The Gun Seller - Страница 4

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I started the motor, revved it loud enough to wake a few fat Belgravian financiers, and set off for Notting Hill. I had to take it easy in the rain, so there was plenty of time for reflection on the night’s business.

The one thing that stayed in my mind, as I jinked the bike along the slick, yellow-lit streets, was Sarah telling me to drop ‘that shit’. And the reason I had to drop it was because there was a dying man in the room.

Newtonian Conversation, I thought to myself. The implication was that I could have kept on holding that shit, if the room hadn’t had a dying man in it.

That cheered me up. I started to think that if I couldn’t work things so that one day she and I would be together in a room with no dying men in it at all, then my name isn’t James Fincham.

Which, of course, it isn’t.

TWO

For a long time I used to go to bed early.

MARCEL PROUST

I arrived back at the flat and went through the usual answerphone routine. Two meaningless bleeps, one wrong number, one call from a friend interrupted in the first sentence, followed by three people I didn’t want to hear from who I now had to ring back.

God, I hated that machine.

I sat down at my desk and went through the day’s mail. I threw some bills into the bin, and then remembered that I’d moved the bin into the kitchen - so I got annoyed, stuffed the rest of the post into a drawer, and gave up on the idea that doing chores would help me to get things straight in my mind.

It was too late to start playing loud music, and the only other entertainment I could find in the flat was whisky, so I picked up a glass and a bottle of The Famous Grouse, poured myself a couple of fingers, and went into the kitchen. I added enough water to turn it into just a Vaguely Familiar Grouse, and then sat down at the table with a pocket dictaphone, because someone had once told me that talking out loud helps clarify things. I’d said would it work with butter? and they’d said no, but it would work with whatever is troubling your spirit.

I put a tape in the machine and flicked the record switch.‘Dramatis Personae,’ Isaid. ‘Alexander Woolf, father of Sarah Woolf, owner of dinky Georgian house in Lyall Street, Belgravia, employer of blind and vindictive interior designers, and Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Gaine Parker. Unknown male Caucasian, American or Canadian, fiftyish. Rayner. Large, violent, hospitalised. Thomas Lang, thirty-six, Flat D, 42 Westbourne Close, late of the Scots Guards, honourable discharge with rank of Captain. The facts, insofar as they are known, are these.’

I don’t know why tape recorders make me talk like this, but they do.

‘Unknown male attempts to secure employment of T. Lang for the purpose of committing unlawful killing of A. Woolf. Lang declines position on grounds of being nice. Principled. Decent. A gentleman.’

I took a mouthful of whisky and looked at the dictaphone, wondering if I was ever going to play this soliloquy back to anyone. An accountant had told me it was a sensible thing to buy because I could get the tax back on it. But as I didn’t pay any tax, have any need for a dictaphone, or trust the accountant as far as I could spit him, I looked upon this machine as one of my less sensible purchases.

Heigh ho.

‘Lang goes to Woolf’s house, with the intention of warning him against possible assassination attempt. Woolf absent. Lang decides to instigate enquiries.’

I paused for a while, and the while turned into a long while, so I sipped some more whisky and laid aside the dictaphone while I did some thinking.

The only enquiry I had instigated had been the word ‘what’ - and I’d barely managed to get that out of my mouth before Rayner had hit me with a chair. Beyond that, all I’d done was half-kill a man and leave, wishing, pretty fervently, that I’d other-half-killed him too. And you don’t really want that sort of thing lying around on magnetic tape unless you know what you’re doing. Which, amazingly enough, I didn’t.

However, I’d just about known enough to recognise Rayner, even before I knew his name. I couldn’t say he’d been following me exactly, but I’ve a good memory for faces - which makes up for being utterly pathetic with names - and Rayner’s was not a difficult face. Heathrow airport, the public bar of some Devonshire Arms on the King’s Road, and the entrance toLeicester Square tube had been enough of an advertisement, even for an idiot like me.

I’d had the feeling that we were going to meet eventually, so I’d prepared myself for the rainy day by visiting Blitz Electronics on the Tottenham Court Road, where I’d shelled out two pounds eighty for a foot of large-diameter electrical cable. Flexible, heavy, and, when it comes to beating off brigands and footpads, better than any purpose-built cosh. The only time it doesn’t work as a weapon is when you leave it in the kitchen drawer, still in its wrapping. Then it’s really not very effective at all.

