(2013) Collateral Damage (16 page)
The point of the news story, by the paper's crime correspondent,
was that the police now suspected that Le Poidevin had been involved with international
terrorists and renegade rightists. The reporter reminded his readers that at first
it was thought Le Poidevin had been murdered as a result of a homosexual quarrel,
perhaps by a blackmail victim who had then torn his apartment apart looking for
the incriminating material.
They had found finger-prints other than Le Poidevin's, but had
been unable to trace them in the criminal records department. Then, two days ago,
an ex-OAS man had been seen at the victim's funeral. Because of this the criminal
police decided to consult the security service, the Direction de la surveillance
du territoire (DST). They had run the mystery finger-prints through their own files
and come up with the name of Hans Koller, a thirty-eight-year-old, West German terrorist,
believed to be working for a left-wing Palestinian group; wanted by Scotland Yard
for the murder of a young woman and the wounding of an Arab publisher. He was, wrote
the crime correspondent, warming to his
subject,
undoubtedly
Europe's most dangerous and experienced terrorist out of captivity and the police
had orders to shoot him on sight.
('Since when,' thought Koller,
'do the French police need orders?')
The DST, the story went on, had shown photographs of Koller to
an Algerian barman and two of his teenage customers. They had been drinking in a
bar near the victim's apartment on the night of the murder and identified Koller
as the man who had made a telephone call from the bar to the cafe where Le Poidevin
worked, claiming he had borrowed a gold lighter from him and asking for his name
so that he could return it. Down the page from Koller's photograph there was a picture
of two of the mini-thugs he had almost tangled with and the barman, all grinning
into camera and looking pleased with themselves. From the penultimate paragraph
Koller learned that his decision to lie low for a couple of days after he had heard
of the waiter's death had lost him the chance of an immediate meeting with FoucheLarimand.
The DST
are
mystified by this connection between a lonely homosexual,
a left-wing terrorist and a former right-wing terrorist. Questioned by the criminal
police after the funeral the OAS man said that he had got to know Le Poidevin because
he was a regular customer at the cafe. Since they learned of his connection with
the terrorist Koller the DST would also like to question the OAS man, but it is
understood that he is now in Athens. There is a possibility that the authorities
there will be asked if he can be held for questioning by French police.
On a campaigning note, the correspondent ended his report by
saying that the case once again highlighted the necessity for the DST to share their
routine information, such as the finger-prints of known terrorists, with the criminal
branch. 'If they had been available the police would have known of Koller's involvement
within hours of the murder.'
'Monsieur.
Monsieur.
Your call to Cyprus.'
The operator was waving at him from across the table.
Koller folded the paper so that his picture didn't show and walked
over. 'Cabin five, quickly,' said the operator. He was a surly young man with dandruff
on the shoulders of his blazer. Me working and all you've gotta do is read newspapers,
his tone implied.
'Thanks,' said Koller.
He could hear the faint 'brrrp, brrrp' sound the caller gets
on the British system used on the island. He hunched his left shoulder to hold the
phone into position and searched his pockets for cigarettes and matches. The faint
ringing tone continued. It sounded as if it came from the bottom of a mine. This
was the second day running he had tried the number. Cyprus was supposed to be their
fail-safe emergency link because it was considered less likely that there would
be a phone-tap there than Beirut, a thirty-minute flight away. He cursed Le Poidevin.
He was convinced he had killed himself to spite him. He wished he'd killed the fat
slob now.
The number in the flat they had in the Greek Cypriot part of
Nicosia continued to ring. He was about to put the receiver down when the woman
answered. She had a young voice. 'Is that Rebecca?' he asked in English. 'It's Benjamin
here.'
The Jewish code-names were one of the Front's little jokes. You
could never accuse the Palestinians of lacking a sense of humour. Briefly, and in
a lightly coded way, he told 'Rebecca' what had happened. When he had finished he
said: 'Tell them I'm going to Athens. OK?'
'Yes, wait. I have a message.' The woman's voice betrayed none
of the dismay she felt as he told her about who had been running their main European
cell for the last three months. He might have been reciting a grocery list.
