The Ayatollah's Money

by Richard Dorrance

  Chapter 67 – Disguises and Weapons

  Hablibi stood in front of the long folding table at the swap meet on which lay a small arsenal of handguns. Hanging down in front of the table was a large banner that read ‘Go Ahead, Make My Day’ and ‘Mr. Smith and Mr. Wesson Dare You’. Both of these aphorisms were lost on Hablibi, but the gentleman sitting behind the table was not. He weighed two hundred and eighty pounds, seventy percent of which was located in the immediate vicinity of his waist. His long gray beard was divided into two pigtails, one of which was braided into the shape of a swastika and the other braided into the shape of an AK47 assault rifle, both of which were done by a local fiber artist who was paid a hefty fee in coke. He said to Hablibi, “You ain’t from Charleston, is you, pardner?”

  “No. Greek. I’m from Greece. Visiting.”

  “You’s a philos’pher?”

  “Umm, no. I’m a, a, a bodyguard, for a shipping guy. He’s here looking at your container shipping terminals. May send some ships here.”

  “Too bad. Always wanted to fuck with a Greek philos’pher, see if I could get him riled up. They’s always claiming they’s pacifists. Work differences out rational. I say’s we gotta a better way here in the south – guy with the bigger gun gets his way.”

  Hablibi processed this and found it oddly familiar. He remembered one of his uncles telling him something similar when he was a kid, on a family outing in the desert outside Tehran, only his uncle was talking about knives rather than handguns. Hablibi said, “That’s my problem. This guy last night got in my boss’s face at a restaurant, and he had a bigger gun than I did. Made me look bad. I need something badass.”

  The guy didn’t like furiners, but he sympathized with being on the short end of an armed confrontation. He said, “The bigger the piece of badass you want, the more it’s gonna cost ya. You got the cash, I got the ass.”

  “How much for your biggest piece?”

  The guy started to lean forward to pick up a gun on the table, but felt the tug of gravity on his gut and slumped back in his lawn chair. He pointed and said, “Right there. 50 caliber Desert fucking Eagle. That’s the big dog on the block. Two grand.”

  “That include shots?”

  “What?”

  “The shots. The things it shoots”

  “We talking bullets, pardner? That what you mean?”

  “Yeah, bullets. In Greece we call ‘em shots.”

  “Bullets is extra. Two bucks each, and I got a box of a hundred.”

  Hablibi looked around, wondering if there were security people watching, like they always are in Iran. He said, “What’s it take to buy the Desert fucking Eagle big dog? That looks like what I need.”

  “Just cash for the ass, baby. That’s all. Just a little private transaction between consenting adults. That’s the law down here. Unless you’s nuts. Are ya?”

  Hablibi thought, ‘With whom around here as the reference point?’ but he just said, not today, my brother, not today.”

  “Then we’s good to go.”

  “You happen to have two of them big dogs?”

  The guy looked up at Hablibi and said, “You want two Desert fucking Eagles? One’s not enough? That guy last night musta scared you good.”

  “My boss said, don’t let it happen again, and when he says something, he means it. I gotta protect my job.”

  “I got two of ‘em, but they’re my last ones, so the price just went up to five grand. Plus the shots, er, bullets.”

  Half an hour later Hablibi lugged the thirty pounds of iron out to his car in the parking lot and put it in the trunk. As he left the guy said, “Watch the kick on those bad boys. First time I fired one it came back and knocked out one a my teeth.” Hablibi thought, ‘Maybe I’ll pass that tip on to The Colonel and Lewy, and maybe I won’t. See how much the assassins know about ordnance.'

  As he drove back towards town he wondered if he really needed to google ‘cesium 325’ when he got back to the hotel, or if the two big dogs would satisfy his troops. He had an idea finding some of that hot stuff lying around might be tricky, and, besides, he had a date later with Mr. Cuervo and Ms. Smith, one of the hookers.

  While he was accomplishing his objective, Lewy and Priss were working on theirs. Priss stopped in the College of Charleston bookstore and bought stuff to make himself look like a student. The cashier asked him, “What year’s your son? Freshman?”

  It took Priss a few seconds to understand the question and get over his surprise at someone thinking he would send his son, if he’d had one, to a school in this hellhole of democracy. If he did decide on something other than home schooling for his son, he’d send him to one of those jihad commando nursery schools over on a mountaintop in Pakistan, eat one meal a day of cactus stew. Bring him up right. He said, “Yeah, freshman, on exchange program.”

  “What country are you from?”

  “We’re from Ir….Ireland.”

  “Yeah, your family been there long?”

  “We been drinking Guinness for centuries.”

  The cashier thought, right, and handed him his receipt.

  While Priss was in the bookstore, Lewy was on his second large pepperoni pizza, sitting in Angelonis, a few blocks away from The Hall. He was casing the joint and learning the ropes, however superficial, of his new profession. If he was going to be a delivery boy, he had to know the product, right? They didn’t have good pizza in Tehran; probably had something to do with the amount of sawdust they mixed in with the flour to make the crust. Just about the time he finished packing the last slice into what formerly was a lean and Spartan stomach, the delivery boy came from behind the counter carrying three boxes and headed out the door, with Lewy, the self-designated apprentice, right behind.

