The Gun Seller

KENNETH GRAHAME

The remainder of myLondon excursion was taken up with preparations of one sort or another.

I typed a long and incomprehensible statement, describing only those parts of my adventure in which I had behaved like a good and clever man, and deposited it with Mr Halkerston at the National Westminster Bank in Swiss Cottage. It was long because I didn’t have time to do a short one, and incomprehensible because my typewriter has no letter ‘d’.

Halkerstonlooked worried; whether by me, or by the fat brown envelope I gave him, I couldn’t tell. He asked if I had any special instructions as to the circumstances under which it should be opened, and when I told him to use his judgement, he quickly put the envelope down and asked someone else to come and take it to the strong room.

I also converted the balance of Woolf’s original payment to me into traveller’s cheques.

Feeling flush, I then went back to Blitz Electronics on Tottenham Court Road, where I spent an hour with a very nice man in a turban, talking about radio frequencies. He assured me that the Sennheiser Mikroport SK 2012 was absolutely the thing, and that I should accept no substitutes, so I didn’t.

I then headed east to Islington to see my solicitor, who pumped my hand and spent fifteen minutes telling me that we must play golf again. I told him that was a splendid idea, but, strictly speaking, we would need to play golf before we’d be able to play it again, at which he blushed and said he must have been thinking of a Robert Lang. I said yes, he must have been, and proceeded to dictate and sign a will, in which I bequeathed all my estate and chattels to The Save The Children Fund.

And then, with only forty-eight hours to go before I was due back in the trenches, I ran into Sarah Woolf.

When I say ran into her, I do actually mean I ran into her.

I’d hired a Ford Fiesta for a couple of days, to take me aboutLondon while I made a final peace with my Creator and my Creditors, and the course of my errands took me within yearning distance ofCork Street. So, for no reason that I’m prepared to own up to, I took a left, and a right, and a left again, and found myself tooling past the mostly shuttered galleries, thinking of happier days. Of course, they hadn’t really been happier at all. But they’d been days, and they’d had Sarah in them, and that was near enough.

The sun was low and bright, and I think ‘Isn’t She Lovely?’ was dribbling from the radio as I turned my head, for the tiniest of instants, towards the Glass building. I turned back, just as a flash of blue darted out in front of me from behind a van.

Darted, at least, is the word I’d have used on the claim form. But I suppose stepped, strolled, ambled, even walked - any of those would have been nearer the truth.

I stamped on the brake pedal, far too late, and watched in stiff-armed horror as the blue flash first backed away from me, then held its ground, then slammed its fists down on to the bonnet of the Fiesta as the front bumper slid towards its shins.

There was nothing to spare. Absolutely nothing. If the bumper had been dirty, I would have touched her. But it wasn’t, and I didn’t, which allowed me to become immediately furious. I’d thrown open the door and got half-way out of the car, meaning to say what the fuck’s the matter with you, when I realised that the legs I’d nearly broken were familiar. I looked up and saw that the blue flash had a face, and the sort of startling grey eyes that make men talk gibberish, and excellent teeth, quite a few of which were showing now.

‘Jesus,’ I said. ‘Sarah.’

She stared at me, white-faced. Half in shock, and the other half in shock.

‘Thomas?’

We looked at each other.

And as we looked at each other, standing there inCork Street,London,England, in bright sunshine, with Stevie Wonder being sentimental in the car, things around us seemed to change somehow.

I don’t know how it happened, but in those few seconds, all the shoppers, and businessmen, and builders, and tourists, and traffic wardens, with all their shoes and shirts and trousers and dresses and socks and bags and watches and houses and cars and mortgages and marriages and appetites and ambitions… they all just faded away.

Leaving Sarah and me, standing there, in a very quiet world.

‘Are you all right?’ I said, about a thousand years later.

It was just something to say. I don’t really know what I meant by it. Did I mean was she all right because I hadn’t hurt her, or was she all right because a lot of other people hadn’t hurt her?

Sarah looked at me as if she didn’t know either, but after a while I think we decided to go with the former.

‘I’m fine,’ she said.

And then, as if they were arriving back from their lunch hour, the extras in our film began to move again, to make noise. Chattering, shuffling, coughing, dropping things. Sarah was gently wringing her hands. I turned to look at the bonnet of the Ford. She’d made an impression.

