The Stone Leopard (20 page)

Over lunch he wondered whether to go straight on to meet the next witness on the list, Robert Philip of Colmar, and then he decided he would wait until Monday. The local Monday newspaper should carry an account of Jouvel's death, which could be enlightening.

Robert Philip, 8 Avenue Raymond Poincare, Colmar
, was the second name on the list Col Lasalle had handed over to Alan Lennox. It was also the second name on the list Carel Vanek carried in his head. On Saturday evening the three members of the Soviet Commando pad their bills at their respective hotels and left Strasbourg, driving the forty miles to Colmar through a snowstorm. They arrived in the Hans Andersen-like town of steep-roofed buildings and crooked alleyways at 9.30 pm and again Vanek took precautions, dropping off Lansky with his suitcase near the station, so that only two men arrived together at the hotel.

Lansky walked into the station booking-hall, inquired the time of a train for Lyon for the following day, and then smoked a Gauloise while he waited for a train to come in—any train. Walking out with the three passengers who got off a local from Strasbourg, he crossed the Place de la Gare to the Hotel Bristol which Vanek and Brunner had entered earlier and booked a room in the name of Froissart. The receptionist, noting he had no car, assumed he had just come off the Strasbourg train.

Upstairs in his bedroom, Vanek had followed his usual routine, checking Philip's address in the telephone directory and locating it on the Blay street-guide of Colmar he had obtained from the hall porter. He looked up as Brunner slipped into his room. 'This is very convenient—staying here,' he informed the Czech. 'Philip lives just round the corner. . .'

`If he is home,' the pessimistic Brunner replied.

`Let's find out. . .'

Vanek did not use the room phone to call Philip's number; that would have meant going through the hotel switchboard. Instead he went out with Brunner to the car and they drove about a kilometre into the shopping area and entered a bar where Vanek called the number he had found in the directory. The voice which answered the phone was arrogant and brusque. 'Robert Philip. . .'

`Sorry, wrong number,' Vanek muttered and broke the connection. 'He's home,' he told Brunner. 'Let's go look at the place. . .

On a snowbound December night at 10.30 pm the Avenue Raymond Poincare was a deserted street of trees and parks with small, grim, two-storey mansions set back behind prison-like railings. No. 8 was a square-looking stone villa with steps leading up to a porch and a gloomy garden beyond the railings. There were lights in the large bay window on the ground floor and the upper storey was in darkness.

`I think you can get round the back,' Brunner said as the Citroén cruised slowly past the villa and he tried to take in as much detail as he could.

`The next thing to check is whether he lives alone,' Vanek remarked. 'Tomorrow is Sunday. If we can check out the place in the daytime I think we might just pay a visit to Mr Robert Philip tomorrow night. . .'

`One day you will be too quick. . .

`Tomorrow is 19 December,' Vanek replied calmly. 'We have only four days left to visit two people—one of them across the Rhine in Germany. In speed can lie safety. And this will not be a job for the Rope. We have had one suicide, so Robert Philip will have to die by accident. . .'

Earlier on the same day, arriving in Strasbourg by helicopter, Boisseau put Inspector Rochat through a grilling almost without Rochat realizing what was happening. He was well aware he must tread warily: unlike Lyon, Grelle had no particular friendship with the prefect of Strasbourg and the locals were prickly about his arrival. After half an hour he suggested that later Rochat must join him for a drink, but first could they visit the dead man's apartment?

It was Boisseau who extracted from detective Bonheur the information that two men had entered No. 49 between 6.30 and 7.15 pm, that the second man had shuffled and carried an umbrella, that later the first man had left at 7.2 pm, followed by the umbrella man half an hour later. 'Which was just about the time Jouvel may have died,' he pointed out to Rochat.

It was Boisseau who interviewed the other tenants in the building and discovered no one could identify the shuffling man, which meant he did not live there. 'Which proves nothing,' he informed Rochat, 'but why did he come here when we can find no one he visited ? And half an hour is a long time for a man to enter a building for no purpose.'

It was Boisseau who interviewed Denise Viron, the red-headed girl, obtaining from her a detailed description of two quite different men who had made inquiries about Leon Jouvel the previous day. He made a careful note of the descriptions, observing that neither of them could have been the shuffling man

`Could either of these two men have been English?' he asked at one stage. Denise had shaken her head vigorously, crossing her legs in a provocative way which made Inspector Rochat frown. Boisseau, on the other hand, who was interviewing the girl in her apartment, had noticed the legs appreciatively while he offered her another cigarette.

`Was Jouvel often asked about by people?' he inquired. `Did he have many visitors ?'

`Hardly any. The two callers were exceptional. . .'

Boisseau had not blamed Rochat for failing to dig up this information. It was quite clear that his superiors had resented the Paris police prefect's intrusion on their territory and had ordered the inspector to clear up the case quickly. So, once it seemed clear it was suicide, Rochat had inquired no further.

`You are satisfied ?' Rochat suggested as he drove the man from Paris back to the airport.

`Are you?' Boisseau countered.

`Technically everything was as it should be—taking into account Jouvel's short stature, the length of the rope, the position of the bathroom chair he had kicked away from under himself. Only an expert could have faked it.'

`I find your last observation disturbing,' Boisseau said.

Robert Philip, fifty-two years old—the same age as Guy Florian, but there the resemblance ended—rose late from his bed on Sunday morning, and was then annoyed because his companion, Noelle Berger, continued sleeping. Shaking her bare white shoulder roughly, he made his request with his usual finesse.

`Get up, you trollop, I want some breakfast. . .'

Separated from his wife, he now consoled himself with a series of fleeting
affaires
, each of which he took care to ensure did not last too long. As he told his drinking cronies, 'Have them in the house for a week and they think they own the place. . .'
 
