Instruments of Darkness
Instruments of Darkness
Robert Thomas Wilson
‘First in a field of one’ (Literary Review) Robert Wilson’s first novel, a tense and powerful thriller set in the sultry heat of West AfricaBenin, West Africa. Englishman Bruce Medway operates as a ‘fixer’ for traders along the part of the coast they used to call the White Man’s Grave. It’s a tough existence, but Medway can handle it… until he crosses the formidable Madame Severnou. Warned off by his client, Jack Obuasi, his energies are redirected into the search for missing expat Steven Kershaw. Kershaw, though, is a man of mystery: trader, artist, womanizer… and sado-masochist.Against background rumblings of political disturbance, in the face of official corruption, egged on by an enigmatic policeman, Medway pursues his elusive quarry across West Africa. Is Kershaw tied to Obuasi’s and Madame Severnou’s shady dealings? Is he a vicious murderer? Is he, indeed, alive or dead?
Instruments of Darkness
Robert Wilson
For Jane and in memory of my father
1922–1980
Table of Contents
Cover Page (#ued26865e-fee9-5fd3-b5a3-074541f9fb78)
Title Page (#u6d5df439-0271-56c8-bbae-34dbc0b53e64)
Dedication (#uc46306fa-2a1f-53c3-a380-4c0928505da7)
AUTHOR’S NOTE (#ua10a5269-9e09-590f-b805-cf0b6362b6cd)
Map (#u5bdeb644-3944-531f-82a1-a4a6cb9e42c0)
Prologue (#u287f5032-8400-52c5-b5f3-7adf0c9ffc35)
Chapter 1 (#ud340e898-a03a-5b97-91da-5316191205a6)
Chapter 2 (#ubab112fc-c780-5371-8b56-273aafbdfce4)
Chapter 3 (#u2bb09c35-9e35-5547-8185-72ef53306e05)
Chapter 4 (#ud8598d9e-5420-5d41-b3ff-de9e82455c42)
Chapter 5 (#u1a12a6c1-3158-5f26-9868-d4e2fa5062d5)
Chapter 6 (#ubd0130b7-62e1-5f59-867c-84d1c07d650c)
Chapter 7 (#u28f1d1f1-4bf1-57cf-a8c7-93eba8db84c3)
Chapter 8 (#u65daa8c3-9ac6-5f4e-87a6-2fde1506829a)
Chapter 9 (#ufb41ee49-8743-5425-a390-484632efdf83)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 33 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 34 (#litres_trial_promo)
Robert Wilson (#litres_trial_promo)
Praise for Robert Wilson (#litres_trial_promo)
By the Same Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
AUTHOR’S NOTE (#ulink_a384234b-ee17-52a7-b4a5-c29b5df662b2)
The French West African currency, the CFA, was devalued in January 1994 from 50 CFA to 100 CFA to the French franc. All financial transactions in this novel are based on the old rate.
Although this novel is set very specifically in West Africa, and its backdrop is the Liberian Civil War, all the characters and events in it are entirely fictitious and no resemblance is intended to any event or to any real person, either living or dead.
Map (#ulink_8f200b5a-a1c7-5f30-84af-2640ace0e0fe)
Prologue (#ulink_e61924c9-a5d4-5e21-8787-c525c24553ed)
My name is Bruce Medway. I live in Cotonou, Benin, West Africa, along that stretch of coast they used to call the White Man’s Grave because it was hot, humid, and full of malaria. It still is, but we don’t die so easily now. Air conditioning and quinine have made us smell better and more difficult to wipe out.
I travelled across the Sahara a couple of years ago and stayed. I knew I wasn’t going back before I came. I used to live in London where I made good money in a shipping company. The boredom crushed me, the traffic nearly killed me and the recession threw me out of a job.
Now I live in this warm, damp hole in the armpit of Africa and it suits me. The house is rented. I share it with Moses, my driver, who occupies the ground floor and Helen, my cook and maid, who lives with her sister nearby and comes in every day.
I don’t make much money. I’d make more without Moses and Helen, but then, cooking and driving in 100 degrees isn’t much fun, they need the money, and I like them.
I’ve got some work. I collect money for people, some of which is late, more of which is very late and most of which is so late it’s stolen. I organize things for people – offices, transport, labour and contacts. I negotiate. I manage. Occasionally I find people who’ve lost themselves, some of them accidentally, others on purpose. I’ll work for anybody unless I know they’re criminal or if they ask me to follow their wives or husbands. My clients are mostly expatriates. A lot of them I wouldn’t invite back to my mother’s, and that’s probably why they’re here and not there.
They come here to trade as they have done for the last 500 years. They’re a different crowd now – Lebanese and Armenians, Chinese and Koreans, Syrians and Egyptians, Americans and Asians. The Europeans are still here as well, toughing it out with the soggy climate. A lot of them drink too much, some because there’s nothing else to do and others because they want to forget why they’re here.
They trade with the Africans and the Africans trade with each other and they all move up and down the coast with the same aim – a fast, hard buck. In Ghana and Nigeria, the old British colonies, the bucks aren’t hard and fast. Their currencies, the cedi and the niara, flop about with the price of cocoa and oil. In Togo, Benin and Ivory Coast the French keep a foot in the door of their ex-colonies by supporting the CFA franc (Communauté Financière Africaine) at fifty to the French franc so that’s the hard, fast buck that everybody’s after. When they get it, they want more. It’s no different to anywhere else in the world.
Chapter 1 (#ulink_9ea9424b-9d00-5cdf-b1fd-d486a6687494)
Tuesday 24th September
There were a few worse places to be in the world than outside warehouse 2 in Cotonou Port, but I couldn’t think of them. Moses and I were on our haunches in 105 degrees and – it felt like – 200 per cent humidity. I was losing weight and patience.
Berthed on number 2 quay, in air crinkled by the heat from the baked concrete, was the Naoki Maru. It was a 14,000-tonner dry cargo ship with a rust problem and an Oriental crew who leaned on their elbows at the ship’s rail, waiting. Waiting to discharge my client’s 7000 tons of parboiled rice from Thailand which was going to be sold to Madame Severnou, who I was waiting for to come and give me the money. Above us, on the roof, a couple of vultures were waiting for someone to make a mistake crossing the road. A driverless fork lift stood outside warehouse 3 with a pallet of cashew nut sacks a metre off the ground waiting to put them down. I could see the driver, waiting and doing some sleeping on some sheanut sacks in the warehouse. We were all waiting. This is Africa where everybody has mastered the art of waiting. Waiting and sweating.
The sweat was tickling my scalp as it dripped down the back of my head. I could feel it coursing down my neck, weaving through my chest hair, dribbling down my thickening stomach and soaking into the waistband of my khaki trousers so I knew I’d have a rash there for a week. I wasn’t even moving. The dark patches under my arms were moving more than I was. I looked down at my hands. The sweat hung in beads off my forearms and dripped down my knuckles and in between my fingers. Christ, even my nails were sweating. I looked at Moses. He wasn’t sweating at all. His black skin shone like a pair of good shoes.
‘Why you no sweat, Moses?’
‘I no with a woman, Mister Bruce.’
‘You do sweat then?’
‘Oh yes please, sir.’
I had a newspaper in my hand called the Benin Soir which always came out the morning after the ‘soir’ looking unshaved, hungover and ready for nothing. I opened it and scanned the pages. There was nothing but smudged newsprint and black and white photographs of African people on black backgrounds. I tried to get some breeze from turning the pages.
I turned the last page and folded the paper in half. I was going to start fanning my face, which is what most people use the Benin Soir for, when I saw an almost readable item in the bottom left-hand corner with the heading: Tourist Dead. Cotonou had never had tourists and now the first one had died.
The article told me that a girl called Françoise Perec, a French textile designer, had been found dead in an apartment in Cotonou. There was a paragraph that finished with the word sexuel which I couldn’t read at all and I didn’t need to. A police spokesman said that it looked like a sex session that had gone too far. I wondered how a policeman could tell that from a dead body. Is there such a thing as an ecstatic rictus? A drop of my sweat hit the page. I folded the newspaper and used the Benin Soir how it was meant to be used.
I was beginning to gag on the smell of hot sacks, stored grain and crushed sheanut when a pye-dog strayed out of the warehouse shade. It wasn’t the healthiest pye-dog I’d ever seen. It definitely wasn’t anybody’s pet dog. It had the shakes. I could count its toast rack ribs and it needed a rug job. Its nose hoovered the ground. Out of the corner of my eye I saw one of the crewmen leave the ship’s rail. The pye-dog moved in tangents. It stopped, clocked round a spot as if its nose was glued to it and then moved on. The crewman bounced down the gangway. There was a flash of light from his hand. He was carrying a cleaver.
Moses had pushed up his sunglasses and was frowning at the way things were developing. Inevitability was in the air. The pye-dog, its diseased hindquarters shaking, the crewman, his stainless steel cleaver glinting, closed on each other. The sun was high. There were no shadows. The instant before they met, the dog looked up, aware of something. The survival instinct wasn’t operating too well inside that pye-dog. He looked right. The crewman came from the left and took the dog’s head clean off with a single blow.
There was no sound. The dog’s fallen body twitched with brainless nerves. The crewman picked up the dog’s head and held it trophy high. The men at the rail burst into cheering and clapping. Moses threw off his Mr Kool act and was up on his feet, eyes rolling in horror, and pointing.
‘Must have been a Chinese,’ I said, before Moses could get anything out.
‘Why he kill the dog?’ asked Moses.
‘To eat.’
‘He eat him?’ Moses was shocked.
‘You eat rat. He eat dog,’ I said, trying to balance the horror of foreign cuisine.
‘Dog eat dog,’ said Moses, laughing at his own joke, ‘…and I no eat rat. I eat bush rat and he no rat rat.’
‘I see,’ I said, nodding.
The crewman put the dog’s head down and picked up the body which he tucked under his arm. The legs still twitched in memory of birds chased and rubbish investigated. He bent down again and picked up the head by an ear. He walked back to the ship. The dog’s tongue lolled out of the side of its mouth. Its wall eyes bulged out. A dark patch remained on the concrete of number 2 quay.
‘He go eat him!’ Moses confirmed to himself as if it were a fair thing to do.
‘Hot dog,’ I said without smiling, knowing that Moses would roar with laughter, which he did. My best lines fall on deaf ears, my worst are a triumph. I think I satisfy his anticipation.
‘Here we go,’ I said, standing up.
Moses turned and saw the group of hadjis heading our way. Al hadji is the title given to a Muslim who has been to Mecca. Before air travel it must have been a big deal to have been a West African hadji. Now they charter planes and a grand will do the job. These boys have got money and Allah on their side and a long line in horseshit.
They looked quite something, for a bunch of businessmen, dressed in their floor-length robes, their black skins against the light blue, green, burgundy and yellow cloth, their heads bobbing underneath multicoloured cylindrical hats. In another world they could have been showing a summer collection. Here they meant business. They were going to hassle me for the rice which wasn’t mine to be hassled for. I reached for my cigarettes. They weren’t there. I gave up last year. That’s why I put on the weight. It all came back.
I heard an expensive engine. A grey Mercedes with tinted windows stopped with a squeak in between me and the hadjis. An electric motor lowered the window. The hadjis huddled together so that the car’s occupant must have seen seven sweaty faces pressed into the frame of the window. One of them took out a hanky and wiped his brow.
Some African words came from the back seat of the car. The words sounded like they could move some sheep around. They had the hadjis rearing back. The group moved as one, turning and walking back to the port entrance. The window buzzed back up. One of the hadjis fell back to get a stone out of his Gucci loafers.
The Mercedes swung round to where Moses and I were standing. The driver, anthracite black, was out of the car almost before it had stopped. He opened the rear door and looked as if he might drop to one knee.
I got a short blast of air-conditioned cool and with it came Madame Severnou. All five foot of her and another nine inches of sculpted deep green satin which sat on her head but could just as easily have made it to a plinth in the Uffizi. At six foot four I could put a crick in her neck, but as Madame Severnou knew, size wasn’t anything.
‘Bruce Medway,’ she said, as if tungsten would melt in her mouth. She held out a small coffee-coloured hand encrusted with gold rings and jewels.
‘Madame Severnou,’ I said, taking her hand and thinking, this is one of the few occasions you put twenty grand into someone’s hand and get it back. ‘How’s business?’
‘Very good. I’ve been in Abidjan…Ali!’ she shouted, withdrawing her hand and checking it to make sure she hadn’t slipped a grand or two.
The driver, who had been standing to attention by the boot, opened it on cue. He took out the double bedsheet which had been drawn into a sack like laundry. Moses opened the boot of my smacked-up Peugeot estate and Ali dumped it on top of the tool box and spare tyre.
‘What did you say to the hadjis?’ I asked Madame Severnou.
‘I remind them I am the seller. They know it but they forget sometime.’
Madame Severnou was petite from the waist upwards but downwards was the market mamma bottom, a bargaining tool not to be messed with. This meant that she didn’t walk, she waddled, and the bottom did what the hell it liked. She waddled over to the Peugeot. Moses backed off. She turned to me and said: ‘Six hundred and thirty-six million CFA. I hope you have some friends to help you count it. Not much of it is in ten thousand notes.’
She held out her hand and I put an envelope in it which she tore open. Her eyes flickered for a fraction of a second.
‘This is a non-negotiable copy,’ she said with an edge to her voice that I could feel against my carotid.
‘It is,’ I said.
‘It’s no Monopoly money in here!’ she said, pointing at the boot. ‘Ali!’ she roared, whipping the air with her finger. Ali lunged at the laundry.
‘Moses,’ I said in a voice made to steady the thin red line. The boot came down and Ali was lucky to get away with his fingers still on.
‘I’ll count it and give you the original tomorrow,’ I said to Madame Severnou. The ground frosted over between us but we both started at the two vultures which dropped down beside the dark patch where the pye-dog had been killed and broke Madame Severnou’s concentration. She turned back to me.
‘I give you six hundred and thirty-six million CFA and you give me a piece of paper.’ Her voice came fully loaded. I said nothing. The look she gave me thudded between my eyes and I realized this was not the usual West African drama.
The two vultures, their wings folded behind their backs, paced around the patch on the quay like two detectives inspecting the outline of a murder victim.
‘What about demurrage?’ asked Madame Severnou.
‘Time doesn’t start counting until tomorrow noon.’
‘What about my trucks?’
‘I’ll see you tomorrow. I’ve only got twenty-four hours to count all this.’
Something clicked in Madame Severnou’s face. The points had changed. The boiling anger flattened to a simmer, her little mouth pouted and broke into a smile.
‘OK. You come to lunch. I cook for you. Agouti. Your favourite.’ Her smile was like a faceful of acid.
I got the panoramic view of her bottom as she climbed into her car. Ali closed the door. The window buzzed down. She had all the techniques and the technology to go with them.
‘I do the snails for you as well. Just like last time.’
The window slid back up and the Mercedes moved out into the fierce sunlight between the warehouses. Agouti? That’s bush rat which she cooked with okra and manioc leaves. ‘Rat in Green Slime’. The snails, my God, the snails – they looked and tasted like deformed squash balls and the chilli sauce was so hot the last time, I woke up the next day still in a silent scream.
Moses hadn’t missed the cruelty in those eyes as the electric window zipped up her face. He was fumbling for the door handle. I was nervous myself.
‘Less go now, Mister Bruce.’
‘Wait small.’
‘Is lunchtime.’
‘I know. I think is better we wait small. Let the traffic calm down. Then we go. We look at this ship now.’
We drove to the ship circling the vultures on the way. They were shaking their heads, then looking at each other, then staring at the ground. They knew there had been a death, a recent one, and a pye-dog too, but where the hell was it?
This was a first for Moses and I to be driving around with more than a million pounds in the back seat and Moses’s clutchless gear changes were shredding metal and my inner calm. Madame Severnou hadn’t made things any easier for us. At least she didn’t know where I lived and I was anxious that she didn’t find out. I had a feeling from the sweetness of her lunch invitation that well before we sat down to eat I was going to get a lesson in business etiquette that wasn’t included in the Harvard course.
One of the crewmen took me up to meet the ship’s Korean captain in his cabin. The generator rumbled like an old man in a bathroom but still coughed out some air conditioning which made my back colder than a dungeon wall. The captain poured me a cold beer. The first inch put medals on my chest. There was a photograph on the cabin wall of the captain with what looked like his local kindergarten.
‘Which ones are yours?’ I asked.
‘All of them,’ he said.
‘All of them?’
‘And another coming. I love childrens.’ He said it like most people talk about pizza.
We chatted about rice, his home in Korea, storms in the Pacific and favourite ports. He wasn’t an African fan. On the way here he had discharged containers in Abidjan and Tema, picked up some containers of old cashew nut in Lomé, and was now going to Lagos to discharge hi-fi and load cotton, then on to Douala or Libreville, he didn’t know which, and it didn’t matter because he hated both. He liked Ghana. They had a good Korean restaurant in Accra. I knew it. They served me a gin and tonic there which came with a stretcher.
He walked me around the ship. I felt like royalty except I couldn’t think of anything nice to say. It was one of those ships that takes a bunch of Koreans two weeks to build. Five holds, one aft, four forward with the bridge in between. The lifting gear on number 5 hold at the rear of the ship was broken; the captain put his hand on my shoulder and told me not to worry, that the rice was in the four forward holds. The fifth hold had the hi-fi in it for discharge at Lagos, and that was where they would fix the lifting gear.
We looked at the rice, which wasn’t very interesting. How long can you look at a pile of sacks? The captain said something to a man holding a four-foot spanner who would never be clean again. I thought about showing some interest, but instead leaned on the slatted metal cover of number 2 hold and earned a first degree burn for my trouble. Moses stood by the gangway, not learning any Korean at all. It was time to blow. The smell of hot painted metal was taxing my nose’s interest in life.
I held my hand out to the captain who said: ‘You must have lunch,’ and we both turned at the same time because Moses was showing us how to get down a gangway starting on his feet and ending on his nose.
‘Moses!’ I shouted.
He was holding the car door open for me which he had done on the first day he worked for me and never since.
‘Yes please, Mister Bruce, sir.’
‘Lunch?’
‘You forget something, Mister Bruce.’
‘No.’
‘You have meeting.’
‘I have?’
‘The meeting with the man with the dog.’
‘The man with the dog?’
‘Yes please, sir.’
I turned to the captain and shook his hand. ‘Sorry, I have a meeting with a man with a dog. Next time, I hope.’
As I got in the car, I saw Moses was sweating.
‘I don’t see no woman, Moses,’ I said down my shirt front.
We drove off, me grinning and Moses shouting: ‘You go make me eat dog! Mister Bruce. I no eat um. I no eat um never.’
Chapter 2 (#ulink_ec379912-802f-5410-b627-184fbe1c2d83)
The port was at a standstill; only the sun was out working on the scattered machinery and the corrugated iron roofs which creaked and pinged in the terrible heat. The shade of the buildings guarded sprawled stevedores who, rather than slow broil on the hot ground, lay across wooden pallets sleeping. The Peugeot’s tyres peeled themselves off the hot tarmac.
There was no traffic outside the port. We looked left down the Boulevard de la Marina and fifty metres down the road a parked car’s engine started. We turned right and headed east into Cotonou town centre. Moses’s eyes flickered from the windscreen to the rearview.
The sun leeched all the colour out of the sky, the buildings, the people, the palms, the shrubs, everything. Through the open window a breeze like dog breath lingered over my face as I manipulated the wing mirror. A madman with dusty matted hair stood in dirty brown shorts inspecting his navel. He slumped to his haunches as we drove past and started parting the dirt on the road as if something had fallen out. We passed the agents’ offices. The air conditioners shuddered and dripped distilled sweat into the thick afternoon air.
‘He following us, Mister Bruce.’
‘Slow down,’ I said. ‘Turn left.’
Moses dropped down to a fast walking pace and the car, an old Peugeot 305, settled behind us. Vasili, a Russian friend of mine, had told me not to worry about learning about Africa, that the Africans would teach you all you needed to know. They weren’t going to teach me anything about tailing cars.
‘Left again,’ I murmured. ‘And again.’
We were back to Boulevard de la Marina, still with our tail. Three cars slicked past in front of us heading into town.
‘Take them,’ I said, and Moses’s foot hit the floor.
We were past one car when a truck pulled out from the left, past two by the time its driver saw us. Moses didn’t bother with the third car, which would have put us through the radiator grille of the truck, but with his mouth wide open preparing to scream, he swung between the second and third cars and went up on to the pavement where he took out two frazzled saplings, snappety-snap, and overtook the third car on the inside, crashing back on to the road just in time for the roundabout which he took more briskly than he intended.
Behind us, the truck had slewed and stopped across the road, the second car was now facing the other way and the tail was up on the pavement with the car’s cheekbone crumpled into a low concrete wall. Cyclists sizzled past giving the scene the eyes right.
‘We lose him?’ asked Moses.
‘You lost him,’ I said, straightening my eyebrows.
We came into the centre of town, which, far from being free of lunchtime traffic, was jammed with cars moving at the pace of setting lava with half a million bicycles swooping in and out of them like housemartins. In the mid-seventies the President had announced a Marxist-Leninist revolution and forged links with the People’s Republic of China who built a football stadium and then took the opportunity to sell the Beninois a lot of bicycles. All that remained of the old regime were some battered hoardings with Marxist slogans like La lutte continue, which had now become the white man’s battlecry as he tried to make money in a difficult world.
We crawled past the PTT waiting to get on to Avenue Clozel and I noticed a tickering sound from the car when it was moving which must have come from Moses’s off-piste run. A man with brown, decaying teeth put his head in the window and tried to sell me a stick which he said would keep me hard all night. I asked him if I had to eat it or put in my pants and he said all I had to do was hold it and I told him it would cramp my style. Moses said I should have bought it and I asked him how he knew I needed it.
We were trying to get to my house, not a place that I’d had to fight hard to rent but comfortable enough for me. The rooms were big. The open plan living and dining room had breeze coming in from two sides. The bedrooms each had a wall of window. The bathroom worked and the kitchen was big enough for me to create a lot of washing up when I did the cooking. There was a large covered balcony on one side of the living room where I ate breakfast, and dinner if I felt like having my blood thinned by adventurous mosquitoes. The furniture was a mixture, some of it cane which I didn’t like but was cheap, the rest of it was carved wood which I did like, but couldn’t sit on. There were a lot of carpets, mainly from Algeria and Morocco, and cushions covered in the same designs. I spent most of the time on the floor. You couldn’t fall further than that.
There was a garage at the side of the house, and in the courtyard a huge and ancient palm tree with orange and purple palm oil nuts hanging off it in swagged clusters. The walls of the garden were covered in purple bougainvillaea. A green leafy creeper grew up the banister of the stairs at the front of the house which led up from the garage to my apartment.
The place I rented was on the west side of the lagoon. Most expats lived on the east side in Akpakpa or around the Hotel Aledjo. I preferred living with the Africans. They enjoyed themselves. The expats hated Cotonou. It was depressing to live with them and their wives who looked at you as if you could liven up their afternoons.
Moses kept up a monologue on Benin medicine, dog cuisine and great movie car chases he had seen. He let up occasionally to roar at cyclists so that they veered off and crashed into market stalls rather than hit the car.
‘Africans fear dogs,’ I said.
‘Thassway we no eat um.’
‘You fear them because they bite you.’
‘Thass it, Mister Bruce, they bite us.’
‘But if you eat um then you get the power of the dog and you no fear no more.’
Moses stopped the car, throwing me against the dashboard. A cyclist had come off in front of us. Two children put their hands through my window and were pulled away by a couple of Nigerians who shoved cheap ghetto blasters in my face. A girl offered Moses some water from a plastic jug on her head and another barbecued meat which congealed under greasy grey paper in a blue plastic bowl.
‘You clever, Mister Bruce. You be right. But not the dog the Chinaman kill. He sick dog. You eat dog, you find big, strong dog, then you eat him.’
‘You can’t get near a big, strong dog.’
‘Thassway we always fear the dogs.’
After half an hour in the traffic, with Moses yelling at cyclists to stop cadging lifts off the car, we turned off Clozel and started up Sekou Touré with nothing more to look at than crumbling, ill-painted buildings. The tickering noise from the car was still there as we turned left into the grid of mud streets where I lived. We bought some kebabs from a girl who was cooking them just outside the house. I opened the gate and, in the shade of the garage, saw Heike Brooke waiting for me, sitting on a step with her skirt up over her thighs keeping herself cool. She leaned forward and rubbed her shins and stood up letting the skirt fall to her knees. She leaned against her 2CV which she was considering taking off life support.
I’d met Heike two years ago when she was twenty-eight and I was thirty-six. It was in the Algerian Sahara about a hundred miles north of Tamanrasset. I was lying in a small square of shade under a tarpaulin fixed to the side of my dead car. The battery and the alternator were finished and I was on the way out. I had been there for three days without seeing anyone and was beyond the hallucinatory stage of thinking that every rock was a truck coming towards me. I was reading Dombey andSon which was taking the edge off the 120-degree heat and just about letting me forget that I only had three and a half litres of water left.
When I heard the rumbling noise of a truck, I thought it was from the truck route that I couldn’t see thirty miles to the east, but knew was there. Then I saw the Hanomag radiator grille from over the top of my book and I came out from under that tarpaulin as if I’d just had a kiss from a scorpion. As the truck came nearer I saw the driver and passenger were two guys, both with thirty foot of cloth wound around their heads and faces, so that all I could see was a sinister slit where the eyes should have been.
I was either going to be rescued or robbed. The truck stopped and the driver jumped out. The driver had breasts and hips and was wearing a calf-length tea gown; the passenger had breasts too and was wearing a denim shirt and a pair of baggy trousers that I’d seen the Mozabites wearing in Ghardaia. They unwound the cloth around their heads and revealed themselves to be two women in full make-up. In my confused state I thought that these hermaphrodites were the desert sprites that an Algerian soldier had told me about, or that perhaps I was having some contact with a strange simultaneous world where the genders had united. They introduced themselves as Heidi and Heike, two Berliners going to West Africa. They towed me to Tamanrasset which was a real enough experience and saved me from a thirsty death.
Heidi had driven back across the desert six months later, but Heike had stayed and was running an aid project in the north of Benin. Every few months she came to Cotonou to drink us into a very dark world beyond oblivion and find out if I was worth loving. I tried to tell her these two activities were not compatible but she insisted that for her alcohol was the only approach road to love. By coming to Africa she had thrown in her job as a TV commercials producer and left her director and first ‘serious’ boyfriend. She had discovered he was over-generous with nothing except one part of his anatomy and not exclusively to her. She was looking for a purer life, less complicated, but like a lot of us couldn’t always make up her mind. The drink parted her from her memories, gave her just enough courage to try again and, like me, she liked it.
Heike was a beautiful woman despite this punishment. She was the daughter of a British army officer and a Berlin café owner which meant she was bilingual and disinclined to listen to anyone’s bullshit. She was tall, just under six foot, with a long whippy body that wasn’t skinny but carried no extra flesh. She had thick brown hair which she always wore put up in a way that looked as if she’d just slammed a clip in any old place, but it was always just right. The style accentuated her long neck and fragile bones. Her eyes were intimidating. They were very clear light blue and green, like aquamarines.
I knew from the beginning that although she looked breakable she was tough. She had access to a temper that on a few occasions had caused her rather large hands to form fists and lash out on the ends of her long arms and hurt people. People like me.
Sometimes I deserved to be hit, but never because I couldn’t keep my trousers done up. That wasn’t my style at all. I found out early on in life that playing around messed up my head, dealt me the clap and gave me a better understanding of the blues than I really wanted. No, she would hit me, because she couldn’t get in there. She would tell me she was breaking down walls. I wasn’t always sure why the walls were up in the first place or what they were guarding, but whatever it was, she wanted to get to it. I wasn’t disinterested myself.
Heike was standing in the garage, her hands on her slim hips. She was wearing a white broderie anglaise top which showed about a foot of lean torso between it and her skirt, which was red with a light brown and white pattern. The lips of her small mouth were pursed, she was gnawing at the inside of her cheek. She looked at me with disdain as I walked up to her and kissed her. She threw her long arms around my shoulders and kissed me back.
‘I’ve been waiting for hours,’ she said in a voice that had been waiting with her.
Moses slid past me into the garage, nudging me with the wing mirror. The tickering noise had stopped. He got out, opened the boot and pulled the bedsheet out, grinning at Heike who said hello to him in the form of a suppressed smile. He walked up the stairs and Heike and I followed.
‘You’ve got a lot of laundry, Bruce.’
‘The biannual wash,’ I said.
