Quai des Orfèvres

Quai des Orfèvres is the Paris headquarters of the Police Judiciaire, set beside the Seine, and a central working location in the novel’s investigations. Its offices receive the OAS’s violence at close range, house the police response, and become the hub from which Claude Lebel mobilizes a national and international search for the Jackal.

Police headquarters and investigative center

At 36 Quai des Orfèvres, the Brigade Criminelle works among crowded desks and case papers. Maurice Bouvier, its respected chief, takes charge of investigating the wave of robberies that has spread across France. In a surprisingly small, work-strewn office, investigators chart the value of stolen cash and jewels; by the latter half of July, the total exceeds two million new francs. The ledger exposes a gap: even after robbery costs and payments to the men carrying them out, a substantial sum remains unaccounted for. The office’s calculations make criminal activity legible as a financial pattern, while the unexplained balance points toward a larger purpose.

Crisis, command, and communications

The headquarters also became the destination for a grim delivery. Twenty-four hours after Antoine Argoud was seized in Munich, an anonymous caller speaking for the OAS told a desk sergeant that Argoud, bound and gagged, was in a van behind the Criminal Investigation Brigade building at 36 Quai des Orfèvres. Police officers found him barely able to stand: his eyes had been bandaged, his face was caked with dried blood, and his mouth hurt from the gag. The SDECE Action Service had spirited him across the border during the night and left the police a message whose practical purpose was mixed with a macabre joke. Argoud remained in custody until June 1968. His removal weakened the OAS, but it also cleared the way for his deputy, Marc Rodin, to take command of operations against Charles de Gaulle.

Later, the same headquarters became the nerve centre of the hunt for the Jackal. After a fifty-minute briefing by the Minister of the Interior, Claude Lebel emerged from the conference room dazed by the scale of the directive: he could establish his own office, draw on the resources of the organizations represented at the meeting, and spend without a stated limit. He turned that authority into a working command post. His assistant, Lucien Caron, was to become his sole secretary, with ordinary staff excluded from the secret; a camp bed, washing and shaving supplies, and a percolator were requisitioned for the office. Lebel also ordered ten outside telephone lines and a dedicated operator, making the headquarters both a place to work around the clock and a channel through which he could demand help from other departments.

From the building’s basement communications room, Lebel and Caron spent three hours contacting senior crime investigators abroad over secure high-frequency links. Lebel initially presented the approach as a routine tip rather than a formal inquiry, explaining that the police did not yet know whether the intended offence had advanced into preparation. He could offer little identifying information, but he made the essential qualification clear: the unknown man would have to be a top professional political assassin with successful killings behind him. The headquarters thus connected two very different kinds of police work: painstaking records and departmental coordination within Paris, and an urgent international search built around a description of a criminal whose name was still unknown.

Records, leads, and the field search

Lebel’s investigation turned archival traces into a route through the country. During an overnight review, the team searched the Pantheon’s records again, this time for Duggan. A card showed that Alexander James Quentin Duggan had entered France from Brussels on the Brabant Express on July 22. A separate report from customs officers travelling on the Etoile du Nord Express recorded him among the passengers going from Paris to Brussels on July 31. The paired entries established that the name had crossed the frontier in both directions, while leaving open where the man using it had gone next.

A hotel card from the Prefecture of Police supplied a more precise interval: Duggan had stayed from July 22 through July 30 at a small hotel near the Place de la Madeleine, using a passport number that matched the information received from London. Inspector Caron favoured a raid, but Lebel chose a quiet visit in the small hours. The proprietor confirmed that the man was no longer there by August 15; Lebel’s discretion spared the other guests from being woken, while the inquiry gained a checked lead without a conspicuous police operation.

When news came from Commissaire Valentin in Clermont-Ferrand, Lebel ordered a different kind of search. A team was to begin at the spot near Ussel where the car had been found, mark it at the centre of a square on the map, and ask systematically at farmhouses, village shops and cafés, hotels, and woodcutters’ shacks. The description was deliberately practical: a tall, fair-haired Englishman who spoke good French, carrying three suitcases and a handgrip, with plenty of cash and the appearance of someone who had slept rough. The instructions also controlled what the search could reveal: local reporters were to be diverted with a story about a possibly dazed survivor of a car crash, and if the man was found, the police were to surround him rather than approach him. At nine that evening, back at Quai des Orfèvres, Lebel received Valentin’s report from Tulle and asked whether the car and the room at the château had been fingerprinted. Valentin confirmed that both had been examined and that hundreds of prints matched, extending the trail from border records and witness inquiries to physical evidence.

A succession inside the Brigade

The headquarters was also the scene of an abrupt change in command. On July 18, a brief notice in Le Figaro reported that Commissaire Hyppolite Dupuy, Deputy Chief of the Brigade Criminelle, had suffered a severe stroke in his office at Quai des Orfèvres and died on the way to hospital. Claude Lebel, then Chief of the Homicide Division, was named as his successor and took up the duties immediately, amid the summer workload pressing on the Brigade’s departments. The notice made the office more than a fixed backdrop: it was where institutional disruption opened the way for the investigator who would soon direct the hunt for the Jackal.