(2013) Collateral Damage (24 page)
'Not at the moment. Don't you see? That's the beauty of it. Dove
thinks he's being run by the Realists - by your publishing friend from London. Abu
Kamal is keeping his head down. I wouldn't like to be his insurance man afterwards,
though. I don't think he'll be allowed to just toddle off back to his classroom.'
'What do you mean?'
'I think they'll kill him - just in case he ever learns the truth.
Much too embarrassing.'
He sounded pleased with himself.
What a devious little bastard you are, thought Fitchett. 'What
about the infiltration story?' he asked.
'Any truth?'
'Could be the Israelis.
I believe they're
quite good at finding out
who
the cut-outs are and moving
in. Anyway, they're the obvious choice. A few years ago the Agency might have done
it - not now. All the gung-ho boys are busy having nervous breakdowns. Somebody
might decide it's unethical and tell the Washington Post or publish their diary.'
'Hmm,' said Fitchett,
'what a well-informed press officer you are.'
The Funny hardly faltered. 'How are the press treating you by
the way? Leaving you alone I hope?'
'We haven't been formally introduced,' said Fitchett.
'Good.'
'Yet,' thought the policeman.
At the end of the week Fitchett had another meeting with the
Lebanese detective. The Branch man was waiting for him in a cafe in Hamra Street,
where he was trying hard not to double up and groan like a wrestler at the periodic
colic pains he was suffering, a sensation he imagined distinctly similar to being
bayonetted in the guts with a rusty corkscrew. He blamed this state of affairs on
the Turkish coffee he had substituted for tea. Even now he was trying to take his
mind off the battle raging in his lower colon by watching a fly fandango, one wing
fanning madly for balance, around the rim of yet en other little cup of the addictive
sweet black stuff.
When the Lebanese policeman arrived he looked sad. 'He's gone,'
he said.
'You told me you controlled the airport.'
'We do. He went by boat from Sidon to Cyprus. I hear they are
expecting Koller to go there. He's in Athens at the moment.'
'I see,' said Fitchett through pursed lips. The lull in the intestinal
hostilities was over.
Cold steel again.
That night, business in the Admiral bar was slack. While Fitchett
packed his bags in the hotel he had originally patronized to avoid the press, the
staff correspondents of most of the British dailies in Beirut were trying to concentrate
their minds on Stephen Dove.
Despite the different by-lines all the stories were remarkably
similar in that none of the reporters seemed aware of the schoolteacher's liaison
with a Palestinian organisation and, as promised, none mentioned Fitchett by name.
But they all wrote that a vengeful, grief-crazed schoolmaster, whom Scotland Yard
were anxious to interview about the assault on the cabinet minister's daughter,
was running around the Middle East looking for Koller. That he had disappeared from
his hotel and there were fears for his safety.
Since their foreign editors, even on the unpopular newspapers,
had become bored with tales of Arab fratricide, they welcomed the story as good
'human interest' and gave it space.
One of them, as Fitchett had hoped, despatched a man to Emma's
parents who persuaded them to part with a wedding photograph of Dove. 'These creeps
who don't want the rope back forget about the families of the victims,' the reporter
said piously - it was not until he left that they remembered he represented a newspaper
long opposed to capital punishment.
Beirut's one English language daily carried a news agency report
on Dove the following day. The overseas editions of British newspapers arrived twenty-four
hours later. Fitchett hoped that when Dove saw them he would realise he had lost
his only advantage – surprise - and give up.
During his first week there, three important things happened
to Fouche-Larimand in the clinic in Athens. The first was that he was told by his
friend the surgeon that this time there was nothing he could do and it was unlikely
that he had more than a few, painful months to live. In the meantime, because of
the fuss in Paris over the death of this waiter fellow, he was welcome to remain
at the clinic and the surgeon quite willing to fend off unwelcome callers, whatever
their credentials.