As for the unknown male Caucasian who’d offered me a killing job, well, I didn’t hold out much hope of ever tracing him. Two weeks ago I’d been inAmsterdam, escorting aManchester bookmaker who desperately wanted to believe that he had violent enemies. He’d hired me to bolster the fantasy. So I’d held car doors open for him, and checked buildings for snipers that I knew weren’t there, and then spent a gruelling forty-eight hours sitting with him in night-clubs, watching him throw money in every direction but mine. When he’d finally wilted, I’d ended up loafing about my hotel room watching blue movies on television. The phone had rung - during a particularly good bit, as I remember - and a male voice had asked me to the bar for a drink.

I’d checked to make sure that the bookmaker was safely tucked up in bed with a nice warm prostitute, then sidled downstairs in the hope of saving myself forty quid by wringing a couple of drinks out of some old army friend.

But, as it turned out, the voice on the phone belonged to a short fat body in an expensive suit who I definitely didn’t know. And didn’t particularly want to know either, until he reached into his jacket and pulled out a roll of bank notes about as thick as I am.

American bank notes. Exchangeable for goods and services at literally thousands of retail outlets worldwide. He pushed a one hundred dollar bill across the table to me, so I spent five seconds quite liking the little chap, and then, almost immediately, love died.

He gave me some ‘background’ on a man named Woolf - where he lived, what he did, why he did it, how much he did it for - and then he told me that the bank note on the table had a thousand little friends, who would find their way into my possession if Woolf’s life could be discreetly brought to an end.

I had to wait until our part of the bar was empty, which I knew wouldn’t take long. At the prices they were charging for liquor, there were probably only a couple of dozen people in the world who could afford to stick around for a second drink.

When the bar had cleared, I leant across to the fat man and gave him a speech. It was a dull speech, but even so, he listened very carefully, because I’d reached under the table and taken hold of his scrotum. I told him what kind of a man I was, what kind of a mistake he’d made, and what he could wipe with his money. And then we’d parted company.

That was it. That was all I knew, and my arm was hurting. I went to bed.

I dreamt a lot of things that I won’t embarrass you with, and ended up imagining that I was having to hoover my carpet. I kept hoovering and hoovering, but whatever was making the mark on the carpet just wouldn’t go away.

Then I realised that I was awake, and that the stain on the carpet was sunlight because someone had just yanked open the curtains. In the twinkling of an eye I whipped my body into a coiled, taut, come-and-get-it crouch, the electrical cable in my fist and bloody murder in my heart.

But then I realised that I’d dreamt that too, and what I was actually doing was lying in bed watching a large, hairy hand very close to my face. The hand disappeared, leaving a mug with steam coming out of it, and the smell of a popular infusion, sold commercially as PG Tips. Perhaps in that twinkling of an eye I’d worked out that intruders who want to slit your throat don’t boil the kettle and open the curtains. ‘Time is it?’

‘Thirty-five minutes past the hour of eight. Time for your Shreddies, Mr Bond.’

I pulled myself up from the bed and looked over at Solomon. He was as short and cheerful as ever, with the same ghastly brown raincoat that he’d bought from the back pages of theSunday Express.

‘I take it you’ve come to investigate a theft?’ I said, rubbing my eyes until white dots of light started appearing.

‘What theft would that be, sir?’

Solomon called everyone ‘sir’ except his superiors. ‘The theft of my doorbell,’ I said.

‘If you are, in your sarcastic fashion, referring to my silent entrance to these premises, then may I remind you that I am a practitioner of the black arts. And practitioners, in order to qualify for the term, have to practise. Now be a good lad and jump into some kit will you? We’re running late.’

He disappeared into the kitchen and I could hear the clicking and buzzing of my fourteenth-century toaster.

I hauled myself out of bed, wincing as my left arm took some weight, slung on a shirt and a pair of trousers and took the electric razor into the kitchen.

Solomon had laid a place for me at the kitchen table, and set out some toast in a rack that I didn’t even know I had. Unless he’d brought it with him, which seemed unlikely. ‘More tea, vicar?’