Colin Forbes - The Stone leopard

Turning round suddenly, he caught the movement of a shadow which merged into the wall.

He forced himself to turn round and walk back, and it reminded him of all those occasions when he had once forced himself to turn his back on the Leopard's vicious wolfhound. Jouvel was trembling as he made himself go on walking back down the shadowed street, and he was sweating so much his glasses steamed up. Reaching the doorway where he had seen the shadow move, he couldn't be sure whether anyone was there. Pretending to adjust his glasses, he wiped them quickly with his fingers. The blur cleared and a heavily-built man with a fat face stared back at him out of the doorway. Jouvel almost fainted.

The fat-faced man who wore a dark coat and a soft hat, lifted a flask and drank from it noisily, then belched. Jouvel's pounding heart began to slow down. A drunk! Without saying a word he walked back up the street to his home. Behind him police detective Armand Bonheur was also sweating as he remained in the doorway. Good God, he had almost blown it! And the inspector's instructions had been explicit.

`Whatever happens, Jouvel must not suspect he is being tailed. The order comes right down the line from Paris…'

Turning in under the stone archway of No. 49, Jouvel went across the cobbled courtyard and into the building beyond. Climbing the staircase to the second floor, he was unlocking his apartment door when a red-haired girl peered out of the next apartment. He smiled pleasantly. 'Good evening, M'selle…' Disappointed, the girl made a rude gesture at his back. 'Silly old ponce.' For Denise Viron anything over forty was fodder for the graveyard; anything under forty, fair game.

Inside his apartment Jouvel hurried over to the television set and switched on. Brewing himself a cup of tea in the kitchen, he came back, settled in an old armchair and waited. Florian's head and shoulders appeared on the screen a few minutes later. Jouvel closed his eyes. 'The Americans want to turn Europe into one vast supermarket, selling American goods, of course…' And still Jouvel couldn't be certain. I must be going mad he thought.

`Mr Jouvel? He is away today but he is back in Strasbourg tomorrow. The shop opens at nine…'

Louise Vallon, Jouvel's assistant, put down the phone and thought no more about the call as she turned to attend to a customer. In a bar close to the shop Carel Vanek replaced the receiver and walked out on to the Quai des Bateliers where Walther Brunner sat waiting in the Citroen DS 23 they had just hired from the Hertz branch in the Boulevard de Nancy. `He's out of town today,' Vanek said as he settled himself behind the wheel, 'but he's back tomorrow. Which just gives us nice time to soak up some atmosphere…'

When the Soviet Commando had arrived aboard a local train from Kehl they split up again as they had done in Munich. Lansky had simply walked across the large cobbled square outside the station and booked a room at the Hotel Terminus in the name of Lambert. After depositing three sets of skis- which would never be collected-in the luggage store at Strasbourg Gare, Vanek and Brunner took two separate cabs at intervals to the Hotel Sofitel where they registered, quite independently, as Duval and Bonnard. Meeting outside the hotel, they went to the Boulevard de Nancy and hired the Citroen.

Before leaving his room at the Sofitel, Vanek had consulted Bottin, the French telephone directory, to check on Leon Jouvel's address. Yes, it was the address given on the list, 49 rue de l' 8pine, but there had also been the address of a television shop in the Quai des Bateliers. Using a street map of Strasbourg purchased from a newspaper kiosk, Vanek and Brunner had driven round the old city to locate both addresses before Vanek made his first call from the bar. He then drove a short distance from the quai before handing over the car to his companion. For the rest of the afternoon and most of the evening the three men would move round Strasbourg on their own, familiarizing themselves with the city's layout and getting the feel of being in France.

`Buy a paper, go into bars and cafes, chat with everyone you can,' Vanek had instructed. 'Start merging with your background by mixing with it. Take a short bus-ride, find out what people are talking about. By tonight I want you to be more French than the French themselves…'

Following his own advice, Vanek sampled the flavour of Strasbourg by walking. Unlike Brunner, from now on he walked everywhere, knowing that the easiest way to get your bearings in a strange city is to walk. As the street map indicated, the old quarter of the city was for all practical purposes an island surrounded by water, the huge 'moat' being formed by the river Il which encircles the heart of Strasbourg. A series of bridges all round the perimeter crossed the river into this ancient heart, built, for the most part, in the fourteenth century. It was still daylight at four o'clock, but only just in the narrow, silent rue de l'Epine, when Vanek walked in under the archway of No. 49.

One of the numerous plates at the entrance to the building registered the fact that Leon Jouvel lived on the second floor, and he was knocking on the door of the second-floor apartment when the door of the neighbouring apartment opened and a red-haired girl peered at him speculatively.

`He's gone away for the day to see his sister-back in the morning,' she informed the Czech. 'Do you think I could help you in some way?'

Vanek, careful to eye her hips and other parts of her anatomy with due appreciation, had no trouble at all in extracting from Denise Viron the information he needed. He was, he explained, a market research specialist. 'Mr Leon Jouvel is one of the people chosen to answer our questionnaire . a survey on pension needs.' Within a few minutes he learned that Jouvel was a widower, that he occupied the apartment on his own, that he possessed no animals-here Vanek had in mind a guard-dog-that he was out all day at the shop arid only returned at 6.30 in the evenings, that he was no longer a sociable man, so there were few visitors.

`If you would like to come in,' the girl said, smoothing her skirt down over her long, lithe legs, 'I might be able to help you in other ways…'

Vanek, whose appetite for women was healthy, made it a point never to mix business with pleasure. And in any case, the girl had so far not had too close a look at him in the gloomy hall. Explaining that he had five more people to interview that day, he left her with a vague impression he would certainly be calling on her again within a few days. As arranged earlier, at eight in the evening he met Brunner and Lansky at a corner of the Place Kleber as snow drifted down over the huddled rooftops of Strasbourg. Taking them into a crowded bar, he found a table at the back.

`… and so,' he continued a few minutes later, 'it is made to order for a quick solution. You visit him tomorrow night, soon after 6.30 when he has returned home…' It was Lansky he had chosen to pay a call on Leon Jouvel. 'He is a widower and lives on his own. He has a second-floor apartment and the building is quiet. No one about at all except for a red-headed girl who lives next door. She could be a nuisance-she's looking for somebody to keep her bed warm.'

`I don't like it,' Brunner said. 'You're moving too fast. We need more time to check on this man…

`Which is exactly what we have not got,' Vanek snapped. 'In five days from now-December 22-we have to complete the whole job, which includes visiting three people, one of them in Germany. So, the strategy is simple-we deal with the first two on the list quickly.. .'

`If the place is empty, I'd better take a preliminary look inside it tonight,' Lansky said. He stood up. 'We'll meet at the bus station in the Place de la Gare tomorrow at the time agreed?'