The Stone Leopard

by Colin Forbes

  In the years which followed Philip supplied weapons to Fidel Castro in his early days—using the Communist connections he had built up in the Lozere—to Eoka terrorists fighting the British in Cyprus, to Kurdish rebels fighting the Iraqi government, and to anyone hard-pressed enough to pay over-the-odds prices for an inferior product. 'I have,' as he once boasted to a bar companion, 'overtaken my contemporaries.' His wife, Yvonne, now occupied an apartment in Paris. 'I have pensioned her off,' as he was fond of saying. 'After all, I do not believe in treating a woman badly. . .'

  At two in the afternoon Noelle Berger emerged from the villa alone, well wrapped in a fur coat, and walked the few steps which took her to the station, leaving Robert Philip alone in the house. The Citroén which had been parked opposite No. 8 had long since disappeared and the only person in sight was a lean, bony-faced individual who stood gazing into a shop window. Noelle went into the station and bought a return ticket to Strasbourg, taking no notice of the man who came up behind her and in his turn purchased a single to the same city.

  Vanek's instructions to Lansky had been simple. 'I don't think she's his wife—she looked far too young and casual. If she comes out, follow her—unless she has a suitcase, in which case she's leaving, so forget her. . .'

  Noelle Berger had decided to go and do some Christmas shopping in Strasbourg to give Philip time to recover his temper.

  Let him stew in his own juice, she had reasoned, and then he'll be glad to see me back this evening. In Strasbourg the shops had opened at two—to scoop in more business since it was so close to Christmas—and Noelle spent quite a lot of Philip's money in the rue des Grandes Arcades. Which damned well serves him right she told herself. Later she relented and bought him a bright yellow waistcoat. Once, someone nearly knocked her under the wheels of a bus as she waited at a crowded kerbside, but when she looked round she saw only a fat woman behind her. At the end of the afternoon, laden with purchases, she made her way to the quiet district known as Petite France down by the river. She had decided to have a cup of tea with a friend before catching the train back to Colmar.

  At the edge of the lonely Place Benjamin Zhia the river Il divides into three different sections before joining up again lower down, and here an intricate network of footwalks crosses the river. There is a lock-gate, a penned-up channel where the water roars through the bottleneck, and sluices which flood out from under a building beyond. The sound of churning river is deafening. Taking a short cut, Noelle moved out on to the footwalks, quite alone as far as she knew. She was half-way across, she had heard nothing above the growling roar of the water, when something made her turn round. Lansky was one step behind her, both hands upraised. She stared in disbelief as the hands reached her and shoved. She was half-way down before she screamed, and her screams were lost in the boiling sluices which dragged her under and then rushed her at speed towards the Quai des Bateliers. Bobbing on the surface of the racing flood her Christmas purchases had a bizarre, festive look, including a bright yellow waistcoat which broke free from its wrappings.

  In twenty minutes Lansky was boarding the turbo-train which would return him to Colmar by seven in the evening. With two people in a house it is too difficult to stage a convincing double 'accident'.

  CHAPTER THREE

  ON THE EVENING of Sunday, 19 December, Grelle waited in his office for Boisseau to return from Strasbourg, but as the hours ticked away the police prefect was far from idle. For a good part of the day he had been immersed in tightening up the security arrangements for the presidential motorcade drive to Charles de Gaulle Airport—or Roissy as it was often called —on the morning of 23 December when Florian departed for Russia.

  Marc Grelle had made himself an expert on death by assassination—on the methods used, on the people who used them. He had made a particular study of the thirty-one attempts which had been made to assassinate General de Gaulle, on the reasons why they might have succeeded, on the reasons why they failed. The list of techniques employed was formidable.

  Killing by remote detonation of explosive charges under a moving vehicle; killing by sniper armed with rifle and telescopic sight; killing at close quarters—by stabbing, by shooting; killing by imposture—by use of a stolen military or police uniform; killing by motor-bike outrider approaching presi-

  dential car; killing by suicidal air collision—one plane crashing into another carrying the president; killing by absurdly exotic methods—using a camera-gun, using explosive-carrying dogs trained to run to a certain spot where the president was due to speak; and killing by motorized ambush.

