The American Read online

  I have, in my time, had to build a complete weapon from scratch. Purchase the metal, forge it and shape it, drill it, sleeve and rifle the barrel, design the mechanism. It was just such a job that had me sweating and stinking in the back of beyond past Kai Tak airport. Not only had I to build the weapon, I also had to disguise it as a briefcase.

  It was masterly, though I say so myself. The butt was the handle, the top frame the barrel. The magazine was in the spine and hinged open on what seemed the case hinges. The mechanism was mounted in a false combination lock in the centre of the front. It went through several customs checks. I took it through to Manila myself. The gun was used three times, each time successfully. Each time in a different country. I understand it is now in the FBI museum or somesuch. Of course, that was in the days before rigorous X-ray checks at airports. The hijackers have made my life so very much more difficult.

  To this end, I am surprised my client is not bothered with such a risk. Clearly, this weapon is to be used on mainland. Europe or somewhere easily accessible without air travel.

  As I sit at my workbench, carefully bending the sheet steel for the extra long magazine, I wonder who the target is. Such thoughts fill those long minutes when the hands are busy but do not need the brain.

  The most likely hit is, I think, Arafat or Sharon. If he is the target, my client must be working for a government. I have prepared weapons for freelance agents of the Americans, French, and British before now. I am careful not to operate for government salaried staff.

  If Qaddafi is not the contract, it could be any head of state in Europe, even a visiting head of state. The British Prime Minister would be a likely candidate: in many quarters, and not all of them foreign or anti-British by a long way, she is sufficiently hated to be a hit. There would be muted cheering in many streets at such an outcome. The German leader is another possibility. So is his entire cabinet. Andreas Baader may be dead but his ideals live on.

  I met Baader just the once. He was introduced to me by a Briton, Iain MacLeod, in Stuttgart in the winter of 1971. He was a quiet man, very good looking in the way of popular revolutionaries. He had thick, bushy eyebrows and a trim moustache. His hair was cut short. He looked like a German Che Guevara. His eyes shone with the fire of conviction one sees in monks and mercenaries, the blaze of ideological certainty, the inner conflagration of the sure knowledge the course one follows is right.

  So many of those for whom I work have this burning in their soul. It consumes them. It is their drug, their sex, the very air they breathe. You cannot poison them, or shoot them, or blow them up, or drown them, or toss them off a cliff. Even when their bodies are consigned to the earth, or the ash of their flesh spread on the wind, the forest fire of their belief lives on. The man can die but the ideals cannot. You cannot crush a concept.

  I am a good gun-maker. One of the best in the world. Certainly in my world. I do not refer to myself as a gunsmith: it rings too much of artisanery. I am not an artisan. I am an artist. I fashion a weapon with as much care for form and attention to detail as a cabinet-maker does a fine piece of furniture. No painter lavishes more of himself on a picture than I do of myself on a gun.

  How I came to develop this facility was purely by chance. I never sought to work in weaponry, did not anticipate armoury as a career. It started as a favour to one of the other petty criminals who lived in the village, that centre of all that is banal in the world. He was one of the few who spoke to me other than to pass the time of day or weather. Perhaps he knew, or innately felt, there was more to me than repairing silver teapots. In my world, one can sense a kindred spirit with an almost instinctive ability.

  His name was Fer. He was about sixty. I never discovered the origins of his name: he might have been Fergus, or perhaps Ferguson. He may have been Farquarson, for all I know, born the wrong side of the sheets and condemned to life as a peasant. He resided in a derelict Bedford van in an orchard a mile from the village: the tyres were perished, grass and docks grew against the panels, the radiator and hood were missing as was half the engine. Where the gearbox should have been grew a sturdy ash sapling. By now, the trunk will have split the rusting hulk.

  Fer was the neighbourhood poacher: he kept ferrets in the cab of the van and lived in the back with a black lurcher bitch called Molly. In winter, he was a ready source of pheasants, rabbits and, on occasion, hares or venison. In the summer, he supplied pigeons to the Chinese restaurants in the nearby towns. He was also able to provide summer trout and, if the waters ran well, autumn salmon. When the season was inappropriate, he worked as a woodsman, felling or thinning trees and taking the timber as payment, selling it by the sack-load in a lay-by on the main road. He had an axe one could shave with; he could work a two-man saw single-handed; he had a countryman’s eye for the main chance and a shotgun.

