Purely by chance, because he was a conscientious man anxious to please a foreigner, the clerk spelt the name out to underline that he had got it right.
‘Il n’existe pas, monsieur. Voyons … jay, air, eee….’
‘Non, jay, air, zed …’ cut in Kowalski.
The clerk looked perplexed.
‘Excusez moi, monsieur. Jay, air, Zed?? Jay, air, zed, igrec, bay?’
‘Oui,’ insisted Kowalski, ‘G.R.Z.Y.B.O.W.S.K.I.’
The Italian shrugged and presented himself to the switchboard operator once again.
‘Get me international enquiries, please.’
Within ten minutes Kowalski had JoJo’s telephone number and half an hour later he was through. At the end of the line the ex-legionnaire’s voice was distorted by crackling and he seemed hesitant to confirm the bad news in Kovac’s letter. Yes, he was glad Kowalski had rung, he had been trying to trace him for three months.
Unfortunately, yes, it was true about the illness of little Sylvie. She had been getting weaker and thinner, and when finally a doctor had diagnosed the illness, it had already been time to put her to bed. She was in the next bedroom at the flat from which JoJo was speaking. No it was not the same flat, they had taken a newer and larger one. What? The address? JoJo gave it slowly, while Kowalski, tongue between pursed lips, slowly wrote it down.
‘How long do the quacks give her?’ he roared down the line. He got his meaning over to JoJo at the fourth time of trying. There was a long pause.
‘Allo? Allo?’ he shouted when there was no reply. JoJo’s voice came back.
‘It could be a week, maybe two or three,’ said JoJo.
Disbelievingly, Kowalski stared at the mouthpiece in his hand. Without a word he replaced it on the cradle and blundered out of the cabin. After paying the cost of the call he collected the mail, snapped the steel case on his wrist tight shut, and walked back to the hotel. For the first time in many years his thoughts were in a turmoil and there was no one to whom he could turn for orders how to solve the problem by violence.
In his flat in Marseilles, the same one he had always lived in, JoJo also put down the receiver when he realised Kowalski had hung up. He turned to find the two men from the Action Service still where they had been, each with his Colt .45 Police Special in his hand. One was trained on JoJo, the other on his wife who sat ashen-faced in the corner of the sofa. ‘Bastards,’ said JoJo with venom. ‘Shits.’
‘Is he coming?’ asked one of the men.
‘He didn’t say. He just hung up on me,’ said the Pole.
The black flat eyes of the Corsican stared back at him.
‘He must come. Those are the orders.’
‘Well, you heard me, I said what you wanted. He must have been shocked. He just hung up. I couldn’t prevent him doing that.’
‘He had better come, for your sake JoJo,’ repeated the Corsican.
‘He will come,’ said JoJo resignedly. ‘If he can, he will come. For the girl’s sake.’
‘Good. Then your part is done.’
‘Then get out of here,’ shouted JoJo. ‘Leave us alone.’
The Corsican rose, the gun still in his hand. The other man remained seated, looking at the woman.
‘We’ll be going,’ said the Corsican, ‘but you two will come with us. We can’t have you talking around the place, or ringing Rome, now can we, JoJo?’
‘Where are you taking us?’
‘A little holiday. A nice pleasant hotel in the mountains. Plenty of sun and fresh air. Good for you JoJo.’
‘For how long?’ asked the Pole dully.
‘For as long as it takes.’
The Pole stared out of the window at the tangle of alleys and fish stalls that crouch behind the picture postcard frontage of the Old Port.
‘It is the height of the tourist season. The trains are full these days. In August we make more than all the winter. It will ruin us for several years.’
The Corsican laughed as if the idea amused him.
‘You must consider it rather a gain than a loss, JoJo. After all, it is for France, your adopted country.’
The Pole spun round. ‘I don’t give a shit about politics. I don’t care who is in power, what party wants to make a balls-up of everything. But I know people like you. I have been meeting them all my life. You would serve Hitler, your type. Or Mussolini, or the OAS if it suited you. Or anybody. Regimes may change, but bastards like you never change …’ He was shouting limping towards the man with the gun whose snout had not quivered a millimetre in the hand that held it.
‘JoJo,’ screamed the woman from the sofa. ‘JoJo, je t’en prie. Laisse-le.’
The Pole stopped and stared at his wife as if he had forgotten she were there. He looked round the room and at the figures in it one by one. They all looked back at him, his wife imploring, the two Secret Service toughs without noticeable expression. They were used to reproaches which had no effect on the inevitable. The leader of the pair nodded towards the bedroom.
‘Get packed. You first, then the wife.’
‘What about Sylvie? She will be home from school at four. There will be no one to meet her,’ said the woman.
The Corsican still stared at her husband.
‘She will be picked up by us on the way past the school. Arrangements have been made. The headmistress has been told her granny is dying and the whole family has been summoned to her death-bed. It’s all very discreet. Now move.’
JoJo shrugged, gave a last glance at his wife and went into the bedroom to pack, followed by the Corsican. His wife continued to twist her handkerchief between her hands. After a while she looked up at the other agent on the end of the sofa. He was younger than the Corsican, a Gascon.
‘What … what will they do to him?’
‘Kowalski?’
‘Viktor.’
‘Some gentlemen want to talk to him. That is all.’
An hour later the family were in the back seat of a big Citroën, the two agents in the front, speeding towards a very private hotel high in the Vercors.
The Jackal spent the weekend at the seaside. He bought a pair of swimming trunks and spent the Saturday sunning himself on the beach at Zeebrugge, bathed several times in the North Sea, and wandered round the little harbour town and along the mole where British sailors and soldiers had once fought and died in a welter of blood and bullets. Some of the walrus-moustached old men who sat along the mole and threw for sea bass might have remembered forty-six years before, had he asked them, but he did not. The English present that day were a few families scattered along the beach enjoying the sunshine and watching their children play in the surf.
On Sunday morning he packed his bags and drove leisurely through the Flemish countryside, strolling through the narrow streets of Ghent and Bruges. He lunched off the unmatchable steaks broiled over a timber fire served by the Siphon restaurant at Damm and in the mid-afternoon turned the car back towards Brussels. Before turning in for the night he asked for an early call with breakfast in bed and a packed lunch, explaining that he wished to drive into the Ardennes the following day and visit the grave of his elder brother who had died in the Battle of the Bulge between Bastogne and Malmedy. The desk clerk was most solicitous, promising that he would be called without fail for his pilgrimage.
In Rome Viktor Kowalski spent a much less relaxed weekend. He turned up regularly on time for his periods of guard duty, either as the desk man on the landing of the eighth floor, or on the roof by night. He slept little in his periods off duty, mostly lying on his bed off the main passage of the eighth floor, smoking and drinking the rough red wine that was imported by the gallon flagon for the eight ex-legionnaires who made up the guard. The crude Italian rosso could not compare for bite with the Algerian pinard that sloshes inside every legionnaire’s pannikin, he thought, but it was better than nothing.