The Gun Seller

CHAUCER

I arranged to meet Ronnie at four-thirty, when the gallery closed for the day and the thundering stampede of customers had been safely locked out for another night to drool on the pavement with their camp-beds and open cheque-books.

I didn’t actively try to enlist her help, but Ronnie was a game young thing who, for some reason, sensed a combination of good deeds and high adventure and couldn’t resist it. I didn’t tell her that so far it had only involved bullet holes and mashed scrota, because I couldn’t ignore the possibility that she would be extremely useful. For one thing I was now without transport, and for another, I find I often think better when there’s someone else around to think for me.

I killed some hours at the British Library, trying to find out what I could about the Mackie Corporation ofAmerica. Most of the time was spent getting the hang of the index system, but in the last ten minutes before I had to leave, I

managed to establish the following priceless information - that Mackie was a Scottish engineer who had worked with Robert Adams in producing a solid frame trigger-cocking cap-and-ball percussion revolver, which the two of them exhibited at the Great Exhibition inLondon in 1851. I didn’t bother to write that down.

With one minute to go, I cross-referred my way into a crashingly dull volume calledThe Teeth O f The Tiger,by a Major J. S. Hammond (ret’d), where I discovered that Mackie had founded a company that had since grown to become the fifth largest supplier of defence ‘materiel’ to the Pentagon. The company’s headquarters were currently inVensom,California, and its last given annual pre-tax profit had more noughts on the end of it than I could fit on the back of my hand.

I was on my way back toCork Street, weaving through the afternoon shoppers, when I heard the news vendor’s cry, and it may well have been the first time in my life that I actually understood something a news vendor said. The other passers-by were almost certainly hearing ‘Reeded In Silly Shut Up’, but I hardly had to glance at the poster to know that he meant ‘Three Dead In City Shoot-Up.’ I bought a copy and read as I walked.

A ‘massive police investigation’ was under way following the discovery of the bodies of three men, all of whom had perished as the result of gunshot wounds, at a derelict office building in the heart of London’s financial district. The bodies, none of which had yet been identified, were found by the security guard, Mr Dennis Falkes, 51 and father of three, returning to his post after a dental appointment. A police spokesman declined to speculate on the motive behind the killings, but was apparently unable to rule out drugs. There were no photographs. Just a rambly background story about the rise in the number of drug-related deaths in the capital in the last two years. I tossed the paper into a bin and kept walking.

Dennis Falkes had taken some folding money from

someone, that much was obvious. The chances were it was Groomed who paid him, so when Falkes got back and found his benefactor dead he didn’t have much incentive not to call the police. I hoped for his sake that the dentist story was true. If it wasn’t, the police were going to make his life extremely difficult.

Ronnie was waiting for me in her car outside the gallery. It was a bright red TVR Griffith, with a five litre V8 engine, and an exhaust note that could have been heard inPeking. It fell some way short of being the ideal car for a discreet surveillance operation, but (a), I wasn’t in a position to quibble, and (b), there’s an undeniable pleasure in stepping into an open-top sports car driven by a beautiful woman. It feels like you’re climbing into a metaphor.

Ronnie was in high spirits, which didn’t mean she hadn’t seen the newspaper story about Woolf. Even if she had, and even if she’d known that Woolf was dead, I’m not sure it would have made much difference. Ronnie had what they used to call pluck. Centuries of breeding, some of it in, some of it out, had given her high cheek-bones and an appetite for risk and adventure. I pictured her at the age of five, careering over eight-foot fences on a pony called Winston, risking her life seventy times before breakfast.

She shook her head when I asked her what she’d found in Sarah’s desk at the gallery, and then pestered me with questions all the way toBelgravia. I didn’t hear a single one of them thanks to the howl of the TVR exhaust, but I nodded and shook my head whenever it seemed appropriate.

When we reached LyallStreet, I yelled at her to take a run past the house, and not to look at anything but the road ahead. I found a tape of AC/DC, slotted it into the cassette player, and turned the volume up as far as it would go. I was working on the principle, you see, that the more obvious you are, the less obvious you are. Given the choice, I’d usually say that the more obvious you are, the more obvious you are, but choice was one of the things I was short of at that moment.

Necessity is the mother of self-delusion.

As we passed the Woolf house, I put my hand up to my eye and prodded a bit, which allowed me to stare at the front of the house as hard as I could while apparently adjusting a contact lens. It looked empty. But then again, I’d hardly expected to see men with violin cases on the front steps.

