A Darkening Stain
Robert Wilson

For Jane

and

my sister, Anita

The sky is darkening like a stain; Something is going to fall like rain, And it won’t be flowers.

‘The Witnesses’ (W. H. Auden)

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Epigraph

Map

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

Acknowledgements

About the Author

By the Same Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Map

1

Friday 19th July, Cotonou Port.

The thirty-five-ton Titan truck hissed and rocked on its suspension as it came to a halt. Shoulders hunched, it gave a dead-eyed stare over the line of scrimmage which was the chain across the opening of the port gates. On the wood panelling behind the cab were two hand-painted film posters of big men holding guns – Chuck Norris, Sly Stallone – the bandana boys. He handed down his papers to the customs officer who took them into the gatehouse and checked them off. Excitement rippled through the rollicking crowd of whippet-thin men and boys who’d gathered outside the gates in the afternoon’s trampling heat, which stank of the sea and diesel and rank sweat.

The Titan was loaded with bales of second-hand clothes tied down on to the flat-bed of the truck by inch-thick hemp rope. The driver, faceless behind his visor, kicked up the engine which blatted black fumes from a four-inch-wide pipe, ballooning a passing policeman’s shirt. A squeal of anticipation shimmered through the crowd.

Six men, armed with wooden batons the thickness of pickaxe handles, climbed on to the edges of the flat-bed, three a side. Each of them twisted a wrist around a rope and hung off, twitching their cudgels through the thick air. The crowd positioned themselves along the thirty metres of road from the gates to the junction with Boulevard de la Marina. The officer came out with the papers and handed them back up to the driver. He nodded to the man on chain duty who looked at the crowd outside and grinned.

The huge truck farted up some more and lurched as the driver thumped it into gear. He taunted the crowd with his air brakes. They giggled, high-pitched, nearly mad. The chain dropped and the battered, grinning face of the Titan dipped and surged across the line. The men hanging off the back roared and slashed with their batons. The truck picked up some momentum, the cab through the gates now, and the crowd threw themselves at the wall of bales, clawing at the clothes packed tight as scrap metal. The batons connected. Men and boys fell stunned as insects, one was dragged along by the leg of a pair of jeans he’d torn from a bale until a sharp crack on the wrist dropped him. The Titan snarled into second gear.

I saw the boy coming from some way off. He was dressed in a white shirt, a pair of long white shorts and flip-flops. He turned the corner off Boulevard de la Marina up to the port gates and was swallowed up by the mêlée who were now running at a sprint. A baton arced down into the pack and caught the boy on the back of the head. He fell forward, bounced off the hip of some muscled brute who held the reins of a nylon pink nightie stretched to nine feet, and disappeared under the wheels of the Titan.

The crowd roared, and the section around where the boy had fallen collapsed to the ground. The truck pulled away, crashing through the gears. It didn’t stop for the Boulevard de la Marina. The driver stood on his horn. Cars and mopeds squirmed across the tarmac. The men riding shotgun stopped swinging their batons and hung on with both hands. The Titan let out a final triumphant blat of exhaust and headed into town.

I got out of my Peugeot and ran across to where the boy had gone down. People came from all angles. Closer, I could see his arm, the white bone of his arm and the blood soaking into the sleeve and up the chest of his shirt. Some of the hoodlums around him were smeared with his blood, four of them upped and ran. The rest were staring down at the mash of flesh and bone and the thick red ooze on the road. Then the boy was picked up and borne away, his crushed arm hanging like a rag, his head thrown back, eyes rolled to white. Three men ran him down to the main road and threw him into a car which took off in the direction of the hospital. Then they stood and looked at his blood on their shirts.

I was called back to my car which was waiting to get into the port. Horns blared. Arms whirled.

‘M. Medway, M. Medway. Entrez, entrez! Main-te-nant. Main-te-nant.’

I drove in, threading through the line of trucks waiting to get out, past a pile of spaghetti steel wire just beginning to brown with rust. It was five o’clock in the afternoon. I took a small towel from the passenger seat and wiped away the tears of sweat streaming down my face.

I was heading for a ship called the Kluezbork II, Polish flag, 15,000 tons deadweight. Bagado, my ex-partner in M & B ‘Investigations and Debt Collection’ and now back in the Cotonou force in his old job as a detective, was waiting for me on board. He had a problem, a five-men-dead problem. But it wasn’t as big as the captain’s problem which was five men dead on his ship, all stowaways, his vessel and cargo impounded indefinitely and he passing the time of day right now in a hell cell with twenty odd scumbags down at the Sûreté in town.

Bagado had told me to get down to the port as fast as possible because the stink was getting bad and they wanted the bodies on ice pronto, but it was important for me to see the situation down there. Why me? He’d blethered on about my shipping experience, but what he really wanted to do was to talk and since his boss, Commandant Bondougou, had split us up and taken him back into the force he didn’t like being seen down at my office too much.

The ship’s holds were all open and I caught the smell of the five men beginning to putrefy from the quay. The engineer pointed me to number three hold’s hatch where some sick-looking young policemen were hanging around for further instructions. Bagado was waiting on a platform halfway down into the hold. He stood, hands jammed into the pockets of his blue mac, which had more creases than an old man’s scrotum. He nodded over the platform’s rail at the five dead men. Three of them were propped against the metal wall of the hold looking as if they’d just dozed off while staring at the wall of timber which was the cargo in hold number three. The other two lay on their fronts, in the metre or so in between, like tired children who’d dropped to the floor mid-play. It was a peaceful scene uncreased by violence.

‘What are you doing up here?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know what killed them yet,’ said Bagado, coming out of his trance, flat, depressed. ‘I don’t want to go down there and end up like that.’

‘How long’s the hold been open?’

‘Three or four hours.’

‘That should have got the air circulating. Let’s take a look.’

We climbed down the ladder on to the floor of the hold.

‘Looks as if they suffocated to me,’ said Bagado. ‘No violence, anyway.’

‘We’re a long way from the engine room,’ I said. ‘Who found them?’

‘The first mate was doing a routine stowaway check and didn’t like the smell in here…brought the master to the platform…that was it.’

‘The only time I’ve heard of people suffocating in holds is on tankers, especially after palm oil. Gives off a lot of carbon dioxide. They send in the cleaners and they get halfway down the ladder before they realize they can’t breathe. I heard of eight people dying like that in one hold up on Humberside.’

‘But this hold isn’t enclosed like a tanker’s,’ said Bagado, leaning against the timber wall.

‘Wouldn’t matter if the oxygen’s displaced from the bottom,’ I said, and walked between the bodies to the other side of the hold. Bagado pushed himself off the timber to follow me.

‘Damn,’ he said, looking at the shoulder of his mac, a big stain on it.

I touched the logs. They were still wet with sap.

‘This timber’s fresh,’ I said.

‘Loaded out of Ghana three nights ago.’

‘I’ve heard about some of these hardwoods. They give off fumes, some of them toxic. They’re pretty volatile in the heat. You put that in an enclosed hold, the oxygen levels drop…’

‘Cause of death – fresh timber,’ said Bagado. ‘Could be.’

‘Who are these guys?’ I asked. ‘They got any ID?’

‘They’re all Beninois.’

‘How’d they get on board?’

‘With the stevedores. They were loading cotton seed in holds one and two over the last couple of days. Four teams of them.’

‘You know that?’

‘A guess. We’re picking up the chef d’équipe now,’ he said.

‘What am I doing here, Bagado?’ I asked. ‘You didn’t get me down here to talk botany.’

Bagado shouted up to his juniors. A head appeared over the platform’s rail. He rattled instructions out using Fon rather than French. The head disappeared. Feet rang on the rungs of the ladder. Bagado turned back to me, a faint sneer on his face from the stink of the bodies and something else.

‘Let’s go up on to the platform,’ he said.

‘Was that guy listening in on you?’

‘As you can see,’ he said. ‘I do have a problem.’

We climbed back up on to the platform.

‘But not with these five,’ I said to the soles of his feet.

‘Bondougou,’ he said, the name mingling naturally with the rotten air. A name that brought tears of gratitude to the eyes of corrupt businessmen, politicians and civil servants. The name of the man who’d targeted Bagado’s life and set about dismantling it piece by piece. The first time Bagado and I met he’d just been sacked by Bondougou for issuing an unauthorized press release about a dead girl’s tortured body. He’d come to work with me after that, until our recent split, and those circumstances weren’t exactly lavender-scented either. Since then Bondougou had given Bagado investigations and pulled him on almost every one as soon as he started getting anywhere. The only people he got to put in the slammer were the ones who’d reined in on last year’s Christmas gift to the Commandant. Bondougou and Bagado were polar opposites. They needed each other only for metaphysical reference.

‘So, tell me,’ I said, once we were up on the platform.

‘He has to be…’ Bagado’s voice faded, as he leant over the rail.

‘Come again.’

‘He has to go.’

‘And you think I’m the man for the job or I’m the man who can find you the man to do the job?’

‘Be serious, Bruce.’

‘So, what does “he has to go” mean? I assume you’re talking about into the ground six foot under or stuffed head first down a storm drain after heavy rain. He’s not the kind to take early retirement just because he’s upset a few of his detectives.’

‘That would be a very satisfactory outcome. The storm drain I think is the more likely…but you know me, Bruce. It’s just not possible for me to even think like that.’

‘Whereas I…’

‘Quite.’

‘…go grasping the wrong end of the stick,’ I said. ‘We used to be partners, didn’t we, Bagado?’

‘And very complementary ones too, I thought.’

‘I don’t remember getting any compliments.’

‘I can’t think why,’ said Bagado, his neck disappearing into the collar of his mac.

‘So what’s Bondougou’s game? What’s he done to…?’

‘He’s gone too far,’ he said, to the dense knot of his dark tie.

‘Well, I thought he must have done more than scribble over your prep,’ I said, wiping a finger across my forehead and dropping a hank of sweat through the metal grating of the platform floor.

‘Five girls have gone missing…’

‘In Cotonou?’

‘Schoolgirls,’ he nodded. ‘The youngest is six, the eldest, ten.’

‘And he won’t let you near it?’

‘He’s put one of his resident idiots on it.’

‘Any bodies turned up?’

‘No.’

‘You think all five are connected?’

‘Things like that are always connected.’

‘Why do you think this is Bondougou’s business?’ I asked. ‘Just because he won’t let you near it, or what?’

‘He’s on it. He reads everything that comes in. Takes all the reports verbally first. He’s very interested.’

Bagado started to snick his thumbnail against his front teeth, a tic that meant he was thinking – thinking and worrying.

‘How am I supposed to fit myself in on this?’ I asked. ‘If Bondougou finds me sniffing around he’ll hit home runs with my kneecaps. And the usual usual – I’ve got a living to earn somehow.’

‘I know, I know,’ he said, and stared down into the hold at the five dead men. ‘How are we going to get these men out of here?’

‘Put them in a cargo net and lift them out.’

‘Let’s go,’ he said. ‘Before I get morbid.’

‘You mean you aren’t morbid yet?’

We climbed back up on to the hot metal deck and leant over the ship’s rail, gulping in air cut with bunker fuel and some muck they had boiling in the ship’s galley – whatever, it was fresh after all that. The full weight of the afternoon heat was backing off now, the sun tinting some colour back into things.

‘I want you to help me, Bruce.’

‘Any way I can, Bagado,’ I said. ‘As usual I’m running this way and that, feet not touching the ground.’

‘Who’s that for?’

‘Irony, Bagado. Don’t go losing your sense of irony.’

‘I’m losing my sense of everything these days…because there is no sense in anything. It’s all non-sense. How did I get to this pretty pass, Bruce?’

‘This pretty what?’

‘Pass.’

‘Is that one of your pre-independence colonial expressions?’

‘Concentrate for me, will you?’

‘OK. You’ve been manoeuvred into a position by Bondougou and now you’ve decided to manoeuvre your way out and I’m going to help you.’

‘How?’

‘You’ve only just saddled me with the problem. Let me run around a bit, break myself in on it.’

‘No hit men.’

