MacLeish was a bonus which lived up to his main principle: never do anything for nothing.
In Paris on Monday morning, 13 December, Grelle and Boisseau were no nearer clearing up the mystery surrounding Gaston Martin's strangely coincidental arrival only hours after the attempt on Florian's life. Detectives had visited the Hotel Cecile where Martin had dumped his bag after getting off the boat train from Le Havre, and his few miserable possessions had been brought to the prefecture. They consisted of one small suitcase of clothes. 'And this is all he had to show for sixty years of living,' the prefect commented. 'It's pathetic, the way some people live-and die…
`This newspaper we found in his room is interesting,' Boisseau replied. 'It clears up the riddle of why he was standing at the spot where Lucie Devaud died…
The copy of Le Monde, dated 9 December, the day after the assassination attempt, had carried one of those 'scene of the crime' diagrams newspaper editors are so fond of inserting; this one was a street plan of a section of the eighth arrondissement with a cross marking the spot where Lucie Devaud had been shot. Martin's copy of the paper, purchased at Le Havre when he came off the freighter, had been folded to the diagram, as though he had used it as a reference. 'They even showed the fur shop in the diagram,' Boisseau explained, 'so it was easy for him to find the spot…
`Which tells us nothing about any connection he may have had with the Devaud woman,' Grelle snapped. 'We've traced her to an expensive apartment in the Place des Vosges but no one there seems to know anything about her…
At nine in the morning the telex came in from Cayenne, Guiana-in response to Grelle's earlier request for information. It was a very long message and Grelle later supplemented it by a phone call to the Cayenne police chief. The story it told was quite damnable. During the war Gaston Martin had fought with the Resistance group commanded by the Leopard in the Lozere. He had, according to his own account-told to the Cayenne police chief only a few weeks earlier-worked closely with the Leopard, acting as his deputy. He even mentioned the savage wolfhound, Cesar, who guarded the Communist leader wherever he went.
At the war's end, still a dedicated Communist, Martin had reported to party headquarters in Paris where he was placed under the control of a special political section. Then, in July 1945, only two months after the war's end, Martin was entrusted with a mission: he was to go to Guiana in South America to organize a secret cell inside the union of waterfront workers. 'Control the ports of the west,' he was told, 'and we shall rule the west…'
Martin had set off with great enthusiasm, taking a ship from Le Havre bound for Cayenne, proud to be chosen for this important work. Landing in the tropical slum which is Cayenne had somewhat tempered his enthusiasm, but soon he plunged into a world of intrigue and underground activity. He took his orders from a man called Lumel; of mixed French and Indian blood, Lumel had been born in Guiana. Then the blow fell. Overnight his world was shattered. Drinking in a waterfront bar one evening before going home, he witnessed a drunken brawl and an American seaman was knifed to death. The police, tipped off by an anonymous call, came for him the next day. They found the murder weapon hidden at the back of a cupboard in the shack where he lived.
Lumel supplied Martin with a lawyer, who muffed his defence at the trial. He was sentenced to twenty years' hard labour on Devil's Island. For the first few months in this dreaded penal institution Martin was sustained by the belief that Lumel would find some way to free him; hope died with the passing of the years, with the non-arrival of any message from Lumel who seemed to have abandoned him. When Devil's Island was closed in 1949 he was transferred to another equally sordid penal settlement. -
With good behaviour-and he was a model prisoner-Martin should have been released in 1963. But late in 1962 there was an incident in the prison to which Martin had been transferred. A warder was knifed in the back and died. The murder weapon was found in the holdall Martin used to store his wooden eating implements. It was a repetition of the Cayenne murder sixteen years earlier. And should have immediately been suspect, Grelle thought grimly as he went on reading.
Reading between the lines, the governor of the prison had been an unsavoury character who wanted the matter cleared up quickly. Martin was accused, tried and sentenced to another twenty years. It was about this time that Martin became finally convinced that someone was trying to keep him in prison for ever. He served the greater part of his new sentence and then something odd happened. Lumel, knocked down in a street accident by a hit- and-run driver, called the Cayenne police chief as he lay dying. 'That car knocked me down deliberately,' he alleged. 'They tried to kill me…' Before he expired he dictated and signed a confession.
