ROBERT WILSON

Blood is Dirt

For Jane and my mother and in memory of João

Contents

Cover

Title Page

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About the author

by the same author

Praise for Robert Wilson

Copyright

About the Publisher

1
Cotonou, Benin. Friday 16th February.

The sheep stood in the car park looking at its African owner with interest but no concern, which was a mistake. The animal had arrived from the market on a moped lying across the lap of its executioner whose sackful of knives was resting on the sheep’s back. He’d lifted the sheep off with a gentleness normally reserved for sick children. The sheep was no more than dazed at seeing life passing it by a little quicker than usual. The butcher tethered it to the bumper of a Land Rover and arranged his knives on the sack.

A boy arrived in a sweat on a bicycle which he leaned against the wall. He ran into the building. His feet slapped on the tiles in the stairwell. A while later the feet came back down again. And a while after that someone wearing steel tips on their shoes followed. They appeared in the car park.

The sheep looked from the owner to the boy and then to the very tall, athletic Lebanese with the steel tips who was about to be the new owner but with one drastic difference that the sheep had not, as yet, rumbled. The Lebanese inspected the sheep, drumming the fingers of one hand on his washboard stomach and using the other hand to spin his gold chain around his neck. He nodded.

The African took hold of a horn on the sheep’s head and wiped a blade across its neck opening up a red, woolly grimace. The animal was puzzled by the movement and its consequences. It fell on its side. Blood trickled down the concrete ramp of the car park, skirted a large patch of black oil and pooled in the dirt of the road where a dog licked it quickly before it soaked into the sand. The Lebanese clipped away.

I’d come out of the office to catch what could hardly be called a breeze that was playing around on the balcony, but it was better than sitting in the rise of one’s own fetor. I had nothing on my plate which was why I was taking an interest in alfresco butchery and it was lucky I did. Glancing up from the twitching life struggling to get away from the future mutton roast, my eyes connected with the only white man in the street. He was looking at the sign hanging on my first floor balcony which said ‘M & B’ and below that ‘Enquêtes et Recouvrements’, ‘Investigations and Debt Collection'.

The white man was wearing a cream linen suit which must have seemed like a great idea in the shop window in London but out here quite quickly achieved the crumpled, downtrodden look of a copywriter or a graphic artist. He slipped a card into his pocket and was about to walk across the car park when he noticed the dead sheep with accusatory eyes and lolling head. The sight of it jerked something between his shoulder blades. His head flicked up, he looked left and right and went on to his back foot, preparing for a cartoon scram. The butcher, who was kneeling down by now, took out a wooden tube and with a small knife made a nick in the back leg above the sheep’s elbow. He inserted the tube and blew down it. The boy stood adjacent with a machete in his hand almost trailing on the ground. At a nod from the butcher he raised the machete. I pushed myself off the balcony rail and shouted, ‘Yes!’ at the white man and pointed at the entrance to the building below me. It gave him just enough courage to skitter past the sheep and gave me half a chance at our first client in more than a week. The boy beat on the belly of the sheep with the flat of the machete blade. Whump, whump, whump.

I stepped back from the balcony into the office. Bagado, my partner, who had been a detective on the Cotonou force up until a few years back, looked up from behind the single bare desk in the room. The door opened without being knocked.

‘What the hell is going on out there?’ asked the white man.

‘They’re butchering a sheep.’

Whump, whump, whump.

‘A sheep?’

‘What did you think it was? A white man?’

‘No, I … Jesus. What’s he blowing down its leg for?’

‘Get some air under the hide. Makes it easier to skin.’

‘Don’t they have a shop or anything?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘I don’t think they have, Mr …?’

‘Briggs. Napier Briggs.’

‘Bruce Medway,’ I said, without holding out my hand.

‘I know,’ he said. ‘Why the hell do you think I’m here?’

‘I’ve never been a great guesser.’

‘No, what I meant was …’

‘I know what you meant.’

He ran his hand through some hair on his head in a way that made me think it had been a lot thicker until recently.

‘I’ve lost some money,’ he said, looking shambolic enough so that we’d believe him. ‘A great deal of money. I want you to get it back.’

We didn’t say anything. I looked him up and down and thought about two things. The first, his name. How to make ‘Briggs’ more interesting – stick ‘Napier’ in front of it, get yourself an eyepatch and a black silver skull-topped cane. The man was missing some props. The second thing was whether he had enough money left to pay us to find what he’d lost.

Bagado’s head came out of the wreckage of his blue mac like a tortoise that’s caught a whiff of spring. He had his hands steepled and the spired fingers were itching up and down a scar he had in the cleft of his chin.

‘How much is a great deal?’ he asked, and Napier jumped as high as he had when he’d seen the dead sheep. He rushed at me and drove me out on to the balcony.