‘I don’t know any hit men. How would I know any, Bagado? Just because I mix in that…’

‘Irony, Bruce. I was being ironical.’

2

I drove out of the port, the sky already turning in the bleak late afternoon. People were still standing over where the boy’s arm had been crushed, the stain darkening into the tarmac. I turned right on to the Boulevard de la Marina, heading downtown. Bagado had told me to keep my mouth shut about the stowaways and the fresh timber theory. If he wanted to land the marlin instead of the minnows he needed some tension to build up on the outside and the best way was to let the rumour machine run amok.

The traffic was heavy in the centre of town, with the going-home crowd heading east over the Ancien Pont across the lagoon. The long rains had been going on too long and the newly laid tarmac for last year’s Francophonie conference was getting properly torn up. Cars eased themselves into crater-like potholes. Bald truck tyres chewed off more edges as they ground up out of the two-foot trenches that had only been a foot deep the week before.

Night fell at the traffic lights in central Cotonou. Beggars and hawkers worked the cars. Mothballs, televisions, dusters, microwaves. I didn’t do too much thinking about Bagado’s problem. Disappearing schoolgirls was not my business and the only way Bondougou was leaving was if he overplayed a hand against somebody a lot nastier than I and they gave him the big cure. That might happen…eventually. But me? I’d rather steer clear of that stuff. Make some money. Keep my head down. Things were going better than usual. I had money in my pocket and Heike, my English/German girlfriend, and I were getting along with just the odd verbal, no fisticuffs. I got a surge just thinking about her and not only from my loins.

A calloused hand, grey with road dust, appeared on my windowsill. It belonged to one of the polio beggars I supported at what they called ‘my traffic lights’.

‘Bonjour, ça va bien?’ he asked, arranging his buckled and withered limbs underneath him.

‘ça marche un peu,’ I said, wiping my face off. I gave him a couple of hundred CFA.

‘Tu vas réussir. Tu vas voir. Tu vas gagner un climatiseur pour ta voiture.’

Yes, well, that would be nice. These boys understand suffering. I could do with some cool. I could do with an ice-cold La Beninoise beer. I parked up at the office, walked back to the Leader Price supermarket and bought a can of cold beer. I crossed the street to the kebab man, standing in front of his charcoal-filled rusted oil drum, and had him make me up a sandwich of spice-hammered meat, which he wrapped in newspaper.

The gardien at the office said I had visitors. White men. I asked him where he’d put them and he said he’d let them in. He said that they’d said it would be all right.

Did they?

I went up, thinking there was nothing to steal, no files to rifle, no photos to finger through, only back copies of Container Week and such, so maybe I’d find a couple of guys eager to see someone to brighten the place up and keen to part with money just to get out of the place.

Sitting on my side of the desk, just outside the cone of light shed from a battered Anglepoise, was a man I recognized as Carlo, and on the client side a guy I only knew by sight. Suddenly my lamb kebab didn’t taste so good. These two were Franconelli’s men. Roberto Franconelli was a mafia capo who operated out of Lagos picking up construction projects and Christ knows what else besides. We’d started our relationship by hitting it off and then I’d made a mistake, told a little fib about a girl called Selina Aguia, said she was interested in him when she wasn’t (not for that reason, anyway). Now Mr Franconelli had a healthy, burgeoning dislike for my person and I knew that this little visit was not social.

‘Bruce,’ said Carlo, holding out his hand. I juggled the beer and kebab and he slapped his dark-haired paw into mine. ‘This is Gio.’

Gio didn’t take the heel of his hand away from his face and gave me one of those minimalist greetings I associate with coconuts.

Carlo sat back out of the light and put his feet up on my desk, telling me something I didn’t need to be told.

‘I’d offer you a beer…’ I said.

‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘Gio?’

Gio didn’t move an eyelid.

‘He’ll have a Coke. He don’t drink.’

I slammed my can of beer down and slid it across to Carlo. I shouted for the gardien and gave him some money for another beer and a Coke. I took the third chair in the room and drew it up to the desk. Carlo nestled the beer in his lap and pinged the ring-pull, not breaking the seal. I continued with the lamb kebab and gave Gio a quick once-over. Brutal. Trog-brutal.

‘You eat that shit off the street?’ asked Carlo.

‘Keeps up my stomach flora, Carlo,’ I said. ‘I don’t want you to think I actually like it.’

Carlo said something in Italian. Gio wrinkled his nose. Animated, heady stuff.

‘You don’t mind if I smoke?’ asked Carlo. ‘While you do your stomach flora thing.’

‘I’m touched you asked.’

He lit up. The gardien came back with the drinks. Gio and I opened our cans.

‘Chin-chin,’ I said.

Carlo kept on pinging.

‘This a social?’ I asked, wiping my fingers off on the newspaper.

‘Mr Franconelli’s got a job for you.’

‘I didn’t think Mr Franconelli liked me any more.’

‘He don’t.’

‘Does that mean he won’t be paying?’

‘He’ll pay. You’re small change.’

‘What’s the job?’

‘Find someone,’ said Carlo, stretching himself to a shivering yawn.

‘You can tell me it all at once, you know, Carlo. I can take in more than one thing at a time – beer, kebab, your friend here, who you want me to find – all in one big rush.’

‘The guy’s name is Jean-Luc Marnier.’

‘Would that be a full-blooded Frenchman, a métis, or an African?’

Carlo flipped a photo across to me. Jean-Luc Marnier was white, in his fifties, with thick, swept-back grey hair that was longish at the collar and tonic-ed. It had gone yellow over one eye, stained by smoke from an unfiltered cigarette he had in his mouth. Attractive was just about an applicable adjective. He might have been movie-hunk material when he was younger and smoother, but some hardness in his life had cragged him up. He had prominent facial bones – cheeks, jaw, forehead all rugged with wear – a full-lipped mouth, surprisingly long ears with fleshy lobes and a blade-sharp nose – a seductive mixture of soft and hard. His dark eyes were shrewd and looked as if they could find weaknesses even when there weren’t any. I thought he probably had bad teeth, but he looked like a ladies’ man, which meant he’d have had them fixed. The man had some presence, even in a photo, but it was a rogue presence.

‘Is he a big guy?’ I asked.

‘A metre seventy-five. Eighty-five kilos. Not fat, just a little heavy.’

‘What’s he do?’

‘Import/export.’

‘For a change,’ I said. ‘He have an office?’

‘And a home,’ said Carlo, sliding over a piece of paper.

‘Why can’t you find him yourself?’

Carlo pinged the ring-pull some more, getting on my nerves.

‘We’ve looked. He’s not around. Nobody talks to us.’

‘Does that mean he’s been a bad boy?’

‘Take a look at the guy,’ said Carlo.

‘What do I do when I find him?’

Gio looked at Carlo out of the corner of his hand as if he might be interested in something for the first time.

‘You just tell us where he is.’

‘Then what?’

‘Finish,’ he said, and crushed his cigarette out in the tuna can supplied.

‘You going to kill him? Is that it?’

Carlo and Gio stilled to a religious quiet.

‘Forget it, Carlo,’ I said. ‘That is not my kind of work.’

Carlo’s feet crashed to the floor. He slammed the beer can down on the desk top and leaned over at me so that our faces were close enough for beer and tobacco fumes to be exchanged.

‘I thought you were the one who liked me, Carlo.’

‘I do, Bruce. I like you fine. But not when you’re dumb.’

‘Then I don’t know how you ever got to like me.’

Carlo grunted about one sixteenth of a laugh. He put his hand on my shoulder and gave me a little massage, brutally thumbing the muscle over the bone.

‘I know a lot of smart people who tell me they’re dumb.’

‘It’s a trick we learn,’ I said.

‘Now, Gio, you might be surprised to learn, is a very remarkable teacher ‘cos he can make dumb people think smart and smart people think dumb. Not bad for a guy who’s never been to school, still has trouble readin’ a book with no pictures.’

I took another look at Gio, at the slab-of-concrete forehead, the short neck with black hair sprouting up it from his deep chest, forearms like animals’ thighs, rower’s wrists and agricultural hands, the odd knuckle missing from thumping the mule straight whilst ploughing.

‘He’s got intelligent hands,’ I said. ‘I can see that.’

‘Careful, Bruce. His English is not so good but he has a good ear for tone and if he thinks you don’t take him seriously he has a number of very short lessons he can give.’

‘Look, Carlo, I’m not being difficult. You’ve just asked me to find a guy and in not so many words you’ve told me that when I find him you’re going to…’

Carlo tapped me on the forehead with an envelope. I shut up. He laid the envelope on the desk.

‘There’s some money in there and I put a little item in with it that I think you’ll find very interesting. I don’t think it’s something you’ll want to talk to Mr Franconelli about, but it should help you make your mind up. Now, you’ve got forty-eight hours to find Marnier. We’ll be staying in the Hotel de la Plage – walking distance, but don’t come and see us. Leave a message at the desk for us to call by or meet up someplace. OK?’

Carlo let go of my shoulder and stood up. He opened up his can, sprayed me down with the spurting beer and emptied the foam over my head.

‘Thanks for the beer.’

‘Don’t mention it, Carlo,’ I said.

They left the office.

Fifteen minutes to trash my life, that was all it took. I turned the envelope over. It was stuck down. I felt the thickness of the money and couldn’t find the strength to open it just yet.

Now Bagado and I both had our millstones and Bagado was going to have to tread water with his while I got out from under my own.

3

Heike wasn’t home. She’d taken to working late, getting all virtuous since she’d started on her health kick. She’d stopped smoking, which meant I didn’t have to listen to the tar bubbling in the stem of those plastic holders she used to use. She’d hung up her drinking waders too, except for the odd glass of wine at dinner. I’d always thought her beautiful even with her vices, maybe because of her vices, now, without them she was the same but just more so. The health aura seemed to bring out her intelligence too, or maybe she just remembered things when all the parking spaces weren’t taken up by hangovers. I confess, it was making me nervous having her out there in this condition.

I waved at Helen, our cook, who was out on the balcony grilling chicken. I stripped and showered off Carlo’s beer shampoo. I tried not to think about Jean-Luc Marnier or Roberto Franconelli by thinking about my first night with Heike instead. How we’d met in the desert, she with her girlfriend in a live Hanomag truck, me on my own in a dead car being towed behind.

We’d stopped and eaten dinner around a fire, it being brisk in the desert at night. She hadn’t said a word to me, the girlfriend did all the talking. Afterwards I went for a walk by myself to look at the stars, breathe in the emptiness and feel the African continent pulsating under my feet, thumping in my chest as if I had a bull’s heart.

I thought I was on my own but then Heike was next to me. We exchanged looks but still no words and in a matter of moments we’d struggled and wrenched ourselves out of our disobedient clothes and were lying naked on the desert floor in a mad, frantic embrace. Our limbs and genitals locked together, the live ground pumping something so exotic through us we shouted when we came. The girlfriend had heard the ruckus and was forced to ask shyly and from some way off whether Heike was all right. Heike had croaked something back at her which she must have heard before from cheap hotel rooms, backs of cars, dark garden ends, because the clear desert air carried her gooseberry weariness back to us.

Having dispatched some of the nastiness, I wedged myself in amongst the floor cushions, stiffened myself with a gulp of Red Label and opened the envelope Carlo had given me. There was 250,000 CFA in it, $300, enough for 48 hours work plus expenses. There was also the other item. A newspaper cutting from the Guardian in Lagos. This is what it said:

Yesterday a police autopsy revealed that Gale Strudwick, who was discovered dead in the swimming pool at her home on Victoria Island three days ago, had died of drowning. A police spokesman said: ‘There was a large quantity of alcohol in her system and she had recently eaten a heavy meal. We do not suspect any foul play.’ Friends had described her as ‘severely depressed’ after her husband, Graydon Strudwick, died of renal failure in Akimbola Awoliyi Memorial Hospital in March.

I sank the whisky in my glass and poured another good two inches and socked it back. Then I poured another inch and in the spirit calm thought that must have been one hell of a meal to sink her to the bottom of the pool, and Gale was not a big eater. She wasn’t a depressive either, not about Graydon, anyway.

