ROBERT WILSON

The Big Killing

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Map

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

AUTHOR’S NOTE

About the Author

By the same author

Praise for Robert Wilson

Copyright

About the Publisher

For Jane and in memory of Peggy

Chapter 1

Saturday 26th October

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I’m Fat Paul, who are you?’

‘Bruce Medway.’

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

‘Pineapple fritters.’

‘How d’they do that?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

C’est bon, bon. C’est bon, bon.

C’est bon pour le moral…’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘When I’m doing it, you mean?’

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

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

‘Transactions,’ I said.

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

‘As long as it’s not criminal.’

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

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

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

‘What did you have in mind?’

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

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

‘You gonna Korhogo…when?’

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

‘No, no – this not for Korhogo.’

‘That’s what it says here.’

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

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

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

‘Waiting for me to come back down again.’

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

‘Why don’t you deliver it yourself?’

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

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

‘Ten, mebbe fiftee', ‘s ‘nough.’

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

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

‘Where and when is this drop?’

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

‘Why there?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘How about child pornography?’

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

I gave him his package.

‘You not gonna do it?’

‘I’m going to think about it.’

He smiled and raised his eyebrows.

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

‘But none of it upfront?’

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

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

‘You got any questions you wan’ aks?’

Tomorrow. I’ll have some questions tomorrow.’

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

‘If I knew that I’d ask them now.’

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

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

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

‘No plobrem,’ said Kwabena slowly.

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

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

‘I like you, Bruce,’ said Fat Paul.

‘How do you know?’

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

Chapter 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘You, Moses.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday 27th October

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

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

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

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

‘How so?’

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

‘Characters?’ he asked.

‘Fat Paul, Silent George, Colossal Kwabena.’

‘Colossal?’

‘Very big.’

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

‘What do George and Kwabena do?’

‘They my bodyguards.’

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

‘I’m not so quick on my feet.’

‘Why do you need to be quick?’

‘I make money.’

‘Doing what?’

‘Videos.’

‘You got an office?’

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

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

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

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

‘How do you know, Fat Paul?’

‘You let me buy you chop.’

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

‘You not workin’ for you’self.’

‘How do you know that too, Fat Paul?’

‘No self-respect,’ he said.

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

‘I know shit when I see it.’

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

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

‘Thanks, I’ve got it. Listen…’

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

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

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

‘Snags are problems, difficulties, obstacles.’

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

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

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

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

‘What sort of secret?’

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

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

‘Is a business secret.’

‘Show me the cassette.’

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

‘See?’ said Fat Paul.

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

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

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

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

‘Too much. We find cheaper white man.’

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

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

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

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

‘I need some expenses.’

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

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

Chapter 3

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Yes.’

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

‘A miracle.’

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

‘I’m still here.’

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

‘I’m short of money,’ I said.

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

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

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

‘You’ve got a replacement?’

‘You want to make it easy for yourself.’

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

‘I’m sure you were.’

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

‘About money, you mean?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I did.’

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

‘I’m on holiday.’

‘You anywhere near Abidjan?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good. You’ve got a job.’

‘I know that.’

‘What do you mean?’

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

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

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

‘What do I have to do?’

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

‘He’s twenty-seven.’

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

‘Another poverty-stricken bum.’

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

‘How small?’

‘Three hundred a day plus expenses.’

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

Touchy.’

‘Telling me the money before the catch.’

‘Play the game, Bruce.’

‘The catch, Martin.’

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

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

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

‘How do you know?’

‘I like you.’

‘You like everybody.’

‘I didn’t like that Somalian bastard.’

‘He’s dead now.’

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

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

‘You still there?’ asked Martin.

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

‘You’re that short, are you?’

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

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

I gave him the number.

‘I won’t be able to go to Sierra.’

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

‘Maybe you’re right.’

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

‘Or, if I have any problems.’

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

‘Somebody else said that to me today.’

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

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

‘That’s a little unconventional, Bruce.’

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

‘You know what you need?’

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

‘You need a credit card.’

‘One with credit on it, you mean?’

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

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

‘I am. I do. But no money.’

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

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

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

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

‘I don’t want the girl.’

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

‘Why hit the girl?’

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

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

Chapter 4

It was 2.30 p.m. by the time I joined the Grand Bassam/Abidjan highway and drove past the handicraft shops, who could sell you a pot for more than you’d pay in Sèvres, and traditional healers, who could put a spell on a troublesome mother-in-law in Tashkent. It was a pleasant drive along the palm-treed coastline, past a seamless bidonville of stalls selling tat, bars, and hotels specializing in rooms by the hour. I skirted the end of the airport runway and high up above the departures hall was a team of vultures, their fingers spread at the end of their wings, circling in the thermals, grumbling at the low incidence of pilot error since computers came in.

After the airport the two-lane Grand Bassam road joined a fourteen-lane highway into downtown Abidjan. I drove through the suburbs of Koumassi and Marcory with the Manhattan-style skyline of the financial district called Plateau in front of me. You could forget you were in Africa if you concentrated on the skyscrapers but at Treichville I broke right and the buzz and hot stink of life in the African Abidjan brought me home. I crossed the lagoon, that separated the two continents, over the Pont Général de Gaulle.

Life hadn’t been so good in Abidjan recently. Before it was no different to being in any modern city; built around the lagoon the cityscape looked like Sydney and the facilities were much the same. Everything had been accessible on a well-larded expatriate salary and after work the residential districts of Cocody and Deux Plateaux were splashed with gold and silver lame and rang with crystal laughter. On the other side of those well-clipped hedges the locals were beginning to hit the ground with sticks while they listened to the President’s fading charisma. Then the power workers went on strike. Now there was no guarantee of getting ice in a whisky and cool air to sleep in.

The Ivorians, like all the people along this coast, wanted to run their own country with a bit of democracy. Now that the money had run out, the price of coffee and cocoa had dropped and the value of pineapples foundered, people had taken to thinking they could do no worse than have a crack at it themselves. The army had sensed a mood and had staged a rebellion and the air force had followed. In the confusion a lot of shops were emptied by people with no credit facilities but strong arms and big appetites.

Order was re-established after a few pay rises were promised but not with the same respect for the law as before. Care had to be taken on the streets. There were a lot of fast young men who weren’t above a little violence to get a handbag or a gold chain. People ran from their cars to the office and didn’t bother to go out for a meal or try to see a film which might not make it to the last reel. Restaurants closed, businesses folded. Everybody stayed in and sweated by candlelight and drank very warm Beaujolais and thought about Geneva and other places of perfect order.

I parked my car in the Novotel basement, picked up the hired Peugeot that blended in with all the other Peugeots that were the only cars in Ivory Coast unless you had a ministerial Mercedes or a bandit’s BMW. I worked my way north up to the Banco National Park passing the fanicos, a bunch of immigrant workers who stood in thigh-deep water all day washing clothes by pounding them against rocks in the river, and headed west towards the coastal town of Grand Lahou. They were few cars out in the susurrating heat, which meant that I didn’t have to eat someone else’s dust, picking grit out of my eyes on the graded road.

The drop point was in a pineapple plantation. Tracks had been cut through the fields for harvesting and one of these led down to a landing stage on the Ebrié lagoon, the body of water which stretched west from Abidjan about sixty miles. I decided to take Fat Paul’s advice and check it out beforehand and then drink beer in Tiegba until time came for the drop at 8.30.

I found a left turn with the orange arrow that George had told me about and took the dirt track between the acres of tilled grey earth with a foot-high pineapple every metre whichever way you looked. Three kilometres later the track dropped down steeply through thick vegetation to a large clearing of beaten and sunbaked earth from which a wooden jetty took off out into the lagoon.

It was no cooler down by the water. There was no fresh breeze coming off it, just more humidity and insects. Out on the jetty, down between the warped and loosening slats of the walkway, the water had hardly the energy to slop around the wooden support struts. Through the haze I could just see the opposite bank of the lagoon. The sun, still high even though there was only another hour and a half’s light in it, punished the scene and the sweat dripped off my eyebrows. I turned back and something flashed in the corner of my eye from high up in the vegetation on the bank. I ambled back towards the car, casting about like a retired colonel with no troops to inspect, and a fish came up for a fly, leaving concentric ripples. Another flash – high up to my right and I got a fix on it this time.

Looking back from the jetty I could see another track dropped down at the far end of the clearing from where I’d parked. I stepped off the uncertain planking and picked up a stone and sent it on a blasé skim across the water. After a minute’s fevered nonchalance I got back in the car and drove fast across the hard earth and up the other track. I broke through the vegetation and out on to the plateau of the pineapple plantation in time to see a whipped-up funnel of dust which hung well and long in the torpid air, making a screen of ash-grey voile through which the car, pulling away, was invisible.