‘Who the fuck is he?’

‘My partner, Bagado. M & B. Medway and Bagado.’

‘He’s not …?’ he asked with ferocious intensity.

‘What?’

Briggs wiped the sweat off his face with his hand and flicked it on the ground. He dropped on to the balcony rail with his elbows and looked over. He reared back.

‘Oh, my God.’

The sheep’s intestines were out of the belly now. They slipped and jostled against each other, still warm. The sheep was on its back, skinned, the hide underneath it to keep the meat clean.

‘Take a seat, Mr Briggs,’ I said. ‘Take a seat in here.’

I got him on to a chair. Bagado raised his eyebrows.

‘Coffee?’ I asked.

‘Black,’ he said. ‘I mean black-black.’

‘White,’ said Bagado, ‘au lait.’

I roared down the stairwell to the gardien who came up to take 2000 CFA off me and I added three croissants to the order. Briggs moved his chair back from the desk. He took out a packet of Camels from his linen jacket which had now become a relief map of a mountainous desert in the thick unsliced heat. He took three matches to light up and flicked each dud through the hole in the wall where the air conditioner should have been.

At least he wasn’t overwhelmed by our new office. The single plant on the floor in its concrete pot, the view of the neighbouring block out of one window, a mango tree and a tailor’s shack out of the other, a local stationer’s calendar on the wall, and the two of us evidently with only one desk to sit behind, didn’t even have any schoolboy chic let alone adult consequence.

‘Ours is a new business,’ said Bagado, trying to pull some cheer into his voice.

‘Delicately balanced between start-up and instant bankruptcy,’ I added.

‘A great deal of money could be as much as …’

‘… five hundred dollars,’ I said. ‘We need perspective, Mr Briggs.’

He sucked on the Camel, pulling an inch of it into his lungs without even glazing over. His yellow cigarette fingers were shaking and his thumb flickered against the filter. He was tall and thin. The sort who could eat like a pig and never get themselves over 150 pounds, the sort who kickstarted the day with four espressos and five Camels, the sort who could live off whatever their latest stomach ulcer was secreting. His eyes were sunken and dark, his face lined deeply with creases that dropped from the outsides of his eyes to the corners of his mouth. He tugged at his tie, which was down by his sternum, as if it was crimping his windpipe.

‘You do do this kind of thing?’ he asked. ‘Getting my money back. I mean, that is your … bag?’

‘We run a debt-collection service. We call it debt to be polite. People feel better about returning money which has been “extensively borrowed” rather than “stolen”.’

He nodded and threaded an arm through the back of the chair, trying to break it off.

‘Has your money been “extensively borrowed''?’ asked Bagado.

‘No. It’s been stolen. I’ve been ripped off like you wouldn’t believe.’

‘Oh, we would, Mr Briggs,’ said Bagado. ‘Have no fear of that, we would.’

Napier Briggs screwed the cigarette into the corner of his mouth and struggled out of his jacket as if he’d been strapped in there and we were a paying audience. He sat back exhausted with one wrist still stuck in a sleeve’s gullet. Bagado opened a drawer and produced an empty sardine tin, which was the office ashtray. He nudged it towards him. Briggs tore his fist out of the sleeve and whipped the cigarette out of his mouth, taking a lungful of quality filter. He lit another from the butt and crushed it out in the tin and licked and blew on a finger. He looked blasted by sun, booze and nerves. His skin was stretched tight over his skull, and the remains of his blond hair looked as if it had been stitched in. His lower teeth were stained brown from nicotine and bitumen coffee.

‘How much money, Mr Briggs? You didn’t say.’

‘One million eight hundred and fifty-seven thousand and small … dollars.’

‘Gold bars in a trunk? Cash in a suitcase? Diamonds in a condom?’

Napier Briggs bent over and gripped his forehead. The pain and suffering of money loss getting the better of him for a moment. A man bereaved. You’d have seen more control at an English graveside.

‘Take your time, Mr Briggs. Ours has been passing slowly enough without you,’ said Bagado. ‘Begin at the beginning; now that we know the end we just need to fill in the middle. Colouring by numbers. It couldn’t be easier. What do you do for a living? That’s a start.’

He took a card from his wallet and flipped it across the desk at us.

‘Napier Briggs Associates Ltd. Shipbrokers,’ read Bagado. ‘How many associates?’

‘One.’

‘Who’s that?’

‘A sleeping one. Nonexecutive. Nothing to do with the business. Just an arrangement.’

‘So a one-man band,’ I said, ‘with nearly two million dollars in liftable cash.’

‘A specialist in chemical, and clean and dirty fuel transportation,’ read Bagado. ‘You didn’t get muddled up in a Bonny Light Crude scam, did you, Mr Briggs?’

