Colin Forbes - The Stone leopard

`Lodge-keeper? I am Capt. Moreau, the colonel's assistant.' Bristling with anger, the man examined the passport at much greater length than was really necessary. 'You could end up dead-taking a crazy risk like that,' he grumbled.

`Less of a risk than facing an unknown man with a gun in this God-forsaken place.'

Lennox insisted on seeing Moreau's own identity card before he returned the weapon, first folding the projecting magazine parallel to the barrel so the weapon became inoperative. When identity documents had been exchanged the Frenchman told him curtly to leave his car and walk up to the house. 'Why don't you get stuffed?' Lennox suggested. Going outside, he climbed into his car, drove through the gateway and on towards the house. Moreau was using a wall phone when he left the lodge, presumably to call up the colonel.

As he drove slowly up a long curving drive Lennox saw how neglected the place was. Wet shrubbery which gleamed in the headlights had grown out over the drive, in places almost closing it so the car brushed past shrubs as he approached Lasalle's refuge. The farmhouse, a long, two-storey building which came into view round a bend, was in the same state. Unpainted, with tiles missing from the roof, it hardly looked habitable.

Shortage of money, Lennox assumed: fugitive colonels are hardly likely to be sitting on fat bank accounts.

Col Rene Lasalle met him at the entrance, then closed, locked and bolted the heavy door before leading the way into a large, rambling living-room crammed with old-fashioned furniture. In the hall Lennox noted there were new and modern locks on the door; in the living-room locks had been attached to all the windows. Theoretically safe inside Germany, the colonel had sealed himself off inside a minor fortress.

`They will come for me one day,' Lasalle remarked crisply. `Shabby little Corsican thugs with knives in their pockets. They may try to kidnap me-they may come to kill me. But they will come.'

The one-armed colonel, his left sleeve flapping loose like the broken wing of a bird, was small and spare, and as he fetched drinks from a sideboard he moved with a springy step. Lennox immediately had an impression of enormous energy, of a strong- willed personality likely to dominate any group of people he might be a part of. Fifty-five years old, Lasalle's features were sharp and gaunt, his eyes large and restless, his thin moustache little more than a dark slash. He still had a full head of dark hair and his most prominent feature was a hooked nose. In some ways he reminded Lennox of a miniature version of Charles de Gaulle himself. The colonel handed him a large brandy, raised his own glass. 'To the destruction of the enemies of France!'

`I'll drink to that…' Lennox was watching the colonel carefully. 'Whoever they might be.'

`The Soviet faction inside Paris-led by the Leopard. But first I need to know something about you, about your background…

For fifteen minutes he grilled the Englishman. It was the most shrewd and penetrating interrogation Lennox had ever experienced, with a lot of cross-questioning, a lot of jumping backwards and forwards as the Frenchman swiftly absorbed the details of Lennox's life and probed deeper and deeper. 'You have met Marc Grelle?' he said at one point. 'You are a personal friend of the police prefect then?' Lennox assured him that this was not so, that they had met only once for an hour in Marseilles during the planning of a counter-terrorist operation. At the end of fifteen minutes Lasalle pronounced himself satisfied.

`You can go into France for me,' he said as though conferring a high honour.

`I'm glad I pass inspection,' Lennox replied ironically, 'but what you may not realize is I haven't made up my mind about you…'

`That is necessary?'

`That is essential. You see-it's going to be my head laid on the block…'

Leon Jouvel. Robert Philip. Dieter Wohl.

These were the names of the three witnesses, as Lasalle persisted in calling them, which he wished Lennox to visit and quietly interrogate. 'I'm convinced that one of these three people-all of whom were involved with the Leopard during the war-can tell you something which will lead us to the Communist agent inside Paris today,' the Frenchman said emphatically. 'In any case, as far as I know, they are the only survivors, apart from Annette Devaud-and she is blind…'

`Devaud?' Lennox queried. 'That was the name of the woman who tried to shoot Florian..

`A common enough name.' Lasalle shrugged and made an impatient gesture with his right hand. 'I see no reason for a connection. And in any case, Annette Devaud, who must be over seventy now, has been blind since the end of the war. A blind person can identify no one positively. Now…'

It had started eighteen months earlier-a year before the climactic row with President Florian which ended in the colonel's flight from France. Lasalle had been interrogating a known Communist agent who had infiltrated inside a French army barracks near Marseilles. 'That area is infested with the vermin,' the colonel remarked. Lennox gathered the interrogation had been preceded by a physical session which had reduced the agent, a man called Favel, to a moaning wreck. `While trying to escape from the barracks,' Lasalle explained, `he accidentally shot a sergeant. The men who questioned him before me were the sergeant's friends. So..'

An hour after Lasalle had begun his own interrogation just before midnight Favel had started rambling on about the wartime Resistance. At first Lasalle had thought this was a trick to veer the interrogation into other channels; later he had become interested as the prisoner made repeated references to the Leopard. At intervals-the interrogation had continued for over twelve hours-the broken man had told a strange story about a man who would one day rise from the dead to liberate France from the capitalist yoke. This man, had, in fact, already risen from the dead and was walking the streets of Paris.

`It seemed absolute nonsense for a long time,' Lasalle explained. 'I thought I was dealing with a religious maniac- which seemed odd for a dedicated Communist-and then he told me he had been hiding in the barracks…'

`Hiding?' Lennox queried.

`Hiding from his own people,' Lasalle said impatiently. 'I had got it the wrong way round-instead of trying to spy for the Communist cell in Marseilles he was fleeing from them. What better place to hole up than in a military barracks-or so he thought. They were trying to kill him-I think because he knew too much.'

Tut he did know something?'

`He said it was no common spy he was talking about-a civil servant who photographs documents at dead of night and passes over microfilm inside a cigar or some such absurdity. No, Favel was referring to a highly placed mandarin close to the centre of power. To a man who for years had waited and worked his way up steadily-without having a single contact with any Communist organization. That is the genius of the idea-with no Communist contacts it is impossible to detect him.'

'Favel named the man?'

Lasalle made a gesture of resignation. 'He did not know who he was-only that he existed. What finally convinced me was a tragedy. The day after I completed my interrogation, Favel escaped from the barracks-twenty-four hours later he was found at the bottom of a cliff with his neck broken.'

`His so-called friends caught up with him?'

`I'm convinced of it,' Lasalle replied. 'I started my own investigation and eventually I came up with those three names on the list. I visited one of them-Leon Jouvel in Strasbourg- but I think my position frightened him. I came away feeling sure that he knew something. Shortly after that, I had my great confrontation with Florian and had to flee my own country…

Lennox asked other questions. Both Jouvel and Philip, the two Frenchmen on the list of witnesses, lived in Alsace. Was it a coincidence? 'Not at all,' Lasalle explained. 'The Leopard favoured men from Alsace in his Resistance group-he believed they were more reliable than the more excitable men from the Midi.' The colonel smiled sarcastically. 'He was, I am sure, a realist in everything.'