he thought, the sods at head office hadn’t said what he was like.
Fifteen minutes later two Citroën ambulances slid into the road outside the block and the doctor came up. He spent five minutes examining Kowalski. Finally he drew back the unconscious man’s sleeve and gave him an injection. As the two stretcher-bearers staggered away towards the lift with the Pole, the doctor turned to the wounded Corsican who had been regarding him balefully from his pool of blood beside the wall.
He prised the man’s hands away from his knee, took a look and whistled.
‘Right. Morphine and the hospital. I’m going to give you a knock-out shot. There’s nothing I can do here. Anyway, mon petit , your career in this line is over.’
Guerini answered him with a steam of obscenities as the needle went in.
Vissart was sitting up with his hands to his head, a dazed expression on his face. Capetti was upright by now, leaning against the wall retching dry. Two of his colleagues gripped him under the armpits and led him hobbling from the flat into the corridor. The leader helped Vissart to his feet as the stretcher-bearers from the second ambulance carried the inert form of Guerini away.
Out in the corridor the leader of the six took a last look back into the desolated room. The doctor stood beside him.
‘Quite a mess, hein ?’ said the doctor.
‘The local office can clean it up,’ said the leader. ‘It’s their bloody flat.’
With that he closed the door. The doors of flat 22 and 24 were also open, but the interiors were untouched. He pulled both doors closed.
‘No neighbours?’ asked the doctor.
‘No neighbours,’ said the Corsican, ‘we took the whole floor.’
Preceded by the doctor, he helped the still dazed Vissart down the stairs to the waiting cars.
Twelve hours later, after a fast drive the length of France, Kowalski was lying on a cot in a cell beneath a fortress barracks outside Paris. The room had the inevitable whitewashed walls, stained and musty, of all prison cells, with here and there a scratched obscenity or prayer. It was hot and close, with an odour of carbolic acid, sweat and urine. The Pole lay face up on a narrow iron cot whose legs were embedded in the concrete floor. Apart from the biscuit mattress and a rolled-up blanket under his head, the cot contained no other linen. Two heavy leather straps secured his ankles, two more his thighs and wrists. A single strap pinned his chest down. He was still unconscious, but breathing deeply and irregularly.
The face had been bathed clean of blood, the ear and scalp sutured. A stick of plaster spanned the broken nose, and through the open mouth out of which the breath rasped could be seen the stumps of two broken front teeth. The rest of the face was badly bruised.
Beneath the thick mat of black hair covering the chest, shoulders and belly other livid bruises could just be discerned, the results of fists, boots and coshes. The right wrist was heavily bandaged and taped.
The man in the white coat finished his examination, straightened up and replaced his stethoscope in his bag. He turned and nodded at the man behind him, who tapped at the door. It swung open and the pair of them went outside. The door swung to, and the jailer slid home the two enormous steel bars.
‘What did you hit him with, an express train?’ asked the doctor as they walked down the passage.
‘It took six men to do that,’ replied Colonel Rolland.
‘Well, they did a pretty good job. They damn nearly killed him. If he wasn’t built like a bull they would have done.’
‘It was the only way,’ replied the Colonel. ‘He ruined three of my men.’
‘It must have been quite a fight.’
‘It was. Now, what’s the damage?’
‘In layman’s terms: possible fracture of the right wrist – I haven’t been able to do an X-ray remember – plus lacerated left ear, scalp and broken nose. Multiple cuts and bruising, slight internal haemorrhaging, which could get worse and kill him, or could clear up on its own. He enjoys what one might call a rude good health – or he did. What worries me is the head. There’s concussion all right, whether mild or severe is not easy to say. No signs of a skull fracture, though that was not the fault of your men. He’s just got a skull like solid ivory. But the concussion could get worse if he’s not left alone.’
‘I need to put certain questions to him,’ observed the Colonel, studying the tip of his glowing cigarette. The doctor’s prison clinic lay one way, the stairs leading to the ground floor the other. Both men stopped. The doctor glanced at the head of the Action Service with distaste.