‘Are you sure?’ I said. ‘I mean, you must have…’

‘Really, Thomas, I’m fine.’ There was a pause, which she spent straightening her dress, and I spent watching her do it. Then she looked up at me. ‘What about you?’

‘Me?’ I said. ‘I’m…’

Well, I mean to say. Where was I supposed to begin?

We went to a pub. The Duke Of Somewhereshire, tucked into the corner of a mews nearBerkeley Square.

Sarah sat down at a table and opened her handbag, and while she fiddled around inside it, doing that woman thing, I asked her if she wanted a drink. She said a large whisky. I couldn’t remember whether you’re supposed to give alcohol to people who’ve just had a shock, but I knew I wasn’t up to asking for hot, sweet tea in aLondon pub, so I made my way to the bar and ordered two double Macallans.

I watched her, the windows, and the door. They had to have been following her. Had to.

With the stakes as they were, it was inconceivable that they would let her wander round unattended. I was the lion, if you can believe that for a moment, and she was the tethered goat. It would have been madness to let her roam.

Unless.

Nobody came in, nobody peered in, nobody wandered past and sneaked a sideways look in. Nothing. I looked at Sarah.

She’d finished with her handbag, and now sat, looking towards the middle of the room, her face a complete blank. She was in a daze, thinking of nothing. Or she was in a jam, thinking of everything. I couldn’t tell. I was pretty sure that she knew I was looking at her, so the fact that she didn’t look back was odd. But then odd isn’t a crime.

I collected the drinks and made my way back towards her table.

‘Thanks,’ she said, taking the glass from me and throwing its contents down her throat in one go.

‘Steady,’ I said.

She looked at me for a moment with real aggression, as if I was just one more person at the end of a long line, getting in her way, telling her what to do. And then she remembered who I was - or remembered to pretend to remember who I was - and smiled. I smiled back.

‘Twelve years ageing in a sherry cask,’ I said cheerfully, ‘stuck out on aHighland hillside, waiting for its big moment ‘- and then bang, doesn’t even get to touch the sides. Who’d be a single malt whisky?’

I was wittering, obviously. But under the circumstances, I felt entitled to do a bit of that. I had been shot, beaten, knocked off my bike, imprisoned, lied to, threatened, slept with, patronised, and made to shoot at people I’d never met. I had risked my life for months, and was hours away from having to risk it again, along with a lot of other lives, some of which belonged to people I quite liked.

And the reason for it all - the prize at the end of this Japanese quiz show I’d been living in for as long as I could remember - was sitting in front of me now, in a safe, warm,London pub, having a drink. While outside, people strolled up and down, buying cuff-links and remarking on the uncommonly fine weather.

I think you’d have wittered too.

We got back into the Ford, and I drove us around.

Sarah still hadn’t really said much, except that she was sure there was nobody following her, and I’d said good, that’s a relief, and hadn’t believed it for a second. So I drove around, and watched the rear-view mirror. I took us down narrow one-way streets, up leafy, car-free avenues, jinked from lane to lane on the Westway, and saw nothing. I thought hang the expense, and drove into, and straight out of, two multi-storey car-parks, which is always a nightmare for the following vehicle. Nothing.

I left Sarah in the car while I got out and checked for a magnetic transmitter, running my fingers under the bumpers and wheel arches for fifteen minutes until I was sure. I even pulled over a couple of times, and scanned the skies above for a clattering police helicopter.

Nothing.

If I’d been a betting man, and I’d had something to bet with, I’d have put it all on us being clean, untailed, and unwatched.

Alone in a quiet world.

People talk about nightfall, or night falling, or dusk falling, and it’s never seemed right to me. Perhaps they once meant befalling. As in night befalls. As in night happens. Perhaps they, whoever they were, thought of a falling sun. That might be it, except that that ought to give us dayfall. Day fell on Rupert the Bear. And we know, if we’ve ever read a book, that day doesn’t fall or rise. It breaks. In books, day breaks, and night falls.

In life, night rises from the ground. The day hangs on for as long as it can, bright and eager, absolutely and positively the last guest to leave the party, while the ground darkens, oozing night around your ankles, swallowing for ever that dropped contact lens, making you miss that low catch in the gully on the last ball of the last over.

Night rose on Hampstead Heath as Sarah and I walked together, sometimes holding hands, sometimes not.

