‘Very well. You wish to operate entirely alone, without friends or refuge. Be it on your own head. How about false papers? We have two excellent forgers at our disposal.’
‘I will acquire my own, thank you.’
Casson broke in. ‘I have a complete organisation inside France similar to the Resistance during the German occupation. I can put this entire structure at your disposal for assistance purposes.’
‘No thank you. I prefer to bank on my own complete anonymity. It is the best weapon I have.’
‘But supposing something should go wrong, you might have to go on the run …’
‘Nothing will go wrong, unless it comes from your side. I will operate without contacting or being known to your organisation, M. Casson, for exactly the same reason I am here in the first place; because the organisation is crawling with agents and stool-pigeons.’
Casson looked fit to explode. Montclair stared glumly at the window trying to envisage raising half a million dollars in a hurry. Rodin stared thoughtfully back at the Englishman across the table.
‘Calm, André. Monsieur wishes to work alone. So be it. That is his way. We do not pay half a million dollars for a man who needs the same amount of molly-coddling our own shooters need.’
‘What I would like to know,’ muttered Montclair, ‘is how we can raise so much money so quickly.’
‘Use your organisation to rob a few banks,’ suggested the Englishman lightly.
‘In any case, that is our problem,’ said Rodin. ‘Before our visitor returns to London, are there any further points?’
‘What is to prevent you from taking the first quarter of a million and disappearing?’ asked Casson.
‘I told you, messieurs, I wanted to retire. I do not wish to have half an army of ex-paras gunning for me. I would have to spend more protecting myself than the money I had made. It would soon be gone.’
‘And what,’ persisted Casson, ‘is to prevent us waiting until the job is done and then refusing to pay you the balance of the half-million?’
‘The same reason,’ replied the Englishman smoothly. ‘In that event I should go to work on my own account. And the target would be you three gentlemen. However I don’t think that will occur, do you?’
Rodin interrupted. ‘Well if that is all, I don’t think we need detain our guest any longer. Oh … there is one last point. Your name. If you wish to remain anonymous you should have a code-name. Do you have any ideas?’
The Englishman thought for a moment. ‘Since we have been speaking of hunting, what about the Jackal? Will that do?’
Rodin nodded. ‘Yes, that will do fine. In fact I think I like it.’
He escorted the Englishman to the door and opened it. Viktor left his alcove and approached. For the first time Rodin smiled and held out his hand to the assassin. ‘We will be in touch in the agreed manner as soon as we can. In the meantime could you begin planning in general terms so as not to waste too much time? Good. Then bonsoir, Mr Jackal.’
The Pole watched the visitor depart as quietly as he had come. The Englishman spent the night at the airport hotel and caught the first plane back to London in the morning.
Inside the Pension Kleist Rodin faced a barrage of belated queries and complaints from Casson and Montclair, who had both been shaken by the three hours between nine and midnight.
‘Half a million dollars,’ Montclair kept repeating. ‘How on earth do we raise half a million dollars?’
‘We may have to take up the Jackal’s suggestion and rob a few banks,’ answered Rodin.
‘I don’t like that man,’ said Casson. ‘He works alone, without allies. Such men are dangerous. One cannot control them.’
Rodin closed the discussion. ‘Look, you two, we devised a plan, we agreed on a proposal, and we sought a man prepared to kill and capable of killing the President of France for money. I know a bit about men like that. If anyone can do it, he can. Now we have made our play. Let us get on with our side and let him get on with his.’
3
DURING THE SECOND half of June and the whole of July in 1963 France was rocked by an outbreak of violent crime against banks, jewellers’ shops and post offices that was unprecedented at the time and has never been repeated since. The details of this crime wave are now a matter of record.
From one end of the country to the other banks were held up with pistols, sawn-off shotguns and submachine guns on an almost daily basis. Smash and grab raids at jewellers’ shops became so common throughout that period that local police forces had hardly finished taking depositions from the shaking and often bleeding jewellers and their assistants than they were called away to another similar case within their own manor.
Two bank clerks were shot in different towns as they tried to resist the robbers, and before the end of July the crisis had grown so big that the men of the Corps Républicain de Sécurité, the anti-riot squads known to every Frenchman simply as the CRS, were called in and for the first time armed with submachine guns. It became habitual for those entering a bank to have to pass one or two of the blue-uniformed CRS guards in the foyer, each toting a loaded submachine carbine.
In response to pressure from the bankers and jewellers, who complained bitterly to the Government about this crime wave, police checks on banks at night were increased in frequency, but to no avail, since the robbers were not professional cracksmen able to open a bank vault skilfully during the hours of darkness, but simply thugs in masks, armed and ready to shoot if provoked in the slightest way.
The danger hours were in daylight, when any bank or jeweller’s shop throughout the country could be surprised in the middle of business by the appearance of two or three armed and masked men, and the peremptory cry ‘Haut les mains’.
Three robbers were wounded towards the end of July in different hold-ups, and taken prisoner. Each turned out to be either a petty crook known to be using the existence of the OAS as an excuse for general anarchy, or deserters from one of the former colonial regiments who soon admitted they were OAS men. But despite the most diligent interrogations at police headquarters, none of the three could be persuaded to say why this rash of robberies had suddenly struck the country, other than that they had been contacted by their ‘patron’ (gang boss) and given a target in the form of a bank or jeweller’s shop. Eventually the police came to believe that the prisoners did not know what the purpose of the robberies was; they had each been promised a cut of the total, and being small fry had done what they were told.
It did not take the French authorities long to realise the OAS was behind the outbreak, nor that for some reason the OAS needed money in a hurry. But it was not until the first fortnight of August, and then in a quite different manner, that the authorities discovered why.
Within the last two weeks of June, however, the wave of crime against banks and other places where money and gems may be quickly and unceremoniously acquired had become sufficiently serious to be handed over to Commissaire Maurice Bouvier, the much-revered chief of the Brigade Criminelle of the Police Judiciaire. In his surprisingly small work-strewn office at the headquarters of the PJ at 36 Quai des Orfèvres, along the banks of the Seine, a chart was prepared showing the cash or, in the case of jewellery, approximate re-sale value of the stolen money and gems. By the latter half of July the total was well over two million new francs, or four hundred thousand dollars. Even with a reasonable sum deducted for the expenses of mounting the various robberies, and more for paying the hoodlums and deserters who carried them out, that still left, in the Commissaire’s estimation, a sizable sum of money that could not be accounted for.