Web of Spies

by Colin Smith

  The priest recited his words with great tenderness; Le Poidevin might have been the loyalist of his flock and a whole village in attendance. Fouche-Larimand, grey-faced and trying not to look as if he was leaning on the walking-stick he carried, wondered if Le Poidevin would have appreciated his presence. Such a frightened man, he thought, always battered by events, like a piece of driftwood. He had no doubt in his own mind that Koller had killed him. He knew Le Poidevin would have talked and was convinced what remained of his life was in danger. He looked forward to a confrontation. The cane he was holding was a sword-stick.

  The freshly-turned earth was beginning to tighten its grip around Le Poidevin and Fouche-Larimand had already seen one sun set on the Acropolis by the time Koller saw his photograph in one of the afternoon papers. It was the new Interpol photograph supplied by Scotland Yard from the video camera outside Ruth’s flat. He was taken full face, his jaw pointing upwards, eyebrows arched in quizzical surprise.

  He bought the newspaper at a little green-painted kiosk, watching the middle-aged woman who served him for a trace of recognition as her hand slid over his face on more newsprint awaiting customers. From the kiosk he went to a post and telegraphic office near the Sorbonne. He had deliberately chosen the lunch-hour when he knew it would be crowded with foreign students calling home or composing begging telegrams on the wooden shelf that ran the length of one wall. He gave the overseas telephone operator his number, found a corner where he could keep his eye on the door, and read about himself while he waited his turn.

  The point of the news story, by the paper’s crime correspondent, was that the police now suspected that Le Poidevin had been involved with international terrorists and renegade rightists. The reporter reminded his readers that at first it was thought Le Poidevin had been murdered as a result of a homosexual quarrel, perhaps by a blackmail victim who had then torn his apartment apart looking for the incriminating material.

  They had found finger-prints other than Le Poidevin’s, but had been unable to trace them in the criminal records department. Then, two days ago, an ex-OAS man had been seen at the victim’s funeral. Because of this the criminal police decided to consult the security service, the Direction de la surveillance du territoire (DST). They had run the mystery finger-prints through their own files and come up with the name of Hans Koller, a thirty-eight-year-old, West German terrorist, believed to be working for a left-wing Palestinian group; wanted by Scotland Yard for the murder of a young woman and the wounding of an Arab publisher. He was, wrote the crime correspondent, warming to his subject, undoubtedly Europe’s most dangerous and experienced terrorist out of captivity and the police had orders to shoot him on sight. (‘Since when,’ thought Koller, ‘do the French police need orders?’)

  The DST, the story went on, had shown photographs of Koller to an Algerian barman and two of his teenage customers. They had been drinking in a bar near the victim’s apartment on the night of the murder and identified Koller as the man who had made a telephone call from the bar to the cafe where Le Poidevin worked, claiming he had borrowed a gold lighter from him and asking for his name so that he could return it. Down the page from Koller’s photograph there was a picture of two of the mini-thugs he had almost tangled with and the barman, all grinning into camera and looking pleased with themselves. From the penultimate paragraph Koller learned that his decision to lie low for a couple of days after he had heard of the waiter’s death had lost him the chance of an immediate meeting with FoucheLarimand.

  The DST are mystified by this connection between a lonely homosexual, a left-wing terrorist and a former right-wing terrorist. Questioned by the criminal police after the funeral the OAS man said that he had got to know Le Poidevin because he was a regular customer at the cafe. Since they learned of his connection with the terrorist Koller the DST would also like to question the OAS man, but it is understood that he is now in Athens. There is a possibility that the authorities there will be asked if he can be held for questioning by French police.

  On a campaigning note, the correspondent ended his report by saying that the case once again highlighted the necessity for the DST to share their routine information, such as the finger-prints of known terrorists, with the criminal branch. ‘If they had been available the police would have known of Koller’s involvement within hours of the murder.’

  ‘Monsieur. Monsieur. Your call to Cyprus.’

  The operator was waving at him from across the table.

  Koller folded the paper so that his picture didn’t show and walked over. ‘Cabin five, quickly,’ said the operator. He was a surly young man with dandruff on the shoulders of his blazer. Me working and all you’ve gotta do is read newspapers, his tone implied.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Koller.

  He could hear the faint ‘brrrp, brrrp’ sound the caller gets on the British system used on the island. He hunched his left shoulder to hold the phone into position and searched his pockets for cigarettes and matches. The faint ringing tone continued. It sounded as if it came from the bottom of a mine. This was the second day running he had tried the number. Cyprus was supposed to be their fail-safe emergency link because it was considered less likely that there would be a phone-tap there than Beirut, a thirty-minute flight away. He cursed Le Poidevin. He was convinced he had killed himself to spite him. He wished he’d killed the fat slob now.