Some money fell out from the top where the corners of the sheet were drawn together. She picked it up.
‘You should empty the pockets first,’ she said like a good little hausfrau, which is one thing she isn’t. The door to my part of the house opened straight into the living room. Moses threw the sheet on the floor. The knot gave and two corners of the sheet burst open and the money spewed out on to the floor. Heike was not impressed.
‘Can you count?’ I asked her.
‘I think I’ve just forgotten how.’
‘It’ll all come flooding back once you get started.’
‘Can I have a drink or do I just get straight down into it?’
Heike took a shower. I made a salad to go with the kebabs and broke open some beers and we sat on the floor and ate the food. Heike rubbed her wet hair with both hands and looked at the money as if it was sending her mad. We started counting. A light breeze blew through the mosquito netting over the slatted windows. Heike pulled up an ashtray. It was early afternoon. We had a long way to go.
Chapter 3 (#ulink_c5a14235-4c45-5fdc-a7fc-53fc0dfe6e0d)
Heike was smoking cigarettes through a two-inch holder which took out most of the tar. After the hundredth time I’d seen her cleaning it, I gave up smoking and took up watching. She held the holder between her teeth at the side of her mouth and snorted smoke while she counted bundles of small denomination notes.
In the late afternoon, we stopped for a while and drank some sugary mint tea. Heike lay on her back with her legs bent and crossed at the knee. She told us that she had persuaded the women in her aid project to plant aubergines which would grow in the poor soil up north. It had taken some time because the men were suspicious of a new vegetable. The clincher had been to get the men and women together and deliver a seminar on the aphrodisiacal properties of aubergines. She had selected a number of priapic specimens as examples and had nearly been trampled to death in the stampede.
We continued and the sun gave us a warm yellow light to work by, which quickly turned pink and then orange. Then the sun dropped like a penny in a slot and we turned the lights on. The atmosphere changed to smoky poker room and we cracked some cold beers.
At eight o’clock I stood up. Moses, sitting crosslegged on the floor, fell backwards. I picked up the warm beer, went into the kitchen and threw it down the sink. Moses said he was going to get some chicken. Heike came into the kitchen and drank mineral water from the bottle in the fridge.
‘I hate money,’ I said, looking at Heike who was reflected in the darkness of the window, looking at me out of the corner of her eye with the neck of the mineral water bottle in her mouth.
‘Money’s all right, but not all the time,’ she said, pouring some of the chilled water into her hand and patting her breast bone. She walked over to the sink and I felt her body leaning against me.
‘What are you looking at?’ she asked.
I turned and our faces were very close together. We were breathing a little faster and my hand slipped to her bare waist. Her eyes were darting around and her mouth opened. I moved my lips to hers so that they were almost touching. Our eyes held each other’s. My hand slipped around to the small of her back and I put two fingers on either side of her spine and pushed up very slowly. We both swallowed. Our lips touched. My fingers were nearly between her shoulder blades. A long arm snaked across my back and her fingers ran up my neck and spread out through my hair. She crushed my lips to hers and her tongue flickered in my mouth. I didn’t mind the taste of tobacco and lipstick. I felt her breasts pressed to my chest and her legs trembling against mine. The inside of my body lifted as if I’d just hit a hump in the road. We both heard Moses coming back into the house and drew away from each other.
‘It’s been a long time,’ I said, holding her wrist and letting my hand slip down into hers. She breathed heavily, licking her lips and said nothing. Moses came in the kitchen. Heike looked across at him, her shoulder against mine. Moses grinned. His sex radar was infallible.
We ate the chicken with some hot Piment du Pays that I’d brought over from Togo. I opened up a bottle of cold Beaujolais that had had Heike’s name on it for the last couple of months. Moses stuck to beer. Afterwards, we dragged ourselves back into the living room and carried on counting the money.
It was 10.30, we were taking it in turns sighing, me like a horse on a cold morning, Moses like a dog left in a car, and Heike like someone who’s into her third day in Immigration. She stood up, stretched and went to her bag and came back with a pack of cards in her hand.
‘Poker?’ she asked.
Moses, who had fallen back with his head resting on some blocks of cash, sat up.
‘You deal, Miss Heike.’
‘Miss Heike beat us no small,’ I said to Moses.
‘There’s nothing like playing with other people’s money,’ she said and riffled the pack of cards. The noise from the cards shot through me and I sat rigid. The tickering from the car, but not the car, the noise of a playing card flicking over the wheel spokes of a bicycle. There was always fifty bicycles behind you in Cotonou. That was the tail. The noise had stopped as soon as we’d got to the house. Vasili was right – Madame Severnou’s first lesson. How to outwit the Oyinbo
(#litres_trial_promo) without raising a sweat.
‘Something the matter?’ asked Heike.
There was a click at the gate. Moses turned on to his knees and was up at the window looking down like a cat.
‘It’s Helen,’ he said.
‘What’re we nervous about?’ asked Heike.
I found myself staring down at over a million pounds in cash and feeling things going wrong. With Heike here I’d lost concentration, hadn’t thought things through. I’d had that feeling in the port this afternoon that Madame Severnou was going to be trouble. I’d done nothing about it and now lesson number two was coming. How to burn the Oyinbo for the lot.
Moses knew what I was thinking and was already packing the tied-up blocks of money into carrier bags.
‘Let Heike do that,’ I said, tying up the bedsheet. ‘Tell Helen to go back to her sister and get the car ready.’
Heike was on the floor packing the money. I picked up four carrier bags and the sheet and ran downstairs. Moses was reversing the car into the garage. Helen slipped out through the gate. I flung the money into the boot and ran back up the stairs. Moses was out and opening the gates. I hit Heike coming through the doors telling me she had it all.
I left the lights on, checked the floor and dropped down the steps two at a time. Moses drove the car out and I closed the gates. The car pitched and yawed over the mud road. Heike leaned forward from the back seat. We parked up under some bougainvillaea that fell down the walled garden of the house on the opposite corner to mine. We could just see the gates. It was very dark and the light cast from the living room window was blocked by the head of the palm tree in the garden. We sat with our breath quivering like sick men waiting to die.
After fifteen minutes the paranoia wore off. Moses played a drum solo on the steering wheel. Heike sat back, looked out the window and hummed something from Carmen. I sat with my back against the window and my arm hung over the top of the seat and played with her fingers.
‘So,’ asked Heike, with a little German creeping into her accent to show me she was annoyed. ‘What’s going on?’
‘It’s a lot of money,’ I said, only half concentrating, ‘and the person who gave it to me wasn’t very happy about what she got in return. I think we might be getting a visit. We were followed out of the port this afternoon but I thought we’d lost them.’
‘It’s a lot of money for rice.’
‘It’s for parboiled rice,’ I said. ‘Seven thousand tons of it. The Nigerians won’t touch anything else. There’s an import ban, too, which gives it a premium.’
‘You’re going to smuggle seven thousand tons of rice into Nigeria?’
‘Not smuggle, exactly. The Nigerian government have said that each man can bring in a bag of rice legally. We’ve got five hundred guys who are going to take two hundred and eighty sacks each, one at a time, through the border at Igolo, north of Porto Novo.’
‘You can do that?’
‘It needs a bit of help which is why my client, Jack Obuasi, cut this woman, Madame Sevenou, into the deal. She can oil the Customs.’
‘Have I met Jack?’
‘If you had it would have probably been in his bed, and I think you would have remembered that.’
‘So who is he?’
‘He’s an English/Ghanaian who lives in Lomé. This isn’t the first job I’ve done for him, but it’s only the second time with this Severnou woman. She’s not easy. For a start, I can tell there isn’t enough money. I reckon we’re short about fifty to a hundred mil. She’s a greedy woman…with an appetite.’
‘It was only Helen, remember.’
‘So far.’
‘And you’ve still got the documents?’
‘Yes, but that doesn’t mean very much. A non-negotiable bill of lading with a bit of tippex, some faxing and a couple of million CFA could get to be negotiable.’ I gripped her finger and she bit back the next question.
Headlights lit up the mud road and were killed. A quiet engine cut out and a car rocked over on its expensive suspension and stopped in front of the gates to the house. The doors opened. Four men got out. They didn’t close the doors. They weren’t carrying violin cases but they did have long arms. They went through the gates. Moses started up the Peugeot which made a noise like a tractor and baler and we rode up on to the tarmac and went into town.
We bought some pizza at La Caravelle café to take away. We had a beer while we waited. Some white people came in. We must have looked tense. They walked straight back out. Heike had thrown away the cigarette holder and was smoking for Germany.
We crossed the lagoon and turned off down towards the coast and the Hotel Aledjo where we took a bungalow and finished counting the money at three in the morning. The total was fifty million CFA short, a hundred thousand pound commission for Madame Severnou. By this time, I had a half bucket of sand up my eyelids and Heike was asleep sitting on the floor with her head on the bed. Moses and I packed the money inside the car so that it looked empty from the outside. Moses lay down on a mat on the porch of the bungalow with the bedsheet from the money.
I put Heike on the bed and threw a sheet over her; as it landed, she opened her eyes. There was nobody behind them. Her voice said, ‘I’m going.’ Her eyes closed. She was asleep. Normally, when she came down from up country, the first night we made love of the desperate, savage kind that two months’ celibacy encourages. It was something we liked to do besides drinking, something that kept us going together. This time I left her a note. I gave Moses some money and told him to look after Heike in the morning and then drove the 100 miles west along the coast to Lomé, the capital of Togo.
Chapter 4 (#ulink_04dfc09e-3d8e-5d6b-83aa-eb7011c75a7f)
Wednesday 25th September
They didn’t bother to search the car at the Benin/Togo border and it was still dark when I left the Togo side of the frontier. I couldn’t make out the sandbar at the mouth of the lagoon at Aneho but by the time I came to the roundabout for Lomé port, it was light. The morning was fresh, unlike my shirt.
After commercial Cotonou, Lomé was a holiday resort. There were European luxury hotels and restaurants which fronted on to the beach and air-conditioned supermarkets with more than tomato purée in them. Most of the buildings had seen paint during the decade and a lot of the roads were metalled and swept clean. There was greenery in the town which backed on to a lagoon traversed by causeways which took you out to the suburbs. Lomé is a freeport where booze and cigarettes are cheaper than anywhere else in the world. Life was a permanent happy hour.
The coast road passed the Hotel de La Paix, which still looked like the architect’s children doctored the plans. It seemed empty. Closer to Lomé on the left was the five-star Hotel Sarakawa with a snake of taxis outside and a fight for rooms on the inside. The sea appeared motionless but didn’t fool anybody. Nobody swam. The currents were well-known killers along this coast.
People were beginning to make their way to market. The polio cripples hauled their torsos up to the traffic lights and arranged their collapsible legs beside them ready for another day in the sun scraping together the money for a meal.
I drove past the 24 Janvier building and Hotel Le Benin, turned right and arrived at the wrought iron gates of the white-pillared pile that Jack Obuasi rented for a million CFA a month. The gardien opened the gates for me and I cruised the botanical gardens up to the house. The drive cut through a manicured jungle of shrubs and bamboo before breaking through a line of palm trees where the lawns started. The two bowling green-sized expanses of grass were rolled and snipped, snipped and rolled, by a gang of gardeners who could have had a football tournament between them.
The house was whiter than a Christmas cake and had a central portico with four fluted pillars. It was the kind of portico that should have had a motto carved in it. Jack favoured La lutte continue. There was an east and a west wing on either side of the portico. Each wing had five bedrooms upstairs, all with bathrooms and all air-conditioned, with white shutters, which, if you had the energy to throw them open, would give you a view of the old wooden pier that strode out into the Gulf of Guinea. Underneath these bedrooms was enough space for living rooms, dining rooms, games rooms, jacuzzi rooms and cricket nets if you felt out of practice. There was also Jack’s office, and in his office, a desk that a family of four could have lived in without him noticing.
The walls of the office were bare, but, in the other rooms, were covered with African masks, animal skins and ancient weaponry. Man-sized carvings hung around the place like servants of long standing who couldn’t be sacked. Some rooms were taken over by collections of African paintings which crammed the walls from floor to ceiling. The floors were entirely of white marble only broken by large rugs whose tassels were kept in line by Patience, Agnes and Grace, the three maids.
In the rooms he never used he had much better cane furniture than I did, which wasn’t difficult. In the rooms he did use were tables and chairs of every hard wood the jungle had to offer, as well as armchairs and sofas from France and England that formed exclusive circles about the place like people at a cocktail party who wouldn’t mix. The one failure was a table and six chairs carved from a single tree, but the table was too low and a man’s bottom couldn’t fit in between the snarling carved heads on the arms of the chairs even if it had wanted to.
There was a large verandah above the garage and maids’ quarters at the end of the east wing and another at the back of the house overlooking the swimming pool. They were both surrounded by a nursery of potted plants. I parked the car behind Jack’s Mercedes in the garage.
It was breakfast time. Patience, the most senior of Jack’s maids, with the eyes of a murderess and the shoulders of a mud wrestler, came out of her quarters and pointed to the verandah above the garage. I locked the car. Patience adjusted her wrap and slouched off to the kitchen. Mohammed, a tall, rangy, immensely strong servant of Jack’s who could polish a Mercedes down to the base metal came from the back of the house hunched over, holding a monkey by the hand. Jack had bought the monkey and found that Mohammed came with it. The monkey saw me and hid behind Mohammed’s legs like a shy little girl.
‘How are you, Mohammed?’ I asked.
‘Yessssir,’ he said with the intensity of a truck’s air brakes.
A parrot in a cage started running through its repertoire of clicks and whistles, calling for Patience and doing imitations of her cleaning the verandah: little sweeping sounds with the odd chair scraping thrown in. I walked up the spiral staircase to the verandah and heard the murmur of the video-taped soaps that were recorded for Jack and sent from England. He played them in the big gaps of his light-scheduled day. Christ, he played them all the time.
‘Mister Jack will see you now,’ the parrot said to the back of my head.
Jack wasn’t seeing anything. He was lying on a lounger with a cup of coffee the colour of his skin on his stomach, the video zapper on his chest. His eyes were closed. One big finger was crooked through the coffee cup handle. He wore a pair of shorts and nothing else.
He was a large man, probably as tall as six foot four, with heavy shoulders and a broad chest which must have housed solid slabs of pectoral when he was younger, but was now on the turn to flabby dugs. He had a big hard, round belly which shone like polished wood. He flicked his feet to keep the flies off and his sandals made a loud flopping sound on the soles of his feet.
Jack was a good-looking man, but it was the mixture of African and European in him that made him peculiar and fascinating. His hair was black but not as tightly curled as a full African’s. His skin was the colour of a walnut shell. He had blue eyes from his English mother and a straight sharp nose with a mouth fuller than most, but not African. He had long flat cheeks that fell from his sharp cheekbones and he kept these and the rest of his face clean-shaven. He had small, perfectly formed African ears.
Jack’s overall impression, which he’d had to work on, was one of lazy power. He was a lion that turned up for his prepared meals, ate, lounged about, never had to move too quickly but had a look in his eye when he turned his big head that told you who was the patriarch. He had great charm, a boyish smile and he loved to laugh. When he walked into a room of people all you could hear were women’s hearts fluttering like a colony of fantails. He left a wake of despair. He was ruthless in his pursuit of sex. A man who couldn’t sleep alone but couldn’t bear the same woman twice. Women knew this. His bed was never empty.
He’d had another hard night. He slept more on that lounger than he did in his bed. The parrot tutted as if he knew. Jack’s eyes opened.
‘Bruce,’ he said in a thick sleepy voice. He glanced at the coffee cup in his hand, leaned his head forward with an effort and drained it. ‘My God,’ he said, sinking back. It was difficult to find any sympathy for him. I took the zapper off his chest and shut down the TV which sat in its little roofed shelter in the corner of the verandah.
‘Madame Severnou’s left you fifty mil short.’ I paused for a moment while his supine brain took this in. ‘And last night she sent some muscle round to my house to pick up the rest.’ Jack’s eyes opened and flickered as he registered. ‘And I’m pretty sure that right now she’s unloading the rice without the original bill of lading.’
Jack didn’t move for a moment until his tongue came out and licked the nascent bristle below his bottom lip. He stared down through his feet at the blank TV with half-closed eyes.
‘Can you turn that on again?’
‘Can you listen for a minute?’
If there’s any good news,’ he sighed, staring off over the wall into the palm trees of the next-door garden with ostentatious lack of interest.
‘I’ve got five hundred and eighty-odd million in the Peugeot.’
He let the hand with the coffee cup in it fall by his side. A dribble of coffee leaked out on to the tiles. He put the cup down and with a sudden jerk shot himself up off the lounger and walked like a man with diving boots on to the rail of the verandah. He leaned on it as if he was catching his breath. On his back were four deep, six-inch long gouges on each scapula.
‘And this after you’ve been in bed with a polecat all night,’ I said.
‘A lioness, Bruce, a bloody lioness,’ he said as if he was talking to someone in the neighbouring garden.
‘What the hell’s going on with her?’ he asked his stomach, which percolated some coffee through his intestines. He turned and walked back to the table by the lounger, squatted with a loud crack from both knees and poured himself some more coffee and filled a cup for me. He took a croissant from a plate and bit into it. His brain wasn’t getting the spark to turn itself over. He heaved himself on to the lounger.
‘I got the beef out of Tema, it’s on its way up to Bolgatanga,’ he said without thinking and blowing out flakes of croissant on to his hairless chest. I checked the coffee for insects. He was telling me things I didn’t need to know. Jack’s mobile phone rang. On automatic, he pulled up the aerial, clicked the switch to ‘Talk’, and then said nothing, but listened for some time, his eyebrows going over the jumps. I took a slug of the coffee which kicked into my nervous system. It was robusta and strong and bad for you if you’re the shaky type.
‘Can I think about it?’ Jack asked the phone, and then waited while he was told why he couldn’t. ‘I can help, but you have to let me talk…’ He held out a hand to me with eyes that said you can’t tell anyone anything these days. ‘I can’t. I haven’t got the time,’ which was a lie. ‘I have…No you don’t…’ He turned his back to me and I missed a snatch; he came back with some more croissant in his mouth. ‘I have to talk to him first.’ Pause. ‘Let me talk to him.’ Jack looked into the earpiece, pushed the aerial down and switched the phone to ‘Standby’.
‘Look,’ I said, ‘I’ll take this lot down to your man Jawa and then I’ll get back to Cotonou.’
‘What for?’ he asked.
‘If not the rice, Jack, the fifty million might be useful.’
‘I have to think about this.’
‘Did Moses call?’ I asked.
‘No,’ he said thinking elsewhere. ‘Moses didn’t call.’
I listened to the sound of Lomé getting itself together. Some women walked past the wall at the back of the house with piles of washing on their heads and babies on their backs who were sleeping on the rhythmical movement of their mothers’ hips. It seemed like a good place to be, rather than up here feeling seedy and bitter-mouthed from the coffee.
‘You’ve done business with her before,’ I said. ‘She’s always been straight with you, she’s always paid, it’s not as if you’re a one-off. So what’s going on?’ Jack nodded at each element with his chin on his praying hands. I looked at the top of his head. ‘Is it me?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said, looking up.
I stared into his blue eyes and all I saw was a big problem. The phone went in the house and Patience’s flip flops slapped across the tiles.
‘It’s Moses for Mister Bruce.’
‘Can she put it up here?’
‘Different line,’ said Jack, and I went down into the house.
Moses said the rice was being off-loaded and that nothing had been touched in the house. Heike tore the phone out of his hand. She was angry and spoke to me in barbed wire German which left my ear ragged and bleeding. She was in no mood to be apologized to. I didn’t try. The plastic split as her phone hit the cradle. I hauled myself back up to the verandah.
‘Africa. Africa. Africa,’ said Jack after Moses’s news.
‘I’ll drop the money at Jawa’s and go back.’
‘No,’ said Jack, holding up his hand. ‘She’s got the rice now. You won’t even get in the port. I’ll talk to her about the fifty million. I want you to do something else for me. My uncle in Accra needs some help in Cotonou.’
‘I didn’t know you had an uncle in Accra.’
‘I don’t. He’s a family friend, a Syrian multimillionaire. He did a lot of business with my father over the last forty years.’
‘Was that him before?’ I asked. Jack nodded. ‘What does he want?’
‘He needs someone he can trust in Cotonou and I’m volunteering you.’
‘I’ll give him a call.’
‘He wants to see you.’
‘What the hell for?’
‘He likes to see people he employs.’
‘I don’t want to go to Accra.’
‘It’s good money.’
‘To hell with the money. Heike’s in town and she’s bloody furious.’
‘You didn’t make her count the money?’
‘What the hell else was she going to do?’
Jack shook with high giggling laughter and drummed his fingers on his taut belly.
‘If you go now you’ll be back in Cotonou this evening.’
‘Ready for action,’ I said.
Jack ducked his head and turned his mouth down.
‘It’s a new client for you. He’ll pay you a lot better than anyone else around here.’
‘You mean his currency is money rather than promises.’
‘He does have money.’
‘Giving-type money or keeping-type money?’
‘Money-type money.’
‘I don’t care. I don’t want to go.’ I was searching for something. ‘I’ve got lunch with Madame Severnou.’
‘Lunch!’
‘Yeah, first course is a ground glass soufflé.’
‘You’re not going to lunch.’
‘No, and I’m not going to Accra either.’
‘I’ll get someone else. Fine. No problem.’ Jack was giving me the lion look now.
‘I owe Heike. We were counting until three in the morning.’
‘No problem. Forget it.’ Jack looked off into his neighbour’s garden again.
‘Jack,’ I said. ‘I’ll go as long as you promise never to say “no problem” to me.’
‘No problem,’ he said smiling. I didn’t laugh.
It was a game that had to be played. Jack knew I needed the money. I knew I needed the money. Jack knew that I owed him. But appearances have to be kept up. I also wanted to find out what was going on with Madame Severnou and I thought I might be able to catch Jack right now with the stabbing technique.
‘What’s going on, Jack?’
‘With what?’ he said.
‘Madame Severnou.’
Our eyes fixed; Jack’s were steady.
‘Croissant?’ he said, holding up the plate and shrugging.
‘I’ve got to get rid of this first,’ I said, pinching the fat on my stomach. Jack smiled and breathed out.
‘You have nothing to fear, Bruce,’ he said, standing up and slapping his wooden gut. We shook hands and clicked fingers Ghanaian style.
‘My uncle’s name is unpronounceable. Everybody calls him B.B. He lives on the airport side not far from the Shangri La Hotel. Ask for the Holy Church of Christ. His house is next door, on the left as you look at the church.’
I started down the spiral staircase, back into the garage.
‘By the way,’ added Jack, picking up the zapper, ‘he’s a little unusual for a millionaire.’
‘He gives people money for nothing?’ I said.
Jack laughed and the TV came on so I left him. I kept a few things in a room in Jack’s house. I had a shower and changed.
Patience accepted my dirty clothes which she dropped on the floor and walked off to go and be surly somewhere else. Jack was leaning over the balcony waiting for me.
‘What were the heavies like?’ he asked.
‘Big and heavy,’ I said, not feeling like telling him anything.
‘Did they have guns?’
‘Either that or very long arms.’ That impressed him.
‘You keep me informed,’ he said.
‘What about?’
‘About B.B. and things. You might need some help. He’s not so easy to deal with.’
‘Is anybody?’
‘Come and see me when you get back.’ I got in the car and drove down to Jawa’s compound near the DHL office in town.
Jawa’s boy let me into the garage underneath the office and disappeared. I filled up some cardboard boxes with the currency and went upstairs to Jawa’s office through several rooms of dead-eyed men counting huge quantities of money.
Jawa was a small, balding Indian with muddy quarter-circles under his eyes. He was thinner than an African dog. He didn’t eat food, but nourished himself by chewing the ball of his palm. He sat at his desk surrounded by ashtrays, each with a burning cigarette, and took drags from them all in turn, as if he were a beagle in a scientific experiment. The idea was that he should be smoking in the same order at the end of the day as he was at the beginning. It was something to do in the gaps between making money. He poured some tea and started to play with a lump of gold, weighing it in his palm and looking it over.
‘There’s going to be more trouble here, Bruce.’ He spoke very quickly, as if the words were going to outstrip him.
‘With what?’
‘This multi-party democracy.’
‘Jack called me last week from the Hotel Golfe. He said he was trapped, they were throwing stones at each other in the street.’
‘And shooting…There was shooting, too. It’s going to get hot, Bruce, very hot.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I’m listening. The people are getting angry. They told me at the flour mill they asked for a hundred per cent pay rise. They’re going to close the port and the taxi drivers are going on strike. It’s going to get very, very hot.’ He put the lump of gold down and leaned forward. ‘Does he want this in London or Zurich?’
‘Zurich.’
‘They’ll blame it on the Ghanaians, close the border, the usual things. But it won’t work this time. They’ll be fighting, looting…’ He sipped his tea and kept some cigarettes going. He booted up the computer, took the slip of paper I’d given him and entered the money in Jack’s account.
‘How’s Cotonou?’ he asked.
‘Still good,’ I said.
‘They had big trouble there, too. Nothing’s easy in Africa. Nothing stays good for long…We’re going to see blood.’
‘You’ll be all right, Jawa.’
‘If they don’t shoot me. You don’t know these people. I know them. Tea?’
‘I’ve got to get going.’
I left him worrying his lump of gold, scrolling through his accounts, smoking his cigarettes, chewing his palm, thinking about blood. He was a busy man.
Chapter 5 (#ulink_605af714-a03d-5f00-8ec8-fba9c03877c8)
I drove back down to the coast road and headed west to the Ghanaian border. The sun on the sea and the breeze through the coconut palms washed off Jawa’s depressing office and morose talk. For a while, I kept pace with a young white woman on horseback. The dappled grey seemed to be smiling through gritted teeth as his hooves kicked up the sand. The girl was out of the saddle, her bottom in the air, her head and shoulders leaning over the horse’s ears, her mouth wide open.
I looked at her and wondered what I was doing grubbing around in this half-lit world of trade and commerce, making a bit here, getting shafted there, listening to people talking very, very seriously and watching the insincerity flicking from face to face until all you could be sure of was that nothing was going to happen as agreed.
I crawled into the crowds around the border. The horse eased. The girl sat back a little. The horse’s head came up with its front legs. She turned him and was gone.
The Togo/Ghana border was always full of people. The Ghanaians poured across with their goods to pick up the hard CFA. I parked up in the border compound and a group of money changers gathered around me intoning the names of the currencies like priests at Communion. I bought some cedi for petrol and Moses expected me to buy Ghanaian bread for him. I paid a boy to go and get my name entered in the exit ledger and have my passport stamped. A soldier with a rifle over his shoulder was enjoying himself frisking all the women traders. Jawa was right. They were expecting trouble.
I drove across the baked mud to the Ghana side. Ten minutes later, I coasted through the border town of Aflao and bought a half dozen of the usual tough, green-skinned oranges from an alarmed young girl who scored them for me and cut a hole in the top so I could squeeze out the juice.
It was a fast, flat, boring drive to Accra and I arrived at the airport roundabout in a couple of hours. It was hot. I drove past the Shangri La Hotel and thought about going in there for a Club beer or six and a long lie down. I found the ‘uncle’s’ house four streets back from the main road. I followed the music. They were singing in the open plan church next door.
The garden boy opened the gates and I went up the short drive past a frangipani tree and parked in front of a double garage. There was a huge woman sitting in the darkness. All I could see was the size of her white bra, which must have been a 90 double Z. She threw a wrap over herself. I asked for B.B. and she pointed to a door at the back of the garage which led to the battleship-grey front door of the main house. The house looked like a municipal building. It was L-shaped and tall with white walls and grey woodwork. There was nothing pretty about it. There were no plants or flowers. It was functional.
I knocked. There was an echoing rumbling noise of someone clearing their throat in an empty room. The noise rose to a crescendo and ended in a cough and a sneeze which bounced around the walls inside the house. There was an exhausted sigh. A different noise started, a man with a stammer.
‘Ra-ra-ra-ra-ra-Mary!’ he finished surprisingly.
There was the neat sound of someone who picked up their feet when they walked and the door opened. Mary had a round bush of hair and a smile a foot wide to go with it. I walked up a few steps and found myself in the main living room. There was a table and a few chairs which dated back to the British colonial days, then a large space before a four-piece suite which I could tell was going to be hot from where I was standing. A fifties ceiling light of a cluster of brass tubes held in a wooden circle had six lamps but only three bulbs. The walls on either side had two massive grey frames holding eight columns of slatted windows which were netted against mosquitoes. Between the frames, the walls were bare and white. The wall at the far end of the room was occupied entirely by a scene of snow-capped mountains, pine trees and a lake which should have been in the Swiss Tourist Board’s offices, circa 1965. I blinked hard at the hoarding because treetops rather than bottoms appeared to be coming out of the lake. I could see that a whole section in the middle was missing. Sitting in the left-hand corner of this scene was B.B.
