Kitabı oku: «The Big Killing»

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Map

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

AUTHOR’S NOTE

About the Author

By the same author

Praise for Robert Wilson

Copyright

About the Publisher

For Jane and in memory of Peggy

Chapter 1

Saturday 26th October

We were here again – if you call a hangover company or a slick of methylated sweat a friend – in this bar, this palmleaf-thatched shack set back from the sea in some fractious coconut palms, waiting for the barman to arrive. The head I was nursing (the first since last Saturday) had already been given some hot milk – the Ivorians called it coffee, I called it three grains of freeze-dried and a can of condensed milk. Now it wanted a hair of the dog, and not from any of those manky curs digging themselves into the cool sand outside, and not, definitely not, any of that White Horse that was galloping around my system last night, no sirree. An ice-cold beer was what was needed. One with tears beading on the bottle and the label peeling off. I held my hand out to see how steady we were. No horizontal hold at all. Where was that barman? Once he was here, there’d be security, there’d be options. I could decide whether to hold back and make it look pre-lunch rather than post-breakfast.

There he was. I could hear him, the barman, whistling that bloody tune, preparing himself for another day demonstrating the nuances of insouciance which had taken him a lifetime to refine. I sat back on the splintery wooden furniture, opened the Ivoire Soir and relaxed.

I’d bought the newspaper from a kiosk in Grand Bassam, the broken-down old port town where I was staying, which was a long spit down a palm-frayed shoreline from Abidjan, the Ivory Coast capital city. I normally used it to stave off the first cold beer of the day and the boredom which came from three weeks waiting for the job I was supposed to be doing not to materialize. This time I was actually reading it. There was some ugly detail about a body, recently discovered in Abidjan, which the BBC World Service had told me, at five o’clock that morning, belonged to James Wilson. He had been a close aide to the President of the neighbouring country of Liberia and the President, as everybody in the Ivory Coast knew, had been captured, tortured and killed last month by the breakaway rebel faction leader, Jeremiah Finn.

The World Service had also told me that hundreds of civilian bodies had been uncovered in swampland just north of Springs Payne Airport outside the Liberian capital, Monrovia, and that over the past three days rebel soldiers from Samson Talbot’s Liberian Democratic Front had buried more than 500 bodies of mainly Ghanaian and Nigerian civilians in mass graves four miles to the north west of the capital. All this before they rounded off their report on the country’s civil war with the positive identification of the strangled and mutilated body of James Wilson who’d been found in the Ebrié lagoon near the Treichville quarter of Abidjan yesterday.

All this on snatches of dream-torn sleep, with a hangover to support, cold water to shave in and a body that was finding new ways to say – ‘Enough!’ No. It had not been a morning for skipping down to the beach to dance ‘highlife’ into the long, torpid afternoon. It was a morning for taxing my patience, the beer-foam depth of my resolve, whilst trying to divert myself with the strange facts of James Wilson’s death.

He’d been strangled with a piece of wire, which was the conventional bit, but then the killer had strayed into the occult by using a set of metal claws to open out the abdomen. These metal claws were used by members of the Leopard Societies who hadn’t been heard of for some time. Their cardholders used to kill people who’d been accused of witchcraft and feed on their innards by the light of the moon. That’s what it said. There’d been no moon the last three nights and the police had been informed by the coroner that James Wilson’s innards had been eaten by fish. The reporter seemed disappointed. I made a mental note to hold off on the seafood whenever my next remittance came through.

The article finished with some conjecture as to why James Wilson’s political career had ended with him as a gutless floater – a state, it occurred to me, that most politicians were making a success out of every day in the ‘developed’ world. The journo cited unnamed intelligence sources that linked the thirty-two-year-old James Wilson to the handing over of the late Liberian President to the lethal interrogation techniques of Jeremiah Finn and that it was Wilson’s own Krahn tribe members who had given him the payback.

A cold beer appeared in front of me. I looked up at the barman who slipped back behind his cane-slatted bar and was giving me his ‘eyelids at half-mast’ routine.

‘C’est quoi ça?’ I asked, my watch still clipping its way round to 10.30 a.m.

‘Une bière, M. Bru,’ he said, fond of stating the obvious, and added, ‘grande modèle,’ meaning it was a full litre bottle of ice-cold Solibra and I should stop looking for philosophy when there was a serious opportunity to deaden myself to existence. I stood up so that I could see more than his flat-calm eye language and used my full six feet four inches to impress upon him that I gave the orders around here and I didn’t like barmen making assumptions about my drinking habits. He pointed with his chin across the earthen floor into an obscure corner of the shack.

It was a shock to find that the obese half-caste who’d introduced himself to me yesterday as Fat Paul had managed to rumble in without my noticing. He was sitting there with his buttocks hanging over either side of one of the few metal chairs in the joint, wearing a bright-blue silk shirt with big white parakeets all over it. He gave me a little tinkling wave and a sad housewife’s smile. I nodded, sat back down and blocked out the frosted, beading grande modele with the full spread of the Ivoire Soir.

Fat Paul was sitting with George and Kwabena who’d been with him yesterday. I’d watched them getting out of a large black 1950s Cadillac with tail fins higher than sharks’ dorsals and chrome work you could check your tonsils in. They’d come into the bar and chosen a table next to mine and Fat Paul had started talking to me as if he was a star and I was an extra in a movie’s opening sequence in a bar on Route 66.

