Hugh Laurie - The Gun Seller

The Swiss sat in bars and murmured to each other; either they were upset, or they were worried about the effect on business. It was hard to tell. They needn’t have worried, of course. By nightfall, the bars and restaurants were fuller than I’d ever seen them. Nobody wanted to miss out on an opinion, on a rumour, on any shred of interpretation they could hang on this ghastly, terrible event.

First of all, they blamed the Iraqis, which seems to be standard procedure nowadays. The theory lasted for an hour or so, until wise heads began to suggest that Iraqis couldn’t have done it, couldn’t even have got into the village without people noticing. Accent, skin-colour, kneeling down and facingMecca. These were things that just didn’t get past the nose of your average canny Swiss without attracting attention.

Next came an out-of-control pentathlete; exhausted after twenty miles of cross-country skiing, our man stumbles and falls, causing his.22 target rifle to discharge, killing Herr Van Der Hoewe in an accident of astronomical unlikelihood. Weird though this theory was, it attracted a considerable amount of support; mainly because it involved no malice, and malice was something that the Swiss simply did not want to countenance in their snow-capped paradise.

For a while, the two rumours lay down with each other, giving birth, after a time, to a truly bizarre hybrid: it was an Iraqi pentathlete, said the not-at-all-wise heads. Maddened with envy at the success of the Scandinavians in the last winter Olympics, an Iraqi pentathlete (someone knew someone who had heard the name Mustapha mentioned) had run amok; in fact, was probably still out there somewhere, stalking the mountain in search of tall, blond skiers.

And then there was a lull. The bars began to empty, the cafes closed down for the night, and the waiters found themselves exchanging mystified looks as they cleared away plate after plate of uneaten food.

It took me a while to realise what was happening too.

The tourists, finding nothing very satisfactory in most of the explanations being trafficked about the town, had retreated to their hotel rooms to kneel, in ones and twos, before the all-powerful, all-seeing CNN, whose Man On The Spot, Tom Hamilton, was, even now, giving the world the benefit of ‘the very latest reports, just in’.

Gathered around the television in the bar of Zьm Wilden Hirsch, Latifa and I, wearing a dozen slightly drunk Germans about our shoulders, heard Tom expound the idea that ‘the killing was possibly the work of activists’ - for which, I would guess, Tom gets paid around $200,000 a year. I wanted to ask him how he had managed so ruthlessly to exclude the possibility that it was the work of passivists; in fact, I could easily have done so, since Tom was plying his trade, in a pool of flaring tungsten light, not two hundred yards from where we were trying to stand up. Only twenty minutes before, I had stood and watched while a CNN technician buttoned a radio microphone into Tom’s tie, and Tom had waved him away and said he’d do it himself, because he didn’t want anyone spoiling the knot.

The statement was due to have been released atten o’clock, local time. If Cyrus had done his job, and the statement had reached them as planned, then CNN were taking their time verifying it. More likely, if the rest of the staff were anything like Tom, they were taking their time reading it. Francisco had insisted on using the word ‘hegemony’, and that had probably knocked them back a bit.

It finally came on the air attwenty-five past eleven, delivered slowly and clearly, and with a hefty sub-text of ‘God these guys make me sick’ by the CNN anchorman, Doug Rose.

The Sword Of Justice.

Mum, come quick. That’s us. The man’s talking about us. I think, if I’d wanted to, I could probably have slept with Latifa that night.

The rest of the CNN coverage consisted of a lot of library footage concerning terrorism through the ages, stretching the viewer’s memory all the way back to the beginning of last week, when a group of Basque separatists had bombed a government building in Barcelona. A man with a beard came on and tried to flog copies of a book he’d written about fanaticism, and then we were back to CNN’s main agenda: telling people who are watching CNN that what they really ought to be doing is watching CNN. Preferably in a different fine hotel to the one they’re in.

I lay on my bed at The Eiger, alone, feeding whisky and nicotine into myself with alternate hands, and started to wonder what would happen to you if you were ever actually in the fine hotel they were advertising, at the time they advertised it. Would it mean that you had died? Or gone to a parallel universe? Or that time had started to go backwards?

I was getting drunk, you see, which was why I didn’t hear the knock at first. Or if I did hear it at first, I just convinced myself that I didn’t, and that the knocking had been going on for ten minutes, possibly ten hours, while my brain yanked itself from its CNN torpor. I hauled myself off the bed.

‘Who is it?’ Silence.

I had no weapon, nor any particular desire to use one, so I opened the door wide and stuck my head out. What will be will be.

A very short man stood in the corridor. Short enough to really hate someone of my height.

‘Herr Balfour?’

I had a moment of complete blankness. The kind of blankness that often descends on agents working under cover - when the plates come spinning off the poles and they lose track of who they’re supposed to be, who they really are, which hand they hold a pen with, or how door handles work. Drinking whisky, I’ve found, tends to increase the frequency of these episodes.

I was aware of him staring at me, so I pretended to cough while I struggled to get a hold of myself. Balfour, yes or no. Balfour was a name I was using, but with whom? I was Lang to Solomon, Ricky to Francisco, Durrell to most of the Americans, and Balfour… that’s it. I was Balfour to the hotel; and therefore, if they so chose, and I had no doubt that they had so chosen, I was Balfour to the police, too.

I nodded.

‘You will come with me.’

He turned on his heel and marched off down the corridor. I grabbed my jacket and room key and followed him, because Herr Balfour was a good citizen, who abided by every law he could find and expected others to do the same. As we walked to the lift, I looked down at his feet and saw that he was wearing platform shoes. He really was enormously short.

It was snowing outside (which, I grant you, is where it usually snows, but remember that I was only just starting to sober up) and huge discs of white were fluttering to the ground, like the debris from some celestial pillow-fight, covering everything, softening everything, making everything matter less.

We walked for about ten minutes, him taking seven paces to my one, until we reached a small building out on the edge of the village. It was a wooden, single-storey affair, and it might have been very old, or it might not. It had loose-fitting shutters over the windows, and the marks in the snow said that a lot of people had been paying calls recently. Or perhaps it was one person, who kept forgetting something.

It was a strange experience, walking into that house, and I think it would have been just as strange if I’d been sober. I felt like I should have brought something; gold or frankincense, at the very least. I didn’t feel so bad about the myrrh, because I’ve never been quite certain what it is.

The Very Short Man stopped at a side door, glanced over his shoulder at me, then knocked once. After what seemed like a while, a bolt was shot somewhere, then another, and another, and another, and at last the door swung open. A grey-haired woman peered at the Very Short Man for a moment, at me for three moments, nodded, and stood aside to let us through.