We walked in silence mostly, just listening to the sounds of our feet on the grass, the mud, the stones. Swallows flitted here and there, darting in and out of the trees and bushes like furtive homosexuals, while the furtive homosexuals flitted here and there, pretty much like swallows. There was a lot of activity on the Heath that night. Or perhaps it’s every night. Men seemed to be everywhere, in ones, and twos, and threes and mores, appraising, signalling, negotiating, getting it done: plugging into each other to give, or receive, that microsecond of electric charge that would allow them to go back home and concentrate on the plot of an Inspector Morse without getting restless.

This is what men are like, I thought. This is unfettered male sexuality. Not without love, but separate from love. Short, neat, efficient. The Fiat Panda, in fact.

‘What are you thinking about?’ asked Sarah, staring hard at the ground as she walked.

‘About you,’ I said, with hardly a stumble.

‘Me?’ she said, and we strolled for a while. ‘Good or bad?’

‘Oh good, definitely.’ I looked at her, but she was frowning, still staring downwards. ‘Definitely good,’ I said again.

We came to a pond, and stood by it, and stared at it, and threw stones in it, and generally gave thanks for it according to whatever ancient mechanism it is that draws people to water. I thought back to the last time we had been alone together, on the banks of the river atHenley. BeforePrague, before the Sword, before all kinds of other things.

‘Thomas,’ she said.

I turned and looked at her head on, because I suddenly had the feeling that she’d been rehearsing something in her mind and now wanted to get it out in a hurry.

‘Sarah,’ I said.

She kept looking down.

‘Thomas, what do you say we make a run for it?’

She paused for a while, and then, at last, raised her eyes to me - those beautiful, huge, grey eyes - and I could see desperation in them, deep and on the surface. ‘I mean, together,’ she said. ‘Just get the hell out.’

I looked at her and sighed. In another world, I thought to myself, it might have worked. In another world, in another universe, in another time, as two quite different people, we really might have been able to put all of this behind us, take off to some sun-drenchedCaribbean island, and have sex and pineapple juice, non-stop, for a year.

But now, it wasn’t going to work. Things I’d thought for a long time, I now knew; and things I’d known for a long time, I now hated knowing.

I took a deep breath.

‘How well do you know Russell Barnes?’ I said. She blinked.

‘What?’

‘I asked you how well you knew Russell Barnes.’

She stared at me for a moment, then let out a kind of laugh; the way I do, when I realise I’m in big trouble.

‘Barnes,’ she said, looking away and shaking her head, trying to behave as if I’d just asked her whether she preferred Coke or Pepsi. ‘What the hell has that…’

I took hold of her by the elbow and squeezed, jerking her round to face me again.

‘Will you answer the fucking question, please?’

The desperation in her eyes was changing to panic. I was scaring her. To be honest, I was scaring myself.

‘Thomas, I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ Well, that was it.

That was the last glimmer of hope gone. When she lied to me, standing there by the water in the rising night, I knew what I knew.

‘It was you who called them, wasn’t it?’

She struggled against my grip for a moment, and then laughed again.

‘Thomas, you’re… what the hell is the matter with you?’

‘Please, Sarah,’ I said, keeping hold of her elbow, ‘don’t act.’

She was getting really frightened now, and started to try and pull away. I hung on.

‘Jesus Christ…’ she began, but I shook my head and she stopped. I shook my head when she frowned at me, and I shook my head when she tried to look scared. I waited until she’d stopped all those things.

‘Sarah,’ I said eventually, ‘listen to me. You know who Meg Ryan is, don’t you?’ She nodded. ‘Well, Meg Ryan gets paid millions of dollars to do what you’re trying to do now. Tens of millions. Do you know why?’ She stared back at me. ‘Because it’s a very difficult thing to do well, and there aren’t more than about a dozen people in the world who can pull it off at this distance. So don’t act, don’t pretend, don’t lie.’

She closed her mouth and seemed suddenly to relax, so I eased my grip on her elbow, and then let go altogether. We stood there like grown-ups.

‘It was you who called them,’ I said again. ‘You called them the first night I came to your house. You called them from the restaurant, the night they took me off the bike.’

I didn’t want to have to say the last bit, but somebody had to.

You called them,’ I said, and they came to kill your father.’

She cried for about an hour, on Hampstead Heath, on a bench, in the moonlight, in my arms. All the tears in the world ran down her face and soaked into the earth.