‘I’m Fat Paul, who are you?’

‘Bruce Medway.’

‘What they got here that’s any good, Bruce?’

‘Pineapple fritters.’

‘How d’they do that?’

‘They dip them in batter, deep fry them and coat them with sugar.’

‘Sounds good. I’ll have six. What you want?’ he said, looking at Kwabena and George.

They’d sat in the same corner they were sitting in now and Fat Paul had ordered a bottle of beer and had it sent over to me. Later he’d asked me to join them for lunch and seeing as I had hell and all to do I went over without bothering with any of the ‘no, no, thank you’ crap.

Before I’d sat down they’d asked me if I was a tourist and when I’d said no Kwabena had produced a chair from behind his back and had let me sit on it. The conversation hadn’t exactly zipped around the table while we were eating but afterwards, while Fat Paul was taking a digestif of another four pineapple fritters, he’d asked me what I did for a living.

‘I do jobs for people who don’t want to do the jobs themselves. I do bits of business, management, organization, negotiations, transactions, and debt collection. Sometimes I find people who’ve gone missing. Sometimes I just talk to people on behalf of someone else. The only things I don’t do are criminal things…that…and domestic trouble. I won’t have anything to do with husbands, wives and lovers.’

‘You been asked that before,’ said Fat Paul, chuckling.

Soon after that they’d paid the bill and left but, by the way Fat Paul had looked back at me from the doorway, I’d expected to see him again, and here he was, the twenty-five-stone pineapple-fritter bin. He made it look so easy, but that’s talent for you.

‘You want join us for lunch, Mr Bruce?’ said Kwabena, measuring each word as it came out and looming dark in my light so that I couldn’t read the paper.

‘It’s ten-thirty in the morning,’ I said, and Kwabena looked back at Fat Paul, lacking the programming to get any further into normal human relations without more guidance.

‘You got t’eat!’ shouted Fat Paul across the bar. ‘Keep you strength up.’

Kwabena picked up the bottle of beer between his thumb and forefinger and took three strides across to Fat Paul’s table. The barman turned on the radio, which immediately played the hit of the year he’d been whistling earlier. Its single lyric was so good that they felt the need to repeat it three times an hour. It was the kind of song that could make people go into public places and kill.

‘C’est bon pour le moral. C’est bon pour le moral,

C’est bon, bon. C’est bon, bon.

C’est bon pour le moral…’

My ‘moral’ dipped as I looked at Fat Paul’s buried eyes, which were like two raisins pressed into some dough so old that it had taken on a light-brown sheen. The mild contour of his nose rose and fell across his face and his nostrils were a currant stud each and widely spaced almost above the corners of his mouth, which had a chipolata lower lip and did a poor job of hiding some dark gums and brown lower teeth. He had a goitrous neck which hung below the hint of his chin and shook like the sac of a cow’s udder. A gold chain hid itself in the crease of skin that came from the back of his neck before exiting on to the smooth, hairlessness of his chest. He had a full head of black hair which for some reason he felt looked great crinkle cut and dipped in chip fat.

The one thing that could be said of Fat Paul was that he was fat. He was fat enough not to know what was occurring below his waist unless he had mirrors on sticks and a jigsaw imagination. He told me that he had a very slow metabolism. I suggested he had no metabolism at all and he said, no, no, he could feel it moving at night. I put it to him that it might just be the day’s consumption shifting and settling. This vision of his digestive system so unnerved him that he lost his appetite for a full minute.

Fat Paul’s nationality wasn’t clear. There was some African in there and perhaps some Lebanese or even American. To me he spoke English in a mixture of excolonial African and American movies, to George and Kwabena he used the Tui language.

George was a tall, handsome Ghanaian who was wearing a white short-sleeve shirt and a tie which he had contrived so that one end covered his crotch and the other stuck out like a tongue from the black-hole density of the knot at his top button. The tie was white with horses pounding across it with jockeys on their backs in wild silks. He hid behind some steel-rimmed aviator sunglasses and did what he was good at – letting his tie do the talking.

Kwabena was a colossus. His cast was probably taking up some valuable warehouse space in the steelworks where he’d been poured. His frame was covered by very black skin which had taken on a kind of bloom, as if it had been recently tempered by fire. He wore a loud blue and yellow shirt which had been made to go over an American football harness but nipped him around the shoulders. He sat with his mouth slightly open and blinked once a minute while his hands hung between his knees preparing to reshape facial landscapes. He looked slow but I wouldn’t have liked to be the one to test his reactions. If he caught you and he’d been programmed right he’d have you down to constituent parts in a minute.

‘What was it you say you doin'?’ asked Fat Paul, the fourth pineapple fritter of the morning slipping into his mouth like a letter into a pillar box.

‘When I’m doing it, you mean?’

He laughed with his shoulders and then licked his fingers one by one, holding them up counting off my business talents.

‘Management, negotiations, debt collection, organization, findin’ missin’ people, talkin’ to people for udder people…no, I’m forgettin’ some…’

‘Transactions,’ I said.