‘This is a prison,’ he said quietly. ‘All right, it’s for offenders against the security of the state. But I am still the prison doctor. Elsewhere in this prison what I say, concerning prisoners’ health, goes. That corridor …’ he jerked his head backwards in the direction from which they had come … ‘is your preserve. It has been most lucidly explained to me that what happens down there is none of my business, and I have no say in it. But I will say this; if you start “questioning” that man before he’s recovered, with your methods, he’ll either die or become a raving lunatic.’
Colonel Rolland listened to the doctor’s bitter prediction without moving a muscle.
‘How long?’ he asked.
The doctor shrugged, ‘Impossible to say. He may regain consciousness tomorrow, or not for days. Even if he does, he will not be fit for questioning – medically fit that is – for at least a fortnight. At the very least. That is, if the concussion is only mild.’
‘There are certain drugs,’ murmured the Colonel.
‘Yes, there are. And I have no intention of prescribing them. You may be able to get them, you probably can. But not from me. In any case, nothing he could tell you now would make the slightest sense. It would probably be gibberish. His mind is scrambled. It may clear, it may not. But if it does, it must happen in its own time. Mind-bending drugs now would simply produce an idiot, no use to you or anyone else. It will probably be a week before he flickers an eyelid. You’ll just have to wait.’
With that he turned on his heel and walked back to his clinic.
But the doctor was wrong. Kowalski opened his eyes three days later, on 10th August, and the same day had his first and only session with the interrogators.
The Jackal spent the three days after his return from Brussels putting the final touches to his preparations for his forthcoming mission into France.
With his new driving licence in the name of Alexander James Quentin Duggan in his pocket he went down to Fanum House, headquarters of the Automobile Association, and acquired an International Driving Licence in the same name.
He bought a matching series of leather suitcases from a second-hand shop specializing in travel goods. Into one he packed the clothes that would, if necessary, disguise him as Pastor Per Jensen of Copenhagen. Before the packing he transferred the Danish maker’s labels from the three ordinary shirts he had bought in Copenhagen to the clerical shirt, dog collar and black bib that he had bought in London, removing the English maker’s labels as he did so. These clothes joined the shoes, socks, underwear and charcoal-grey light suit that might one day make up the persona of Pastor Jensen. Into the same suitcase went the clothes of American student Marty Schulberg, sneakers, socks, jeans, sweat-shirts and windcheater.
Slitting the lining of the suitcase, he inserted between the two layers of leather that comprised the stiffened sides of the case the passport of the two foreigners he might one day wish to become. The last additions to this caseful of clothes were the Danish book on French cathedrals, the two sets of spectacles, one for the Dane, the other for the American, the two different sets of tinted contact lenses, carefully wrapped in tissue paper, and the preparations for hair tinting.
Into the second case went the shoes, socks, shirt and trousers of French make and design that he had bought in the Paris Flea Market, along with the ankle-length greatcoat and black beret. Into the lining of this case he inserted the false papers of the middle-aged Frenchman André Martin. This case remained partly empty, for it would soon also have to hold a series of narrow steel tubes containing a complete sniper’s rifle and ammunition.
The third, slightly smaller, suitcase was packed with the effects of Alexander Duggan: shoes, socks, underwear, shirts, ties, handkerchiefs and three elegant suits. Into the lining of this suitcase went several thin wads of ten-pound notes to the value of a thousand pounds, which he had drawn from his private bank account on his return from Brussels.
Each of these cases was carefully locked and the keys transferred to his private key-ring. The dove-grey suit was cleaned and pressed, then left hanging in the wall cupboard of his flat. Inside the breast pocket were his passport, driving licence, international licence and a folder containing one hundred pounds in cash.
Into the last piece of his luggage, a neat hand case, went shaving tackle, pyjamas, sponge-bag and towel, and the final pieces of his purchases – a light harness of finely sewn webbing, a two-pound bag of plaster of Paris, several rolls of large-weave lint bandages, half a dozen rolls of sticky plaster, three packs of cotton wool and a pair of stout shears with blunt but powerful blades. The grip would travel as hand-luggage, for it was his experience that in passing Customs at whatever airport an attaché case was not usually the piece of luggage selected by the Customs officer for an arbitrary request to open up.
