Philip Kerr - The Shot

He took aim, which was another kind of concentration, choosing the exact spot he wished to hit. It was an old sniper’s trick: pick a point of impact that was the same size as your bullet. When shooting at the side of a man’s head, Tom favoured the tip of the ear. Shooting from the front, as in this case, he always aimed at the philtrum, the little groove in the target’s upper lip. Either way you were certain to hit the brain stem. And at less than a hundred and fifty yards, teeth and bones were hardly likely to deflect a .30-calibre bullet. Tom could shoot groups of one inch at a range of one hundred yards. For a precise shot to the central nervous system, that was really his maximum range. So, keeping the scope’s reticle steady on the man walking toward him, and his aiming spot, he waited for Sylvia to report that the target was clear of other pedestrians and traffic. It was like watching a silent movie, except that the picture he could see was in colour.

For almost thirty seconds a horse-drawn carriage obscured his view of the target. Then, the driver, wearing a tweed cap and blue suit, cracked his whip and the single horse broke into a trot and turned the corner of Cangallo, leaving Tom with what Sylvia confirmed excitedly was now a good clear shot.

Slowly he started to gather the trigger under the tip of his forefinger, taking just the slack out of it, until he felt the heavier resistance of the sear, and, gathering his breath once more, pulling back only to the point of release. He was only a second away from firing when Gregor turned his head and glanced behind him as if to be reassured that his police bodyguard was still in tow. Seeing that he was, Gregor looked to his front again, smiling now, and then slowed as he approached the street corner, ready to cross over Cangallo. He did not seem to have a care in the world. Or a conscience.

‘You’re clear to fire,’ repeated Sylvia. ‘There’s nothing coming either—’

A split second before she heard the gunshot above her, she saw the German reach up for his mouth as though he had felt the sharp pain of a sudden toothache, and his head was momentarily surrounded with what looked like a circle of crimson light as the back of his skull blew off. Both the bodyguard and a pedestrian walking to the rear of Helmut Gregor were splattered with blood and brain coming toward them. Even to Sylvia’s untrained eye it was plain to see that Gregor had suffered a fatal head shot. But swallowing her horror she followed his poleaxed body down on to the sidewalk, and continued to report the silent scene visible through the binoculars. Her first thought was that it seemed incredible that Gregor could have been killed from such a distance.

‘It looks as though you blew the nose right off his face,’ she said.

Tom bolted the rifle and relocated his target now lying in the gutter. This time he aimed at the throat, just below the lower jaw.

‘And I think also the back of his skull,’ she added. ‘He must be dead. No, wait. I think his leg moved a little.’

Tom thought it was probably just a spasm, but he squeezed off a second shot anyway, to make quite sure.

‘Jesus,’ exclaimed Sylvia, hardly expecting that Tom would have bothered to fire again. Still watching through the binoculars, she caught sight of Gregor’s jaw fly off like a piece of broken pottery. Shaking her head, she threw the binoculars on to the bed, and added that the man was now dead for sure. Then she took a deep breath and sat down heavily on the floor, with her back against the bed, and dropped her head between her knees, almost as if she herself had been shot. The cruelty of what she had seen appalled her. The cold-bloodedness of it, too. She had only a vague idea of the dead man’s crimes: that he had done things of unspeakable cruelty. She hoped so. She took no pleasure at all in having participated in this man’s death, however wicked he might have been. Her only source of consolation was that for Helmut Gregor, the invisible hand that had killed with such detached precision had struck him like the fist of God. Not that the man climbing down from the top of the wardrobe looked much like an angel of the Lord. There was something about the American’s face that made her feel uncomfortable. No laugh lines around the mouth, not even the line of a frown on the high forehead, and as for the eyes — it wasn’t as if they were dead or anything grotesque like that, it was just that they were always the same, with the right eye — the one he used to peer through the sniper-scope — permanently narrowed, so that even when he was looking at her he appeared to be choosing some feature on her face as his next aiming point.

Tom slid the rifle into a tournament-size golf bag, disguising the barrel end with a numbered head cover. He added the clubs, hoisted the bag on to his shoulder, and then checked his appearance in the wardrobe’s full-length mirror. There were a number of excellent golf clubs in the suburbs of BA — the Hurlingham, the Ranelagh, the Ituzaingo, the Lomas, the Jockey, the Hindu Country Club — and, dressed in a pair of dark-blue flannels, navy-blue polo-shirt, and matching windcheater, Tom thought he looked to all the world like a man with nothing more lethal on his mind than the dry Martinis he might consume at the nineteenth hole. And, but for the fact that it was late in the afternoon and would soon be dark, he might even have played. He was a keen golfer and often used a bag of clubs to disguise the fact that he was carrying a rifle. This particular bag and the cheap set of Sam Sneads it contained (not so cheap when he remembered the ad valorem they’d charged him at the airport) he had brought with him from the pro shop at the Miami Shores Country Club where he usually played, and he planned to give them to Sylvia’s father after she had disposed of the rifle. The old man was a member of the club at Olivos, close to where Eichmann had been living until rabbit farming took him to San Fernando and the house on Garibaldi Street from which he had been kidnapped.

‘You’re just going to carry it out the front door of the hotel?’ asked Sylvia, closing the bedroom window.

‘Sure. You got a better idea?’ He thought she was looking a little green around the gills. Never seen anyone shot in colour before. Probably just a few old SS newsreel shots of Jews getting it in the back of the head. Not the same thing at all.

She shook her head. ‘No, I guess not,’ she admitted.

‘You look like you need a cup of mate ,’ said Tom, who’d developed quite a taste for Argentina’s national drink himself. A herbal alternative to coffee, mate was a refreshing drink as well as being considered a great remedy for mild stomach upsets.

‘How can you do that?’ she whispered. ‘How can you kill someone like that? In cold blood.’

‘Why do I do it? Why do I take down contracts?’ Tom considered the question for a moment. It was one he’d been asked many times before, mostly in the army, when he’d been more up-front about being a shooter. Somehow it never seemed to satisfy people merely to say that it was all a matter of training. Not that he usually felt much of a need to explain himself. But during the three or four days he had spent with Sylvia he had come to like her. There was something about this girl that made him want to tell her that he wasn’t filled with hate any more than he was some kind of psycho. That he was just a man doing what men were always best at, which was killing other men. Never very articulate, Tom searched for a form of words that she might understand, and in doing so he shrugged, pursed his lips, bobbed his head one way and then the other, and took a deep breath through his nose before finally he answered her.

‘I go to the movies a lot. I’m in a lot of strange towns, killing time, y’know?’ He smiled wryly as he reflected on that particular choice of words. ‘One movie I saw. Shane . With Alan Ladd? Pretty damn good movie. It’s about this stranger that arrives in a little Wyoming town, who tries to forget his previous life with a gun. Only you know he won’t be able to do that. He’ll try and he’ll fail and that’s all there is to it. Which means that right from the moment the bad guy, Jack Palance, appears on screen, you know he’s going to be shot. And that Shane is going to be the one to kill him. The guy’s a walking dead man and he doesn’t even know it. Just waiting to fall into his grave. It’s the same with these guys I kill. When I take the contract they’re dead already. If it wasn’t me who killed them, it’d be someone else. The way I see a contract is that it’s better for them it’s me because I’m good at what I do. Better for them: a clean shot; better for me: I’m well paid for what I do. If it wasn’t for the money I’d probably still be in the army. Money’s the how and the why of just about everything in this world. Whether it’s cutting a man’s hair, pulling his teeth, or shooting him dead.’