But
Im Popeye the pop-up man
Let them hit me as hard as they can
Ill be here at the finish
Came the peace process.
Age thirty-seven: released from jail after serving less than two years.
Maybe it was enough.
You and I have a lot in common, Popeye. Members of ruthless and dangerous organizations, we have both had to learn to survive any which way we could.
And we both have unfinished business with Gawain Sempernel. Or rather, I have unfinished business with him while he has unfinished business with you.
Hes going soon. He thinks no one beneath him knows it but you cannot keep a Sibyl and a secret at the same time.
And you, Popeye, are his farewell finger to the envious gods who he believes cannot bear such rival effulgence near their throne. Six months from now he hopes to be clasped to the bosom of our common alma mater, in the holy shrine of a Masters Lodge, where he will sit with one buttock firmly on the faces of those poor dons whose careers are in his gift, and the other discreetly offered for former colleagues to kiss when they beat a path to his door in search of that advice and expertise only his lost omniscience can offer.
The poor sod has overdosed on Deighton and Le Carré!
So there you are, Popeye. We have both been screwed by Gaw Sempernel.
In fact, you could say that, thanks to him, in our different ways we both know what it is to exist locked up in a cell.
And now, though I am officially the turnkey, we find ourselves cheek by jowl in this cell within a cell that the great comedian Gaw calls Sibyls Leaves.
Imprisonment changes people. It gives them time to think.
I think a lot.
Popeye too. What he thought was probably something like its coming to an end. Maybe I can finally get a life which doesnt involve my old body being full of bullets and surrounded by corpses. Ive survived the war, surely it cant be all that hard to survive the peace?
It was going to be harder than you could have dreamt, Popeye.
You found a movement split and splintering under pressure of internal debate as to how to proceed in face of the new situation.
Worse, despite your continuing claims of amnesia, you found yourself courted by the most extreme groups for your knowledge of where the arms were hidden.
There must have been lots of heated debate.
There were certainly hairy moments when you were threatened with having the information tortured out of you by men who thought that Amnesia was a popular Far Eastern sexual tourism centre.
Still, a man who has survived being interrogated by Gaw Sempernel can survive anything.
But something had to give.
Finally, confused as to whether you were victor or victim, unable to understand whether youd got what youd been fighting for or not, you decided like many a thwarted philosopher before you that it was time to cultivate your own garden.
Maybe it was now your memory came back. Maybe it had never gone.
And if it brought you peril, it might as well bring you profit too.
Uniting for safety with a small group of fellow disenchanted releasees who thought that being applauded onto the platform at a Republican meeting was little enough reward for what theyd been through, you advertised for customers. And when you found your former colleagues less than keen to pay for what they regarded as already their own, you looked further afield.
A couple of minor but lucrative European and near-East deals followed. But your ace-in-the hole, the biggie which was going to make your retirement fortune was the cache of state-of-the-art guns and missiles youd left buried somewhere deep in enemy country during that cross country trip which ended in the Liverpool fiasco.
We know now (and as usual with Popeye, weve got the bodies to prove it) that the chosen site was a remote and inaccessible spur of Kielder Forest on the English/Scottish border.
For this cache you wanted a customer with serious money.
What you found was PAL, the smallest but most extreme of the Colombian guerilla groups, fallen on hard times not so much because of the activities of the official counter-insurgency forces, but because its immodestly, though not altogether inaccurately, self-styled legendary leader, Fidel Chiquillo, had managed to get up the noses of high command in both Farc and ELN, the two most powerful rebel organizations.
They set about squeezing PAL out of existence by drying up its source of arms in the Americas. Word was spread; you sell to PAL, you dont sell to us.
So here we have Chiquillo, desperate to re-establish himself on the Colombian scene, ready to go anywhere to do a deal. He has a contact in Europe, his negotiator, who sniffs out the deal with Popeye.
But even so far afield, deals are not easy for Chiquillo to make.
To get himself safe to the UK, to do the deal securely, then to get the shipment intact to South America, he needs allies powerful enough to ignore Farc, ELN, the drug barons and even the elected government itself.