  The weapon was a side-by-side twelve-bore. It was not a Purdey or a Churchill, nothing grand, no teak case chased in brass with a filigreed lock and velvet compartments. It was just a working gun. Fer kept it in pristine condition, oiled and cleaned and polished it with devotion. He lavished more attention upon it than he did upon Molly the dog, the ferrets, the van or himself. Yet even loved ones fall sick. The connector guide plate fractured one autumn evening and he came to me.

  The excuse was that the gun was old, spare parts no longer available, but that the weapon was otherwise sound and he could not afford to replace it. The truth was that it was unlicensed and probably of dubious history. Fer could not risk taking it to a gun dealership.

  I agreed, under the strictest of secrecy, to repair the fault. The broken part was easily duplicated. He offered me money but I suggested he pay me with a pheasant or two.

  In my little workshop, I disassembled the shotgun. I was like a child being given a clockwork motor to dissect. The interlocking of the pieces, the neat order of metal upon metal, the chain reaction of finger muscle to explosive charge fascinated, captivated me. I effected the repair overnight. Fer paid me with fish and game for three months, always visiting after dark and always calling me ‘Sir.’

  A year later, one of my acquaintances asked the same of me. His gun was similar to Fer’s except that the left hand firing pin was the part which had failed and the barrels were sawn short at twelve inches from the breech.

  In such workmanship as mine, there are no adult education evening classes in the local secondary school. This is not clay-throwing and pot-making, not tapestry weaving. This is the choreography of cut steel. It is self-taught.

  Consider a gun. Most people think of it only as an explosive device. There is a bang, something or someone drops dead. They know there is a bullet which zips through the air. They know there is a cartridge case either of brass, compressed card or plastic, which remains, empty and smoking. They know there is a trigger which does this. Otherwise they see it as do head-hunters in the jungle: the fire-stick which speaks with the voice of the gods, the thunder-pole, the spear-no-one-throws, the lightning-tube. They think the pull on the trigger is all that is required. Pull the trigger and the target is hit. They watch too many television gangster shows, believe all they see on the movies where no policeman or cowboy ever misses, where the bullets fly straight and true, according to the script.

  Life and death are not scripted.

  A gun is a beautiful thing. The trigger does not just click backwards and the cartridge go bang. It operates a series of levers, springs, catches which move with the precision of a Swiss watch. Each has to be machined to the finest of tolerances, cut and shaped with as much accuracy as is demanded of a neuro-surgeon cutting into a brain. Each has to relate exactly to the next. The smallest of deviations, the merest one hundredth of a millimetre, and the mechanism will not obey the order of the other parts, and it will jam.

  Only once has a weapon of mine jammed. It was some time ago, some twenty years ago, in fact. The weapon was a rifle, not based upon another’s design but entirely upon my own. I made it in its entirety, even sleeving the barrel and rifling it. I w
as foolish, arrogant enough to think I could improve upon a design proven through half a century of wars, assassinations, murders, riots and civil unrest.

  It was to be used upon one of the few non-political targets for which I have provided the weapon and one of the few I have known about beforehand.

  In truth, the target was political in a manner of speaking: it was the motive which was not. The hit was the American multi-millionaire proprietor of several international companies—pharmaceuticals, newspapers and television networks, a chain of international hotels, an airline or two. He was also known as an important philanthropist, donating drug rehabilitation clinics to hard-pressed, under-funded American cities. I shall not give you his name. He is still alive and he has my fault to thank for this, although he does not know it.

  I was staying on Long Island at the time and was asked to telephone a number in New Jersey, instructed by an American lawyer, a Manhattan attorney to the Mafia, for whom I had done some occasional work in the past. His letter of introduction was short. I remember it well Dear Joe, it began: he always addressed me as Joe—I was Joe Doe to him. It was best that way. Give a callow youth a call, will you? He’s only eighteen, but he’s no mug. Do not judge him until you have heard his whole spiel. I realize you may not like the job, but as a favor to me, will you consider it? The money is guaranteed. I have it on hold for you. Larry.