‘You like?’ he said in a thick, throaty voice.
‘I…there’s something…’ I fished.
‘It get wet in de airport,’ B.B. explained. ‘You get de idea anyhoare.’
We shook hands.
‘Bruise?’ he asked, as if I did easily.
He stood up for some reason. He was holding his shorts up with one hand. He had such a tremendous stomach that they had no chance of being done up. He wore a string vest which stretched over his belly and creaked under the strain like a ship’s rigging. The vest was badly stained with coffee and a few other things, one of which was egg. He had short, recently cropped grey hair and snaggled grey eyebrows which fought each other over the bridge of his fleshy nose. His mouth was small and sweet and looked as if it might whistle. His neck was like a gecko’s. It hung from below his jowls and fanned out to his clavicles.
He crashed back into the armchair, swung his feet up on to the table and crossed them at the ankles. His big yellowing toenails arced out from the flesh by a couple of inches and he had hard pads of skin on his soles. They were high-mileage feet in need of some remoulds.
‘Sit, Bruise,’ he waved at a chair. ‘Ka-ka-ka-ka-ka-ka-Mary!’ he roared.
Mary was standing right behind his chair and said, ‘Yessah!’ which made him jump a bit. He turned as if he was in a seat belt and gave up.
‘I see,’ he said. ‘You want drink, Bruise?’
I asked for a beer. He tried to turn to Mary again and it brought on a wince of pain so he relaxed. ‘You bring beer for Mister Bruise and the ginger drink for me.’ Mary hadn’t even moved when B.B. said: ‘No, no, no, no, no. Yes.’ She went to the kitchen.
B.B. rapped the arm of his chair, alternating between his knuckles and the palm of his hand for a minute or two. Suddenly his eyes popped out of his face and he leaned forward as if he was going to say his last words, but instead let out a sneeze like a belly flop, showering me and the furniture. He pulled a yellow handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped his nose and took the sweat off his brow and then held it tumbling out of the back of his hand.
‘My God,’ he said. ‘I tink I have a cold.’
I was ‘tinking’ I was going to get a cold when Mary came in with the drinks. He sipped his daintily with his little finger cocked. He dabbed his mouth with the handkerchief and put the drink down. His face creased with agony. He lifted himself off one buttock and then settled back down again. His face calmed.
‘Yesterday I tink I eat someting funny. The ginger is good for the stomach,’ he said. ‘Lomé? Is hot?’
‘There’s going to be more trouble.’
‘Africa,’ breathed B.B. ‘Always problem. It getting hot in Ivory Coast now. De people, dey want to be free. Dan when dey free dey don’t know what to do. Dey make big trobble. Dey teef tings and kill. Dey ruin deir contry. Is very hot in Abidjan now. Very hot.’
I sipped my beer and felt very hot through the Dralon seat covers. B.B. went through a few more crises. I felt as if I’d been there a couple of hours. I didn’t feel awkward; he seemed to have things to occupy him.
‘Jack said you wanted to see me,’ I volunteered.
‘Yairs,’ he said and sipped his drink and looked out into the garden.
Mary flipped in and flopped out again. It reminded him of something.
‘Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-Mary!’ he hollered, and she reappeared.
‘We eat someting?’
‘Corn beef, sah!’
He looked at me, wanting some encouragement, so I nodded. Mary went back into the kitchen.
‘Jack –’ he said and stopped. The singing in the church stopped too and was replaced by a preacher who roared at his sinners, torturing them with feedbacks from his microphone. B.B. lost his track. His eyes looked up into his forehead as if he might find it up there. Something clicked, it sounded like a synapse from where I was sitting.
‘Jack,’ he repeated, and I flinched because his eyes had popped again, but the sneeze didn’t come, ‘is a nice man. His father too. His father dead now. He was a nice man, a good man. We do lot of business together. He know how to wok. We wok very hard togedder, all over Ghana, the north, the west side, east…Kete, Krachi, Yendi, Bawku, Bolgatanga, Gambaga, Wa…We wok in all dese places.’
He sipped his drink and I wondered where all this was going to. He breathed through his nose and mouth at the same time, the air rushing down the channels. His feet seemed to conduct an orchestra of their own. He talked for twenty minutes with a few coughing breaks in which he turned puce and became so still that I thought an impromptu tracheotomy was looming and I took a biro out for the purpose. What he talked about is difficult to remember, but it took a long time and part of it was about how hard he had ‘wokked’ with Jack’s father, which brought him back to Jack again.
‘Jack,’ he said, ‘has never wokked. Everting has been given. Is a problem, a big problem. If money is easy, you always want more, but more easy evertime.’
He winced again and leaned over, raising his left buttock as if he were about to break wind ostentatiously in the direction of something he disagreed with. The pain made him lose his track but his random access memory came up with something else. ‘Cushion,’ he said, and I looked around. ‘Cushion!’ he said again, wagging his finger with irritation. ‘When you want to cross the road you always look, if you walk and no look you get run over. Cushion. Always look. Take your time. Don’t be in hurry. Cushion is a very importarn ting. Jack is not careful. He no understand the word cushion.’
B.B. sipped his drink. ‘Respeck,’ he said, holding up a different finger. ‘Respeck is very importarn ting. If you no have respeck you no listen, if you no listen you make mistake. If you make mistake in Africa you get lot of trobble. Jack he no listen. He know everyting. He no respeck. You know Africa, Bruise?’ he said suddenly, so that I wasn’t sure if it was a question.
‘Not as well as you,’ I said, throwing a handful of flattery.
‘Now listen.’ He looked at me intently. ‘You see, I am still small boy. In Africa you learn all de time. If you tink you know everting you stop learning, dan you get big trobble. It come up on you like a dog in de night.
You hear noting until you feel de teeth.’ He grabbed a buttock with a clawed hand so that I got the picture.
‘Smock?’ he asked, and I looked puzzled, so he lit an imaginary cigarette.
‘I gave up.’
‘Me too,’ he said, annoyed.
He saw someone over my shoulder in the garden.
‘Ra-ra-ra-ra-ra-ra garden boy!’ he yelled.
Outside, the gardener was looking around as if he’d heard The Call. He ran towards the gate.
‘Bloddy fool!’ said B.B., standing up, grabbing his shorts and walking with an old footballer’s gait to the window.
‘Ra-ra-ra-ra-ra-garden boy!’ he bellowed and banged on the window frame.
The gardener worked it out, ran to the door and knocked.
‘Come,’ said B.B., searching his pockets.
The gardener, glistening with sweat, stood with his machete down by his side, naked apart from some raggedy shorts and a willingness to please. B.B. had performed the Augean task of cleaning his pockets out of old handkerchiefs and found nothing.
‘You have some monny, Bruise?’ he asked.
I gave him some money with Jack’s words sticking in my craw. He told the gardener to get him some Embassy.
He was about to walk back to the armchair when Mary came in with the food. It was chilli hot corned beef stew with rice and pitta bread. B.B. sat down and ripped the pile of pitta bread in half like a phone book. He reached over and scraped exactly a half of the chilli and a half of the rice on to his plate with his fork. He fell on it using the pitta bread as a shovel. Most of the food went in his mouth. I used a knife and fork and wore my napkin on the arm nearest to him.
The gardener came back in with the cigarettes and B.B. grunted at him. He finished his food and tore into the packet of cigarettes and chain-smoked three of them without speaking. He picked rice out of his chest hair and ate it in between drags. I picked the Cellophane wrapping of the packet out of my corned beef. He stood up and walked back to the chair, cigarettes in one hand and the shorts in the other. I finished my food and sat down in front of him again. We sat in the silence left over from B.B.’s breathing. I was getting a little frustrated now and had started thinking about Heike. B.B. was fretting over what was on his mind.
‘You see, Bruise,’ he said, ‘I giff this man a job. He’s a good man. He been here before. I know he haff no money. He haff big problem. So I giff him job and now he’s gone. I no understand.’
I didn’t understand either, but I realized we were talking about what he wanted me to do for him in Cotonou.
‘Who is this man?’
B.B. muddled about with some papers on a side table. The phone went and he picked it up.
‘Hello,’ he said looking up into his forehead again. ‘John. Yairs. OK. Cocoa?…Coffee?…Dollar?…Parn?…Fresh Fran?…Swiss Fran?…Arsenal?…Oh, my God! Tankyouvermush.’
He put the phone down and went back to the papers. He pulled one out and waved it at me. I took it from him. It was a photocopy of a British passport. It belonged to a man called Steven Kershaw.
‘When you say he’s gone, what do you mean? He’s quit the job. He’s flown back to the UK or what?’ I asked.
‘He disappear,’ said B.B. ‘He never dere when I call.’
‘So what do you want me to do?’
‘Find him,’ he said. ‘His wife keep calling me and I don’t know what say to her.’
‘Have you got a photo of him?’
He reached over to the papers again, winced as some ash fell into his chest hair and he slapped himself hard there, coughing the cigarette out which fell into his crotch and he came out of the chair roaring like a bull elephant. I got the cigarette out of the chair. He sat down again and took the cigarette off me as if I’d been trying to steal it and plugged it back into his mouth.
‘My God,’ he said. ‘Is big problem.’
He found the photo. Steven Kershaw was early forties and dark. He had dark brown hair, dark skin, and dark eyes. The hair was thick and cut short with a side parting. He had a moustache which rolled over his top lip into his mouth. From his face he looked as if he carried a little extra weight but wasn’t fat.
‘Is he English?’ I asked.
‘Yairs,’ said B.B. ‘But his mother from Venezuela or someting like dat.’
‘How tall is he?’
‘Smaller dan you.’
‘Most people are.’
‘Yairs. Less dan six foot.’
‘Is he big?’
‘He not fat like me. He fat small.’
‘Does he have any scars, or marks?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘What about the moustache?’
‘I tink he shave it.’
‘What was he supposed to do?’
‘I organize flat for him. I organize warehouse for him. I organize bank accoun’ for him…everting.’
‘To do what?’
‘Sheanut. I buy sheanut from Djougou and Parakou in de north of Benin. It come down to Cotonou in trucks. He weigh de sheanut, pay de suppliers and store it. When we get contrack we ship it.’
‘How long has be been missing?’
‘Since last week. He supposed to call everday. He no call.’
‘What about the money in the account?’
‘No, no. He no teef man,’ he said waving the cigarette at me. ‘He no chop de monny. De monny still dere.’
‘What sort of cash does he have?’
‘Expense monny. Four hundred parn, two hundred thousand CFA, someting like dat.’
‘Credit cards?’
‘I don’t tink so. He declared bankropp in UK. Thassway I giff him de job.’
‘Car?’
‘Nissan Sunny. ACR 4750.’
‘How do you know him?’
‘A Syrian friend. He introduze us.’
‘What’s his name?’
‘Dey call him Dama.’
‘His address?’
‘You know de road out of Lomé to Kpalimé. You cross de lagoon, up de hill, he has de big house on de right at de traffic light.’
‘You said Kershaw’s been here before?’
‘Das right. Not wokking for me. For his own accoun’.’
‘Doing what?’
‘I don’t know…but I tell you somet’ing, Bruise, he a very capable man, he understan’ de business very well. A very good head for trade and a good attitude, you know.’
Either that was true or B.B. found it necessary to cover himself for his poor judgement to a complete stranger.
‘What do you think then?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know. Maybe…You know Africa…dese African girls…maybe he lose his head. Dese girls dey change your head. Dey make you weak. Dey drife you mad.’
B.B. sounded like a man who knew. ‘You know dey get beautiful girl mush more beautiful dan English girl, dey fall in lov and deir head come off.’
‘Where’s the flat?’
‘In Cadjehoun. When you come into Cotonou from Togo on de right side.’
‘That big block?’
He nodded and gave me the flat number. He wanted me to organize the sheanut business for him as well until I found Kershaw, so he told me where the warehouse and office were and gave me a set of keys. He also told me about a weekend house that Kershaw used in Lomé near the Grande Marché. It was a house that belonged to an Armenian friend of his who wasn’t using it. He asked if I wanted a fee. I said yes and he ignored me. He asked me if I wanted a game of backgammon. I asked him if he meant instead of my fee, which he didn’t understand, but it meant that he heard the word ‘fee’ again.
He lit another cigarette in addition to the two still smoking in the ashtray. We walked out of the house to the garage.
‘What’s he like, Steven Kershaw?’ I asked. ‘What’s he like doing?’
‘He like to go to bars. He like girls. He like to play cards. Yairs,’ he said, thinking, ‘he’s a lively fellow. He like to tok a lot. He like to tok to women. Thassway I say maybe de African girls give him trobble.’
‘What about his wife?’
‘Dere he haff problem. De monny. It break de marriage.’
‘She still calls him?’
‘Yairs,’ said B.B. thinking about that. ‘He like to draw. His wife say she going to send art material to him in Lomé. Yairs, he always sketching, you know – trees, birds, people. He show me a drawing of myself. I tell him thass no very good. He say, “Why?” and I say it make me look like baboon.’
‘My fee is fifty thousand CFA a day plus expenses.’
‘Whaaaaaat!’ he roared. His face fell and his coal eyes bored into me.
‘Fifty thousand CFA a day plus expenses.’
‘My God, maybe I do de job myself.’
‘Two hundred and fifty thousand CFA in advance.’
‘Whaaaaat!’ he bellowed, and stormed back into the house. The big woman in the garage smiled at me. I smiled back. B.B. returned and handed me a sheaf of
notes.
‘Is good business you’re in,’ he said, subdued now.
‘I don’t earn fifty thousand everyday.’
‘Is true,’ he said, smiled and shook my hand.
I left B.B. standing in the garage holding on to his shorts and smoking and talking to the big African woman. The preacher was still giving them hell on earth in the church next door. The palms looked bored stiff. I drove back past the Shangri La and kept going to the roundabout and turned right on to the motorway to Tema with the bit between my teeth and Heike on my mind. At the toll booth a boy tried to sell me a Fan Milk yoghurt, then a set of screwdrivers and finally a duster. I blew him out on all three.
At the Tema roundabout, I saw the dark clouds hanging over Togo. The storm was heading this way. The women at the side of the road were already packing up their long oblong loaves of sweet Ghanaian bread. I stopped and bought some for Moses.
I thought about B.B. as I moved towards the storm. The old Africa hand who’s ‘still a small boy’ but shrewd as a grifter. The millionaire who lives like a student on a tight grant. The guy who doesn’t have to do anything but has to do something. The guy who’s got a bit lonely over the years. He enjoyed having a crack at Jack. He was enjoying the Kershaw intrigue. He enjoyed men and their weaknesses. He was bored by strengths. You didn’t make money out of people’s strengths.
The first drop of rain burst against the windscreen. The tarmac turned to liquid. The windscreen wipers went berserk. I felt cool for the first time in a week. The thunder rumbled like a wooden cart on a cobbled road. Sometimes I felt the car floating, aquaplaning along. The road didn’t feel solid and I wasn’t sure whether I was in control.
Chapter 6 (#ulink_29759fd9-5dd6-5aa6-972f-a5444d7da87d)
The patches of tarmac – which were all that was left of the road – in Aflao were steaming after the rain and people wandered about in sodden clothes looking like refugees. The rain had made the town look ten times dirtier than it was, which was inconceivable. I stopped and bought some grilled plantain to chew on.
The border had become a lake on the Ghanaian side. The flow of traffic was going back to Ghana now and I was through in five minutes. The traders on the Togolese side stared out from under plastic sheeting, holloweyed and dismal behind their banks of cigarettes, tinned tomato purée and sardines. Mud worked its way up the buildings of this strange quarter of Lomé that butted right up against the wire of the frontier. The sea was grey and the sand looked hard and dark. Africa, after rain, was a place of the living dead.
I drove around town before going to Jack’s house. Through the drizzle still whimpering over the city, I saw the red lights marking the height of the 2 Fevrier Hotel, its glass walls reflecting the greyness of the late afternoon. The smell of the rain made me think of London on a November evening. I had a sudden nostalgia for a dim pub with warm beer and a cheese roll with courtesy lettuce.
There was no light at Jack’s house or in his area. Parked behind Jack’s Mercedes was a larger, longer Mercedes with Nigerian plates and windows tinted so that only a squat version of myself was visible on them. Looking in, I’d expected to see a bowling alley at least.
Jack was glowing strangely in the yellow light of a hurricane lamp where he sat by the french windows of the living room. His legs were stretched out and his hands were clasped behind his head. He was nodding as if he was listening to somebody, which was unusual because, as B.B. said, he never did. The guy he was with must have been important or Jack would have been flicking through Hello magazine and playing with his nose.
Mohammed came over and directed me towards the spiral staircase leading to the breakfast verandah. I got a back view of Jack’s guest who was sitting in a cane two-seater sofa which wasn’t reacting well to the circumstances. This man was wide and made wider by his suit whose cloth and tailoring values could still be discerned in the oily light. He moved for his drink and the sofa cracked like a splitting redwood.
His hand buried the glass. A heavy gold watch hung on a thick loose chain from his wrist as if he wanted to shake the worthless thing off. The light shone down the back of his shorn head and revealed three horizontal creases in the skin where there was supposed to be a distinction between where the head ends and the neck begins. It was a thick neck, a working ox’s neck. I wouldn’t have liked to be the man to strangle it.
Night fell faster after the rain and I stood at the rail of the verandah and looked down into the darkness of the garden. A drink had fitted itself into my hand with no complaints from me. I heard the booming laughter of a man who hadn’t found anything funny but knew a cue when he heard one. There was more cracking from tortured furniture and the heavy footfall of a man who walks little.
The huge Nigerian appeared at the bottom of the portico steps. Beneath his pewter grey super lightweight suit his black shoes shone with a better shine than patent leather. A chauffeur appeared from nowhere. He must have been sleeping on top of the tyre under the front wheel arch. He opened the car door which swung out with magnificent weight. Mohammed stood holding a torch so the Nigerian could see where he was.
Jack was saying something I couldn’t hear which was probably just as well. Mohammed moved the torch’s light between Jack and the Nigerian, drawing attention to himself. Jack’s voice told him to stop being a bloody fool. Mohammed held the torch steady. The Nigerian was jangling something in his pocket which must have been the keys to his Swiss bank’s safe deposit box because he didn’t look like a man who’d ever heard of loose change. He was chuckling a low, rich, deep chuckle that he must have bought in Harrods and displaying great white teeth and a thick, pink tongue. He walked in a stumbling way to the car following the pool of light from Mohammed’s guiding torch. Jack appeared between the pillars of the unlit portico.
The big man bent over and got into the car while the chauffeur danced around him in case something stuck and needed to be levered in. He must have thrown himself back into the seat because the Mercedes’s suspension coughed politely, just to show that it hadn’t really been a problem. The chauffeur pushed the door to and it closed with a satisfying thunk.
The engine of this car was no louder than Heike breathing in her sleep. The car rolled backwards, arced on its power steering, negotiated a few bumps and floated off into the black shrubbery. Jack was waving, maybe the Nigerian waved back or maybe he gave him the finger. Jack will never know.
The spiral staircase shivered against the house as Jack climbed up to the verandah. He made it to the drinks tray and poured himself a beer. He drank and sighed the sigh of someone who has been so unfortunate as to have made such money.
‘Who was Mr Big Shot?’ I asked.
‘That was Mr AA International Commodities Traders Limited,’ said Jack with a smug look that would have earned him a dead leg anywhere in the world.
‘He looked like Mr Kiss My Arse from over here.’
‘Sometimes, Bruce, arses have to be kissed.’
‘Tell him before you do it, or he won’t notice.’
Jack drank some more beer and ignored me.
‘How did you get on with B.B.?’ he asked.
‘He gave me the job and he paid me an advance.’
‘I told you.’
‘I bought him a packet of cigarettes first.’
‘He likes generous people.’
‘Millionaires do.’
‘Did you get the lecture?’
‘On wok, you mean.’
‘He loves eating Chinese.’
‘He spoke very highly of you.’
‘He tink I neffer haff to wok for my monny.’
‘Someting like dat, ‘I said, and we both laughed.
I put my empty glass down and poured us both some whisky into fresh glasses with ice.
‘Do you know anything about Kershaw?’ I asked.
‘I know what he looks like.’
‘You’ve never spoken to him.’
‘B.B. likes to keep things separate.’
‘You got anything to tell me?’
‘He lost a bit of weight.’
‘Thanks, Jack, don’t strain your brain. Did you speak to Madame Severnou?’
‘She’s calm now.’
‘I’m glad about that,’ I said, mustering some acrid sarcasm to spread on my tone. ‘I was worried for her. I’d hate to think of her out of pocket or inconvenienced. It must be tiresome to have to send the hit squad out every time someone questions your integrity.’
‘Bruce,’ said Jack, ‘calm down. What I meant was that the misunderstanding that made her do that has been cleared up.’
‘What misunderstanding was that, Jack? It must have been a pretty big one, and if they’re that big I normally see the dust cloud coming over the horizon well before.’
‘She thought that when you gave her the non-negotiable copy you were acting on my instructions. That…and she didn’t like the way you handled it.’
‘Look, I know this woman is used to people throwing themselves on the ground in front of her so that she doesn’t get dust on her toenails, but she has to understand that I’m there representing you in a deal where with very little effort she gets to make fifty thousand dollars.’
‘Without her…’
‘Spare me the horseshit, Jack. You could sell that rice to anyone. They’re screaming for it. You’re doing her the favour and, don’t forget, she did short you by a hundred thousand pounds.’
‘I’m going to tell you this, Bruce’ said Jack in a voice that wasn’t used to getting annoyed but when it did it was time to hit the deck, ‘and then I want you to mind your own fucking business. The fifty million CFA is for some cotton fibre I’ve bought from AAICT and her fee. I didn’t know that she was going to turn it round that way but it’s done now and it works out the same. More important, she got me the contact with AAICT and this is her payback.’
‘What about the four suits coming round to my place with half a brain between them?’
‘Madame Severnou trades with other people’s money. If she loses it, they get upset. She has to protect herself…’
‘Against me?’
‘She was annoyed with me and she was going to send the message back through you. She wanted to remind you of your position in the deal. She wanted to show you that she was a principal and that principals have to be respected.’
Jack wanted to think of another five reasons why Madame Severnou should have sent the gunmen round but couldn’t, so be poured himself another drink and refilled my glass. He was calming down now. He forced one of his cheesy grins on me which I swatted away.
‘Why didn’t you just give her the original?’ he asked in one of those voices of disarming simplicity that normally get the people who use them hurt.
‘She’s the sort of woman who you shake hands with and she checks her jewellery, you check your fingers and when you get home you find she’s taken the shirt off your back and some of your skin’s gone with it.’
‘She’s not that bad.’
‘She resents the fact that you’re breathing air that she could be breathing.’
‘You’ll warm to her eventually.’
‘Like I will to a puff adder on coke. And anyway, why didn’t you explain all this shit to me?’
‘I didn’t think you’d give her the copy.’
‘You pay me to manage things for you in Cotonou. If you want a gofer…’
‘All right, Bruce. I admit it. I should have been clearer.’
Jack defused rows by conceding but not giving an inch. We both sat down on a couple of wooden loungers with foam rubber mattresses. Jack balanced his drink on his belly and looked up at the stars which weren’t there. He pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket and offered me one without thinking. He plugged one into his mouth, lit it, and drew on it as if he was trying to keep his cool in the trenches. He let the smoke trail out of his nose and from between his teeth and it disappeared off behind his ear.
He leaned forward and split his legs on either side of the lounger. He reached for an ashtray, put it in front of him and winced with his right cheek and eye.
‘I have no sympathy for you, Jack. You get less than you deserve.’
‘I bear the scars of love,’ he said, as if it was a terrific bore.
‘Love, Jack? I didn’t think that was your scene.’
‘Love, African style,’ he cautioned me with his cigarette.
‘How does that go?’
‘She likes me. I want her. She lets me. I pay her.’
‘I’d forgotten how romantic it was.’
‘The women here aren’t fools.’
‘Who said they were?’
‘They’re not fooled into thinking romance exists. They know what exists.’
‘Let me guess. Money and power?’ Jack somersaulted the cigarette in his hand and stabbed the air with it. ‘Exactly. Haven’t you noticed, I don’t go with white women any more?’
‘I haven’t consulted my black book recently.’
‘Well, I don’t. They’re too complicated.’
‘You don’t have to pay…’
‘…money. That’s what I mean. You sleep with them and before you know it you’ve got a relationship, they’ve moved in and they’re supervising your life like it’s a school project. Jesus. What I want is…’ He trailed off.
‘What do you want, Jack?’
‘I don’t want that.’
‘Whatever you do want, you’re not finding it.’
Jack wasn’t listening any more. I had exhausted his attention span between thoughts about sex. He smoked an inch of his cigarette in one drag and let out more smoke than a bonfire on a wet November afternoon.
‘There is one white woman I would like to have,’ he said from behind his smokescreen. I didn’t respond but sipped my whisky and did some passive smoking.
‘Elizabeth Harvey.’
‘Never heard of her. Is she a movie star?’
‘You know her. She’s married to that American banker.’
‘Clifford Franklin Harvey the seventh.’
‘The seventh?’
‘Americans always have Christian names like surnames and numbers like royalty.’
‘What do you think?’
‘She doesn’t look like one night stand material to me.’
He gave me an alarming grin followed by a diabolical laugh and some vestiges of smoke left in his lungs from the last toe-reaching drag came out of it.
He took the final drag from his cigarette, which was so hot he had to whip it out of his mouth before his lips blistered. He crushed it mercilessly into the ashtray.
‘You’re right.’
‘I think she’s Catholic, too.’
‘You’ve seen her kicking with her left foot.’
‘I’ve seen her coming out of a Catholic church.’
‘Perfect,’ said Jack. ‘To attain the unattainable, Bruce. That’s an excitement in life. What are you doing hanging around churches?’
‘Hoping for a bit of salvation to rub off.’
Jack laughed, a high-pitched giggling laugh, and shook his head.
‘Oh Bruce,’ he said with mock pity, ‘sometimes I think you’re my brother, other times my son.’
‘Naivety’s one of my strongest suits.’
Jack looked up like a dog over its dinner. He lit another cigarette and rolled it across his bottom lip. The paper and tobacco crackled as he drew on it.
‘I forgot to tell you. Heike called.’
‘Thanks.’
‘I told her you’d gone to Accra. She said something in German.’
‘Did it hurt?’
‘She said she was going to Porto Novo tonight and she’d be back at your place tomorrow afternoon.’
I chewed my thumbnail for a minute and Jack inspected the video zapper which told me the interview was over. I asked if I could stay the night, saying I’d go to Charlie’s bar and see if anybody there knew anything about Steven Kershaw.
‘Do you want to bet, Bruce?’ Jack asked as I juddered down the spiral staircase.
‘On what?’ I said without looking up, just hearing his voice.
‘That I can bed Elizabeth Harvey before you find Steven Kershaw.’
‘You’re a sick man, Jack. You’re making too much money. It’s creasing your moral fibre.’
He wasn’t listening. The soap opera voices had started another crisis in another world.
Chapter 7 (#ulink_d7b7d97c-fd61-57ef-9e42-6df102e9288f)
I showered and changed and went out into the cool night and the smell of wet grass. The cicadas were practising. The inside of my car smelt of wet newspaper and damp carpeting. I shut the car door waiting for the satisfying thunk and heard a chord from a cheap guitar with a broken string.
The lights were back on in downtown Lomé and the place was full of music. A shop selling cassettes had set up some speakers on the street and for half a mile nobody was walking without a wriggle or a jerk. Three girls with snack food in large aluminium bowls on their heads stood together and bobbed up and down and turned around in time.
I came out on to the coast road and headed east out of Lomé. A wind was blowing through the low palms along the beach. The stiff leaves knocked against each other and made a harsh clapping noise like a few sarcastic people in an audience.
The Hotel Sarakawa looked like a recently landed space craft illuminating the dark and attracting humans for observation. The port was lit and it looked as if there might be work going on. Charlie’s bar was on the beach a mile beyond the port. There was a rough track through some wasteland from the metalled road up to his compound which continued a further two hundred yards to another bar called Al Fresco’s where the track looped back to the Lomé/Benin road.