‘What’s a Bonny Light Crude scam?’

‘It’s not as cheerful as it sounds.’

‘Businessmen come here,’ I said, ‘they get introduced to people who are close personal friends of the president of the Nigerian National Oil Corporation. They visit offices with an NNOC brass plate on the wall. They part with money to register their company as a buyer of unbelievably cheap Nigerian crude oil. They part with money for advance expenses and ship’s bunkers. They part with money for a bill of lading for a few hundred thousand barrels of Nigerian crude that doesn’t exist. That’s a Bonny Light Crude scam.’

‘I take it you haven’t done business in West Africa before, Mr Briggs?’ asked Bagado. Napier looked up, confused, too many things bowling around in his head. ‘You specialize in dirty fuel transportation but you don’t know what a Bonny Light Crude scam is.’

‘No. Yes. I see what you’re getting at.’

‘The truth, Mr Briggs, that’s what we want to get at. That way we can help you. Many of these scams sound incredible in the telling and absurd on paper, but if you’re involved in them they become a part of your life, a part of your business hopes and aspirations. You’ve no need to be coy about …’

‘… my greed?’ asked Napier, his head tilted to one side like an intelligent dog.

‘Be brutal with yourself, by all means,’ said Bagado. ‘But tell us what happened too.’

‘I received a letter from a man who described himself as a senior accountant at the Ministry of Finance of the Benin Republic living and working in Porto Novo.’

‘Do you have this letter?’

‘The letter,’ said Napier, surfing over Bagado’s question, ‘offered me a percentage of something over thirty million dollars. The money came from overinvoicing on a contract awarded to a foreign company.’

‘All you had to do,’ Bagado cut in, ‘was supply them with signed letterheads, signed invoices and the name of your bank along with the account number and telephone/fax number.’

Napier Briggs sat rigid, Bagado’s words as good as a glance across a crowded room of Gorgons.

‘Hundreds of these letters are coming out of Nigeria every week. What’s happened to you Mr Briggs is that you’ve been four-one-nined.’

‘Four-one-nined?’

‘Obtaining Goods by False Pretences, section four-one-nine of the Nigerian Criminal Code. You really haven’t done much business in West Africa, Mr Briggs.’

‘I’ve done some deals,’ said Napier, finding a carat of professional pride from somewhere, and then giving himself away by scratching the crown of his head and picking at imaginary specks on his face.

‘The senior accountant at the Ministry of Finance in Benin, did he come to you via one of your successful deals … as a reward for something, perhaps?’

If we’d been impressed by the range of Napier’s nervous tics before, now we were spellbound by the sheer speed with which his hands shifted over his face and head. He tugged his ears, scratched his head, picked at the side of his nose, smoothed his eyebrows, pulled at the point of his chin, pinched his eyelids, the cigarette changing hands all the time, not having enough to do, he could have used six or seven smokes to keep himself occupied.

‘Why don’t you just show us the letter, Mr Briggs?’ I asked.

‘Napier. For Christ’s sake, it’s Napier.’

‘Napier?’

He lit another cigarette from the butt, and dragged on the stub, hauling the most acrid smoke deep down into his lungs. Bagado nudged the tin again, wincing at what the X-rays must look like. Napier brutalized the tin with the butt and walked to the window holding his forehead with his free hand as if the nicotine rush might drop him.

‘Mr Briggs,’ said Bagado, still not comfortable with Napier, ‘I’m not one for turning down custom. As you can see, we need the money. But, in this case, I think you would be better served, and I will write a letter of introduction, by going back to Nigeria to see a man called Colonel Adjeokuta. He has set up an investigation bureau within the Lagos police force specializing in 419 cases. He knows how these gangs operate, he has case histories, he knows some of the gang members, he has some of them available for comment in the Kirikiri Maximum Security Prison in Lagos, some of them are on death row and are interested …’

‘I want a private investigation,’ said Napier Briggs, in a quiet intense voice that seemed to have stopped the traffic for a moment. ‘Anyway, this is a Benin thing.’

‘It’s a Lagos gang using a Benin scenario. Porto Novo is on the border. There are many crime links between Benin and Nigeria. Stolen cars, hi-fi, petrol, drugs …’

‘I don’t want the Nigerians involved.’

‘I’m half Nigerian myself, Mr Briggs.’

‘Then perhaps you’ll know why.’

‘Do you mean the Nigerian authorities?’

‘No,’ he said, his head seeming to operate independently of his neck, the puppeteer getting his fingers crossed. The three of us exchanged code through the volumes of smoke leaking out of Napier.

‘They used the letterheads to clear out your account?’ I asked, trying a new line.

‘They said the invoices would show goods and services I’d supplied,’ said Napier, ‘the letterheads would be used to give covering information. They’d put the whole lot through the system and effect a transfer. They needed a foreign company account to pull it off.’

