‘I think we should be able to manage most of that,’ said Major Gilliland.
‘You mean you keep that sort of thing in stock ?’
‘We don’t keep anything in stock. When we get an order we buy what we can. Mainly from the Ministry of Supply. Bits and pieces from other places.’
‘And do you get many orders as big as this?’
The Major smiled faintly, and said, ‘Last week I had to find two destroyers.’
‘Good heavens,’ said Hugo. ‘I’d no idea this sort of thing went on. Where does it all come from? I suppose we finished the last war with a mass of stuff we didn’t need, is that it?’
‘It’s not only the ending of a major war, Mr. Greest. Weapons go out of fashion almost as quickly as ladies’ clothes. Take those rifles. If you were after .303 Lee Enfield No. 4s, or American M.I. Garand carbines or AR-10s, we could let you have them at once and at a reasonable price. We could even get you M-14S or AR-15s. If, on the other hand, you were looking for something up to the moment like an M-16 Armalite or a Russian AK-47, we’d have to shop round for it, and it would cost you a lot of money.’
Observing the blank look on Hugo’s face he said, ‘You’re new to this game, aren’t you?’
‘To me,’ said Hugo, ‘a rifle is a thing which I remember, vaguely, from my school days. It was brown, it was oily, and it was infernally heavy. It had a bolt at one end and a knob to fix a bayonet on at the other. It was called, I think, a service rifle.’
‘And a very good weapon it was,’ said the Major, with the first Spark of enthusiasm he had shown. The trouble is that weapons nowadays have become too sophisticated altogether.’
‘Any help you can give me, technical or otherwise, will be gratefully received.’
Then you’ve had no experience of weapons since your school days?’
‘I’ve handled a lot of small arms. But they were carefully plugged Lugers and Birettas. And when I pulled the trigger the noise was made by a sound-effects man.’
‘I see. Well, it’s something of a jungle you’re stepping into.’
‘So Taverner said.’
‘Taverner?’
‘He’s the man at the Foreign Office who sent me here. He said that as soon as it was known that I was in the market for arms, I’d have a crowd of people on my neck.’
‘It’s a competitive business. It can be a very profitable one. The leaders in the field are the Americans. I saw an estimate the other day that they had sold more than fifty billion dollars’ worth of arms since the last war. Of course a billion doesn’t mean quite the same on the other side of the Atlantic as it does here. But it’s a pretty staggering figure all the same. The American Government gets the lion’s share. They’ve got a section in the Department of Defense which does nothing but handle sales. The I.L.N.S. Very popular with the politicians. It’s the only part of the Pentagon which makes money instead of spending it.’
‘But there are private operators?’
‘Certainly. Cummins is the best known. He’s so big he’s respectable. There are others who—well—let’s say they’re prepared to cut a few corners to get their fingers in the gravy. Abacus and Target, for instance.’
‘Come again.’
‘Abacus is the Anglo-Bostonian Arms Corporation of the U.S.A. Target is Trans-American Rifle and Gun Enterprises of Topeka. And there are plenty of others. Smaller and even less scrupulous ones, right down to individual wheelers and dealers. Arms are big business in North America. I can’t swear that it’s true, but it’s commonly believed that the only reason Uncle Sam wouldn’t drop Taiwan which was really a great embarrassment to them was because the politicians were subject to such pressure from the gun lobby.’
(But Major Gilliland, Hugo thought, would not be a very promising subject for pressure. He was dry, thin and indestructible; a man from whom all superfluous fat and superfluous emotion had already been squeezed.)
‘Where do we come in the race?’
‘As arms salesmen? Difficult to say, because no figures are ever published. No reliable figures, that is. America’s certainly first, by several lengths. Then Belgium, Sweden, Italy and ourselves in a bunch, would be my guess.’
‘And does the general public know what goes on? I mean, I’d no idea—’
‘The facts have all been published.’
‘Do people approve?’
