Web of Spies

by Colin Smith

  ‘Why don’t they kill him themselves?’

  ‘Bad for the morale of the rank and file. He’s not the only Kraut working for them. There are other foreigners as well. This deal is strictly between the sheikhs. Much better if some crazy Englishman does the dirty work.’

  ‘But surely there’s a danger that Dove might talk one day. Tell somebody that Koller’s own organisation betrayed him, led him to the man who murdered his wife?’

  ‘Not at the moment. Don’t you see? That’s the beauty of it. Dove thinks he’s being run by the Realists - by your publishing friend from London. Abu Kamal is keeping his head down. I wouldn’t like to be his insurance man afterwards, though. I don’t think he’ll be allowed to just toddle off back to his classroom.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I think they’ll kill him - just in case he ever learns the truth. Much too embarrassing.’ He sounded pleased with himself.

  What a devious little bastard you are, thought Fitchett. ‘What about the infiltration story?’ he asked. ‘Any truth?’

  ‘Could be the Israelis. I believe they’re quite good at finding out who the cut-outs are and moving in. Anyway, they’re the obvious choice. A few years ago the Agency might have done it - not now. All the gung-ho boys are busy having nervous breakdowns. Somebody might decide it’s unethical and tell the Washington Post or publish their diary.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Fitchett, ‘what a well-informed press officer you are.’

  The Funny hardly faltered. ‘How are the press treating you by the way? Leaving you alone I hope?’

  ‘We haven’t been formally introduced,’ said Fitchett.

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Yet,’ thought the policeman.

  At the end of the week Fitchett had another meeting with the Lebanese detective. The Branch man was waiting for him in a cafe in Hamra Street, where he was trying hard not to double up and groan like a wrestler at the periodic colic pains he was suffering, a sensation he imagined distinctly similar to being bayonetted in the guts with a rusty corkscrew. He blamed this state of affairs on the Turkish coffee he had substituted for tea. Even now he was trying to take his mind off the battle raging in his lower colon by watching a fly fandango, one wing fanning madly for balance, around the rim of yet en other little cup of the addictive sweet black stuff.

  When the Lebanese policeman arrived he looked sad. ‘He’s gone,’ he said.

  ‘You told me you controlled the airport.’

  ‘We do. He went by boat from Sidon to Cyprus. I hear they are expecting Koller to go there. He’s in Athens at the moment.’

  ‘I see,’ said Fitchett through pursed lips. The lull in the intestinal hostilities was over. Cold steel again.

  That night, business in the Admiral bar was slack. While Fitchett packed his bags in the hotel he had originally patronized to avoid the press, the staff correspondents of most of the British dailies in Beirut were trying to concentrate their minds on Stephen Dove.

  Despite the different by-lines all the stories were remarkably similar in that none of the reporters seemed aware of the schoolteacher’s liaison with a Palestinian organisation and, as promised, none mentioned Fitchett by name. But they all wrote that a vengeful, grief-crazed schoolmaster, whom Scotland Yard were anxious to interview about the assault on the cabinet minister’s daughter, was running around the Middle East looking for Koller. That he had disappeared from his hotel and there were fears for his safety.

  Since their foreign editors, even on the unpopular newspapers, had become bored with tales of Arab fratricide, they welcomed the story as good ‘human interest’ and gave it space.

  One of them, as Fitchett had hoped, despatched a man to Emma’s parents who persuaded them to part with a wedding photograph of Dove. ‘These creeps who don’t want the rope back forget about the families of the victims,’ the reporter said piously - it was not until he left that they remembered he represented a newspaper long opposed to capital punishment.

  Beirut’s one English language daily carried a news agency report on Dove the following day. The overseas editions of British newspapers arrived twenty-four hours later. Fitchett hoped that when Dove saw them he would realise he had lost his only advantage – surprise - and give up.

  10. Just Fade Away

  During his first week there, three important things happened to Fouche-Larimand in the clinic in Athens. The first was that he was told by his friend the surgeon that this time there was nothing he could do and it was unlikely that he had more than a few, painful months to live. In the meantime, because of the fuss in Paris over the death of this waiter fellow, he was welcome to remain at the clinic and the surgeon quite willing to fend off unwelcome callers, whatever their credentials.

