The Gun Seller

WALTER SCOTT

I was in hospital for seven meals, however long that is. I watched television, took painkillers, tried to do all the half finished crosswords in the back numbers ofWoman’s Own.And asked myself a lot of questions.

For a start, what was I doing? Why was I getting in the way of bullets, fired by people I didn’t know, for reasons I didn’t understand? What was in it for me? What was in it for Woolf? What was in it for O’Neal and Solomon? Why were the crosswords half-finished? Had the patients got better, or died, before completing them? Had they come into hospital to have half their brain removed, and was this the proof of the surgeon’s skill? Who had ripped the covers off these magazines and why? Can the answer to ‘Not a woman (3)’ really be ‘man’?

And why, above all, was there a picture of Sarah Woolf pasted on the inside of the door of my mind, so that whenever I yanked it open, to think of anything - afternoon television, smoking a cigarette in the lavatory at the end of the ward, scratching an itchy toe - there she was, smiling and scowling at me simultaneously? I mean, for the hundredth time, this was a woman I was quite definitely not in love with.

I thought Rayner might be able to answer at least some of these questions, so when I judged myself well enough to get up and shuffle around, I borrowed a dressing-gown and headed upstairs to the Barrington Ward.

When Solomon had told me that Rayner was also in theMiddlesexHospital, I’d been, for a moment at least, surprised. It seemed ironic that the two of us should end up getting repaired in the same shop, after all we’d been through together. But then, as Solomon pointed out, there aren’t many hospitals left inLondon these days, and if you hurt yourself anywhere south of the Watford Gap, you’re liable to end up in the Middlesex sooner or later.

Rayner had a room to himself, directly opposite the nurses’ desk, and he was wired up to a lot of bleeping boxes. His eyes were closed, either from sleep or coma, and his head was wrapped in a huge, cartoon bandage, as if Road Runner had dropped that safe just once too often. And he wore blue flannelette pyjamas, which, perhaps for the first time in a lot of years, made him look child-like. I stood by his bed for a while, feeling sorry for him, until a nurse appeared and asked me what I wanted. I said I wanted a lot of things, but would settle for knowing Rayner’s first name.

Bob, she said. She stood at my elbow, with her hand on the door-knob, wanting me to leave, but deferring to my dressing-gown.

I’m sorry, Bob, I thought.

There you were, just doing what you were told, what you were paid to do, and some arse comes along and hits you with a marble Buddha. That’s rough.

Of course, I knew that Bob wasn’t exactly a choirboy. He wasn’t even the boy who bullies the choirboy. At the very best, he was the older brother of the boy who bullies the boy who bullies the choirboy. Solomon had looked Rayner up in the MoD files, and found that he’d been chucked from the Royal Welch Fusiliers for black-marketeering - anything from army boot laces to Saracen armoured cars had gone through the barrack gates under Bob Rayner’s jersey - but even so, I was the one who’d hit him, so I was the one who felt sorry for him.

I put what was left of Solomon’s grapes on the table by his bed, and left.

Men and women in white coats tried to get me to stay in hospital for a few more days, but I shook my head and told them I was fine. They tutted, and made me sign a few things, and then they showed me how to change the dressing under my arm and told me to come straight back if the wound started to feel hot or itchy.

I thanked them for their kindness, and refused their offer of a wheelchair. Which was just as well, because the lift had stopped working.

And then I limped on to a bus and went home.

My flat was where I’d left it, but seemed smaller than I remembered. There were no messages on the answering machine and nothing in the fridge besides the half-pint of natural yoghurt and stick of celery that I’d inherited from the previous tenant.

My chest was hurting, as they’d said it would, so I took myself off to the sofa and watched a race meeting atDoncaster, with a large tumbler of I’m Sure I’ve Seen That Grouse Somewhere Before at my elbow.

I must have dozed off for a while, and it was the phone that woke me. I sat up quickly, gasping at the pain from my armpit, and reached for the whisky bottle. Empty. I felt really terrible. I looked at my watch as I lifted the receiver.Ten past eight, or twenty to two. I couldn’t tell which.

‘Mr Lang?’

Male. American. Click, whirr. Come on, I know this one. ‘Yes.’

‘Mr Thomas Lang?’ Got it. Yes, Mike, I’ll name that voice in five. I shook my head to try and wake myself up, and felt something rattling.

‘How do you do, Mr Woolf?’ I said.

Silence at the other end. And then: ‘A lot better’n you, from what I hear.’

‘Not so,’ I said. ‘Yeah?’

‘My biggest worry in life has always been having no stories to tell my grandchildren. My time with the Woolf family should last them until they’re about fifteen, I’d say.’

I thought I heard him laugh, but it could have been a crackle on the line. Or it could have been O’Neal’s lot, tripping over their bugging equipment.

‘Listen, Lang,’ said Woolf, ‘I’d like us to meet up some place.’

‘Of course you would, Mr Woolf. Let me see. This time you’d like to offer me money to perform a vasectomy on you without you noticing. Am I close?’

‘I’d like to explain, if that’s okay by you. You like to eat Italian?’

I thought of the celery and the yoghurt and realised that I like to eat Italian very much indeed. But there was a problem here.

‘Mr Woolf,’ I said, ‘before you name a place, make sure you can book it for at least ten people. I’ve a feeling this may be a party line.’

‘That’s okay,’ he said, cheerfully. ‘You got a tourist guide right by your phone.’ I looked down at the table and saw a red paperback.Ewan’s Guide toLondon.It looked new, and I certainly hadn’t bought it. ‘Listen carefully,’ said Woolf, ‘I want you to turn to page twenty-six, fifth entry. See you there in thirty minutes.’

There was a kerfuffle on the line, and I thought for a moment he’d hung up, but then his voice came back. ‘Lang?’

‘Yes?’

‘Don’t leave the guide-book in your apartment.’ I took a deep and weary breath.

‘Mr Woolf,’ I said, ‘I may be stupid, but I’m not stupid.’

‘That’s what I’m hoping.’

The line went dead.

The fifth entry on page twenty-six of Ewan’s comprehensive guide to losing dollars in the Greater London Area was ‘Giare,216Roseland,WC2,Ital,60 ppair con, Visa, Mast, Amex’ followed by three sets of crossed spoons. One glance through the book told me that Ewan was pretty sparing with his three spoon motif, so at least I had a reasonable supper to look forward to.

The next problem was how to get there without towing along a dozen brown-raincoated civil servants behind me. I couldn’t be sure that Woolf would be able to do the same, but if he’d gone to the trouble of the guide-book trick, which I have to admit I liked, he must have been fairly sure that he could move around without being bothered by strange men.

I let myself out of the flat and went down to the street door. My helmet was there, resting on top of the gas meter, along with a pair of battered leather gloves. I opened the front door and stuck my head out into the street. No felt- hattedfigure straightened up from a lamppost and tossed away an unfiltered cigarette. But then again, I hadn’t really expected that.

Fifty yards to the left I could see a dark greenLeyland van with a rubber aerial sticking out of the roof, and to the right, on the far side of the street, a red and white striped roadmenders tent. Both of them could have been innocent.

I slipped back inside, put on the helmet and gloves and dug out my key-ring. I eased open the letter-box on the front door, brought the remote control switch for the bike alarm level with the slot, and pressed the button. The Kawasaki blipped back at me once to tell me that its alarm was now off, so I threw open the door and ran down to the street as fast as my armpit would let me.

The bike started first time, as Japanese bikes tend to do, so I slid it to half-choke, popped it into first gear, and eased out the clutch. I also got on it, in case you were worried. By the time I passed the dark-green van I must have been doing forty miles an hour, and I amused myself for a moment with the thought of a lot of men in anoraks banging their elbows on things and saying shit. When I reached the end of the street, I could see, in the mirror, the lights of a car pulling out after me. It was a Rover.

I turned left on to the Bayswater Road within shouting distance of the speed limit, and stopped at a traffic light that’s never once been green in all the years I’ve been coming up to it. But I wasn’t bothered. I fiddled with my gloves and visor for a while, until I sensed the Rover crawling up on the inside, and then I glanced across at the moustachioed face behind the wheel. I wanted to tell him to go home, because this was about to become embarrassing.

As the light switched to amber, I closed the choke fully and eased the throttle to around five thousand revs, then shifted my weight forward over the petrol tank to keep the front wheel down. I dropped the clutch as the light turned green and felt theKawasaki ’s gigantic rear wheel thrash madly from side to side like a dinosaur’s tail, until it found the grip it needed to sling me forwards down the road.

Two-and-a-half seconds later I was doing sixty, and two-and-a-half seconds after that the street lamps were melting into one, and I’d forgotten what the Rover driver looked like. Giare was a surprisingly cheerful place, with white walls and an echoing tile floor that turned every whisper into a shout and every smile into a howling belly-laugh.

A Ralph Lauren blonde with huge eyes took my helmet and showed me to a table by the window, where I ordered a tonic water for myself and a large vodka for the pain in my armpit. To pass the time before Woolf arrived, I had a choice between Ewan’s guide-book or the menu. The menu looked slightly longer, so I started on that.