  The number in the flat they had in the Greek Cypriot part of Nicosia continued to ring. He was about to put the receiver down when the woman answered. She had a young voice. ‘Is that Rebecca?’ he asked in English. ‘It’s Benjamin here.’

  The Jewish code-names were one of the Front’s little jokes. You could never accuse the Palestinians of lacking a sense of humour. Briefly, and in a lightly coded way, he told ‘Rebecca’ what had happened. When he had finished he said: ‘Tell them I’m going to Athens. OK?’

  ‘Yes, wait. I have a message.’ The woman’s voice betrayed none of the dismay she felt as he told her about who had been running their main European cell for the last three months. He might have been reciting a grocery list.

  He could hear her moving about the phone, obviously looking for her memo. ‘Do you know an Englishman called Stephen Dove? Big man. Big shoulders.’

  ‘No. Why?’

  ‘I don’t know. I was asked to ask you if you called - that’s all.’

  Her voice sounded slightly reproachful; he should have known better than to ask unnecessary questions. ‘OK. Bye.’

  ‘Bye, bye.’

  He went to the counter to pay for his call. The dandruffed operator was filling out some forms and kept him waiting. Standing there he became uncomfortably aware of the rolled newspaper carrying his picture; he sought reassurance by allowing the hand holding it to brush down the side of his jacket so he could feel the weapon tucked into the waistband of his trousers. ‘My call,’ he said. ‘How much?’

  ‘Your call to where?’

  Koller thought: has this idiot recognized me? Is he playing for time before the police arrive?

  ‘The call to Cyprus. Cabin five.’

  ‘Ah yes, forty francs, Monsieur.’

  The German guessed he was overcharging him by a couple of francs, but he wanted to get away. He counted out four tens. The operator took them without a word and went back to filling in his forms.

  A few minutes later, walking along S tGermain looking for a taxi to take him across the river, it occurred to Koller that he had heard the name Dove somewhere. He couldn’t for the life of him think where.

  4. Beirut

  ‘What do you think he is?’ the reporter asked his drinking companion when Dove had gone to the lavatory.

  ‘Some sort of bob-a-job spook I suppose. This place is full of them. The espionage centre of the Middle East and all that.’

  ‘He says he’s a schoolteacher on holiday.’

  ‘Well he can’t be a spook then. A spook would have a better cover than that. Jesus Christ. What an asshole. A schoolteacher on holiday. He’s p
robably running away from his wife or something. Your turn, I believe.’

  ‘Ah, yes. Jusef. Two whisky-and-waters and a beer for our absent friend. Put it on his bill.’

  From the other side of the city carne the sound, like a heavenly drum roll, of a single salvo of twenty-four 107-millimetre Syrian rockets landing one after the other on East Beirut. The noise inspired the bar’s grey parrot to do his famous whistling impersonation of an artillery shell about to explode in your ear. Neither the real thing nor the imitation attracted much attention since the rockets were falling two miles away and, unlike during the civil war, the Christian militias usually restricted their own artillery to counter-battery work rather than random firing on Moslem West Beirut.

  Syrian tactics, the reporters had explained to Dove, were brutally simple. They refused to get involved in costly street fighting in the lanes of Ashrafiyeh. When their soldiers were fired on they simply bombarded the Christian suburbs until they considered they had been sufficiently punished. Lately, the ceasefires were getting shorter, the bombardments longer, and the press corps larger.

  Every night this boisterous tribe gathered around the Circle bar in the Admiral Hotel, perpetually celebrating reunions with colleagues last encountered in similar bars in South-East Asia or Africa. They drank a great deal and communicated in their own jargon, a mostly English dialect that seemed to be understood by several nationalities. They tended, Dove noticed, to dress alike too, favouring shirts or bush-jackets with lots of pockets into which they crammed wallets, notebooks, film, identity cards, hip-flasks, cigarettes, Swiss army clasp-knives, amphetamines, and even paperback volumes on Middle-East politics.

  As far as the schoolteacher could see their days followed a rhythmic, peasant simplicity. Despite their late nights they tended to get up early to go out and look at the ‘bang bang’. They reappeared in mid-afternoon, dirty and sweaty, and either went straight to their rooms to write their despatches or left their precious film in the hands of avaricious taxi-drivers who took it the fifty miles or so to the Jordanian satellite transmitting station in Amman. In the early evening they fought each other to get their reports on the telex, chain-smoked and appeared to be on the verge of nervous breakdowns when the line went down.