The terrain curved so that I couldn’t see the main road to Abidjan and I had to drive a fast and dusty kilometre to find out that whoever had been watching me was in a large dark saloon. The car, off to the right now where the track joined the main road, slowed into a gully, then kicked up on to the graded road and was engulfed in its own dust for a moment before finding a lower gear and heading east, back to the city.

I followed with the windows shut and the dust still finding its way into the car, mixed with the sweat streaming off my face and down my neck. I reached the gully and stopped. The car was too far ahead, and if I’d taken the gully at speed it would have put a kink in the chassis which might have been noticed. I sat back and watched the dust settle in a film over the dashboard and bonnet. A minibus passed from right to left driven by an African with white people in the back holding on to their seats. They were all wearing hats, which meant they were tourists, and they were hunched, grim and tense from a rough ride.

I should have turned right, driven back to the city, gone straight through Abidjan and out to Grand Bassam. I should have found Fat Paul sitting in some broken-down colonial house and given him his package along with some suggestions as to where, on his unchartered anatomy, he could stick it. I let the tourist bus get ahead and then turned left, following it at a distance down to the lagoon village of Tiegba.

Why did I do that, when the first of those snags I’d been on at Fat Paul about had just left a big rent in the threadbare fabric of my inner calm? Why, when Martin Fall was going to start paying me £300 a day plus expenses, did I carry on with a job that stank of disaster? Maybe my sense of honour needed a long stretch in a rehab centre to get itself realigned to cope with a modern world. Or was I just persuading myself that I was all confused with old-fashioned values handed down by well-meaning parents who would never understand the game.

I drove through the purpling afternoon and ran a film clip through my head which was clear as the day it had happened, twenty-two years ago. My father dying in a London hospital. The iron-grey light of a slate-cold, viral January – the month that saw off the parchment-skinned pensioners and people like my father with weak hearts and lungs black, clogged and bleeding from four decades of Woodbines and Capstans. His fingernails were blue, his grey and phlegmy eyes were frightened on either side of the black rubber oxygen mask which covered his dark lips. His hand dragged at the tube of the mask to pull it off and get it over with. The nurse chided him. He beckoned me over. I pulled the mask off a crack and heard the oxygen and then his voice like a radio on the other side of a windy railway track. ‘Never do anything for the money,’ he said to my sixteen-year-old innocence, ‘and if you say you’re going to do something, do it.’ Those were the last words of a London contract electrician; he survived the night but didn’t make it to mid-morning tea.

I’d taken this job for the money, so I’d failed him once. Now that I was following through with something I’d started would the old man be nodding his approval? I doubted it. I had an attitude problem, brought on by being alone too much, brought on by spending too much of my time with a bottle for company. One thing I did know was that I wasn’t confused. The truth was, I wanted to see if I could get away with it – tempt fate and still beat it. Maybe Heike was right to stay away from me.

No other cars passed on the other side of the road before I dropped down to the landing stage for the boats across to the stilted village of Tiegba. It was 5.30 p.m. by the time I parked up by the bar where the sound of elderly, annoyed Americans filled the air like frogs sending invitations after dark. Some of them were getting into low flat boats, filming their feet with video cameras while they did it. Most of the rest were climbing up the wooden stairs to the bar.

I asked the driver if he’d seen the last car to pass him on the road. He looked at me as if he’d had a bellyful of something that wasn’t food, and I was there to tread on his toes, while he patched up the inner tube of a tyre that wore its tread like a race memory. I left him to it and went up to the bar.

I nodded at a long-limbed guy slouched across a table. He nodded back. I washed in the two-man lavatory packed with seven desperate people jogging on the spot, their trainers squeaking on the tiled floor. The only things that were communicating were pacemakers and brand names.

‘The john don’t flush,’ said a weary voice from one of the cubicles. The room groaned. I got out of there.

I ordered a beer and sat at the old guy’s table. He introduced himself as Harold and told me about his trip, told me how many people had died on his trip, without my asking. I cut through it after five minutes and asked him if he’d seen the car. He said he had and that it was a dark saloon which was a big help – probably a Peugeot too, an even bigger help.

It was suddenly dark. Harold still hadn’t moved anything apart from his hat across his face. There was an intensity in the atmosphere, a stillness that meant that rain was charging down the coast towards us. Nobody spoke. A woman sighed and a man added a rattly cough –we could have been in the end ward of an old people’s home, the ward closest to the Chapel of Rest.

Lamplight flickered across the lagoon in the village. Low African voices coaxed the boats through the water. Toad-talk puckered the darkness and insects worked through the night. The air was stuffed into the room.

‘Gonna rain,’ said Harold.

The sprung fly-screen door whinged open and snapped shut. Harold’s hat stopped for a moment. A younger man in his early sixties came in and told them they were going to leave. They moved as one. Harold straightened and said something about not wanting to die on the premises and an old woman from the group chastised him. He looked through me over my shoulder, out of the slatted windows and mosquito netting into the dark.

‘I wouldn’t wanna die out here,’ he said, and then focused on me as if I was a candidate.

They filed out. Trousers hanging off bottoms with no buttocks, backs curved, forearms withered, breastless concave chests breathing shallow in the deep, thick air. The screen door slapped shut on the last of them.

I moved further into the bar and sat by the window which should have shown the lagoon or given at least the comfort of water lapping but showed only the grey haze of netting on black and the sound of air fizzing. The minibus moved off. A light breeze fanned off the water and guttered the candles on the tables. I had two more hours to kill.

The rain filled in the time. I helped it along with a few beers served by the barman who came from Sierra Leone and who demanded payment as soon as the bottle hit the table. He took the note and flattened it on the table, picking out any folds and creases and then folded it in half lengthways. He talked all the time, concentrating on his work and telling me he had left Sierra Leone because there was no work there and he reckoned the Liberian war was going to drift across the border and stir up trouble in the eastern part of his country where all the diamonds were.

‘They look for diamonds, buy guns,’ he said.

‘Where do they get the guns from?’

‘They have logs…timber…in Liberia, but no diamonds.’

‘But where do they get the guns from?’

‘On the east side, they have plenty wood. Fetch plenty money. You work in the logging camps?’

‘No. You?’

‘The guns,’ he said, and stopped. The fly screen slapped behind a policeman wearing a black plastic bin liner which he stripped off. He sat down and the barman served him a drink he didn’t pay for.

The rain roared. The water ran down the mosquito netting and the wind blew spray through it on to my face. It was good to breathe cool air with oxygen in it. The barman went behind his counter, the rain too loud for conversation. I felt the policeman’s eyes on me as I sipped the beer and replaced the glass on the same ring on the table top.

I was sharing Harold’s reluctance to die. His talk, the pointlessness of dying people touring the world when all they wanted to do was sit on the stoop sipping Diet Coke, had weakened my hands. I could barely pour the bottle, hardly grip the glass. The beer had soured my mouth and I began to think I was heading into something which if it didn’t finish me off might put some years on me in a single, compact, fear-loaded minute.

Unlike Harold my objection was not to dying out here. The location wasn’t the problem. What did I care? Maybe Harold would rather belly up in the Piggly Wiggly car park in Fort Lauderdale. Me? I didn’t give a damn – as long as it wasn’t now. That was all I cared about.

My flesh was as chill as a fridged goose and the policeman’s eyes were thinning the hair on the back of my head. I started, several times, to think of Heike sitting in a Berlin café stirring coffee, waiting for someone, but I canned each one before I let myself slide into that particular darkness.

The rain eased off, the policeman got up, rolled his bin liner and left. The insects started up again. The barman blew out the candles in the bar. I went down to the car. My teeth itched. I looked for the policeman, but it was too dark to see anything in the weakening light from the closing bar.

With the headlights on I wiped off the number plates and altered two of the numbers with the black tape I’d brought with me. It was probably a pointless exercise now that I’d been seen at the drop point, but pointlessness seemed to be the night’s theme. Inside the car I removed the bulb from the interior light and rolled down the window.

I drove towards Abidjan breathing in the cool air full of the smell of wet earth from the pineapple plantation. I found the orange arrow and the track down to the lagoon. I rolled into the thick vegetation which covered the track dropping down to the bare, beaten earth in front of the jetty a few minutes after my 8.30 appointment. Large drops of water fell from the high trees as the tyres unstuck themselves from the mud.

The car skidded, as it came out of the trees, down on to the now puddled expanse of bare earth. My stomach lurched with it at the thought of trying to make it up the steep slope, at the other end of the clearing, if I needed to get away in a hurry.

