The Day of the Jackal

A few seconds later the Englishman was gone into the night. He walked for five blocks before taking a taxi back to the Amigo and it was midnight when he arrived. He ordered cold chicken and a bottle of Moselle in his room, bathed thoroughly to get rid of the last traces of make-up, then slept.

The following morning he checked out of the hotel and took the Brabant Express to Paris. It was July 22nd.

The head of the Action Service of the SDECE sat at his desk on that same morning and surveyed the two pieces of paper before him. Each was a copy of a routine report filed by agents of other departments. At the head of each piece of blue flimsy was a list of department chiefs entitled to receive a copy of the report. Opposite his own designation was a small tick. Both reports had come in that morning and in the normal course of events Colonel Rolland would have glanced at each, taken in what they had to say, stored the knowledge somewhere in his fearsome memory, and had them filed under separate headings. But there was one word that cropped up in each of the reports, a word that intrigued him.

The first report that arrived was an interdepartmental memo from R.3 (Western Europe) containing a synopsis of a dispatch from their permanent office in Rome. The despatch was a straight-forward report to the effect that Rodin, Montclair and Casson were still holed up in their top floor suite and were still being guarded by their eight guards. They had not moved out of the building since they established themselves there on June 18th. Extra staff had been drafted from R.3. Paris to Rome to assist in keeping the hotel under round-the-clock surveillance. Instructions from Paris remained unchanged: not to make any approach but simply to keep watch. The men in the hotel had established a routine for keeping in touch with the outside world three weeks previously (see R.3 Rome report of June 30th), and this was being maintained. The courier remained Viktor Kowalski. End of message.

Colonel Rolland flicked open the buff file lying on the right of his desk next to the sawn-off 105 mm shell case that served for a copious ashtray and was even by then half-full of Disque Bleue stubs. His eyes strayed down the R.3 Rome report of June 30th till he found the paragraph he wanted.

Each day, it said, one of the Guards left the hotel and walked to the head post office of Rome. Here a poste restante pigeonhole was reserved in the name of one Poitiers. The OAS had not taken a postal box with a key, apparently for fear it might be burgled. All mail for the top men of the OAS was addressed to Poitiers, and was kept by the clerk on duty at the poste restante counter. An attempt to bribe the original such clerk to hand over the mail to an agent of R.3 had failed. The man had reported the approach to his superiors, and had been replaced by a senior clerk. It was possible that mail for Poitiers was now being screened by the Italian security police, but R.3 had instructions not to approach the Italians to ask for co-operation. The attempt to bribe the clerk had failed, but it was felt the initiative had had to be taken. Each day the mail arriving overnight in the post office was handed to the Guard, who had been identified as one Viktor Kowalski, formerly a corporal of the Foreign Legion and a member of Rodin’s original company in Indo-China. Kowalski seemingly had adequate false papers identifying him to the post office as Poitiers, or a letter of authority acceptable to the post office. If Kowalski had letters to post, he waited by the post box inside the main hall of the building until five minutes before collection time, dropped the mail through the slit, then waited until the entire boxful was collected and taken back into the heart of the building for sorting. Attempts to interfere with the process of either collection or despatch of the OAS chief’s mail would entail a degree of violence, which had already been precluded by Paris. Occasionally Kowalski made a telephone call, long-distance, from the Overseas Calls telephone counter, but here again attempts either to learn the number asked for or overhear the conversation had failed. End of message.

Colonel Rolland let the cover of the file fall back on the contents and took up the second of the two reports that had come in that morning. It was a police report from the Police Judiciaire of Metz stating that a man had been questioned during a routine raid on a bar and had half-killed two policemen in the ensuing fight. Later at the police station he had been identified by his fingerprints as a deserter from the Foreign Legion by the name of Sandor Kovacs, Hungarian by birth and a refugee from Budapest in 1956. Kovacs, a note from PJ Paris added at the end of the information from Metz, was a notorious OAS thug long wanted for his connection with a series of terror murders of loyalist notables in the Bone and Constantine areas of Algeria during 1961. At that time he had operated as partner of another OAS gunman still at large, former Foreign Legion corporal Viktor Kowalski. End of message.

Rolland pondered the connection between the two me

n yet again, as he had done for the previous hour. At last he pressed a buzzer in front of him and replied to the ‘Oui, mon colonel’ that came out of it, ‘Get me the personal file on Viktor Kowalski. At once.’

He had the file up from archives in ten minutes, and spent another hour reading it. Several times he ran his eye over one particular paragraph. As other Parisians in less stressing professions hurried past on the pavement below to their lunches, Colonel Rolland convened a small meeting consisting of himself, his personal secretary, a specialist in handwriting from the documentation department three floors down and two strong-arm men from his private Praetorian guard.

