(2013) Collateral Damage

by Colin Smith

  'Keep him sweet. Tell him there's been a delay. An important conference has come up- something like that. Tell him we will be there in a couple of days. Has he asked about Dove yet? There have been newspaper reports.'

  'No. He hasn't asked. We've hardly spoken.'

  'If he does tell him we sent the Englishman home. Understand?'

  'Yes.'

  'And keep him sweet. Whatever you do, keep him sweet. You know how to capture a grasshopper?' His voice had taken on the excited, schoolboyish edge adopted by Arab men when they are about to be slightly risqué with a woman. 'You stroke all his legs.'

  'I don't believe this one's legs are for stroking.'

  'My dear, he's not made of stone.'

  When she came back Koller was sitting in the kitchen drinking coffee and reading about his bomb in London in an old copy of the Herald Tribune he had found about the place.

  He could see straight away that something was troubling her. She would, he thought, never be anything other than a cut-out or a courier. She found it difficult to wear a mask.

  He took the news of the delay far more calmly than she had expected. 'The front-line soldier is always at the bottom of the list,' he said with mock solemnity. 'My father used to say that.'

  The terrorist pointed to the article he had just been reading. 'This schoolteacher Stephen Dove - I see now why you asked me about him. I had forgotten the name of the woman who died in the London bomb. I suppose he was the one who beat up my friend. Is he her brother or husband?'

  'Husband.' She noticed that it was 'the woman who died in the London bomb', not 'the woman I killed'.

  'Do you know what's happened to him?'

  'We killed him in Beirut,' she said, obeying orders.

  'Was that necessary?' He surprised himself with the question. 'They thought so. He was a nuisance. You don't approve?'

  'I should have thought it would have been easier to lead the master sleuth, Mr Sherlock Holmes from the Yard, to him.'

  'Well, it wasn't,' she said stubbornly.

  'Has the body been found?'

  'No – and it won't be.'

  'I see,' said Koller. 'Poor bastard. First we kill his wife with a bomb that should never have been planted - then we kill him for getting angry about it. That's the nice thing about our organisation. We never make little mistakes.'

  'What about your friend in London? Didn't he deserve it for what happened to her?'

  'Ruth enjoyed playing with fire and she got burned. I can't hold it against him.'

  Dear God, she thought. Male solidarity.

  'Did your father tell you that too - about playing with fire? Tell me about him.' She wanted to change the subject.

  'OK. Let's have lunch.'

  They went to an outdoor restaurant which served a good mezze and where the waiters were friendly although it was midafternoon and most of the tables already cleared. They ordered a bottle of Othello red wine. The woman didn't drink much, but Koller made up for her. And over the Turkish coffee and glasses of the local orange liqueur known as filfar the German told her about his father.

  'He was a Nazi - still is. So were most adult Germans between 1933 and 1945, although they would never admit it. But he was a one hundred per-center. Joined the SS when he was eighteen or nineteen - just before the war. Not the Totenkopfverbande, the concentration camp bastards; the Waffen SS. They were supposed to be the imperial guard, the stormtroopers. Of course, they were Nazis too, but they claim they did their killing in battle. The relatives of a few dead partisans around might beg to differ, but they would say they were no worse than the Americans in Vietnam or the French in Algeria or the British in Northern Ireland-'

  'Or the Jews in Palestine,' the woman interrupted.

  'Yes. Or the new fighting Super Jew. Have you heard the one about the old Nazi who dies and goes to hell and meets the Fuhrer?'

  She shook her head.

  '"What's the news?" asks Hitler.'

  '"Mein Fuhrer, the news is bad. The Germans are now the best merchants in the world and the Jews are the best soldiers." '

  She smiled and gazed into his eyes. They were very blue, she thought.

  'Anyway, he spent a lot of time in France working with the Milice against the Maquis. That's where he met FoucheLarimand - the man I saw in Athens. Then during the Normandy fighting he was quite badly hurt fighting the British around Caen.'

  The woman nodded, not quite understanding all the references. It was somebody else's war and it happened a long time ago. The only war she knew was her own.

