The Big Killing

  Ten yards from the car I stopped dead. The two litres of sweat lathering my body iced. The gun was out of the waistband of my trousers and pointing into my spine.

  'Slowly...' he said, speaking with an American accent. 'Let me down, man, but slowly.'

  I still had the knife but I wasn't keen to test my ability with it against a .38. I lowered him to the floor. He was small and it was a long way for him to go off my six-foot-four-inch frame. I still held his right wrist as his feet touched the ground and remembered that he had held the gun in his right hand in the corridor. He must have been groggy still from the smack on the head because he moaned. I felt the gun come off my spine and he twisted his wrist out of my grip. I straightened and he started falling backwards trying to change the gun into his right hand as he was going down. The heavy suppressor tilted the gun and his fingers turned into a full set of dislocated thumbs. Then I was on him. I grabbed his right hand which held the gun and it coughed out a shot. A Mercedes's tyre burst, kicking up concrete dust from the floor and the car slumped on to its right buttock.

  I had a problem. The knife was in my left pocket. My left hand held his right, my right was groping around at his flailing fist which was punching me in the head. The gun went off again and this time one of my Peugeot's tyres popped. I dropped my forehead hard on to the bridge of his nose. There was a crack and a bit of a grind, which I felt in the back of my head. I reared back, preparing to butt him again and he said, quietly, as if to himself, 'No.'

  The gun fell from his fingers and I picked it up and stood back from him. He sat up and held his broken nose with both hands while blood poured on to his shirt.

  'It's broke,' he said. 'You broke my goddam nose.'

  I'd given up my English instinct for apologizing a long time ago so I didn't say anything. He told me he'd never broken his nose before in a way that made me think that perhaps we hadn't just been trying to kill each other. He asked me what he should do about it and I told him that was the least of his problems and that he should get on and change the tyre he'd just shot out on my car.

  'Me?' he asked, as if this was well below his normal line of duty, and I had to explain to him that I wasn't going to do it because I had the gun, and in those circumstances the one without the gun did the dirty work. He shrugged and said he didn't know how to change a tyre.

  For a moment I'd begun to like him. He was sitting on the ground like a youngster who'd just executed a brave rugby tackle and found that, in life, not only is bravery not always rewarded, but it can also damage your looks. I was on the brink of giving him a hand when a movie still came into my head of Fat Paul, George and Kwabena in their hotel room and I kicked him hard in the leg.

  'You fuck!' he shouted, rolling to one side, so I hoofed him up the backside. He scrabbled to his feet and straightened his jacket. I lined him up for another message from my size-twelve boot and he limped to the car, overdoing it.

  I asked him his name while he got the tyre and jack out and he said it was Eugene, '...but they call me Red.'

  'Sounds tougher than Eugene, is that it?'

  He didn't answer.

  'You a Liberian?' I asked.

  'Yeah, I am. What's it to you?'

  I took his wallet out of my back pocket and read his ID. Eugene Amos Gilbert, born 1958, profession: businessman. I checked through the wallet which had a little currency in it and not much else. I asked him who sent him and he didn't answer so I asked him who he worked for and he still didn't say anything. Then I told him I was talking to him and he said he was concentrating on changing the tyre because he hadn't done one before and he didn't want to screw it up and get us involved in an accident. I was touched.

  He changed the tyre like someone who'd changed a couple of thousand tyres in his lifetime and then suffered a stroke in that very specific part of his brain. I told him I was going to check the wheel nuts and that for every loose one I was going to break a finger. He tightened all the nuts.

  I gave him his wallet and told him he was driving. He said he didn't know how to drive so I asked him what the hell he was doing in his car at the lagoon yesterday. He shrugged. I told him to give me his hand. He held it out without thinking. I took his middle finger and just before I snapped it back he had a sudden and total recall of how to drive.

  We got in the car and Eugene looked over the dashboard, steering wheel and gearshift as if he was buying it. I told him to get on and drive it across the Pont Général de Gaulle to Treichville. He responded by kangaroo hopping us up to the garage gates, which made me put the gun firmly in his ribs and explain in his little ear that the safety was off and this was no way to drive, whereupon we smoothed out and he began driving like a president's limo chauffeur. It took some time to raise the gardien. He opened up the grille for us with his eyes barely open and we went out into the black shiny night.

  I asked him who he worked for and again he didn't respond, except to grunt with the barrel in his ribs.

  'Why did you kill Fat Paul?' I asked, and he looked a little surprised.

  'I found him and the other two covered in flies with a couple of vultures in his stomach. Why did you kill him?' He shrugged as if there didn't have to be a reason. 'What're you after?' I asked.

  He checked the rearview and tried his nose with the fingers of his left hand as if he was modelling clay. 'OK. How did you find Fat Paul?'

  'I followed you, man.'

  'From where?'

  'The Novotel, where d'you think?'

  'You didn't follow me last night.'

  'I saw the number of your car at the lagoon in the afternoon. I call a friend in that place in Abidjan where they keep the numbers, they told me it's a hire car and there's only four companies in Abidjan do that.'

