by Robb, Graham
With de Gaulle’s retirement from politics in 1946, his own career had taken off. He already had the velvety charm that later earned him the nickname ‘the Fox’. The devious road-map of his past, which had taken him from xenophobic nationalism to almost simultaneous distinction in the Vichy regime and the Résistance, and then to that broad domain of opportunity called the centre-left, now looked almost like a bold itinerary based on long-held convictions. He had been the youngest Minister of the Interior in French history. Recently, he had served as Minister of Justice, which had enabled him to amass a considerable treasure of experience, friends, contacts and compromising dossiers on all sorts of people, though not, as it happened, on Robert Pesquet. But then Pesquet was able to compromise himself without anyone’s assistance.
Pesquet, too, had lost his seat in the recent elections, when de Gaulle had returned triumphantly to power. Yet while Mitterrand himself had been salvaged by the centre-left and given a seat in the Senate, Pesquet was still in the political wilderness. He was thought to have links with the secret paramilitary units that waged a war of terror on the ‘traitors’ who wanted to abandon Algeria to the Arabs. In fact, Pesquet was simply a victim of his political philosophy: ‘Keep your eyes on the bottom of the leading sheep’, he liked to say, ‘and look neither left nor right.’ Evidently, he had chosen the wrong sheep. His so-called friends on the right had hardly leapt to his defence when he was accused of planting the bomb that was found in the toilets of the Assemblée Nationale. And Pesquet’s clownish retort had scarcely served his cause: ‘Why the hell would I have tried to blow the bogs up when it’s the only useful place in the whole building?’
He peered out at the street, distinguishing the dark figures outside from the reflections that flitted across the screens and mirrors. From a certain angle, a man who seemed to be heading for the Place Saint-Germain-des-Prés would suddenly vanish into himself and set off in the opposite direction. Sitting in the window of the Lipp, one could inspect a passing woman from the front and then, without turning one’s head, complete the assessment from the rear. Robert Pesquet materialized from neither direction. He looked up at the wall above the telephone and the humidor. The clock, for once in agreement with its reflections, said midnight. He waited another twenty or thirty minutes, then walked out into the street, feeling the car keys in his pocket.
The October nights had turned chilly. He climbed smartly into the driving seat, turned the key and started the engine at the first attempt.
The Peugeot 403 had been the result of a careful selection process, like a stylish outfit that appeared to owe its elegance to chance. It was the perfect car for a prominent centre-left, anti-Gaullist politician with a foot placed quite firmly in the socialist camp. With its (purely hypothetical) top speed of 128 kph and its neat but almost dowdy corporation, it exuded robustness and reliability; yet it also had a certain modestly aspirational quality. The leather trim, the cigarette lighter and the fog lamps, which came as standard, looked to a future of international travel and freedom from material cares. The gear lever was mounted on the steering column, which provided an extra seat up front. Despite the folding armrests and the reclining front seats, the 403 seemed more likely to be used for holidays with a medium-sized family than for escapades with a mistress.
He drove across the square, heading east, then signalled right to turn into the Rue de Seine.
At that moment, according to what was, for a time, the only available account, a small dark car took the same corner rather too tightly and almost wedged him up against the kerb. There was nothing unusual in this, but, as he told reporters shortly afterwards, it made him ‘vigilant’. These were, after all, troubled times. He was hardly the most faithful advocate of decolonization–as Minister of Justice, he had called for Algerian liberation movements to be crushed by military might–but as the would-be champion of whatever an anti-Gaullist party would have to represent, he was more or less obliged to be in favour of withdrawal, and there were many in France who were murderously opposed to any politician who even hinted at Algerian independence. Only three days before, Paris-Presse had reported that a pro-French-Algeria hit squad had crossed the Spanish border and was operating somewhere in France.