  Since Fouche-Larimand essentially saw himself as a character out of a Dumas novel his romanticism scored its usual victory over harsh reality and at first he took the prognosis with great equanimity. All he said was that he thought it a little unfair that a man who had had as many bullets in him as himself should die in bed.

  This first news induced a certain rational perspective that enabled him to treat the second event, which ordinarily he might have regarded as a disaster, in a positive light. An enterprising young French reporter working for a news magazine conned his way into the clinic in Kolanaki by the simple ruse of buying a stethoscope and a white coat, whereupon he assumed a mien of such a daunting mixture of determination and concern that none of the staff dared challenge him.

  When he entered Fouche-Larimand’s room and, without preliminaries, produced a motor-drive Olympus from beneath his overall and began snapping away, the patient’s first reaction was to have him thrown out. He even reached for the swordstick next to his bed with the intention of doing it himself if at all possible. Then, quite suddenly, he changed his mind. He ordered the journalist to stop taking his damn pictures, to sit down, and to listen.

  For it had occurred to Fouche-Larimand that this was his opportunity to make a statement, leave behind a political testament.

  For the next three hours he went through thirty years of recent French history from the Third Republic to the death of de Gaulle as seen through the eyes of an anglophobic, anti-semitic, minor and impoverished member of the aristocracy who was not ashamed to have fought in the uniform of his country’s old enemy.

  Fouche-Larimand’s hatred of the English, it seemed, started with the British attack, after the surrender in 1940, on the unsuspecting French fleet at Mers-el-Kebir. A cousin of his died when the Bretagne was blown out of the water: ‘twelve hundred Frenchmen murdered by those pigs.’ From there he went on to explain his own concept of the Occupation - ‘a civil war between Vichy and the communists in the so-called Resistance’ - and his activities in the counter-espionage section of the Milice. He went into some detail about his almost permanent loan to the Gestapo in Paris - ‘not the ogres they’re painted to be’ - and the network he ran there, in which the wretched Le Poidevin was a very small cog. Later, shortly before the Allied landing in Normandy, he had tired of these activities and wanted to go back to some real soldiering (he had been a newly commissioned lieutenant in an armoured regiment when the war started). Since the Vichy government had recently given permission for Frenchmen to enlist in the Waffen SS he decided to participate in the international struggle against Bolshevism on the Eastern front. After training he arrived at the front just in time to take part in the last eight months of slaughter. ‘There were seven thousand Frenchmen in the Charlemagne Division. Two hundred of us returned.’

  Afterwards, there was the Legion, in which he enlisted under the name of a Danish comrade from the Viking Division whose papers came his way when he expired in the cot next to FoucheLarimand in a field hospital somewhere in East Prussia. He retained his nom de guerre until, emboldened by a decoration awarded for an action near Diem Bien Phu, relatives at home made discreet enquiries and discovered he was not wanted for any war crimes. He served in Algeria - ‘another stab in the back for France
from the same man’ - and then the OAS, in which he enormously exaggerated the role he played; this was followed by another amnesty.

  The reporter filled page after page in his notebook, having wisely decided not to interrupt the old man’s flow with questions. Only when Fouche-Larimand had finished, the single eye glittering madly in the shrunken face, did he ask him about Le Poidevin.

  ‘I knew him in the Milice. I went to his funeral,’ he said curtly. ‘You kept in touch with him over all these years?’

  ‘No. We renewed our acquaintanceship quite recently. We met by chance at the cafe where he worked.’

  ‘What connection could he have had with somebody like Koller?’

  ‘I’ve no idea - apart from the obvious one,’ he added mischievously.

  ‘You mean, mon Colonel, that Koller’s a homosexual.’

  ‘Why not?’

  At Fouche-Larimand’s request the reporter took some more photographs of him - this time with his hair combed, in a silk dressing-gown, and smoking a cigarette - then departed, the camera now openly displayed, with his scoop.