  His name, of course, was not Lawrence, or Larry, or anything like it. That, too, was best.

  A request from Larry was as good as Royal Command from the Queen of England. He had clout I could not refuse. So I rang the boy and listened to him out of courtesy to my lawyer friend and with misgivings about the job.

  The boy wanted his father killed. This was not only his intention, it was also the express wish of his mother. The millionaire, I was informed, was as good at philandering as he was at running multinational corporations. His sexual conquests, which the boy told me his father referred to when amongst his cronies as asset-stripping, were various and many. In the course of his stripping asses, as it were, he had contracted syphilis and had passed this on to his wife.

  The motive was understandable but I was still loath to take on such a commission, even for my friend. I did not want to become known merely as a murderer’s assistant. Nothing can be gained from that.

  The boy, no doubt inheriting some of his father’s shrewdness, sensed my reluctance, even over the ’phone.

  ‘You don’t want to do it,’ he said.

  He spoke in a very classy Bostonian accent. I wondered if he was to be a graduate at the Harvard Business School: he had the right voice.

  ‘It is not my usual line of work,’ I agreed.

  ‘Larry said you’d take that stance. But there is something more. I’ll send it round. You call me back.’

  Within the hour, an envelope was delivered by courier. It contained several documents, photostats of US Government memos, all marked secret and all concerning Latin America. There were also three photographs. One showed the hit with a rebel leader known for his genocidal ideologies, another had him with a well-known cocaine baron and the third was a very compromising photograph of the hit humping a very pretty girl on the side of a swimming pool. I rang the number again.

  ‘The clinics are funded by the dope,’ the boy bluntly informed me. ‘And the girl’s the one that gave my mother the . . .’

  He fell silent and the line hummed. I looked at the photographs lying on the desk beside the telephone. I thought I could hear him faintly sobbing and felt an immense sorrow for him.

  ‘Do you have someone in mind . . . ?’ I began.

  ‘Larry has,’ he replied, a catch in his voice.

  ‘I see. And what exactly do you want of me?’

  ‘The piece,’ he said.

  How strange it was to hear a Boston voice speak like a hoodlum in the cinema.

  ‘I can do that. But I shall need to meet the man who is to do it. I have to know the requirements.’

  ‘Rifle, long barrel, telescopic sight fitting—you don’t need to provide that—automatic.’

  ‘A good man only needs one bullet,’ I remarked.

  ‘We want the girl rubbed out, too.’

  I nodded. It was human nature.

  ‘Very well,’ I agreed. ‘I shall give Larry a call and tell him I accept. He’ll have to contact me for collection and payment. But understand this: I am not doing this because I want to help your or your mother. I do not work for the simple motives of vengeance or petty retribution. It is my opinion that your mother should have been wiser in her choice of husband at the start.’

  ‘I undersand,’ he said. ‘Larry said this would be your attitude.’

  ‘Larry, no doubt,’ I went on, ‘also said that if you sent me the envelope the contents would clinch the deal.’

  ‘Yes. He did,’ he admitted and he hung up.

  I made the gun. It was untraceable. No numbers, no patterning, no mass-produced or purchased parts. I tested it. It worked well. I fired twelve shots from it in six seconds, just the required fire rate.

  Yet it jammed on the day. I cannot account for this malfunction but I accept, for I am a professional, that it was my sole responsibility.

  The hit was not killed. He was winged, a slug in the shoulder and another in the liver. The assassin should have gone for two head shots. The problem was the swimming pool was close and the target rolled into it on the first shot. The second, in his side, was deflected by the water. The third and last struck the concrete pool surround and ricocheted. The girl was killed outright. The assassin, unable to defend himself, was gunned down by bodyguards. He had no back-up weapon and that was foolish.

