The Day of the Jackal

One was carrying a suitcase stuffed with Calthrop’s personal papers, and private belongings. He went down to the street, jumped into the waiting squad car and drove back to Superintendent Thomas. The other started on the long round of interviews. He began with the neighbours, aware that most would have to head for their places of work within an hour or two. The local tradesmen could come later.

Thomas spent several minutes riffling through the collection of possessions spread all over his office floor. Out of the jumble the detective inspector grabbed a small blue book, walked to the window and started to flick through it by the light of the rising sun.

‘Super, have a look at this.’ His finger jabbed at one of the pages in the passport in front of him. ‘See … “Republica de Dominica, Aeroporto Ciudad Trujillo, Decembre 1960, Entrada …” He was there all right. This is our man.’

Thomas took the passport from him, glanced at it for a moment, then stared out of the window.

‘Oh yes, this is our man, boyo. But does it not occur to you that we’re holding his passport in our hands?’

‘Oh, the sod …’ breathed the inspector when he saw the point.

‘As you say,’ said Thomas, whose chapel upbringing caused him only very occasionally to use strong language. ‘If he’s not travelling on this passport, then what is he travelling on? Give me the phone, and get me Paris.’

By the same hour the Jackal had already been on the road for fifty minutes and the city of Milan lay far behind him. The hood of the Alfa was down and the morning sun already bathed the Autostrada 7 from Milan to Genoa. Along the wide straight road he pushed the car well over eighty miles an hour and kept the tachometre needle flickering just below the start of the red band. The cool wind lashed his pale hair into a frenzy around the forehead, but the eyes were protected by the dark glasses.

The road map said it was two hundred and ten kilometres to the French frontier at Ventimiglia, about a hundred and thirty miles, and he was well up on his estimated driving time of two hours. There was a slight hold-up among the lorry traffic of Genoa as it headed for the docks just after seven o’clock, but before 7.15 he was away on the A.10 to San Remo and the border.

The daily road traffic was already thick when he arrived at ten to eight at the sleepiest of France’s frontier points, and the heat was rising.

After a thirty-minute wait in the queue he was beckoned up to the parking ramp for Customs examination. The policeman who took his passport examined it carefully, muttered a brief ‘Un moment, monsieur’ and disappeared inside the Customs shed.

He emerged a few minutes later with a man in civilian clothes who held the passport.

‘Bonjour, monsieur.’

‘Bonjour.’

‘This is your passport?’

‘Yes.’

There was another searching examination of the passport.

‘What is the purpose of your visit to France?’

‘Tourism. I have never seen the Côte d’Azur.’

‘I see. The car is yours?’

‘No. It’s a hired car. I had business in Italy, and it has unexpectedly occasioned a week with nothing to do before returning to Milan. So I hired a car to do a little touring.’

‘I see. You have the papers for the car?’

The Jackal extended the international driving licence, the contract of hire, and the two insurance certificates. The plain-clothes man examined both.

‘You have luggage, monsieur?’

‘Yes, three pieces in the boot, and a hand-grip.’

‘Please bring them all into the Customs hall.’

He walked away. The policeman helped the Jackal off-load the three suitcases and the hand-grip, and together they carried them to Customs.

Before leaving Milan he had taken the old greatcoat, scruffy trousers and shoes of André Martin, the non-existent Frenchman whose papers were sewn into the lining of the third suitcase, and rolled them in a ball at the back of the boot. The clothes from the other two suitcases had been divided between the three. The medals were in his pocket.

Two Customs officers examined each case. While they were doing so he filled in the standard form for tourists entering France. Nothing in the cases excited any attention. There was a brief moment of anxiety as the Customs men picked up the jars containing the hair-tinting dyes. He had taken the precaution of emptying them into after-shave flasks, previously emptied. At that time after-shave lotion was not in vogue in France, it was too new on the market and mainly confined to America. He saw the two Customs men exchange glances, but they replaced the flasks in the hand-grip.

Out of the corner of his eye he could see through the windows another man examining the boot and engine bonnet of the Alfa. Fortunately he did not look underneath. He unrolled the greatcoat and trousers in the boot and looked at them with distaste, but presumed the coat was for covering the bonnet on winter nights and old clothes were a contingency in case repairs had to be done on the car along the road. He replaced the clothes and closed the boot.