‘Transactions,’ repeated Fat Paul, nodding at me so I knew I’d got it right.

‘As long as it’s not criminal.’

‘And no fucky-fucky business,’ finished Fat Paul.

‘I’ve not heard it put like that before.’

‘Sorry,’ he said, beckoning to Kwabena for a cigarette, “swat ‘sall about, you know, jig-a-jig, fucky-fucky. I no blame you. Thass no man’s business. But transactions. Now there’s somethin'. Somethin’ for you. Make you some money.’

‘What did you have in mind?’

Fat Paul clicked the fingers he’d been sucking and George opened a zip-topped case and handed him a package which he gave to me. It was a padded envelope with a box in it. The envelope had been sealed with red wax and there was the impression of a scorpion in the wax. It was addressed to M. Kantari in Korhogo, a town in the north of the Ivory Coast, where I was expecting to be sent any day now to sort out a ‘small problem'.

‘How d’you know I was going to Korhogo?’ I asked, and Fat Paul looked freaked.

‘You gonna Korhogo…when?’

‘I don’t know. I’ve got a job to do there. I’m waiting for instructions to come through.’

‘No, no – this not for Korhogo.’

‘That’s what it says here.’

‘No. You deliver it to someone who take it to Korhogo.’

‘I see,’ I said, nodding. ‘Is that strange, Fat Paul?’

‘Not strange. Not strange at all,’ he said quickly. ‘He gonna give you some money for the package. You go takin’ it up Korhogo side then you up there wid the money and we down here wid…’

‘Waiting for me to come back down again.’

‘That’s right. We got no time for waitin'.’

‘Why don’t you deliver it yourself?’

‘I need white man for the job,’ said Fat Paul. ‘The drop ibbe made by ‘nother white man, he only wan’ deal with white man. He say African people in this kind work too nervous, too jumpy, they makin’ mistake, they no turnin’ up on time, they go for bush, they blowin’ it. He no deal with African man.’

‘There can’t be that many white people up in Korhogo.’

‘Ten, mebbe fiftee', ‘s ‘nough.’

‘The drop? Why did you call it the drop?’

‘You callin’ it transaction. I callin’ it a drop.’

‘Where and when is this drop?’

‘Outside of Abidjan, west side, down by the lagoon Ebrié, eight-thirty tomorrow night.’

‘Why there?’

‘The white man no wan’ come to Abidjan, he no wanbe seen there, he have his own problems, I donno why.’

‘Why don’t you just go to Korhogo and cut out the middlemen?’

‘We’ – he pointed to himself who could easily pass for plural – ‘we no wango Korhogo, too much far, too much long.’

‘Well, it sounds funny to me, Fat Paul. Nothing criminal. Remember.’

‘I rememberin’ everythin’ and this no funny thin', you know. You jes’ givin’ a man a package an’ he givin’ you some money. You takin’ you pay from the money an’ givin’ us the rest. I’m not seein’ anythin’ crinimal,’ he said, getting the word wrong and not bothering to go over it again.

‘What’s in it?’ I asked rattling the package, and Fat Paul didn’t say anything. ‘A video cassette?’

Fat Paul nodded and said, ‘What you puttin’ on a video cassette that’s criminal?’

‘How about child pornography?’

‘Hah!’ He sprung back from the table. ‘This nothin’ like that kind thin'.’

I gave him his package.

‘You not gonna do it?’

‘I’m going to think about it.’

He smiled and raised his eyebrows.

‘Mebbe I’m helpin’ you think. I’m payin’ two hundred and fifty thousand CFA do this job, a thousand dollars, you understandin’ me?’

‘But none of it upfront?’

‘You workin’ for African people now, we no have the money ‘fore somebody give it. Not like white people, they always havin’ money…’

‘Well, now I know what you want, I’ll think about it.’

‘You got any questions you wan’ aks?’

Tomorrow. I’ll have some questions tomorrow.’

‘You tekkin’ long time think up you questions. How many you got?’

‘If I knew that I’d ask them now.’

‘You jes’ give the man the package. And the man’ – he slowed up for my benefit – ‘the man he give you an envelope, wax sealed like this one. In the envelope is the money. You don’t have to coun’ it. Just tek it. Give one hand, tek the other. Is ver’ simple thin'. I mean, Kwabena he could do it without troublin’ he head ‘cept he black. He only jes’ come down from the trees. Still scratching hisself under the arms. No be so, Kwabena?’

Kwabena grinned at Fat Paul’s insult with a twinkling set of ivories and so little malevolence it would concern me if he was my bodyguard.

‘Don’ be fool',’ said Fat Paul, reading my thoughts, ‘he lookin’ kind and nice like mama’s bo’ but, you see, he got no feelin'. He got no feelin’ one way ‘rother. You go run wid the money. I say, “Kwabena, Mr Bruce go run with the money.” He find you, tek you and brek you things off like spider thing. You got me?’

‘No plobrem,’ said Kwabena slowly.

‘Time we goin',’ said Fat Paul, looking at a watch on a stretch-metal strap which was halfway up his forearm. ‘Leave Mr Bruce time for thinkin'. Time for thinkin’ all these questions he gonna aks. I’m goin’ rest, lie down, prepare mysel’ for the big game.’