  'When he came out of hospital they made him a Standarten (Uhrer- that's about a colonel in most people's armies - and he was posted as liaison officer on the staff of the Charlemagne Division serving on the Russian front. He ran into FoucheLarimand again there. They were all French fascists in the Division - Pierre Laval's crowd. There were a lot of foreigners in the SS, mostly Slavs, Ukranians - people like that. But there were also a few West Europeans - Dutchmen, Danes, Norwegians, Belgians; all fighting communism in the name of the New Order. As a liaison officer my father came into contact with a lot of these people. Then, a couple of months before Hitler did the decent thing, Standartenfuhrer Koller was wounded again and for him the war was over. I was about three years old at the time. 'Afterwards, I suppose for a man in his late twenties with a gammy leg who had been a soldier all his adult life, he didn't do so badly. We starved for a while like everybody else. Then he got involved in some deals in war scrap. I think he might have dealt in the black market too. He made quite a lot of money, taught himself some engineering and established his own manufacturing business-car components.

  'After that, as the saying goes, he never looked back. Only that wasn't true. He always looked back. He could never forget. Like a lot of old Nazis he saw the Cold War as a complete vindication of all he had fought for. He got involved in the campaign for pension rights for Waffen SS people. He was always attending various reunions all over the country. Then some of the survivors of the West European Divisions came out of their holes and began to attend these meetings. That's how he met up with people like Fouche-Larimand again - just after he'd come back from Algeria.

  'I'm the only son. I was never very close to him although he always wanted to be close to me. Maybe it was something to do with the fact that he couldn't walk without a cane, so I was never able to play the sort of rough games with him most kids can. My mother was a Nazi too, had the full SS wedding, went through all the formalities; traced their family trees to prove there was not a trace of the Jew in their genes; submitted pictures of themselves in bathing-suits to the Reichfuhrer's office to show that they looked like the right Aryan stock, fit to breed the superrace. Me and my sister.

  'He was always trying to lead me into his crazy dreams and I never really wanted to know. We used to go on holidays to the Black Forest, a place near Ulm, and he used to take a pistol he'd kept an old '08 Luger. We'd walk deep into the woods. It was difficult for him and he sometimes had to beat a path through the undergrowth with his stick. When we came to a quiet clearing we'd find some targets, or maybe he'd bring an old can with him, and blaze away. Can you imagine me, ten years old, blazing away at a can in the middle of a Hansel and Gretel wood, with a real Luger? You would think I'd be a very happy little boy. Not a bit. It terrified me. I was sworn to secrecy. It was all part of what made me different from other kids.

  'When I was at school the Nazis seemed to be Hitler and about one hundred other people including my father. Do you understand me? None of the other kids had parents who admitted they were Nazis. They'd all been secret resisters in the Wehrmacht, or good Catholics who'd never approved of Hitler, or knew somebody who knew somebody who had been in a concentration camp. To hear them talk about what their fathers did you'd think the Martians must have been masquerading as Germans after 1933. It was incredible. Maybe there were a few Mein Kampfs going musty in their attics too, but ours was the only one still on the bookshelf and to hell with de-Nazification.'

&
nbsp; 'You sound almost proud of him?' She was looking at him quizzically, noting the anguish, the way he wanted to talk.

  'No. I'm not proud of him. The others had the sense to be ashamed, to realise that, to some extent, they all shared the guilt. His answer is to say: there is no need for guilt – it was necessary. So in my case, as any pop psychiatrist will tell you, I rebelled against my father. Of course, most kids rebel against their father. My rebellion was extreme because he was extreme.

  'But I under-estimated him. I thought I'd defeated him - not just broken away, but rubbed his face in it. Not at all. He plotted revenge. He and Fouche-Larimand and others like him, all exSS, formed this European organisation they call the Charlemagne Circle after that French Division.