The cone of light from the headlights was broken by the corner of another car. The radiator grille and mud-tread tyres belonged to a dark-coloured Toyota Land Cruiser. The paranoia kicked in. This was not the car driven by whoever had been watching me that afternoon. The dark saloon was still out there. I cut the headlights and the darkness shut down around us. If he was out there, he had to be close, because the night was black enough to have texture, so black that you knew that any light was inside your head.

I left the engine running and opened the door and, without getting out, shut it. I fixed my eyes on the patch of night where I knew the Land Cruiser’s windscreen was and waited, the car in gear, my foot cocked on the accelerator.

A superior lock clicked. A lozenge of yellow light appeared twenty-five yards away. In the barley-sugar glow, head thrown back and mouth open as if napping in a layby, was the driver, a white man. Moving fast out of the passenger seat an African’s head joined the night. His dark jacket, white shirt, black tie followed. A thin shaft of light, as solid as a blade, angled out. A white spot wobbled over the vegetation. The beam arced across the night sky, the white spot finding nothing out there, before it slashed through the blackness spearing my windscreen.

I dumped the clutch and picked up speed moving at an angle to the Land Cruiser, no headlights, using the cabin glow from the open Land Cruiser door to aim for where the African stood, a gun in one hand, the torch in the other. A shot – a crack of flame opened and closed. Then the torch was falling, my tyres slapping the puddles. The African’s empty left hand gripped the Land Cruiser’s roof rack. His right hand, still with the gun, pushed up off the door frame. His legs kicked up behind him. Another shot, another white line across the retina, and brown water burst in a puddle to my left. Then impact – the right corner of my car slammed the jeep’s door shut. The cabin blacked out. The Land Cruiser rocked. The man’s knees, elbows, toes and heels scrabbled across the roof rack. A body splashed in water. An engine howled.

I turned the headlight on. The track was a hundred metres away. The ground was troughed and shadowed with plateaux of light from the rain water. The car’s suspension panicked and jarred, the frame of the windscreen swerved and dipped. Different patches of trees held their leaves up against the light.

I hit the path and cut the headlights to sides only and eased my foot off the accelerator, still in first gear, the engine not screaming any more. Another shot cracked off. The car crawled up the slope. The front end slid right – the wheel, violent in my hands, snapped at my fingers. The tyres ripped over the slippery ruts of the track and caught on the drier central ridge but slid back and zipped in the mud. The car crabbed sideways and forward, the angle crazed, the tyres chewing at the road not catching, the body slewing and then rearing at the track’s edge. The rubber caught, the chassis lunged with the sound of gravel pockmarking the underseal. Another shot – the sound of ice cracking over a river and something with a sharp bite, like a horse fly, stung my neck. The car scrabbled like a desperate climber on a chute of scree. Another shot – the trees closer, my shoulders hunched forward, face up against the glass, the trees even closer but not in them yet, one more shot and then into the noise of the trees, the drops of water slapping and gonging on the metal. A warm trickle dropped below my collar, pooled in the clavicle hollow and ran down my chest.

I stabbed the headlights on, which lit the tunnel of vegetation leading out on to the flats of the pineapple plantation. The car baulked at the rain-filled troughs across the track. The shock absorbers did what they were paid to do. The displaced water shot off into the night with the sound of torn paper. My eyes flickered between the rectangles of mirror, waiting for headlights to appear.

The gully between the track and the graded road was flooded and I hit it at speed, the rain water pouring over the bonnet up to the windscreen. The car clawed its way up the bank as I lashed out at the wipers which swiped the screen in double time. Still no lights appeared in the mirrors. Steam poured out of the wheel arches and the engine faltered, leaving blank spaces in my chest. The fan belt screeched like a stuck pig as the car humped on to the road, the windscreen squeaking dry under the crazed wipers. The Peugeot gripped the road and I rallied through the gears back to Abidjan looking for lights, but the mirrors shone black all the way.

It was nearly eleven o’clock by the time I reached my room near Grand Bassam and the power was off. I flexed my fingers, still stiff from gripping the steering wheel, lit a hurricane lamp and drank from the neck of a bottle of Bell’s. I flopped under the mosquito net with it, and stared at the fan which hadn’t worked even with electricity.

My thoughts steadied in the yellow light which swayed lazily on the walls. I could see the Land Cruiser’s driver, the white man who was supposed to make the drop, not sleeping but dead. There was no blood on him but he was stretched back, stiff, a line across his neck, the garrotte tied around the seat’s head rest. The African I’d only seen for a second. His hair was close cropped and he had soft, rounded features with the light skin of a Métis which had shown three tribal cicatrices on the cheek dark against it.

I turned the lamp off and took a final suck on the bottle. My jaw began to loosen off and I went to sleep with Fat Paul where I didn’t want him – sitting heavily on my mind.

Chapter 5

Monday 28th October

I woke up with a headache, a pain in the neck and a whisky bottle where a lover should have been. The sheets reeked. The room was already hot from the sun pouring through the unshuttered window and I had a film of sweat on my forehead and top lip. I felt a weight at the foot of the bed and started, but it was only Moses striking a maternal pose. I propped myself up on an elbow and saw the blood on the pillow. I kicked my way out of the mosquito net, Moses looking at me as if I might refuse to go to school.

‘I’m all grown up now, Moses. You don’t have to watch over me.’

‘You bleeding, Mr Bruce, please sir,’ he said. ‘That car, thess hole in window, back one driver’s side.’

The mirror showed something that looked human but had been kept underground for a long time. Moses appeared on my shoulder and I told him to look at the back of my neck. He drew the collar down, sucked on his teeth and took a pair of tweezers out of the penknife on the table. After a sharp pain that travelled down my spine to my coccyx and back up again he showed me the diamond of glass that had embedded itself in my neck.

‘You be lucky,’ he said.

‘Maybe I am.’

‘You be lucky bullet stoppin’ in head rest passenger side.’

‘And not in me, you mean?’

‘No, please sir, not goin’ on brekkin’ other window, you pay two and ibbe costly.’

‘Thanks for your concern.’

‘Your good health is mine. You are my mastah,’ he said in a tone of voice I knew well.

‘How much do you want?’

Moses grinned. When he used the words ‘sir’ and ‘mastah’ it always meant money. He looked off into his head somewhere, pretending to do a calculation when he’d already cheated the answer.

‘Two thousand.’

‘Cedis?’

‘We in Ivory Coast,’ he said. ‘They speakin’ French here and asseptin’ CFA. Cedis gettin’ me nothin’ ‘cept Ghana side.’

‘Is it cheaper Ghana side?’

‘Oh, no, please sir. Ghana girls are very demandin'.’

‘These girls sucking you dry, Moses. This rate you never afford yourself a wife, you owing me too much money.’

Moses took the money with his right hand, his left holding the wrist, his head bowed. ‘Thanks for your concern,’ he said.

He slipped past me out of the door and I called him back.

‘I go-come,’ he said.

The girl was leaning against the hired Peugeot with a pair of strong arms folded. She saw Moses and stood. Her breasts were high, almost on her shoulders, and the white nylon blouse, with its frilly trim at the shoulders and neck, looked incongruous against the developed shoulders and biceps. She rolled Moses’s money in the top of her wrap. Moses was talking fast. She ignored him and pushed off the Peugeot with her rock-hard bottom, and moved off into the trees.

‘Strong girl,’ I said to Moses, who had returned with the body language of someone now completely at my service.

‘Not jes’ inne arms, Mr Bruce,’ he said, and snapped a finger as if he’d just picked up something hot.

Moses cleaned and dressed my wound after I’d showered. We stripped the black tape off the number plates and packed our things into the car. I had an argument with the landlady who’d heard I was moving to the Novotel which made her push for a full week’s rent. She had a baby girl on her back, who looked around her mother’s hips at the action, occasionally stretching out a small hand at the money in mine as if she understood the game and couldn’t wait to get started. We left at 9.30 a.m., the woman lobbing insults at us while the baby, who’d taken a fat elbow in the cheek, cried.

We found a garage in Zone 4C which could repair the hire car’s window. Two young and violent-looking boys wearing sawn-off corduroys and sandals made out of old tyres were slapped away from the car by a more cultured-looking fellow in a white coat who removed the panel from the door. Moses, who’d seen a crowd gathering across the street, pulled me over the road.