Kwabena helped Fat Paul to his feet. The waist of his dark-blue trousers had been made to go around the widest part of his body so that the flies were a couple of feet long, the zipper coming from an upholsterer rather than a tailor. He was bare-ankled and wore slip-on shoes because he couldn’t get over his stomach to put on complicated things like socks and lace-ups.

‘I like you, Bruce,’ said Fat Paul.

‘How do you know?’

‘You smell nice,’ he said, and laughed. He laughed hard enough so that I hoped he wouldn’t bust his gut and he was still laughing when he left the shack, hitting the doorjamb a glancing blow and nearly bringing the whole thing down. A dog appeared at the door, attracted by the laughter, thinking it might mean good humour and scraps handed down with abandon. The barman hit him on the nose with a beer-bottle top and he got the picture and took off with his bum close to the floor, leaving us with only a thin thread of music on the radio for entertainment.

Chapter 2

With Fat Paul gone and the Ivoire Soir finished I sucked on the grande modèle and fingered my face which still had a few livid marks from a beating I’d taken nearly a month ago. This was just the surface damage and it reminded me why I was even passing the time of day with a lowlife like Fat Paul who deserved the kind of attention you give a dog turd on the pavement.

Heike, the half-English/half-German woman I loved, who’d got mixed up in the ugly piece of business I had been involved in last month, had left Africa and gone back to Berlin from where she’d written saying she was looking for work.

B.B., the overweight Syrian millionaire to whom I still owed money after my last job working for him, was employing me, not on my daily rate, but on a small monthly salary and some expenses, which made the little I owed him feel like a twenty-five-year mortgage.

I was supposed to be handling the sacking of a Dane called Kurt Nielsen who was running B.B.'s sheanut operation in Korhogo. This was what B.B. had called his ‘small problem in Korhogo’ which didn’t seem to be a problem at all, just a way of B.B. amusing himself by keeping me dangling on a string.

Kurt Nielsen had been messing with the local girls, keeping bad books and, worst of all, not calling B.B. I’d asked him what was wrong with playing around.

‘Thass what I’m saying, Bruise,’ B.B. had said. ‘He not playing. He fall in lov'. Dese girls you don’t fall in lov', you play. Is nice and light. You fall in lov’ an’ ever’ting spoil.’

B.B. didn’t want him sacked until he had a replacement which he was finding hard to get. That’s what he said anyway. I knew different. I knew it was because we’d agreed that I would start charging my daily rate when I’d got rid of Nielsen and B.B. hated the sound of my daily rate.

He’d made life sound attractive by offering an all-expenses-paid holiday in Grand Bassam until I was needed. Then I’d found that any expense was too much for B.B. and we’d been fighting over small change ever since. The only expense he considered legitimate were telephone calls which I had to make every day and which would finish with the same line: ‘Calm, Bruise. Wait small. Now is not de time.’

Bagado, my Beninois detective friend, who had suffered a cracked collar bone during our last job, had come out of plaster and into continued unemployment in Cotonou. He had no money and the resources of his extended family were already overextended. I sent him money which I was borrowing from my Russian friend, Vassili, who was also helping me run Helen, my cook, who, although she wasn’t cooking for me, was looking after a sick uncle of hers who needed medicine.

Moses, my driver, was with me but we couldn’t afford much expensive Ivorian petrol so the car stayed put and Moses practised whatever it was he felt he hadn’t perfected with the local girls. This was proving expensive for him and therefore for me, and I was threatening to cut out the middleman.

‘Who the middleman, Mr Bruce?’ he would ask.

‘You, Moses.’

He clapped his hands and laughed at this and went through a succession of deep thoughts without finding the hidden meaning.

In an ideal world Heike would come back. Something awkward and sharp amongst all the food that B.B. shovelled into himself would get caught in his throat and he’d pass on into a better world. Bagado would get his job back in the police force. Helen’s uncle would get better. I’d get some decent work and Moses would get a short sharp dose of the clap. Only the latter was a serious possibility.

So, I was bored – bored and broke. I needed something to do to take my mind off the things that were causing my brain to plod in tight circles, finding no answers to questions which didn’t have any. I needed money. Fat Paul made out he was going to solve both problems.

In the late afternoon I went for a nap in my cheap room in a house on the furthest outskirts of Grand Bassam. It was a narrow cell on the flat roof of an old unpainted concrete block which had no glass in any of the windows and whose shutters had been used for firewood a long time ago.

After I’d jerked awake for the seventh time it was dark. I got up and took two shots of whisky as a mouthwash and then another two to cure the motion sickness. I called B.B. and he gave me the ‘wall small’ routine again. I didn’t bother to check my answering machine at home in Cotonou, Benin, and instead I hit a place with beer and loud music called Le Cafard, the cockroach, a real sleazy joint for men who didn’t shave and women who smelled strongly of cheap sex. I had shaved and I didn’t buy any cheap sex, but people could tell I had the right temperament for the bar. I had le cafard, the blues, and they let me alone to get on with it.

