The Gun Seller

CHARLES DIBDIN

Some time passed. It might have been a lot of time, and probably was, but after the bike crash I’d started being a bit suspicious about time and how it behaved. Patted my pockets after every meeting, that kind of thing.

There was no way of measuring anything in this room. The light was artificial, on constantly. And the noise-level didn’t do anything at all. Hearing some milk-bottles rattling in a crate, or somebody yelling‘Evening Standard,five o’clockedition only just arrived’ would have helped a bit. But you can’t have everything.

The only chronometering device I had about my person was my bladder, which told me that roughly four hours had elapsed since the restaurant. Which didn’t tally with the aftershave reckoning from Groomed. But then again, these cheap modern bladders can be hellishly unreliable.

Richie had left the room only once, to fetch a chair. While he was gone I tried to break free, knot the sheet together, and abseil to the ground, but only made it as far as scratching my thigh before he came back. Once he’d got himself comfortable he didn’t make another sound, which made me think that he’d probably brought something to read as well. But there was no noise of any pages turning, so he was either a very slow reader or just happy to sit and stare at the wall. Or me.

‘I need to go to the lavatory,’ I croaked. No answer.

‘I said I need…’

‘Shut the fuck up.’

This was good. This made me feel much better about what I was going to have to do to Richie.

‘Look, you have to…’

‘You hear what I said? Shut the fuck up. You gotta piss, piss where you are.’

‘Richie…’

‘Who the fuck told you to call me Richie?’

‘What should I call you?’ I closed my eyes.

‘Don’t call me anything. Don’t call. Stay there and piss. Understand?’ _

‘I don’t want to piss.’

I could almost hear his brain grinding away. ‘What?’

‘I need to crap, Richie. Old British tradition. Now if you want to sit in the same room while I crap, that’s up to you. I just thought it would be fair to warn you.’

Richie thought about this for a while, and I was sure I could hear his nose wrinkling. The chair scraped, and the rubber shoes made their way towards me.

‘You don’t go to the toilet, and you don’t crap yourself.’ The face came into view, tight as ever. ‘Hear me? You stay where you are, you shut the fuck up…’

‘You haven’t got children, have you, Richie?’

He frowned, which looked like a gigantic effort on his face. Eyebrows, muscles, tendons, everything called into action for this single, faintly stupid, expression.

‘What?’

‘I don’t actually have any myself, to tell the truth, but I have god-children. And you can’t just tell them not to. It doesn’t work.’

The frown deepened.

‘The fuck are you talking about?’

‘I mean, I’ve tried it. You’ve got children in the car, and one of them wants to crap, and you tell them to hold on, put a cork in it, wait until we reach somewhere, but it doesn’t work. When the body has to crap, it has to crap.’

The frown eased slightly, which was nice, because I was starting to feel tired just looking at it. He bent down towards me, bringing his nose in line with mine.

‘Listen to me, you piece of shit…’

That was as far as he got, because on the word ‘shit’ I brought my right knee up as hard as I could and caught him on the cheek. He froze for a second, part surprise, part concussion, and I lifted my left leg and hooked it round the back of his neck. As I dragged him down on to the bed, he managed to get his left hand out in front of him to try and keep himself up. But he had no idea how strong legs are. Legs are very strong indeed.

Much stronger than throats.

He lasted pretty well, I have to admit. He tried the usual stuff, grabbing at my groin, thrashing his foot towards my face, but to do that kind of thing effectively you need air, and I just wasn’tinthe mood to let him have it in any useful quantities. His resistance curved upwards through angry, to wild, to terrified, peaked and then drifted all the way down to unconscious. I held him for a good five minutes after his last kick, because if I’d been him I would have tried playing dead as soon as I realised the game was up.

But Richie definitely wasn’t playing dead.

My hands had been tied with straps, which took a while. The only tools available weremyteeth, and by the time I’d finished I felt like I’d eaten a couple of Portakabins. I also got some solid confirmation of the injury to my chin, because the first time it brushed against a buckle, I thought I was going to go through the ceiling. Instead, I looked down and saw a mess of blood on the leather strap, some dark and old, some red and very new.

When it was over I fell back, panting with the effort, and tried rubbing some life back into my wrists. Then I sat up again and gently swung my feet over the edge of the bed and on to the floor.

It was the sheer variety of the pain that stopped me from crying out. It came from so many places, spoke so many languages, wore so many dazzling varieties of ethnic costume, that for a full fifteen seconds I could only hang my jaw in amazement. I gripped the side of the bed and screwed my eyes shut until the roar had eased to a babble, then took another inventory. Whatever I’d hit first, I’d hit with my right side. The knee, thigh and hip were screaming at me, and their screams were all the keener for the recent contact with Richie’s head. My ribs felt as though they’d been taken out and put back in the wrong order, and my neck, though definitely not broken, was hardly movable. And then there were the testicles.

