Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris (41 page)

Commissioner Clot greeted his former boss (he had known the senator as Minister of Justice), and took his statement. The details supplied by Mitterrand were understandably sketchy, but there were peculiarities about the case that–experience told him–would soon resolve themselves into definite leads. In fact (perhaps it was the late hour or the eminence of the victim), it had the slightly skewed, dreamlike quality of the most seductively enigmatic cases. Even before he had sent his best men to interview the waiters at the Lipp and the inhabitants of the
quartier
, a thousand questions were taunting his mind with tantalizing ambiguities.

For instance, it was well known that French-Algeria activists planned their operations with military precision, for the excellent reason that most of them were high-ranking officers in the French army. Why, then, had they–or their hired assassins–used a vehicle that was unable to keep up with a 403, which was hardly a gazelle among motor cars? Assuming the information to be correct, the whole thing had taken an inordinate amount of time: at least ten minutes to drive 1.6 kilometres. It would have been the slowest car chase in history. Perhaps the senator had lingered in the vicinity of the Lipp, or perhaps the assassins had waited–but why?–before riddling the 403 with bullets.

Discrepancies like these were often explained as the investigation proceeded. Even a man with Mitterrand’s self-possession was likely to misremember things that immediately preceded such a shocking event. Apart from his vagueness about the time, it was impossible not to be struck by the fact that he had mentioned a Square Médicis, which, strictly speaking, did not exist, at least not under that name. Insignificant details, no doubt, but details that established the possible unreliability of the victim’s own testimony.

The forensic team raised a new set of questions. They festooned the senator’s car with metal rods that made it look like a wounded boar–one rod for each bullet hole. There were seven in all, poking out of the front and rear doors of the passenger side in a neat arc. One thing was immediately obvious: all the rods were at right angles to the doors, which meant that, when the shots were fired, the assassins’ car had not been moving.

He was, in short, dealing with professional killers who had had the self-assurance to stop their car and shoot a man whom they presumed to be lying flat across the front seats or cowering on the floor. One of the bullets had in fact punctured the driver’s seat. But these were also professional killers who had failed, twice, to run their target off the road and then almost lost him on the Boulevard Saint-Michel. And if they were such confident and cold-blooded killers, why had they not taken the obvious precaution of peering into the car and then looking to see whether their target was lying on the ground a few yards away or–stupidly, it had to be said–standing up, running across the grass and jumping over a hedge?

Then there was the matter of the seven bullet holes. According to the forensic team, the killers had used a Sten gun, probably left over from the war. Four years of Nazi occupation had filled the cellars and tool sheds of France with illicit weapons and produced a generation of men who considered illegal activity an expression of personal freedom. It was an odd choice of weapon all the same: Sten guns were notoriously unreliable. But even a Sten could fire thirty rounds in three seconds. Why, then, had only seven shots been fired? (There was no sign that any bullets had missed the car.) Was this the work of some previously unknown and under-rehearsed group of poorly funded terrorists? Was it intended simply as a warning? (But there were easier and safer ways to intimidate a politician.) Or was it–Clot dreaded to think–a covert operation carried out by French intelligence agents with the aim of influencing public opinion?

All in all, it was a captivating case. Phone taps and searches of suspects’ homes turned up nothing; the hit squad from Spain gave no sign of life; there were witnesses who had heard the shooting, but no one had actually seen it happen. And yet, as the days passed, Clot felt a strange reluctance to pursue the investigation. It looked increasingly like the sort of case that would be solved by the sudden appearance of a piece of evidence that no amount of ingenuity could have produced. The more he saw of it, the less enticing it became. It is entirely to Georges Clot’s credit as a policeman that the anticipated joy of discovery had already begun to fade when, on 22 October, he stuffed the files into his metal cabinet and slammed the drawer shut with a bang that had the fake Picassos and Utrillos dancing on their hooks.

4. POSTE RESTANTE

T
HE
M
ÉDICIS POST OFFICE
stands opposite the Senate on the Rue de Vaugirard, at a point where the wind always seems to be blowing up a storm, probably because of the inordinate length of the street (the Rue de Vaugirard is the longest in Paris), which funnels the south-westerlies into the heart of the Left Bank.