  Two hours later Priss and Lewy were in The Colonel’s room, demonstrating their newly developed skills and disguises. Priss’s clothes were new and clean, but had some holes in them made in the factory. He wore his baseball hat backwards, just like Lewy, but his said, Wanna Make It, Sugar?, while Lewy’s said, Angelonis Plumbing. And Lewy’s clothes were old and smelly, him having traded with a homeless guy he saw hanging out near the shop dumpster. He had learned in assassins school that when adopting a disguise, don’t cut corners just for the sake of personal comfort. Priss had a huge backpack he hoped to fill with guns, knives, canisters of sarin gas, small vials of radioactive dust, and an iPhone a College of Charleston female student had scammed him $1,400 for, telling him it would function as a police taser by holding the end against someone’s neck and typing in ‘ZAP NOW’ in caps. The only prop Lewy had were two large pizza boxes he’d retrieved from the dumpster.

  Sitting on the bed with a bottle of Jack Daniels in his hand, The Colonel reviewed his troops. “AttenHUD,” he yelled, and the two junior assassins snapped into ramrod position. “Status report, in full.”

  Priss said, “I’m portraying a College of Charleston student, Sir. Clothes all authentic, backpack soon to be filled with deadly weapons, and I’ve been practicing walking down the sidewalk constantly looking at and playing with this phone, without running into lamp posts or women with baby carriages. That took a while, and I had a few accidents, but I think I have the hang of it now. Sir. Oh, and Sir, this phone is really cool, the Guard Elite Assassination Corps should consider adding it to our official assassin’s standard equipment issue package. It works as a taser, which isn’t a deadly weapon, I grant you, but it can inflict a lot of pain on an enemy of the state, like the Laleh woman.”

  The Colonel said, “Have you tried it out yet?”

  Priss looked at it in his hand, then said, “No, but I can now,” and leaping behind Lewy, pressed it to the back of Lewy’s neck.

  Lewy screamed, “Are you crazy?” and twisted away, falling to the floor.

  Priss looked at The Colonel and said, “Just joking.”

  The Colonel took a swig from the bottle and, like Hablibi, wondered again abou
t cultural contamination. Back home members of the Guard Elite Assassination Corps didn’t joke around. He looked at Lewy and said, “What do you have to offer?”

  Lewy got up from the floor, looking daggers at Priss, and said, “I spent time in the pizza place, know what it's like to eat two large pepperoni pizzas by myself, and know how to do the delivery thing now. I can get into the theater place and look around.”

  “How’s the pizza at Angelonis?

  “Lots better than ours. I asked the guy if he used fine grain sawdust or course grain in the dough, and he looked at me like I was crazy. That may have something to do with it.”

  Just then there was a knock on the door, and Hablibi entered. He looked at the three assassins and the new guy, Jack Daniels, and said, “I got something I think you’ll like.” He dumped the two huge handguns and the box of bullets on the bed. The three Guard Elite guys looked at them, did the math, and said in unison, “Who doesn’t get one?” Jack, being new to the team, didn’t say anything.

  Hablibi said, “Those were expensive, ten grand. I figure they’re badass enough, only need two. I gotta watch the expense account.” Already he had wired the surplus five grand back to his mother in Tehran for a new sixty inch flat screen.

  The Colonel set Jack on the night table, picked up one of the guns, looked at it, and said to Hablibi, “You idiot. You know what you bought? Jew guns. Big, badass Jew guns. Desert fucking Eagles, for Allah’s sake. How we gonna walk around with these? People’ll talk: ‘Can’t the Iranians make their own guns? They have to use Israeli weapons?’ This is embarrassing.”

  Hablibi, thinking he’d done so well, suddenly felt deflated. Jew guns. Shit. Why hadn’t the idiot at the swap meet mentioned that. How was he to know about Jew guns? He reached over and grabbed Jack by the shoulder, looking for solace. He swigged, thought for a minute, and said, “Look, you’re not walking around the assassins school back home, showing off your weapons to the cleaning ladies, trying to impress them. You can keep these hidden until the attack, and then no one will notice them in all the mayhem and bloodshed. Right?”

  The Colonel had to agree, and privately he was thrilled, always having wanted to shoot one of the Jewboy’s bigass guns, the most powerful handgun in the world, Clint Eastwood’s assertion notwithstanding. He said, “Ok. We keep the Eagles for the attack. Me and Lewy carry them. Priss, you're the strategist and tactician. Your job is to plan the assault after we find out when they’re going to do their show.” He looked at Hablibi and asked, “What other weapons you get? Priss has to have something.”

  Hablibi took another swig and looked at the floor. “That’s all I got so far.”

  Priss felt deflated, and thought the same thought he had before. ‘What kind of assassin doesn’t have even a single deadly weapon?’ What was he going to put in his College of Charleston backpack? Books?