The Stone Leopard (3 page)

This very young second-in-command of the BND was a man of medium height, slim build and thinning brown hair. 'In this job I shall be bald at forty,' he was fond of saying. 'Is it true that women go wild over bald men ?' Normally serious-faced, he had one quality in common with Guy Florian: when he smiled he could charm almost anyone into agreeing with him. His job was to try and foresee any potentially explosive situation which might harm the Federal Republic politically—to foresee and defuse in advance. The arrival of Lasalle on German soil was a classic case. 'Not one of my outstanding successes,' he once admitted, 'but then we don't know where it's going to lead, do we ? Lasalle knows something—maybe one day he will tell me what he knows. . .

Nash met Lanz at Liege in Belgium. Earlier in the morning, landing at Brussels at 8.30 am, the American had hired a car at the airport in the name of Charles Wade, the pseudonym under which he was travelling. Arriving in Liege, Nash spent half an hour with Lanz in the anonymous surroundings of the railway station restaurant, then he drove on south to Clervaux in the Ardennes. The secret rendezvous with Col Lasalle had been chosen carefully—Clervaux is neither in Germany nor in Belgium. This little-known town is high up in the hills of northern Luxembourg.

The secrecy surrounding Nash's visit was essential to the survival of Lasalle as a credible public figure; once Paris could prove he was in touch with the Americans he could so easily be discredited as a tool of Washington. At the quiet Hotel Claravallis in Clervaux, inside a room booked in the name of Charles Wade, Nash and Lasalle talked in absolute secrecy for two hours. Afterwards, Lasalle left immediately and drove back to Germany. Nash had a quick lunch at the hotel and then drove straight back to Belgium where he reported to Peter Lanz who had waited for him in Liege. Half an hour later Nash was on his way back to Brussels where he caught the night plane to New York. During his lightning dash to Europe, travelling under a pseudonym, Nash had gone nowhere near the American Embassy in Brussels. He was eating dinner on the plane while he doodled animal pictures and then erased them. Pictures of the head of a leopard.

CHAPTER TWO

DAVID
 
NASH was somewhere on the road between Brussels and Liege, driving to keep his first appointment with Peter Lanz, when Marc Grelle in Paris received what appeared to be a routine phone call. The large office of the police prefect is on the second floor of the prefecture; its walls are panelled, its windows overlook the Boulevard du Palais; and to ensure privacy the windows are masked by net curtains. As usual, Grelle was wearing a pair of slacks and a polo-necked sweater as he sat behind his desk, going through the morning's paperwork, which he disliked.

Grelle, born in the city of Metz, was a man of Lorraine. In France the Lorrainers are known as the least French of the French. Sturdy physically, not at all excitable, they have a reputation for being level-headed and dependable in an emergency. Grelle had travelled a long way to reach Paris from Metz. At the time of Florian's election as president eighteen months earlier, Marc Grelle had been police prefect of Marseilles and would have been quite content to complete his career in that raffish seaport. 'Look where ambition gets you,' he had a habit of saying. 'Look at any cabinet minister. They take pills to help them sleep, they take stimulants to keep them awake at the Wednesday cabinet meetings. They marry rich wives to further their ambitions, then spend their wives' money on mistresses to keep themselves sane. What is the point of it all ?'

It was only with the greatest reluctance that Grelle accepted Florian's strong plea for him to come to Paris. 'I need one honest man close to me,' Florian had urged. His face had creased into the famous smile. 'If you won't accept I shall have to leave the post vacant l' So, Grelle had come to Paris. Sighing, he initialled a paper and was turning to another document when the phone rang. The call was from Andre Boisseau, his deputy.

`I'm at the Hotel-Dieu, chief, just round the corner. I think you ought to get over here right away. A man is dying and there's something very odd about him. . .

`Dying ?'

`He was knocked down by a hit-and-run driver in the Faubourg St Honore yesterday evening opposite the Elysee at the very spot where Lucie Devaud died. . .

