Web of Spies

by Colin Smith

  ‘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?’

  ‘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. I
t 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.’

  ‘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.