The Devil and Miss Prym (On the Seventh Day 3)

There was no reply.

"Tomorrow," the stranger said. "But you seem to believe that tomorrow will come and keep putting off what I asked you to do. We're getting towards the end of the week, and if you don't say something, I'll have to do it myself."

Chantal left the refuge, stood a safe distance from it, undid the canvas bag, and took out the shotgun. The stranger didn't seem to attach any importance to this.

"You dug up the gold again," he went on. "If you had to write a book about your experiences, how do you think most of your readers would react--given all the difficulties they have to face, the injustices dealt to them by life and other people, the struggle they have in order to pay for their children's schooling and to put food on the table--don't you think that those people would be urging you to take the gold and run?"

"I don't know," she said, loading a cartridge into the gun.

"Nor do I. But that's the answer I'm looking for."

She inserted the second cartridge.

"You're willing to kill me, despite that reassuring little tale about finding a wolf. But that's all right, because that too provides me with an answer to my question: human beings are essentially evil; even a young woman from a remote village is capable of committing murder for money. I'm going to die, but now I have my answer, so I can die happy."

"Here, take it," she said, handing him the gun. "No one knows that I know you. All the details you gave in the hotel are false. You can leave when you want and, as I understand it, you can go anywhere you want to in the world. You don't need to have a good aim: all you have to do is point the shotgun in my direction and squeeze the trigger. Each cartridge is full of tiny bits of lead; as soon as they leave the barrel, they spread out into a cone shape. They can kill birds or human beings. You can even look the other way if you don't want to see my body being blown apart."

The man curled his finger around the trigger, and Chantal was surprised to see that he was holding the gun correctly, like a professional. They stood like that for a long while, and she was aware that he had only to slip or be startled by an animal coming on them unexpectedly and his finger could move and the gun go off. She suddenly realized how childish her gesture had been, trying to defy someone merely for the pleasure of provoking him, saying that he was incapable of doing what he was asking others to do.

The stranger was still pointing the gun at her, staring at her unblinking, his hands steady. It was too late now--maybe deep down he thought it wouldn't be such a bad idea to end the life of this young woman who had dared to challenge him. Chantal was on the point of asking him to forgive her, but the stranger lowered the gun before she could say a word.

"I can almost touch your fear," he said, handing her back the gun. "I can smell the sweat pouring off you, despite the rain, and even though the wind is shaking the treetops and making an infernal racket, I can hear your heart thumping in your throat."

"I'm going to do what you asked me to do this evening," she said, pretending she hadn't heard the truths he was telling her. "After all, you came to Viscos to learn about your own nature, to find out if you were good or evil. There's one thing I've just shown you: regardless of what I may have felt or stopped feeling just now, you could have pulled the trigger, but you didn't. Do you know why? Because you're a coward. You use others to resolve your own conflicts, but you are incapable of taking certain decisions."

"A German philosopher once said: 'Even God has a hell: his love of mankind.' No, I'm not a coward. I've pressed many worse triggers than this one, or, rather, I have made far better guns than this and distributed them around the world. I did it all perfectly legally, got the transactions approved by the government, the export licenses, paid all the necessary taxes. I married a woman who loved me, I had two beautiful daughters, I never stole a penny from my company, and always succeeded in recovering any money owed to me.

"Unlike you, who feel persecuted by destiny, I was always a man of action, someone who struggled with the many difficulties in my way, who lost some battles and won others, but always understood that victories and defeats form part of everyone's life--everyone, that is, except cowards, as you call them, because they never lose or win.

"I read a lot. I was a regular churchgoer. I feared God and respected His commandments. I was a highly paid director of a huge firm. Since I was paid commission on every deal we made, I earned more than enough to support my wife, my daughters, and even my grandchildren and my greatgrandchildren; because the arms trade is the most profitable business in the world. I knew the value of every item I sold, so I personally checked all our transactions; that way I uncovered several cases of corruption and dismissed those involved and halted the sales. My weapons were made to help defend order, which is the only way to ensure progress and development in this world, or so I thought."

The stranger came up to Chantal and took her by the shoulders; he wanted her to look him in the eyes and know that he was telling the truth.

"You may consider arms manufacturers to be the lowest of the low. Perhaps you're right, but the fact is that man has used weapons ever since he lived in caves--first to kill animals, then to win power over others. The world

has existed without agriculture, without domesticated animals, without religion, without music, but never without weapons."

He picked up a stone from the ground.

"Here's the first of them, generously donated by Mother Nature to those who had to confront prehistoric animals. A stone like this doubtless saved the life of a man, and that man, after countless generations, led to you and me being born. If he hadn't had that stone, the murderous carnivore would have devoured him, and hundreds of millions of people would not have been born."

The wind was blowing harder, and the rain was battering them, but neither of them looked away.

"Many people criticize hunters, but Viscos welcomes them with open arms because it lives off them; some people hate seeing a bull in a bullring, but go and buy the meat from the butcher's claiming that the animal had an 'honorable' death; a lot of people are critical of arms manufacturers, but they will continue to exist until there's not a single weapon left on the face of the earth. Because as long as one weapon remains, there will always have to be another, to preserve the fragile balance."

"What has all this got to do with my village?" Chantal demanded. "What has it got to do with breaking the commandments, with murder, stealing, with the essence of human nature, with Good and Evil?"

At this, the stranger's eyes changed, as if overwhelmed by a deep sadness.

"Remember what I told you at the beginning. I always tried to do my business according to the law; I considered myself what people usually term a 'good man.' Then one evening I received a phone call in my office: it was a woman's voice, soft but devoid of emotion. She said her terrorist group had kidnapped my wife and daughters. They wanted a large quantity of what they knew I could give them--weapons. They told me to keep quiet about it, they told me that nothing would happen to my family if I followed their instructions.

"The woman rang off saying that she would call again in half an hour and told me to wait for her call in a phone booth at the train station. She said not to worry; my family was being well treated and would be freed within a few hours, because all I had to do was send an electronic message to one of our subsidiaries in a certain country. It wasn't even real theft, more like an illegal sale that would go completely unnoticed in the company I worked for.

"Since I was a good citizen, brought up to respect the law and to feel protected by it, the first thing I did was to ring the police. A minute later, I was no longer the master of my own decisions; I was transformed into someone incapable of protecting his own family; my universe was suddenly filled with anonymous voices and frantic phone calls. When I went to the designated phone booth, an army of technicians had already hooked up the underground telephone cable to the most modern equipment available, so that they could instantaneously trace exactly where the call was coming from. There were helicopters ready to take off, police cars strategically positioned to block the traffic, trained men, armed to the teeth, on full alert.

"Two different governments, in distant continents, already knew what was going on and they forbade any negotiations; all I had to do was to follow orders, repeat what they told me to say and behave exactly as instructed by the experts.

"Before the day was out, the hiding place where they were keeping the hostages had been discovered, and the kidnappers--two young men and a woman, all apparently inexperienced, simply disposable elements in a powerful political organization--lay dead, riddled with bullets. Before they died, however, they had time to execute my wife and daughters. If even God has a hell, which is his love for mankind, then any man has his hell within easy reach, and that's his love for his family."