At the entrance the gardien checked the car and opened the barrier. I parked outside a huge paillote which was the restaurant part of the bar. The paillote was a massive thatched cone supported by wooden beams. There was seating for a hundred people and a bar underneath. It was empty. It always was after rain. Next to the paillote was a concrete building which Charlie had built a couple of years ago with profits from all those fingers he had in all those pies. This was the real bar. A huge open plan room looking out to sea with a thirty-foot bar on the back wall, seating for fifty around a piano and a lot of room to stand and fall in.
I walked into the air conditioning and piano music. The hum of the distant generator that ran Charlie’s compound disappeared. A light-skinned African girl with close cropped hair and a long neck was playing some Billie Holiday and looking out to sea through the arched windows. There was nothing out there except the dark.
At the bar, balancing on one leg of a four-legged stool, was a Lebanese guy in his early twenties. He had his palms flat down on the bar, his head hung at a level which gave him a perfect view of the whisky in his glass as he spun from one side to the other on the axis of the bar stool’s leg. A Togolese girl was drying some glasses and looking at her single customer with concern and disdain. I stood at the bar and the Lebanese looked at me from under his armpit. His lips hung slackly.
‘Charlie?’ I asked the girl.
The Lebanese swung his head up to look at her too quickly and too hard and it took several adjustments for him to focus. The girl shrugged at me with her eyeballs. The Lebanese gave me an exaggerated translation which was too much for his tenuous equilibrium. The stool spun violently on the axis of the single leg and sent the Lebanese crashing against his back into the bar. The stool slipped away from him and entangled itself in his legs, impairing his recovery so he had to throw himself on the mercy of two other bar stools who wanted nothing to do with him. He came down hard on the tiled floor with the chrome bar stools bouncing around him like a street gang. The pianist stopped, swivelled around on her bottom and gave us a clanging discord with her elbow on the middle section of the piano keys. It had been a very quiet evening.
The Lebanese needed plenty of help but looked as if the exercise might sober him up. I walked to a door at the end of the bar, opened it and caught a faceful of sea air. It was only four or five yards across some damp, hard ground to Charlie’s house. There was a light on. I closed the door on the Lebanese who was finding new ways to say putain merde. Billie Holiday resumed.
Charlie’s maid answered my knock as if she’d been waiting on the other side of the door all evening. I stood in the hall which had a single light in it, shining down directly over a plinth with a slim-necked pot on it which spouted a flower with a long green stem and a head like a bird with an excited comb.
I was trying to work out what this image was saying to me when Charlie’s maid returned and led me down a dark corridor to the living room which, like the bar, looked out through arched windows on to the sea. There was no sound of air conditioning but it was very cool in the room, and although there was no smoke, the smell of Gauloise was strong.
Charlie was sitting on the edge of a ten-foot white leather sofa, right in the middle with his legs apart, his forearms resting on his thighs and his large hairy hands dangling in between his knees. There were two women each sitting in a corner of an identical sofa opposite him. There was a tiger skin rug laid out diagonally between the sofas held down by a large glass-topped table with three glasses and an ashtray the size of a cymbal on it. One of the women had her bare foot in the tiger’s mouth; a long canine slid in and out in between her big and second toes.
‘Bruce! My God!’ said Charlie in his expansive American businessman’s way. ‘How ya doing?’ He came over and clapped me on the shoulder and shook my hand in his strong paw. Charlie looked shorter than he was only because of his width. He was six foot and a little slimmer than a brown bear but with no less body hair. It would be a big mistake to say he was fat and an understandable mistake to think it. He had a covering. Something for the winter, he would say as we sat outside on a December evening in ninety-five degrees, sweating like pigs, drinking dry martinis made with gin and an olive and held in the general direction of Italy for the vermouth.
He was bald and employed no techniques for disguising it, although I’m sure he could have trained some hair up from his shoulders and worn his collar up if he’d wanted to. His bare head was tanned dark brown and shone like polished teak. His remaining black hair was cut very short. He had strong black eyebrows which you would have thought would meet in the middle but didn’t, and a thick bristly moustache. His eyes were dark green with long dark lashes, his cheekbones high, his jawline solid and square at the chin with a dimple on the point. The bottom lip of his mouth was full and tanned so that when he licked it, as he often did, it was the colour of fresh liver. Like most Americans, he had ten thousand-dollar teeth which were all his own but didn’t look it.
Charlie had a big head, a big tanned head for a big hairy body. He was very strong but with no use for his strength other than drumming figures into a calculator. He was benign when sober, hard but not unpleasant when he was doing business, affable and charming when he was being social, but when he was drunk there were probably only a couple of things in the world more unpleasant – a fighting bull that’s caught your eye in an open street is one of those things that springs to mind. He was wearing a pair of dark blue chinos, a yellow short-sleeved shirt and no watch. He kept that in his pocket on a long chain connected to his belt.
He introduced me to the two women who had both looked up with their eyes. Jasmin, who had her tanned foot in the tiger’s mouth, had very long legs inside some equally long, baggy blue jeans. She wore a white T-shirt with what looked like her DNA on the front. She had short, straight blonde hair, very big blue eyes, a long and pointed nose and a mouth full of £25.50 teeth which were all her own and looked it. She had to be English, which she was.
Her arms were long and slender with small hands, one of which played with a lighter, the other held a cigarette. She smoked like a schoolgirl, the cigarette held at the very tips of her fingers and puffed at like a pecking hen. She was nervous despite the relaxed sprawl. There was a lithe sexuality to her boyish body and a surprised innocence to her eyes which I am sure triggered off base thoughts in the minds of a lot of men. I realized that she was the woman I’d seen on horseback that morning on the way to Ghana.
Yvette, who sat at the other end of the sofa from Jasmin, had more sophistication than the rest of us put together. She had very dark, shoulder length brown hair, styled with a nostalgia for the fifties movie star. You could see the same head of hair with one of the non-hats and some netting that they used to wear in those days. Her eyes were quite wide apart and, although large and rounded, narrowed at the edges with an Oriental sharpness that wasn’t done with make-up. They were violet in colour and made her look more feline than any woman I’d ever seen. Her nose was small for her face, which had high wide cheekbones and a wide, full-lipped mouth with a pronounced cupid’s bow. She wore a pale purple lipstick and her teeth were small and white with a gap between the front two which she had a habit of tickling with the tip of her tongue. Her skin was perfect white with not even the first hint of a line or a crease. I was looking too hard and too long.
‘Did I miss something shaving?’ she said to me in a deep, cracked voice with a French accent.
‘No,’ I said, taking the opportunity to look over her face again. ‘Very close, no cuts. Perfect…not the first time, right?’
She threw her head back and laughed through some gravel in her throat which trembled the white skin and light blue veins of her neck.
I sat down opposite her and took another look while Charlie did something about everybody’s drinks and looked over his shoulder at Yvette – a lot. She wore a pink crêpe jacket, and a blood orange crêpe sarong which was split to mid thigh. The jacket wasn’t fastened and I could see from her exposed waist that she was naked underneath it. A long orange and pink silk scarf dropped down from around her neck and covered her breasts. Like Jasmin, she sat low on the sofa, her legs crossed at the knee, and her bare feet nodding. She smoked an untipped Gauloise, thick and fat as a chalk stick, with the relish of a true professional. Charlie handed me a Scotch with ice and sat on the sofa next to me.
‘Yvette tells me they don’t believe in marriage in France,’ Charlie said as he sat down. ‘Says they have this thing concubinage instead.’ He strained his whisky through his moustache. ‘Sounds kind of interesting, you know, concubines and that. Sounds to me as if you could trade ‘em.’
‘Like pork bellies, you mean?’ I asked Charlie, wondering how they got to be talking about this kind of stuff.
‘I was thinking more onna lines with “1987 Concubine convertible. Low mileage, one previous owner, swap plus cash considered”.’
‘I think you’re over-romanticizing it, Charlie,’ I said.
‘No, no, Bruce, you gotta understand, marriage – that ol’ roman’ic institution – is old-fashioned. Strictly wartime only before you fly off to a certain death. That’s what the lady says.’
‘Don’t you think so, Bruce?’ Yvette dared me, having dug deep to pronounce my name.
‘I’ve heard there’s a very high success rate when the man dies immediately.’
‘Whose side you on?’ asked Charlie. I ignored him.
‘The woman is left with a memory of perfect love and consummation…’
‘Yeah,’ said Charlie, with no encouragement.
‘…and, if it’s really a perfect marriage, a load of money.’
‘Now here is a man who really understands,’ said Yvette, uncrossing her legs and leaning forward.
‘And the guy?’ said Charlie. ‘What the hell does the guy get out of this perfect marriage?’
‘The guy gets to die at the pinnacle of his achievement. Wedding night followed by heroic death.’
‘What more could a man want?’ asked Jasmin.
‘To do it again?’ asked Charlie.
‘It’s never as good the second time,’ said Jasmin, ‘and anyway, men are always looking for the ultimate thrill.’ She pecked at her cigarette. ‘Sex and death. In Japan they don’t always need the sex…I’ve seen them sit down to eat puffer fish knowing that if the chef’s carved it up wrong any one of them could get the chop.’
‘Raw fish,’ said Charlie, ‘is not my kind of thrill.’
‘Yes,’ said Jasmin smugging at her Gauloise. ‘I think the spider gets it right. She shows her mate a good time, gets herself pregnant and has a problem free dinner.’
‘I think I’m coming round to concubinage,’ said Charlie. ‘I don’t wanna give you indigestion or anything.’
‘Don’t worry about us,’ said Yvette. ‘We have huge appetites. You must think of it as an act of kindness. We’re saving you from yourselves.’
‘Kindness was not the word I had in mind,’ said Charlie.
‘All this talk and now I’m hungry,’ said Yvette. ‘It’s time to eat.’
‘Will you be our guests?’ offered Charlie.
Yvette had stood up and looked Charlie over.
‘You look too tough for me. I like my meat very tender,’ she said baring her teeth.
‘The tender bits are inside,’ I said for Charlie.
Yvette raised an eyebrow. ‘Can I use a phone?’
Charlie pointed to the desk at the far end of the room behind our sofa. He saw Yvette hesitate. ‘Sorry, it’s the only one inna house. My rules. Somebody wants to use my phone, I wanna know what they’re saying. It’s business…’ he smiled, ‘something personal.’
She gave Charlie a look which left me charcoal broiled and I was only sitting next to him. She walked over to the phone and punched out some numbers.
‘Camilia?’ she asked and started speaking in Italian. Charlie nodded and drank some more and sneaked a look at Jasmin who had stood up and walked to the window to look at the dark.
Yvette put the phone down and walked back over. ‘I’m sorry…’ she said.
‘I heard,’ said Charlie.
‘You speak Italian?’ she asked.
‘I am Italian,’ he said. ‘Carlo Reggiani.’
Yvette and Jasmin slipped into their shoes. ‘We have to go. Tonight we are meeting someone for dinner who says they know somebody who probably knows lots of other somebodies who might be able to sell me something I want,’ explained Yvette.
‘That’s the only kind of business they have here,’ said Charlie.
‘African art, Bruce, is a terrible business. The worst,’ she said, smoothing her scarf inside the lapels of her jacket.
I put my drink on the table and we all walked out to the private parking area at the back of the house. There was a taxi with a powder blue furry dashboard waiting for them under a low palm tree. Charlie was kissed soundly on the cheek by Yvette, which might have disappointed him but he didn’t show it. The two women got into the car. The taxi took a while to get going and circled us before disappearing behind the paillote.
Chapter 8 (#ulink_6b2d44f7-3d97-5916-af62-9562e757cab0)
Charlie shivered.
‘She does something for me, that woman.’
‘Confuse you?’ I said.
‘There’s one thing I’m not confused about,’ he said, turning and putting his hand on my shoulder to steer me into the house.
‘They don’t make them like that any more,’ I said.
‘Right.’
‘Now that we’re all being genetically engineered.’
‘Something went wrong in my test tube,’ said Charlie, looking down at his big hairy body.
‘Not us, Charlie. You can still see the ape in us. In the future they’ll iron out all those blips and glitches that make someone extraordinary like Yvette and we’ll all look like leads from shampoo and shaving ads. We’ll be the bathroom people from planet Earth.’
‘You know, Bruce’ – he stopped and looked at me from under his eyebrows with his hand resting on the back of my neck – ‘you’re kinda weird, but you’re OK…I think, anyways.’
We went back into the house and sat opposite each other on the sofas with big tumblers of Scotch in our hands and a bottle and a bucket of ice on the table. We drank and refilled without speaking. I took Kershaw’s photograph out of my shirt pocket and flicked it across to Charlie.
‘I’m looking for this guy. His boss wants me to find him, says he hasn’t heard from him in a week. He describes him as missing.’
‘Steve Kershaw,’ said Charlie, rolling his glass across his forehead. ‘English. Buys sheanut in Cotonou.’ He spun the photo back at me across the table.
‘When did you last see him?’
‘He was in here about three days ago with a blonde girl, French I think, I didn’t know her. Nice looking though. Great legs, nice ass.’
‘Three days doesn’t sound like he’s very “missing” to me.’
‘You asked me a question,’ he shrugged.
‘Was he intimate with this French girl?’
‘Kind of,’ he patted his bald head with his hairy hand. ‘Sex rather than marriage type, I’d say.’ Charlie twisted his leg under himself and winced. ‘You know, this concubinage thing confuses me, Bruce. It sounds…financial.’
‘It’s like a common-law wife,’ I said, my eyes widening with the whisky on an empty stomach which was loosening off the gab more than I wanted it to. ‘I know you Americans are keen on marriage. Divorce, too. But in Europe now, marriage is out. People live together, they don’t need to tie the knot in front of God any more. It keeps the divorce rate down. I’ve met quite a few Americans who’ve had three or four wives, which to Europeans sounds like upgrading, like we do with computers. The Africans? Well, they have all four wives at once, it shows they’re making money. But then they say divorce is not a cheap option in the US. Is it a status symbol there yet, Charlie?’ He didn’t answer but stared at a bookcase with no books in it.
‘You been married before, Charlie?’
Charlie, who was sitting sideways on the sofa with his arm thrown over the back of it, gave me a sideways look as if I was trying to cheat off him in an exam. He held up two fingers and took a large slug of whisky from his glass, including a lump of ice which he crunched.
‘And you’d like to make Yvette number three?’
Charlie didn’t react well to that dart into his private life. He’d shown me more than he’d wanted to earlier and, being a businessman always on the lookout for leverage, thought I could be the type to abuse it, which is the sort of thing he would do. The look he gave me told me so. It left me with frost bite down my front. His face lost expression, his eyelids closed a little, and he spoke in a soft voice. ‘We were talking about Steve Kershaw.’
As he said this, Charlie’s brain spun and clicked into a different mode. He was not a man to reveal what he was thinking. I had caught him off guard. Charlie knew that I knew that Yvette had got through, if not to the heart, then at least to the fillet steak. He leaned back with his elbow on the arm of the sofa, straightened his leg and sipped his whisky, licking the liverish lip to show that he was relaxed. He put his glass down on the carpet and rubbed his face with his hand.
‘Steve Kershaw,’ said Charlie in a voice that had a very straight edge to it. ‘Can I call him Steve?’ he asked, not expecting an answer but just to show me he was back in town. ‘Steve Kershaw used to come in here with a lot of different women. He only came in at the weekends. I never once saw him with another guy. I saw him in here with black girls, white girls, Orientals, Indians, tall girls, short girls, beautiful girls and ugly girls but I never saw him with a guy.’
‘He likes women,’ I said, shrugging my eyebrows.
Charlie drew a straight horizontal line with his hand. ‘I don’t trust that kinda guy.’
‘Did you know any of these women?’ I asked.
‘The only woman I knew to talk to was a woman called Nina Sorvino. She works in the trade department of the US Embassy. She liked him but thought he was kinda intense. I don’t know what happened but something went wrong. She was here last night giving me the lowdown. I think he was into weird sex. She wasn’t specific.’
‘D’you mind if I talk to her?’
‘Try her. She’ll tell you more than I can. She might know some other people. I’ll call her tomorrow, let her know you’re gonna be in touch.’
‘Did you ever talk to him?’
‘Uh huh. Like I said. Not my type.’
Charlie poured himself a very stiff whisky and did the same for me. He took a gulp out of his as if it was nothing more than a cold beer. He grunted as the alcohol hit his system. The blinds were coming down in my head and I could see Charlie was beginning to paw the ground with his hoof.
‘Whaddya think’s gonna happen, Bruce?’ asked Charlie, slapping the back of the sofa and lapsing into a more pronounced American drawl. It was the usual thing – Charlie on the hunt for information. He was a businessman, a trader, one of the good ones who realized that information was everything and he didn’t give a damn about the source. He knew better than anybody else that not hearing the vital piece of news in Africa wouldn’t just mean that you missed out on some action, it could cost you your whole business and, in bad times, your life.
He also knew that the boy who packed his groceries last month, or the young army sergeant at the road block could, with not very many twists of fate if he didn’t draw the line at shooting people, become a highranking minister, or even the president himself.
‘The President might survive this one, but it’s going to be painful,’ I said. ‘He’s losing the support of the people. France is edging away from him. There’s going to be a question mark about future US aid. He’s been around too long. It’s happening everywhere else in Africa. The day of the dictator is over. They’re all feeling the cold wind now. Africa’s going to be a different continent by the end of the century.’
‘What about here?’ said Charlie.
‘The army’s the problem. You’re never safe until you’ve got the army with you. The army’s full of northerners from the President’s tribe. They’re not going to want to see their man go.’
Charlie finished half a tumbler of whisky in one tip, poured himself some more and added another half inch to mine.
‘The southerners will get their election. The President probably won’t get in, but whoever does will be under threat from the army from day one.’
‘A coup.’
‘The first thing any civil administration will want to do is weaken the army. Generals in the US don’t like that and they don’t like it here either.’
‘Is anybody talking about this kind of thing on the street?’
‘On the street they just want multi-party democracy. They don’t know what it means beyond free elections with more than one party, but they want it. Some of them think they know what it means but they don’t realize how much choice complicates things. They see France and Germany with democracy and they know how wealthy those countries are. So they think, if they’re rich, we’ll be rich. But there’re some big gaps and a lot can happen in the gaps.’
‘It’s gonna be a fuck-up, in other words,’ said Charlie, his voice thick with the drink.
‘It’s just the next stage. Africa’s been dominated by the Europeans and now it’s going to be dominated by their systems. It’s the only road.’
‘The only road they know is how to fuck things up.’
Charlie started pacing up and down the room. His forehead was glistening despite the air conditioning. Somebody had put a couple of bags of cement on my shoulders. I drank some more to see if it lightened the load.
Some hours later, which turned out to be minutes, Charlie stopped wearing a trail in the carpet and fixed me with a malevolent, drunken eye. Maybe I hadn’t been answering his questions, or maybe it was just the time of night when it occurred to him to start disliking company. I decided not to look back in case it stirred up his machismo and I caught the full force of Hurricane Charlie in an enclosed room. Wherever I did look, things either came towards me or I went towards them. I realized from the silence burning behind his eyes that the subject was going to change, and for the worse. As always with Charlie, it was going to get personal and it was going to be about sex.
‘How’s that babe of yours, Bru?’ he asked.
‘Heike, Charlie. Her name’s Heike.’
‘Yeah, Heike. Kraut, right? Ossa Kraut like inna sack?’
‘Maybe it’s time for me to go.’
‘Come on, Bru, ossa Kraut like inna sack? I went with a Thai chick once, she was tighter’n a duck’s ass.’
‘That’s not something I’d know about.’
‘On account of what, Bru?’
‘On account of English ducks are suspicious of people who come at them with that kind of thing in mind.’
Charlie poured some more whisky into my glass and topped up his own.
‘You think you’re smart,’ he said, shaking his head and panting a little from the alcohol crashing around his system. ‘English people. They think they’re smart. Nina. She likes English guys. Me? I think they’re all faggots. But Nina…when you meet her she’ll tell you she likes English guys. She says: “They don’t fuck you with their eyes.”’
‘Now that’s true, Charlie, once we’ve been told what to do it with, we remember.’
‘You don’t know when to shut the fuck up.’
‘I’m drunk. That’s what happens. It just keeps pouring out of me.’
‘I thought you could take it.’
‘I can. I like it and I can take it. But I can’t take it and keep my mouth shut.’
Charlie drank half his tumbler and nodded to me. I took a gulp which blazed its way down my oesophagus. He topped me up so that I had neat whisky to the brim and did the same for himself.
‘Cheers,’ he said, and took an inch off the top, to show me that the real men were on his sofa. ‘The first English guy I met was at my brother’s. My brother makes films in LA.’
‘What kind of films?’
‘Thrillers, comedies…’
‘Right, I was just making sure he wasn’t a Pasolini or anything.’
‘He does skin movies too, if he has to. Pays the bills.’ Charlie liked to talk tough.
‘The English guy?’
‘Yeah. My brother throws a party, like he has to, to get work now and again. It’s one of those parties, lot of girls. Lot of working girls, you know what I mean. They going round with the blow, little white piles of it on silver platters with spoons. I’m talking with these two guys. One of them is English. He’s a writer. Calls himself Al ‘cos he’s in the States. His real name is Algernon. What sort of a fucking name is that? Anyways, Al’s got a plate with some canapés on it. The girl comes round with the blow and Al picks up the spoon, loads it with blow and sticks it onna side of his plate. Then he says to the girl: “You got any celery to go with that?” Now that is what I call one big asshole.’
‘I laughed.’
‘I heard you,’ said Charlie. ‘You wanna see one of my brother’s films?’
‘No thanks, I got to go.’
‘It’s a short,’ said Charlie, leaning over, picking up the zapper and the TV came to life. There was a picture of African straw-roofed mud huts and two girls pounding yam.
‘This is Africa.’
‘This is Togolese TV, asshole.’
Charlie clicked on the video and a dark ill-lit picture came on in which only the movement of things could just be discerned.
‘Is this wildlife or something?’
‘Kinda.’
As the camera pulled back, Charlie turned the sound up and the telltale tinny music and sobbing ecstasy accompanied a shot of a woman laid out face down on a bench, her wrists and ankles tied underneath. A huge and hairy man who looked as if he drove trucks during the day held her thin waist in large and sinisterly gloved hands while he worked on her from behind. Another man sat in dazed concentration at the other end of the bench with the woman’s head nodding in his lap.
‘Good night, Charlie,’ I said, and lurched out of the room.
‘Good night, chickenshit,’ he shouted after me, without taking his eyes off the screen.
I needed some fresh air. Things appeared cut together like a film. There was no feeling of time passing. The dark corridor, the bird-like flower in the pot, the door, the warm wet darkness, the bar door. The bar door was locked. I walked down towards the sea.
I knew there was a steep bank of red earth down to the sandy beach but it was very dark and the bar was shut down so there was no light. I eased forward with one foot ahead of me until I felt stupid enough, then I stopped and looked out. My eyes got used to the dark. I was very close to the bank. It was closer to the bar than I remembered it. The sea was slowly eating its way into Charlie’s compound. It wasn’t going to be long before it all tipped into the Gulf of Guinea.
Standing in the dark was giving me sensory deprivation rather than sobering me up. I walked back to the bar; Charlie was still sitting in his living room, his brother’s film flickering on the screen. I fell heavily on my shoulder and kicked out at whatever I had fallen over, which groaned. I crawled back, and in the dim light I could just make out the slack features of the drunken Lebanese. I called the gardien and we hauled him up to the paillote, which left me speechless with a huge quantity of blood crashing through my head. The boy was covered in ants and his face and hands were swollen with mosquito bites. The gardien said he would put him in one of the guest rooms. After ten minutes, my pulse went back down from my ears to my wrist and I got in the car and drove back to Lomé.
There were street gangs operating in the centre of town and on the coast road at night. They wanted money in the name of democracy. I decided to go around town and headed for one of the causeways across the lagoon that hardly anybody used at night. There was no street lighting. There was nobody out. The noise from the cicadas closed in. A tyre burned in the middle of the road, the thick black smoke making the night thicker and blacker.
A group on a piece of wasteland stood around a blazing oil drum whose flames slashed out at the night. As I approached the lagoon, two kids ran across the road and into the dark. Further on, a young woman trotted with her hands covering her cheeks. A young man stood at the side of the road as I rolled past with my elbow out of the window. He slapped my arm.
‘Go back. Go back,’ he said.
I cut the lights, got out of the car and looked down on to the causeway. A car was parked diagonally across the road, its headlights flaring out across the lagoon. In the light, three people stood looking out into the lagoon, their hands behind their backs as if inspecting something. They crumpled forwards off the road. The sound of three shots, delayed, cracked across the water. The black, still lagoon rippled out in silver lines before the lights died on the causeway.
‘Go now. They’re coming,’ the young man said to the back of my head.
‘Who’s they?’ I asked.
‘Nobody knows,’ said the young man.
We heard the car approaching. The young man ran, his shirt tail flapping. I drove down a side street and parked by a house out of sight of the road, got out and looked back down the street. A single car drove past at walking pace with no lights on.
Ten minutes later I drove across the lagoon. The mosquitoes screamed across the water.
Chapter 9 (#ulink_bb2ddcea-01d8-517f-82cd-d8939aa9218a)
Thursday 26th September
By morning, my face was welded to the bed, I had an arm like a plastic leg and a brain as dry as a monkey nut and no bigger. Something rattled in my inner ear as I sat up. I drank the best part of a litre bottle of water and felt intimidated by the brightness of the sunlight slanting through the slats of the shutters forming white bars on the marble-tiled floor. I stared into them for a while until they lost what little meaning they had.
I made it to the shower and rehydrated to full size underneath it. I shaved with limited success. I flossed for the first time in a month and ended up with a cat’s cradle in my mouth. I dressed as if I’d done it before but could use some maternal supervision. I flipped off the air conditioner, opened the shutters and staggered back as the sun slapped a white rhomboid across the room. By the time I’d got to the bottom of the stairs I was ready for bed.
On the verandah, Jack was asleep in the lounger with the radio murmuring on his stomach, the TV quiet for once. I poured some coffee, ate some pineapple and retreated to a shady corner with a pair of sunglasses.
‘Morning,’ said Jack.
‘Should be,’ I said.
Jack opened one eye and found me with it.
‘What happened to you?’
‘Man to man with Charlie. The usual. Half pints of whisky, no water.’
‘Did he get ugly?’
‘He’s never been pretty.’
I sipped the coffee. It was that robusta again. It rippled through my system as if I’d mainlined it.
‘They found twenty-one dead bodies in the lagoon this morning,’ said Jack.
The black and white images of last night played themselves through my head.
‘There’s a taxi strike. We’re going to have trouble,’ he said.
‘Who did it?’
‘Nobody knows.’
‘That’s what the guy said to me last night.’
‘Which guy?’
I told Jack what I had seen.
‘Did they say whether they came from the north or south?’ I asked.
‘Both.’
‘A mixture?’
‘No. Some people say all northerners, others all southerners.’
‘Who’s trying to scare who?’
‘I’d say the army were scaring the southerners.’
‘And the army says the southerners are trying to discredit the army and are killing their own people.’
‘Dead people make everybody think about what’s going on. Everybody’s thinking twice about changing their nice, boring stable lives. Trotsky’s bloody omelette; just give me fried eggs sunny side up any time,’ said Jack, with a full stomach and an empty head.
‘Don’t talk to me about fried eggs.’
‘Restraint…’
‘Don’t talk to me about that either. You are no authority.’
‘I myself had an evening of ecstasy and restraint.’
‘Acid house comes to Lomé?’
‘I spent an evening in the company of…’
Jack who was already supine managed to sink even further back into the lounger.
‘Elizabeth Harvey. You don’t waste your time.’
‘It’s my challenge.’
‘What are you doing on your lounger then?’
‘I didn’t restrain myself all night.’
‘I’d hate to think you were slacking.’
I finished my coffee and called the US Embassy and arranged to meet Nina Sorvino at the German Restaurant for lunch. She said she knew who I was from Charlie, so I didn’t need a carnation and a copy of The Times. Her accent was from the wrong side of the tracks. I called Dama, the friend of B.B.’s who had introduced Kershaw. We arranged to meet after lunch in his house up the Kpalimé road.