We went into a walled compound of a two-storey concrete office block. The sun, already high, was hot and the surface of the red earth in the compound was drying into crushed chillies. Steam hugged the surfaces of large crimson puddles. In a clearing amongst the crowd stood a group of dejected Africans and a large Lebanese in a white robe which was stained red at the bottom. A grey-haired African in a white shirt and lime-green trousers stood next to him. The local witch doctor, they said.

The witch doctor had come to find out who was thieving money from the Lebanese. He told the first man to kneel and, detaching a bag from his belt, poured a mound of sand in front of the kneeling man who leaned forward over it. He looped a cotton noose over the man’s head and poked the loose hanging strand into the mound of sand. He asked him in his own language if he had stolen the money and the man with quivering thighs said that he hadn’t. There was a pause. Nothing happened. The noose was removed and the man joined the crowd.

The witch doctor repeated the ritual with the others who all passed. The Lebanese was perplexed until somebody suggested the accountant and he perked up. The cry went up and a moment later the small, fine-featured accountant came down the steps of the office building weighed down by his own dignity and an array of pens and a wafer of a calculator in the breast pocket of his shirt. The crowd instantly disliked him.

He refused to submit to the black magic and was rewarded with a low grunt from the crowd. The Lebanese told him there would be no job for him unless he did. The accountant knelt before the mound of sand. The crowd thickened. The witch doctor looped the thread over the man’s head and asked him the question. The denial was on the way out of the man’s throat when it was strangled by the cotton noose which seemed to have been pulled taut by an unseen hand. It bit into his neck, jerked his head down, popped his eyes and forced his tongue out till the stalk showed at his teeth. The crowd surged and the accountant erupted above their heads flailing, the pens and the calculator already gone from his breast pocket, his shirt torn open and his trousers already down his thighs. Moses pushed me out of the compound.

‘They go beat him now,’ he said.

It was midday by the time I’d returned the car and checked into the Novotel whose main entrance backed on to the busy Avenue Général de Gaulle, where you could buy hi-fi, hardware and haberdashery during the day but only whores at night. I sent Moses out to buy a blank VHS tape which, after the car expenses, took me down to the last few thousand CFA I had.

Martin Fall had booked me into room 205 on the second floor which the management changed to 307 on the third because an agronomist convention had taken the whole of the second. I asked at reception if they had any private video viewing and recording facilities and the girl said she would set something up for me. I took my bags up to the room and called B.B.; he wasn’t there. I left a message with his maid that I was in the Novotel.

I came back down with Fat Paul’s package. Moses appeared with the blank tape. I told him to get lost for half an hour. I was taken to a small conference room where a TV and two VCRs had been set up next to a whiteboard and an overhead projector. I broke the seal on the envelope and slotted the original and blank tape into the two machines and played and recorded at the same time.

There was some snow and then the film’s title appeared and, in case you couldn’t read, a lazy, Afro-American dude’s voice told you what it was: ‘Once you tasted chocolate…’ and I realized that this wasn’t the film that the Métis was expecting to have to kill for. I watched it all the same, in case Fat Paul’s ‘business secret’ was thrown in there somewhere. It was a tawdry tale, shot on a low-budget set, of a white, heavily wigged and made-up housewife who, having waved her husband goodbye, is immediately visited by two large black plumbers with tool boxes and wrenches for verisimilitude. The three of them went into the kitchen which shook when the door closed. The woman knelt down to show the plumbers what was going on under the sink and the sorry state of her underwear. At this point there should have been something flashing on the screen for the benefit of all plumbers and would-be plumbers like, ‘This only happens in porn'. In an indecently short time the woman’s skirt was up around her waist and there were two implausibly hung plumbers in front of and behind her. It went on like that. There were a few close-ups of nearly surgical detail and plenty of the rear plumber’s view, who ground into the girl’s bottom with sickening thrusts, which shuddered a butterfly tattoo she had at the top of the cleft. After a few changes of position and what seemed like half a day but was only fifteen minutes it was all over and they left, that’s right, without doing the plumbing job. She didn’t seem to mind which is where the suspension of disbelief really broke down badly. You’d have thought after that they’d have done the work for free. Then the girl was on a sofa and hubby came home and he was straight from the office and dead keen but she wasn’t having any of it and the punchline came up delivered for the non-readers in the same voice: ‘…you can’t never go back to vanilla.’ The double negative giving some cohesion to the film. Then there was more snow which I stopped after a few minutes.

The tapes rewound, I boxed them and I went back up to reception to find Moses sitting in the lobby looking hang-dog at his flip-flopped feet.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘I pissing glass, please, Mr Bruce,’ he said a little too loudly for a hotel lobby. We watched the pink newspaper that had been sitting next to Moses close and fold and a businessman took his full head of side-parted hair elsewhere. I sat in his place. Moses shrugged and played with his fingers.

‘What about the condoms I gave you?’

‘They finish.’

‘They finish?’

‘Yes please.’

‘No, you finish when they finish. When they finish you stop.’

‘I don’ understand.’

‘When you no have condom, you stop, you no stop you go get AIDS.’

‘I try,’ he said, showing me a pair of clean palms. ‘They no let me.’

‘I can tell you really protested,’ I said, and told him to get the car.

I went up to my room and split open Fat Paul’s cassette. There was nothing inside it except tape. I stuffed it back inside the envelope with its broken seal. I dropped the copy into reception and kept the original with me. Moses was waiting outside.

We drove around the Baie de Cocody past St Paul’s Cathedral and into the residential suburb of Cocody itself. I left Moses at the Polyclinique and gave him the last of my money.

‘This no catch for nothin', Mr Bruce, please sir.’

‘It’ll have to catch because that’s all I’ve got.’

‘You go-come?’

‘I go-come.’

‘ ‘Cause if the money no catch ibbe big plobrem. They callin’ police and things.’

‘Nobody’ll touch you, Moses, when they know what you got.’

I arrived in Grand Bassam centre ville just after 1.00 p.m. and turned right past a somnolent gore routière and headed out across the lagoon to the Quartier France. This used to be the main trading centre and port of the Ivory Coast until yellow fever hit the town at the end of the last century. The French moved out and opened up the Vridi canal in 1950 which made Abidjan the country’s port. The old trading houses still existed, most of them broken down and crumbling like any African economy you’d care to look at. It was in one of these that I was due to meet Fat Paul. I saw the Cadillac parked outside a building which fronted on to the lagoon. It had a large hole in the wall and a drift of rubble down to street level. I turned left 100 metres in front of the Cadillac and parked up on the other side of the building from it.

I walked up some steps through a cracked and splintered wooden door into a cool dark room whose plaster lay shattered on the floor. There was a short passage from the room into a large and warmer warehouse, still with most of its roof on. At the far end, by the hole, was Fat Paul wearing a short-sleeve shirt of cobalt blue with red palm trees on it. He was sitting on a packing case with Kwabena next to him, up on an oil drum, his trousers tight across his thighs, bare ankles showing, his feet just off the ground. George was leaning against the wall by the hole, looking out over the lagoon and fingering his tie.

The warehouse had a wooden pillared corridor three metres wide. The pillars supported a mezzanine whose floor had been ravaged by a type of beetle that did for wood what the pox did for a port whore’s face. Through the opiate quiet of the early-afternoon heat came the ticking sound of small jaws undermining the structure and powdering the air with dust motes which hung, dazed, in the shafts of light coming through the roof where the tiles had shifted or broken.

Kwabena pushed himself off the oil drum, picked up a strip of packing-case wood with a nail in the end and went over to where George was standing by the hole in the wall. He tried to push the nail out with his fingers and failed, so swung it against the wall where it made a sharp crack like a festive squib. The thin man inside Fat Paul jumped about a foot, and nearly got away, but his elephant-seal body caught him and set off a crescendo tremble which he quelled manually.

George’s sunglassed head turned under beta-blocker control. A gun came from under his jacket in the armpit. He swept the room and put the gun back in his armpit again and turned to look out across the lagoon, thinking he was the Ice Man in some sharp, smart, budget thriller. Fat Paul said something rapid and savage in Tui and restuck a slick of hair that had fallen loose.

‘Fuckin’ man,’ he said for my benefit. ‘I send you back to the forest…you fuckin’ person!’ he yelled over his shoulder.

‘Nervous?’ I asked.

‘No,’ he said loudly, then calm again: ‘What you got for me?’

‘I’m surprised you’re here.’

‘Why?’

George’s right hand was down by his side, the fingertips tapping the outside of his thigh. Kwabena dropped the strip of wood. Fat Paul held his cheek and chewed the end of his little finger.

‘Remember what we talked about on the beach?’

‘We said lot of things.’

‘Snags. Remember that?’

‘Fuckin’ snags,’ said Fat Paul bitterly, so that I nearly laughed. ‘Tell me.’