He accelerated gently along the Rue de Seine, which turns into the Rue de Tournon. Up ahead, he could see the dome of the Senate. A right turn would take him to the corner of the Rue Guynemer, where he lived. But when he glanced in the rear-view mirror, the other car was still there, and so, instead of heading for home, he turned left, as he later explained, ‘in order to give myself time to think’. The Boulevard Saint-Michel lay ahead; the railings of the Luxembourg were to his right, the silent bookshops of the Rue de Médicis to his left.
By his own account, the following sequence of events, from start to finish, must have taken little more than two minutes. On the Square Médicis, the dark car surged alongside and tried to run him off the road. There was no longer any doubt in his mind. He jammed the accelerator to the floor; the 403 responded almost instantly and shot along the boulevard. In the rear-view mirror, he saw the other car fall behind. At the first turn–the dimly lit Rue Auguste-Comte, which runs between the Luxembourg and the Observatoire–he flung the car to the right, pulled over to the left and opened the door. He vaulted the metal railings, took four or five strides across the grass and flattened himself on the ground.
As he lay face down on the damp grass, he heard the sound of skidding tyres and a rattle of shots from an automatic weapon. It would have been an ironic end for a man who had escaped six times from prisoner-of-war camps to be gunned down in a Paris park. In 1940, when he had been wounded near Stenay on the Meuse, the stretcher party had had to leave him in the open, exposed to the strafing of a German fighter plane. Perhaps it was that experience that gave him the sangfroid to stand up, run across the lawn and jump over the hedge that borders the Avenue de l’Observatoire. He squeezed himself into the corner of the entrance of no. 5, and rang the bell. As he did so, he heard the assassins’ car roar off into the night.
By now, the whole quartier was awake. The police were on the scene in no time at all, closely followed by journalists. Television cameras were set up and flash-bulbs blazed. The seriousness of the incident was plain to see: seven bullet holes in the front and rear doors of the 403. The senator showed exemplary calm but was obviously shaken.
It was now just after one o’clock. After taking down the details–the chase along the boulevard, a small car containing two, maybe three armed men–the reporters dashed to all-night bars to telephone their news-rooms or raced back across the river to offices in the second arrondissement. They were just in time for the night editors to insert brief reports: ‘Senator In Foiled Assassination Attempt’. Next day (Saturday, 17 October), it was front-page news in all the papers. For once, the political news was as thrilling as a crime novel, and the sub-editors had an easy job:
DEATH CHASE IN THE OBSERVATORY GARDENS!
TWO HEADLIGHTS IN THE NIGHT…IT WAS THE KILLERS!
There were maps and diagrams, with dotted lines and arrows showing exactly where the senator had jumped the hedge on the Avenue de l’Observatoire and where he had been standing when the killers drove away. There were photographs of the bullet holes in the bodywork, and of the garden railings, which appeared to be about four feet high. (The senator was obviously a man who had kept himself in trim.)
Fully aware of the danger, as he continued to drive along, M. François Mitterrand was devising a plan that would give his pursuers the slip…He was able to survive the premeditated assassination attempt thanks to his extraordinary calm under fire, his presence of mind and his encyclopedic knowledge of the Latin Quarter.
The shooting in the Jardins de l’Observatoire rang alarm bells all over France. New security measures were introduced. French-Algeria sympathizers were visited by the police and had their apartments searched. Border controls were tightened. Moderate left-wing politicians and commentators warned of a possible fascist
coup d’état and demanded swift and effective reprisals. The Republic was in danger. The crackdown was so sudden and severe that some right-wing politicians claimed that it was all a cunning attempt to justify political repression and to discredit the patriotic cause of French Algeria.
Senator Mitterrand himself showed admirable restraint. Even at the height of his parliamentary career, he had never been so much in demand. He was besieged by news photographers and pestered for interviews. However, in statements to the press, he confined himself to a few careful words: ‘Since feelings are running high at the moment, I do not want to say anything that might inflame the situation, though simple logic would suggest that the explanation for this attack lies in the climate of political passion that has been created by extremist groups.’
