‘Well,’ he said finally, still looking out into the glaring courtyard, ‘he must be told.’
The policeman did not answer. It was one of the advantages of being a technician that you did your job and left the top decisions to those who were paid to take them. He did not intend to volunteer to be the one who did the telling. The Minister turned back to face him.
‘Bien. Merci, Commissaire. Then I shall seek an interview this afternoon and inform the President.’ The voice was crisp and decisive. A thing had to be done. ‘I need hardly ask you to maintain complete silence on this matter until I have had time to explain the position to the President and he has decided how he wishes this affair to be handled.’
Commissaire Ducret rose and left, to return across the square and a hundred yards down the road to the gates of the Elysée Palace. Left to himself the Minister of the Interior spun the buff file round to face him and again read it slowly through. He had no doubt Rolland’s assessment was right, and Ducret’s concurrence left him no room for manoeuvre. The danger was there, it was serious, it could not be avoided and the President had to know.
Reluctantly he threw down a switch on the intercom in front of him and told the plastic grill that immediately buzzed at him, ‘Get me a call to the Secretary General of the Elysée.’
Within a minute the red telephone beside the intercom rang. He lifted it and listened for a second.
‘M. Foccart, s’il vous plait.’ Another pause, then the deceptively soft voice of one of the most powerful men in France came on the line. Roger Frey explained briefly what he wanted and why.
‘As soon as possible, Jacques … Yes, I know you have to check. I’ll wait. Please call me back as soon as you can.’
The call back came within an hour. The appointment was fixed for four that afternoon, as soon as the President had finished his siesta. For a second it crossed the Minister’s mind to protest that what he had on the blotter in front of him was more important than any siesta, but he stifled the protest. Like everybody in the entourage of the President, he was aware of the inadvisability of crossing the soft-voiced civil servant who had the ear of the President at all times and a private filing system of intimate information about which more was feared than was known.
At twenty to four that afternoon the Jackal emerged from Cunningham’s in Curzon Street after one of the most delicious and expensive lunches that the London sea-food specialists could provide. It was after all, he mused as he swung into South Audley Street, probably his last lunch in London for some time to come, and he had reason to celebrate.
At the same moment a black DS 19 saloon swung out of the gates of the Interior Ministry of France into the Place Beauvau. The policeman in the centre of the square, forewarned by a shout from his colleagues on the iron gates, held up the traffic from all the surrounding streets, then snapped into a salute.
A hundred metres down the road the Citroën turned towards the grey stone portico in front of the Elysée Palace. Here too the gendarmes on duty, forewarned, had held up the traffic to give the saloon enough turning room to get through the surprisingly narrow archway. The two Gardes Républicains standing in front of their sentry-boxes on each side of the portico smacked their white-gloved hands across the magazines of their rifles in salute, and the Minister entered the forecourt of the palace.
A chain hanging in a low loop across the inner arch of the gate halted the car while the duty inspector of the day, one of Ducret’s men, briefly glanced inside the car. He nodded towards the Minister, who nodded back. At a gesture from the inspector the chain was let fall to the ground and the Citroën crunched over it. Across a hundred feet of tan-coloured gravel lay the façade of the palace. Robert, the driver, pulled the car to the right and drove round the courtyard anticlockwise, to deposit his master at the foot of the six granite steps that lead to the entrance.
The door was opened by one of the two silver-chained, black frock-coated ushers. The Minister stepped down and ran up the steps to be greeted at the plate-glass door by the chief usher. They greeted each other formally, and he followed the usher inside. They had to wait for a moment in the vestibule beneath the vast chandelier suspended on its long gilded chain from the vaulted ceiling far above while the usher telephoned briefly from the marble table to the left of the door. As he put the phone down, he turned to the Minister, smiled briefly, and proceeded at his usual majestic, unhurried pace up the carpeted granite stairs to the left.
