The Stone Leopard Page 2

  `I don't think we ought to get mixed up with psychopathic exiles,' MacLeish repeated. He looked out of the window where he could just see a section of the Triborough Bridge through the skeletal framework of a new high-rise. They argued about it for over an hour, but in the end Nash wore them down. It was Washington which was becoming psychopathic in Nash's view; with the military and most of the administration against the troop withdrawal from Europe which Congress had forced on them, it was becoming even more important to know what was really happening in Europe, to warn their ex-allies of any dangerous development they could uncover.

  On the following day Nash flew to Europe to meet the man Guy Florian had ruined.

  Col Rene Baptiste Lasalle, ex-assistant chief of French military counter-intelligence, had recently been called 'an extinct volcano' by Guy Florian, but for a man whose career was abruptly ended when it seemed almost certain he would soon be promoted to the exalted rank of general, the volcano remained remarkably active. Certainly the rumbling of Col Lasalle was heard clearly enough in Paris.

  Six months before Lucie Devaud tried to shoot Guy Florian in the Faubourg St Honore, Lasalle had quarrelled violently with the president and had to flee France overnight; it was rumoured he was about to be arrested for conspiring against the president. Driving his own car, Lasalle crashed through a frontier control post east of Metz at four in the morning and took refuge in West Germany. From the moment of his arrival in the Federal Republic he set about organizing a campaign of rumours to discredit the man who had ruined him. As his instrument he chose Europe Number One, the independent radio station with its transmitters in the Saarland.

  At the time when David Nash flew from New York to meet him secretly, Col Lasalle was fifty-five years old. Small, compact and lean-faced, he now made his way through life with only one arm: his left arm had been blown clean off his shoulder by a landmine in Algeria in 1962. At that time a captain in army counter-intelligence, Lasalle had proved himself the most brilliant officer in the French Army when it came to rooting out Arab underground leaders. Within twenty-four hours of his arm being taken away from him, his family was also taken away: a terrorist threw a bomb into the living-room of his villa, killing his wife and seven-year-old son. Lying in hospital, his reaction was typical when he heard the news.

  `Since my private life is finished I shall devote the rest of my time to France—to help preserve her way of life. It is the only thing left to me. . .

  Immediately his convalescence was over, he returned from Marseilles to North Africa. The convalescence in itself was remarkable. Finding his sense of balance faulty, Lasalle took to walking in the Estoril mountains with a stick, leaping over deep ravines to find a new balance. 'When survival is at stake,' he said later, 'the body adjusts itself wonderfully. . . .' He went back to Algeria just in time to detect and foil the most determined effort up to date to assassinate General de Gaulle. Then, years later, came the clash with Florian.

  Now, exiled to the Saarland, living in a farmhouse close to Saarbrucken—close also to the French border—Lasalle broadcast regularly over Europe Number One, the radio station on German soil listened to by millions inside France. And the loss of one arm seemed to have increased the electric energy of this small man who boasted he had never been idle for a day in his life. The target of his virulent broadcasting campaign was Guy Florian.

  `Why is he going to visit Soviet Russia on 23 December? What is the real motive behind this visit ? Why is he going there of all places at a time when Europe is threatened by the looming shadow of the Red Army as never before. Who is the cabinet minister about whom whispers are spreading in Paris ? . .

  Never once did Lasalle refer to Florian by name. Always he referred to 'he', to 'this man', until gradually it dawned on Paris that Lasalle was not only an expert counter-intelligence officer; he had now become a master of poisonous political propaganda who was threatening to undermine the foundations of Florian's regime. This was the man who had quietly indicated to the Americans that he wanted to speak to a trustworthy intelligence official.

  * * *

  On the night of Thursday, 9 December, the same day when in New York David Nash informed MacLeish that he would be flying to Europe to interview Col Rene Lasalle, a short, grizzle- haired man in shabby clothes arrived in the Faubourg St Honore and took up a position opposite the Elysee Palace. He was standing at the exact spot on the kerb where, twenty-four hours earlier, Lucie Devaud had fallen into the gutter when Marc Grelle's bullets hit her in the chest. No one took any notice of him, and if the uniformed garde republicaine on duty outside the Elysee gave him even a moment's thought he must have assumed that this was just another voyeur, one of those macabre people who delight in goggling at the scene of an attempted crime.

  The shabbily-clothed man arrived at 7.3o pm, when it was dark.

  In his middle sixties, his face lined and worn and with a straggle of grey moustache, he was still standing there at 8.30 pm, when, as if in a daze, he suddenly stepped into the street without looking. The car coming at speed only a few metres away had no time to pull up; the man must have loomed in front of the driver's windscreen without warning. The vehicle hit the pedestrian a terrible blow, drove on over him and accelerated down the street, disappearing in the direction of Madeleine. Fifteen minutes later an ambulance with siren screaming rushed him to the Hotel-Dieu on the Ile de la Cite. On arrival a doctor examined the patient and said he would be lucky to last the night.

  On Thursday, g December, having got rid of his visitors from Washington, David Nash consulted a road map of western Europe, checked distances and promptly decided to fly across the Atlantic the same night. If he caught Pan Am flight 92 leaving New York at 5.45 pm, he could be in Brussels early next day, which should give him time to drive to Luxembourg —where he had arranged to meet Lasalle—and back again to catch another night flight from Brussels to New York. He boarded flight 92 by the skin of his teeth and then relaxed in his first-class seat as the Boeing 707 climbed steadily towards thirty thousand feet above the Long Island coast.

  Nash had a tight schedule ahead of him, He was not only going to meet Lasalle on the neutral ground of Luxembourg; he had also arranged to meet his German counterpart, Peter Lanz, with whom he maintained a close and cordial relationship. After all, the French fugitive colonel was residing in Germany and it had been one of Lanz's more delicate duties to keep an eye on his electric visitor who had fled from the territory of Germany's closest ally.

  The German authorities had very mixed feelings about the arrival of Col Lasalle in their midst. They gave him refuge— no specific charges had ever been levelled against him by Paris —and the local police chief in Saarbrucken was instructed to maintain a distant surveillance on the fugitive. Lasalle himself, fearing an attempt to kidnap him, had asked for police protection, and this was granted on the understanding that it was never referred to publicly. With the passage of time— Lasalle had now been in Germany for six months—the surveillance was relaxed.

  Peter Lanz had visited Lasalle several times, requesting him to tone down his broadcasts, and always Lasalle received the German courteously and said he would consider the request. Then he would get into his car, drive to the radio station and blast Florian all over again with a fresh series of innuendoes. Since he was breaking no law, Lanz would shrug his shoulders and then sit down to read carefully a transcript of the latest outburst.

  Lanz, at thirty-two, was exceptionally young to occupy the post of vice-president of the Bundesnachrichtendienst, the West German Federal Intelligence Service. He owed his rapid promotion to his ability, and to the fact that a large number of older men were suddenly swept out of the organization when the new Chancellor, Franz Hauser, was elected three months after Guy Florian's own rise to power. 'I don't want intriguers,' Hauser had snapped, 'I want young and energetic men who can do the damned job. . .

  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. . .