‘What were you doing with nearly two million dollars in your account?’

‘They were freight payments from contracts and time charters and I’d had some good months on the spot market. It was all money due to go out to the shipowners in the New Year … apart from my two per cent.’

‘Timely,’ I said. ‘All that money being there, Napier?’

‘Not for me. Not for my owners.’

‘Who would have known about that kind of money being in there?’

‘The charterers, the owners, the bank … myself.’

‘You have someone else in your office?’

‘Karen. Out of the question, she’s been with me for years.’

‘She’d have known, though?’

‘Yes.’

‘Your associate?’

‘I told you. Nonexec. Remember?’

‘Do you have a wife, an ex, a girlfriend, a partner in life?’

‘Divorced. Three years ago.’

‘Bitter?’

‘This isn’t relevant.’

‘You’re not giving us much to go on this end, Napier. I’m just coming at it from a different angle. Did your wife know about your business?’

‘She used to.’ ‘You talked about it with her?’

‘She was a broker. She covered the Mediterranean small ships market.’

‘Was there anyone else involved at that time?’

‘Back off,’ Napier snarled. ‘This is none of …’

‘It’s only a question. Has your company always been called Napier Briggs Associates?’

‘No. It used to be Atkin Briggs Shipbrokers Ltd.’

‘What happened to Atkin?’

‘Blair Atkin.’ He said it as if he’d just got a mouthful of coffee grounds.

‘Your wife ran off with Blair?’

Napier had his back to us now, his hands above his head, leaning against the window, two fingers trailing smoke.

‘Yes,’ he said, taut as a drum skin.

‘You’re sure this isn’t relevant?’

‘They split up a year later. I haven’t seen or heard from her since. Nor has … anyway, she was a bitch.’

‘Was?’ asked Bagado.

‘Still is. I doubt it was the kind of expertise she could drop.’

‘You broke with her?’

‘She broke with me. I was very bitter about it. It bust up the marriage, tore the company in half, screwed up lives, all because she couldn’t keep her knickers on. Now let’s forget my wife, my ex-wife. She’s not involved. She’s out of the picture.’

‘How do you suggest we get ourselves into the picture, Napier? No letter. No proof. Scant information which we have to wring out of you and you turn down the offer of the Lagos fraud squad. What do you want us to do? Hang around on street corners in downtown Lagos looking at people’s back pockets? Time-consuming. Expensive. How much money have you got on you? Maybe not much beyond your own expenses. You’re not giving us anything, Napier. Chuck us a bone, for God’s sake. Spill your guts or bow out. We’ve got some paperclip chains to make.’

‘Perhaps Mr Briggs is concerned that he’s done something illegal,’ said Bagado. Napier kicked himself back off the window and turned on him. ‘Transferring funds from overinvoicing on a government contract. Whose money is it?’

‘Ah, yes,’ said Napier, backing down, leaning against the window, easing another smoke out, keeping the chain going. ‘Embarrassing.’

‘What percentage did they offer you?’

‘Forty. Thirty-five for …’

‘Who was the other five for?’

‘Someone called Dan Emanalo. He doesn’t exist, nor does the company he works for.’

‘Which was?’

‘Chemiclean Limited. I supplied them with chemicals in drums. They had a government contract to supply sewage treatment systems.’

‘But they didn’t exist?’

‘No.’

‘But they miraculously paid you for supplying the chemicals?’

Napier Briggs fell silent. He wasn’t a topnotch liar. He was pretty good at shutting up or spinning out half truths and he was an outstanding smoker, but lying … he just didn’t have it.

‘You’re binding up on us again, Napier.’

‘I have to think about this.’

‘Nothing’s going out of this room, Napier. Strictly P and C and all that.’

‘Where’s that coffee?’ he asked.

‘Coming.’

Napier clasped the back of his neck and tried to squeeze the anguish out.

‘Why can’t I think?’

‘Maybe you’re scared, Napier?’

‘Did you have particular need of this ten million?’ asked Bagado.

‘Ten million?’

‘Thirty-five per cent of thirty million dollars.’

‘Yes. No,’ said Napier, and his face crumpled. He was losing it. We sat in the silence left over by the traffic. The coffee and croissants arrived. Two cafes au lait for Bagado and I, and a double tarantula juice for Napier. He sipped it, rattling the cup back into the saucer each time. Thinking. Thinking. The brain turning and turning like a hamster’s wheel.

‘What did you make supplying the sewage treatment chemicals?’

‘Two per cent of the shipping, about three thousand dollars, but I did the product as well. Took five per cent of that. I don’t usually do product.’

‘Who did you get the product off?’

‘Dupont,’ he said, too quickly.

