The Guardian

by Christopher Kenworthy

  He wound the end of one long scarf round one wrist and was reaching for the other when he heard a movement in the doorway.

  When he looked up, Amy was standing there, with her pistol in her hand.

  “I thought you were...” he began, and then everything happened at once.

  The girl on the bed twisted onto her back and grabbed for the knife, Carver ducked, and Amy fired.

  The girl fell backwards onto the pillows of Djamalla’s bed.

  The .38 calibre bullet left a neat hole between the wide, violet eyes and from the cavity a tiny fountain of blood squirted for a few seconds, soaking the pillows.

  Carver sat up, the knife now held by the blade behind his right ear.

  The gun was still pointing at the bed, and Carver was beyond it.

  “Drop the gun, Amy, or I’ll kill you,” he said.

  Very slowly, the gun wavered from its aim, and fell to the floor with a thump. Amy followed it, her eyes rolling backwards into her head in a classic faint.

  “Oh, goddamn it,” said Carver out loud. “This place is getting to be like the Gunfight at OK Corral!”

  He stood up and went round the bed. Amy was lying on her back, arms outstretched, knees together and feet splayed. Her skirt had ridden back up her thighs to show that she was wearing stockings, a sight of which Carver would normally have thoroughly approved.

  Tonight, however, he had had enough of unconscious women. He took Amy’s left wrist in his right, pulled her upright, and ducked to take her on his shoulder in a fireman’s lift. As he walked through to the living room, she gave a little moan down between his shoulder blades and he laid her on the settee, and turned the standing lamp on over her head. She turned her face away from the light, and moaned again.

  Carver was tempted to go and get cold water, but he did not want to leave her. She seemed to have far too good a supply of guns for comfort.

  He pocketed the snub-nosed .38 – hardly a woman’s gun, he thought, but Amy had shown a remarkable gift with it. The pistol was a little small for his taste. Like most Americans he believed deeply that big guns were best guns.

  Amy came to, looking sick, and he put her head between her knees for a while, partly to help bring her round and partly because a woman with her head held firmly between her knees was a woman unlikely to kick him in the face.

  When he was sure she was fully conscious, he explained to her what had happened. She nodded, very white still, and when he finished, she said simply:

  “When I saw the body in the hall, I thought you had gone berserk. When you knocked me out, I was sure.”

  It made sense, he had forgotten the first sight she must have seen through the half open door would be Djamalla’s body.

  “She was dead when I got here. The blonde must have killed her,” he said.

  “Then ... we learned nothing?” She stared at him with huge eyes.

  “We learned that the next sale is at a place called Château Bram on Saturday,” he said.

  She got up and walked to the bathroom, where he could hear her vomiting. Presently, she came back, drying her face and hands on a towel. She looked considerably better, but still groggy. He found some aspirin in the kitchen drawer and some painkilling suppositories and offered them. She took both packets out of his hand, and disappeared for a few minutes. He supposed that like most French women she preferred to take her painkillers internally.

  “I must telephone my office and report the deaths,” she said and he sat quiet while she phoned, low-voiced and clipped from the living room. Her end of the conversation was monosyllabic and unrevealing.

  Then: “We must go now, the clean up squad must not see you. We can go to my place,” she said.

  He glanced at his watch. It was five in the morning, and already the sky would be greying. Without argument, he followed her down the darkened staircase, and into the street. Once, there, he turned towards the Place de la République.

  “Come, we can go in my car,” she said. He shook his head.

  “I have an errand to run and then I’m going south,” he told her. “We’ve only got a couple of days to find this Château Bram and get in. After that, the evidence is going abroad and Irene with it.”

  “Get in the car; I know where Château Bram is,” she said. “It will be two days’ drive, and we will arrive just in time to see them assemble. We do not want to be hanging around the area for days beforehand. The locals would notice us immediately, and locals talk.”