He could hear her moving about the phone, obviously looking for
her memo. 'Do you know an Englishman called Stephen Dove?
Big
man.
Big shoulders.'
'No. Why?'
'I don't know. I was asked to ask you if you called - that's
all.'
Her voice sounded slightly reproachful; he should have known
better than to ask unnecessary questions. 'OK. Bye.'
'Bye, bye.'
He went to the counter to pay for his call. The dandruffed operator
was filling out some forms and kept him waiting. Standing there he became uncomfortably
aware of the rolled newspaper carrying his picture; he sought reassurance by allowing
the hand holding it to brush down the side of his jacket so he could feel the weapon
tucked into the waistband of his trousers. 'My call,' he said.
'How much?'
'Your call to where?'
Koller thought: has this idiot recognized me? Is he playing for
time before the police arrive?
'The call to Cyprus.
Cabin five.'
'Ah yes, forty francs, Monsieur.'
The German guessed he was overcharging him by a couple of francs,
but he wanted to get away. He counted out four tens. The operator took them without
a word and went back to filling in his forms.
A few minutes later, walking along S tGermain looking for a taxi
to take him across the river, it occurred to Koller that he had heard the name Dove
somewhere. He couldn't for the life of him think where.
'What do you think he is?' the reporter asked his drinking companion
when Dove had gone to the lavatory.
'Some sort of bob-a-job spook I suppose. This place is full of
them. The espionage centre of the Middle East and all that.'
'He says he's a schoolteacher on holiday.'
'Well he can't be a spook then. A spook would have a better cover
than that. Jesus Christ. What an asshole.
A schoolteacher on holiday.
He's probably running away from his wife or something. Your turn, I believe.'
'Ah, yes.
Jusef.
Two
whisky-and-waters and a beer for our absent friend.
Put it on his bill.'
From the other side of the city carne the sound, like a heavenly
drum roll, of a single salvo of twenty-four 107-millimetre Syrian rockets landing
one after the other on East Beirut. The noise inspired the bar's grey parrot to
do his famous whistling impersonation of an artillery shell about to explode in
your ear. Neither the real thing nor the imitation attracted much attention since
the rockets were falling two miles away and, unlike during the civil war, the Christian
militias usually restricted their own artillery to counter-battery work rather than
random firing on Moslem West Beirut.
Syrian tactics, the reporters had explained to Dove, were brutally
simple. They refused to get involved in costly street fighting in the lanes of Ashrafiyeh.
When their soldiers were fired on they simply bombarded the Christian suburbs until
they considered they had been sufficiently punished. Lately, the ceasefires were
getting shorter, the bombardments longer, and the press corps larger.
Every night this boisterous tribe gathered around the Circle
bar in the Admiral Hotel, perpetually celebrating reunions with colleagues last
encountered in similar bars in South-East Asia or Africa. They drank a great deal
and communicated in their own jargon, a mostly English dialect that seemed to be
understood by several nationalities. They tended, Dove noticed, to dress alike too,
favouring shirts or bush-jackets with lots of pockets into which they crammed wallets,
notebooks, film, identity cards, hip-flasks, cigarettes, Swiss army clasp-knives,
amphetamines, and even paperback volumes on Middle-East politics.
As far as the schoolteacher could see their
days followed a rhythmic, peasant simplicity.
Despite their late nights they
tended to get up early to go out and look at the 'bang bang'. They reappeared in
mid-afternoon, dirty and sweaty, and either went straight to their rooms to write
their despatches or left their precious film in the hands of avaricious taxi-drivers
who took it the fifty miles or so to the Jordanian satellite transmitting station
in Amman. In the early evening they fought each other to get their reports on the
telex, chain-smoked and appeared to be on the verge of nervous breakdowns when the
line went down.
