Solo

‘All three,’ he said. ‘My God, what kind of man are you?’

Mikali produced an envelope which he dropped on the table. ‘Fifteen thousand francs as agreed.’ He took the Colt from his pocket. ‘I’ll hang on to this. I prefer to get rid of it myself.’

He turned to the door. Jarrot said, ‘Where are you going?’

‘I have a concert,’ Mikali told him. ‘Or had you forgotten?’ He glanced at his watch. ‘In exactly thirty minutes, so I’ll have to get moving.’

‘Jesus Christ,’ Jarrot said and then added violently, ‘What if something goes wrong? What if they trace you?’

‘You’d better hope they don’t. For your own sake as much as mine. I’ll come back after the concert. Say eleven o’clock. Okay?’

‘Sure,’ Jarrot said wearily. ‘I got no place to go.’

Mikali got into his hire car and drove away. He felt calm and relaxed, no fear at all, but it seemed obvious that Claude Jarrot had very much outlived his usefulness. Plus the fact that his attitude left a great deal to be desired. He was certainly not the man he had been in the old days in Algeria. It was unfortunate, but it seemed painfully apparent that he was going to have to do something about Jarrot. But for the moment, there was the concert.

He reached the opera house with only fifteen minutes in hand, had barely time to change. But he made it and stood watching in the wings, as the conductor went on stage.

He followed him to a storm of applause. There was a full house and he noticed Melos and the Greek Ambassador and his wife in the third row, Melos sitting in the aisle seat.

The Concerto in A Minor was written by Schumann originally as a one-movement fantaisie for piano and orchestra for his wife Clara, herself a concert pianist. Later, he expanded it into a three-movement concerto which the music critic of the London Times once described as a laboured and ambitious work and praised Madame Schumann’s attempts to pass her husband’s rhapsody off as music.

In Mikali’s hands that night it sparkled, came alive in a way that totally electrified the audience. Which was why there was considerable surprise, to say the least, when half-way through the intermezzo, in response to a message brought by a footman, the Greek Ambassador, his wife and the cultural attaché got up and left.

Jarrot watched the news on television. The killing was obviously political, according to the commentator, which was proved by the fact that the assassin had allowed the chauffeur to go free; had referred to the victims as fascists. Probably a member of one of the many disaffected political groups of Greeks living in exile in Paris. In this case, the police had an excellent lead. The man they were seeking was a Cretan – a Cretan peasant. The chauffeur was definite on that. He had recognized the accent.

The pictures of the bodies, particularly in the rear of the Mercedes, were graphic to say the least and made Jarrot remember some of Mikali’s exploits from the old days. And he had said he was coming back after the concert. Why? There could really only be one reason.

He had to get out while there was still time, but to whom could he turn? Certainly not to the police and not to any of his criminal associates. Quite suddenly, in spite of his half-drunken state, he thought of the obvious answer. The one person. Maître Deville, his lawyer. The best criminal lawyer in the business, everyone knew that. He’d saved him from prison twice now. Deville would know what to do.

He wouldn’t be at his office now, of course, but at the apartment where he lived alone since his wife had died of cancer three years previously. Rue de Nanterre, off the Avenue Victor Hugo. Jarrot found the number and dialled it quickly.

There was a slight delay then a voice said, ‘Deville here.’

‘Maître? It’s me, Jarrot. I must see you.’

‘In trouble again, eh, Claude?’ Deville laughed good-humouredly. ‘I’ll see you at the office first thing. Let’s say nine o’clock.’

‘It can’t wait, Maître.’

‘My dear chap, it will have to. I’m going out to dinner.’

‘Maître, have you heard the news tonight? About what happened in the Bois de Meudon.’

‘The assassinations?’ Deville’s voice had changed. ‘Yes.’

‘That’s what I’ve got to see you about.’

‘Are you at the garage?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then I’ll expect you here in fifteen minutes.’

Jean Paul Deville was fifty-five years of age and one of the most successful lawyers practising at the criminal bar in Paris. In spite of this, his relations with the police were excellent. Although he used every trick in the book on behalf of his clients, he was fair and just and scrupulously correct in his dealings. A gentleman in the old-fashioned sense of the word, he had cooperated to the advantage of the Sûreté on more than one occasion which made him a popular figure in that quarter.

