No Comebacks

by Frederick Forsyth

  The following morning he mailed the letter by air and the package by surface post, which meant the train and a ten-day delay.

  The Iberia Caravelle drifted into Campo de Manises and touched down as the sun was setting. It was still furiously hot and the thirty passengers, mostly villa owners from Paris arriving for six weeks' vacation, grumbled at the usual baggage delays in the customs shed.

  Calvi carried one medium-sized suitcase as hand baggage. It was opened and inspected carefully, then he was out of the airport building and into the open air. First he wandered over to the airport car park and was glad to see that a large area of it was screened by trees from the airport buildings. The cars stood in rows beneath the trees, waiting for their owners. He decided to return the next morning and take his transport from there. Then he took a taxi into town.

  The clerk at the hotel was more than helpful. As soon as the Corsican presented himself and his passport, the desk clerk recalled the booking, the letter of confirmation written by M. Calvi, and dived into the back office to emerge with the package containing the book. The Corsican explained that unfortunately his friend Calvi would not be joining him, but that he would obviously settle both room bills when he left the following morning. He produced a letter from the absent Calvi authorizing him to take receipt of the book awaiting collection. The clerk glanced at the letter, thanked the Corsican for offering to settle both the room bills, and handed over the package.

  In his room Calvi checked the padded envelope. It had been opened, the metal staples had been bent together to pass through the sealing aperture, and then bent back again. The blob of glue he had placed on one of the metal lugs was missing. But inside, the book was still untouched in its polythene wrapper, for it would have been impossible to open the polythene without tearing or distorting it.

  He opened it, forced the book covers apart with the blade of his penknife and extracted the parts of the gun. These he assembled back together, screwed on the silencer and checked the shells in the magazine. They were all there — his special slugs, with half the explosive removed to cut down the noise to a low crack. Even with half the usual power behind it, a 9-mm slug still goes straight into a human head at 10-foot range, and Calvi never fired at more than 10 feet on a job.

  He locked the gun into the bottom of the wardrobe, pocketed the key and smoked a cigarette on the balcony, gazing out at the bullring in front of the hotel and thinking of the day ahead. At nine he came down, still in his dark grey suit (from one of Paris's most exclusive tailors) that passed perfectly with the staid atmosphere of the old and expensive hotel. He dined at the Terrassa del Rialto and slept at midnight. From the hotel clerk he learned there was a plane to Madrid at eight in the morning, and he had himself called at six.

  The next morning he checked out at seven and took a taxi to the airport. Standing at the gate he watched a dozen cars arrive, noting the make and number of the car and the appearance of the driver. Seven cars were driven by men without passengers, in what looked like business suits. From the observation terrace of the airport building he watched the passengers stream out to the plane for Madrid, and four of the car drivers were among them. He looked at the notes on the back of an envelope in his hand, and found he had a choice of a Simca, a Mercedes, a Jaguar and a small Spanish Seat, the local version of the Fiat 600.

  After the plane had taken off he went to the men's room and changed from his suit into cream jeans, pale blue sports shirt, and blue zip-fronted nylon windbreaker. The gun he wrapped in a towel and stowed in the soft airline bag he took from his suitcase. The case he checked into left-luggage deposit, confirmed his evening booking for the Paris flight and walked back to the car park.

  He picked the Seat because it is the most common car in Spain and has easy door handles for the car thief. Two men drove into the car park as he waited, and when they had gone he approached the small red beetle of a car. He slipped a metal pipe from his sleeve, slid it over the door handle and jerked downwards. The lock gave with a soft crack. From inside he opened the hood and clipped a wire jumper from the positive battery terminal to the starter motor. Behind the wheel the car started at the touch of a button, and he bowled out of the car park on the road to Valencia and the new seaboard highway N332 south to Alicante.

  It is 92 kilometres or 55 miles from Valencia to Ondara, through the orange-growing centres of Gandia and Oliva, and he took it easy, making the trip in two hours. The whole coast was blistering in the morning sun, a long ribbon of golden sand dotted with brown bodies and splashing swimmers. Even the heat was ominous, without a breath of wind, and along the sea horizon lay a faint and misty haze.

