by Colin Smith
'Aren't you going to kill me?' demanded Fouche-Larimand, his voice high-pitched, almost squeaky.
Koller, moving slowly around the bed, shook his head.
'Don't you want to hear about Siegfried, your dear comrade Siegfried? God, how he screamed. Like a woman. He screamed before we'd even started on him and when - when we started pulling the nails - he screamed even more. He would have told us without that, but we did it anyway became that's what the bastard deserved. And when he knew we were going to finish him he cried - cried like a child.'
Koller looked at the old man. He was sitting up in bed, his hands gripping the steel bed frame either side of the mattress, chin up and quivering slightly, his good eye half-closed.
The terrorist raised the revolver in his outstretched right hand and aimed it at his chest. Fouche-Larimand took a deep breath. Koller lowered the pistol. 'No,' he said.
'Please,' gasped the dying man, 'a soldier's death. I'm a Catholic, I can't-'
'I'm more of a soldier than you,' said Koller tonelessly.
With surprising speed Fouche-Larimand dived forward, unsheathed the sword stick and lunged at the terrorist - a picador goading the bull.
It was still a pathetic attempt. Koller turned sideways and the blade nicked the flesh on his right hip. He brought the gun up and used the barrel to knock the sword-stick out of the old man's feeble grip so that it fell the other side of the bed. Again he aimed the pistol at the Frenchman's chest and again Fouche-Larimand tensed himself for death.
They remained frozen in this tableau for a few seconds before Koller returned the pistol to the waistband of his trousers.
'No,' he said. 'Be an old soldier. Just fade away.'
'Swine,' shuddered the old man, 'fucking swine.'
But when Koller got to the door Fouche-Larimand spoke to him again. 'Hans,' he said quietly, 'Siegfried didn't die like that. He was very brave.'
'I know,' said the terrorist.
Koller was getting drunk. He had toured half a dozen bars in the narrow streets around Constitution Square until he found one dark enough and without the endless, lilting bouzouki stomp on its music system to mock his terrible despair. He drank brandy, staring straight ahead of him at a firing squad of bottles, in a way that quickly drove the barman back to his newspaper and made him surface only when some telepathy established between them signalled a refill.
He felt dirty, used. It was, he realised, an exquisite act of revenge. Truly, the triumph of the will. He drank to exorcize the djinn Fouche-Larimand had raised, but the monster's triumphant, maniacal drumming would not leave his head. Old songs from an old revolution, subliminally learned as a child, came back with the remorseless tramp of phantom regiments and a man with a limp used his cane on a boy because he had yawned at a saga of tribal valour.
In the end, he abandoned alcohol, and by early evening was pacing the smart streets of Kolanaki, occasionally pausing to study his reflection in the windows of boutiques where chic Athenians with hennaed hair pretended they were in Paris. He didn't see them. He saw only the defeat tattooed on his drink slackened face. 'I have lost,' he said aloud. 'I have lost.'
He returned to his room at the Grande Bretagne and lay on the bed, the hip wound from the sword-stick bleeding and beginning to stain his clothes, his mind still racing from what he had learned. He forced himself to get up, pick up the bedside telephone and place a call to 'Rebecca' in Cyprus. When it came through he condensed what he had heard to a few short, unemotional sentences as if he was talking about somebody else.
As usual she did not sound the least bit surprised or even interested. He asked for instructions and she said she would call back. Yet the brief contact calmed him and after a while he began to doze, dreaming first of childhood and then of 'Rebecca', whom he had never met. His hand rested on the gun under his pillow. Shane.
The telephone bell brought him reluctantly into that false dawn that is the price of a drunken siesta. In his dream Rebecca had been warm and comforting, but he couldn't remember her face and that made him feel uneasy. The voice on the telephone belonged to the real Rebecca: cold, impersonal, code-name Rebecca - an enigma. She took just thirty seconds to deliver his orders. He was to go to Cyprus as soon as possible. When he put the receiver down he said to himself, 'No, she is ugly and you will play the stiff-necked Kraut and call her Fraulein. Comrade Fraulein.'
