The Gun Seller

BISHOP HENRY KING

The American consulate inCasablanca stands half-way down the leafy boulevard Moulay Yousses, a thoroughly minuscule enclave of nineteenth-century French grandeur, built to help the weary colonialist unwind after a hard day’s infrastructure-designing.

The French came toMorocco to build roads, railways, hospitals, schools, fashion sense - all the things that the average Frenchman knows to be indispensable to a modern civilization - and whenfive o’clock came, and the French looked upon their works and saw that they were good, they reckoned they had bloody well earned the right to live like Maharajahs. Which, for a time, they did.

But when neighbouringAlgeria blew up in their faces, the French realised that, sometimes, it’s better to leave them wanting more; so they opened their Louis Vuittons, and packed their bottles of aftershave, and their other bottles ofaftershave, and that extra bottle that had slid down behind the lavatory cistern, that turned out, on closer inspection, to contain aftershave, and stole away into the night.

The inheritors of the vast, stuccoed palaces that the French left behind were not princes, or sultans, or millionaire industrialists. They were not nightclub singers, or footballers, or gangsters, or television soap stars. They were, by an amazing chance, diplomats.

I call it an amazing chance, because that now makes a clean sweep. In every city, in every country in the world, diplomats live and work in the most valuable and desirable real estate there is to be found. Mansions, castles, palaces, ten-up-ten-downs with ensuitedeer park: whatever and wherever it may be, diplomats walk in, look around, and say yes, I think I can bear this.

Bernhard and I straightened our ties, checked our watches, and trotted up the steps to the main entrance.

‘So now, what can I do for you two gentlemen?’ Call-Me-Roger Buchanan was in his early fifties, and he had risen as high in the American diplomatic service as he was ever going to get.Casablanca was his final posting, he’d been here three years, and sure, he liked it just fine. Great people, great country, food’s a little too oil-based, but otherwise just grand.

The oil in the food didn’t seem to have slowed Call-Me-Roger down all that much, because he must have been pushing at least sixteen stone, which, at five feet nine, is quite a push.

Bernhard and I looked at each other, with eyebrows raised, as if it didn’t really matter which one of us spoke first.

‘Mr Buchanan,’ I said gravely, ‘as my colleague and I explained in our letter, we manufacture what we believe to be the finest kitchen gloves presently coming out of the North African region.’

Bernhard nodded, slowly, as if he might have gone further and said the world, but no matter.

‘We have facilities,’ I continued, ‘inFez,Rabat, and we’re shortly to be opening a plant just outside Marrakech. Our product is a fine product. We’re sure of that. It’s one you may have heard of, one you may even have used, if you’re what they call a "New Man".’

I chortled like a numbskull, and Bernhard and Roger joined in. Men. Using kitchen gloves. That’s a good one. Bernhard took up the story, leaning forward in his chair and speaking with sombre, respectable Germanicism.

‘Our scale of production,’ he said, ‘has now reached a point where we’d be very interested in considering a licence to export to the North American market. And I think what we would like from you, sir, is a little help through the many mechanisms we would need to have in place.’

Call-Me-Roger nodded, and jotted something down on a pad of paper. I could see that he had our letter in front of him on the desk, and it looked as if he’d drawn a ring round the word ‘rubber’. I would have liked to have asked him why, but this wasn’t the moment.

‘Roger,’ I said, getting to my feet, ‘before we get started in depth.’

Roger looked up from his pad.

‘Down the hall, second door on the right.’

‘Thanks,’ I said.

The lavatory was empty, and smelled of pine. I locked the door, checked my watch, then climbed up on to the seat and eased open the window.

To the left, a sprinkler tossed graceful arcs of water across an expanse of well-tended lawn. A woman in a print-dress was standing by the wall, picking at her fingernails, while a few yards away, a small dog defecated intensely. In the far corner, a gardener in shorts and a yellow tee-shirt knelt and fiddled with some shrubs.

To the right, nothing.

More wall. More lawn. More flower beds. And a monkey-puzzle tree.

I jumped down from the lavatory, looked at my watch again, unlocked the door and stepped out into the corridor. It was empty.

I walked quickly to the staircase and bounced merrily down, two steps at a time, drumming my hand on the banister to no particular tune. I passed a man in shirt-sleeves carrying paper, but I said a loud ‘morning’ before he could say anything.

