The Gun Seller

by Hugh Laurie

  'Well?' I said. 'Do we wrap it up? Job done, bad guys caught with their hands in the till, scones and knighthoods all round?'

  He stopped, somewhere behind my right shoulder.

  'The truth, master, is that things get a little awkward from now on.'

  I turned to look at him. And tried to smile. He didn't smile back.

  'So what would be the adjective to describe the way things have been up to now, do you think? I mean, if trying to hit someone in the middle of a flak jacket isn't awkward ...'

  But he wasn't listening to me. That wasn't like him either.

  'They want you to go on,' he said.

  Well, of course they did. I knew that. Catching terrorists was not the object of this exercise and never had been. They wanted me to go on, they wanted it all to go on, until the setting was right for the big demonstration. CNN right there on the spot, cameras rolling - not arriving four hours after the event.

  'Master,' said Solomon, after a while, 'I have to ask you a question, and I need you to answer me honestly.'

  I didn't like the sound of this. This was all horribly wrong. This was red wine with fish. This was a man wearing a dinner jacket and brown shoes. This was as wrong as things get.

  'Fire away,' I said.

  He really did look worried.

  'Will you answer me honestly? I need to know before I ask the question.'

  'David, I can't tell you that.' I laughed, hoping he'd drop his shoulders, relax, stop frightening me. 'If you ask me to tell you whether or not you've got bad breath, I will answer you honestly. If you ask me ... I don't know, practically anything else, then yes, I will probably lie.'

  This didn't seem to satisfy him much. There was no reason why it should have done, of course, but what else could I say?

  He cleared his throat, slowly and deliberately, as if he might not get the chance to do it again for some time.

  'What precisely is your relationship with Sarah Woolf?'

  I was really thrown now. Couldn't make head or tail of this. So I watched while Solomon walked slowly backwards and forwards, pursing his lips and frowning at the floor, like someone trying to broach the subject of masturbation with his teenage son. Not that I've ever been present at such a session, but I imagine that it involves a lot of blushing and fidgeting, and the discovery of microscopic specks of dust on sleeves of jackets that suddenly require a huge amount of attention.

  'Why are you asking me, David?'

  'Please, master. Just...' This was not Solomon's best day, I could tell. He took a deep breath. 'Just answer. Please.'

  I watched him for a while, feeling angry with him and sorry for him in just about equal parts.

  '"For old times' sake," were you about to say?'

  'For the sake of anything,' he said, 'that will make you answer the question, master. Old times, new times, just tell me.'

  I lit another cigarette and looked at my hands, trying, as I'd tried many times before, to answer the question for myself, before I answered it for him.

  Sarah Woolf. Grey eyes, with a streak of green. Nice tendons. Yes, I remember her.

  What did I really feel? Love? Well, I couldn't answer that, could I? Just not familiar enough with the condition to be able to pin it on myself like that. Love is a word. A sound. Its association with a particular feeling is arbitrary, unmeasurable, and ultimately meaningless. No, I'll have to come back to that one, if you don't mind.

  What about pity? I pity Sarah Woolf because ... because what? She lost her brother, then her father, and now she's locked in the dark tower while Childe Roland fumbles about with a collapsible step-ladder. I could pity her for that, I suppose; for the fact that she gets me as a rescuer.

  Friendship? For God's sake, I hardly know the woman.

  Well what was it, then?

  'I'm in love with her,' I heard someone say, and then realised it was me.

  Solomon closed his eyes for a second, as if that was the wrong answer, again - then moved slowly, reluctantly, to a table by the wall, where he picked up a small plastic box. He weighed it in his hand for a moment, as if contemplating whether to give it to me or hurl it out of the door into the snow; and then he started rummaging in his pocket. Whatever he was looking for was in the last pocket he tried, and I was just thinking how nice it was to see this happening to someone else for a change, when he produced a pencil torch. He gave me the torch and the box, then turned his back and drifted away, leaving me to get on with it.

  Well, I opened the box. Of course I did. That's what you do with closed boxes that people give you. You open them. So I lifted the yellow plastic lid, actually and metaphorically, and straight away my heart sank a little lower still.

