Midnight Plus One

The waiter came up with mymarc.

When he'd gone, Harvey said, 'I don't see what Liechtenstein gets out of all this.'

'Some stamp duty, a small capital tax, a lot of work for Liechtenstein lawyers.' I sipped. 'They get a small cut of businesses they wouldn't even get a smell of otherwise. The last I heard, there were six thousand foreign firms registered in Liechtenstein.'

He smiled. It was a slow, twisted movement that used up only one side of his face. 'And I thought they lived by printing new mail stamps every year.' He crushed his cigarette out. 'I hear the cops are also after us.'

'If they know Maganhard's in the country. According to Merlin, they shouldn't know. But if they do – let's get one thing straight.' I looked at him. There's no shooting policemen.'

He looked back at me, rubbing one finger slowly up and down the side of his bony nose. 'Well, well, well,' he said softly. 'And I was just going to say the same thing. Okay.'

His voice got brisker. 'So we don't kill cops. But we could have a problem – if Maganhard's business pals remember they could fix him just by tipping off the cops that he's around. No bother, no risk – to them.'

I nodded. 'I'd thought of that. Maybe they haven't. Or maybe they want him dead.'

He smiled his sideways smile again. 'Or maybe there's a lot we don't know about this job yet?'

It was about eleven o'clock when we left the restaurant and it had started raining again: a slow, steady drizzle that looked as if it could keep up for hours.

'You book a room?' Harvey asked.

'No. I didn't want to go filling out forms and leaving my name around here.'

'Better come up to mine.'

I looked at him sharply in the lamplight. He smiled lop-sidedly back. 'I brought a different passport. This one doesn't say Harvey Lovell.'

We went to his hotel, just north of the river, and got up to his room without anybody seeing me. It was a small, clean, worn room with as much personality as a dead mouse. He sat on the bed, leaving me a choice of the bedside table or a chair, neither of which had been built for sitting on. While I was still making up my mind, he reached an old fabric Air France suitcase out from under the bed, and took out a rolled black wool shirt. He unwrapped it, and had a stubby revolver in a holster with some complicated-looking straps.

'Sorry I don't have a drink to offer,' he said shortly. Then he pulled up his right trousers leg and started fitting the holster on to his calf and ankle. I walked across and picked the gun off the bed.

It was a Smith and Wesson with a two-inch barrel, loaded with five.38 Specials. It was a perfectly ordinary-looking little gun except that he'd added a little more wood to the butt, to improve the grip. But even that wasn't fancy: no careful carving so that every finger fitted exactly into the right place – and took five minutes to get fitted. Fully carved grips are strictly for the Saturday afternoon gunmen.

I glanced quickly at him. He'd frozen with the holster still half strapped to his ankle, his eyes on my hand. He didn't like somebody else holding a gun, and especially not his. Gunmen never do.

I tossed it back on the bed and nodded at the holster. 'Why're you wearing it down there?'

He relaxed and went back to strapping the holster on. 'Easiest place to get it, in a car. Stick it in your belt, or under your arm and it'll take you a week to pull it.'

That made sense to me. 'You planning to wear it there when you get out of the car?' I asked.

'Nope.' He went on fixing the holster.

I waited a moment, then said: 'You've only got five rounds in that thing. Why not an automatic?'

'You need a thirty-eight round to have any punch,' he said, with careful calmness. 'Thirty-eight automatic would be a sight heavier and a sight bigger. Automatics can jam, too.' But by now I was hardly listening. I wasn't really interested in his opinions on guns – only that he had some. To a man who bets his life on his choice of guns there's only one True Belief about guns – his own – and the only True Prophet is himself. Every one has a different belief, of course, which is why there are still so many gunmakers in business.

'Anyway – you think they'll come at us more than five at a time?' he ended up.

I shook my head. He finished strapping on the holster and, still sitting on the edge of the bed, dropped the revolver in. Then snatched it out again. And again – and again. There was nothing smooth and graceful about it, the way it is in the cowboy books. It came out in a vicious grab. I liked that, too.

Then he stood up and slid the gun into a small open-sided spring-clip holster on his belt just forward of his left hip.

'You bringing a gun on this trip?' he asked.

'Yes.'

'Merlin said you probably wouldn't.'

'He didn't ask me. I borrowed one off some friends in Paris.'

He was about to ask me what type. I said: 'Mauser 1932.'

For him, it was probably an expression of intense surprise: his face just went utterly still.

The big job? The thing with a change lever that'll fire full automatic?'

'That's the one.'

He slanted his eyebrows slightly, one up, one down. He had me now: I'd betrayed a bit of my own True Belief -and what a belief.

'You towing it behind us on a trailer?' he asked. 'Or sending it ahead by freight train?'

I grinned There are a lot of snags to the old 'broom-handle' Mauser, particularly the 1932 model converted to real automatic fire. It weighs three pounds, is a foot long, has one of the worst grips going, and fired on full automatic it's as easy to aim as an angry cat. But it has its advantages – and the hell with anybody who doesn't agree.

I said: 'I've always thought the best place to wear a gun is in your hand. If you're fast in your thinking you won't have to be all that fast with a gun.'

'Sounds reasonable,' he said, in a voice with the reasonableness carefully sprinkled on top.

'So you don't like the Mauser '32?' I asked.

'You could say that. You might also say I don't like you telling me about guns.'

I grinned cheerfully. 'All I wanted to know. I had to be sure I didn't have to run you as well as everything else on this job.'

He slanted his eyebrows again. 'This was just to see if I could be pushed around?'

'I didn't know you. I've heard talk of you-' His face suddenly snapped shut, like a blind across a window. I went on: 'But they could have been wrong.'

He relaxed slowly and looked at the floor. 'Yes,' he said, 'they could have been wrong.' He looked up. 'I could like working with you. As long as you remember I won't be making applications in triplicate to open fire. You'll know I want to shoot when you hear me shooting.'

'That's another thing I wanted to be sure of.'

He smiled. 'I've worked with people who didn't understand that – at first.' Then his face got expressionless again, 'Just one thing. We're hired for different jobs: you get him to Liechtenstein – and I keep him alive. Most of the time it'll be the same job. But maybe not always. You might remember that, too.'

I nodded and buttoned up my raincoat. 'I'm going to pick up the car. I'll meet you down beside the river in twenty minutes.'

He smiled again. 'I still think you're crazy, bringing that Mauser.'

I shrugged. 'Call it wartime experience. I started this work when it was mostly Sten-guns and plastic explosive. Doesn't it make you feel better, being backed up by a machine-gun battalion?'

He shook his head firmly. 'Not backed up… If you ever get around to firing that thing, I want to bebehind you.'

We grinned at each other. I thought of asking him why he'd gone stiff when I said I'd 'heard talk' of him. But that isn't the sort of question you ever ask a professional bodyguard-gunman.