The Long Kill

by Reginald Hill

  He worked swiftly and with tremendous concentration and ninety minutes later he was satisfied. Carefully he wrapped up the three keys with a small tungsten file for on-the-spot modification and put the resulting package into his inside pocket.

  Now he relaxed and realized he was hungry, not having eaten anything since his breakfast at the Crag Hotel. The freezer held a selection of made-up meals. He selected one at random and put it in the microwave oven. It turned out to be lasagna. He ate most of it, washed down with a half bottle of his best Chablis. Suddenly he felt rather restless and looked at the telephone and thought of ringing Anya in Cumbria. It was a crazy notion, instantly dismissed. He then thought of ringing his Enid number, to let them know he was here. But that would be a mistake too. He had retired. He must not seem to have any desire to make contact. And in any case he guessed that they would know he was back by now and if they wished to contact him, eventually they’d get round to it.

  He forced himself to relax, and went through to the bedroom, and lay on his bed, and waited for Jacob.

  The first time he ever saw Jacob, he had been lying on his bed.

  He swam out of a drug-filled sleep into a world of physical pain and then burst through that into a world of mental and emotional agony, more bitter by far, and finally opened his eyes in desperate search of a physical image to blot out the horrors in his mind.

  And there was Jacob.

  Just a man in a dark double-breasted suit totally unsuitable for the hot, humid climate of South-East Asia, yet there was no sign of discomfort as he sat by the bed, still as a lizard on a wall, his squashed-up face wearing its customary expression of weary puzzlement at the foolishness on display before him.

  ‘You’re awake, are you?’ he asked. ‘Can you move?’

  He tried. The pain in his body shifted around a bit but didn’t get much worse until he tried to speak. Then he realized that the left side of his face must have been badly cut. A long strip of plaster covered perhaps a dozen stitches.

  ‘Where’s Nguyet?’ he managed to whisper.

  The dark-suited man shrugged.

  ‘I should think she’s dead, wouldn’t you, Mr Collins?’

  ‘I saw her, she was alive …’ His voice tailed off as he recalled his last glimpse of that golden body, supine among a forest of dusty boots.

  ‘The civil police say she was a taxi-girl picked up under Madame Nhu’s morality laws. The secret police say she was a communist sympathizer fomenting unrest at the university. The Special Force say she was a Buddhist saboteur. They can’t all be right, can they? But they all agree that she died resisting arrest, and I’m afraid they can’t all be wrong either.’

  ‘It’s not true! She can’t be dead!’

  His voice spiralled high, but not out of conviction. The other did not even argue.

  ‘And you,’ he said. ‘You’d have been dead too, wouldn’t you? If those Americans hadn’t happened to come along. What did you think you were doing?’

  The tone was one of polite curiosity. He closed his eyes and let the memories come rushing back. Flung out into the street in front of Nguyet’s apartment, he had staggered half-demented with rage and terror into the nearest bar. Here he had emptied his wallet in front of the barman and demanded a gun. Saigon, under President Diem’s repressive regime, was a city where it was said you could get anything for money. The barman said nothing but removed the money and five minutes later a newspaper-wrapped package was put into his hands. It was not a bar used much by Westerners, but as he left, two Americans came in. They were attached to their Embassy’s Cultural and Educational Mission and Jaysmith’s British Council teaching contract at the university had brought them in touch. He ignored their greeting and rushed past them, tearing at the newspaper package. Alarmed by his appearance, the Americans followed.

  As he arrived back at Nguyet’s apartment block, the street door opened and the dog-faced colonel and his entourage came out.

  Screaming with hate he had ripped the last of the paper from the package and leapt forward brandishing the ancient revolver it contained. Thrusting the weapon into the colonel’s face, he squeezed the trigger. It fell off. A soldier smashed the useless weapon from his hand. Another drove him to the ground with a savage blow to the head. Then they were all at him with rifle butts and boots. Only the arrival of the Americans had saved him from being beaten to death in the street.

