The Gun Seller

OSCAR WILDE

Ronnie took us back to her flat off the King’s Road, and we drove past it a dozen times in each direction. We weren’t checking for surveillance, just looking for a place to park. This was the time of day when Londoners who own cars, and that’s most of them, pay heavily for their indulgence - time stands still, or goes backwards, or does some fucking thing that doesn’t correspond with the ordinary rules of the universe - and all those TV commercials showing sexy sportsters being flung about deserted country roads start to irritate you a little. They don’t irritate me, of course, because I ride a bike. Two wheels good, four wheels bad.

When she’d finally managed to squeeze the TVR into a space, we discussed taking a taxi back to her flat, but decided that it was a nice enough evening and we both fancied the walk. Or rather, Ronnie fancied the walk. People like Ronnie always fancy the walk, and people like me always fancy people like Ronnie, so we each put on a stout pair of walking legs and set off. On the way, I gave her a brief account of the LyallStreet session, and she listened in rapt near-silence. She hung on my words in a way that people, particularly women, don’t usually hang. They usually let go, twist their ankle in the fall, and blame me for it.

But Ronnie was different somehow. Different because she seemed to think that I was different.

When we finally made it back to her flat, she unlocked the front door, stood to one side, and asked, in a strangely little girl voice, if I wouldn’t mind going in first. I looked at her for a moment. I think perhaps she wanted to gauge how serious the whole thing was, as if she still wasn’t quite sure of it or me; so I put on a grim expression and went through the flat in what I hoped was a Clint Eastwoody sort of a way - pushing open doors with my foot, opening cupboards suddenly - while she stood in the corridor, her cheeks spotted with red.

In the kitchen, I said, ‘Oh God.’

Ronnie gave a gasp, and then ran forward and peered round the door-jamb.

‘Is this bolognese?’ I said, and held up a wooden spoonful of something old and badly misjudged.

She tutted at me and then laughed with relief, and I laughed too, and we suddenly seemed like very old friends. Close, even. So obviously, I had to ask her.

‘When’s he coming back?’

She looked at me, and blushed a little, then went back to scraping bolognese from the saucepan.

‘When’s who coming back?’

‘Ronnie,’ I said. I moved round until I was more or less in front of her. ‘You’re very well put together, but you do not take a size forty-four chest. And if you did, you wouldn’t take it in a lot of identical pin-stripe suits.’

She glanced towards the bedroom, remembering the cupboards, and then went to the sink and started to run hot water into the pan.

‘Drink?’ she said, without turning round.

She broke out a bottle of vodka while I threw ice-cubes over the kitchen floor, and eventually she decided to tell me that the boyfriend, who, as I think I could probably have guessed, sold commodities in the City, didn’t stay at the flat every night, and when he did he never got there before ten. Honestly, if I’d had a pound for every time a woman has told me that, I’d have at least three by now. The last time it happened, the boyfriend came back atseven o’clock - ‘He’s never done that before,’ - and hit me with a chair.

I deduced from her tone, and from her words too, that the relationship was not going as swimmingly as it might and, in spite of my curiosity, I thought it probably best to change the subject.

As we settled ourselves on the sofa, with the ice-cubes making sweet music inside the glasses, I started to give her a slightly fuller version of events - starting withAmsterdam, and ending with LyallStreet, but leaving out the bit about helicopters and Graduate Studies. Even so, it was a goodish yarn, with plenty of derring-do, and I added some derring -didn’t-really-but-it-sounds-good, just to keep up her glowing opinion of me. When I’d finished, she wrinkled her brow slightly.

‘But you didn’t find the file,’ she asked, looking disappointed.

‘Nope,’ I said. ‘Which doesn’t mean it isn’t there. If Sarah really wanted to hide it in the house, it would take a team of builders about a week to search the place properly.’

‘Well; I went over the gallery, and there’s definitely nothing there. She’s left some paperwork around, but it’s all just work stuff.’ She went over to the table and opened her briefcase. ‘I did find her diary, if that’s any good.’

I don’t know if she was serious about this. She must have read enough Agatha Christies to know that finding diaries is almost always good.