‘Maybe you know already.’

‘Tell me anyway.’

I was standing in a shaft of light, the sun hot on my head and a shoulder. I moved towards a pillar. Kwabena moved opposite me four or five yards off, his smell strong in the heat.

‘I checked the drop point in the afternoon,’ I said. ‘Someone was watching. I thought it might be the guy who was going to give me the money, thought he might be checking to see if I was white and reliable. I went after him and got close enough to see he was in a dark saloon. When I went back to make the drop at eight-thirty the other car was there, but not a saloon – a Toyota Land Cruiser. The white guy was in the driver’s seat but there was an African sitting next to him. The white man was taking a long nap with a piece of wire around his neck, tied to the head rest. The African had things to say, but with a torch and a gun. That’s what I mean by snags. Big snags. Big snags you didn’t tell me about.’

‘You’re here,’ he said, as if I was making a big fuss.

‘And I wouldn’t mind knowing what’s going on.’

‘Sure you would. Were you followed?’

‘I didn’t look.’

Fat Paul fluttered his fingers and George disappeared out of the hole and Kwabena set off past me down the pillared corridor.

‘Why’d you make the drop out there, Fat Paul?’

‘That’s the way he wanted it.’

‘Like hell he did.’

‘You just in it for the money, what do you know?’

‘My mistake.’

‘You too hungry. No chop enough.’

‘So why didn’t we do it at a petrol station, or a bar outside Abidjan? Why did we go out there in the boondocks?’

‘Boondocks, snags, you teachin’ me things I don’t know. Is good,’ he said, patting his molten-tar hair. ‘But you aksin’ too many questions, my likin'. What you wan’ know everything for? You the paid help.’

George pulled himself back through the hole in the wall, slipping on the rubble outside. He held up a hand, the lump in his armpit visible. I took out the package and shook the cassette out into my hand and threw it on the floor towards Fat Paul. Kwabena came from behind me and picked it up.

‘Not what I’d call an “important film”.’

‘You learnin’ fast,’ said Fat Paul, now standing and giggling. ‘You enjoy the show? They big boys, huh? Mekkin’ you white boys feel small?’

‘So now you know the competition’s out there,’ I said. ‘One man dead, nearly two. The real thing must be important.’

‘You still wan’make some money?’

‘I made that mistake already.’

‘No, you right. This corruption thing with money too bad. You do it for free this time. Is better for you.’

‘You know how to annoy people, Fat Paul.’

‘People been annoyin’ me all my life,’ he said, quick and loud. ‘White people tellin’ me I’m fat. Tellin’ me that all the time, like I don’t remember. So I call myself Fat Paul jes’ so they know, I know.’

‘I’ll be leaving now and I won’t be seeing you.’

‘You staying right where you are and doin’ what you told,’ he said.

‘Is that right?’

‘You got no option.’

‘Don’t order me around, Fat Paul, and don’t make threats. That way we might stay friends the last thirty seconds I know you.’

I walked back down the pillared corridor until I heard a noise like a golf ball being hit into a mattress and a piece of wooden beam in between two pillars disappeared in a burst of powder. I stopped and turned to see George with his gun in his right hand and the suppressor he’d attached resting in his left palm.

‘You involved now, Bruce Medway,’ said Fat Paul, smiling. George slapped the heavy suppressor on his palm. Kwabena put his hand down his trousers and straightened himself out.

‘For the moment,’ I said.

‘To the finish,’ said Fat Paul, shaking his head. ‘The only stupid thing you doin’ is lookin’ too much the money. Mebbe I give you no money you do it right.’

‘I lose interest when I work for free.’

‘I tell you something might help you,’ he said, beckoning me with a flap of his hand. I walked over to him. He took a package off the oil drum where Kwabena had been sitting, identical to the one I’d had, and tapped it on his thumbnail. ‘You a clever man, Bruce. It make sense not to use your car. Hirin’ the Peugeot was good thinkin', and changin’ the numbers a good idea, tekkin’ out the light a better idea…’

‘The policeman?’

‘And the bartender.’ He nodded. ‘You drink three beers. Leave eight-fifteen. They find a Land Cruiser with a dead man down by the lagoon this mornin'. Tyre marks clear in the mud after the rain. They doin’ autopsy findin’ time of death, should be eight/eight-thirty. This lookin’ dicey for you, they find you were there. You understandin’ you involvement now?’

‘It’s coming to me.’

He held the package over his shoulder and Kwabena took it and handed it on to me.

‘Another film?’

‘You no need to know nothin’ this time.’

‘Who’s it for?’ I asked, looking at the blank envelope. ‘There’s no Kantari this time.’

‘Mebbe we findin’ there’s other people in the market.’

‘So where’s the drop?’

‘We call you.’

‘I’m in the Novotel. I’ve got another job starting tonight.’

‘That’s nice. You gettin’ popular. This thing all over before nine tonight.’

‘What time are you going to call?’

“Tween five and six. ‘safternoon.’

‘And if you don’t call?’

‘I’m only half African.’

‘And the other half?’

‘American,’ he said, stroking his neck. ‘My fadder like them white girls. You know them aid workers. He fuck one, she havin’ me then leavin’ me with my fadder when she go back to the States. They don’t like white girls comin’ back home with little black piccaninny under they arms.’

‘You staying out here in Grand Bassam?’

He thought about that for a moment, shook a hanky out and polished his face round and round getting slower.

‘We in the Hotel La Croisette on the front.’

‘You don’t like Abidjan?’

‘They nervous in Abidjan. I like keepin’ calm.’

‘You mean you don’t want to get seen, a man your size in that shirt.’

‘Time for lunch,’ he said, looking at his watch. ‘We no chop yet…you?’

I shook my head. He turned and walked to the hole in the wall with surprising speed, Kwabena just in front of him. He took the big man’s arm to support himself going down the rubble pile.

‘Bon appétit,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘We call you.’ No need to bother about me now. No need to buy me lunch. No need to work on me any more. Someone calls you a clever man, it’s always because he’s cleverer.

From the hole in the wall I watched George swing open the Cadillac’s heavy door and get into the driver’s seat. Kwabena opened the back door. Fat Paul sat on the edge of the seat while Kwabena stirruped his hands. Fat Paul put his foot in them and pushed himself across the back seat into some cushions arranged against the other door. George waited with his hand on the ignition until Kwabena was sitting next to him. The engine roared and then bubbled. The car moved off.

The flat blue-grey lagoon lay stagnant in the afternoon heat. There were no boats out. Two men lay under some palmleaf thatch down by the water, sleeping. A car started, off in the buildings behind me somewhere, and I leaned against the broken wall and thought about how neatly I’d been stitched.

I replayed Fat Paul buying me lunch, opening the package, showing me the contents, resealing it, being open, frank, talking me through it, gaining my trust, letting me think he was a bit of an idiot, letting me bargain him up for a payoff he was never going to have to make. He’d got himself into an all-win situation. If I’d been killed he’d have known he had a problem. I didn’t get killed, he still knew he had a problem and he could use me to clear it up. Saved himself some money, too.

Chapter 6

I picked up Moses at the Polyclinique. He’d lost his hang-dog look and was waving his prescription at me as if it was a winning lottery ticket.

‘No money,’ I said, and his face crashed.

‘I still pissing glass, Mr Bruce.’

‘I’m sure you are. Don’t drink anything,’ I said. ‘We might get some money this afternoon. Mebbe you shouldn’t have given the girl the two thousand she giving you trouble down there.’

‘Two thousand CFA don’t catch for this thing,’ he said, shaking the paper, ‘and I don’t know she giving me trouble down there. I know, mebbe I beat her doing this thing.’

‘She looked as if she could give you a beating, you ask me.’

‘Mebbe you right, Mr Bruce. She stroooong woman.’

We parked up in the Novotel garage. Moses gave me his prescription and I told him to come and see me first thing in the morning. I asked reception to put Fat Paul’s new sealed package in the hotel safe and went up to my room, double-locked the door and flaked out on the bed. I dreamt, no doubt something meaningful which would catch up with me later, and just as an unanswered ringing had begun to annoy me, I woke up with the phone on the other side of the bed, insisting. Somebody had filled my mouth with those things the dentist puts in to soak up the goo, but it didn’t matter because it was B.B. on the line and he was speaking through a mouthful of four bananas.

‘You tek your time,’ he said.

‘I was sleeping.’

‘It three in de afternoon.’

‘All this leisure tires me out.’

