A Gun for Sale (2 page)

The fears which preoccupy the characters of
A Gun for Sale
– of imminent world war, of possible gas attacks, of sinister political powers – would all have been real and present fears to Greene’s first readers. Greene’s choice of an armaments manufacturer as the villain of the piece was particularly timely. Left-wing political theory of the early 1930s had come increasingly to lay the blame for war past and war future at the door of capitalism, which was held to have contaminated state morality with finance. In particular, such theories denounced the massive interlocking interests of governments and the arms companies – Vickers, Krupp, Skoda, Schneider-Creusot. A series of dramatically titled books detailing this hypothesis were published:
Death and Profits
(1932),
The
Bloody Traffic
(1933),
Salesmen of Death
(1933). Of these the best known was the dispassionate but damning
Merchants of Death: A Study of the International Armament Industry
(1934) by H.C. Engelbrecht and F.C. Hanighen, which triggered a 1935 Royal Commission on ‘the war traffic’ in Britain.

The figure of Sir Marcus – a spiritless but deadly destroying angel, for whom spilt blood is as nothing compared to a rocketing share price – would therefore have been a familiar to the public imagination, as would the excited and nervous gossip which fills the novel – in the newspaper office, on the street, in Dr Yogel’s surgery – about the killing which is to be made in ‘munitions shares’.

Almost everyone in
A Gun for Sale
is wounded, venal, vengeful or all three. One thinks of salacious Mr Davis, preying sexually on his showgirls, or the sharp-elbowed women who jostle outside a Nottwich jumble sale, waiting for it to open: ‘They are quite capable’, Greene has the nervous vicar note, in one of the novel’s rare flashes of humour, ‘of storming the doors’. Those few moments of compassion which do occur are nested within nastiness: the display of arid love, for instance, which passes between mean-minded Acky and his meaner-minded wife, when they are confronted by Raven.

Of these many bitter characters, the bitterest is Raven himself: our murderer and our detective, our hero and our villain. Hatred, Greene writes melodramatically, ‘had constructed [Raven] into this thin smoky murderous figure in the rain, hunted and ugly … He had never felt the least tenderness for anyone.’ Raven is not even evil, just perfectly indifferent – and this is what makes him all the more alarming.

Greene at one point describes Raven as carrying ‘a chip of ice in his breast’. It is a phrase which inevitably recalls the famous observation in his autobiography
A Sort of Life
(1971) that ‘there’s a splinter of ice in the heart of a writer’. Greene recalled being in hospital as a child, being treated for appendicitis, when a ten-year-old boy was brought in to the ward with a broken leg. The parents were told they could go home, but shortly after they had left, complications set in. The
parents
were summoned back; the boy died. While the other patients shut out the sounds of the mother’s cries of anguish with their radio headphones, Greene watched and listened. ‘This was something,’ he concluded chillingly, ‘which one day I might need’.

The similarities between Raven the assassin and Greene the novelist stretch beyond their shared pitilessness. Both also show a deep disdain for the pieties of liberal humanism.
A Gun for Sale
, indeed, can be seen as the start of Greene’s long-running attempt to destroy what Hywel Williams nicely described as ‘the ethical religion of the English: a decadent liberal Protestantism sliding into secular do-gooding agnosticism.’ Against the robust nineteenth-century trio of the progressive, the humane and the universal, Greene relentlessly pitted the squalid, the crooked and the fugitive. His major novels, beginning with
Stamboul Train
(1932) and intensifying in
A Gun for Sale
, confront and continually affront the persistent liberal-minded English belief that truth and decency are always obvious to those endowed with a rational and optimistic goodwill. This is why motives in Greene’s novels are always mixed, why the good are sometimes damned and sometimes not, and why the wicked often end up, if not blessed, at least free. His characters exist in a moral world where goodness and badness do not exist as opposed and separate states, but shade into one another by fine degrees.

This ambiguous pessimism – or clear-eyed realism – runs right through to the end of
A Gun for Sale
. Anne and Mather are in a train carriage returning from Nottwich to London. Watching the countryside pass them by in reverse, both know – as the first readers of Greene’s book would have known – that a world war has not been prevented, only postponed. ‘This darkening land,’ thinks Mathers as he gazes out of the window, ‘flowing backwards down the line, was safe for a few more years.’ Three, to be precise.

