Web of Spies

by Colin Smith

  ‘You’ll have us arrested,’ said Dove, surveying a considerable cleavage. He slid his hand over hers and ordered some more drinks.

  Later, much later than he intended to be, he was sitting in one of the alcoves with her, drinking something she called champagne for about the price of a ticket to the Vienna opera. The bar was filling up. Two more ‘hostesses’ had arrived, plump little Egyptians clipping Syrian officers who lunged to refill their glasses with the speed of men saving children from drowning. A few people were drinking at the bar. One of them, a lean young man with hair that covered his ears, occasionally seemed to glance in Dove’s direction. There was nobody in the place remotely resembling Koller. Tina couldn’t remember meeting any Germans. ‘Oh, we get all sorts down here,’ she said when he asked her. The only people who appeared to have registered with her were the young Vikings of the Norwegian contingent. ‘Lovely fellahs,’ she giggled. ‘Generous, too.’

  Later still, having negotiated a price, he was lying naked on a bed in a nearby apartment house watching her undress. ‘I don’t usually do consoomation,’ she had explained. ‘Only if I really like a fellah. I’m just there to get you to buy drinks, really.’

  ‘For what I’ve spent it ought to be love at first sight,’ said Dove. But he was sufficiently drunk not to care. Within earshot the Syrians and the Christian militias were exchanging the first shells of the evening. Neither of them had mentioned it.

  The room was lit by a single orange bulb in a bedside lamp and, to Dove’s eyes, there was a cosy, almost fireside glow to it. He had removed the Webley from his waistband while she visited the bathroom - ‘got to open the bank,’ she said - and placed it in the inside pocket of his jacket which was slung over a chair near the bed. Now he studied her through half-closed eyes as she removed her shirt, a half-cup bra and, to his surprise, a panti-girdle. When she turned to him he noticed she was a little flabby about the thighs. It didn’t matter. Drink and soft lighting helped sustain the fantasy. Just for a little while she could be Emma. She came and sat next to him and stroked him until he was fully aroused. He lay back, his eyes closed, until he heard a tearing sound. She was opening a sealed condom. ‘Don’t know what you’ve been up to, do I, luv,’ she said, deftly rolling it on him like a deck-hand preparing a diver against the perils of the deep.

  Dove grunted. She was ruining it. She wasn’t being Emma. She wasn’t being anybody he bloody well wanted. She was being a whore with a heart of oak. Under the lubricated plastic detumescence set in. Yet he was loath to let the fantasy slip away. He grabbed her, pulled her towards him, tried to kiss her. She turned her head away. ‘Don’t kiss me.’

  ‘Why the hell not?’ he exploded.

  ‘Kissing’s for private,’ she said. ‘You can do anything else.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake kiss me, you bitch,’ and grabbing her hard by the hair he pulled her down on to the bed.

  At first she tried to make a joke of it. ‘I want nourishment not punishment,’ she pleaded. Then she started to fight back in earnest: scratching, biting, trying to get her knees to his groin. ‘Gerroff me, you bastard,’ she groaned. ‘Fuck off, you bloody animal.’

  They fought in hard sweaty silence. The bedside lamp went flying to land on the floor intact, its unshaded bulb casting crazy shadows. Dove was determined, but careful not to hurt her badly. He pinioned her, he slapped her, he crushed her with his weight until she slowly relaxed, and the hand at the back of his head was no longer pulling his hair, and her lips were not biting but brushing his. When they kissed they melted together like true lovers and, to his surprise, when she allowed him to open her legs, he found she was moist below. ‘It takes all kinds,’ thought Dove.

  Afterwards, when she was making noisy use of the bidet next door, he realised that during their exertions the condom had come off.

  He dressed quickly and left, declining her offer of a drink and leaving a large tip, suddenly sober and contrite. Emma would understand, he told himself. It didn’t help very much. In the lift he took the little revolver out of his pocket and put it back in his waistband.