‘I see…’ he said, swallowing something that must have been the size and furriness of a tennis ball because it took him several goes and left him out of breath. ‘Ra-ra-ra-ra Mary!’ he stammered at a roar to the maid and I heard the slip, slap, slop of her arrival at his side. ‘Drink,’ he said. He put the receiver on his stomach and I heard some subterranean noises that would have made a potholer rush for the surface.

‘What you doing in the Novotel?’

‘I’m staying here.’

‘For your own accoun'?’

‘Unless you want to pay?’ I said, hearing that line fizz through his brain.

‘I not payin’ for dat!’ he roared. ‘Gah! You tinking for one…’

‘B.B., calm down. I’m paying.’

‘Mebbe you pay me de monny you owe me ‘fore you go stayin’ in de Novotel.’

‘You’ll get it, and when you do I’m up to my daily rate, remember.’

‘Bloddy daily rate! Bloddy ting! You teef man wid your daily rate!’

‘What do you want, B.B.?’ I asked, measuring out the syllables. B.B. bubbled some more, chewed over his anger and spat it out like gristle.

‘First ting,’ he belched. ‘You go, you go tomorrow. Kurt, he gone. He not dere. I don’ know where he gone. De wife, she say he still dere. I aks to spik to him. She say he always out. You go, you find de problem. You still haf de Kurt passport detail?’ he asked, knowing I still had it from the last time he’d asked me. He coughed a quantity of phlegm into his mouth and I felt him search for his hanky. ‘Second ting,’ he said, spitting the oyster, ‘you go to Danish Embassy?’

‘Not yet.’

‘What you doin’ all day?’

‘I’ve got a tight schedule.’

‘Mebbe you try wokking in de day like rest of us. Sleep at night, you know.’

‘I’ll make a note of that.’

‘You go to Danish Embassy this afternoon; this Kurt man a criminal, I know it. T’ird ting, de Japanese, dey come.’

‘Which Japanese?’

‘De company dat buy de sheanut. Dey have de croshing plant in Japan.’

‘I know, but what are their names?’

‘My God, dis difficult ting. Har-ra-ra-ra-ra…’

‘Was that one or both of them?’

‘No, de udder one is, Ka-ka-ka-ka-ka…’

‘Fax me.’

‘You tinking correck.’

‘What about money?’

‘Wait de monny!’ he shouted, irritated. ‘De Japanese…you show dem round, show dem de operascharn, you give dem good time, tek plenty whisky. Kurt wife, she help make some food tings an’ such. OK?’

‘Fine. The money for this?’

‘You always aksing de monny!’

‘I haven’t got any and it often slips your mind.’

‘Is there anything left in Korhogo?’

‘No. All gone. You find de books and tell me where it gone. OK. You better horry or de bank it shut,’ he finished, the phone clattering into its cradle.

I called the Danish Embassy and made an appointment to see a vice-consul called Leif Andersen at 4.00 p.m. The sky had clouded over by the time I left the hotel at 3.15 and looked ready for rain. I took a taxi to the bank in the Alpha 2000 building and told the car to wait while I withdrew both B.B. and Martin Fall’s money. I put it in a plastic carrier bag from Le Coq Sportif that I’d brought with me. The taxi was gone when I came out, which was a small worry. I didn’t want to dally too long in the street with a bag holding nearly 3 million CFA – $12,000 doesn’t look much like a pair of running shoes.

Up the street a rangy kid of about twenty, in a sweatshirt with a big number thirty-two on it, strolled out of a shop doorway with his hands in his baggy jeans pockets. He had his hair razored up over the ears and cut flat top. Across the street another punk looked over the roof of a car, wearing a baseball cap the wrong way round and a black T-shirt with something white on it. These kids had been watching movies, I thought, and turned to walk down the hill. Two boys walked out of a garage in front of me, one lifting his T-shirt to get some air up there and to show me what he had in the waistband of his jeans, the other with an ear missing. These two were shabbier, old jeans cut tight, faded T-shirts. The one with two ears had Mr Smile on the front without the smile, both with no shoes. I turned back and the other kid was standing by the door to the bank, his friend starting to cross the road now. The taxi rounded the block and started cruising down the hill in no hurry. I walked up the hill towards it, the kid outside the bank with his hands out of his pockets now, wiping them on his shirt front, nervous, like me. I ran at him. His eyes widened, looking for his friends. I could hear a pair of trainers and the slap of bare feet on the pavement. I kicked the kid outside the bank hard on the inside of his left knee and he went down so fast on to the concrete slabs of the pavement that his head hit the ground first. I turned, the taxi coming in front of me now, the kid from across the road in between the parked cars and the one with both ears between the taxi and me, a flash of silver in his hand. The driver, still coasting, opened the passenger door and hit the kid on the point of the elbow. The kid went down and the knife span across the pavement. I got in the taxi, the other two boys backing off.

I told the driver that when a man goes into a bank and tells the taxi to wait it wasn’t just out of a feeling of importance. He said he knew that but the traffic police didn’t give a damn. Then he thought about it and said he reckoned they were on the take. They were always there for a parking fine and nowhere near a bag snatch. I told him it was the same the world over.

We drove around the block. I pointed him down Avenue Chardy and into a car park at the back of some buildings. I went into a travel agent called PanAfricAbidjan and found a Swiss guy in there who spoke seven languages, one of which was mine. I asked him if he could make 75,000 CFA available in a travel agent called Bénin-Bénin in the quartier Zongo in Cotonou. He made a phone call and said he could. I gave him the money from my Coq Sportif bag.

At the Novotel reception I took some more money out of the bag and asked them to put the rest of it in the hotel safe. I went into a chemist and picked up Moses’s prescription and bought a large supply of condoms for him which they were decent enough to wrap. It was a short walk from the chemist’s to the Danish Embassy and I was shown straight into the vice-consul’s office with its windswept off-white carpeting that looked like snow on its way to sludge.

Leif Andersen was a short, powerful, mid-thirties guy with a friendly brown moustache and a face that had enjoyed a few too many drinks, as it was puffy with vein maps leading nowhere on his cheeks. He was wearing a sports jacket, a white shirt, and some kind of club tie with wine glasses and bottles all over a burgundy background. He sat with his fingers dovetailed across a bit of a belly beneath a painting of some bleak North Sea-whipped Danish coastline which made me grit my teeth in the overstrong air conditioning.

‘How can I help you?’ he asked.

‘Got a visitor’s jacket?’

‘Sorry,’ he said, opening his hands. ‘The AC’s stuck.’

‘At minus five?’

‘Plus sixteen, zero humidity.’

‘Any chance of something to drink?’

‘Tea?’ he asked, and I shook my head.

‘I’m looking for a guy called Kurt Nielsen.’

‘The one running a sheanut operation in Korhogo?’

‘You know your nationals pretty well.’

‘What’s your interest?’

‘My client’s a Syrian businessman in Accra. He owns the sheanut operation.’

‘Kurt Nielsen’s wife was looking for him, too.’

‘Was?’

She called a couple of weeks ago. We asked for passport details and photographs and she called two days later and said he’d reappeared.’

You weren’t curious?’

‘Not really. Men take time off from their wives. They spend a lot of time together in these isolated places.’

‘So the men go off without telling their wives where they’re going?’

‘We don’t do marriage guidance here.’

‘So you didn’t do anything about it then?’

He shook his head. ‘One, he reappeared. Two, there are a lot of Nielsens in Denmark, and Petersens and Andersens. We all have the same names. We need more than “Nielsen” to help us find him.’

I held out the photocopy of the passport details which B.B. had given me and he looked at them for a few seconds and left the room. I did some running on the spot to keep the circulation going and looked around Leif’s minimalist office for a drinks cabinet with something warming in it. Ten minutes later he came back with a computer print-out and a pair of black-framed glasses on his nose.

‘I’d like to find Kurt Nielsen as well,’ he said.

‘He’s on the run?’

‘No, he’s dead.’

The Kurt Nielsen who’d owned the passport was born in Alborg in 1954. He left school when he was sixteen and started work on the fishing boats, Danish and later British. He served two short stretches for robbery, the first in ‘70, the second in ‘74. After the second term he started working on British ships and spending shoretime in England. He seemed to have developed a taste for young girls and served three years for sexual assault on a twelve-year-old in Middlesbrough. He got out in ‘85. He died a year later in Nottingham. He had been a lodger with the Cochrane family. Mr Cochrane came back early from his job as a scaffolder after a fall and found Kurt Nielsen having sex with his thirteen-year-old daughter over the sink in the kitchen. Cochrane hit him over the head with a full bottle of cider which had been on the kitchen table and stuck the broken end in his neck. Kurt Nielsen died 3rd June, 1986.