Robert Macfarlane, 2005

Chapter 1

1

MURDER DIDN’T MEAN
much to Raven. It was just a new job. You had to be careful. You had to use your brains. It was not a question of hatred. He had only seen the Minister once: he had been pointed out to Raven as he walked down the new housing estate between the small lit Christmas trees, an old grubby man without friends, who was said to love humanity.

The cold wind cut Raven’s face in the wide Continental street. It was a good excuse for turning the collar of his coat well above his mouth. A hare-lip was a serious handicap in his profession; it had been badly sewn in infancy, so that now the upper lip was twisted and scarred. When you carried about so easy an identification you couldn’t help becoming ruthless in your methods. It had always, from the first, been necessary for Raven to eliminate a witness.

He carried an attaché case. He looked like any other youngish man going home after his work; his dark overcoat had a clerical air. He moved steadily up the street like hundreds of his kind. A tram went by, lit up in the early dusk: he didn’t take it. An economical young man, you might have thought, saving money for his home. Perhaps even now he was on his way to meet his girl.

But Raven had never had a girl. The hare-lip prevented that. He had learnt, when he was very young, how repulsive it was. He turned into one of the tall grey houses and climbed the stairs, a sour bitter screwed-up figure.

Outside the top flat he put down his attaché case and put on gloves. He took a pair of clippers out of his pocket and cut through the telephone wire where it ran out from above the door to the lift shaft. Then he rang the bell.

He hoped to find the Minister alone. This little top-floor flat was the socialist’s home; he lived in a poor bare solitary way and Raven had been told that his secretary always left him at half-past six; he was very considerate with his
employees
. But Raven was a minute too early and the Minister half an hour too late. A woman opened the door, an elderly woman with pince-nez and several gold teeth. She had her hat on and her coat was over her arm. She had been on the point of leaving and she was furious at being caught. She didn’t allow him to speak, but snapped at him in German, ‘The Minister is engaged.’

He wanted to spare her, not because he minded a killing but because his employers would prefer him not to exceed his instructions. He held the letter of introduction out to her silently; as long as she didn’t hear his foreign voice or see the hare-lip she was safe. She took the letter primly and held it up close to her pince-nez. Good, he thought, she’s short-sighted. ‘Stay where you are,’ she said, and walked back up the passage. He could hear her disapproving governess voice, then she was back in the passage saying, ‘The Minister will see you. Follow me, please.’ He couldn’t understand the foreign speech, but he knew what she meant from her behaviour.

His eyes, like little concealed cameras, photographed the room instantaneously: the desk, the easy chair, the map on the wall, the door to the bedroom behind, the wide window above the bright cold Christmas street. A small oil-stove was all the heating, and the Minister was having it used now to boil a saucepan. A kitchen alarm-clock on the desk marked seven o’clock. A voice said, ‘Emma, put in another egg.’ The Minister came out from the bedroom. He had tried to tidy himself, but he had forgotten the cigarette ash on his trousers, and his fingers were ink-stained. The secretary took an egg out of one of the drawers in the desk. ‘And the salt. Don’t forget the salt,’ the Minister said. He explained in slow English, ‘It prevents the shell cracking. Sit down, my friend. Make yourself at home. Emma, you can go.’

Raven sat down and fixed his eyes on the Minister’s chest. He thought: I’ll give her three minutes by the alarm-clock to get well away: he kept his eyes on the Minister’s chest: just there I’ll shoot. He let his coat collar fall and saw with bitter rage how the old man turned away from the sight of his harelip.

The Minister said, ‘It’s years since I heard from him. But I’ve never forgotten him, never. I can show you his photograph in the other room. It’s good of him to think of an old friend. So rich and powerful too. You must ask him when you go back if he remembers the time –’ A bell began to ring furiously.

Raven thought: the telephone. I cut the wire. It shook his nerve. But it was only the alarm-clock drumming on the desk. The Minister turned it off. ‘One egg’s boiled,’ he said and stooped for the saucepan. Raven opened his attaché case: in the lid he had fixed his automatic fitted with a silencer. The Minister said: ‘I’m sorry the bell made you jump. You see I like my egg just four minutes.’