‘Gentlemen,’ he told them, ‘with the unwilling but inevitable assistance of one not here present, we are going to compose, write and despatch a letter.’

5

THE JACKAL’S TRAIN arrived at the Gare du Nord just before lunch and he took a taxi to a small but comfortable hotel in the Rue de Suresne, leading off the Place de la Madeleine. While it was not a hotel in the same class as the d’Angleterre of Copenhagen or the Amigo of Brussels, he had reasons for wishing to seek a more modest and less known place to stay while in Paris. For one thing his stay would be longer, and for another there was far more likelihood of running into somebody in Paris in late July who might have known him fleetingly in London under his real name than in either Copenhagen or Brussels. Out on the street he was confident that the wrap-around dark glasses he habitually wore, and which in the bright sunshine of the boulevards were completely natural, would protect his identity. The possible danger lay in being seen in a hotel corridor or foyer. The last thing he wished at this stage was to be halted by a cheery ‘Well, fancy seeing you here’, and then the mention of his name within the hearing of a desk clerk who knew him as Mr Duggan.

Not that his stay in Paris had anything about it to excite attention. He lived quietly, taking his breakfast of croissants and coffee in his room. From the delicatessen across the road from his hotel he bought a jar of English marmalade to replace the blackcurrant jam provided on the breakfast tray, and asked the hotel staff to include the jar of marmalade on his tray each morning in place of the jam.

He was quietly courteous to the staff, spoke only a few words of French with the Englishman’s habitually atrocious pronunciation of the French language, and smiled politely when addressed. He replied to the management’s solicitous enquiries by assuring them that he was extremely comfortable and thank you.

‘M. Duggan,’ the hotel proprietress told her desk clerk one day, ‘est extrêmement gentil. Un vrai gentleman.’ There was no dissent.

His days were spent out of the hotel in the pursuits of the tourist. On his first day he bought a street map of Paris, and from a small notebook marked off on the map the places of interest he most wanted to see. These he visited and studied with remarkable devotion, even bearing in mind the architectural beauty of some of them or the historical associations of the others.

He spent three days roaming round the Arc de Triomphe or sitting on the terrace of the Café de l’Elysée scanning the monument and the roof-tops of the great buildings that surround the Place de l’Etoile. Anyone who had followed him in those days (and no one did) would have been surprised that even the architecture of the brilliant M. Haussmann should have attracted so devoted an admirer. Certainly no watcher could have divined that the quiet and elegant English tourist stirring his coffee and gazing at the buildings for so many hours was mentally working out angles of fire, distances from the upper storeys to the Eternal Flame flickering beneath the Arc, and the chances of a man escaping down a rear fire escape unnoticed into the milling crowds.

After three days he left the Etoile and visited the ossuary of the martyrs of the French Resistance at Mont-Valérien. Here he arrived with a bouquet of flowers, and a guide, touched by the gesture of the Englishman to the guide’s one-time fellow Resistants, gave him an exhaustive tour of the shrine and a running commentary. He was hardly to perceive that the visitor’s eyes kept straying away from the entrance to the ossuary towards the high walls of the prison which cut off all direct vision into the courtyard from the roofs of the surrounding buildings. After two hours he left with a polite ‘Thank you’ and a generous but not extravagant pourboire.

He also visited the Place des Invalides, dominated on its southern side by the Hôtel des Invalides, home of Napoleon’s tomb and shrine to the glories of the French Army. The western side of the enormous square, formed by the Rue Fabert, interested him most, and he sat for a morning at the corner café where the Rue Fabert adjoins the tiny triangular Place de Santiago du Chili. From the seventh or eighth floor of the building above his head, No. 146 Rue de Grenelle, where that street joins the Rue Fabert at an angle of ninety degrees, he estimated a gunman would be able to dominate the front gardens of the Invalides, the entrance to the inner courtyard, most of the Place des Invalides, and two or three streets. A good place for a last stand, but not for an assassination. For one thing the distance from the upper windows to the gravelled path leading from the Invalides Palace to where cars would be drawn up at the base of the steps between the two tanks was over two hundred metres. For another the view downwards from the windows of No. 146 would be partly obscured by the topmost branches of the dense lime trees growing in the Place de Santiago and from which the pigeons dropped their off-white tributes on to the shoulders of the uncomplaining statue of Vauban. Regretfully, he paid for his Vittel Menthe and left.

A day was spent in the precincts of Notre Dame Cathedral. Here amid the rabbit warren of the Île de la Cité were back stairways, alleys and passageways, but the distance from the entrance to the cathedral to the parked cars at the foot of the steps was only a few metres, and the roof-tops of the Place du Parvis were too far away, while those of the tiny abutting Square Charlemagne were too close and easy for security forces to infest with watchers.