At one point the crying became so violent, and so loud, that we began to gather a distant, scattered audience, who muttered to each other about calling the police, and then thought better of it. Why did I put my arms around her? Why did I hold a woman who’d betrayed her own father, and who’d used me like a piece of paper-towel?

Beats me.

When at last the crying started to ease, I kept on holding her, and felt her body jerk and shudder with those after-tears hiccups that children get.

‘He wasn’t meant to die,’ she said suddenly, with a clear, strong voice, which made me wonder if it was coming from somewhere else. Maybe it was. ‘That wasn’t meant to happen. In fact,’ she wiped at her nose with her sleeve, ‘they actually promised me he’d be okay. They said as long as he was stopped, then nothing would happen. We’d both be safe, and we’d both be…’

She faltered, and for all the calm in her voice, I could tell that she was dying from the guilt. ‘You’d both be what?’ I said.

She bent her head back, stretching her long neck, offering her throat to someone who wasn’t me.

Then she laughed. ‘Rich,’ she said.

For a moment, I was tempted to laugh too. It sounded like such a ridiculous word. Such a ridiculous thing to be. It sounded like a name, or a country, or a kind of salad. Whatever the word was, it surely couldn’t mean having a lot of money. It was just, simply, too ridiculous.

‘They promised you’d be rich?’ I said.

She took a deep breath and sighed, and her laughter faded away so quickly it might never have happened.

‘Yup,’ she said. ‘Rich. Money. They said we’d have money.’

‘Said it to who? Both of you?’

‘Oh God, no. Dad wouldn’t have…’ She stopped for a moment, and a violent shiver ran over her body. Then she tilted her chin upwards, and closed her eyes. ‘He was way, way past listening to that kind of stuff.’

I saw his face. The eager, determined, born-again look. The look of a man who’d spent his life making money, making his way, paying his bills, and then, just in time, he’d discovered that wasn’t the point of the game after all. He’d seen a chance to put it right.

Are you a good man, Thomas?

‘So they offered you money,’ I said.

She opened her eyes and smiled, quickly, and then wiped her nose again.

‘They offered me all kinds of things. Everything a girl could want. Everything a girl already had, in fact, until her father decided he was going to take it away.’

We sat like that for a while, holding hands, thinking and talking about what she’d done. But we didn’t get very far. When we began, both of us thought that this was going to be the biggest, deepest, longest talk either of us had ever had with another human being. Almost immediately, we realised it wasn’t. Because there was no point. There was so much to be said, such a huge mound of explanation to be gone through, and yet somehow, none of it really needed to be said at all.

So I’ll say it.

Under Alexander Woolf’s leadership, the company of Gaine Parker Inc made springs, levers, door catches, carpet grips, belt buckles, and a thousand other bits and pieces of Western life. They made plastic things, and metal things, and electronic things, and mechanical things, some of them for retailers, some of them for other manufacturers, and some for theUnited States government.

This, in the beginning, was good for Gaine Parker. If you can make a lavatory seat that pleases the head Woolworths buyer, you’re quids in. If you can make one that pleases the US government, by conforming to the specifications demanded of a military lavatory seat - and I assure you that there is such a thing, and it has specifications, and at a guess I’d say those specifications probably cover thirty sides of A4 paper - if you can do that, well, then you’re quids in, out, round to the front and in again, a million times over.

As it happened, Gaine Parker didn’t make lavatory seats. They made an electronic switch that was very small and did something clever with semi-conductors. As well as being indispensable to the manufacturers of air-conditioning thermostats, the switch also found a home in the cooling mechanism of a new kind of military-specification diesel generator. And so it came to pass, in February of 1972, that Gaine Parker and Alexander Woolf became sub-contractors to the US Department of Defense.

The blessings of this contract were without number. Besides allowing, or even encouraging, Gaine Parker to charge eighty dollars for an item that elsewhere in the market would be lucky to fetch five, the contract served as a stamp of guaranteed, no nonsense, blue-chip quality, causing the world’s customers for small, clever, switchy things to beat a wide gravel drive to Woolf’s door.

