The Stone Leopard (27 page)

`Yes.'

The official returned the passport and Vanek moved on, to be joined a few minutes later by Lansky. Vanek had presented the third set of papers he had brought from Tabor, papers made out in the name of Lucien Segard, papers which carried a photograph of him without a moustache. Only the previous night in Kehl he had shaved off the moustache in the station wash-room before accompanying Lansky to a small hotel where they had spent the night. Lansky had also used his third set of papers which carried the name Yves Gandouin. When frontier control officials have been asked to look out for men travelling under the names of Duval and Lambert it is only human for them to concentrate on people of those names, and to be anything but suspicious of different names.

Without having the least idea that their previous identities had been blown, Vanek had taken his decision the previous night after they had abandoned the Mercedes. 'Twice we have crossed the French border using our present papers,' he had told Lansky, 'and twice is enough.' He had then proceeded to burn the papers carrying the names Duval and Lambert before they walked to the nearest village and independently boarded a bus crowded with Christmas shoppers for Kehl. Inside Germany they were really in no danger: the only people who knew their names were inside France, and on the phone Marc Grelle had been reluctant to give Peter Lanz such information because of the delicacy of the investigation he was conducting.

Arriving back in Strasbourg, Vanek kept well away from the Hertz car-hire branch in the Boulevard de Nancy. 'Never go back,' was one of his favourite maxims. Instead, the two men took a cab to the airport where Vanek hired a Renault 17 from the Avis car-hire branch in the name of Lucien Segard. By 2 pm they were on their way to Saverne, which is only twenty- five miles from Strasbourg.

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Alan Lennox had stayed up half the night at the Hotel Colombi

in Freiburg talking to Peter Lanz. The German, who had been handed a copy of the
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
containing Dieter Wohl's letter just before he left Bonn—`I should have been shown it days earlier, but no one thought to read the correspondence columns'—was dubious as to whether Annette Devaud would still be alive.

`From what Wohl said to you,' he remarked, 'she would be a

very old lady now—and if she is blind how could she recognize anyone ? Even assuming she ever knew what the Leopard looked like. . .'

`There's nothing else left,' Lennox said obstinately. 'No one else left, perhaps I should say. What Leon Jouvel told me is very inconclusive—although he was convincing at the time. In any case, the poor devil is dead. I'm going back across the Rhine tomorrow to try and find Annette Devaud.'

`Going back again over the frontier for the third time on false papers? I'm not asking you to do that. . .

`Call it British bloody-mindedness—we're known for it. I just want to get to the bottom of this thing and find out who the Leopard really is. Wish me luck.'

`I have a feeling you're going to need more than luck,' Lanz replied gravely.

Remembering the atmosphere of intense police activity at Strasbourg station only thirty-six hours earlier, it took a certain amount of will-power for Lennox to hand his papers across the counter to French passport control and then wait while they were inspected. They were examined only cursorily and handed straight back; no one was interested in a man called Jean Bouvier. Probably the easiest way to pass through a checkpoint is to choose a time when someone else is being watched for.

Obtaining the address from Bottin, the telephone directory, Lennox left Strasbourg station and went straight to Hertz car-hire in the Boulevard de Nancy where he chose a Mercedes 350 SE. It was expensive but he wanted some power under the bonnet. By noon he was leaving Strasbourg, driving west for Saverne in the Vosges mountains. He had, of course, no idea that for the first time since he had embarked on this trip at the behest of David Nash of New York he was two hours ahead of the Soviet Commando.

It was Boisseau who heard about the newspaper cutting of Dieter Wohl's letter to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung sent to Paris by the French Secret Service agent in Bonn. Oddly enough he was shown the photostat of the cutting by Commissioner Suchet of counter-intelligence whom he had made it his business to cultivate. Suchet was under the impression that this gave him a private pipeline into the prefecture, whereas the reverse was true; the only information given to him by Boisseau had first been vetted by Marc Grelle. It was late in the morning of Wednesday, 22 December, when Boisseau showed the photostat to his chief.

`So there could just be a witness who never appeared on Lasalle's list,' Grelle mused. 'That is, assuming she is still alive, after all these years. . .'

`She is. I phoned the police station at Saverne. She's living at a remote farmhouse quite a distance from Saverne itself— high up in the Vosges mountains. This letter made me go through the files again and there is one we overlooked. Annette Devaud was in charge of the Leopard's courier network. The really interesting thing could be the name. . .'

`Annette Devaud—Lucie Devaud. . . .' The prefect clasped his hands behind his neck and looked shrewdly at his deputy. `All avenues closed, I said. I wonder. All right, Boisseau, fly to Saverne. Yes, this afternoon, I agree. In view of what has happened to the other witnesses should you not call Saverne and ask them to send out a police guard ?'

`She must be old—they might frighten her. And in any case, since she was not on Lasalle's list why should she be on the Commando's ? Both Lasalle and the Commando must have been working from the same list—in view of what happened. So where is the danger ?'

`I leave it to you,' the prefect said.

Driving across the flat plain of Alsace which lies between Strasbourg and the Vosges mountains, Lennox soon ran into atrocious weather. Curtains of rain swept across the empty road, adding even more water to the already flooded fields, and in the distance heavy mist blotted out the Vosges completely. He drove on as water poured down his windscreen and then the engine began knocking badly, which made him swear because he knew the mountain roads ahead could be difficult. It was his own fault: the Hertz people had been reluctant to let him have this car, the only Mercedes 350 on the premises for hire. `It has not been serviced, sir,' the girl had protested. 'I am not permitted . . .' Lennox had impatiently overridden her objections because he liked the car, and now he was paying for it.

