The Gun Seller

JAMES HOWELL

I swung theKawasaki along Victoria Embankment just for the hell of it. To clear its pipes and mine.

I hadn’t told the Woolfs about the phonecall to my flat and the nasty American voice at the other end. ‘Graduate studies’ could have meant anything - graduate studies, even - and the caller could have been anybody. When you’re dealing with conspiracy theorists - and kiss or no kiss, that’s definitely what I was dealing with - there’s no point in feeding them extra coincidences to get excited about.

We’d left the restaurant in an amiable state of truce. Out on the pavement, Woolf had squeezed my arm and told me to sleep on it, which gave me a nasty jolt because I’d been watching Sarah’s bottom as he spoke. But as soon as I realised what he meant I promised I would indeed, and out of politeness asked where I could get hold of him if I needed to. He’d winked and said he’d find me, which I didn’t much care for.

There was, of course, one extremely good reason for me to stay on the right side of Woolf. He may have been a flake and a crank, and his daughter may have been nothing more than a very attractive back-to-front jacket case, but I couldn’t deny that the two of them had a certain charm.

What I’m trying to say, is that they’d gone and put quite a large amount of that charm into my bank account.

Please don’t misunderstand me. I don’t care greatly for money, as a rule. I mean, I’m not one of these people who works for free, or anything like that. I charge for my services, such as they are, and I get cross when I think I’m owed by somebody. But at the same time, I think I can honestly say that I’ve never really chased money. Never done anything that I didn’t enjoy, at least a little, just for the sake of having more of the stuff. Someone like Paulie, for example - and he’s told me this himself, many times - spends most of his waking hours either getting hold of money, or thinking about getting hold of it. Paulie could do unpleasant things - immoral things, even - and if there was a plumpness about the cheque at the end of it, he wouldn’t mind a bit. Bring it on, Paulie would say.

But me, I’m just not made that way. Different mould altogether. The only good thing I’ve ever noticed about money, the only positive aspect of an otherwise pretty vulgar commodity, is that you can use it to buy things.

And things, on the whole, I do quite like.

Woolf’s fifty thousand dollars was never going to be the key to everlasting happiness, I knew that. I couldn’t buy a villa inAntibes with it, or even rent one for more than about a day and a half. But it was handy, nonetheless. Comforting. It put cigarettes on my table.

And if, in order to keep hold of some of that comfort, I had to spend a couple more evenings in the chapters of a Robert Ludlum novel, getting periodically kissed by a beautiful woman, well, I could just about bear that.

It was aftermidnight and there wasn’t much traffic on the Embankment. The road was dry and the ZZR needed a gallop, so I eased open the throttle in third gear and replayedsome lines of Captain Kirk to Mr Chekhov in my head as the universe rearranged itself round my back wheel. I was probably brushing the cheek of a hundred and ten asWestminsterBridge came into view, and I dabbed the brakes and shifted my weight slightly, ready to crank the bike over for the right turn. The lights into Parliament Square were turning green and a dark-blue Ford was starting to move off, so I dumped another wedge of speed and prepared to ease round it on the outside of the bend. As I came level, my right knee getting down towards the tarmac, the Ford started drifting to the left, and I straightened up to take a wider line.

At that point, I thought he simply hadn’t seen me. I thought he was an average car driver.

Time is a funny thing.

I once met an RAF pilot who told me how he and his navigator had had to eject from their very expensive Tornado GR1, three hundred feet above the Yorkshire dales, because of what he called a ‘bird strike’. (This, rather unfairly in my view, made it sound as if it was the bird’s fault; as if the little feathered chap had deliberately tried to head-butt twenty tons of metal travelling in the opposite direction at just under the speed of sound, out of spite.)

Anyway, the point of the story is that, after the accident, the pilot and navigator had sat in a de-briefing room and talked to investigators, uninterrupted, for an hour and fifteen minutes about what they’d seen, heard, felt and done, at the moment of contact.

An hour and fifteen minutes.

And yet the black box flight-recorder, when it was eventually pulled from the wreckage, showed that the time elapsed between the bird entering the engine intake and the crew ejecting, was a fraction under four seconds.