Gale Strudwick had been a friend, someone I’d known from my London days who, before she’d confused herself with money, sex and power, I’d liked as well. We’d got ourselves knotted up together in some bad business with Roberto Franconelli and her husband three or four months back. We’d both witnessed some example-setting from the Italian one night which had left me feeling like never talking again in my life, especially about football. Gale was a drinker and more lippy, more provocative, more aggressive about the money she needed to maintain the five-mile-high lifestyle she craved and which she wasn’t going to get from her dead husband’s estate. The cutting was a warning: Be sweet and you shall continue, be sour and you shall be sucking the mud from the bottom of the lagoon.

I rammed the money and clipping into my pocket and stared into my glass thinking about Gale – tough, sexy Gale – who’d talked herself a yard too far over the edge.

Heike breezed in trailing health and efficiency, and I had that feeling of looking up from the complexities of my life to see an aeroplane leaving a chalk mark on a clear blue sky and wanting to be there and out of this.

‘You look whipped,’ she said, dumping her bag on her way into the kitchen. How do women know your mental state just by walking into a room? She came back sipping a beading bottle of Possotomé mineral water, holding a glass of ice cubes.

‘I was feeling bullish,’ I said.

‘I like bullish,’ she said, kneeling down, straddling my lap and giving me a big, cool kiss. ‘What happened?’

‘You first. Yours looks better.’

‘I pulled in six hundred thousand marks from that company Wasserklammer today and they only attached strings to half of it so our little Nongovernmental Organization can expand the AIDS project in Porto Novo.’

‘You must be the boss’s blue-eyed girl.’

‘I’ve always been Gerhard’s blue-eyed girl,’ she said, exuding stuff from glands to make stallions whinny.

‘True,’ I said, damping my bitterness.

‘Now he thinks I’m a star.’

‘You don’t want him thinking you’re going to take over. I don’t think his ego could handle it.’

‘The agency’s not so far advanced that they think a woman could cut it as a boss in Africa.’

‘But we know they’re wrong.’

‘Are you trying to get round me?’

‘Why would I want to do that?’

She kissed me again and let me know through some uncrack-able eye semaphore that the long empty African evening was going to be full. I asked after Moses, my driver, who was being treated for HIV by Heike’s agency. It was one of our evening rituals, and not a bad one because he was always improving, getting stronger. This time she said I might even have him back behind the wheel in a week’s time.

I put my hands up underneath her skirt and stroked her thighs. She ran a cool, wet hand through my hair and I nuzzled her breasts.

‘Not yet,’ she said. ‘You haven’t told me yours.’

‘You don’t want to know.’

‘You’ve been doing well recently. All that work in the port.’

‘Something’s just caught up with me and I have to jump.’

‘Try saying no.’

‘I did. It was rephrased in a way that begged the answer yes.’

‘Couldn’t have been that bad if they were begging.’

‘Sorry. Wrong word. These guys do not go around begging. They ask, then they lean and then…’

‘I don’t know how you get involved.’

‘They come into my office and involve themselves, Heike, for Christ’s sake. I don’t even have to be in.’

‘So you knew them?’

‘Yeah, well, something left over from that Selina Aguia business back in March.’

‘Oh God, not her.’

‘Not exactly, but someone we both got to know around that time.’

‘We were going through one of our bad patches at the time, I seem to remember,’ she said.

‘One of those momentary dark clouds that used to flit across the sunshine of our lives.’

‘Flit? I don’t remember it being as a quick as a flit.’

‘Forget about all that,’ I said. ‘I want to think about something else. I want to think about going away.’

‘Back to Europe?’

‘I was just thinking about that first night in the desert. Our first time.’

‘Oh, you mean the ground,’ she said.

‘Yeah, the ground. You remember that ground.’

‘Let’s do it,’ she said. ‘Let’s go up to Niger and lie on the ground.’

‘We can do a bit more than just lie.’

But she was off and thinking about it, planning it all in her head. I took my hands out from under her skirt and eased them up her T-shirt and cupped her breasts and she pressed her sex down on to my lap so I hardened. We kissed some more and I was all keen on doing some re-enactment, but Helen came in from the balcony, slapping her thigh with a wooden spoon and asked us whether we wanted our yam boiled or fried.

‘We could go up there when my mother comes out.’

‘When your mother comes out?’ I asked. ‘Your mother’s coming out here to Cotonou?’

‘Why not?’

‘The holiday destination on the mosquito coast apart from maybe Lagos,’ I said. ‘I noticed you didn’t say your father was coming.’

‘No. He’s been before. Spent a couple of years in Ghana in the fifties. He says he doesn’t need to come again.’

‘Well, that means he’s told her it’s not lion and hippo country out here.’

‘She knows that already.’

‘And she knows about the malaria, the heat, the sweat, the pollution…’

‘Why do you live here, Bruce Medway?’

‘I’m just saying it’s not Mombasa beach around here. It’s not jambo country.’

‘I know. I just want you to tell me why you live here.’

‘It’s not the climate. It’s not the cuisine.’

‘Just tell me why.’

‘I’m just saying that those two things are important holiday…’

‘I don’t want to know about what’s important for holidays. I want you to tell me why you live here.’

‘The people.’

‘The people?’

‘If I thought I wasn’t going to see Bagado or Moses or Helen again for the rest of my life, I’d feel…’

‘Yes? What would you feel?’ she asked, teasing me a little, big Bruce Medway talking about his feelings.

‘I’d feel impoverished.’

She kissed me.

‘You’re all right, really,’ she said, patting my face, running her hand through my hair again, stroking the old dog.

‘Am I?’

‘And anyway, Mum’s not coming for the climate or the cuisine or the people. She’s coming to see us.’

‘Us?’

‘That’s you and me, Bruce. The loving couple.’

‘She doesn’t know me.’

‘I know this may sound strange, but she wants to. She wants to get to know you.’

‘Why would she want to do a thing like that?’ I asked, suddenly feeling myself on the brink of something, not the yawning black ravine but something bigger than me, like a view that goes on for ever to some distant mountains.

‘I’m pregnant.’

4

Saturday 20th July, Cotonou.

It rained in the night, louder and longer than Buddy Rich could have ever coaxed out of his snare. I stared at the slice of window reflected on the wall, at the water rippling shadows down the pane. I listened to Heike sleeping, felt the warmth of her hip on my thigh, her ribs feathering my flank. Happiness crept into my chest and curled up there tight as a ball of kitten. But no sooner was it there than I felt this terrible despair at ever being able to hang on to it. Happiness was a moment rather than a state.

I fainted into sleep without realizing it. I thought I was still staring at the rain running, running down the wall to nowhere, but somehow I’d got up and was looking down at myself. My shadow blocked the slice of window. A terrible darkness fell so that I no longer knew whether I was the one standing or lying, no longer knew if I’d been happy even for a moment.

I left for work in the morning – disturbed. Part of me was flinging myself around like a ballerina born to it but the rest, the bigger part, was weighed down, burdened by some unknown foresight. I drove and let yesterday crash over me, haul me down to its root, and roll me around in the airless, noisome turbulence.

Five men dead, schoolgirls disappearing off the streets of Cotonou, Le Commandant Bondougou, Carlo, Gio and Franconelli. What Bagado didn’t know, something that had come my way by accident in that ugly business at the beginning of March when Franconelli set his terrible example, was that Bondougou, the Cotonou Chief of Police, was a Franconelli man. Bondougou covered up all the murders, and there were a number, from that horrific night and not a peep was heard in any of the media. That knowledge sat on my chest like a 300 lb bench press that I’d been foolish enough to think I could lift.

For me to find Carlo and Gio waiting in my office after Bagado had implied that he wouldn’t mind seeing Bondougou end up as the main dish in a shark fest was a cruel irony. Me help Bagado sideline Bondougou? If miracles came my way and I found myself well placed to nudge him into the feeding frenzy I could only see myself going straight in after him.

I parked up at the office, tweaked the gardien awake and sent him across to the Caravelle café for coffee and croissants. The tailor’s shack opposite my office was coming alive into the grey, sodden morning with the aid of the usual North Korean folk music from the radio. I wasn’t talking to those guys. I’d asked them to make me a pair of trousers out of the last two metres of super-lightweight cotton I could find in Cotonou and they’d ballsed it up and left themselves no extra to adjust. Still, there were always spare boys around to run errands for me, do a bit of following and such, so I didn’t dress the boss down too much for botching my trews.

The office stank of beer. I opened the windows and went out on to the balcony with my phone book and flicked through to the number of the biggest shipping agents in Cotonou. I put a call in to my friend Appollinaire Agossa, a young dude type who listened out for me.

‘Polly? It’s me, Bruce.’

‘No need to introduce yourself, M. Bru, you’re the only man I know who calls me Polly.’

‘Am I? My privilege. Do you know a guy called Jean-Luc Marnier?’

‘No.’

‘Can you find out for me? He runs an import/export company called La Côte Oueste. Looks like a crook, too.’

‘They’re all crooks. How long have I got?’

‘Ages. Ten minutes?’

I hung up. The gardien came in with the best thing of the morning and I gave him a tip to go and buy his bouille, the wet sugary bird food they like to eat for breakfast. I gave him some extra to go and find a girl to clean the office up properly too. I drank coffee and fluffed eating the croissant badly so it was all over me when Polly called back.

‘That was quick,’ I said.

‘Only because we’ve been working the ship for Marnier’s company, loading cotton seed.’

‘The Kluezbork II?’

‘You’ve heard?’

‘I was on it yesterday afternoon.’

‘They think the crew did it and they were going to throw them to the sharks when they got out to sea.’

‘That’s not logical, Polly.’

‘That’s the rumour.’

Bagado’s machine working already.

‘You got anything sensible or interesting on Marnier?’

‘He imports veg oil in drums and bottles it here in Cotonou to sell locally. He exports cotton seed and fibre. Somebody said he’s done cashew but I don’t remember the name La Côte Oueste. I’ve heard he does business out of Lomé and Abidjan too. That’s it.’

‘Well, that all sounds very legal to me.’

‘He doesn’t have to be a crook.’

‘The people I know he’s dealing with say he does,’ I said. ‘Anyway, thanks. When’s your birthday?’

‘You missed it.’

‘I’ll make it up to you, Polly.’

‘Don’t call me Polly, that’ll do.’

‘You’re lucky you’re not pretty.’

‘That’s not what the girls say in the New York, New York club.’

‘It’s dark in the New York, New York, and you’re black.’

‘Au revoir, M. Bru.’

I got in the car in a sweat from the coffee and headed east to cross the lagoon to Akpakpa and the industrial zone where Marnier’s company had their offices, about four kilometres out on the Porto Novo road. Bagado’s car was sitting beside a large puddle near the Ancien Pont, and there was a big crowd streaming down the bank to one side of the bridge. I parked up and went with the flow. I knew it was bad because some wailing had started up towards the front and people were crowding on the bridge looking down at the water’s edge, the Catholics among them crossing themselves.

An ambulance arrived and reversed down the bank. I followed it in and broke through the police cordon to find Bagado standing alone by a small skiff with sails made out of polypropylene sacks. His hands were jammed down into his mac pockets, stretching it tight across his back. His body language was grim. I drew alongside. His jaw muscle, working over some high-density anxiety, popped out of the side of his cheek.

His head turned five degrees to me and then went back to the skiff. In the belly of the boat, blown up to the point where the brown school pinafore was stretched taut, was the decomposing, fish-ravaged body of what I assumed was one of the missing schoolgirls. On the ground by the skiff, with his head between his knees, was the boat’s owner. His skin was grey and there was a patch of vomit between his heels.

‘He found her up on the sand bar. She was on her way out to the Gulf and the sharks and we wouldn’t have known anything more about her,’ said Bagado.

‘Where’s Bondougou?’

‘He’s coming. You’d better get out of here. This crowd could go off any minute.’

‘You’d better get going too, Bagado.’

‘I just want to look at this a moment. Hone my wrath.’