I reached the first floor and turned right, and saw that the corridor was busier.

Two women were standing half-way down, deep in conversation, and a man on my left was locking, or unlocking, an office door.

I glanced at my watch and started to ease up, feeling in my pockets for something that, maybe, I’d left somewhere, or if not there, somewhere else, but then again, maybe I never had it, but if I had, should I go back and look for it? I stood in the corridor, frowning, and the man on the left had opened the office door and was looking at me, about to ask me if I was lost.

I pulled my hand out of my pocket and smiled at him, holding up a key ring.

‘Got it,’ I said, and he gave me a small, uncertain nod as I walked on.

A bell pinged at the end of the corridor and I speeded up a little, jangling the keys in my right hand. The lift doors slid open, and a low trolley started to nose its way out into the corridor.

Francisco and Hugo, in their neat blue overalls, carefully shepherded the trolley out of the lift; Francisco pushing, Hugo resting both his hands on the water barrels. Relax, I wanted to say to him, as I slowed down to let the trolley go ahead of me. It’s only water, for Christ’s sake. You’re following it as if it’s your wife on her way to the delivery room.

Francisco was moving slowly, checking the numbers on the office doors, looking very good indeed, while Hugo kept turning and licking his lips.

I stopped at a notice-board and examined it. I tore down three pieces of paper, two of them being the fire drill, and one, an open invitation to a barbecue at Bob and Tina’s, Sunday atnoon. I stood there, reading them as if they needed to be read, and then looked at my watch.

They were late. Forty-five seconds late.

I couldn’t believe it. After everything we’d agreed, and practised, and sworn about, and practised again, the little fuckers were late.

‘Yes?’ said a voice. Fifty-five seconds.

I looked down the corridor, and saw that Francisco and Hugo had reached the open reception area. A woman sat at a desk, peering at them over big glasses.

Sixty-five fucking seconds.

‘Salem alicoum,’ said Francisco, in a soft voice. ‘ Alicoum salem,’ said the woman.

Seventy.

Hugo banged his hand on the top of the water barrels, then turned and looked at me.

I started to walk forwards, took two steps, and then I heard it.

Heard it and felt it. It was like a bomb.

When you watch cars crashing on television, you’re fed a certain level of sound by the dubbing mixers, and you probably think to yourself that’s it, that’s what a car crash sounds like. You forget, or, with a bit of luck, you never know, how much energy is being released when half-a-ton of metal hits another half-a-ton of metal. Or the side of a building. Vast amounts of energy, capable of shaking your body from head to toe, even though you’re a hundred yards away.

The Land Rover’s horn, jammed down with Cyrus’s knife, cut through the silence like the wail of an animal. And then it quickly faded away, swamped by the sounds of doors opening, chairs being pushed back, bodies scuffling into doorways - looking at each other, looking back down the corridor.

Then they were all talking, and most of them were saying Jesus, and goddamn, and the fuck was that, and suddenly I was watching a dozen backs, scurrying away from us, tripping, skipping, tumbling over each other to get to the stairwell.

‘You think we should see?’ said Francisco to the woman behind the desk.

She looked at him, then squinted down the corridor.

‘I can’t… you know…’ she said, and her hand moved towards the telephone. I don’t know who she thought she was going to call.

Francisco and I looked at each other for about a hundredth of a second.

‘Was that…’ I began, staring nervously at the woman, ‘I mean, did that sound like a bomb?’

She put one hand on the phone and the other out in front, palm towards the window, asking the world to just stop and wait a moment while she got herself together.

There was a scream from somewhere.

Somebody had seen the blood on Benjamin’s shirt, or fallen over, or just felt like screaming, and it got the woman half on to her feet.

‘What could that be?’ said Francisco, as Hugo started to move round the edge of her desk.

This time she didn’t look at him.

‘They’ll tell us,’ she said, peering past me down the corridor. ‘We stay where we are, and they’ll tell us what to do.’

As she said it, there was a metallic click, and the woman instantly knew that it was out of place, was terribly wrong; because there are good clicks and bad clicks, and this was definitely one of the worst.

She swung round to look at Hugo.