Of medium height and gross, heavy figure, Philip had a thatch of reddish hair cut
en brosse
and a thick moustache of the same reddish tinge. Grumbling, he went downstairs and pulled back the living-room curtain. At the opposite kerb in the normally deserted street was parked a Citroén with the bonnet up and two men peering inside at the engine. A holdall lay on the pavement with tools spread about. 'Serve you right for wasting petrol,' Philip muttered, holding his silk dressing- gown round his middle as he went off into the kitchen. A few minutes later, similarly attired, Noelle Berger, small and blonde-haired and with an ample figure, wandered into the living-room in search of a cigarette.

`See the girl,' Vanek whispered, his head half under the Citroén's bonnet. 'This is going to be complicated.'

`Ideally,' Brunner replied, 'she should be dealt with away from the house. . .'

`If she leaves the damned place. This is Sunday. . .'

Robert Philip had been the Leopard's armourer during the war, the man in charge of acquiring weapons and ammunition for the Resistance group, a process which normally involved raiding enemy munition stores, and as such he had been one of the key members of the Leopard's staff. Since the war Philip's career had been a success story—if you measure success by the acquisition of a large villa and a sizeable bank account by dubious means. Philip was a gun-runner.

In 1944, while Resistance groups in the Midi were building up huge caches of weapons to support the Republique Sovietique du Sud the Leopard was on the verge of bringing into existence, Robert Philip was busily diverting some of these weapons to secret hideouts. It must have been a great relief to Philip when the Communist coup failed. Seeing de Gaulle was winning, Philip proclaimed himself a lifelong Gaullist, revealing half of his weapon caches to the General. The other half he salted away as a future investment.

In the years which followed Philip supplied weapons to Fidel Castro in his early days—using the Communist connections he had built up in the Lozere—to Eoka terrorists fighting the British in Cyprus, to Kurdish rebels fighting the Iraqi government, and to anyone hard-pressed enough to pay over-the-odds prices for an inferior product. 'I have,' as he once boasted to a bar companion, 'overtaken my contemporaries.' His wife, Yvonne, now occupied an apartment in Paris. 'I have pensioned her off,' as he was fond of saying. 'After all, I do not believe in treating a woman badly. . .'

At two in the afternoon Noelle Berger emerged from the villa alone, well wrapped in a fur coat, and walked the few steps which took her to the station, leaving Robert Philip alone in the house. The Citroén which had been parked opposite No. 8 had long since disappeared and the only person in sight was a lean, bony-faced individual who stood gazing into a shop window. Noelle went into the station and bought a return ticket to Strasbourg, taking no notice of the man who came up behind her and in his turn purchased a single to the same city.

Vanek's instructions to Lansky had been simple. 'I don't think she's his wife—she looked far too young and casual. If she comes out, follow her—unless she has a suitcase, in which case she's leaving, so forget her. . .'

Noelle Berger had decided to go and do some Christmas shopping in Strasbourg to give Philip time to recover his temper.

Let him stew in his own juice, she had reasoned, and then he'll be glad to see me back this evening. In Strasbourg the shops had opened at two—to scoop in more business since it was so close to Christmas—and Noelle spent quite a lot of Philip's money in the rue des Grandes Arcades. Which damned well serves him right she told herself. Later she relented and bought him a bright yellow waistcoat. Once, someone nearly knocked her under the wheels of a bus as she waited at a crowded kerbside, but when she looked round she saw only a fat woman behind her. At the end of the afternoon, laden with purchases, she made her way to the quiet district known as Petite France down by the river. She had decided to have a cup of tea with a friend before catching the train back to Colmar.

At the edge of the lonely Place Benjamin Zhia the river Il divides into three different sections before joining up again lower down, and here an intricate network of footwalks crosses the river. There is a lock-gate, a penned-up channel where the water roars through the bottleneck, and sluices which flood out from under a building beyond. The sound of churning river is deafening. Taking a short cut, Noelle moved out on to the footwalks, quite alone as far as she knew. She was half-way across, she had heard nothing above the growling roar of the water, when something made her turn round. Lansky was one step behind her, both hands upraised. She stared in disbelief as the hands reached her and shoved. She was half-way down before she screamed, and her screams were lost in the boiling sluices which dragged her under and then rushed her at speed towards the Quai des Bateliers. Bobbing on the surface of the racing flood her Christmas purchases had a bizarre, festive look, including a bright yellow waistcoat which broke free from its wrappings.

In twenty minutes Lansky was boarding the turbo-train which would return him to Colmar by seven in the evening. With two people in a house it is too difficult to stage a convincing double 'accident'.

CHAPTER THREE

ON THE EVENING of Sunday, 19 December, Grelle waited in his office for Boisseau to return from Strasbourg, but as the hours ticked away the police prefect was far from idle. For a good part of the day he had been immersed in tightening up the security arrangements for the presidential motorcade drive to Charles de Gaulle Airport—or Roissy as it was often called —on the morning of 23 December when Florian departed for Russia.

Marc Grelle had made himself an expert on death by assassination—on the methods used, on the people who used them. He had made a particular study of the thirty-one attempts which had been made to assassinate General de Gaulle, on the reasons why they might have succeeded, on the reasons why they failed. The list of techniques employed was formidable.

Killing by remote detonation of explosive charges under a moving vehicle; killing by sniper armed with rifle and telescopic sight; killing at close quarters—by stabbing, by shooting; killing by imposture—by use of a stolen military or police uniform; killing by motor-bike outrider approaching presi-

dential car; killing by suicidal air collision—one plane crashing into another carrying the president; killing by absurdly exotic methods—using a camera-gun, using explosive-carrying dogs trained to run to a certain spot where the president was due to speak; and killing by motorized ambush.