The first item was fighting under the name ‘Crostini of Mealed Tarroce, with Benatore Potatoes’ and weighed in at an impressive twelve pounds sixty-five. The Ralph Lauren blonde came over and asked me if I needed any help with the menu, and I asked her to explain what potatoes were. She didn’t laugh.

I’d just started to unravel the description of the second dish, which could have been poached Marx Brother for all I know, when I caught sight of the Woolf at the door, clinging determinedly to a briefcase while a waiter peeled off his coat.

And then, at exactly the same moment that I noticed our table was laid for three, I saw Sarah Woolf step out from behind him.

She looked - and I hate to say this - sensational. Absolutely sensational. I know it’s a clichй, but there are times when you realise why clichйs become clichйs. She wore a plain-cut dress in green silk, and it hung on her in a way that all dresses would like to hang if they got the chance - staying still at the bits where it ought to have stayed still, and moving at the bits where movement was exactly what you wanted. Just about everybody watched her travel to the table, and there was a hush in the room while Woolf pushed the chair in behind her as she sat down.

‘Mr Lang,’ said Woolf major, ‘good of you to come.’ I nodded at him. ‘You know my daughter?’

I glanced across at Sarah, and she was looking down at her napkin, frowning. Even her napkin looked better than anyone else’s.

‘Yes of course,’ I said. ‘Now let me see.Wimbledon?Henley? Dick Cavendish’s wedding? No, I’ve got it. Down the barrel of a gun, that’s where we last met. How nice to see you again.’

It was supposed to be friendly, a joke even, but when she still didn’t look at me, the line seemed to curdle into something aggressive, and I wished I’d shut up and just smiled. Sarah adjusted the cutlery into what she obviously thought was a more pleasing formation.

‘Mr Lang,’ she said, ‘I’ve come here at my father’s suggestion to say that I’m sorry. Not because I think I did anything wrong, but because you got hurt and you shouldn’t have. And I’m sorry for that.’

Woolf and I waited for her to go on, but it seemed as if that was all we were going to get for now. She just sat there, rummaging in her bag for a reason not to look at me. Apparently she found several, which was odd, because it was quite a small bag.

Woolf gestured for a waiter, and turned to me. ‘Had a chance to look at the menu yet?’

‘Glanced at it,’ I said. ‘I hear that whatever you’re having is excellent.’

The waiter arrived and Woolf loosened his tie a little. ‘Two martinis,’ he said, ‘very dry, and…’

He looked at me and I nodded.

‘Vodka martini,’ I said. ‘Incredibly dry. Powdered, if you’ve got it.’

The waiter pushed off, and Sarah started looking round the place, as if she was bored already. The tendons in her neck were beautiful.

‘So, Thomas,’ said Woolf. ‘Mind if I call you Thomas?’

‘Okay with me,’ I said. ‘It’s my first name, afterall.’

‘Good. Thomas. First of all, how’s your shoulder?’

‘Fine,’ I said, and he looked relieved. ‘A lot better than my armpit, which is where I got shot.’

At last, at long last, she turned her head and looked at me. Her eyes were much softer than the rest of her pretended to be. She bowed her head slightly, and her voice was low and cracked.

‘I told you, I’m sorry,’ she said.

I wanted desperately to say something back, something nice, and gentle, but I came up empty-headed. There was a pause, which might somehow have turned nasty if she hadn’t smiled. But she did smile, and a lot of blood suddenly seemed to be crashing about in my ears, dropping things and falling over. I smiled back, and we kept on looking at each other.

‘I suppose we have to say it could have been worse,’ she said.

‘Of course it could,’ I said. ‘If I was an international armpit model, I’d be off work for months.’

This time she laughed, actually laughed, and I felt like I’d won every Olympic medal that had ever been struck.

We started with some soup, which came in a bowl about the size of my flat and tasted delicious. The talk was small. It turned out that Woolf was also a fan of the turf, and that I’d been watching one of his horses race atDoncaster that afternoon, so we chatted a little about racing. By the time the second course arrived, we were putting the finishing touches to a nicely-rounded three-minuter on the unpredictability of the English climate. Woolf took a mouthful of something meaty and sauce-covered, and then dabbed his mouth.

‘So, Thomas,’ he said, ‘I guess there are one or two things you’d like to ask me?’

‘Well, yes.’ I dabbed my mouth in return. ‘I hate to be predictable, but what the fuck do you think you’re doing?’ There was an intake of breath from a nearby table, but Woolf didn’t flinch and neither did Sarah.

