The Stone Leopard (17 page)

But the idea had not appealed to the Czech when he had first examined the list, and he found the same objections influencing him now they were approaching the Rhine. The point was Vanek did not wish to risk alerting a second security service—that of Germany—so early on in the trip; just in case the killing of Wohl by 'accident' went wrong. And later they would have to return across Germany from France on their way home. No, better leave Dieter Wohl until later. So, for quite different reasons, Vanek had taken the same decision as Alan Lennox—to go into France first.

Closing his novel, he puffed more cigar smoke in the direction of Brunner. Again Lansky was travelling on his own in a separate coach; it was good tactics and it also suited Vanek who disliked the younger Czech. Soon they would reach Kehl, the last stop inside Germany before the express crossed the Rhine bridge into France. He decided they would get off at Kehl—even though it would have been simpler to stay on the express until it reached Strasbourg. Vanek had an idea— which was not entirely incorrect—that the frontier control people cast a careful eye over international expresses. Getting off at Kehl, they could board a more local train to take them on to Strasbourg, and possibly purchase certain extra clothes while they were in the German city. He took out his papers and looked at them. When they arrived in Strasbourg they would be three French tourists returning from a brief winter sports holiday in Bavaria. There was no longer anything to link them with Czechoslovakia.

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Leon Jouvel, 49 rue de l'Epine, Strasbourg
, was the first name on the list Col Lasalle had handed to Alan Lennox. Fifty-three years old, Jouvel was small and plump with a bushy grey moustache, a shock of grey hair and a plump right hand which liked to squeeze the knees of pretty girls when he thought he could get away with it. Louise Vallon, who worked in the television shop he owned, found him easy to handle. 'He's not dangerous,' she confided to a friend, 'only hopeful, but recently he's seemed so depressed, almost frightened. . .'

What was frightening Leon Jouvel was something which had happened over thirty years ago and now seemed to have come back to haunt him. In 1944, working with the Resistance in the Lozere, he had been the Leopard's radio operator. Even holding that key position, like everyone else he had no idea what the Communist leader looked like. He had always known when the Leopard was close because the wolfhound, Cesar, would give a warning growl. Jouvel hated the beast, but obeying instructions he always forced himself to turn his back on the animal and wait with his notebook until the Leopard arrived and gave him the message to transmit. Noting down the message—which he immediately burned after transmission —he would hurry away to his concealed transmitter, aware only that the Resistance chief was a very tall man; once, on a sunny day, he had seen his shadow.

But because of his job—and the frequency of these brief communications—Jouvel was more familiar with the Leopard's voice than anyone in the Resistance group, and Jouvel had an acute ear for sounds. During the past eighteen months—since Guy Florian had become president—Jouvel had changed considerably. All his friends commented on the change. Normally jovial and talkative, Jouvel became irritable and taciturn, often not hearing what was said to him. It was the frequent appearance of the president on television which had unnerved the plump little man.

A widower, it had been Jouvel's custom to while away the evenings in bars and cafés, gossiping with friends. Now he sat at home alone in his second-floor apartment, watching the news bulletins and political broadcasts, waiting for Guy Florian to appear, to
speak
. During a Florian speech he would sit in front of the television set with his eyes shut, listening intently. It was quite macabre—the similarity in the voices, but it was impossible to be sure.

Sitting with his eyes closed he could have sworn he was listening to the Leopard standing behind him, giving him yet another message to transmit in those far-off days up in the mountains. He studied the speech mannerisms, noted the little hesitations which preceded a torrent of abuse as the president attacked the Americans. At first he told himself it was impossible: the Leopard had died in Lyon in 1944. Then he began to think back over the past, recalling the burial of the Leopard deep in the forest which he had attended. The four men who had handled the coffin—all of whom died a few days later in an ambush—had been in a great hurry to get the job over with. There had been a lack of
respect
. A few months later Jouvel had been terrified by a visit from Col Lasalle, who had arrived in mufti.