We went round the block and I signalled to Ronnie to pull over a couple of hundred yards short of the house. She switched off, and for a few moments my ears rang with the sudden quiet. Then she turned to me, and I could see that the red spots were back in her cheeks.

‘What now, boss?’

She really was getting into this.

‘I’ll take a stroll past and see what happens.’

‘Right. What do I do?’

‘Be great if you could stay here,’ I said. Her face fell. ‘In case I need to get out in a hurry,’ I added, and her face picked itself up again. She reached into her handbag and brought out a small brass-coloured canister which she pressed into my hand.

‘What’s this?’ I said.

‘Rape alarm. Press the top.’

‘Ronnie…’

‘Take it. If I hear it, I’ll know you need a lift.’

The street looked as ordinary as it could, given that every single house in it cost upwards of two million pounds. The value of the cars alone, lining both sides of the road, probably exceeded the wealth of many small countries. A dozen Mercedes, a dozen jaguars and Daimlers, five Bentley saloons, a Bentley convertible, three Aston Martins, three Ferraris, a Jensen, a Lamborghini.

And a Ford.

Dark-blue, facing away from me, opposite the house on the other side of the street, which was why I hadn’t noticed it the first time round. Two aerials. Two rear-view mirrors. A dent half-way up the nearside front wing. Sort of dent a large motorcycle might make in a side-to-side collision. One man in the passenger seat.

My first feeling was relief. If they were staking out Sarah’s house, there was a good chance that it was because they didn’t have Sarah, and the house was the next best thing. But then again, they might already have Sarah and had just sent someone along to collect her toothbrush. If she still had any teeth, that is.

No point in worrying about that. I kept walking towards the Ford.

If you’ve ever had any training in military theory, it’s possible that you had to sit through a lecture on a thing called the Boyd Loop. Boyd was a chap who spent a large amount of time studying air-to-air combat during the Korean war, analysing typical ‘event sequences’ - or, in layman’s language, sequences of events - to see why pilot A was able to shoot down pilot B, and how pilot B felt about it afterwards, and which of them had had kedgeree for breakfast. Boyd’s theory was based on the utterly facile observation that when A did something, B reacted, A did something else, B reacted again et cetera, forming a loop of action and reaction. The Boyd Loop. Nice work if you can get it, you may be thinking. But Boyd’s ‘Eureka’ moment, which to this day causes his name to be bandied about military academies the world over, came when he hit upon the notion that if B could do two things in the space of time it normally took him to do one, he would ‘get inside the loop’, and the forces of right would thereby prevail.

Lang’s Theory, which amounts to much the same thing at a fraction of the cost, is that you punch the other chap’s face before he has a chance to get it out of the way.

I came up behind the Ford on the left-hand side, and stopped level with it, looking up at the Woolfs ’ house. The man in the Ford didn’t look at me. Which he would have done if he’d been a civilian, because people do look at people when they’ve got nothing else to do. I bent down and

knocked on his window. He turned and stared at me for a long moment before he wound it down, but I could tell he hadn’t recognised me. He was in his forties and liked his whisky.

‘Are you Roth?’ I snapped, in the best American accent I could manage - which is actually pretty good, though I say so myself.

He shook his head. ‘Roth been here?’ I said.

‘Who the fuck is Roth?’ I’d expected him to be an American, but he sounded extremelyLondon.

‘Shit,’ I said, standing up and looking towards the house. ‘Who are you?’

‘Dalloway,’ I said, frowning. ‘They tell you I was coming?’ Again he shook his head. ‘You been out of the car? Missed the call?’ I was pushing hard, speaking fast and loud, and he was puzzled. But not suspicious. ‘Heard the news? Seen a newspaper, for Christ’s sake? Three dead men, and Lang wasn’t one of them.’ He stared up at me. ‘Shit,’ I said again, in case he hadn’t heard me the first time.

‘What now?’

Cigar for Mr Lang. I had him. I chewed my lip for a while, then decided to take a chance.

‘You here alone?’

He nodded towards the house.

‘ Micky’sinside.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘We change over in ten minutes.’

‘You change over now. I have to get in. Anybody show so far?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Phone?’

‘Once. Girl’s voice, about an hour ago. Asking for Sarah.’

‘Right. Let’s go.’