They’d changed. I simply couldn’t believe that they were the same testicles I’d carried around with me all my life, and yes, treated as my friends. They were bigger, much bigger, and completely the wrong shape.

There was only one thing for it.

There is a technique, known to practitioners of the martial arts, for relieving scrotal discomfort. It is often used in Japanesedojos, whenever your training-partner has got a little over-eager and actually landed one in the genital neighbourhood.

What you do is this: jump six inches in the air, and land on your heels with your legs as stiff as you can make them, to increase, just for an instant, the gravitational pull on the scrotum. I don’t know why it should work, but it does. Or rather it doesn’t. So I had to try it a few times, pogoing around the room as hard as my right leg would let me, until gradually, infinitesimally, the howling pain began to subside. Then I bent down to examine Richie’s body.

The label in his suit proclaimed the gifts of Falkus, The Fine Tailors, but nothing else; he had six pounds and twenty pence in his right trouser pocket, and a camouflage-patterned penknife in his left. His shirt was white nylon, and the shoes were four-hole Baxter half-brogues in oxblood leather. That was more or less it. There was nothing else to mark Richie out from the crowd and set the keen-eyed investigator’s pulse racing. No bus ticket. No library card. No page of personal ads from a local newspaper with one entry ringed in red felt-tip pen.

All I could find that was even remotely out of the ordinary was a Bianchi cross-draw holster, containing one brand new nine millimetre Glock 17 self-loading pistol.

You may have read, at one time or another, some of the nonsense that’s been written about the Glock. The fact that its body is made from a fancy polymer material got one or two journalists very excited a while back about the possibility that the gun might not register on airport X-ray machines - which happens to be so much hooey. The slide, barrel, and a fair portion of its innards are metal, and if that weren’t enough, seventeen rounds of Parabellum ammunition are pretty hard to pass off as lipstick refills. What it does have is a high magazine capacity for a low weight, great accuracy, and virtually unequalled reliability. All of which have made the Glock 17 the choice of housewives everywhere.

I worked the slide, pushing a round into the breech. There’s no safety catch on the Glock. You just point, shoot, and run like hell. My kind of gun.

I eased open the door to the corridor, and there was no space shuttle. It was a plain, white corridor, with seven other doors leading off it. All shut. At the end of the corridor was a window, looking out at a skyline that could have been any one of fifty cities. It was daylight.

Whatever the building was built for, it hadn’t been doing it for a long time. The corridor was dirty and lined with rubbish - cardboard boxes, mounds of paper, bin-liners, and half-way down, a mountain bike without wheels.

Now, clearing a hostile building is really a game for three or more players. Six is a good number. The player to the left of the dealer checks the rooms, with two more as understudies, while the other three watch the corridor. That’s how it works. If you really must play it on your own, the rules are entirely different. You open every door very slowly, checking your back as you do it, squinting through the hinges and taking about an hour to cover ten yards of corridor. That’s what it says in every manual ever written on the subject.

My feeling about manuals is that the other fellow’s probably read them too.

I zig-zagged down the corridor as fast as I could go, gun outstretched, flinging open all seven of the doors until I reached the other end where I threw myself down beneath the window, braced to empty the magazine at anyone who might pop their head out. Nobody did.

But now the doors were open, and the first one on the left led on to a staircase. I could see a few feet of banister, and above it, a mirror. I got up into a crouch and ran through the door, waving the gun up and down the stairs in as threatening a fashion as I could manage. Nothing.

I drew back my right hand and drove the butt of the Glock into the middle of the mirror, shattering the glass. I picked out a hefty-looking piece and cut my left hand on it. Which was an accident, in case you’re wondering.

I held up the broken mirror and squinted at the reflection of my chin. The wound was less than pretty.

Back in the corridor, I reverted to the slow method of clearance, creeping to the edge of each door-frame, sticking the mirror out across the doorway, turning its gaze slowly across the room. It was a clumsy method, and since the walls were no more than an inch of Gyproc plaster board, and probably couldn’t have stopped a cherry-stone squeezed from the fingers of a tired three-year-old, it was also fairly useless. But it felt better than standing in the doorway shouting ‘yoohoo?’

The first two rooms were in the same state as the corridor. Dirty, and piled with junk. Dead typewriters, telephones, three-legged chairs. I was reflecting on the fact that there is nothing in any of the world’s great museums that looks quite as ancient as a ten-year-old photocopier, when I heard a noise. A human noise. A groan.

I waited. It didn’t repeat, so I replayed the noise in my head. It was the next room down the corridor. It was male. It was someone having sex, or in a bad state. Or it was a trap

I eased back out into the corridor and along to the next doorway, and lay down along the wall. I pushed the mirror out in front of me and adjusted its position. Sitting in a chair in the middle of the room, his head slumped forward on to his chest, was a man. Short, fat, middle-aged, and tied to the chair. With leather straps.

There was blood on the front of his shirt. A lot of it.

