Hugh Laurie - The Gun Seller

Which, to be honest, is unfair, bordering on the ridiculous. In the same way that it would be ridiculous to call a Fiat Panda a crap car, just because you can’t fit a wardrobe in the back. It might be crap for all sorts of other reasons - it breaks down, or it uses a lot of oil, or it’s lime-green with the word ‘turbo’ written pathetically across the back window - but it’s not crap because of the one characteristic that it was specifically designed to have: smallness. Neither is a Volvo a crap car, simply because it won’t squeeze past the barrier in the Safeways car-park and allow you to get out without paying.

Burn me on a mound of faggots if you like, but the two machines are just plain different, and that’s that. Designed to do different things, at different speeds, on different types of roads. They’re different. Not the same. Unalike.

There, I’ve said it. And I don’t feel any better.

Latifaand I made love twice before breakfast, and once afterwards, and by mid-morning I’d managed to remember Burnt Umber, which made thirty-one, something of a personal record.

‘Cisco,’ I said, ‘tell me something.’

‘Sure, Rick. Go ahead.’

He glanced across at me, then reached down to the dashboard and popped the cigarette lighter.

I thought, for a long, slow, Minnesotan moment. ‘Where does the money come from?’

We travelled about two kilometres before he answered. We were in Francisco’s Alfa Romeo, just the two of us, gradually reeling in the Autoroute de Soleil from Marseille toParis, and if he let ‘Born In The USA’ go round just once more on the tape-deck, I was probably going to have a nosebleed. Three days had passed since the shooting of Dirk Van Der Hoewe, and The Sword Of justice was feeling pretty invincible by now, because the newspapers had started to discuss other matters and the police were scratching their computerised, intelligence-gathering heads at the lack of any firm leads. ‘Where does the money come from,’ Francisco repeated eventually, drumming the steering-wheel with his fingers. ‘Yeah,’ I said.

The motorway hummed by. Wide, straight, French. ‘Why do you want to know?’

I shrugged.

‘Just… you know… just thinking.’

He laughed like a crazy rock ‘n’ roll thing.

‘Don’t you think, Ricky, my friend. You just do. You good at doing. Stick with that.’

I laughed too, because this was Francisco’s way of making me feel good. If he’d been six inches taller, he’d have ruffled my hair like a big-hearted older brother.

‘Yeah. I was just thinking, though…’

I stopped. For thirty seconds we both sat a little straighter in our seats as a dark-blueGendarme Peugeot cruised past. Francisco eased fractionally off the accelerator and let it go.

‘I was thinking,’ I said, ‘like when I paid the check at the hotel, you know… and I thought, like, that’s a lot of money… you know… like six of us… hotels and stuff… plane tickets… lots of money. And I thought… like, where’s it coming from? You know, somebody’s paying, right?’

Francisco nodded wisely, as if he was trying to help me with a complicated problem involving girlfriends.

‘Sure, Ricky. Somebody’s paying. Somebody’s got to pay, all the time.’

‘Right,’ I said. ‘That’s what I thought. Somebody’s got to pay. So, like, I thought… you know… who?’

He kept his eyes to the front for a while, then slowly turned and looked at me. For a long time. So long, that I had to keep flicking my eyes to the road in front to make sure there wasn’t a fleet of jack-knifing lorries ahead of us.

In between these glances, I shone back at him with as much innocent stupidity as I could manage. Ricky’s not dangerous, I was trying to say. Ricky’s an honest infantryman. Ricky’s a simple soul who just wants to know who’s paying his wages. Ricky is not - never has been, and never will be - a threat.

I chuckled, nervously.

‘You going to watch the road?’ I said. ‘I mean, like… you know’

Francisco chewed his lip for a moment, then suddenly laughed with me and turned back to face the front.

‘You remember Greg?’ he said, in a happy, sing-song way. I frowned, heavily, because unless a thing happened in the last few hours, Ricky’s not sure he can remember it too well. ‘Greg,’ he said again. ‘With the Porsche. With the cigars. Took your picture for the passport.’

I waited a while, and then nodded vigorously.

‘Greg, sure, I remember him,’ I said. ‘Drove a Porsche.’ Francisco smiled. Maybe he was thinking that it didn’t matter what he told me, because I’d have forgotten it all by the time we got toParis.

‘That’s him. Well now, Greg, he is a clever guy.’

‘Yeah?’ I said, as if this was a new concept to me.

‘Oh sure,’ said Francisco. ‘Real clever. Clever guy with money. Clever guy with a lot of things.’

I thought about this for a while. ‘Seemed like an asshole to me,’ I said. Francisco looked at me in surprise, then let out a yell of delighted laughter, and hammered the steering-wheel with his fist.

‘Sure he’s an asshole,’ he shouted. ‘A fucking asshole, yeah.’

I laughed along with him, glowing with pride at having said something to please the master. Eventually, gradually, we both calmed down, and then he reached out a hand and turned off the Bruce Springsteen. I could have kissed him.

‘Greg works with another guy,’ said Francisco, his face becoming suddenly serious. ‘Zurich. They are like finance people. They move money around, do deals, handle a lot of big stuff. Varied stuff. You know?’ He looked across at me, and I frowned dutifully back, showing some hard concentration. That seemed to be what he wanted. ‘Anyhow, Greg gets a call. Money coming in. Do this with it, do that with it. Sit on it. Lose it. Whatever.’

‘You mean, like, we got a bank account?’ I said, grinning. Francisco grinned too.

‘Sure, we got a bank account, Ricky. We got a lot of bank accounts.’

I shook my head in wonder at the ingenuity of this, and then frowned again.

‘So Greg pays money for us, right? But not his money?’

‘No, not his money. He deals with it, takes his cut. Big cut, I think, seeing as how he drives a Porsche, and all I got is this fucking Alfa. But it ain’t his money.’

‘Sowho?’ I said. Probably too quickly. ‘I mean, like one guy? Or a lot of guys, or what?’

‘One guy,’ said Francisco, then took a last, long, deciding look at me - auditing me, weighing me up - trying to remember all the times I’d annoyed him, all the times I’d pleased him; figuring out whether I’d done enough to earn this one piece of information that I had no right or reason to know. Then he sniffed, which is a thing Francisco always did when he was getting ready to say something important.

‘I don’t know his name,’ he said. ‘His real name, I mean. But he uses a name for the money. For the banks.’

‘Yeah?’ I said.

I was trying to make it look as if I wasn’t holding my breath. Cisco was teasing me now, drawing the whole thing out for fun.

‘Yeah?’ I said again.

‘The name is Lucas,’ he said at last. ‘Michael Lucas.’ I nodded.

‘Cool,’ I said.

After a while I settled my head back against the window, and pretended to sleep.

There’s a thing, I thought, as we thrummed along towardsParis, and Christ knew what. There’s a strange piece of philosophy in action. I just hadn’t realised that before.

Thou Shalt Not Kill, I’d always assumed, was top of the list. The Big One. Coveting neighbour’s asses, obviously, was a thing to avoid; likewise, committing adultery, not honouring thy father and thy mother, and bowing down before graven images.