So he turns to the los Cojos, that is el Consejo Juridico, the national security group whose operations are so clandestine they make the official secret police look like Dixon of Dock Green. Their jefe supremo, Colonel Gonzalo Solis (who lost a foot in a bomb attack in 1981, hence the nickname cojo, the lame one), knows where all the bodies are buried, which is not surprising as he has buried so many of them himself. Colombian politicians need to be nimble-footed indeed to satisfy the conflicting demands of such rapidly changing partners as the guerilla groups, the drug lords, the United Nations and their own electorate, and over many years, El Cojo has come to call the steps. He is the only man powerful enough to guarantee the deal, but even he hesitates before going up against the loose anti-PAL alliance which applies in the Americas.
But in the end the offer of a commission to be paid in Colombias favourite currency, pure cocaine, equal to the amount required by Popeye for his weapons proves impossible to resist.
The PAL embargo back home, he decrees, does not apply to deals done in Europe.
And to those in both high and low places who are ready to protest against his decision, he offers a private reassurance that there is no risk of a PAL resurgence. Indeed, quite the contrary. Chiquillo must come personally to close the deal as El Cojos guarantee of safe conduct applies only to the guerilla leader himself, not his negotiator. And once the deal is done, the Cojos European chief, Jorge Casaravilla, a man so ruthlessly violent that the colonel likes to keep him several thousand miles of blue water away, has instructions to scoop up everything and everyone with extreme prejudice.
Chiquillo agrees to the terms and makes his payment to El Cojo. His negotiator makes the final arrangements, and at last, by ways and means undetectable even by the eagle eye of soaring Gaw and the strange magic of his Sibyl, Chiquillo arrives in the UK and goes with his two Cojos escorts to the rendezvous in Kielder.
Anyone familiar with Popeye Ducannons track record might have forecast what happened next.
As always, chaos, catastrophe, corpses, and blood on the forest floor.
And, equally as always, when the gunsmoke settles, Popeye pops up out of the forest with nothing worse than a couple of flesh wounds, a crease along the side of his skull, and a bad headache.
All this and more he tells his one surviving colleague, Jimmy Amis, known as Amity James because of the friendly way he has with him when blowing off your kneecaps.
And all this and more Amity tells us when we pick him up and shake several credit cards under several names out of his pockets and point out that having qualified for early release under the Good Friday Agreement does not disqualify him from early return under the common law.
The more he tells us is that Popeye heard Chiquillo, the other survivor, telling someone on his mobile that hed be with them at somewhere called the CP in two to three hours.
If he made it, that was. For according to Popeye, Chiquillo had taken a hit.
More importantly to Popeye, hed taken both the weaponry and the bagful of coke which was payment for it.
Having worked all his life in a twilight world of deceit and betrayal, Popeye isnt much bothered by the whys and wherefores. All he wants is what he regards as his pension fund back. The only clue he has is what he knows about Chiquillos negotiator. This, together with what the Cojos know about Chiquillo himself, might well lead them to both the man and the arms.
Alliances with Jorge Casaravilla are notoriously dangerous.
But so are alliances with Popeye Ducannon!
The last thing he said to Amity James was, Im just off to see a man about a dog. Or maybe its a dog about a man. Mind the shop while Im gone, will you?
Since then, absolute silence.
Except in our work as in nature there is no such thing.
Have you heard that silence where the birds are dead, yet something pipeth like a bird?
Theres always something piping.
And here I sit, Sibyl in her lonely cave, recording and replaying till finally I recognize the tune.
Piper, pipe that song again!
Theyre still here, thats what my sensors tell me and thats what Gaw wants to hear, those arms and the man who stole them, and the drug fortune he didnt pay for them, all still here hidden away somewhere connected with something contracted to CP. What does my Word Search give me?
Canadian Pacific? Its a long way round to Colombia!
Cape Province? As above only more so.
Central Park? Worth checking which northern cities have a Central Park.
C.P. Snow? Does anyone still read him, I wonder.
Chelsea pensioner? At least its vaguely military.
Command post? Sos this. Right place for arms, I suppose.
Common prostitute? Hardly.
Communist Party? An office? Do they still have offices since glasnost?
