The Gun Seller

EDWARD YOUNG

There was a bomb scare on the flight out toPrague. No bomb, but lots of scare.

We were just settling ourselves into our seats when the pilot’s voice came over the intercom, telling us to deplane with all possible speed. No ‘ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of British Airways,’ or anything like that. Just get off the plane now.

We hung around in a lilac-painted room, with ten fewer chairs than there were passengers and no music to play by, and you weren’t allowed to smoke. I was, though. A uniformed woman with a lot of make-up told me to put it out, but I explained that I was asthmatic and the cigarette was a herbal dilation remedy I had to take whenever I was under stress. Everybody hated me for that, the smokers even more than the non-smokers.

When we finally shuffled back on to the aircraft, we all looked under our seats, worried that the sniffer dog might have had a cold that day, and that somewhere there was a little black hold-all that all the searchers had missed.

There once was a man who went to see a psychiatrist, crippled by a fear of flying. His phobia was based on the belief that there would be a bomb on any plane he boarded. The psychiatrist tried to shift the phobia but couldn’t, so he sent his patient to a statistician. The statistician prodded a calculator and informed the man that the odds against there being a bomb on board the next flight he took were half a million to one. The man still wasn’t happy, and sat there convinced that he’d be on that one plane out of half a million. So the statistician prodded the calculator again and said ‘all right, would you feel safer if the odds were ten million to one against?’ The man said, yes, of course he would. So the statistician said ‘the odds against there being two, separate, unrelated bombs on board your next flight are exactly ten million to one against.’ The man looked puzzled, and said ‘that’s all well and good, but how does it help me?’ The statistician replied: ‘It’s very simple. You take a bomb on board with you.’

I told this to a grey-suited businessman fromLeicester, sitting in the seat next to me, but he didn’t laugh at all. Instead, he called a stewardess and said he thought I had a bomb in my luggage. I had to tell the story again to the stewardess, and a third time to the co-pilot who came back and squatted at my feet with a scowl on his face. I’m never going to make polite conversation ever again.

Perhaps I’d misjudged how people feel about bombs on aeroplanes. That’s possible. A more likely explanation is that I was the only person on the flight who knew where the hoax bomb call had come from, and what it meant.

It was the first, lumbering, scene-setting move of Operation Dead Wood.

Pragueairport is slightly smaller than the sign which says ‘PragueAirport’, at the front of the terminal building. The thumping Stalinist scale of it made me wonder whether the sign had been built before radio navigation, so that pilots could read it while still only half-way across the Atlantic.

Inside, well, an airport is an airport is an airport. It doesn’t matter where you are in the world, you have to have stone floors for the luggage trolleys, you have to have luggage trolleys, and you have to have glass cases displaying crocodile skin belts that no one will ever want to buy in a thousand years of civilisation.

News of Czecho’s escape from the Soviet maw hadn’t reached the immigration officials, who sat in their glass boxes and re-fought the Cold War with every disgusted flick of their eyes from passport photograph to decadent imperialist standing before them. I was that imperialist, and I’d made the mistake of wearing a Hawaiian shirt, which, I suppose, emphasised my decadence. I’ll know better next time. Except that maybe by next time, someone will have found the key to the glass boxes and told these poor buggers that they’re now sharing cultural and economic floor space with Euro-Disney. I decided to try and learn the Czech for ‘missing you already’.

I changed some money and went outside to hail a taxi. It was a cool evening, and the broad, Stalinist puddles in the car-park, splashing blue and grey reflections of the newly built neon advertisements around the sky, made it seem even cooler. I rounded the corner of the terminal building and the wind bounded up to greet me, licking at my face with diesel flavoured rain and then skipping, playfully around my shins, tugging at my trousers. I stood there for a moment, soaking up the strangeness of the place, heavily conscious that I had, in all kinds of ways, gone from one state to another.

