Gerald Seymour - Battle Sight Zero

‘You are satisfied, my young friend?’

The man beside Tooth, same age but heavier built, without the extreme menace but seeming by his shifting eyes to be more devious, ignored Hamid. Like he did not want to be there, would prefer to be anywhere than here.

‘I am. It is clean.’

‘On your head be it…’ And the remark was repeated, after translation, in English, and both were laughing, grimly… And when might he expect to be paid for what he had done, near drowned, when might that happen? It did not seem the best moment, the right moment, for the questions to be asked. ‘… on your head. So, do it.’

He had the package in his hand, and started, slowly, and not wishing to hurry, be noticed, to walk.

Tooth said, ‘I like an open space, I like the unpredictable, I like to be where they could not have anticipated and there is no chance of a bug.’

‘Me too,’ said Crab.

But, in Crab’s case, it would be an ‘open place’ somewhere else. He had initiated the question of the deal, had made the proposition. Wished, fervently, that he had not. It had a bad taste, had a smell like the rotting seaweed close to the quay where they had parked the car and spent half the night waiting for the bloody package; brought from the fishing boat by a near-drowned rat who had then wanted to tell his horror story, get his hero-fucking-gram, and he had been cut off as if he’d had a chainsaw at his knees, not acknowledged. Wanted to be back in his home, smart leafy Cheshire, where nothing stank, and maybe taking flowers to Rosie’s grave, and maybe discussing what Gary would cook him for supper… a bad taste and a bad smell, and the value of an old friendship, and the resurrection of old stories often told seemed to have done its time, become surplus. But he smiled weakly, and thought about the flight, and a gin on the way and Gary at the airport.

Tooth said, ‘The kid, that’s the motherfucker’s brother. Looks handicapped. They’ll come together and they’ll swap. You know her?’

‘Don’t, just know her contacts. She’s nothing, does as she’s told.’

‘Good-looking girl. Holds herself well. She came with the kid and…’

‘Rode on the scooter with him.’

‘Don’t fucking interrupt me, Crab, don’t…’

Done coldly, like Crab was just a junior associate, never like that before. Not spoken to as if he were an equal. And momentarily bit his lip, to stop himself from snapping back. No one in Cheshire, nor the stretch of Manchester where he was known, would have silenced him that abruptly.

‘…and just after she came, the VW parked up, the Polo, and the driver is now perched on the wall. Looks spare – what’s he there for?’

‘It’s her boyfriend. He’s taking her home.’

‘You know him, Crab?’

‘Only know he’s a lorry driver. What I hear, she has him wrapped around her finger. Do anything for her. Just a lorry driver.’

‘But you don’t know him.’

‘There’s others that have checked him – not me. They get the rifle, we get our stuff. They go. No, I don’t know him. Fuck sake, Tooth, what’s eating you?’

No reply. He thought Tooth’s head was very still. It did not move as if he followed the progress of the girl and the Arab kid, nor of the ‘rat’ who had the package – bubble-wrap and masking tape – held loose by in his hand. Tooth’s gaze was locked, watching the guy who sat on the wall, swinging his feet. Crab reckoned he’d a pain in his stomach, and felt the cold damp at the back of his neck, and decided he should never have involved himself in the smuggling of a weapon, and it seemed that time stood motionless, and heard a rifle fire, and screaming, like the dream… Had seemed ‘a nice little earner’, shifting a weapon and more to come.

September 2018

Two men were deep in conversation at a café hidden away in a side street near to the principal entry gates for the Port of Piraeus. Seedy, needing paint on the walls and new vinyl on the floor, team photos of the perennial Greek champions, Olympiakos, in frames that had lost their lustre after years of nicotine had floated up from tables and enveloped the glass, a place of casual service, where strangers would not feel welcome. They worked to establish a price for the item on offer. On one side of the table, a plastic cloth covering its surface, was the vendor: a former civil servant from the Agriculture Ministry who had lost his job, and most of his income, when he had been fired under the imposed austerity programme. Opposite him was a merchant seaman, a navigating officer, whose regular route in a Greek-flagged fertiliser carrier was between Piraeus and the Somalian port of Mogadishu, beyond the Red Sea, into the western edge of the Indian Ocean – pirate seas.