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Robert Thomas Wilson
‘First in a field of one’ (Literary Review) Robert Wilson’s first novel, a tense and powerful thriller set in the sultry heat of West AfricaBenin, West Africa. Englishman Bruce Medway operates as a ‘fixer’ for traders along the part of the coast they used to call the White Man’s Grave. It’s a tough existence, but Medway can handle it… until he crosses the formidable Madame Severnou. Warned off by his client, Jack Obuasi, his energies are redirected into the search for missing expat Steven Kershaw. Kershaw, though, is a man of mystery: trader, artist, womanizer… and sado-masochist.Against background rumblings of political disturbance, in the face of official corruption, egged on by an enigmatic policeman, Medway pursues his elusive quarry across West Africa. Is Kershaw tied to Obuasi’s and Madame Severnou’s shady dealings? Is he a vicious murderer? Is he, indeed, alive or dead?
Instruments of Darkness
Robert Wilson
For Jane and in memory of my father
1922–1980
Table of Contents
Cover Page (#ued26865e-fee9-5fd3-b5a3-074541f9fb78)
Title Page (#u6d5df439-0271-56c8-bbae-34dbc0b53e64)
Dedication (#uc46306fa-2a1f-53c3-a380-4c0928505da7)
AUTHOR’S NOTE (#ua10a5269-9e09-590f-b805-cf0b6362b6cd)
Map (#u5bdeb644-3944-531f-82a1-a4a6cb9e42c0)
Prologue (#u287f5032-8400-52c5-b5f3-7adf0c9ffc35)
Chapter 1 (#ud340e898-a03a-5b97-91da-5316191205a6)
Chapter 2 (#ubab112fc-c780-5371-8b56-273aafbdfce4)
Chapter 3 (#u2bb09c35-9e35-5547-8185-72ef53306e05)
Chapter 4 (#ud8598d9e-5420-5d41-b3ff-de9e82455c42)
Chapter 5 (#u1a12a6c1-3158-5f26-9868-d4e2fa5062d5)
Chapter 6 (#ubd0130b7-62e1-5f59-867c-84d1c07d650c)
Chapter 7 (#u28f1d1f1-4bf1-57cf-a8c7-93eba8db84c3)
Chapter 8 (#u65daa8c3-9ac6-5f4e-87a6-2fde1506829a)
Chapter 9 (#ufb41ee49-8743-5425-a390-484632efdf83)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 33 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 34 (#litres_trial_promo)
Robert Wilson (#litres_trial_promo)
Praise for Robert Wilson (#litres_trial_promo)
By the Same Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
AUTHOR’S NOTE (#ulink_a384234b-ee17-52a7-b4a5-c29b5df662b2)
The French West African currency, the CFA, was devalued in January 1994 from 50 CFA to 100 CFA to the French franc. All financial transactions in this novel are based on the old rate.
Although this novel is set very specifically in West Africa, and its backdrop is the Liberian Civil War, all the characters and events in it are entirely fictitious and no resemblance is intended to any event or to any real person, either living or dead.
Map (#ulink_8f200b5a-a1c7-5f30-84af-2640ace0e0fe)
Prologue (#ulink_e61924c9-a5d4-5e21-8787-c525c24553ed)
My name is Bruce Medway. I live in Cotonou, Benin, West Africa, along that stretch of coast they used to call the White Man’s Grave because it was hot, humid, and full of malaria. It still is, but we don’t die so easily now. Air conditioning and quinine have made us smell better and more difficult to wipe out.
I travelled across the Sahara a couple of years ago and stayed. I knew I wasn’t going back before I came. I used to live in London where I made good money in a shipping company. The boredom crushed me, the traffic nearly killed me and the recession threw me out of a job.
Now I live in this warm, damp hole in the armpit of Africa and it suits me. The house is rented. I share it with Moses, my driver, who occupies the ground floor and Helen, my cook and maid, who lives with her sister nearby and comes in every day.
I don’t make much money. I’d make more without Moses and Helen, but then, cooking and driving in 100 degrees isn’t much fun, they need the money, and I like them.
I’ve got some work. I collect money for people, some of which is late, more of which is very late and most of which is so late it’s stolen. I organize things for people – offices, transport, labour and contacts. I negotiate. I manage. Occasionally I find people who’ve lost themselves, some of them accidentally, others on purpose. I’ll work for anybody unless I know they’re criminal or if they ask me to follow their wives or husbands. My clients are mostly expatriates. A lot of them I wouldn’t invite back to my mother’s, and that’s probably why they’re here and not there.
They come here to trade as they have done for the last 500 years. They’re a different crowd now – Lebanese and Armenians, Chinese and Koreans, Syrians and Egyptians, Americans and Asians. The Europeans are still here as well, toughing it out with the soggy climate. A lot of them drink too much, some because there’s nothing else to do and others because they want to forget why they’re here.
They trade with the Africans and the Africans trade with each other and they all move up and down the coast with the same aim – a fast, hard buck. In Ghana and Nigeria, the old British colonies, the bucks aren’t hard and fast. Their currencies, the cedi and the niara, flop about with the price of cocoa and oil. In Togo, Benin and Ivory Coast the French keep a foot in the door of their ex-colonies by supporting the CFA franc (Communauté Financière Africaine) at fifty to the French franc so that’s the hard, fast buck that everybody’s after. When they get it, they want more. It’s no different to anywhere else in the world.
Chapter 1 (#ulink_9ea9424b-9d00-5cdf-b1fd-d486a6687494)
Tuesday 24th September
There were a few worse places to be in the world than outside warehouse 2 in Cotonou Port, but I couldn’t think of them. Moses and I were on our haunches in 105 degrees and – it felt like – 200 per cent humidity. I was losing weight and patience.
Berthed on number 2 quay, in air crinkled by the heat from the baked concrete, was the Naoki Maru. It was a 14,000-tonner dry cargo ship with a rust problem and an Oriental crew who leaned on their elbows at the ship’s rail, waiting. Waiting to discharge my client’s 7000 tons of parboiled rice from Thailand which was going to be sold to Madame Severnou, who I was waiting for to come and give me the money. Above us, on the roof, a couple of vultures were waiting for someone to make a mistake crossing the road. A driverless fork lift stood outside warehouse 3 with a pallet of cashew nut sacks a metre off the ground waiting to put them down. I could see the driver, waiting and doing some sleeping on some sheanut sacks in the warehouse. We were all waiting. This is Africa where everybody has mastered the art of waiting. Waiting and sweating.
The sweat was tickling my scalp as it dripped down the back of my head. I could feel it coursing down my neck, weaving through my chest hair, dribbling down my thickening stomach and soaking into the waistband of my khaki trousers so I knew I’d have a rash there for a week. I wasn’t even moving. The dark patches under my arms were moving more than I was. I looked down at my hands. The sweat hung in beads off my forearms and dripped down my knuckles and in between my fingers. Christ, even my nails were sweating. I looked at Moses. He wasn’t sweating at all. His black skin shone like a pair of good shoes.
‘Why you no sweat, Moses?’
‘I no with a woman, Mister Bruce.’
‘You do sweat then?’
‘Oh yes please, sir.’
I had a newspaper in my hand called the Benin Soir which always came out the morning after the ‘soir’ looking unshaved, hungover and ready for nothing. I opened it and scanned the pages. There was nothing but smudged newsprint and black and white photographs of African people on black backgrounds. I tried to get some breeze from turning the pages.
I turned the last page and folded the paper in half. I was going to start fanning my face, which is what most people use the Benin Soir for, when I saw an almost readable item in the bottom left-hand corner with the heading: Tourist Dead. Cotonou had never had tourists and now the first one had died.
The article told me that a girl called Françoise Perec, a French textile designer, had been found dead in an apartment in Cotonou. There was a paragraph that finished with the word sexuel which I couldn’t read at all and I didn’t need to. A police spokesman said that it looked like a sex session that had gone too far. I wondered how a policeman could tell that from a dead body. Is there such a thing as an ecstatic rictus? A drop of my sweat hit the page. I folded the newspaper and used the Benin Soir how it was meant to be used.
I was beginning to gag on the smell of hot sacks, stored grain and crushed sheanut when a pye-dog strayed out of the warehouse shade. It wasn’t the healthiest pye-dog I’d ever seen. It definitely wasn’t anybody’s pet dog. It had the shakes. I could count its toast rack ribs and it needed a rug job. Its nose hoovered the ground. Out of the corner of my eye I saw one of the crewmen leave the ship’s rail. The pye-dog moved in tangents. It stopped, clocked round a spot as if its nose was glued to it and then moved on. The crewman bounced down the gangway. There was a flash of light from his hand. He was carrying a cleaver.
Moses had pushed up his sunglasses and was frowning at the way things were developing. Inevitability was in the air. The pye-dog, its diseased hindquarters shaking, the crewman, his stainless steel cleaver glinting, closed on each other. The sun was high. There were no shadows. The instant before they met, the dog looked up, aware of something. The survival instinct wasn’t operating too well inside that pye-dog. He looked right. The crewman came from the left and took the dog’s head clean off with a single blow.
There was no sound. The dog’s fallen body twitched with brainless nerves. The crewman picked up the dog’s head and held it trophy high. The men at the rail burst into cheering and clapping. Moses threw off his Mr Kool act and was up on his feet, eyes rolling in horror, and pointing.
‘Must have been a Chinese,’ I said, before Moses could get anything out.
‘Why he kill the dog?’ asked Moses.
‘To eat.’
‘He eat him?’ Moses was shocked.
‘You eat rat. He eat dog,’ I said, trying to balance the horror of foreign cuisine.
‘Dog eat dog,’ said Moses, laughing at his own joke, ‘…and I no eat rat. I eat bush rat and he no rat rat.’
‘I see,’ I said, nodding.
The crewman put the dog’s head down and picked up the body which he tucked under his arm. The legs still twitched in memory of birds chased and rubbish investigated. He bent down again and picked up the head by an ear. He walked back to the ship. The dog’s tongue lolled out of the side of its mouth. Its wall eyes bulged out. A dark patch remained on the concrete of number 2 quay.
‘He go eat him!’ Moses confirmed to himself as if it were a fair thing to do.
‘Hot dog,’ I said without smiling, knowing that Moses would roar with laughter, which he did. My best lines fall on deaf ears, my worst are a triumph. I think I satisfy his anticipation.
‘Here we go,’ I said, standing up.
Moses turned and saw the group of hadjis heading our way. Al hadji is the title given to a Muslim who has been to Mecca. Before air travel it must have been a big deal to have been a West African hadji. Now they charter planes and a grand will do the job. These boys have got money and Allah on their side and a long line in horseshit.
They looked quite something, for a bunch of businessmen, dressed in their floor-length robes, their black skins against the light blue, green, burgundy and yellow cloth, their heads bobbing underneath multicoloured cylindrical hats. In another world they could have been showing a summer collection. Here they meant business. They were going to hassle me for the rice which wasn’t mine to be hassled for. I reached for my cigarettes. They weren’t there. I gave up last year. That’s why I put on the weight. It all came back.
I heard an expensive engine. A grey Mercedes with tinted windows stopped with a squeak in between me and the hadjis. An electric motor lowered the window. The hadjis huddled together so that the car’s occupant must have seen seven sweaty faces pressed into the frame of the window. One of them took out a hanky and wiped his brow.
Some African words came from the back seat of the car. The words sounded like they could move some sheep around. They had the hadjis rearing back. The group moved as one, turning and walking back to the port entrance. The window buzzed back up. One of the hadjis fell back to get a stone out of his Gucci loafers.
The Mercedes swung round to where Moses and I were standing. The driver, anthracite black, was out of the car almost before it had stopped. He opened the rear door and looked as if he might drop to one knee.
I got a short blast of air-conditioned cool and with it came Madame Severnou. All five foot of her and another nine inches of sculpted deep green satin which sat on her head but could just as easily have made it to a plinth in the Uffizi. At six foot four I could put a crick in her neck, but as Madame Severnou knew, size wasn’t anything.
‘Bruce Medway,’ she said, as if tungsten would melt in her mouth. She held out a small coffee-coloured hand encrusted with gold rings and jewels.
‘Madame Severnou,’ I said, taking her hand and thinking, this is one of the few occasions you put twenty grand into someone’s hand and get it back. ‘How’s business?’
‘Very good. I’ve been in Abidjan…Ali!’ she shouted, withdrawing her hand and checking it to make sure she hadn’t slipped a grand or two.
The driver, who had been standing to attention by the boot, opened it on cue. He took out the double bedsheet which had been drawn into a sack like laundry. Moses opened the boot of my smacked-up Peugeot estate and Ali dumped it on top of the tool box and spare tyre.
‘What did you say to the hadjis?’ I asked Madame Severnou.
‘I remind them I am the seller. They know it but they forget sometime.’
Madame Severnou was petite from the waist upwards but downwards was the market mamma bottom, a bargaining tool not to be messed with. This meant that she didn’t walk, she waddled, and the bottom did what the hell it liked. She waddled over to the Peugeot. Moses backed off. She turned to me and said: ‘Six hundred and thirty-six million CFA. I hope you have some friends to help you count it. Not much of it is in ten thousand notes.’
She held out her hand and I put an envelope in it which she tore open. Her eyes flickered for a fraction of a second.
‘This is a non-negotiable copy,’ she said with an edge to her voice that I could feel against my carotid.
‘It is,’ I said.
‘It’s no Monopoly money in here!’ she said, pointing at the boot. ‘Ali!’ she roared, whipping the air with her finger. Ali lunged at the laundry.
‘Moses,’ I said in a voice made to steady the thin red line. The boot came down and Ali was lucky to get away with his fingers still on.
‘I’ll count it and give you the original tomorrow,’ I said to Madame Severnou. The ground frosted over between us but we both started at the two vultures which dropped down beside the dark patch where the pye-dog had been killed and broke Madame Severnou’s concentration. She turned back to me.
‘I give you six hundred and thirty-six million CFA and you give me a piece of paper.’ Her voice came fully loaded. I said nothing. The look she gave me thudded between my eyes and I realized this was not the usual West African drama.
The two vultures, their wings folded behind their backs, paced around the patch on the quay like two detectives inspecting the outline of a murder victim.
‘What about demurrage?’ asked Madame Severnou.
‘Time doesn’t start counting until tomorrow noon.’
‘What about my trucks?’
‘I’ll see you tomorrow. I’ve only got twenty-four hours to count all this.’
Something clicked in Madame Severnou’s face. The points had changed. The boiling anger flattened to a simmer, her little mouth pouted and broke into a smile.
‘OK. You come to lunch. I cook for you. Agouti. Your favourite.’ Her smile was like a faceful of acid.
I got the panoramic view of her bottom as she climbed into her car. Ali closed the door. The window buzzed down. She had all the techniques and the technology to go with them.
‘I do the snails for you as well. Just like last time.’
The window slid back up and the Mercedes moved out into the fierce sunlight between the warehouses. Agouti? That’s bush rat which she cooked with okra and manioc leaves. ‘Rat in Green Slime’. The snails, my God, the snails – they looked and tasted like deformed squash balls and the chilli sauce was so hot the last time, I woke up the next day still in a silent scream.
Moses hadn’t missed the cruelty in those eyes as the electric window zipped up her face. He was fumbling for the door handle. I was nervous myself.
‘Less go now, Mister Bruce.’
‘Wait small.’
‘Is lunchtime.’
‘I know. I think is better we wait small. Let the traffic calm down. Then we go. We look at this ship now.’
We drove to the ship circling the vultures on the way. They were shaking their heads, then looking at each other, then staring at the ground. They knew there had been a death, a recent one, and a pye-dog too, but where the hell was it?
This was a first for Moses and I to be driving around with more than a million pounds in the back seat and Moses’s clutchless gear changes were shredding metal and my inner calm. Madame Severnou hadn’t made things any easier for us. At least she didn’t know where I lived and I was anxious that she didn’t find out. I had a feeling from the sweetness of her lunch invitation that well before we sat down to eat I was going to get a lesson in business etiquette that wasn’t included in the Harvard course.
One of the crewmen took me up to meet the ship’s Korean captain in his cabin. The generator rumbled like an old man in a bathroom but still coughed out some air conditioning which made my back colder than a dungeon wall. The captain poured me a cold beer. The first inch put medals on my chest. There was a photograph on the cabin wall of the captain with what looked like his local kindergarten.
‘Which ones are yours?’ I asked.
‘All of them,’ he said.
‘All of them?’
‘And another coming. I love childrens.’ He said it like most people talk about pizza.
We chatted about rice, his home in Korea, storms in the Pacific and favourite ports. He wasn’t an African fan. On the way here he had discharged containers in Abidjan and Tema, picked up some containers of old cashew nut in Lomé, and was now going to Lagos to discharge hi-fi and load cotton, then on to Douala or Libreville, he didn’t know which, and it didn’t matter because he hated both. He liked Ghana. They had a good Korean restaurant in Accra. I knew it. They served me a gin and tonic there which came with a stretcher.
He walked me around the ship. I felt like royalty except I couldn’t think of anything nice to say. It was one of those ships that takes a bunch of Koreans two weeks to build. Five holds, one aft, four forward with the bridge in between. The lifting gear on number 5 hold at the rear of the ship was broken; the captain put his hand on my shoulder and told me not to worry, that the rice was in the four forward holds. The fifth hold had the hi-fi in it for discharge at Lagos, and that was where they would fix the lifting gear.
We looked at the rice, which wasn’t very interesting. How long can you look at a pile of sacks? The captain said something to a man holding a four-foot spanner who would never be clean again. I thought about showing some interest, but instead leaned on the slatted metal cover of number 2 hold and earned a first degree burn for my trouble. Moses stood by the gangway, not learning any Korean at all. It was time to blow. The smell of hot painted metal was taxing my nose’s interest in life.
I held my hand out to the captain who said: ‘You must have lunch,’ and we both turned at the same time because Moses was showing us how to get down a gangway starting on his feet and ending on his nose.
‘Moses!’ I shouted.
He was holding the car door open for me which he had done on the first day he worked for me and never since.
‘Yes please, Mister Bruce, sir.’
‘Lunch?’
‘You forget something, Mister Bruce.’
‘No.’
‘You have meeting.’
‘I have?’
‘The meeting with the man with the dog.’
‘The man with the dog?’
‘Yes please, sir.’
I turned to the captain and shook his hand. ‘Sorry, I have a meeting with a man with a dog. Next time, I hope.’
As I got in the car, I saw Moses was sweating.
‘I don’t see no woman, Moses,’ I said down my shirt front.
We drove off, me grinning and Moses shouting: ‘You go make me eat dog! Mister Bruce. I no eat um. I no eat um never.’
Chapter 2 (#ulink_ec379912-802f-5410-b627-184fbe1c2d83)
The port was at a standstill; only the sun was out working on the scattered machinery and the corrugated iron roofs which creaked and pinged in the terrible heat. The shade of the buildings guarded sprawled stevedores who, rather than slow broil on the hot ground, lay across wooden pallets sleeping. The Peugeot’s tyres peeled themselves off the hot tarmac.
There was no traffic outside the port. We looked left down the Boulevard de la Marina and fifty metres down the road a parked car’s engine started. We turned right and headed east into Cotonou town centre. Moses’s eyes flickered from the windscreen to the rearview.
The sun leeched all the colour out of the sky, the buildings, the people, the palms, the shrubs, everything. Through the open window a breeze like dog breath lingered over my face as I manipulated the wing mirror. A madman with dusty matted hair stood in dirty brown shorts inspecting his navel. He slumped to his haunches as we drove past and started parting the dirt on the road as if something had fallen out. We passed the agents’ offices. The air conditioners shuddered and dripped distilled sweat into the thick afternoon air.
‘He following us, Mister Bruce.’
‘Slow down,’ I said. ‘Turn left.’
Moses dropped down to a fast walking pace and the car, an old Peugeot 305, settled behind us. Vasili, a Russian friend of mine, had told me not to worry about learning about Africa, that the Africans would teach you all you needed to know. They weren’t going to teach me anything about tailing cars.
‘Left again,’ I murmured. ‘And again.’
We were back to Boulevard de la Marina, still with our tail. Three cars slicked past in front of us heading into town.
‘Take them,’ I said, and Moses’s foot hit the floor.
We were past one car when a truck pulled out from the left, past two by the time its driver saw us. Moses didn’t bother with the third car, which would have put us through the radiator grille of the truck, but with his mouth wide open preparing to scream, he swung between the second and third cars and went up on to the pavement where he took out two frazzled saplings, snappety-snap, and overtook the third car on the inside, crashing back on to the road just in time for the roundabout which he took more briskly than he intended.
Behind us, the truck had slewed and stopped across the road, the second car was now facing the other way and the tail was up on the pavement with the car’s cheekbone crumpled into a low concrete wall. Cyclists sizzled past giving the scene the eyes right.
‘We lose him?’ asked Moses.
‘You lost him,’ I said, straightening my eyebrows.
We came into the centre of town, which, far from being free of lunchtime traffic, was jammed with cars moving at the pace of setting lava with half a million bicycles swooping in and out of them like housemartins. In the mid-seventies the President had announced a Marxist-Leninist revolution and forged links with the People’s Republic of China who built a football stadium and then took the opportunity to sell the Beninois a lot of bicycles. All that remained of the old regime were some battered hoardings with Marxist slogans like La lutte continue, which had now become the white man’s battlecry as he tried to make money in a difficult world.
We crawled past the PTT waiting to get on to Avenue Clozel and I noticed a tickering sound from the car when it was moving which must have come from Moses’s off-piste run. A man with brown, decaying teeth put his head in the window and tried to sell me a stick which he said would keep me hard all night. I asked him if I had to eat it or put in my pants and he said all I had to do was hold it and I told him it would cramp my style. Moses said I should have bought it and I asked him how he knew I needed it.
We were trying to get to my house, not a place that I’d had to fight hard to rent but comfortable enough for me. The rooms were big. The open plan living and dining room had breeze coming in from two sides. The bedrooms each had a wall of window. The bathroom worked and the kitchen was big enough for me to create a lot of washing up when I did the cooking. There was a large covered balcony on one side of the living room where I ate breakfast, and dinner if I felt like having my blood thinned by adventurous mosquitoes. The furniture was a mixture, some of it cane which I didn’t like but was cheap, the rest of it was carved wood which I did like, but couldn’t sit on. There were a lot of carpets, mainly from Algeria and Morocco, and cushions covered in the same designs. I spent most of the time on the floor. You couldn’t fall further than that.
There was a garage at the side of the house, and in the courtyard a huge and ancient palm tree with orange and purple palm oil nuts hanging off it in swagged clusters. The walls of the garden were covered in purple bougainvillaea. A green leafy creeper grew up the banister of the stairs at the front of the house which led up from the garage to my apartment.
The place I rented was on the west side of the lagoon. Most expats lived on the east side in Akpakpa or around the Hotel Aledjo. I preferred living with the Africans. They enjoyed themselves. The expats hated Cotonou. It was depressing to live with them and their wives who looked at you as if you could liven up their afternoons.
Moses kept up a monologue on Benin medicine, dog cuisine and great movie car chases he had seen. He let up occasionally to roar at cyclists so that they veered off and crashed into market stalls rather than hit the car.
‘Africans fear dogs,’ I said.
‘Thassway we no eat um.’
‘You fear them because they bite you.’
‘Thass it, Mister Bruce, they bite us.’
‘But if you eat um then you get the power of the dog and you no fear no more.’
Moses stopped the car, throwing me against the dashboard. A cyclist had come off in front of us. Two children put their hands through my window and were pulled away by a couple of Nigerians who shoved cheap ghetto blasters in my face. A girl offered Moses some water from a plastic jug on her head and another barbecued meat which congealed under greasy grey paper in a blue plastic bowl.
‘You clever, Mister Bruce. You be right. But not the dog the Chinaman kill. He sick dog. You eat dog, you find big, strong dog, then you eat him.’
‘You can’t get near a big, strong dog.’
‘Thassway we always fear the dogs.’
After half an hour in the traffic, with Moses yelling at cyclists to stop cadging lifts off the car, we turned off Clozel and started up Sekou Touré with nothing more to look at than crumbling, ill-painted buildings. The tickering noise from the car was still there as we turned left into the grid of mud streets where I lived. We bought some kebabs from a girl who was cooking them just outside the house. I opened the gate and, in the shade of the garage, saw Heike Brooke waiting for me, sitting on a step with her skirt up over her thighs keeping herself cool. She leaned forward and rubbed her shins and stood up letting the skirt fall to her knees. She leaned against her 2CV which she was considering taking off life support.
I’d met Heike two years ago when she was twenty-eight and I was thirty-six. It was in the Algerian Sahara about a hundred miles north of Tamanrasset. I was lying in a small square of shade under a tarpaulin fixed to the side of my dead car. The battery and the alternator were finished and I was on the way out. I had been there for three days without seeing anyone and was beyond the hallucinatory stage of thinking that every rock was a truck coming towards me. I was reading Dombey andSon which was taking the edge off the 120-degree heat and just about letting me forget that I only had three and a half litres of water left.
When I heard the rumbling noise of a truck, I thought it was from the truck route that I couldn’t see thirty miles to the east, but knew was there. Then I saw the Hanomag radiator grille from over the top of my book and I came out from under that tarpaulin as if I’d just had a kiss from a scorpion. As the truck came nearer I saw the driver and passenger were two guys, both with thirty foot of cloth wound around their heads and faces, so that all I could see was a sinister slit where the eyes should have been.
I was either going to be rescued or robbed. The truck stopped and the driver jumped out. The driver had breasts and hips and was wearing a calf-length tea gown; the passenger had breasts too and was wearing a denim shirt and a pair of baggy trousers that I’d seen the Mozabites wearing in Ghardaia. They unwound the cloth around their heads and revealed themselves to be two women in full make-up. In my confused state I thought that these hermaphrodites were the desert sprites that an Algerian soldier had told me about, or that perhaps I was having some contact with a strange simultaneous world where the genders had united. They introduced themselves as Heidi and Heike, two Berliners going to West Africa. They towed me to Tamanrasset which was a real enough experience and saved me from a thirsty death.
Heidi had driven back across the desert six months later, but Heike had stayed and was running an aid project in the north of Benin. Every few months she came to Cotonou to drink us into a very dark world beyond oblivion and find out if I was worth loving. I tried to tell her these two activities were not compatible but she insisted that for her alcohol was the only approach road to love. By coming to Africa she had thrown in her job as a TV commercials producer and left her director and first ‘serious’ boyfriend. She had discovered he was over-generous with nothing except one part of his anatomy and not exclusively to her. She was looking for a purer life, less complicated, but like a lot of us couldn’t always make up her mind. The drink parted her from her memories, gave her just enough courage to try again and, like me, she liked it.
Heike was a beautiful woman despite this punishment. She was the daughter of a British army officer and a Berlin café owner which meant she was bilingual and disinclined to listen to anyone’s bullshit. She was tall, just under six foot, with a long whippy body that wasn’t skinny but carried no extra flesh. She had thick brown hair which she always wore put up in a way that looked as if she’d just slammed a clip in any old place, but it was always just right. The style accentuated her long neck and fragile bones. Her eyes were intimidating. They were very clear light blue and green, like aquamarines.
I knew from the beginning that although she looked breakable she was tough. She had access to a temper that on a few occasions had caused her rather large hands to form fists and lash out on the ends of her long arms and hurt people. People like me.
Sometimes I deserved to be hit, but never because I couldn’t keep my trousers done up. That wasn’t my style at all. I found out early on in life that playing around messed up my head, dealt me the clap and gave me a better understanding of the blues than I really wanted. No, she would hit me, because she couldn’t get in there. She would tell me she was breaking down walls. I wasn’t always sure why the walls were up in the first place or what they were guarding, but whatever it was, she wanted to get to it. I wasn’t disinterested myself.
Heike was standing in the garage, her hands on her slim hips. She was wearing a white broderie anglaise top which showed about a foot of lean torso between it and her skirt, which was red with a light brown and white pattern. The lips of her small mouth were pursed, she was gnawing at the inside of her cheek. She looked at me with disdain as I walked up to her and kissed her. She threw her long arms around my shoulders and kissed me back.
‘I’ve been waiting for hours,’ she said in a voice that had been waiting with her.
Moses slid past me into the garage, nudging me with the wing mirror. The tickering noise had stopped. He got out, opened the boot and pulled the bedsheet out, grinning at Heike who said hello to him in the form of a suppressed smile. He walked up the stairs and Heike and I followed.
‘You’ve got a lot of laundry, Bruce.’
‘The biannual wash,’ I said.
Some money fell out from the top where the corners of the sheet were drawn together. She picked it up.
‘You should empty the pockets first,’ she said like a good little hausfrau, which is one thing she isn’t. The door to my part of the house opened straight into the living room. Moses threw the sheet on the floor. The knot gave and two corners of the sheet burst open and the money spewed out on to the floor. Heike was not impressed.
‘Can you count?’ I asked her.
‘I think I’ve just forgotten how.’
