‘That’s a type 56,’ he said, putting the barrel close to his face. ‘Yes, it’s from a northern province. This folding stock was new.’ It came from State Factory 66, just one of 15 million of its type produced there since the 1950s. He pulled out another; from 1981, he told me, Chinese as well. His finger traced the first two digits of the serial number. There are about ninety variants of this type, he said, and pointed at a vicious black derivative – one with a hard metal folding stock. ‘East German.’ He needn’t have said any more. It looked East German. There was nothing funny about it.
You could see national traits in many of these guns, however subtle. The Finnish version had a certain chic to it – a tubular stock that evoked northern European woods and candles. The Egyptian one came with a small tree stamped on it, made especially by the Maadi company there on old imported Russian machines. The North Korean one looked cheap and sorry for itself – a small communist star on its base. The Red Young Guard, a force made of up fifteen-year-old Korean students, used this model; it was certainly light enough for their malnourished bodies. Then there were AKs from Pakistan, from Russia, from China – sometimes a dozen from one country alone. There was even an old Viet Cong one – the rifle that proved the ultimate battlefield leveller against the might of the American army.
The one that caught my eye, though, was the gold one: a glittering metal-plated AK designed to commemorate the end of the Iran-Iraq war in 1988. Saddam Hussein handed them out as gifts – a sort of oil-bling chic in limited edition.
‘I’ve got to hold that one,’ I said. Something in me was feeling the pull of history, the uniqueness of this whole situation. I wanted to get my picture taken with it, wearing too-large shades and an open-necked shirt.
‘Very Arab,’ Mark said, and eased it from me back onto the shelf.
He took me to another rack. Here was a Lebanese M16 semi-automatic – this one made by Colt USA. Beside it was an M16 seized from the IRA – complete with a filed-down serial number. Next to it was a line of futuristic and squat black Belgian FN F2000s – a weapon so beloved of Colonel Gaddafi’s murderous forces. There was ingenuity to all of these; as you moved along the line many had small modifications that improved on the design of its neighbour.
‘If I find a new way of protecting myself, you will find a new way of preventing that,’ Mark said.
Then, with a certain reverence, he pulled out an 1805 model of the Baker Rifle – a rifle used on the fields of battle at Waterloo in 1815. It weighed about the same, he said, as the British army’s SA80 rifle today: ten pounds. I held it and imagined a scared seventeen-year-old in rank and file clutching its wooden stock with child’s hands, fearing all that lay ahead.
We moved away from the military weapons and on to a rack of sporting guns, notable for their provenance and their price. Mark pulled out a hunting rifle – a .375 H & H Magnum – carried by a companion of President Roosevelt on an African hunting trip in 1909. A similar one to this fetched almost $32,000 at auction. Next to it was an M30 Luftwaffe Sauer & Sohn Drilling, the world’s most expensive survival firearm. A three-barrelled shotgun complete with a Nazi swastika, it was designed to help Germany’s Luftwaffe pilots avoid capture. You could see Hermann Goering’s obsession with beauty and craftsmanship in this elegant and totally impractical weapon. And just as I thought that you couldn’t get more expensive than that, Mark showed me the most pricey gun in his collection: a bespoke Arab commission of a Smith & Wesson Model 60, made in powder blue and coated in 984 diamonds. It costs over £120,000.
But this opulence was not the thing to catch my eye. Rather, there, nestled in a rack among some ageing rifles, was the prototype for the late nineteenth-century Magazine Lee Enfield Rifle. In army terminology it was the MLE, or ‘Emily’, the rifle clutched by thousands and thousands of British soldiers as they marched to their deaths in the First World War, and one of the first of millions made. It was also the rifle that had introduced me to the world of the gun – the one I learned to shoot with in the Army Cadets.
Before I could get too distracted, Mark moved us on to a small and nondescript chest of drawers – a cabinet of curiosities. Drawer after drawer of discreet guns used by the secret service were opened. There was the famous James Bond Walter PPK, 9mm;7 a Parker Pen gun; a ‘sleeve’ gun designed to be tucked up a jacket; guns disguised as lighters, rings, pagers, belt buckles and penknives. All of them innocuous and all capable of killing.
‘Squirrelly,’ Mark described them. They certainly captured the imagination – secret agents and honey-traps and the whiff of soupy rendezvous in the fog of East Berlin. We carried on, each rifle catching Mark’s eye taken out, examined and admired. So time passed in this space without sun or guiding light. It felt as if we were in a huge mausoleum – a tomb of arms. A feeling of claustrophobia started to form, and the buzzing overhead lights began to hurt my eyes. Then, suddenly, it was time to say goodbye.
I had one final question. I asked Mark about his hand. ‘Did you lose it in a shooting accident?’
‘No,’ he replied. ‘I was a Thalidomide baby.’ In the late 1950s the prescribing of a pill to combat morning sickness caused hundreds of babies to be born with defects. His false hand had nothing to do with a gun wound. He smiled and bade me farewell and, after another body search to make sure no secret-service pen guns had ended up in my pocket, I left.
Night was falling, and I walked away from this secret vault with its murderous contents, out into a drizzling, darkening northern city. A Thalidomide baby, I thought, turning up my collar. So much for assumptions.
I woke to the sound of an argument. The whores had been up all night, and the dawn was just hitting the sidewalks of Geneva; they were still short of a good night’s takings. Such things test the patience of anyone.
I pushed open the window and looked down. The pink neon strips of Le Player’s sex lounge shimmied in the lessening dark; the transsexuals, who had pushed their long legs out at the passing men, had left the kerb outside World’s Elite hours before, but the women from the Congo were still there. They knew what work really was and they whistled and plucked at the sleeves of men seeking comfort in the early morning. They were sweet-perfumed and hard-faced.
After Leeds I had come here, to Switzerland, to get my facts straight about how many guns there were in the world. The night before I had read that in 2007 it was estimated that there was about one gun for every seven people in the world; that police forces had about 26 million firearms; armies 200 million;8 and that civilians owned the rest: 650 million.9 These figures came from the Small Arms Survey – a Swiss-based organisation that lay about a mile away from where I was staying and which was my next port of call.
I had a meeting that morning with their chief, Eric Berman. With almost a billion guns out there, his job was to give some semblance of statistical order to them. He was, in a sense, a worldwide oracle on gun facts and figures. Definitely a man to meet. So I dressed and left the hotel, passed the cat-calling women and headed out to Geneva’s waking streets.
The Small Arms Survey was on Avenue Blanc, and the area could not have been more Swiss. The Survey’s office was tucked away in the same building as the Myanmar, Cape Verde and Tanzanian missions. Next door to them was a chocolate shop with an oversized cacao bunny in the window. Beside that stood a business school, a medical centre and the Swiss Audit & Fiduciary Services Company. It all had a sterility and orderliness to it that was a world away from the gore and blood that gun violence brings.
I rang the bell. Eric was called for. As I waited, I browsed the magazines on the waiting-room table: Defence News International, Security Community, Asian Military Review – bitter-edged titles. The same could be said of the photography on the walls. One showed bullet holes in a window overlooking a grimy industrial sprawl in La Vela Gialla, an Italian neighbourhood run by the Camorra mafia family. There was a photo of a drug dealer’s hand in Brooklyn, clutching a Colt Python .357 Magnum along with fifty bucks’ worth of five-dollar crack cocaine wraps. Then an image, black and white like the others,