  Larry was upset but I was still paid. He did not believe the gun jamming was my fault. He assumed the hitman had done something to the weapon, dropped it, tried to adjust it. But I know better. I did the job in a rush, my heart was not in it and I took insufficient care. The failure was my fault, unequivocally. I have always regretted it.

  Galeazzo’s secondhand bookshop smells of dust and dry biscuits. It is a crowded little place. Books stand in piles upon the floor, upon tables. Shelves are lined with books. Extra volumes lie on top of those standing upright. The wooden floorboards creak underfoot. If the beams of the cellar below were not made of thick blocks of mountain chestnut, 40 cms square, the shop would long since have collapsed. The first floor is also piled high with books, the back-stock. Galeazzo lives in a two-storey apartment above that.

  He is a man of about my age, grey-haired and stooping as befits a book-dealer. He is a widower, jokes that his wife was crushed to death under a collapsing bookshelf. The truth—Giuseppe informed me: he saw it in a newspaper blowing in the street—is less amusing and just as bizarre. She was visiting relatives in Sulmona when an earth tremor struck. A third floor balcony broke and a motorcycle parked upon it fell on her as she ran to the centre of the street for safety. She was killed instantly. It was a neat, tidy, correct death, as it should be.

  Remarkably, the bookshop stock is not restricted to books in Italian. Almost every European language is represented on Galeazzo’s shelves and in reasonable quantities. Just as remarkable is the shop itself: the Italians do not pride themselves in owning secondhand goods. Look about the Italian countryside at the buildings falling down, at the ruins of structures which could make solid, even superior homes if they were renovated. Instead, close by you see the concrete frame of a modern shanty going up. If the Italians prefer new houses to old, there is no way they will buy old books.

  Yet Galeazzo makes a reasonable living. He sends out quarterly catalogues to professors on his mailing list, receives mail orders which he fulfils by return of post. He even has, he tells me, customers in Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, and the USA. The Americans want only books about the Old Country. Here, of course, they are searching for their Italian roots. The British request books in English on Italy. The professors are on the look-out for folklore, mediaeval religious books and tomes on regional architectu
re.

  With his good command of English, Galeazzo and I get along well. We sit in the Bar Conca d’Oro some days and talk about books. He keeps his eye open for volumes on butterflies and has sold me a number of valuable editions illustrated by artists far superior to myself. Several are nineteenth-century publications with exquisite hand-tinted steel engravings.

  ‘Why do you live in Italy?’

  This is a question often upon his lips. I usually make no verbal response but shrug in the Italian manner, and grimace.

  ‘You should live in . . .’ Every time, he pauses to consider a new country, one not mentioned previously. ‘. . . Indonesia. They have many forests, many strange reptiles. Many butterflies. Why do you paint Italian butterflies? Everyone knows Italian butterflies.’

  ‘They do not,’ I remonstrate. ‘For example, the genus Charaxes—Charaxes jasius. Hardly known elsewhere in Europe, it has frequently been seen in the past on Mediterranean shores and in Italy, wherever the strawberry tree grows. Even the Danaidæ have been discovered in Italy. A hundred years ago, I grant you, but I may find another. The Monarch. The rare Danaus chrysippus.’

  ‘Meagre creatures. You should go to Java.’ He pronounces it Yarvah, like a Jewish festival. ‘There are butterflies as big as birds.’

  ‘I live in Italy,’ I confide in him, ‘because the wine is cheap, the women beautiful and the rent low. At my age such things are important. I have no pension.’

  He pours more wine, Lacrima di Gallipoli. My glass balances unsteadily on an Everyman edition of Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle which Galeazzo has read and knows intimately: his glass teeters on an edition of Ciano’s diary, also in English. He claims to be named after Count Ciano but I believe this to be romantic piffle. The wine he purchases on his book-buying forays to Apulia. Somewhere on the heel of Italy he knows of a library which he can raid from time to time. I try to suss out this seemingly endless supply of cosmopolitan editions. It gives me the opportunity to steer the conversation away from butterflies of which I have only enough knowledge to fool the casual listener. Put me in a room with even an amateur lepidopterist and he will see through my sham in minutes.