  Outside, he had taken perhaps twenty steps when an old Chevrolet pulled up alongside him, a figure in the back gesticulating as if he wanted to know the way somewhere. The door opened; Dove recalled slight apprehension as he walked up to it, the distant jangling of alarm bells. Later, it came to him that when people wanted to ask directions they usually wound down the window.

  There had been three of them: the driver, the man in the back of the car and a third who came up from behind and bundled him into the car with a gun in his back. They had taken the Webley then. The one who had been behind him, the lean, long-haired young man who had watched him in the bar, held it up by its hexagonal barrel, like an object of archaeological interest. ‘Some piece,’ he said. ‘Who’d you get this off? Billy the Kid?’

  To Dove’s amazement he spoke English with a heavy American accent. Conversation ceased after that. When the Englishman started to ask questions he snapped: ‘Shut up or we’ll barbecue your ass.’

  They passed through a checkpoint manned by Saudi soldiers of the Arab peace-keeping force. A pistol in his belly, Dove watched helplessly while they waved the traffic through with graceful Bedouin gestures as if their real task was merely to slow the foolish urban pace. Shortly after that the Chevrolet turned into an underground car park where they gagged him and handcuffed his hands behind his back, the way the New York cops do to prevent prisoners grabbing their escort’s weapon. He did the rest of the trip in the boot, and he guessed correctly that this was because the Syrian road-blocks they had to pass through heading south were a tougher proposition than the Saudis.

  He had bounced about in the cramped, petrol-reeking blackness, trying not to vomit because he knew if he did he would choke on it and die. There was also a tearing pain across his chest which he put down to indigestion brought on by the cheap champagne. His nerve was still quite good then. He was able to fight off fear with the notion that he might soon be meeting Koller, and all he wanted was just one chance to get his hands around the German’s neck. He didn’t really mind what happened after that.

  He was almost unconscious when the car stopped and they dragged him out, banging his ankles on some projection before he was allowed to fall in a heap on to the hard dirt. They pulled him up, one under each arm, and he found himself next to a wire mesh fence with three strands of barbed wire running around the top. The gag was removed and wrapped around his eyes - he could feel the dampness of his spittle as a blindfold. He inhaled great lungfuls of the scented Mediterranean air. They walked him up steps, through doors, down steps. When they took the blindfold and the handcuffs off he was in the cellar.

  There was evidence that it was sometimes used as a storeroom. Half a dozen empty sacks of the type that might have once contained rice or lentils were piled in one corner; there was also an old ammunition box with Russian markings on it that he sometimes sat on.

  During his first night he had been obliged to urinate on the floor, groping around the walls until he reached a corner as far as possible from the place where he intended to try and sleep. Next morning they had given him a galvanized bucket, which was removed every evening after his last meal. So far he had managed to induce constipation and the cellar did not smell as foul as it might have done. It was a cold place and the urine spent when the handcuffs were removed still stained the floor.

  Dove despised himself for his fear. There was enough of the puritan in him to regard his capture as just punishment for his carousing with the whore and not as the ineluctable event it was. He found himself making an agnostic’s secret deals with an authority that, even in his innermost thoughts, he feared to name in case a turncoat obeisance only brought down divine contempt. Instead, he bargained as he did as a schoolboy - no place in the first fifteen for passing this exam. Now, remembering the missing condom, he examined himself hopefully for venereal disease, offering shameful discomfort, even syphilitic insanity, for his life.
>
  He supposed that in the back of his mind he had considered that his odyssey might lead to his death, even welcomed the idea, but somehow it had never occurred to him that this might happen before he got to Koller. Apart from the meals, delivered by an old man in a grubby shirt while an unsmiling youth covered him with a Kalashnikov from the top of the stairs, nobody asked questions or told him why they were holding him. He became convinced the Front were awaiting Koller’s arrival; that the German had discovered that he was responsible for what had happened to the cabinet minister’s daughter; had expressed a desire to deal with him personally. When he had read about her injuries in a two-day-old British newspaper he had not felt the slightest remorse. It had been necessary to question her, he reasoned, and as it was she had given him a phoney address for the terrorist. The rest had been an accident and, in any case, she was far less innocent than Emma. He had been amused to read in the newspaper that the police were working on the theory that some member of a rival faction was responsible for her injuries. More disturbing was the description she had given of her attacker once she had recovered consciousness: big build, fairish hair, Midlands or North Country accent, blond hairs on the back of his hand. He found the last part puzzling. Why had she retained that particular detail? He had visions of the guards dragging him to Koller, twisting his fingers until the backs of his hands were clearly displayed.