  The last method was the favourite, and Grelle could see why. The motorized ambush was most deadly because it used highly-trained thugs at short range, men who could react at the last split second according to circumstances. De Gaulle had, in fact, come closest to death when his motorcade was ambushed by other cars. With this catalogue of assassination attempts in his head, Grelle, aided by the tireless Boisseau, set out to counter every one of them. He was still working on the problem when his deputy returned from Strasbourg.

  It was nine in the evening, and Boisseau, who had had nothing to eat since lunch, sent out to the corner brasserie for food. He ate his meal at the prefect's desk while he went on reporting about the Strasbourg trip. 'You see,' he continued, Jouvel's suicide is technically sound, no doubt about that, and few people can fake that kind of death. As you know, they would overlook certain details. . .

  `Unless we are confronted with a professional assassin? Which would give rise to all sorts of unpleasant implications. . .

  `What I don't like,' Boisseau remarked, sopping up gravy with a piece of bread, 'is those two men who called on the tart and asked her—quite independently—almost the self-same questions about Jouvel. And that when Jouvel normally had no one calling on him or even interested in him. So, who were those two strangers—to say nothing of the man with the umbrella whom none of the tenants recognized ?'

  `Face it,' Grelle advised, Jouvel may well have committed suicide and these other people are probably irrelevant. At this end we are getting nowhere yet—neither Roger Danchin nor Alain Blanc have made contact with any known Soviet link. We are at that stage we have encountered on so many cases when everything is a blind alley. We have to wait for a development, a pointer. . . .' He took out from a locked drawer the list of witnesses compiled by Col Lasalle, glancing at it again. Tor all we know the key to the whole thing may be a man we can't even put under surveillance—Dieter Wohl of Freiburg.'

  `You could phone Peter Lanz of the BND,' Boisseau suggested. 'He is always very helpful. . .

  `When even here on our home patch we are having to proceed with the secrecy which characterizes conspirators? I dare not start spreading this abroad.' Grelle stretched and yawned. `God, I'm tired. No, we must wait—and hope—for a pointer.'

  * * *

  In a two-storey house beyond the outskirts of Freiburg, the university town on the edge of the Black Forest, the ex Abwehr officer Dieter Wohl, stood by the window of his darkened bedroom as he peered across the fields towards the west, towards France only a few miles away across the Rhine. He was remembering.

  A large, well-built man with a strong-jawed face, Wohl was sixty-one years old. As his shrewd blue eyes stared towards Alsace, a faint smile puckered his mouth. It had all been so long ago, so futile. Now there was peace on both sides of the Rhine, thank God; at least he had lived to see that. A retired policeman and widower, Dieter Wohl had plenty of time to think about the past.

  It was the banner headline in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung eleven days ago which had first stirred memories, the story about the attempt to assassinate the French president. A shocking business. What had intrigued Wohl had been the name of the woman who had made the attempt, a Lucie Devaud. Curious. That was the name of the woman who had died in the sunken car when the Leopard went into the river. Could there be any connection he wondered?

  After reading the newspaper story Wohl had dug out one of his old wa
r diaries from the back of his desk. It had been strictly forbidden by military regulations—to keep a diary— but many soldiers had broken the regulation; even generals and field-marshals who later made a pot of money writing up their memoirs. With all the time in the world on his hands, Wohl read through the whole of the diary for 1944. As he read, it all came back to him.

  As a keen young Abwehr officer stationed in the Lozere district of France, Wohl had made up his mind to trap the Leopard. Diligently he picked up every scrap of gossip about the mysterious Resistance leader and recorded it; his passion for secrecy, his remarkable network of agents, his ferocious dog, Cesar—the Leopard's only friend so far as Wohl could gather.

  Once—and only once—Wohl had come close to capturing the Leopard when he received a tip-off that his adversary would be driving down a certain country road at a certain time. The ambush was laid on the far side of a bridge over a river the Leopard would have to cross. At this point a thick forest came down steeply to the water's edge and Wohl stationed himself high up among the trees with a pair of field-glasses. It was close to noon on a windy day when he saw the car coming behind a screen of trees, coming at high speed. Through his glasses Wohl saw an image blurred by foliage— and the speed of the approaching vehicle.

