The Day of the Jackal

These were the faces the Jackal studied at length on the writing bureau in his flat off South Audley Street. It took him one day and a series of visits to theatrical costumiers, opticians, a man’s clothing store in the West End specialising in garments of American type and mainly made in New York to acquire a set of blue-tinted clear-vision contact lenses; two pairs of spectacles, one with gold rims and the other with heavy black frames, and both with clear lenses; a complete outfit consisting of a pair of black leather sneakers, T-shirt and underpants, off-white slacks and a sky-blue nylon windcheater with a zip-up front and coll

ars and cuffs in red and white wool, all made in New York; and a clergyman’s white shirt, starched dog-collar and black bib. From each of the last three the maker’s label was carefully removed.

His last visit of the day was to a men’s wig and toupee emporium in Chelsea run by two homosexuals. Here he acquired a preparation for tinting the hair a medium grey and another for tinting it chestnut brown, along with precise and coyly delivered instructions on how to apply the tint to achieve the best and most natural-looking effect in the shortest time. He also bought several small hair-brushes for applying the liquids. Otherwise, apart from the complete set of American clothes, he did not make more than one purchase at any one shop.

The following day, July 18th, there was a small paragraph at the bottom of an inside page of Le Figaro. It announced that in Paris the Deputy Chief of the Brigade Criminelle of the Police Judiciaire, Commissaire Hyppolite Dupuy, had suffered a severe stroke in his office at the Quai des Orfèvres and had died on his way to hospital. A successor had been named. He was Commissaire Claude Lebel, Chief of the Homicide Division, and in view of the pressure of work on all the departments of the Brigade during the summer months he would take up his new duties forthwith. The Jackal, who read every French newspaper available in London each day, read the paragraph after his eye had been caught by the word ‘Criminelle’ in the headline, but thought nothing of it.

Before starting his daily watch at London Airport he had decided to operate throughout the whole of the forthcoming assassination under a false identity. It is one of the easiest things in the world to acquire a false British passport. The Jackal followed the procedure used by most mercenaries, smugglers and others who wish to adopt an alias for passing national boundaries. First he took a car trip through the Home Counties of the Thames Valley looking for small villages. In the third cemetery he visited, the Jackal found a gravestone to suit his purpose, that of Alexander Duggan who died at the age of two and a half years in 1931. Had he lived, the Duggan child would have been a few months older than the Jackal in July 1963. The elderly vicar was courteous and helpful when the visitor presented himself at the vicarage to announce that he was an amateur geneologist engaged in attempting to trace the family tree of the Duggans. He had been informed that there had been a Duggan family that had settled in the village in years past. He wondered, somewhat diffidently, if the parish records might be able to help in his search.

The vicar was kindness itself, and on their way over to the church a compliment on the beauty of the little Norman building and a contribution to the donations box for the restoration fund improved the atmosphere yet more. The records showed both the Duggan parents had died over the past seven years, and, alas, their only son Alexander had been buried in this very churchyard over thirty years before. The Jackal idly turned over the pages in the parish register of births, marriages and deaths for 1929, and for the month of April the name of Duggan, written in a crabbed and clerkly hand, caught his eye.

Alexander James Quentin Duggan, born April 3rd, 1929, in the parish of St Mark’s, Sambourne Fishley.

He noted the details, thanked the vicar profusely and left. Back in London he presented himself at the Central Registry of Births, Marriages and Deaths, where a helpful young assistant accepted without query his visiting card showing him to be a partner in a firm of solicitors of Market Drayton, Shropshire, and his explanation that he was engaged in trying to trace the whereabouts of the grandchildren of one of the firm’s clients who had recently died and left her estate to her grandchildren. One of these grandchildren was Alexander James Quentin Duggan, born at Sambourne Fishley, in the parish of St Mark’s, on April 3rd, 1929.