Perhaps it was sea followed by something beginning with P?
Or maybe it was Spanish. Si pez? Yes fish. Si pie? Yes foot.
Youre getting silly, girl.
Face it, youre not expected to work things out, just sit here and feed things in.
While the great giant Gaw is striding around out there, making sure he doesnt tell anyone, including me, more than they need to know.
Oh, there are things you need to know, Gaw, and one day soon I look forward to telling you them. Then perhaps youll realize that walking over people is not a vocation for a true man, or even a grotesque imitation of one.
Im Popeye the pop-up man
Let them hit me as hard as they can
Ill be here at the finish
Cos I eat up my spinach
Im Popeye, the pop-up man!
ix
bag lady on a bike
Shirley Novello lay back in the front seat of her Fiat Uno.
Well, maybe lay back was stretching it a bit, which was more than even a medium-sized woman like herself could comfortably manage in such a small car. At least she could drive it comfortably, which longer legs would have made difficult. Mind you, a bit of discomfort would have been a cheap price to pay for longer legs. She looked down at hers with a critical eye. Even with ninety-five per cent of them visible as they emerged from a leather skirt hardly broader than a lumberjacks belt, they couldnt be termed long. What they could be termed was muscular. And what the hell was wrong with muscular? Muscularity was a quality she greatly admired in men. She found it a turn-on, and saw no reason to bother with people who didnt return the compliment. Anyway, above the waist she could compete with anyone, she thought complacently, raising her eyes to the straining buttons of her sun top. Not many of those in a kilo ho ho, as the wet wankers in the canteen would say if they ever got wind of the battened-down bounty lurking beneath the sack-like muddy-brown T-shirts she favoured at work. These, plus a matching selection of baggy trousers, had dampened down awareness of her as a woman to the point where the sexist cracks were conventional rather than focused. A cop-out? Not really. A cop-in, more like it; meaning you sussed out the best way to permit yourself to function most efficiently as a cop. Like Sergeant Wield. There were still plenty of mutt-headed myopes around the station who didnt realize he was gay, and were ready to give you an argument about it. How could anyone who looked like him and talked like him and put the fear of God into you like him be gay? Stands to reason. Wankers!
It was because of Wield that she was here on duty now, dressed in play gear rather than her workaday drabs. Shed been clocking off at four when hed grabbed her.
Shirley, I need a body to spell Seymour watching Mrs Pascoe. Any chance?
At least he framed it as a question.
She said, Sarge, Ive got plans for tonight that itll cost hearts to break. I can give you till eight if thats any good.
Thatll do fine. Thanks, hed said.
So he was grateful which was nice. But was he trustworthy? She was due to meet a new boyfriend at a new club, both of which she had high hopes of, at eight thirty. Thirty minutes wasnt much to get home and changed in even if her relief turned up on time. So, working on the principle that she wasnt going to be under the gaze of the station neanderthals, shed come on duty dressed for partying.
Privately she thought this watch on the Pascoe house was overkill. Chummy, who was probably this lad Roote, wasnt likely to come back for a third go. Shed dug up the case file and he sounded a real nut. It had been back when Pascoe was still an unmarried sergeant and La Pascoe was teaching at a college where the Principal had been topped. Roote had evidently assaulted both Pascoe and the Fat Man, breaking a bottle of Scotch over the latters head. Just went to show there was good even in the worst of us! So, bang him up and fix for a patrol car to crawl past maison Pascoe every couple of hours!
Still, overtime was overtime. She turned on Radio One full blast and settled back to fantasize about the muscular young man who was her escort that night.
Then, just before seven, she saw the bag lady.
She was on a bicycle, but she was undoubtedly a bag lady. There were three plastic carriers dangling from the handlebars and another two either side of the saddle. The woman herself was something the far side of seventy, maybe the far side of eighty, with a round leathery face like an under-inflated football and wispy white hair escaping from beneath an unravelling straw hat whose brim looked like a horse had dined on it. Her ample body was draped in several layers of clothing that it would have taken an archaeologist to date. The bike itself was coeval with its rider, or perhaps a little older, its flaking khaki paint suggesting it might have seen service in the Great War.