Since Fouche-Larimand essentially saw himself as a character
out of a Dumas novel his romanticism scored its usual victory over harsh reality
and at first he took the prognosis with great equanimity. All he said was that he
thought it a little unfair that a man who had had as many bullets in him as himself
should die in bed.
This first news induced a certain rational perspective that enabled
him to treat the second event, which ordinarily he might have regarded as a disaster,
in a positive light. An enterprising young French reporter working for a news magazine
conned his way into the clinic in Kolanaki by the simple ruse of buying a stethoscope
and a white coat, whereupon he assumed a mien of such a daunting mixture of determination
and concern that none of the staff dared challenge him.
When he entered Fouche-Larimand's room and, without preliminaries,
produced a motor-drive Olympus from beneath his overall and began snapping away,
the patient's first reaction was to have him thrown out. He even reached for the
swordstick next to his bed with the intention of doing it himself if at all possible.
Then, quite suddenly, he changed his mind. He ordered the journalist to stop taking
his damn pictures, to sit down, and to listen.
For it had occurred to Fouche-Larimand that this was his opportunity
to make a statement, leave behind a political testament.
For the next three hours he went through thirty years of recent
French history from the Third Republic to the death of de Gaulle as seen through
the eyes of an anglophobic, anti-semitic, minor and impoverished member of the aristocracy
who was not ashamed to have fought in the uniform of his country's old enemy.
Fouche-Larimand's hatred of the English, it seemed, started with
the British attack, after the surrender in 1940, on the unsuspecting French fleet
at Mers-el-Kebir. A cousin of his died when the Bretagne was blown out of the water:
'twelve hundred Frenchmen murdered by those pigs.' From there he went on to explain
his own concept of the Occupation - 'a civil war between Vichy and the communists
in the so-called Resistance' - and his activities in the counter-espionage section
of the Milice. He went into some detail about his almost permanent loan to the Gestapo
in Paris - 'not the ogres they're painted to be' - and the network he ran there,
in which the wretched Le Poidevin was a very small cog. Later, shortly before the
Allied landing in Normandy, he had tired of these activities and wanted to go back
to some real soldiering (he had been a newlycommissioned lieutenant in an armoured
regiment when the war started). Since the Vichy government had recently given permission
for Frenchmen to enlist in the Waffen SS he decided to participate in the international
struggle against Bolshevism on the Eastern front. After training he arrived at the
front just in time to take part in the last eight months of slaughter. 'There were
seven thousand Frenchmen in the Charlemagne Division. Two hundred of us returned.'
Afterwards, there was the Legion, in which he enlisted under
the name of a Danish comrade from the Viking Division whose papers came his way
when he expired in the cot next to FoucheLarimand in a field hospital somewhere
in East Prussia. He retained his nom de guerre until, emboldened by a decoration
awarded for an action near Diem Bien Phu, relatives at home made discreet enquiries
and discovered he was not wanted for any war crimes. He served in Algeria - 'another
stab in the back for France from the same man' - and then the OAS, in which he enormously
exaggerated the role he played; this was followed by another amnesty.
The reporter filled page after page in his notebook, having wisely
decided not to interrupt the old man's flow with questions. Only when Fouche-Larimand
had finished, the single eye glittering madly in the shrunken face, did he ask him
about Le Poidevin.
'I knew him in the Milice. I went to his funeral,' he said curtly.
'You kept in touch with him over all these years?'
'No. We renewed our acquaintanceship quite recently. We met by
chance at the cafe where he worked.'
'What connection could he have had with somebody like Koller?'
'I've no idea - apart from the obvious one,' he added mischievously.
'You mean, mon Colonel, that Koller's a homosexual.'
'Why not?'
At Fouche-Larimand's request the reporter took some more photographs
of him - this time with his hair combed, in a silk dressing-gown, and smoking a
cigarette - then departed, the camera now openly displayed, with his scoop.
