(2013) Collateral Damage (13 page)
Koller was carrying two weapons. The .44 snub-nosed
Magnum
in the waist and of his trousers, the butt barely concealed
by the bottom of his jerkin, and a flick-knife in his trouser pocket. It was the
knife he brought out now, but he didn't open it. If it came to it he hoped that
the click and the flash of a genuine switchblade might be enough to frighten these
children away. After all, this wasn't Marseilles. Koller watched the boy, thinking
how it was always the smallest or weakest who wanted to fight, wanted to prove he
was as good as they were.
The boy stood there smoking and looking in the direction of the
Metro entrance. Behind him the bar door must have been open, for Koller could hear
his friends calling to him. Another record started on the juke-box. The youth seemed
to regard this as a signal that he had been out-voted and with the cigarette still
in his mouth sauntered back into the bar. The terrorist heaved a sigh of relief,
and pocketed the knife. The older boys had obviously decided their beer was more
interesting than a wild-goosechase down the Metro. He waited a few seconds and
then started walking back towards the block where the man he now knew was called
Le Poidevin lived. When he got there he checked the mail-boxes. Le Poidevin was
on the ninth floor.
The waiter was wearing a maroon velvet smoking-jacket when he
came to the door and an open-necked white frilly evening shirt. A gold medallion
on a gold chain nested in the greying hairs of his chest. In his arms he carried
a Siamese cat with a red collar about its neck which stared at Koller with evil
blue eyes. For a moment the two men looked at each other in mutual astonishment.
Then Koller said: 'Are you two alone? I'd like a few words.'
Le Poidevin motioned him inside and closed the door behind him.
The Siamese sprang out of his arms and ran off somewhere. The sitting room which
he ushered the German into had a white fitted carpet and was furnished in stripe-upholstered
reproduction Louis Quinze. There were several statues and paintings of golden youths
about the place which, together with his off-duty costume, left little doubt as
to their owner's sexual preference.
Koller sat on the edge of an armchair; the waiter spread himself
on a chaise-longue. 'Why are you here?' The accent was basically Parisian. Only
a hint of foreignness remained.
'I'd like you to tell me one or two things, M'sieu Le Poidevin.'
'I can't tell you anything. You should know that. You'll get
yourself into trouble coming here.'
'Trouble from whom?'
'Don't be silly.'
Nevertheless, the fat man's attitude was one of benign curiosity.
Poor confused boy, he thought, how on earth did he come to be involved? Not that
he was really a boy; tough-looking, too. They had both lit up cigarettes. Le Poidevin
went to a sideboard and produced a bottle of Calvados and two glasses. 'Do you like
this stuff?'
The German nodded.
'How did you find out where I live, my name?'
'I followed you.'
'But my name.
How did you ...'
'I think I'd better ask the questions.'
Le Poidevin, who had just returned his bulk to the chaise
longue, stood up. 'Look here. I think if you're going to be rude I must ask you
to leave.'
Koller stared up at him, his hands resting lightly on his knees.
'Sit down. I said, sit down.'
The waiter hesitated for a moment, then sat down and drained
most of his glass. Somehow it failed to warm him. 'Who are you?
Some kind of policeman?
Your accent isn't French. It sounds...'
'I said I'll ask the questions,' said Koller, helping himself
to a glass of the apple brandy. He sipped at his drink for a moment, then rose and
walked across to the window. It was the sliding sort in an aluminium frame. Koller
opened it and looked out. Across the street was a similar block, with rooms made
furtive by the blue glow from television screens. Below, street-lights illuminated
a small lawn, a low wall and cars parked either side of the street.
'Hot, isn't it?' said Koller pleasantly.
The waiter didn't reply, just sat on the couch trying to fight
down the waves of fear that had already turned his palms moist. 'Come and have a
look at the view,' said Koller, gently. He was standing side on to the window so
that the fat man was always in vision.
'I've already seen it,' said Le Poidevin, failing to keep the
fear out of his voice.
'Please, I would like you to have another look.'