With his purchases and packing complete he had reached the end of his planning. The disguises of Pastor Jensen and Marty Schulberg, he hoped, were merely precautionary tactics which would probably never be used unless things went wrong and the identity of Alexander Duggan had to be abandoned. The identity of André Martin was vital to his plan, and it was possible that the other two would never be required. In that event the entire suitcase could be abandoned in a left-luggage office when the job was over. Even then, he reasoned, he might need either of them for his escape. André Martin and the gun could also be abandoned when the job was over, as he would have no further use for them. Entering France with three suitcases and an attaché case, he estimated he would leave with one suitcase and the hand luggage, certainly not more.
With this task finished he settled down to wait for the two pieces of paper that would set him on his way. One was the telephone number in Paris which could be used to feed him information concerning the exact state of readiness of the security forces surrounding the French President. The other was the written notification from Herr Meier in Zürich that two hundred and fifty thousand dollars had been deposited in his numbered bank account.
While he was waiting for them he passed the time by practising walking round his flat with a pronounced limp. Within two days he was satisfied that he had a sufficiently realistic limp to prevent any observer from being able to detect that he had not sustained a broken ankle or leg.
The first letter he awaited arrived on the morning of 9th August. It was an envelope postmarked in Rome and bore the message: ‘Your friend can be contacted at MOLITOR 5901. Introduce yourself with the words “Ici Chacal”. Reply will be “Ici Valmy”. Good luck.’
It was not until the morning of the 11th that the letter from Zürich arrived. He grinned openly as he read the confirmation that, come what may, provided he remained alive, he was a wealthy man for the rest of his life. If his forthcoming operation was successful, he would be even richer. He had no doubts that he would succeed. Nothing had been left to chance.
He spent the rest of that morning on the telephone booking air passages, and fixed his departure for the following morning, 12th August.
The cellar was silent except for the sound of breathing, heavy but controlled from the five men behind the table, a rasping rattle from the man strapped to the heavy oaken chair in front of it. One could not tell how big the cellar was, nor what was the colour of the walls. There was only one pool of light in the whole place and it encircled the oak chair and the prisoner. It was a standard table lamp such as is often used for reading, but its bulb was of great power and brightness, adding to the overpowering warmth of the cellar. The lamp was clipped to the left-hand edge of the table and the adjustable shade was turned so that it shone straight at the chair six feet away.
Part of the circle of light swept across the stained wood of the table, illuminating here and there the tips of a set of fingers, a hand and a wrist, a clipped cigarette sending a thin stream of blue smoke upwards.
So bright was the light that by contrast the rest of the cellar was in darkness. The torsos and shoulders of the five men behind the table in a row were invisible to the prisoner. The only way he could have seen his questioners would have been to leave his chair and move to the side, so that the indirect glow from the light picked out their silhouettes.
This he could not do. Padded straps pinned his ankles firmly against the legs of the chair. From each of these legs, front and back, an L-shaped steel bracket was bolted into the floor. The chair had arms, and the wrists of the prisoner were secured to these also by padded straps. Another strap ran round his waist and a third round his massive hairy chest. The padding of each was drenched with sweat.
Apart from the quiescent hands, the top of the table was almost bare. Its only other decoration was a slit bordered in brass and marked along one side with figures. Out of the slit protruded a narrow brass arm with a bakelite knob on the top which could be moved backwards and forwards up and down the slit. Beside this was a simple on/off switch. The right hand of the man on the end of the table rested negligently close to the controls. Little black hairs crawled along the back of the hand.
Two wires fell beneath the table, one from the switch, the other from the current control, towards a small electrical transformer lying on the floor near the end man’s feet. From here a stouter rubber-clad black cable led to a large socket in the wall behind the group.
In the far corner of the cellar behind the questioners a single man sat at a wooden table, face to the wall. A tiny glow of green came from the ‘on’ light of the tape recorder in front of him, although the spools were still.