‘What are you going to do about it?’

Leif Andersen sat on the edge of his desk with the print-out resting on his thigh and said nothing for several minutes.

‘I don’t want to rush you, Mr Andersen, but it’s bloody cold in here and I don’t want to be the first man five degrees off the equator to get hypothermia.’

‘Do you drink, Mr Medway?’

‘Not tea, for Christ’s sake.’

‘Aquavit?’

‘Now I’m with you.’

He locked the door of the office and produced a bottle and two glasses from his bottom drawer.

‘Not what you British would call consular behaviour, but we are in Africa.’

‘How do you think the Falklands War got started?’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Consular behaviour,’ I said. ‘Skol.’

We banged back a slug apiece and he refilled the glasses. He banged that one back too, catching me on the hop so that he had to wait to fill up for thirds. He nodded and we threw the third one down, and I felt a moment’s abandon and thought it might be throwing-glasses-in-the-fireplace time. He put away the bottle and glasses and unlocked the door. He sat back down, gritted his teeth, tensed his biceps and hissed out the pent-up air in his lungs.

‘Good. Where were we?’

‘What are you going to do about the Nielsens?’

‘The Nielsens? Right. Yes, of course. You know,’ he started and got out from behind his desk and walked over to the window and looked out on to a dull, grey Avenue Noguès, ‘sometimes I look out of the window in the rainy season. The sky is grey. I can hear the wind off the sea around the building, the rain on the window. It’s cold in here, as you know. I have a couple of glasses of Aquavit and I think I’m back in Skagen, you know it? Right on the northern tip of Denmark. Terrible place, but I like it around there.’ He paused, letting the Aquavit shunt around his system, letting it take the edge off his cares. He swallowed something the size of a crab apple, as if he was trying to keep his longing down, and took his glasses off.

‘You know what I think?’ He turned to me. ‘Mrs Nielsen didn’t call herself Mrs Nielsen, she referred to Kurt Nielsen as her husband but she called herself Dotte Wamberg, she’ – he ran both hands through his hair – ‘she couldn’t find her husband, she called me, I asked for her husband’s details, she said she’d have to find them and send them on. Then she must have started thinking and realized that she was going to have some problems if she did that, so she had her husband reappear. How’s that?’

‘You’ve done some conclusion-leaping, Mr Andersen.’

‘Only since you came in asking about him and we’ve found that he’s on a dead man’s stolen passport.’

‘OK, I’ll buy it. What’re you going to do about it?’

‘I’ve a lot…’ He looked at his watch. ‘The ambassador’s coming back from Lagos, the agronomists, back to…’

‘Nothing, then?’

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘Will a fourth Aquavit get us through this hazy patch we’re in at the moment?’

Leif locked the door, and took the bottle and glasses out of the drawer again. We had a fourth and a fifth before he put the bottle away, but it didn’t make him any more expansive on what he had in mind. He slapped and kicked his desk around a bit and rolled himself back and forwards on his castored chair and laughed about things in his head without involving me, but he avoided definitive action on Kurt Nielsen and Dotte Wamberg.

Somebody knocked on the door and the vice-consul sat up and asked whoever it was to come in. The door was still locked and he said ‘shit’ under his fiery breath and took off out of his chair, which backed off into the far corner of the room so that he was in two minds as to whether to open the door or go after the chair. He unlocked the door. A woman with straight blonde hair, a light-blue dress and folders held to her bosom, came in. She looked from Andersen to me and then at the chair, which in my vision seemed a long way off. She wore a pair of blue steel-rimmed spectacles whose lenses were the size of throat lozenges. She put the files on the desk and left without turning to see Leif bowing with a flourish from his right hand, which would have given the game away if the alembic fumes hadn’t already. He shut the door, breathless.

‘She’s very attractive, isn’t she?’

‘Is she new?’

Leif didn’t have to answer and he didn’t have to tell me why he didn’t want to go up to Korhogo and find out what had happened to Kurt Nielsen, who was going to be some lowlife, probably an escaped convict. What did he care about all that? He said he’d fax the passport through to the Danish police authorities and get an ID on who Kurt Nielsen really was and ask them if they wanted any action taken. I said I’d appreciate it if he could give me the dirt on Kurt Nielsen and he gave me his card and said to call him in a couple of days.

Chapter 7

By ten to five I was back in the Novotel sitting on one of the twin beds in room 307 nearest the window. The high-stacked, bruised clouds of the storm building over Ghana were moving towards me. It would be raining by nightfall. I thought about going out in that storm and doing something for nothing for Fat Paul and that drew me to the secrets of the mini-bar, which I opened but only checked. I needed to be steady for what Fat Paul might have in mind.

I stared at the carpet, waiting for the phone, and had one of those existential lurches when I saw myself – a big man, getting drunk to hold himself together on a small bed in a hotel room in Africa, fresh from a meeting with another drunken bum and about to do something criminal for a vindictive slob. For a moment, I seemed to be on the brink of an explanation for the mystery and absurdity of my situation. Then the god controlling those moments of insight decided I’d be better off without the self-knowledge. A fluorescent light started flickering, pitched at an epileptic-fit-inducing frequency. I turned it off and lay down, relieved that I didn’t have to run down to the bar and tell all the other people deadening themselves to reality that I’d cracked it and we could all relax.

I woke up with the rain on the window and it dark outside and in the room. It was just before six o’clock. I phoned reception – no calls. I made sure they knew I was in 307, having moved me from 205 – still no calls. I took a bottle of mineral water out of the mini-bar and sat in the white light from the chamber and drank it until my teeth hurt. I kicked the door shut and lay back down on the bed in the dark, light coming in under the door.

I was missing something which wasn’t home but felt like it ten times over. Hotel rooms did this to me. I thought of individuals sitting in concrete boxes stacked on top of each other and the human condition got lonelier. I’d fallen for two women before Heike, one of them was now married to Martin Fall. I’ve been disappointed just as much as anybody closing in on forty has. I’d always bounced back, though. It might take a few months of rolling into the cold side of the bed before I’d get used to sleeping in the middle again, but I could always get used to being on my own. This time I wasn’t bouncing back, I was slipping further down the black hole. I was missing Heike more than an amputee missed a leg and people could see it, smell it, and feel it.

Some footage came into my head, black-and-white stuff, a little quick and faltering like an old home movie. Heike was sitting on the floor of my living room in my house in Cotonou, Benin. She wore her big white dress, her legs were crossed and covered by the dress, her long bare arms rested on her knees. She had a cigarette going in one of her large, almost manly, hands and in the other she held a glass with her little finger sticking out. Her hair, as usual, was pinned up any old how so that every loose strand said: ‘kiss this nape'. She sat there and occupied herself smoking and drinking and not saying anything and her completeness brought on a terrible ache, and I shut the film down and drifted off into a lumpy sleep.

I woke up and looked around the darkness in the room, thinking there was a bat flying around expertly missing walls and furniture. I turned on the neon and it blasted the room with light and dark until I’d fumbled around for the light switch by the door. It was 6.30 p.m. The rain still gusted against the window outside and thunder rumbled off in a corner somewhere. The phone went and I tore it off its cradle.

‘I thought you said you weren’t all African…’

‘…This is Leif Andersen, Mr Medway.’

‘Sorry, I was expecting somebody else. Have you got anything for me?’

There was a long crash, one that went on for fifteen, twenty seconds, of falling crockery followed by a roar of approval from down the phone.

‘Are you eating Greek tonight?’ I asked.

‘I’m in a place called Maison des Anciens Combatants in Plateau.’

‘War Heroes in Plate Crash.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Nothing, Mr Andersen. You called. Did the Danish police come through with an ID?’

‘Not yet. The Ivorian police came through with something. They’ve found our Kurt Nielsen down by the Ebrié lagoon about eighty kilometres outside Abidjan. In the pineapple plantations off the road down to Tiegba.’

‘They found him, what, walking around, taking a leak, out of his head…?’

‘Dead, Mr Medway. Strangled with a wire garrotte.’

‘Was he a floater?’

‘I’m not sure…’

‘Was he in the lagoon?’

‘No, he was in a Toyota Land Cruiser.’

‘His own?’

‘It belonged to M. Kantari in Korhogo. He reported it stolen this morning. The report made its way down through Bouaké and Yamoussoukro to Abidjan by this afternoon.’

‘Have you seen the body?’

‘No.’

‘How do they know it’s Nielsen?’

‘He had his passport on him. That’s why they called us.’

‘Did they find anything else?’

‘No, but if they did and it was valuable we wouldn’t hear about it.’