For a man who had been sliding down the greasy pole, it was an extraordinary turn of events. From one day to the next, he became the leading champion of the fight against right-wing terrorism. Messages of sympathy and support reached him from all over France. An assassination attempt was scarcely something to celebrate, but a good politician knows how to profit from adversity. François Mitterrand was back where he belonged. De Gaulle would no longer be able to ignore him, and the socialists who had shunned him because of his dubious past would welcome him as a battle-hardened hero in the long struggle against the Gaullists.
3. CLOT
AT THAT TIME, there was, realistically, only one man who could be entrusted with the delicate and potentially dangerous job of tracking down the terrorists. Only one man commanded the respect of politicians, criminals and the media, and had sufficient public prestige to ensure that the investigation would be seen as exhaustive and fair.
Commissioner Georges Clot, head of the Brigade Criminelle, was an affable and modest man, who found his own dazzling reputation something of an embarrassment. He had been featured in so many crime magazines, under titles such as ‘Commissioner Clot Against Dédé la Gabardine’, that some people believed him to be a fictional character. A year before the attempted assassination of Senator Mitterrand, Clot had appeared on a television programme devoted to Simenon, the creator of Maigret, and had tried to explain exactly how the adventures of Inspector Maigret differed from the unexciting drudgery of real detective work. But since Clot himself was one of the models for Maigret, he had failed, despite the convincingly dreary setting of metal file cabinets and plastic chairs, to dampen the romance.
It was precisely because Clot had known the allure of criminal investigation that he was such an effective policeman. He came from a large family in the heart of the remote Aveyron. His father, a village postman, had destined Georges for the teaching profession, but one day, a cousin had arrived from Paris with a friend who worked for the Sûreté. Young Clot had listened to the man’s tales of impenetrable enigmas and brilliant, retrospectively obvious solutions, and discovered his true vocation.
A long time passed before he was able to get his teeth into a genuine mystery. It was four or five years before the Second World War. He was a junior detective in the Grandes-Carrières precinct in the north of Paris when the sort of case he had always dreamt of finally landed on his desk. A concierge in the Rue de Damrémont had reported the mysterious death of an old Russian officer. The body was lying on the bed, dressed in the uniform of a hussar. When his dolman was unbuttoned, the man was found to have died from a deep stab-wound. A blood-smeared sabre, which matched the wound, had been hidden in a cupboard. Strangely, there was no damage to the dolman. Its gold braid was intact and nothing had pierced the cloth.
That night, Clot examined the puzzle with mounting excitement. A shadowy tale began to form in his mind: a murder disguised as a natural death; a murderer who simultaneously covered his tracks and left incriminating evidence. Perhaps the murder in the Rue de Damrémont was the obscure dénouement of a drama that had its roots in the darkest days of Czarist Russia…
Next morning, a letter arrived at the police station. It had been written and posted the day before by the dead man. Having decided to kill himself, he had administered the fatal blow and used the last seconds of his waning life to replace the sabre in the cupboard and to button up the splendid uniform in which he wished to be buried. For Clot, this was a huge disappointment but a salutary lesson: nine times out of ten, ingenious reasoning was a complete waste of time.
Then came the war, which saw Clot digging a tunnel for six months in a Moravian prisoner-of-war camp only to be caught a few yards before the end. He was repatriated, and spent the rest of the war as a policeman in Paris, pretending to root out members of the Résistance but in fact supplying them with false passports. After the war, he accepted the nightmarish task of arresting and interviewing policemen who had collaborated too closely with the Nazis, and showed an admirable determination to distinguish force of circumstance from malice.
Since then, Clot had run the Brigade Criminelle too efficiently for any Sherlock-Holmesian excitement. He was happily married to his job and immune to the allure of mystery. He did however allow himself an occasional furtive expedition to Montmartre and the Marché aux Puces. By posing as an art-collector, he uncovered hundreds of forged paintings–mostly Picassos and Utrillos. When the canvasses began to clutter up the corridors, he hung them on his walls and lent them to his colleagues. After five years of undercover bargain-hunting, the offices on the Quai des Orfèvres housed the world’s largest collection of bogus masterpieces. No doubt, among those objects of beauty and desire lurked some genuine, priceless originals that should have been sent across the river to the Louvre. But since experts and even the painters themselves could not always tell the difference, there was little sense in troubling the art world with futile mysteries.