‘Lady,’ he said, his eyes shining, ‘you had your chance.’

So here we are.

Sitting pretty, feeling good.

We have had control of the building for thirty-five minutes now and, all in all, it could have been a lot worse.

The Moroccan staff have gone from the ground floor, and Hugo and Cyrus have cleared the second and third floors from end to end, herding men and women down the main staircase and out into the street with a lot of unnecessary shouts of ‘let’s go’ and ‘move it’.

Benjamin and Latifa are installed in the lobby, where they can move quickly from the front of the building to the back if they need to. Although we all know they won’t need to. Not for a while, anyway.

The police have turned up. First in cars, then in jeeps, now by the truckload. They are scattered around outside in tight shirts, yelling and moving vehicles, and they haven’t yet decided whether to walk nonchalantly across the street, or scuttle across with their heads dipped low to avoid sniper fire. They can probably see Bernhard on the roof, but they don’t yet know who he is, or what he’s doing there.

Francisco and I are in the consul’s office.

We have a total of eight prisoners here - five men and three women, bound together with Bernhard’s job-lot of police handcuffs - and we have asked them if they wouldn’t mind sitting on the very impressive Kelim rug. If any of them moves off the rug, we have explained, they do it at the risk of being shot dead by Francisco or myself, with the help of a pair of Steyr AUG sub-machine guns that we cleverly remembered to bring with us.

The only exception we have made is for the consul himself, because we are not animals - we have an awareness of rank and protocol, and we don’t want to make an important man sit cross-legged on the floor - and anyway, he needs to be able to speak on the phone.

Benjamin has been playing with the telephone exchange, and has promised us that any call, to any number in the building, will come through to this office.

So Mr James Beamon, being the duly appointed representative of the United States government in Casablanca, second in command on Moroccan soil only to the ambassador in Rabat, is sitting at his desk now, staring at Francisco with a look of cool appraisal.

Beamon, as we know well from our researches, is a career diplomat. He is not the retired shoe-salesman you might expect to find in such a post - a man who has given fifty million dollars to the President’s election campaign fund, and been rewarded with a big desk and three hundred free lunches a year. Beamon is in his late-fifties, tall and heavily built, and he has a very quick brain. He will handle this situation well and wisely.

Which is exactly what we want.

‘What about the rest-room?’ Beamon says.

‘One person, every half an hour,’ says Francisco. ‘You decide the order among yourselves, you go with one of us, you do not lock the door.’ Francisco moves to the window and looks out into the street. He raises a pair of binoculars to his eyes.

I look at my watch.Ten forty-one.

They will come at dawn, I think to myself. The way attackers have done since attacking was first invented. Dawn. When we’re tired, hungry, bored, scared.

They will come at dawn, and they will come in from the east, with a low sun behind them.

Ateleven twenty, the consul had his first call.

WafiqHassan, Inspector of Police, introduced himself to Francisco, then said hello to Beamon. He had nothing specific to relate, except that he hoped everybody would act with good sense, and that this whole thing could be sorted out without any trouble. Francisco said afterwards that he spoke good English, and Beamon said he’d been to Hassan’s house for dinner two nights ago. The two of them had talked about how quietCasablanca was.

Ateleven forty, it was the press. Sorry to bother us, obviously, but did we have a statement to make? Francisco spelt his name, twice, and said we would be delivering a written statement to a representative of CNN, just as soon as they got here.

At five to twelve, the phone rang again. Beamon answered it and said he couldn’t talk just at the moment, would it be possible to call back tomorrow, or maybe the day after? Francisco took the receiver from him and listened for a moment, and then burst out laughing at the tourist fromNorth Carolina, who wanted to know whether the consulate could guarantee the drinking water in the Regency Hotel.

Even Beamon smiled at that.

Attwo fifteen, they sent us lunch. A stew of mutton and vegetables, with a vast pot of couscous. Benjamin collected it from the front steps, while Latifa nervously waved her Uzi back and forth in the doorway.

Cyrus found some paper plates somewhere, but no cutlery, so we sat and let the food cool, before scooping it up with our fingers.

It was very nice, considering.

Atten past three, we heard the trucks starting to move, and Francisco ran to the window.

The two of us watched as police drivers revved and ground gears, shunting backwards and forwards in ten-point turns. ‘Why are they moving?’ said Francisco, squinting through the binoculars.