I worked my way back through the jostling crowd. Younger men at the back were beginning to get excited. They had sticks and rocks and their fists were jabbing the air. Some of them were hawkers from the traffic lights, looking to break up the boredom of their day with a bit of blood-letting. I got into my car and crawled across the bridge, pedestrians pounded on the roof.

La Côte Oueste Sari wasn’t difficult to find. The gardien let me in through a gate that could handle plenty of trouble should it come along. He pointed me up to some offices flanking the warehouse where I could see a bottling plant not in use. Most of the offices had their blinds down, but I found one with a glass door and beyond it a white woman in a short, tight red skirt, black vest and red high heels with little leather bows on the back. She had her back to the door and was spraying a huge umbrella plant. She was stretching up with one leg bent at the knee as if she was hoping that there was somebody else in the office to take notice. The air was freeze-dried inside and I didn’t disturb the woman’s work by coming in. She persisted with the disapproving atomizer – tsk, tsk – tsk, tsk.

‘Bonjour,’ I said

She span round faster than if she’d been caught with her hands in the till and went over on one of her high heels. She fell back into a plump black leather chair which swallowed her with a gasp. The atomizer, which I could now see was a water pistol, was pointing at me.

‘You don’t frighten me with that,’ I said to her in French.

She laughed badly, as if there was plenty needed tightening up in the nerves department.

‘You scared me,’ she said, putting the pistol down. ‘I didn’t hear you come in.’

‘You don’t look as if you’ve got a weak heart.’

‘I don’t,’ she said, and went behind the desk.

To keep herself in that trim she must have had the heart of a steeplechaser. Her body had a fat percentage in the single figures and it looked as if it was monitored that way. She must have had a set of scales with the grams marked off and a red line for anything over fifty kilos.

Her face was as taut as a jockey’s, the muscles evident under the stretched skin. She had a small mouth, very small. It couldn’t have used up more than an inch. It looked as if it was going to be very economical. She put a set of long red talons through her short bleach-blonde hair and kicked herself away from the desk on a castered chair. She crossed her legs, keeping her eyes on mine, seeing where they went, and leaned back, showing me the workings of her abdominals under the spray-on vest.

‘I’ve come to see Jean-Luc. Is he here?’

‘You should have called,’ she said.

‘Does that mean he isn’t?’

She blinked once, slowly, and breathed in through her nose as if that was some kind of a reply.

‘Does that mean I need an appointment?’ I asked.

A little tongue came out of the little mouth and nipped back in again.

‘I’m doing all the work here,’ I said, ‘and you’re the one behind the desk.’

‘What do you want to see him about?’

‘Veg oil.’

‘You don’t need to see him to buy veg oil. I can sell you that.’

‘I’m not buying, I’m selling.’

‘He’s not buying,’ she said. ‘I know.’

‘I wouldn’t mind hearing that from him.’

‘I speak with his voice.’

‘Since the operation,’ I said.

She frowned.

‘Une petite blague,’ I said.

‘Très petite,’ she confirmed.

‘Are you his managing director, then?’ I asked. ‘You didn’t give me your card or tell me your name.’

‘Carole,’ she said, and as an afterthought, ‘Marnier.’

‘You must be his wife.’

‘I could be his sister, his half sister or his sister-in-law.’

‘If he had a brother…which he doesn’t,’ I guessed.

The knot of muscle at the back of her neck keeping her shoulders braced loosened about a millimetre.

‘You didn’t say your name.’

‘Bruce Medway.’

‘No card?’

‘No,’ I said, getting some of my own economy going.

She uncrossed her muscly legs, pulled herself back up to the desk and tucked herself in tight underneath it.

‘Is Jean-Luc in trouble?’ I asked.

‘Trouble?’ she said, hitting the wrong note, making it sound like an understatement for his current situation.

‘Everybody gets trouble in Africa,’ I said. ‘Sooner or later. I heard there was some on board the Kluezbork II yesterday, not that…’

‘What?’

‘Not that it would have anything to do with Jean-Luc…necessarily. But you know how Africans like to make trouble because…well, trouble is money.’

‘What trouble?’

‘Five dead men.’

She didn’t blink for some time, her eyes glazing and pinking at the rims in the cold air. Her mouth formed a perfect ‘o’, lower case.

‘Five?’ she said, interrogatively.

‘Should there have been more?’

‘I don’t know what you’re saying…what you’re asking. Are you asking anything?’

‘I’m saying he needs some help with that…and I can give it to him.’

‘Help with what?’

‘Help with the five dead men and his cotton seed on the same ship.’

‘How do you know…?’

‘Of course, I’d have to see him personally on the subject.’

‘But…’

‘And you seem to be the only one who can…facilitate that.’

All the talk about the Kluezbork II had confused her. She didn’t seem to know about the dead stowaways, but she was aware of the cotton seed and that the repercussions could be expensive. I walked across to the window and parted the Venetian blinds with two fingers. The warehouse was very quiet, nobody in there at all.

‘And I’d still like to talk to him about veg oil, if that’s possible?’ I said, moving back round to her side of the desk.

She picked up the phone and dialled a Benin mobile phone number, one of the new ones which had come in since the Francophonie conference last year. I memorized the number.

She spoke in rapid French, with her little mouth kissing the mouthpiece. I heard nothing. Then she shut up and listened. After a minute she put the phone down and tapped the polished desk top with her red fingernails. She kicked off her shoe and I heard her foot rasping up and down a calf that hadn’t been razored recently.

‘You and Jean-Luc been married long?’ I asked.

She looked up into her head.

‘Four years,’ she said.

‘You like it in Africa?’

‘Very much.’

‘Where do you come from in France?’

‘Lille.’

‘The weather’s not so nice in Lille.’

‘Ça c’est vrai.’

I lowered myself into one of the black leather chairs. Carole kicked off her other shoe and wriggled her feet back to life after they’d been crammed to the points of her five-inch highs with their prissy little bows. The phone went off louder than a ref’s pea whistle. It jolted her. She snatched at it and listened and then held it out to me.

‘What the fuck do you want?’ asked a voice in English with barely a trace of French accent.

‘Nice English, Jean-Luc. Where’d you pick that up?’

‘I know who you are. Now what the hell do you want?’

‘To meet,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to talk on the phone.’

‘Too bad,’ he said. ‘I only talk on the phone. Who’re you working for?’

‘Myself.’

‘Bullshit. The kind of work you do, you don’t get off your ass unless somebody’s paying. So who’s paying?’

‘A man’s got to live even if he doesn’t have any clients.’

‘So what’s all this stuff about veg oil?’

‘OK, you’re right. I’m not interested in veg oil. I had to get started somewhere. Your wife wasn’t blowing your trumpet for you.’

‘With a mouth that size she doesn’t blow anything,’ he said crudely, and laughed with congested lungs, which set him off coughing.

‘Maybe you’d like to talk about the Kluezbork II.’

‘What’s that about?’

‘You know, Jean-Luc.’

‘Yeah, I know. What can you do about it?’

‘Those stowaways came in on one of your cotton seed stevedore shifts.’

‘And?’

‘You know how it works, Jean-Luc. You’re responsible. You’re the white man, for Christ’s sake. You’re as good as a monarch.’

‘OK. So you can get the ship out. How much?’

‘My fee is two hundred and fifty thousand CFA…upfront. Plus some grease to get things rolling. And if you’re going to be as shy as this you’re going to have to make provision for expenses.’

‘I have to be shy.’

‘If we meet, Jean-Luc, maybe you can tell me about that problem as well and perhaps you can start living a life again.’

‘I’ll call you,’ he said, and hung up.

Carole stood by the door with a little bag under her arm and some gold-rimmed sunglasses with red lenses on. She’d made a bad mistake. The lipstick she’d applied was dark purple. Her mouth looked like a split plum and didn’t go with anything else.

‘I’ve got to leave now,’ she said.

5

I sat in my Peugeot 504 saloon, picking at the piping on the seat cover. After a few minutes, Carole tottered around the puddles to an electric-blue Renault 5 Turbo. She smoothed her hands over her microskirt-encased bottom which showed no trace of visible panty line, got into the car, shucked her heels and took off at a fair lick. She had a grinning furry monkey hanging off four yellowing sucker pads in the rear window.

I let her get ahead and put four cars between her and myself on the Porto Novo/Cotonou road going back into town. She cut away from the line of traffic heading across the Ancien Pont, which she could see was backed up, probably because of the dead schoolgirl. The Renault 5 dodged through the muddy backstreets of Akpakpa and humped on to the metalled road going across the Nouveau Pont.

In front of the huge sprawl of rust-roofed stalls around the Dan Tokpa market she slowed and rocked up on to the central reservation and stopped next to a petrol hawker. She messed around in the car for a few minutes and came out wearing trainers. She crossed the road and went into the market, past the squatting money changers who must have said something other than Deutschmark, Dollar, Franc Français because she lashed a young guy with a caning look that had all the old hands laughing.

The market was heaving with people and filth from after the rain. The corrugated-iron roofs were set at decapitation height for my 6’ 4”. Carole’s trim, fatless, five-foot-nothing figure was more suited to this terrain, and I lost her in amongst the electrical goods no more than fifty yards in. I took time to extricate myself. A white man gets a lot of attention in a market like this and I was sold to every inch of the way. I arrived at the exit in time to see Carole’s Renault 5 hop off the central reservation and heard the whistle of her turbo as she nipped through the traffic lights and headed up Boulevard Saint Michel.

I’d just passed my first stupidity test with an alpha. I wasn’t a great one for punching the roof of my car and damning my eyes under these circumstances. It had happened many times before and I’d always been surprised at how many of my clients didn’t mind hiring someone more stupid than themselves. People like me served a purpose. The trick was to find out the purpose before my usefulness ran out. Jean-Luc Marnier was doing some planning around me and I realized I was going to need more dirt on him before we met.

I went back down Sekou Touré to the centre of town and parked outside the Gerbe d’ Or patisserie. There was a guy called Al Hadji Bélijébi who came from Niger and had some offices above a pharmacy near here. I knew him because he was a rice importer and his rice had been occupying my warehouse space in the port. He was impressed by the politeness of my pressure. He didn’t move his rice but we did become friends of a sort and he’d help me out if he could.

The secretary in the cold dark hallway up to his office buzzed me through. Al Hadji was sitting in magnificent blue robes behind the usual businessman’s ninety-cubic-foot desk, which he must have lowered through the roof, or built his office around it. We shook hands. He chucked his new mobile lovingly under the chin and offered coffee.

‘Is this business?’ he asked.

‘Do you know a guy called Jean-Luc Marnier?’

Bélijébi’s face stilled at the name. He nodded.

‘I know him,’ he said. ‘But if you don’t, it might be better for you to keep it that way.’

‘Does that mean he is a crook?’

Bélijébi didn’t answer.

‘When did you last see him?’ I asked.

‘Not for months.’

‘What’s his game?’

‘This is only talk, you understand. But the men I’ve heard this from are not idle gossipers.’

‘As long as you tell me more than he’s in import/export, I’ll listen.’

‘It’s what he imports and exports that’s important.’

‘Not just veg oil and cotton seed?’

‘No,’ he said, screwing a massive gold ring up and down a finger. ‘He exports people.’

The round pin finds the round hole.

‘There’s a long tradition of that kind of thing along this coast,’ I said. ‘Didn’t it all start from that place west of here, Ouidah? Some Brazilian supplying slavers with…’

‘Not slaves. These are paying customers. People paying to get an EC passport and passage.’

‘Full paperwork service supplied.’

‘I don’t know the details.’

‘Does he import anything interesting?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said, staring at the desk.

‘Is this something else I shouldn’t know about?’

‘I really don’t know,’ he said, not looking up.

‘Does Marnier have any friends, or just dissatisfied business associates?’

‘There’s a Frenchman who runs a bar down in the Jonquet zone. Michel Charbonnier. I think he’s supposed to be a friend but if you go and see him don’t use my name.’

‘That sort of bar?’

‘Are there any others down there?’

‘Does it have a name?’

‘L’ouistiti.’

‘What’s a ouistiti?’

‘A marmoset, I think you call it.’

‘How cute.’

‘You’ll see,’ he said, finishing his coffee, ‘if you can stay up that late without getting into trouble.’

I went back home with a baguette from the Gerbe d’ Or in the passenger seat and let Helen make me a salad. I was going to sleep out the afternoon, which was oppressive with more storm clouds building. I didn’t manage it. I ended up lying in bed thinking in very tight circles about Marnier.

If Bélijébi was hearing right, the five dead men on the Kluezbork II were Marnier’s stowaways – another good reason, alongside the Franconelli factor, for him to keep his face off the street and his wife on the hop. I was sure Marnier would want to hear my ‘inside’ on the Kluezbork II and I was equally certain that I was going to get to meet him, but that any face-to-face would be a big surprise, even bigger for me because I had no solution to his problem.

Bagado was also in this equation, which had the look of one of those differential jobs I never got the hang of in maths. He’d kiss me if I served up Marnier the marlin just as certainly as he would brickbat my balls if he found I’d slipped one past him, even if it was to save my own ass. And that, after all, was the nub as far as I was concerned – Marnier or me.

There was no question it was going to be Marnier, but I wanted a better feel for what Franconelli’s men had in mind and why. Now that I knew we weren’t dealing with a Simple Simon I had to get myself tutored up. At least I’d made contact with Marnier and had a mobile number for him, which could give me a quarter chance of squeezing more juice out of Carlo.

I left a message at the Hotel de la Plage for Carlo and Gio to meet me at the La Verdure restaurant/bar in downtown Cotonou. I certainly didn’t want them coming to the office now that I knew Marnier was out there keeping himself informed.

I slept a brain-damaged sleep and woke up with an eye glued shut and the realization that I hadn’t checked out Marnier’s home address. I had to do that before I went to the La Verdure. Get rid of all the obvious stuff first.

The home address that Carlo had given me was up in Cadjehoun, an area next to the smart Cocotiers district, which had gone through a rebuilding project to house minions for the Francophonie. I found Marnier’s house at the end of an afternoon darkening early with rain clouds. It wasn’t new and was built on the same principle as mine – servants’ quarters and a garage on the ground floor, and an apartment on the first. There was a chain across the short drive and a gardien’s stool positioned by the open gate. The gardens out front were in superb condition, with a variety of palms and shrubs getting high on the long rains. I parked, stepped over the chain and shouted for the gardien. Two ribbons of fresh tyre marks went into the empty garage, taking mud with them.

A young guy stripped to the waist and sweating appeared out of the shrubbery with a hoe in one hand and a heavy chopping machete in the other.

‘Le patron il est ici?’ I asked.

‘Il est parti depuis longtemps.’

‘Et la patronne?’

‘Il n’y a pas une patronne.’

Interesting.

‘Qu’est-ce que c’est la derniére fois que tu a vu le patron?’

‘Cinq ou six mois.’

‘Qui t’ a payé?’

‘Uhn?’

‘Tu n‘as été pas payé?’

Floored by that question he looked off into the garden. It was nearly night by now, with the storm brewing. I slipped him 500 CFA which he kept in his hand and looked at. A trickle of sweat slipped down his chest.

‘Le patron n’est jamais ici,’ he said.

‘Il habite oú maintenant?’

‘Je ne sais pas, monsieur. Vraiment.’

He tried to give me back the money. I told him to keep it and asked if I could take a look around. He didn’t like it but the money had complicated things. I went up the outside stairs and looked into the living room. In the failing light a basically furnished place revealed itself. The only expensive item a big TV and stereo system. I looked up on the roof and sure enough there was a large and expensive satellite dish. The place wasn’t abandoned and I was sure people had lived here until very recently. There were drinks and glasses out on a tray on a sideboard and a book with a bookmark in it on a pile of glossies on the coffee table. I should have come straight here once Carole had lost me. The alphas were coming up thick and fast on the stupidity tests.

I left. The gardien looked as if he was going to cry. I drove back into town. The evening fish market was up and people were buying steadily under the orange glow of the streetlights. Parking boys kept trying to usher me into vacant slots in front of the smartest shops in Cotonou. Girls with pyramids of oranges on trays on their heads begged me to buy. I parked up outside the railings of the La Verdure.

I was ten minutes late. Carlo and Gio were sitting on the back terrace in front of a beer and a Coke. The girls were hovering. The Italians talked without looking up at each other, as if there was some kind of confessional going on. A tall Nigerian girl I knew from playing pool in here with Heike of a Saturday night bumped a hip into Gio and risked running her hand through his hair. He braced a shoulder which was enough to tip her away and then he leaned across and slapped her hard on the long bare thigh she had on show below her miniskirt. There wasn’t anything playful about the slap and she yelped. She retreated to the other girls in the bar, where I was ordering a demi pression, and showed off Gio’s perfect paw mark purpling up into a soft welt she’d have for a week. I told the girl to get some ice on it and went out to join the funsters.

I gave them a good evening and pulled up a chair to the table for two. They said nothing. Carlo took the foam off his demi. Gio’s peasant hands rested on the table top, taking a momentary break from violence.

‘I’ve made contact with Marnier,’ I said.

‘Where is he?’ asked Carlo, sucking in an inch of beer, glass held between two fingers.

‘He’s inside the cellphone footprint of Cotonou.’

‘That’s something,’ said Carlo.

‘He’s got another reason to keep quiet.’

‘What’s the first reason?’

‘You guys.’

‘Does he know about us?’

‘How much work did you do before you came to me?’

‘I went to his office and his home.’

‘You didn’t take Gio with you, did you?’

‘No,’ he said, and nodded at Gio to keep him calm. Christ, the guy was on no fuse at all.

‘Did you speak to anyone?’

‘Una ragazza.’

‘Bleach-blonde, miniskirt, nails?’

‘Yeah.’

‘So Marnier knew about you before I got to him.’

‘What’s the other reason he’s hiding?’

‘Five dead stowaways were found on a ship he was working yesterday.’

‘So?’

‘They’re his. He put them there. It’s a sideline.’

‘You telling us you can’t do the job?’

Gio’s body odour was starting to get a little feral.

‘I’m doing it, aren’t I? I’m here telling you how it is,’ I said. ‘Now look, maybe there’s a few things you can do for me. First of all, never come to my office for whatever reason. He’s going to come and see me sometime…’

‘Then we’ll come and talk to him.’

‘No. I’ll fix up a meeting and you can turn up and talk to him then. If you sniff around my office he’ll never show in the first place.’

‘What’re the other things?’

‘Why do you want to find him and what’re you going to do to him when you find him?’

‘When you find him,’ he said, and then started blabbing to Gio in some dialect which sounded like a couple of Portuguese talking about opera.

‘You said he’s on a cellphone,’ said Carlo.

I wrote the number for him on a beer mat. They talked some more and Carlo nodded into the bar. Then he got up and said he’d speak to Franconelli, ask permission. Gio sucked on his Coke through the lemon and ice cubes.

‘You speak any English, Gio?’

‘No.’

Well, I tried.

We sat there for ten minutes. Two sailors were playing pinball in the bar and the girls were all over them. They shrugged off the flashier-looking but tougher Nigerian girls. They preferred the smaller, plumper Beninois girls who had a sweeter act but were no less focused on the bottom line.

Gio ordered another Coke to slurp. The waiter didn’t have to ask me. Carlo rejoined us.

‘Mr Franconelli says you’re to do what you’re fucking told and find Jean-Luc Marnier and don’t ask any questions about stuff that doesn’t concern you.’

‘Right.’

‘You ask me you’re better off not knowing dick. That way it’s safer.’

‘You mean if I was indiscreet…’

‘Mr Franconelli will know and he will not be happy.’

‘As unhappy as he is with Marnier?’

‘Maybe more unhappy…I don’t know. I don’t know why you want to know this shit.’

‘Only that it’ll help me know where to walk and not to walk with Marnier. He sounds like a complicated man who’s sensitive to trouble. If he’s going to trust me enough to come out of hiding I’d like to know where he’s sensitive, don’t want to lean on his bad arm if he has one.’

Carlo and Gio exchanged a look.

‘But now that you’ve put it the way you’ve put it maybe I don’t want to know as much as I thought,’ I said.

‘Probably you don’t,’ said Carlo.

‘Maybe what I’ll do is ask you some questions and you give me “yes” and “no” answers. How about that?’

‘We could try that.’

‘Does Marnier import goods for Franconelli, here, in Benin?’

‘Yeah. He has done.’

‘Has he handled it the way Franconelli expected it to be handled?’

‘Not quite.’

‘Has he been cheating on you guys?’

Carlo ducked and weaved as if this was not the real issue but could be part of the problem.

‘Is this a wrist-slap or is Marnier headed for the big elsewhere?’

Carlo rattled a couple of sentences out to Gio. Gio shrugged, said nothing, giving his usual expert opinion.

‘That depends on what he says to us,’ said Carlo.

‘Why didn’t you get Gio to talk to the ragazza? I’m sure she’d have sung to him if he’d asked her nicely.’

‘That’s not how Mr Franconelli wanted to work it.’

‘Good family man?’

‘If you like.’

I finished my beer. Gio looked into the bar at one of the Beninoise who had her hands down one of the sailor’s trousers while he was playing the pinball machine. He wasn’t fighting too hard and he was losing a lot of balls.

‘Anything else?’ asked Carlo.

‘I don’t think so,’ I said, a little nervous at how things were coming to a close, worried that Franconelli had chosen me specifically for the job and that once it was done maybe I’d find myself taking a look down the barrel of a Beretta and getting an eyeful – visions of Gale Strudwick face down in a Lagos swimming pool, the rain coming down on her hardening flesh.

We stood. Gio’s chair fell backwards and landed with a sharp crack that made me start. Gio smiled at me, which was not nice. Worn teeth with a discoloured crust up by the gums over a dark, hollow Palaeolithic mouth, maybe a stalactite coming down at the back there.

‘Twenty-four hours,’ said Carlo.

Gio patted my cheek with a surprisingly soft and dry palm.

6

The usual evening train pushed through the traffic, horn honking, heading out across the bridge to the industrial zone with a line of empty cars that screeched and grated on the rails embedded in the tarmac. I stopped off at the Lebanese supermarket round the corner from the La Verdure and bought a half of Bell’s and some black wrinkly olives imported directly from the Bekaa Valley. I went back to the office with my goodies. The gardien was off somewhere doing what gardiens do best, not looking after the place. The door of the office wasn’t locked as it should have been. I opened it, stood on the threshold and looked in. It didn’t stink of beer any more, which was good. I put a hand in to turn on the light.

‘Leave it off,’ said a voice in English with plenty of French sewn into it. ‘Come in and shut the door behind you.’

Someone was sitting in my chair, backlit by the glow from the streetlights and supermarket hoardings on Sekou Touré. The people who come to my office these days just don’t recognize their side of the desk. I got annoyed.

‘Who the hell are you?’ I asked.

‘You’ve been looking for someone. Have you forgotten already?’

‘Well, you’re not Marnier, not with all that ronronnement in your voice.’

‘Only cats ronronnent.’

‘You know what I mean. So who are you?’

‘I’m representing Marnier. Jean-Luc’s not ready to come out into the open yet.’

‘Well, that’s tough because I’m only going to talk to Marnier, the man himself. And while we’re talking about talking, you can do your talking from the client side of the desk and let me sit in my own chair.’

‘I don’t want to be involved in this business. I’m doing a favour for Jean-Luc. I’d rather you didn’t see my face.’

‘If you’re worried about your ugliness, don’t be. There’s plenty of that in this business.’

‘What do you know about ugliness?’ he said, as if I was new on the playground.

‘It’s not skin deep like yours probably is.’

‘You’ve got a very strong backhand, M. Medway.’

‘That wasn’t a compliment,’ I said, and nodded at him. ‘How’d you like my forehand?’

‘Vous êtes un peu fâché, M. Medway. Ça ne va pas en Afrique,’ he said, imitating a French West African accent.