  'The way I see it my father's Charlemagne and FoucheLarimand was his Count Palatine. What they do is get themselves into a position where they can control Marxist guerrilla groups and then get them to do things that are counterproductive. In one area we're on the same side. I'm not talking about your revolution, the Palestinian revolution, because it's basically a national one. But most European revolutionary Marxists I know believe that in order to overthrow the so-called democracies you've got to sting them into betraying their true totalitarian face so that the workers get the message and throw them out. Naturally, the essential difference is that my father and his Paladins believe that if the capitalists cracked down they would have popular support. You'd just take out the first thousand leftists and shoot them a la Chile.

  'But I doubt Standartenfuhrer Koller is solely motivated by politics. Oh, no! What he wanted to do, more than anything else, was control me. And in the end he did. Fouche-Larimand told me it took them almost three years to track me and Siegfried down in Paris. And of course a two-man cell system with orders picked up from a dead-letter-box isn't that difficult to control once you've got the right codes. They got those from Siegfried. They tortured him. They pulled his toe-nails out like the Gestapo used to - it must have made them feel very nostalgic. 'After Siegfried was found in the river, and I thought the Israelis had got on to us, it all fitted. I received a message all in the right code, saying that we're closing the dead-letter-box and going over to a live cut-out because the situation's too fluid. The next thing I know I receive orders to use a particularly stupid sort of bomb to knock over the publishing gentleman in London. That was clever. It not only kept the quarrel between you and the Realists hot, just when it looked as though it was beginning to cool down, but also kills a passing innocent. Within twenty-four hours the press is demanding the rope for terrorists.

  'The weak part of their operation was Le Poidevin - the cutout. He just didn't fit. He didn't look like the sort of person we'd use. After the London fuck-up I smelt something. It was the bomb as well. So old-fashioned, absolutely dependent on the target's timing. Why not a mercury fuse? We have them. So I took a chance and followed this cut-out home. We had quite an evening together. He got very pissed on Calvados. He even sang a German war song he said Fouche-Larimand was always singing. It's a song my father likes very much, but I didn't make the connection at the time.'

  'A Nazi song?' she asked, draining her filfar.

  'No. A sentimental song about the promise of spring even after the darkest winter.

  '"Everything passes. One day it'll be over, After every December, There's always a May."'

  He spoke the words to her in English. 'And do you like this song?'

  'Once I couldn't stand it. Now sometimes I can see the attraction.'

  'It's May very soon.'

  'Yes.'

  'When Le Poidevin had finished you killed him?' It was more of a statement than a question.

  'No, I didn't - although I might as well have for all the trouble the ungrateful bastard caused me. But I didn't kill him, because there didn't seem to be much point. He was a hopeless old queen who didn't understand what he'd gotten into and they'd used him, blackmailed him because he was a collaborator. I just frightened the shit out of him. The only explanation I can think of is that he killed himself. Fouche-Larimand denied that they did it and since he seems to have told the truth about almost everything else I don't know why he should have lied about that.'

  'Why didn't you kill Fouche-Larimand?'

  'It would have been doing him too much of a favour. I'm not in the euthanasia business. I wanted him to suffer the way Siggy did.'

  He told her about his brush with the same sword-stick the Frenchman used on himself and patted his hip.

  'It was my best revenge. He really enjoyed telling me about Standartenfuhrer Koller's latest campaign, watching me squirm. Afterwards I wandered about Athens for hours - got drunk. It made me feel dirty, used. Almost as if I'd been incestuously raped.'

  'What are you going to do now?'

  'I don't know. Maybe I should go back to Germany and kill him. Probably I should have done it a long time ago - he's the person I've been fighting all my life.'

  'But you won't.' She was looking directly at him, resting her hands on her chin. She had her sun-glasses off and her eyes sparkled like a fountain.

  'Perhaps you're right. In a way it would be just what he'd want me to do. The final victory. Imagine what a ball Axel Springer would have with it: "Red Monster Slays Father".