His family had all been killed when Stuka dive-bombers had pounded Calais in 1940. Deville himself had not served in the army because of bad eyesight. A clerk in a lawyer’s office, he had been shifted to Eastern Germany and Poland along with thousands of his fellow countrymen as a slave worker.

Like many Frenchmen, caught behind the Iron Curtain at the end of the war, he had not reached France again until 1947. His family in Calais having all died, he had decided to make a new life for himself in Paris, going to the Sorbonne on a special government grant for people like him, and taking a law degree.

Over the years, he had acquired a considerable reputation. He had married his secretary in 1955, but there had been no children. Her health had always been poor and with cancer of the stomach she had taken two painful years to die.

All of which had occasioned nothing but sympathy for him, not only with the police and his own profession, but amongst the criminal fraternity as well.

It was really rather ironic when one considered that this benign and handsome Frenchman was, in reality, Colonel Nikolay Ashimov, a Ukrainian who had not seen his homeland for something like twenty-five years. Probably the single most important Russian Intelligence agent in Western Europe. An agent, not of the KGB, but of its bitter rival, the Intelligence section of the Red Army known as the GRU.

The Russians, even before the end of the war, had spy schools at various places in the Soviet Union, each one with a distinctive national flavour like Glacyna where agents were trained to work in English-speaking countries in a replica of an English town, living exactly as they would in the West.

Ashimov spent two long years preparing in a similar way at Grosnia where the emphasis was on everything French, environment, culture, cooking, and dress being faithfully replicated.

He had a distinct advantage over the others from the first as his mother was French. His progress was rapid and he was finally posted to join a group of French slave workers in Poland in 1946, enduring the hardships of their existence, assuming the role of the Jean Paul Deville who had died of pneumonia in a Siberian coalmine in 1945. And then, in 1947 he had been sent home – home to France.

Deville poured Jarrot another brandy. ‘Go on, drink up, I can see you need it. An amazing story.’

‘I can trust you, Maître, can’t I?’ Jarrot demanded wildly. ‘I mean, if the flics got even a hint of this…’

‘My dear fellow,’ Deville said soothingly, ‘haven’t I told you before? The relationship between a lawyer and his client is like that between priest and penitent. After all, if I’d disclosed what I knew of your OAS connection to the SDECE…’

‘But what do I do?’ Jarrot demanded. ‘If you saw the news on television, you know what he’s capable of.’

‘Fantastic,’ Deville said. ‘I’ve often heard him play, of course. He’s quite brilliant. I remember vaguely reading in some magazine that he’d served in the Legion for a couple of years as a boy.’

Jarrot said, ‘He was never a boy, that one. If I told you some of the things he pulled off out there in Algiers in the old days. Why, at Kasfa, he took two bullets in the lung and still managed to kill four fellagha with a handgun. A handgun, for Christ’s sake.’

Deville poured him another brandy. ‘Tell me more.’

Which Jarrot did. By the time he was finished, he was thoroughly drunk. ‘So what do I do?’

‘Eleven o’clock, I think he said he’d return.’ Deville glanced at his watch. ‘It’s ten now. I’ll get my coat and we’ll go back to the garage. I’d better drive. You’re in no fit state to cross the street on your own.’

‘The garage?’ Jarrot’s speech was slow and heavy. ‘Why the garage?’

‘Because I want to meet him. Reason with him on your behalf.’ He slapped Jarrot on the shoulder. ‘Trust me, Claude, to help you. After all, that is the reason you came to see me, isn’t it?’

He went into his bedroom, pulled on a dark overcoat and took down the black Homburg hat he always wore. He opened the drawer in his bedside bureau and took out an automatic pistol. He was, after all, going to confront a man who, if everything he had heard tonight was true, was a psychopathic killer of the first order.

He weighed the pistol in his hand, then taking, on hunch alone, the biggest chance of his life, he put it back in the drawer. He returned to the other room where he found Jarrot at the brandy again.

‘Right, Claude,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Let’s go.’