  The box contained slide photographs, and I knew, absolutely knew, that I wasn't going to like whatever was in them.

  I plucked out the first one, and held it up in front of the torch.

  Sarah Woolf. No mistake there.

  A sunny day, a black dress, getting out of a London taxi. Good. Fair enough. Nothing wrong with that. She was smiling - a big, happy smile - but that's allowed. That's okay. I didn't expect her to be sobbing into her pillow twenty-four hours a day. So. Next.

  Paying the driver. Again, nothing wrong with that. You ride in a cab, you have to pay the driver. This is life. The photograph was taken with a long lens, at least a 135, probably more. And the closeness of the sequence meant a motor-drive. Why would anyone bother to take ...

  Moving away from the cab towards the kerb, now. Laughing. The cab driver's watching her bottom, which I would do if I was a cab driver. She'd watched the back of his neck, he was watching her bottom. A fair exchange. Well not quite fair, perhaps, but no one ever said it was a perfect world.

  I glanced up at Solomon's back. His head was bowed.

  And the next one, please.

  A man's arm. Arm and shoulder, in fact, in a dark-grey suit. Reaching out for her waist, while she tilts her head back, ready for a kiss. The smile is bigger still. Again, who's worrying? We're not puritans. A woman can go out for lunch with somebody, can be polite, pleased to see him - doesn't mean we have to call the police, for fuck's sake.

  Arms round each other now. Her head is camera-side, so his face is obscured, but they're definitely hugging. A proper, full-on hug. So he's probably not her bank manager. So what?

  This one's almost the same, but they've started to turn. His head lifting away from her neck.

  They're coming towards us now, arms still round each other. Can't see his face, because a passer-by is passing-by, close to the camera, blurred. But her face. Her face is what? Heaven? Bliss? Joy? Rapture? Or just politeness. Next and final slide.

  Oh, hello, I thought to myself. This is the one.

  'Oh, hello,' I said aloud. This is the one.'

  Solomon didn't turn.

  A man and a woman are coming towards us, and I know them both. I've just owned up to being in love with the woman, although I'm not really sure if that's true, and I'm getting less sure by the second, while the man .. yeah, right.

  He's tall. He's good-looking, in a weathered kind of a way. He's dressed in an expensive suit. And he's smiling too. They're both smiling. Smiling on a big scale. Smiling so hard, it looks like the tops of their heads are about to fall off.

  Of course I'd like to know what the fuck the two of them are so happy about. If it's a joke, I'd like to hear it - judge for myself whether it's worth rupturing your pancreas over, whether it's the kind of joke that would make you want to take hold of the person next to you and squeeze them like that. Or squeeze them at all.

  Obviously, I don't know the joke, I'm just sure that it wouldn't make me laugh. Incredibly sure.

  The man in the photograph, with his arm round my mistress of the dark tower, making her laugh - filling her with laughter, filling her with pleasure, filling her with bits of himself, for all I know - is Russell P. Barnes.

  We're going to take a break there. Join us after I've thrown the box of slides across the room.
/>   Twenty

  Life is made up of sobs,

  sniffles, and smiles,

  with sniffles predominating.

  O. HENRY

  I told Solomon everything. I had to.

  Because, you see, he is a clever man, one of the cleverest I've ever known, and it would have been silly to try and stagger on without making use of his intellect. Until I saw these photographs, I'd been pretty much on my own, ploughing a lonely furrow, but now was the time to admit that the plough had wobbled off at right angles and run into the side of the barn.

  It was four o'clock in the morning by the time I finished, and long before then Solomon had broken open his knapsack and pulled out the kind of things that the Solomons of this world never seem to be without. We had a thermos of tea, with two plastic cups; an orange each, and a knife to peel them with; and a half-pound of Cadbury's milk chocolate.

