Fiumicino Airport is the point where Viktor Kowalski leaves Rome for Marseille, turning a carefully arranged journey into a visible link in the investigation. He passes through its everyday spaces as a man trying to travel without attracting notice, while agents watch him board and relay his route. The airport’s importance lies in this double function: it offers a departure from Rome, but also makes movement legible through tickets, flight times, and observation.

Role in the journey

Kowalski’s plan takes shape before he reaches the airport. At Rome’s main post office, he asks a clerk to telephone the Alitalia flight enquiries office about flights between Rome and Marseille. He has missed the Monday service, which is due to leave Fiumicino within the hour, and learns that the next direct flight is on Wednesday. There are no other direct airlines on that route; the alternatives involve indirect flights. He chooses the Wednesday service, scheduled to leave at 11:15 a.m. and arrive at Marignane Airport shortly after noon, and arranges a return flight for the following day.

The booking depends on the identity documents he carries. With passports abolished within the Common Market, his national identity card is sufficient. The clerk instructs him to be at the Alitalia desk at Fiumicino an hour before departure. This advance inquiry gives the journey a precise timetable, but it also establishes the interval in which others can follow his preparations. Fiumicino is not simply a name on a route: it is the fixed departure point around which his next movements can be anticipated.

Kowalski at the airport

On Wednesday morning, Kowalski first completes his duties at the post office, collecting five envelopes addressed to M. Poitiers. After Colonel Rodin relieves him, he returns to his room to sleep. When he sets out again, he takes his Colt .45, a black beret, sticking plaster, and the lire and French francs representing six months of savings. He tells the duty guard that a telephone call is wanted upstairs, then leaves the hotel and heads for Fiumicino by taxi.

At the airport, he pays for his Alitalia ticket in cash and tells the clerk he has neither a suitcase nor hand luggage. The passengers on the 11:15 Marseille flight are not due to be called for another hour and five minutes, so he waits in the cafeteria with a coffee, watching aircraft through the plate-glass windows. The pause briefly opens onto a life he did not have. He enjoys watching planes arrive and depart, though he cannot understand how an airport works; engines have meant military aircraft to him, from wartime Messerschmitts, Stormoviks, and Flying Forts to later aircraft in Vietnam and Algeria. He wonders whether, in another life, he might have worked at an airport, then recognizes that his own history leaves no way back to that imagined alternative.

His thoughts turn instead to Sylvie Grzybowski. He believes it is wrong that she should die while the men in Paris whom Colonel Rodin has blamed for betraying France and the Army remain alive. That conviction sits beside the civilian bustle he watches through the windows: the airport offers a moment of quiet observation, but cannot detach him from the purpose Rodin has given his journey.

Observation and departure

Kowalski is not alone in watching the airport’s activity. An SDECE agent follows him as he presents himself at the Alitalia desk. Separately, two agents working for Colonel Rolland observe from the departure area. They see Kowalski wearing the black beret and the piece of sticking plaster on his cheek as he passes through the glass doors and walks across the sunlit apron to the aircraft. His disguise, intended to alter how he appears, becomes a detail the observers can record.

Once the aircraft takes off, the agents leave the rail and use a public kiosk in the main hall to telephone a Rome number. Their message identifies the flight as Alitalia 451 and reports its departure and expected landing at Marignane at 12:10. Within ten minutes the information reaches Paris, and ten minutes after that it is being heard in Marseille. A departure witnessed at Fiumicino is thus converted into timely information for the wider pursuit. The airport’s public communications and scheduled service make the journey trackable even though Kowalski carries no luggage and pays cash.

Narrative significance

The airport scene sets the ordinary procedures of air travel against the secrecy Kowalski is trying to maintain. His booking, identity card, cash payment, lack of baggage, altered appearance, and timed departure are all practical elements of escape; together, they also offer observers a sequence of facts to assemble. Fiumicino does not expose his purpose by itself. Rather, watching him there allows the agents to confirm that he has left Rome and to pass on a flight number and destination.

The scene also gives the pursuit a human counterpoint. As he waits among the windows and aircraft, Kowalski imagines a different occupation and remembers the losses that shape his political anger. Then the call for his flight moves him from reflection to action: he crosses the apron and boards. Fiumicino marks both the brief interval in which that private history surfaces and the moment his movement becomes part of the investigators’ timetable.