Another Day, Another Jackal

by Lex Lander

  The man on Barail’s left, a Minister of State in the Socialist Government of Alain Juppé, glanced at him, his brow corrugated with anxiety. Shorter than Barail he had difficulty keeping up, and the uneven, uncultivated terrain did not suit his city-trained feet. The other two members of this exclusive group found the pace no hardship: a bearded, bespectacled Simonelli positively loping along on his long legs, and the youngest of the group, a Gaullist member of the Senate and hard-line nationalist, bursting fit from a rigid regime of exercising.

  ‘Jean-Marie is not as sanguine as you appear to be about using this ... this mercenary,’ the Minister puffed, arms swinging wildly as if to generate momentum. The uncut grass whipped at his legs. ‘How do we know he will not attempt to extort additional payment from us afterwards?’

  ‘I know,’ Barail replied confidently, ‘and that is enough. You must trust me, Patrick, and so must our revered leader. You have put me in the driving seat, you must leave the choice of tools to me. Do not interfere, je t’en prie.’

  ‘At least tell me his name, anything ... Is he a Frenchman?’

  ‘He is not. And this I have decided on reflection is preferable. The man must be seen to be a renegade, an outsider ...’

  ‘An outlaw,’ Simonelli put in.

  The Senator gave a grunt of accord. ‘All who will be in and with the new cabinet must be ... be untainted.’ The choice of word pleased him to the point of absurdity, and he nodded to himself, smiling. ‘You must insist on it,’ he emphasised, with a sharp look at the Minister.

  ‘Self-delusion,’ Simonelli sneered and was surprised when the Senator did not rise to the barb.

  ‘Tell me then,’ the Minister said, almost in desperation, ‘what can I convey to Jean-Marie? I cannot go back empty-handed. Can you give me a date? The political moves must be planned too, you know. For you this may be just a military operation, but unless we of the Government act in concert with you and with each other, the blow will have been struck for nothing.’

  Barail stopped suddenly. Waited for the others to gather round him, anticipating.

  ‘Tell him that we are meeting our man here, tomorrow, to settle the practical aspects. Tell him ... in June at the latest we will strike. The exact date cannot be revealed yet, not until our man has made his preparations. But it shall be no later than June.’ He treated the Minister to the smile that could disarm as readily as that of an attractive child. ‘Will that do?’

  The Minister squinted at Barail, for the sun was behind him, white and brilliant; the heat of it brought pimples of sweat to his forehead. ‘It is not much. But if that is all you can give me ...’ He shrugged. ‘I will leave you now. Come, Georges.’

  Hands were shaken. The two politicians walked on, leaving Barail gazing at their backs.

  ‘It will take more than the likes of such men to make France great again,’ he lamented. He looked sidelong at the inscrutable Corsican. ‘Only such as you and I could do that.’

  Simonelli, hot in his dark wool suit, snapped a twig from the overhanging branch of a pear tree.

  ‘And we care only about the money,’ he said simply.

  * * *

  ‘Allo, allo!’ he blared into the mouthpiece.

  ‘Napoleon?’

  ‘Ah, Sheryl, ma chérie. Are you in France?’

  ‘Soon will be. Listen, Napoleon, I want to call a final meeting of the full committee - you, me, Barail and Lux. I’ll be bringing Gary with me.’

  Simonelli smoothed a slim eyebrow with a moistened finger. ‘To what end? Everything is in place. We don’t need to talk about it. The talking is over.’

  ‘For once just do as you’re told,’ Sheryl said in a voice that resembled the crunch of a bad gear change. ‘I’m running this show, not you. Set it up for Thursday next week, or Friday at the latest.’

  ‘Very well,’ Simonelli conceded sulkily. ‘Telephone me this time tomorrow. I can’t guarantee Lux will have called in. If not, it will be the day after. Where is this meeting to take place?’

  ‘Wherever is easiest for everyone to converge. Auxerre, I suppose, if we’re to keep you out of jail.’

  ‘And afterwards, shall I see you?’

  ‘Before and after if you like, darling. It’s been a long famine.’

