My Little Armalite (28 page)

I sank back in disbelief, like some hero trapped in a Kafkaesque nightmare. It was impossible that these people could be within their rights as they did this to me, yet clearly they were. Never had the gap between justice and the law, between
what should be
and
what is legally allowed
, been so blindingly plain.

I tried to breathe only through my nostrils, but as the blue clouds of smoke slowly filled the entire place it became clear to me that I had no alternative but to yield to injustice and move. I was not sitting with bloody
smokers
. So I was going to have to give up my beloved, sleep-necessary window seat. No more could I use the cushions opposite on which to stretch my legs luxuriously out. I was going to have to pick up my pillow and walk away, with no certainty that I would find so comfy a place on the whole long train. Quite
probably I would now have to muscle in on half a dozen happy young people and sit there feeling old, uncool and unclean. But there was no alternative.

Except that there was.

—
Bon dia, scushe, exishte la poxibilitate de prendare una xigaret?
I asked, smiling, for I had by now established that my companions were Romanians and thus spoke the handiest language on earth, the only one which you can actually make up as you go along and be more or less understood provided you stick to everyday needs.

—Si, exishte, they replied, with satisfying amazement. They did not quite smile but were clearly relieved that there was now a logical explanation for my scowling behaviour: I was not mad, I was simply a foreigner dying for a smoke, the way you do. The begged cigarette appeared, along with a light. I smiled, nodded thanks, mimed delight and relief, sucked deeply, opened my second beer and sat happily back.

As I did so, the collar of my old tweed jacket shoved itself higher, and I caught, amidst the horsey fibres, a smell I had never found on my clothes before. A strange and slightly sickly mix of talcum powder, WD-40 and bonfire night. And something else. Yes, that was it. Burning metal. My first day at my secondary school.

I would, had I been born a year before, have been safely bussed twelve miles to the grammar school, to take my place amongst the at least partially bookish and studious. But it had all gone comprehensive by the time my turn came along, so I walked to what had been the local secondary modern. This place had for some decades equipped for life stout Devon youths who had sex by thirteen, drove tractors and played darts in pubs by fourteen and delightedly left education soon thereafter. And so it fell out that our very
first lesson of our very first day was to take up a piece of steel so that we might each forge and rivet our very own coat hook, to serve us for all our schooldays, using a bloody great red-hot coke-fired miniature blast furnace, anvils and hammers and all. I stared in dis-belief as my turn approached, and was simply too scared to pull my red-hot lump of metal out with the yard-long tongs, despite the teacher‘s shouts and the laughter of my new classmates. By the time I had been ordered, stung and ear-clipped into grasping it with the metal jaws, the steel had gone beyond white-hot, had caught fire and was burning, crackling like a giant, hellish sparkler, sending out foot-long lightning bolts that bounded across the floor and made my fellow pupils dance joyously for cover. The teacher was forced to rescue me and the classroom. He snapped that I was a bloody useless nancy boy, and shoved me aside so hard that I fell on to the bare cement, thus setting the seal on my playground fate that morning and for years to come.

That smell it was. Burning metal.

I sniffed tweed again, inhaled tobacco again, sucked beer again, sat back and smiled: gunsmoke!

By the time we reached Dresden the tall, wide buffet car had provided me with three further beers and a packet of American cigarettes (provided by a Hungarian waiter in a small act of private enterprise). What with the drink and the fact that it was years since I had been on a German railway, I forgot how high the trains are and stepped from the door into unexpected nothingness, falling with a small yelp of shock on to the platform.

I lay there for a moment, flat on my back, almost laughing with delight at this proof that I was indeed back in good old Europe, and that I could still roll instinctively from a fall without hurting myself like some old git.

From this surprisingly comfortable position, I surveyed the grandeur of the renovated Hauptbahnhof. State spending? We have no idea what it really means, in Britain. Or at any rate, since we pay the bastards enough in taxes, they must be spending it in some mysteriously invisible way. On wars and preparations for wars, perhaps? Well, you could see what they did with the stuff here. The place so dripped with public money that the nineteenth-century building seemed like a proud showcase for some extraordinary new form of high-tech transport. And this was supposed to be a deprived region!

