Marseilles is both a refuge of anonymity and a practical staging ground for Creasy’s preparations. Its busy streets and working-class outskirts provide cover for movement, while a warehouse and a locked garage connect the city to the arms and transport required for the campaign he is about to begin.

A City of Anonymity

Creasy likes Marseilles because a person can disappear into it. Its inhabitants mind their own business, making the city seem suited not only to getting lost but also to drug smuggling and arms dealing. This impression is more than atmosphere: it helps explain why Creasy uses the city while arranging the clandestine work ahead. He travels by taxi in ordinary clothes, moves through public spaces without drawing attention, and watches his surroundings as he goes.

The city’s anonymity is presented as a practical condition rather than an abstract quality. At the station, Creasy sits at a quiet table in the restaurant, opens a briefcase, checks documents and a street map, and keeps an eye on the concourse beyond the glass partition. Later, he rides east through the city and walks to a garage in a working-class suburb. These transitions place routine public movement alongside concealed preparations.

Arms Dealing and Leclerc

Creasy’s connection to Marseilles includes Leclerc, an arms dealer whom he asks about while planning the weapons he will need. Guido Arrellio offers to check Leclerc’s availability by telephone, then reads the list Creasy has prepared on the train and recognizes the scale of the undertaking. The exchange establishes Marseilles as a point of access to the campaign’s material needs, even before Creasy reaches the city.

The novel also presents the political complications surrounding Leclerc’s trade. In an arms transaction involving two Arab buyers, Leclerc is pressed to supply at least six rocket launchers as part of a package that includes fifty M.A.S. machine guns and five hundred Armalites. His ministry contact has said the buyers must not receive rocket launchers, despite an end-user certificate from a small Persian Gulf state. The shipment is meant to pass through Beirut, a destination that leaves its eventual users uncertain. This episode shows arms commerce entangled with official restrictions and opaque routes; it gives context to the trade Creasy approaches through Leclerc, without making the buyers or their transaction part of Creasy’s own arrangements.

Arrival and False Identity

The Toletela reaches Marseilles the night before Creasy begins collecting the materials prepared for him. At the railway station, he retrieves a black-leather briefcase from the baggage room and studies Guido Arrellio’s letter. The case contains a key, a street map marked with a small inked circle and marginal instructions, and two sets of papers: identity documents for Luigi Racca, an Amalfi vegetable importer, and papers for a Toyota van.

Creasy understands that Racca is a real importer unaware that his name is being borrowed. The passport and accompanying papers have been produced by a skilled forger in Naples. After examining the map and returning the contents to the locked briefcase, Creasy collects parcels from Paris and Brussels and checks into a small hotel under Racca’s identity. Marseilles thus serves as a place where a manufactured identity can be put to use, while the paperwork and route instructions turn the city map into a tool for moving through the operation discreetly.

The Garage and the Hidden Equipment

Following the map, Creasy has a taxi leave him at the corner of Rue St. Honore. He then walks for ten minutes to Rue Catinat and watches the street before entering Number 11. The garage stands among tenement buildings, small workshops, and factories in a working-class suburb. Its location and ordinary surroundings contrast with the preparations concealed inside.

A Toyota Hiace fills most of the garage. Painted deep gray and marked with faded lettering identifying Luigi Racca as a vegetable dealer, it appears old and battered. Creasy knows, however, that its engine and suspension are in perfect condition. A coil of electrical cord and plug lets him illuminate the van’s interior; he recognizes the provision as Guido Arrellio’s forethought. Inside are timber, sacks tightly packed with cotton waste, thick felt, a workbench fitted with a vise, and a toolbox. Creasy unloads the materials, then carefully removes the dozen countersunk screws securing the panel behind the driver’s seat, taking care not to mark the paint.

Narrative Function

These settings make Marseilles legible through the work Creasy performs there: collecting papers, checking a route, using a borrowed identity, and inspecting a vehicle prepared for concealment. The station, hotel, streets, arms warehouse, and garage are not interchangeable backdrops. Each offers a different part of the operation, from public anonymity to locked, purpose-built spaces. The city’s defining narrative contrast is between its ordinary urban life and the covert preparations that can proceed within it.