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the Rue de Char et Pain before the man I wanted found me.
Arthur was quite puzzled by the arrangement. A slight, white-haired man with a neat mustache, ex-RAF
officer, Oxonian, he had begun shaking his head after the first two minutes and kept interrupting me with
questions about delivery. While he was no Sir Basil Zaharoff, he became genuinely concerned when a
client's ideas sounded too half-baked. It troubled him if something went sour too soon after delivery. He
seemed to think it reflected back on him in some way. For this reason, he was often more helpful than the
others when it came to shipment. He was concerned about my plans for transportation because I did not
seem to have any.
What one generally requires in an arrangement of this sort is an end-use certificate. What it is, basically,
is a document affirming that country X has ordered the weapons in question. You need the thing in order
to get an export permit from the manufacturer's country. This keeps them looking honest, even if the
shipment should be reconsigned to country Y once it has crossed their border. The customary thing to do
is to buy the assistance of an ambassadorial representative of country X-preferably one with relatives or
friends connected with the Defense Department back home-in order to get the papers. They come high,
and I believe Arthur had a list of all the going rates in his head.
"But how are you going to ship them?" he had kept asking. "How will you get them where you want
them?"
"That," I said, "will be my problem. Let me worry about it." But he kept shaking his head.
"It is no good trying to cut corners that way, Colonel," he said. (I had been a colonel to him since we
had first met, some dozen years before. Why, I am not certain.) "No good at all. Try to save a few
dollars that way and you might lose the whole shipment and wind up in real trouble. Now I can fix you up
through one of these young African nations quite reasonably-"
"No. Just fix me up with the weapons."
During our talk, Ganelon just sat there drinking beer, as red-bearded and sinister-looking as ever, and
nodding to everything that I said. As he spoke no English, he had no idea as to the state of negotiations.
Nor, for that matter, did he really care. He followed my instructions, though, and spoke to me
periodically in Thari and we would chat briefly in that language about nothing in particular. Sheer
perversity. Poor old Arthur was a good linguist and he wanted to know the destination of the pieces. I
could feel him straining to identify the language each time that we spoke. Finally, he began nodding as
though he had.
After some more discussion, he stuck his neck out and said, "I read the newspapers. I am certain his
crowd can afford the insurance." That was almost worth the price of admission to me.
But, "No," I said. "Believe me, when I take possession of those automatic rifles, they are going to vanish
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off the face of the Earth."
"Neat trick, that," he said, "considering I don't even know where we will be picking them up yet."
"It does not matter."
"Confidence is a fine thing. Then there is foolhardiness. . . ." He shrugged. "Have it as you say then-your
problem."
Then I told him about the ammo and he must have been convinced as to my mental deterioration. He just
stared at me for a long while, not even shaking his head this time. It was a good ten minutes before I
could even get him to look at the specifications. It was then that he began shaking his head and mumbling
about silver bullets and inert primers.
The ultimate arbiter, cash, convinced him we would do it my way, however. There was no trouble on the
rifles or the trucks, but persuading an arms factory to produce my ammo was going to be expensive, he
told me. He was not even certain he could find one that would be willing. When I told him that the cost
was no object, it seemed to upset him even more. If I could afford to indulge in weird, experimental
ammo, an end-use certificate would not come to that much-No. I told him no. My way, I reminded him.
He sighed and tugged at the fringe of his mustache. Then he nodded. Very well, we would do it my way.
He overcharged me, of course. Since I was rational in all other matters, the alternative to psychosis
would be that I was party to an expensive boondoggle. While the ramifications must have intrigued him,
he apparently decided not to look too far into such a sticky-seeming enterprise. He was willing to seize
every opportunity I extended for dissociating himself from the project. Once he found the ammo
people-a Swiss outfit as it turned out-he was quite willing to put me into contact with them and wash his
hands of everything but the money.
Ganelon and I went to Switzerland on fake papers. He was a German and I was Portuguese. I did not
especially care what my papers showed, so long as the forgery was of good quality, but I had settled on
German as the best language for Ganelon to learn, since he had to learn one and German tourists have
always seemed to be all over the place. He picked it up quite rapidly. I had told him to tell any real
Germans and any Swiss who asked that he had been raised in Finland.
We spent three weeks in Switzerland before I was satisfied with the quality controls on my ammo. As I
had suspected, the stuff was totally inert in this shadow. I had worked out the formula, though, which was
all that really mattered at that point. The silver came high, of course. Perhaps I was being over-cautious.
Still, there are some things about Amber that are best dispatched with that metal, and I could afford it.
For that matter, what better bullet-short of gold-for a king? Should I wind up shooting Eric, there would
be nolese-majeste involved. Indulge me, brothers.
Then I left Ganelon to shift for himself for a time, since he had thrown himself into his tourist role in a true
Stanislavskian fashion. I saw him off to Italy, camera about his neck and a faraway look in his eyes, and I
flew back to the States.
Back? Yes. That run-down place on the hillside below me had been my home for the better part of a
decade. I had been heading toward it when I was forced off the road and into the accident which led to
everything which has since occurred.
I drew on my cigarette and regarded the place. It had not been run-down then. I had always kept it in
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