‘Well, Mr Andersen, thanks for your help…’

‘One thing more, Mr Medway. We need positive identification of the body.’

‘I never knew him.’

‘No, but Mrs Nielsen, or Dotte Wamberg, did and we have been unable to contact her.’

‘You want a phone number?’

‘We have one, but first of all there’s no answer and second, these things are better done in person.’

‘What about someone from the Danish Embassy?’

‘There’s no one available. We’ve informed the local police, but they cannot be relied on.’

‘I can’t guarantee I’ll get there tomorrow. You know how things are.’

‘He’s in the hospital morgue. He’s not going anywhere.’

‘Well, I won’t put it like that to Dotte Wamberg.’

‘You’re a sensitive man, Mr Medway, I can tell.’

‘How?’

‘Anybody who drinks Aquavit in the afternoon understands.’

‘I thought it was because I was a drunk.’

‘What does that make me, Mr Medway?’

‘You get diplomatic immunity.’

Andersen laughed. ‘Another thing for you that you should keep to yourself. Kurt Nielsen’s stomach had been ripped open by a set of metal leopard claws. I think they found someone called James Wilson in the lagoon here in Abidjan the other day. He had the same problem. Cheers,’ he said, and put down the phone.

I phoned reception again – still no calls, but there was a fax from Ghana. Then I remembered Bagado and put a call through to Cotonou. The phone rang and rang for minutes until a dull, thick voice answered.

‘Bagado?’

‘Yes.’

‘You all right?’

‘I’ve some fever. A little malaria. I was sleeping.’

‘Do you want some work?’

‘What sort of work?’

‘Picking bananas,’ I said, and he thought about it for ten seconds.

‘Forget it,’ he said.

‘Detective work, Bagado. What the hell else would I call you for?’

‘Picking bananas – I don’t know. I’m nearly that desperate. My little girl is sick and I have nothing. I open the cupboard, and the cupboard is bare…not even any shelves…my wife has used them for firewood.’

‘Go to a travel agent called Bénin-Bénin in the quartier Zongo; you know it. They have some money for you. Seventy-five thousand CFA. Give some to your wife and use the rest to get yourself to Accra. I want you to check out someone who calls himself Fat Paul who works out of an office in Adabraka called Abracadabra Video on Kojo Thompson Road. He has two bodyguards who call themselves George and Kwabena. The first one is a shooter, the second is just very big. He says he runs a video business, you know, a chain of video cinemas. See what you can find out about him. Then come to the Novotel in Abidjan as fast as you can. OK?’

‘What’s the hurry?’

I told Bagado about the failed drop, Martin Fall’s job and the James Wilson/Kurt Nielsen killings and we signed off.

I put a call through to the Hotel La Croisette and the receptionist there answered in a thick, tired voice which came from a head that must have been asleep on the counter. She told me that Fat Paul and Co were in 208 and tried to call them – no answer. Then she started waking up a bit and told me the key to the room was in reception, which meant they must be out. I asked her to check the bar and restaurant. They weren’t there. I asked her if there was a large American car parked outside the hotel and she said that was the only car parked outside the hotel. They were the only guests. The hotel didn’t fill up except at the weekends. The phone went dead. I asked reception to reconnect me. They tried, but the woman said the phones were down with the storm. I left a message that if a Mr Paul called, to tell him I was going to meet him in the Hotel La Croisette in Grand Bassam. I said he might call himself Mr Fat Paul, I didn’t know, and I heard her writing it all down. I told her if anybody else called not to give them that message and took the lift straight down to the basement.

There seemed to be several storms around taking their turn coming in. Thunder boomed off in the north and the sky lit up in the east over Grand Bassam. When I came out of the Novotel it was raining, but not as hard as it had done judging by the slow trickle in the road gutters and the huge bodies of water that had collected at the bottom of the steep streets of Plateau. The storm drains were choked and cars were cruising with water up to their sills.

I crossed the lagoon. The lights were out in Treichville, Marcory, Zone 4A and C, Koumassi, Biétri and Port Bouë. Just after the airport I had to pull over and let the storm through, the rain a solid wall at the end of the car, the wipers out of their depth even at that crazy double speed when you stop looking at the road and marvel at the insanity. The rain blasted full heavy metal on the roof for minutes, then backed off to light instrumental. I set off on full beam, down the black glass road to Grand Bassam.

There were no lights on there either. People were moving around as if an air raid had just finished. A car horn was sounding off constantly in the streets beyond the gare routière and a harsh white halogen light came on by the market, powered by a diesel generator which farted up to full speed somewhere in the dark. The light showed rain slanting silver and people hopping across the streets with plastic bags over their heads. I sank slowly into street-wide puddles and crawled across the lagoon to the Quartier France. I parked next to Fat Paul’s Cadillac in front of the Hotel La Croisette. The sea fringe was invisible in the dark. The roar said it was rough out there. A stiff breeze blew on to the shore, snapping at my shirt.

There were two hurricane lamps lighting the lobby and the receptionist was asleep on a chair behind the desk, her head resting on the wall, snoring. I lifted the key to room 208 off its hook and palmed it as the woman woke up. She was dazed. I asked to go up to the room, showing her the key was out. She took a lamp from under the desk and lit it with the slow and gentle movements of someone on automatic.

The lamplight made huge shadows that loomed and wavered down the warm, bare corridor to Fat Paul’s room. The hotel was silent apart from the loose change and keys in my trousers and my feet on the strip of sisal carpeting over the polished floor. Several rooms had their doors open, sheets piled on the floor in one, the maids slacking with the lack of business during the week. There was a smell of raw sewage that didn’t surprise me after the rain.

Fat Paul’s room was at the end of the corridor, the room on the corner, windows on two sides. The bad smell was getting stronger and changing with sweeter nuances over the sulphur that made my face twitch and my empty stomach sick. The hairs were up on my neck, the sweat cold. I went back down and told the receptionist to find the manager.

The manager was annoyed. He didn’t like problems on a night with no power and with nobody in the rooms. He knew how little money he was making. He changed his tone when he hit the smell in the corridor; in fact, he shut up and got his handkerchief out. He had a master key which I wanted him to use, but his hand was shaking so much I took it and opened up the room.

The stench exploded out of the room, but worse than the smell was the noise. I’d heard that noise on African butchers’ stalls in the market when they flick the black meat with a bloody cloth and with an irritated buzz a skin of flies takes off a foot and relands. That was the first noise. Behind it was something worse. Behind it came the sound of a flap. Something tense and feathery batted the air in the dark. Without thinking, I reached in and turned on the light switch, but the power was still off. I held the lamp in the room and heard the tearing of flesh, and the flap – the flap of a large bird’s wing.

There in the yellow oily light, in the black shadows working their way up the walls, were two vultures. The one with its head down, the other looking up, its whole head covered in blood, black and red in the strange light, as if it had been recently skinned.

The manager’s vomit slapped the polished floor between the carpet and the wall at the same time as the power came back on. Harsh electric light banged on in the corridor and room. The vultures shrieked at the sudden exposure and danced back into the centre of the room, their wings spread. The red-smeared muslin drapes at the windows open to the sea were lifted and twisted almost horizontal to the ceiling by the wind. The floor was covered in blood, the red and black of carnage. The ghastly yellow of Fat Paul’s raw fat quivered as he lay there opened out, mostly naked, his clothes torn off. My vomit, consisting of nothing but soured and burning spirit, joined the manager’s. I retched myself dry and breathless.

We went back downstairs and the manager called the police while the receptionist found me a broom. Back upstairs in 208 the vultures had been joined by a tornado of insects circling the light and speckling the walls. I closed all the shutters but one and beat the vultures out of the room – the two of them screeching, mad, angry, their heads bloodied, their wings heavy. I shut them out and they stayed outside and screeched, scraping their talons on the metal railing of the balcony.

Two of the three bodies in room 208 had been shot. George’s hand was still inside his jacket reaching for his gun. One eye was missing. A large quantity of blood had soaked into his shirt, the jockey tie and the carpet. Kwabena lay with a collapsed wooden table underneath him, one of his large hands over a huge wound in his chest. Fat Paul’s head rested on his shoulder. He had what seemed to be a set of giblets hanging out of his mouth and he’d been opened up the length of his abdomen. Some of his fingers had been sheared off. They lay like cocktail sausages next to him. The ones still attached had no rings on. His gold chain and watch had gone. High up on his chest, against the lighter coffee-coloured skin, I saw the marks that I hadn’t seen on George and Kwabena. The leopard-claw marks. As I closed the door I saw the black hole where Fat Paul’s genitals had been and realized what the giblets were.

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