Apart from the breathing, the silence of the cellar was almost tangible. All the men were in shirt sleeves, rolled up high and damp with sweat. The odour was crushing, a stench of sweat, metal, stale smoke and human vomit. Even the latter, pungent enough, was overpowered by one even stronger, the unmistakable reek of fear and pain.
The man in the centre spoke at last. The voice was civilized, gentle, coaxing.
‘Ecoute, mon p’tit Viktor . You are going to tell us. Not now perhaps. But eventually. You are a brave man. We know that. We salute you. But even you cannot hold out much longer. So why not tell us? You think Colonel Rodin would forbid you if he were here. He would order you to tell us. He knows about these things. He would tell us himself to spare you more discomfort. You yourself know, they always talk in the end. N’est-ce pas, Viktor ? You have seen them talk, hein ? No one can go on and on and on. So why not now, hein ? Then back to bed. And sleep, and sleep and sleep. No one will disturb you …’
The man in the chair raised a battered face, glistening with sweat, into the light. The eyes were closed, whether by the great blue bruises caused by the feet of the Corsicans in Marseilles or by the light, one could not tell. The face looked at the table and the blackness in front of it for a while, the mouth opened and tried to speak. A small gobbet of puke emerged and dribbled down the matted chest to the pool of vomit in his lap. The head sagged back until the chin touched the chest again. As it did so the shaggy hair shook from side to side in answer. The voice from behind the table began again.
‘Viktor, écoute-moi . You’re a hard man. We all know that. We all recognize that. You have beaten the record already. But even you can’t go on. But we can, Viktor, we can. If we have to we keep you alive and conscious for days, weeks. No merciful oblivion like in the old days. One is technical nowadays. There are drugs, tu sais . Third degree is finished now, probably gone for good. So why not talk. We understand, you see. We know about the pain. But the little crabs, they do not understand. They just don’t understand, Viktor. They just go on and on … You want to tell us, Viktor? What are they doing in that hotel in Rome? What are they waiting for?’
Lolling against the chest, the great head shook slowly from side to side. It was as if the closed eyes were examining first one and then the other of the little copper crabs that gripped the nipples, or the single larger one whose serrated teeth clipped each side of the head of the penis.
The hands of the man who had spoken lay in front of him in a pool of light, slim, white, full of peace. He waited for a few moments longer. One of the white hands separated itself from the other, the thumb tucked into the palm, the four fingers spread wide, and laid itself on the table.
At the far end the hand of the man by the electric switch moved the brass handle up the scale from figure two to figure four, then took the on/off switch between finger and thumb.
The hand further along the wooden top withdrew the splayed fingers, lifted the forefinger once into the air, then pointed the fingertip downwards in the world-wide signal for ‘Go’. The electric switch went on.
The little metal crabs fixed to the man in the chair and linked by wires to the on/off switch appeared to come alive with a slight buzzing. In silence the huge form in the chair rose as if by levitation, propelled by an unseen hand in the small of the back. The legs and wrists bulged outwards against the straps until it seemed that even with the padding the leather must cut clean through the flesh and bone. The eyes, medically unable to see clearly through the puffed flesh around them, defied medicine and started outwards bulging into vision and staring at the ceiling above. The mouth was open as if in surprise and it was half a second before the demonic scream came out of the lungs. When it did come, it went on and on and on …
Viktor Kowalski broke at 4.10 in the afternoon and the tape recorder went on.
As he started to talk, or rather ramble incoherently between whimpers and squeaks, the calm voice from the man in the centre cut across the maunderings with incisive clarity.
‘Why are they there, Viktor … in that hotel … Rodin, Montclair and Casson … what are they afraid of … where have they been, Viktor … who have they seen … why do they see nobody, Viktor … tell us, Viktor … why Rome … before Rome … why Vienna, Viktor … where in Vienna … which hotel … why were they there, Viktor …?’
Kowalski was finally silent after fifty minutes, his last ramblings as he went into relapse being recorded on tape until they stopped. The voice behind the table continued, more gently for another few minutes until it became clear there were going to be no more answers. Then the man in the centre gave an order to his subordinates and the session was over.