  The third event gave the dying man even more pleasure. He received an international call on his bedside phone from the man Le Poidevin had said he called ‘le Grand jules’. They talked for about six minutes and, according to the middle-aged nurse who arrived to give him his bed-bath, but stayed to listen, they talked in German.

  What the nurse, who had polished her school German during the Nazi occupation, heard, was this:

  Ah. You mean if he turns up I can tell him? All of it? It will be a pleasure. I will die a happy man. Yes, I think so too. He will come. Yes, yes. I agree. He must have told him. He must have told him something. The funeral? (laughter) No, it was a mistake. I wish I was that clever. You know me - always the sentimentalist. But it was in the papers, and now a reporter has interviewed me here. Yes, here - in the clinic. What? A Frenchman. I forget which one. Yes, one of those. Yes, he will read it. He will come, I’m sure about that. Then he will -

  At this point he noticed the nurse and angrily waved her away.

  Koller waited in the Paris flat for two weeks to allow the hue and cry following Le Poidevin’s death to subside. He ate out of a stockpile of canned food he and Siegfried had laid in months before for just such an emergency. He read a lot, quickly moving from a worthy re-reading of Johann Most, Che Guevara and Regis Debray to the westerns he had been guiltily fond of ever since he was at Gymnasium.

  ‘Why do you read that American trash?’ his father had always asked. ‘I’ve seen half-starved boys not much older than you make them run like rabbits.’

  ‘They’re just stories, Papa. Just stories.’

  But even then, when he and all his schoolfriends had declared themselves pacifists and had sworn they would never be conscripted, he had dreamed of being the loner with a gun in his hand and a cause to kill or be killed for. A Shane putting down the cattle barons and their thugs who would crush the homesteading proletariat.

  His father would sometimes invade these day-dreams by making one of his rare, and to the boy, totally incomprehensible jokes. ‘It will always be one of those mysteries of military science how they managed to defeat the Apaches without air cover and the British to cover their flanks.’

  Then the young Koller would rush upstairs and lock himself in his room in petulant pubescent fury, throw the book aside, recall yet again, until the heat came to his eyes, the taunts endured from classmates since barely out of kindergarten.

  ‘Your pappy burned babies.’

  ‘It’s not true. I’ll kill you.’

  ‘It is. It is. My mother saw it in the paper. He was a Nazi. An SS man. A pig of a Nazi.’

  As he grew older the taunts stopped, because he acquired the reputation of always being the one willing to turn childish grappling into a real fight with the first punch to the face. Once, after one of these victories, he was sent home early and for almost an hour refused to tell his mother why until, with a mixture of threats and kindness, she wheedled the truth out of him.

  ‘Don’t listen to these lies,’ she had said sternly. Then, ‘Were they Jews?’

  Miserably he had confessed he did not know what a Jew was. She asked the names of his tormentors and what they looked like, and seemed relieved at the lack of ‘steins’ and the abundance of blond thatch.

  ‘But was Pappy a Nazi? Was he in the SS?’

  ‘He did his duty.’

  ‘But was he?’

  ‘Many people were. They were the finest soldiers Germany has ever had. You must be proud.’

  ‘Did he burn babies?’

  ‘Of course not. These are wicked lies made up after the war by the Russians and the Americans. They did these things. The English too. They burned people alive in air raids.’

  She put her arms around him. ‘Next time they say it, just ignore them. They are stupid people. Now I must phone your school. Forget about it.’

  But he was not allowed to forget. Every time his father thumped the table when the subject of pension rights for the Waffen SS came up - ‘We were the Imperial Guard, not butchers’ - or a newspaper brought ‘lying Jewish propaganda’ into the house, he was not allowed to forget. Or when medals were carefully packed for a regimental reunion that made headlines because of the clashes with the demonstrators waving placards outside, he was not allowed to forget.

  And later on, just before university and the start of his attempt to wash out the stain, there were the nightly harangues on ‘those damned Communists who are stealing the country’s youth’.

  With hindsight he saw these paternal outbursts for what they were - a forlorn, pre-emptive strike at the larceny budding around his own hearth.