The third event gave the dying man even more pleasure. He received
an international call on his bedside phone from the man Le Poidevin had said he
called 'le Grand jules'. They talked for about six minutes and, according to the
middle-aged nurse who arrived to give him his bed-bath, but stayed to listen, they
talked in German.
What the nurse, who had polished her school German during the
Nazi occupation, heard, was this:
Ah. You mean if he turns up I can tell him?
All of it?
It will be a pleasure. I will die a happy man. Yes,
I think so too. He will come. Yes, yes. I agree. He must have told him. He must
have told him something.
The funeral?
(
laughter
) No, it was a mistake. I wish I was that clever. You
know me - always the sentimentalist. But it was in the papers, and now a reporter
has interviewed me here. Yes, here - in the clinic. What?
A Frenchman.
I forget which one. Yes, one of those. Yes, he will read it. He will come, I'm sure
about that. Then he will -
At this point he noticed the nurse and angrily waved her away.
Koller waited in the Paris flat for two weeks to allow the hue
and cry following Le Poidevin's death to subside. He ate out of a stockpile of canned
food he and Siegfried had laid in months before for just such an emergency. He read
a lot, quickly moving from a worthy re-reading of Johann Most, Che Guevara and Regis
Debray to the westerns he had been guiltily fond of ever since he was at Gymnasium.
'Why do you read that American trash?' his father had always
asked. 'I've seen half-starved boys not much older than you make them run like rabbits.'
'They're just stories, Papa.
Just stories.'
But even then, when he and all his schoolfriends had declared
themselves
pacifists and had sworn they would never be
conscripted, he had dreamed of being the loner with a gun in his hand and a cause
to kill or be killed for.
A Shane putting down the cattle barons
and their thugs who would crush the homesteading proletariat.
His father would sometimes invade these day-dreams by making
one of his rare, and to the boy, totally incomprehensible jokes. 'It will always
be one of those mysteries of military science how they managed to defeat the Apaches
without air cover and the British to cover their flanks.'
Then the young Koller would rush upstairs and lock himself in
his room in petulant pubescent fury, throw the book aside, recall yet again, until
the heat came to his eyes, the taunts endured from classmates since barely out of
kindergarten.
'Your pappy burned babies.'
'It's not true. I'll kill you.'
'It is. It is. My mother saw it in the paper. He was a Nazi.
An SS man.
A pig of a Nazi.'
As he grew older the taunts stopped, because he acquired the
reputation of always being the one willing to turn childish grappling into a real
fight with the first punch to the face. Once, after one of these victories, he was
sent home early and for almost an hour refused to tell his mother why until, with
a mixture of threats and kindness, she wheedled the truth out of him.
'Don't listen to these lies,' she had said sternly.
Then, 'Were they Jews?'
Miserably he had confessed he did not know what a Jew was. She
asked the names of his tormentors and what they looked like, and seemed relieved
at the lack of 'steins' and the abundance of blond thatch.
'But was Pappy a Nazi?
Was he in the SS?'
'He did his duty.'
'But was he?'
'Many people were. They were the finest soldiers Germany has
ever had. You must be proud.'
'Did he burn babies?'
'Of course not.
These are wicked lies
made up after the war by the Russians and the Americans. They did these things.
The English too.
They burned people alive in air raids.'
She put her arms around him. 'Next time they say it, just ignore
them. They are stupid people. Now I must phone your school. Forget about it.'
But he was not allowed to forget. Every time his father thumped
the table when the subject of pension rights for the Waffen SS came up - 'We were
the Imperial Guard, not butchers' - or a newspaper brought 'lying Jewish propaganda'
into the house, he was not allowed to forget. Or when medals were carefully packed
for a regimental reunion that made headlines because of the clashes with the demonstrators
waving placards outside, he was not allowed to forget.
And later on, just before university and the start of his attempt
to wash out the stain, there were the nightly harangues on 'those damned Communists
who are stealing the country's youth'.
With hindsight he saw these paternal outbursts for what they
were - a forlorn, pre-emptive strike at the larceny budding around his own hearth.