  So, as we ate, and drank, and smoked, and disapproved of smoking, I laid out the story of Graduate Studies from beginning to middle: that I was not where I was, doing what I was doing, for the good of democracy; I was not keeping anyone safe in their beds at night, or making the world a freer, happier place; all I was doing - all I'd ever been doing since the whole thing started - was selling guns.

  Which meant that Solomon was selling them too. I was the gun seller, the sales rep, and Solomon was something in the marketing department. I knew he wouldn't like that feeling much.

  Solomon listened, and nodded, and asked the right questions, in the right order, at the right time. I couldn't tell whether or not he believed me; but then, I'd never been able to do that with Solomon, and probably never would.

  When I'd finished, I sat back and toyed with a couple of squares of chocolate, and wondered whether bringing Cadbury's to Switzerland was the same as bringing coals to Newcastle, and decided it wasn't. Swiss chocolate has gone badly downhill since I was a lad, and nowadays is only fit for giving to aunts. And all the while, Cadbury's chocolate plods on and on, better and cheaper than any other chocolate in the world. That's my view, anyway.

  'That's a heck of a story, master, if you don't mind me saying.' Solomon was standing, staring at the wall. If there'd been a window, he'd probably have stared out of that, but there wasn't.

  'Yup,' I agreed.

  So we came back to the photographs, and we thought about what they might mean. We supposed and we postulated; we maybeed, and what-iffed, and how-aboutted; until eventually, when the snow was just beginning to gather some light from somewhere and bounce it in through the shutters and under the door, we decided that we'd at last covered all the angles.

  There were three possibilities.

  Quite a lot of sub-possibilities, obviously, but at that moment we felt like we wanted to deal in broad strokes, so we swept up the sub-possibilities into three main piles, which ran like this: he was bullshitting her; she was bullshitting him; neither one of them was bullshitting the other, they'd simply fallen in love with each other - fellow Americans, passing the long afternoons together in a strange city.

  'If she's bullshitting him,' I began, for about the hundredth time, 'it's to what purpose? I mean, what is she hoping to gain by it?'

  Solomon nodded, then quickly rubbed his face, squeezing his eyes shut.

  'A post-coital confession?' He winced at the sound of his own words. 'She records it, films it or whatever, sends it to the Washington FostV

  I didn't like that much, and neither did he.

  'Pretty feeble, I'd say.'

  Solomon nodded again. He was still agreeing with me rather more than I deserved - probably because he was relieved that I hadn't gone to pieces altogether, what with one thing and about a million others, and wanted to massage me back into a reasonable and optimistic frame of mind.

  'So he's bullshitting her?' he said, putting his head on one side, eyebrows raised, ushering me through the gate like a subtle sheepdog.

  'Maybe,' I said. 'A willing captive is less trouble than an unwilling one. Or maybe he's spun her some yarn, told her it'll all be taken care of. He has the ear of the President himself, something like that.'

  That didn't sound too good either.

  Which left us with possibility number three.

  Now why would a woman like Sarah Woolf want to get together with a man like Russell P. Barnes? Why would she walk with him, laugh with him, make the beast with four buttocks with him? If that's actually what she was doing, and there wasn't much doubt in my mind about it.

  All right, he was handsome. He was fit. He was intelligent, in a stupid sort of a way. He had power. He dressed well. But apart from all that, what was in it for her? I mean, for Christ's sake, he was old enough to be a corrupt representative of her government.

  I deliberated on the sexual charms of Russell P. Barnes as I trudged back to the hotel. Dawn was definitely pulling into the station by now, and the snow had begun to throb with an electric, new-fallen whiteness. It climbed the inside of my trousers, and clung, squeakily, to the soles of my boots, and the bit just in front seemed to say 'don't walk on me, please don't walk ... oh.'

  Russell arsing Barnes.

  I got back to the hotel and made for my room as quietly as I could. I unlocked the door, slipped inside and then, immediately, stopped: froze, with my windcheater half off. After the journey through the snow, with nothing but alpine air moving around my system, I was tuned to pick up all the nuances of indoor smells - the stale beer from the bar, the shampoo in the carpet, the chlorine from the basement swimming pool, the beachy sun-cream smell from just about everywhere - and now this new smell. A smell of something that really shouldn't have been in the room.

