The Stone Leopard (7 page)

`When you get a conflict of evidence, you test it. I'm starting to test it,' Grelle said brusquely.

The direct route to the Elysee would have led along the rue St Honore and the Faubourg St Honore beyond, but because of the one-way system Grelle drove via the Place de la Concorde, along the Avenue Gabriel, which took him past the American Embassy, and then up the Avenue Marigny, passing on his right the large walled garden which lies behind the Elysee itself. Arriving at the palace, he waited while a guard lowered the white-painted chain and then drove into the courtyard beyond. Getting out of his car, he went straight to the guardhouse.

`Can I see the register of visitors ?' the prefect asked casually.

The officer showed him the book which records the date, time of arrival and identity of everyone visiting the Elysee. It was the page for Thursday, 9 December, the day when Gaston Martin had stood outside the Elysee which interested Grelle. He checked the entries for visitors who had arrived between 7.30 and 8.30 in the evening; then, to throw the duty officer off the scent, he looked at one or two other pages.

`Thank you,' he said and went out into the courtyard and up the seven steps which led to the plate glass doors of the main entrance.

Not even a cabinet minister could have called as casually as this, but Marc Grelle was held in especially high regard by Guy Florian. 'He has no political ambition,' the president once informed a cabinet minister he knew to be excessively ambitious. 'I had to drag him away from Marseilles to Paris. Sometimes I think he is the only honest man in France. I would trust him with my life. . .

In fact, Guy Florian had entrusted Grelle with his life. While the president is inside the department of Paris the responsibility for his security—and that of cabinet ministers—is in the hands of the police prefect. On the morning after the assassination attempt Florian had ordered that from now on his personal safety was to be in the hands of Marc Grelle throughout the whole of France. With one stroke of his pen Florian had made the prefect the most powerful figure in the French Republic after himself—if he chose to exercise that power.

`The president will receive you,' a uniformed usher informed Grelle as he waited in the marble-floored lobby which is carpeted only down the centre. The interview took place in the president's study on the first floor at the rear of the Elysee, a room with tall windows which overlooks the walled garden laid out with lawns and gravel paths. Facing the president as he sits at his Louis XV desk is a Gobelin wall tapestry of 'Don Quixote Cured of his Madness by Wisdom', and there are two telephones on the desk, one black and one white. A third instrument stands on a side table close to his right hand. As the door was closing behind Grelle he heard the chiming of one of the hundred and thirty-seven clocks which furnish the Elysee. 11 am. A large Alsatian dog bounded across the room, reared up and dropped its forepaws on the prefect's shoulders.

`Kassim, get down, you brute,' Grelle growled affectionately. The prefect himself, who was fond of dogs, had personally found the animal when requested to do so by Florian soon after his election. It was said in the Elysee that only two people dared touch the animal: Grelle and the president himself. Removing the forepaws, the prefect bowed and then sat down opposite the most powerful statesman in western Europe. Typically, Florian waited for him to speak.

`I was very disturbed to see that you again walked back from the Place Beauvau on the evening of 9 December,' Grelle began. 'And only twenty-four hours after the appalling incident. . .'

Florian lowered his lean, intelligent head like a small boy caught in the farmer's apple orchard. It was the kind of gesture, coming from a president, which would have disarmed most men, but Grelle's expression remained grave. 'It will not happen again,' Florian assured him. 'You saw the pictures in Friday's papers, of course?'

`I was thunderstruck.'

`But you are no politician, my friend. The street was swarming with detectives—at a discreet distance so the photographers would not include them in the pictures! But it is good politics, you see—the president walks the streets again only one day after the incident!' Florian grinned impishly. 'It is all nonsense, of course. Tell me, am I forgiven ?'

Grelle returned to the prefecture reassured that from now on the president would stay behind the security fence erected to guard him. Only one question remained: was the security fence foolproof?

`Come in, close the door and lock it,' Grelle told Boisseau as he settled himself on the edge of his desk. It was a habit of the prefect's when disturbed to perch his buttocks on the edge of a desk or table so he could start pacing about more easily if the inclination took him. Boisseau sat in a chair, took out his pipe and relaxed, waiting. With less nervous energy than his chief, he had the look of a patient squirrel, and behind his back that, in fact, was what his staff called him. Andre the Squirrel.

`I checked the visitors' register at the Elysee for the evening of 9 December for the hour 7.30 to 8.30,' Grelle said abruptly. `Before I go on, remember that the only physical description we have of the Leopard concerns his height—over six feet tall. . .

`You have found something ?' Boisseau suggested.

`Someone—more than one, as it happens. Florian himself arrived back on foot at eight o'clock from the Place Beauvau—that won't happen again, incidentally. The interesting thing is three other ministers also arrived on foot—they had come from the meeting at the Ministry of the Interior. . .'

The two men exchanged cynical smiles. Normally everyone would have returned from the Place Beauvau in his own ministerial car, but because the president had walked back they had felt obliged to adopt the same form of locomotion. `And, of course, they hoped to get their own pictures in the papers,' Grelle observed, 'knowing there were photographers in the Place Beauvau.'

`Who else came back ?' Boisseau asked quietly.

`Pierre Rouget for one—we can dismiss him, of course.' They smiled again. Rouget was the nominal prime minister, the man the reporters called 'Florian's poodle'. An amiable man—`with a backbone of rubber' as Grelle sometimes remarked—no one took much notice of him and it was rumoured he would soon be replaced. In any case, he was no taller than five feet eight. `Between 8.15 and 8.30,' Grelle continued, 'two other men arrived and walked into the Elysee—and they came back separately, a few minutes apart. One of them was my own boss, the Minister of the Interior, Roger Danchin. The other was the Minister of National Defence, Alain Blanc. Both of them as you know are the tallest men in the cabinet, both of them are over six feet tall. . .