But maybe not Sarah’s. It was a leather-bound A4-sized affair, produced by a cystic fibrosis charity, and it didn’t tell me much about its owner that I couldn’t have guessed. She took her work seriously, lunched a little, didn’t put circles instead of dots above her ‘ i’s, but did doodle cats when she was on the phone. She hadn’t made many plans for the months ahead, and the last entry simply said ‘CED OK 7.30’. Looking back over the previous weeks, I saw that CED had also been OK three times before, once at 7.30 and twice at 12.15.

‘Any idea who this is?’ I said to Ronnie, showing her the entry. ‘Charlie? Colin? Carl, Clive, Clarissa, Carmen?’ I dried up on women’s names beginning with ‘C’.

Ronnie frowned.

‘Why would she write a middle initial?’

‘Beats me,’ I said.

‘I mean, if the name’s Charlie Dunce, why not write CD?’ I looked down at the page.

‘Charlie Etherington -Dunce? God knows. That’s your patch.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ She was surprisingly quick to take offence.

‘Sorry, I just mean… you know, I imagine you pass the time of day with double-barrelled sorts…’ I tailed off. I could see Ronnie didn’t like this.

‘Yes, and I’ve got a poncy voice, and a poncy job, and my boyfriend works in the city.’ She got up and went to pour herself another vodka. She didn’t offer me one, and I had the definite feeling that I was paying for someone else’s crimes. ‘Look, I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I didn’t mean anything by it.’

‘I can’t help the way I sound, Thomas,’ she said. ‘Or the way I look.’ She took a belt of vodka and kept her back to me. ‘What’s to help? You sound great, you look even better.’

‘Oh, shut up.’

‘In a minute,’ I said. ‘Why are you so cross about it?’ She sighed and sat down again.

‘Because it bores me, that’s why. Half the people I meet never take me seriously because of the way I talk, and the other half only take me seriously because of the way I talk. Gets on your nerves after a while.’

‘Well, I know this is going to sound pretty oily, but I take

you seriously.’

‘Do you?’

‘Of course I do. Incredibly seriously.’ I waited a bit. ‘Doesn’t bother me that you’re a stuck-up bitch.’

She looked at me for a longish moment, in the course of which I started to think that maybe I’d got it wrong, and she was about to throw something. Then suddenly she laughed, and shook her head, and I feltalot better. I hoped she did.

At aboutsix o’clock the phone rang, and I could tell from the way Ronnie held the receiver that it was the boyfriend announcing his arrival time. She stared at the floor and said yeah a lot, either because I was in the room, or because their relationship had reached that stage. I picked up my jacket and carried my glass through to the kitchen. I washed and dried it, in case she forgot to, and was putting it back in the cupboard when Ronnie appeared.

‘Will you call me?’ She looked a bit sad. Perhaps I did, too. ‘You bet,’ I said.

I left her chopping onions in preparation for the commodity broker’s return, and let myself out of the flat. Apparently the arrangement was that she made supper for him, and he made breakfast for her. Considering Ronnie was the sort of person to call a couple of grapefruit segments a major blow-out, I suspect that he’d got the better of the deal. Honestly. Men.

A cab took me along the King’s Road into theWest End and byhalf past six I was loitering outside the Ministry of Defence. A couple of policemen watched me as I paced up and down, but I’d armed myself with a map and a disposable camera, and was taking pictures of pigeons in a gormless enough way to put their minds at rest. I’d had a lot more suspicion from the shopkeeper when I asked him for a map and said I didn’t care which town it was of.

I’d made no other preparations for the trip, and I certainly hadn’t wanted to have my voice logged on any incoming call to the Ministry. I was taking a chance on my reading of O’Neal as a swot and, from my first reconnaissance, it looked as if I’d got it right. Seventh floor, corner office, O’Neal’smidnight oil was burning brightly. The regulation net curtains that hang in the windows of all ‘sensitive’ government buildings might defeat a telephoto lens, but they can’t stop light from showing in the street.

Once upon a time, in the heady days of the Cold War, a twit in one of the supervising security branches had decreed that all ‘ targetable’ offices should leave their lights on twenty-four hours a day, to prevent enemy agents from tracking who was at work where, and for how long. The idea was greeted at the time with nods of the head and pats on the back and many a murmured ‘that fellow Carruthers will go a long way, mark my words’ - until, that is, the electricity bills started flopping on to the mats of the relevant finance sections, whereupon the idea, and Carruthers, had been shown the door pretty smartly.