The tape recording was taken off the spool and rushed by a fast car from the cellar beneath the fortress into the outskirts of Paris and the offices of the Action Service.
The brilliant afternoon that had warmed the friendly pavements of Paris throughout the day faded to golden dusk, and at nine the street lights came on. Along the banks of the Seine the couples strolled as always on summer nights, hand in hand, slowly as if drinking in the wine of dusk and love and youth that will never, however hard they try, be quite the same again. The open-fronted cafés along the water’s edge were alive with chatter and clink of glasses, greetings and mock protests, raillerie and compliments, apologies and passes, that make up the conversation of the French and the magic of the river Seine on an August evening. Even the tourists were almost forgiven for being there and bringing their dollars with them.
In a small office near the Porte des Lilas the insouciance did not penetrate. Three men sat round a tape recorder that turned slowly on a desk. Through the late afternoon and evening they worked. One man controlled the switches, continuously flicking the spools on to ‘playback’ or ‘rewind’ and then ‘playback’ again on the instruction of the second. This man had a pair of earphones over his head, brow furrowed in concentration as he tried to decipher meaningful words out of the jumble of sounds coming through the phones. A cigarette clipped between his lips, rising blue smoke making his eyes water, he signed with his fingers to the operator when he wanted to hear a passage again. Sometimes he listened to a ten-second passage half a dozen times before nodding to the operator to hold on. Then he would dictate the last passage of speech.
The third man, a younger blond, sat behind a typewriter and waited for dictation. The questions that had been asked in the cellar beneath the fortress were easy to understand, coming clear and precise through the earphones. The answers were more disjointed. The typist wrote the transcript like an interview, the questions always on a fresh line and beginning with the letter Q. The answers were on the next line, beginning with the letter R. These were disjointed, involving the use of plenty of spacing dots where the sense broke up completely.
It was nearly twelve midnight before they had finished. Despite the open window the air was blue with smoke and smelt like a powder magazine.
The three men rose stiff and weary. Each stretched in his own fashion to untwine the bunched and aching muscles. One of the three reached for the telephone, asked for an outside line and dialled a number. The man with the earphones took them off and re-wound the tape back on to the original spool. The typist took the last sheets out of his machine, extracted the carbons from between them and began to arrange the separate piles of paper into sets of the confession in order of pages. The top set would go to Colonel Rolland, the second to files, and the third to mimeograph for extra copies to be made for department heads, to be distributed if Rolland deemed fit.
The call reached Colonel Rolland at the restaurant where he had been dining with friends. As usual the elegant-looking bachelor civil servant had been his witty and gallant self, and his compliments to the ladies present had been much appreciated, by them if not by their husbands. When the waiter called him to the phone, he apologized and left. The phone was on the counter. The Colonel said simply ‘Rolland’ and waited while his operative at the other end identified himself.
Rolland then did the same by introducing into the first sentence of his conversation the correct prearranged word. A listener would have learned that he had received information that his car, which had been under repair, was mended, and could be collected at the Colonel’s convenience Colonel Rolland thanked his informant, and returned to the table. Within five minutes he was excusing himself with urbanity, explaining that he faced a hard day in the morning and ought to get his ration of sleep. Ten minutes later he was alone in his car, speeding through the still-crowded city streets towards the quieter faubourg of Porte des Lilas. He reached his office soon after one in the morning, took off his immaculate dark jacket, ordered coffee from the night staff, and rang for his assistant.
The top copy of Kowalski’s confession came with the coffee. The first time he read the twenty-six pages of the dossier quickly, trying to grasp the gist of what the demented legionnaire had been saying. Something in the middle caught his eye, causing him to frown, but he read on to the end without a pause.
His second reading was slower, more cautious, giving greater concentration to each paragraph. The third time he took a black felt-nib pen from the tray in front of the blotter and read even more slowly, drawing the thick black line of ink through the words and passages relating to Sylvie, Luke something, Indo-China, Algeria, JoJo, Kovacs, Corsican bastards, the Legion. All these he understood, and they did not interest him.