I climbed to my feet, dusted down my pillow, winced slightly at a new pain in my back, and looked around
for the exit. Yes, I was a bit drunk, but so what? I deserved it. I had learned to fire an assault rifle today and could now look global warming in the eye with less wretched, rabbit-like terror.

After all, what would really happen, when The Day came, when the Thames Barrier finally gave, for example? Society would not disappear overnight. Emergency laws would be enacted, citizens enlisted, state-supporting elements co-opted in the fight to preserve some form of civilisation. A well-spoken and indubitably English man titled Doctor, able to swiftly show his mastery of an assault rifle, provide one himself and make it clear that he was quite prepared to use it if ordered to, against carloads of hooded looters, for example, would be sure to find a welcome for himself and special treatment for his family. Yes, in a very real way, I had today made an important investment in providing for my loved ones' futures. Life for the family man is about more than just work. Well done, John Goode.

Well, I mean, obviously that was all rubbish, just my little joke.

What I had done was simply learn how to make the bloody gun safe so that I could dump it when I got home. Object achieved, well and truly. Lost my fear of guns entirely. Piece of piss, to disarm it, now. So if I wanted another drink or two, and I did, I could bloody well have one. Or, indeed, two. Nice pure German beer, mmm, yes, what harm could that do anyone? I would simply call Panke and tell him I was too tired to do anything that night. Assuming he had even got my message, that was. I could meet him tomorrow or go home without even seeing him. I could go back to Prague and do that night-shoot with George. A night-fighting capability, after all, might well be decisive for my family's survival when
shtf
, whatever that was …

—Nonsense, I laughed aloud. It was all just a jolly daydream. In the real world, my plan was watertight, caulked with hard logic. Whether I actually saw Panke or not was immaterial. I reminded myself firmly: all I had ever wanted from my trip to Dresden was a firm cover story about why I had gone to Prague. That story would be complete and cast-iron the moment I had checked into the hotel and called Panke from my room.

Clever, you see. Not a PhD for nothing!

I almost chuckled aloud at my own cunning and walked out of the station, past the easily missable bronze-and-stone memorial to the people who had been seriously beaten up by the police on this very spot not twenty years ago for asking to be allowed to travel outside their country.

I knew the way of old. Straight down the Berliner Strasse, through the state socialist architecture to cobble-stones and glories restored without thought of expense. I would wander around them and have a quick nightcap, why not? Bound to be some little old magical pub, always is in Germany, maybe have a chat with someone or other, a woman maybe, just to practise my German, then back to wonderful five-star hotel linen (oh God!) and a splendid night of baby-free sleep far from the Armalite and Phil and noisy little hooded gits in cars and the sodding mortgage and …

What
mortgage rate was that poster offering?

Was that all Germans paid? Bastards. Hmm, yes, that made you think …

I did not mean to stop before the poster outside a closed bakery-cum-cooked-meat-takeaway and start thinking earnestly (though a little drunkenly) about the East German housing market. But my poor deformed little British subconscious locked on. It had been battered by decades of radio and TV programmes in
which
successful businessmen
were introduced like modern-day saints and people's frantic scrabbles up
the property ladder
were illuminated as though this represented their souls' hard-fought ascent towards Nirvana. We may not be a nation of shopkeepers any more (shop-keeping hours are too much like hard work), but by God we have become a grand gang of would-be little landlords. My innermost being had been hounded every weekend of the millennium by
Your Property
supplements whose legions of hacks were obliged to find endless new financial terrors or opportunities to justify their employment. The very core of my mind had been mutated by incessant jabbering articles about how Bulgaria (or was it Albania? Or Latvia?) was the next no-lose property hot spot for monetaristically sophisticated British investors.