  `God in Heaven!'

  A man was behind the wheel and beside him sat a girl, her hair streaming behind her in the wind. This was something Wohl had not anticipated—a woman in the car—and it worried him as the car came closer to the bridge. She must be a Resistance courier, he imagined. He strained to see detail in his glasses and he was excited. This was the first time anyone had actually seen the Leopard. The trouble was he couldn't see the man's face—everything was blurred by the screen of trees and the vehicle's movement. But he would have to slow down as he came up to the river: there was a sharp bend just before the road went over the bridge. Beyond the far end of the bridge was a road-block.

  The Leopard made no effort to slow at all. He was reputed always to move at speed to avoid being shot at. With a scream of tyres and a cloud of dust the vehicle careered round the bend and came up on to the bridge. It was a remarkable piece of driving, Wohl admitted, his eyes glued to the glasses. As the car came out of the dust-cloud half-way across the bridge the Leopard must have seen the road-block. He reacted instantly; still moving at speed he drove into the parapet, smashed through it and went down into the river which at this point was eighteen feet deep. Wohl could hardly believe his eyes as he saw the vehicle disappear and a belated burst of machine-gun fire rattled.

  As it plunged the car turned turtle and went down roof first. When it settled on the bottom both the man and the girl must have been upside down as the river surged inside. Wohl was quite sure that the Leopard must now be dead but he took no chances. Using a megaphone he barked out orders and the soldiers began to force their way through the thick under-growth lining the banks. It was three hours later before a breakdown truck equipped with a crane hauled the sunken car slowly to the surface.

  Wohl was on the bridge when the car, dripping with water, was swung over and down. He received another shock. There was no trace of the Leopard. But the girl was still there, imprisoned in the front seat, her dark hair plastered to her skull, an attractive girl of about twenty. After a few days, using the Vichy police's fingerprint records, Wohl was able to identify her as Lucie Devaud. The medical examiner told the Abwehr officer that at some recent time she had been delivered of a child.

  The incident caused a minor scandal among the Resistance forces which split into two opposing views. Some said that the Leopard had acted correctly, had sacrificed everything to reach his rendezvous on time. Others were not so charitable— Lucie Devaud had a courageous record as a courier—and argued that he could have taken the girl out with him if he hadn't been so concerned to save his own skin. But then the surge of war, the later attempt to set up a Communist Republique du Sud, smothered the incident and it was forgotten, particularly when the Leopard himself was shot dead in Lyon. . . .

  Over thirty years later all this came back to Dieter Wohl when he read in the paper the name of the woman who had tried to kill Guy Florian. And by now Wohl himself had started to write his memoirs, so it seemed too good an opportunity to miss—to try and prompt people who might know something into writing him, to furnish more material for his book. On Friday, to December, he wrote a letter to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, referring to his wartime diary and the fact that he was writing his memoirs, and to give his communication an air of authority he mentioned the name of a certain Annette Devaud, who had also been a member of the Leopard's Resistance group, even going so far as to include her last known address of over thirty years ago. To make his letter even more arresting he quoted a sentence from one of Col Lasalle's provocative broadcasts. 'Who is this Lucie Devaud who last night tried to kill a certain European statesman ?' At the conclusion of his letter Wohl added a question of his own. Is Annette Devaud still alive in Saverne, I wonder?

  Wohl succeeded in his aim even more swiftly than he could have hoped. The letter was printed in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on Tuesday, 1 4 December, and was duly read on the same day by Paul-Henri Le Theule, the Secret Service officer attached to the French Embassy in Bonn. Le Theule, thirty-eight years old and only a child at the war's end, knew nothing about the Leopard, but his eye was caught by the brief reference to Col Rene Lasalle. Hard up for material to pad his next report, he cut out the letter and added it to the meagre pile waiting for the next Paris diplomatic bag.

  The bag was delivered to Paris on Saturday, 18 December, but it was only Sunday morning when Roger Danchin, working his way through a pile of paperwork, came across the cutting, which he showed to Alain Blanc who happened to be with him Dictating a memo to the Elysee, Danchin sent both memo and cutting across the road and by lunchtime Guy Florian had seen both documents. At three in the afternoon Soviet Ambassador Leonid Vorin, who had lunched with Alain Blanc, arrived at the Elysee, talked briefly with the president and then hurried back to his embassy in the rue de Grenelle.