WHEN NEWS OF the shooting in the Jardins de l’Observatoire reached him that night in October 1959, Georges Clot felt the old stirrings of detective fever. Not only was this a matter of national importance, it also promised to be a satisfyingly tricky hunt for professional killers who must have covered their tracks in interesting ways. The police car raced along the boulevard and stopped where some people were listening to a man in a dark overcoat. The man was pale and trembling but evidently able to keep an audience hanging on his every word.
Commissioner Clot greeted his former boss (he had known the senator as Minister of Justice), and took his statement. The details supplied by Mitterrand were understandably sketchy, but there were peculiarities about the case that–experience told him–would soon resolve themselves into definite leads. In fact (perhaps it was the late hour or the eminence of the victim), it had the slightly skewed, dreamlike quality of the most seductively enigmatic cases. Even before he had sent his best men to interview the waiters at the Lipp and the inhabitants of the quartier, a thousand questions were taunting his mind with tantalizing ambiguities.
For instance, it was well known that French-Algeria activists planned their operations with military precision, for the excellent reason that most of them were high-ranking officers in the French army. Why, then, had they–or their hired assassins–used a vehicle that was unable to keep up with a 403, which was hardly a gazelle among motor cars? Assuming the information to be correct, the whole thing had taken an inordinate amount of time: at least ten minutes to drive 1.6 kilometres. It would have been the slowest car chase in history. Perhaps the senator had lingered in the vicinity of the Lipp, or perhaps the assassins had waited–but why?–before riddling the 403 with bullets.
Discrepancies like these were often explained as the investigation proceeded. Even a man with Mitterrand’s self-possession was likely to misremember things that immediately preceded such a shocking event. Apart from his vagueness about the time, it was impossible not to be struck by the fact that he had mentioned a Square Médicis, which, strictly speaking, did not exist, at least not under that name. Insignificant details, no doubt, but details that established the possible unreliability of the victim’s own testimony.
The forensic team raised a new set of questions. They festo
oned the senator’s car with metal rods that made it look like a wounded boar–one rod for each bullet hole. There were seven in all, poking out of the front and rear doors of the passenger side in a neat arc. One thing was immediately obvious: all the rods were at right angles to the doors, which meant that, when the shots were fired, the assassins’ car had not been moving.
He was, in short, dealing with professional killers who had had the self-assurance to stop their car and shoot a man whom they presumed to be lying flat across the front seats or cowering on the floor. One of the bullets had in fact punctured the driver’s seat. But these were also professional killers who had failed, twice, to run their target off the road and then almost lost him on the Boulevard Saint-Michel. And if they were such confident and cold-blooded killers, why had they not taken the obvious precaution of peering into the car and then looking to see whether their target was lying on the ground a few yards away or–stupidly, it had to be said–standing up, running across the grass and jumping over a hedge?
Then there was the matter of the seven bullet holes. According to the forensic team, the killers had used a Sten gun, probably left over from the war. Four years of Nazi occupation had filled the cellars and tool sheds of France with illicit weapons and produced a generation of men who considered illegal activity an expression of personal freedom. It was an odd choice of weapon all the same: Sten guns were notoriously unreliable. But even a Sten could fire thirty rounds in three seconds. Why, then, had only seven shots been fired? (There was no sign that any bullets had missed the car.) Was this the work of some previously unknown and under-rehearsed group of poorly funded terrorists? Was it intended simply as a warning? (But there were easier and safer ways to intimidate a politician.) Or was it–Clot dreaded to think–a covert operation carried out by French intelligence agents with the aim of influencing public opinion?