Major Gilliland smiled thinly, and said, ‘Most of my friends know what I do. I haven’t noticed any of them actually spitting.’
‘I didn’t mean that. You’re doing a job. What I meant was, ideologically. The idea of selling arms to people to kill each other with.’
‘I’ve never been able to make out what people think. At one time we believed in international arms cartels run by sinister financiers who provoked European wars for profit. It was nonsense, of course. If there’s one thing that kills international profit, it’s a major war. On the other hand, there’s a strong theoretical argument against equipping guerrillas and rebels with modern arms.’
‘Theoretical?’
‘Certainly. In practice it’s neater and kinder to kill someone with a rifle than with a panga.’
‘I suppose so,’ said Hugo doubtfully.
‘On the other hand, you could argue that to equip a state like Umran with a modern, efficiently armed, force is the best guarantee against further trouble. But you came to ask about arms, not to listen to arguments. I think the next sensible step would be for me to put you in touch with someone from Ordnance who can talk over the technical details with you. It’ll take a day or two to arrange.’
‘As long as it’s only a day or two,’ said Hugo. ‘My brief acquaintance with Sheik Ahmed suggests to me that when he wants something, he doesn’t want it tomorrow. He wants it the day before yesterday.’
‘I’ll get my secretary to fix it.’ He must have pressed a bell, because a dumpy, middle-aged lady wearing pebbles glasses had appeared in the room. ‘Give us a telephone number where we can contact you, Mr. Greest.’
After some reflection he gave them Sam Maxfeldt’s telephone number. He could visualise his mother’s reactions if someone rang up and told her that a consignment of four-inch mortars was ready for inspection.
At the moment when Hugo was leaving the offices of the Crown Agents on Millbank, Colonel Leroy Delmaison (Colonel Rex to his friends) was entering one of the flats in Inverness Mansions, which is a block of flats on the north side of the Cromwell Road.
He opened the curtains, turned on one bar of the electric fire, sank down into the shabby, chintz-covered armchair, and sighed.
He was a man to whom, in or out of uniform, the word dapper would seem appropriate. The remains of his reddish-brown hair was dressed neatly round his sun-browned shining bald pate. A reddish-brown moustache jutted, in the appropriate cavalry officer, or Dean Acheson, manner from his upper lip. The hair on each side of his face had been prolonged, and partly concealed the fact that his right ear was missing and that the right side of his face was scarred. Part of his jaw-bone was missing, too. A section, made of silver, had been inserted after the explosion which had removed his right ear.
Like most people who travel a lot, the Colonel disliked hotels. Small unpretentious hotels, medium-sized family hotels, huge and splendid international hotels; he had tried them all many times and had found them, for different reasons, distasteful. It had been with gratitude, therefore, that he had accepted a friend’s offer of this flat for a few weeks. It was a bachelor’s apartment. Shabby covers and curtains, books on the shelves, drink in the corner cupboard, and a double-bed, in case your tastes ran to company at night.
Colonel Rex sighed again. Mixed with the satisfaction was an element of regret.
The Colonel was a man who had trained himself to observe. He had therefore not overlooked the young man in the neat suit with the sallow-skinned, almost hairless face, who had been sitting doing nothing in particular in the arrival lounge at Heathrow; and who, in the company of a second young man, so like him that he might have been his brother, had followed the Colonel from Heathrow to the flat.
The Colonel had been driving a fast car, and he knew all the clever side-roads and by-ways down which a driver might switch and double, but because he had learned the first rule of being followed he had made no attempt to use them. (Don’t try to throw off your followers. Lead them quietly to wherever it is you happen to be going. Let them see you park your car and go inside. Let them discover that this is your base. Then they will be happy to watch it. And you can watch them. Until you are ready to deal with them.)
There were a number of possible reasons for the young men being there. The slightly splayed nostrils, the neat rounded countersunk ears, and the colour and texture of the hair suggested a point of origin in the Antilles where Spaniard mixed with Indian. Haitian, Dominican or Puerto Rican.
