Colin Forbes - The Stone leopard

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…'

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.'

`Which could be a very different thing…'

`Quite true. You see, there's something you don't know. The Communist Resistance leader known during the war as the Leopard is dead.'

On Saturday morning, 11 December, David Nash, who had just returned from Europe aboard the night flight from Brussels, flew from New York to Washington for an emergency meeting with Andrew MacLeish at the State Department. The two men locked themselves away in a small room on the second floor and MacLeish listened without saying a word for fifteen minutes; it was one of his strong points, that he could absorb a verbal report without interruption, soaking up information like a sponge.

`And Lasalle gave absolutely no indication of the identity of this alleged cabinet minister who could be a secret Communist agent?' he inquired eventually. 'This man he calls the second Leopard-because he has adopted the pseudonym of the dead wartime Communist Resistance leader?'

`None at all,' Nash replied promptly. 'He played the whole thing very close to the chest. What he did tell me was that he believes he was on the verge of uncovering the agent when he had his titanic row with Florian-which ended in his flight from France. Since then he hasn't been able to carry his investigation any further and he's worried stiff that a coup d'etat is planned to take place while Florian is in Moscow on this coming visit. He suspects that the Russians invited the president to Russia to get him out of Paris at the crucial moment, The attempted assassination decided Lasalle-to make contact with me. He's pretty certain that if it had succeeded the coup d'etat led by the second Leopard would have taken place at once.'