I shrugged. ‘Traffic warden?’ He looked at me angrily.

‘Fuck, I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It’s something to do. Maybe they want to make some noise while they dig a tunnel. Nothing we can do about it.’

Francisco chewed his lip for a second, and then moved to the desk. He picked up the phone and dialled the lobby. Latifa must have answered.

‘Lat, stay ready,’ said Francisco. ‘You hear anything, see anything, call me.’

He slammed the phone down, a little too hard.

You were never as cool as you pretended, I thought.

Byfour o’clock the phone had started to get very busy, with Moroccans and Americans ringing at five minute intervals, and always demanding to speak to someone other than the person who’d answered.

Francisco decided it was time to switch us round, so he called Cyrus and Benjamin up to the first floor, and I went down to join Latifa.

She was standing in the middle of the hall, peering through the windows and hopping from foot to foot, throwing the baby Uzi from hand to hand.

‘What’s the matter?’ I said. ‘You want to take a piss?’

She looked at me and nodded, and I told her to go and do it, and not worry so much.

‘Sun’s going down,’ said Latifa, half a packet of cigarettes later.

I looked at my watch, then out through the rear windows, and sure enough, there was that falling sun, that rising night. ‘Yeah,’ I said.

Latifastarted adjusting her hair, using the reflection from the glass window at the reception desk.

‘I’m going outside,’ I said. She looked round, startled. ‘What? You crazy?’

‘I just want to take a look, that’s all.’

‘Look at what?’ said Latifa, and I could see she was furious with me, as if I really was deserting her for good. ‘Bernhard’s on the roof, he can see better than anybody. What you want to go outside for?’

I sucked at my teeth for a moment, and checked my watch again.

‘That tree’s bothering me,’ I said.

‘You want to look at a fucking tree?’ said Latifa. ‘Branches go over the wall. I just want to take a look.’

She came to my shoulder and peered out through the window. The sprinkler was still going.

‘Which tree?’

‘That one there,’ I said. ‘The monkey-puzzle tree.’ Ten minutes past five.

The sun about half-way through its descent.

Latifawas sitting at the foot of the main staircase, scuffing the marble floor with her boot and toying with the Uzi.

I looked at her and thought, obviously, of the sex we’d had together - but also of the laughs, and the frustrations, and the spaghetti. Latifa could be maddening at times. She was definitely fucked up and hopeless in just about every conceivable way. But she was also great.

‘It’s going to be okay.’ I said.

She lifted her head and looked back at me.

I wondered whether she was remembering the same things. ‘Who the fuck said it wasn’t?’ she said, and ran her fingers through her hair, dragging a slice of it down over her face to shut me out.

I laughed.

‘Ricky,’ shouted Cyrus, leaning over the banister from the first floor.

‘What?’ I said.

‘Up here. Cisco wants you.’

The hostages were spread out on the rug now, heads in laps, back against back. Discipline had relaxed enough for some of them to stretch their legs out over the edge of the rug. Three or four of them were singing ‘ SwanneeRiver’ in a quiet, half-hearted way.

‘What?’ I said.

Francisco gestured towards Beamon, who held out the phone to me. I frowned and waved it away, as if it was probably my wife and I’d be home in half-an-hour anyway. But Beamon kept holding out the receiver.

‘They know you’re an American,’ he said.

I shrugged a so what.

‘Talk to them, Ricky,’ said Francisco. ‘Why not?’

So I shrugged again, sulkily, Jesus, what a waste of time, and ambled up to the desk. Beamon glared up at me as I took the phone.

‘A goddamn American,’ he whispered.

‘Kiss my ass,’ I said, and put the receiver to my ear. ‘Yeah?’ There was a click, and a buzz, and another click.

‘Lang,’ said a voice. Here we go, I thought. ‘Yeah,’ said Ricky. ‘How you doing?’

It was the voice of Russell P Barnes, arsehole of this parish, and even through the fizzing interference, his voice was backslappingly confident.

‘The fuck do you want?’ said Ricky. ‘Wave, Thomas,’ said Barnes.

I signalled to Francisco for the binoculars, and he handed them across the desk to me. I moved to the window.