  Dove was lost in this reverie when the sound of bolts being drawn heralded breakfast. The heavy wooden door swung open and the stubble-chinned old man appeared, carrying a tray on which there was a steaming glass of tea and more hommos. Behind him came the hostile youth with the automatic rifle and, through the door, he glimpsed the beginning of a whitewashed corridor.

  The old man came carefully down the steps, the laden tray he was carrying held slightly to one side so that he could see where to put his feet. As he came closer Dove saw that next to the tea were the cigarettes he had asked for the previous evening. In the present circumstances it seemed a good idea to start smoking again. Dove took the tray and put it on the ammunition box, picked up the cigarettes and began peeling the cellophane from the packet. As he did so he realised that there were no matches with them. ‘Light?’ he said. The old man looked puzzled. ‘Matches. Les allumettes,’ said the schoolteacher desperately. The idea of cigarettes and no matches was quite unbearable. He mimed lighting a cigarette, holding the packet as if it were a box of matches. The youth began sullenly searching his pockets with his left hand, holding the Kalashnikov loosely by its pistol grip on his right side so that its muzzle pointed to the floor. At length he found a box and made to pass them to his companion at the foot of the stairs. On impulse Dove, a cigarette in his mouth, strode up three flights to take them directly from the guard. The boy was no more than sixteen years old and had thin, almost feminine, wrists. Dove became filled with a terrible elation, like that wild moment in the loose when a ball tumbles free and a clever forward seizes his chance to score. His big left hand closed around the youth’s wrist and jerked, while at the same time he got his right hand to his shirt to complete the throw which landed him heavily on his back, his head against the urine bucket. The Kalashnikov clattered onto the steps; as he picked it up Dove caught a glimpse of the old man taking off down the corridor like a schoolboy, yelling as he went.

  Dove ran on after him, fumbling with the rifle, head down, shoulders hunched, vague memories of jolly mock bayonet charges practised at school cadet-force camps returning. The corridor was not very long, twenty metres perhaps. At the end of it was a portiere of some heavy grey material, now half-drawn and flapping on its curtain-rings in the wake of the terrified servant. The schoolteacher followed him through and found himself in a large, quite modern kitchen where a woman, in the short skirt with trousers beneath favoured by Palestinian peasants, stood staring at him open-mouthful, an enamel dish of chopped meat in her hands. Next to her was the old man-he had seized a kitchen knife, still bloody from the chopped meat. Behind them was an open door, through which could be seen the wire mesh fence with the barbed wire on top he remembered from the time they pulled him out of the car. Dove let out a ferocious yell and charged. It was too much for the old man, who jumped back and took an ineffective swipe at the rugby forward, scratching his face and upper arm, as he went careering through the door.

  At the fence Dove turned right and began to follow it around the villa, passing over the grille above his cell as he did so. He rounded two corners until he came to the front, where a big black American car was parked next to a pick-up truck with a belt-fed heavy machine-gun mounted on the back. He sprinted between the vehicles, making for the open tubular steel gates he could see beyond them. There was wetness on his face, but he wasn’t certain whether it was blood or sweat.

  As he left the cover of the car for his dash to the gate he became aware of movement on the front porch of the villa to his right. Somebody shouted, ‘Dove’, but he was going for the touchdown now, right between the posts, the Kalashnikov the ball. Then he was falling, skidding along on his elbows, hanging on to the rifle. He knew right away what had happened. He had tripped over the rooted metal flange the gate was bolted into when closed. He went to get up and there was a short burst of fire. Three little fountains of dust kicked up from the ground about a metre from his head. ‘Christ,’ he thought, ‘so that’s what it’s like.’ Dove pulled himself round, working on his elbows, keeping his belly as close to the friendly earth as possible, then brought the rifle to his shoulder, aimed in the general direction of the porch and pulled the trigger. It refused to budge. He pulled again; still nothing happened. ‘Safety catch,’ he thought. His fingers searched the mechanism around the breach, found a knob which moved downwards when pressure was applied. Again he heaved at the trigger, but it might have been set in concrete.

