Hugh Laurie - The Gun Seller

Hugh Laurie

The Gun Seller

1996

Cold-blooded murder just isnt Thomas Langs cup of tea. Offered a tidy sum to assassinate an American industrialist, he opts to warn the intended victim insteada good deed that soon takes a bad turn. Quicker than he can down a shot of his favourite whiskey, Lang is bashing heads with a Buddha statue, matching wits with evil billionaires, and putting his life (among other things) in the hands of a bevy of femmes fatales. Up against rogue CIA agents, wanna-be terrorists, and an arms dealer looking to make a high-tech killing, Langs out to save the leggy lady he has come to loveand prevent an international bloodbath to boot.

I saw a man this morning

Who did not wish to die;

P. S. STEWART

Imagine that you have to break someones arm.

Right or left, doesnt matter. The point is that you have to break it, because if you dontwell, that doesnt matter either. Lets just say bad things will happen if you dont. Now, my question goes like this: do you break the arm quicklysnap, whoops, sorry, here let me help you with that improvised splintor do you drag the whole business out for a good eight minutes, every now and then increasing the pressure in the tiniest of increments, until the pain becomes pink and green and hot and cold and altogether howlingly unbearable? Well exactly. Of course. The right thing to do, the only thing to do, is to get it over with as quickly as possible. Break the arm, ply the brandy, be a good citizen. There can be no other answer.

Unless.

Unless unless unless.

What if you were to hate the person on the other end of the arm? I mean really, really hate them.

This was a thing I now had to consider.

I say now, meaning then, meaning the moment I am describing; the moment fractionally, oh so bloody fractionally, before my wrist reached the back of my neck and my left humerus broke into at least two, very possibly more, floppily joined-together pieces.

The arm weve been discussing, you see, is mine. Its not an abstract, philosophers arm. The bone, the skin, the hairs, the small white scar on the point of the elbow, won from the corner of a storage heater at Gateshill Primary Schoolthey all belong to me. And now is the moment when I must consider the possibility that the man standing behind me, gripping my wrist and driving it up my spine with an almost sexual degree of care, hates me. I mean, really, really hates me. He is taking for ever.

His name was Rayner. First name unknown. By me, at any rate, and therefore, presumably, by you too.

I suppose someone, somewhere, must have known his first namemust have baptised him with it, called him down to breakfast with it, taught him how to spell itand someone else must have shouted it across a bar with an offer of a drink, or murmured it during sex, or written it in a box on a life insurance application form. I know they must have done all these things. Just hard to picture, thats all.

Rayner, I estimated, was ten years older than me. Which was fine. Nothing wrong with that. I have good, warm, non arm-breaking relationships with plenty of people who are ten years older than me. People who are ten years older than me are, by and large, admirable. But Rayner was also three inches taller than me, four stones heavier, and at least eight however-you-measureviolence units more violent. He was uglier than a car park, with a big, hairless skull that dipped and bulged like a balloon full of spanners, and his flattened, fighters nose, apparently drawn on his face by someone using their left hand, or perhaps even their left foot, spread out in a meandering, lopsided delta under the rough slab of his forehead.

And God Almighty, what a forehead. Bricks, knives, bottles and reasoned arguments had, in their time, bounced harmlessly off this massive frontal plane, leaving only the feeblest indentations between its deep, widely-spaced pores. They were, I think, the deepest and most widely-spaced pores I have ever seen in human skin, so that I found myself thinking back to the council putting-green in Dalbeattie, at the end of the long, dry summer of 76.

Moving now to the side elevation, we find that Rayners ears had, long ago, been bitten off and spat back on to the side of his head, because the left one was definitely upside down, or inside out, or something that made you stare at it for a long time before thinking oh, its an ear. And on top of all this, in case you hadnt got the message, Rayner wore a black leather jacket over a black polo-neck. But of course you would have got the message. Rayner could have swathed himself in shimmering silk and put an orchid behind each ear, and nervous passers-by would still have paid him money first and wondered afterwards whether they had owed him any. As it happened, I didnt owe him money. Rayner belonged to that select group of people to whom I didnt owe anything at all, and if things had been going a little better between us, I might have suggested that he and his fellows have a special tie struck, to signify membership. A motif of crossed paths, perhaps.

But, as I said, things werent going well between us.

A one-armed combat instructor called Cliff (yes, I knowhe taught unarmed combat, and he only had one armvery occasionally life is like that) once told me that pain was a thing you did to yourself. Other people did things to youthey hit you, or stabbed you, or tried to break your arm but pain was of your own making. Therefore, said Cliff, who had spent a fortnight in Japan and so felt entitled to unload dogshit of this sort on his eager charges, it was always within your power to stop your own pain. Cliff was killed in a pub brawl three months later by a fifty-five-year-old widow, so I dont suppose Ill ever have a chance to set him straight. Pain is an event. It happens to you, and you deal with it in whatever way you can. The only thing in my favour was that, so far, I hadnt made any noise.

Nothing to do with bravery, you understand, I simply hadnt got round to it. Up until this moment, Rayner and I had been pinging off the walls and furniture in a sweatily male silence, with only the occasional grunt to show that we were both still concentrating. But now, with not much more than five seconds to go before I passed out or the bone finally gave waynow was the ideal moment to introduce a new element. And sound was all I could think of. So I inhaled deeply through my nose, straightened up to get as close as I could to his face, held the breath for a moment, and then let out what Japanese martial artists refer to as a kiai youd probably call it a very loud noise, and that wouldnt be so far offa scream of such blinding, shocking, what-the-fuck-was-that intensity, that I frightened myself quite badly. On Rayner, the effect was pretty much as advertised, because he shifted involuntarily to one side, easing the grip on my arm for about a twelfth of a second. I threw my head back into his face as hard as I could, feeling the gristle in his nose adjust itself around the shape of my skull and a silky wetness spreading across my scalp, then brought my heel up towards his groin, scraping the inside of his thigh before connecting with an impressive bundle of genitalia. By the time the twelfth of a second had elapsed, Rayner was no longer breaking my arm, and I was aware, suddenly, of being drenched in sweat.

I backed away from him, dancing on my toes like a very old St Bernard, and looked around for a weapon.

The venue for this pro-am contest of one fifteen-minute round was a small, inelegantly furnished sitting-room in Belgravia. The interior designer had done a perfectly horrible job, as all interior designers do, every single time, without fail, no exceptionsbut at that moment his or her liking for heavy, portable objets