(2013) Collateral Damage (17 page)
'No. A poor car for a poor person,' and they had laughed about
that, but she was right because even if he had had the money it would never have
been a Porsche.
The subterfuge with the car was something he made himself do
as an extra little precaution: in fact, he felt there was little chance of the police
connecting him with the attack on the cabinet minister's daughter. His main problem
had been travelling with the Webley. Since people like Koller had ensured that even
grannies were subject to the indignity of a body search, the only answer was to
put it in his main suitcase, the one that went into the aircraft's hold, and hope
Customs accepted his 'nothing to declare'.
This had worked going in and out of Paris, but he had worried
about Lebanon with its cowboy reputation. He decided if he was caught to pose as
the naive schoolteacher who thought everybody was allowed to carry one.
He had been worrying about the gun when he first sighted Lebanon,
a hazy coastline viewed from the window-seat of a Caravelle apparently about to
crash land on a turquoise Mediterranean. Then, as the landing gear shuddered down,
the approach over a deserted harbour, still dosed although, officially, the civil
war was over. Next the aircraft was skimming the cream-coloured apartment blocks
of Moslem West Beirut, the occasional terra cotta bungalow roof a clue to the style
before the concrete flood, followed by the almost comical greenery of the city golf-course
neighbouring the runway rushing up to meet them. From above it looked quite tame,
and the schoolteacher felt oddly cheated.
The gun problem was resolved when a fat and cheerful customs
officer, having given the flight-bag he was carrying as hand baggage a cursory inspection,
chalked his unopened case and waved him through. The khaki-uniformed policemen with
their huge pistols in open holsters did not spare him a second glance. As Fitchett
had rightly suspected, the Lebanese gendarmerie were indifferent to fugitive British
schoolteachers accused of beating up cabinet ministers' daughters. The embassy were
aware of this too: they asked the Foreign Ministry if they would mind, when they
weren't too busy, having a word with the Justice Ministry about the matter - with
no conviction that anything would be achieved by doing so.
The Admiral Hotel, just off Hamra, was recommended to Dove by
a taxi-driver who must have been under the impression that he was another journalist.
'All your friends there,' he had said enigmatically, as he charged him three times
the going rate from the airport. As soon as he got to his room Dove had taken the
pistol out and carried it in his waistband ever since. He worked on the assumption
that he might only find Koller once and he wanted to be prepared. His concept of
the future extended no further than his meeting.
About a week after his arrival
L'Orient Le Jour
published an Agence France Presse report about the
hunt for Koller in Paris. At first, Dove was cross that he had been in the same
city and missed him. He imagined himself rubbing shoulders with the terrorist at
Charles de Gaulle, too obsessed with getting to Beirut to notice the looks of the
blond man he had just pushed past on the escalator. Then, lying in bed at night
listening to the Christian sector getting another pasting, he reasoned that the
German would have to get out of Paris and that Beirut was his most likely bolt-hole.
Some of the journalists must know where he was likely to hang out, he reasoned.
It was just a matter of interrupting their endless shop-talk long enough to get
them to concentrate their minds on the subject. In the meantime, the children with
the Kalashnikovs, as well as the odd chrome-plated automatic glimpsed in a taxi-driver's
glove compartment, had convinced him that he really ought to do something about
getting a better gun. He was quite unaware that his incessant questions about terrorists
in general, and Koller in particular, plus his manic peregrinations about the city,
were beginning to attract attention.
'Rebecca', the young woman in Cyprus who took Koller's message,
returned to Beirut the day after she received it - on the first available flight.
She arrived at Khaldeh airport clutching a demi-john of cheap Cypriot brandy, ignored
the small boys touting for taxis, and was picked up by a new black Buick with darkened
windows. In the back of the Buick sat a middle-aged Arab with steel-rimmed spectacles,
a cuddly, roly-poly figure wearing a black leather jacket over a white polo-necked
sweater. This was Koller's boss, Abu Kamal. He wasn't normally disposed to meet
people at airport and, partial to Cypriot brandy though he was, Rebecca was going
to be in a lot of trouble if Koller's message was not as important as she said it
was.