‘It’s just been one of those days,’ I said. ‘The rainy season or my biorythms, I don’t know which.’

‘I don’t want to be here, you know.’

‘Well, you are. So you’re in it.’

‘I have to be here.’

‘You owe Marnier?’

He ducked his head as if weighed down by his dues.

‘I’ve a feeling Marnier’s debts could run very deep, the kind of man he is,’ I said, and the man nodded. I sat down and put the whisky and the olives on the desk. ‘There should be a couple of glasses in the top drawer, help us relax a little in each other’s company.’

‘C’est mieux comme Ça,’ he said, and took out the glasses.

I filled them.

‘Olive?’

We sipped whisky and ate olives, made mounds of pits on the desk top.

‘What’s your task, Monsieur…?’

‘Jacques will do.’

‘Tell me, Jacques.’

‘The name of your company is M & B. Who is the “B”?’

‘Bagado. He’s a police detective. He lost his job a few years back and we worked together for a while. Now he’s back on the force. Been back three or four months now. So he doesn’t work with me any more.’

‘What’s your involvement with him?’

‘We talk. We like each other. We’re friends. My girlfriend likes him a lot too. They’re friends. We don’t talk about work. Not much, anyway.’

‘Do you exchange information?’

‘I don’t tell him about all my bad-boy clients, if that’s what you mean. If I did, I wouldn’t get any work, might even get myself uglied-up a little, like you or worse. You know what business can be like out here, Jacques.’

‘I know,’ he said, sounding miserable about it.

‘Does Marnier have something in mind for me? Something for me to do? I mean, I’ve already met his wife but maybe he doesn’t trust her opinion, maybe the words come out too small from that little mouth of hers. Yeah, he certainly didn’t seem to think much of her in one department.’

‘I don’t know what Jean-Luc is thinking. He asked me to come and talk to you so I do. Carole? I don’t know what he thinks about Carole. I don’t know where she is any more. Maybe you coming along was all they needed to know that things were getting…hot.’

‘So now they’ve disappeared. They’re not at the office. I dropped by their home and they’re not there either. Do you know where they are?’

‘Why were you in their office?’

‘Ambulance-chasing. Looking for work. I had some privileged information.’

‘From your police friend?’

‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘I thought the information might make his life less problematic and fatten my pocket at the same time.’

‘Tell me.’

‘Only Marnier. Face to face.’

‘He says he wants you to do something for him.’

‘Then he’ll have to tell me himself. And if he wants me to pick something up from somebody or drop something off to somebody, at night, on a lonely road in the rain…forget it. Not for any money. Go and tell him that, Jacques.’

‘But…’

‘I don’t want to hear any more. Tell Marnier to make direct contact or what I know stays with me and what he wants me to do, I won’t. Now buzz, busy bee, because I’m tired of this.’

The phone rang. Jacques jumped. I tore it off the handset.

‘Bruce Medway.’

‘Jean-Luc Marnier.’

‘We were just getting bored with each other, me and Jacques.’

‘I could tell,’ he said, which made my neck bristle.

I stood and looked through the windows and out on the balcony.

‘Are you watching this?’

‘Tell him to leave.’

I buzzed Jacques off and he stalked out, keeping his face away from me.

‘He’s shy, your friend. Are you coming up?’

‘Doucement, doucement, nous sommes en Afrique.’

I got round my side of the desk with my ear still connected and settled uncomfortably into the warmth left over by Jacques.

‘Carole tells me you’re “beau”…Is that right?’ asked Marnier.

‘I’ve just been talking to your friend about ugliness…’

‘But are you “beau”?’

‘That’s a strange question, Jean-Luc.’

‘Not for me, it isn’t.’

Something about the slant of those words reined me in, so I didn’t forget myself and crash in there and say that in the photo I’d seen of him he didn’t look too leprous.

‘Well?’ he asked.

‘I never made the May Queen but I’ve had my moments,’ I said. ‘I was just telling Jacques that ugliness doesn’t bother me too much. There’s a lot of it around in this world.’

‘That’s unusual for someone pretty. Normalement les beaux aiment seulement les autres beaux.’

‘Who said that?’

‘Me.’

‘The truth is, Jean-Luc, I might have made the cut at the school dance when I was a youngster, but now I’m in that battle zone over forty, you know what it’s like, wrinkle and sag, wrinkle and sag.’

‘Stay out of the sun. Drink water, my friend.’

‘We’re not going to stay friends for long with that kind of advice.’

He laughed. A crackle of static shivved my right ear.

‘Now, Africans, M. Medway, now they have skin. Beautiful skin. But maybe that’s the nature of beauty…it’s always flawed. We wrinkle and sag and they’re…well, they’re born black.’

‘I’m sure they don’t see it that way.’

‘You’d be surprised.’

I could hear him coming up the stairs now. His feet sliding until they stubbed the next step, his breathing wheezing up badly even after five steps. The man out of condition on all those French filterless cigarettes he stained his hair with.

‘Smoker’s lungs, Jean-Luc, maybe it’s time for you to give up before you belly up.’

‘Look who’s got the advice now,’ he said, stopping on the stairs, the air roaring over the webs of phlegm in his lungs.

‘I’ll shut up, Jean-Luc, let you get to the top of the stairs…’

‘Without annoying me. If I get angry I can’t breathe.’

‘I’ll remember that.’

He got to the top of the stairs and coughed his heart up and spat it out on the floor in the hall.

‘Sorry,’ he said, creeping round the door, ‘for the mess.’

Whatever crap I was going to come up with stopped in a lump under my voice box. I’d done my bit of bragging about how much ugliness I could take, but I wasn’t prepared for what Jean-Luc Marnier sprang on me. His face was hardly a face any more. It wasn’t even an anagram. Not even an anagram put back together by a surgeon speaking a different language. It was an onomatopoeia. It yelled horror.

A scar like a bear-driven stock market collapse travelled from his right eye socket, across his cheek whose bone was knocked flat, underneath his nose where it joined the rip of his mouth for a second before going down to his jawline and into his shirt. There was nothing neat about the stitching. The skin was puckered and bulged in torn peaks. The end of his nose was missing and there was a deep divot across the bridge, which meant he breathed exclusively through his mouth and his right eye was a glazed wall, its socket shattered. Where there should have been a left eyebrow there was a thick, livid welt which ran round to his left ear, which wasn’t there. Below the ear a chunk of his neck was missing and the skin had been stretched over it. The other side of his neck looked like molten lino.

He straightened up at the doorway and walked to the chair like an old soldier pulling himself together, General Gordon, maybe. He sat down and reached into the pocket of his light-blue sleeveless shirt with only two fingers and a thumb on his right hand. Scars like a railway terminus ran up his arms and it wasn’t difficult to see that he’d been cut to the bone. He jogged a cigarette out of the packet and drew it into his mouth. He lit it with a Bic and blew smoke out on the end of a residual cough. Something else different to his photo. He’d dyed his hair black. There was some desperation in that.

‘Now you see why your looks are interesting to me,’ he said, shyly, like a schoolboy with gravel-ripped knees.

I searched for vocabulary but found only first syllables. I reached for Jacques’s whisky and slid it across to Marnier and took a half inch off my own.

‘That’s what I bring out in people,’ he said. ‘Is that Jacques’s glass? Would you mind washing it out?’

‘What happened to you, Jean-Luc?’ I asked, taking another glass out of the drawer and filling it for him.

‘Machete attack. Typical Africans…they didn’t finish the job.’

‘Not here, in Benin?’

‘No, no, Liberia. I shouldn’t have been there. Some tribal problem. The village I was in was attacked. Ten men moved through the village hacking at anything that moved. They sprayed the place with a little gasoline and whumph! They killed twenty-eight people in less than ten minutes. When they left, the locals, who had run, came back. They stitched me up, did what they could for me, got me transport back to Côte d’Ivoire. But, you know how it is, these refugee hospitals they don’t have much call for cosmetic surgeons. So…’ he finished, and revealed himself with what remained of his hands.

‘How long ago was all that?’

‘Must be three or four months now. I was lucky. None of the wounds got infected. The local people covered them in mud. That’s where all our best antibiotics come from.’

‘You must have lost a lot of blood.’

‘Not so much that I let them give me a transfusion. I couldn’t have black man’s blood run through my veins. Don’t know what it would do to me. Make me late…unreliable, things like that.’

‘You don’t think much of Africans for a man whose life was saved by them.’

‘No, no, I like them. I was just joking. I’m very fond of Africans. They are marvellous people. Those local people who helped me. So innocent. So charming. So caring. But I have my prejudices too and at my age they’re difficult to get rid of.’

‘I don’t want you to think I’m being facetious, but for a man who’s suffered what you have and only four months ago…you’ve made a good recovery.’

He grunted out a laugh or a dismissal, I didn’t know which, and stuck his cigarette in his terrible mouth and loosened off the belt of his trousers.

‘Some of my less obvious wounds,’ he said, closing his eye to the smoke, ‘are still open and very badly infected. I’m nervous in crowds. I don’t like loud noises or sudden movements. I find people difficult…to trust.’

‘But this isn’t the only reason you’re hiding, Jean-Luc, is it?’

‘This?’ he asked, pointing at his face and then laying a snub-nosed .38 revolver on my desk. ‘I’m not hiding because of this. I’ll say something for the Africans…it doesn’t bother them. They look at me as if it is normal for a white man to have such a face. And they don’t pity me either. I like that. My own people. Pah! That’s something different. They look at me as if I’m an affront. They look at me as if I should have had the sensitivity to consider their feelings. I should have thought before offending their aesthetic senses. I should be in purdah. Our society is obsessed with beauty, don’t you think, M. Medway?’

‘And your wife?’ I asked, the question in my head and out of my mouth before I could snatch it back.

‘What about my wife?’ he said, quick and vicious.

‘How has she coped with a man who left her whole and came back…It can’t have been easy.’

‘A lot of people underestimate Carole. They spend too long looking at her ass. You know, even before this I was not leading-man material. She didn’t marry me for my looks, M. Medway. And I was fifty-two years old. She was twenty-eight. What does that tell you?’

‘That maybe you’ve got a good sense of humour.’

‘Now you are being facetious.’

‘A little. But that’s what women like in a man, so they say. You look down their ads in the Lonely Hearts columns and they all ask for GSOH…but they never tell you what jokes they laugh at.’

‘And the guys? What do the guys ask for?’

‘Sex, fun, zero commitment. But they do offer something very important to women. FHOH.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Full Head Of Hair.’

Marnier roared. He ran a hand through his thick black locks.

‘I win,’ he said, and laughed some more.

‘So why did she marry you?’

‘That’s personal. I only mentioned it to illustrate a point.’

‘She keeps herself in very good condition.’

‘Perhaps you’re one of these guys who looks at her ass too long,’ he said, touchy.

‘She didn’t give me much opportunity.’

Marnier roared again, hard enough to split any stitches he might still have left in him.

‘She lost you without even having to think about it,’ he said. ‘Ah, M. Medway, I think I’m going to like you.’

‘That worries me.’

‘I don’t like many people.’

‘If you’re including Jacques in your list, I might as well tell you he didn’t seem to like being your friend too much.’

‘Jacques?’

‘The guy who was in here just a minute ago.’

‘Him?’ he said, contemptuous. ‘He’s a fool.’

Suddenly, for a whole load of very good reasons, I had the desire to get out of there, get back home, get away from all this…all this manoeuvring, all this manly sizing up.

‘Let’s get back to why you’re hiding, Jean-Luc.’

‘Is there more whisky?’ he asked, finishing his glass.

I refilled him but not myself. Discourage the man. Let him drink alone. I showed him the olives.

‘Lebanese,’ he said, chewing one.

‘Time’s winged chariot, Jean-Luc.’

‘What?’

‘It’s hurrying near.’

‘You have an education,’ he said. ‘Now look, I want you to do something for me.’

‘Is it to do with why you’re hiding?’

‘I’ll be honest with you…’

‘Is that unusual?’

‘You’re very interesting, M. Medway,’ he said, looking at me out of the corner of his head.