Puerto Ricans, the Colonel considered were the most single- minded assassins in the world. In 1950 they had had a near miss at President Truman and four years later had opened fire in the House of Representatives and wounded six Congressmen. On the latter occasion the attempt had been made with weapons supplied by the Colonel, who had, in the past decade, concluded many profitable deals in that part of the world. One in particular had held the seeds of future trouble.
He had sold, to the army of a small but proud Republic five hundred revolvers. They had new shiny black grips and handsome lanyards and were invoiced as Smith and Wesson .455 revolvers at fifteen pounds each. And there was no doubt that the chamber of the revolver accepted a .455 bullet. They also carried the indisputable mark of the Birmingham Proofing House to show that they had stood up to the rigorous tests which that body imposes.
What had not been made clear to the purchasers was that, at the time when they had passed the proofing house, they had been .45s. The extra .005 of metal had been reamed out of them in the Colonel’s own workshop in Quebec City.
It is true that by removing .005 of metal, the Colonel had also removed part of the safety margin. And a revolver which explodes when you fire it is apt to do more damage to the marksman than to his target.
If this sort of accident had happened too often, it could account for the presence of the two young men.
The Colonel lit a cigar and considered the question. The most probable answer was that they would watch him, to find out what business he was engaged on in England. They would plan to put in an appearance at the precise moment when the Colonel’s negotiations were reaching a conclusion, and they would then threaten to make trouble with the authorities. Unless a fair share of the profits on the new deal was handed to them. Enough to compensate them for the fact that they had paid fifteen pounds each for revolvers worth, at most, five pounds.
It all depended, thought the Colonel, on who had got hurt. If it had been a few unimportant officers or non-commissioned officers, money would be adequate compensation.
If, on the other hand, it had been the President’s son, or one of his boyfriends, only blood would pay the bill.
The Colonel moved to the window. The car which had followed him was parked on the other side of the road. One of the young men was in it. The other was out of sight.
He was about to return to his chair when the telephone rang.
He picked up the receiver and said, ‘Yes.’ And this was all he did say for some time. When the comfortable middle-aged woman’s voice at the other end had finished he said, ‘Thank you so much, my dear. If you examine your bank account next week you will find that Father Christmas has not forgotten you. Let me write that address down. Number 17, Riverside Avenue, Richmond. Lovely. Goodbye for now.’
Sam Maxfeldt said, ‘I hope we haven’t let you in for something.’
‘What are you talking about?’ said Hugo.
‘When this woman rang up she said she was Larry Foreman’s secretary. She said Larry wanted to call on you before he left for America tomorrow and discuss a proposition. He wanted your address, so my secretary gave it to him. She shouldn’t have done it, of course.’
‘That sounds exciting.’
‘But it wasn’t.’
‘Wasn’t what?’
‘It wasn’t Larry’s secretary. When the girl told me, I thought I ought to find out more about this proposition and I rang Larry’s office back. The call hadn’t come from them.’
‘It was probably a gag by one of my fans,’ said Hugo. When he had become famous he had gone ex-directory, and his address was always given as Sam Maxfeldt’s office.
‘I expect that’s it,’ said Sam.
At eight o’clock that same evening Colonel Rex left Inverness Mansions. He left by the back door, and walked unhurriedly to Gloucester Road Underground Station. He did not think he was being followed, but he was taking no chances.
He caught the first train that came in. The fact that the indicator board showed that it was going to Wimbledon, and that this was almost exactly in the wrong direction, did not seem to worry him.
By the time the train had crossed the Thames and reached East Putney he had finished his cigar, and here he got out. Without surrendering his ticket he crossed the bridge, and sat down, on the deserted platform on the other side to wait for a train back to Earls Court. This simple manoeuvre ensured that anyone following him would have to declare himself.
There was no one.