  There was a lot of sense in that. He shrugged and climbed into her Renault 4 obediently, and let her drive, While she did so, he examined her carefully. Since he had met her she had exuded the same kind of self-possession and calm that her British counterpart did. Her vomiting after the death of the girl in the apartment had been the only crack in her composure, and that indicated a strength of character and professionalism that it would be prudent to respect.

  She might look like a fashion plate, but she thought like a Marine Commando, and she was a respectable shot, too. The shot she had fired at him in the kitchen had been uncomfortably close, considering she was firing blind, in the dark and in a flat she had never visited before.

  The other had been a classic killing shot fired almost as a mechanical reaction to a snap situation.

  Now, he needed two things desperately. Sleep and a gun.

  “Don’t go to your flat,” he said as Amy swung round a corner narrowly missing a clutch of parked cars and a young man on a moped with two baguettes sticking from his armpit at suicidal angles.

  “I need to do some shopping.”

  Amy gave him a withering look from the corner of her eye.

  “At six in the morning? Not a prayer,” she said.

  He pulled himself upright in the car and shook his head. He had to sleep, and soon. But he could not sleep in Paris. The enemy were proving all too good at finding him no matter where he happened to be. He needed to get on the road, and let Amy drive while he slept.

  So he needed to get his hand on a gun. A real gun, not a snub-nosed .38 special.

  “Turn left and make for the Place de L’Étoile,” he instructed. Amy started to argue, and he snapped: “Do as I say, for once, for Christ’s sake!”

  She gave him a startled look, and swung left.

  “If you say we have to drive to Château Bram, then we’ll drive,” he said. “But we’ll drive in my car, not this biscuit box on wheels.”

  Her expression said volumes, but she followed his instructions and they arrived in the narrow side street where his car now stood. The big Daihatsu was tucked away behind a Citroën van which appeared to have been built of corrugated iron, and then ambushed by men armed with shotguns. The rash of rust spots on it looked like freckles.

  Carver walked round the Daihatsu, kicking the tires, peered underneath for any signs of sinister packages, and decided it had not been tampered with. To be on the safe side, though, he handed the keys to Amy and let her open it up.

  Nothing went bang. They climbed in.

  Carver waited till the glow plug had done its job and the diesel engine coughed wheezily into wakefulness. When it had settled down to a sewing-machine tick-a-tick-a-tick, he eased it out of the narrow gap between the Citroën and the wall, and let it run down to the Étoile. Amy slumped silently in the passenger seat, and looked sulky.

  “You want to pick up anything from the apartment?”

  She looked at him, startled again.

  “From my apartment? You mean we go now? In this?”

  “Yo.” Carver peered at a single elderly traction-avant coming up the Champs-Élysées, decided to risk it, and shaved past in front of it. The driver, forbidden by law to sound his horn, banged impotently on the side of his car as it slid by two coats of paint away, and vanished viciously towards the Bois de Boulogne. Carver felt better, though not a lot.

  “Very well,” said Amy, sounding a little more perky. “Drop me here and I’ll get my car and lead y
ou there.

  “No need,” said Carver, still driving. “Nobody’s going to tow a police car away, and we won’t need yours. Also, it may be known, they’ve been finding us too easy so far and I’d like to know how.”

  She snorted but seemed to accept his argument, and directed him to a quiet street on the left bank, where they both went upstairs to a small flat with smart furniture and a lot of clothes tossed into heaps on the bed. Amy pulled a soft bag from under the bed, and threw clothes into it seemingly at random.

  Carver sat down on a chair and examined the revolver thoughtfully. It was loaded with bullets which had a small hole in the nose, and he looked at one of them for a long time before slipping it back into the cylinder.

  He really must remember not to be hit by one of Amy’s wild rounds, he said to himself. It might severely spoil his day.

  *

  He was still thinking that when she woke him, over an hour later.

