Solo - Jack Higgins [16]
'Maitre, 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 Surete 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, Maitre, 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