Boisseau didn't want to say any more on the phone, so putting on his leather raincoat, Grelle left the building and walked the short distance to the large hospital which overlooks the right bank of the Seine. It was pouring with rain but he hated driving short distances—`Soon, babies will be born with wheels instead of legs,' was one of his favourite sayings. Boisseau was waiting for him on the first floor of the gloomy building. 'Sorry to get you wet through, chief, but he won't speak to anyone except the police prefect. The man's name is Gaston Martin. He's just back from Guiana—for the first time in thirty years, for God's sake. . .

Later, Grelle pieced together the bizarre story. Guiana is the only overseas department in South America which still belongs to France. Known once to the public mainly because this is where the notorious penal settlement, Devil's Island, was situated, it had remained for years out of the world's headlines, one of the sleepier areas in the vast Latin-American continent.

Gaston Martin, a man in his late sixties, had spent all of his life since the Second World War in this outlandish place. Then, for the first time in over thirty years, he had returned home aboard a freighter which docked at Le Havre on 9 December, less than twenty-four hours after the attempted assassination of Guy Florian. Travelling to Paris by train, he dumped his small bag at the Cecile, a seedy Left Bank hotel, and went out for a walk. Eventually he turned up outside the Elysee where, at exactly 8.30 pm, he had been run down by a car as he stepped off the sidewalk. Grelle knew nothing of this as he followed Boisseau into a room occupied by only one patient. The prefect's nose wrinkled as he smelt antiseptic. A fit man, he detested hospital odours.

Gaston Martin lay in the single bed attended by a nurse and a doctor who shook his head when Grelle asked how the patient was. 'I give him one hour,' he whispered. 'Maybe less. The car went right over him . . . lungs are pierced. No, it makes no difference if you question him, but he may not respond. I'll leave you for a few minutes. . . .' He frowned when Boisseau made his own request. 'The nurse, too?' 'As you wish. . .'

Why were so many wards like death cells, Grelle wondered as he approached the bed. Martin, his head covered with wispy grey hair, had a drooping moustache under a prominent hooked nose. More character than brains Grelle assessed as he drew up a chair beside the bed. Boisseau opened the conversation. 'This is the police prefect of Paris, Marc Grelle. You asked to see him. . .

`I saw him . . . going into the Elysee,' Martin quavered.

`Saw who ?' Grelle asked quietly. The man from Guiana reached out and held the prefect's hand, which gave Grelle a funny feeling, a sensation of helplessness. 'Saw who ?' he repeated.

`The Leopard. . .'

Something turned over inside Grelle, then he remembered something else and felt better. In the few seconds before he replied his memory spun back over God knew how many files he had read, trying to recall exact details. He knew immediately who this man must be referring to, and when he recalled the second detail he realized Martin must be raving.

`I don't know who you mean ?' Grelle said carefully.

`Communist Resistance leader . . . the Lozere.' Gripping the prefect's hand tightly, Martin struggled to heave himself up on the pillow, his face streaked with sweat, Boisseau tried to stop him, but Grelle said leave him alone. He understood the desperate reaction: Martin was trying to stay alive just a little longer, feeling he could only do this by getting himself out of the supine position.

`Communist wartime leader. . . .' Martin repeated. 'The . . . youngest . . . in the Resistance. . .'

`You couldn't have seen him go into the Elysee,' Grelle told him gently. 'There are guards, sentries on the gate. . .

`They saluted him. . .

Grelle felt the shock at the pit of his stomach. Despite the effort he made, a slight tremor passed through his hand, and Martin felt it. His rheumy eyes opened wider into a glare. 'You believe me,' he gasped. 'You have to believe me. . .'

Grelle turned to Boisseau, whispering the order. 'No one is to be allowed in here—not even the doctor. On my way in I saw a gendarme near the entrance—go get him, station him outside this door, then come back in yourself . .