  Returning to Colmar aboard the turbo-train from Strasbourg at seven on Sunday evening, Lansky hurried the few steps from the station across the place to the Hotel Bristol where he found his two companions waiting impatiently for him in Vanek's bedroom. He told them how he had dealt with Noelle Berger and Vanek was relieved. 'It means Philip is now alone in the house and we may be able to turn his girl's disappearance to our advantage, but we must advance the time of our visit. . .'

  `Why ?' asked Lansky. 'Late on a Sunday night would be much safer. . .'

  `Because,' Vanek explained with sarcastic patience, 'Philip will soon begin to worry about what has happened to her. If we leave him to worry too long he may call the police. . .'

  While Lansky had been away in Strasbourg the other two men had continued their research on Robert Philip, each of them taking turns to watch No. 8 from a small park further down the Avenue Raymond Poincare while they pretended to feed the birds or to be waiting for someone. And it was because it was difficult to keep Philip's villa under observation from a closer point—and a tribute also to their skill—that they escaped the notice of the occasional patrol-car which came gliding along the avenue while the officer behind the wheel checked on the same villa.

  At three in the afternoon, throwing bread for some sparrows, Vanek saw Philip emerge from the house, come down the steps and walk to the gate which he proceeded to lean on while he smoked a cigarette. Slipping behind a tree, Vanek used the monocular glass he always carried to study the Frenchman close up. Under the flashy, camel-hair coat he wore, Vanek noticed between the railings that the Frenchman was still clad in pyjama trousers. On Sundays Philip rarely dressed; slopping about the house in his night-things was his way of relaxing. And also, he was thinking, that when Noelle returned it would be so much easier to flop her on the bed when all he had to divest himself of was pyjamas. Left alone in the house, Philip was lusting for his latest mistress.

&
nbsp; `That could be a bit of luck, too,' Vanek informed Brunner later, 'bearing in mind the method we shall adopt. . .'

  It was close to nine o'clock when Brunner walked up the steps leading to the porch of No. 8 and rang the bell. At that hour on a Sunday the snowbound Avenue Raymond Poincare was deserted and very silent. Lights were on behind the curtained bay window at the front and Brunner's ring on the bell brought a quick—but cautious—reaction. A side curtain overlooking the porch was drawn back and Philip stood in the window, still wearing his dressing-gown over his pyjamas. Holding a glass, he stared at Brunner suspiciously, then dropped the curtain. A few moments later the door was opened a few inches and held in that position by a strong chain.

  `Mr Robert Philip ?' Brunner inquired.

  `Yes, What is it ?'

  Expecting to see Noelle Berger laden with packages, Philip was taken aback by the arrival of this stranger. Brunner presented the Siirete Nationale card he had carried since the Commando had left Tabor.

  `Surete, sir. I am afraid I have some bad news about an acquaintance of yours, a young lady. May I come in for a moment ?'

  Worried as he was about his mistress, Philip was a wary man who had not survived all these years in the half-world of gunrunning by accepting people or identity cards at face value; in fact, he himself had more than a nodding acquaintance with false papers.

  `I don't know you,' he said after a moment. 'And it just happens that I know most of the police in Colmar. . .'

  `That doesn't surprise me. . . .' Brunner made an impatient gesture. 'I was transferred here from Strasbourg only last week. . .'

  `Wait there while I get some clothes on. . . .' The door slammed shut in Brunner's face. Inside the hall Philip frowned, sensing something odd about this unknown visitor. He reached for the phone on a side-table and something hard and pipe-like pressed against his back, digging through the silk dressing-gown as a voice spoke quietly. 'If you make a sound I shall shoot you. Take your hand away from that phone. Now, face the wall. . . .' While Brunner was distracting the Frenchman's attention, keeping him at the front of the house, Vanek had gone round the side-path to the back of the house. He had followed the same route earlier—soon after dark when Philip had drawn the curtains over the front windows—and had found the french doors which were locked and without a key in the hole. Now, using the skeleton keys, he had let himself inside and come into the hall while Philip was talking to his unexpected visitor.