«Thank you so much, Mr Mallinson.»
«Good night.»
Mallinson replaced the receiver, re-set the alarm clock for six-thirty instead of seven, and went back to sleep.
In a small and fusty bachelor flat, while Paris slept towards the dawn, a middle-aged schoolmaster paced up and down the floor of the cramped bedsitter. The scene around him was chaotic: books, newspapers, magazines and manuscripts lay scattered over the table, chairs and sofa, and even on the coverlet of the narrow bed set into its alcove on the far side of the room. In another alcove a sink overflowed with unwashed crockery.
What obsessed his thoughts in his nocturnal pacings was not the untidy state of his room, for since his removal from his post as headmaster of a Lycee at Sidi-bel-Abbes and the loss of the fine house with two manservants that went with it, he had learned to live as he now did. His problem lay elsewhere.
As dawn was breaking over the eastern suburbs, he sat down finally and picked up one of the papers. His eye ran yet again down the second lead story on the foreign news page. It was headlined «OAS Chiefs Holed Up in Rome Hotel.»
After reading it for the last time he made up his mind, threw on a light mackintosh against the dill of the morning, and left the flat.
He caught a cruising taxi on the nearest boulevard and ordered the driver to take him to the Gare du Nord. Although the taxi dropped him in the forecourt, he walked away from the station as soon as the taxi had left, crossed the road and entered one of the all night cafes of the area.
He ordered a coffee and a metal disc for the telephone, left the coffee on the counter and went into the back of the cafe to dial. Directory Enquiries put him on to the International Exchange and he asked them the number of a hotel in Rome. He got it within sixty seconds, replaced the receiver and left.
At a cafe a hundred metres down the street he again used the phone, this time to ask Enquiries for the location of the nearest all night post office from which international calls could be placed. He was told, as he had expected, that there was one round the corner from the mainline station.
At the post office he placed a call to the Rome number he had been given, without naming the hotel represented by the number, and spent an anxious twenty minutes waiting until it came through.
«I wish to speak to Signor Poitiers,» he told the Italian voice that answered.
'Signor Che?» asked the voice.
'Il Signor francesi. Poitiers. Poitiers…»
«Che?» repeated the voice.
«Francesi, francesi.. ' said the man in Paris, «Ah, si, il signor francesi. Momento, per favore…»
There was a series of clicks, then a tired voice answered in French.
«Quay.. ' «Listen,» said the man in Paris urgently. «I don't have much time. Take a pencil and note what I say. Begins. 'Valmy to Poitiers. The jackal is blown. Repeat. The jackal is blown. Kowalski was taken. Sang before dying. Ends.'
Got that?»
«Quay,» said the voice. «I'll pass it on.»
Valmy replaced the receiver, hurriedly paid his bill and scurried out of the building. In a minute he was lost in the crowds of commuters streaming out of the main hall of the station. The sun was over the horizon, warming the pavements and the chill night air. Within half an hour the smell of morning and croissants and grinding coffee would vanish beneath the pall of exhaust fumes, body odour and stale tobacco. Two minutes after Valmy had disappeared a car drew up outside the post office and two men from the DST hurried inside. They took a description from the switchboard operator, but it could have described anybody.
In Rome Marc Rodin was awakened at 7.55 when the man who had spent the night on the duty desk on the floor below shook him by the shoulder. He was awake in an instant, half out of bed, hand groping for the gun under his pillow. He relaxed and grunted when he saw the face of the ex-legionnaire above him. A glance at the bedside table told him he had overslept anyway. After years in the tropics his habitual waking hour was much earlier, and the August sun of Rome was already high above the roofs. But weeks of inactivity, passing the evening hours playing piquet with Montclair and Casson, drinking too much rough red wine, taking no exercise worth the name, all had, combined to make him slack and sleepy.
«A message, mon colonel. Somebody phoned just now, seemed in a hurry.»
The legionnaire proffered a sheet from a note pad on which were scribbled the disjointed phrases of Valmy. Rodin read through the message once, then leapt out of the thinly sheeted bed. He wrapped the cotton sarong he habitually wore, a habit from the East, round his waist, and read the message again.
«All right. Dismiss.»
The legionnaire left the room and went back downstairs.
Rodin swore silently and intensely for several seconds, crumpling the piece of paper in his hands. Damn, damn, damn, damn Kowalski.
For the first two days after Kowalski's disappearance he had thought the man had simply deserted. There had been several defections of late from the cause, as the conviction set in among the rank and file that the OAS had failed and would fail in its aim of killing Charles de Gaulle and bringing down the present Government of France. But Kowalski he had always thought would remain loyal to the last.
And here was evidence that he had for some inexplicable reason returned to France, or perhaps had been picked up inside Italy and abducted. Now it seemed he had talked, under pressure of course.
Rodin genuinely grieved his dead servitor. Part of the considerable reputation he had built up as a fighting soldier and commanding officer had been based on the enormous concern he showed for his men. These things are appreciated by fighting soldiers more than any military theorist can ever imagine. Now Kowalski was dead, and Rodin had few illusions of the manner of his passing.
Still, the important thing was to try to recollect just what Kowalski had had to tell. The meeting in Vienna, the name of the hotel. Of course, all of that. The three men who had been at the meeting. This would be no news to the SDECE. But what did he know about the jackal? He had not been listening at the door, that was certain. He could tell them of a tall blond foreigner who had visited the three of them. That in itself meant nothing. Such a foreigner could have been an arms dealer, or a financial backer. There had been no names 'mentioned.
But Valmy's message mentioned the Jackal by his code-name. How? How could Kowalski have told them that? With a start of horror Rodin recalled the scene as they had parted. He had stood in the doorway with the Englishman; Viktor had been a few feet down the corridor, annoyed at the way the Englishman had spotted him in the alcove, a professional outmanoeuvred by another professional, waiting for trouble, almost hoping for it. What had he, Rodin said? «Bonsoir, Mr Jackal.»
Of course, damn and blast it.
Thinking things over again, Rodin realised that Kowalski could never have got the killer's real name. Only he, Montclair and Casson knew that. All the same, Valmy was right. With Kowalski's confession in the hands of the SDECE, it was too far blown to be retrievable. They had the meeting, the hotel, probably they had already talked to the desk clerk; they had the face and figure of a man, a code name. There could be no doubt they would guess what Kowalski had guessed-that the blond was a killer. From then on the net around De Gaulle would tighten; he would abandon all public engagements, all exits from his palace, all chances for an assassin to get him. It was over; the operation was blown. He would have to call off the Jackal, insist on the money back, minus all expenses and a retainer for the time and trouble involved.
There was one thing to be settled, and quickly. The Jackal himself must be warned urgently to halt operations. Rodin was still enough of a commanding officer not to send a man out on his orders on a mission for which success had become impossible.
He summoned the bodyguard to whom, since the departure of Kowalski, he had given the duties of going every day to the main post office to collect the mail and, if necessary, make telephone calls, and briefed him at length.
By nine o'clock the bodyguard was in the post office and asked for a telephone number in London. It took twenty minutes before the telephone at the other end began to ring. The switchboard operator gestured the Frenchman to a cabin to take the call. He picked up the receiver as the operator put hers down, and listened to the bzzz-bzzz… pause… buzz-bzzz of an English telephone ringing.
The Jackal rose early that morning, for he had much to do. The three main suitcases he had checked and re-