O’Neal emerged from the main door of the Ministry at ten minutes past seven. He gave a nod to the security guard, who ignored him, and stepped out into theWhitehall dusk. He was carrying a briefcase, which was odd - because nobody would have let him out of the building with anything more important than a few sheets of lavatory paper - so maybe he was one of those strange people who use a briefcase as a prop. I don’t know.

I let him get a few hundred yards away from the Ministry before I started after him, and I had to work hard to keep my pace down, because O’Neal walked peculiarly slowly. One might have thought that he was enjoying the weather, if there’d been any to enjoy.

It wasn’t until he crossed The Mall and started to speed up that I realised he’d been promenading; playing the part of the Whitehall tiger on the prowl, master of all he surveyed, privy to mighty secrets of state, any one of which would blow the socks off the average gawping tourist if he or she but knew. Once he’d stepped out of the jungle and on to the open savannah, the act wasn’t really worth bothering with, so he walked normally. O’Neal was a man you could feel sorry for, if you had the time.

I don’t know why, but I’d expected him to go straight home. I’d imagined a terraced house in Putney, where a longsuffering wife would feed him sherry and baked cod and iron his shirts while he grunted and shook his head at the television news, as if every word of it had an extra, darker, meaning for him. Instead, he skipped up the steps past theICA, intoPall Mall and the Travellers Club.

There was no point in my trying anything there. I watched through the glass doors while O’Neal asked the porter to check his pigeon-hole, which was empty, and when I saw him shrug off his coat and move into the bar I judged it safe to leave him for a while.

I bought chips and a hamburger from a stall on the Haymarket and wandered a while, chewing as I went, watching people in bright shirts shuffle in to see musical shows that seemed to have been running for as long as I’d been alive. A depression started to drift down on to my shoulders as I walked, and I realised, withajolt, that I was doing exactly the same thing as O’Neal - looking on my fellow man with a weary, cynical, ‘you poor saps, if only you knew’ feeling. I snapped myself out of it and threw the hamburger in a bin.

He came out athalf past eight, and walked up the Haymarket to Piccadilly. From there he carried on upShaftesbury Avenue, then took a left turn intoSoho, where the tinkle of theatre-going chatter gave way to the bassier throbs of chic bars and strip joints. Huge moustaches with men hanging off the back loitered about in doorways, murmuring things about ‘sexy shows’ as I passed.

O’Neal was also being hustled by the doormen, but he seemed to know where he was going and didn’t once turn his head to the advertised wares. Instead, he jinked left and right a few times, never looking back, until he reached his oasis, The Shala. He turned and walked straight in.

I kept going until the end of the street, dawdled for a minute, then headed back to admire The Shala’s intriguing facade. The words ‘Live’, ‘Girls’, ‘Erotic’, ‘Dancing’ and ‘Sexy’ were painted round the door in a random fashion, as if inviting you to try and make a sentence out of them, and there were half-a-dozen faded snaps of women in their underwear pinned up in a glass case. A girl in a tight leather skirt lolled in the doorway, and I smiled at her in a way that said I was fromNorway and yes, The Shala looked like just the place to refresh oneself after a hard day being Norwegian. I could just as easily have yelled that I was coming in there right now with a flamethrower, I doubt whether she would have batted an eyelid. Or could have batted it, under the weight of all that mascara.

I paid her fifteen pounds and filled in a membership form in the name of Lars Petersen, care of the Vice Squad, New Scotland Yard, and trotted down the steps into the basement to see just exactly how live, sexy, erotic, dancing and girls The Shala could really be.

It was a sorry sort of dive. Very, very sorry indeed. The management had long ago decided that turning the lights down was a cheap alternative to cleaning the place, and I had the constant feeling that the carpet-tiles were coming away with the soles of my shoes. Twenty or so tables were arranged around a small stage, on which three glassy-eyed girls bounced along to some loud music. The ceiling was so low that the tallest of them had to dance with a stoop; but surprisingly, considering all three were naked and the music was the Bee Gees, they were carrying the whole thing off with a fair degree of dignity.

