by Nino Ricci
His first morning at the camp he was given an eighteen-round Glock and put in front of a huge rubberized screen designed to reseal itself from a bullet’s friction when it was shot. As he watched, a shooting rampage unfolded in front of him that was like one of Marcus’s shooter games blown up to life size, so realistic he could make out the colour of people’s eyes, the sprays of blood on the walls. People running screaming in every direction; others lying bleeding or dead on the floor. The setting, a classroom building in a university, was custom chosen, every detail hauntingly familiar. The scene moved him down hallways, around corners, through open foyers where he stood fully exposed, with each step the sickening pop, pop of the shooter and the grating howls and pleas getting louder. The whole time, people running at him wild-eyed, the fear in them so bald and real he could hardly bear to look at it.
From a doorway, a man ranting at him, a girl in a chokehold, the flash of what might have been a gun. David’s heart was pounding; he was drenched in sweat. At the back of his neck, the first time it had ever happened to him with a gun in his hands, a premonitory shiver.
The screen went black.
His instructor stepped out from a monitoring booth at the back of the room.
“Sorry, man, you’re dead.”
David had signed on for regular courses after that, for a while going down almost weekly, sometimes for two- or three-day sessions. The place offered training for every setting and every scenario, from back-alley muggings and home invasions to hostage takings and guerrilla-style ambushes. In the course of a day he might fire a thousand rounds, doing the same drills over and over, building his muscle memory, training his animal self to make decisions his thinking one was too oafishly lumbering for. After a while he started getting flashes of the simulations he’d done as though he had truly lived them, had been through rampages and war, was a seasoned killer. At the back of his mind, the constant obsession with raising the odds. The actual stopping zones on a human body were infinitesimally small: there was the brain stem’s medulla, about the size of an egg, which could shut the body down like a light switch; there was the heart, the size of a fist. The prospect of making these shots on a moving target in a state of agitation without having hardwired them into your very being was next to nil.
From up the street, the rat-a-tat of a Kalashnikov being tested and right away the smell of powder, sharp as ammonia. All along the market the AKs predominate, all with the weathered, indestructible look of having been through it, wars and guerrilla uprisings and coups, jihads, terrorist massacres. Some of them might have come off the lines right back in the first days of the Cold War, might have made the rounds since then of Cambodia and Vietnam, Angola and Afghanistan, Bosnia, Rwanda, Iraq, to end up in this backwater failed state still ready for service. David had had a few goes on an AK at his gun camp. Even in full auto, when it could slice off an arm in a matter of seconds, it had the simplicity of a Nerf gun, and about as much kick.
He pans the street with his video glasses, but when he tries to engage any of the traders they shake their heads, either not understanding him or not wanting to. David can feel the street watching him, the barefoot boys, the alhajis in the tea houses, the young men who sit chewing khat in the shade of tamarinds. He has already seen how easily matters can turn here. The journalists’ driver had tried to force their van through a throng of pedestrians once and people had begun to shout insults and pound at the windows with what felt like real violence.
“Mr. Man!” One of the traders is holding out a beat-up AKM whose folding metal stock has the look of a crude prosthetic limb. “This way, come, you can shoot this one! One bullet, one dollar!”
The man is thick-necked and hulking, with none of the desert leanness that is the norm here. He wears a bright yellow T-shirt that reads Pirate.
“Who do you want to shoot today, Mr. Man? Who do you want to kill?”
A dozen rifles dangle like sides of meat from the front of his stall. A couple of M16 knock-offs; a hodgepodge of Kalashnikovs with markings in Cyrillic, in Roman, in Arabic, in Chinese. David, playing along, takes the AKM the trader holds out.
“How much?”
The man grins.
“For you, my friend, only your life.”
“The price is too high, I think.”
“You are smart, my friend. You don’t want to die in this place.”
The trader goes by the name of Madman. David tries to draw him out, not sure if he is con man or sage but glad to be getting some footage.
“You are journalist, yes? New York Times. You can put my name there.”
He goes through his guns, reeling off prices. David tries to get him to talk more generally, about sources, about his bosses, about the city’s factions, but he grows cagey. David asks about the Malana, whom the Western press touts as someone trying to rise above the sectarianism and violence, but Madman acts like he has never heard of him.
“People from your country, they come here, they say factions, they say clan, is a way to say we are not civilized. But we are civilized, my friend, many thousands of years. Before the Romans, before the Greeks. They say guns, they say killing, but where are there more guns, more killing? In your own country.”
David doesn’t quibble. For all he knows the man has committed atrocities, nearly everyone has in this place who has survived, but he seems to have understood the lesson of history, that in the long run such delinquencies hardly matter.
David has spied a crate at the back of the stall that holds a collection of handguns, piled in a heap like discarded auto parts.
“What about those? Are they for sale?”
Madman’s eyes brighten.
“Aha! So I have found you out! You like to have pistol, not so?”
He dumps the crate unceremoniously onto the counter of his stall. A Jericho, a Taurus Millennium, a couple of Glocks. The others are mostly cheap knock-offs or types David has never seen.
