The Gun Seller

by Hugh Laurie

  But not being all that bright - being two balls short of a pig-fuck, or whatever they say in Minnesota - Ricky had neglected to notice the important advantages that these celluloid gods had over him. In fact, there really is only one advantage, but it is a very important one. The advantage is that films aren't real. Honestly. They're not.

  In real life, and I'm sorry if I'm shattering some deeply cherished illusions here, men in Ricky's situation don't tell anyone to go and screw themselves. They don't sneer insolently, they don't spit in anyone's eye, and they certainly, definitely, categorically don't free themselves in a single bound. What they actually do is stand stock still, and shiver, and cry, and beg, literally beg, for their mother. Their nose runs, their legs shake, and they whimper. That is what men, all men, are like, and that is what real life is like.

  Sorry, but there it is.

  My father used to grow strawberries under a net. Every now and then, a bird, seeing some fat, red, sweet things on the ground, decided to try and get under the net, steal the fruit therefrom, and clear off. And every now and then, that bird would get the first two things right - no sweat, they'd go like clockwork - and then he or she would make a complete dog's breakfast of the third. They would get stuck in the fine mesh, and there'd be a lot of squawking and flapping, and my father would look up from the potato trench, whistle me over, and tell me to get the bird out. Carefully. Get hold of it, untangle it, set it free.

  This was the job I hated more than any other in the whole universe of childhood.

  Fear is frightening. It is the most frightening of all the emotions to behold. An animal in a state of rage is one thing, often a pretty alarming one thing, but an animal in a state of terror - that juddering, staring, skittering bundle of feathered panic - is something I never wanted to see again.

  And yet, here I was, seeing it.

  'Piece a fuckin' shit,' said one of the Americans, coming into the kitchen and immediately busying himself with a kettle.

  Solomon and I looked at each other. We'd sat at the table for twenty minutes after they'd taken Ricky away, without exchanging a word. I knew that he'd been as shaken as I was, and he knew I knew, so we'd just sat there, me staring at the wall, him scratching lines on the side of his chair with his thumbnail.

  'What happens to him now?' I asked, still staring at the wall.

  'Not your problem,' said the American, as he spooned coffee grounds into a jug. 'Not anybody's problem, after today.' I think he laughed as he said that, but I couldn't be sure.

  Ricky was a terrorist. That was how the Americans thought of him, and that was why they hated him. They hated all terrorists anyway, but what made Ricky special, what made them hate him more than most, was the fact that he was an American terrorist. And that just didn't seem right. Until Oklahoma City, the average American had looked upon the letting-off of bombs in public places as a quaint, European tradition, like bull-fighting or Morris dancing. And if it ever spread out of Europe, it surely went east, to the camel jockeys, the goddamn towel-heads, the sons and daughters of Islam. Blowing-up shopping malls and embassies, sniping at elected officers of the government, hijacking 747s in the name of anything other than money, was downright un-American and un-Minnesotan. But Oklahoma City changed a lot of things, all of them for the worse, and, as a result, Ricky was being made to pay top dollar for his ideology.

  Ricky was an American terrorist, and he'd let the side down.

  I was back in Prague by dawn, but I didn't go to bed. Or at least, I went to bed, but I didn't get in. I sat on the edge, with a filling ashtray and an emptying packet of Marlboro, and stared at the wall. If there'd been a television in the room, I might have watched that. Or I might not. A ten-year-old episode of Magnum, dubbed into German, isn't much more interesting than a wall.

  They'd told me that the police would come at eight, but in the event it was only a few minutes after seven when I heard the first boot on the first step. That little ruse was presumably meant to guarantee bleary-eyed surprise on my part, in case I was unable to affect it convincingly. No faith, these people.

  They numbered about a dozen, all of them in uniform, and they made an over-cooked meal of the whole business, kicking in the door, shouting and knocking things over. The head-boy spoke some English, but not enough, apparently, to understand 'that hurts'. They dragged me down the stairs past the white-faced landlady - who probably hoped that the days of tenants being hauled off at dawn by police vans were gone for good - while other tousled heads peeked nervously at me through the cracks of doors.