His last visit was to the square at the southern end of the Rue de Rennes. He arrived on July 28th. Once called the Place de Rennes, the square had been renamed Place du 18 Juin 1940 when the Gaullists took power in the City Hall. The Jackal’s eyes strayed to the shining new name plate on the wall of the building and remained there. Something of what he had read the previous month returned to him. June 18th, 1940, the day when the lonely but lofty exile in London had taken the microphone to tell the French that if they had lost a battle, they had not lost the war.

There was something about this square, with the crouching bulk of the Gare Montparnasse on its southern side, full of memories for the Parisians of the war generation, that caused the assassin to stop. Slowly he surveyed the expanse of tarmac, crisscrossed now by a maelstrom of traffic pounding down the Boulevard de Montparnasse and joined by other streams from the Rue d’Odessa and the Rue de Rennes. He looked round at the tall, narrow-fronted buildings on each side of the Rue de Rennes that also overlooked the square. Slowly he wended his way round the square to the southern side and peered through the railings into the courtyard of the station. It was a-buzz with cars and taxis bringing or taking away tens of thousands of commuter passengers a day, one of the great mainline stations of Paris. By that winter it would become a silent hulk, brooding on the events, human and historical, that had taken place in its steely, smoky shadow. The station was destined for demolition.1

The Jackal turned with his back to the railings and looked down the traffic artery of the Rue de Rennes. He was facing the Place du 18 Juin 1940, convinced that this was the place the President of France would come, one last time, on the appointed day. The other places he had examined during the past week were possibles; this one, he felt sure, was the certainty. Within a short time there would be no more Gare Montparnasse, the columns that had looked down on so much would be smelted for suburban fences and the forecourt that had seen Berlin humiliated and Paris preserved would be just another executives’ cafeteria. But before that happened, he, the man with the kepi and two gold stars, would come once again. But in the meantime the distance from the top floor of the corner house on the western side of the Rue de Rennes and the centre of the forecourt was about a hundred and thirty metres.

The Jackal took in the landscape facing him with a practised eye. Both corner houses on the Rue de Rennes where it debouched into the square were obvious choices. The first three houses up the Rue de Rennes were possibles, presenting a narrow firing angle into the forecourt. Beyond them the angle became too narrow. Similarly, the first three houses that fronted the Boulevard de Montparnasse running straight through the square east to west were possibilities. Beyond them the angles became too narrow again, and the distances too great. There were no other buildings that dominated the forecourt that were not too far away, other than the station building itself. But this would be out of bounds, its upper office windows overlooking the forecourt crawling with security men. The Jackal decided to study the three corner houses on the western side of the Rue de Rennes first, and sauntered over to a café on the corner at the eastern side, the Café Duchesse Anne.

Here he sat on the terrace a few feet from the roaring traffic, ordered a coffee, and stared at the houses across the street. He stayed for three hours. Later he lunched at the Hansi Brasserie Alsacienne on the far side, and studied the eastern façades. For the afternoon he sauntered up and down, looking at closer quarters into the front doors of the blocks of apartments he had picked out as possibles.

He moved on eventually to the houses that fronted the Boulevard de Montparnasse itself, but here the buildings were offices, newer and more briskly busy.

The next day he was back again, sauntering past the façades, crossing the road to sit on a pavement bench under the trees and toying with a newspaper while he studied the upper floors. Five or six floors of stone façade, topped by a parapet, then the steeply sl

oping black-tiled roofs containing the attics, pierced by mansarde windows, once the quarters of the servants, now the homes of the poorer pensionnaires. The roofs, and possibly the mansardes themselves would certainly be watched on the day. There might even be watchers on the roofs, crouching among the chimney stacks, their field glasses on the opposite windows and roofs. But the topmost floor below the attics would be high enough, provided one could sit well back into the darkness of the room not to be visible from across the street. The open window in the sweltering heat of a Paris summer would be natural enough.

But the further back one sat inside the room, the narrower would be the angle of fire sideways down into the forecourt of the station. For this reason the Jackal ruled out the third house into the Rue de Rennes on each side of the street. The angle would be too narrow. That left him four houses to choose from. As the time of day he expected to fire would be the mid-afternoon, with the sun moving towards the west, but still high enough in the sky to shine over the top of the station roof into the windows of the houses on the east side of the street, he eventually chose those two on the west side. To prove it, he waited until four o’clock on July 29th, and noticed that on the west side the topmost windows were receiving only a slanting ray from the sun, while it still fiercely lit the houses on the east.