Free (2013) Collateral Damage by Colin Smith

been
made and there had been several generous donations.
    The split leather armchairs, the tarnished cutlery and the stained
linen had all gone. The aged waiters had been pensioned off and replaced with a
crew of clear-eyed, firm-limbed Mediterraneans. An order for oxtail soup had ceased
to be a hazardous undertaking.
    The publisher's own contribution towards this metamorphosis had
been extremely modest. He often suspected that the real reason an English friend
had put him up for membership was that he was regarded as something of a bridge
between the petro-dollar set and the indigenous old guard. Whatever the reason,
the place amused him. The dub still totally excluded women, a habit he considered
one of the more fathomable bonds between the upper-class English and the Arab. The
atmosphere sometimes reminded him of one of the better, older cafes in Beirut or
Cairo. All it needed was a few hookahs for hire.
    He greeted Dove in the hall, where portraits of distinguished
former members had become indecipherably black with age, disembodied eyes glowering
out of dark oil swirls. The Palestinian was surprised at the size of the schoolteacher, the powerful look of the broad shoulders squeezed
into the jacket of a brown suit which he judged had been cut in a darkened room
with a pair of garden shears. They sat in the new leather chairs in the reading
room where one of the new Greek waiters brought them whisky.
    After the publisher had repeated the condolences he had already
expressed in a formal letter from his hospital bed, Dove got to the point very quickly.
His wife, he said, had died because she got caught up in somebody else's war. For
his own peace of mind he had to know more about this war. He had to know why somebody
felt it worthwhile to try and murder the publisher regardless of how many innocents
had to die with him. Because of this he was going to take a holiday in Beirut, where
he understood some of the people engaged in this war lived. He was going to talk
to as many people as possible in an attempt to understand the motives of those involved.
Dove tried to give the impression that this was motivation enough for his journey,
that he somehow expected this learning process to heal his grief.
    Like many journalists, which is what
he basically was, the Palestinian enjoyed delivering impromptu lectures on his favourite
subject. In addition, he had the Arab's reluctance to get straight to the meat of
a subject without first surrounding it with a few conversational hors d'oeuvres.
    So, after taking a sip of his whisky and bringing out a string
of amber worry beads, he began to tell Dove of the modern history of the Palestinian
people. He started in 1948 when his people were, as he put it, driven out of their
homeland by an army which included in its ranks hundreds of European Jews who, only
a few years before, had been refugees themselves. 'You have no doubt heard,' said
the Palestinian, 'of the Jewish diaspora - the dispersal of the Jews throughout
the world.'
    Dove gave a curt nod, increasingly resentful of the patronizing
tone. Perhaps at some point he should demonstrate that he could read and write.
    'Well,' continued the publisher, quite indifferent to the effect
his lecturing tone was having on the schoolteacher, 'there is also a Palestinian
diaspora of rather more recent vintage. Three million of us are scattered about
the world. Mostly in the Middle East, but also in Europe, North
and South America, Australia ... everywhere.
    'Many of us still have,' he said, kneading the beads through
his fingers, 'the door-keys of the homes we left thirty years ago. Our right to
Palestine has a sight more validity than a mystical religious claim going back two
thousand years. Especially a claim that allows Poles, Germans, Russians and what
have you, people who look about as indigenous to the Middle East as I would in Lapland
-'
    'And, if you go back far enough, you were all Jews before you
were converted to Islam,' said Dove,