‘French Dupont?’

‘Yes, it was,’ he said, wanting to fill that out a bit more but having nothing else to say.

‘Sweet deal?’

‘Very.’

What are we talking about? Two hundred, three hundred grand.’

‘Something like that.’

‘Takes care of your running costs for a bit.’

‘Sure.’

‘Now, the ten million dollars, that’s different. That’s retirement money. Don’t have to push the pen any more, hump the phone to your ear. It can solve big problems, too, that kind of money.’

‘Like?’

‘Debts. Payoffs. Muscle.’

Napier slugged back the last dram of tar and refitted the cup. He lit another cigarette and threw the old butt out on to the balcony. He folded his jacket over his arm and shook his legs in his trousers, which were clinging to those parts where dogs like to stick their noses. He picked up his zip-top briefcase by the ear.

‘It’s like going to a shrink, Napier,’ I said. ‘You have to relive the trauma to get over the neurosis. Have a think about things. Straighten them out in your head. Come back and talk to us again.’

‘Do you have a home number?’ ‘I do, but I don’t give it out. This kind of business and a happy home life don’t go together. You’ve got a card, I take it?’

‘Yeah. The guy in the British High Commission gave it to me.’

‘We have an answering machine here. Office hours are eight a.m. to one p.m. and five p.m. to eight p.m. Where are you staying, Napier?’

‘The Hotel du Lac, just across the lagoon there.’

Bagado and I listened to the man who’d nearly been our tenth client scuffing down the untiled concrete stairs.

‘That was close,’ said Bagado.

‘We can still nail him.’

‘You better be quick.’

‘With all the competition out there, you mean?’

‘I think he’s a dead man, or heading that way.’

‘Really? He just looked a little scared to me.’

‘Victim,’ said Bagado, shaking his head.

‘Hotel du Lac,’ I said, thinking about that for a moment. ‘That’s middling, but they’re doing it up. It’s still cheapish. He must be a bit short. If he’d been in the Aledjo or the Sheraton, even the Golfe, I’d have felt better about him.’

‘Is that why you asked him?’

‘No. I thought I might go and hustle him some more this evening.’

‘Even if he’s a dead man and he hasn’t got any money?’

‘Nobody’s got less money than us, Bagado.’

‘Do you want his croissant?’

‘See what I mean?’

2

Bagado didn’t show for the evening sitting-around session. He had a sick daughter and a wife who’d had to take to the streets selling live chickens from a calabash. Life was getting hard for him. All the money he earned went straight out into the extended family, and worse than that-there just wasn’t enough for his brain to chew on.

If I hadn’t heard from Napier Briggs by the close of business I was going to go round to the Hotel du Lac and try and necklock him into being a client, even a nonpaying client. Maybe we could do something on a commission basis for him like those ambulance-chasing lawyers do. Us, desperate? Forget it.

I turned the light out to save on electricity and hobbled out on to the balcony to see if I could hook any other passing suckers who’d want help from a couple of strapped PIs working from a stripped-down cell in a dog-poo coloured apartment block at the epicentre of Cotonou’s pollution.

I hobbled because I’d had gout. A bad bout of it, but I was coming out the other end. Sympathy had been low on the ground-with lepers on the street it tended to be. I tried telling people it was the purine in anchovies and sardines rather than a weekly intake of a bottle of … what’s the point, you wouldn’t believe me anyway.

I sniffed the air over Cotonou and caught the usual gagging mix of sea breath, rubbish, drains, grilled kebabs all wrapped in a heady concoction of diesel and two-stroke fumes. Yeah, the bicycles have gone and we’ve been overrun by a million mopeds. Marxism is finished.

We had the Francophonie conference here at the end of last year and they stripped the place down, repainted it, repaired the roads and introduced mobile phones. In three months the Beninois became capitalists.

The transition wasn’t completed without pain. The economy, in the jaws of the free market, was given a kick in the pants by the French who devalued the CFA franc by a hundred per cent to one hundred CFA to one French franc. The whimpering is still going on. Imports are hellishly expensive, trips to France are out, supporting kids in school in Europe is painful; on the other hand, exports are cheap. But who gives a damn about that if the wife can’t afford twelve metres of Dutch Wax African print to adorn her body? No one.

I dragged myself back inside and called Heike-my English/German girlfriend, the one who towed me out of the desert all those years ago, the one who works as a latterday saint for a German NGO1 aid agency – to see if my priapic driver Moses’s blood-test results had come through. He’d been sick for a month and a half and my toe had been through hell on the brake pedal. Heike had persuaded him to go and see a doctor last week and it had been like a child’s first day at school.

The receptionist told me that Heike had left the office, and the blood tests hadn’t come through.