I put away the last quarter of the bottle of whisky when I got back to my room and fainted into sleep, which came in short bursts of violent dreaming, and starts awake in blue-white flashes with instant fears of death, like travelling on a runaway subway train. I woke up face down, twisted in the sheet with sweat cold on my bare back. In the room the darkness was blacker than evil and the mosquitoes had found a note rarely played on the violin which stretched the brain to the thinness of fuse wire. I waited for dawn to paint itself into the room while I marvelled at the size and leatheriness of my tongue.

The bender, which I’d decided was my last, did me some good. I reckoned I’d bottomed out, which worried me because that was what politicians said about economic recessions when there was still some ways to go. I wrote down some pros and cons for doing Fat Paul’s work for him and although his offer still looked as attractive as a flophouse mattress, it was beginning to show some merits. You could sleep on it as long as you held your nose and it would only be for one night.

Sunday 27th October

‘You got it,’ said Fat Paul after we’d been through the drop details for the third time. He leaned over his sloping gut to slap the table top but didn’t make it. He settled a jewel-bitten hand on one of his pappy breasts.

He was dressed in the usual five square metres of face-slapping material. The blue and the white parakeets was off today. It was the red with green monkeys for Sunday. He snarled at Kwabena for a cigarette and took a handkerchief out and polished his face with it.

We were sitting at a table in my corner of the bar, which had annoyed Fat Paul because he had his back to the door and I had an angled view out of it down the beach to the sea. It was just coming up to one o’clock but Fat Paul had lost his appetite, maybe because it was hotter than yesterday with no rainfall for the last couple of days, or maybe he didn’t like his back unprotected. He only ordered four pineapple fritters.

‘It’s not what you’d call a regular piece of business,’ I said.

‘How so?’

‘One, the money. Two, the location for what you call “the drop”. Three, the contents of the envelope. Four, the characters involved.’

‘Characters?’ he asked.

‘Fat Paul, Silent George, Colossal Kwabena.’

‘Colossal?’

‘Very big.’

‘Is good word. I like it. Colossal,’ he said, trying it out for size. Then he changed, getting aggressive. ‘Whass wrong these people?’

‘What do George and Kwabena do?’

‘They my bodyguards.’

‘That’s my point,’ I said. ‘Why do you need your body guarded?’

‘I’m not so quick on my feet.’

‘Why do you need to be quick?’

‘I make money.’

‘Doing what?’

‘Videos.’

‘You got an office?’

He handed me a card which gave the company name as Abracadabra Video, Adabraka and an address on Kojo Thompson Road in Accra, Ghana. The company ran video cinemas. They specialized in showing action movies, mainly kickboxer, to local neighbourhoods. It was a lucrative business, there was a high cash turnover and hardly any overheads. A lot of people were interested in taking over the business but not paying for it. Kwabena provided the muscle to persuade them otherwise and if he couldn’t cope George leaned in with the old metal dog leg and people quietened down, talked sensible, played cards and drank beer as if nothing had been further from their mind.

‘You look like shit,’ said Fat Paul, irritated now and trying another strategy. Trying to get tough with a line I hadn’t heard before.

‘My mother loves me,’ I said without looking up.

‘You got no money,’ he said. ‘No money to chop.’

‘How do you know, Fat Paul?’

‘You let me buy you chop.’

‘You have to pay for what you want. Lunch lets you sit at the same table.’

‘You not workin’ for you’self.’

‘How do you know that too, Fat Paul?’

‘No self-respect,’ he said.

‘I suppose you think you know me pretty well?’

‘I know shit when I see it.’

‘I’ve got a good eye for it myself,’ I said, looking at his brow which was swollen as if recently punched. Beneath it his eye sockets had no contour and his piggy peepers looked black and aware. Sweat ran down his cheeks as if he was crying. He didn’t look as if anything could hurt him unless you tried to take away his plate.

‘You just give the man the package…’ intoned Fat Paul. I held up my hand.

‘Thanks, I’ve got it. Listen…’

‘No, no,’ he said. ‘You listen. First I show you where you mek the drop, out Abidjan west side, down by the lagoon Ebrié in pineapple plantation. You go there in the afternoon. The man he comin’ from the north, he comin’ late, he only get there after dark. You check the place, mekkin’ sure you comfortable. Then go down Tiegba side fifteen-minute drive, nice bar, you waitin’ there, the other man come. Relax some, drink beer, look at the lagoon. They’s a village there on legs, ver’ nice, the tourists like’t ver’ much. Then the time come. You ver’ smooth now widde beer and the pretty place an’ you gettin’ in you car an mek the drop. ‘S very easy thing, you know.’ He sat back and put a hand up to his face and dipped the little finger in the corner of his mouth.

‘Most nights,’ I said, ‘my motor reflexes put on a good show. I wake up in the mornings alive even if I don’t feel it. Then, if I haven’t been kissing the bottle too hard I find I have the coordination to stand up and move around. Getting somewhere, putting my hand inside my shirt and pulling out a package and giving it to someone is a cinch for a man with my kind of skills. What’s more, I have the in-built ability to take something with my left hand while I’m giving something else with my right. I can also count and eat a biscuit at the same time, but you tell me this job doesn’t take such talent.’ I stopped while Fat Paul’s lip took on another cigarette. ‘Now you’re beginning to see you’re talking to someone who’s done a few things in life. Someone who knows the difference between a French-restaurant cheese and a curl of dogshit, someone who knows where the grass is greenest there’s twenty years of slurry underneath. So don’t pretend to me that this job’s a snap. Don’t tell me about relaxing with beers and a tourist village on legs and all I’ve got to do is give a man a package when the postman does it every day and nobody gives him two hundred and fifty thousand CFA. Don’t tell me there’s no snags when there’s money…’

‘Snags?’ Fat Paul interrupted. ‘What are these snags?’