The Colonel switched trains once more at Earls Court and reached Richmond at ten to nine. At nine o’clock he was ringing the doorbell on Hugo’s side of the house.
Hugo answered the door himself. He had been expecting a gaggle of teenage fans, and the sight of a middle-aged man in a neat herring-bone Ulster, with a brief-case in one hand and a rolled umbrella in the other, took him momentarily off balance.
‘Mr. Greest?’
‘That’s me,’ said Hugo. ‘What can I do for you?’
‘I must apologise for calling at such an uncivilised hour, but I’ve only just landed in England.’
‘Well come in,’ said Hugo. It seemed the only thing to say. ‘Let me take your coat.’
He led the way up a short flight of stairs, and held open the door of his sitting room. ‘I imagine this is something to do with Umran.’
‘Indeed it is,’ said the Colonel. ‘But I must explain at once, in case you decide to throw me out—’ he smiled as though speaking of a remote contingency— ‘that I have not been sent here by the Foreign Office, or by the Crown Agents.’
‘Then how did you—oh, I see. You’re the person who rang up Sam.’
‘A friend of mine did it for me.’
‘Well,’ said Hugo cautiously, ‘now that you’re here, you’d better tell me what it’s all about.’
‘It’s about arms.’
‘You’re an arms salesman.’
‘Let me give you my card. My friends call me Colonel Rex. I hope you will follow suit.’
‘I’m afraid you’re too late, Colonel. I’ve made all my arrangements through the Crown Agents.’
‘Have you signed anything?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Well, thank goodness for that.’
‘Why?’
‘I should hate to think,’ said the Colonel, ‘that, in the course of a single day, providence had placed a modest fortune in your hands and you had thrown it away.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘You are aware that there are two sources for the purchase of arms. Government and private operators.’
‘Major Gilliland told me as much.’
‘Ah, yes. Mike Gilliland. I know him well. An excellent fellow, and good at his job. Quite the best man they have. But did he explain to you the difference between the two sources? The difference from your point of view? Perhaps not.’
‘Not precisely.’
‘And yet it’s very simple. It is the only reason that private operators like myself exist. The government agencies hold all the cards. They have stocks of arms. They have technical experts at call from the armed forces. They control the necessary export licences. But being government servants, they work within very strict financial controls. No money ends up in their pockets. It goes straight from the buyer – in this case the Ruler of Umran – to the seller, the British Treasury.’
‘I suppose that’s right.’
‘But if you buy from a private operator, the whole transaction is more in the nature of a joint venture, and the profits accrue accordingly. You, by favour of the Ruler of Umran, have a potential order worth perhaps half a million pounds. I could not price it more accurately without knowing the precise details.’
‘You seem to have learned a good deal about it already, if I may say so.’
There is no mystery about that. The Ruler of Umran was known to be over here on a shopping expedition for his new army. It is only quite recently that he has been in a position to spend big money. You know about that, of course.’
‘I did hear that there had been a mineral strike.’
‘But you don’t know exactly what has been found.’
‘I was told, but I’ve forgotten.’
‘I see.’ Hugo thought that he detected, for the first time, a faint look of approval in the Colonel’s eyes; the look which a poker player might give an opponent whom he has assumed to be a fool, when he realises that he may have to revise his judgement.
‘Let us revert to this transaction. If the sale price to Umran is half a million pounds it should be possible, by careful selection, to buy the weapons for four hundred thousand, possibly less. There is a large element of luck in a transaction of this sort. Since the arms are for a sovereign state which is friendly to this country and is not at war with any other state there should be no difficulty about export licences, and therefore no need to spend money in overcoming those difficulties. The total profit should be available for distribution between the two of us. Since I should have to do most of the work, I suggest a forty-sixty split.’
‘You mean,’ said Hugo slowly, ‘that if I do it through the Crown Agents I get nothing, but if I do it this way I pocket forty thousand pounds.’
‘An approximate figure, of course.’
‘Perhaps you’d care for a drink?’