  It shouldn't have been there because I was only paying for a single, and Swiss hotels are notoriously strict about this kind of thing.

  Latifa was stretched out on my bed, asleep, the top sheet coiled around her naked body like a Rubens pastiche.

  'Where the fuck have you been?'

  She was sitting up now, the sheet tight round her chin, while I sat on the end of the bed and pulled off my boots.

  'For a walk,' I said.

  'For a walk where?' snapped Latifa, still crumpled with sleep, and angry with me for seeing her that way. 'It's fucking snow. Where do you walk in fucking snow? What have you been doing?'

  I yanked off the last boot and slowly turned to look at her.

  'I shot a man today, Latifa.' Except I was Ricky to her, so I pronounced it Laddifa. 'I pulled the trigger and shot a man down.' I turned away and stared at the floor, the soldier-poet, sickened by the ugliness of battle.

  I felt the sheet relax under me. Slightly. She watched me for awhile.

  'You walked all night?'

  I sighed. 'I walked. I sat. I thought. You know, a human life ... '

  Ricky, as I'd painted him, was a man not wholly at ease with the business of talking, so this answer took some time to get out. We let a human life hang in the air for a while.

  'A lot of people die, Rick,' said Latifa. 'There is death everywhere. Murder everywhere.' The sheet relaxed a little more, and I saw her hand move gently to the side of the bed, next to mine.

  Why was it that I kept on hearing this argument wherever I went? Everybody's doing it, so you'd be a square not to join in and help the whole business along. I suddenly wanted to slap her, and tell her who I was, and what I really thought; that killing Dirk, killing anybody, was not going to change anything apart from Francisco's fucking ego, which was already large enough to house the world's poor twice over, with a few million bourgeoisie in the spare-room.

  Fortunately, I am the consummate professional, so I just nodded and hung my head, and sighed some more, and watched her hand creep nearer and nearer to mine.

  'It's good that you feel bad,' she said, after some thought. Not much thought, obviously, but some. 'If you felt nothing, it would mean there was no love, no passion. And we are nothing without passion.'

  We're not a great deal with it, I thought, and started to pull off my shirt.


  Things were changing, you see. In my head.

  It was the photographs that had finally done it - had made me realise that I had been bouncing around inside other people's arguments for so long that I'd reached the point of not caring. I didn't care about Murdah and his helicopters; I didn't care about Sarah Woolf and Barnes; I didn't care about O'Neal and Solomon, or Francisco and The Sword Of fucking Justice. I didn't care who won the argument, or who won the war.

  I particularly didn't care about myself.

  Latifa's fingers brushed against the back of my hand.

  When it comes to sex, it seems to me, men really are caught between a rock and a soft, limp, apologetic place.

  The sexual mechanisms of the two genders are just not compatible, that's the horrible truth of it. One is a runabout, suitable for shopping, quick journeys about town, and extremely easy parking; the other is an estate, designed for long distances, with heavy loads - altogether larger, more complex, and more difficult to maintain. You wouldn't buy a Fiat Panda to move antiques from Bristol to Norwich, and you wouldn't buy a Volvo for any other reason. It's not that one is better than the other. They're just different, that's all.

  This is a truth we dare not acknowledge these days -because sameness is our religion and heretics are no more welcome now than they ever were - but I'm going to acknowledge it, because I've always felt that humility before the facts is the only thing that keeps a rational man together. Be humble in the face of facts, and proud in the face of opinions, as George Bernard Shaw once said.

  He didn't, actually. I just wanted to put some authority behind this observation of mine, because I know you're not going to like it.

  If a man gives himself up to the sexual moment, then, well, that's all it is. A moment. A spasm. An event without duration. If, on the other hand, he holds back, by trying to remember as many names as he can from the Dulux colour chart, or whatever happens to be his chosen method of deferment, then he's accused of being coldly technical. Either way, if you're a heterosexual man, emerging from a modern sexual encounter with any kind of credit is a fiendishly difficult thing to do.