He booked himself onto the next morning's flight to Larnaca, the Greek Cypriot airport. Before he packed he examined again the old revolver the Armenian in the safe-house had given him. Normally he never risked passing through airport security checks with a gun - not even in his hold luggage. Nor did he regard Cyprus as a high-risk area. After all, he was going to be among friends. Now he was reluctant to part with the clumsy weapon until he had another one at hand. Fouche-Larimand's revelations had changed the rules. He stripped the weapon down as far as it would go, removing the cylinder and barrel, unscrewing the butt-plates. He had a very shallow false bottom in his suitcase which accommodated everything except the cylinder with its bullets - it had been designed to take a flat automatic. He shrugged and thrust it inside a wiled pair of socks which he placed in the bottom of the case.
At the airport he bought a copy of the English-language Athens News. There was a story on the front page about FoucheLarimand, the former OAS man wanted for questioning about a murder in Paris. He was dead. He had impaled himself on his sword-stick. The terrorist wondered if it had been painful enough.
11. Desdemona's Island
Koller, a brand new Pentax camera slung over his right shoulder, was waiting in line at the green sign-posted 'Nothing to Declare' section in the Customs Hall at Larnaca airport. There was a queue, because almost all the Greek Cypriots coming home for the Orthodox Easter had decided that they preferred to enter through this gate - with the result that most people were being challenged.
He watched them go through the belongings of a granny in black, one of a coven who looked as if they had all been hatched from the same bow-legged mould. She had three battered suitcases and a huge polythene bag stuffed with clothes loaded on to one of the self-service luggage carts. They went through each case, pulling out bottles of fat Greek olives and paper-wrapped smelly cheeses, running their fingers through her folded underwear as if they suspected she might be running heroin. Behind the German another of her ilk, perhaps to demonstrate her general disapproval of mankind, was busy ramming her luggage chariot into the small of his back. The terrorist turned and scowled at her, but she pretended not to notice.
Koller was trying to gauge his chances of rushing out through the narrow door beyond the Customs men if the revolver's cylinder was discovered in his socks. He concluded they were bad.
Opposite the door, in the departure lounge, stood a young policeman cradling a Kalashnikov.
'Tourist?' asked the Customs man when his turn came. His eyes were on Koller's camera - as he hoped they would be.
'Yes. Just for a few days. I bought this camera in the duty-free shop at Athens. Do I have to pay duty on it here?' The German sounded slightly nervous, anxious to please.
'Not if you take it with you when you go,' said the Customs man. He was smiling and good-natured. It was the damn women you had to watch with perfume for their granddaughters. 'Of course.'
'Anything else to declare?'
'Only cigarettes and a bottle of cognac.'
He chalked a mark on to the German's case. 'Have a nice stay in Cyprus.'
'Thank you.'
It had been agreed that he would be met. He felt in the shoulder-bag he carried as hand luggage for the copy of the Athens News, folded it in half and placed it in his left jacket pocket so that most of the cover showed. He put his case down and stood like this at the main entrance to the small, prefabricated terminal building, politely fending off gentle and dignified soliciting for hire-cars and taxis.
'Excuse me, but were you on the Athens or the London flight?' The voice was much softer than it sounded on the telephone.<
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'Rebecca?'
'Benjamin?'
She was thought Koller, with all a blond man's superficial longing for olive-skinned women, quite extraordinarily beautiful. About thirty, he guessed, a little over five feet with hardly an ounce of spare flesh, her black hair pulled back in a simple ponytail, and wearing a tightly cut cream-coloured safari jacket over faded blue jeans. She led him to her car, an old red MGB with the hood down although, by eastern Mediterranean standards, it was not a particularly warm day. 'I saw you were getting the sharp end of the Lolibs,' she said as she fiddled with the ignition, and put on dark glasses.
'Lolibs?'
'Little-old-ladies-in-black. That's what the English here call them. The British still have military bases here.' She spoke good American English, not very different from his own.
'Yes,' he grinned. 'Very fierce. Commando-trained. One of them was trying to run me over with her chariot.' 'I know. I was watching.'
After that the slip-stream around the open top made conversation difficult. They sped along the mainly flat roads towards Nicosia in silence, passing below the ridge where a red Turkish flag fluttering cheekily from an Orthodox church marked the Moslems' southernmost penetration of the divided island.
The woman drove well, although a little too fast, nervously biting her bottom lip as she accelerated out of bends. The island was wearing its spring greenery, the land not yet baked to the biscuit colour of its high-summer metamorphosis from Southern European to Middle Eastern. 'A nice place for a holiday,' thought Koller, who had never been here before. He had been thinking a lot about resting lately. Suddenly he was very tired. A killer tired of killing. The flesh under the stickingplaster on the hip wound began to itch and he absent-mindedly scratched it. He looked at the woman, but under her dark glasses she appeared to keep her eyes glued resolutely to the road as if she wanted to discourage the slightest intimacy. He wondered what she made of his story and whether she would discuss it with him. He badly wanted to talk it over with someone before the meeting with their boss.
'That's your room,' she said. Her flat was in one of the new nondescript concrete blocks that had mushroomed around the Greek Cypriot periphery of the old walled city since the Turkish invasion. From the small balcony at the front the distant peaks of the Troodos range were almost dissolved in the day's dusthaze; from the back kitchen window the green foothills of the Kyrenia mountains, the other garden wall of the central plain, were almost obscured by half-constructed tower blocks and the giant, yellow painted cranes that nurtured them.
It was a small room, a child's room. A single bed, a chest-ofdrawers with a wall mirror over it, a fitted wardrobe. It was plain and impersonal - and for reasons he couldn't fathom Koller felt oddly disappointed, although it was no plainer than a hundred hotel or safe-house rooms he had slept in these last ten years. On the plane he had told himself he was coming home.
He put the camera on the chest-of-drawers and his bags down by the wardrobe. The woman was standing by the door. 'If you're hungry,' she said, 'there's food in the fridge. I've got to go out for an hour.'
He didn't want her to go. He picked up the camera and gave it to her. 'Present,' he said. 'I don't know how to shoot one of these.'
She held it in both hands, hardly looking at it. 'Have you got a gun?'
'No. You know the rules. Never go through an airport with one unless it's really necessary. Do you have one for me?'
'No. Not here.'
He was annoyed about that, but he didn't say anything. Instead he said: 'When are they coming?'
'Tonight. They're on the evening flight from Beirut. They should be here by eight o'clock.'
'What do they think about what happened in Europe? The Charlemagne Circle?'
'I don't know. We keep our messages brief.' They had told her almost everything, subtracted a little and added one lie. They had told her Koller was a traitor.
'Why are you going out?'
'To make a call. Tell them you're here. We always use hotels or a call-box for outgoing calls. Then they can't be traced back to this apartment. We think the Cypriots might tap calls to certain Beirut numbers.'
'I see. Maybe when you come back we can go out to lunch?'
'Yes. Why not.'
'Good.'
She gave him the camera back. 'You had better give this to someone else. I can't shoot one either.'
'You could learn.'
'I prefer to shoot other things.'
He took it off her. 'Maybe I'll learn,' he said. 'It could be a new career.'
'You want a new career?'
'I'm worried about my pension.'
When she had gone he put his things away and assembled the old revolver. It was a .45 made in France about the time of Verdun; its blueing was scratched and one of the butt-plates was chipped. He examined the bullets that went with it. The lead in one of them felt loose in the cartridge. He twisted it and it came out. He looked inside the cartridge. Apart from a few grains of gunpowder at the bottom, like tiny balls of caviar, the rest had been emptied. He felt the other bullets. They seemed all right. One dud might be excusable.