  Dinner was usually devoted to the destruction of a small grape harvest, bottles delivered to the command, ‘Think we could damage another one of those.’ Afterwards, the survivors struggled to the bar and delivered themselves of the coup de grace. One young man wore a bullet dug out of him on a chain around his neck. But when they talked of ‘bang bang’, Dove noticed that it was considered bad form to be anything other than a craven coward who had strayed into the action through poor navigation. TV cameramen sometimes affected not to know what country they were in.

  Since his arrival the schoolteacher had been able to contact only one of the names the Palestinian publisher had given him and that man, a lecturer in law at one of the city’s universities, had proved quite useless. Because of this he fell on the journalists as his last hope of finding the German whom he was convinced had scuttled back to Beirut after killing Emma, like a rat to his hole. Dove was by no means a stupid man, but he never really understood that the majority of these reporters were visitors to Beirut and some, like himself, for the first time. They could hardly find their way to the local Reuter’s office let alone, as Dove fondly hoped, list half a dozen places where a German terrorist might be lifting his stein. Moreover, although they were polite enough, it was plain that they were uninterested in those outside the tribe, and surrounded by the authentic version Dove no longer felt it wise to pose as a reporter. When he confessed his alien background their eyes would glaze over and, although they might buy him a drink, they were less than generous with their conversation. He was usually in bed long before they were, dreaming of Koller.

  Once he realised the address Ruth had given him was phoney Dove had explored Beirut with an optimism only true obsession can generate. He saw Koller everywhere. He saw him in the gloomy little afternoon bars in the side-streets, where acned hostesses from Newcastle pushed bad champagne and generally failed to recapture the port’s pre-civil-war reputation of being the best whore-house in the Middle East. And when he came out, furious and belching, squinting into the sunlight, h,e wandered down Hamra, where chic young Lebanese window-shopped among French-stocked boutiques, sniffing air perfumed with freshlymade popcorn and roasted corn-cobs, until he spotted him again at a table in one of the glass-fronted cafes there.

  But once he was inside, Koller always transmogrified into a uniformed private in the Norwegian contingent of the United Nations, his automatic rifle leaning casually against the formica table-top, or a family man treating two sticky-faced children to chocolate ice-cream. Then Dove would retreat back into the throng outside, stepping over beggars displaying stumps and sores or worse - once he passed a handsome, three-foot young man whose body had been reduced to arms and a torso which met the pavement just below his heart. Dove, obsessed by white faces, was quite oblivious to all this. When he was involved with collisions with people on the pavement, as he frequently was, he mumbled his apologies to a blur of clones. Twice he collided with the same slim young man in jeans and a sports shirt, but Dove saw only that he wasn’t Koller.

  Most of all he saw the German visiting the scruffy administrative offices of the Palestine Liberation Organisation near the Arab University - where twelve-year-old sentries delighted to remove the magazines from their Kalashnikovs to show visitors they were loaded. He would wait for him to come out and follow him back through the crowded, garbage-filled streets, skirting the hovels of one of the smaller Palestinian refugee camps, corrugated roofs held down with old tyres, ignoring the street-vendors with their pyramids of Marlboro cigarettes or whisky. Yet when he brushed alongside him, said ‘excuse me’ and asked for directions or a light for a cigarette it wasn’t Koller after all, or at least it wasn’t the Koller he knew from the newspaper photographs.

  Then in the evening, when the Christian militiamen stopped sniping at the untidy Syrian infantry patrols and the bandits who crept out of the ruined port area kept honest folk indoors, he saw him again, talking to an American journalist at the bar of the Admiral Hotel. But when he elbowed a place next to him and eavesdropped on the conversation, he turned out to be a Finnish television producer saying: ‘You were here in the war? It must have been horrible.’

  Yet events since his departure from London had gone well enough at first and Dove had derived a certain amount of satisfaction from the coolness of his behaviour. He had left the Cortina in the car-park for the Number Three terminal at Heathrow and then switched to Number One terminal for his flight to Paris. He had felt a slight twinge about leaving the car, his last link with a life that had been worth living. ‘A sensible car for a sensible person,’ Emma used to say.

  ‘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. Next the aircraft was skimming the cream-coloured apartment blocks of Moslem West Beirut, the occasional terra cotta bungalow roof a clue t
o 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.