The Gun Seller

O. HENRY

I told Solomon everything. I had to.

Because, you see, he is a clever man, one of the cleverest I’ve ever known, and it would have been silly to try and stagger on without making use of his intellect. Until I saw these photographs, I’d been pretty much on my own, ploughing a lonely furrow, but now was the time to admit that the plough had wobbled off at right angles and run into the side of the barn.

It wasfour o’clock in the morning by the time I finished, and long before then Solomon had broken open his knapsack and pulled out the kind of things that the Solomons of this world never seem to be without. We had a thermos of tea, with two plastic cups; an orange each, and a knife to peel them with; and a half-pound of Cadbury’s milk chocolate.

So, as we ate, and drank, and smoked, and disapproved of smoking, I laid out the story of Graduate Studies from beginning to middle: that I was not where I was, doing what I was doing, for the good of democracy; I was not keeping anyone safe in their beds at night, or making the world a freer, happier place; all I was doing - all I’d ever been doing since the whole thing started - was selling guns.

Which meant that Solomon was selling them too. I was the gun seller, the sales rep, and Solomon was something in the marketing department. I knew he wouldn’t like that feeling much.

Solomon listened, and nodded, and asked the right questions, in the right order, at the right time. I couldn’t tell whether or not he believed me; but then, I’d never been able to do that with Solomon, and probably never would.

When I’d finished, I sat back and toyed with a couple of squares of chocolate, and wondered whether bringing Cadbury’s to Switzerland was the same as bringing coals to Newcastle, and decided it wasn’t. Swiss chocolate has gone badly downhill since I was a lad, and nowadays is only fit for giving to aunts. And all the while, Cadbury’s chocolate plods on and on, better and cheaper than any other chocolate in the world. That’s my view, anyway.

‘That’s a heck of a story, master, if you don’t mind me saying.’ Solomon was standing, staring at the wall. If there’d been a window, he’d probably have stared out of that, but there wasn’t.

‘Yup,’ I agreed.

So we came back to the photographs, and we thought about what they might mean. We supposed and we postulated; we maybeed, and what- iffed, and how- aboutted; until eventually, when the snow was just beginning to gather some light from somewhere and bounce it in through the shutters and under the door, we decided that we’d at last covered all the angles.

There were three possibilities.

Quite a lot of sub-possibilities, obviously, but at_ that moment we felt like we wanted to deal in broad strokes, so we swept up the sub-possibilities into three main piles, which ran like this: he was bullshitting her; she was bullshitting him; neither one of them was bullshitting the other, they’d simply fallen in love with each other - fellow Americans, passing the long afternoons together in a strange city.

‘If she’s bullshitting him,’ I began, for about the hundredth time, ‘it’s to what purpose? I mean, what is she hoping to gain by it?’

Solomon nodded, then quickly rubbed his face, squeezing his eyes shut.

‘A post-coital confession?’ He winced at the sound of his own words. ‘She records it, films it or whatever, sends it to the Washington Post?’

I didn’t like that much, and neither did he. ‘Pretty feeble, I’d say.’

Solomon nodded again. He was still agreeing with me rather more than I deserved - probably because he was relieved that I hadn’t gone to pieces altogether, what with one thing and about a million others, and wanted to massage me back into a reasonable and optimistic frame of mind.

‘So he’s bullshitting her?’ he said, putting his head on one side, eyebrows raised, ushering me through the gate like a subtle sheepdog.

‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘A willing captive is less trouble than an unwilling one. Or maybe he’s spun her some yarn, told her it’ll all be taken care of. He has the ear of the President himself, something like that.’

That didn’t sound too good either.

Which left us with possibility number three.

Now why would a woman like Sarah Woolf want to get together with a man like Russell P Barnes? Why would she walk with him, laugh with him, make the beast with four buttocks with him? If that’s actually what she was doing, and there wasn’t much doubt in my mind about it.

All right, he was handsome. He was fit. He was intelligent, in a stupid sort of a way. He had power. He dressed well. But apart from all that, what was in it for her? I mean, for Christ’s sake, he was old enough to be a corrupt representative of her government.

I deliberated on the sexual charms of Russell P Barnes as I trudged back to the hotel. Dawn was definitely pulling into the station by now, and the snow had begun to throb with an electric, new-fallen whiteness. It climbed the inside of my trousers, and clung, squeakily, to the soles of my boots, and the bit just in front seemed to say ‘don’t walk on me, please don’t walk… oh.’

Russell arsing Barnes.