I found a cab eventually, and told the driver in fluent English that I wantedWenceslas Square. This request, I now know, is phonically identical to the Czech phrase for ‘I am an air-brained tourist, please take everything I have’. The car was a Tatra, and the driver was a bastard; he drove fast and well, humming happily to himself, like a man who’s just won the pools.

It was one of the most beautiful sights I’ve ever seen in any city.Wenceslas Square is not a square at all, but a double avenue, running down a slope from the massiveNationalMuseum which overlooks it. Even if I’d known nothing of the place, I would have felt that this was important. History ancient and modern had happened in large dollops over this half-mile of grey and yellow stone, and it had left a smell. L’AirDu Temps de Praha.Prague Springs, Summers, Winters and Autumns had come and gone, and would probably come again.

When the driver told me how much money he wanted, I had to spend a few minutes explaining that I didn’t actually want to buy the cab, I just wanted to settle up for the fifteen minutes I’d spent in it. He told me that it was a limousine service, or at least he said ‘limousine’ and shrugged a lot, and after a while agreed to reduce his demands to the merely astronomical. I hefted my bag and started to walk.

The Americans had told me to find my own digs, and the only sure way to look like a man who’s spent a long time looking for somewhere to stay is to spend a long time looking for somewhere to stay. So I settled into a comfortable march and did Prague One, which is the central district of the old city, in about two hours. Twenty-six churches, fourteen galleries and museums, an opera house - where the boy Mozart had staged his first-ever performance ofDon Giovanni -eight theatres, and a McDonald’s. One of the above had a fifty-yard queue outside it.

I stopped in a few bars to soak up some ambience, which came in tall, straight glasses with ‘Budweiser’ written on the side, and watched to see how the modern Czech walks, talks, dresses and disports himself. Most of the waiters assumed I was German, which was a fair enough mistake to make considering the city was heaving with them. They travelled in groups of twelve, with back-packs and huge thighs, and strung themselves out across the street when they walked. But then of course, for most Germans,Prague is only a few hours away by fast tank, so it’s hardly surprising that they treat the place like the end of their garden.

I had a plate of boiled pork and dumplings in a cafe by the river and, on the advice of a Welsh couple at the next table, took a stroll across theCharlesBridge. Mr and Mrs Welsh had assured me that it was a spectacular construction, but thanks to the thousand buskers draped over every yard of parapet, all of them singing Dylan songs, I never saw any of it.

I found lodgings eventually at the Zlata Praha, a tatty boarding-house on the hill near the castle. The landlady gave me a choice between a big dirty room or a small clean one, and I chose the big dirty one, thinking I could clean it myself. After she’d gone I realised how silly that was. I’ve never even cleaned my own flat.

I unpacked my things, lay down on the bed and smoked. I thought about Sarah, and her father, and Barnes. I thought about my own parents, and Ronnie, and helicopters and motorcycles and Germans and McDonald’s hamburgers.

I thought about a lot of things.

I woke at eight, and listened to the sounds of the city hauling itself up and taking itself to work. The only unfamiliar noise came from the trams, clattering and hissing their way across cobbled streets and over the bridges. I wondered whether I should stay with the Hawaiian shirt or not.

Bynine o’clock I was in the town square, being pestered by a short man with a moustache offering me a tour of the city by horse-drawn carriage. I was supposed to be swayed by the quaint authenticity of his conveyance, but on casual inspection it looked to me extremely like the bottom-half of a Mini Moke, with the engine taken out and shafts for the horse where the headlights used to be. I said no thank you a dozen times, and fuck off once.

I was looking for a cafe with Coca-Cola umbrellas over its tables. That was what they’d said. Tom, when you get there, you’ll see a cafe with Coca-Cola shades over the tables. What they hadn’t said, or hadn’t realised, was that the Coca-Cola rep had been quite fantastically conscientious around these parts, unloading his umbrellas on twenty or so establishments in a hundred yard radius of the square. The Camel Cigarettes rep had only scored twice, so he was presumably dead in a ditch somewhere while the Coca-Cola man was receiving brass plaques and a personalised car-parking space at headquarters inUtah.