I was inside his Boyd Loop, that was obvious. Amazing what you can make people do if you get the first note right. He clambered out of the car, eager to show how quickly he could clamber out of cars, and followed at my shoulder as I strode over to the house. I took the keys to my flat out of my pocket and then stopped myself.

‘Have you got a knock?’ I said as we reached the front door.

‘Pardon?’

I rolled my eyes with impatience.

‘A knock. Signal. I don’t want Micky blowing a hole in my chest as we go through the goddamn door.’

‘No, we just… I mean, I just shout " Micky".’

‘Gee, that’s really neat,’ I said. ‘Who worked that one out?’ I laid it on a bit, trying to make him bristle so he’d be all the keener to show how efficient he was. ‘Do it.’

He put his mouth to the letter-box.

‘ Micky,’ he said, and then glanced up, apologetically. ‘It’s me.’

‘Oh, I get it,’ I said. ‘That way he knows it’s you. Cool.’ There was a pause, and then the latch turned and I pushed straight into the house.

I tried not to look at Micky much, so he’d know straightaway he wasn’t the point at issue. But a quick glance told me he was also in his forties, and as thin as a very thin stick. He wore leather backless gloves and a revolver, and probably some clothes as well, but I wasn’t really paying attention to them.

The revolver had a Smith Wesson nickel finish, a short barrel, and an enclosed hammer, making it good for firing from inside a pocket. Probably a Bodyguard Airweight, or something similar. A sneaky kind of a gun. You may ask whether I could name an honest, decent, fair-minded kind of gun, and of course I can’t. All guns throw lead at people with a view to causing harm, but, given that, they tend to have more or less distinct characters. And some are sneakier than others.

‘You Micky?’ I said, looking busily round the hall.

‘I am.’ Micky was a Scot, and was trying frantically to get some sign from his partner as to who the hell I was. Micky was going to be a problem.

‘Dave Carter sends his regards.’ I was at school with a Dave Carter.

‘Oh. Yeah,’ he said. ‘Right.’

Bingo. Two Boyd Loops in five minutes. In a giddy whirl of triumph, I walked over to the hall table, and picked up the phone.

‘ Gwinevere,’ I said, enigmatically. ‘I’m in.’

I put the receiver back on the cradle and moved towards the stairs, cursing myself for having so massively overdone it. They couldn’t have fallen for that one. But when I turned, they were both still standing there, meek as lambs, with a pair of ‘you’re the guv’nor ’ looks on their faces.

‘Which one is the girl’s bedroom?’ I snapped. The lambs exchanged nervous glances. ‘You checked the rooms, right?’ They nodded. ‘So which is the one with the lacy pillows and the poster of Stefan Edberg, for Chrissakes?’

‘Second on the left,’ said Micky.

‘Thank you.’

‘But…’

I stopped again. ‘But what?’

‘There’s no poster…’

I gave them both a fair rendition of a withering look, and carried on up the stairs.

Mickywas right, there was no poster of Stefan Edberg. There weren’t even that many lacy pillows. Eight, maybe. But Fleur de Fleurs was in the air, one part per billion, and I felt a sudden, physical stab of worry and longing. For the first time I realised how much I wanted to protect Sarah from whatever it was, or whoever they were.

Now maybe this was just a lot of old damsel-in-distress nonsense, and perhaps, on another day, my hormones might have been busy on another subject entirely. But at that moment, standing in the middle of her bedroom, I wanted to rescue Sarah. Not just because she was good, and the bad guys weren’t, but because I liked her. I liked her a lot.

Enough of that kind of talk.

I went to the bedside-table, lifted the phone receiver and tucked the mouthpiece under a lacy pillow. If either one of the lambs started to regain some courage, or just curiosity, and felt like trying Dial-An-Explanation, I’d hear it. But the pillow ought to stop them from hearing me.

I ran through the cupboards first, trying to guess whether a sizeable chunk of Sarah’s clothes had gone. There were a few empty hangers here and there, but not enough to indicate an orderly departure to a far-away place.

The dressing-table had a scattering of pots and brushes on it. Face-cream, hand-cream, nose-cream, eye-cream. I wondered for a moment how serious it would be if you ever got home drunk and accidentally put face-cream on your hands or hand-cream on your face.

The drawers of the dressing-table contained more of the same. All the tools and lubricants necessary to keep a modern Formula 1 woman on the road. But definitely no file.

