(2013) Collateral Damage (29 page)
'OK. Let's go. Yaller,' said the Palestinian. Again Dove got
a whiff of the whisky. It surprised him. He had expected George to be as cool as
he was when the Israeli planes attacked.
Koller was sitting at the kitchen table trying to finish the
letter he had outlined to Nadia at lunch the day before. He wrote on lined yellow
paper in a forward-slanting, almost gothic
script, that
was very similar to the hand of the parent he was writing to. Around his feet lay
several scrunched-up drafts. In the end he settled for just three lines. When he
had finished he took the letter into his room where he had some envelopes. Nadia
was next door in her bedroom, her body wrapped in an orangecoloured towel, using
a hair-drier. They were not long out of bed and intending to dine out. She had decided
that this would be the moment to warn him that they didn't believe: his story about
The Circle.
Dove and George came up in the lift. The first thing the schoolteacher
noticed was that there was a spy-hole in the front door and, for a second or two,
this alone was enough to bring him to a halt. He imagined Koller behind the woodwork
watching every move he made. What had George said? No modern door could stop a pistol
bullet. He was sweating now and there was a tight pain coming up across his chest
that reminded him of the way he felt after training sessions with the fedayeen.
On the right of the front door there was a strip of frosted glass and through it
he could see that the light was on in the hallway. The sound of church bells and
explosions floated up from outside.
He checked that the Walther's safety was off and then carefully
replaced it in the waistband of his trousers; his palm was sticky with sweat. Behind
him George was breathing heavily and Dove thought: 'He's as scared as I am.'
He took out the door-key the Palestinian had given him and wondered
again how they had so quickly found a safe-house belonging to a rival organisation.
The key was not very new looking. Its metal was dull and the ridges felt worn.
He inserted it and suddenly found himself hoping that the woman had changed the
lock or bolted the door. This was madness. What was he doing here? The key turned
easily. He pushed the door and they stepped inside.
George had told him the layout several times, although never
how he knew it. On the right there was a long, open-plan drawing and dining room
entered through a sliding glass door. Unlike the hallway this room was in darkness.
At the end of the hallway facing him was a door that had been left slightly ajar:
he could see that a light was on inside. He had been told that this would most probably
be Koller's bedroom. 'Go get him,' hissed George.
Dove walked quickly along the grey marble floor, pistol in his
right hand,
arm
almost fully outstretched. When he got
to the bedroom door he kicked it open and saw a fair-haired man sitting on the bed
addressing an envelope which lay on a pad across his knees. For a fraction of a
second they stared at each other.
Terrorist pen in hand, the schoolteacher
with his gun.
Dove fired twice. The shots deafening in the confines of the
small room, and then in a voice he hardly recognized as his own: 'I'm Stephen Dove.'
The first bullet was wild, the consummation of blind panic. It
caught the terrorist high up on the fleshy part of the thigh as he dropped the pen
and his hand ran back along the mattress. The second shot was aimed the way George
had taught him to do it, the left hand steadying his right wrist. The special soft-nosed
bullet hit Koller just below his heart, ripped through a lung and exited near his
backbone. He stopped moving then and fell back onto the bed, his left arm taking
his weight while the stain spread on his shirt and his face began to drain to the
colour of stone. 'Stop an elephant with this gun,' George had said. But Koller was
still alive - just.
Somewhere a woman was shouting in Arabic. Dove was hardly aware
of it. 'You killed my wife,' he said. It was important to explain why he had done
this thing to him. The Englishman's finger was still on the trigger, but the arms
were relaxed now and the pistol pointing almost to the floor.
Koller slowly nodded his head in comprehension. His mouth was
open and he was trying to fight down the shock. He felt no real pain yet; he was
reminded of being winded on a school football field.
The woman was shouting again, this time in English for the benefit
of Koller. 'He told me they were coming tomorrow. You must believe me. He told me
it was tomorrow.' The German seemed to nod again.
Dove turned round and saw George pushing aside a wildfaced young
woman wrapped in an orange beach-towel while at the same time he appeared to be
trying to level his Walther at the Englishman's chest. Dove stared at the Palestinian,
noted the glazed look in his eyes. Then the pistol swung away from him and there
was what sounded like a single echoing report. George catapulted back against the
wall, clutching his throat. Koller was
lying
on the bed
in much the same position as before with the little Vzor automatic in his right
hand. There was a small, blueish hole in the centre of his forehead and he was quite
dead. George and Koller had fired simultaneously.
The woman came over and seized Koller by his bloodied shirt,
pulled him upright as if she was trying to shake him back to life. Then she collapsed,
her cheek in the gore on his chest, shoulders heaving with great sobs. The Palestinian
was slumped against the wall making dreadful choking sounds, legs twitching like
a half-crushed insect. Dove, unhurt, stepped over him into the hallway and tried
to vomit out the memory of what he had just done and seen.
The woman followed him out, her cheek smudged with Koller's blood,
absently arranging the top of the orange bathtowel about her breasts. Dove, hardly
aware of her presence, was looking down at a small puddle of vomit on the floor,
the ringing in his ears from the gunshots beginning to be replaced by a rushing,
sea-shell sound. The woman was saying something in her American English, but the
sense of the words took a long time to penetrate his understanding. 'He saved your
life,' she was saying. 'Hans Koller saved your life.'
Dove wanted to explain. He opened his mouth to speak, but he
found it painful to work his jaw and the reply failed to come. He felt his chest
was in a vice, the breath being squeezed out of him in a gigantic bear-hug. He gasped,
snatching at the air like a drowning man, conscious that it was spilling past him
before he could drink his fill. Everything began to blur as if his eyes were watering.