‘It’ll all come flooding back once you get started.’
‘Can I have a drink or do I just get straight down into it?’
Heike took a shower. I made a salad to go with the kebabs and broke open some beers and we sat on the floor and ate the food. Heike rubbed her wet hair with both hands and looked at the money as if it was sending her mad. We started counting. A light breeze blew through the mosquito netting over the slatted windows. Heike pulled up an ashtray. It was early afternoon. We had a long way to go.
Chapter 3 (#ulink_c5a14235-4c45-5fdc-a7fc-53fc0dfe6e0d)
Heike was smoking cigarettes through a two-inch holder which took out most of the tar. After the hundredth time I’d seen her cleaning it, I gave up smoking and took up watching. She held the holder between her teeth at the side of her mouth and snorted smoke while she counted bundles of small denomination notes.
In the late afternoon, we stopped for a while and drank some sugary mint tea. Heike lay on her back with her legs bent and crossed at the knee. She told us that she had persuaded the women in her aid project to plant aubergines which would grow in the poor soil up north. It had taken some time because the men were suspicious of a new vegetable. The clincher had been to get the men and women together and deliver a seminar on the aphrodisiacal properties of aubergines. She had selected a number of priapic specimens as examples and had nearly been trampled to death in the stampede.
We continued and the sun gave us a warm yellow light to work by, which quickly turned pink and then orange. Then the sun dropped like a penny in a slot and we turned the lights on. The atmosphere changed to smoky poker room and we cracked some cold beers.
At eight o’clock I stood up. Moses, sitting crosslegged on the floor, fell backwards. I picked up the warm beer, went into the kitchen and threw it down the sink. Moses said he was going to get some chicken. Heike came into the kitchen and drank mineral water from the bottle in the fridge.
‘I hate money,’ I said, looking at Heike who was reflected in the darkness of the window, looking at me out of the corner of her eye with the neck of the mineral water bottle in her mouth.
‘Money’s all right, but not all the time,’ she said, pouring some of the chilled water into her hand and patting her breast bone. She walked over to the sink and I felt her body leaning against me.
‘What are you looking at?’ she asked.
I turned and our faces were very close together. We were breathing a little faster and my hand slipped to her bare waist. Her eyes were darting around and her mouth opened. I moved my lips to hers so that they were almost touching. Our eyes held each other’s. My hand slipped around to the small of her back and I put two fingers on either side of her spine and pushed up very slowly. We both swallowed. Our lips touched. My fingers were nearly between her shoulder blades. A long arm snaked across my back and her fingers ran up my neck and spread out through my hair. She crushed my lips to hers and her tongue flickered in my mouth. I didn’t mind the taste of tobacco and lipstick. I felt her breasts pressed to my chest and her legs trembling against mine. The inside of my body lifted as if I’d just hit a hump in the road. We both heard Moses coming back into the house and drew away from each other.
‘It’s been a long time,’ I said, holding her wrist and letting my hand slip down into hers. She breathed heavily, licking her lips and said nothing. Moses came in the kitchen. Heike looked across at him, her shoulder against mine. Moses grinned. His sex radar was infallible.
We ate the chicken with some hot Piment du Pays that I’d brought over from Togo. I opened up a bottle of cold Beaujolais that had had Heike’s name on it for the last couple of months. Moses stuck to beer. Afterwards, we dragged ourselves back into the living room and carried on counting the money.
It was 10.30, we were taking it in turns sighing, me like a horse on a cold morning, Moses like a dog left in a car, and Heike like someone who’s into her third day in Immigration. She stood up, stretched and went to her bag and came back with a pack of cards in her hand.
‘Poker?’ she asked.
Moses, who had fallen back with his head resting on some blocks of cash, sat up.
‘You deal, Miss Heike.’
‘Miss Heike beat us no small,’ I said to Moses.
‘There’s nothing like playing with other people’s money,’ she said and riffled the pack of cards. The noise from the cards shot through me and I sat rigid. The tickering from the car, but not the car, the noise of a playing card flicking over the wheel spokes of a bicycle. There was always fifty bicycles behind you in Cotonou. That was the tail. The noise had stopped as soon as we’d got to the house. Vasili was right – Madame Severnou’s first lesson. How to outwit the Oyinbo
(#litres_trial_promo) without raising a sweat.
‘Something the matter?’ asked Heike.
There was a click at the gate. Moses turned on to his knees and was up at the window looking down like a cat.
‘It’s Helen,’ he said.
‘What’re we nervous about?’ asked Heike.
I found myself staring down at over a million pounds in cash and feeling things going wrong. With Heike here I’d lost concentration, hadn’t thought things through. I’d had that feeling in the port this afternoon that Madame Severnou was going to be trouble. I’d done nothing about it and now lesson number two was coming. How to burn the Oyinbo for the lot.
Moses knew what I was thinking and was already packing the tied-up blocks of money into carrier bags.
‘Let Heike do that,’ I said, tying up the bedsheet. ‘Tell Helen to go back to her sister and get the car ready.’
Heike was on the floor packing the money. I picked up four carrier bags and the sheet and ran downstairs. Moses was reversing the car into the garage. Helen slipped out through the gate. I flung the money into the boot and ran back up the stairs. Moses was out and opening the gates. I hit Heike coming through the doors telling me she had it all.
I left the lights on, checked the floor and dropped down the steps two at a time. Moses drove the car out and I closed the gates. The car pitched and yawed over the mud road. Heike leaned forward from the back seat. We parked up under some bougainvillaea that fell down the walled garden of the house on the opposite corner to mine. We could just see the gates. It was very dark and the light cast from the living room window was blocked by the head of the palm tree in the garden. We sat with our breath quivering like sick men waiting to die.
After fifteen minutes the paranoia wore off. Moses played a drum solo on the steering wheel. Heike sat back, looked out the window and hummed something from Carmen. I sat with my back against the window and my arm hung over the top of the seat and played with her fingers.
‘So,’ asked Heike, with a little German creeping into her accent to show me she was annoyed. ‘What’s going on?’
‘It’s a lot of money,’ I said, only half concentrating, ‘and the person who gave it to me wasn’t very happy about what she got in return. I think we might be getting a visit. We were followed out of the port this afternoon but I thought we’d lost them.’
‘It’s a lot of money for rice.’
‘It’s for parboiled rice,’ I said. ‘Seven thousand tons of it. The Nigerians won’t touch anything else. There’s an import ban, too, which gives it a premium.’
‘You’re going to smuggle seven thousand tons of rice into Nigeria?’
‘Not smuggle, exactly. The Nigerian government have said that each man can bring in a bag of rice legally. We’ve got five hundred guys who are going to take two hundred and eighty sacks each, one at a time, through the border at Igolo, north of Porto Novo.’
‘You can do that?’
‘It needs a bit of help which is why my client, Jack Obuasi, cut this woman, Madame Sevenou, into the deal. She can oil the Customs.’
‘Have I met Jack?’
‘If you had it would have probably been in his bed, and I think you would have remembered that.’
‘So who is he?’
‘He’s an English/Ghanaian who lives in Lomé. This isn’t the first job I’ve done for him, but it’s only the second time with this Severnou woman. She’s not easy. For a start, I can tell there isn’t enough money. I reckon we’re short about fifty to a hundred mil. She’s a greedy woman…with an appetite.’
‘It was only Helen, remember.’
‘So far.’
‘And you’ve still got the documents?’
‘Yes, but that doesn’t mean very much. A non-negotiable bill of lading with a bit of tippex, some faxing and a couple of million CFA could get to be negotiable.’ I gripped her finger and she bit back the next question.
Headlights lit up the mud road and were killed. A quiet engine cut out and a car rocked over on its expensive suspension and stopped in front of the gates to the house. The doors opened. Four men got out. They didn’t close the doors. They weren’t carrying violin cases but they did have long arms. They went through the gates. Moses started up the Peugeot which made a noise like a tractor and baler and we rode up on to the tarmac and went into town.
We bought some pizza at La Caravelle café to take away. We had a beer while we waited. Some white people came in. We must have looked tense. They walked straight back out. Heike had thrown away the cigarette holder and was smoking for Germany.
We crossed the lagoon and turned off down towards the coast and the Hotel Aledjo where we took a bungalow and finished counting the money at three in the morning. The total was fifty million CFA short, a hundred thousand pound commission for Madame Severnou. By this time, I had a half bucket of sand up my eyelids and Heike was asleep sitting on the floor with her head on the bed. Moses and I packed the money inside the car so that it looked empty from the outside. Moses lay down on a mat on the porch of the bungalow with the bedsheet from the money.
I put Heike on the bed and threw a sheet over her; as it landed, she opened her eyes. There was nobody behind them. Her voice said, ‘I’m going.’ Her eyes closed. She was asleep. Normally, when she came down from up country, the first night we made love of the desperate, savage kind that two months’ celibacy encourages. It was something we liked to do besides drinking, something that kept us going together. This time I left her a note. I gave Moses some money and told him to look after Heike in the morning and then drove the 100 miles west along the coast to Lomé, the capital of Togo.
Chapter 4 (#ulink_04dfc09e-3d8e-5d6b-83aa-eb7011c75a7f)
Wednesday 25th September
They didn’t bother to search the car at the Benin/Togo border and it was still dark when I left the Togo side of the frontier. I couldn’t make out the sandbar at the mouth of the lagoon at Aneho but by the time I came to the roundabout for Lomé port, it was light. The morning was fresh, unlike my shirt.
After commercial Cotonou, Lomé was a holiday resort. There were European luxury hotels and restaurants which fronted on to the beach and air-conditioned supermarkets with more than tomato purée in them. Most of the buildings had seen paint during the decade and a lot of the roads were metalled and swept clean. There was greenery in the town which backed on to a lagoon traversed by causeways which took you out to the suburbs. Lomé is a freeport where booze and cigarettes are cheaper than anywhere else in the world. Life was a permanent happy hour.
The coast road passed the Hotel de La Paix, which still looked like the architect’s children doctored the plans. It seemed empty. Closer to Lomé on the left was the five-star Hotel Sarakawa with a snake of taxis outside and a fight for rooms on the inside. The sea appeared motionless but didn’t fool anybody. Nobody swam. The currents were well-known killers along this coast.
People were beginning to make their way to market. The polio cripples hauled their torsos up to the traffic lights and arranged their collapsible legs beside them ready for another day in the sun scraping together the money for a meal.
I drove past the 24 Janvier building and Hotel Le Benin, turned right and arrived at the wrought iron gates of the white-pillared pile that Jack Obuasi rented for a million CFA a month. The gardien opened the gates for me and I cruised the botanical gardens up to the house. The drive cut through a manicured jungle of shrubs and bamboo before breaking through a line of palm trees where the lawns started. The two bowling green-sized expanses of grass were rolled and snipped, snipped and rolled, by a gang of gardeners who could have had a football tournament between them.
The house was whiter than a Christmas cake and had a central portico with four fluted pillars. It was the kind of portico that should have had a motto carved in it. Jack favoured La lutte continue. There was an east and a west wing on either side of the portico. Each wing had five bedrooms upstairs, all with bathrooms and all air-conditioned, with white shutters, which, if you had the energy to throw them open, would give you a view of the old wooden pier that strode out into the Gulf of Guinea. Underneath these bedrooms was enough space for living rooms, dining rooms, games rooms, jacuzzi rooms and cricket nets if you felt out of practice. There was also Jack’s office, and in his office, a desk that a family of four could have lived in without him noticing.
The walls of the office were bare, but, in the other rooms, were covered with African masks, animal skins and ancient weaponry. Man-sized carvings hung around the place like servants of long standing who couldn’t be sacked. Some rooms were taken over by collections of African paintings which crammed the walls from floor to ceiling. The floors were entirely of white marble only broken by large rugs whose tassels were kept in line by Patience, Agnes and Grace, the three maids.
In the rooms he never used he had much better cane furniture than I did, which wasn’t difficult. In the rooms he did use were tables and chairs of every hard wood the jungle had to offer, as well as armchairs and sofas from France and England that formed exclusive circles about the place like people at a cocktail party who wouldn’t mix. The one failure was a table and six chairs carved from a single tree, but the table was too low and a man’s bottom couldn’t fit in between the snarling carved heads on the arms of the chairs even if it had wanted to.
There was a large verandah above the garage and maids’ quarters at the end of the east wing and another at the back of the house overlooking the swimming pool. They were both surrounded by a nursery of potted plants. I parked the car behind Jack’s Mercedes in the garage.
It was breakfast time. Patience, the most senior of Jack’s maids, with the eyes of a murderess and the shoulders of a mud wrestler, came out of her quarters and pointed to the verandah above the garage. I locked the car. Patience adjusted her wrap and slouched off to the kitchen. Mohammed, a tall, rangy, immensely strong servant of Jack’s who could polish a Mercedes down to the base metal came from the back of the house hunched over, holding a monkey by the hand. Jack had bought the monkey and found that Mohammed came with it. The monkey saw me and hid behind Mohammed’s legs like a shy little girl.
‘How are you, Mohammed?’ I asked.
‘Yessssir,’ he said with the intensity of a truck’s air brakes.
A parrot in a cage started running through its repertoire of clicks and whistles, calling for Patience and doing imitations of her cleaning the verandah: little sweeping sounds with the odd chair scraping thrown in. I walked up the spiral staircase to the verandah and heard the murmur of the video-taped soaps that were recorded for Jack and sent from England. He played them in the big gaps of his light-scheduled day. Christ, he played them all the time.
‘Mister Jack will see you now,’ the parrot said to the back of my head.
Jack wasn’t seeing anything. He was lying on a lounger with a cup of coffee the colour of his skin on his stomach, the video zapper on his chest. His eyes were closed. One big finger was crooked through the coffee cup handle. He wore a pair of shorts and nothing else.
He was a large man, probably as tall as six foot four, with heavy shoulders and a broad chest which must have housed solid slabs of pectoral when he was younger, but was now on the turn to flabby dugs. He had a big hard, round belly which shone like polished wood. He flicked his feet to keep the flies off and his sandals made a loud flopping sound on the soles of his feet.
Jack was a good-looking man, but it was the mixture of African and European in him that made him peculiar and fascinating. His hair was black but not as tightly curled as a full African’s. His skin was the colour of a walnut shell. He had blue eyes from his English mother and a straight sharp nose with a mouth fuller than most, but not African. He had long flat cheeks that fell from his sharp cheekbones and he kept these and the rest of his face clean-shaven. He had small, perfectly formed African ears.
Jack’s overall impression, which he’d had to work on, was one of lazy power. He was a lion that turned up for his prepared meals, ate, lounged about, never had to move too quickly but had a look in his eye when he turned his big head that told you who was the patriarch. He had great charm, a boyish smile and he loved to laugh. When he walked into a room of people all you could hear were women’s hearts fluttering like a colony of fantails. He left a wake of despair. He was ruthless in his pursuit of sex. A man who couldn’t sleep alone but couldn’t bear the same woman twice. Women knew this. His bed was never empty.
He’d had another hard night. He slept more on that lounger than he did in his bed. The parrot tutted as if he knew. Jack’s eyes opened.
‘Bruce,’ he said in a thick sleepy voice. He glanced at the coffee cup in his hand, leaned his head forward with an effort and drained it. ‘My God,’ he said, sinking back. It was difficult to find any sympathy for him. I took the zapper off his chest and shut down the TV which sat in its little roofed shelter in the corner of the verandah.
‘Madame Severnou’s left you fifty mil short.’ I paused for a moment while his supine brain took this in. ‘And last night she sent some muscle round to my house to pick up the rest.’ Jack’s eyes opened and flickered as he registered. ‘And I’m pretty sure that right now she’s unloading the rice without the original bill of lading.’
Jack didn’t move for a moment until his tongue came out and licked the nascent bristle below his bottom lip. He stared down through his feet at the blank TV with half-closed eyes.
‘Can you turn that on again?’
‘Can you listen for a minute?’
If there’s any good news,’ he sighed, staring off over the wall into the palm trees of the next-door garden with ostentatious lack of interest.
‘I’ve got five hundred and eighty-odd million in the Peugeot.’
He let the hand with the coffee cup in it fall by his side. A dribble of coffee leaked out on to the tiles. He put the cup down and with a sudden jerk shot himself up off the lounger and walked like a man with diving boots on to the rail of the verandah. He leaned on it as if he was catching his breath. On his back were four deep, six-inch long gouges on each scapula.
‘And this after you’ve been in bed with a polecat all night,’ I said.
‘A lioness, Bruce, a bloody lioness,’ he said as if he was talking to someone in the neighbouring garden.
‘What the hell’s going on with her?’ he asked his stomach, which percolated some coffee through his intestines. He turned and walked back to the table by the lounger, squatted with a loud crack from both knees and poured himself some more coffee and filled a cup for me. He took a croissant from a plate and bit into it. His brain wasn’t getting the spark to turn itself over. He heaved himself on to the lounger.
‘I got the beef out of Tema, it’s on its way up to Bolgatanga,’ he said without thinking and blowing out flakes of croissant on to his hairless chest. I checked the coffee for insects. He was telling me things I didn’t need to know. Jack’s mobile phone rang. On automatic, he pulled up the aerial, clicked the switch to ‘Talk’, and then said nothing, but listened for some time, his eyebrows going over the jumps. I took a slug of the coffee which kicked into my nervous system. It was robusta and strong and bad for you if you’re the shaky type.
‘Can I think about it?’ Jack asked the phone, and then waited while he was told why he couldn’t. ‘I can help, but you have to let me talk…’ He held out a hand to me with eyes that said you can’t tell anyone anything these days. ‘I can’t. I haven’t got the time,’ which was a lie. ‘I have…No you don’t…’ He turned his back to me and I missed a snatch; he came back with some more croissant in his mouth. ‘I have to talk to him first.’ Pause. ‘Let me talk to him.’ Jack looked into the earpiece, pushed the aerial down and switched the phone to ‘Standby’.
‘Look,’ I said, ‘I’ll take this lot down to your man Jawa and then I’ll get back to Cotonou.’
‘What for?’ he asked.
‘If not the rice, Jack, the fifty million might be useful.’
‘I have to think about this.’
‘Did Moses call?’ I asked.
‘No,’ he said thinking elsewhere. ‘Moses didn’t call.’
I listened to the sound of Lomé getting itself together. Some women walked past the wall at the back of the house with piles of washing on their heads and babies on their backs who were sleeping on the rhythmical movement of their mothers’ hips. It seemed like a good place to be, rather than up here feeling seedy and bitter-mouthed from the coffee.
‘You’ve done business with her before,’ I said. ‘She’s always been straight with you, she’s always paid, it’s not as if you’re a one-off. So what’s going on?’ Jack nodded at each element with his chin on his praying hands. I looked at the top of his head. ‘Is it me?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said, looking up.
I stared into his blue eyes and all I saw was a big problem. The phone went in the house and Patience’s flip flops slapped across the tiles.
‘It’s Moses for Mister Bruce.’
‘Can she put it up here?’
‘Different line,’ said Jack, and I went down into the house.
Moses said the rice was being off-loaded and that nothing had been touched in the house. Heike tore the phone out of his hand. She was angry and spoke to me in barbed wire German which left my ear ragged and bleeding. She was in no mood to be apologized to. I didn’t try. The plastic split as her phone hit the cradle. I hauled myself back up to the verandah.
‘Africa. Africa. Africa,’ said Jack after Moses’s news.
‘I’ll drop the money at Jawa’s and go back.’
‘No,’ said Jack, holding up his hand. ‘She’s got the rice now. You won’t even get in the port. I’ll talk to her about the fifty million. I want you to do something else for me. My uncle in Accra needs some help in Cotonou.’
‘I didn’t know you had an uncle in Accra.’
‘I don’t. He’s a family friend, a Syrian multimillionaire. He did a lot of business with my father over the last forty years.’
‘Was that him before?’ I asked. Jack nodded. ‘What does he want?’
‘He needs someone he can trust in Cotonou and I’m volunteering you.’
‘I’ll give him a call.’
‘He wants to see you.’
‘What the hell for?’
‘He likes to see people he employs.’
‘I don’t want to go to Accra.’
‘It’s good money.’
‘To hell with the money. Heike’s in town and she’s bloody furious.’
‘You didn’t make her count the money?’
‘What the hell else was she going to do?’
Jack shook with high giggling laughter and drummed his fingers on his taut belly.
‘If you go now you’ll be back in Cotonou this evening.’
‘Ready for action,’ I said.
Jack ducked his head and turned his mouth down.
‘It’s a new client for you. He’ll pay you a lot better than anyone else around here.’
‘You mean his currency is money rather than promises.’
‘He does have money.’
‘Giving-type money or keeping-type money?’
‘Money-type money.’
‘I don’t care. I don’t want to go.’ I was searching for something. ‘I’ve got lunch with Madame Severnou.’
‘Lunch!’
‘Yeah, first course is a ground glass soufflé.’
‘You’re not going to lunch.’
‘No, and I’m not going to Accra either.’
‘I’ll get someone else. Fine. No problem.’ Jack was giving me the lion look now.
‘I owe Heike. We were counting until three in the morning.’
‘No problem. Forget it.’ Jack looked off into his neighbour’s garden again.
‘Jack,’ I said. ‘I’ll go as long as you promise never to say “no problem” to me.’
‘No problem,’ he said smiling. I didn’t laugh.
It was a game that had to be played. Jack knew I needed the money. I knew I needed the money. Jack knew that I owed him. But appearances have to be kept up. I also wanted to find out what was going on with Madame Severnou and I thought I might be able to catch Jack right now with the stabbing technique.
‘What’s going on, Jack?’
‘With what?’ he said.
‘Madame Severnou.’
Our eyes fixed; Jack’s were steady.
‘Croissant?’ he said, holding up the plate and shrugging.
‘I’ve got to get rid of this first,’ I said, pinching the fat on my stomach. Jack smiled and breathed out.
‘You have nothing to fear, Bruce,’ he said, standing up and slapping his wooden gut. We shook hands and clicked fingers Ghanaian style.
‘My uncle’s name is unpronounceable. Everybody calls him B.B. He lives on the airport side not far from the Shangri La Hotel. Ask for the Holy Church of Christ. His house is next door, on the left as you look at the church.’
I started down the spiral staircase, back into the garage.
‘By the way,’ added Jack, picking up the zapper, ‘he’s a little unusual for a millionaire.’
‘He gives people money for nothing?’ I said.
Jack laughed and the TV came on so I left him. I kept a few things in a room in Jack’s house. I had a shower and changed.
Patience accepted my dirty clothes which she dropped on the floor and walked off to go and be surly somewhere else. Jack was leaning over the balcony waiting for me.
‘What were the heavies like?’ he asked.
‘Big and heavy,’ I said, not feeling like telling him anything.
‘Did they have guns?’
‘Either that or very long arms.’ That impressed him.
‘You keep me informed,’ he said.
‘What about?’
‘About B.B. and things. You might need some help. He’s not so easy to deal with.’
‘Is anybody?’
‘Come and see me when you get back.’ I got in the car and drove down to Jawa’s compound near the DHL office in town.
Jawa’s boy let me into the garage underneath the office and disappeared. I filled up some cardboard boxes with the currency and went upstairs to Jawa’s office through several rooms of dead-eyed men counting huge quantities of money.
Jawa was a small, balding Indian with muddy quarter-circles under his eyes. He was thinner than an African dog. He didn’t eat food, but nourished himself by chewing the ball of his palm. He sat at his desk surrounded by ashtrays, each with a burning cigarette, and took drags from them all in turn, as if he were a beagle in a scientific experiment. The idea was that he should be smoking in the same order at the end of the day as he was at the beginning. It was something to do in the gaps between making money. He poured some tea and started to play with a lump of gold, weighing it in his palm and looking it over.
‘There’s going to be more trouble here, Bruce.’ He spoke very quickly, as if the words were going to outstrip him.
‘With what?’
‘This multi-party democracy.’
‘Jack called me last week from the Hotel Golfe. He said he was trapped, they were throwing stones at each other in the street.’
‘And shooting…There was shooting, too. It’s going to get hot, Bruce, very hot.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I’m listening. The people are getting angry. They told me at the flour mill they asked for a hundred per cent pay rise. They’re going to close the port and the taxi drivers are going on strike. It’s going to get very, very hot.’ He put the lump of gold down and leaned forward. ‘Does he want this in London or Zurich?’
‘Zurich.’
‘They’ll blame it on the Ghanaians, close the border, the usual things. But it won’t work this time. They’ll be fighting, looting…’ He sipped his tea and kept some cigarettes going. He booted up the computer, took the slip of paper I’d given him and entered the money in Jack’s account.
‘How’s Cotonou?’ he asked.
‘Still good,’ I said.
‘They had big trouble there, too. Nothing’s easy in Africa. Nothing stays good for long…We’re going to see blood.’
‘You’ll be all right, Jawa.’
‘If they don’t shoot me. You don’t know these people. I know them. Tea?’
‘I’ve got to get going.’
I left him worrying his lump of gold, scrolling through his accounts, smoking his cigarettes, chewing his palm, thinking about blood. He was a busy man.
Chapter 5 (#ulink_605af714-a03d-5f00-8ec8-fba9c03877c8)
I drove back down to the coast road and headed west to the Ghanaian border. The sun on the sea and the breeze through the coconut palms washed off Jawa’s depressing office and morose talk. For a while, I kept pace with a young white woman on horseback. The dappled grey seemed to be smiling through gritted teeth as his hooves kicked up the sand. The girl was out of the saddle, her bottom in the air, her head and shoulders leaning over the horse’s ears, her mouth wide open.
I looked at her and wondered what I was doing grubbing around in this half-lit world of trade and commerce, making a bit here, getting shafted there, listening to people talking very, very seriously and watching the insincerity flicking from face to face until all you could be sure of was that nothing was going to happen as agreed.
I crawled into the crowds around the border. The horse eased. The girl sat back a little. The horse’s head came up with its front legs. She turned him and was gone.
The Togo/Ghana border was always full of people. The Ghanaians poured across with their goods to pick up the hard CFA. I parked up in the border compound and a group of money changers gathered around me intoning the names of the currencies like priests at Communion. I bought some cedi for petrol and Moses expected me to buy Ghanaian bread for him. I paid a boy to go and get my name entered in the exit ledger and have my passport stamped. A soldier with a rifle over his shoulder was enjoying himself frisking all the women traders. Jawa was right. They were expecting trouble.
I drove across the baked mud to the Ghana side. Ten minutes later, I coasted through the border town of Aflao and bought a half dozen of the usual tough, green-skinned oranges from an alarmed young girl who scored them for me and cut a hole in the top so I could squeeze out the juice.
It was a fast, flat, boring drive to Accra and I arrived at the airport roundabout in a couple of hours. It was hot. I drove past the Shangri La Hotel and thought about going in there for a Club beer or six and a long lie down. I found the ‘uncle’s’ house four streets back from the main road. I followed the music. They were singing in the open plan church next door.
The garden boy opened the gates and I went up the short drive past a frangipani tree and parked in front of a double garage. There was a huge woman sitting in the darkness. All I could see was the size of her white bra, which must have been a 90 double Z. She threw a wrap over herself. I asked for B.B. and she pointed to a door at the back of the garage which led to the battleship-grey front door of the main house. The house looked like a municipal building. It was L-shaped and tall with white walls and grey woodwork. There was nothing pretty about it. There were no plants or flowers. It was functional.
I knocked. There was an echoing rumbling noise of someone clearing their throat in an empty room. The noise rose to a crescendo and ended in a cough and a sneeze which bounced around the walls inside the house. There was an exhausted sigh. A different noise started, a man with a stammer.
‘Ra-ra-ra-ra-ra-Mary!’ he finished surprisingly.
There was the neat sound of someone who picked up their feet when they walked and the door opened. Mary had a round bush of hair and a smile a foot wide to go with it. I walked up a few steps and found myself in the main living room. There was a table and a few chairs which dated back to the British colonial days, then a large space before a four-piece suite which I could tell was going to be hot from where I was standing. A fifties ceiling light of a cluster of brass tubes held in a wooden circle had six lamps but only three bulbs. The walls on either side had two massive grey frames holding eight columns of slatted windows which were netted against mosquitoes. Between the frames, the walls were bare and white. The wall at the far end of the room was occupied entirely by a scene of snow-capped mountains, pine trees and a lake which should have been in the Swiss Tourist Board’s offices, circa 1965. I blinked hard at the hoarding because treetops rather than bottoms appeared to be coming out of the lake. I could see that a whole section in the middle was missing. Sitting in the left-hand corner of this scene was B.B.
‘You like?’ he said in a thick, throaty voice.