  ‘Then I forgive you.’

  ‘Napoleon?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You’re an asshole.’

  The line went dead.

  Twenty-Three

  * * *

  The French term for display dummies is mannequins pour étalages, and it was under this heading that Lux tracked down an outfit called ‘Window’, in an industrial zone in the town of Carron, not far from Nice.

  They were manufacturers not distributors and reluctant to supply a one-off to a private individual.

  ‘It is not that we ourselves have any objection, monsieur,’ the large lady from the sales department explained, ‘simply that, if the word got around we would lose the confidence of our wholesale customers. You understand, I am sure.’

  Oh, yes, Lux quite understood. Now, he wheedled, how about selling him two standard models from stock for 2,000 francs cash each. Just parcel them up, put the money in your pocket and none would be the wiser.

  ‘Monsieur!’ came the affronted response.

  Lux sighed. ‘Okay, okay, three thousand each.’

  Five minutes later he was arranging the dummies in the trunk of his car, cocooned to the point of unrecognizability in brown paper, mute and unresisting, their joints malleable and conforming to his every wish and whim. The large dame, flapping about him like a torn sail, was anxious for him to be up and away, the banknotes scorching the bodice of her voluminous flowered dress, where she had stuffed them.

  He drove back along the dusty, unfinished road, off the industrial estate, and took the N202 down into Nice.

  * * *

  ‘A two-piece suit, monsieur? Our selection is infinite. Do step this way, if you please.’

  Staff in the retail drapery world are the most well-mannered of all shop assistants, Lux found, irrespective of nationality and the quality of the establishment. Maybe the rag trade exercises a peculiar attraction to those of servile disposition. If so, he couldn’t understand why.

  The fawning assistant at this draper’s store in Fréjus, male, homosexual naturally, fifty or so with bifocal-lensed glasses, led Lux into an inner sanctum, where suits were suspended in ranks as if on parade.

  ‘I want a middle quality,’ Lux said, and reeled off a few measurements. ‘And I want two identical.’

  ‘Ah, bon!’ the salesman exclaimed, overtly gratified. ‘But monsieur is quite broad of shoulder, our stock of suits in your size is limited ... Is it absolutely essential that they are identical?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  From then on the salesman went to it with a will. In the end he dug up five suits that would fit and which he could supply in duplicate. Lux settled for a charcoal grey with a subtle beige check costing over 3,000 francs apiece. Steep for what would be a single wearing, but what the hell? It wasn’t every day he knocked off a Head of State. The least he could do was dress for the occasion. With a little arm twisting the salesman threw in two identical ties for free.

  He paid in cash.

  * * *

  Just a few streets away but as spiritually remote from the bustling shopping precinct on rue Jean Jaures as is New York’s Bowery from Fifth Avenue, was the fancy dress hire business where, almost one month ago, Lux had booked his gendarme uniform. He went on foot. It had a shop front but only just, barely a door’s width of window.

  The gendarme’s uniform was bagged up and waiting for him. He paid the balance of a week’s hire charge in cash. The male assistant showed surprise at the length of the hire term. Lux offered no explanation, put his anonymous cash receipt in the bag and ten seconds later he was gone.

  * * *

  To Philippe Mazé, that most scrupulous and conscientious of police officers, it was a nightmare scenario: seven day
s from now the President of the Republic could be off on his holidays in the Var, knowing that an assassin was waiting for him and that, notwithstanding the elaborate precautions now pending and shortly to be in place, he could be gunned down or blown up or whatever. Bodyguards galore would surround him. The house and grounds would be swept for interlopers and explosive devices. All the extensive security machinery would be brought into play to preserve and protect France’s ruler. Yet no measures on Earth could wholly eliminate the jeopardy in which the President would be placing himself. Only when the assassin and his employers were caught and put behind bars would he be able to resume his normal routine, with only a squad of bodyguards instead of an army.