  At the station, I was held in a room for a while - no coffee, no cigarettes, no friendly faces - and then, after some more shouting, a few slaps and pokes in the chest, I was chucked in a cell; sans belt, sans bootlaces.

  On the whole, they were pretty efficient.

  There were two other occupants of the cell, both male, and they didn't get up when I came in. One of them probably couldn't have got up if he'd wanted to, seeing as how he was drunker than I think I've ever been in my entire life. He was sixty and unconscious, with alcohol seeping from every part of his body, and his head hung so low on his chest you almost couldn't believe that there was a spine in there, holding him together.

  The other man was younger, darker, wearing a tee-shirt and khaki trousers. He looked at me once, head to toe and back again, and then carried on cracking the bones in his wrists and fingers while I lifted the drunk out of his chair and laid him, not too gently, in the corner. I sat down opposite the tee-shirt and closed my eyes.

  'Deutsch?'

  I couldn't tell how long I'd been asleep because they'd taken my watch as well - in case I managed to work out a way of hanging myself with it, presumably - but the numbness of my buttocks suggested at least a couple of hours.

  The drunk had gone, and the tee-shirt was now squatting at my side.

  'Deutsch?' he said.

  I shook my head and closed my eyes again, taking one last draught of myself before stepping into another person.

  I heard the tee-shirt scratching at himself. Long, slow, thoughtful scratches.

  'American?' he said.

  I nodded, still with my eyes closed, and felt a strange moment of peace. So much easier to be someone else.

  They kept the tee-shirt for four days, and me for ten. I wasn't allowed to shave or smoke, and eating was actively discouraged by whoever cooked the food. They questioned me once or twice about the bomb scare on the flight from London, and asked me to look at photographs - two or three in particular to begin with, and then, when they started to lose interest, whole directories of wrong-doers - but I made a big point of not focusing on them, and tried to yawn whenever they slapped me.

  On the tenth night, they took me to a white room and photographed me from a hundred different angles, then gave me back my belt, laces and watch. They even offered me a razor. But as the handle looked rather sharper than the blade, and my beard seemed to be helping me towards metamorphosis, I turned it down.

  It was dark outside, cold and dark, and it was trying to rain in a feeble, oh-I-can't-really-be-bothered-with-this sort of a way. I walked slowly, as if I didn't care about the rain, or much else that life on this earth had to offer, and hoped that I wouldn't have to wait long.

  I didn't have to wait at all.

  It was a Porsche 911, in dark-green, and there was nothing particularly clever about spotting it, because Porsches were as rare on the streets of Prague as I was. It trickled along beside me for a hundred yards, then made up its mind, spurted ahead to the end of the street and stopped. As I got to within ten yards or so, the passenger door was pushed open. I slowed down, checked behind and in front, and ducked my head to look at the driver.

  He was in his mid-forties, with a square jaw and successfully greying hair, and Porsche marketing men would happily have pushed him forward as 'a typical owner' - if he really was the owner, which was sort of unlikely, considering his occupation.

  Of course, at that moment, I wasn't supposed to know his
occupation.

  'Want a lift?' he said. Could have been from anywhere, and probably was. He saw me thinking about his offer, or thinking about him, so he added a smile to close the deal. Very good teeth.

  I glanced behind him to where the tee-shirt sat, folded up on the tiny rear seat. He wasn't wearing a tee-shirt now, of course, but a lurid purple thing that had no creases in it. He enjoyed my expression of surprise for a few moments, then nodded at me - part hello, part get in - and when I did so, the driver blipped the throttle and let out the clutch all in a playful rush, so that I had to scrabble to close the door. The two of them seemed to find this very entertaining. The tee-shirt, whose real name was most definitely not and never had been Hugo, shoved a packet of Dunhill in front of my nose, and I took one and pressed the dashboard lighter home.

  'Where are you headed?' said the driver.

