The Dealer and the Dead Read Free

governed it. Many of the men and women now posted to the depot had seemed unaware that he was no longer on Bulgaria’s payroll – instead was flogging off the country’s tanks, howitzers, missiles, small arms, shells and ammunition.
    He and Gillot had toured four great warehouses with a uniformed escort, and Gillot had realised that little had changedfrom his previous visit two years before. Every man he saw – from general down to bottle-washer, second class – was on a cut from the action. Good quality stuff. Well kept and stored. Temperature control to ensure that the warehouses did not overheat the systems in summer or freeze them in winter. A good meal, served in a corner of number-three warehouse (artillery, static and mechanised), and a decent wine. Gillot had drunk little, the minimum for politeness’ sake, had kept a clear head and reckoned he’d done a good deal. It would be cash up front. Onto covered lorries, hidden from view, would be loaded one thousand rifles, five hundred thousand 7.62mm bullets, two hundred PKMB machine-guns, a hundred AGS-17 automatic grenade launchers and fifteen hundred 30mm grenades, twenty-five SVD Dragunov sniper rifles, ten S-23 180mm artillery pieces, odds and sods, and five hundred POMZ-2 anti-personnel stake mines. The figures had been worked and reworked, disputed and agreed on a host of paper napkins.
    The general had leaned across the table, grasped Gillot’s hand and held it in a vice-grip of trust. Gillot had said, ‘You have nothing to worry about, and that’s a promise.’ Translation was unnecessary. The lorries would go from the depot to the Burgas docks for loading, and before dawn the freighter would edge out of the port, head south towards the Turkish coast and chug across the Black Sea, the more sensitive cargo buried beneath sacks of vegetables, cement or crated furniture parts.
    In the shadowed corner of the world inhabited by Harvey Gillot – where light seldom intruded and was at all times unwelcome – trust was the most valued currency.
    He trusted the general about as far as he could have kicked a discarded Coke tin, and the general trusted him implicitly, which was comforting and made for a satisfactory commercial relationship.
    They had drunk their coffee, nibbled a biscuit, and the flight was called. He would return to civilisation with an independent French airline that would take him into Lyons.
    They did the hug at the gate, and an approximation of a cheek kiss.
    ‘It’s a pleasure to do business with you, General.’
    ‘And I like to do business with you. You make me laugh, you have good stories, you are the best company. Maybe that is as important as your honesty. If I did not think you were honest you would be in a river’s silt, buried. A Lebanese is there because he was not honest with me. It is good to laugh and to have honesty.’
    He went through the gate.
    Other than the warmth of his smile, there was little to point out Harvey Gillot as a man of wealth, of business acumen, of anything remarkable. He was in his forty-seventh year, he carried a few pounds too many at his waist and his stomach bulged a little over his trouser belt. His hair had lost the fresh colour of his youth and there was grey above his ears. He walked with a purposeful stride, but without the swagger of success that would have attracted the attention of strangers, cameras or officials. His hair was tidy, his shirt clean, his suit pressed and his tie subdued. He had a full face, but not the jowls of excess or the gauntness of abstinence. Unless he smiled, people did not notice him.
    A leather satchel was hooked on his shoulder. In it were his electronic notepad, a mobile phone and three pairs of socks he had washed for himself in his hotel bathroom, two crumpled shirts, a set of used underwear, an iPod loaded with easy-listening light classical, a pair of cotton pyjamas and his washbag. That was how he travelled. He had no need of a paperwork mountain, assistants or