“Which one, my friend? I give you best price, to sell and also buy back.”
David eyes the guns, hardly daring to take one in hand. At his camp, once his reflexes in the simulations had sharpened to the point where more times than not he was making the kill, fear had given way to something else: anticipation. The slow burn in his blood, better than any drug; the incredible focus.
“Is that all you’ve got?”
Madman smiles.
“You are right.” As if they are no longer playing at things. “You are a man of knowledge. Those are only for boys.”
He brings out a basket with what is clearly his premium line. A Heckler and Koch. A Springfield. A Walther. It is the last one, though, that holds David’s eye: a Beretta. It looks like an idealized version of his own, the same red dot by the safety, the same hatching on the slide, the same monogrammed grip, but sleeker and darker and more substantial somehow, with the flawless finish of something engineered to standards slightly beyond the human. He picks it up. It sits more squarely in his hand than his own does, feels more perfectly balanced. He checks the markings: US M9. American military issue.
He drops the magazine and inspects it, pulls the slide back to check the chamber and barrel. Clear.
Madman looks pleased.
“I think you know this one.”
David points the gun skyward and slowly squeezes the trigger to test its resistance. This is the instant he loves, the one just before the hammer strikes, when the gun is still all potential, poised at the balancing point between intent and loss of control.
Click.
“How much?”
The question of buying or not feels already moot. Even Madman, taking his time, playing David out, seems to know this.
“This one is special, my friend, is only one in all of the market. You can see for yourself. Is from your own soldiers, when they came.”
The gun has clearly seen service but doesn’t look old enough to go back to the American presence. More likely some recent clandestine has been parted from it, though under what circum
stances David doesn’t like to guess.
“I’ll give you three hundred.”
In the end he agrees to five, probably more than the gun would cost new, and to a buyback of a mere hundred and fifty. He hasn’t dared to come out with that much money on him and will have to return to his hotel for it. Now that business is being transacted Madman has turned no-nonsense, his eye perpetually scanning the street.
“I will come with you. Is better.”
Madman wraps the gun in burlap and twine together with a box of the same 9×19 Parabellum soft points David uses in his Beretta back home, making a parcel that resembles those of the local bootleggers. He calls a boy over to watch his stall and pops a banana clip into a Kalashnikov.
“We are safe now, no worries.”
Madman waits behind at the cross street when they reach the hotel, to avoid problems with the guards. In the hotel courtyard, Said is berating one of the kitchen boys.
“Animal!” he says, reaching out theatrically to smack the boy on the back of the head when he sees David passing.
The hotel is bustling today because of some sort of peace forum sponsored by the international delegation. David manages to get in and out without interference, glad he has squirrelled away some of his cash in his room and spared himself the awkwardness of needing to get into Yusuf’s safe. Only when he is back in the street does he realize how reckless he has been, rushing out unaccompanied and unarmed with his fistful of cash like the merest rube.
Madman stands waiting for him with his parcel in the shadow of a ruined building.
“You managed it?”
“All there.”
He draws into a doorway to count the cash.
“Is good.” Already elsewhere, already gone. “Go with God, my friend.”
This time Yusuf spots him as he enters the hotel, his eye going straight to the burlap package.
“Mr. Pace! Where have you been? Is very foolish to go out alone!”
He is decked out in all his finery today like some oil sheik.
“As you can see, I’ve managed to survive.”
David heads for his room. In the hall he passes the flinty Reuters woman he met the night before at the hotel bar, a new arrival, dressed in a low-cut top that in a country like this might be enough to earn her a stoning. Tasha or Tara, something fashionable like that. At the bar—a snakepit of gonzo journalists and black marketeers that Yusuf opens up only well after supper, presumably to keep it from corrupting the locals—she had barely given him the time of day, matching the men drink for drink and holding court the whole night with her war-zone tales.
She raises an exaggerated eyebrow at his parcel, clearly taking it for the bottle it has been made up to resemble.
“Any to share?”
Fuck you, David thinks, though something in him responds to her despite himself, as though the insect swarm that has been massing at the back of his head is starting to clear.
David gets one of the boys in the service courtyard to bring a jar of kerosene up to his room and sets about cleaning the Beretta, stripping it down on his flimsy desk. Fine desert sand has worked its way into the gun’s every cranny. The slide shows a good deal of wear, though the barrel, which he scrubs by pulling a strip of kerosene-soaked hand towel through it with a shoelace, is fairly clean. All this suggests the gun has come straight out of the military, which uses only fully jacketed rounds, not much given to fouling. In the delicious logic of war, jacketed rounds are considered more humanitarian than the soft points favoured by civilians because they pass through flesh more cleanly.
Partway into the cleaning, someone comes knocking. The air conditioning has died again and the smell of the kerosene has filled the room.
“Is everything all right, Mr. Pace?”
It is Yusuf. David doesn’t get up.
“Fine. Everything’s fine.”
The barest pause.