‘Right,’ he said, nodding. ‘Fair question. First of all, in spite of whatever you may have been told by your Defence people, I have nothing whatsoever to do with drugs. Nothing. I’ve taken some penicillin in my time, but that’s it. Period.’

Well, that obviously wasn’t good enough. Not by a long shot. Saying period at the end of something doesn’t make it incontrovertible.

‘Yes, well,’ I said, ‘forgive my tired old English cynicism, but isn’t this a case of "you would say that wouldn’t you"?’ Sarah looked at me crossly, and I suddenly thought I might have overdone it. But then I thought heck, beautiful tendons or not, there were some things that needed to be straightened out here.

‘Sorry to bring it up before you’ve even got started,’ I said, ‘but I assume we’re here for plain talking, so I’m talking plainly.’

Woolf had another bite at his food and kept his eyes on his plate, and it took me a moment to realise that he was leaving it to Sarah to answer.

‘Thomas,’ she said, and I turned to look at her. Her eyes were big and round, and went from one side of the universe to the other. ‘I had a brother. Michael. Four years older than me.’

Oh cripes. Had.

‘Michael died half-way through his first year atBatesUniversity. Amphetamines, qualudes, heroin. He was twenty years old.’

She paused, and I had to speak. Something. Anything. ‘I’m sorry.’

Well, what else do you say? Tough? Pass the salt? I realised I was hunching down towards the table, trying to blend with their grief, but it was no good. On a subject like this, you’re an outsider.

‘I tell you that,’ she said eventually, ‘for one reason only. To show you that my father,’ and she turned to look at him while he kept his head bowed, ‘could no more get involved in the traffick of drugs than he could fly to the moon. It’s that simple. I’d bet my life on that.’

Period.

For a while, neither of them would look at each other, or at me.

‘Well, I’m sorry,’ I said again. ‘I’m very, very sorry.’

We sat like that for a moment, a little kiosk of silence in the middle of the restaurant din, and then suddenly Woolf switched on a smile, and seemed to get all brisk.

‘Thanks, Thomas,’ he said. ‘But what’s done is done. For Sarah and me, this is old stuff, and we dealt with it a long time ago. Right now, you want to know why I asked you to kill me?’

A woman at the next table turned and looked at Woolf, frowning. He can’t have said that. Can he? She shook her head and went back to her lobster.

‘In a nutshell,’ I said.

‘Well it’s very simple,’ he said. ‘I wanted to know what kind of person you were.’

He looked at me, his mouth closed in a nice, straight line. ‘I see,’ I said, not seeing anything at all. This is what happens, I suppose, when you ask for things in a nutshell. I blinked a few times, then sat back in my chair and tried to look cross.

‘Anything wrong with ringing my headmaster?’ I said. ‘Or an ex-girlfriend? I mean, that all seemed too dull, I suppose?’ Woolf shook his head.

‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘I did all of that.’

That was a shock. A real shock. I still get hot flushes about having cheated in Chemistry O-Level and scoring an A when experienced teachers had anticipated an F. I know one day it’s going to come out. I just know it.

‘Really,’ I said. ‘How did I do?’ Woolf smiled.

‘You did okay,’ he said. ‘A couple of your girlfriends reckon you’re a pain in the ass, but otherwise you did okay.’

‘Nice to know,’ I said.

Woolf continued, as though reading from a list. ‘You’re smart. You’re tough. You’re honest. Good career in the Scotch Guards.’

‘Scots,’ I said, but he ignored me, and went on.

‘And best of all, from my point of view, you’re broke.’ He smiled again, which irritated me.

‘You missed out my watercolour work,’ I said.

‘That too? Hell of a guy. The one thing I needed to know was whether you could be bought.’

‘Right,’ I said. ‘Hence the fifty thousand.’ Woolf nodded.

This was starting to get out of hand. I knew that at some point I ought to have been making some kind of hard man speech about who I was, and who the hell did they think they were, prodding around in who I was, and just as soon as I’d had the pudding I was going right back to who I was - but somehow the right moment never seemed to come along. In spite of the way he’d treated me, and for all his nosing around in my school reports, I still couldn’t bring myself to dislike Woolf. He just had something I liked. And as for Sarah, well, yes. Nice tendons.

Even so, a glint of the old steel wouldn’t do any harm. ‘Let me guess,’ I said, giving Woolf a hard look. ‘Once you’ve found out that I can’t be bought, you’re going to try and buy me.’

He didn’t even falter. ‘Exactly,’ he said.