  He sat in the chair, stiff and embarrassed. Amy of the couture clothes and big, beautiful jewellery was gone, and in her place a dark haired student in jeans and a halter top was staring at him. She had a tan for which a model girl would have willingly have sold her soul, and the breasts which stretched the halter top were round and high. Her jeans were belted tightly at the waist with a broad, rawhide belt with an oval silver buckle big enough to eat her dinner off, and she was wearing cowboy boots.

  There were big, dark glasses perched on top of her head, and a pair of soft rawhide gloves tucked into the hip pocket of her jeans. In her hand was a cup of coffee slightly smaller than a municipal swimming pool.

  “White men come, kill buffalo,” Carver croaked and reached for the cup of coffee. It was boiling, black and laced with cognac as well as sugar. He gulped it down, burning his tongue.

  “Quoi?”

  “You. You look like the reason they all went west, young man. Good boots, there. And the buckle says you won a rodeo.”

  She shot him a one sided smile.

  “It is true you are an Apache?”

  “My daddy was a Sioux Indian, so I suppose you’re close. At least you got me on the right Continent,” he grunted. The second half of the coffee was almost as good as the first, and she took the cup away wordlessly and brought it back refilled.

  “What time is it?” He looked at his watch while he was asking and her reply came as he saw that it was after eight.

  “Oh, shit! Now I suppose we’ll have to fight our way through the traffic.”

  They had. It was awful, but eventually they pulled into the little tree lined road in Fontainebleau where Nathan lived, and he turned off the engine and let the car rest.

  “I thought you wanted to do shopping?”

  “I do,” he said. “But this is one shop you won’t find on any guides. Wait here for me, would you?”

  He ignored her protests and went along the pavement under the trees to the dusty door in the old house where Nathan David had his agency. He had to ring three times before the grill in the door opened, and a dark eye inspected him coldly.

  “Oui?”

  “It is I, Carver, and I have come to see le facteur,” he said. There was a long silence and he looked back at the Daihatsu and saw Amy’s furious face staring back at him. He was glad he had the keys in his pocket. For certain reasons he was not prepared to tell Amy, it would be impossible for her to hot wire the Fourtrak in a short time, and he was fairly certain she would have driven off and left him there if she had the opportunity.

  The door opened smoothly and silently, and he stepped through. Facing him was a slim man of middle height with a close crop of prematurely silver hair and a face like a tanned Corsair pirate. He was dressed in a faded denim shirt and light blue cotton trousers, with espadrilles on his feet and no socks.

  “Shalom, Nathan,” said Carver. “I need a gun.”

  The pirate grinned, showing a set of strong, healthy teeth, and shook him by the hand.

  “Shalom, Carver,” he said. “You need a gun? So what else is new?”

  “Not a very great deal, “ said Carver, and allowed himself to be ushered down to the rear of the house and into a kitchen which looked like an advertisement for kitchens.

  Coffee was steaming on a hob, blue and white tiles picked out the wall spaces between carved oak cupboard doors. There was a basket of bread and a jar of apricot jam on the draining board.

  “You want to eat?”

  Carver shook his head. “I want to buy, Nathan. Mind if I take a look at the stock?”

  The dealer looked hurt. Nathan David was a talker of the old school, and did not believe a deal could he made on less than four cups of over strength coffee and an hour’s chat.

  “I heard you’d been away for a while, man,” he said, reluctantly opening the door in the far wall and leading the way through.

  “Just a while,” said Carver non committaly. The dark eyes surveyed him with lively interest, and then Nathan shrugged.

  “You must try not to prattle on so much, my boy,” he said with a grin and stepped aside to let Carver walk in front of him.

  They stepped together into a different world.

  Along the wall of the long, narrow room behind the steel sheathed door was an armourer’s workbench, bristling with vices, abrasive wheels, drill and punches.

  Above the bench hung the hand tools of the trade and the pieces on which David was currently working.