O’Neal had a table at the front, and seemed to have taken a shine to the girl on the left, a pasty-faced creature who looked to me as if she could do with a large steak and kidney pie and a good night’s sleep. She kept her eyes on the wall at the back of the club and never smiled.

‘Drink.’

A man with boils on his neck was leaning over the bar at me.

‘Whisky please,’ I said, and turned to the stage.

‘Five pounds.’

I looked back at him. ‘I’m sorry?’

‘Five pounds for the whisky. You pay now’

‘I don’t think I do,’ I said. ‘You give me the whisky. Then I’ll pay.’

‘You pay first.’

‘You fuck yourself with a garden fork first.’ I smiled, to take the sting out of it. He brought the whisky. I paid him five pounds.

After ten minutes at the bar, I decided that O’Neal was here to enjoy the show and nothing else. He didn’t look at his watch or the door, and he was drinking gin with enough abandon to convince me that he was definitely off the clock. I finished my own drink and sidled over to his table.

‘Don’t tell me. She’s your niece and she’s only doing this so she can get her Equity Card and join the Royal Shakespeare Company.’ O’Neal turned and stared at me as I pulled out a chair and sat down. ‘Hello,’ I said.

‘What are you doing here?’ he said, crossly. I rather think he may have been a little embarrassed.

‘Hang on,’ I said. ‘That’s the wrong way round surely. You’re supposed to say "hello" and I say "what are you doing here?"‘

‘Where the hell have you been, Lang?’

‘Oh, hither and yon,’ I said. ‘As you know, I am a petal borne aloft on the autumn winds. It should say that in my file.’

‘You followed me here.’

‘ Tut. Followed is such an ugly word. I prefer "blackmail".’

‘What?’

‘But, of course, it means something completely different. So all right, let’s say I followed you here.’

He’d started looking round the room, trying to see if I had any large friends with me. Or maybe he was looking for large friends of his own. He leant forward and hissed at me. ‘You are in very, very serious trouble, Lang. It is only fair that I should warn you of that.’

‘Yes, I think you’re probably right,’ I said. ‘Very serious trouble is certainly one of the things I’m in. A strip club is another one. With a senior civil servant who shall remain nameless for at least an hour.’

He leaned back in his chair, a peculiar leer spreading across his face. The eyebrows raised, the mouth curled upwards. I realised it was the beginning of a smile. In kit form.

‘Oh dear,’ he said. ‘You really are trying to blackmail me. That is terribly pathetic.’

‘Is it? Well we can’t have that.’

‘I am meeting someone here. The choice of rendezvous was not mine.’ He drained his third gin. ‘Now I should be greatly obliged if you would take yourself off somewhere, so I don’t have to call the doorman and have you ejected.’

The sound-track had moved seamfully into a loud but bland cover of ‘War, What Is It Good For?’ and O’Neal’s niece moved down to the front of the stage and started shaking her vagina at us, almost in time to the music.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I think I like it here just fine.’

‘Lang, I am warning you. You have at this moment very little credit in the bank. I have an important meeting here, and if you disrupt it, or inconvenience me in any way, I shall foreclose on you. Do I make myself plain?’

‘Captain Mainwaring,’ I said. ‘That’s who you remind me of.:

‘Lang, for the last time…’

He stopped when he saw Sarah’s Walther. I think I probably would have done the same, in his place.

‘I thought you said you didn’t carry firearms,’ he said, after a while. Nervous, but trying not to show it.

‘I’m a victim of fashion,’ I said. ‘Someone told me they’re in this year, and I just had to have one.’ I started to take off my jacket. The niece was only a few feet away, but she was still staring at the back wall.

‘You are not going to fire a gun in here, Lang. I don’t believe you are entirely insane.’

I bundled the jacket into a tight ball and slipped the gun into one of the folds.

‘Oh, I am,’ I said. ‘Entirely. Thomas "Mad Dog" Lang they used to call me.’

‘I am beginning…’

O’Neal’s empty glass exploded. Shards scattered across the table and on to the floor. He went very pale.