‘I…there’s something…’ I fished.
‘It get wet in de airport,’ B.B. explained. ‘You get de idea anyhoare.’
We shook hands.
‘Bruise?’ he asked, as if I did easily.
He stood up for some reason. He was holding his shorts up with one hand. He had such a tremendous stomach that they had no chance of being done up. He wore a string vest which stretched over his belly and creaked under the strain like a ship’s rigging. The vest was badly stained with coffee and a few other things, one of which was egg. He had short, recently cropped grey hair and snaggled grey eyebrows which fought each other over the bridge of his fleshy nose. His mouth was small and sweet and looked as if it might whistle. His neck was like a gecko’s. It hung from below his jowls and fanned out to his clavicles.
He crashed back into the armchair, swung his feet up on to the table and crossed them at the ankles. His big yellowing toenails arced out from the flesh by a couple of inches and he had hard pads of skin on his soles. They were high-mileage feet in need of some remoulds.
‘Sit, Bruise,’ he waved at a chair. ‘Ka-ka-ka-ka-ka-ka-Mary!’ he roared.
Mary was standing right behind his chair and said, ‘Yessah!’ which made him jump a bit. He turned as if he was in a seat belt and gave up.
‘I see,’ he said. ‘You want drink, Bruise?’
I asked for a beer. He tried to turn to Mary again and it brought on a wince of pain so he relaxed. ‘You bring beer for Mister Bruise and the ginger drink for me.’ Mary hadn’t even moved when B.B. said: ‘No, no, no, no, no. Yes.’ She went to the kitchen.
B.B. rapped the arm of his chair, alternating between his knuckles and the palm of his hand for a minute or two. Suddenly his eyes popped out of his face and he leaned forward as if he was going to say his last words, but instead let out a sneeze like a belly flop, showering me and the furniture. He pulled a yellow handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped his nose and took the sweat off his brow and then held it tumbling out of the back of his hand.
‘My God,’ he said. ‘I tink I have a cold.’
I was ‘tinking’ I was going to get a cold when Mary came in with the drinks. He sipped his daintily with his little finger cocked. He dabbed his mouth with the handkerchief and put the drink down. His face creased with agony. He lifted himself off one buttock and then settled back down again. His face calmed.
‘Yesterday I tink I eat someting funny. The ginger is good for the stomach,’ he said. ‘Lomé? Is hot?’
‘There’s going to be more trouble.’
‘Africa,’ breathed B.B. ‘Always problem. It getting hot in Ivory Coast now. De people, dey want to be free. Dan when dey free dey don’t know what to do. Dey make big trobble. Dey teef tings and kill. Dey ruin deir contry. Is very hot in Abidjan now. Very hot.’
I sipped my beer and felt very hot through the Dralon seat covers. B.B. went through a few more crises. I felt as if I’d been there a couple of hours. I didn’t feel awkward; he seemed to have things to occupy him.
‘Jack said you wanted to see me,’ I volunteered.
‘Yairs,’ he said and sipped his drink and looked out into the garden.
Mary flipped in and flopped out again. It reminded him of something.
‘Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-Mary!’ he hollered, and she reappeared.
‘We eat someting?’
‘Corn beef, sah!’
He looked at me, wanting some encouragement, so I nodded. Mary went back into the kitchen.
‘Jack –’ he said and stopped. The singing in the church stopped too and was replaced by a preacher who roared at his sinners, torturing them with feedbacks from his microphone. B.B. lost his track. His eyes looked up into his forehead as if he might find it up there. Something clicked, it sounded like a synapse from where I was sitting.
‘Jack,’ he repeated, and I flinched because his eyes had popped again, but the sneeze didn’t come, ‘is a nice man. His father too. His father dead now. He was a nice man, a good man. We do lot of business together. He know how to wok. We wok very hard togedder, all over Ghana, the north, the west side, east…Kete, Krachi, Yendi, Bawku, Bolgatanga, Gambaga, Wa…We wok in all dese places.’
He sipped his drink and I wondered where all this was going to. He breathed through his nose and mouth at the same time, the air rushing down the channels. His feet seemed to conduct an orchestra of their own. He talked for twenty minutes with a few coughing breaks in which he turned puce and became so still that I thought an impromptu tracheotomy was looming and I took a biro out for the purpose. What he talked about is difficult to remember, but it took a long time and part of it was about how hard he had ‘wokked’ with Jack’s father, which brought him back to Jack again.
‘Jack,’ he said, ‘has never wokked. Everting has been given. Is a problem, a big problem. If money is easy, you always want more, but more easy evertime.’
He winced again and leaned over, raising his left buttock as if he were about to break wind ostentatiously in the direction of something he disagreed with. The pain made him lose his track but his random access memory came up with something else. ‘Cushion,’ he said, and I looked around. ‘Cushion!’ he said again, wagging his finger with irritation. ‘When you want to cross the road you always look, if you walk and no look you get run over. Cushion. Always look. Take your time. Don’t be in hurry. Cushion is a very importarn ting. Jack is not careful. He no understand the word cushion.’
B.B. sipped his drink. ‘Respeck,’ he said, holding up a different finger. ‘Respeck is very importarn ting. If you no have respeck you no listen, if you no listen you make mistake. If you make mistake in Africa you get lot of trobble. Jack he no listen. He know everyting. He no respeck. You know Africa, Bruise?’ he said suddenly, so that I wasn’t sure if it was a question.
‘Not as well as you,’ I said, throwing a handful of flattery.
‘Now listen.’ He looked at me intently. ‘You see, I am still small boy. In Africa you learn all de time. If you tink you know everting you stop learning, dan you get big trobble. It come up on you like a dog in de night.
You hear noting until you feel de teeth.’ He grabbed a buttock with a clawed hand so that I got the picture.
‘Smock?’ he asked, and I looked puzzled, so he lit an imaginary cigarette.
‘I gave up.’
‘Me too,’ he said, annoyed.
He saw someone over my shoulder in the garden.
‘Ra-ra-ra-ra-ra-ra garden boy!’ he yelled.
Outside, the gardener was looking around as if he’d heard The Call. He ran towards the gate.
‘Bloddy fool!’ said B.B., standing up, grabbing his shorts and walking with an old footballer’s gait to the window.
‘Ra-ra-ra-ra-ra-garden boy!’ he bellowed and banged on the window frame.
The gardener worked it out, ran to the door and knocked.
‘Come,’ said B.B., searching his pockets.
The gardener, glistening with sweat, stood with his machete down by his side, naked apart from some raggedy shorts and a willingness to please. B.B. had performed the Augean task of cleaning his pockets out of old handkerchiefs and found nothing.
‘You have some monny, Bruise?’ he asked.
I gave him some money with Jack’s words sticking in my craw. He told the gardener to get him some Embassy.
He was about to walk back to the armchair when Mary came in with the food. It was chilli hot corned beef stew with rice and pitta bread. B.B. sat down and ripped the pile of pitta bread in half like a phone book. He reached over and scraped exactly a half of the chilli and a half of the rice on to his plate with his fork. He fell on it using the pitta bread as a shovel. Most of the food went in his mouth. I used a knife and fork and wore my napkin on the arm nearest to him.
The gardener came back in with the cigarettes and B.B. grunted at him. He finished his food and tore into the packet of cigarettes and chain-smoked three of them without speaking. He picked rice out of his chest hair and ate it in between drags. I picked the Cellophane wrapping of the packet out of my corned beef. He stood up and walked back to the chair, cigarettes in one hand and the shorts in the other. I finished my food and sat down in front of him again. We sat in the silence left over from B.B.’s breathing. I was getting a little frustrated now and had started thinking about Heike. B.B. was fretting over what was on his mind.
‘You see, Bruise,’ he said, ‘I giff this man a job. He’s a good man. He been here before. I know he haff no money. He haff big problem. So I giff him job and now he’s gone. I no understand.’
I didn’t understand either, but I realized we were talking about what he wanted me to do for him in Cotonou.
‘Who is this man?’
B.B. muddled about with some papers on a side table. The phone went and he picked it up.
‘Hello,’ he said looking up into his forehead again. ‘John. Yairs. OK. Cocoa?…Coffee?…Dollar?…Parn?…Fresh Fran?…Swiss Fran?…Arsenal?…Oh, my God! Tankyouvermush.’
He put the phone down and went back to the papers. He pulled one out and waved it at me. I took it from him. It was a photocopy of a British passport. It belonged to a man called Steven Kershaw.
‘When you say he’s gone, what do you mean? He’s quit the job. He’s flown back to the UK or what?’ I asked.
‘He disappear,’ said B.B. ‘He never dere when I call.’
‘So what do you want me to do?’
‘Find him,’ he said. ‘His wife keep calling me and I don’t know what say to her.’
‘Have you got a photo of him?’
He reached over to the papers again, winced as some ash fell into his chest hair and he slapped himself hard there, coughing the cigarette out which fell into his crotch and he came out of the chair roaring like a bull elephant. I got the cigarette out of the chair. He sat down again and took the cigarette off me as if I’d been trying to steal it and plugged it back into his mouth.
‘My God,’ he said. ‘Is big problem.’
He found the photo. Steven Kershaw was early forties and dark. He had dark brown hair, dark skin, and dark eyes. The hair was thick and cut short with a side parting. He had a moustache which rolled over his top lip into his mouth. From his face he looked as if he carried a little extra weight but wasn’t fat.
‘Is he English?’ I asked.
‘Yairs,’ said B.B. ‘But his mother from Venezuela or someting like dat.’
‘How tall is he?’
‘Smaller dan you.’
‘Most people are.’
‘Yairs. Less dan six foot.’
‘Is he big?’
‘He not fat like me. He fat small.’
‘Does he have any scars, or marks?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘What about the moustache?’
‘I tink he shave it.’
‘What was he supposed to do?’
‘I organize flat for him. I organize warehouse for him. I organize bank accoun’ for him…everting.’
‘To do what?’
‘Sheanut. I buy sheanut from Djougou and Parakou in de north of Benin. It come down to Cotonou in trucks. He weigh de sheanut, pay de suppliers and store it. When we get contrack we ship it.’
‘How long has be been missing?’
‘Since last week. He supposed to call everday. He no call.’
‘What about the money in the account?’
‘No, no. He no teef man,’ he said waving the cigarette at me. ‘He no chop de monny. De monny still dere.’
‘What sort of cash does he have?’
‘Expense monny. Four hundred parn, two hundred thousand CFA, someting like dat.’
‘Credit cards?’
‘I don’t tink so. He declared bankropp in UK. Thassway I giff him de job.’
‘Car?’
‘Nissan Sunny. ACR 4750.’
‘How do you know him?’
‘A Syrian friend. He introduze us.’
‘What’s his name?’
‘Dey call him Dama.’
‘His address?’
‘You know de road out of Lomé to Kpalimé. You cross de lagoon, up de hill, he has de big house on de right at de traffic light.’
‘You said Kershaw’s been here before?’
‘Das right. Not wokking for me. For his own accoun’.’
‘Doing what?’
‘I don’t know…but I tell you somet’ing, Bruise, he a very capable man, he understan’ de business very well. A very good head for trade and a good attitude, you know.’
Either that was true or B.B. found it necessary to cover himself for his poor judgement to a complete stranger.
‘What do you think then?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know. Maybe…You know Africa…dese African girls…maybe he lose his head. Dese girls dey change your head. Dey make you weak. Dey drife you mad.’
B.B. sounded like a man who knew. ‘You know dey get beautiful girl mush more beautiful dan English girl, dey fall in lov and deir head come off.’
‘Where’s the flat?’
‘In Cadjehoun. When you come into Cotonou from Togo on de right side.’
‘That big block?’
He nodded and gave me the flat number. He wanted me to organize the sheanut business for him as well until I found Kershaw, so he told me where the warehouse and office were and gave me a set of keys. He also told me about a weekend house that Kershaw used in Lomé near the Grande Marché. It was a house that belonged to an Armenian friend of his who wasn’t using it. He asked if I wanted a fee. I said yes and he ignored me. He asked me if I wanted a game of backgammon. I asked him if he meant instead of my fee, which he didn’t understand, but it meant that he heard the word ‘fee’ again.
He lit another cigarette in addition to the two still smoking in the ashtray. We walked out of the house to the garage.
‘What’s he like, Steven Kershaw?’ I asked. ‘What’s he like doing?’
‘He like to go to bars. He like girls. He like to play cards. Yairs,’ he said, thinking, ‘he’s a lively fellow. He like to tok a lot. He like to tok to women. Thassway I say maybe de African girls give him trobble.’
‘What about his wife?’
‘Dere he haff problem. De monny. It break de marriage.’
‘She still calls him?’
‘Yairs,’ said B.B. thinking about that. ‘He like to draw. His wife say she going to send art material to him in Lomé. Yairs, he always sketching, you know – trees, birds, people. He show me a drawing of myself. I tell him thass no very good. He say, “Why?” and I say it make me look like baboon.’
‘My fee is fifty thousand CFA a day plus expenses.’
‘Whaaaaaat!’ he roared. His face fell and his coal eyes bored into me.
‘Fifty thousand CFA a day plus expenses.’
‘My God, maybe I do de job myself.’
‘Two hundred and fifty thousand CFA in advance.’
‘Whaaaaat!’ he bellowed, and stormed back into the house. The big woman in the garage smiled at me. I smiled back. B.B. returned and handed me a sheaf of
notes.
‘Is good business you’re in,’ he said, subdued now.
‘I don’t earn fifty thousand everyday.’
‘Is true,’ he said, smiled and shook my hand.
I left B.B. standing in the garage holding on to his shorts and smoking and talking to the big African woman. The preacher was still giving them hell on earth in the church next door. The palms looked bored stiff. I drove back past the Shangri La and kept going to the roundabout and turned right on to the motorway to Tema with the bit between my teeth and Heike on my mind. At the toll booth a boy tried to sell me a Fan Milk yoghurt, then a set of screwdrivers and finally a duster. I blew him out on all three.
At the Tema roundabout, I saw the dark clouds hanging over Togo. The storm was heading this way. The women at the side of the road were already packing up their long oblong loaves of sweet Ghanaian bread. I stopped and bought some for Moses.
I thought about B.B. as I moved towards the storm. The old Africa hand who’s ‘still a small boy’ but shrewd as a grifter. The millionaire who lives like a student on a tight grant. The guy who doesn’t have to do anything but has to do something. The guy who’s got a bit lonely over the years. He enjoyed having a crack at Jack. He was enjoying the Kershaw intrigue. He enjoyed men and their weaknesses. He was bored by strengths. You didn’t make money out of people’s strengths.
The first drop of rain burst against the windscreen. The tarmac turned to liquid. The windscreen wipers went berserk. I felt cool for the first time in a week. The thunder rumbled like a wooden cart on a cobbled road. Sometimes I felt the car floating, aquaplaning along. The road didn’t feel solid and I wasn’t sure whether I was in control.
Chapter 6 (#ulink_29759fd9-5dd6-5aa6-972f-a5444d7da87d)
The patches of tarmac – which were all that was left of the road – in Aflao were steaming after the rain and people wandered about in sodden clothes looking like refugees. The rain had made the town look ten times dirtier than it was, which was inconceivable. I stopped and bought some grilled plantain to chew on.
The border had become a lake on the Ghanaian side. The flow of traffic was going back to Ghana now and I was through in five minutes. The traders on the Togolese side stared out from under plastic sheeting, holloweyed and dismal behind their banks of cigarettes, tinned tomato purée and sardines. Mud worked its way up the buildings of this strange quarter of Lomé that butted right up against the wire of the frontier. The sea was grey and the sand looked hard and dark. Africa, after rain, was a place of the living dead.
I drove around town before going to Jack’s house. Through the drizzle still whimpering over the city, I saw the red lights marking the height of the 2 Fevrier Hotel, its glass walls reflecting the greyness of the late afternoon. The smell of the rain made me think of London on a November evening. I had a sudden nostalgia for a dim pub with warm beer and a cheese roll with courtesy lettuce.
There was no light at Jack’s house or in his area. Parked behind Jack’s Mercedes was a larger, longer Mercedes with Nigerian plates and windows tinted so that only a squat version of myself was visible on them. Looking in, I’d expected to see a bowling alley at least.
Jack was glowing strangely in the yellow light of a hurricane lamp where he sat by the french windows of the living room. His legs were stretched out and his hands were clasped behind his head. He was nodding as if he was listening to somebody, which was unusual because, as B.B. said, he never did. The guy he was with must have been important or Jack would have been flicking through Hello magazine and playing with his nose.
Mohammed came over and directed me towards the spiral staircase leading to the breakfast verandah. I got a back view of Jack’s guest who was sitting in a cane two-seater sofa which wasn’t reacting well to the circumstances. This man was wide and made wider by his suit whose cloth and tailoring values could still be discerned in the oily light. He moved for his drink and the sofa cracked like a splitting redwood.
His hand buried the glass. A heavy gold watch hung on a thick loose chain from his wrist as if he wanted to shake the worthless thing off. The light shone down the back of his shorn head and revealed three horizontal creases in the skin where there was supposed to be a distinction between where the head ends and the neck begins. It was a thick neck, a working ox’s neck. I wouldn’t have liked to be the man to strangle it.
Night fell faster after the rain and I stood at the rail of the verandah and looked down into the darkness of the garden. A drink had fitted itself into my hand with no complaints from me. I heard the booming laughter of a man who hadn’t found anything funny but knew a cue when he heard one. There was more cracking from tortured furniture and the heavy footfall of a man who walks little.
The huge Nigerian appeared at the bottom of the portico steps. Beneath his pewter grey super lightweight suit his black shoes shone with a better shine than patent leather. A chauffeur appeared from nowhere. He must have been sleeping on top of the tyre under the front wheel arch. He opened the car door which swung out with magnificent weight. Mohammed stood holding a torch so the Nigerian could see where he was.
Jack was saying something I couldn’t hear which was probably just as well. Mohammed moved the torch’s light between Jack and the Nigerian, drawing attention to himself. Jack’s voice told him to stop being a bloody fool. Mohammed held the torch steady. The Nigerian was jangling something in his pocket which must have been the keys to his Swiss bank’s safe deposit box because he didn’t look like a man who’d ever heard of loose change. He was chuckling a low, rich, deep chuckle that he must have bought in Harrods and displaying great white teeth and a thick, pink tongue. He walked in a stumbling way to the car following the pool of light from Mohammed’s guiding torch. Jack appeared between the pillars of the unlit portico.
The big man bent over and got into the car while the chauffeur danced around him in case something stuck and needed to be levered in. He must have thrown himself back into the seat because the Mercedes’s suspension coughed politely, just to show that it hadn’t really been a problem. The chauffeur pushed the door to and it closed with a satisfying thunk.
The engine of this car was no louder than Heike breathing in her sleep. The car rolled backwards, arced on its power steering, negotiated a few bumps and floated off into the black shrubbery. Jack was waving, maybe the Nigerian waved back or maybe he gave him the finger. Jack will never know.
The spiral staircase shivered against the house as Jack climbed up to the verandah. He made it to the drinks tray and poured himself a beer. He drank and sighed the sigh of someone who has been so unfortunate as to have made such money.
‘Who was Mr Big Shot?’ I asked.
‘That was Mr AA International Commodities Traders Limited,’ said Jack with a smug look that would have earned him a dead leg anywhere in the world.
‘He looked like Mr Kiss My Arse from over here.’
‘Sometimes, Bruce, arses have to be kissed.’
‘Tell him before you do it, or he won’t notice.’
Jack drank some more beer and ignored me.
‘How did you get on with B.B.?’ he asked.
‘He gave me the job and he paid me an advance.’
‘I told you.’
‘I bought him a packet of cigarettes first.’
‘He likes generous people.’
‘Millionaires do.’
‘Did you get the lecture?’
‘On wok, you mean.’
‘He loves eating Chinese.’
‘He spoke very highly of you.’
‘He tink I neffer haff to wok for my monny.’
‘Someting like dat, ‘I said, and we both laughed.
I put my empty glass down and poured us both some whisky into fresh glasses with ice.
‘Do you know anything about Kershaw?’ I asked.
‘I know what he looks like.’
‘You’ve never spoken to him.’
‘B.B. likes to keep things separate.’
‘You got anything to tell me?’
‘He lost a bit of weight.’
‘Thanks, Jack, don’t strain your brain. Did you speak to Madame Severnou?’
‘She’s calm now.’
‘I’m glad about that,’ I said, mustering some acrid sarcasm to spread on my tone. ‘I was worried for her. I’d hate to think of her out of pocket or inconvenienced. It must be tiresome to have to send the hit squad out every time someone questions your integrity.’
‘Bruce,’ said Jack, ‘calm down. What I meant was that the misunderstanding that made her do that has been cleared up.’
‘What misunderstanding was that, Jack? It must have been a pretty big one, and if they’re that big I normally see the dust cloud coming over the horizon well before.’
‘She thought that when you gave her the non-negotiable copy you were acting on my instructions. That…and she didn’t like the way you handled it.’
‘Look, I know this woman is used to people throwing themselves on the ground in front of her so that she doesn’t get dust on her toenails, but she has to understand that I’m there representing you in a deal where with very little effort she gets to make fifty thousand dollars.’
‘Without her…’
‘Spare me the horseshit, Jack. You could sell that rice to anyone. They’re screaming for it. You’re doing her the favour and, don’t forget, she did short you by a hundred thousand pounds.’
‘I’m going to tell you this, Bruce’ said Jack in a voice that wasn’t used to getting annoyed but when it did it was time to hit the deck, ‘and then I want you to mind your own fucking business. The fifty million CFA is for some cotton fibre I’ve bought from AAICT and her fee. I didn’t know that she was going to turn it round that way but it’s done now and it works out the same. More important, she got me the contact with AAICT and this is her payback.’
‘What about the four suits coming round to my place with half a brain between them?’
‘Madame Severnou trades with other people’s money. If she loses it, they get upset. She has to protect herself…’
‘Against me?’
‘She was annoyed with me and she was going to send the message back through you. She wanted to remind you of your position in the deal. She wanted to show you that she was a principal and that principals have to be respected.’
Jack wanted to think of another five reasons why Madame Severnou should have sent the gunmen round but couldn’t, so be poured himself another drink and refilled my glass. He was calming down now. He forced one of his cheesy grins on me which I swatted away.
‘Why didn’t you just give her the original?’ he asked in one of those voices of disarming simplicity that normally get the people who use them hurt.
‘She’s the sort of woman who you shake hands with and she checks her jewellery, you check your fingers and when you get home you find she’s taken the shirt off your back and some of your skin’s gone with it.’
‘She’s not that bad.’
‘She resents the fact that you’re breathing air that she could be breathing.’
‘You’ll warm to her eventually.’
‘Like I will to a puff adder on coke. And anyway, why didn’t you explain all this shit to me?’
‘I didn’t think you’d give her the copy.’
‘You pay me to manage things for you in Cotonou. If you want a gofer…’
‘All right, Bruce. I admit it. I should have been clearer.’
Jack defused rows by conceding but not giving an inch. We both sat down on a couple of wooden loungers with foam rubber mattresses. Jack balanced his drink on his belly and looked up at the stars which weren’t there. He pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket and offered me one without thinking. He plugged one into his mouth, lit it, and drew on it as if he was trying to keep his cool in the trenches. He let the smoke trail out of his nose and from between his teeth and it disappeared off behind his ear.
He leaned forward and split his legs on either side of the lounger. He reached for an ashtray, put it in front of him and winced with his right cheek and eye.
‘I have no sympathy for you, Jack. You get less than you deserve.’
‘I bear the scars of love,’ he said, as if it was a terrific bore.
‘Love, Jack? I didn’t think that was your scene.’
‘Love, African style,’ he cautioned me with his cigarette.
‘How does that go?’
‘She likes me. I want her. She lets me. I pay her.’
‘I’d forgotten how romantic it was.’
‘The women here aren’t fools.’
‘Who said they were?’
‘They’re not fooled into thinking romance exists. They know what exists.’
‘Let me guess. Money and power?’ Jack somersaulted the cigarette in his hand and stabbed the air with it. ‘Exactly. Haven’t you noticed, I don’t go with white women any more?’
‘I haven’t consulted my black book recently.’
‘Well, I don’t. They’re too complicated.’
‘You don’t have to pay…’
‘…money. That’s what I mean. You sleep with them and before you know it you’ve got a relationship, they’ve moved in and they’re supervising your life like it’s a school project. Jesus. What I want is…’ He trailed off.
‘What do you want, Jack?’
‘I don’t want that.’
‘Whatever you do want, you’re not finding it.’
Jack wasn’t listening any more. I had exhausted his attention span between thoughts about sex. He smoked an inch of his cigarette in one drag and let out more smoke than a bonfire on a wet November afternoon.
‘There is one white woman I would like to have,’ he said from behind his smokescreen. I didn’t respond but sipped my whisky and did some passive smoking.
‘Elizabeth Harvey.’
‘Never heard of her. Is she a movie star?’
‘You know her. She’s married to that American banker.’
‘Clifford Franklin Harvey the seventh.’
‘The seventh?’
‘Americans always have Christian names like surnames and numbers like royalty.’
‘What do you think?’
‘She doesn’t look like one night stand material to me.’
He gave me an alarming grin followed by a diabolical laugh and some vestiges of smoke left in his lungs from the last toe-reaching drag came out of it.
He took the final drag from his cigarette, which was so hot he had to whip it out of his mouth before his lips blistered. He crushed it mercilessly into the ashtray.
‘You’re right.’
‘I think she’s Catholic, too.’
‘You’ve seen her kicking with her left foot.’
‘I’ve seen her coming out of a Catholic church.’
‘Perfect,’ said Jack. ‘To attain the unattainable, Bruce. That’s an excitement in life. What are you doing hanging around churches?’
‘Hoping for a bit of salvation to rub off.’
Jack laughed, a high-pitched giggling laugh, and shook his head.
‘Oh Bruce,’ he said with mock pity, ‘sometimes I think you’re my brother, other times my son.’
‘Naivety’s one of my strongest suits.’
Jack looked up like a dog over its dinner. He lit another cigarette and rolled it across his bottom lip. The paper and tobacco crackled as he drew on it.
‘I forgot to tell you. Heike called.’
‘Thanks.’
‘I told her you’d gone to Accra. She said something in German.’
‘Did it hurt?’
‘She said she was going to Porto Novo tonight and she’d be back at your place tomorrow afternoon.’
I chewed my thumbnail for a minute and Jack inspected the video zapper which told me the interview was over. I asked if I could stay the night, saying I’d go to Charlie’s bar and see if anybody there knew anything about Steven Kershaw.
‘Do you want to bet, Bruce?’ Jack asked as I juddered down the spiral staircase.
‘On what?’ I said without looking up, just hearing his voice.
‘That I can bed Elizabeth Harvey before you find Steven Kershaw.’
‘You’re a sick man, Jack. You’re making too much money. It’s creasing your moral fibre.’
He wasn’t listening. The soap opera voices had started another crisis in another world.
Chapter 7 (#ulink_d7b7d97c-fd61-57ef-9e42-6df102e9288f)
I showered and changed and went out into the cool night and the smell of wet grass. The cicadas were practising. The inside of my car smelt of wet newspaper and damp carpeting. I shut the car door waiting for the satisfying thunk and heard a chord from a cheap guitar with a broken string.
The lights were back on in downtown Lomé and the place was full of music. A shop selling cassettes had set up some speakers on the street and for half a mile nobody was walking without a wriggle or a jerk. Three girls with snack food in large aluminium bowls on their heads stood together and bobbed up and down and turned around in time.
I came out on to the coast road and headed east out of Lomé. A wind was blowing through the low palms along the beach. The stiff leaves knocked against each other and made a harsh clapping noise like a few sarcastic people in an audience.
The Hotel Sarakawa looked like a recently landed space craft illuminating the dark and attracting humans for observation. The port was lit and it looked as if there might be work going on. Charlie’s bar was on the beach a mile beyond the port. There was a rough track through some wasteland from the metalled road up to his compound which continued a further two hundred yards to another bar called Al Fresco’s where the track looped back to the Lomé/Benin road.
At the entrance the gardien checked the car and opened the barrier. I parked outside a huge paillote which was the restaurant part of the bar. The paillote was a massive thatched cone supported by wooden beams. There was seating for a hundred people and a bar underneath. It was empty. It always was after rain. Next to the paillote was a concrete building which Charlie had built a couple of years ago with profits from all those fingers he had in all those pies. This was the real bar. A huge open plan room looking out to sea with a thirty-foot bar on the back wall, seating for fifty around a piano and a lot of room to stand and fall in.
