'So it could still be either of them?' Boisseau shrugged. 'Like so much police work-a great deal of sweat and then nothing. At least we are finished with these mouldy files.'
`Not quite.' Grelle balanced two files on his hand. 'I decided to check someone else-purely as a theoretical exercise. Gaston Martin said he saw a tall man walk into the Elysee between 7.3o and 8.3o, a man saluted by the guards. Remember we are policemen-we go solely by facts. At eight o'clock Guy Florian returned to the Elysee. I have also checked his wartime background.'
When Boisseau had recovered from the shock, when he grasped the fact that Grelle was conducting a theoretical exercise, he listened while the prefect briefly outlined the president's war-time career. He had served in a section of what came to be known as the Comet Line, an escape route for Allied airmen running from France across the Spanish border. Stationed in an old house up in the Pyrenees behind St Jean-de-Luz, Florian had escorted escaping airmen into Spain where they were met by an official from the British consulate at Bilbao.
`Two hundred and fifty miles away from Lozere,' Boisseau commented, joining in the game, `so he could not possibly be the Leopard.'
`Impossible,' Grelle agreed. 'Except that his brother Charles, who was older but looked like him, also served in the Comet Line. Now, if Charles had agreed to impersonate Guy Florian -remember, escape routes are shrouded in mystery and the operatives rarely appeared…
`I didn't know he had a brother…
`He hasn't any more. In July 1945 Charles set off on one of his solitary swims into the Atlantic and never came back. His body was washed ashore two weeks later.'
`I see…' Boisseau sucked at his pipe. 'A lot of people died young in those days; a lot of them connected with the Leopard. I had the report in from Lyon late this afternoon about the men who buried him and the undertaker…
`Which reminds me,' Grelle interjected. 'We are flying to Lyon tomorrow. There is only one way to clear up the contradiction between the man Gaston Martin said he saw and the recorded death of the Leopard-and that is to open up his grave. I spoke to Hardy on the phone myself and he is rushing through an emergency exhumation order. Now, what about the men who buried the Leopard?'
`All dead. Shot in an enemy ambush four days after the burial, the bodies riddled with Mauser bullets.'
`Plenty of Mausers about in all sorts of hands in 1944,' Grelle observed. 'And the priest?'
`There was no priest-the Leopard was an atheist… `Of course. And the undertaker?'
`Shot through the head the morning after the burial. Someone, identity unknown, broke into his house. And there was another curious thing,' Boisseau continued. 'A young Communist sculptor who had worked with the Resistance group wanted to do something to commemorate his beloved leader. So he sculpted a statue which was placed over the grave six months later. It is still there, I understand, deep inside the forest. It is a statue of a leopard, a stone leopard.'
CHAPTER EIGHT
On 16 December the Soviet Commando crossed the Czech frontier into Austria. They came over at the obscure border post at Gmund in the Nieder-Osterreich province where Czech control towers loom over the landscape like gallows. Arriving just before nine in the morning, they presented their French passports for inspection.
The sleepy Austrian official-he had been up all night and was soon going off duty-was already prejudiced in their favour. A few minutes earlier he had seen his Czech opposite numbers giving the three tourists a thorough going-over. The battered old Peugeot had been searched while the three men stood in the road. Their documents had been carefully examined. Anyone who was no friend of the Czechs had to be all right for entry into Austria. He had no way of knowing that Vanek himself had phoned the Czech border post earlier to arrange this charade; nor could he know that their arrival had been timed to coincide with the moment just before he went off duty. A tired official is unlikely to check new arrivals with any great interest.
`Our papers are foolproof,' Vanek had explained to his two companions, 'but the way to succeed in this life is to load all dice in your favour…
The Austrian official stamped the French documents, the frontier pole was raised, the Peugeot with Vanek behind the wheel drove across the border into the narrow streets of the small Austrian town. If the sleepy official thought about them at all as he kicked snow off his boots he must have assumed they were French tourists returning from a winter sports holiday. The conclusion was easy to draw: Vanek and Brunner, sitting in the front of the car, with Lansky occupying the back, were all clad in French ski-clothes.
`First hurdle jumped,' Vanek said cheerfully.
Brunner grunted. 'Plenty more ahead of us…'
Vanek drove at speed for two hours along the lonely open road which leads to Vienna and where fields spread out across the plain for ever; where the only traffic you meet is the occasional ox-drawn farm wagon. Overhead it was cloudy and grey; on either side the fields were snowbound; ahead the highway was a pure white lane with Vanek's the first car to leave wheeled tracks in the snow. Beyond the small town of Horn he pulled up in the deserted countryside. Getting out of the car, Vanek burned the French papers the passport official had stamped and then, using a spade which Brunner handed him, he buried the remnants, carefully re-arranging the snow over the shallow hole. Getting back into the Peugeot, he handed round sets of French papers which were duplicates of those he had just burned; duplicates except for the fact that they carried no stamp linking them with Czechoslovakia.
Reaching Vienna at noon, he parked the Peugeot in the Opera Square; later it would be picked up by a minor official from the Czech Embassy. When they had crossed the frontier at Gmund their car registration number had been automatically noted, so now they severed this second link with their country of origin. With Vanek leading the way, shouldering his skis, the three men walked into the main entrance of the Hotel Sacher and turned through the doorway on the right which opens into a tea-room. They spent the next half-hour in leisurely fashion, drinking coffee and eating cakes while Vanek, chattering away in French, watched every person who followed them into the tea- room.
At 12.30 pm exactly, the three men left the tea-room by a door leading into a side street, still carrying their skis. The Mercedes waiting for them was parked outside the Hotel Astoria and the registration number confirmed to Vanek that this was their vehicle. The key was in the ignition and nearby a Czech official who had watched the car folded up his newspaper and walked away; when he had picked up the Peugeot waiting in Opera Square his job was done.
With Vanek again behind the wheel, they drove to the Westbahnhof, the terminus from which trains depart from Vienna for western Europe. Brunner-with Vanek's help-had worked out the schedule precisely. Arriving at the Westbahnhof before 1 pm gave them nice time to eat lunch in the station restaurant before they boarded the express due to depart at 2 pm. The train was moving out of the station when a Slovak climbed inside the Mercedes parked outside the Westbahnhof and drove off.
The Commando, all links with Czechoslovakia effectively severed, was on its way to Germany.
It was just before noon in the German city of Mainz-four hundred miles to the east the Soviet Commando had now arrived in Vienna-when Alan Lennox again met Peter Lanz of the BND in the station first-class restaurant. The Englishman, who had been sitting at the table for a few minutes, nodded as Lanz took a chair and dropped a copy of the magazine Der Spiegel on the chair between them. Lanz picked up the menu. 'The papers are inside,' he murmured. 'Sorry we've taken such a bloody long time over them. But they're good…' He ordered coffee from the waiter.
It was impossible for Lanz to tell the Englishman the real cause of the delay, that he had just returned from the Palais Schaumburg in Bonn where Chancellor Hauser had given the go-ahead. 'That speech of Florian's at Lille last night disturbed me,' the chancellor had explained to Lanz. 'If he goes on building up this atmosphere of ferment he may leave behind him in Paris a situation ripe for a coup d'etat while he is in Moscow. We must find out whether there is a high-level Communist at work in Paris-and quickly…'
`Under that napkin near your hand,' Lennox said quietly, `you'll find my British passport. Hang on to it for me until I get back. It wouldn't be very clever if they found that on me when I'm inside France…'
Lanz put the folded napkin in his lap, paused while the waiter served coffee, and then pocketed the