I found it after twenty minutes. The Nicholas. Two pounds for a cup of coffee.

They’d told me to go indoors, but it was a beautiful morning and I felt like not doing what I was told, so I sat outside with a view of the square and the passing Germans. I ordered coffee, and as I did so I saw two men emerge from the cafe and sit down at a nearby table. They were both young and fit-looking, and both wore sunglasses. Neither of them looked in my direction. They’d probably been inside for an hour, getting themselves nicely positioned for the meeting, and I’d gone and spoilt everything.

Excellent.

I adjusted the position of my chair and closed my eyes for a while, letting the sun get in amongst the crow’s feet. ‘Master,’ said a voice, ‘a rare and special pleasure.’

I looked round and saw a figure in a brown raincoat squinting down at me.

‘This seat taken?’ said Solomon. He sat in it without waiting for an answer.

I stared at him.

‘Hello, David,’ I said eventually.

I knocked a cigarette out of its packet while he signalled a waiter. I glanced over at the two Sunglasses, but they were looking as far away from me as possible every time I turned.

‘Kava, prosim,’ said Solomon, in what seemed like a pretty handy accent. He turned to me. ‘Good coffee, terrible food.

That’s what I’ve been putting on my postcards.’

‘It’s not you,’ I said.

‘Isn’t it? Who is it then?’

I kept on staring. It was all most unexpected. ‘Let me put it this way,’ I said. ‘Is it you?’

‘Do you mean is it me sitting here, or is it me you’re supposed to be meeting?’

‘David.’

‘It’s both, sir.’ Solomon leaned back to let the waiter unload the coffee. He took a sip and smacked his lips with approval. ‘I have the honour to be acting as trainer for the duration of your stay in this territory. I trust you will find the relationship a profitable one.’

I nodded my head in the direction of the Sunglasses. ‘They with you?’

‘That’s the idea, master. Not one that they like very much, but that’s all right.’

‘American?’ He nodded.

‘As apple pie. This operation is very, very joint. Much jointer than we’ve had it for a long time, as a matter of fact. A good thing, all in all.’

I thought for a while.

‘But why didn’t they tell me?’ I said. ‘I mean, they knew I knew you, so why didn’t they tell me?’

He shrugged.

‘Are we not but teeth on the cogs of a gigantic machine, sir?’

Well, quite.

Of course, I wanted to ask Solomon everything.

I wanted to take him right back to the beginning - to reconstruct all that we knew about Barnes, and O’Neal, and Murdah, and Dead Wood and Graduate Studies - so that between us we’d be able to triangulate some kind of position in this mess, and perhaps even plot a course out of it.

But there were reasons why I couldn’t. Big, strapping reasons that stuck their hands up at the back of the class and wriggled about in their seats, forcing me to listen to them. If I told him what I thought I knew, Solomon would either do the right thing or the wrong thing. The right thing would, very possibly, get Sarah and me killed, and, very certainly, wouldn’t stop what was coming. It might postpone it, get it replayed on another pitch at another time, but it wouldn’t stop it. The wrong thing didn’t bear thinking about. Because the wrong thing would mean that Solomon was on the other team, and when you come right down to it, nobody knows anybody.

So, for the time being, I shut up and listened while Solomon ran over the fine print on how I was expected to pass the next forty-eight hours. He spoke fast but calmly, and we covered a lot of ground in ninety minutes, thanks to him not having to say ‘this is real important’ every other sentence, as the Americans had done.

The Sunglasses drank Coke.

I had the afternoon to myself, and as it looked like being the last one I’d get for a while, I wasted it extravagantly. I drank wine, read old newspapers, listened to an open-air performance of some Mahler, and generally sported myself as a gentleman of leisure.

I met a French woman in a bar who said she worked for a computer software company, and I asked her if she’d have sex with me. She just shrugged, Frenchly, which I took to mean no.