Much of the wandering concerned Sylvie, some of it a woman called Julie, which meant nothing to Rolland. When all this was deleted, the confession would not have covered more than six pages. Out of the remaining passages he tried to make some sense. There was Rome. The three leaders were in Rome. Well, he knew that anyway. But why? This question had been asked eight times. By and large the answer had been the same each time. They did not wish to be kidnapped like Argoud had been in February. Natural enough, thought Rolland. Had he then been wasting his time with the whole Kowalski operation? There was one word the legionnaire had mentioned twice, or rather mumbled twice, in answering these eight identical questions. The word was ‘secret’. As an adjective? There was nothing secret about their presence in Rome. Or as a noun. What secret?
Rolland went through to the end for the tenth time, then back again to the beginning. The three OAS men were in Rome. They were there because they did not wish to be kidnapped. They did not wish to be kidnapped because they possessed a secret.
Rolland smiled ironically. He had known better than General Guibaud that Rodin would not run for cover because he was frightened.
So they knew a secret did they? What secret? It all seemed to have stemmed from something in Vienna. Three times the word Vienna cropped up, but at first Rolland had thought it must be the town called Vienne that lies twenty miles south of Lyon. But perhaps it was the Austrian capital, not the French provincial town.
They had a meeting in Vienna. Then they went to Rome and took refuge against the possibility of being kidnapped and interrogated until they revealed a secret. The secret must stem from Vienna.
The hours passed, and so did innumerable cups of coffee. The pile of stubs in the shell-case ashtray grew. Before the thin line of paler grey started to tip the grisly industrial suburbs that lie east of the Boulevard Mortier Colonel Rolland knew he was on to something.
There were pieces missing. Were they really missing, gone for all time since the message by phone at three in the morning had told him Kowalski would never be questioned again because he was dead? Or were they hidden somewhere in the jumbled text that had come out of the deranged brain as the final reserves of strength failed?
With his right hand Rolland began to jot down pieces of the puzzle that had no seeming place to be there. Kleist, a man called Kleist. Kowalski, being a Pole, had pronounced the word correctly and Rolland, knowing some German still from his wartime days, wrote it down correctly although it had been spelt wrongly by the French transcriber. Or was it a person? A place perhaps? He rang the switchboard and asked them to seek out the Viennese telephone directory and search for a person or a place called Kleist. The answer was back in ten minutes. There were two columns of Kleists in Vienna, all private individuals, and two places of that name: the Ewald Kleist Primary School for Boys, and the Pension Kleist in the Brucknerallee. Rolland noted both, but underlined the Pension Kleist. Then he read on.
There were several references to a foreigner over whom Kowalski seemed to have mixed feelings. Sometimes he used the word bon , meaning good, to refer to this man; at other times he called him a fâcheur , an annoying or irritating type. Shortly after 5 a.m. Colonel Rolland sent for the tape and tape recorder, and spent the next hour listening to it. When he finally switched off the machine he swore quietly and violently to himself. Taking a fine pen he made several alterations to the transcribed text.
Kowalski had not referred to the foreigner as bon but as ‘blond’. And the word coming from the torn lips that had been written down as fâcheur had in reality been faucheur , meaning a killer.
From then on the task of piecing together Kowalski’s hazy meaning was easy. The word for jackal, which had been crossed out wherever it occurred because Rolland had thought it was Kowalski’s way of insulting the men who had hunted him down and were torturing him, took on a new meaning. It became the code name of the killer with the blond hair, who was a foreigner, and whom the three OAS chiefs had met at the Pension Kleist in Vienna days before they had gone into heavily protected hiding in Rome.
Rolland could work out for himself the reason now for the wave of bank and jewel robberies that had rocked France over the preceding eight weeks. The blond, whoever he was, wanted money to do a job for the OAS. There was only one job in the world that could command that kind of money. The blond had not been called in to settle a gang fight.
