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 Rennes. He arrived on July 28th. Once called the Place de Rennes' the square had been renamed Place du 18 Juin 1940 when the Gaullists took power in the City Hall. The Jackal's eyes strayed to the shining new name plate on the wall of the building and remained there. Something of what he had read the previous month returned to ham. June 18th, 1940, the day when the lonely but lofty exile in London had taken the microphone to tell the French that if they had lost a battle, they had not lost the war.

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 Rennes. He looked round at the tall, narrow-fronted buildings on each side of the Rue de Rennes that also overlooked the square. Slowly he wended his way round the square to the southern side and peered through the railings into the courtyard of the station. It was a-buzz with cars and taxis bringing or taking away tens of thousands of commuter passengers a day, one of the great mainline stations of Paris. By that winter it would become a silent hulk, brooding on the events, human and historical, that had taken place in its steely, smoky shadow. The station was destined for demolition.» Author's note: The old Gare Montparnasse facade was demolished in 1964 to make way for office-block development. The new station building has been erected five hundred yards further down the railway line.

The Jackal turned with his back to the railings and looked down the traffic artery of the Rue de Rennes. He was facing the Place du 18 Juin 1940, convinced that this was the place the President of France would come, one last time, on the appointed day. The other places he had examined during the past week were possibles; this one, he felt sure, was the certainty. Within a short time there would be no more Gare Montparnasse, the columns that had looked down on so much would be smelted for suburban fences and the forecourt that had seen Berlin humiliated and Paris preserved would be just another executives' cafeteria. But before that happened, he, the man with the kepi and two gold stars, would come once again. But in the meantime the distance from the top floor of the corner house on the western side of the Rue de Rennes and the centre of the forecourt was about a hundred and thirty metres.

The Jackal took in the landscape facing him with a practised eye. Both corner houses on the Rue de Rennes where it debouched into the square were obvious choices. The first three houses up the Rue de Rennes were possibles, presenting a narrow firing angle into the forecourt. Beyond them the angle became too narrow. Similarly, the first three houses that fronted the Boulevard de Montparnasse running straight through the square east to west were possibilities. Beyond them the angles became too narrow again, and the distances too great. There were no other buildings that dominated the forecourt that were not too far away, other than the station building itself. But this would be out of bounds, its upper office windows overlooking the forecourt crawling with security men. The Jackal decided to study the three corner houses on the western side of the Rue de Rennes first, and sauntered over to a cafe on the corner at the eastern side, the cafe Duchesse Anne.

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 Alsacienne on the far side, and studied the eastern facades. For the afternoon he sauntered up and down, looking at closer quarters into the front doors of the blocks of apartments he had picked out as possibles.

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 pensionnaires. The roofs, and possibly the mansardes themselves would certainly be watched on the day. There might even be watchers on the roofs, crouching among the chimney stacks, their field glasses on the opposite windows and roofs. But the topmost floor below the attics would be high enough, provided one could sit well back into the darkness of the room not to be visible from across the street. The open window in the sweltering heat of a Paris summer would be natural enough.

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 Rennes on each side of the street. The angle would be too narrow. That left him four houses to choose from. As the time of day he expected to fire would be the mid afternoon, with the sun moving towards the west, but still high enough in the sky to shine over the top of the station roof into the windows of the houses on the east side of the street, he eventually chose those two on the west side. To prove it, he waited until four o'clock on July 29th, and noticed that on the west side the topmost windows were receiving only a slanting ray from the sun, while it still fiercely lit the houses on the east.

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.