  From his north-facing window Mazé could just make out part of the anti-clockwise carriageway of the Périphérique. Traffic was almost stationary, as ever at nine-fifteen on a mid-week morning. It was a windless day and over the city as a whole lay a dirty brown pall of pollution. He didn’t like to dwell on what it did to people’s lungs, breathing in that muck, so he stepped away from the window and hunted for a cigarette.

  He decided to set down on paper an evaluation of the present status, a gathering of his thoughts, and present it as a memo to Le Renard. If nothing else it would clear his fuddled head and shovel some of the shit upwards instead of letting it all heap up on his desk. A smouldering cigarette in the corner of his mouth, he contemplated the mass of files on the groaning shelves, stuffed with records and reports that went back to the late seventies. All that information, all that sweat, and none of it was of the least value in this unique case.

  He considered the protagonists one by one, starting with Barail, Commissaire Divisionnaire in the CRS, number two in the presidential security corps to Le Renard. Professionally speaking, he was finished of course, would end up in a cell on a diet of bread and potatoes. Meanwhile, he surely had more secrets to impart than Lucille had extracted from him. But to haul him in was to blow the plot and maybe they would, maybe they wouldn’t get him to name the top dog. Or bitch. The last thought brought a wry smile to Mazé’s face. He personally still doubted a woman could or would initiate an assassination attempt. There was something un-womanly about it. The moneybag’s wife, the Chink, had been more or less ruled out following Maurice Incardona’s enquiries.

  Stubbing out his cigarette and igniting another, he returned to his appraisal of Barail’s role. Le Renard had been adamant about leaving the Commissaire to go about his business for now. He didn’t want the conspiracy aborted, end of story. Since Barail was no longer a menace, Mazé was not disposed to argue the point. Recommended course of action then? None, as far as Barail was concerned.

  So what about Simonelli. Officially a fugitive but no one had a clue where he was. Lucille had confirmation from Barail that a man he referred to as ‘the Corsican’ was in cahoots with him. On the recordings he didn’t speak of this man as a straight partner, or his confederate, or his equal, rather as someone who had been foisted on him. Her hunch was that this person acted as the intermediary between the principal and Barail, and Mazé tended to agree with her reading. So find Simonelli and just maybe he would lead them directly to the boss. Right then. Recommended course of action: set in train an all-out manhunt for the Corsican.

  The other lead player was the Jackal Mk 2 himself - Hull, or whatever name he was masquerading under. His Menton home was under permanent surveillance but whenever he was away, which was most of the time, he was left to travel freely. Mazé’s reasoning, shared by Le Renard, was that putting a tail on Jackal 2 (or should it be 3?) would be the same as telling him he was rumbled. An even greater danger was that the American would ambush the tail and make him sing. So his comings and goings were allowed to remain a mystery. Would it really make any difference knowing where he was, what he was doing, Mazé had continued to ask himself over the past weeks. His reluctant conclusion was invariably that it would not. It simply offended his professional mores to leave a contract killer loose on the streets of French cities. No, what really mattered was his timetable and his method. The two key questions, still unanswered.

  Mazé thrust spread fingers into his unruly hair and created hirsute havoc. The responsibility of it all didn’t worry him - not much, it didn’t. The fact was, though he kept it well hidden, he was fucking frantic. If anything went wrong it wouldn’t be Le Renard’s head up for the chop; the old bastard wasn’t called Le Renard because he lacked cunning and the survival instinct. Even if the President was blown away, the CG would still be there at the end of it all, sitting in his flash office, immune to the crisis that a successful assassination would unleash upon France.

  So Mazé’s preference would be to pull the Jackal in when next he showed up in Menton. Grill him for every last syllable of information and get rid of the husk. The man was already on record as a killer so why go easy on him? Yet with the Jackal as with Barail, no direct connection with the mastermind of the operation had been established. The Jackal generally reported to Barail. If he couldn’t name names from higher up the tree it would be a pointless, indeed destructive, exercise.

  For all that, Mazé felt on balance that the Jackal should be rendered inactive, prevented from making his attempt on the President’s life. It was the more sure option. Recommended course of action: arrest Hull and question him. Rigorously.