  But the doors to which David turned his attention were those of the cabinets opposite the bench. The armourer took a steel rod from his pocket, put one end of it into a small circular hole in one of the doors, and pressed gently. There was a click, and along the line of steel doors a succession of echoing clicks.

  David smiled, put his hand on the nearest door, and pushed it to one side. The other doors repeated the movement, and Carver was staring at an illuminated display of hand guns and rifles.

  He smiled, and shook his head wonderingly.

  “My old man would have sold his happy hunting ground for a couple of hours alone with this cabinet, Nathan,” he said softly. “I ever tell you that?”

  “Every time you come,” said the gunsmith.

  Carver chuckled. In all his experience, he had never come across anybody with knowledge of firearms like Nathan David.

  The old desert fighter had a concentration camp number tattooed on the inside of his forearm, and his face went stony when Germany was mentioned.

  But Carver had never heard him discuss the War or his part in it. He knew the man had fought against the British in the years when the refugee Jews were carving their State out of Palestine, but he did not know in what capacity.

  In fact, when he assembled what facts he did have about Nathan David in his mind, they were very few.

  He had no idea what Nathan’s original nationality had been, or his real function in Paris. He had no idea whether there was a Mrs David or a family. He had no idea just how much official standing the gun shop on the quiet street in Fontainebleau might have.

  But he did know he had come to the right place.

  “I need some artillery, Nathan,” he said, without taking his eyes off the display behind the glass.

  “So you said. What for?”

  “I am going looking for someone who is very important to me. I need something powerful. I have not much time for refinements. How about a Browning or a Colt?”

  The gunsmith whistled gently to show he was impressed, and pointed.

  “You can have either. I’ve got the double action High Power here, or I’ve a Commander.”

  “Or a Beretta 92,” said Carver, his eyes gleaming, “What’s that like in the field? I never used one.”

  The gunsmith took a pistol from the case.

  “Won the US Army’s pantomime to choose a new handgun, but I think it’s too complicated for military use,” he said. “Uses the same load as the Browning and the SIG, though. Want a SIG? That’s the quality handgun for the
man on the move…”

  “What’s wrong with the Beretta?”

  “Absolutely nothing. But it does take some getting used to. Not the gun to use in a hurry if you never used one before. Do you need a big magazine capacity?”

  “Not essential.”

  “Try a Desert Eagle, then.”

  “Jesus Christ!” said Carver, accepting the monstrous pistol and working the slide to check the action was empty. It was a huge weapon with a bulbous barrel and weighed heavily in his hand.

  “Try Moses. Nearly two kilos empty, carries a magazine of nine, and shoots .357 Magnum rimmed shells,” said David with quiet pride. “They are talking a .44 magnum in Tel Aviv, but I haven’t got one here. Muzzle velocity is 434 metres a sec. Colt’s only 253.”

  “What’s it like to shoot?”

  “A bit like being kicked in the hand by a bad tempered camel, but believe it or not, it’s a pleasure. She’ll shoot through brick walls. How many shells you want? What currency you paying with?”

  “American dollars. Gimme two packs of shells and hold another few here for me.”

  David pulled a flat plastic briefcase from under the showcase, opened it, and slid in two heavy flat packs.

  “I loaded those myself. The weapon fits here.” He showed a compartment with a plastic foam pad.

  Carver shook his head and stowed the big gun in his waistband. It dragged down his belt, and the gunsmith chuckled.

  “Best take a belt and holster. I got some Coach Harness ones here.”

  He supplied the leather goods; and Carver loaded the clip of the big gun. With the huge shells peeked into its massive butt, it felt like an artillery piece.

  “You knew I was going to take this, didn’t you?”

  David shot him an amused look from under silver brows.

  “You kidding? I got it sent here especially for you. If ever I saw a man and gun designed for one another, it’s you two. Sighted in already, by the way. I enjoyed myself doing it, and I reckoned if you needed it, you’d need it in a hurry. But I’m not kidding about the penetrating power. Watch it, or you really will shoot through brick walls.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN