A shot rang out across the parking lot. It was deserted except for a few cars belonging to the government’s night staff. A middle-aged man in a dark overcoat, on his way home from a late meeting, had just reached the door of his car. He fell to the ground with a bullet in his spine. Thomas, the security guard on duty at the government building failed to identify where the shot had come from, nor did he see the body lying on the ground until twelve long minutes had passed, during which the man had died. It was virtually unknown in that part of the capital city for sounds like rifle shots to be heard in the evening hours. In a country where gun laws were strictly enforced, few real shots were ever heard in that cosmopolitan area.
All Thomas’ attention at that time was on a basement door in the main building that had been left open by mistake. The lock had not been oiled for a long time and it was difficult to push the door sufficiently hard to close it. That job done, he decided to investigate whether the noise had come from a car bursting a tire or catapulting a stone it ran over, winging it through the air. Walking slowly around the parking lot, he came upon the black ministerial car standing on its own, with a body lying beside it. He bent low and put his finger on the carotid artery of the stricken man, but felt no pulse. He called an ambulance, and it was there in moments.
Thomas had not known the identity of the victim, but it was soon discovered that this was none other than the leader of the opposition party in Parliament, Dr. Jan Elam.
Immediately upon the police identifying Dr. Elam, the President was informed of his death. In what seemed no time at all, a naval SWAT team descended upon the parking lot from helicopters as a mixed force of police and regular army personnel surrounded the neighborhood. Having secured a radius of half a kilometer with the army, the police went door to door. Some twenty people were taken into custody, and a few of them were tried for a variety of drug-related offenses. Nobody seemed likely to have been involved in the shooting. The police records of those interviewed included members of parliament, senators, a high court judge, and so on, down to the very least likely, a woman in her early fifties who had had too much to drink, and had lost her way in the dark.
The radio news broadcasts soon picked up the story. Their speculation was that a political enemy of the leader of the Progressive Party had bought an assassin to bring to an end the success of Dr. Elam’s campaign to reform the tax structure. Newspapers and political blogs announced the next day that Elam had been winning over the electorate to curb the excessive pay and bonuses given to successful investors, bankers, captains of industry, and so on.
“It is time for the little man to have his day in the sun,” Elam had said. With a general election due in seven weeks, the dead Jan Elam was readily cast as a martyr of the cause to support the working poor.
Suddenly, Elam, an alcoholic, womanizing glutton, that his friends feared because he kept close tabs on their own indiscretions as the means of safeguarding his reputation, had become a defender of the poor, even a saint. His often estranged wife told multiple lies to the press about his virtues, and downplayed their deep marital disharmony. There was a solemn funeral. He had been too controversial a figure, too flawed, to merit the accolade of a lying-in-state.
The President himself gave the funeral oration in the ancient cathedral. He mentioned that Jan, three years his senior, had been something of a mentor for him during college days. The public university allowed American style fraternities and sororities to provide for the needs of undergraduates. Both young men had been members of a rather notorious community, the Pink Panther Club, where fast cars, drugs, and riotous living had been its main attraction. The press took up this reference, citing the number of former Eton schoolboys in British cabinets, and in America, the members the Skull and Bones secret society at Yale, who became political and commercial leaders to an extent that was “positively baffling.”
In the third week of the political campaign, two more politicians fell to an unseen assassin’s bullet. Kristian Nostra, shadow finance minister in the opposition Progressive Party, was walking along a country path ten minutes away from his home with his two thoroughbred wolf hounds when he was gunned down with a bullet in his heart. The path was little used, and it was not until Ana, his housekeeper, who was of a nervous disposition, fearfully began contacting neighbors that the alarm was raised. It took little time to find and identify the body and call the police. Once again, the SWAT team arrived in little time, followed by a mass of police and army personnel. The President declared a state of emergency. Round the clock security was authorized for the leading politicians of all three major political parties and previously unprotected government ministers. Arrangements were hastened to ensure that all of them were covered by nightfall.
The same morning, however, a mere ten miles away from the Nostra residence, the canal side home of Boris Laangthorn, Chairman of the Progressive Party, went up in flames. Boris and his wife had escaped from the blaze, and stood together glumly watching the fire being hosed down, when all of a sudden he fell into the canal. At first it was thought to be an accident, but on recovering the body the rescuers found a bullet had penetrated the brain of the politician from behind. It was judged to have been fired across the canal where bushes and trees were abundant, providing a safe shelter for the marksman. Work on the fire had masked the sound of the shot.