The order to put Gaston Martin out of circulation reached Lumel in 1945 even before Martin disembarked at Cayenne. `It came from Communist party headquarters in Paris,' Lumel explained in his statement. 'I could have had him killed, of course, but they didn't want it done that way…
`I know why,' Grelle said to Boisseau, who was smoking his pipe while the prefect read the report. 'Too many people who could identify the Leopard had already been killed…
`You're guessing, chief.'
`I'd bet my pension on it…
Lumel admitted organizing the frame-up of Gaston Martin for the bar-room killing, admitted that years later he had paid a large sum of money to arrange for the killing of the warder inside the prison Martin had been transferred to. After Lumel died Martin was personally interrogated by the Cayenne chief of police, a decent man Grelle gathered from the tone of the report. Bitterly disillusioned by his long years in prison, by Lumel's confession, Martin had told the police chief everything. 'I think he realized that his entire life had been thrown away for an illusion-the illusion of the Communist ideal,' the Cayenne police chief commented in his report. 'I arranged for his immediate release. It will probably always be a mystery why Gaston Martin had to be condemned to the life of an animal for nearly all his days…
Grelle dropped the report on his desk. 'The bastard,' he said quietly. 'To go on concealing his identity he had people killed, a man imprisoned in that black jungle hell for life. God knows how many other poor devils died for the sake of the cause-in the report I read of the Leopard I noticed a number of his closer associates came to a sticky end before the war was over. It's a trail of blood this man has left behind him…
The prefect was walking round his office with his hands shoved down inside his slacks pockets. Boisseau had rarely seen his chief so angry. 'Remember this, Boisseau,' Grelle went on. `Do a job but never devote your life to a so-called cause. You will find yourself in pawn to scum…
`All this to protect the Leopard? A man who is dead?'
`We'll see about that.' Grelle was putting on his leather raincoat. 'I'm going to the Elysee. If anyone asks for me, you don't know where I am.'
`I still don't understand it,' Boisseau persisted. 'The record shows the Leopard died in 1944. Gaston Martin, who we now know was Petit-Louis, the Leopard's right-hand man, says he saw him walk into the Elysee…'
`When you get a conflict of evidence, you test it. I'm starting to test it,' Grelle said brusquely.
The direct route to the Elysee would have led along the rue St Honore and the Faubourg St Honore beyond, but because of the one-way system Grelle drove via the Place de la Concorde, along the Avenue Gabriel, which took him past the American Embassy, and then up the Avenue Marigny, passing on his right the large walled garden which lies behind the Elysee itself. Arriving at the palace, he waited while a guard lowered the white-painted chain and then drove into the courtyard beyond. Getting out of his car, he went straight to the guardhouse.
`Can I see the register of visitors?' the prefect asked casually.
The officer showed him the book which records the date, time of arrival and identity of everyone visiting the Elysee. It was the page for Thursday, 9 December, the day when Gaston Martin had stood outside the Elysee which interested Grelle. He checked the entries for visitors who had arrived between 7.30 and 8.30 in the evening; then, to throw the duty officer off the scent, he looked at one or two other pages.
`Thank you,' he said and went out into the courtyard and up the seven steps which led to the plate glass doors of the main entrance.
Not even a cabinet minister could have called as casually as this, but Marc Grelle was held in especially high regard by Guy Florian. 'He has no political ambition,' the president once informed a cabinet minister he knew to be excessively ambitious. 'I had to drag him away from Marseilles to Paris. Sometimes I think he is the only honest man in France. I would trust him with my life…
In fact, Guy Florian had entrusted Grelle with his life. While the president is inside the department of Paris the responsibility for his security-and that of cabinet ministers-is in the hands of the police prefect. On the morning after the assassination attempt Florian had ordered that from now on his personal safety was to be in the hands of Marc Grelle throughout the whole of France. With one stroke of his pen Florian had made the prefect the most