I got back to the hotel and made for my room as quietly as I could. I unlocked the door, slipped inside and then, immediately, stopped: froze, with my windcheater half off. After the journey through the snow, with nothing but alpine air moving around my system, I was tuned to pick up all the nuances of indoor smells - the stale beer from the bar, the shampoo in the carpet, the chlorine from the basement swimming pool, the beachy sun-cream smell from just about everywhere - and now this new smell. A smell of something that really shouldn’t have been in the room.

It shouldn’t have been there because I was only paying for a single, and Swiss hotels are notoriously strict about this kind of thing.

Latifawas stretched out on my bed, asleep, the top sheet coiled around her naked body like a Rubens pastiche. ‘Where the fuck have you been?’

She was sitting up now, the sheet tight round her chin, while I sat on the end of the bed and pulled off my boots. ‘For a walk,’ I said.

‘For a walk where?’ snapped Latifa, still crumpled with sleep, and angry with me for seeing her that way. ‘It’s fucking snow. Where do you walk in fucking snow? What have you been doing?’

I yanked off the last boot and slowly turned to look at her. ‘I shot a man today, Latifa.’ Except I was Ricky to her, so I pronounced it Laddifa. ‘I pulled the trigger and shot a man down.’ I turned away and stared at the floor, the soldier-poet, sickened by the ugliness of battle.

I felt the sheet relax under me. Slightly. She watched me for a while.

‘You walked all night?’

I sighed. ‘I walked. I sat. I thought. You know, a human life…’

Ricky, as I’d painted him, was a man not wholly at ease with the business of talking, so this answer took some time to get out. We let a human life hang in the air for a while.

‘A lot of people die, Rick,’ said Latifa. ‘There is death everywhere. Murder everywhere.’ The sheet relaxed a little more, and I saw her hand move gently to the side of the bed, next to mine.

Why was it that I kept on hearing this argument wherever I went? Everybody’s doing it, so you’d be a square not to join in and help the whole business along. I suddenly wanted to slap her, and tell her who I was, and what I really thought; that killing Dirk, killing anybody, was not going to change anything apart from Francisco’s fucking ego, which was already large enough to house the world’s poor twice over, with a few million bourgeoisie in the spare-room.

Fortunately, I am the consummate professional, so I just nodded and hung my head, and sighed some more, and watched her hand creep nearer and nearer to mine.

‘It’s good that you feel bad,’ she said, after some thought. Not much thought, obviously, but some. ‘If you felt nothing, it would mean there was no love, no passion. And we are nothing without passion.’

We’re not a great deal with it, I thought, and started to pull off my shirt.

Things were changing, you see. In my head.

It was the photographs that had finally done it - had made me realise that I had been bouncing around inside other people’s arguments for so long that I’d reached the point of not caring. I didn’t care about Murdah and his helicopters; I didn’t care about Sarah Woolf and Barnes; I didn’t care about O’Neal and Solomon, or Francisco and The Sword Of fucking Justice. I didn’t care who won the argument, or who won the war.

I particularly didn’t care about myself.

Latifa’sfingers brushed against the back of my hand. When it comes to sex, it seems to me, men really are caught between a rock and a soft, limp, apologetic place.

The sexual mechanisms of the two genders are just not compatible, that’s the horrible truth of it. One is a runabout, suitable for shopping, quick journeys about town, and extremely easy parking; the other is an estate, designed for long distances, with heavy loads - altogether larger, more complex, and more difficult to maintain. You wouldn’t buy a Fiat Panda to move antiques fromBristol toNorwich, and you wouldn’t buy a Volvo for any other reason. It’s not that one is better than the other. They’re just different, that’s all.

This is a truth we dare not acknowledge these days - because sameness is our religion and heretics are no more welcome now than they ever were - but I’m going to acknowledge it, because I’ve always felt that humility before the facts is the only thing that keeps a rational man together. Be humble in the face of facts, and proud in the face of opinions, as George Bernard Shaw once said.

He didn’t, actually. I just wanted to put some authority behind this observation of mine, because I know you’re not going to like it.

If a man gives himself up to the sexual moment, then, well, that’s all it is. A moment. A spasm. An event without duration. If, on the other hand, he holds back, by trying to remember as many names as he can from the Dulux colour chart, or whatever happens to be his chosen method of deferment, then he’s accused of being coldly technical. Either way, if you’re a heterosexual man, emerging from a modern sexual encounter with any kind of credit is a fiendishly difficult thing to do.