I sat in the dark and listened to the radio playing Africando from the tailor’s shack across the street until it seemed like the time to close up for the night and get down to the Hotel du Lac to see if Napier was in pieces yet and needed gluing.

It was a thick, hot night and the stench in the stairwell from the overflowing sceptic tank added a ripeness that had the mosquitoes dancing for blood. I hacked through it and folded myself into my battered Peugeot estate which was so old and decrepit that I’d quite often been mistaken for a bush taxi on the open road.

The mopeds were out in force and their blue exhaust had been changed into a sickly orange by the streetlighting. People were sitting on the first-floor verandah of the redecorated La Caravelle cafe. They were drinking and trying to stay alive in the small pockets of air still available. Some Lebanese lads with baseball caps on back to front hung over the balcony rail looking at a couple of policemen wrestling with a Nigerian street hawker. A huge diesel locomotive, pushing a line of open wagons, honked and grumbled between the stationary cars and trucks on its way across the lagoon. I turned left, overtook it without disappearing into the usual two-foot-deep Peugeot trap, and crossed the lagoon. The dayglo sign of the Hotel du Lac was easily visible from the bridge, as was the scaffolding on its side. I turned right past the Hotel Pacific, which seemed a long way from home, and parked up behind the hotel. The mosquitoes were screaming out here and I was all over myself like a flea-ridden dog.

I walked by the pool and down the steps to the well-lit bar in the front. There were hunched people in there and a po-faced barman scraping foam off the pressions with a throat spatula.

‘Looking for me?’ asked Napier, jiggling something amber in my face from his side-saddle position on his bar stool. He nearly launched himself on to the floor and was only saved by the boniness of his elbow on the lip of the bar.

‘This isn’t one of my usual haunts.’

‘You’re a drinking man then?’

‘It has been known.’

‘What’ll it be?’

‘A beer.’

‘One of these to chase?’

‘I’ve never said no.’

The barman settled the drinks and I backed up on to a stool. A woman eyed us coolly from the other side of the bar.

‘I told her to fuck off before she even got her bum up on the stool,’ said Napier.

‘You’re learning, but it pays to be polite here. It’s the French in them.’

‘Couldn’t get any life into the old boy even if I wanted to.’

‘Anxious,’ I said, and we drank.

‘No,’ said Napier, squeezing his lips with his fist. ‘Fucking petrified.’

‘Petrified?’

“Swat I said.’

‘Have you heard something?’

‘What’s it to you?

‘I’m sitting next to you in a bar. That’s what people do. Tell each other what’s on their minds.’

‘What’s on your mind?’

‘Money. I want to make some.’

‘Out of me?’

‘If there’s any to be made.’

‘Do you mind getting killed?’

‘It’s not high on my list of goals.’

‘You have goals?’

‘No, it was just something to say.’

‘I had goals,’ he said, sniffing at his Scotch and then taking a pull of beer.

‘What happened?’

‘I scored too many in my own net.’

‘Don’t get maudlin on me, Napier.’

‘I thought we could say what was on our minds.’

‘You cheated. You were going to tell me why you were petrified. You lost some money. That’s worrying but it doesn’t make you scared. You asked me if I minded getting killed. Who’s going to kill me if I stick my nose in?’

Napier waggled his finger at the barman. Two more grandes pressions arrived and two more Red Labels. He lit a Camel. The phone rang in the hotel.

‘Gardez l'écoute,’ said the receptionist.

A short fat fellow came into the bar from the hotel and held up a finger. ‘M. Napier. Téléphone.’

Napier squirmed off his stool and leaned back for his cigarettes in case it was a long one.

‘Keep my beer warm,’ he said, and let me know how drunk he was by pinballing his way out of our tight corner before getting on the straight and narrow.

He was back in ten minutes, looking frisky and not half as drunk as he had been. He hopped up on to the bar stool and clapped me on the back. I didn’t like the turnaround in mood, especially as it looked as if it was going to involve me.

‘Still wanna make some money, Bruce?’

‘Not if I’ve got to lay down my life for it,’ I said.

‘You can’t take it with you, Napier, remember that.’

‘Sure I do,’ he said and socked back the chaser. ‘That was them on the phone.’

‘Who’s them?’

‘They said there’s been a mistake.’

‘That’s big of them. Who’s they?’

‘They said they want to give me my money back.’

‘Why should they suddenly want to do a thing like that?’

‘I don’t know …’ he said, without letting his confidence falter, before he remembered not to lie. Pressure.’

‘Tell me about the kind of person who can exert that kind of pressure.’

‘Well, you know, like you say, you meet people. You tell them what’s on your mind. Sometimes they help you. Sometimes they don’t even have to be asked. You coming?’

‘Napier, you’re going to have to tell me what you’re talking about.’

‘I want you to hold my hand.’

