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A day was spent in the precincts of Notre Dame Cathedral. Here amid the rabbit warren of the Ile de la City were back stairways, alleys and passageways, but the distance from the entrance to the cathedral to the parked cars at the foot of the steps was only a few metres, and the roof-taps of the Place du Parvis were too far away, while those of the tiny abutting Square Charlemagne were too close and easy for security forces to infest with watchers.
His last visit was to the square at the southern end of the Rue de Re
There was something about this square, with the crouching bulk of the Gare Montparnasse on its southern side, full of memories for the Parisians of the war generation, that caused the assassin to stop. Slowly he surveyed the expanse of tarmac, crisscrossed now by a maelstrom of traffic pounding down the Boulevard de Montparnasse and joined by other streams from the Rue d'Odessa and the Rue de Re
The Jackal turned with his back to the railings and looked down the traffic artery of the Rue de Re
The Jackal took in the landscape facing him with a practised eye. Both corner houses on the Rue de Re
Here he sat on the terrace a few feet from the roaring traffic, ordered a coffee, and stared at the houses across the street. He stayed for three hours. Later he lunched at the Hand Brasserie Alsacie
He moved on eventually to the houses that fronted the Boulevard de Montparnasse itself, but here the buildings were offices, newer and more briskly busy.
The next day he was back again, sauntering past the facades, wing the road to sit on a pavement bench under the trees and spying with a newspaper while he studied the upper floors. Five or six floors of stone facade, topped by a parapet, then the steeply sloping black-tiled roofs containing the attics, pierced by mansarde windows, once the quarters of the servants, now the homes of the poorer pensio
But the further back one sat inside the room, the narrower would be the angle of fire sideways down into the forecourt of the station. For this reason the Jackal ruled out the third house into the Rue de Re
The next day he noticed the concierge. It was his third day sitting either at a cafe terrace or on a pavement bench, and he had chosen a bench a few feet from the doorways of the two blocks of flats that still interested him. Within a few feet, behind him and separated by the pavement down which pedestrians scurried endlessly, the concierge sat in her doorway and knitted. Once, from a nearby cafe, a waiter strolled over for a chat. He called the concierge Madame Berthe. It was a pleasant scene. The day was warm, the sun bright, reaching several feet into the dark doorway while it was still in the south-east and south, high in the sky over the station roof across the square.
She was a comfortable grandmotherly soul, and from the way she chirped 'Bonjour, monsieur' to the people who occasionally entered or lift her block, and from the cheerful «Bonjour, Madame Berthe' that she received each time in return, the watcher on the bench twenty feet away judged that she was well liked. A good-natured body, and with compassion for the unfortunate of this world. For shortly after two in the afternoon a cat presented itself and within a few minutes, after diving into the dark recesses of her loge at the rear of the ground floor, Madame Berthe was back with a saucer of milk for the creature she referred to as her little Minet.
Shortly before four she bundled up her knitting, put it into one of the capacious pockets of her pinafore and shuffled on slippered feet down the road to the bakery. The jackal rose quietly from his bench and entered the apartment block. He chose the stairs rather than the lift and ran silently upwards.