There. That was it, and this was the right moment. A gentleman has his limits, and so doI. 1 tossed my napkin on to the table.

‘Well this is fascinating,’ I said, ‘and I suppose if I was a different sort of person I might even think it was flattering. But right now I really have to know what this is all about. Because if you don’t tell me, now, I’m leaving the table, your lives, and possibly even this country.’

I could see that Sarah was watching me, but I kept my eyes fixed on Woolf. He chased the last potato round his plate and ran it down in a pool of gravy. But then he put down his fork and started to speak very quickly.

‘You know about the Gulf War, Mr Lang?’ he said. I don’t know what happened to Thomas, but the mood certainly seemed to have changed somewhat.

‘Yes, Mr Woolf,’ I said, ‘I know about the Gulf War.’

‘No, you don’t. I’ll bet everything I have that you don’t know the first damn thing about the Gulf War. Familiar with the term military-industrial complex?’

He was talking like a salesman, trying to bulldoze me somehow, and I wanted to slow things down. I took a long sip of wine.

‘Dwight Eisenhower,’ I said eventually. ‘Yes, I’m familiar. I was part of it, if you remember.’

‘With respect, Mr Lang, you were a very small part of it. Too small - forgive me for saying it - too small to know what you were a part of.’

‘As you like,’ I said.

‘Now take a guess at the single most important commodity in the world. So important, that the manufacture and sale of every other commodity depends on it. Oil, gold, food, what would you say?’

‘I’ve a feeling,’ I said, ‘that you’re going to tell me it’s arms.’

Woolf leaned across the table, too quickly and too far for my liking.

‘Correct, Mr Lang,’ he said. ‘It is the biggest industry in the world, and every government in the world knows it. If you’re a politician, and you take on the arms industry, in whatever form, then you wake up the next day and you’re no longer a politician. Some cases, you might not even wake up the next day. Doesn’t matter whether you’re trying for a law on a gun ownership registration in the state ofIdaho, or trying to stop the sale of F-16s to the Iraqi Air Force. You step on their toes, they step on your head. Period.’

Woolf sat back in his chair and wiped some sweat from his forehead.

‘Mr Woolf,’ I said, ‘I realise it must be strange for you, being here inEngland. I realise that we must strike you as a nation of hicks, who only got hot and cold running water the day before you flew in, but even so, I have to tell you that I’ve heard a lot of this before.’

‘Just listen, will you?’ said Sarah, and I jumped slightly at the anger in her voice. When I looked at her, she just stared back at me, her lips pressed tightly together.

‘Did you ever hear of the Stoltoi Bluff?’ said Woolf. I turned back to him.

‘The Stoltoi… no, I don’t believe so.’

‘Doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘Anatoly Stoltoi was a Red Army General. Chief-of-Staff under Khrushchev. Spent his whole career convincing theUS that the Russians had thirty times as many rockets as they had. That was his job. His life’s work.’

‘Well it worked, didn’t it?’

‘For us, yeah.’

‘Us being…?’

‘Pentagon knew it was bullshit from start to finish. Knew it. But that didn’t stop them using it to justify the biggest arms build-up the world has ever seen.’

Maybe it was the wine, but I felt I was being awfully slow to get the point of all this.

‘Right,’ I said. ‘Well let’s do something about it, shall we? Now, where did I leave my time-machine? Oh I know, next Wednesday.’

Sarah made a slight hissing noise and looked away from the table, and maybe she was right - maybe I was being flippant - but for God’s sake, where were we going with all this?

Woolf closed his eyes for a moment, gathering some patience from somewhere.

‘What would you say,’ he said slowly, ‘the arms industry needs more than anything else?’

I scratched my head dutifully. ‘Customers?’

‘War,’ said Woolf. ‘Conflict. Trouble.’

Well, here we go, I thought. Here comes the theory.

‘I’ve got it,’ I said. ‘You’re trying to tell me that the Gulf War was started by arms manufacturers?’ Honestly, I was being as polite as I could.

Woolf didn’t answer. He just sat there, with his head slightly tilted to one side, watching me and wondering if he’d got the wrong man after all. I didn’t even have to wonder.

‘No, seriously,’ I said. ‘Is that what you’re telling me? I mean, I really want to know what you think. I want to know what this is all about.’

‘You saw the footage they showed on TV?’ said Sarah, while Woolf just kept on watching. ‘Smart bombs, Patriot missile systems, all that stuff?’

‘I saw it,’ I said.

‘The makers of those weapons, Thomas, are using that footage in promotional videos at arms fairs around the world. People dying, and they’re using the stuff for commercials.

