The Stone Leopard (6 page)

`At the very least,' the American assured him. 'We're up against a deadline which is ten days from now. . .

`You are up against a deadline,' Lennox corrected him. 'I warned you on the phone—your kind of business is something I can do without. . .

They talked until 3 am, while Nash used up two packs of cigarettes, telling the Englishman about his recent visit to Peter Lanz and Col Lasalle, about the enormous anxiety in Washington that some great Communist coup was imminent, that Rene Lasalle might possibly—just possibly—be able to provide the key which would unlock the identity of the unknown Soviet agent in Paris. 'He's convinced the crunch is coming when Florian flies off to Moscow,' Nash said at midnight as he sipped his champagne. 'So we have no time at all to check out these three people inside France who, Lasalle believes, may come up with the answer. . .'

`I had the quaint idea that Washington hates the guts of President Guy Florian,' Lennox observed.

Nash's mouth tightened. 'That's as maybe. The hell of it is we're stuck with him—just as we were stuck with de Gaulle. In politics you may not like your bedmate, but you have to sleep with her all the same. President Florian of France and Chancellor Hauser of Germany are all that stand between Soviet Russia and the Channel coast now that Congress has opted out of Europe—your Channel coast, too,' he added.

`So where does the Leopard come into it ? None of what you say makes much sense,' Lennox remarked bluntly. 'The Leopard is dead—he was shot in Lyon in 1944. I think Lasalle is just trying to stir up some muck, hoping it will stick to his old enemy, Guy Florian. Your French colonel is a fanatic.'

`Even fanatics get to know things,' Nash persisted. 'We don't entirely go along with his Leopard story but we do think he stumbled on something six months ago just before Florian threw him out of France. He got a sniff of some highly placed underground link with the Soviets—and don't forget that Lasalle was the best army counter-intelligence chief the French ever had. . .'

'But he won't give you this list of so-called witnesses, if it exists. . .'

`I'm certain it exists,' Nash flared. 'He's very security- minded so he only gives that to the man who goes into France to interview them. . .

`So why come to me ?'

Nash swallowed the rest of his champagne, taking his time over replying. 'Because of who you are,' he said quietly. 'These witnesses may well only speak to a Frenchman. Lanz has agreed to supply cover papers. To avoid the security apparatus the man who goes in must merge with the landscape. You qualify, Alan. You were born and grew up in Paris. We gave you top security clearance while you were in the States. You're experienced in underground work, God knows. The Red Night in Syria proved that. You're made for the job,' the American went on. 'We need you. You need us. . .'

`And just why do I need you ?' Lennox asked quietly.

`Because you need American government approval of that bid you put in for a major security contract with an American company, a company which, incidentally, handles certain Defence Department projects. Confidentially, I understand your bid was the lowest and is acceptable—providing you get Washington's rubber stamp. . .'

It was at this point that the explosion came, that Lennox started talking non-stop, refusing to allow Nash to interrupt while he told him what he thought about politics and politicians. 'Your own people do the same thing. . . .' Nash interjected and then subsided under the torrent of Lennox's words. 'It's pressure,' Lennox told him savagely, 'bloody pressure tactics, and you know how I react to that. . . .' The verbal battle went on until close to three in the morning as the atmosphere thickened with smoke, as they drank Scotch, as Nash, tie-less and in his shirt-sleeves now, fought back against Lennox's onslaught. Then, without warning, the Englishman switched his viewpoint.

`All right,' he said as he refilled the glasses, 'I'll go and see Lasalle and talk to him—but on the clear understanding that I make up my mind when I get there whether it's worth going into France. . .'

`That's great. . .

`Wait a minute, there are conditions. If I go in, you'll personally guarantee my American contract is approved. You'll also guarantee that only MacLeish will know I've agreed—the security on this thing has to be ironclad tight. Finally, you'll pay me a service fee of twenty thousand dollars. . .

`For God's sake,' Nash protested, 'you'll be getting the contract. . .'

`Which is the least I deserve since my bid is lowest. The twenty thousand dollars is danger money. You think it's going to be a picnic going undercover into France now ?' Lennox demanded. 'For Christ's sake, before you arrived I was listening to the news bulletin—since the attempt on Florian's life French security is buzzing like a beehive. I'll risk tripping up over Grelle's mob, the counter-espionage gang, maybe even the CRS thugs. MacLeish is getting himself a non-American messenger boy on the cheap at twenty thousand.'

`Who said anything about a non-American?' Nash inquired mildly.

`You did when you phoned from Washington and then flew over here by the seat of your pants. . .

Shortly after three in the morning they came to their agreement, Nash swallowed a final gulp of neat Scotch, checked over certain details with Lennox and then walked back through the rain to the Ritz, quite satisfied and grimly amused at Lennox's insistence on the service fee. MacLeish could damn well shell out the twenty thousand and trim his budget elsewhere. Back in his flat Lennox washed dirty glasses and then started packing. Like Nash he was a night bird, and like Nash he was satisfied. From the moment the proposition had been put to him he had been interested because it suited him. It gave him something new and interesting to poke his nose into; it made the American contract secure; and he had just concluded a hard-fought deal. Extracting the twenty thousand from MacLeish was a bonus which lived up to his main principle: never do anything for nothing.

In Paris on Monday morning, 13 December, Grelle and Boisseau were no nearer clearing up the mystery surrounding Gaston Martin's strangely coincidental arrival only hours after the attempt on Florian's life. Detectives had visited the Hotel Cecile where Martin had dumped his bag after getting off the boat train from Le Havre, and his few miserable possessions had been brought to the prefecture. They consisted of one small suitcase of clothes. 'And this is all he had to show for sixty years of living,' the prefect commented. 'It's pathetic, the way some people live—and die. . .

