(2013) Collateral Damage (2 page)

The clock he had bought that day at a Woolworth's in South London.
'This'll wake you up whatever you've been up to the night before,' said the teenage
assistant, tottering about on platform shoes, all saucy looks,
acne
and eye make-up. Cockney shop-girls never ceased to amaze
him. They acted like princesses, he thought, yet all they had to look forward to
was
kids and drudgery. Not like his curious friend. No
kids, firm tits, and her very own urban guerrilla.

She had not left the room, but merely closed the door behind
her. 'Christ, I don't know how you've got the nerve,' she said. It made her feel
good to be in the same room as the explosive, to share for a moment his danger.

She was in her mid-twenties with shoulder-length auburn hair
over the jungle-green soldier's shirt she wore with jeans. She used no make-up,
called homosexuals 'gays' and liked her letters addressed 'Ms'. Despite careful
camouflage her diction sometimes revealed an expensive education. Her father was
a cabinet minister. She had no idea who or what the bomb was intended for. He never
discussed a job with her before he did it. Knowing that something was going to happen
was good enough.

'If you won't go out please be quiet,' he said in his accented
English. 'This is not a firework.' But in spite of his irritation he found her excitement
pleasing.

He assembled all the bits and pieces in a suitably anonymous
black and chrome executive briefcase, paying particular attention to the position
of the clothes-peg on the face of the clock. That was his safety catch: when it
was removed the bomb was primed. He looked at the face of the clock again. The alarm
was set for 6.05 p.m., giving the silly punctual bastard just enough time to open
his car door, start the ignition and drive a couple of hundred yards before it went
off. He was going to pay dearly for being a man of habit. He snapped the case shut
and looked at his watch.

'Einer fiir die Strasse?' she said. Her pigeon German, one of
their jokes, had recently begun to grate on him. She was rolling a joint, sealing
the cigarette paper with her tongue.

'No,' he said, 'relaxed is not what I need to be. I'll have a
coffee.'

He made his own rules. One of them was killing on a clear head.

'Such a clean-living boy,' she said.

They walked out of the bedroom leaving the bomb he had just made
on the bed. The next room was full of mirrors, low glass tables and bamboo furniture.
The flat belonged to a television reporter, a foreign correspondent living abroad
who had once, briefly, been her lover. It was decorated as a trophy room rather
than a place to live in.
When she first saw it she half expected
labels under the exhibits.
On the walls were opium pipes inlaid with silver
and the bowl halfway down the stem; half a dozen types of shell cases; the rusty
barrel and some of the stock of a shattered Kalashnikov; an Afghanjezaii; daggers,
spears, bows and arrows; framed photographs of uniformed Asians, Africans, and Arabs
confronting a single bush-shirted Caucasian armed only with a microphone and an
expression of awful sincerity. The TV man had let her move in at a nominal rent
while he was living abroad. If she had not met Koller she would probably not have
accepted, but he was not one who liked slumming: in fact, she sometimes suspected
that a Chelsea flat was her main attraction for him. Most of her contemporaries
were still at the bedsitter stage: posters on the wall, red light-bulbs in the lamp
near the leaky waterbed, and joss-sticks burning to cover the cooking smells. Either
that or squatting in crumbling ruins where the cat's piss masked the damp smells.

She liked the flat, but sometimes she felt guilty about it. It
was a difficult place to untidy and the reporter had insisted that she retain the
weekly cleaning lady.

'Jesus, Ruth. It's like something out of a bloody Sunday colour
supplement,' one of her friends from the tiny Trotskyist party she belonged to had
declared, putting his ammunition boots on the chaise-longue and flicking his ash
on a Kurdish rug. At the end of the evening he wanted to fuck her. Damn cheek!