`This man, the Leopard,' the colonel had said, 'if you took down all these signals from him, surely you could recognize his voice if you heard it again ?'

`It was so long ago. . .'

Fencing inexpertly with one of the most accomplished interrogators in France, Jouvel had managed not to reveal his crazy suspicion. Like many Frenchmen, Jouvel mistrusted both the police and the army, preferring to go his own way and not get mixed up with authority. But had he convinced the sharp- eyed little colonel he knew nothing? Jouvel sweated over the visit for weeks after Lasalle had gone. And now, only eight. days before Christmas, there had been the incident this evening.

Locking up his shop at six, he walked back over the bridge from the Quai des Bateliers into the deserted old quarter. After dark the rue de 1'Epine is a sinister street where ancient five- storey buildings hem in the shadows and your footsteps echo eerily on the cobbles. There is no one about and not too much light. This evening Jouvel was sure he had heard footsteps behind him.

Turning round suddenly, he caught the movement of a shadow which merged into the wall.

He forced himself to turn round and walk back, and it reminded him of all those occasions when he had once forced himself to turn his back on the Leopard's vicious wolfhound. Jouvel was trembling as he made himself go on walking back down the shadowed street, and he was sweating so much his glasses steamed up. Reaching the doorway where he had seen the shadow move, he couldn't be sure whether anyone was there. Pretending to adjust his glasses, he wiped them quickly with his fingers. The blur cleared and a heavily-built man with a fat face stared back at him out of the doorway. Jouvel almost fainted.

The fat-faced man who wore a dark coat and a soft hat, lifted a flask and drank from it noisily, then belched. Jouvel's pounding heart began to slow down. A drunk! Without saying a word he walked back up the street to his home. Behind him police detective Armand Bonheur was also sweating as he remained in the doorway. Good God, he had almost blown it! And the inspector's instructions had been explicit.

`Whatever happens, Jouvel must not suspect he is being tailed. The order comes right down the line from Paris. . .'

Turning in under the stone archway of No. 49, Jouvel went across the cobbled courtyard and into the building beyond. Climbing the staircase to the second floor, he was unlocking his apartment door when a red-haired girl peered out of the next apartment. He smiled pleasantly. 'Good evening, M'selle. . . .' Disappointed, the girl made a rude gesture at his back. 'Silly old ponce.' For Denise Viron anything over forty was fodder for the graveyard; anything under forty, fair game.

Inside his apartment Jouvel hurried over to the television set and switched on. Brewing himself a cup of tea in the kitchen, he came back, settled in an old armchair and waited. Florian's head and shoulders appeared on the screen a few minutes later. Jouvel closed his eyes. 'The Americans want to turn Europe into one vast supermarket, selling American goods, of course. . . .' And still Jouvel couldn't be certain. I must be going mad he thought.

`Mr Jouvel ? He is away today but he is back in Strasbourg tomorrow. The shop opens at nine. . .'

Louise Vallon, Jouvel's assistant, put down the phone and thought no more about the call as she turned to attend to a customer. In a bar close to the shop Carel Vanek replaced the receiver and walked out on to the Quai des Bateliers where Walther Brunner sat waiting in the Citroén DS 23 they had just hired from the Hertz branch in the Boulevard de Nancy. `He's out of town today,' Vanek said as he settled himself behind the wheel, 'but he's back tomorrow. Which just gives us nice time to soak up some atmosphere. . .'

When the Soviet Commando had arrived aboard a local train from Kehl they split up again as they had done in Munich. Lansky had simply walked across the large cobbled square outside the station and booked a room at the Hotel Terminus in the name of Lambert. After depositing three sets of skis— which would never be collected—in the luggage store at Strasbourg Gare, Vanek and Brunner took two separate cabs at intervals to the Hotel Sofitel where they registered, quite independently, as Duval and Bonnard. Meeting outside the hotel, they went to the Boulevard de Nancy and hired the Citroén.