`This newspaper we found in his room is interesting,' Boisseau replied. 'It clears up the riddle of why he was standing at the spot where Lucie Devaud died. . .

The copy of
Le Monde
, dated 9 December, the day after the assassination attempt, had carried one of those 'scene of the crime' diagrams newspaper editors are so fond of inserting; this one was a street plan of a section of the eighth arrondissement with a cross marking the spot where Lucie Devaud had been shot. Martin's copy of the paper, purchased at Le Havre when he came off the freighter, had been folded to the diagram, as though he had used it as a reference. 'They even showed the fur shop in the diagram,' Boisseau explained, 'so it was easy for him to find the spot. . .

`Which tells us nothing about any connection he may have had with the Devaud woman,' Grelle snapped. 'We've traced her to an expensive apartment in the Place des Vosges but no one there seems to know anything about her. . .

At nine in the morning the telex came in from Cayenne, Guiana—in response to Grelle's earlier request for information. It was a very long message and Grelle later supplemented it by a phone call to the Cayenne police chief. The story it told was quite damnable. During the war Gaston Martin had fought with the Resistance group commanded by the Leopard in the Lozere. He had, according to his own account—told to the Cayenne police chief only a few weeks earlier—worked closely with the Leopard, acting as his deputy. He even mentioned the savage wolfhound, Cesar, who guarded the Communist leader wherever he went.

At the war's end, still a dedicated Communist, Martin had reported to party headquarters in Paris where he was placed under the control of a special political section. Then, in July 1945, only two months after the war's end, Martin was entrusted with a mission: he was to go to Guiana in South America to organize a secret cell inside the union of waterfront workers. 'Control the ports of the west,' he was told, 'and we shall rule the west. . .'

Martin had set off with great enthusiasm, taking a ship from Le Havre bound for Cayenne, proud to be chosen for this important work. Landing in the tropical slum which is Cayenne had somewhat tempered his enthusiasm, but soon he plunged into a world of intrigue and underground activity. He took his orders from a man called Lumel ; of mixed French and Indian blood, Lumel had been born in Guiana. Then the blow fell. Overnight his world was shattered. Drinking in a waterfront bar one evening before going home, he witnessed a drunken brawl and an American seaman was knifed to death. The police, tipped off by an anonymous call, came for him the next day. They found the murder weapon hidden at the back of a cupboard in the shack where he lived.

Lumel supplied Martin with a lawyer, who muffed his defence at the trial. He was sentenced to twenty years' hard labour on Devil's Island. For the first few months in this dreaded penal institution Martin was sustained by the belief that Lumel would find some way to free him; hope died with the passing of the years, with the non-arrival of any message from Lumel who seemed to have abandoned him. When Devil's Island was closed in 1949 he was transferred to another equally sordid penal settlement. -

With good behaviour—and he was a model prisoner—Martin should have been released in 1963. But late in 1962 there was an incident in the prison to which Martin had been transferred. A warder was knifed in the back and died. The murder weapon was found in the holdall Martin used to store his wooden eating implements. It was a repetition of the Cayenne murder sixteen years earlier. And should have immediately been suspect, Grelle thought grimly as he went on reading.

Reading between the lines, the governor of the prison had been an unsavoury character who wanted the matter cleared up quickly. Martin was accused, tried and sentenced to another twenty years. It was about this time that Martin became finally convinced that someone was trying to keep him in prison for ever. He served the greater part of his new sentence and then something odd happened. Lumel, knocked down in a street accident by a hit-and-run driver, called the Cayenne police chief as he lay dying. 'That car knocked me down deliberately,' he alleged. 'They tried to kill me. . . .' Before he expired he dictated and signed a confession.

The order to put Gaston Martin out of circulation reached Lumel in 1945 even before Martin disembarked at Cayenne. `It came from Communist party headquarters in Paris,' Lumel explained in his statement. 'I could have had him killed, of course, but they didn't want it done that way. . .

`I know why,' Grelle said to Boisseau, who was smoking his pipe while the prefect read the report. 'Too many people who could identify the Leopard had already been killed. . .

`You're guessing, chief.'

`I'd bet my pension on it. . .

Lumel admitted organizing the frame-up of Gaston Martin for the bar-room killing, admitted that years later he had paid a large sum of money to arrange for the killing of the warder inside the prison Martin had been transferred to. After Lumel died Martin was personally interrogated by the Cayenne chief of police, a decent man Grelle gathered from the tone of the report. Bitterly disillusioned by his long years in prison, by Lumel's confession, Martin had told the police chief everything. 'I think he realized that his entire life had been thrown away for an illusion—the illusion of the Communist ideal,' the Cayenne police chief commented in his report. 'I arranged for his immediate release. It will probably always be a mystery why Gaston Martin had to be condemned to the life of an animal for nearly all his days. . .

Grelle dropped the report on his desk. 'The bastard,' he said quietly. 'To go on concealing his identity he had people killed, a man imprisoned in that black jungle hell for life. God knows how many other poor devils died for the sake of the cause—in the report I read of the Leopard I noticed a number of his closer associates came to a sticky end before the war was over. It's a trail of blood this man has left behind him. . .

The prefect was walking round his office with his hands shoved down inside his slacks pockets. Boisseau had rarely seen his chief so angry. 'Remember this, Boisseau,' Grelle went on. `Do a job but never devote your life to a so-called cause. You will find yourself in pawn to scum. . .

`All this to protect the Leopard? A man who is dead ?'

`We'll see about that.' Grelle was putting on his leather raincoat. 'I'm going to the Elysee. If anyone asks for me, you don't know where I am.'

`I still don't understand it,' Boisseau persisted. 'The record shows the Leopard died in 1944. Gaston Martin, who we now know was Petit-Louis, the Leopard's right-hand man, says he saw him walk into the Elysee. . .'