‘They are hard times for me.’

‘Hard times for all of us.’

‘The bank will not lend me money any longer. I have no opportunity to work.’

‘But it is old.’

‘The family now live on hand-outs, food-banks, charities.’

‘I sympathise, sincerely. But it is an ancient weapon.’

‘It is indeed old, but it functions. With it are two filled magazines. I think two or three rounds were discharged. One was inside the bank, one killed an off-duty policeman, who was in the middle of a transaction and intervened. He fired one shot… God forbid that circumstances make it necessary for you to use it… Not much ammunition, but dealers do bullets for twenty cents each: was on the internet. I have to sell it, but at a sensible price.’

The rifle was inside a canvas bag wedged between the one-time public employee’s shoes. Cracked and scuffed and without polish, they were evidence of the poverty consuming his family. He had shown this solitary customer the state it was in, and had explained, truthfully.

‘It was my son. He had it for a year. He is supposed to clean his own bedroom. It was under his bed, against a wall. My wife never saw it, nor my sisters, nor me. He picked it up when the gunman fell, and ran with it, hid it…’

‘Three fifty American dollars. The best price.’

‘He was frightened, my boy, and did not know how to dispose of it, anxiety festered in him. Imagine, a boy who is eleven years old and sleeping above a killing machine, with blood soaked into it. It was when we had, three days, only bread to eat, only tap water, and he took me and showed it to me.’

‘Three fifty, my bottom.’

‘God forbid those bastards come after you, but they are down below and getting a grappling hook on the rails, and you will have more than a pressure hose. You can shoot…’

‘Three fifty, all I am prepared to pay.’

The seaman had started to scrape his chair back, and he finished his coffee ostentatiously, made a theatrical show of it. The ‘take it or leave it’ moment.

‘Four hundred – help me…’

‘But it is from another age. It looks uncared for, unwanted, at the end of usefulness. But it has history and the cuts on the wood would be the victims of it, and done in different styles which tells me it has been to many places, had a multitude of owners. I am a man of the sea, been through many ports, sailed many vessels and some were luxury and more had first-class quarters for crew, and some were freighters and trampers and carried filth, rubbish, bottom of the heap… Listen to me. Each time we docked we would go ashore and seek out the cat-houses, girls. Always now I imagine such a history given a whore. Fresh, firm flesh when the girl starts out, with a prettiness and an eagerness to learn her trade, and might be in London or in Marseille or hoping to get to Berlin and do the main avenues and have her own roof, and she begins to sag and the lines appear and she is not worth the great capitals’ business and might have reached Naples, or Vienna. More lines and more kilos at the waist and it will be Belgrade, or our city here, even Beirut, and her value is tumbling but still she knows how to please but the men are rougher, less concerned about anything other than a fast performance, then getting drunk. Now she is at the end of the line. The whore has come to Baghdad or to Damascus, even to Karachi, and she wears more make-up, puts it on with a shovel, and keeps her mouth closed so her teeth cannot be seen. Her teats drop far down her chest, and she cannot get enough hair dye. I tell you, friend, I will meet the whore in Mogadishu. I will, out of sentiment, pay her what she asks, and hope she does not leave me with a complaint and embarrassment. A man with her should close his eyes, not be concerned when the undersheet was last changed, do it and be hardly undressed, and go back to the hotel and scrub well. It is a sad tale of decline… I don’t think that the whore, when she can no longer find business in Mogadishu, has anywhere else to go. It is the end. How does it happen, the end, I do not know, but that is the whore’s progress. You offer me an old whore.’