  Then there was the dinner at home held en the same night in April every year. Candle-lit, the best silver out, and wine on the table for the silent, secret toasts between the adults. When they were children he and his sister were allowed to attend the first part of the evening, before the wine really flowed and the songs started; as adolescents they were commanded. He remembered Eva, all giggles and girlish good humour, demanding: ‘But what are you celebrating? Is it your engagement? Is it when you met? Is it when you fell in love? Please tell us.’

  To which the invariable reply was, ‘When you’re older. We’ll tell you when you’re older.’

  Only they never did tell them, and it was not until he was seventeen that Koller discovered that the twentieth of April was Hitler’s birthday.

  He last saw his parents shortly before he first went underground to avoid a minor arson charge. He had adopted the contemporary hirsute uniform of student protest and their estrangement was already almost complete. His mother, intuitively sensing crisis, had said: ‘When your father was your age he was a revolutionary too - against the bourgeoisie, against your grandparents. Later they made things up. Don’t hate us.’

  ‘I don’t hate you. I just hate what you stand for.’ This was a lie. He hated them because of what they stood for, the inherited stigma.

  ‘If you’d been born-’ his mother said.

  ‘NO. I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t have done what you did. That racialist thing - it’s disgusting.’

  ‘You don’t know the pressures. You take so much for granted. A strong Germany, a job after university, food in your belly.’

  When he left he did not say goodbye and it was not until the police called, a few days later, that they realised he was involved in something more than merely demonstrating against somebody else’s war. They had not met for more than seven years and he never telephoned. When the newspapers printed his wanted picture, his mother tried to prevent his father from seeing it. Once, early on, they had received a postcard on which he had written: ‘I am fine and doing something I believe in.’ In brackets he had added: ‘Hope cops let you have this when they have checked the handwriting!’

  Since his telephone call to Cyprus from the post office near the Sorbonne Koller had stopped his midday excursions. He would usually wait until dusk before mixin
g in the early evening rush to buy his newspapers. Otherwise he relied on radio and television for his news. The other tenants in his block were middle class and incurious, and the concierge was so accustomed to his infrequent comings and goings that she hardly registered the presence or absence of the Dutch gentleman who went away a lot on business.

  The young French reporter had a good show with his scoop and his magazine promoted it on the billboards outside the newsstands. ‘The fascist, the waiter, and the terrorist’ they called it. To Koller’s disgust an introduction to the interview, which had been printed almost verbatim, made much of the possibility that he had been having a homosexual affair with the dead waiter, even hinting that Fouche-Larimand himself might have been the third member of a ghastly ménage a trois that transcended ideological boundaries. What redeemed the article, as far as Koller was concerned, was that it carried the full address of the clinic in Athens. The temptation to leave immediately was enormous, but he stayed in the flat for another three days until - exactly two weeks after Le Poidevin’s death - he judged that the heat was off and he could cross frontiers at minimum risk.

  He took a train to Brussels, travelling on an Australian passport in the name of Martin, his last remaining alias and one he had always been reluctant to use because of his accented English. But the Flemish-speaking immigration man who boarded the train at the frontier gave the document the most cursory glance. A few hours later he was on the direct Sabena flight to Athens, trying to catch the eye of a big-hipped stewardess for a second after-dinner brandy.

  He took a room at the Grande Bretagn in Constitution Square, a belle époque establishment of brass and polished wood and wing-collared barmen, where the richer tourists recover from their ascent through warm smog on the Acropolis.

  As usual, because of airport security, he had taken his pistol only as far as Brussels and next morning had to go to one of the Front’s safe houses in the port of Piraeus, a forty-five-minute drive away, to collect another one. To his disgust the Armenian there could offer him only an ancient, long-barrelled revolver that was difficult to conceal under his jacket. Nor was there any opportunity to test the tarnished brass cartridges that came with it. He grumbled, but the Armenian, an overweight epicurean already into his third ouzo of the day, was adamant that it was all that was available. After Koller left he made a telephone call to Cyprus.