‘You want to look to your left,’ said Barnes. I didn’t, actually.

On the corner of the block, in a corral of jeeps and army trucks, stood a clutch of men. Some in uniform, some not.

I lifted the binoculars, and saw trees and houses leaping about in the magnified scale, and then Barnes shot across the lens. I went back, and steadied, and there he was, a phone at his ear, and binoculars at his eyes. He did actually wave.

I checked the rest of the group, but couldn’t see any striped grey trousers.

‘Just sayin ’ hello, Tom,’ said Barnes. ‘Sure,’ said Ricky.

The line crackled away as we waited for each other. I knew I could wait longer than him.

‘So, Tom,’ said Barnes, eventually, ‘when can we expect you out of there?’

I looked away from the binoculars, and glanced at Francisco, and at Beamon, and at the hostages. I looked at them, and thought of the others.

‘We ain’t comin ’ out,’ said Ricky, and Francisco nodded slowly. I looked through the binoculars and saw Barnes laugh. I didn’t hear it, because he held the receiver away from his face, but I saw him throw back his head and bare his teeth. Then he turned to the group of men round him and said something, and some of them laughed too.

‘Sure, Tom. When you…’

‘I mean it,’ said Ricky, and Barnes kept on smiling. ‘Whoever you are, nothing you try is going to work.’ Barnes shook his head, enjoying my performance.

‘You may be a clever guy,’ I said, and saw him nod. ‘You may be an educated man. Maybe you’re even a college graduate.’

The laugh faded a little from Barnes’ face. That was nice. ‘But nothing you try is going to work.’ He dropped the binoculars and stared. Not because he wanted to see me, but because he wanted me to see him. His face was like stone. ‘Believe me, Mr Graduate,’ I said.

He stayed stock-still, his eyes lasering across the two hundred yards between us. And then I saw him shout something, and he put the receiver back to his ear.

‘Listen, you piece of shit, I don’t care whether you come out of there or not. And if you do come out, I don’t care whether it’s walking, or in a big rubber bag, or in a lot of little rubber bags. But I got to warn you Lang…’ He pressed the phone tighter to his mouth, and I could hear spittle in his voice. ‘You better not mess with progress. Do you understand me? Progress is something you’ve just got to let happen.’

‘Sure,’ said Ricky. ‘Sure,’ said Barnes.

I saw him look off to the side and nod.

‘Take a look to the right, Lang. Blue Toyota.’

I did as I was told, and a windscreen skidded through the image in the binoculars. I steadied on it.

Naimh Murdahand Sarah Woolf, side-by-side in the front of theToyota, drinking something hot from plastic beakers.

Waiting for the Cup Final kick-off. Sarah was looking down at something, or at nothing, and Murdah was examining himself in the rear-view mirror. He didn’t seem to mind what he saw.

‘Progress, Lang,’ said the voice of Barnes. ‘Progress is good for everybody.’

He paused and I slid the binoculars left again, just in time to see him smile.

‘Look,’ I said, putting some worry into my voice, ‘just let me talk to her, will you?’

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Francisco straighten in his chair. I had to deal with him, keep him straight, so I held the phone away from my face and threw an embarrassed grin over my shoulder.

‘It’s my mom,’ I said. ‘Worried about me.’ We both laughed a little at that.

I squinted through the binoculars again, and saw that Barnes was now standing by theToyota. Inside the car, Sarah had the phone to her mouth, and Murdah had turned sideways in his seat to watch her.

‘Thomas?’ she said. Her voice sounded low and raw. ‘Hi,’ I said.

There was a pause, while we exchanged one or two interesting thoughts across the fizzing line, and then she said, ‘I’m waiting for you.’

That’s what I wanted to hear.

Murdahsaid something I didn’t catch, and then Barnes reached in through the window and took the phone from Sarah. ‘No time for all this, Tom. You can talk all you want, once you’re out of there.’ He smiled. ‘So, any thoughts you’d like to share at this time, Thomas? A word, maybe? Little word, like yes or no?’

I stood there, watching Barnes watching me, and I waited as long as I dared. I wanted him to feel the size of my decision. Sarah was waiting for me.

Please, God, this had better work. ‘Yes,’ I said.

Twenty-five

Do be careful with this stuff,

because it’s extremely sticky.