‘Call me Bruce, for God’s sake.’

‘You’re quicker than I thought, Bruce,’ he said.

‘I can be slow too. As Carole found out.’

‘And my gardien,’ he said. ‘It means you have a good understanding of your strengths and weaknesses. Self-knowledge is a rare thing.’

‘Pity I don’t adhere to the little that’s come my way.’

‘Then you’re unpredictable as well…not a bad thing.’

‘Let’s get back to what you want me to do for you. The Kluezbork II, for instance.’

‘That will resolve itself.’

‘You’re not hiding from angry relatives.’

‘I don’t follow.’

‘Of the five dead men. Your stowaways.’

‘Mine? Where did you hear that from?’

‘It’s well known that you shift a little human cargo along with your cotton seed.’

‘They won’t be able to stick that on me.’

‘They’re talking to the chef d’équipe of that final shift…’

‘They won’t get anywhere.’

‘You don’t know the man who’s running the investigation.’

‘Your M. Bagado? He still won’t get anywhere.’

‘You’re covered then?’

‘You don’t think I can work out of Cotonou without a lot of…support. Very expensive support, I might add. You must realize by now, Bruce, that’s the beauty of Africa. Everything is possible avec la graisse.’

‘This isn’t port business. It’s police business. And Bagado doesn’t…’

‘Let me ask you something,’ he said, lighting another cigarette from the butt of the last. ‘Have you heard of Bondougou? Le Commandant.’

The name disappeared into the smoke over Marnier’s shoulder and then on into the darkness of the room.

‘I see.’

Marnier gave me a huge Gallic shrug and stubbed out the butt in the tuna can available. He picked up the refilled glass of whisky.

‘Your health.’

‘Yours too,’ I said, pouring myself one and joining him. ‘You need it more than I do.’

‘If I stopped smoking,’ he said, ‘I’d come apart. The tar glues me together.’

‘I don’t want to think about that for too long,’ I said. ‘Are you hiding or aren’t you? You went through quite a performance to get to me.’

‘You came to see me first. I don’t know all your connections yet. Maybe someone has asked you to find me,’ he said, shrewd eyes on mine.

‘Is that why you’re keeping my phone occupied?’

‘Expensive but safe.’

‘So somebody’s after you?’

‘Somebody’s always after me.’

‘You’re that kind of businessman.’

‘Sometimes people disagree with the way I make things work.’

‘For them or for yourself.’

‘Ha! Yes,’ he said, and fingered the couple of inches of thick scar tissue he had between the corner of his mouth and jawline.

‘Maybe you’re not being so honest about how your face was cut up,’ I said.

‘It was a machete attack.’

‘I can see that.’

‘Let’s talk about what you’re going to do for me.’

‘Good, I’ve got a home to go to.’

‘How nice,’ he said, irritable now, the breathing going suddenly. ‘I want you to take me to Grand-Popo.’

‘You’ve got a wife. She’s got a car. Renault 5 Turbo. Fast, comfortable.’

‘Carole’s been under enough strain as it is.’

‘What are we going to do in Grand-Popo?’ I asked. ‘The beach is nice.’

‘I’m going to meet somebody.’

‘For dinner. I’ve heard the Auberge isn’t bad. Better for lunch, though.’

‘Perhaps. I’ve taken a small house so we’ll have some privacy.’

‘Who are you meeting? If that’s not too intrusive.’

‘A man from Togo. That’s all you need to know.’

‘But we’re going to meet in this house you’ve taken, not out on some open piece of wasteland in the dark. I don’t like those kind of meeting places and I’ve been to a few in my time.’

‘Now you’re adhering to that little self-knowledge of yours.’

‘And why not?’

‘Don’t worry, I’m in no condition to be stumbling around in the dark.’

‘When do we go?’

‘Tomorrow. You’ll be told what time. Make the whole day available…and night,’ he said, standing and taking a bent brown envelope from his back pocket. ‘This is the first half. Two hundred and fifty thousand CFA. The rest when we get back to Cotonou. That is your rate? Two hundred and fifty thousand a day?’

He stubbed out the cigarette and picked up the revolver and mobile phone. He stuffed the revolver into his waistband and pocketed the phone.

‘We’re still connected,’ he said, patting his phone. ‘I’ll let you have your line back in five minutes. It’s been a pleasure, Bruce.’

‘Jean-Luc,’ I said, and we shook hands.

He left and I put the phone back on the hook. I went out on to the balcony and watched him appear underneath me. He glanced up and nodded. He hailed a taxi moto and just about managed to get his leg over the back of it. He waved without turning round and the moped wobbled off into the orange-lit pollution of the city. I waited five minutes and put my call through to Carlo in the Hotel de la Plage.

We met in the booze section of the supermarket. I told him what he wanted to know and that if he was going to follow he’d better be discreet but keep close because if it was going to happen it might be sudden and it might not be in Grand-Popo. Carlo fingered the bottles and nodded with his bottom lip between his teeth.

‘You want to tell me how to do my job some more?’ he asked.

I picked two bottles of white wine off the shelf.

‘You didn’t tell me he’d taken a beating since the photograph.’

‘He has?’

‘He’s a mess,’ I said.

Carlo tutted, shook his head.

‘Machete attack in Liberia,’ I said, as we walked past the fruit on the way to the checkout. ‘Lucky to survive.’

‘Mr Franconelli said he was a hard man.’

‘They tell me the peaches are good.’

‘Maybe I’ll get a kilo,’ said Carlo.

‘You do that.’

7

I got back home at 8 p.m. with the two bottles of Sancerre. Heike was in and on the iced water. I joined her and she served me with a raised eyebrow.

‘I don’t mind watching you get off your face, you know,’ she said.

‘Maybe I mind,’ I said. ‘Don’t want you to see something you don’t like.’

‘Something I’ve never seen before?’ she said, snaking an arm around my neck, crushing me into a kiss.

‘I was going to say…something that could sneak out after I’ve had a few which you’ve never noticed before, being in the same condition, as you are most of the time you’re with me.’

‘You think I could stay young and beautiful drinking the way you do?’ she said, stroking my face hard, trying to iron out those creases.

‘I was also going to say that sobriety’s a very unforgiving state.’

‘Then you must be a very forgiving person,’ she said. ‘But with nothing to forgive. You’re flying already. I could smell you from the door.’

‘That Sancerre’s going to go down as well,’ I said. ‘And when I’ve finished this glass of water I’m going to have a Grande Beninoise. I’ve been talking a lot and it’s dehydrated me.’

‘I’m glad you’re not reforming just because you’re going to be a father.’

‘Maybe in the last few months before D-day I’ll start trying to be good.’

‘They’ve already got a brain after two months. They hear things.’

‘But they don’t know what they mean.’

‘Babies are very tonal,’ she said.

‘It’ll learn to sleep to the clinking of glass.’

‘Because it’s all crap after that.’

‘Well, I’ve just been told I’m very interesting.’

‘By your drinking pal?’ she said. ‘That’s a very sad thing for you to be saying, Bruce Medway.’

I opened the beer and drank it like I said I would. We sat down to eat, a Spanish chicken dish called chilindron, which was good for the climate. The chilli kept the sweat up. I idled over the Sancerre while Helen cleared the plates and brought the Red Label out, which she put down with a thump and a sigh. I sent her back with it and she gave me one of her half-lidded, muddy-eyed looks that told me I wasn’t fooling her.

‘Don’t hold back on my account,’ said Heike.

‘I’ve got to go out tonight,’ I said.

‘Oh yes?’

‘Clubbing.’

‘Anybody I should know?’

‘It’s work.’

‘You shouldn’t bring it home with you.’

‘I wouldn’t, but the guy I want to see runs a bar down the Jonquet and it doesn’t get going until midnight.’

‘Which bar?’

‘A place called L’ouistiti. I’m told it means “marmoset” – you know it?’

‘I’ve had a drink in there before now.’

‘Who with?’

‘An American Peace Corp worker. It’s their after-work joint. Grim, unless you like grunging it.’

‘You know me, Heike,’ I said. ‘Who was the Peace Corp worker?’

‘Robyn.’

I dead-eyed her.

‘With a “y”,’ she added.

‘Aha-a,’ we said, tipping our glasses at each other. ‘Just checking there.’

‘I’m flattered,’ she said, sounding the opposite.

‘This ouistiti place…?’

‘It’s run by a guy called Michel Charbonnier.’

‘You know him?’ I asked.

‘He’s a creep.’

‘What sort of a creep?’

‘A sex creep.’

‘Touchy, feely?’

‘Breathey, breathey.’

‘I’ll keep my distance.’

‘I don’t know how you do it, Bruce.’

‘Bring myself to the marks for the Michel Charbonniers of this world?’

‘He’s probably the lighter end of it too.’

‘You’d have liked the guy I was with this evening.’

‘The one who thought you were interesting? I don’t think so. That hotel-barroom mutual back-slapping bullshit isn’t my kind of conversation.’

‘I’ve got to go away tomorrow too…an all-nighter.’

‘With Mr Interesting…on our day off?’ she said, irritated. ‘He must have made a big impression. Where’re you going?’

‘Maybe Grand-Popo.’

‘What sort of an answer is that?’

‘A tricky one.’

‘This isn’t going to be a row but…’

‘I’ve noticed that when one of us isn’t drinking we don’t row.’

‘When I’m not drinking. You’re never not drinking.’

‘If it’s not going to be a row why’s it already sounding like one?’

‘I don’t want it to be a row but…’

‘No more “buts”. You’ve softened me up. Ask your question.’

‘What’s the attraction?’

‘Of the work?’

‘It’s not the money, is it?’

‘Why do you think Bagado likes the work?’

‘Note,’ she said, pointing at the imaginary stenographer, ‘he didn’t answer the question. Bagado, well, Bagado has different motives. He has a sincere belief that he’s acting for the force of good against evil. He’s on a mission, a crusade.’

‘And I just like rummaging in drawers.’

‘Maybe that’s it.’

‘I’m not as cynical as you might think.’

‘Most of the time you seem to be acting for the good.’

‘That sounds like Bagado talking,’ I said.

Silence.

‘You never told me very much and nowadays even less,’ she said.

‘I don’t tell Bagado either. He’s a policeman. I can’t. And anyway, you don’t want to hear.’

‘True.’

‘So what does Bagado say about me?’

‘You won’t like it.’

‘Maybe I’ll withdraw the question then. I get enough unpalatable stuff rammed down my neck all day without having to hear what my friends say about me, behind my back, to my wife.’

‘Not yet, Bruce.’

‘Not yet what?’

‘I’m not yet your wife.’

‘I said wife?’

‘Your slip’s showing. The Freudian one.’

I reached over. She leaned back. I ran my hand up the back of her neck. She resisted. I forced her into a kiss until she broke away.

‘I won’t take that as a proposal. If it’s subliminal it doesn’t count,’ she said. ‘It’s still in the head.’

‘And you want it from the heart.’

‘I didn’t want it to sound too much like romantic trash.’

‘Leave that to me, I’m good at the pulp end of things.’

I got an inadvertent look.

‘What else has Bagado said to you?’

She shrugged and sipped her glass, which was empty.

‘You two’ve been going through my school report again.’

‘He doesn’t think you’re bad…’

‘I know, I know…he thinks I’m “morally weak”.’

‘He thinks your only guiding principle is your own fascination.’

I called Helen in with the Red Label. She dragged it in kicking and screaming. I poured a finger and brimmed it with water.

‘One thing you might want to remember is that if Bagado hadn’t come along, I wouldn’t be involved in any of this. I was doing fine until…’

‘He embroiled you in his crusade?’

‘Yes, I think that’s fair. He’s the one who involved me in bigger things. People killing and getting killed and sometimes for no other reason than a base human emotion like…jealousy.’

‘Jealousy?’ she said with mock outrage, not rising to the bait. ‘Jealousy’s a very strong emotion.’

‘Especially sexual jealousy…so I’ve heard.’

‘Maybe for men.’

‘No, no, women too. How’d you like it if I told you I’d been sleeping with somebody else, you pregnant and all.’