Just after lunch, the ladies who sat behind the counters saw the doors swing open and a posse of men burst into the building as though blown in by a gust of wind. One was a lawyer, dressed in his robes; another–who seemed to be the focus of attention–looked too silly and fidgety to be genuinely important. This, and the presence of several cameramen, convinced some of the
postières
that a film was being made, and they reached for their combs and powder compacts.

Few would have suspected that the weaselly little man in the disreputable-looking raincoat had ever sat on the benches of the Assemblée Nationale. On the other hand, the smirk on his face and his curiously flinching gait made it easy to imagine him creeping into the parliamentary toilets with a bomb. He stubbed out his cigarette, walked up to the counter labelled ‘
Poste restante
’, and asked for any mail addressed to M. Robert Pesquet. An envelope was produced, which he left lying on the counter. Then he turned around and said, like a bad actor, ‘Maître Dreyer-Durfer, kindly take this letter, which I have not touched, place it in your briefcase and deposit it in a safe for the examining magistrate.’

The lawyer slid the letter off the counter, held it up between thumb and forefinger, and addressed the post office at large: ‘I am taking this letter, M. Pesquet, untouched by yourself, which I shall place in a safe, as you have just requested, in which it shall remain at the disposal of the examining magistrate.’ Then, turning to the flustered clerk, he said, in the same stentorian voice, ‘I, Maître Dreyer-Durfer, request that you make a note of all that has just occurred.’

‘Yes, sir,’ stammered the woman, ‘Do you want me to make a note of the words, too?’

A look of inexhaustible patience appeared on the lawyer’s face. ‘The words above all, my good lady, if you please.’

With that, Maître Dreyer-Durfer led the way out of the post office, followed by his smirking client, who quickly lit another cigarette in the lee of his black robe.

R
OBERT
P
ESQUET
, former carpenter, former
député
, stool-pigeon of the far right and member of several thuggish ‘patriot’ groups, had single-handedly solved the mystery of the assassination attempt. Two days before, a group of journalists had heard him make his astonishing claim in his lawyer’s chambers in the Rue de la Pompe. Naturally, Senator Mitterrand had denied everything. But now, Pesquet had played his trump card: a letter written and posted to himself forty-eight hours before the events.

The letter was read out to the lawyers and their two clients in the chambers of Judge Braunschweig at the Palais de Justice. ‘
I shall describe in exact detail the bogus assassination attempt of the Jardins de l’Observatoire that will take place on the night of 15–16 October according to the plan devised by M. Mitterrand…
’

According to Pesquet’s letter, Mitterrand had come to him with a scheme that would save them both from political obscurity. The letter went on to describe everything, in the future tense, exactly as it had occurred, from the Brasserie Lipp to the Jardins de l’Observatoire. Pesquet had followed in his Simca with a dim but playful peasant who worked on his estate at Beuvron-en-Auge. The Sten gun had been borrowed from a friend. The only changes Pesquet had to point out to the judge concerned the few minutes during which Mitterrand had been lying on the wet grass, waiting to be assassinated. First, two lovers had been kissing under the trees; then a taxi had dropped off a fare. After driving around the block several times, the Simca had stopped alongside the 403, and Pesquet had heard a voice coming from the darkness: ‘Shoot, for God’s sake! What the hell are you doing?’ Everything else had gone according to plan: the Sten gun sputtered and banged; Pesquet drove on to the Boulevard du Montparnasse, parked the car and returned on foot in time to admire Mitterrand’s suave performance in front of the cameras.

The judge laid down the letter and looked up to see the unusual spectacle of half a dozen speechless lawyers. For the first and only time, François Mitterrand appeared to lose his self-control. He turned pale and made a sound that might have been a sob. He could hear the cackling of his enemies and the hysterical laughter of twenty-six million voters. His career was in ruins. Whether or not Pesquet was telling the truth, this was the kind of humiliation from which no politician ever recovered.