  As he entered Ondara he passed the Hotel Palmera, where he knew the former secretary of General Raoul Salan, once head of the OAS, still lived with his memories. In the town centre he had no trouble asking the way to Playa Caldera, which he was told by helpful townspeople lay two miles out of town. He drove into the residential sprawl of villas, mainly owned by expatriates, just before noon, and began to cruise, looking for the Villa San Crispin familiar from the long-destroyed photograph. To ask directions to the beach was one thing, to ask them to the villa might stick in someone's memory.

  He found the yellow shutters and the white-painted terra cotta walls just before one o'clock, checked the name marked on a tile set into the pillar by the front gate and parked the car 200 yards farther on. Walking idly, his bag slung over one shoulder like a tourist heading for the beach, he cased the back entrance. It was easy. From farther up the earth road on which the villa stood, a small footpath led away into a plantation of orange trees behind the row of houses. From the cover of the trees he could see that only a low fence separated the red earth of the orange orchard from the garden and the unshaded patio at the back of the villa with the yellow shutters, and he could see his man pottering about the garden with a watering can. There were french windows leading from the back garden into the main ground-floor room, wide open to allow a draught to blow through, if there should be a breath of wind. He checked his watch — time for lunch, and drove back to Ondara.

  He sat till three in the Bar Valencia on Calle Doctor Fleming, and had a large plate of enormous grilled prawns and two glasses of the local light white wine. Then he paid and left.

  As he drove back to the Playa the rain clouds finally moved in off the sea and there was a dull rumble of thunder across the oil-smooth water, very unusual for the Costa Blanca in mid-July. He parked the car close to the path into the orange grove, tucked the silenced Browning into his belt, zipped the windbreaker up to the neck and headed into the trees. It was very quiet when he came back out of the grove and stepped across the low wall into the garden of the villa. The locals were all taking a siesta in the heat, and the rain began to patter onto the leaves of the orange trees; a score of large drops hit his shoulders as he crossed the flagstones, and when he reached the french windows the shower broke at last, drumming onto the pink tiles of the roof. He was glad; no one would hear a thing.

  From a room to the left of the sitting room he heard a typewriter clack several times. He eased the gun out, standing immobile in the centre of the lounge, and moved the safety catch to 'Fire'. Then he walked across the rush matting to the open study door.

  Major Archie Summers never knew what happened or why. He saw a man standing in the doorway of his study and half rose to inquire what he wanted. Then he saw what was in the visitor's hand and half opened his mouth. There were two soft plops, drowned by the rain outside, and he took both bullets in the chest. The third was fired vertically downwards at 2-foot range into his temple, but he didn't even feel that one. The Corsican knelt by the body for a moment and put a forefinger where the pulse should have been. Still crouching he swivelled round to face the sitting-room door ...

  The two men met the next evening in the bar in the Rue Miollin, the killer and the client. Calvi had telephoned his message that morning after arriving back from Valencia the previous evening just before midnight, and Sanderson had
flown over at once. The client seemed nervous as he handed over the rest of the £5000.

  'No problems at all?' he asked again. The Corsican smiled quietly and shook his head.

  'Very simple, and your major is very dead. Two bullets in the heart and one through the head.'

  'No one saw you?' asked the Englishman. 'No witnesses?'

  'No.' The Corsican rose, patting the wads of notes into his breast pocket. 'Though I'm afraid I was interrupted at the end. For some reason it was raining hard, and someone came in and saw me with the body.'

  The Englishman stared at him in horror. 'Who?'

  'A woman.'

  'Tall, dark-haired?'

  'Yeah. A nice-looking piece too.' He looked down at the expression of panic in the client's face, and patted the man on the shoulder.

  'Don't worry, monsieur,' he said reassuringly, 'there will be no comebacks. I shot her, too.'

  THERE ARE NO SNAKES IN IRELAND

  McQueen looked across his desk at the new applicant for a job with some scepticism. He had never employed such a one before. But he was not an unkind man, and if the job-seeker needed the money and was prepared to work, McQueen was not averse to giving him a chance.

  'You know it's damn hard work?' he said in his broad Belfast accent.

  'Yes, sir,' said the applicant.