Helplessly, my conditioned mind spiralled off into bold entrepreneurial leaps of imagination about remortgaging cunningly in London so as to extend my property portfolio Eurozone-wise and thus let other poor suckers who needed a place to bring up their families (but could not afford to buy) fund my fat little workless existence in happy years to come …

Such heaven!

The small matter of whether I could actually even afford my own mortgage at the moment anyway could soon be fixed, surely, with some sophisticated modern financial uptooling? And where better to uptool than London? I mean, shit, what if I geared myself to the limit and bought a place in the most run-down shit-heap rustbelt brown-coal part of the old East Germany? After all, I had some unusual local knowledge. Berlin was obviously chucking euros at the region.

For the love of God, why oh why hadn't I bought a
high-ceilinged old flat here back in 198bloody7? I could have got it for nothing, almost.

Then I remembered that there was actually a very good reason why I had not bought a place back here in nineteen eighty-seven. There had been, back in nineteen eighty-seven, a certain tricky little speed hump here for would-be real-estate speculators. They called it Communism and its principal backer was the Red Army.

I arrived in the floodlit square around Our Lady's church and smugly located my splendid hotel. A band of musicians was playing squeezeboxes and balalaikas to dinner-jacketed, long-gowned punters spilling out from the launch party of a Russian jewellery shop next to the hotel. So much for the Red Army. But perhaps I would pop in once I had fixed up my room. If I strolled in, blithely twirling my hotel key, surely I could blag a glass or two of free champagne? Just a merry nightcap before sliding into my doubtless gorgeous bed for sleep, sleep at last.

Then I noticed the two men in the hotel's big doorway, looking at me.

They did not seem to fit together in any way of normal social logic, yet were clearly here as a team. One was a tall young man with a long, pale face and somewhat glittering glasses, wearing a shirt and tie under a dark blue suit of slightly too sharp a cut to be daily wear. The neat turn-ups on his trouser legs lay just high enough to show that he was wearing boots, not shoes. His companion was far shorter, considerably older, with long, greying hair that hung down well over the shoulders of a leather waistcoat that was never going to button again over a large beer gut that stretched the black T-shirt underneath. His trousers were also of leather, brown, not black. Had it not been for the fact that his locks were floatingly clean and that
he too wore slim-rimmed gold glasses, he would have looked like a refugee from an American bikers' convention.

The young, suited man caught my gaze and looked me swiftly over once more. He turned to elbow his companion.

The police, of course!

I stopped dead in the empty square, and looked down at my feet. I could see my own multiple shadows on the floodlit cobblestones. The cornered Harry Lime in
The Third Man
. Even now, I could perhaps still run. But for how long? Where? For what? Even in my somewhat tiddly and careworn state, I could see that my only hope now lay in giving myself up with a good grace, insisting on extradition and relying on British justice to deploy its well-known prejudice in favour of the educated classes.

And God, I was tired of being on the run. Once more, I felt the deep rush of relief as I thought of telling all. Surely, they would have beds in German police stations? Yes, somehow it would be easier to confess everything in German. Absolutely everything. About how I had publicly sung bold songs in Lottie's bar (with, as it turned out, the happy agreement of the local Stasi), accusing the evil West German state (that mere American satrap) of being viciously fascistic in its treatment of essentially good-hearted and Che-like Baader-Meinhof murderers …

Me?

Oh yes, me. Guilty, my Lord, both as charged and not.

Knowing that the German police are all armed, and not wanting my internal organs destroyed, I stuffed my pillow under my arm ( I simply could not bear to let it go) and set my course towards the two men with
my hands well away from my sides, my fingers spread and pointing upwards, my palms out towards them like some plaster Jesus showing his holes for doubters. As I neared them, I smiled and spoke firmly in German, relishing the strange freedom that comes with speaking fluently in a foreign language. It seemed fitting that my reckoning should come in another tongue. Fitting, and for some reason far less fearful. As if, like a holiday romance, it didn't really count.

—I'm Dr John Goode, I said. —And I surrender.

—You are Herr Doktor Goode? asked the tall, creepy one.