  ‘I was going to kill that bastard,’ he said with savage hate. ‘I still am.’

  ‘Are you? This is the man, I believe, isn’t it?’

  A photograph was held in front of him. The dog-face of the colonel stared down at him. He nodded, unable to speak.

  ‘Colonel Tai. A very nasty piece of work. Directly answerable to Tran Van Khiem who, as you may know, is Madame Nhu’s brother and head of anti-subversion forces. And you’re going to kill him, are you? You’ll have to be quick, Mr Collins.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  The dark-suited man pointed at an envelope by the bed.

  ‘You’re persona non grata, Mr Collins. There’s a plane ticket in there, valid for this evening’s flight only. If you’re not on the flight, you will be arrested on a charge of attempted murder, subversion, sabotage, it hardly matters what as you’re not likely to survive arrest, are you? I should catch that plane if I were you, even if it means crawling to the airport, naked.’

  The superior tone got to him at last.

  ‘Who the hell are you?’ he demanded. ‘Are you official? From the Embassy? You’ve got the look of one of those smooth bastards!’

  The man laughed drily, apparently genuinely amused by the comment.

  ‘A smooth bastard, am I? Then you’d better call me Jacob, hadn’t you, Mr Collins? And am I official? No, I’m so unofficial, I scarcely exist, do I? Come here a moment, will you?’

  He went to the window. Laboriously the injured man climbed out of bed and followed. His flat was in a small block on a side street off the Boulevard Charner, one of Saigon’s main thoroughfares, choked now as nearly always during the day with cycles, motor-scooters, cars and trucks. The man who called himself Jacob pointed to the intersection.

  ‘At precisely six o’clock this afternoon, Colonel Tai will be going down the boulevard in his jeep. He will be held up there by a slight accident, right at that corner. How far is it? About fifty yards, would you say? An easy shot for a man who was his regimental and university rifle champion, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘How the hell do you know that? Who are you?’

  ‘Nobody. Jacob if you like, but I prefer nobody. What do you think, Mr Collins? Could you pull a trigger? One that wouldn’t fall off this time?’

  He didn’t have to think.

  ‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘I could pull a trigger.’

  Jacob contemplated him for a moment.

  ‘Yes, I think you could,’ he said softly. ‘Goodbye, Mr Collins.’

  He left so abruptly that there was no time to ask further questions.

  An hour later there was a gentle tap at the door.

  When he opened it, there was no one there. But against the wall stood a long cardboard box with the name and trademark of a well-known brand of vacuum cleaner on it.

  He took it into the flat and opened it.

  It contained a Lee-Enfield .303 rifle, old, but beautifully maintained. The magazine was full.

  He went to the window and looked out. Fifty yards. From this distance he could not miss. The thought of squeezing the trigger and seeing Tai’s head burst open in a shower of blood and brains filled him with such a passion of hate that he had to sit down till the weakness in his legs passed away. He had a bottle of whisky in his case, bought at Heathrow eight months earlier and still unopened.

  He opened it now and drank from the bottle. It did him good. He drank again. After a while the drink calmed the wildness in him and his mind began to function again. He knew beyond all doubt he was going to kill Tai, but he now let his thoughts dwell on the mysterious Jacob. Saig
on in the autumn of 1963 was awash with rumour. Self-immolation by Buddhist monks; acts of sabotage by God knows who; arrest without trial by Government forces; the sacking of the Saigon pagodas; all these had fuelled the perennial rumour of an imminent anti-Diem coup. Perhaps most significant of all was the withdrawal of American support, signalled in a variety of ways.

  Tai’s assassination by a Westerner would be just another such signal. That the assassin was English, not American, would mean nothing to the native populace, but it would enable the Americans to claim total innocence. Jacob was probably paying off some debt to the CIA.

  But for the full effect of the assassination to be felt it would have to be known that the killer was a Westerner. And there was only one way of advertising that.