Even in this, his darkest hour, ‘the Fox’ remembered the lessons he had learned in the war. A man who had escaped six times from prisoner-of-war camps was not so easily defeated. It was unfortunate, of course, that Pesquet had accused him of faking the assassination attempt before revealing the letter, and that Mitterrand had accused Pesquet of slander. It was also unfortunate that he had allowed himself to bask in all the praise and sympathy. After Pesquet’s
poste restante
trick, he could hardly claim to be entirely innocent. And yet, there was one possible explanation that just might be accepted as the truth…

This was the version of events that Mitterrand gave to Judge Braunschweig and the nation. He confessed that he had indeed met Pesquet once or twice before the shooting. Pesquet had come to him with a terrible tale: his old French-Algeria friends, to whom he owed a great deal of money, had ordered him to assassinate Mitterrand. If Pesquet refused, he would certainly be killed, and so he had begged Mitterrand to help him out. A faked assassination attempt would let Pesquet off the hook and make it less likely that anyone else would try to kill Mitterrand. In a spirit of Christian charity, Mitterrand had agreed to play along. Their last meeting was to have taken place at the Brasserie Lipp. Though Pesquet had not shown up, the rest of the operation had gone as planned. It was only when Pesquet had accused him publicly of organizing the whole charade that Mitterrand realized what had happened: he was the victim of a right-wing plot to destroy his political career.

Though not entirely convincing, this would at least present him in a slightly better light. The newspapers were unimpressed. No one expected politicians to obey the law, but they were supposed to retain a certain dignity and savoir-faire. One of the least insulting headlines appeared in
L’Aurore
: ‘To think that this booby used to be Minister of the Interior!’

J
UDGE
B
RAUNSCHWEIG
made the best of a bad job. Somehow, the guilty had to be punished, but without causing further damage to the international standing of the French Republic. The world must know that Paris was not Shanghai or Casablanca. Pesquet and his sidekick were charged with possession of an illegal weapon, while Mitterrand, having wasted the time of Commissioner Clot with a pointless investigation, was charged with contempt of court. These were comparatively minor charges, which would probably be dropped in any case.

Surprisingly, the Senate voted to strip Mitterrand of his senatorial immunity, but by then the case had entered the boundless, foggy realm of judicial procedure whose decaying files are occasionally washed away by a tide of indifference and secret negotiations. Biographers and historians who have gone in search of the unrecognizable fragments of truth have seen various oily personalities emerge from the mist: Prime Minister Debré, who had been accused of ordering an illegal execution in Algeria; Pesquet’s lawyer, Tixier-Vignancour, who defended right-wing terrorists and stood as a presidential candidate; and Tixier-Vignancour’s bullish campaign manager, Jean-Marie Le Pen. These were some of the men whom Mitterrand suspected of plotting his downfall. None of them ever confessed to any involvement in the affair.

Pesquet himself was forced to leave the country and has since invented so many different versions of the incident that even if he now made an honest confession, it would be worthless. In a letter published by
Le Monde
in 1965, he unexpectedly lent support to Mitterrand’s presidential campaign by confessing that Mitterrand had organized the fake assassination attempt in good faith. Later, however, he retracted his statement, claiming that friends of Mitterrand had paid him forty thousand francs to write the letter. The retraction itself earned him a few more francs when he published it in a book titled
My Genuine-Fake Assassination Attempt on Mitterrand: The Truth at Last
.

The ‘Affaire de l’Observatoire’ reached its practical conclusion that winter, when, in a seemingly needless reconstruction arranged by Commissioner Clot, Senator Mitterrand’s Peugeot 403 was taken to a quiet avenue in the Bois de Vincennes, peppered with bullets and crashed into a tree. The original shooting had left it relatively unscathed. After the ‘reconstruction’, all that remained was a tangled, windowless wreck.

‘The Fox’ now entered the period that came to be known as his ‘crossing of the desert’. Having first demanded that Mitterrand be prosecuted, President de Gaulle changed his mind and decided that the incident should never again be mentioned, and that his own party would never try to profit from it. Some said that he was trying to protect his Prime Minister, Michel Debré, from any embarrassing revelations that Mitterrand might make about his role in the murder of a general in Algeria. Others, close to de Gaulle, said that he wanted to uphold the dignity of the office, since–incredible as it seemed at the time–Mitterrand might one day be President. Of course, de Gaulle knew full well that Mitterrand would never be allowed to forget. For years afterwards, though the
députés
of the Assemblée Nationale maintained a courteous silence on the subject, it was extraordinary how often the word ‘Observatoire’ cropped up in their speeches.