  ‘My dear Dove,’ said a familiar voice. ‘To fire that weapon I believe you are first required to pull back the cocking handle. But if you try to do that the gentlemen behind you will be obliged to shoot. Please put the bloody thing down and come and have a drink.’

  Dove looked behind him. Less than two metres away stood two solemn young Palestinians in chequered keffiyehs, pointing their weapons downwards from the hip. He tossed the Kalashnikov aside and looked up at the smiling figure walking towards him from the porch. It was the Palestinian publisher, still dressed as if he was planning to lunch at his London club.

  7. Training

  Dove was sitting at a table trying hard not to catch the grimy cuffs of his Airey and Wheeler lightweight on the starched white cloth. It had become important not to soil the cloth. The cloth stood for cleanliness, and civilized behaviour. Suddenly he felt very tired. Somebody had given him a handkerchief to dab the knife-cut on his face and he was clutching a large glass of whisky.

  ‘Well, well, Habibi,’ the publisher was saying, ‘we didn’t realise we had the makings of such a fine fighting man with us. Truly a fedayeen. You had us worried there for a moment. We thought you were going to hurt yourself - or one of us.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Dove. The fight had gone out of him. He had almost scored, but now the ball was back up field. He was numb. Was any of this real? This Arab sitting opposite in a pin-stripe suit, the drink, the sympathetic voice. He squeezed his eyes tightly shut and for a moment made himself believe that when he opened them Emma’s head would be beside his on the pillow, hair disarrayed, the petulant, childlike lips.

  ‘They had to do it,’ said the publisher, trying to sound apologetic. ‘They had to check you out, make certain you were genuine. The bona fide article and all that. That’s why they asked me to come here. I just hope they’ll let me back in at Heathrow without the virginity test.’

  ‘You don’t look much like a Punjabi bride to me,’ said Dove, beginning to recover a little.

  ‘No, slightly soiled I’ll admit, but then you don’t look so fresh yourself at the moment. Look, let me show you to your room. You can clean up, and we’d better have a look at that cu
t too. When you’re ready I’ll explain what we propose to do.’ The publisher rose. ‘There’s some clean clothes there as well - I think you’ll find they fit.’

  Dove’s room was clean and simply furnished with a bed, a curtained-off wardrobe, and a small Kurdish rug decorating the bare boards. There was a card table in one corner on which stood an earthenware jug and bowl and clean towels. The publisher was right about the clothes. They were his own and lay in his suitcase on the bed. So did the Webley - unloaded. He wondered how they had managed to get his case out of the Admiral, where security was known to be good. He was shown where to shower and shave, and afterwards one of the serious young guards from the main gate dressed the scratches on his cheek and shoulder with iodine and sticking plaster. Then he went downstairs to where the publisher was waiting. ‘Coffee, tea or shall we continue with the whisky?’ he asked.

  The schoolteacher thought it better to keep his head clear and allowed the publisher to pour him coffee from a pot with a beaklike spout. The Palestinian talked for half an hour or more. When he had finished Dove leaned back, lit a cigarette and wondered whether he could believe his ears.

  ‘Let’s get this straight,’ he said. ‘You’re proposing to train me at one of your camps, teach me all your tricks, and then turn me loose on Koller?’

  ‘If you want to,’ said the publisher.

  ‘You mean I have a choice?’

  ‘Certainly. We can find Koller, but we can’t make you kill him. To do that you’ve got to want to do it very badly. We were rather thinking you did.’

  ‘I do,’ said Dove.

  ‘In that case,’ said the publisher, ‘I think we have a contract.’ The lawyer came in. ‘He’s agreed,’ said the publisher.

  ‘Good.’