I closed them all and walked through to the adjoining bathroom. The silk dressing-gown Sarah had worn when I first saw her was hanging on the back of the door. There was a toothbrush in the rack over the basin.

I walked back through to the bedroom and looked around, hoping for a sign of something. I mean, not an actual sign - I wasn’t expecting an address scrawled in lipstick on the mirror - but I’d hoped for something, something that should have been there and wasn’t, or shouldn’t have been there and was. But there was no sign, and yet something was wrong. I had to stand in the middle of the room and listen for a while before I realised what it was.

I couldn’t hear the two lambs talking. That was wrong. They ought to have plenty of things to say to each other. After all, I was Dalloway, and Dalloway was a new element in their lives; they should have been talking about me.

I crossed to the window and looked down into the street. The door of the Ford was open, and it looked like the whisky lamb’s leg sticking out of it. He was on the radio. I got the phone out of bed and put it back on the hook, and as I did so I automatically opened the draw of the bedside-table. It was a small drawer, but it seemed to contain more than the rest of the room. I rummaged through the packets of paper tissues, the cotton-wool, the paper tissues, the pairs of nail scissors, the half-eaten bar of Suchard chocolate, the paper tissues, the pens, the tweezers, the paper tissues, the paper tissues - do women eat these fucking things or what? - and there, at the bottom of the drawer, nestling on a bed of paper tissues, was a heavy bundle wrapped in a strip of chamois leather. Sarah’s fetching little Walther TPH. I popped out the magazine and checked the slot down the side. Full.

I slipped the gun into my pocket, took another deep breath of Nina Ricci, and left.

Things had changed amongst the lambs since I’d last spoken to them. Definitely for the worse. The front door was open, Micky was leaning against the wall next to it with his right hand in his pocket, and I could see Whisky standing on the steps outside, looking up and down the street. He turned when he heard me on the stairs.

‘Nothing,’ I said, and then remembered I was supposed to be American. ‘Not a goddamn thing. Shut the door will you?’

‘Two questions,’ said Micky.

‘Yeah?’ I said. ‘Make it fast.’

‘Who the fuck is Dave Carter?’

There didn’t seem to be much point my telling him that Dave Carter had been under-sixteen fives champion at school, and that he’d gone on to work for his father’s electrical engineering company in Hove. So I said, ‘What’s the second question?’

Mickyglanced across at Whisky, who’d come up to the door and got himself very much in the way of my exit. ‘Who the fuck are you?’

‘Dalloway,’ I said. ‘Want me to write it down for you? What the hell is the matter with you guys?’ I slipped my right hand into my pocket and saw Micky’s right hand move in his.

If he decided to kill me, I knew I would never even hear the shot. Still, I’d managed to get my hand into my right pocket. Just a pity that I’d put the Walther in the left. I brought my hand out again, slowly, with my fist closed. Micky was watching me like a snake.

‘Goodwin says he’s never heard of you. He never sent anybody. Never told anybody we were here.’

‘Goodwin is a lazy son-of-a-bitch who’s way out of his depth,’ I said, irritably. ‘What the hell has he got to do with it?’

‘Nothing at all,’ said Micky. ‘Want to know why?’

I nodded. ‘Yes, I want to know why.’

Mickysmiled. He had terrible teeth. ‘Because he doesn’t exist,’ he said. ‘I made him up.’

Well, there you are. I’d been Looped. As ye sew, so shall ye knit.

‘I’m going to ask you again,’ he said, starting towards me. ‘Who are you?’

I let my shoulders slump. The game was up. I held my wrists out in front of me in a ‘handcuff me, officer’ gesture. ‘You want to know my name?’ I said.

‘Yeah.’

The reason they never heard it was because we were interrupted by an ear-drum-splitting howl of incredible intensity. The sound bounced off the floor and ceiling of the hallway and came back twice as strong, rocking the brain and blurring the eyes.

Mickywinced and backed away along the wall, and Whisky started to lift his hands to his ears. In the half second they gave me, I ran for the open door and hit Whisky in the chest with my right shoulder. He bounced back and fell against the railings, as I turned left and took off down the street at a speed I hadn’t travelled at since I was sixteen. If I could get twenty yards away from the Airweight, I’d have a chance.

To be honest, I don’t know if they fired at me. After the unbelievable sound from Ronnie’s little brass canister, my ears were in no state to process that kind of information. All I know is they didn’t rape me.

Eleven

There is no sin except stupidity.