(2013) Collateral Damage (8 page)
When he walked out he would walk with his hands well clear of
his clothes. They would see that he was unarmed. He had even considered carrying
a bunch of flowers because the sight of a supposedly dangerous man bearing such
an incongruous thing could, he supposed, unnerve an enemy. Then again they might
find such originality disturbing, think his bouquet contained a weapon.
He didn't think much about the woman he had killed. It was an
accident. She just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. He had read
in the newspapers that she was the daughter of a senior army officer and therefore
obviously not a member of the working class. He had fleetingly wondered whether
she had ever been in rebellion against her background like he was.
Probably not.
As a rule the British were too naive, too complacent
for that.
'When will you leave?' asked the cabinet minister's daughter.
'Tomorrow morning.'
'Perhaps you ought to go at night.' She didn't say 'tonight',
but he knew that was what she meant. He didn't tell her his fears. In the dark they
would be twice as nervous; in the dark a twig became
a cannon
.
'You want to get rid of me?' He smiled to show he was joking,
that he could not possibly suspect her of that.
'No. Don't be silly. I just thought it would be safer for you.'
'No. That's wrong. People are twice as watchful at night.'
He knew she wouldn't argue with him however stupid his reasoning
sounded. He was supposed to be the expert. Besides, she was still in love with him
and fear had not yet swamped the other emotion.
'And when you get back
you'll look into the other thing?'
'Yes.'
'Where will you start?'
He hesitated. He had already told her something of his suspicion,
but only in the vaguest terms. Normally he told her as little of the truth as possible.
There were, for instance, other warm beds for him in the city, other people holding
passports and money for him she never knew existed. They were much too valuable
to compromise. Ruth was blown, expendable. If he got away he could never return
now that the cops were taking an interest in her. He had been a fool, unable to
resist the luxury of good sex and a mind open to colonization. Next time, he promised
himself, it would be the debutante who thought Engels was something to do with geometry.
But for the moment he recognized the necessity to confide in
her. She desperately needed the flattery of a confidence, being on the team, to
help keep the fear in check. If she panicked she might run to somebody for help,
one of the PERRP crowd or even her parents. And that would be messy.
Even fatal.
It would do no harm, he reasoned, to give her the
outline of his problem. No details.
Nothing that would damage
him if she talked.
And one day she would talk; he had no doubt about that.
'Do you know anything about the cut-out system?' he asked, and
quickly went on to explain what it was without bothering for her reply.
It was a method, he told her, commonly used by both intelligence
agencies and organisations like his own. In the active part of the movement it was
important to keep each cell as watertight as possible so that if one lot got busted
it would be impossible for them to give away the others even if their captors plugged
their balls into the local electricity supply. Cell members had no idea who belonged
to the other cells and where they were to be found. There had been two people in
his cell, he said. Now there was only himself.
'What happened to your comrade?'
'He was killed.' He didn't explain the circumstances; it would
only add to her fear.
'A cut-out,' he went on, 'is a go-between. This is the person
through whom we talk to the headquarters of the Front. The cutout gives our orders
and we give him our requests. This way we never meet our immediate bosses; we do
not even know who they are.'
Sometimes, he explained, the cut-outs would change without warning.
Until shortly after Siegfried disappeared he had never actually met their cut-out.
He collected messages from a drop.
'A drop?'
'A dead-letter-box.'
He made one up
for her. 'In Paris we used to use a cigarette packet dropped by a certain tree in
a park.'
Then one day he had received a coded message telling him to deal
directly with the cut-out. At the time, since it had to be assumed that Siegfried
had probably talked, it seemed a sensible break in routine. The cut-out was a waiter
in a cafe on the Left Bank. This was the man who had given him instructions to bomb
the publisher. When he got back he was going to ask this man some questions.
'You see, the cut-out system works beautifully as long as nobody
breaks the circuit.'
'And if they do?
',
she asked.
He drained his cognac. 'Then a man could find himself playing
for a different team without even realizing the colour of his shirt had changed.'
The Palestinian publisher had arranged to meet Dove in his club.
He was not looking forward to it. Somebody had tried to kill him, his arm was still
in a sling, and another man's wife had accidentally died. Now this man insisted
on seeing him. Why? What could they possibly have to say to each other? Could he,
with any degree of credibility, say to him: much better it had been me, when it
was perfectly obvious that ninety-nine per cent of the human race would, given a
choice, prefer a complete stranger to die than themselves? The man was obviously
a fool.
It was partly because he felt like this that he had chosen his
club for the meeting. If his guest turned out as expected, with any luck he would
be intimidated by the ambiance and could be disposed of fairly quickly.
Until comparatively recently the club had been a distinctly threadbare
institution, with its members, servants and fittings in a state of sympathetic decay.
Its saviour had been a distinguished Arabist on the committee, a man consumed by
what the publisher, with his Levantine disdain, regarded as a peculiarly English
passion for the unwashed Bedouin and terrible deserts. He proposed the recruitment
to the club of selected billionaire sheikhs from the Gulf, men who habitually spent
their summer months in Europe, mostly in London. The sheikhs, as the Arabist rightly
predicted, were not unappreciative of the honour or the spirit in which it had been
made and there had been several generous donations.
The split leather armchairs, the tarnished cutlery and the stained
linen had all gone. The aged waiters had been pensioned off and replaced with a
crew of clear-eyed, firm-limbed Mediterraneans. An order for oxtail soup had ceased
to be a hazardous undertaking.
The publisher's own contribution towards this metamorphosis had
been extremely modest. He often suspected that the real reason an English friend
had put him up for membership was that he was regarded as something of a bridge
between the petro-dollar set and the indigenous old guard. Whatever the reason,
the place amused him. The dub still totally excluded women, a habit he considered
one of the more fathomable bonds between the upper-class English and the Arab. The
atmosphere sometimes reminded him of one of the better, older cafes in Beirut or
Cairo. All it needed was a few hookahs for hire.