At the first floor they went down the short wide landing that overlooked the hallway below, and stopped when the usher knocked softly on the door to the left of the landing. There was a muffled reply of ‘Entrez’ from within, the usher smoothly opened the door and stood back to let the Minister pass into the Salon des Ordonnances. As the Minister entered the door closed behind him without a sound and the usher made his stately way back down the stairs to the vestibule.
From the great south windows on the far side of the salon the sun streamed through, bathing the carpet in warmth. One of the floor-to-ceiling windows was open, and from the palace gardens came the sound of a wood pigeon cooing among the trees. The traffic of the Champs Elysées five hundred yards beyond the windows and completely shielded from view by the spreading limes and beeches, magnificent in the foliage of full summer, was simply another murmur, not even as loud as the pigeon. As usual when he was in the south-facing rooms of the Elysée Palace, M. Frey, a townsman born and bred, could imagine he was in some château buried in the heart of the country. The roar of the traffic down the Faubourg St Honoré on the other side of the building was just a memory. The President, as he knew, adored the countryside.
The ADC of the day was Colonel Tesseire. He rose from behind his desk.
‘Monsieur le Ministre …’
‘Colonel …’ M. Frey gestured with his head towards the closed double doors with the gilt handles on the left-hand side of the salon. ‘I am expected?’
‘Of course, M. le Ministre.’ Tesseire crossed the room, knocked briefly on the doors, opened one half of them and stood in the entrance.
‘The Minister of the Interior, Monsieur le President.’
There was a muffled assent from inside. Tesseire stepped back, smiled at the Minister, and Roger Frey went past him into Charles de Gaulle’s private study.
There was nothing about that room, he had always thought, that did not give a clue to the man who had ordered its decoration and furnishings. To the right were the three tall and elegant windows that gave access to the garden like those of the Salon des Ordonnances. In the study also one of them was open, and the murmuring of the pigeon, muted as one passed through the door between the two rooms, was heard again coming from the gardens.
Somewhere under those limes and beeches quiet men toting automatics with which they could pick the ace out of the ace of spades at twenty paces lurked. But woe betide the one of them who let himself be seen from the windows on the first floor. Around the palace the rage of the man they would fanatically protect if they had to had become legendary in the event that he learned of the measures taken for his own protection, or if those measures obtruded on his privacy. This was one of the heaviest crosses Ducret had to bear, and no one envied him the task of protecting a man for whom all forms of personal protection were an indignity he did not appreciate.
To the left, against the wall containing the glass-fronted bookshelves, was a Louis XV table on which reposed a Louis XIV clock. The floor was covered by a Savonnerie carpet made in the royal carpet factory at Chaillot in 1615. This factory, the President had once explained to him, had been a soap factory before its conversion to carpet making, and hence the name that had always applied to the carpets it produced.
There was nothing in the room that was not simple, nothing that was not dignified, nothing that was not tasteful, and above all nothing that did not exemplify the grandeur of France. And that, so far as Roger Frey was concerned, included the man behind the desk who now rose to greet him with his usual elaborate courtesy.
The Minister recalled that Harold King, doyen of British journalists in Paris and the only contemporary Anglo-Saxon who was a personal friend of Charles de Gaulle, had once remarked to him that in all of his personal mannerisms the President was not from the twentieth, but from the eighteenth century. Every time he had met his master since then Roger Frey had vainly tried to imagine a tall figure in silks and brocades making those same courteous gestures and greetings. He could see the connection, but the image escaped him. Nor could he forget the few occasions when the stately old man, really roused by something that had displeased him, had used barrack-room language of such forceful crudity as to leave his entourage or Cabinet members stunned and speechless.
As the Minister well knew, one subject likely to produce such a response was the question of the measures the Interior Minister, responsible for the security of the institutions of France, of which the President himself was the foremost, felt obliged to take. They had never seen eye to eye on that question, and much of what Frey did in that regard had to be done clandestinely. When he thought of the document he carried in his briefcase and the request he was going to have to make, he almost quaked.
‘Mon cher Frey.’