‘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 next 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 Amélie Lebel, and two children, a plain girl with steel-rimmed 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 énorme 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 le Patron or le 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 L
ebel, ‘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 facilities, get straight on to the department chief and quote my name. Fortunately this office now gets top priority from every other ancillary service—by order. Prepare a circular memorandum, copy to every department chief who attended this evening’s meeting, ready for my signature, announcing that you are now my sole assistant and empowered to require from them anything that I would ask them for personally if I were not engaged. Got it?’
Caron finished writing and looked up.
‘Got it, chief. I can do that throughout the night. Which is the top priority?’
‘The telephone switchboard. I want a good man on that, the best they’ve got. Get on to Chief of Admin at his home, and again quote Bouvier for authority.’
‘Right. What do we want from them first?’
‘I want, as soon as they can get it, a direct link personally to the head of the Homicide Division of the criminal police of seven countries. Fortunately, I know most of them personally from past meetings of Interpol. In some cases I know the Deputy Chief. If you can’t get one, get the other.
‘The countries are: United States, that means the Office of Domestic Intelligence in Washington. Britain, Assistant Commissioner (Crime) Scotland Yard. Belgium. Holland. Italy. West Germany. South Africa. Get them at home or in the office.
‘When you get each of them one by one, arrange a series of telephone calls from Interpol Communications Room between me and them between seven and ten in the morning at twenty-minute intervals. Get on to Interpol Communications and book the calls as each Homicide chief at the other end agrees to be in his own communications room at the appointed time. The calls should be person-to-person on the UHF frequency and there is to be no listening in. Impress on each of them that what I have to say is for their ears only and of top priority not only for France but possibly for their own country. Prepare me a list by six in the morning of the schedule of the seven calls that have been booked, in order of sequence.
‘In the meantime, I am going down to Homicide to see if a foreign killer has ever been suspected of operating in France and not been picked up. I confess, nothing in that line comes to mind, and in any case I suspect Rodin would have been more careful on his selection than that. Now, do you know what to do?’
Caron, looking slightly dazed, glanced up from his several pages of scribbled notes.
‘Yes, chief, I’ve got it. Bon, I’d better get to work.’ He reached out for the telephone.