Four seconds. That’s bang, one, two, three, fresh air.

I didn’t really believe this story when I heard it. Apart from anything else, the pilot was a wiry little runt, with those creepily blue eyes that physically talented people often have.

And besides, I couldn’t stop myself from siding with the bird in the story.

But I do believe it now.

I believe it because the driver of the Ford never took the right turn. And I lived several lives, not all of them pleasant and fulfilling, while he ran me off the road and into the railings along the side of the House of Commons. When I braked, he braked. When I accelerated, he accelerated. When I leaned the bike over to take the turn, he kept on going, straight for the railings, nudging me in the shoulder with the glass of his passenger window.

Yes, I could definitely talk for an hour about those railings. And a good deal longer about the moment I realised that the driver of the Ford was not an average driver at all. He was actually very good indeed.

It wasn’t a Rover, which meant something. He must have had a radio set to get him into position, because nobody had passed me on the Embankment. The passenger was looking at me as I came alongside, and plainly not saying ‘mind that motorcyclist’ as the car drifted towards me. They had two rear-view mirrors, which has never been standard equipment on any Ford. And my testicles hurt. That’s what woke me up.

You’ve probably noticed on your travels that motorcyclists don’t wear seat-belts, which is both good and bad. Good because nobody wants to be tied to five hundred pounds of very hot metal when they’re sliding down the road. Bad because when the brakes are applied severely, the bike stops and the rider doesn’t. He carries on in a northerly direction until his genitals interface with the petrol tank and tears come to his eyes, preventing him from seeing the very thing he’s braking to try to avoid.

The railings.

Those sturdy, no-nonsense, finely turned railings. Railings worthy of the task of encircling the mother of parliaments. Railings that, in the spring of 1940, they’d have been tearing down to make Spitfires and Hurricanes andWellingtons and

Lancasters, and what was the other one with the split tailplane? Was it a Blenheim?

Except of course the railings weren’t there in 1940. They’d been put up in 1987 to stop mad Libyans from interrupting Parliamentary business with a quarter of a ton of high explosive wedged into the back of a family Peugeot.

These railings, my railings, were there to do a job. They were there to defend democracy. They were hand-built by craftsmen called Ted or Ned, or possibly Bill.

They were railings fit for heroes. I slept.

A face. A very big face. A very big face with only enough skin to cover a very small face, so that everything about it looked tight. Tight jaw, tight nose, tight eyes. Every muscle and tendon on the face bulged and rippled. It looked like a crowded lift. I blinked, and the face was gone.

Or maybe I slept for an hour and the face stayed for fifty-nine minutes. I’ll never know. Instead of the face there was only a ceiling. Which meant a room. Which meant I’d been moved. I started thinking about theMiddlesexHospital, but I knew straight away that this was a very different fish-kettle.

I tried flexing bits of my body. Gently, not daring to move my head in case my neck was broken. The feet seemed okay, if a little far away. As long as they weren’t further than six feet and three inches I wasn’t going to complain. The left knee answered my letter by return of post, which was nice, but the right felt wrong. Thick and hot. Come back to that. Thighs. Left okay, right not so good. Pelvic girdle seemed all right, but I wouldn’t know for sure until I put some weight on it. Testicles. Ah, there was another matter entirely. I didn’t have to put weight on those to know they were in a poor state. There were too many of them and they hurt too much. Abdomen and chest got a B-minus, and my right arm failed altogether. Just wouldn’t move. Neither would the left, although I could just about move the hand, which is how I knew I wasn’t in the William Hoyle Ward. Things can be rough and ready in NHS hospitals these days, but even so they tend not to tie your hands to the bed without a good reason. I left the neck and head for another day, and fell into as deep a sleep as I could manage with seven testicles.

The face was back, tighter than ever. This time he was chewing something, and the muscles in his cheeks and neck were standing out like a diagram from Gray’s Anatomy. There were crumbs around his lips and every now and then a very pink tongue shot out and carried one off to the cave of his mouth.