‘My God…’ he stammered.

Rhythm’s the thing. You’ve either got it or you haven’t. I’d fired on one of the big crashing chords of ‘War’ and made no more noise than if I’d been licking an envelope. If the niece had been doing it, she would have fired on the upbeat and ruined everything.

‘Another drink?’ I said, and lit a cigarette to cover the smell of burnt powder. ‘On me.’

‘War’ ended before Christmas and the three girls ambled off the stage, to be replaced by a couple whose act relied heavily on whips. They were pretty obviously brother and sister and couldn’t have had less than a hundred years between them. The man’s whip was only three feet long because of the low ceiling, but he wielded it as if it was thirty, lashing his sister to the tune of ‘We Are The Champions’. O’Neal sipped chastely at a new gin and tonic.

‘Now then,’ I said, adjusting the position of the jacket on the table, ‘I need one thing from you and one thing only.’

‘Go to hell.’

‘I certainly will, and I’ll make sure your room is ready. But I need to know what you’ve done with Sarah Woolf.’

He stopped his glass amid sips, and turned to me, genuinely puzzled.

‘What I’ve done with her? What on earth makes you think I’ve done anything with her?’

‘She’s disappeared,’ I said.

‘Disappeared. Yes. That’s a melodramatic way of saying you can’t find her, I assume?’

‘Her father is dead,’ I said. ‘Did you know that?’

He looked at me for a long time.

‘Yes, I did,’ he said. ‘What interests me is how you knew it.’

‘You first.’

But O’Neal was starting to get bold, and when I moved the jacket closer to him he didn’t flinch.

‘You killed him,’ he said, part angry, part pleased. ‘That’s it, isn’t it? Thomas Lang, brave soldier of fortune, actually went through with it and shot a man. Well, my dear friend, you are going to have one hell of a job getting out of this one, I hope you realise that.’

‘What are Graduate Studies?’

The anger, and the pleasure, gradually slipped out of his face. He didn’t look as if he was going to answer, so I decided to press on.

‘I’ll tell you what I think Graduate Studies are,’ I said, ‘and you can give me points out of ten for accuracy.’

O’Neal sat, motionless.

‘First of all, Graduate Studies means different things to different people. To one group, it means the development and marketing of a new type of military aircraft. Very secret, obviously. Very unpleasant, likewise. Very illegal, probably not. To another group, and this is where it all starts to get really interesting, Graduate Studies refers to the mounting of a terrorist operation that will allow the makers of this aircraft to show off their toy to advantage. By killing people. And make a genuinely huge sack of money from the resulting flow of enthusiastic buyers. Very secret, very unpleasant, and very, very, very to the power of ten, illegal. Alexander Woolf got wind of this second group, decided he couldn’t let them get away with it, and started to make a nuisance of himself. So the second group., some of whom perhaps have legitimate positions in the intelligence community, start mentioning Woolf at drinks parties as a drugs trafficker, to blacken his name and undermine any little campaign he might want to get going. And when that didn’t work, they threatened to kill him. And whenthatdidn’t work, they did kill him. And maybe they’ve killed his daughter as well.’

O’Neal still hadn’t moved.

‘But the people I really feel sorry for in all of this,’ I said, ‘besides the Woofs, obviously, is anyone whothinksthat they belong to the first group, not illegal, but all the time have been aiding, abetting and otherwise lending succour to the second group, very illegal, without even knowing it. Anyone in that position, I would say, has definitely got the skunk by the tail.’

He was looking over my shoulder now. For the first time since I’d met him, I couldn’t tell what he was thinking. ‘Well, that’s it,’ I said. ‘Personally, I thought it was a wonderful routine, but now over to Judith and the opinion of the judges.’

But he still didn’t answer. So I turned and followed his gaze towards the entrance to the club, where one of the doormen stood, pointing at our table. I saw him nod and step back, and the lean, powerful figure of Barnes, Russell P, strode into the room and headed towards us.

I shot them both dead there and then, and caught the next plane toCanada, where I married a woman called Mary-Beth and started up a successful pottery business.

At least, that’s what I should have done.

Twelve

He hath no pleasure in the strength of an horse: neither delighteth he in any man’s legs.