Eight o’clockwas the appointed hour, so I dawdled in a cafe until ten past, pushing another helping of boiled pork and dumplings around the plate and smoking immoderately. I paid the bill and walked out into the cool evening, at last feeling my pulse shake itself up at the prospect of action.

I knew I had no reason to feel good. I knew that the job was almost impossible, that the road ahead was long, rocky, and had very few petrol stations, and that my chances of makingthree score years and ten had dropped through the floor.

But, for whatever reason, good is what I felt.

Solomon was waiting for me at the rendezvous with one of the Sunglasses. One of the pairs of sunglasses, I mean. Although of course he wasn’t wearing sunglasses now, it being dark, so I quickly had to concoct a new name for him. After a few moments thought, I came up with No Sunglasses. I think there may be a touch of Cree Indian in me.

I apologised for being late, and Solomon smiled and said I wasn’t, which was irritating, and then all three of us climbed into a dirty, grey diesel Mercedes, with No Sunglasses at the wheel, and set off on the main road out of the east of the city.

After half-an-hour we’d cleared the outskirts ofPrague, and the road had narrowed to two fastish lanes, which we took at an easy pace. Just about the worst way to fuck up a covert operation on foreign soil is to get a speeding ticket, and No Sunglasses seemed to have learnt this lesson well enough. Solomon and I passed the occasional remark about the countryside, how green it was, how parts of it looked a bit likeWales - although I’m not sure if either of us had ever been there - but otherwise we didn’t talk much. Instead, we drew pictures on the steamed-up rear windows whileEurope unfolded outside, Solomon doing flowers and me doing happy faces.

After an hour the signs started showing forBrno, which never looks right written down, and never sounds right said, either, but I knew we weren’t going that far. We turned north towards Kostelec, and then almost immediately east again, on an even narrower road, with no signs at all. Which just about summed things up.

We wound through a few miles of black pine forest, and then No Sunglasses went on to side-lights, which cut our speed down. After a few miles of that, he doused the lights altogether, and told me to put out my cigarette because it was ‘fucking with his night vision’.

And then, all of a sudden, we were there.

They’d been keeping him in the basement of a farm house. For how long, I couldn’t tell - I only knew that it wasn’t going to be for much longer. He was about my age, about my height, probably had been about my weight before they’d stopped feeding him. They said his name was Ricky, and that he came fromMinnesota. They didn’t say that he was scared out of his wits and wanted to go back toMinnesota as soon as he could, because they didn’t have to. It was in his eyes, as clearly as anything has ever been in anyone’s eyes.

Ricky had dropped out at the age of seventeen. Dropped out of school, dropped out of his family, dropped out of just about everything that a young man can drop out of - but then, pretty soon, he’d dropped into some other things, alternative things, and they’d made him feel better about himself. For a while, anyway.

Ricky felt a lot worse about himself at this moment; most probably because he’d managed to get himself into one of those situations where you’re naked in the cellar of a strange building, in a strange country, with strangers staring at you, some of whom have obviously been hurting you for a while, and others of whom are just waiting to take their turn. Flickering across the back of Ricky’s mind, I knew, were images from a thousand films, in which the hero, trussed-up in the same predicament, throws back his head with an insolent sneer and tells his tormentors to go screw themselves. And Ricky had sat in the dark, along with millions of other teenage boys, and duly absorbed the lesson that this is how men are supposed to behave in adversity. They endure, first of all; then they avenge.

But not being all that bright - being two balls short of a pig-fuck, or whatever they say inMinnesota - Ricky had neglected to notice the important advantages that these celluloid gods had over him. In fact, there really is only one advantage, but it is a very important one. The advantage is that films aren’t real. Honestly. They’re not.

In real life, and I’m sorry if I’m shattering some deeply cherished illusions here, men in Ricky’s situation don’t tell anyone to go and screw themselves. They don’t sneer insolently, they don’t spit in anyone’s eye, and they certainly, definitely, categorically don’t free themselves in a single bound. What they actually do is stand stock still, and shiver, and cry, and beg, literally beg, for their mother. Their nose runs, their legs shake, and they whimper. That is what men, all men, are like, and that is what real life is like.