‘That’s not …’

‘I’ll give you five. No. I’ll give you ten thousand … dollars.’

‘What’s wrong with your hand?’

‘Nothing you’re going to catch.’

‘I don’t know about that,’ I said, and drained the first grande pression and started in on the second. ‘Let’s get this straight. The gang that stole your money from your UK bank account have called you here in your luxurious Beninois hotel and have volunteered to give you your money back. In cash. In dollars.’

He nodded.

Ten hours ago you came into my office so frazzled you wouldn’t even tell me their shoe size. Half an hour ago you tell me you’re petrified … seem to think your death is required in all this. Ten minutes ago you get a phone call and you’ve kissed and made up. Now you want me to hold your hand out there in the dark. What annoys me, Napier, what you have to tell me right now is-do I look that much of a sucker?’

He nodded.

‘You’re on your own,’ I said, and stood up to finish the beer.

‘No, no, Bruce. Sorry. I didn’t mean that. What I meant was that if I start telling you what it’s all about we’re going to be here until six in the morning and the meeting is at nine tonight. There just isn’t the time to fill you in. You’ve got twenty minutes to say “yes” and get me there. But look, what I can tell you is that the person gave me a name. The name of a very powerful man who has guaranteed the handover and my personal safety.’

‘What about mine?’

‘Yours too.’

‘What the hell do you need me for?’

‘How do you get a moped taxi to stop in this town?’

‘You shout kekeno. It’s Fon for “stop”.’

‘Now you don’t want me to get on the back of a moped with two million dollars in a suitcase, do you?’

‘I’m your chauffeur,’ I said, getting it. Napier laughed.

‘If you like.’

Since when have you paid your chauffeur ten thousand bucks for a night’s work?’

‘As a matter of fact this is the first time,’ he said, and socked back the chaser.

What’s the name of your guarantor?’

‘You don’t need to know and you don’t want to know.’

‘Maybe I’d like to know. See if he’s on my party list. Get an invitation to him for my next one. If he’s this powerful I could use him in my business.’

Napier got another Camel under way and used his thumb to get an imaginary plank out of his own eye.

‘The less you know about this the better. You help me. You take your money. We never see each other again.’ ‘Just as we were getting beyond the small-talk stage, getting to know each other a bit …’

‘Nobody knows me, Bruce, least of all myself. Time’s short. Are you in or out?’

‘Where’s the meet?’

‘Are you in or out?’

‘Why do you think I’m asking?’

‘That’s not a yes and it’s not a no.’

‘It means if we’re meeting in a private room in the Sheraton it’s a “yes''. If we’re meeting in an empty warehouse in the industrial zone it’s a big “no''. There are places to do these kind of things. I did one of these out in the bush in the Côte d’Ivoire and nearly found myself as dead as the guy I was supposed to be meeting.’

‘In a coconut grove opposite the Hotel Croix du Sud. They tell me there’s a bit of beach there where people go for picnics at the weekend.’

‘Harmless enough during the day.’

‘But you need your hand held at night.’

‘This is not a good idea, Napier,’ I said. ‘What if I say no.’

‘Nothing’s going to stop me going out there to take a look.’

‘You’re a bastard.’

‘Am I?’ he asked, innocent as cherry blossom.

‘You’re the one who said you wanted to make some money out of my … out of me, if it could be made.’

‘That’s right. I’m upfront about what I want. You, on the other hand, won’t tell me a damn thing and then you corner me into feeling responsible for you … a white man in West Africa with …’

‘You’re not doing it for free,’ he said, and smiled. Now that his face wasn’t a chiselled mess of fear and worry I could see what got him into a lot of trouble and what probably got him a lot of women too – a little-boy look. I dropped the chaser down the hatch and we went out to the car. I fitted the keys into the ignition and thought ten thousand dollars could solve a lot of problems and then stopped myself in case the next time I looked in the mirror I’d find Napier staring back at me.

‘I don’t suppose you’ve got a gun, have you?’ he asked.

Firing a piece of lead into human flesh, watching a man drop with a gut shot, seeing his life crawling away from him, takes something that I haven’t got. And you-if I remember rightly, Napier Briggs-got spooked from seeing a dead sheep in the car park, got the vom from seeing a little offal on the pavement. I don’t think you’re in any frame of mind to be going around pointing guns at people.’

We drove back across the lagoon, up the main drag past the remains of the evening fish market and past the port which was lit up with ships being worked and loaded trucks queuing to get out on the road. The ship’s agents offices were dark and quiet on either side of the Boulevard de la Marina. We continued up past the Hotel du Port, the Présidence, the Hotel Croix du Sud and the huge expanse of cocotiers between the road and the sea. Napier watched it all go.

‘Where are we going?’ he asked.