  'It's a quick in-and-out job, ye know. No questions, no pack drill. You'll be working on the lump. Do you know what that means?'

  'No, Mr McQueen.'

  'Well, it means you'll be paid well but you'll be paid in cash. No red tape. Geddit?'

  What he meant was there would be no income tax paid, no National Health contributions deducted at source. He might also have added that there would be no National Insurance cover and that the Health and Safety standards would be completely ignored. Quick profits for all were the order of the day, with a fat slice off the top for himself as the contractor. The job-seeker nodded his head to indicate he had 'goddit' though in fact he had not. McQueen looked at him speculatively.

  'You say you're a medical student, in your last year at the Royal Victoria?' Another nod. 'On the summer vacation?'

  Another nod. The applicant was evidently one of those students who needed money over and above his grant to put himself through medical school. McQueen, sitting in his dingy Bangor office running a hole-and-corner business as a demolition contractor with assets consisting of a battered truck and a ton of second-hand sledgehammers, considered himself a self-made man and heartily approved of the Ulster Protestant work ethic. He was not one to put down another such thinker, whatever he looked like.

  'All right,' he said, 'you'd better take lodgings here in Bangor. You'll never get from Belfast and back in time each day. We work from seven in the morning until sundown. It's work by the hour, hard but well paid. Mention one word to the authorities and you'll lose the job like shit off a shovel. OK?'

  'Yes, sir. Please, when do I start and where?'

  'The truck picks the gang up at the main station yard every morning at six-thirty. Be there Monday morning. The gang foreman is Big Billie Cameron. I'll tell him you'll be there.'

  'Yes, Mr McQueen.' The applicant turned to go.

  'One last thing,' said McQueen, pencil poised. 'What's your name?'

  'Harkishan Ram Lai,' said the student. McQueen looked at his pencil, the list of names in front of him and the student.

  'We'll call you Ram,' he said, and that was the name he wrote down on the list.

  The student walked out into the bright July sunshine of Bangor, on the north coast of County Down, Northern Ireland.

  By that Saturday evening he had found himself cheap lodgings in a dingy boarding house halfway up Railway View Street, the heart of Bangor's bed-and-breakfast land. At least it was convenient to the main station from which the works truck would depart every morning just after sun-up. From the grimy window of his room he could look straight at the side of the shored embankment that carried the trains from Belfast into the station.

  It had taken him several tries to get a room. Most of those houses with a B-and-B notice in the window seemed to be fully booked when he presented himself on the doorstep. But then it was true that a lot of casual labour drifted into the town in the height of summer. True also that Mrs McGurk was a Catholic and she still had rooms left.

  He spent Sunday morning bringing his belongings over from Belfast, most of them medical textbooks. In the afternoon he lay on his bed and thought of the bright hard light on the brown hills of his native Punjab. In one more year he would be a qualified physician, and after another year of intern work he would return home to cope with the sicknesses of his own people. Such was his dream. He calculated he could make enough money this summer to tide himself through to his finals and after that he would have a salary of his own.

  On the Monday morning he rose at a quarter to six at the bidding of his alarm clock, washed in cold water and was in the station yard just after six. There was time to spare. He found an early-opening cafe and took two cups of black tea. It was his only sustenance. The battered truck, driven by one of the demolition gang, was there at a quarter past six and a dozen men assembled near it. Harkishan Ram Lai did not know whether to approach them and introduce himself, or wait at a distance. He waited.

  At twenty-five past the hour the foreman arrived in his own car, parked it down a side road and strode up to the truck. He had McQueen's list in his hand. He glanced at the dozen men, recognized them all and nodded. The Indian approached. The foreman glared at him.

  'Is youse the darkie McQueen has put on the job?' he demanded.

  Ram Lai stopped in his tracks. 'Harkishan Ram Lai,' he said. 'Yes.'

  There was no need to ask how Big Billie Cameron had earned his name. He stood 6 feet and 3 inches in his stockings but was wearing enormous nail-studded, steel-toed boots. Arms like tree trunks hung from huge shoulders and his head was surmounted by a shock of ginger hair. Two small, pale-lashed eyes stared down balefully at the slight and wiry Indian. It was plain he was not best pleased. He spat on the ground.

