The Gun Seller

by Hugh Laurie

  I started wondering how long it would be before pregnant mothers started appearing on ski slopes, sliding down on their stomachs, yelling technical instructions and whistling Mozart. Dirk Van Der Hoewe, in the company of his Scottish wife Rhona and their two teenage daughters, arrived at The Edelweiss at eight o'clock the same evening. They'd had a long journey, six hours door to door, and Dirk was tired, irritable, and fat.

  Politicians aren't usually fat nowadays - either because they work harder than they used to, or because modern electorates have expressed a preference for being able to see both sides of the person they're voting for without having to lean over - but Dirk looked like he'd bucked the trend. He was a physical reminder of an earlier century, when politics was something you did between two and four in the afternoon, before squeezing into some fancy trousers for an evening of piquet and foie gras. He wore a tracksuit and furry boots, which is not considered unusual if you're Dutch, and a pair of spectacles bounced around his breasts on a loop of pink string.

  He and Rhona stood in the middle of the foyer directing their sumptuous luggage, which had Louis Vuitton written all over it, while their daughters scowled and kicked at the floor, deep in their furious, adolescent hell.

  I watched from the bar. Bernhard watched from the newspaper stand.

  The next day was a technical rehearsal, Francisco had said. Take everything at half-speed, quarter-speed even, and if there's a problem, or anything that looks like it might become one, stop and check it out. The day after would be dress rehearsal, at full-speed, using a ski pole as the rifle, but today was technical.

  The team was me, Bernhard and Hugo, with Latifa as back-up; which we hoped we wouldn't have to use, because she couldn't ski. Neither could Dirk - there being very few hills in Holland larger than a packet of cigarettes - but he had paid for his holiday, had arranged for a news photographer to be there to catch the care-worn statesman at play, and all in all was damned if he wasn't going to give it a try.

  We watched Dirk and Rhona as they hired their equipment, grunting and clumping with the boots; we watched them as they trudged fifty yards up the nursery slopes, stopping every now and then to admire the view and muck about with the gear; we watched as Rhona got herself ready to point downhill, and Dirk found a hundred and fifty reasons not to go anywhere; and then, finally, when we were all starting to feel itchy at having to stand still doing nothing for so long, we saw the Dutch Deputy Minister of Finance, white-faced with the stress of it all, slither ten feet down the hill and sit down.

  Bernhard and I exchanged a look. The only one we'd allowed ourselves since we arrived, and I had to turn away and scratch my knee.

  By the time I looked back at Dirk, he too was laughing. It was a laugh that said I am an adrenalin-maddened speed freak, who craves danger the way other men crave women and wine. I take fantastic risks, and by rights I shouldn't still be alive. I am living on borrowed time.

  They repeated the exercise three times, stepping an extra yard up the hill for each run, before fatness got the better of Dirk, and they retired to a cafe for lunch. As the two of them stumped off across the snow, I turned back to the mountain for a glimpse of the daughters, hoping to judge how good they were on skis, and therefore how far afield they'd be likely to go on an average day. If they were gangly and awkward, I reckoned they'd probably hang about the lower slopes, within reach of their parents. If they were any good, and if they hated Dirk and Rhona even half as much as they seemed to, they would be in Hungary by now.

  I could see no sign of them, and was about to turn back down the slope when I caught sight of a man, standing on a crest above me, looking down into the valley. He was too far away for me to be able to read his features, but even so, he was absurdly conspicuous. And now just because he had neither skis, poles, boots, sunglasses, nor even a woolly hat.

  What made him conspicuous was the brown raincoat, bought from the back pages of the Sunday Express.

  Eighteen

  This night methinks is but the daylight sick,

  THE MERCHANT OF VENICE

  'Who pulls the trigger?'

  Solomon had to wait for an answer.

  In fact he had to wait for every answer, because I was on a skating-rink, skating, and he wasn't. It took me roughly thirty seconds to complete a circuit and drop off a reply, so I had lots of scope to be irritating. Not that I need lots of scope, you understand. Give me just an eency-weency bit of scope, and I'll madden you to death.

  'Do you mean the metaphorical trigger?' I said, as I passed.