Boisseau took the dead pipe out of his mouth and stared at the prefect. 'You don't really believe this? Danchin, Blanc— the two strong men in the government? Martin must have been having hallucinations.'

`I don't really believe anything,' Grelle replied coolly. 'All I do is to check the facts and see where they lead—as we do in any investigation. But as we have agreed, I'm telling you everything however absurd it may seem.'

`Absurd ? It's unbelievable. . .

`Of course.' Grelle picked up a report off his desk, talking as he scanned the first page. 'Something else has happened. David Nash, the American, has just been spotted arriving at Roissy airport this morning by a Surete man. And I have received a pressing invitation to a reception at the American Embassy this evening. You believe in coincidence, Boisseau ?'

Andre the Squirrel did not reply. He was gazing into the distance, as though trying to grasp a fact so great it was beyond his comprehension.

`Danchin or Blanc ?' he murmured.

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It had been Roger Danchin's aim to become Minister of the Interior since he had been a youth, spending endless hours over his studies at the Ecole Normale d'Administration, the special school founded by de Gaulle himself to train future leaders of the French Republic. And while Guy Florian and Alain Blanc—at the Ecole Polytechnique—were the hares who forged ahead because of their brilliance, Danchin was the tortoise who got there in the end because he never stopped trying. Sometimes it is the tortoise which outlasts the hares.

By the time he was offered the post of Minister of the Interior, Roger Danchin, an intelligence expert, probably knew more about the French security system than any other man alive. Like Alain Blanc, over six feet tall, he had developed the stoop which tall men sometimes affect. Fifty-two years old, he was thin and bony-faced, a man with a passion for secrecy and a man who loved power. Blanc, who disliked him, summed up Danchin in a typical, biting anecdote. `Danchin would interrogate his own grandmother if he suspected she had changed her will—and after three hours under the arc lights she would leave him all the money. . . Danchin was at the height of his power when he summoned Grelle to see him just after the prefect returned from checking the Elysee register.

When the prefect entered the Minister's office on the first floor Danchin was standing by the window which overlooks a beautiful walled garden at the rear of the building, a garden the public never sees. 'Sit down, Grelle,' Danchin said, still staring down at the garden. 'I hear from Roissy that David Nash, the American, has just arrived in Paris. What do you think that implies ?'

`Should it imply something ?' Grelle inquired. By now he had grasped how this devious man's mind worked; rarely asking a direct question, Danchin tried to catch people out by encouraging them to talk while he listened.

`Something is happening, Grelle, I sense it. Strange also that he should arrive here so soon after the attempt on the president's life. . .'

`I don't see the connection,' Grelle stonewalled. 'But I have an invitation to the American Embassy this evening. . .'

`You are going ?' Danchin interjected sharply.

`Why not, Minister ? I may pick up something interesting. At least I should be able to answer your question as to why he has come to Paris. . .'

`And this woman, Lucie Devaud—has Boisseau found out something more about her ? She couldn't be connected in any way with the arrival of Nash, I presume ?'

`Surely you can't suspect the Americans were behind the attempt ?' Grelle protested. `They do some strange things but . .'

`Probing, Grelle, just probing. . Danchin suddenly returned behind his desk, moving so quietly Grelle was not aware he had left the window. It was another disturbing habit of Danchin's which his assistant, Merlin, had once complained about to Grelle. 'He turns up without warning like a ghost, standing behind you. Did you know that when people go out to lunch Danchin creeps into their offices to check the papers on their desks—to make sure they are not doing something he has no knowledge of? The atmosphere inside this place is terrible, I can tell you. Terrible!'

Grelle got out of Danchin's office as soon as he could, mopping his brow as he went downstairs and out into the fresh air. I wouldn't work in this place for a million francs a year he told himself as he got behind the wheel of his car. He drove out with a burst of exhaust as though to express his relief. Not for ten million francs !

Alain Blanc was born to a world of châteaux and money, of vintage wines and good food, possessed of a brain which in later years could absorb the details of a nuclear test ban treaty in a third of the time it would have taken Roger Danchin. With the family land and vineyards behind him Blanc, who came from the Auvergne, need never have worked for a day in his life. He chose to ignore the chance of a life of idleness, plunging instead into a life of furious activity.

A man of enormous vitality and appetite for work, he became one of the key political figures in Florian's regime, the man whom ambassadors quietly consulted when they could not get Florian's ear. An 'X', which stands for the crossed cannons symbol of the Ecole Polytechnique, a school where money is no substitute for brains, he was one of the five top students the year he graduated. His close friend, Guy Florian, passed out first among a galaxy of brilliant men. Years later, well entrenched in the political bedrock of France, it was Alain Blanc, the manipulator, who master-minded Florian's rise to the presidency.

Over six feet tall, fifty-four-year-old ex-paratrooper Blanc was heavily built; plump-faced, his hair thinning, his head was like a monk's dome. A man of powerful personality, he was reputed to be able to talk anyone into agreeing to anything with his warmth and jovial aggressiveness. Women, especially, found him attractive—he was so lively. 'He doesn't take himself seriously,' his mistress, Gisele Manton once explained, 'but he takes women seriously—or pretends to. . .'

His relations with Marc Grelle were excellent: the prefect understood the Minister of National Defence and never let Blanc overwhelm him. When they argued, which was frequently, it was with a fierce jocularity, and Blanc knew when he was beaten. 'The trouble with you, Grelle,' he once told the prefect, 'is you don't believe in politicians. . .'