From that moment, nothing could go wrong, and nothing did. Woolf’s standing in thematerielbusiness grew and grew, and his access to the very important people who run that world - and who therefore could safely be said to runtheworld - grew with it. They smiled at him, and joked with him and put him up for membership of the St Regis golf club onLong Island. They called him atmidnight for long chats about this and that. They asked him to go sailing with them in the Hamptons, and, more importantly, accepted his return invitation. They sent his family Christmas cards, and then Christmas presents, and, eventually, they began to wine him at two hundred-seat Republican party dinners, where much talk was exchanged on the subject of the budget deficit andAmerica ’s economic regeneration. And the higher he rose, the more contracts came his way, and the smaller, and more intimate, the dinners became. Until, finally, they stopped having much to do with party politics at all. They had more to do with the politics of common sense, if you follow me.

It was at the end of one of these dinners that a fellow admiral of industry, his judgement skewed by a couple of pints of claret, told Woolf about a rumour he had come across. The rumour was a fantastic one, and Woolf, of course, didn’t believe it. In fact, he found it funny. So funny, that he decided to share the laugh with one of the very important people, during one of their regular late-night phone-calls - and found that the line had gone dead before he’d reached the punch line.

The day Alexander Woolf decided to take on the military industrial complex was the day everything changed. For him, for his family, for his business. Things changed quickly, and they changed for good. Roused from its slumber, the military-industrial complex lifted a great, lazy paw, and swatted him away, as if he were no more than a human being.

They cancelled his existing contracts and withdrew possible future ones. They bankrupted his suppliers, disrupted his labour force, and investigated him for tax evasion. They bought his company’s stock in a few months and sold it in a few hours, and when that didn’t do the trick, they accused him of trading in narcotics. They even had him thrown out of the St Regis, for not replacing a fairway divot.

None of which bothered Alexander Woolf one bit, because he knew that he’d seen the light, and the light was green. But it did bother his daughter, and the beast knew this. The beast knew that Alexander Woolf had started out in life with German as his first language, andAmerica as his first religion; that at seventeen, he was selling coat-hangers out of the back of a van, living alone in one basement room inLowes,New Hampshire, with both parents dead and not ten dollars to his name. That was what Alexander Woolf had come from, and that was what he was prepared to go back to, if going back was what it took. To Alexander Woolf, poverty was not the dark, or the unknown, or a thing to be feared in any way. At any time of life.

But his daughter was different. His daughter had experienced nothing but big houses, and big swimming pools, and big cars, and big orthodontistry treatments, and poverty frightened her to death. The fear of the unknown was what made her vulnerable, and the beast knew that too.

A man had made her a proposition. ‘So,’ she said.

‘Well quite,’ I said.

Her teeth were chattering, which made me realise how long we’d been sitting there. And how much I still had left to do.

‘I’d better take you home,’ I said, getting to my feet. Instead of getting up with me, she curled tighter to the bench, her arms folded across her stomach as if she was in pain. Because she was in pain. When she spoke, her voice was incredibly quiet, and I had to squat down at her feet to hear. The lower I got, the more she bowed her head to avoid my eyes.

‘Don’t punish me,’ she said. ‘Don’t punish me for my father’s death, Thomas, because I can do that without your help.’

‘I’m not punishing you, Sarah,’ I said. ‘I’m just going to take you home, that’s all.’

She lifted her head and looked at me again, and I saw a new fear sliding into her eyes.

‘But why?’ she said. ‘I mean, we’re here, now. Together. We can do anything. Go anywhere.’

I looked down at the ground. She hadn’t got it yet. ‘And where do you want to go?’ I asked.

‘Well it doesn’t matter, does it?’ she said, her voice getting louder as the desperation grew. ‘The point is we can go. I mean, Christ, Thomas, you know… they controlled you because they threatened me, and they controlled me because they threatened you. That’s how they did it. And that’s over now. We can go. Take off.’

I shook my head.

‘I’m afraid it’s not that simple now,’ I said. ‘If it ever was.’ I stopped and thought for a moment, wondering how much I ought to tell her. Nothing, is what I really ought to tell her. But fuck it.

‘This thing isn’t just about us,’ I said. ‘If we just walk away, other people are going to die. Because of us.’

‘Other people?’ said Sarah. ‘What are you talking about? What other people?’

I smiled at her, because I wanted her to feel better, and not so scared, and also because I was remembering them all. ‘Sarah,’ I said. ‘You and I…’

I faltered. ‘What?’ she said.

I took a deep breath. There was no other way of saying it. ‘We have to do the right thing,’ I said.

Twenty-three

But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth, When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth.