Frederick Forsyth - The Day of the Jackal

«Come on, Lucien. Let's go and pay a call on Monsieur Valmy.»

«What about the girl?»

«Oh, she'll have to be charged.»

The knock came at seven o'clock. The schoolmaster was brewing himself a cup of breakfast food on the gas-ring. With a frown he turned down the gas and crossed' the sitting room to open the door. Four men were facing him. He knew who they were and what they were without being told. The two in uniform looked as if they were going to lunge at him, but the short, mild-looking man gestured for them to remain where they were.

«We tapped the phone,» said the little man quietly. «You're Valmy.»

The schoolmaster gave no sign of emotion. He stepped back and let them enter the room.

«May I get dressed?» he asked.

«Yes, of course.»

It took him only a few minutes, as the two uniformed policemen stood over him, to draw on trousers and shirt, without bothering to remove his pyjamas. The younger man in plain clothes stood in the doorway. The older man wandered round the flat, inspecting the piles of books and papers.

«It'll take ages to sort through this little lot, Lucien,» he said, and the man in the doorway grunted.

«Not our department, thank God.»

«Are you ready?» the little man asked the schoolmaster.

«Yes.»

«Take him downstairs to the car.»

The Commissaire remained when the other four had left, riffling through the papers on which the schoolmaster had apparently been working the night before. But they were all ordinary school examination papers being corrected. Apparently the man worked from his flat; he would have to stay in the flat all day to remain on the end of the telephone in case the jackal called. It was ten past seven when the telephone rang. Lebel watched it for several seconds. Then his hand reached out and picked it up.

«Allo?»

The voice on the other end was flat, toneless.

«Ici Chacal.»

Lebel thought furiously.

«Ici Valmy,» he said. There was a pause. He did not know what else to say.

«What's new?» asked the voice at the other end.

«Nothing. They've lost the trail in Correze.» There was a film of sweat on his forehead. It was vital the man stay where he was for a few hours more. There was a click and the phone went dead. Lebel replaced it and raced downstairs to the car at the kerbside.

«Back to the office,» he yelled at the driver.

In the telephone booth in the foyer of a small hotel by the banks of the Seine the jackal stared out through the glass perplexed. Nothing? There must be more than nothing. This Commissaire Lebel was no fool. They must have traced the taxi-driver in Egletons, and from there to Haute Chalonniere. They must have found the body in the chateau, and the missing Renault. They must have found the Renault in Tulle, and questioned the staff at the station. They must have…

He strode out of the telephone booth and across the foyer.

«My bill, if you please,» he told the clerk. «I shall be down in five minutes.»

The call from Superintendent Thomas came in as Lebel entered his office at seven-thirty.

«Sorry to have been so long,» said the British detective. «It took ages to wake the Danish consular staff and get them back to the office. You were quite right. On July 14th a Danish parson reported the loss of his passport. He suspected it had been stolen from his room at a West End hotel, but could not prove it. Did not file a complaint, to the relief of the hotel manager. Name of Pastor Per Jensen, of Copenhagen. Description, six feet tall, blue eyes, grey hair.»

«That's the one, thank you, Superintendent.»

Lebel put the phone down. «Get me the Prefecture,» he told Caron.

The four Black Marias arrived outside the hotel on the Quai des Grands Augustins at 8.30. The police turned room 37 over until it looked as if a tornado had hit it.

«I'm sorry, Monsieur le Commissaire,» the proprietor told the rumpled-looking detective who led the raid, «Pastor Jensen checked out an hour ago.»

The jackal had taken a cruising taxi back towards the Gare d'Austerlitz where he had arrived the previous evening, on the grounds that the search for him would have moved elsewhere. He deposited the suitcase containing the gun and the military greatcoat and clothes of the fictitious Frenchman Andre Martin in the left-luggage office, and retained only the suitcase in which he carried the clothes and papers of American student Marty Schulberg, and the hand-grip with the articles of make-up.

With these, still dressed in the black suit but with a polo sweater covering the dog-collar, he checked into a poky hotel round the corner from the station. The clerk let him fill in his own registration card, being too idle to check the card against the passport of the visitor as regulations required. As a result the registration card was not even in the name of Per Jensen.

Once up in his room, the Jackal set to work on his face and hair. The grey dye was washed out with the aid of a solvent, and the blond reappeared. This was tinted with the chestnut-brown colouring of Marty Schulberg. The blue contact lenses remained in place, but the gold-rimmed glasses were replaced by the American's heavy-rimmed executive spectacles. The black walking shoes, socks, shirt, bib and clerical suit were bundled into the suitcase, along with the passport of Pastor Jensen of Copenhagen. He dressed instead in the sneakers, socks, jeans, T-shirt and windcheater of the American college boy from Syracuse, New York State.

By mid-morning, with the American's passport in one breast pocket and a wad of French francs in the other, he was ready to move. The suitcase containing the last remains of Pastor Jensen went into the wardrobe, and the key of the wardrobe went down the gush of the bidet. He used the fire-escape to depart, and was no more heard of in that hotel. A few minutes later he deposited the hand-grip in the left-luggage office at the Gare d'Austerlitz, stuffed the docket for the second case into his back pocket to join the docket of the first suitcase, and went on his way. He took a taxi back to the Left Bank, got out at the comer of Boulevard Saint Michel and the Rue de la Huchette, and vanished into the maelstrom of students and young people who inhabit the rabbit warren of the Latin Quarter of Paris.

Sitting at the back of a smoky dive for a cheap lunch, he started to wonder where he was going to spend the night: He had few doubts that Lebel would have exposed Pastor Per Jensen by this time, and he gave Marty Schulberg no more than twenty-four hours.

«Damn that man Lebel,» he thought savagely, but smiled broadly at the waitress and said, «Thanks, honey.»

Lebel was back on to Thomas in London at ten o'clock. His request caused Thomas to give a low groan, but he replied courteously enough that he would do everything he could. When the phone went down Thomas summoned the senior inspector who had been on the investigation the previous week.

«All right, sit down,» he said. «The Frenchies have been back on. It seems they've missed him again. Now he's in the centre of Paris, and they suspect he might have another false identity prepared. We can both start as of now ringing round every consulate in London asking for a list of passports of visiting foreigners reported lost or stolen since July 1st. Forget Negroes and Asiatics. Just stick to Caucasians. In each case I want to know the height of the man. Everybody above five feet eight inches is suspect. Get to work.»

The daily meeting at the Ministry in Paris had been brought forward to two in the afternoon.

Lebel's report was delivered in his usual inoffensive monotone, but the reception was icy.

«Damn the man,» exclaimed the Minister halfway through, «he has the luck of the devil!»

'No, Monsieur It Ministre, it hasn't been luck. At least, not all of it. He has been kept constantly informed of our progress at every stage. This is why he left Gap in such a hurry, and why he killed the woman at La Chalonniere and left just before the net closed. Every night I have reported my progress to this meeting. Three times we have been within hours of catching him. This morning it was the arrest of Valmy and my inability to impersonate Valmy on the telephone that caused him to leave where he was and change into another identity. But the first two occasions he was tipped off in the early morning after I had briefed this meeting.»