Ten minutes later the message was in Paris, and ten minutes after that it was being listened to in Marseilles.
The Alitalia Viscount swung out over the bay of impossibly blue water and turned on to final approach for Marignane Airport. The pretty Roman air hostess finished her smiling walk down the gangway, checking that all seat belts were fastened and sat down in her own corner seat at the back to fasten her own belt. She noticed the passenger in the seat ahead of her was staring fixedly out of the window at the glaring off-white desolation of the Rhone Delta as if he had never seen it before.
He was the big lumbering man who spoke no Italian, and whose French was heavily accented from some motherland in Eastern Europe. He wore a black beret over his cropped black hair, a dark and rumpled suit and a pair of dark glasses which he never took off. An enormous piece of sticking plaster obscured one half of his face; he must have cut himself jolly badly, she thought.
They touched down precisely on time, quite close to the terminal building, and the passengers walked
across to the Customs hall. As they filed through the glass doors a small balding man standing beside one of the passport police kicked him lightly against the ankle.
‘Big fellow, black beret, sticking plaster.’ Then he strolled quietly away and gave the other the same message. The passengers divided themselves into two lines to pass through the guichets. Behind their grilles the two policemen sat facing each other, ten feet apart, with the passengers filing between them. Each passenger presented his passport and disembarkation card. The officers were of the Security Police, the DST, responsible for all internal state security inside France, and for checking incoming aliens and returning Frenchmen.
When Kowalski presented himself the blue-jacketed figure behind the grille barely gave him a glance. He banged his stamp down on the yellow disembarkation card, gave the proffered identity card a short glance, nodded and waved the big man on. Relieved, Kowalski walked on towards the Customs benches. Several of the Customs officers had just listened quietly to the small balding man before he disappeared into a glass-fronted office behind them. The senior Customs officer called to Kowalski.
‘Monsieur, votre baggage.’
He gestured to where the rest of the passengers were waiting by the mechanical conveyor belt for their suitcases to appear from the wire-frame barrow parked in the sunshine outside. Kowalski lumbered over to the Customs officer.
‘J’ai pas de baggage,’ he said.
The Customs officer raised his eyebrows.
‘Pas de baggages? Eh bien, avez vous quelque chose à declarer?’
‘Non, rien,’ said Kowalski.
The Customs man smiled amiably, almost as broadly as his sing-song Marseilles accent.
‘Eh bien, passez, monsieur.’ He gestured towards the exit into the taxi rank. Kowalski nodded and went out into the sunshine. Not being accustomed to spending freely, he looked up and down until he caught sight of the airport bus, and climbed into it.
As he disappeared from sight several of the other Customs men gathered round the senior staffer.
‘Wonder what they want him for,’ said one.
‘He looked a surly bugger.’
‘He won’t be when those bastards have finished with him,’ said a third jerking his head towards the offices at the back.
‘Come on, back to work,’ chipped in the older one. ‘We’ve done our bit for France today.’
‘For Big Charlie you mean,’ replied the first as they split up, and muttered under his breath, ‘God rot him.’
It was the lunch-hour when the bus stopped finally at the Air France offices in the heart of the city and it was even hotter than in Rome. August in Marseilles has several qualities, but the inspiration to great exertions is not one of them. The heat lay on the city like an illness, crawling into every fibre, sapping strength, energy, the will to do anything but lie in a cool room with the jalousies closed and the fan full on.
Even the Cannebière, usually the bustling bursting jugular vein of Marseilles, after dark a river of light and animation, was dead. The few people and cars on it seemed to be moving through waist-deep treacle. It took half an hour to find a taxi; most of the drivers had found a shady spot in a park to have their siesta.
The address JoJo had given Kowalski was on the main road out of town heading towards Cassis. At the Avenue de la Libération he told the driver to drop him, so that he could walk the rest. The driver’s ‘si vous voulez’ indicated plainer than text what he thought of foreigners who considered covering distances of over a few yards in this heat when they had a car at their disposal.
Kowalski watched the taxi turn back into town until it was out of sight. He found the side street named on the piece of paper by asking a waiter at a terrace café on the sidewalk. The block of flats looked fairly new, and Kowalski thought the JoJos must have made a good thing of their station food trolley. Perhaps they had got the fixed kiosk that Madame JoJo had had her eye on for so many years. That at any rate would account for the increase in their prosperity. And it would be nicer for Sylvie to grow up in this neighbourhood than round the docks. At the thought of his daughter, and the idiotic thing he had just imagined for her, Kowalski stopped at the foot of the steps to the apartment block. What had JoJo said on the phone. A week? Perhaps a fortnight? It was not possible.
He took the steps at a run, and paused in front of the double row of letter-boxes along one side of the hall. ‘Grzybowski’ read one. ‘Flat 23.’ He decided to take the stairs since it was only on the second floor.
Flat 23 had a door like the others. It had a bell push with a little white card in a slot beside it, with the word Grzybowski typed on it. The door stood at the end of the corridor, flanked by the doors of flats 22 and 24. He pressed the bell. The door in front of him opened and the lunging pickaxe handle swung out of the gap and down towards his forehead.
The blow split the skin but bounced off the bone with a dull ‘thunk’. One each side of the Pole the doors of flats 22 and 24 opened inwards and men surged out. It all happened in less than half a second. In the same time Kowalski went berserk. Although slow-thinking in most ways, the Pole knew one technique perfectly, that of fighting.
In the narrow confines of the corridor his size and strength were useless to him. Because of his height the pickaxe handle had not reached the full momentum of its downward swing before hitting his head. Through the blood spurting over his eyes he discerned there were two men in the door in front of him and two others on each side. He needed room to move, so he charged forward into flat 23.
The man directly in front of him staggered back under the impact; those behind closed in, hands reaching for his collar and jacket. Inside the room he drew the Colt from under his armpit, turned once and fired back into the doorway. As he did so another stave slammed down on his wrist, jerking the aim downwards.