It habitually took Kowalski a long time to make up his mind on anything where no orders from above were available to help him, nor standing orders to decide on his behalf. But by Monday morning he had come to his decision.
He would not be gone long, perhaps just a day, or maybe two days if the planes did not connect properly. In any event, it was something that had to be done. He would explain to the patron afterwards. He was sure the patron would understand, even though he would be bloody angry. It occurred to him to tell the Colonel of the problem and ask for forty-eight hours’ leave. But he felt sure that the Colonel, although a good commanding officer who also stuck by his men when they got into trouble, would forbid him to go. He would not understand about Sylvie, and Kowalski knew he could never explain. He could never explain anything in words. He sighed heavily as he got up for the Monday morning shift. He was deeply troubled by the thought that for the first time in his life as a legionnaire he was going to go AWOL.
The Jackal rose at the same time and made his meticulous preparations. He showered and shaved first, then ate the excellent breakfast placed on the tray by his bedside. Taking the case containing the rifle from the locked wardrobe, he carefully wrapped each component in several layers of foam rubber, securing the bundles with twine. These he stuffed into the bottom of his rucksack. On top went the paint tins and brushes, the denim trousers and check shirt, the socks and the boots. The string shopping bag went into one of the outer pockets of the rucksack, the box of bullets into the other.
He dressed himself in one of his habitual striped shirts that were fashionable in 1963, a dove-grey lightweight suit as opposed to his usual check worsted ten-ounce, and a pair of light black leather sneakers from Gucci. A black silk knitted tie completed the ensemble. He took the rucksack in one hand and went down to his car, parked in the hotel lot. This he locked in the boot. Returning to the foyer he took delivery of his packed lunch, nodded a reply to the desk clerk’s wishes for a bon voyage, and by nine was speeding out of Brussels along the old E. 40 highway towards Namur. The flat countryside was already basking in a warm sunshine that gave a hint of a scorching day to come. His road map told him it was ninety-four miles to Bastogne and he added a few more to find a quiet place in the hills and forests to the south of the little town. He estimated he would do the hundred miles by noon easily, and gunned the Simca Aronde into another long, flat straight across the Walloon plain.
Before the sun had reached zenith he was through Namur and Marche, following the signposts that indicated Bastogne was approaching. Passing through the little town that had been torn to pieces by the guns of Hasso von Manteuffel’s King Tiger tanks in the winter of 1944, he took the road southwards into the hills. The forests grew thicker, the winding road more frequently darkened by great elms and beeches and less often sliced by a single beam of sunshine between the trees.
Five miles beyond the town the Jackal found a narrow track running off into the forest. He turned the car down it, and after another mile found a second trail leading away into the forest. He turned the car a few yards up this and hid it behind a clump of undergrowth. For a while he waited in the cool shade of the forest, smoking a cigarette and listening to the ticking of the engine block as it cooled, the whisper of wind through the upper branches, and the distant cooing of a pigeon.
Slowly he climbed out, unlocked the boot and laid the rucksack on the bonnet. Piece by piece he changed his clothes, folding the impeccable dove-grey suit along the back seat of the Aronde and slipping on the denim slacks. It was warm enough to do without a jacket, and he changed the collared and tied shirt for the lumberjack check shirt. Finally the expensive town sneakers gave way to the hiking boots and woollen socks, into which he tucked the bottoms of the denims.
One by one he unwrapped the component parts of the rifle, fitting it together piece by piece. The silencer he slipped into one trouser pocket, the telescopic sight into the other. He tipped twenty shells from the box into one breast pocket of his shirt, the single explosive shell, still in its tissue-paper wrapper, into the other.
When the rest of the rifle was assembled he laid it on the bonnet of the car and went round to the boot again and took from it the purchase he had made the previous evening from a market stall in Brussels before returning to the hotel, and which had lain in the boot all night. It was the Honeydew melon. He locked the boot, tipped the melon into the empty rucksack along with the paint, brushes and hunting knife, locked the car and set off into the woods. It was just after noon.
Within ten minutes he had found a long, narrow clearing, a glade where from one end one could get a clear vision for a hundred and fifty yards. Placing the gun beside a tree, he paced out a hundred and fifty paces, then sought a tree from which the place where he had left the gun was visible. He tipped the contents of the rucksack out on to the ground, prised the lids off both tins of paint, and set to work on the melon. The upper and lower parts of the fruit were painted quickly brown over the dark green skin. The centre section was coloured pink. While both colours were still wet, he used his forefinger to draw crudely a pair of eyes, a nose, moustache and mouth.
Jabbing the knife into the top of the fruit to avoid smearing the paint by finger contact, the Jackal gingerly placed the melon inside the string shopping bag. The big mesh and fine string of the bag in no way concealed either the outline of the melon or the design sketched upon it.
Lastly he jabbed the knife hard into the trunk of the tree about seven feet from the ground, and hung the handles of the shopping bag over the hilt. Against the green bark of the tree the pink and brown melon hung suspended like a grotesque autonomous human head. He stood back and surveyed his handywork. At a hundred and fifty yards it would serve its purpose.
He closed the two tins of paint and hurled them far into the forest where they crashed through the undergrowth and disappeared. The brushes he jabbed into the ground bristles foremost and stamped on them until they too were lost to view. Taking the rucksack he went back to the rifle.
The silencer went on easily, swivelling round the end of the barrel until it was tight. The telescopic sight fitted snugly along the top of the barrel. He slipped back the bolt and inserted the first cartridge into the breech. Squinting down the sight, he scoured the far end of the clearing for his hanging target. When he found it, he was surprised to find how large and clear it looked. To all appearances, had it been the head of a living man, it would have been no more than thirty yards away. He could make out the criss-cross lines of the string of the shopping bag where it restrained the melon, his own finger smears denoting the main features of the face.
He altered his stance slightly, leaned against a tree to steady his aim, and squinted again. The two crossed wires inside the telescopic sight did not appear to be quite centred, so he reached out with the right hand and twiddled the two adjusting screws until the cross in the sight appeared to be perfectly central. Satisfied, he took careful aim at the centre of the melon and fired.
The recoil was less than he had expected, and the restrained ‘phut’ of the silencer hardly loud enough to have carried across a quiet street. Carrying the gun under his arm, he walked back the length of the clearing and examined the melon. Near the upper right-hand edge the bullet had scored its path across the skin of the fruit, snapping part of the string of the shopping bag, and had buried itself in the tree. He walked back again and fired a second time, leaving the setting of the telescopic sight exactly where it had been before.