It’s obscene.’

‘Right,’ I said. ‘Agreed. The world is a pretty terrible place, and we’d all much rather live on Saturn. How does this affect me, specifically?’

As the Woolfs traded some meaningful looks, I tried desperately to conceal the enormous pity I now felt for the pair of them. Obviously, they had embarked on some ghastly conspiracy theory which would, in all probability, consume the best years of their lives with the cutting-out of articles from newspapers, and the attending of seminars on the subject of grassy knolls, and nothing I could say would divert them from their chosen course. The best thing would be to slip them a couple of quid towards their sellotape costs and be on my way.

I was thinking hard, trying to phrase a decent excuse for leaving, when I realised that Woolf had been tugging at his briefcase - and now he had it open and was pulling out a handful of ten-by-eight glossy photographs.

He passed the top one to me, so I took it.

It was a picture of a helicopter in flight. I couldn’t judge its size, but it was nothing like any type I had seen or heard of. It had two main rotors, running a couple of feet apart off a single mast, and there was no tail rotor. The fuselage looked short compared to the main body, and there were no identifying letters anywhere. It was painted black.

I looked at Woolf for an explanation, but he simply handed me the next photograph. This one had been taken from above, so it showed a background, and what surprised me was that it was urban. The same aircraft, or one like it, was hovering between a pair of faceless tower blocks, and I could see that the machine was definitely small, possibly a single- seater.

The third photograph was a much closer shot, and showed the helicopter on the ground. Whatever else it was, it was definitely military, because there was a mess of very nasty looking kit hanging from the armaments rack that ran through the fuselage behind the cabin. Hydra 70mm rockets, Hellfire air-to-ground missiles,.50 calibre machine guns, and heaps more besides. This was a big toy, for big boys.

‘Where did you get these?’ I said. Woolf shook his head.

‘That’s not important.’

‘Well, I think it is important,’ I said. ‘I have the very strong feeling, Mr Woolf, that you ought not to have these photographs.’

Woolf tilted his head back, as if he was finally starting to lose patience with me.

‘It doesn’t matter where they came from,’ he said. ‘What matters is the subject. This is a very important aircraft, Mr Lang. Believe me. Very, very important.’

I believed him. Why wouldn’t I?

‘The Pentagon’s LH programme,’ said Woolf, ‘has been running for twelve years now, trying to find a replacement for the Cobras and Super-Cobras the USAAF and the Marine Corps have been using since the Vietnam War.’

‘LH?’ I said, tentatively.

‘Light helicopter,’ Sarah answered, with an ‘imagine not knowing that’ expression. Woolf senior pressed on.

‘This aircraft is a response to that programme. It’s a product of the Mackie Corporation ofAmerica, and is designed for use in counter-insurgency operations. Terrorism. The market for it, outside of the Pentagon’s procurement, is among police and militia forces around the world. But at two-and-a-half million dollars each, they’re going to be hard to shift.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I can see that.’ I glanced at the pictures again and scrabbled for something intelligent to say. ‘Why the two rotors? Looks a bit complicated.’ I caught them looking at each other, but couldn’t tell you what the look meant.

‘You don’t know anything about helicopters, do you?’ said Woolf, eventually.

I shrugged.

‘They’re noisy,’ I said. ‘They crash a lot. That’s about it.’

‘They’re slow,’ said Sarah. ‘Slow, and therefore vulnerable on a battlefield. The modern attack helicopter can travel at around two-hundred-and-fifty miles an hour.’

I was about to say that that sounded pretty slippy to me, when she continued: ‘A modern fighter airplane will cover a mile in four seconds.’

Without summoning a waiter and asking for a pencil and paper, there was not the remotest chance of my working out whether this was faster or slower than two hundred and fifty miles an hour, so I just nodded and let her carry on.

‘What limits the speed of a conventional helicopter,’ she said slowly, sensing my discomfort, ‘is the single rotor.’

‘Naturally,’ I said, and settled back in my seat for Sarah’s impressively expert lecture. A lot of what she had to say passed comfortably over my head, but the gist of it, if I’ve got it right, seemed to be as follows:

The cross-section of a helicopter blade, according to Sarah, is more or less the same as the wing of an aeroplane. Its shape creates a pressure differential in the air passing over its upper and lower surfaces, producing a consequent lift. It differs from an aeroplane wing, however, in that when a helicopter moves forward, air starts passing over the blade that’s coming forward faster than it passes over the blade that’s going backwards. This produces unequal lift on the two sides of the helicopter, and the faster it goes, the more unequal the lift becomes. Eventually the ‘retreating’ blade stops producing any lift at all, and the helicopter flips on to its back and drops out of the sky. This, according to Sarah, was a negative aspect.