  'Well get in the fecking truck,' he said.

  On the journey out to the work site Cameron sat up in the cab which had no partition dividing it from the back of the lorry, where the dozen labourers sat on two wooden benches down the sides. Ram Lai was near the tailboard next to a small, nut-hard man with bright blue eyes, whose name turned out to be Tommy Burns. He seemed friendly.

  'Where are youse from?' he asked with genuine curiosity.

  'India,' said Ram Lai. 'The Punjab.'

  'Well, which?' said Tommy Burns.

  Ram Lai smiled. 'The Punjab is a part of India,' he said.

  Burns thought about this for a while. 'You Protestant or Catholic?' he asked at length.

  'Neither,' said Ram Lai patiently. 'I am a Hindu.'

  'You mean you're not a Christian?' asked Burns in amazement.

  'No. Mine is the Hindu religion.'

  'Hey,' said Burns to the others, 'your man's not a Christian at all.' He was not outraged, just curious, like a small child who has come across a new and intriguing toy.

  Cameron turned from the cab up front. 'Aye,' he snarled, 'a heathen.'

  The smile dropped off Ram Lai's face. He stared at the opposite canvas wall of the truck. By now they were well south of Bangor, clattering down the motorway towards Newtownards. After a while Burns began to introduce him to the others. There was a Craig, a Munroe, a Patterson, a Boyd and two Browns. Ram Lai had been long enough in Belfast to recognize the names as being originally Scottish, the sign of the hard Presbyterians who make up the backbone of the Protestant majority of the Six Counties. The men seemed amiable and nodded back at him.

  'Have you not got a lunch box, laddie?' asked the elderly man called Patterson.

  'No,' said Ram Lai, 'it was too early to ask my landlady to make one up.'

  'You'll need lunch,' said Burns, 'aye, and breakfast. We'll be making tay ourselves on a fire.'

  'I will make sure to
buy a box and bring some food tomorrow,' said Ram Lai.

  Burns looked at the Indian's rubber-soled soft boots. 'Have you not done this kind of work before?' he asked.

  Ram Lai shook his head.

  'You'll need a pair of heavy boots. To save your feet, you see.'

  Ram Lai promised he would also buy a pair of heavy ammunition boots from a store if he could find one open late at night. They were through Newtownards and still heading south on the A21 towards the small town of Comber. Craig looked across at him.

  'What's your real job?' he asked.

  'I'm a medical student at the Royal Victoria in Belfast,' said Ram Lai. 'I hope to qualify next year.'

  Tommy Burns was delighted. 'That's near to being a real doctor,' he said. 'Hey, Big Billie, if one of us gets a knock young Ram could take care of it.'

  Big Billie grunted. 'He's not putting a finger on me,' he said.

  That killed further conversation until they arrived at the work site. The driver had pulled northwest out of Comber and two miles up the Dundonald road he bumped down a track to the right until they came to a stop where the trees ended and saw the building to be demolished.

  It was a huge old whiskey distillery, sheer-sided, long derelict. It had been one of two in these parts that had once turned out good Irish whiskey but had gone out of business years before. It stood beside the River Comber, which had once powered its great waterwheel as it flowed down from Dundonald to Comber and on to empty itself in Strangford Lough. The malt had arrived by horse-drawn cart down the track and the barrels of whiskey had left the same way. The sweet water that had powered the machines had also been used in the vats. But the distillery had stood alone, abandoned and empty for years.

  Of course the local children had broken in and found it an ideal place to play. Until one had slipped and broken a leg. Then the county council had surveyed it, declared it a hazard and the owner found himself with a compulsory demolition order.

  He, scion of an old family of squires who had known better days, wanted the job done as cheaply as possible. That was where McQueen came in. It could be done faster but more expensively with heavy machinery; Big Billie and his team would do it with sledges and crowbars. McQueen had even lined up a deal to sell the best timbers and the hundreds of tons of mature bricks to a jobbing builder. After all, the wealthy nowadays wanted their new houses to have 'style' and that meant looking old. So there was a premium on antique sun-bleached old bricks and genuine ancient timber beams to adorn the new-look-old 'manor' houses of the top executives. McQueen would do all right.