  He stood at the window and looked out to the intersection. Jacob needed no special plan. Tai would have his usual armed escort. It was only fifty yards to the apartment block’s only entrance. If he survived sixty seconds after pulling the trigger, he would be a very lucky man.

  No. He corrected himself. A very unlucky man.

  He didn’t mind dying if that was the price to pay for the colonel’s death. His attack at Nguyet’s apartment had been suicidal.

  But he felt a sudden reluctance to die for the man called Jacob and the mysterious forces behind him.

  Despite his aching body, the whisky was making him drowsy. There were still two hours to go and he dare not risk sleep. He pulled on trousers and a shirt and went down into the street.

  He strolled aimlessly, ignoring the city’s crowded and varied street life which on first arrival had so fascinated him. The beggars, the girls selling flowers, the vendors of books and pictures and ornaments, the street urchins, the workmen in battered felt hats with never-ending, never-removed cigarettes in their lips, the hire-car drivers, the shoe-shine boys, none of these could interest him any more. Only once, when among the steady stream of svelte and graceful Vietnamese women passing in and out of the fashionable shops, he imagined he glimpsed Nguyet, did he show any animation. But even as he pressed forward crying her name, he knew he was wrong.

  And he had been wrong even to have loved her.

  He had loved his father and he had deserted him.

  He had loved his mother and she had died.

  He had been willing for the want of any other object to transfer his love to his stepfather, but he had rejected him.

  In the Army, at university, he had been popular, active, successful, but he had not made the mistake of allowing anyone too close. When he got the chance to come to this exotic, distant place, there had been no ties at home to make him hesitate.

  And here, as if the bitter rules which must guide his life in England did not apply, he had relaxed once more and taken Nguyet into the deepest and most secret places of his soul.

  Now she had paid the price.

  He stopped so suddenly that other pedestrians bumped into him. But these polite and gentle people showed no irritation or curiosity. He realized he was outside the Hotel de la Paix, one of the city’s many monuments to the French colonial dream. Without conscious decision, he went into the crowded lobby and made his way up the stairs to the top floor. Letting his instinct guide him, he turned left and walked to the end of the corridor. There was a bathroom here. He opened the door and went in.

  It was a high airy room. A posse of cockroaches scuttled beneath the high-sided cast-iron bath at his entry. Painfully, he clambered up on the side of the bath and, disturbing another huge cockroach on the dusty windowsill, opened the high narrow window.

  It gave him a crow’s-eye view straight down the boulevard. There, somewhere between three and four hundred yards away, was the intersection where the colonel’s jeep would be stopped in just over an hour’s time.

  He got down off the bath and went to the door. There was a key on the inside. He removed it, went out, and locked the door behind him.

  On his way back down the boulevard, he was even less conscious of his surroundings as he carefully paced out the distance. Three hundred and twenty-five yards. Back in his flat, he packed the few belongings he wanted to take with him in a small grip, slipped a small pair of field glasses he used for bird-spotting into his pocket and repacked the rifle in its box.

  He arrived back at the hotel at quarter to six. Approaching one of the hire-car drivers he told him he would be leaving for the airport in about fifteen minutes and gave him the grip to look after. It was Nguyet who had taught him this lesson about most of her people. Trust given without hesitation was nearly always repaid in full.

  No one paid him any attention as once more he climbed the stairs. Locking the bathroom door behind him, he took out the rifle and adjusted the sights. They had been set at fifty yards and no doubt perfectly zeroed. Jacob was not a man to omit any detail, he guessed.

  At five to six, he turned the bath taps on. The ancient geyser made a thoroughly satisfactory din, a series of groans, wheezes, and explosions among which a gun shot would hardly be noticed. Standing on the edge of the bath, he scanned the middle distance with his glasses.

  It was perfectly timetabled. At one minute to six he caught his first glimpse of the small convoy of two jeeps moving very fast and scattering the other traffic with much blaring of horns. As they came nearer, he saw that one was crowded with soldiers, guns at the ready.

  The other had only one armed soldier sitting next to the driver, and in the back, still and solitary, Colonel Tai.