Most civil servants in Britain do their best to be helpful when confronted with a polite enquiry, and in this case the assistant was no exception. A search of the records showed that the child in question had been registered precisely according to the enquirer’s information, but had died on November 8th, 1931, as the result of a road accident. For a few shillings the Jackal received a copy of both the birth and death certificates. Before returning home he stopped at a branch office of the Ministry of Labour and was issued with a passport application form, at a toyshop where for fifteen shillings he bought a child’s printing set, and at a post office for a one-pound postal order.

Back in his flat he filled in the application form in Duggan’s name, giving exactly the right age, date of birth, etc., but his own personal description. He wrote in his own height, colour of hair and eyes, and for profession put down simply ‘business man’. The full names of Duggan’s parents, taken from the child’s birth certificate, were also filled in. For the referee he filled in the name of Rev. James Elderly, vicar of St Mark’s, Sambourne Fishley, to whom he had spoken that morning, and whose full name and title of LL.D had obligingly been printed on a board outside the church gate. The vicar’s signature was forged in a thin hand in thin ink with a thin nib, and from the printing set he made up a stamp reading: ‘St Mark’s Parish Church Sambourne Fishley’, which was placed firmly next to the vicar’s name. The copy of the birth certificate, the application form, and the postal order were sent off to the Passport Office in Petty France. The death certificate he destroyed. The brand-new passport arrived at the accommodation address by post four days later as he was reading that morning’s edition of Le Figaro. He picked it up after lunch. Late that afternoon he locked the flat, and drove to London Airport where he boarded the flight to Copenhagen, paying in cash again to avoid using a chequebook. In the false bottom of his suitcase, in a compartment barely thicker than an ordinary magazine and almost undetectable except to the most thorough search, was two thousand pounds which he had drawn earlier that day from his private deed-box in the vaults of a firm of solicitors in Holborn.

The visit to Copenhagen was brisk and businesslike. Before leaving Kastrup Airport he booked himself on the next afternoon’s Sabena flight to Brussels. In the Danish capital it was far too late to go shopping, so he booked in at the Hotel d’Angleterre on Kongs Ny Torv, ate like a king at the Seven Nations, had a mild flirtation with two Danish blondes while strolling through the Tivoli Gardens and was in bed by one in the morning.

The next day he bought a lightweight clerical-grey suit at one of the best-known men’s outfitters in central Copenhagen, a pair of sober black walking shoes, a pair of socks, a set of underwear and three white shirts with collars attached. In each case he bought only what had the Danish maker’s name on a small cloth tab inside. In the case of the three white shirts, which he did not need, the point of the purchase was simply to acquire the tabs for transference to the clerical shirt, dog collar and bib that he had bought in London while claiming to be a theological student on the verge of ordination.

His last purchase was a book in Danish on the notable churches and cathedrals of France. He lunched off a large cold collation at a lakeside restaurant in the Tivoli Gardens and caught the 3.15 plane to Brussels.

4

WHY A MAN of the undoubted talents of Paul Goossens should have gone wrong in middle age was something of a mystery even to his few friends, his rather more numerous customers and to the Belgian police. During his thirty years as a trusted employee of the Fabrique Nationale at Liège he had established a reputation for unfailing precision in a branch of engineering where precision is absolutely indispensable. Of his honesty also there had been no doubt. He had also during those thirty years become the company’s foremost expert in the very wide range of weapons that the excellent company produces, from the tiniest lady’s automatic to the heaviest of machine guns.

His war record had been remarkable. Although he had continued after the Occupation to work in the arms factory run by the Germans for the Nazi war effort, later examination of his career had established beyond doubt his undercover work for the Resistance, his participation in private in a chain of safe-houses for the escape of downed Allied airmen, and at work his leadership of a sabotage ring that ensured a fair proportion of the weapons turned out by Liège eit

her never fired accurately or blew up at the fiftieth shell, killing the German crews. All this, so modest and unassuming was the man, had been wormed out of him later by his defence lawyers and triumphantly produced in court on his behalf. It had gone a long way to mitigating his sentence, and the jury had also been impressed by his own halting admission that he had never revealed his activities during the war because post-liberation honours and medals would have embarrassed him.