  'Anyway, I've got a better idea. I've decided to write him a letter. I'm going to write him a letter telling him how he'd better watch himself every living minute of the day because the moment he drops his guard - the moment he drops his guard that's when we're going to get him. That's worse in some ways, because it's a real life-sentence. He's going to have to ask for police protection or hire himself bodyguards to guard him from his own son. He'll never be able to put his head on the pillow at night without wondering whether he will wake up in the morning or watch a car come up close alongside without wondering who is in it. And the police won't protect him forever and the hired bodyguards will be expensive and lazy and he knows they're no guarantee. And the important thing is that he won't doubt for a moment that I intend to do this because that's what he would do and he has never wanted to understand that I'm not him. His last years are going to be fucking tormented.'

  She looked at him. His eyelids had narrowed to slits. It was much more like the Koller she had heard about. Except there was a rough edge to his voice and when she looked again she saw that his eyes were brimming with tears.

  Afterwards, as she drove back to her flat in the MG, they passed an EOKA memorial in the form of a bronze statue of a young guerrilla, forever hurling a grenade at the perfidious British. 'A shrine for a terrorist,' grinned Koller. His depression seemed to have lifted. When she changed gear she made sure her hand brushed his knee.

  In the early evening Koller was woken by several loud explosions. 'Rebecca' felt his body tense besides her, sensed him peer around the darkened room.

  'Don't worry,' she said. 'It's only fireworks. The Greek kids let them off for Easter. It goes on for days.'

  'It sounds like a whole army out there. I thought the Turks were coming for us.' He was ashamed of his nervousness, trying to laugh it off.

  'They're home-made. It's illegal, but all the kids do it. Sometimes they blow their hands off.'

  As she spoke there was a particularly spectacular report. 'Neutron bomb,' said Koller - but he still sounded uncertain. 'They put them in empty buildings - half-built ones - so that they echo.'

  She sprang naked from the bed and ran over to the window to peer through the venetian blinds. 'No Turks,' she said. 'Would you like a cigarette?'

  'And a brandy,' he commanded.

  He watched her leave the room, still naked, a dancer's silhouette of firm muscle with a maid's arrogant breasts.

  Their love-making had been as uneven as it had been sudden. When they got back to the flat she had produced her own bottle of filfar and insisted that they drank several more glasses. She had been coquettish then, giggling, sometimes staring intently into his eyes, sitting close enough for him to feel her heat. It had reminded Koller
of a whore's synthetic seduction, the smiling mask always betrayed by the dead eyes. It had not stopped him wanting her.

  In the end, he had seasoned lust with caution by taking her to bed in his room, where they had sweated out the alcohol in laboured, vengeful climaxes above the pistol he had stolen from her. Yet afterwards, he noticed a change in her mood. The mask slipped and the eyes came to life. There had been odd, puzzling moments of tenderness. Once she had caressed the wound on his hip and whispered, 'Maybe you should go. Maybe you should leave here.'

  'Why? Am I in danger?'

  'Not while I'm with you.'

  But he noted how she avoided the question, and made sure he was not asleep until she was.

  She told herself she was weak, susceptible to feeble female emotions. After all, she wasn't a prostitute. She reasoned that if she slept with a man, even a traitor, then it was only normal that a certain animal affection developed. But although she tried to suppress these feelings she knew there was more to it than sheer physical infatuation. After the first night she could not believe that this Hans Koller, a man who had sacrificed much to fight for her cause, was a traitor. For once the organisation was wrong. Intuition fought blind obedience and won. She was convinced he was telling the truth, just as later she had to face up to the fact that there had been no need to sleep with him - he wasn't going anywhere. He had nowhere to go. And in their pillow-talk he had told her he had dreamed of her and she believed him.

  Next morning, when the time came to telephone Beirut, she decided to hell with discipline; she told them what she thought. It would be a terrible tragedy, she said. They must not take action without hearing his side of things.

  The person who took the call was George, now back in Beirut helping to arrange Dove's departure for Cyprus. The Lebanese detective's information had not been entirely correct. It was true there had been a plan to get the Englishman out by boat, but there were difficulties. Now they were going by car to Damascus and by air from there. The hold-up had been getting Dove a Syrian visa. George relayed 'Rebecca's' misgivings to Abu Kamal.