I took a left before the conference centre on to a short causeway out to the new Novotel and parked up in its floodlit car park. The flags of all nations snapped in the sea breeze, their ropes pinged against the metal poles.

‘The Croix du Sud was back …’

‘Your two million dollars is out there,’ I said, pointing across him back towards the port. About three hundred metres.’

‘You’re still going with me … aren’t you?’

‘Now that we’re away from the bar, the beers and the chasers, now that you can see how black it is out there in the cocotiers, now that you can hear the sea and the wind, I thought I’d give you a chance to think about whether you reckon there’s somebody standing out in the middle of that lot with two million in a suitcase.’

Napier looked to where I’d been pointing. In the bright lights of the Novotel car park I saw the sweat start out on his forehead. He wiped a finger across his brow and dabbed the palms of his hands on his trousers. His tongue came out to try and put some lick on his lips.

‘Where’s this guarantor you’ve just spoken to on the phone?’

‘Lagos,’ he said, turning back, his mind drifting off to a time when this was all over and he was on a flight back to Paris with his cash in the overhead.

‘Why don’t we drive in there?’ he asked, the light bulb coming on in his head.

‘We could, but there’s only one way in and one way out and once we’re in there we’re stuck in the car, an easy sedentary target. If we’re on the hoof we can leg it through those palm trees and there’s nobody who’d be able to get a clear shot at you through that lot.’

They were good words to use, ‘target', ‘leg it', ‘shot', but they didn’t infect his judgement with a germ of terror. He sat in silence, staring into the dash, mouth open, jaw tense, gunning himself up.

‘You don’t think this is a funny place to hand over two million dollars?’

‘No,’ he said, pinching the septum of his nose, thinking about something else now, and then making up his mind about it.

‘If anything goes wrong out there, Bruce, you should … you will get a visit from my associate.’

‘The nonexec one you didn’t tell us anything about?’

‘That one,’ he said.

‘She’s my daughter. The company put her through an MBA, that’s all. She runs her own business, nothing to do with me.’

‘She have a name?’

‘Selina,’ he said.

‘Well, I hope I never get to meet her.’

‘No,’ he said, turning to the window where he set about filtering all the doubt out of his mind while his eyes drank in the blackness of the wind-rattled coconut palms.

He started out of the car. I grabbed his arm.

‘No talking. Quiet as possible. If they’re out there they’ll know we’ve arrived. The first person to talk is me and’ – I whipped the Camel out of his mouth and tossed it out of the window–

‘no smoking.’

We walked to the edge of the tarmac. The security guards at the gate had their backs to us. We dropped off the raised car park and trotted into the coconut palms. We waited a few minutes until our eyes were used to the dark and walked on. The ground was firm between the palms. It wasn’t long before we found the patch of beaten earth and a rough table where the city people came to drink beer and breathe air with a dash of the sea in it.

I sat on the ground with my back to a coconut palm and watched Napier in almost no light at all sitting on his hands on the table under a palm-leaf lean-to trying to forget about smoking Camels. We sat there for more than half an hour. The wind whistled up quite a few false alarms for us but in the end nobody showed. A little before a quarter to ten I stood up and whacked the back of my jeans.

‘I’ve got to take a piss,’ I said. All the beer I’d drunk sat like a medicine ball in my lap. Napier hissed.

A car, with its headlights on full beam, rippled across the coconut palms and silhouetted two figures on the pavement. The car slowed and stopped. The lights died. One of the figures bent to window height. There was a discussion. The door opened and the figure who’d done the talking got in.

‘It’s a pick-up, Napier. This is a smart part of town. Girls come here to get taken for a ride by men in Mercedes. That could have been you if they’d showed.’

I walked off to the edge of the palms about thirty or forty metres and kicked a hole in the sand.

‘Maybe they didn’t show because of you,’ he said to the back of my head.

‘I didn’t crash, I was invited, remember. You cleared me with your big man. And anyway, I’m going now. I’ve got dinner. You want to stay, you can find your own way back.’

I urinated for at least two minutes. I closed my eyes to the relief spreading through me. The wind got up and blew with some force through the palms and their leaves clacked together like empty scabbards. I walked back to the table shivering, suddenly cold and clammy in the salty breeze.

‘Napier,’ I called, seeing he’d moved from the table. I looked around for the red glow of a cigarette butt, knowing he wouldn’t have been able to hang on. I made a 180-degree sweep of the coconut grove. The Hotel Croix du Sud’s gate lights winked on the other side of the boulevard, the aura of the new conference centre lit the night sky, the Novotel and its car park looked as if they were out in a sea of black, but there was no Napier. I shouted his name. The breeze took it off me and shuttled it through the trunks of the palms, but nothing came back.

Just like that-he’d gone.

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