‘Lang?’ The tongue was working round the inside of his mouth now, running over his gums and puckering his lips so that for a moment I thought he was going to kiss me. I let him wait.

‘Where am I?’ I was pleased to hear that there was a thoroughly ill-sounding croak to my voice.

‘Yeah,’ said the face. If it had enough skin, I think it might have smiled. Instead, it moved away from whatever I was lying on, and I heard a door open. But it didn’t shut.

‘He’s up,’ said the same voice, quite loud, and the door still didn’t shut. Which meant that whoever controlled the room controlled the corridor too. If it was a corridor. For all I knew, it could have been the gantry to a space shuttle. Or from it. Maybe I was in a shuttle, about to leave the world very far behind.

Footsteps. Two pairs. One rubber, one leather. Hard floor. Leather steps are slower. Leather’s in charge. Rubber’s a flunky, holding the door, making way for leather. Rubber’s the face. Rubber Face. Easy to remember.

‘Mr Lang?’ Leather had stopped by the bed. If it was a bed. I kept my eyes closed, a little frown of pain on my face. ‘How’re you feeling?’ American. A lot of Americans in my life at the moment. Must be the exchange rate.

He started to move round the bed, and I could hear the crunch of dust under his shoes. And the aftershave. Much too strong. If we became friends, I’d tell him. But not now.

‘I always wanted a bike when I was a kid,’ said the voice. ‘A Harley. My dad said they were dangerous. So when I learnt to drive I crashed the car four times in the first year just to get back at him. He was an asshole, my dad.’

Time passed. Which I couldn’t do anything about.

‘I think my neck is broken,’ I said. I kept my eyes closed and the croak was coming along nicely.

‘Yeah? Sorry to hear that. Now tell me about yourself, Lang. Who are you? What do you do? You like movies? Books? Ever had tea with the Queen? Talk to me.’

I waited until the shoes turned, and slowly opened my eyes. He was out of vision, so I fixed on the ceiling.

‘Are you a doctor?’

‘I’m not a doctor, Lang, no,’ he said. ‘I’m surely not a doctor. A son-of-a-bitch is what I am.’ There was a snigger somewhere in the room, and I guessed that Rubber Face was still by the door.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘A son-of-a-bitch. That’s what I am. That’s my job, that’s my life. But hey, let’s talk about you.’

‘I need a doctor,’ I said. ‘My neck…’Tears started in my eyes, and I let them come. I sniffed a bit, choked a bit, put on a cracking good show, if I say so myself.

‘If you want to know the truth,’ said the voice, ‘I don’t give any kind of shit about your neck.’

I decided I was never going to tell him about his aftershave. Not ever.

‘I want to know other things,’ said the voice. ‘Lots and lots of other things.’

The tears kept coming.

‘Look, I don’t know who you are, or where I am…’ I faltered, straining to get my head off the pillow.

‘Fuck away, Richie,’ said the voice. ‘Get some air.’

There was a grunt from over by the door, and two shoes left the room. I had to assume that Richie was in them.

‘See, that’s kind of the idea, Lang. You don’t have to know who I am, and you don’t have to know where you are. The idea is that you tell me things, I don’t tell you.’

‘But what…’

‘Did you hear what I said?’ There was suddenly another face in front of mine. Smooth, scrubbed skin, and hair like Paulie’s. Fluffily clean, and combed to ridiculous perfection. He was about forty, and probably spent two hours a day on an exercise bike. There was only one word for him. Groomed. He examined me closely, and from the way his gaze hung over my chin I guessed that I hadareasonably spectacular injury there, which cheered me up a bit. Scars are always handy for breaking the ice.

Finally his eyes met mine, and the four of them didn’t get on at all. ‘Good,’ he said, and moved away.

It had to be early in the morning. The only excuse for that strength of perfume was that he’d only just shaved.

‘You met Woolf,’ said Groomed. ‘And his air-head daughter.’ _ ‘Yes.’

There was a pause and I could tell that 1’d pleased him, because the smile changed the sound of his breathing. If I’d denied it, wrong number, no speakee Engleesh, he’d have known I was a player. If I came clean, he might take me for an idiot. All the evidence pointed that way, after all.