Driving on across the lonely plain, the knocking became worse and he knew he had been foolish. Squinting through the windscreen, he saw a sign.
Auberge des Vosges and petrol five hundred metres ahead
. He wanted in any case to check Annette Devaud's address—and to find out whether anyone knew if she was still alive. Through the pouring rain a small hotel with a garage attached came into view. Pulling up in front of the pumps, he lowered the window and asked the mechanic to check the vehicle. A few minutes later the mechanic came into the hotel bar with the bad news. He had found the defect: it would take a couple of hours to put it right.

`Can't you hurry it up?' Lennox asked.

`I am starting work on it now,' the mechanic informed him. `I can hurry it up yes. It will take two hours.'

Lennox ordered a second cognac and two jambon sandwiches, which arrived as large hunks of appetizing French bread sliced apart and with ham inside them. Had the mechanic said three hours he would have been tempted to try and hire another car. He sank his teeth hungrily into the sandwich; two hours shouldn't make all that difference to the state of the world.

Annette Devaud, now spending the evening of her life at Woodcutter's Farm, had held one of the key positions in the Leopard's Resistance group in 1944: she had controlled the network of couriers, mostly girls in their late teens and early twenties, who had carried messages backwards and forwards under the very noses of the enemies. Almost forty years old, slim and wiry, she had been a handsome woman with a proud Roman nose and an air of authority which had rivalled that of the Leopard himself. Of all the men and women who had worked under him, the Leopard had most respected Annette Devaud, possibly because she was an outspoken anti- Communist. 'At least I know where I am with her,' he once said. And Annette Devaud had another distinction—she knew what the Leopard looked like.

Because he found it useful to build up the reputation of an invincible personality, the Leopard kept it a secret when he was shot in the leg during a running battle in the forests. The wound did not take long to heal, but for a short period he was bed-ridden. It was Annette Devaud who shared his solitary convalescence, nursing him swiftly back to health, and it was during these few weeks that she came to know exactly what he looked like.

Annette Devaud heard, but did not see, the celebrations of Liberation Day; she had gone blind overnight. No one was able to diagnose the cause of her affliction, although some thought it was the news of the death of her husband who had fought with General Leclerc's division. Then again it could have been the death of her nineteen-year-old daughter Lucie, who drowned when the Leopard drove his car into the river to avoid Dieter Wohl's ambush. This happened after Annette had nursed the Leopard back to health when he was shot.

At the end of the war, returning to her home, Woodcutter's Farm, she remained there for over thirty years. The onset of blindness was an even greater blow than it might have been for some people; Annette had been a talented amateur artist who drew portraits in charcoal, and this too she put behind her as she adjusted to her new life. But in a folder she kept the collection of portrait sketches she had made during the war from memory. Among the collection were two lifelike portraits of the Leopard.

Annette Devaud had endured another tragedy. Against her will, her daughter Lucie had insisted on becoming one of her couriers, and during her time with the Resistance the nineteen-year-old girl had taken as a lover an ex-accountant called Albert Camors. Out of the liaison a child had been born only six months before the Leopard drove Lucie Devaud into the river. Taking its mother's name, the child was called Lucie. Camors survived the war but quarrelled violently with the strong-willed Annette Devaud and he refused to let her have anything to do with the child. Prospering in peacetime—he became a Paris stockbroker—Camors brought up the child himself and never married.

A solitary but strong-willed child—reproducing in some ways the character of her grandmother, Annette, whom she never saw—Lucie grew up in a bachelor household and developed an obsession about the mother she couldn't remember. From her father she heard about the Leopard, about how her mother had died. Then, when she was almost thirty, Camors expired in the arms of his latest mistress and Lucie inherited his fortune and an apartment in the Place des Vosges. And for the first time she visited her blind grandmother.

The two women took to each other immediately and one day Annette, talking about the war, showed her grand-daughter the folder of sketches, including the two of the Leopard. Lucie instantly recognized the portraits, but in her secretive way she said nothing to the blind woman. Using the names of people who had belonged to the Resistance group—which Annette had mentioned—she began checking. With her father's money to finance the investigation, she employed a shrewd lawyer called Max Rosenthal to dig into the Leopard's background. And without saying anything to Annette, she removed the two portrait sketches from the folder and took them back to her Paris apartment.

It was Max Rosenthal who traced Gaston Martin, the Leopard's wartime deputy, to Guiana where he was on the verge of being released from prison. Lucie Devaud wrote a careful letter to the man Annette had mentioned, hinting to Martin that the Leopard had become an important political figure in France, and then waited for a reply. The letter reached Martin shortly after he had been released from prison and he took his time about replying to her.

It was during the opening of a Paris fashion show that Lucie played the macabre trick which finally convinced her she had uncovered the real identity of the Leopard. She had seen the animal in a rue de Rivoli shop which specialized in exotic presents costing a great deal of money. Purchasing the animal, she kept it in her apartment and then obtained a ticket for the fashion show in the rue Cambon. In a newspaper she had read that President Florian would be attending the show with his wife, Lise.

When Guy Florian arrived escorting Lise—he was attending the show to dispel rumours that they were no longer on speaking terms—the show had already started, models were parading, and Lucie Devaud was sitting in a front-row seat with her draped overcoat concealing the underneath of her chair. Florian and his wife sat down almost opposite her. The show was almost over when Lucie tugged at the chain she held in her hand and which led underneath her draped chair. A model had just walked past when the leopard cub emerged from under the chair, stood on the carpet with its legs braced and bared its teeth.

It was over in a moment. An armed plain-clothes security man, one of several sent to the show by Marc Grelle, caught the expression on the president's face, grabbed the chain out of Lucie's hand, tugged the animal and led it out of the salon, followed by its owner with her coat draped over her arm. Florian recovered quickly, made an off-hand gesture and cracked a joke. 'I have had nothing to drink and yet there are spots in front of my eyes !'