Arms and the Women

So Popeye the pop-up man, it looked like the system had done what its trained shooters couldn’t and buried you.

But…

I’m Popeye the pop-up man

Let them hit me as hard as they can

I’ll 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.

He’s 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 Master’s 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 Sibyl’s Leaves.

Imprisonment changes people. It gives them time to think.

I think a lot.

Popeye too. What he thought was probably something like – it’s coming to an end. Maybe I can finally get a life which doesn’t involve my old body being full of bullets and surrounded by corpses. I’ve survived the war, surely it can’t 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 you’d got what you’d 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 they’d 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 you’d 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, we’ve 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 don’t 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 Colombia’s 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 Cojo’s 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 Ducannon’s 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 he’d 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.