I walked into the air conditioning and piano music. The hum of the distant generator that ran Charlie’s compound disappeared. A light-skinned African girl with close cropped hair and a long neck was playing some Billie Holiday and looking out to sea through the arched windows. There was nothing out there except the dark.
At the bar, balancing on one leg of a four-legged stool, was a Lebanese guy in his early twenties. He had his palms flat down on the bar, his head hung at a level which gave him a perfect view of the whisky in his glass as he spun from one side to the other on the axis of the bar stool’s leg. A Togolese girl was drying some glasses and looking at her single customer with concern and disdain. I stood at the bar and the Lebanese looked at me from under his armpit. His lips hung slackly.
‘Charlie?’ I asked the girl.
The Lebanese swung his head up to look at her too quickly and too hard and it took several adjustments for him to focus. The girl shrugged at me with her eyeballs. The Lebanese gave me an exaggerated translation which was too much for his tenuous equilibrium. The stool spun violently on the axis of the single leg and sent the Lebanese crashing against his back into the bar. The stool slipped away from him and entangled itself in his legs, impairing his recovery so he had to throw himself on the mercy of two other bar stools who wanted nothing to do with him. He came down hard on the tiled floor with the chrome bar stools bouncing around him like a street gang. The pianist stopped, swivelled around on her bottom and gave us a clanging discord with her elbow on the middle section of the piano keys. It had been a very quiet evening.
The Lebanese needed plenty of help but looked as if the exercise might sober him up. I walked to a door at the end of the bar, opened it and caught a faceful of sea air. It was only four or five yards across some damp, hard ground to Charlie’s house. There was a light on. I closed the door on the Lebanese who was finding new ways to say putain merde. Billie Holiday resumed.
Charlie’s maid answered my knock as if she’d been waiting on the other side of the door all evening. I stood in the hall which had a single light in it, shining down directly over a plinth with a slim-necked pot on it which spouted a flower with a long green stem and a head like a bird with an excited comb.
I was trying to work out what this image was saying to me when Charlie’s maid returned and led me down a dark corridor to the living room which, like the bar, looked out through arched windows on to the sea. There was no sound of air conditioning but it was very cool in the room, and although there was no smoke, the smell of Gauloise was strong.
Charlie was sitting on the edge of a ten-foot white leather sofa, right in the middle with his legs apart, his forearms resting on his thighs and his large hairy hands dangling in between his knees. There were two women each sitting in a corner of an identical sofa opposite him. There was a tiger skin rug laid out diagonally between the sofas held down by a large glass-topped table with three glasses and an ashtray the size of a cymbal on it. One of the women had her bare foot in the tiger’s mouth; a long canine slid in and out in between her big and second toes.
‘Bruce! My God!’ said Charlie in his expansive American businessman’s way. ‘How ya doing?’ He came over and clapped me on the shoulder and shook my hand in his strong paw. Charlie looked shorter than he was only because of his width. He was six foot and a little slimmer than a brown bear but with no less body hair. It would be a big mistake to say he was fat and an understandable mistake to think it. He had a covering. Something for the winter, he would say as we sat outside on a December evening in ninety-five degrees, sweating like pigs, drinking dry martinis made with gin and an olive and held in the general direction of Italy for the vermouth.
He was bald and employed no techniques for disguising it, although I’m sure he could have trained some hair up from his shoulders and worn his collar up if he’d wanted to. His bare head was tanned dark brown and shone like polished teak. His remaining black hair was cut very short. He had strong black eyebrows which you would have thought would meet in the middle but didn’t, and a thick bristly moustache. His eyes were dark green with long dark lashes, his cheekbones high, his jawline solid and square at the chin with a dimple on the point. The bottom lip of his mouth was full and tanned so that when he licked it, as he often did, it was the colour of fresh liver. Like most Americans, he had ten thousand-dollar teeth which were all his own but didn’t look it.
Charlie had a big head, a big tanned head for a big hairy body. He was very strong but with no use for his strength other than drumming figures into a calculator. He was benign when sober, hard but not unpleasant when he was doing business, affable and charming when he was being social, but when he was drunk there were probably only a couple of things in the world more unpleasant – a fighting bull that’s caught your eye in an open street is one of those things that springs to mind. He was wearing a pair of dark blue chinos, a yellow short-sleeved shirt and no watch. He kept that in his pocket on a long chain connected to his belt.
He introduced me to the two women who had both looked up with their eyes. Jasmin, who had her tanned foot in the tiger’s mouth, had very long legs inside some equally long, baggy blue jeans. She wore a white T-shirt with what looked like her DNA on the front. She had short, straight blonde hair, very big blue eyes, a long and pointed nose and a mouth full of £25.50 teeth which were all her own and looked it. She had to be English, which she was.
Her arms were long and slender with small hands, one of which played with a lighter, the other held a cigarette. She smoked like a schoolgirl, the cigarette held at the very tips of her fingers and puffed at like a pecking hen. She was nervous despite the relaxed sprawl. There was a lithe sexuality to her boyish body and a surprised innocence to her eyes which I am sure triggered off base thoughts in the minds of a lot of men. I realized that she was the woman I’d seen on horseback that morning on the way to Ghana.
Yvette, who sat at the other end of the sofa from Jasmin, had more sophistication than the rest of us put together. She had very dark, shoulder length brown hair, styled with a nostalgia for the fifties movie star. You could see the same head of hair with one of the non-hats and some netting that they used to wear in those days. Her eyes were quite wide apart and, although large and rounded, narrowed at the edges with an Oriental sharpness that wasn’t done with make-up. They were violet in colour and made her look more feline than any woman I’d ever seen. Her nose was small for her face, which had high wide cheekbones and a wide, full-lipped mouth with a pronounced cupid’s bow. She wore a pale purple lipstick and her teeth were small and white with a gap between the front two which she had a habit of tickling with the tip of her tongue. Her skin was perfect white with not even the first hint of a line or a crease. I was looking too hard and too long.
‘Did I miss something shaving?’ she said to me in a deep, cracked voice with a French accent.
‘No,’ I said, taking the opportunity to look over her face again. ‘Very close, no cuts. Perfect…not the first time, right?’
She threw her head back and laughed through some gravel in her throat which trembled the white skin and light blue veins of her neck.
I sat down opposite her and took another look while Charlie did something about everybody’s drinks and looked over his shoulder at Yvette – a lot. She wore a pink crêpe jacket, and a blood orange crêpe sarong which was split to mid thigh. The jacket wasn’t fastened and I could see from her exposed waist that she was naked underneath it. A long orange and pink silk scarf dropped down from around her neck and covered her breasts. Like Jasmin, she sat low on the sofa, her legs crossed at the knee, and her bare feet nodding. She smoked an untipped Gauloise, thick and fat as a chalk stick, with the relish of a true professional. Charlie handed me a Scotch with ice and sat on the sofa next to me.
‘Yvette tells me they don’t believe in marriage in France,’ Charlie said as he sat down. ‘Says they have this thing concubinage instead.’ He strained his whisky through his moustache. ‘Sounds kind of interesting, you know, concubines and that. Sounds to me as if you could trade ‘em.’
‘Like pork bellies, you mean?’ I asked Charlie, wondering how they got to be talking about this kind of stuff.
‘I was thinking more onna lines with “1987 Concubine convertible. Low mileage, one previous owner, swap plus cash considered”.’
‘I think you’re over-romanticizing it, Charlie,’ I said.
‘No, no, Bruce, you gotta understand, marriage – that ol’ roman’ic institution – is old-fashioned. Strictly wartime only before you fly off to a certain death. That’s what the lady says.’
‘Don’t you think so, Bruce?’ Yvette dared me, having dug deep to pronounce my name.
‘I’ve heard there’s a very high success rate when the man dies immediately.’
‘Whose side you on?’ asked Charlie. I ignored him.
‘The woman is left with a memory of perfect love and consummation…’
‘Yeah,’ said Charlie, with no encouragement.
‘…and, if it’s really a perfect marriage, a load of money.’
‘Now here is a man who really understands,’ said Yvette, uncrossing her legs and leaning forward.
‘And the guy?’ said Charlie. ‘What the hell does the guy get out of this perfect marriage?’
‘The guy gets to die at the pinnacle of his achievement. Wedding night followed by heroic death.’
‘What more could a man want?’ asked Jasmin.
‘To do it again?’ asked Charlie.
‘It’s never as good the second time,’ said Jasmin, ‘and anyway, men are always looking for the ultimate thrill.’ She pecked at her cigarette. ‘Sex and death. In Japan they don’t always need the sex…I’ve seen them sit down to eat puffer fish knowing that if the chef’s carved it up wrong any one of them could get the chop.’
‘Raw fish,’ said Charlie, ‘is not my kind of thrill.’
‘Yes,’ said Jasmin smugging at her Gauloise. ‘I think the spider gets it right. She shows her mate a good time, gets herself pregnant and has a problem free dinner.’
‘I think I’m coming round to concubinage,’ said Charlie. ‘I don’t wanna give you indigestion or anything.’
‘Don’t worry about us,’ said Yvette. ‘We have huge appetites. You must think of it as an act of kindness. We’re saving you from yourselves.’
‘Kindness was not the word I had in mind,’ said Charlie.
‘All this talk and now I’m hungry,’ said Yvette. ‘It’s time to eat.’
‘Will you be our guests?’ offered Charlie.
Yvette had stood up and looked Charlie over.
‘You look too tough for me. I like my meat very tender,’ she said baring her teeth.
‘The tender bits are inside,’ I said for Charlie.
Yvette raised an eyebrow. ‘Can I use a phone?’
Charlie pointed to the desk at the far end of the room behind our sofa. He saw Yvette hesitate. ‘Sorry, it’s the only one inna house. My rules. Somebody wants to use my phone, I wanna know what they’re saying. It’s business…’ he smiled, ‘something personal.’
She gave Charlie a look which left me charcoal broiled and I was only sitting next to him. She walked over to the phone and punched out some numbers.
‘Camilia?’ she asked and started speaking in Italian. Charlie nodded and drank some more and sneaked a look at Jasmin who had stood up and walked to the window to look at the dark.
Yvette put the phone down and walked back over. ‘I’m sorry…’ she said.
‘I heard,’ said Charlie.
‘You speak Italian?’ she asked.
‘I am Italian,’ he said. ‘Carlo Reggiani.’
Yvette and Jasmin slipped into their shoes. ‘We have to go. Tonight we are meeting someone for dinner who says they know somebody who probably knows lots of other somebodies who might be able to sell me something I want,’ explained Yvette.
‘That’s the only kind of business they have here,’ said Charlie.
‘African art, Bruce, is a terrible business. The worst,’ she said, smoothing her scarf inside the lapels of her jacket.
I put my drink on the table and we all walked out to the private parking area at the back of the house. There was a taxi with a powder blue furry dashboard waiting for them under a low palm tree. Charlie was kissed soundly on the cheek by Yvette, which might have disappointed him but he didn’t show it. The two women got into the car. The taxi took a while to get going and circled us before disappearing behind the paillote.
Chapter 8 (#ulink_6b2d44f7-3d97-5916-af62-9562e757cab0)
Charlie shivered.
‘She does something for me, that woman.’
‘Confuse you?’ I said.
‘There’s one thing I’m not confused about,’ he said, turning and putting his hand on my shoulder to steer me into the house.
‘They don’t make them like that any more,’ I said.
‘Right.’
‘Now that we’re all being genetically engineered.’
‘Something went wrong in my test tube,’ said Charlie, looking down at his big hairy body.
‘Not us, Charlie. You can still see the ape in us. In the future they’ll iron out all those blips and glitches that make someone extraordinary like Yvette and we’ll all look like leads from shampoo and shaving ads. We’ll be the bathroom people from planet Earth.’
‘You know, Bruce’ – he stopped and looked at me from under his eyebrows with his hand resting on the back of my neck – ‘you’re kinda weird, but you’re OK…I think, anyways.’
We went back into the house and sat opposite each other on the sofas with big tumblers of Scotch in our hands and a bottle and a bucket of ice on the table. We drank and refilled without speaking. I took Kershaw’s photograph out of my shirt pocket and flicked it across to Charlie.
‘I’m looking for this guy. His boss wants me to find him, says he hasn’t heard from him in a week. He describes him as missing.’
‘Steve Kershaw,’ said Charlie, rolling his glass across his forehead. ‘English. Buys sheanut in Cotonou.’ He spun the photo back at me across the table.
‘When did you last see him?’
‘He was in here about three days ago with a blonde girl, French I think, I didn’t know her. Nice looking though. Great legs, nice ass.’
‘Three days doesn’t sound like he’s very “missing” to me.’
‘You asked me a question,’ he shrugged.
‘Was he intimate with this French girl?’
‘Kind of,’ he patted his bald head with his hairy hand. ‘Sex rather than marriage type, I’d say.’ Charlie twisted his leg under himself and winced. ‘You know, this concubinage thing confuses me, Bruce. It sounds…financial.’
‘It’s like a common-law wife,’ I said, my eyes widening with the whisky on an empty stomach which was loosening off the gab more than I wanted it to. ‘I know you Americans are keen on marriage. Divorce, too. But in Europe now, marriage is out. People live together, they don’t need to tie the knot in front of God any more. It keeps the divorce rate down. I’ve met quite a few Americans who’ve had three or four wives, which to Europeans sounds like upgrading, like we do with computers. The Africans? Well, they have all four wives at once, it shows they’re making money. But then they say divorce is not a cheap option in the US. Is it a status symbol there yet, Charlie?’ He didn’t answer but stared at a bookcase with no books in it.
‘You been married before, Charlie?’
Charlie, who was sitting sideways on the sofa with his arm thrown over the back of it, gave me a sideways look as if I was trying to cheat off him in an exam. He held up two fingers and took a large slug of whisky from his glass, including a lump of ice which he crunched.
‘And you’d like to make Yvette number three?’
Charlie didn’t react well to that dart into his private life. He’d shown me more than he’d wanted to earlier and, being a businessman always on the lookout for leverage, thought I could be the type to abuse it, which is the sort of thing he would do. The look he gave me told me so. It left me with frost bite down my front. His face lost expression, his eyelids closed a little, and he spoke in a soft voice. ‘We were talking about Steve Kershaw.’
As he said this, Charlie’s brain spun and clicked into a different mode. He was not a man to reveal what he was thinking. I had caught him off guard. Charlie knew that I knew that Yvette had got through, if not to the heart, then at least to the fillet steak. He leaned back with his elbow on the arm of the sofa, straightened his leg and sipped his whisky, licking the liverish lip to show that he was relaxed. He put his glass down on the carpet and rubbed his face with his hand.
‘Steve Kershaw,’ said Charlie in a voice that had a very straight edge to it. ‘Can I call him Steve?’ he asked, not expecting an answer but just to show me he was back in town. ‘Steve Kershaw used to come in here with a lot of different women. He only came in at the weekends. I never once saw him with another guy. I saw him in here with black girls, white girls, Orientals, Indians, tall girls, short girls, beautiful girls and ugly girls but I never saw him with a guy.’
‘He likes women,’ I said, shrugging my eyebrows.
Charlie drew a straight horizontal line with his hand. ‘I don’t trust that kinda guy.’
‘Did you know any of these women?’ I asked.
‘The only woman I knew to talk to was a woman called Nina Sorvino. She works in the trade department of the US Embassy. She liked him but thought he was kinda intense. I don’t know what happened but something went wrong. She was here last night giving me the lowdown. I think he was into weird sex. She wasn’t specific.’
‘D’you mind if I talk to her?’
‘Try her. She’ll tell you more than I can. She might know some other people. I’ll call her tomorrow, let her know you’re gonna be in touch.’
‘Did you ever talk to him?’
‘Uh huh. Like I said. Not my type.’
Charlie poured himself a very stiff whisky and did the same for me. He took a gulp out of his as if it was nothing more than a cold beer. He grunted as the alcohol hit his system. The blinds were coming down in my head and I could see Charlie was beginning to paw the ground with his hoof.
‘Whaddya think’s gonna happen, Bruce?’ asked Charlie, slapping the back of the sofa and lapsing into a more pronounced American drawl. It was the usual thing – Charlie on the hunt for information. He was a businessman, a trader, one of the good ones who realized that information was everything and he didn’t give a damn about the source. He knew better than anybody else that not hearing the vital piece of news in Africa wouldn’t just mean that you missed out on some action, it could cost you your whole business and, in bad times, your life.
He also knew that the boy who packed his groceries last month, or the young army sergeant at the road block could, with not very many twists of fate if he didn’t draw the line at shooting people, become a highranking minister, or even the president himself.
‘The President might survive this one, but it’s going to be painful,’ I said. ‘He’s losing the support of the people. France is edging away from him. There’s going to be a question mark about future US aid. He’s been around too long. It’s happening everywhere else in Africa. The day of the dictator is over. They’re all feeling the cold wind now. Africa’s going to be a different continent by the end of the century.’
‘What about here?’ said Charlie.
‘The army’s the problem. You’re never safe until you’ve got the army with you. The army’s full of northerners from the President’s tribe. They’re not going to want to see their man go.’
Charlie finished half a tumbler of whisky in one tip, poured himself some more and added another half inch to mine.
‘The southerners will get their election. The President probably won’t get in, but whoever does will be under threat from the army from day one.’
‘A coup.’
‘The first thing any civil administration will want to do is weaken the army. Generals in the US don’t like that and they don’t like it here either.’
‘Is anybody talking about this kind of thing on the street?’
‘On the street they just want multi-party democracy. They don’t know what it means beyond free elections with more than one party, but they want it. Some of them think they know what it means but they don’t realize how much choice complicates things. They see France and Germany with democracy and they know how wealthy those countries are. So they think, if they’re rich, we’ll be rich. But there’re some big gaps and a lot can happen in the gaps.’
‘It’s gonna be a fuck-up, in other words,’ said Charlie, his voice thick with the drink.
‘It’s just the next stage. Africa’s been dominated by the Europeans and now it’s going to be dominated by their systems. It’s the only road.’
‘The only road they know is how to fuck things up.’
Charlie started pacing up and down the room. His forehead was glistening despite the air conditioning. Somebody had put a couple of bags of cement on my shoulders. I drank some more to see if it lightened the load.
Some hours later, which turned out to be minutes, Charlie stopped wearing a trail in the carpet and fixed me with a malevolent, drunken eye. Maybe I hadn’t been answering his questions, or maybe it was just the time of night when it occurred to him to start disliking company. I decided not to look back in case it stirred up his machismo and I caught the full force of Hurricane Charlie in an enclosed room. Wherever I did look, things either came towards me or I went towards them. I realized from the silence burning behind his eyes that the subject was going to change, and for the worse. As always with Charlie, it was going to get personal and it was going to be about sex.
‘How’s that babe of yours, Bru?’ he asked.
‘Heike, Charlie. Her name’s Heike.’
‘Yeah, Heike. Kraut, right? Ossa Kraut like inna sack?’
‘Maybe it’s time for me to go.’
‘Come on, Bru, ossa Kraut like inna sack? I went with a Thai chick once, she was tighter’n a duck’s ass.’
‘That’s not something I’d know about.’
‘On account of what, Bru?’
‘On account of English ducks are suspicious of people who come at them with that kind of thing in mind.’
Charlie poured some more whisky into my glass and topped up his own.
‘You think you’re smart,’ he said, shaking his head and panting a little from the alcohol crashing around his system. ‘English people. They think they’re smart. Nina. She likes English guys. Me? I think they’re all faggots. But Nina…when you meet her she’ll tell you she likes English guys. She says: “They don’t fuck you with their eyes.”’
‘Now that’s true, Charlie, once we’ve been told what to do it with, we remember.’
‘You don’t know when to shut the fuck up.’
‘I’m drunk. That’s what happens. It just keeps pouring out of me.’
‘I thought you could take it.’
‘I can. I like it and I can take it. But I can’t take it and keep my mouth shut.’
Charlie drank half his tumbler and nodded to me. I took a gulp which blazed its way down my oesophagus. He topped me up so that I had neat whisky to the brim and did the same for himself.
‘Cheers,’ he said, and took an inch off the top, to show me that the real men were on his sofa. ‘The first English guy I met was at my brother’s. My brother makes films in LA.’
‘What kind of films?’
‘Thrillers, comedies…’
‘Right, I was just making sure he wasn’t a Pasolini or anything.’
‘He does skin movies too, if he has to. Pays the bills.’ Charlie liked to talk tough.
‘The English guy?’
‘Yeah. My brother throws a party, like he has to, to get work now and again. It’s one of those parties, lot of girls. Lot of working girls, you know what I mean. They going round with the blow, little white piles of it on silver platters with spoons. I’m talking with these two guys. One of them is English. He’s a writer. Calls himself Al ‘cos he’s in the States. His real name is Algernon. What sort of a fucking name is that? Anyways, Al’s got a plate with some canapés on it. The girl comes round with the blow and Al picks up the spoon, loads it with blow and sticks it onna side of his plate. Then he says to the girl: “You got any celery to go with that?” Now that is what I call one big asshole.’
‘I laughed.’
‘I heard you,’ said Charlie. ‘You wanna see one of my brother’s films?’
‘No thanks, I got to go.’
‘It’s a short,’ said Charlie, leaning over, picking up the zapper and the TV came to life. There was a picture of African straw-roofed mud huts and two girls pounding yam.
‘This is Africa.’
‘This is Togolese TV, asshole.’
Charlie clicked on the video and a dark ill-lit picture came on in which only the movement of things could just be discerned.
‘Is this wildlife or something?’
‘Kinda.’
As the camera pulled back, Charlie turned the sound up and the telltale tinny music and sobbing ecstasy accompanied a shot of a woman laid out face down on a bench, her wrists and ankles tied underneath. A huge and hairy man who looked as if he drove trucks during the day held her thin waist in large and sinisterly gloved hands while he worked on her from behind. Another man sat in dazed concentration at the other end of the bench with the woman’s head nodding in his lap.
‘Good night, Charlie,’ I said, and lurched out of the room.
‘Good night, chickenshit,’ he shouted after me, without taking his eyes off the screen.
I needed some fresh air. Things appeared cut together like a film. There was no feeling of time passing. The dark corridor, the bird-like flower in the pot, the door, the warm wet darkness, the bar door. The bar door was locked. I walked down towards the sea.
I knew there was a steep bank of red earth down to the sandy beach but it was very dark and the bar was shut down so there was no light. I eased forward with one foot ahead of me until I felt stupid enough, then I stopped and looked out. My eyes got used to the dark. I was very close to the bank. It was closer to the bar than I remembered it. The sea was slowly eating its way into Charlie’s compound. It wasn’t going to be long before it all tipped into the Gulf of Guinea.
Standing in the dark was giving me sensory deprivation rather than sobering me up. I walked back to the bar; Charlie was still sitting in his living room, his brother’s film flickering on the screen. I fell heavily on my shoulder and kicked out at whatever I had fallen over, which groaned. I crawled back, and in the dim light I could just make out the slack features of the drunken Lebanese. I called the gardien and we hauled him up to the paillote, which left me speechless with a huge quantity of blood crashing through my head. The boy was covered in ants and his face and hands were swollen with mosquito bites. The gardien said he would put him in one of the guest rooms. After ten minutes, my pulse went back down from my ears to my wrist and I got in the car and drove back to Lomé.
There were street gangs operating in the centre of town and on the coast road at night. They wanted money in the name of democracy. I decided to go around town and headed for one of the causeways across the lagoon that hardly anybody used at night. There was no street lighting. There was nobody out. The noise from the cicadas closed in. A tyre burned in the middle of the road, the thick black smoke making the night thicker and blacker.
A group on a piece of wasteland stood around a blazing oil drum whose flames slashed out at the night. As I approached the lagoon, two kids ran across the road and into the dark. Further on, a young woman trotted with her hands covering her cheeks. A young man stood at the side of the road as I rolled past with my elbow out of the window. He slapped my arm.
‘Go back. Go back,’ he said.
I cut the lights, got out of the car and looked down on to the causeway. A car was parked diagonally across the road, its headlights flaring out across the lagoon. In the light, three people stood looking out into the lagoon, their hands behind their backs as if inspecting something. They crumpled forwards off the road. The sound of three shots, delayed, cracked across the water. The black, still lagoon rippled out in silver lines before the lights died on the causeway.
‘Go now. They’re coming,’ the young man said to the back of my head.
‘Who’s they?’ I asked.
‘Nobody knows,’ said the young man.
We heard the car approaching. The young man ran, his shirt tail flapping. I drove down a side street and parked by a house out of sight of the road, got out and looked back down the street. A single car drove past at walking pace with no lights on.
Ten minutes later I drove across the lagoon. The mosquitoes screamed across the water.
Chapter 9 (#ulink_bb2ddcea-01d8-517f-82cd-d8939aa9218a)
Thursday 26th September
By morning, my face was welded to the bed, I had an arm like a plastic leg and a brain as dry as a monkey nut and no bigger. Something rattled in my inner ear as I sat up. I drank the best part of a litre bottle of water and felt intimidated by the brightness of the sunlight slanting through the slats of the shutters forming white bars on the marble-tiled floor. I stared into them for a while until they lost what little meaning they had.
I made it to the shower and rehydrated to full size underneath it. I shaved with limited success. I flossed for the first time in a month and ended up with a cat’s cradle in my mouth. I dressed as if I’d done it before but could use some maternal supervision. I flipped off the air conditioner, opened the shutters and staggered back as the sun slapped a white rhomboid across the room. By the time I’d got to the bottom of the stairs I was ready for bed.
On the verandah, Jack was asleep in the lounger with the radio murmuring on his stomach, the TV quiet for once. I poured some coffee, ate some pineapple and retreated to a shady corner with a pair of sunglasses.
‘Morning,’ said Jack.
‘Should be,’ I said.
Jack opened one eye and found me with it.
‘What happened to you?’
‘Man to man with Charlie. The usual. Half pints of whisky, no water.’
‘Did he get ugly?’
‘He’s never been pretty.’
I sipped the coffee. It was that robusta again. It rippled through my system as if I’d mainlined it.
‘They found twenty-one dead bodies in the lagoon this morning,’ said Jack.
The black and white images of last night played themselves through my head.
‘There’s a taxi strike. We’re going to have trouble,’ he said.
‘Who did it?’
‘Nobody knows.’
‘That’s what the guy said to me last night.’
‘Which guy?’
I told Jack what I had seen.
‘Did they say whether they came from the north or south?’ I asked.
‘Both.’
‘A mixture?’
‘No. Some people say all northerners, others all southerners.’
‘Who’s trying to scare who?’
‘I’d say the army were scaring the southerners.’
‘And the army says the southerners are trying to discredit the army and are killing their own people.’
‘Dead people make everybody think about what’s going on. Everybody’s thinking twice about changing their nice, boring stable lives. Trotsky’s bloody omelette; just give me fried eggs sunny side up any time,’ said Jack, with a full stomach and an empty head.
‘Don’t talk to me about fried eggs.’
‘Restraint…’
‘Don’t talk to me about that either. You are no authority.’
‘I myself had an evening of ecstasy and restraint.’
‘Acid house comes to Lomé?’
‘I spent an evening in the company of…’
Jack who was already supine managed to sink even further back into the lounger.
‘Elizabeth Harvey. You don’t waste your time.’
‘It’s my challenge.’
‘What are you doing on your lounger then?’
‘I didn’t restrain myself all night.’
‘I’d hate to think you were slacking.’
I finished my coffee and called the US Embassy and arranged to meet Nina Sorvino at the German Restaurant for lunch. She said she knew who I was from Charlie, so I didn’t need a carnation and a copy of The Times. Her accent was from the wrong side of the tracks. I called Dama, the friend of B.B.’s who had introduced Kershaw. We arranged to meet after lunch in his house up the Kpalimé road.
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Robert Wilson
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: ‘First in a field of one’ (Literary Review) Robert Wilson’s first novel, a tense and powerful thriller set in the sultry heat of West AfricaBenin, West Africa. Englishman Bruce Medway operates as a ‘fixer’ for traders along the part of the coast they used to call the White Man’s Grave. It’s a tough existence, but Medway can handle it… until he crosses the formidable Madame Severnou. Warned off by his client, Jack Obuasi, his energies are redirected into the search for missing expat Steven Kershaw. Kershaw, though, is a man of mystery: trader, artist, womanizer… and sado-masochist.Against background rumblings of political disturbance, in the face of official corruption, egged on by an enigmatic policeman, Medway pursues his elusive quarry across West Africa. Is Kershaw tied to Obuasi’s and Madame Severnou’s shady dealings? Is he a vicious murderer? Is he, indeed, alive or dead?