  I glanced over my shoulder and saw that Solomon had smiled and lifted his chin a little, like an indulgent parent, and then turned back to the game of curling he was supposed to be watching.

  Another lap. Speakers blared out some jolly Swiss oom-pah music.

  'I mean the trigger trigger, sir. The actual...'

  'Me.' And I was off again.

  I was definitely getting the hang of this skating thing. I'd started to copy a fancy cross-over turn from a German girl in front of me, and it was working pretty well. I was just about keeping up with her too, which was pleasing. She must have been about six.

  'The rifle?' This was Solomon again, speaking through cupped hands, as if he was blowing on them for warmth.

  He had to wait longer for this reply, because I fell over on the far side of the rink, and for a moment or two managed to convince myself that I'd broken my pelvis. But I hadn't. Which was a shame, because it would have solved all sorts of problems.

  I finally got round to him again.

  'Arrives tomorrow,' I said.

  That wasn't strictly true, as it happens. But in the circumstances of this particular de-briefing, the truth was going to take about a week and a half to deliver.

  The rifle wasn't arriving tomorrow. Bits of it were already here.

  With a lot of prompting from me, Francisco had agreed to go with the PM L96A1. It's not a pretty name, I know, nor even a very memorable one; but the PM, nicknamed 'the Green Thing' by the British Army - on the basis, presumably, that it is both green and a thing - does its job well enough; that job being to fire a 7.62 millimetre round with sufficient accuracy to give the competent recreational shooter, which was definitely me, a guaranteed hit at six hundred yards.

  Manufacturers' guarantees being what they are, I'd told Francisco that if the shot was an inch over two hundred yards - less, if there was a cross-wind -1 wasn't taking it.

  He'd managed to get hold of a Green Thing in take-down format; or, as the makers would have you have it, a 'covert sniper rifle system'. It comes in pieces, in other words, and most of those pieces had already arrived in the village. The compressed sniper-scope had come in as a 200 millimetre lens on the front of Bernhard's camera, with the mount hidden inside; the bolt was doing service as the handle of Hugo's razor, while Latifa had managed to get two rounds of Remington Magnum ammunition into each heel of a stupidly expensive pair of patent-leather shoes. All we lacked was a barrel, and that was coming into Wengen on the roof of Francisco's Alfa Romeo - together with a lot of other long metal things that people use for winter sports.

  I'd brought the trigger myself, in my trouser pocket. Perhaps I'm just not the creative type.

  We had decided to do without the stock and fore-end, as both of them are hard to disguise and, frankly, inessential. Likewise the bipod. A firearm, when all is said and done, is nothing more than a tube, a piece of lead, and some gunpowder. Putting a lot of carbon-fibre bits on it, and a go-faster stripe down the side, won't make the person you hit any deader. The only extra ingredient you need to make a weapon meaningfully lethal - and, thankfully, it's a thing that's still pretty hard to come by, even in this wicked old world - is someone with the will to point and fire it.

  Someone like me.

  Solomon had told me nothing about Sarah. Nothing at all. How she was, where she was - I could even have made do with what he'd last seen her wearing, but he hadn't said a word.

  Perhaps the Americans had told h
im to say nothing. Good or bad. 'Hear this, David, and hear it good. Our analysis of Lang indicates a.negatory response profile to incoming amatory data.' Something like that. With a few 'now let's kick ass' phrases thrown in. But then, Solomon knew me well enough to make his own decisions about what he told me or didn't tell me. And he didn't tell me. So either he didn't have any news about Sarah, or the news he did have wasn't good. Or then again, perhaps the best reason of all for not telling me, because the simplest is often the best, was that I hadn't asked.

  I don't know why.

  I lay in my bath at The Eiger, turning the taps with my feet and adding a pint or two of hot water every quarter of an hour, and thought about it afterwards. Perhaps I was scared of what I'd hear. That was possible. Perhaps I was thinking about the risk of my covert meetings with Solomon; that by extending them, with a lot of chat about the folks back home, I was putting his life at risk as well as my own. That was also possible, if a touch shaky.