‘Snags are problems, difficulties, obstacles.’

‘Snags,’ said Fat Paul, weighing the word on his tongue and giving me a good idea of what a cane toad with a bellyful of insects looks like. ‘Lemme write these snags down.’

He reached around him for a pen and paper and then pretended to write on the palm of his hand. He knew we were coming to it now. I could see him blinking the shrewdness out of his eyes.

‘Are you blackmailing somebody, Fat Paul?’ I asked.

‘Keep you voice down,’ he said, looking up at the barman who didn’t understand English. ‘Blackmail? I not blackmailin’ nobody. This no blackmailin’ thing. This a secret thing is all.’

‘What sort of secret?’

‘I’m tellin’ you that, it no a secret no more.’

‘I asked you what sort of secret, not what it is. Personal secret, political secret, economic secret, arms secret…?’

‘Is a business secret.’

‘Show me the cassette.’

Fat Paul surprised me by flicking his fingers at Kwabena, who took the package out from under his shirt and gave it to him. With one eye closed to the cigarette smoke he broke the wax seal on the package, took out a wad of paper around the cassette, threw the empty envelope on the table. The heavy-duty envelope was still addressed to M. Kantari, Korhogo. He handed me the cassette. There was nothing unusual about it. The cassette didn’t look as if it had been tampered with or opened. I couldn’t see anything in it apart from 180 minutes of magnetic tape.

‘See?’ said Fat Paul.

I folded the wad of paper around the cassette, put it back in the envelope and handed it back to Fat Paul, shaking my head.

‘Now you jes’ tell me two things,’ said Fat Paul, ready for it now and finished with the game. ‘One, if you gonna do it. Two, how much you wan’ for doin’ it.’

‘A million,’ I said, ‘CFA. Four thousand dollars, you understanding me?’

The quality of the silence that followed could have been exported to any library in the world. George glanced across Fat Paul’s inflammable hair at Kwabena who looked as if he’d taken a blow from a five-pound lump hammer and was wondering whether to fall backwards. Fat Paul clasped his bratwurst fingers with the implanted rings and checked his watch, not for the time but because it seemed to be hurting him, cutting into his forearm. He pushed it down to this wrist and shook it. He breathed and kissed in the smoke from the glued cigarette on his lip in little puffs. He breathed out and the smoke baffled over his bottom lip.

‘Too much. We find cheaper white man.’

‘Go ahead. It’d be interesting to see the one you get who’s going to make a drop of a ‘video of a business secret’ at night in the middle of nowhere with money involved and at seven hours’ notice, unless you can delay it some more?’

Fat Paul suddenly started to manage his hair with both hands like a forgetful toupé-wearer. He settled back down again.

‘Seven hundred and fifty…’ he started and I shook my head. He knew it. I had him down on the floor with both feet on his fat neck.

‘Show him the place,’ he said, smiling, and in that instant I saw that he thought he had won. He clicked it away with his fingers and Kwabena produced a stick of red sealing wax and a lighter and melted off a pool on to the envelope. Fat Paul planted his ring in it as it cooled and then blew on his finger.

‘I need some expenses.’

‘For a million CFA, you supplyin’ you own expenses.’

‘So where do we meet tomorrow?’ I asked. ‘Grand Bassam, one o’clock. There’s an old warehouse lagoon side Quartier France, near the Old Trading Houses. You see the car. You find us.’

Chapter 3

Time was speeding up, now that the theoretical pay scale had jumped a few points, so I went back to my room and lay down to get used to it. There was a lot to do if I didn’t want to drift into this exchange unprepared and I reckoned some thinking might help and, although I could do it on my feet, I preferred to be on my back with something liquid in a glass on my chest.

I didn’t want to use my own car for the drop. It was a mess, which attracted attention, and it had Benin plates which are beacon red on a white background. I’d have to hire a car. My Visa card was in a hospital burns unit somewhere recovering from a seared hologram and couldn’t take a day’s car hire without going into intensive care. B.B. was going to have to be tapped. If he didn’t come through then I was going to have to rely on the money from the drop materializing. If it did, I could pay the car hire but I was still going to have to be careful. Fat Paul looked like the kind of businessman who, when he got money, thought gross rather than net and let his suppliers talk things over with George and Kwabena.

I found I was thinking more about the money than I was about what was supposed to happen between now and getting it, so I walked to the nearby crappy hotel, which doubled as a whorehouse, where I made my phone calls. There was a woman and a young girl in the lobby, both painted up like Russian dolls. The older and larger woman was asleep with her head on the back of her chair, while the girl sat on her hands and looked across the room as if there was a teacher telling her something useful. She was that young. There was no teacher, but some broken furniture behind the door in the corner which was gradually being used for firewood and above it all an old wooden fan turned with a ticking sound without disturbing any air.