  At the intersection a bent old man pushed an overloaded handcart into the path of an ancient station-wagon which slewed round, blocking the highway. The driver leapt out, shouting abuse at the old man. The jeeps arrived and skidded to a halt.

  The trouble was that while there was certainly a clear shot from his apartment in the side street, from the hotel the station-wagon blocked his line of fire. The soldiers were screaming at the driver and the old man with the handcart, who continued their argument, desperately trying to keep things going till the dilatory assassin condescended to fire. Any moment now, the impatient colonel might order his jeep to divert up the side street, taking him safely out of any possible shot.

  But the colonel’s impatience manifested itself in quite another way. Standing up in his jeep, he too began to shout at the quarrelling men. Three quarters of his head, just enough for identification, were visible above the station-wagon’s roof.

  He expelled his breath slowly and squeezed the trigger.

  The explosion was deafening in the confines of the small room, but he hardly noticed it. All his senses were straining out towards that distant figure. The head snapped back as though flicked by a giant finger, and Tai fell backwards out of sight.

  Stepping down, he dipped the rifle into the bathwater, rubbed the stock and butt, then slid it out of sight under the bath. Then, turning off the taps and pulling out the plug, he went to the door and unlocked it.

  The corridor was empty. He walked down the stairs, not hurrying, across the foyer and into the street. His driver was waiting with the engine of his ancient Renault ticking over. He got in and the vehicle set off heading in the opposite direction to that in which the colonel’s body lay.

  He arrived at the airport just in time to check in for his flight. The girl on duty said apologetically over his shoulder to someone behind him, ‘Sorry, sir, with this gentleman’s arrival, the flight is now full.’

  He turned to find himself meeting Jacob’s indifferent gaze.

  ‘You thought there’d be a place,’ he said with mild accusation.

  Jacob shrugged slightly and said, ‘Feeling better, are you, Mr Collins?’

  ‘Much better.’

  ‘I’m pleased to hear it. Best hurry. You don’t want to miss your plane, do you? Perhaps we’ll meet again.’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘I never want to see you again. Never.’

  He turned away and headed for the departure gate. He didn’t look back, neither at the man called Jacob nor at the city of Saigon. He was finished with them both
for ever.

  He had fallen into a light sleep when a gentle tap at the door aroused him instantly.

  When he opened it he found himself looking at the two glue-sniffers from the foot of the stairs. The only difference was that their eyes were no longer blank, but bright and alert.

  He stood quite still till their eye-search was over, then the scruffily bearded one called, ‘All right, sir.’

  A third figure appeared behind them.

  ‘Thank you, Davey,’ he said to the bearded man. ‘Thank you, Adam. I shouldn’t be long.’

  The glue-sniffers withdrew, closing the door.

  The newcomer nodded casually at Jaysmith.

  ‘Hello, Jay,’ he said.

  ‘Hello, Jacob,’ said Jaysmith.

  Chapter 9

  The two men sat and viewed each other like old friends reunited after long separation and uncertain what in their relationship had withered, what remained vital.

  Jacob had refused wine, accepted whisky. He raised the glass and sipped it slowly.

  He’s aged, thought Jaysmith. For many years Jacob had been just an unchanging voice to him. In his mind’s eye, he had always stayed as at their first encounter. Now he saw a man in his sixties, fit and active still, but shrunken somehow. The simian puzzlement of that crinkled face had been eroded from great ape to marmoset.

  But the mind and the method remained the same.

  ‘You puzzled us, didn’t you?’ he said with a slight shake of the head. ‘What happened up there?’

  ‘I missed.’

  Jacob showed no surprise.

  ‘Was the target alerted?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Of course not, or you’d have said, wouldn’t you? What was your range?’

  ‘Twelve fifty.’

  ‘You always liked the long kill, didn’t you, Jay? Right from that very first time.’

  His voice was gently reminiscing. Old friends finding their way back to the old relationship via shared memories.

  ‘This time I missed.’