  Or perhaps - and this was the explanation I came to last, moving cautiously around it, peering at it, prodding it with a sharp stick every now and then to see if it'd get up and bite me - perhaps I'd stopped caring. Perhaps I'd just been pretending to myself that Sarah was the reason I was going through with all of this when, in actual fact, now would be a good time to admit that I had made better friends, discovered a deeper purpose, had more reasons to get out of bed in the mornings, since I joined The Sword Of Justice.

  Obviously, that just wasn't possible at all.

  That was absurd.

  I climbed into bed and slept the sleep of the tired.

  It was cold. That was the first thing I noticed as I pulled back the curtains. A dry, grey, just-remember-you're-in-the-Alps-sonny kind of cold, and that worried me a little. True, it might keep some of the more reluctant skiers in their beds, which would be useful; but it would also slow my fingers to 33rpm and make good marksmanship extremely difficult, if not impossible. Worse still, it would make the sound of the shot travel further.

  As rifles go, the Green Thing isn't a particularly noisy instrument - nothing like an Ml 6, which frightens people to death fractionally before the bullet hits them - but even so, when you happened to be the one holding the thing, and you're busy lining up your cross-hairs on an eminent European statesman, you tend to get a little self-conscious about things like noise. About things like everything, in fact. You want people to look the other way for a moment, if they wouldn't mind. Knowing, as you squeeze the trigger, that half-a-mile away, cups would stop on their way to lips, ears would cock, eyebrows would raise, and Vhat the fuck was that?' would come tumbling out of a few hundred mouths in a few dozen languages, just cramps your style ever so slightly. In tennis, they call it choking on the shot. I don't know what they call it in assassination. Choking on the shot, probably.

  I breakfasted well, laying down calories against the possibility that my diet might change radically in the next twenty-four hours, and remain changed until my beard turned grey, and then I headed down to the ski room in the basement. A French family were falling about down there, arguing over who had whose gloves, where the sun cream had gone, why ski-boots hurt as much as they do - so I settled down on the farthest bench I could find and resolved to take my time gathering the gear.

  Bernhard's camera was heavy and awkward, clunking painfully about my chest and feeling twice as phoney as it was. The rifle bolt and one round of ammunition were stowed in a nylon bum-bag, strapped round my waist, and the barrel nestled inside one of the ski poles - red dot on the handle, in case I couldn't tell the difference between a pole that weighed six ounces and one that weighed near enough four pounds. I'd thrown the other three rounds of ammunition out of the bathroom window, reasoning that one round had better be enough because if it wasn't, I was going to be in even bigger trouble - and I just didn't think I could face bigger trouble right at that moment. I wasted a minute cleaning my fingernails with the end of the trigger, then carefully folded the tiny sliver of metal in a paper napkin and stuffed it into my pocket.

  I stood up, took a deep breath, and clumped past la famille to the lavatory.

  The condemned man threw up a hearty breakfast.

  Latifa had her sunglasses propped up on top of her head, which meant stand by, which meant nothing. No sunglasses, and the Van Der Hoewes were staying indoors to play tiddlywinks. Sunglasses over the eyes meant they were headed for the slopes.

  On top of the head meant they might, you might, I might, anything might.

  I stumped across the foot of the nursery slopes, heading for the funicular railway station. Hugo was already there, dressed in orange and turquoise, and he too had his sunglasses perched on top of his head.

  The first thing he did was look at me.

  In spite of all our lectures, all our training, all our grim nods of agreement at Francisco's coaching tips - in spite of all of that, Hugo was looking straight at me. I knew immediately that he would keep looking at me until our eyes met, so I stared back at him, hoping to get it over with.

  His eyes were shining. There's no other word for it. Shining with fun and excitement and let's go, like a child on Christmas morning.

  He reached a gloved hand to his ear and adjusted the Walkman headphones. An average ski-bum, you would have tutted to yourself if you'd seen him; it's not enough to be gliding through the most beautiful scenery on God's earth, he has to go and put Guns 'N' Roses over the top of it. I'd probably have got annoyed by those headphones myself, if I hadn't known that they were actually connected to a short wave receiver at his hip, and that Bernhard was broadcasting his own particular shipping forecast from the other end.