He tried hard to focus, but just then his chest burst out of the bear-hug and he
grabbed at the woman's bath towel too late to stop his forehead cracking the tiled
floor.
Nadia pulled the towel out of Dove's grasp and then watched the
big Englishman
shuddering
his life away, peering down at
him with the detachment of someone attempting to fathom out movement at the foot
of a tall cliff. When it was over she allowed the towel to fall about her ankles
and stood naked like this for perhaps a minute, thinking about the implications
of what had happened. Dove would still be a hero, of course: the manner of his death
would serve only to underline his torment, the anguish of a civilized man revenging
himself on a barbarian. There would never be any posthumous accolades for Koller;
no shrines for a terrorist; he would not even be mourned by the Front.
She picked up the towel, remembering as she did so the way Dove
had lunged for it as he fell, and went into her bedroom, where she dressed carefully
in bra and pants, a silk shirt and skirt. She buttoned the shirt carefully, then
stood in front of a mirror and ripped it savagely down from the collar so that most
of the buttons flew off; she arranged one of the bra cups so that her right breast
was totally exposed. When she was satisfied she went back into the hallway and sat
down beside Dove. She picked up his head by his hair and, trying not to look into
the dead eyes, scratched his face hard several times, making sure she collected
plenty of skin under her fingernails. Rigor mortis had not yet set in and there
was some blood. She lay down, pulled her skirt up so that it was well over her waist,
and rolled her pants down to her hips so that some of her pubic hair was showing.
'Am I in danger?' Koller had asked.
'Not while I'm with you.' And she had believed it.
She swept her hand across the tiles until it came up against
the cold metal of Dove's Walther. She checked to see that the pistol was still in
working order, and then held it loosely in her right hand so that her thumb was
on the trigger. It might work, she thought. One thing she was certain of: the Front
had not intended her to be among the survivors.
Outside, the band played and the youths continued to let off
their fireworks.
Somewhere over the Mediterranean Fitchett ordered a whisky and
decided that he might as well pass the time to Heathrow by starting on his report.
He hated paperwork and it was, he thought, doubly unnecessary in this case because
the affair had been so thoroughly aired in print.
The newspapers had badly wanted to make a hero out of Dove and
it was not their fault that, in the end, he got a bad press. Policemen and reporters
can only work on what they believe to be fact and, in Dove's case, what they believed
to be fact was wrong.
In the Coroner's court in Nicosia the circumstances relating
to the charnel-house discovered in Nadia's apartment had been spelt out quite succinctly.
There were three male corpses and one female. Two of the men and the woman had died
of gunshot wounds. Ballistic evidence provided an accurate reconstruction of who
shot who. The Englishman Stephen Dove had died of cardiac arrest in a struggle with
the Palestinian woman known as Nadia Mouron. Both their fingerprints had been found
on the pistol which killed her and it seemed likely that she had shot herself while
fighting for possession of the gun. The state of her clothing strongly suggested
that Dove had been trying to sexually assault her when he suffered a massive heart
attack, probably almost immediately after the woman had been shot. The pathologist
had pointed out that all four of the deceased had died within minutes of each other.
It was impossible, he said, to pinpoint the exact time of death to within half an
hour. He added that the lividity marks, bruises left by blood gathering at the lowest
point in a fresh corpse, indicated that none of the bodies had been moved after
death.
'Christ. He iced himself chasing pussy,' Fitchett had overheard
an awed American reporter in court whisper to a colleague. The policeman had to
agree that this about summed things up.
Deprived of an unsullied hero Fleet Street was not slow in assembling
the circumstantial evidence. This showed that Dove had been more than a little strange,
almost a licensed sex maniac whose revenge seemed to be sadistically aimed at Koller's
women as much as at the terrorist himself. Apart from the Palestinian woman he had
tried to rape at gunpoint, presumably near the zenith of some terrible sexual high
brought on by the violence, there was the cabinet minister's daughter who would
probably never walk again without the aid of a stick. Then Tina, the whore from
Beirut, turned up at the front desk of the most sensational tabloid and for four
figures and a. good lunch sold them a story which seemed to prove that the schoolteacher
enjoyed beating up ladies of no particular political conviction at all. After that
even close friends such as Roger Day, the English teacher, said that grief had obviously
driven him more than a little crazy.
Dove might have emerged with some credit, however mixed his motives,
for successfully taking on three dangerous terrorists if the Front's flimsy explanation
that George and Koller accidentally shot each other protecting their female comrade
had not been challenged by news stories, quoting 'Israeli intelligence sources',
giving a truer version of events. The Funny had decided that damaging the Front's
relations with their foreign supporters was much more important than allowing some
seedy schoolmaster more dignity than he deserved. So it came out that one of the
dead men had been on Dove's side and they helped him kill their own man.
The only thing the press got nowhere near to
was
the Charlemagne Circle. Fitchett might have if he had allowed
himself to follow his intuition. For a long time on that flight back to London he
studied a photocopy of Koller's note to his father that the Greek Cypriot police
had let him have. It read:
My Dear Papa,
'After every December there's
always a May.'
Now for you it will always
be December.
Not even a 'cut-out' between
us.
He had written 'cut-out'
in English.
Hans
For some time Fitchett
played with a strange idea. He even began to write it. Then he crossed it out. No,
it wouldn't do.
Wouldn't do for the Yard.
If he came up
with something like that they'd really think he was a candidate for the funny farm.
If you enjoyed reading
Collateral
Damage
you may be interested in
Spies
of Jerusalem
by Colin Smith, also published by Endeavour Press.
Extract from Spies of Jerusalem by
Colin Smith
Huj, 8 November 1917: about 2.30 p.m.
There were dead men and dead horses, but at first it was
mostly dead horses.
