It was dark outside, cold and dark, and it was trying to rain in a feeble, oh-I-can’t-really-be-bothered-with-this sort of a way. I walked slowly, as if I didn’t care about the rain, or much else that life on this earth had to offer, and hoped that I wouldn’t have to wait long.
I didn’t have to wait at all.
It was a Porsche 911, in dark-green, and there was nothing particularly clever about spotting it, because Porsches were as rare on the streets ofPrague as I was. It trickled along beside me for a hundred yards, then made up its mind, spurted ahead to the end of the street and stopped. As I got to within ten yards or so, the passenger door was pushed open. I slowed down, checked behind and in front, and ducked my head to look at the driver.
He was in his mid-forties, with a square jaw and successfully greying hair, and Porsche marketing men would happily have pushed him forward as ‘a typical owner’ - if he really was the owner, which was sort of unlikely, considering his occupation.
Of course, at that moment, I wasn’t supposed to know his occupation.
‘Want a lift?’ he said. Could have been from anywhere, and probably was. He saw me thinking about his offer, or thinking about him, so he added a smile to close the deal. Very good teeth.
I glanced behind him to where the tee-shirt sat, folded up on the tiny rear seat. He wasn’t wearing a tee-shirt now, of course, but a lurid purple thing that had no creases in it. He enjoyed my expression of surprise for a few moments, then nodded at me - part hello, part get in - and when I did so, the driver blipped the throttle and let out the clutch all in a playful rush, so that I had to scrabble to close the door. The two of them seemed to find this very entertaining. The tee-shirt, whose real name was most definitely not and never had been Hugo, shoved a packet of Dunhill in front of my nose, and I took one and pressed the dashboard lighter home. ‘Where are you headed?’ said the driver.
I shrugged and said maybe the centre, but it didn’t really matter. He nodded and carried on humming to himself. Puccini, I think. Or it might have been Take That. I sat and smoked, and said nothing, as if I was used to this kind of thing happening.
‘By the way,’ said the driver eventually, ‘I’m Greg.’ He smiled, and I thought to myself, well of course you are.
He took a hand off the wheel and held it out to me. We shook, short but friendly, and then I left a pause, just to show that I was my own man and that I spoke when I felt like it, not before.
After a while, he turned to look at me. A firmer look. Not so friendly. So I answered him.
‘My name is Ricky,’ I said.
PART TWO
Seventeen
You cannot be serious.
I’m part of a team now. A cast. And a caste. We are drawn from six nations, three continents, four religions, and two genders. We are a happy band of brothers, with one sister, who’s also happy and gets her own bathroom.
We work hard, play hard, drink hard, even sleep hard. In fact, we are hard. We handle weapons in a way that says we know how to handle weapons, and we discuss politics in a way that says we have taken the bigger view.
We are The Sword Of Justice.
The camp changes every couple of weeks, and so far has drawn its water from the rivers ofLibya,Bulgaria,South Carolina andSurinam. Not its drinking water, of course; that comes in plastic bottles, flown in twice a week along with the chocolate and the cigarettes. At this moment, The Sword Of justice seems to have come down in favour of Badoit, because it’s ‘gently carbonated’, and therefore accommodates, more or less, the fizzy and the flat factions.
The last few months, I can’t deny, have wrought a change in all of us. The burdens of physical training, unarmed combat, communications drills, weapons practice, tactical and strategic planning, all these were borne at first in a grim spirit of suspicion and competitiveness. That has now gone, I’m glad to say, and in its place blooms a genuine and formidableesprit de corps.There are jokes that we all finally understand, after the thousandth repetition; there have been love affairs that have amicably fizzled out; and we share the cooking, complimenting each other in a chorus of nods and mmmms on our various specialities. Mine, which I do believe is one of the most popular, is hamburgers with potato salad. The secret is the raw egg.
It is the middle of December now, and we are about to travel to Switzerland - where we plan to ski a little, relax a little, and shoot a Dutch politician a little.
We are having fun, living well, and feeling important. What more can one possibly ask from life?
Our leader, inasmuch as we acknowledge the concept of leadership, is Francisco; Francis to some, Cisco to others, and The Keeper to me, in my covert messages to Solomon. Francisco says that he was born inVenezuela, the fifth of eight children, and that he suffered from polio as a child. I’ve no reason to doubt him on any of this. The polio is supposed to account for the withered right leg and the theatrical limp, which seems to come and go depending on his mood and how much he is asking you to do or give. Latifa says he is beautiful and I suppose she may have a point, if three-foot-long eyelashes and olive skin are your thing. He is small and muscular, and if I were casting the part of Byron, I would probably give Francisco a call; not least because he is an absolutely fantastic actor.
To Latifa, Francisco is the heroic elder brother - wise, sensitive, and forgiving. To Bernhard, he is a grim, unflappable professional. To Cyrus and Hugo, he is the fiery idealist, for whom nothing of anything is enough. To Benjamin, he is the tentative scholar, because Benjamin believes in God and wants to be sure of every step. And to Ricky, the Minnesotan anarchist with the beard and the accent, Francisco is a backslapping, beer-drinking, rock ‘n’ roll adventurer, who knows a lot of Bruce Springsteen lyrics. He really can play all the parts.
If there is a real Francisco, then I think I saw him one day on a flight from Marseille toParis. The system is that we travel in pairs but sit separately, and I was half a dozen rows behind Francisco on an aisle seat, when a boy of about five, sitting up at the front of the cabin, started crying and moaning. His mother unhitched the lad from his seat and was starting to lead him down the aisle towards the lavatory, when the aircraft pitched slightly to one side, and the boy stumbled against Francisco’s shoulder.
Francisco hit him.
Not hard. And not with a fist. If I was a lawyer in the case, I might even be able to make out that it was nothing more than a firm push, to try and help the boy get upright again. But I’m not a lawyer, and Francisco definitely hit him. I don’t think anyone saw it but me, and the boy himself was so startled that he stopped crying; but that instinctive, fuck off reaction, to a five-year-old child, told me rather a lot about Francisco.
Apart from that, and God knows we all have our bad days, the seven of us get on pretty well with each other. We really do. We whistle while we work.
The one thing that I thought might prove our undoing, as it has proved the undoing of almost every co-operative venture in human history, simply hasn’t materialised. Because we, The Sword Of justice, architects of a new world order and standard bearers for the cause of freedom, actually, genuinely, share the washing-up.
I’ve never known it happen before.
Thevillageof Mьrren - no cars, no litter, no late payment ofbills - lies in the shadow of three great and famous mountains: theJungfrau, the Monke, and the Eiger. If you’re interested in things of a legendary nature, you may like to know that the Monk is said to spend his time defending the virtue of the Young Woman from the predations of the Ogre - a job he has carried out successfully and with very little apparent effort since the Oligocene period, when these three lumps of rock were, with relentless geologic, wrenched and pummelled into being.