From the balcony he could see the rural frontier where city concrete gave way to agriculture. No more than four hundred yards away there were wheat fields and avenues of dusty grey olive trees. He left the apartment with the revolver in the shoulder-bag and walked towards the olives. The city noise was still all around him: traffic; building labourers hammering and calling to each other from the rising tower blocks; a pneumatic drill being played on the collective nerve like a machine-gun in three-second bursts.
Koller found a spot under an olive tree at the edge of one of the wheat fields that seemed quiet enough. It was evidently favoured by courting couples because, nearby; a den of green stalks had been crushed flat. He put his hand in the bag, cocked the revolver, and - still in the bag in the hope that it would help muffle the shot - aimed it towards the ground. He waited until the pneumatic drill started up again before he pulled the trigger. The hammer fell with a dull click as it did the next five times. He got up and walked quickly back to the apartment.
He dismembered the bullets on the kitchen table with a pair of electrician's pliers he found in a drawer. The Armenian had emptied the powder from all of them and then skilfully crimped them back together again, with the exception of the one that had made him suspicious in the first place. Probably the ouzo had made him careless. He had deliberately been given a weapon he couldn't protect himself with. But by whom? Had Siegfried given Fouche-Larimand all the safe houses? Was the drunken Armenian, like Le Poidevin, one of his men? It would certainly explain the Frenchman's blasé attitude in the clinic - although his death had obviously been real enough. The only other explanation was the least palatable of all: the Front no longer trusted him; did not wish to see him properly armed. Perhaps he wasn't coming home at all. Perhaps Cyprus was hostile territory.
Koller started to search the flat for a gun. One of the bedrooms was locked - he guessed it was her room. He went into the bathroom and took the top off the cistern, but there was nothing taped to the inside. He used a pen-knife to unscrew one of the panels off the bath and all that revealed was dust. He checked behind the books and records in the wall-unit in the living room and delved among the upholstery. Then he went into the kitchen. First he tried the more obvious places - drawers, cupboards. After that he started on the fridge, feeling the packages wrapped in tin foil in the deep freeze compartment, moving about the yogurts and cheeses in the main section. The last place he tried was the cupboard under the sink unit. There was a plastic bucket and a few cleaning materials inside. He pulled these out. Behind them, wedged between the two drainpipes from the double unit, was a tin-foil-wrapped package. As soon as he touched it he knew he had found what he was looking for. It was a Czech .25 Vzor automatic, fully loaded and with a spare magazine of eight bullets. It had been first wrapped in an oil rag, sealed in a polythene bag and then covered in the foil as a final protection. He liked that.
It was professional, neat.
The terrorist took it into his bedroom and tried the action. It appeared to work well. He wiped the surplus oil off it and put the gun and the spare magazine under his mattress. Then he wrapped the old revolver in the same packaging and put it between the pipes. It was a good deal larger than the original, but it would pass a casual inspection.
Rebecca was having trouble with the Beirut call. She had tried dialling it from a call-box on the automatic code for ten minutes, and had then gone to a hotel she sometimes used, where the operator told her there was a thirty-minute delay on calls to the Lebanon. In fact it was almost an hour before they connected her and she spent the time pacing up and down, chain-smoking. When she got through Abu Kamal told her about Fitchett and the trouble they were having getting Dove out of the country. There was no chance of them arriving that night. It might take a couple of days.
'He's very nervous. I'm not sure I can keep him. He's as jumpy as a grasshopper.'
'Why do you think he's nervous?'
'He's lying about things. That machinery our friend in Athens gave him. He's lying about that.'
'That machinery isn't in working order.'
'I know. But why is he lying?'
'Perhaps he knows we're suspicious.'
They had decided to maintain the lie as far as she was concerned. They knew she would gladly kill a traitor. Would even think it clever to let the Englishman do it. Sacrificing a loyal comrade in the cause of fraternal peace might be another matter.
She wanted to say, 'Are you absolutely sure this story of his is lies?' But she took a pride in the fact that she never questioned orders. Indiscipline was the Arab curse. They had to learn to be like the Israelis, like the Israelis had learned to be like the Nazis. The Front hammered that into you.
So she said: 'What should I do?'