Feet ran along the passage. The door opened. Raven turned furiously in his seat, his hare-lip flushed and raw. It was the secretary. He thought: my God, what a household. They won’t let a man do things tidily. He forgot his lip, he was angry, he had a grievance. She came in flashing her gold teeth, prim and ingratiating. She said, ‘I was just going out when I heard the telephone,’ then she winced slightly, looked the other way, showed a clumsy delicacy before his deformity which he couldn’t help noticing. It condemned her. He snatched the automatic out of the case and shot the Minister twice in the back.

The Minister fell across the oil stove; the saucepan upset and the two eggs broke on the floor. Raven shot the Minister once more in the head, leaning across the desk to make quite certain, driving the bullet hard into the base of the skull, smashing it open like a china doll’s. Then he turned on the secretary; she moaned at him; she hadn’t any words; the old mouth couldn’t hold its saliva. He supposed she was begging him for mercy. He pressed the trigger again; she staggered under it as if she had been kicked by an animal in the side. But he had miscalculated. Her unfashionable dress, the swathes of useless material in which she hid her body, had perhaps confused his aim. And she was tough, so tough he couldn’t believe his eyes; she was through the door before he could fire again, slamming it behind her.

But she couldn’t lock it; the key was on his side. He twisted the handle and pushed; the elderly woman had amazing strength; it only gave two inches. She began to scream some word at the top of her voice.

There was no time to waste. He stood away from the door and shot twice through the woodwork. He could hear the pince-nez fall on the floor and break. The voice screamed again and stopped; there was a sound outside as if she were sobbing. It was her breath going out through her wounds. Raven was satisfied. He turned back to the Minister.

There was a clue he had been ordered to leave; a clue he had to remove. The letter of introduction was on the desk. He put it in his pocket and between the Minister’s stiffened fingers he inserted a scrap of paper. Raven had little curiosity; he had only glanced at the introduction and the nickname at its foot conveyed nothing to him; he was a man who could be depended on. Now he looked round the small bare room to see whether there was any clue he had overlooked. The suitcase and the automatic he was to leave behind. It was all very simple.

He opened the bedroom door; his eyes again photographed the scene, the single bed, the wooden chair, the dusty chest of drawers, a photograph of a young Jew with a small scar on his chin as if he had been struck there with a club, a pair of brown wooden hairbrushes initialled J.K., everywhere cigarette ash: the home of an old lonely untidy man; the home of the Minister for War.

A low voice whispered an appeal quite distinctly through the door. Raven picked up the automatic again; who would have imagined an old woman could be so tough? It touched his nerve a little just in the same way as the bell had done, as if a ghost were interfering with a man’s job. He opened the study door; he had to push it against the weight of her body. She looked dead enough, but he made quite sure with the automatic almost touching her eyes.

It was time to be gone. He took the automatic with him.

2

They sat and shivered side by side as the dusk came down; they were borne in their bright small smoky cage above the streets; the bus rocked down to Hammersmith. The shop windows sparkled like ice and ‘Look,’ she said, ‘it’s snowing.’ A few large flakes went drifting by as they crossed the bridge, falling like paper scraps into the dark Thames.

He said, ‘I’m happy as long as this ride goes on.’

‘We’re seeing each other tomorrow – Jimmy.’ She always hesitated before his name. It was a silly name for anyone of such bulk and gravity.

‘It’s the nights that bother me.’

She laughed, ‘It’s going to be wearing,’ but immediately became serious, ‘I’m happy too.’ About happiness she was always serious; she preferred to laugh when she was miserable. She couldn’t avoid being serious about things she cared for, and happiness made her grave at the thought of all the things which might destroy it. She said, ‘It would be dreadful now if there was a war.’

‘There won’t be a war.’

‘The last one started with a murder.’

‘That was an Archduke. This is just an old politician.’

She said: ‘Be careful. You’ll break the record – Jimmy.’

‘Damn the record.’

She began to hum the tune she’d bought: ‘It’s only Kew to you’; and the large flakes fell past the window, melted on the pavement: ‘a snowflower a man brought from Greenland.’