Yes, of course, credit is not the point of the exercise. But then again, it’s easy to say that when you’ve got some. Credit,

I mean. And men just don’t get any these days. In the sexual arena, men are judged by female standards. You may hiss and tut and draw in your breath as sharply as you like, but it’s true. (Yes, obviously, men judge women in other spheres - patronise them, tyrannise them, exclude them, oppress them, make them utterly miserable - but in matters of a writhing nature, the mark on the bench was put down by women. It is for the Fiat Panda to try and be like the Volvo, not the other way round.) You just don’t hear men criticising women for taking fifteen minutes to reach a climax; and if you do, it’s not with any implied accusation of weakness, or arrogance, or self-centredness. Men, generally, just hang their heads and say yes, that’s the way her body is, that’s what she needed from me, and I couldn’t deliver it. I’m crap and I’ll leave at once, as soon as I can find my other sock.

Which, to be honest, is unfair, bordering on the ridiculous. In the same way that it would be ridiculous to call a Fiat Panda a crap car, just because you can’t fit a wardrobe in the back. It might be crap for all sorts of other reasons - it breaks down, or it uses a lot of oil, or it’s lime-green with the word ‘turbo’ written pathetically across the back window - but it’s not crap because of the one characteristic that it was specifically designed to have: smallness. Neither is a Volvo a crap car, simply because it won’t squeeze past the barrier in the Safeways car-park and allow you to get out without paying.

Burn me on a mound of faggots if you like, but the two machines are just plain different, and that’s that. Designed to do different things, at different speeds, on different types of roads. They’re different. Not the same. Unalike.

There, I’ve said it. And I don’t feel any better.

Latifaand I made love twice before breakfast, and once afterwards, and by mid-morning I’d managed to remember Burnt Umber, which made thirty-one, something of a personal record.

‘Cisco,’ I said, ‘tell me something.’

‘Sure, Rick. Go ahead.’

He glanced across at me, then reached down to the dashboard and popped the cigarette lighter.

I thought, for a long, slow, Minnesotan moment. ‘Where does the money come from?’

We travelled about two kilometres before he answered. We were in Francisco’s Alfa Romeo, just the two of us, gradually reeling in the Autoroute de Soleil from Marseille toParis, and if he let ‘Born In The USA’ go round just once more on the tape-deck, I was probably going to have a nosebleed. Three days had passed since the shooting of Dirk Van Der Hoewe, and The Sword Of justice was feeling pretty invincible by now, because the newspapers had started to discuss other matters and the police were scratching their computerised, intelligence-gathering heads at the lack of any firm leads. ‘Where does the money come from,’ Francisco repeated eventually, drumming the steering-wheel with his fingers. ‘Yeah,’ I said.

The motorway hummed by. Wide, straight, French. ‘Why do you want to know?’

I shrugged.

‘Just… you know… just thinking.’

He laughed like a crazy rock ‘n’ roll thing.

‘Don’t you think, Ricky, my friend. You just do. You good at doing. Stick with that.’

I laughed too, because this was Francisco’s way of making me feel good. If he’d been six inches taller, he’d have ruffled my hair like a big-hearted older brother.

‘Yeah. I was just thinking, though…’

I stopped. For thirty seconds we both sat a little straighter in our seats as a dark-blueGendarme Peugeot cruised past. Francisco eased fractionally off the accelerator and let it go.

‘I was thinking,’ I said, ‘like when I paid the check at the hotel, you know… and I thought, like, that’s a lot of money… you know… like six of us… hotels and stuff… plane tickets… lots of money. And I thought… like, where’s it coming from? You know, somebody’s paying, right?’

Francisco nodded wisely, as if he was trying to help me with a complicated problem involving girlfriends.

‘Sure, Ricky. Somebody’s paying. Somebody’s got to pay, all the time.’

‘Right,’ I said. ‘That’s what I thought. Somebody’s got to pay. So, like, I thought… you know… who?’

He kept his eyes to the front for a while, then slowly turned and looked at me. For a long time. So long, that I had to keep flicking my eyes to the road in front to make sure there wasn’t a fleet of jack-knifing lorries ahead of us.

In between these glances, I shone back at him with as much innocent stupidity as I could manage. Ricky’s not dangerous, I was trying to say. Ricky’s an honest infantryman. Ricky’s a simple soul who just wants to know who’s paying his wages. Ricky is not - never has been, and never will be - a threat.

I chuckled, nervously.

‘You going to watch the road?’ I said. ‘I mean, like… you know’

Francisco chewed his lip for a moment, then suddenly laughed with me and turned back to face the front.