  It had been agreed that I would carry no radio. The reasoning went that in the event of my capture - Latifa had actually reached across and squeezed my arm when Francisco said this - nobody would have any immediate reason to think of accomplices.

  So all I had was Hugo and his shining eyes.

  At the top of the Schilthorn mountain, at an altitude of a little over three thousand metres, stands, or sits, the Piz Gloria restaurant; an astonishing confection of glass and steel where, for the price of a pretty decent sports car, you can sit, and drink coffee, and take in a view of no less than six countries on a clear day.

  If you're anything like me, it might take you most of that clear day to work out which six countries they might be, but if you have any time left over, you're liable to spend it wondering how on earth the Murrenians got the building up there and how many of them must have died in the course of its assembly. When you've seen a construction like that, and reflected on how long it takes the average British builder to send you an estimate for a kitchen extension, you end up quite admiring the Swiss.

  The restaurant's other claim to fame is that it once served as a location in a James Bond film; its stage name of Piz Gloria has clung to the place ever since, along with the operator's right to sell 007 memorabilia to anyone who hasn't been bankrupted by the cup of coffee.

  In short, it was a place that any visitor to Miirren just had to visit if they got the chance, and the Van Der Hoewes had decided, over a supper of boeuf en croute the previous evening, that they definitely had the chance.

  Hugo and I dismounted at the top cable-car station and split up. I went inside, and gasped and pointed and shook my head at how really neat all this mountain stuff was, while Hugo hung around outside, smoking and fiddling with his bindings. He was trying to cultivate the look of the serious skier, who wanted steep hills and fine powder, and anyway, don't talk to me because the bass solo on this track is just awesome. I was happy to play the gawping idiot.

  I wrote some more postcards - all of them to a man called Colin, for some reason - and every now and then glanced down at Austria, or Italy, or France, or some other place with snow in it, until the waiters started to get peeved. I was just beginning to wonder whether The Sword Of Justice budget could stretch to a second cup, when a movement of bright colour caught my eye. I looked up and saw that Hugo was waving from
the gantry outside.

  Everyone else in the restaurant noticed him too. Probably thousands of people in Austria, Italy and France noticed him. All in all, it was a hopeless piece of amateurism, and if Francisco had been there he would have slapped Hugo hard, the way he'd had to do many times during training. But Francisco wasn't there, and Hugo was making a multicoloured arse of himself, and a gibbering wreck of me, for no good reason. The only saving grace was that none of the many curious onlookers would have been able to tell exactly who or what he was waving at.

  Because he was wearing sunglasses over his eyes.

  I took the first part of the run at a gentle pace, for two reasons: firstly, because I wanted my breathing to be as even as possible when the time came for the shot; secondly, and more importantly, because I didn't want - with a passion, I didn't want - to break my leg and have to be stretchered off the mountain with a lot of rifle parts concealed about my person.

  So I side-slipped and edged, making the turns as big and slow as possible, gently traversing the blackest part of the run until I came to the tree-line. The severity of the slope was something of a worry. Any fool could have seen that Dirk and Rhona were, frankly, not good enough to manage it without a great deal of falling over, and possibly even some not-getting-up-again. If I'd been Dirk, or a friend of Dirk, or even just an interested skier-by, I'd have said forget it. Take the cable-car back down again and find something gentler.

  But Francisco was confident about Dirk. He felt he knew his man. Francisco's analysis said that Dirk was careful with money - which, I suppose, is one of the qualities you look for in a Minister of Finance - and if Dirk and Rhona decided to scratch, they'd have to pay a hefty penalty for the cable-car ride back down.

  Francisco was prepared to bet my life that Dirk would ski it.

  Just to make sure, he'd popped Latifa into the bar of The Edelweiss the night before, while Dirk was spilling a couple of brandies down the inside of his throat, and made her bill and coo at the bravery of any man prepared to tackle the Schilthorn. Dirk had looked a little worried at first, but Latifa's batting eyelashes and heaving bosom had finally pulled him round, and he'd promised to buy her a drink the following evening if he made it down in one piece.