Jon Cleary - Dragons at the Party

Miguel Seville hated Australia and Australians. Not on political or ideological grounds; it was difficult to take seriously the parish pump policies of this backwater. No, he hated the country, or anyway Sydney, because it was so brash, materialistic and uncultured compared to his own Buenos Aires; he hated the people for the same grating faults. He had been here once before at the secret invitation of an Aboriginal radical group; he had found the blacks as objectionable as the whites. Loud, brash, with opinions on everything: nobody wanted to learn, especially from a foreigner, even an invited one. With the disappearance of Carlos, he had become the top man in his trade; but the Aboriginal radicals had wanted to argue every point with him. In the end he had walked out on them and gone back to Damascus.

That was where he had been two weeks ago when the phone call had come from Beirut. He had gone down to that ruined city and in an apartment in the Muslim quarter met the man who had phoned him.

‘You will be paid one million American dollars.’

Seville tried to show no surprise; but it was difficult. His price was high, but it had never been as high as this. All at once the recent dreaming might come true: he could retire, go back to Argentina and be amongst his own again.

‘Less my ten per cent.’ Rah Zaid was a thin, thin-faced, thin-eyed man who always, no matter what the weather or the time of year, wore a neatly-pressed black silk suit and an Arab head-dress. He had a husky voice that suggested over-exposure to desert sandstorms; the truth, less romantic, was overexposure to American cigarettes. He was smoking now, almost shutting his eyes against the smoke. The air in the apartment was acrid, but that could be the after-effects of the Christian shell that this morning had wiped off the balcony beyond the living-room’s french doors. ‘As usual.’

‘The client is also paying you commission, I suppose?’ Seville didn’t resent what Zaid made out of the contracts; he was the best contact man in the trade that employed them. Utterly amoral, he was nevertheless utterly to be trusted. If he were not, he would have been dead years ago. Seville could have been the one to kill him.

Zaid smiled thinly behind the cigarette smoke: everything about him seemed to be squeezed tight to make the least possible impression. ‘We have an understanding.’

‘Who is the client?’ Seville knew better than to ask, but he always did.

Zaid shook his head. ‘In this case you aren’t to know. Even I don’t know. You are to kill President Timori either in Bunda or, if he abdicates and leaves Palucca, you are to follow him and kill him at the first opportunity.’

‘I thought only kings abdicated?’

‘I gather he thinks of himself as one. If he does, they have no idea where he’ll go. Nobody wants him, not even the Americans.’

Down in the street there was a burst of automatic gunfire, but neither man flinched or got up to investigate. Beirut now had different everyday sounds from those of other cities. A breeze blew in from the bay but there was no smell of salt air, just cordite.

‘When do they want me to leave?’

‘Immediately. Things will come to a head this week in Bunda.’

‘How will the money be paid?’

‘Half a million to your usual account. The rest on completion of the job.’

‘Did you nominate the price or did they?’

Zaid gave another thin smile; Seville, who had been happy as a child, wondered if the Arab had ever laughed aloud, ‘I had to do some bargaining, but that’s what I enjoy.’ Seville could imagine the bargaining: it was second nature to an Arab. ‘These people, whoever they are, hardly quibbled – their go-between came back to me within ten minutes. They must be desperate to be rid of him.’

‘But if he abdicates, why kill him?’

Zaid shrugged, lit another cigarette. ‘Perhaps it is the Americans, It would save them the embarrassment of having to give him political refuge.’

It was Seville’s turn to smile. ‘I don’t think so. They would pay someone a million dollars to kill me .’

‘The client doesn’t know who you are. I was just asked to find an assassin.’

Seville got up and walked to the french doors. He walked with a slight roll, like a man who had spent a long time at sea; but he was no seaman, indeed he hated it. He had a knee-cap that had once been broken by the Argentinian secret police; it gave him little trouble now, but it had affected his walk. He was good-looking in an anonymous way; he grew on women slowly, which was the way he preferred; women, for more than just professional reasons, should always be approached cautiously. He was slim and of medium height and had a cool air to him that was often taken for quiet arrogance and rightly so. He had contempt for a good deal of the world and its citizens.

He looked out across the Bay of St George to the steeply rising mountains. This had once been the most beautiful city in the Levant, a mixture of influences laid like a diorama of history, from the Phoenicians to the French and now the Syrians, on the slopes between the mountains and the sea. Now it was a battlefield, a city of ruins that, if the present madness prevailed, might never be rebuilt.

‘Once I thought of retiring here.’ He had wanted to retire for at least a year; he had tired of the game. But there had not been enough money to retire on; there was no pension fund for freelance terrorists. Indeed, there had been very few commissions for him in the past year; the terrorist groups had started to employ expendable fanatics who cost nothing. He had been fast approaching the point where he would be in debt, an Argentinian national habit but one which he had never indulged. Of course there was the family money, but he would have to wait till his mother died before he could claim any of that; and that would not be easy, because half a dozen police forces would do their best to follow the trail of money to him. It might be years before he could collect it.

Now this windfall was being laid in his lap and he could think seriously of retiring. ‘But I’ll be in my grave before Beirut is peaceful again. Don’t you think so?’

‘Yes,’ said Zaid who preferred not to talk of the grave. No commission ever came out of a cemetery.

‘What happens if something goes wrong? Whom do I contact?’

‘I promised them nothing would go wrong.’

Seville shook his head, smiled almost as thinly as Zaid. ‘You know I try to be as near perfect as possible. But something can always go wrong, especially if the target doesn’t co-operate. You may not know it, but there were six attempts to kill Queen Victoria, but something always went wrong.’

‘Assassins have improved since then – the technology is better. You won’t fail, Miguel. Just think of the million dollars.’

Seville drew an advance from Zaid, went to a local bank and bought $3,000 worth of traveller’s cheques; he did not believe in over-loading himself with money. Police had a bad habit of confiscating money when they picked up a suspected terrorist. He did not sign the cheques, because he could never be certain what name he would be using when it came time to cash them. The bank knew better than to insist that he sign them; in Beirut money was always being withdrawn for reasons better left unqueried. As he came out of the bank a car bomb exploded at the far end of the street. He stood watching the black smoke vomit up in slow motion; then the terrified figures came running out of it. A man was jumping towards him on one leg, the stump of the other streaming blood behind him; suddenly he stopped, balanced like a dancer on the good leg, then fell over. There were screams and shouts and, as if it had been waiting just round the corner for the call, the wail of the siren of an approaching ambulance. He turned and walked away, wondering who the one-legged man had been and why, even as he walked away and the man was behind him, the image of him should be so clear in his mind. He could not remember taking any notice of the victims of his own bomb plantings. Was he to be haunted by memories in his retirement?