«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. Carom' 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 Carom' said Lebel.
«Bon. There's one last thing. Before I left the meeting Sanguinetti suggested the whole group who were there tonight to 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.
'Fraud 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 Orfevres 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 Ile de la Cite, 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 Amelie 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.
«Right,» he resumed, «that was Bouvier to say you have been given security clearance to be told what it is all about. For a start you had better read this.»
While Caron sat on the chair in front of the desk and read the Rolland file, Lebel cleared all the remaining folders and notes off his desk and stacked them on the untidy shelves behind him. The office hardly looked like the nerve centre of the biggest manhunt in France. Police offices never do look much. Lebel's was no exception.
It was no more than twelve feet by fourteen, with two windows on the south face looking out over the river towards the lively honeycomb of the Latin Quarter clustering round the Boulevard St Michel. Through one of the windows the sounds of the night and the warm summer air drifted in. The office contained two desks, one for Lebel, which stood with its back to the window, another for a secretary, which stood along the east wall. The door was opposite the window.
Apart from the two desks and two chairs behind them, there was one other upright chair, an armchair nest to the door, six large grey filing cabinets standing along almost the whole of the west wall and whose combined tops supported an array of reference and law books, and one set of bookshelves, situated between the windows and stuffed with almanacs and files.
Of signs of home there was only the framed photograph on Lebel's desk of an ample and determined-looking lady who was Madame Amelie Lebel, and two children, a plain girl with steelrimmed glasses and pigtails, and a youth with an expression as mild and put-upon as his father.
Caron finished reading and looked up.
«Merde,» he said.
«As you say, une enorme merde,» replied Lebel, who seldom permitted himself the use of strong language. Most of the top commissaires of the PJ were known to their immediate staff by nicknames like Ie Patron or Ie Vieux, but Claude Lebel, perhaps because he never drank more than a small aperitif, did not smoke or swear, and reminded younger detectives inevitably of one of their former schoolteachers, was known within Homicide and more lately in the corridors of the Brigade chief's administrative floor as le Professeur.
Had he not been such a good thief-taker, he would have become something of a figure of fun.
«Nevertheless,» continued Lebel, «listen while I fill you in on the details. It will be the last occasion I shall have time.»
For thirty minutes he briefed Caron on the events of the afternoon, from Roger Frey's meeting with the President to the meeting in the ministry conference room, to his own brusque summons on the recommendation of Maurice Bouvier, to the final setting up of the office in which they now sat as the headquarters of the manhunt for the jackal. Caron listened in silence.
Blimey,» he said at last when Lebel had finished, «they have lumbered you.»
He thought for a moment, then looked up at his chief with worry and concern. 'Mon commissaire, you know they have given you this because no one else wants it? You know what they will do to you if you fail to catch this man in time?»
Lebel nodded with a tinge of sadness.
«Yes, Lucien, I know. There's nothing I can do. I've been given the job. So from now we just have to do it.»
But where on earth do we start?»
«We start by recognising that we have the widest powers ever granted to two cops in France,» replied Lebel cheerfully, «so, we use them.
«To start with, get installed behind that desk. Take a pad and note the following. Get my normal secretary transferred or given paid leave until further notice. No one else can be let into the secret. You become my assistant and secretary rolled into one. Get a camp bed in here from emergency stores, linen and pillows, washing and shaving tackle. Get a percolator of coffee, some milk and sugar brought from the canteen and installed. We're going to need a lot of coffee.
«Get on to the switchboard and instruct them to leave ten outside lines and one operator permanently at the disposal of this office. If they quibble, refer them to Bouvier personally. As for any other requests from me for