Dinner was usually devoted to the destruction of a small grape
harvest, bottles delivered to the command, 'Think we could damage another one of
those.' Afterwards, the survivors struggled to the bar and delivered themselves
of the coup de grace. One young man wore a bullet dug out of him on a chain around
his neck. But when they talked of 'bang bang', Dove noticed that it was considered
bad form to be anything other than a craven coward who had strayed into the action
through poor navigation. TV cameramen sometimes affected not to know what country
they were in.
Since his arrival the schoolteacher had been able to contact
only one of the names the Palestinian publisher had given him and that man, a lecturer
in law at one of the city's universities, had proved quite useless. Because of this
he fell on the journalists as his last hope of finding the German whom he was convinced
had scuttled back to Beirut after killing Emma, like a rat to his hole. Dove was
by no means a stupid man, but he never really understood that the majority of these
reporters were visitors to Beirut and some, like himself, for the first time. They
could hardly find their way to the local Reuter's office let alone, as Dove fondly
hoped, list half a dozen places where a German terrorist might be lifting his stein.
Moreover, although they were polite enough, it was plain that they were uninterested
in those outside the tribe, and surrounded by the authentic version Dove no longer
felt it wise to pose as a reporter. When he confessed his alien background their
eyes would glaze over and, although they might buy him a drink, they were less than
generous with their conversation. He was usually in bed long before they were, dreaming
of Koller.
Once he realised the address Ruth had given him was phoney Dove
had explored Beirut with an optimism only true obsession can generate. He saw Koller
everywhere. He saw him in the gloomy little afternoon bars in the side-streets,
where acned hostesses from Newcastle pushed bad champagne and generally failed to
recapture the port's pre-civil-war reputation of being the best whore-house in the
Middle East. And when he came out, furious and belching, squinting into the sunlight,
h,e wandered down Hamra, where chic young Lebanese window-shopped among French-stocked
boutiques, sniffing air perfumed with freshlymade popcorn and roasted corn-cobs,
until he spotted him again at a table in one of the glass-fronted cafes there.
But once he was inside, Koller always transmogrified into a uniformed
private in the Norwegian contingent of the United Nations, his automatic rifle leaning
casually against the
formica
table-top, or a family man
treating two sticky-faced children to chocolate ice-cream. Then Dove would retreat
back into the throng outside, stepping over beggars displaying stumps and sores
or worse - once he passed a handsome, three-foot young man whose body had been reduced
to arms and a torso which met the pavement just below his heart. Dove, obsessed
by white faces, was quite oblivious to all this. When he was involved with collisions
with people on the pavement, as he frequently was, he mumbled his apologies to a
blur of clones. Twice he collided with the same slim young man in jeans and a sports
shirt, but Dove saw only that he wasn't Koller.
Most of all he saw the German visiting the scruffy administrative
offices of the Palestine Liberation Organisation near the Arab University - where
twelve-year-old sentries delighted to remove the magazines from their Kalashnikovs
to show visitors they were loaded. He would wait for him to come out and follow
him back through the crowded, garbage-filled streets, skirting the hovels of one
of the smaller Palestinian refugee camps, corrugated roofs held down with old tyres,
ignoring the street-vendors with their pyramids of Marlboro cigarettes or whisky.
Yet when he brushed alongside him, said 'excuse me' and asked for directions or
a light for a cigarette it wasn't Koller after all, or at least it wasn't the Koller
he knew from the newspaper photographs.
Then in the evening, when the Christian militiamen stopped sniping
at the untidy Syrian infantry patrols and the bandits who crept out of the ruined
port area kept honest folk indoors, he saw him again, talking to an American journalist
at the bar of the Admiral Hotel. But when he elbowed a place next to him and eavesdropped
on the conversation, he turned out to be a Finnish television producer saying: 'You
were here in the war? It must have been horrible.'
Yet events since his departure from London had gone well enough
at first and Dove had derived a certain amount of satisfaction from the coolness
of his behaviour. He had left the Cortina in the car-park for the Number Three terminal
at Heathrow and then switched to Number One terminal for his flight to Paris. He
had felt a slight twinge about leaving the car, his last link with a life that had
been worth living. 'A sensible car for a sensible person,' Emma used to say.