The waiter pulled himself to his feet, eyed the door, calculated
correctly that he would never be quick enough and walked slowly towards the window.
This was ridiculous, he thought. He had never done this fellow any harm. All he
had done was pass him messages, coded messages that he couldn't make head or tail
of. He'd never even taken as much as a tip from him, not as much as a sou. He tried
to compose his fleshy features. 'If you insist,' he said.
Koller put an avuncular arm around the waiter and they stood
there for a moment peering into the night. In the middle distance they could see
the lights of a plane coming in to land. 'Do you like flying?
',
asked the German, still at his most anodyne. 'Not particularly. I don't do it much.'
'That's a pity,' said Koller, 'a great pity, because if you don't
tell me precisely what I want to know I'm going to throw you out of this window.'
Le Poidevin looked at his tormentor, the fair hair, the crazy,
pale blue eyes, and knew he had been right to be frightened.
'Please, let's sit down.'
'Not before you tell me who gives you the messages you pass onto
me.'
With his hand still on his shoulder Koller could feel Le Poidevin
tense and he sensed that he was about to make a run for it. He pulled the fat little
.44 from his waistband and caressed the fat man's cheek with it. Le Poidevin gasped.
'His name is Fouche-Larimand - Comte Christian FoucheLarimand.'
Koller motioned the waiter back to the chaise-longue and again
sat opposite him in the easy chair, the pistol resting lightly on his lap.
'Who the hell,' said
Koller,
'is Comte
Christian Fouche-Larimand?'
'You don't know him?'
The German shook his head.
'It's a long story. Can I have a drink?'
'As much as you like.'
Le Poidevin refilled both glasses and began his story. It was
really quite a simple tale of blackmail and treachery, but the waiter was often
discursive, sometimes, especially when the Calvados began to bite, tearful and a
couple of times downright evasive until Koller forced him back to the point.
The gist of the
story,
as later relayed
by Koller to his masters in Beirut and elsewhere, was this. The waiter was born
in Guernsey. His father had been killed on the Somme with most of the local regiment,
and he had been brought up by his widowed mother, who doted on him. They lived in
a parish where, in the twenties and the thirties, the native French patois was still
strong, and he had never really been comfortable in English.
By his late teens Le Poidevin realised that he was, as he put
it, different from other men. He took to hanging around those pubs in St Peter Port
patronized by the old sweats from the local garrison or the crews off visiting Royal
Navy ships. He was eighteen when the war started and had wanted to enlist in the
Navy, but his mother kicked up a dreadful fuss at being left alone so he stayed
at home while many of the boys he had been to school with were doing their basic
training in England. Eventually, he could stand it no longer, and in the early spring
of 1940 he went into town and took his medical at the Navy recruiting office there.
He passed, but there was awaiting period before the next local intake were sent
to Portsmouth. He was still waiting for his RN travel warrant when France collapsed
and the Germans arrived.
He had pleaded with his mother to join the civilian evacuation
which took place after the British decided not to put up a fight for the Channel
Islands. But she was old, and a channel crossing frightened her more than the Germans.
So he had been among the Guernsey people who stayed and watched the blond giants
of the Wehrmacht, tanned from the summer Blitzkrieg, hold their victory parade in
St Peter Port. They had appeared invincible then, said Le Poidevin. They all looked
like film-stars.
Tall, athletic, good teeth, clear-eyed; so different
from the bowlegged British regulars who had garrisoned the island or the groping,
pot-bellied petty officers off the visiting destroyers.
The local papers,
transmogrified into propaganda sheets for Dr Goebbels, chronicled fresh triumphs.
The RAF had been shot out of the sky; London was ablaze; the U-boats had drowned
half the British Merchant Fleet. Victory was assured. The New Order had arrived.
Before long the waiter had found a friend among these supermen.
By 1943, due to unit rotation, there had been several friends, although by then
many of the supermen were dead and his friends began to resemble ordinary mortals
with round shoulders and fallen arches. The last of these was a private from Hamburg
called Werner, who had been wounded in Russia. This time, the waiter explained,
it was true love. After the war they planned to start a restaurant together in Bavaria.
They used to meet in his mother's house where they would play
cards until his mother tired and went to bed. She had objected at first to having
a Boche in the house, and pointedly arranged about their parlour photographs of
her husband in service dress and holding a swagger-cane. But Werner charmed her,
as he charmed most people, telling her that his own father had been killed in Flanders
- which might have been true, because Werner never knew his name.
The only people he failed to charm were the German military police,
who raided the house shortly after they had gone to bed one night, suspecting that
Werner's frequent visits there had something to do with the black market. At that
time the local Commandant was taking an increasingly hard line with black marketeers
and there had been threats of execution for any members of the Wehrmacht involved.
Unlike the SS, homosexuality was not a capital offence in the army.
Since it was quite obvious that the MPs were determined to charge him
with something Werner rapidly confessed the true reason for his visits.
This
saved him from the possibility of a firing squad at the price of being returned
to the Eastern Front in a penal battalion of the Dirlewanger Brigade.
It also, of course, implicated Le Poidevin, who was to be handed
over to the Guernsey police together with a sworn statement from Werner. In those
days sodomites could be birched or sent to prison for a long time. Even worse, as
far as Le Poidevin was concerned, was what his appearance in court would do to his
mother. He pleaded with the Military Police Hauptmann interrogating him to charge
him with almost anything else, but he was quite adamant that nothing could be done.
Nonetheless, the Hauptmann must have talked about the matter,
for a few hours before he was about to be delivered to the local constabulary a
guardian angel turned up in the form of a Gestapo officer. The Gestapo man was merely
visiting the island from his base in Paris. He offered Le Poidevin a deal: all charges
would be dropped if he agreed to go to France and work for them. Furthermore, he
would arrange it so that it would appear that he was being sent to the Continent
for further questioning over a matter of sabotage. This would certainly make him
something of a local hero and at the same time they would forward reassuring 'prison
letters' to his mother in which he would indicate that he was in some kind of internment
camp and was being well treated. Later, said the Gestapo man, he could say that
he had been released but, forbidden to return to Guernsey, had found a job in Paris.
Koller listened to all this patiently, as Le Poidevin punctuated
his tale with frequent attacks on the Calvados. The German, being on duty as it
were, was still on his second glass. Cigarette smoke filled the room and they partially
opened the window again. The atmosphere was cosy. The Siamese had reappeared and
was faking slumber on the fat man's knee. If the German had not had a gun on his
own lap they might have been good friends. The waiter even interrupted his narrative
to rummage about in a drawer until he unearthed a well-preserved photograph of Werner,
a bull-necked young man in an unbuttoned tunic killed by Polish partisans during
the Warsaw Uprising.
Le Poidevin arrived in Paris in September 1943 and his mother
died of grief and malnutrition just after Christmas the same year. He was allowed
to attend her funeral 'under escort' - thus perpetuating the lie that he had been
interned. Shortly afterwards the Gestapo passed him on to the Intelligence section
of Joseph Darnand's Milice, the quite recently formed Vichy militia composed of
French fascists.
The terrorists, as Le Poidevin called them, were going on the
offensive in preparation for the Allied invasion. Jean Moulin, de Gaulle's emissary
from London, had been captured in June, but the work he had done to co-ordinate
the various groups under the National Resistance Council was beginning to pay off.
In the Massif Central hundreds of young men were joining the Marquis to dodge the
compulsory labour Pierre Laval's government had introduced that February. The waiter
recited all this as if it were yesterday's news.
The Milice found him a job in a Left Bank bar patronized almost
equally by petty criminals, a few fugitive Jews, and members of the Resistance.
Most of the latter belonged to the Milice Patriotique, the Communist terrorists.
His task was simply to observe, listen and inform. He communicated through a series
of dead-letter-boxes, often in cafes and department stores, or through people such
as waiters or small shopkeepers.