The madame zeroed the meter without looking at it. I dialled B.B.'s number in Accra. She moved off with a sashay shuffle of such indolence that it took her twelve of my dialling attempts to reach the end of the counter which was three yards long. She was interrupted by a large-bellied African in a white shirt with the cuffs halfway up his forearms and a man’s purse in his armpit. He nodded at the young girl and the madame’s arm struck out for a room key. The man took it and followed the young girl’s neat steps out of the lobby.

The satellite took my call and beamed it into Accra. B.B. picked up the phone before it had started ringing.

‘My God,’ he said, on hearing my voice. ‘Bruise?’

‘Yes.’

‘My God. Is ver’ strange ting. I’m tinking ‘bout you dan…you on de phone.’

‘A miracle.’

‘Yairs,’ he said, and I heard him slapping the wooden arm of his chair. ‘What you want?’

‘I’m still here.’

‘I see…’ he said, and I heard his fidgeting for a cigarette, the lighter snapping on and the first drag fighting its way down the skeins of phlegm in his lungs.

‘I’m short of money,’ I said.

‘Ever’body short…Ka-ka-ka-Mary!’ he roared for his housegirl, popping one of my eardrums so that it sang like a gnat. ‘Ashtray,’ he said, chewing over a forgotten sandwich in his jowls.

‘I want you to go to Danish Embassy tomorrow. Ask about Kurt. You got passport detail I give you?’

‘Ask dem. See if dere’s problem. You know, mebbe he haff problem back home.’

‘You’ve got a replacement?’

‘You want to make it easy for yourself.’

‘I’m thinking,’ he said. ‘I’m thinking I mek your job easy.’

‘I’m sure you were.’

‘What you say?’ he asked, catching that change of tone and not liking it.

‘About money, you mean?’

‘Not about de monny! Bloddy monny! Dis ting. Dis monny ting. Gah!’ I sensed him clutching at a twist in his gut. ‘Yuh!’ He sobbed and then relaxed. ‘My God. Stop talking de monny. I know de monny. You yong people got no pay-scharn, you always tinking de monny, always tinking de next ting. You never tinking calm, you always runnin', runnin'. You wok for me, you learn, you learn the ‘vantage of pay-scharn. De African he know it but you no’ learnin’ from him, you tinking he know not’ing, but I tell you, he know tings you never know. Wait small!’ he roared and slammed down the phone.

There was going to have to be some money at the drop.

The young girl came back into the lobby, the guy behind her hitching his trousers after what must have been a knee-trembler in the passageway the time it took. He left. She sat down. I called my home number in Cotonou, Benin. The madame walked over and the girl handed her the money and the key. Helen picked up the phone in my house and I told her to make sure Bagado was there between five and seven tomorrow evening. There were some phone messages for me and she put the receiver on the machine and turned it on.

The four messages were all from a guy in England called Martin Fall. Two on Friday, another on Saturday morning and the last when he was roaring drunk on Saturday night. There was nothing from Heike which was crushing. I thought about calling her, but the last time her mother had answered and Heike wouldn’t come to the phone. Her mother covered for her, but I could tell she was there. I could even see her waving those long slim arms of hers, the big hands open, the face screwed up.

I started dialling Martin Fall’s home number in Hampshire. He was an ex-Army officer who’d quit after ten years in the service and set up his own security company, based in London. He advised despots on how to stay in power, provided weapons training for elite guardsmen and, I didn’t know for sure, he probably brokered the odd arms deal as well. He was pretty sharp business-wise; he knew he wouldn’t get many repeat orders from these countries when the advice broke down and the despots got what was coming to them so he’d branched out into the commercial world. He now gave corporate executives training on how to be tough, aggressive and competitive. This, as far as I could tell, meant waking them up at four in the morning to drop them in rafts in the middle of the North Sea and letting them cope with the busiest shipping lanes in the world for a couple of days.

He’d got into corporations at a high level and, with a mixture of a fabricated pukka voice and a tough exterior, had persuaded them to let him handle their security arrangements worldwide. So he advised these companies with offices and executives in dodgy parts of the world on how to avoid being blown up or kidnapped.

He’d given me some training late at night once when I’d walked into his study and had found him nodding off in a chair with a glass of whisky in his hand. I’d tapped him on the shoulder and had found myself flat on my back with a forearm across my neck, a jagged whisky glass an inch from my eyeball and Martin’s horrible breath in my face.

He’d married an old girlfriend of mine called Anne, and we’d met quite a few times. When I said I was leaving the old country he’d decided that I could be ‘his man in Africa'. This had meant nothing until now. I got through and told him to call me back, hearing the word ‘cheapo’ as I banged down the phone.

‘You should listen to your fucking answering machine,’ he started off sweetly.

‘I did.’

‘Once every three days. You must be rushed off your bloody feet. What are you doing out there? This is an Ivory Coast number you’ve given me.’

‘I’m on holiday.’

‘You anywhere near Abidjan?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good. You’ve got a job.’

‘I know that.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I’m being paid to sit around by one guy and I’m doing a job for another tonight.’