‘What the Mackie people did was put two rotors on a coaxial shaft, spinning in opposite directions. Equal lift on both sides, possibility of nearly twice the speed. Also, no torque reaction, so no need for a tail rotor. Smaller, faster, more manoeuvrable. It’s likely this machine will be capable of over four hundred miles an hour.’

I nodded slowly, trying to show that I was impressed, but not that impressed.

‘Well, fine,’ I said. ‘But the javelin surface-to-air missile will do damn near a thousand miles an hour.’ Sarah stared back at me. How dare I challenge her on this technical stuff? ‘What I mean is,’ I said, ‘things haven’t changed that much. It’s still a helicopter, and it can still be shot down. It’s not invincible.’

Sarah closed her eyes for a second, wondering how to phrase this so that an idiot could understand.

‘If the SAM operator is good,’ she said, ‘and he’s trained, and he’s ready, then he has a chance. One chance only. But the point of this machine is that the target will have no time to prepare. It’ll be down his throat while he’s still rubbing the sleep out of his eyes.’ She stared at me hard. Now have you got it? ‘Believe me, Mr Lang,’ she continued, punishing me for my insolence, ‘this is the next generation of military helicopter.’ She nodded towards the photographs.

‘Right,’ I said. ‘Okay. Well then, they must be jolly pleased.’

‘They are, Thomas,’ said Woolf. ‘They are very, very pleased with this machine. Right now, the guys at Mackie have only one problem.’

Somebody obviously had to say ‘which is?’

‘Which is?’ I said.

‘Nobody at the Pentagon believes it will work.’ I pondered for a while.

‘Well can’t they ask for a test ride? Take it round the block a few times?’

Woolf took a deep breath, and I sensed that, at long last, we were approaching the main business of the evening. ‘What will sell this machine,’ he said slowly, ‘to the Pentagon, and to fifty other air forces around the world, is the sight of it in action against a major terrorist operation.’

‘Right,’ I said. ‘You mean they’ve got to wait for a Munich Olympics to come along?’

Woolf took his time, drawing out the punchline for all it was worth.

‘No, I don’t mean that, Mr Lang,’ he said. ‘I mean they’re going tomakea Munich Olympics come along.’

‘Why are you telling me all this?’

We were on to the coffee now, and the photographs were back in their folder.

‘I mean, if you’re right,’ I said, ‘and personally I’m stuck in the middle of that "if" with a flat tyre and no spare - but if you’re right, what do you plan to do about it? Write to theWashington Post? Esther Rantzen? What?’

Both the Woolfs had gone very quiet, and I wasn’t absolutely sure why. Perhaps they’d thought that just laying out the theory was going to be enough - that as soon as I heard it, I’d be up on my feet, sharpening the butter dish and shouting death to arms manufacturers - but for me it wasn’t anything like enough. How could it be?

‘Do you think of yourself as a good man, Thomas?’ This was from Woolf, but he still wasn’t looking at me. ‘No, I don’t,’ I said.

Sarah looked up. ‘Then what?’

‘I think of myself as a tall man,’ I said. ‘As a poor man. A man with a full stomach. A man with a motorcycle.’ I paused, and felt her eyes on me. ‘I don’t know what you mean by "good".’

‘I guess we mean on the side of the angels,’ said Woolf. ‘There are no angels,’ I said quickly. ‘I’m sorry, but there aren’t.’

There was a lull, while Woolf nodded his head slowly as if conceding that, yes, that was a point of view, it just happened to be a massively disappointing one, and then Sarah sighed and got to her feet.

‘Excuse me,’ she said.

Woolf and I scrabbled at our chairs, but Sarah was halfway across the restaurant floor before we’d managed to get any meaningful standing-up done. She drifted over to a waiter, whispered something to him, then nodded at his reply and headed towards an archway at the back of the room.

‘Thomas,’ said Woolf. ‘Let me put it this way. Some bad people are getting ready to do some bad things. We have a chance of stopping them. Are you going to help us?’ He paused. And kept on pausing.

‘Look, the question still stands,’ I said. ‘What are you planning to do? Just tell me. What’s wrong with the press? Or the police? Or the CIA? I mean come on, we’ll get a phone book and some coins and sort this out.’

Woolf shook his head in irritation, and rapped his knuckles on the table.