If it was a trap, this was the moment when the opposition would expect me to leap up and say, ‘good heavens, may I be of any assistance?’. So I stayed where I was and watched. The man and the corridor.

He didn’t make any other noise, and the corridor didn’t do anything that corridors don’t normally do. After a solid minute of watching, I tossed the mirror aside and crawled round the door-jamb into the room.

I think maybe I’d known it was Woolf, from the moment I first heard the moan. Either I’d recognised the voice, or I’d been thinking all along that if Groomed had been able to catch me, he’d have had no trouble getting hold of Woolf.

Or Sarah, come to that.

I closed the door and propped a chair on two legs under the handle. It wouldn’t stop anyone, but it would give me a chance to get off three or four rounds before the door opened. I knelt down in front of Woolf, and immediately swore at a new pain in my knee. I shifted back and looked at the floor. Seven or eight oily-looking nuts and bolts lay at Woolf’s feet, and I leant down to brush them away.

But they weren’t nuts and bolts, and it wasn’t oil. I was kneeling on his teeth.

I undid the straps and tried lifting his head. Both eyes were closed, but I couldn’t tell whether that was because he was unconscious or because the tissue round his cheeks and eye sockets was horribly swollen. Bubbles of blood and saliva hung round his mouth and his breathing sounded terrible.

‘You’re going to be fine,’ I said. But I didn’t believe me, and I doubt whether he did. ‘Where’s Sarah?’

He didn’t answer, but I could see he was struggling to open his left eye. He tilted his head back and a low grunt burst some of the bubbles round his lips. I leaned forward and took hold of his hands.

‘Where’s Sarah?’ I repeated, with a thick, hairy fist of worry gripping at my larynx. He didn’t move for a while, and I began to think he’d passed out, but then his chest heaved and he opened his mouth as if he was yawning.

‘What do you say, Thomas?’ The voice was a thin rasp, and his breathing was getting worse by the second. ‘Are you…’ He stopped to suck in some more air.

I knew he shouldn’t keep talking. I knew I should tell him to keep quiet and save his strength, but I couldn’t do it. I wanted him to talk. To say anything. About how bad he felt, about who had done this, about Sarah, about racing atDoncaster. Anything to do with life.

‘Am I what?’ I said. ‘Are you a good man?’ I think he smiled.

I stayed like that for a while, watching him, trying to think what to do. If I moved him, he might die. If I didn’t move him, he would die. I even think that part of me actually wanted him to die, so that I could be free to do something. Take revenge. Run away. Get angry.

And then suddenly, almost before I knew it, I was letting go of his hands and picking up the Glock, moving sideways across the room in as low a crouch as I could manage.

Because someone was trying the door-handle.

The chair held firm for a push or two and then slid away from the handle as a foot crashed against it. The door swung wide and a man stood in its place, taller than I’d remembered, which is why I took a few tenths to realise that it was Groomed and that he was pointing a gun into the middle of the room. Woolf started to get up out of the chair, or perhaps he was just falling forward, and there was a long, loud crash which tailed off into a series of flat bangs as I fired six shots into Groomed’s head and body. He fell back into the corridor and I followed him, firing another three into his chest as he went down. I kicked the gun away from his hand and pointed the Glock at the middle of his head. Cartridge cases trickled across the floor of the corridor.

I turned back into the room. Woolf was six feet away from where I’d last seen him, lying on his back in a thickening black pool. I couldn’t understand how his body had travelled so far, until I looked down and saw Groomed’s weapon.

It was a MAC 10. A nasty, pocket-sized sub-machine gun, that didn’t really mind who it hit, capable of emptying its thirty-round magazine in under two seconds. Groomed had managed to hit Woolf with most of the thirty, and they’d torn him to pieces.

I bent forward and fired another round into Groomed’s mouth.

It took me an hour to go over the whole building from top to bottom. By the time I’d finished, I knew that it backed on to High Holborn, had once housed a largish insurance firm, and was now as empty as buildings ever get. Which I’d sort of guessed. Gunfire without subsequent police sirens generally means there’s no one home.

I had no choice but to leave the Glock behind. I dragged Richie’s body into the room with Woolf, laid him across the floor, wiped the butt and trigger of the Glock on my shirt and pressed it into Richie’s hand. I picked up the MAC and fired the last three rounds into Richie’s body, before putting it back beside Groomed.

The tableau, as I’d left it, didn’t make much sense. But then real life doesn’t either, and a confusing scene is often easier to believe than a straightforward one. That’s what I hoped, anyway.

I then retired to The Sovereign, a grubby bed and breakfast in King’s Cross, where I spent two days and three nights while my chin dried up and the bruises on my body turned to beautiful colours. Outside my window, the British public traded crack, slept with itself for money, and fought drunken battles it couldn’t remember in the morning.

While I was there, I thought about helicopters, and guns, and Alexander Woolf, and Sarah Woolf, and a whole lot of interesting stuff.

Am I a good man?

Nine

Boot, saddle, to horse, and away!