‘Well, you’ve just got your third job. I’ve been approached by a guy called – hold on a sec – Samuel Collins of Collins and Driberg. They’re diamond traders with offices in Hatton Garden and Antwerp. His son, Ron – is that Ronald? Maybe not – anyway he’s twenty-seven years old, young, naive and impressionable; no, I dunno, but young Ron is going on an African trip to buy diamonds. He flies to Abidjan Monday October twenty-eighth on BA whatever, getting in at nineteen hundred hours, I think, but it doesn’t matter because you’re not meeting him at the airport. There’s a couple of fixers who are going to do that.

‘He’s going to stay at the Novotel, which is good because we have an account with them and you’re going to stay there too. He’s due to go to a place called Tortiya which is up in the north somewhere, then he either flies out of Abidjan to Sierra Leone where the military are putting up some confiscated goods for tender or he goes to Angola. You don’t have to go to Angola because I’ve got about twenty people out there already but you do have to go to Sierra if he goes. OK?’

‘What do I have to do?’

‘Look after him. His dad’s worried about him.’

‘He’s twenty-seven.’

‘A conservative estimate of his father’s wealth is two hundred and fifty million.’

‘Another poverty-stricken bum.’

‘That’s the ticket. Straight to the point, Bruce, that’s why I picked you. There’s one small catch.’

‘How small?’

‘Three hundred a day plus expenses.’

‘How small’s the catch, clever bastard?’

Touchy.’

‘Telling me the money before the catch.’

‘Play the game, Bruce.’

‘The catch, Martin.’

‘It really is small. You can’t tell him that you’re looking after him. He’s an arrogant little fucker and he won’t have any of it. That’s the catch. Small, isn’t it?’

‘I’m not going to follow him, for Christ’s sake. A white man following another white man in a sea of black faces. You’ve got to be kidding me?’

‘Get close to him, Bruce. Be his friend. You’re good at that.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I like you.’

‘You like everybody.’

‘I didn’t like that Somalian bastard.’

‘He’s dead now.’

‘Ye-e-e-s,’ he said, as if he might have had something to do with it.

The madame was leaning on the end of the desk with her eyelids falling and her head jerking up when the door banged open and an African in full robes stood in the doorway and roared with laughter so that I looked around the busted furniture in the lobby for a punchline. She pulled off the same key and gave it to him. The girl didn’t even bother to look up but stood and set off out of the lobby. The man left a strong smell of cheap spirit behind him, as if he’d been drinking twelve-year-old aftershave. He gave us another roar from the passageway which didn’t sound so much like fun as stoking himself up for the big one.

‘You still there?’ asked Martin.

‘Where are you going to send the money to?’

‘You’re that short, are you?’

‘I am, yes, and it’s tricky to be somebody’s friend if you’re cadging drinks all night.’

‘There’s a Barclays in Abidjan, we’ll send it there. A couple of thousand, OK? Give us your passport number.’

I gave him the number.

‘I won’t be able to go to Sierra.’

‘You’ll find a way for three hundred a day.’

‘Maybe you’re right.’

‘That just about wraps it up then. Give us a call when it’s over.’

‘Or, if I have any problems.’

‘You won’t have any problems. It’s a piece of the proverbial. The easiest money you’ve ever made.’

‘Somebody else said that to me today.’

‘You’re on a roll, Bruce. Enjoy it. I’ll book you in the Novotel tomorrow night; you’re on expenses from then on in.’

‘You couldn’t open up that expense account today, could you?’

‘That’s a little unconventional, Bruce.’

‘I need to hire a car. Nothing to do with you. It’d be a help. Deduct it from my fee.’

‘You know what you need?’

‘No, but you’re going to tell me and don’t say “a proper job”.’

‘You need a credit card.’

‘One with credit on it, you mean?’

Silence from Martin Fall who knew that everybody was in debt but that there was always cash…somewhere.

‘I’m confused,’ he said after some moments. ‘I thought you were on holiday and had a couple of jobs.’

‘I am. I do. But no money.’

Martin said he’d have the expense account open in five minutes. We guffed around a bit more, I asked about Anne, and we hung up.

The door from the passageway opened, the handle hitting the wall hard, and the robed-up African moved through the lobby on the end of a typhoon. The girl came down the passageway doing up her wrap and looking frightened. The madame had come off her elbows on the end of the desk and was standing with her fists balled into where her waist probably was. She said something in her own language which woke the older prostitute, who recognized the tone. The three of them set to it.

I phoned the Novotel from the middle of the cat fight and booked a car for that afternoon. Then I realized what all the broken furniture was about. The madame reached into the pile and brought out a piece of board and gave the girl three hefty whacks on the bottom before I dropped the phone and took the board out of her hand. She turned on me with something in her eyes which I would have preferred to have been murder and I threatened her with the board.

‘You pay for girl!’ she shouted in French.

‘I don’t want the girl.’

‘He want the girl’ – she pointed out of the door – ‘but he drink too much, he see the goods, he try but he no pay. You pay.’

‘Why hit the girl?’

She blinked a few times at that because she wasn’t sure why she was hitting the girl. ‘You want to go hit him for me?’

I left money on the counter, which she rushed at, and got out of there leaving the madame pelting the older prostitute with drawbacks of the trade while the girl dropped on her haunches in the corner and cried.