‘Good. Now. Mind telling me what you talked about?’

‘Well,’ I said, frowning in concentration, ‘he asked me about my army record. I was in the army, by the way.’

‘No shit. He knew that, or you tell him?’ Another big think from the idiot.

‘I’m not sure. Now that you mention it, I think he must have known it already.’

‘Girl knew it too?5

‘Well, I can’t be sure of that, can I? I didn’t pay much attention to her.’ Good thing I wasn’t wired to a machine for that one. The needle would have gone into the next room for a lie-down. ‘He asked about my plans, what sort of work I was up to. Which isn’t much, to be honest.’

‘You in intelligence?’

‘What?’

The way I said it was supposed to answer his question, but he kept going.

‘In the army. You fought terrorists inIreland. Were you involved with intelligence.’

‘Good God, no.’ I smiled, as if I was flattered by the idea. ‘What’s funny?’

I stopped smiling.

‘Nothing, it’s just… you know.’

‘No, I don’t. That’s got a lot to do with why I’m asking. Were you in military intelligence?’

I took a painful breath before answering.

‘Ulsterwas a system,’ I said. ‘That’s all. Everything that happened there had happened a hundred times already. System was everything. People like me just, you know, make up the numbers. I slogged around. Played some squash. Had a few laughs. Good fun, really.’ I thought I might have overdone it with that, but he didn’t seem to mind. ‘Look, my neck… I don’t know, there’s something wrong. I really need to see a doctor.’

‘He’s a bad guy, Tom.’

‘Who is?’ I said.

‘Woolf. Real bad. I don’t know what he’s told you about himself. I’m kind of guessing that he didn’t tell you about the thirty-six tons of cocaine he’s brought intoEurope in the last four months. He tell you that?’ I tried to shake my head. ‘Nah, I figured he’d forget to mention that. But that’s bad with a capital B, wouldn’t you say, Tom? I’d say it was. The Devil’s alive on earth, and he’s selling crack cocaine. Yeah. Sounds like a song. What rhymes with cocaine?’

‘Pain,’ I said.

‘Yeah,’ said Groomed. He enjoyed that. ‘Pain.’ The leather shoes went for a stroll. ‘Ever noticed how bad guys mix with bad guys, Tom? I’ve noticed that. Happens all the time. I don’t know, they like to feel at home, shared interests, same star sign, whatever. See itathousand times. A thousand times.’ The shoes stopped. ‘So when a guy like you starts holding hands with a guy like Woolf, I got to say that makes me not like you very much.’

‘Look, that’s it,’ I said, petulantly. ‘I’m not going to say one more word to you until I’ve seen a doctor. I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about. I know as much about Woolf as I know about you, which is nothing, and I think there’s every chance that my neck is broken.’ No answer. ‘I demand to see a doctor,’ I repeated, trying to sound as much like a British tourist in a French customs shed as I could.

‘No, Tom. I don’t think we want to waste a doctor’s time.’ His voice was even, but I could tell that he was excited. The leather crunched, and the door opened. ‘Stay with him. Every minute. You have to use the bathroom, you call me.’

‘Wait a minute,’ I said. ‘What do you mean waste time? I’m injured. I’m in pain, for Christ’s sake.’

The shoes turned towards me.

‘That may be, Tom. That may very well be. But who the hell washes up paper plates?’

There weren’t many good things to be said or felt about my situation. Not many at all. But the rule is that after any engagement, won or lost, you replay it in your mind to see how much you can learn. So that’s what I did, while Richie slumped against the wall by the door.

First, Groomed knew a lot and he’d known it quickly. So he had manpower, or good communications, or both. Second, he didn’t say ‘you call Igor or one of the other boys’. He said ‘you call me’. Which probably meant there was only Groomed and Richie in the space shuttle.

Third, and at that moment the most important, I was the only one who knew for certain that my neck wasn’t broken.

Eight

For a soldier I listed, to grow great in fame,

And be shot at for sixpence a day.