By the time in the early fifties that a large sum of money had been embezzled from a foreign customer in the course of a lucrative arms deal, and suspicion had fallen upon him, he was a departmental chief in the firm and his own superiors had been loudest in informing the police that their suspicions with regard to the trusted M. Goossens were ridiculous.

Even at the trial his managing director spoke for him. But the presiding judge took the view that to betray a position of trust in such a manner was all the more reprehensible, and he had been given ten years in prison. On appeal it was reduced to five. With good conduct he had been released after three and a half.

His wife had divorced him, and taken the children with her. The old life of the suburban dweller in a neat flower-rimmed detached house in one of the prettier outskirts of Liège (there are not many) was over, a thing of the past. So was his career with FN. He had taken a small flat in Brussels, later a house further out of town, as his fortunes prospered from his thriving business as the source of illegal arms to half the underworld in Western Europe.

By the early sixties he had the nickname L’Armurier, the Armourer. Any Belgian citizen can buy a lethal weapon, revolver, automatic or rifle, at any sports or gun shop in the country on production of a national identity card proving Belgian nationality. Goossens never used his own, for at each sale of the weapon and subsequent ammunition the sale is noted in the gunsmith’s log-book, along with the name and I.D. card number of the purchaser. Goossens used other people’s cards, either stolen or forged.

He had established close links with one of the city’s top pickpockets, a man who, when not languishing in prison as a guest of the state, could abstract any wallet from any pocket at ease. These he bought outright for cash from the thief. He also had at his disposal the services of a master forger who, having come badly unstuck in the late forties over the production of a large amount of French francs in which he had inadvertently left the ‘u’ out of ‘Banque de France’ (he was young then), had finally gone into the false passport business with much greater success. Lastly, when he needed to acquire a firearm for a customer, the client who presented himself at the gunsmith’s with a neatly forged ID card was never himself but always an out-of-work and out-of-jail petty crook or an actor resting between conquests of the stage.

Of his own ‘staff’ only the pickpocket and the forger knew his real identity. So also did some of his customers, notably the top men in the Belgian underworld, who not only left him alone to his devices but also offered him a certain amount of protection in refusing to reveal when captured where they had got their guns from, simply because he was so useful to them.

This did not stop the Belgian police being aware of a portion of his activities, but it did prevent them ever being able to catch him with the goods in his possession or of being able to get testimony that would stand up in court and convict him. They were aware of and highly suspicious of the small but superbly equipped forge and workshop in his converted garage, but repeated visits had revealed nothing more than the paraphernalia for the manufacture of wrought-metal medallions and souvenirs of the statues of Brussels. On their last visit he had solemnly presented the Chief Inspector with a figurine of Mannikin Piss as a token of his esteem for the forces of law and order.

He felt no qualms as he waited on the morning of July 21st, 1963, for the arrival of an Englishman who had been guaranteed to him over the phone by one of his best customers, a former mercenary in the service of Katanga from 1960 to 1962 and who had since masterminded a protection business among the whorehouses of the Belgian capital.

The visitor turned up at noon, as promised, and M. Goossens showed him into his little office off the hall.

‘Would you please remove your glasses?’ he asked when his visitor was seated, and, as the tall Englishman hesitated, added: ‘You see, I think it is better that we trust each other in so far as we can while our business association lasts. A drink, perhaps?’

The man whose passport would have announced him as Alexander Duggan removed his dark glasses and stared quizzically at the little gunsmith as two beers were poured. M. Goossens seated himself behind his desk, sipped his beer and asked quietly,

‘In what way may I be of service to you, monsieur?’

‘I believe Louis rang you earlier about my coming?’