  I shrugged and said maybe the centre, but it didn't really matter. He nodded and carried on humming to himself. Puccini, I think. Or it might have been Take That. I sat and smoked, and said nothing, as if I was used to this kind of thing happening.

  'By the way,' said the driver eventually, 'I'm Greg.' He smiled, and I thought to myself, well of course you are.

  He took a hand off the wheel and held it out to me. We shook, short but friendly, and then I left a pause, just to show that I was my own man and that I spoke when I felt like it, not before.

  After a while, he turned to look at me. A firmer look. Not so friendly. So I answered him.

  'My name is Ricky,' I said.

  PART TWO

  Seventeen

  You cannot be serious.

  JOHN MCENROE

  I'm part of a team now. A cast. And a caste. We are drawn from six nations, three continents, four religions, and two genders. We are a happy band of brothers, with one sister, who's also happy and gets her own bathroom.

  We work hard, play hard, drink hard, even sleep hard. In fact, we are hard. We handle weapons in a way that says we know how to handle weapons, and we discuss politics in a way that says we have taken the bigger view.

  We are The Sword Of Justice.

  The camp changes every couple of weeks, and so far has drawn its water from the rivers of Libya, Bulgaria, South Carolina and Surinam. Not its drinking water, of course; that comes in plastic bottles, flown in twice a week along with the chocolate and the cigarettes. At this moment, The Sword Of Justice seems to have come down in favour of Badoit, because it's 'gently carbonated', and therefore accommodates, more or less, the fizzy and the flat factions.

  The last few months, I can't deny, have wrought a change in all of us. The burdens of physical training, unarmed combat, communications drills, weapons practice, tactical and strategic planning, all these were borne at first in a grim spirit of suspicion and competitiveness. That has now gone, I'm glad to say, and in its place blooms a genuine and formidable esprit de corps. There are jokes that we all finally understand, after the thousandth repetition; there have been love affairs that have amicably fizzled out; and we share the cooking, complimenting each other in a chorus of nods and mmmms on our various specialities. Mine, which I do believe is one of the most popular, is hamburgers with potato salad. The secret is the raw egg.

  It is the middle of December now, and we are about to travel to Switzerland - where we plan to ski a little, relax a little, and shoot a Dutch politician a little.

  We are having fun, living well, and feeling important. What more can one possibly ask from life?

  Our leader, inasmuch as we acknowledge the concept of leadership, is Francisco; Francis to some, Cisco to others, and The Keeper to me, in my covert messages to Solomon. Francisco says that he was born in Venezuela, the fifth of eight children, and that he suffered from polio as a child. I've no reason to doubt him on any of this. The polio is supposed to account for the withered right leg and the theatrical limp, which seems to come and go depending on his mood and how much he is asking you to do or give. Latifa says he is beautiful and I suppose she may have a point, if three-foot-long eyelashes and olive skin are your thing. He is small and muscular, and if I were casting the part of Byron, I would probably give Francisco a call; not least because he is an absolutely fantastic actor.

  To Latifa, Francisco is the heroic elder brother - wise, sensitive, and forgiving. To Bernhard, he is a grim, unflapp- able professional. To Cyrus and Hugo, he is the fiery idealist, for whom nothing of anything is enough. To Benjamin, he is the tentative scholar, because Benjamin believes in God and wants to be sure of every step. And to Ricky, the Minnesotan anarchist with the beard and the accent, Francisco is a backslapping, beer-drinking, rock 'n' roll adventurer, who knows a lot of Bruce Springsteen lyrics. He really can play all the parts.

  If there is a real Francisco, then I think I saw him one day on a flight from Marseille to Paris. The system is that we travel in pairs but sit separately, and I was half a dozen rows behind Francisco on an aisle seat, when a boy of about five, sitting up at the front of the cabin, started crying and moaning. His mother unhitched the lad from his seat and was starting to lead him down the aisle towards the lavatory, when the aircraft pitched slightly to one side, and the boy stumbled against Francisco's shoulder.