'Hello, my dear,' he said as she slid in besides him. 'Come whisper
your sibylline secrets.'
As she talked the car sped south towards the old Phoenician port
of Sidon, passing the places where scruffy Syrian soldiers were manning anti-aircraft
guns dug in alongside the road, their muzzles pointing east over the Mediterranean.
When she had finished Abu Kamal said that she had been right to come and asked if
she was certain that Koller had said he did not know Dove. She said that she was.
Shortly afterwards they arrived at a small, whitewashed villa,
its walls trailing bougainvillea. It stood, facing the sea, about half a mile away
from the nearest Palestinian refugee camp and was surrounded by a wire mesh fence,
around the top of which ran three strands of barbed wire. As they approached the
gate in this fence two lean and fit-looking young men in olive green uniforms and
red chequered keffiyeh headscarves sprang out of a hole in the ground. They were
carrying the paratroopers' version of the Kalashnikov, the sort with the folding
stock.
The Buick stopped. The sentries peered into the vehicle and then
sprang back into an approximation of 'attention' before opening the gate. As they
went into the villa Abu Kamal lit his third cigarette in thirty minutes. He had
difficulty in believing Koller's story himself; now he had to make other people
believe it.
In the main reception room five men were seated around a low
table, smoking and dropping lumps of sugar into glasses of strong tea. There was
a full ash-tray on the table and although it was not yet dusk the curtains were
drawn and the electric light was on. Posters covered the walls, among them a large
coloured photograph of four long-haired young men with white even teeth standing
chest high in a cornfield and gazing moodily between the stalks. They might have
been a pop group, but their instruments were Kalashnikovs and a rocket-propelled
grenade-launcher. Three of the men around the table belonged to the Realists, the
movement the Palestinian publisher was connected with, and they had come to parley.
A man who had been sitting in the front of the Buick next to
the driver went into the room first, followed by Abu Kamal. The woman did not go
in. As Abu Kamal entered, the men around the table rose and one by one went up to
him, embraced, and kissed him on both cheeks. While they did this they were carefully
watched by the other man from the car, a tall, handsome Palestinian in his mid-thirties
who stood by the door with his arms clasped loosely together so that his right hand
disappeared under the flap of his jacket. Like the youths in the poster, all killed
in an attack on an Israeli settlement in Galilee, he wore his hair long - only in
his case it was because during the events, as the civil war was called, somebody
had removed most of his right ear.
When Abu Kamal had taken his seat, sipped his tea, lit another
cigarette, and a certain amount of small talk had been exchanged, he repeated most
of what the woman from Cyprus had told him in the car. It was noticeable that he
directed his story at a man of about his own age who sat opposite him across the
table. He was wearing a well-cut suit with an Yves St Laurent tie, and with his
greying sideboards and gold-rimmed glasses looked like the successful lawyer he
had been until Saudi funds made politics of a sort a feasible career. Unlike the
others he did not smoke, but constantly ran a string of worry beads through his
right hand. After Abu Kamal had finished this man, who was a very senior member
of the Realists, asked: 'Do you believe this story? Do you believe what Koller is
saying?' His tone implied that he, for one, did not.
'I see no reason why not to?' said Abu Kamal quietly.
The long-haired Palestinian at the door stared impassively at
the man with the worry beads, never moving.
'It seems to me,' said the lawyer, 'that this is just why these
people do our cause more harm than good...'
Abu Kamal let out a barely audible sigh, lit another cigarette
and braced himself for the lecture to come.
'They have no real motivation,' the lawyer continued. 'They are
anarchists, nihilists. They will work for anyone who gives them money and a gun
and when they are caught they tell everything they know. How do we know he is telling
the truth? Who's ever heard of these old fascists he talks about doing anything
that
mattered
a damn? How do we know who he is really working
for? He is not Palestinian, he is not...
',
he was going
to say 'Moslem', but changed it to '…one of us.' Abu Kamal and his friends considered
themselves to be Marxist; and, besides, there were many Christian Palestinians in
both factions.
'I will tell you what I do know,' continued the lawyer. 'I know
he's nearly caused bloodshed between brothers again. I know he almost killed a friend
of mine in London, a man I love as dearly as my own brother. I know that he killed
an Englishwoman and that Palestinians are made to look like murderers again. And
now we have the woman's husband here, this poor crazed Englishman who came to see
me at the university the other day. What do we say to him? Do we tell him: "Oh,
we're very sorry your wife died, it wasn't really our fault,'' and try to persuade
him to go home and be a good schoolteacher? Or do we kill him before he kills one
of us? Or do we kill Koller and tell the world that the Palestinians no longer employ
such people?'
'My friend,' said Abu Kamal, 'I thought we came here to talk
peace between brothers. Why do you talk so much of killing? Until we know differently
Koller is our comrade. To harm him would be to harm one of us. As for the Englishman,
he can be looked after.'
'The English are to blame for everything,' said one of Kamal's
aides at the table, a muscular young man in tight jeans and platform-soled shoes.
He was confident; he knew that the one eared man by the door had the lawyer and
his two companions covered. 'They gave the Jews our land. One Englishwoman dies
in London, but how many Palestinian women and children have died when the Zionists
have bombed our camps? This Englishman must not think he can come here acting like
a colonialist, carrying a gun and looking for revenge.'
'How do you know he has a gun?' This time it was one of the lawyer's
companions who spoke, also a younger man. It was like an ideal medieval battle:
the knights had
clashed,
now it was the pikeman's turn.
'Because I bumped into him along Hamra and felt it,' said Kamal's
man proudly. 'It was a small pistol in his trousers.' He had on the same jeans and
sports shirt he was wearing when he collided with Dove. 'I did it twice. Perhaps
we all look alike to him.'
'You are lucky he did not shoot you,' said the other man. He
did not bother to hide his contempt, and Dove's shadow became angry, forgot
himself
.
'He's
not a
fedayeen,' he snapped. 'His
gun is old and-' Kamal frowned at him and he cut himself off, but it was too late.
'Where's the Englishman now?' pounced the lawyer, addressing
his question to Kamal as rank demanded. He had guessed the answer. He just wanted
to see if he would confirm it.
'He's all right,' said Abu Kamal in his quiet voice. 'He's with
us.'
At the door the one-eared man moved his right hand slightly closer
to his left hip. The lawyer pretended not to notice it. 'Kiliing him is not going
to help,' he said.
'I said he's all right. Look, I think it's time for us to talk
alone if you agree.' The lawyer nodded his assent and the others rose slowly and
left the room. The one-eared man was the last to leave.
Food was served by an elderly man in a soiled khaki shirt and
keffiyeh. Both Palestinians ate sparingly at first, mining modestly into the hommos
and tehineh dips with their pitta bread, saving their hunger for the flat cakes
of spiced meat and onions ground in wheat, known as kebbeh. They drank water with
the meal, but afterwards the rough Cypriot brandy was produced, although the lawyer
thought whisky would have been better for his liver. It was not until this stage
that Kamal unfolded his plan. 'You want Koller dead, don't you?' said Abu Kamal
slowly.
'That is your price for peace?' The lawyer nodded.
'We are willing to give you this - but on our terms.'
'And these are?'
'We will arrange for the Englishman to kill Koller.'
The lawyer managed not to look shocked. All he did was
raise
a quizzical eyebrow and ask, 'And how do you propose to
do this? Recruit him into the Front?'
Abu Kamal smiled. 'No. With your permission we will recruit him
into the, er, Realists.'
The lawyer could no longer quite conceal his bewilderment. 'Look,
my friend,' Abu Kamal continued, '
it's
simple. Dove doesn't
know who is holding him. He thinks we are the Front, but he cannot be certain. If
we tell him that we are you, that there was some misunderstanding, that his questions
made us curious and that we had to hold him while we checked him out with friends
in London, he'll believe us.'