Her face stilled in an instant and she started in on me, eyes jutting.

‘See what I mean?’

She sat back, caught out.

‘You and I are different,’ she said.

‘No, we’re not.’

‘Our relationship is based on sex.’

‘Is it?’ I asked.

‘That’s how it started, remember the desert?’

‘The ground,’ I teased.

‘Piss off.’

‘There is more than just sex…isn’t there?’ I said, reaching for her hand.

‘Sometimes,’ she said, allowing me a fingernail. ‘And if you did sleep with someone else, whether I was pregnant or not, I’d…I’d…’

‘I believe you.’

‘How did we get on to people killing each other…?’

We laughed and I gulped some Johnnie Walker.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘An example of my overfascination, how I get over…No, I know what I was going to say. Africa. What I’ve learned from Africa, from this work, is that I’m not indifferent any more. My life’s not set in aspic like it was in London. I don’t just work, play, sleep. I’m not protected from ugliness by my job. Reality isn’t TV. I see the limbless poverty at every traffic light, the fat people in bars eating money sandwiches which, as you’ve probably gathered, means I don’t totally and unequivocally love the place. It drives me crazy. I go mad when the Africans decide not to do things, when they tell you everything except the one thing you want to hear, when they disappear off to their village without a word, but then I’m charmed by their innocence, the way they join their lives to ours. That’s Africa for me – not a whole lot between those two mood swings – wild anger and happy delirium.’

‘Have I ever seen you on one of those deliriously happy days?’

‘You were asleep last night so you didn’t see it.’

She leaned over and kissed me and went for the watered-down whisky while she was at it. I pulled it away.

‘Just a smell,’ she pleaded.

‘Seven months to go,’ I said, and let her have a sip.

‘Longer than that. I don’t think babies like milk cut with Red Label.’

‘This one will,’ I said, slipping a hand up her top. She pulled away.

‘Don’t,’ she said, ‘we’re not finished yet.’

‘We must be after all that crap.’

‘Bagado,’ she said, flatly, ‘doesn’t think you’re much good at the work.’

‘Don’t let him speak at my funeral.’

‘He says you’re good at the business stuff – loading ships in the port, managing gangs and transport – but crime. Solving crime. Seeing what’s going on around you, making deductions, cracking problems…no.’

‘No?’ I said, lightly.

‘That’s what he says…and you know why?’

‘You’re going to tell me. I can feel it in my water.’

‘You get involved in events. You get carried away. No objectivity.’

‘Very interesting. Is that it now? Can we…?’

She came around my side of the table. I pushed my chair back and she sat astride me and put her arms around my neck and her lips up to mine.

‘That’s it,’ she said.

‘You know something,’ I said, pushing her top up over her head, finding no bra. ‘Talking about solving crimes. I solved one of Bagado’s yesterday. Five men dead in a ship’s hold. Suffocated, no sign of violence. How did they die? I came up with fresh timber. Then Bagado came within an inch of telling me he wouldn’t mind somebody taking Bondougou out of the game. What does that sound like to you?’

‘Role reversal,’ she said, and pressed my head down on to her breasts.

‘Thanks.’

‘Now shut up.’

I lifted her up on to the table and stripped her panties off. She tore at the front of my trousers. I sucked on her nipples until they were nut hard. She grabbed me and steered me into her and my knees gave at the feel of her soft, wet warmth. I drove into her lifting her off the table, my hands and arms full of her creamy back. She held my face to hers with the back of her hand round my head and rucked up my shirt.

‘Turn the lights off,’ she said. ‘I’m not entertaining the whole street.’

She wrapped her legs around me. I walked to the wall and lashed out at the lights. Half her face appeared in a corner of light from the street. Her head rose and fell against the wall. My trousers sank to the floor with the weight of keys and money and the jolt of each thrust.

‘Just don’t go indifferent on me,’ she said, and dug her heels into my buttocks, urging me on.

8

I left Heike sleeping and took a taxi into the Jonquet at midnight. I found the L’ouistiti in front of the taxi rank to Parakou. The bar left you in no doubt as to its intentions. Even the name, to my ear, had a girlie mag, fluffy bra, stripper’s pout to it.

The building’s plasterwork was as flaking and pitted as an old doxy’s make-up and, rather than redo it, they’d just slapped some blue paint on top – gloss, as if that would make it better. Now the paint had started coming off in dermatological skeins so that ‘scabby’ was not being unfair. The lighting, beyond the plastic strips of the fly curtain, was red and sore as if the room had been chafed raw. The girls standing in the rasping light, who weren’t hitting on customers yet, had their smiles up on the shelf with the bottles of grog. They were neither drinking nor smoking. They were talking amongst themselves but not chit-chat. It looked more medicinal than that.

I’d hardly got my leg over the back of the moped when my arms were taken up by a girl on either side, so that trying to pay the driver left me in an Olympic wrestling hold requiring a knot expert. They bundled me towards the entrance. The bar was narrow and stretched a long way back and looked intestinal in the light, the few punters inside ulcerating against the walls.

A sailor type was slumped across two high-backed wooden chairs, leaning on an elbow, his face sweating, his eyes tearful and his Adam’s apple working overtime swallowing bad memories. A girl had a hand in his pocket, massaging his wad. My two girls tried to steer me in there next to him but I sailed on past, heading to the back of the place where there was a big guy sitting on a high stool next to a door. He had to be stoned, the way he was sitting, both legs hanging off the stool, his body doubled over, an elbow on one knee and his head floating in his hand like a nodding dog. He straightened when I hove into his tunnel vision.

‘Charbonnier?’ I asked.

The guy’s lids, heavier than obols, stayed at half mast, so I leaned in on him and gave it to him louder in his ear. He reached over to the door with the speed of a hog-filled anaconda and rapped on it twice, finishing with a flourish and a how-about-that look. I wouldn’t have minded giving him a how-about-this elbow in his what-the-hell mouth, but one of the girls had started work rubbing my already sore penis and I shrugged the two of them off.

Inside there was a small-boned Beninois fellow with an accounts book and a calculator in front of him. He stuck a pen behind his ear and folded his arms.

‘Le blanc? Il est dedans?’ I asked.

He nodded. All these guys had been to some French waiters’ school.

‘Je veux le voir,’ I said

He leaned back and pressed a button on the wall, speedier than his friend. A door buzzed open. A pair of hands was sitting behind a desk. The hands, in a cone of light, were arranging a line of grass on three cigarette papers stuck together. The owner of the hands was in the dark and it took time to get used to the contrast and pick him out and when I did he still hadn’t adjusted the astonishment out of his face.

‘Hi, Jacques,’ I said, getting it quicker than usual.

‘What the fuck are you…?’

‘I got lucky,’ I said. ‘Want me to call you Michel now?’

‘Take a seat,’ he said, going back to his work. ‘I hope you smoke.’

‘I gave up.’

‘Tobacco?’ he asked. ‘There’s no tobacco in this.’

He started to roll the monster spliff which was his bulkhead against a long night of Christ knows what nastiness he had raking through his brain. I took the seat in the hot room across from him, my back to an open netted window. The glow from the desk lamp picked up his thin face, a worn and sweating face that was lined in a way that meant he sneered a lot…probably at himself in the mirror of a morning if he could bear it. He’d lost most of his hair, apart from a few strands he’d combed over the creamy whiteness of his pate. He had a tan line across his forehead from wearing a hat, a Panama that was hanging on the wall behind him.

While he finessed the joint I found my gaze locked on to a framed line drawing on the wall which I thought was a still life of a bowl of fruit, but on closer inspection proved to be an Oriental woman weighing a pair of huge balls and about to fellate an impossibly large cock.

‘That one gets the girls every time,’ he said.

‘On the first train out of here?’

‘You’d be surprised,’ he said, and licked the papers to his joint with a very red and glistening tongue that didn’t look as if it could mind its own business for very long. He smoothed off the spliff and put a twist in the end. He tore a strip off a Marlboro packet, roached it and sat back to admire the craftsmanship.

‘So what brings you to me, M. Medway?’

‘I thought we could have a chat about a mutual friend.’

‘Jean-Luc? No. I don’t talk about Jean-Luc. You think of something else.’

The sweat stood out on his forehead and I felt my own runnelling down my spine.

‘It’s hot in here.’

‘The air con’s broken. It’s going to rain.’

He lit the joint, puffing at it to get it going, and then took a huge drag and held it in for so long he squeaked. He let the smoke out slowly and repeated. His eyes glazed and his face softened to a concentrated luxuriousness.

‘You don’t happen to have any whisky?’

He opened a cabinet, poured me a shot of something and handed over the glass.

‘If you want to talk, you have to smoke as well.’

‘Too paranoid?’ I said.

He leaned over and bug-eyed me.

‘Who?’ he said, and smiled with as close to a good nature as he could get without borrowing a Ronald Reagan mask.

‘Maybe that stuff’s good for you,’ I said. ‘Smoothes you out. Stops your nerves jangling in your ears.’

‘In my ears?’ he asked, nicely stoned now.

‘Whatever.’

‘Smoke,’ he ordered, and held out the reefer.

I took a tentative drag and didn’t cough my heels up. All the pollution I’d been breathing had taken the virginity off my lungs.

‘Enjoy,’ he said. ‘There’s not much else around here.’

I nodded at his porno drawing and took another quarter drag from the joint, not wanting to get wrecked in the first minute and waste my time here.

‘Not here, M. Medway. Not in Africa. There’s plenty of girls to fuck, but, you know how it is for them, fucking the white man c’est comme un travail de ménage.’

‘You shouldn’t knock yourself like that, Michel.’

‘Knock myself?’ he asked, rapping his head.

‘Tu ne dois pas dire du mal de toi-même,’ I said. ‘There’s plenty of other people around who’ll do it for you.’

He grunted and leaned back in his chair.

‘You need to smoke some more, M. Medway. Take it in…deep.’

‘Marnier,’ I said, sipping the whisky, the strong flavour of the grass like a hay espresso in my mouth. ‘Tell me about Marnier. Why do you have to do little jobs for him? Especially when you don’t like doing them for him…do you?’

‘I have no choice.’

‘What’s he going to do to you if you don’t?’ I asked. ‘Kill you?’

‘Kill me. Pah!’ he roared, and rocked back on his wooden chair. He fought his feet out from under the desk and put them up on an unopened ream of paper he had sitting next to the phone. He was wearing dirty white plimsolls with no laces. He drew a hand down his gaunt features, picking up some sweat on the way which he wiped on to the thigh of a pair of grey cotton trousers which had been pounded that colour by an African washerwoman. ‘What would he get out of killing me?’

‘I wasn’t being serious.’

‘Smoke some more.’

I took a longer drag on the reefer, which seemed to satisfy him. I fitted the joint between his fuck-you fingers and he nestled back into his chair.

‘The only reason I’m living is because of Jean-Luc. So why would he want to kill me?’

‘I didn’t say he would.’

‘Non?’

The dope was ungluing the conversation fast. A warm glow emanated from my stomach which was being fuelled by my extremities which felt like frozen chicken parts. My eyeballs prickled. My tongue was lilo size and dry and musty like sun-scorched canvas. The whisky added no lick to my mouth. The silence I was in now felt long and ruminative of such things as the wood grain in Charbonnier’s desk, the two missing eyelets in his plimsolls and the crepey quality of the skin on the back of his hands.

‘How did Jean-Luc get cut up?’ I asked, after a small century of chair creaking.

‘Uhn?’ said Michael, resettling himself and tilting back in his captain’s chair. I repeated the question. Time leaked through my fingers.

‘Sierra Leone,’ said Michel, while I tried to remember the question. He handed back the joint. I waved it away. He insisted.

‘What happened in Sierra Leone?’ I asked, the smoke leaking out of me everywhere, the corners of my eyes, my knuckle joints. ‘What was he doing there?’

‘Buying diamonds,’ he said, from what seemed a long way off now.

He eased the joint out of the back of my hand, which was no longer mine, but lay quietly on the desk top ready to be put on.

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