Gerald Seymour - The Dealer and the Dead

The policeman was behind Gillot. Fifteen or twenty paces. More opportunity for the psychologist: would have been duty-driven, would not have had the flawed personality to claim the right to a ten-hour break – many would – and hands washed of a problem. Steyn saw the dried, dark blood, the stains on the suit jacket, the smears on the shirt. Understood that, too. The bluff factor was not compatible with a bodyguard in tow.

Gillot closed on him.

No eye contact, nothing resigned, nothing fearful and nothing confident – no recognition.

The women were in the middle of the track and the corn grew high at either side of them. The widow had her stick and Maria a grenade bulging in a pocket, a knife in her hand. He thought it the sort of a knife that would be used to cut up a slaughtered pig in a shed behind a village home. They blocked Gillot’s way.

Genius. He reached them and stopped. He looked into the faces, would have seen the emotions that could kill him. He did that little smile, apologetic, but without a cringe. He offered no defiance and stepped to the side. Perhaps they expected argument, might have expected explanation or gushing apology. He was past them. Cleverly done.

At a price. The stick was thrown after him, which must have hurt the widow because the arthritis ravaged her. It caught Gillot on the back of the head, but he rode it. Then Maria hurled a stone, which hit Gillot square in the back, by the bullet holes in his shirt. He staggered but didn’t go down. Steyn thought that if he had he would be gone. He would not have risen again. More stones and earth clods rained on Gillot, but he stayed upright.

Steyn walked with Roscoe.

In front, where the path bent, he saw his old friend, Bill Anders, who was – maybe – the architect of the whole damn thing, and in the group with him was Tomislav, who held an RPG-7. His wife had quit before the heavy fighting had started and gone to the enemy. He understood the hate.

A stone cut the back of Gillot’s head and blood matted his hair.

Roscoe could not have put himself into Gillot’s mind. He thought he should have been on one side of the Tango and the doctor on the other. They should have walked beside him, but the stinging ache in his nose and the swelled lip told him where he was wanted and where denied. The women were behind him. There were shouts, curses… Sometimes the doctor, almost with embarrassment, translated what was yelled at Gillot.

So, Roscoe broke ranks. He jogged a few paces and came near to Gillot’s shoulder. One stone jarred his back, low down, while another hit Gillot and glanced off the angle of his neck.

He did it from the side of his mouth. ‘I don’t want you. I don’t need you. You have no place here. You’re not a party to this argument. Get back. I don’t ask you-’

Gillot didn’t have to finish.

It would have been a stone that a plough had turned up, too heavy for the old woman to lift and throw, so it must have been the younger woman who had hurled it. A good aim. It hit the detective somewhere at the back of the head, then bounced on to the track and corkscrewed into the corn. Roscoe yelped, then took two more steps, or three, and subsided. Gillot left him. There would have been another tedious, futile debate: Gillot’s needs against the other man’s sense of obligation.

He didn’t look back. It wouldn’t have helped him to see the detective. He didn’t want to know whether the man was stunned, out cold, or had merely gone down and then pushed himself to his feet again. He went forward.

What he did and how he acted made, curiously, good sense to Harvey Gillot. Certainly he would not look back and probably not to the side. His focus was in front of him. The corn was an aisle. Further on, ahead, he heard a rumble of voices but they were indistinct and he understood only a choir chorus of hostility.

He heard a cry, croaked: ‘For fuck’s sake, Gillot, turn round and let’s get the hell out.’

He did not. Of course not. He could have turned on the island when two shots were fired, or at the Hauptbahnhof and any time in Zagreb after he had gone to the rendezvous cafe and revisited where he had met the schoolteacher. He could have turned at the hotel that morning when he’d settled his bill. Best bloody foot forward.

It was a bigger group that was waiting for him. They had trampled down some of the corn and he saw the rusted frame of a harrow or a plough, abandoned. The thin, sculpted shape of an RPG-7, held high, a grenade loaded, poked above the heads of the women and the shoulders of the men. How many of those had he sold? Good one. Harvey Gillot began the mental arithmetic of the numbers of RPG-7s he had flogged. He started with the Middle East and the ones that had gone to Lebanon for use by the army against Hezbollah and the Palestinian factions up in Tripoli and… a load had gone to Cyprus for a paramilitary crowd, and the Jordanians had had some, and the Syrians had stockpiled more. Anywhere that had no oil had had RPG-7s from him. He didn’t do many contracts with oil-producing countries because they could, more easily, buy government to government with brown envelopes attached. They had gone to Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia, all the fledgling places that were UN newcomers and had broken free from the old Soviet Union. He was doing well, counting high, beyond hundreds and into thousands and- Shit.

They were baying. He thought they looked for blood.

He saw women bend and pick up clods or stones. Some waved knives, rifles were pointed. Then the launcher was lowered, rested on a shoulder and aimed at him. Right. An RPG-7, at close quarters. He knew it had, at two hundred metres, the ability to penetrate 240mm of armour. He was inside that zone – and some – and had no armour of any thickness, just a vest and a shirt that was already holed. The RPG could splatter him. There were AKs too, and the pitch he would have used said that AK-4 assault rifles could kill at damn near half a mile, and a granny could hit with a 7.62mm bullet at less than two hundred metres.

He tried to hold his stride.

No escape. Who, in this world, did Harvey Gillot trust? Would have been, twenty years before, Solly Lieberman, but a bear had had him when he’d gone for a comfort break. Now, only Benjamin Arbuthnot: he had caught a glimpse of his head – hair a little longer, voice a little louder, shoulders a little lower – in the bar when he had checked in at the hotel. Roscoe had referred to ‘an old spook who acts the fool and isn’t’. He set himself that target. Arbuthnot would be along the track, maybe a mile away, maybe five, and if he could reach him he would be… He had faith. About all he bloody did have. He had not come to do penance, most certainly had not come to die. He had come to get the weight of the contract off his back.

He went towards the cluster of men and women. The voices rose in hate chants, the rifles stayed aimed at him and the RPG-7, but he thought they teased him and tried to break him. He walked into the range of the best-thrown rocks and clods.

He was in the avenue, couldn’t divert – and wouldn’t while he had the so-small chance of walking clear.

All the places that William Anders went to work, where he supervised the digging, there were men like the guy who carried the rocket launcher. No colour in his face, and the past sat across his shoulders like a lead weight, the launcher acting as a nudge to the memory. He would not fire, but it was the gesture – and the second was in the military tunic that seemed two sizes too large. Anders reckoned it would have been the guy’s own, that his body had shrunk over the years. The investigator girl had identified him as Tomislav and had said he would have directed the Malyutka missiles. He knew about them. He had flown into Cairo more than thirty years ago, a rookie in his trade, and had been in the Sinai where the Egyptians had started well with them, but the operatives had been massacred when the Israeli Defence Force had mastered a tactic to employ against them: they’d called them ‘Saggers’. Anders had heard then it was not easy kit to use… Not important now. He appreciated that his old friend, the spy, who had shared many of his stamping grounds, might just have done enough to save the life of a long-term asset and might not. In the gods’ laps. With each step he took, Anders despised himself more for being there, booking a ticket to watch a man die.