‘You remember Greg?’ he said, in a happy, sing-song way. I frowned, heavily, because unless a thing happened in the last few hours, Ricky’s not sure he can remember it too well. ‘Greg,’ he said again. ‘With the Porsche. With the cigars. Took your picture for the passport.’

I waited a while, and then nodded vigorously.

‘Greg, sure, I remember him,’ I said. ‘Drove a Porsche.’ Francisco smiled. Maybe he was thinking that it didn’t matter what he told me, because I’d have forgotten it all by the time we got toParis.

‘That’s him. Well now, Greg, he is a clever guy.’

‘Yeah?’ I said, as if this was a new concept to me.

‘Oh sure,’ said Francisco. ‘Real clever. Clever guy with money. Clever guy with a lot of things.’

I thought about this for a while. ‘Seemed like an asshole to me,’ I said. Francisco looked at me in surprise, then let out a yell of delighted laughter, and hammered the steering-wheel with his fist.

‘Sure he’s an asshole,’ he shouted. ‘A fucking asshole, yeah.’

I laughed along with him, glowing with pride at having said something to please the master. Eventually, gradually, we both calmed down, and then he reached out a hand and turned off the Bruce Springsteen. I could have kissed him.

‘Greg works with another guy,’ said Francisco, his face becoming suddenly serious. ‘Zurich. They are like finance people. They move money around, do deals, handle a lot of big stuff. Varied stuff. You know?’ He looked across at me, and I frowned dutifully back, showing some hard concentration. That seemed to be what he wanted. ‘Anyhow, Greg gets a call. Money coming in. Do this with it, do that with it. Sit on it. Lose it. Whatever.’

‘You mean, like, we got a bank account?’ I said, grinning. Francisco grinned too.

‘Sure, we got a bank account, Ricky. We got a lot of bank accounts.’

I shook my head in wonder at the ingenuity of this, and then frowned again.

‘So Greg pays money for us, right? But not his money?’

‘No, not his money. He deals with it, takes his cut. Big cut, I think, seeing as how he drives a Porsche, and all I got is this fucking Alfa. But it ain’t his money.’

‘Sowho?’ I said. Probably too quickly. ‘I mean, like one guy? Or a lot of guys, or what?’

‘One guy,’ said Francisco, then took a last, long, deciding look at me - auditing me, weighing me up - trying to remember all the times I’d annoyed him, all the times I’d pleased him; figuring out whether I’d done enough to earn this one piece of information that I had no right or reason to know. Then he sniffed, which is a thing Francisco always did when he was getting ready to say something important.

‘I don’t know his name,’ he said. ‘His real name, I mean. But he uses a name for the money. For the banks.’

‘Yeah?’ I said.

I was trying to make it look as if I wasn’t holding my breath. Cisco was teasing me now, drawing the whole thing out for fun.

‘Yeah?’ I said again.

‘The name is Lucas,’ he said at last. ‘Michael Lucas.’ I nodded.

‘Cool,’ I said.

After a while I settled my head back against the window, and pretended to sleep.

There’s a thing, I thought, as we thrummed along towardsParis, and Christ knew what. There’s a strange piece of philosophy in action. I just hadn’t realised that before.

Thou Shalt Not Kill, I’d always assumed, was top of the list. The Big One. Coveting neighbour’s asses, obviously, was a thing to avoid; likewise, committing adultery, not honouring thy father and thy mother, and bowing down before graven images.

But Thou Shalt Not Kill. Now that is a Commandment. That’s the one everyone can remember, because it seems the rightest, the truest, the most absolute.

The one that everyone forgets is the one about not bearing false witness against thy neighbour. It seems paltry by comparison to Thou Shalt Not Kill. Nit-picking. A parking offence.

But when it’s thrust in your face, and when your gut reacts to it seconds before you brain has had a chance even to digest what it’s heard, you realise that life, morality, values - they just don’t seem to work the way you thought they did.

Murdahshot Mike Lucas through the throat, and that was one of the wickedest things I’d ever seen, in a life not unmarked by the seeing of wicked things. But when Murdah decided, for reasons of convenience, or amusement, or administrative neatness, to bear false witness against the man he’d killed - to take away not just his physical life, but his moral life too; his existence, his memory, his reputation; using his name, blackening it, just to cover his own tracks - so that he could hang the blame for what was to come on a twenty-eight-year-old CIA man who went a little funny in the head, well, that was the point when things started to change for me. That was the point when I started to get really angry.

Twenty-one

I think I bust a button on my trousers.