Free Leon Uris by Topaz Page B

how his contact would link up with him.
    He repeated the instructions to perfection.
    “Good luck,” André said and hung up. He left the Commodore Hotel and plunged into the endless round of African cocktail parties.

5
    P EPE V IMONT, BORN J OSE Lefebvre, was the son of the foreman of the Vimont plantation on Guadeloupe in the French Antilles.
    When his parents passed away, the elder Vimont, who was without a son, took young Pepe as his own and gave him his name.
    He was a student at the Sorbonne in Paris when the Second World War fell upon France. Choosing to ignore the safe route and return to Guadeloupe, he retreated first into Vichy France, where he joined the fledgling Resistance. The paths of war took him to North Africa, where remnants of defeated France were reuniting under the directorship of Pierre La Croix into the semblance of a combat force and a quasi government.
    Pepe, a light-skinned Negro with sharp features, was able to pass the line easily as a Muslim. He learned Arabic and was soon plunged into the cesspools of Casablanca, the Casbah of Algiers, Cairo, and Dakar as an intelligence agent for the Free French.
    As the war progressed and Pierre La Croix reclaimed Vichy French possessions in the Caribbean, Pepe was tranferred as an operator in that arena.
    The end of the war found the elder Vimont passed away and the plantation in a hopeless state of financial ruin.
    Pepe returned to France and was further trained at an SDECE school at Étampes near Orléans. After a brief mission in Cuba, he resigned from the service and decided to remain in that country and obtained citizenship.
    Pepe Vimont was among the first to flee Castro, emigrating to Miami, where he purchased a small bar in the southwest section among the refugees.
    When his record and whereabouts came to the attention of French Intelligence, André Devereaux sent an agent down to contact him. Pepe agreed to take on special missions for the French to augment his income.
    Pepe liked Miami. It was the first time he had been able to settle long enough to marry and begin a family. His wife was a lovely Cuban girl, and they had a son and another child on the way.
    Only the mysterious voice of Joseph broke the otherwise pastoral existence of family life. Where did the voice come from? He did not know, nor did he inquire. But it was the man coded as Joseph who could trigger him down to Argentina or to the islands.
    It was so strange this time, so very strange, the first call for a mission inside the United States.

6
    N ATIONAL’S DC -7 AFTERNOON flight touched down at Idlewild International at four in the afternoon. Pepe Vimont skimmed through a copy of Ebony as the airport bus passed through the tunnel to the East Side terminal in mid-Manhattan.
    He proceeded to play out the instructions that Joseph had given him over the phone the day before, going by foot to the Doubleday bookstore at Fifty-second Street.
    “Do you have a double album called ‘Roger Williams’ Songs of the Fabulous Forties’?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    He asked the clerk to play side one, band five, on the demonstrator and listened to a minute of the Warsaw Concerto. Pepe studied the vibrant sounds of Roger Williams seriously, purchased the record and left the store.
    The hookup was made.
    An agent whom he would know as Maurice trailed him as he continued up Fifth Avenue and crossed over to Central Park opposite the Plaza Hotel. He took up a bench not far from the waiting line of hansom cabs, lit up, puffed and watched the admixture of New York sophisticates enter the Plaza for after-work cocktails and tourists and romanticists clip-clop off through the park in the aged carriages. A big red sun fell suddenly into the Hudson River, immersing the park in evening shadow.
    A nondescript man sat at the opposite end of the bench, also carrying a bag from the Doubleday store.
    “Excuse me,” he said. “I believe you left this on the counter.”
    Pepe stared at him blankly, accepted the bag,