He greeted Dove in the hall, where portraits of distinguished
former members had become indecipherably black with age, disembodied eyes glowering
out of dark oil swirls. The Palestinian was surprised at the size of the
schoolteacher,
the powerful look of the broad shoulders squeezed
into the jacket of a brown suit which he judged had been cut in a darkened room
with a pair of garden shears. They sat in the new leather chairs in the reading
room where one of the
new
Greek waiters brought them whisky.
After the publisher had repeated the condolences he had already
expressed in a formal letter from his hospital bed, Dove got to the point very quickly.
His wife, he said, had died because she got caught up in somebody else's war. For
his own peace of mind he had to know more about this war. He had to know why somebody
felt it worthwhile to try and murder the publisher regardless of how many innocents
had to die with him. Because of this he was going to take a holiday in Beirut, where
he understood some of the people engaged in this war lived. He was going to talk
to as many people as possible in an attempt to understand the motives of those involved.
Dove tried to give the impression that this was motivation enough for his journey,
that he somehow expected this learning process to heal his grief.
Like many journalists,
which
is what
he basically was, the Palestinian enjoyed delivering impromptu lectures on his favourite
subject. In addition, he had the Arab's reluctance to get straight to the meat of
a subject without first surrounding it with a few conversational hors d'oeuvres.
So, after taking a sip of his whisky and bringing out a string
of amber worry beads, he began to tell Dove of the modern history of the Palestinian
people. He started in 1948 when his people were, as he put it, driven out of their
homeland by an army which included in its ranks hundreds of European Jews who, only
a few years before, had been refugees themselves. 'You have no doubt heard,' said
the Palestinian, 'of the Jewish diaspora - the dispersal of the Jews throughout
the world.'
Dove gave a curt nod, increasingly resentful of the patronizing
tone. Perhaps at some point he should demonstrate that he could read and write.
'Well,' continued the publisher, quite indifferent to the effect
his lecturing tone was having on the schoolteacher, 'there is also a Palestinian
diaspora of rather more recent vintage. Three million of us are scattered about
the world.
Mostly in the Middle East, but also in Europe, North
and South America, Australia ... everywhere.
'Many of us still have,' he said, kneading the beads through
his fingers, 'the door-keys of the homes we left thirty years ago. Our right to
Palestine has a sight more validity than a mystical religious claim going back two
thousand years. Especially a claim that allows Poles, Germans, Russians and what
have you, people who look about as indigenous to the Middle East as I would in Lapland
-'
'And, if you go back far enough, you were all Jews before you
were converted to Islam,' said Dove, determined to illustrate that he was not entirely
ignorant of the affairs of men.
'Possibly,' said the Palestinian, as if he found the idea rather
distasteful. Nevertheless, he ordered more whisky. Evidently the man was not a complete
fool.
'The trouble with the Palestinian cause,' he went on, 'is the
same problem the other Arab states have in their confrontation with Israel. In short,
we can't get it together: we lack unity. In fact, we reflect the divisions among
the Arab nation as a whole because almost each Arab state has its clients among
the Palestinians. This has resulted in the tragic situation whereby we're fighting
the Palestinian civil war before we've recaptured Palestine.'
He tapped his sling. 'This is a civil war injury. Let me explain.
There are those of us, myself included, who some people call moderates. We prefer
to call ourselves "realists". If we can get some of our land back we are
willing to enter into some accommodation with the Zionists. We are also firmly opposed
to the use of terrorism anywhere but inside occupied Palestine - that's the place
you call Israel. We believe that terrorism is counterproductive. We don't want
to get into the situation where the word terrorist is synonymous with Palestinian.'
'You don't have humanitarian objections?' Dove was choosing his
words carefully. Emma had been killed because she had walked into his war and this
bastard was saying that bombs were merely counter-productive.
'My dear fellow.
My country is at war.
If I thought it would advance our cause one inch to wipe out the population of Tunbridge
Wells tomorrow I would agree that it was a painful, but necessary thing to do. How
many British voices protested the bombing of Dresden when the RAF knew it was packed
with refugees? War is war. You have lost a wife and I have lost a whole country
- and many friends.'
'But my wife wasn't part of your bloody war,' said Dove through
clenched teeth.
The publisher noticed that the big man was holding his glass
so tightly that he seemed in danger of grinding it to a powder. 'I know,' he said
hastily. 'I know and you have my deepest sympathy. What more can I say?'
'You can tell me exactly who the people were who wanted to kill
you.'
'Well, I don't know exactly who they were. I mean I don't know
the name of the man who was shooting at me, but I have a very good idea where he
was from and why. He was almost certainly one of the German anarchists some of the
Front
have
been employing for years. They find them convenient
for operations in Europe where a brown skin sometimes attracts attention around
airport terminals or embassies. There are not all that many left now, but the ones
who are left around are - the publisher was going to say 'very good'; in the circumstances
he thought it better to change this to 'very deadly'.
'And you've no idea who planted the bomb and then shot at you.'
'I think there are three possibilities.' He rattled off three
names. The first one he mentioned was Koller's.
'But if these men are supposed to be so good why did they bungle
it?'
'That's something I've been trying to work out myself,' said
the publisher, 'and I have come to the conclusion that it was the will of God.'
They talked a little more. The publisher gave Dove the names
and addresses of some friends of his in Beirut. He asked the schoolteacher why he
wanted to go and he replied vaguely that he had to 'understand'. And because the
publisher prided himself on being a sensitive man he thought he understood what
Dove meant. He warned him to be careful in Beirut. It was not, he said, a town to
make mistakes in.