At seven in the morning Rolland called his communications room and ordered the night-duty operator to send off a blitz imperative to the SDECE office in Vienna, overriding interdepartmental protocol under which Vienna was within the manor of R.3 Western Europe. Then he called in every copy of the Kowalski confession and locked them all in his safe. Finally he sat down to write a report, which had only one listed recipient and was headed ‘for your eyes only’.
He wrote carefully in longhand, describing briefly the operation which he had personally mounted of his own initiative to capture Kowalski; relating the return of the exlegionnaire to Marseilles, lured by the ruse or a false belief that someone close to him was ill in hospital, the capture by Action Service agents, a brief mention for the record that the man had been interrogated by agents of the service, and had made a garbled confession. He felt bound to include a bald statement that in resisting arrest the exlegionnaire had crippled two agents but had also done himself sufficient damage in an attempt at suicide that by the time he was overcome the only possible recourse was to hospitalize him. It was here, from his sick bed that he had made his confession.
The rest of the report, which was the bulk, concerned the confession itself and Rolland’s interpretation of it. When he had finished this he paused for a moment, scanning the rooftops now gilded by the morning sun streaming in from the east. Rolland had a reputation as he was well aware for never overstating his case nor exaggerating an issue. He composed his final paragraph with care.
‘Enquiries with the intention of establishing corroborative evidence of this plot are still under way at the hour of writing. However, in the event that these enquiries should indicate the above is the truth, the plot described above constitutes in my view the most dangerous single conception that the terrorists could possibly have devised to endanger the life of the President of France. If the plot exists as described, and if the foreign-born assassin known only by the code-name of The Jackal has been engaged for this attempt on the life of the President, and is even now preparing his plans to execute the deed, it is my duty to inform you that in my opinion we face a national emergency.’
Most unusually for him, Colonel Rolland typed the final fair copy of the report himself, sealed it in an envelope with his personal seal, addressed it and stamped it with the highest security classification in the secret service. Finally he burned the sheets of foolscap on which he had written in longhand and washed the ashes down the plug of the small hand basin in a cabinet in the corner of his office.
When he had finished he washed his hands and face. As he dried them he glanced in the mirror above the washstand. The face that stared back at him was, he ruefully admitted, losing its handsomeness. The lean face that had been so dashing in youth and so attractive to women in maturity was beginning to look tired and strained in middle age. Too many experiences, too much knowledge of the depths of bestiality to which Man could sink when he fought for his survival against his fellow man, and too much scheming and double-crossing, sending men out to die or to kill, to scream in cellars or to make other men scream in cellars, had aged the head of the Action Service far beyond his fifty-four years. There were two lines down the side of the nose and on down beyond the corners of the mouth that if they got much longer would no more be distinguished but simply agricultural. Two dark smudges seemed to have settled permanently under the eyes and the elegant grey of the sideburns was becoming white without turning silver.
‘At the end of this year,’ he told himself, ‘I really am going to get out of this racket.’ The face looked back at him haggard. Disbelief or simply resignation? Perhaps the face knew better than the mind did. After a certain number of years there was no getting out any more. One was what one was for the rest of one’s days. From the Resistance to the security police, then the SDECE, and finally the Action Service. How many men, and how much blood in all those years? he asked the face in the mirror. And all for France. And what the hell does France care? And the face looked back out of the mirror and said nothing. For they both knew the answer.
Colonel Rolland summoned a motor-cycle dispatch rider to report to him personally in his office. He also ordered fried eggs, rolls and butter, and more coffee, but this time a large cup of milky coffee, with aspirins for his headache. He handed over the package with his seal and gave the dispatch rider his orders. Finishing his eggs and rolls, he took his coffee and drank it on the sill of the open window, the corner that faced towards Paris. He could make out across the miles of roofs the spires of Notre Dame and in the already hot morning haze that hung over the Seine the Eiffel Tower further on. It was already well after nine o’clock on the morning of 11th August, and the city was busily at work, probably cursing the motor-cyclist in the black leather jerkin and the wailing siren who slewed his machine through the traffic towards the eighth arrondissement.
Depending on whether the menace described in the dispatch on that motor-cyclist’s hip could be averted, thought Rolland, might hang whether or not at the end of the year he had a job to retire from.