Before leaving his room at the Sofitel, Vanek had consulted Bottin, the French telephone directory, to check on Leon Jouvel's address. Yes, it was the address given on the list, 49 rue de l' 8pine, but there had also been the address of a television shop in the Quai des Bateliers. Using a street map of Strasbourg purchased from a newspaper kiosk, Vanek and Brunner had driven round the old city to locate both addresses before Vanek made his first call from the bar. He then drove a short distance from the quai before handing over the car to his companion. For the rest of the afternoon and most of the evening the three men would move round Strasbourg on their own, familiarizing themselves with the city's layout and getting the feel of being in France.

`Buy a paper, go into bars and cafés, chat with everyone you can,' Vanek had instructed. 'Start merging with your background by mixing with it. Take a short bus-ride, find out what people are talking about. By tonight I want you to be more French than the French themselves. . .'

Following his own advice, Vanek sampled the flavour of Strasbourg by walking. Unlike Brunner, from now on he walked everywhere, knowing that the easiest way to get your bearings in a strange city is to walk. As the street map indicated, the old quarter of the city was for all practical purposes an island surrounded by water, the huge 'moat' being formed by the river Il which encircles the heart of Strasbourg. A series of bridges all round the perimeter crossed the river into this ancient heart, built, for the most part, in the fourteenth century. It was still daylight at four o'clock, but only just in the narrow, silent rue de l'Epine, when Vanek walked in under the archway of No. 49.

One of the numerous plates at the entrance to the building registered the fact that Leon Jouvel lived on the second floor, and he was knocking on the door of the second-floor apartment when the door of the neighbouring apartment opened and a red-haired girl peered at him speculatively.

`He's gone away for the day to see his sister—back in the morning,' she informed the Czech. 'Do you think I could help you in some way?'

Vanek, careful to eye her hips and other parts of her anatomy with due appreciation, had no trouble at all in extracting from Denise Viron the information he needed. He was, he explained, a market research specialist. 'Mr Leon Jouvel is one of the people chosen to answer our questionnaire

. a survey on pension needs.' Within a few minutes he learned that Jouvel was a widower, that he occupied the apartment on his own, that he possessed no animals—here Vanek had in mind a guard-dog—that he was out all day at the shop arid only returned at 6.30 in the evenings, that he was no longer a sociable man, so there were few visitors.

`If you would like to come in,' the girl said, smoothing her skirt down over her long, lithe legs, 'I might be able to help you in other ways. . .'

Vanek, whose appetite for women was healthy, made it a point never to mix business with pleasure. And in any case, the girl had so far not had too close a look at him in the gloomy hall. Explaining that he had five more people to interview that day, he left her with a vague impression he would certainly be calling on her again within a few days. As arranged earlier, at eight in the evening he met Brunner and Lansky at a corner of the Place Kleber as snow drifted down over the huddled rooftops of Strasbourg. Taking them into a crowded bar, he found a table at the back.

`. .. and so,' he continued a few minutes later, 'it is made to order for a quick solution. You visit him tomorrow night, soon after 6.30 when he has returned home. . . .' It was Lansky he had chosen to pay a call on Leon Jouvel. 'He is a widower and lives on his own. He has a second-floor apartment and the building is quiet. No one about at all except for a red-headed girl who lives next door. She could be a nuisance—she's looking for somebody to keep her bed warm.'

`I don't like it,' Brunner said. 'You're moving too fast. We need more time to check on this man. . .

`Which is exactly what we have not got,' Vanek snapped. 'In five days from now—December 22—we have to complete the whole job, which includes visiting three people, one of them in Germany. So, the strategy is simple—we deal with the first two on the list quickly. . .'

`If the place is empty, I'd better take a preliminary look inside it tonight,' Lansky said. He stood up. 'We'll meet at the bus station in the Place de la Gare tomorrow at the time agreed ?'