‘You haven’t been listening to me, Thomas,’ he said. ‘I’m talking about interests here. The biggest interests in the world. Capital. You don’t take on capital with a telephone and a couple of polite letters to your Congressman.’

I stood up, swaying slightly from the effect of the wine. Or the talk.

‘You leaving?’ said Woolf, without lifting his head. ‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘Maybe.’ I didn’t really know what I was going to do. ‘But I’m going to the lavatory first.’ And that’s certainly what I meant to do at that moment, because I was confused, and because I find porcelain helps me think.

I walked slowly across the restaurant towards the archway, my brain rattling with all kinds of badly-stowed personal items which may fall out and injure a fellow passenger - and what was I doing even thinking about take-off, and runways, and the beginnings of long journeys? I had to get out of this, and get out quickly. Just handling those photographs had been stupid enough.

I turned into the archway, and saw that Sarah was standing in an alcove by a pay phone. She had her back to me, and her head was tipped forward, until it was almost resting against the wall. I stood there for a moment, watching her neck, and her hair, and her shoulders, and yes, all right, I believe I may have glanced at her bottom.

‘Hi,’ I said, stupidly.

She spun round, and for the tiniest instant I thought I saw real fear in her face - of what, I hadn’t the slightest idea - and

then she smiled and replaced the receiver.

‘So,’ she said, taking a pace towards me. ‘You on the team?’

We looked at each other for a while, and then I smiled back, and shrugged, and started to say the word ‘well’, which is what I always do when I’m stuck for words. And you’ll find, if you try this at home, that to form the ‘w’ sound, you have to pucker your lips into a kind of pout - very similar in shape to the one you’d use for whistling, say. Or, perhaps, even kissing.

She kissed me.Shekissedme.

What I mean is, I was standing there, lips puckered, brain puckered, and she just stepped up and threw her tongue into my mouth. For a moment, I thought maybe she’d tripped on a floorboard and stuck out her tongue as a reflex - but that didn’t seem very likely somehow, and anyway, once she’d got her balance back, wouldn’t she have put her tongue away again?

No, she was definitely kissing me. Just likeinthe movies. Just like not in my life. For a couple of seconds I was too surprised, and too out of practice, to know what to do about it, because it had been a very long time since something like this had happened to me. In fact, if I remember correctly, I was an olive-picker in the reign of Rameses III when it did, and I’m not sure how I dealt with it then.

She tasted of toothpaste, and wine, and perfume, and heaven on a nice day.

‘You on the team?’ she said again, and I realised from the clarity of her words that at some point she must have taken her tongue back, although I could still feel it, in my mouth, on my lips, and I knew that I’d always be able to feel it. I opened my eyes.

She was standing there, looking up at me, and yes, it was definitely her. It wasn’t a waiter, or a hatstand.

‘Well,’ I said.

We were back at the table, and Woolf was signing his name on a credit card slip, and perhaps some other things were happening in the world too, but I’m not sure.

‘Thanks for the supper,’ I said, like a robot. Woolf waved his hand at me and grinned. ‘My pleasure, Tom,’ he said.

He was pleased I’d said yes. Yes as in yes, I’d think about it. Precisely what I was to think about, nobody seemed able to say exactly, but it was enough to satisfy Woolf, and for the time being we all had our reasons for feeling good. I picked up the folder and started leafing through the photographs again, one by one.

Small, fast, and violent.

Sarah was pleased too, I think, although she was now behaving as if nothing much had happened besides a decent meal and a bit of a chat about the new times.

Violent, fast and small.

Perhaps, underneath all that composure, there was a seething maelstrom of emotion, and she was only keeping a lid on it because her father was sitting there.

Small, fast, and violent.

I stopped thinking about Sarah.

As each image of this nasty-looking device passed before my eyes, I seemed to feel myself gradually waking up from something, or somewhere. To something or somewhere else. It sounds fanciful, I know, but the starkness of this machine - its ugliness, its stripped-down efficiency, its sheer pitilessness - seemed to seep from the paper into my hands, cooling my blood. Perhaps Woolf sensed what I was feeling.

‘It has no official name,’ he said, gesturing towards the pictures. ‘But it’s temporarily designated as an Urban Control and Law-enforcement Aircraft.’

‘UCLA,’ I said, pointlessly.

‘You spell too?’ said Sarah, with a kind of almost smile. ‘Hence the working name given to this prototype,’ said Woolf.

‘Which is?’

Neither of them answered, so I looked up, and saw that Woolf was waiting until I met his gaze.

‘The Graduate,’ he said.

Seven

One hair of a woman can draw more than a hundred pair of oxen.