In both cases the police reports included among those interviewed a single woman in her early fifties who lived in the area. The fact that she was identified both on all three lists triggered a software match, but on a second interview Maria Systempsky gave watertight explanations that matched her previous stories, and the police thought no more of it. Little ladies don’t go round shooting politicians, do they?
The burial of the politicians involved services at their Catholic church. In a private letter to the Roman Catholic cardinal, the president cited his membership of a Calvinist community church that was well known to be anti-Catholic, and that, anyway, he was also the leader of the Conservative Party. This gentle request forestalled any invitation to deliver funeral orations. The President was relieved because both men had been senior members of the Pink Panther club in his first year at college.
The election was building up to be a landslide, as the population had concluded that the deaths of the leading Progressive politicians indicated a botched conspiracy of right wing politicians. It was time to unseat the President and all the President’s men. People talked about Watergate, and as many “gates” as they could find. The votes were counted, and the carnage of Conservative politicians who lost their seats in the House and Senate was overwhelming.
Was this a plot by someone in the Progressive movement to win the sympathy of the electorate? Within a month, the commentators in newspaper and internets blogs had come to that contrary conclusion. But by then the damage had been done. With a massive majority the Progressives, who had fought bitterly and lost against the Conservatives’ recent move to extend the length of parliamentary terms to six years from four, now were counting their lucky stars that was the right wing that would be muzzled for a miraculous 24 extra months.
Several months passed. Ministers and politicians grew tired of security men following them about everywhere. Even the now former president, still active in politics and oddly untouched by the debacle at the polls, felt enough was enough. Quietly, the detail was removed from politicians no longer in office.
In their seaside villa, the ex-president relaxed with his wife and their two unmarried daughters, and wondered whether it was time for him to give up politics. It was logical that, having earned for both himself and his wife a pair of fine government awarded pensions, he could think of retiring as soon as he could find a suitable replacement as the Conservative leader. He was mulling that issue over, sitting in the garden in a lounge chair, watching the small birds flitting from bough to bough. A click of the garden gate announced that a visitor had arrived, and then a small woman in her early fifties came and sat down opposite him.
“I’ve been expecting you,” he said. “Or a bullet.”
“You are not going to have a bullet,” she asserted. “We were friends and neighbors. When you took me to meet those older college boys you were so drunk that you passed out.”
His mind was on the evening when he brought her to meet three Pink Panther seniors, Jan, Kristian, and Boris, who wanted to take photographs of her. They took her into the park, undressed her and assaulted her with their cameras, stripping her 13-year-old body naked with the eye of their lenses. She was too young and too terrified to fight them. Then they escorted her back to the end of her street, leaving the freshman drunk from the hazing and out cold. A park policeman found him. He had awoken in the hospital.
“You never told the police,” he mused.
“When I got home, my brute of a father was waiting for me. He tore off my dress and started to whip me in anger at being late home. He was so upset his heart gave out. They took us both to the hospital, but he was dead. My lacerations were really bad. He would probably have killed me had he not died. After five days they let me go home.
“My mother had heard about the pictures. She had my suitcase ready at the door and packed me off to her widowed second cousin in the hill country. I worked as her slave for six years before I escaped. My mother died of shame. Every day I was there, I vowed to avenge myself one day on those three young men.”
She paused, looking angry and trembling a little. He mumbled something about his being on her list. She did not answer him. There were tears in both their eyes.
“I took my revenge. Now I will kill myself. I don’t want to be put on trial.”
“I deserve to die,” he growled, unable to look her in the eyes. “I betrayed you.”
He had been told beforehand of the senior Panthers’ intention to make money from the sale of her pictures. He was so ashamed, thinking of the little neighbor who had been so delicate and loving as a little girl. But that had all changed: her rage had turned her into a cold-blooded killer. At that moment, he was ready to die.
She nodded wordless agreement. After a minute’s pause, she finally spoke.
“Now it is time to release myself from hell,” she said. She calmly pulled out a revolver, put the end of the barrel into her mouth, and pulled the trigger.
His wife never forgave him, though his daughters did, and he never recovered from the publicity.
THE END
THE SEA TURTLE
by P.J. Perryman
https://sparklyknickers.wordpress.com/
A World of Possibility Page 30