  So be it. His notes completed, Mazé threw down his much-gnawed pen. He would dictate a memo to Le Renard this instant and insist on discussing it with him tomorrow at the latest.

  He picked up his dictaphone, frowned as he composed his thoughts, then clicked the record button.

  ‘After long deliberation,’ he intoned, as always slightly uncomfortable speaking into a machine, ‘on the options open to us I have arrived at certain conclusions …’

  * * *

  A telephone call to Barail confirmed that Leandri’s phoney RG pass was ready. It would be available for collection in the place where Lux collected his documentation, two days hence. The key would be left in an envelope at the Razzmatazz Bar in St Raphael. Ask for Frédéric, who would expect a generous tip in return.

  ‘Our leader wants a final meeting of the Board,’ Barail said, cutting into Lux’s ‘Au revoir.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘To satisfy herself that all is in place according to plan. Simonelli will be present too.’

  Lux wasn’t wild about the idea. ‘Why add to the risks? All of us together, that’s asking for trouble.’

  ‘She insists, and Simonelli is right behind her, naturally. In front of her too.’

  Lux had wondered about the relationship between Rafael Simonelli and the woman he knew as Jill Walker. Barail’s off-the-cuff remark didn’t come completely out of the blue therefore.

  ‘Okay, so we meet. Where and when?’

  ‘Probably Auxerre, next Thursday. Call me tomorrow at the same time.’

  * * *

  In France gunshots are commonplace and one does not prick up one’s ears at the sound. Hunting guns are sold over the counter with few constraints and the killing of game is widespread. If you choose to pump lead at anything that moves or at a caricature of President Chirac, none will say you nay so long as you do so within your territorial boundaries, i.e. in your own backyard. If you wish to extend your bloodletting farther afield you need a Permis de Chasse - a hunter’s licence - for which a kind of examination must be sat, to prove you know when to shoot which species of game. It’s a straightforward enough process and the exam itself, provided you’ve swotted up on the subject, does not require a high IQ. Lux had obtained his permit after moving to Menton, nearly two years previously.

  Because he did not want his neighbours to hear him blasting off with an abbreviated field gun, he drove up into the Massif to put the Barrett through its paces. Unlike many he did not regard forests as suitable screening for clandestine deeds. The concealment it provides works two ways, it allows you to be spied on. His preference was for a bare chunk of land, ideally with some high ground or other emin
ence between it and any nearby highway. Such a piece of real estate is to be found beyond the village of Plan-de-la-Tour, out on the D74, heading west. An overgrown track serves an uninhabited house, burned down by its owner in the summer of 1994 in an insurance scam, so local mythology went. It is about half a kilometre from the road, which is little used, especially early in the season, and anyone on the far side of the house cannot be seen. The landscape thereabouts is of rolling hillside, descending to the coast, and relatively treeless for most of the distance. Ideal for his purpose.

  Just after dawn he parked the hired Safrane behind the burnt-out house. He was wearing shorts, a drill shirt with big button-down pockets and epaulettes, and Nike sneakers that were showing their age but were as comfortable as carpet slippers. On his head a forage cap, also of a certain antiquity, and Polaroid sunglasses.

  Getting out of the car, he perched on one fender and smoked a cigarette, slowly and with relish. When it was finished he stubbed it in the car ashtray. He unloaded the two naked window dummies from the trunk and set them up against the house’s blackened end wall about a metre apart. He fetched a length of yellow chalk from the shallow tray on the car’s dashboard and proceeded to draw a crude round target of about fifteen centimetres diameter on the wall space between the dummies’ heads, adding a single bulls-eye the size of his fist. At eight hundred metres anything smaller, even magnified to the limit of the telescopic sight, would be too small to hit. He tucked a roll of clear plastic sheet down the back of his waistband, shoved one of the two silencers Boghe had supplied in his hip pocket, hooked a headband of ear muffs around his neck, and slung a bag of loose .50 calibre shells over his shoulder. Finally he hoisted the Barrett rifle across his other shoulder and began to walk, away from the house and across the scrubby ground in roughly an easterly direction.