  Francisco hit him.

  Not hard. And not with a fist. If I was a lawyer in the case, I might even be able to make out that it was nothing more than a firm push, to try and help the boy get upright again. But I'm not a lawyer, and Francisco definitely hit him. I don't think anyone saw it but me, and the boy himself was so startled that he stopped crying; but that instinctive, fuck off reaction, to a five-year-old child, told me rather a lot about Francisco.

  Apart from that, and God knows we all have our bad days, the seven of us get on pretty well with each other. We really do. We whistle while we work.

  The one thing that I thought might prove our undoing, as it has proved the undoing of almost every co-operative venture in human history, simply hasn't materialised. Because we, The Sword Of Justice, architects of a new world order and standard bearers for the cause of freedom, actually, genuinely, share the washing-up.

  I've never known it happen before.

  The village of Miirren - no cars, no litter, no late payment of bills - lies in the shadow of three great and famous mountains: the Jungfrau, the Monke, and the Eiger. If you're interested in things of a legendary nature, you may like to know that the Monk is said to spend his time defending the virtue of the Young Woman from the predations of the Ogre - a job he has carried out successfully and with very little apparent effort since the Oligocene period, when these three lumps of rock were, with relentless geologic, wrenched and pummelled into being.

  Miirren is a small village, with very little prospect of getting any bigger. Being accessible only by helicopter or funicular railway, there is a limit to the quantity of sausage and beer that can be got up the hill to sustain its residents and visitors and, by and large, the locals like it that way. There are three big hotels, a dozen or so smaller boarding houses, and a hundred scattered farm houses and chalets, all built with that exaggeratedly tall pitched roof that makes every Swiss building look as if most of it is buried underground. Which, given their fetish for nuclear shelters, it probably is.

  Although the village was conceived and built by an Englishman, it's not a particularly English resort nowadays. Germans and Austrians come to walk and cycle in the summer, and Italians, French, Japanese, Americans - anyone, basically, who speaks the international language of brightly-coloured leisure fabrics - come to ski in the winter.

  The Swiss come all year round to make money. The money-making conditions are famously excellent from November to April, with several off-piste retail sites and bureau de change facilities, and hopes are high that next year - and about time too - money-making will become an Olympic sport. The Swiss are quietly fancying their chances.

  But there is one feature in particular that has made Miirren especially attractive to Francisco, because this is our first outing and we've all got a few
butterflies. Even Cyrus, and he's hard as nails. Owing to the fact that it's small, Swiss, law-abiding, and hard to get to, the village of Miirren has no police force.

  Not even part-time.

  Bernhard and I arrived this morning, and checked into our hotels; he in The Jungfrau, me for The Eiger.

  The girl at reception examined my passport as if she'd never seen one before, and took twenty minutes to go through the phenomenal list of things that Swiss hoteliers like to know about you before they'll let you sleep in one of their beds. I think I may have got stuck for a moment on the middle name of my geography teacher, and I definitely hesitated on the postal code of the midwife who attended the birth of my great-grandmother, but otherwise I sailed through it without a hitch.

  I unpacked, and changed into a day-glo orange, yellow and lilac windcheater, which is the sort of thing you have to wear in a ski resort if you don't want to be conspicuous, then ambled out of the hotel, up the hill into the village.

  It was a beautiful afternoon; one to make you realise that God really can be very good sometimes with weather and scenery. The nursery slopes were almost empty at this time of day, there being a good hour of skiing time left before the sun dipped behind the Schilthorn and people suddenly remembered that they were seven thousand feet above sea level in the middle of December.

  I sat outside a bar for a while and pretended to write postcards, every now and then casting an eye towards a herd of quite fantastically young French children who were following a female instructor down the slopes in crocodile formation. Each one about the size of a fire extinguisher, and dressed in three hundred pounds' worth of Gortex and duck-down, they slithered and snaked behind their Amazon leader, some of them upright, some bent double, and some even too small for you to be able to tell whether they were upright or bent double.