But she remained an enthusiastic member of the Pure Earth Republican
People's Party - or PERPP, as they preferred to be called. For her it was the logical
evolution of her parents' political progress.
Mother, a German
Jewish refugee who came to England as an adolescent with eyewitness tales of Nazis
on the rampage.
Father, the son of a don, had spent a few months with the
Republican side in Spain before pleurisy probably saved him from a bullet. Both
quit the Communist Party after Stalin kissed Hitler for a slice of Poland. After
1945 her father drifted further to the right with every cold-war crisis, trading
youthful passions for responsibility, honours and possessions. He still called himself
a socialist, a democratic socialist, and sang a throaty Red Flag once a year at
the party conference. By joining PERPP Ruth felt she was somehow compensating for
his betrayal.

Not that her comrades would approve of Koller. Adventurism, they
would call it: true revolution could come only from the masses. Mussolini had started
out as a revolutionary socialist who believed in a violent elite and we all knew
where that had ended didn't we luv? But then all the party did was talk. Talk and
produce newspapers which she admitted, in her more honest moments, were read mainly
by party members and Special Branch.

Koller, on the other hand, acted. He had crossed that line separating
the doers from the talkers and could never go back. He didn't need to wear a combat
jacket and jeans and put his feet up on somebody else's sofa to prove he was a revolutionary.
She loved to watch his chunky, manicured hands make a bomb or load a pistol. Mind
you, at times she wished he was not so damned neat. Look at him now: brown lace-up
brogues; herring-bone trousers; Harris
tweed
jacket; striped
shirt (from Turnbull and Asser, no doubt).

She began to walk towards the kitchen to make his coffee.

'Come here,' he said. He looked stern. She might have been a
small child.

She walked over and they embraced. They first kissed standing
and then, still entwined, collapsed on to one of the sofas where he undid the buttons
on her army shirt and gently stroked her breasts until he felt the nipples harden.
Suddenly he pulled away. She sat up confused, smiling, slightly embarrassed, as
if she had allowed some drunken stranger to fondle her at a party and was now beginning
to sober up.

'We'd better have the coffee,' he said. No sex before the job.
That was another of his rules.

'Swine,' she said, but with resignation.

She got up, one hand among her buttons, the other searching her
pockets for the joint she had rolled.

In the kitchen Ruth ignored the jar of Nescafe she always used
for herself and started fiddling with the percolator. Coffee was something else
he was bloody particular about.

3. Dove

Just south of the Coventry turn-off it started to rain, and Stephen
Dove observed the action of the wipers with the satisfaction often felt by an unmechanically-minded
man when a piece of minor engineering works at his touch. He eased his foot off
the accelerator, reduced the speed of his old red Cortina to sixty, and stuck resolutely
to the centre lane of the southbound Ml. On his inside was a convoy of heavy
lorries
, the gaps between them causing cross-winds that obliged
Dove to wrench the Cortina back on course every time he passed one. On his right,
in the fast lane, newer and faster cars continued to break the 70
m.p.h
. speed limit despite the weather which, according to his
radio, had just stopped play in the first cricket of the season at Edgbaston. At
times like this Dove was glad he could not afford a car in that league. Fast driving
frightened him.

He felt safe cocooned in the familiarity of his car, content
with his steady, safe progress towards the capital. On the radio the cricket commentator
was describing the umpires' inspection of the sodden wicket in a tone lesser nations
reserve for the deaths of presidents. He twiddled blindly with the tuning knob.
First he found some Mahler, but he was in no mood for all that Germanic gloom. Then
he caught the end of a news bulletin whose last item was about fighting in Beirut.
As usual, it was difficult to understand who was fighting who and for what reason.
Maronites, Palestinians, Syrians, Shi'ites,
Israelis
-
they all seemed to change sides as often as those barons in the Wars of the Roses.
Would they never tire of killing each other, he wondered? He shrugged the question
off. He blamed the years spent learning and then teaching history for a basically
apolitical philosophy. Home or abroad, he understood most of the issues, but cared
about none of them.

He continued to turn the radio tuner until the car was suddenly
full of a country and western ballad of love and violence. He sang the chorus aloud,
beating time on the steering-wheel with his left hand.
'Maybe too-mor-row a bullet will find me ...dah dah di doo dah ...sweet
Ro-zee-ta's door.'

The reason why Dove was so happy was that in a couple of hours
he would be reunited with his wife, from whom he had been parted for almost an entire
week. He had married her three months ago after several unsatisfactory affairs,
two of which had ended in disastrous, and in one case almost homicidal,
experiments
with cohabitation.

Getting acquainted with the opposite sex had always been difficult
for him. Women were often attracted to his hulk - he was well over six foot and
still something of a star at the local rugby club - but he usually found it difficult
to make the sort of flippant small talk that helps fire the opening shots of a relationship.
And although, at thirty-two, he was by no means past his prime, his shaving mirror
told him that he had definitely lost that first gloss of youth. There were lines
around his eyes and occasionally he thought he detected a grey hair sprouting like
a distress signal in the morning stubble on his chin. In the last year or two he
had also put on a depressing amount of weight. He was smoking and drinking too much
and his doctor had warned him that coronary thrombosis was not confined to the over
forties. Dove had begun to consider the possibility of dying a bachelor and had
even started a rather morbid study of two elderly unmarried colleagues in the common
room, miserably ticking off points of appearance or traits of character that were
in any way similar to his own. Then he met Emma.

Emma was a skinny blonde
with an urchin hair-cut
and good teeth
, considering the number of cigarettes she smoked. She was
a little above average height and a complete chameleon in that, depending upon the
company, she could be a model out of the pages of Harper's, a whore or a hippie
just in from Katmandu. She was one of those women who used everything she had to
maximum advantage. She was clever, and she walked and talked and put her clothes
together in such a way that she was always the cynosure. She was casually, almost
absent-mindedly promiscuous, having once declared that sex was the most overrated
thing since Picasso. When she wanted a man her signals were clear and unambiguous.
As far as Dove was concerned she was everything he had ever wanted in a woman.

She had a small private income which enabled her to drift in
and out of work when she felt like it. The jobs were usually as somebody's assistant
in advertising or television and she was quite ruthless in using social contacts
to get them. She almost invariably started well, but soon became bored and after
a few months went away on a long holiday from which she did not return. The male
friends whose influence had got her these jobs, often through considerable effort
on their part, usually forgave her because she was the kind of woman who made most
men feel heroes whether she slept with them or not. Certainly this was the effect
she had on Dove, who knew the real Emma about as well as he knew royalty.

They had met at a dinner party in London six months before he
returned to his native Midlands as head of the history department at a large comprehensive
school. At the time, Emma was working as personal assistant to a hard charger in
advertising called Toby. She was beginning to get bored again. Toby's latest thing
was cocaine, something he had been introduced to during a recent trip to New York:
he liked to lick it off her. Even that had begun to pall. She felt she had done
everything: taken every kind of stimulant, slept with every kind of man, done every
kind of job she could possibly find interesting. It was true that she had not, in
spite of the urging of some of her feminist acquaintances, tried a fully-fledged
lesbian affair - though she was not entirely innocent in these matters, having taken
a tumble or two at boardingschool in her youth. It had begun to occur to her that
about the only thing she had not sampled was marriage; and, since it was hardly
an irrevocable step nowadays, she was of a mind to give it a try.

The dinner party took place at the home of an old university
friend of Dove's who worked on less important accounts in the same firm as Toby
and was delighted to have persuaded his illustrious superior to visit his humble
abode south of the Thames.

Dove was then, as was often the case, without a steady woman
friend. He had been invited to partner a grass widow who, on learning that he was
a schoolteacher, launched into a diatribe on standards in state schools and the
prohibitive cost of private education. Dove was at the point of shutting her up
by affecting total agreement when, almost an hour late, Emma and her boss arrived.

Toby wore a red velvet jacket, jeans that were too tight for
him and a little chain of Masai beads around his swollen neck. It was obvious from
their flushed faces and loud voices that they had already had a lot to drink and
possibly more besides.