The Day of the Jackal

‘Well, why?’ asked someone.

‘Because he has picked his day,’ said Lebel. ‘He knows when he is going to strike. Commissaire Ducret, has the President got any engagements outside the palace today, or tomorrow, or Saturday?’

Ducret shook his head.

‘And what is Sunday, August 25th?’ asked Lebel.

There was a sigh round the table like wind blowing through corn.

‘Of course,’ breathed the Minister, ‘Liberation Day. And the crazy thing is, most of us were here with him on that day, the Liberation of Paris, 1944.’

‘Precisely,’ said Lebel. ‘He is a bit of a psychologist, our Jackal. He knows there is one day of the year that General de Gaulle will never spend elsewhere than here. It is, so to speak, his great day. That is what the assassin has been waiting for.’

‘In that case,’ said the Minister briskly, ‘we have got him. With his source of information gone, there is no corner of Paris that he can hide, no single community of Parisians that will take him in, even unwittingly, and give him protection. We have him. Commissaire Lebel, give us that man’s name.’

Claude Lebel rose and went to the door. The others were rising and preparing to leave for lunch.

‘Oh, there is one thing,’ the Minister called after Lebel, ‘how did you know to tap the telephone line of Colonel Saint-Clair’s private flat?’

Lebel turned in the doorway and shrugged.

‘I didn’t,’ he said, ‘so last night I tapped all your telephones. Good day, gentlemen.’

At five that afternoon, sitting over a beer at a café terrace just off the Place de l’Odéon, his face shielded from the sunlight by dark glasses such as everyone else was wearing, the Jackal got his idea. He got it from watching two men stroll by in the street. He paid for his beer, got up and left. A hundred yards down the street he found what he was looking for, a woman’s beauty shop. He went in and made a few purchases.

At six the evening papers changed their headlines. The late editions carried a screaming banner across the top. Assassin de la Belle Baronne se refugie à Paris.’ There was a photo beneath it of the Baronne de la Chalonnière, taken from a society picture of her five years ago at a party in Paris. It had been found in the archives of a picture agency and the same photo was in every paper. At 6.30, with a copy of France-Soir under his arm, Colonel Rolland entered a small café off the Rue Washington. The dark-jowled barman glanced at him keenly and nodded towards another man in the back of the hall.

The second man came o

ver and accosted Rolland.

‘Colonel Rolland?’

The head of the Action Service nodded.

‘Please follow me.’

He led the way through a door at the back of the café and up to a small sitting room on the first floor, probably the owner’s private dwelling. He knocked, and a voice inside said, ‘Entrez.’

As the door closed behind him, Rolland took the outstretched hand of the man who had risen from an armchair.

‘Colonel Rolland? Enchanté. I am the Capu of the Union Corse. I understand you are looking for a certain man …’

It was eight o’clock when Superintendent Thomas came through from London. He sounded tired. It had not been an easy day. Some consulates had co-operated willingly, others had been extremely difficult.

Apart from women, Negroes, Asiatics and shorties, eight foreign male tourists had lost their passports in London during the previous fifty days, he said. Carefully and succinctly he listed them all, with names, passport numbers and descriptions.

‘Now let’s start to deduct those whom it cannot be,’ he suggested to Lebel. ‘Three lost their passports during periods when we know that the Jackal, alias Duggan, was not in London. We’ve been checking airline bookings and ticket sales right back to July first as well. It seems on July 18th he took the evening flight to Copenhagen. According to BEA he bought a ticket at their counter in Brussels, paying cash, and flew back to England on the evening of August 6th.’

‘Yes, that checks,’ said Lebel. ‘We have discovered that part of that journey out of London was spent in Paris. From July 22nd until July 31st.’

‘Well,’ said Thomas, his voice crackling on the London line, ‘three of the passports were missed while he was not here. We can count them out, yes?’

‘Right,’ said Lebel.

‘Of the remaining five, one is immensely tall, six feet six inches, that’s over two metres in your language. Besides which, he’s Italian, which means that his height on the fly-leaf of his passport is given in metres and centimetres, which would be immediately understood by a French Customs officer who would notice the difference, unless the Jackal is walking on stilts.’

‘I agree, the man must be a giant. Count him out. What of the other four?’ asked Lebel.