Sorry, but there it is.

My father used to grow strawberries under a net. Every now and then, a bird, seeing some fat, red, sweet things on the ground, decided to try and get under the net, steal the fruit there from, and clear off. And every now and then, that bird would get the first two things right - no sweat, they’d go like clockwork - and then he or she would make a complete dog’s breakfast of the third. They would get stuck in the fine mesh, and there’d be a lot of squawking and flapping, and my father would look up from the potato trench, whistle me over, and tell me to get the bird out. Carefully. Get hold of it, untangle it, set it free.

This was the job I hated more than any other in the whole universe of childhood.

Fear is frightening. It is the most frightening of all the emotions to behold. An animal in a state of rage is one thing, often a pretty alarming one thing, but an animal in a state of terror - that juddering, staring, skittering bundle of feathered panic - is something I never wanted to see again.

And yet, here I was, seeing it.

‘Piece a fuckin ’ shit,’ said one of the Americans, coming into the kitchen and immediately busying himself with a kettle. Solomon and I looked at each other. We’d sat at the table for twenty minutes after they’d taken Ricky away, without exchanging a word. I knew that he’d been as shaken as I was, and he knew I knew, so we’d just sat there, me staring at the wall, him scratching lines on the side of his chair with his thumbnail.

‘What happens to him now?’ I asked, still staring at the wall. ‘Not your problem,’ said the American, as he spooned coffee grounds into a jug. ‘Not anybody’s problem, after today.’ I think he laughed as he said that, but I couldn’t be sure.

Ricky was a terrorist. That was how the Americans thought of him, and that was why they hated him. They hated all terrorists anyway, but what made Ricky special, what made them hate him more than most, was the fact that he was an American terrorist. And that just didn’t seem right. UntilOklahoma City, the average American had looked upon the letting-off of bombs in public places as a quaint, European tradition, like bull-fighting or Morris dancing. And if it ever spread out ofEurope, it surely went east, to the camel jockeys, the goddamn towel-heads, the sons and daughters of Islam. Blowing-up shopping malls and embassies, sniping at elected officers of the government, hijacking 747s in the name of anything other than money, was downright un-American and un-Minnesotan. ButOklahoma City changed a lot of things, all of them for the worse, and, as a result, Ricky was being made to pay top dollar for his ideology.

Ricky was an American terrorist, and he’d let the side down.

I was back inPrague by dawn, but I didn’t go to bed. Or at least, I went to bed, but I didn’t get in. I sat on the edge, with a filling ashtray and an emptying packet of Marlboro, and stared at the wall. If there’d been a television in the room, I might have watched that. Or I might not. A ten-year-old episode ofMagnum,dubbed into German, isn’t much more interesting than a wall.

They’d told me that the police would come at eight, but in the event it was only a few minutes after seven when I heard the first boot on the first step. That little ruse was presumably meant to guarantee bleary-eyed surprise on my part, in case I was unable to affect it convincingly. No faith, these people.

They numbered about a dozen, all of them in uniform, and they made an over-cooked meal of the whole business, kicking in the door, shouting and knocking things over. The head-boy spoke some English, but not enough, apparently, to understand ‘that hurts’. They dragged me down the stairs past the white-faced landlady - who probably hoped that the days of tenants being hauled off at dawn by police vans were gone for good - while other tousled heads peeked nervously at me through the cracks of doors.

At the station, I was held in a room for a while - no coffee, no cigarettes, no friendly faces - and then, after some more shouting, a few slaps and pokes in the chest, I was chucked in a cell;sansbelt,sansbootlaces.

On the whole, they were pretty efficient.

There were two other occupants of the cell, both male, and they didn’t get up when I came in. One of them probably couldn’t have got up if he’d wanted to, seeing as how he was drunker than I think I’ve ever been in my entire life. He was sixty, and unconscious, with alcohol seeping from every part of his body, and his head hung so low on his chest you almost couldn’t believe that there was a spine in there, holding him together.