“I’m told you have something to clean.” It seems everyone here is Yusuf’s spy. “If I can help you, Mr. Pace. On account of the smell. For the other guests.”
“Be done in a minute. Just an old clock I picked up.”
The evasion is so flimsy that Yusuf doesn’t even bother to acknowledge it.
“You mustn’t go out on your own again, Mr. Pace, I beg you. It’s very dangerous. You must let the hotel look after your security.”
When he has gone David reassembles the gun and goes through his drills. He has brought a holster with him that fits inside his waistband and he practises drawing and holstering, watching for snags and checking the drape of his shirt. He tests the alignment on the sights; he works the trigger. The trigger pull is heavier on the first shot if the gun is uncocked because of the added resistance of having to pull back the hammer. David dry-fires again and again with the hammer both forward and back so he doesn’t get caught botching a shot because he has miscalculated the weight of the pull.
His room looks out over the razor wire of the hotel’s security wall toward the distant slopes of the northern neighbourhoods. A lone low-rise in concrete and silvered glass a couple of blocks over breaks the view. David can’t tell at this distance if it is occupied or abandoned. Someone could be standing at one of its windows that very minute angling to get a bead on him. In the city’s worst days gangs of boys had made a game of such sport, targeting random strangers for casual killings.
David takes aim at one of the upper windows and in his mind’s eye sees a shadow move behind its mirrored surface. He pulls the trigger and a black throb goes through him.
Click.
At the camp it had come to seem that threat was no longer something he prepared for but what he needed to conjure. Now, in this place of threat, the scenarios keep playing out in his head until it is becoming hard to distinguish what he craves from what he fears.
In the hotel dining room Eric, the Frenchman, calls out to him from a table the journalists have colonized at the back. The Reuters woman is there, scrolling through her phone.
“Petra, have you met David yet?” For some reason Eric has made a point of taking David under his wing. “He’s working on a book about failed states. You must know his work.”
“We met at the bar, I think.” Barely looking up from her phone. “Sorry, I never caught the last name.”
“Pah-cheh.” Eric rolls the name out like an aria. “As in ‘Si vis pacem, para bellum.’ Though maybe you know him as Pace.”
“David Pace? You’ve got to be kidding.”
As if on cue her phone rings.
“Sorry, guys, I have to take this.”
David hates the hard turd of ego in him that still clings to the least sign of recognition. That gives in to Eric’s blandishments, though for all David knows he comes here to diddle young boys. That itches now for Petra’s return.
“It looks like the prospects are good,” Eric says. “I am talking about the truce, of course.”
“Don’t tease me with false promise.”
“Ah, yes. If there is a drug here even more dangerous than khat it is that one. Hope.”
When she returns her whole manner has changed.
“So. Professor David Pace. Masculine History, right? Julius Caesar?”
“Excellent,” Eric says. “So you know it, then?”
Petra laughs.
“Oh, I didn’t say I’d read it. But I had this history prof at Harvard who used to go on about it, if you can believe it. Small world.”
David resists the urge to ask the professor’s name.
“So this is the sort of work Harvard gets you these days?”
“Oh, I didn’t say I’d graduated.”
This time David laughs as well, too loudly.
The others have begun to drift off. Eric asks about David’s trip to the gun market.
“I picked up some LAVs and a truckload of M16s. I’m taking the city tonight after supper, if anyone’s up for it.”
“If it means I’d be able to get a drink in this place before midnight,” Petra says, �
��then I’m in.”
It comes to David that this is his cue. Any to share? He is glad of the mickey of gin he scrounged in his first days here on a booze run with some of the journalists.
“I’ve got a bottle back in my room you’re both welcome to.”
Petra lets the offer hang a few beats.
“Can’t say I’d mind. Eric, you in?”
Eric holds up his hands in a show of Gallic helplessness.
“Sadly, some of us have to work for a living.”
Petra draws a cigarette from her pack and David leans in to light it. She takes a long drag.
“I guess that leaves me and Mr. Pah-cheh, then.”
David pours a couple of generous shots of gin into the room’s plastic bar glasses and tops them with a splash of nearly flat tonic from an open can in his fridge. There is an ice machine down the hall but David has yet to see any evidence that it works.
“You need the fucking secret service to keep track of the supply line here these days,” Petra says. “I had some duty-free coming in and the bastards actually confiscated it.”
“I’m sure Eric can set you up. Or Yusuf.”
“Not Yusuf, the snake, he draws the line there. The whole not profiting from sin thing. By which he means what a sin it would be to cut into his profits from his price-gouging bar.”
David doesn’t let himself think how long it has been since he has had sex. More than once he has had to pay for it; more than once he has failed to finish. The last sex he had that actually mattered was with Sophie, also something he doesn’t let himself think about.
He has hardly set the bottle down before Petra is reaching for it to refill her glass. He catches a whiff of something as she leans in that seems too chemical, too deep, to be just the lingering alcohol breath of her previous night’s bender.
“So Harvard,” he says. “How was that?”
For a second she doesn’t seem sure what he is referring to.