He was with the dying Martin for twenty minutes, knowing that his questioning was hastening the poor wretch's death, but also knowing that Martin didn't mind. He just wanted to talk, to pass on his dying message. Boisseau returned to the room a few minutes later, having left the gendarme on duty outside. At one stage a priest tried to force his way into the room, but Martin indicated he was an agnostic and became so agitated the priest withdrew.

For Grelle it was an ordeal, trying to get the man to talk coherently, watching his skin become greyer under the film of sweat, feeling Martin's hand gripping his own to maintain contact with the living, with life itself. At the end of twenty minutes what Grelle had extracted was mostly incoherent babbling, a series of disconnected phrases, but there was a certain thread running through the feverish ramblings. Then Martin died. The hand in Grelle's went limp, rested quietly like the hand of a sleeping child. The man who hadn't seen Paris for over thirty years had returned to die there within forty-eight hours of landing in France.

Returning to his office in the prefecture with Boisseau, Grelle locked the door, told his secretary over the phone that he could take no more calls for the moment, then went over to the window to stare down into the rain-swept street. First he swore his deputy to absolute secrecy. 'In case anything happens to me,' he explained, 'there must be someone else who knows about this—who could carry on the investigation. Although I'm still praying that Martin got it wrong, that he didn't know what he was talking about. . .

`What was Martin talking about ?' the diplomatic Boisseau inquired.

`You know as well as I do,' Grelle replied brutally. 'He was saying that someone who visited the Elysee last night, someone important enough to be saluted—so he has to be of cabinet rank—is a top Communist agent. . .'

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On Grelle's instruction, Boisseau sent off an urgent cable to the police chief at Cayenne, Guiana, requesting all information on Gaston Martin, and then between them they sorted out the broken, often-incoherent story Martin had told them.

He had stood in the vicinity of the Elysee Palace for about one hour—between, say, 7.30 pm and 8.30 pm, sometimes standing at the edge of the kerb where Lucie Devaud had been shot; sometimes wandering up towards the Place Beauvau, and then back again. At least they were sure of 8.30, the time when a car had knocked him down, because this had been witnessed by one of the Elysee sentries. 'Partially witnessed, that is,' Boisseau explained. 'I phoned the inspector in charge of the case while you were coming to the hospital and the fool of a sentry isn't even sure of the make of car which knocked down Martin. . .

And at some moment during this approximate hour Martin swore he had seen the man he had once known as the Leopard walk into the Elysee courtyard and be saluted by the sentries. It was this brief statement which so disturbed Grelle. 'They saluted him . ' Martin's description of the man had been vague; by the time Grelle got round to asking this question the dying man had been slipping away fast. And often he had rambled off in another direction, forgetting the question Grelle had asked him.

`But according to Martin this man was very tall—over six feet,' the prefect emphasized. 'He said that three times—the bit about his great height.'

`This goes back over thirty years to the wartime Resistance,' Boisseau protested. 'That is, if Martin is to be believed at all. How on earth could he recognize a man he hadn't seen all that time? People change like hell. . .

`He was very insistent that he saw the Leopard. Said he hadn't changed much, that the first thing he noticed was the man's walk—then I couldn't get him to describe the walk.'

`It doesn't sound at all likely. . . Boisseau was tie-less by now, in his shirt-sleeves. Coffee had been brought in to them and the room was full of smoke as Grelle used up cigarette after cigarette. The rain was still lashing the windows.

`It doesn't,' Grelle agreed, 'but I was the one who heard every word he said and he frightened me. I think I can judge when a man is telling the truth. . .

`This Leopard then--you think he was really telling the truth about that ?' Boisseau, small and heavily-built, with almond-shaped eyes and thick eyebrows, had made no attempt to keep the scepticism out of his voice. 'Personally, I have never heard of him. . .'

`But you are younger than me.' The prefect lit another cigarette. 'The Leopard is on file, a very old and dusty file by now. And yes, I do think Gaston Martin was telling the truth —as he believed it to be.'