The other man was younger, darker, wearing a tee-shirt and khaki trousers. He looked at me once, head to toe and back again, and then carried on cracking the bones in his wrists and fingers while I lifted the drunk out of his chair and laid him, not too gently, in the corner. I sat down opposite the tee-shirt and closed my eyes.

‘Deutsch?’

I couldn’t tell how long I’d been asleep because they’d taken my watch as well - in case I managed to work out a way of hanging myself with it, presumably - but the numbness of my buttocks suggested at least a couple of hours.

The drunk had gone, and the tee-shirt was now squatting at my side.

‘Deutsch?’ he said.

I shook my head and closed my eyes again, taking one last draught of myself before stepping into another person.

I heard the tee-shirt scratching at himself. Long, slow, thoughtful scratches.

‘American?’ he said.

I nodded, still with my eyes closed, and felt a strange moment of peace. So much easier to be someone else.

They kept the tee-shirt for four days, and me for ten. I wasn’t allowed to shave or smoke, and eating was actively discouraged by whoever cooked the food. They questioned me once or twice about the bomb scare on the flight from London, and asked me to look at photographs - two or three in particular to begin with, and then, when they started to lose interest, whole directories of wrong-doers - but I made a big point of not focusing on them, and tried to yawn whenever they slapped me.

On the tenth night, they took me to a white room and photographed me from a hundred different angles, then gave me back my belt, laces and watch. They even offered me a razor. But as the handle looked rather sharper than the blade, and my beard seemed to be helping me towards metamorphosis, I turned it down.

It was dark outside, cold and dark, and it was trying to rain in a feeble, oh-I-can’t-really-be-bothered-with-this sort of a way. I walked slowly, as if I didn’t care about the rain, or much else that life on this earth had to offer, and hoped that I wouldn’t have to wait long.

I didn’t have to wait at all.

It was a Porsche 911, in dark-green, and there was nothing particularly clever about spotting it, because Porsches were as rare on the streets ofPrague as I was. It trickled along beside me for a hundred yards, then made up its mind, spurted ahead to the end of the street and stopped. As I got to within ten yards or so, the passenger door was pushed open. I slowed down, checked behind and in front, and ducked my head to look at the driver.

He was in his mid-forties, with a square jaw and successfully greying hair, and Porsche marketing men would happily have pushed him forward as ‘a typical owner’ - if he really was the owner, which was sort of unlikely, considering his occupation.

Of course, at that moment, I wasn’t supposed to know his occupation.

‘Want a lift?’ he said. Could have been from anywhere, and probably was. He saw me thinking about his offer, or thinking about him, so he added a smile to close the deal. Very good teeth.

I glanced behind him to where the tee-shirt sat, folded up on the tiny rear seat. He wasn’t wearing a tee-shirt now, of course, but a lurid purple thing that had no creases in it. He enjoyed my expression of surprise for a few moments, then nodded at me - part hello, part get in - and when I did so, the driver blipped the throttle and let out the clutch all in a playful rush, so that I had to scrabble to close the door. The two of them seemed to find this very entertaining. The tee-shirt, whose real name was most definitely not and never had been Hugo, shoved a packet of Dunhill in front of my nose, and I took one and pressed the dashboard lighter home. ‘Where are you headed?’ said the driver.

I shrugged and said maybe the centre, but it didn’t really matter. He nodded and carried on humming to himself. Puccini, I think. Or it might have been Take That. I sat and smoked, and said nothing, as if I was used to this kind of thing happening.

‘By the way,’ said the driver eventually, ‘I’m Greg.’ He smiled, and I thought to myself, well of course you are.

He took a hand off the wheel and held it out to me. We shook, short but friendly, and then I left a pause, just to show that I was my own man and that I spoke when I felt like it, not before.

After a while, he turned to look at me. A firmer look. Not so friendly. So I answered him.

‘My name is Ricky,’ I said.