It was partly because of his size; he was small, and resembled in many ways the cartoonist’s image of a hen-pecked husband, which, although no one in the department knew it, was just what he was.
His dress was dowdy, a crumpled suit and a mackintosh. His manner was mild, almost apologetic, and in his request of a witness for information it contrasted so sharply with the attitude the witness had experienced from his first interview with the law, that the witness tended to warm towards the detective as to a refuge from the roughness of the subordinates.
But there was something more. He had been head of the Homicide Division of the most powerful criminal police force in Europe. He had been ten years a detective with the Brigade Criminelle of the renowned Police Judiciaire of France. Behind the mildness and the seeming simplicity was a combination of shrewd brain and a dogged refusal to be ruffled or intimidated by anyone when he was carrying out a job. He had been threatened by some of the most vicious gang bosses of France, who had thought from the rapid blinking with which Lebel greeted such approaches that their warnings had been duly taken. Only later, from a prison cell, had they had the leisure to realise they had underestimated the soft brown eyes and the toothbrush moustache.
Twice he had been subjected to intimidation by wealthy and powerful figures, once when an industrialist had wished to see one of his junior employees charged with embezzlement on the basis of a cursory glance at the auditor’s evidence, and once when a society blade had wished investigations into the death by drugs of a young actress to be dropped.
In the first case the enquiry into the affairs of the industrialist had resulted in certain other and far bigger discrepancies being unearthed which had nothing to do with the junior accountant, but which had caused the industrialist to wish he had departed for Switzerland while he had the chance. The second time the society host had ended up with a lengthy period as a guest of the state in which to regret he had ever bothered to head a vice ring from his Avenue Victor Hugo penthouse.
Claude Lebel’s reaction to the remarks of Colonel Saint-Clair was to blink like a rebuked schoolboy and say nothing. But it did not subsequently in any way affect his conduct of the job with which he had been saddled.
As the last man filed out of the conference room Maurice Bouvier joined him. Max Fernet wished him luck, shook hands briefly and headed down the stairs. Bouvier clapped a ham-like hand on Lebel’s shoulder.
‘Eh, Men, mon petit Claude. So that’s the way it is, hein? All right, it was me who suggested the PJ handle this business. It was the only thing to do. Those others would have talked round in circles for ever. Come, we’ll talk in the car.’ He led the way downstairs and the pair of them climbed into the back of the Citroën that waited in the courtyard.
It was past nine o’clock and a dark-purple weal lying over Neuilly was all that remained of the day. Bouvier’s car swept down the Avenue de Marigny and over the Place Clemenceau. Lebel glanced out to the right and up the brilliant river of the Champs Elysées, whose grandeur on a summer night never ceased to surprise and excite him, despite the ten years that had passed since he came up from the provinces.
Bouvier spoke at last.
‘You’ll have to drop whatever you are doing. Everything. Clear the desk completely. I’ll assign Favier and Malcoste to take over your outstanding cases. Do you want a new office for this job?’
‘No, I prefer to stick to my present one.’
‘OK, fine, but from now on it becomes headquarters of Operation find-the-Jackal. Nothing else. Right? Is there anyone you want to help you?’
‘Yes. Caron,’ said Lebel, referring to one of the younger inspectors who had worked with him in Homicide and whom he had brought to his new job as assistant chief of the Brigade Criminelle.
‘OK, you have Caron. Anyone else?’
‘No thank you. But Caron will have to know.’
Bouvier thought for a few moments.
‘It should be all right. They can’t expect miracles. Obviously you must have an assistant. But don’t tell him for an hour or two. I’ll ring Frey when I get to the office and ask for formal clearance. Nobody else has to know, though. It would be in the Press inside two days if it got out.’
‘Nobody else, just Caron,’ said Lebel.
‘Bon. There’s one last thing. Before I left the meeting Sanguinetti suggested the whole group who were there tonight be kept informed at regular intervals of progress and developments. Frey agreed. Fernet and I tried to head it off, but we lost. There’s to be a briefing by you every evening at the Ministry from now on. Ten o’clock sharp.’
‘Oh God,’ said Lebel.
‘In theory,’ continued Bouvier with heavy irony, ‘we shall all be available to offer our best advice and suggestions. Don’t worry, Claude, Fernet and I will be there too, in case the wolves start snapping.’
‘This is until further notice?’ asked Lebel.
‘ ’Fraid so. The bugger of it is, there’s no time schedule for this operation. You’ve just got to find this assassin before he gets to Big Charles. We don’t know whether the man himself has a timetable, or what it could be. It might be for a hit tomorrow morning, maybe not for a month yet. You have to assume you are working flat out until he has been caught, or at least identified and located. From then on I think the Action Service boys can take care of things.’
‘Bunch of thugs,’ murmured Lebel.
‘Granted,’ said Bouvier easily, ‘but they have their uses. We live in hair-raising times, my dear Claude. Added to a vast increase in normal crime, we now have political crime. There are some things that just have to be done. They do them. Anyway, just try and find this blighter, huh.’
The car swept into the Quai des Orfèvres and turned through the gates of the PJ. Ten minutes later Claude Lebel was back in his office. He walked to the window, opened it and leant out, gazing across the river towards the Quai des Grands Augustins on the Left Bank in front of him. Although separated by a narrow strip of the Seine where it flowed round the Île de la Cité, he was close enough to see the diners in the pavement restaurants dotted along the quay and hear the laughter and the clink of bottles on glasses of wine.
Had he been a different kind of man it might have occurred to him to realise that the powers conferred on him in the last ninety minutes had made him, for a spell at least, the most powerful cop in Europe: that nobody short of the President or the Interior Minister could veto his request for facilities; that he could almost mobilise the Army, provided it could be done secretly. It might also have occurred to him that exalted though his powers were they were dependent upon success; that with success he could crown his career with honours, but that in failure he could be broken as Saint-Clair de Villauban had obliquely indicated.
But because he was what he was, he thought of none of these things. He was puzzling as to how he would explain over the phone to Amélie that he was not coming home until further notice. There was a knock on the door.
Inspectors Malcoste and Favier came in to collect the dossiers of the four cases on which Lebel had been working when he had been called away earlier that evening. He spent half an hour briefing Malcoste on the two cases he was assigning to him, and Favier on the other two.
When they had gone he sighed heavily. There was a knock on the door. It was Lucien Caron.
‘I just got a call from Commissaire Bouvier’s office,’ he began. ‘He told me to report to you.’
‘Quite right. Until further notice I have been taken off all routine duties and given a rather special job. You’ve been assigned to be my assistant.’
He did not bother to flatter Caron by revealing that he had asked for the young inspector to be his right-hand man. The desk phone rang, he picked it up and listened briefly.