  'What did you want from Fat Paul?'

  He didn't answer.

  'What do you want from me?'

  He thought about that for a moment.

  'I gotta kill you.'

  'Any reason?'

  'You seen my face and you got the package.'

  'We're getting somewhere,' I said. 'What's in the package, Eugene?'

  'Red,' he said. 'The name's Red.'

  Halfway across the bridge I told him to stop.

  'Bad idea, man,' he said.

  'It's the only one I got.'

  'They's a lotta assholes on these bridges.'

  'Now there's two more,' I said, 'and what's a hit man worrying about assholes for?'

  He shrugged and looked out the window across the black leathery lagoon. I hauled him across the passenger seat and stood him on the pavement. There was no traffic and no pedestrians. All the assholes had mugged each other and gone to bed, bored.

  I hoped Eugene was beginning to realize how bad things were looking for him. He felt his nose with both hands and then asked if he could do his shoelaces up, and before I remembered that he was wearing slip-ons he was down on one knee. I took the knife out of my pocket and tapped him on the head with it and he stood up and nodded. I threw it in the lagoon, asking him who he was working for again and what was in the package. He sighed and put his head to one side.

  'Maybe I don't work for nobody.'

  'You look like a pro with that ankle knife.'

  'Maybe I'm doing things for my own account.'

  'But are you?'

  He shrugged again.

  'What about Kurt Nielsen?'

  He looked at me, blank. I tapped him on the forehead. 'You got anything in there?'

  'I don't understand.'

  'You killed Kurt Nielsen last night down by the lagoon. You just said that's where you saw the car.'

  'I forgot. I mean I didn't know him.'

  'Why did you kill him then?'

  'I don't understand the fuck you talking about.'

  'If you're working for yourself you should know who you're killing and why. Or were you just keeping your hand in? Doing some night practice? Getting ready for the big day.'

  'I still don't understand the fuck you talking about.'
/>
  'It's a British thing. It's called "irony".'

  'Irony,' he said. 'Is that heavy or what?'

  'How did you know to go down to the lagoon?'

  'Uh?'

  'How did you know the drop point was down by the lagoon?'

  'I followed the white man.'

  'You were there in the afternoon.'

  'He came early, like you.'

  'You knew where the drop point was. Who told you?'

  He didn't answer.

  'Are you working for Kantari?'

  'Who the fuck he?' he asked, and I gave up and told him that if he didn't spew it out I was going to kill him and he shook his head.

  'You're not going to shoot me,' he said, which was perceptive given the gun in my hand pointing at him. 'How do you know that?'

  'You gave me my wallet.'

  He knew I didn't have whatever was needed to put a bullet in someone. He'd seen me looking inside myself for some cold brutality and come back up with warm English custard. I told him to step over the rail of the bridge and asked him again about Kantari while I searched his pockets. I found Fat Paul's rings. He told me through trembling lips that he couldn't swim and I said that he'd forgotten a lot of things that night and then remembered them under a little pressure.

  'It's true. This time it's true. I don't know how to swim,' he said.

  'You're going for a swim unless you talk. Who's paying you?'

  'I told you, I can't swim.'

  'You're going to learn,' I said, 'and if you don't...' I thumped him in the back.

  There was a splash, a moment of quiet, and a light uncertain breeze, looking for somewhere to blow, fluttered my shirt. Over the rail it was black with the odd glint from the lights on the shore but there was no sound. The clouds which had been spraying rain most of the evening still hung around up above, applying pressure but not much else. A car zipped past on the other side of the still-wet road. I sorted through the rings and found the one with the scorpion on it and threw the rest in after Eugene. I waited, listening for the sound of splashing, the sound of Eugene taking a huge gulp of air, but there was nothing but the smell of the sea coming in on the nothing breeze.

  I walked around the back of the car to the driver's door and, as I reached for the handle, one of those assholes Eugene was worried about appeared in a black string vest, crouching with his arms out. He showed me a nasty but very white grin and a pair of malevolent eye-whites which flickered to his right hand which held a knife. He pointed the blade at my pocket and grunted the word 'Argent.'

  I put my arm straight out in front of me so that the suppressor ended up a couple of inches from his nose. He stopped moving forward and straightened a little so that the gun was pointing at his throat. He was blinking now and the malevolent eye-whites had turned to lightly fried egg-whites and he'd reined in his greedy grin to a nervous smile. He turned and ran without looking back.

  I tucked the gun up underneath the driver's seat and drove back to the hotel. I got into bed with a miniature of Courvoisier in the absence of Johnny Walker. I stared at the ceiling and had the thought that for the first time in four weeks I'd got hold of something and hadn't pissed on my hand.

  Chapter 10

  Tuesday 29th October

  The phone told me it was 5.00 a.m. My body told me it was a lie. I crawled to the mini-bar and polished off everything nonalcoholic, including some very gaseous tonic water which lodged itself behind my sternum like a heart attack.

  I let the shower needle my scalp for some time to see if it would loosen some of the grey phlegmy stuff that had seeped into my frontal lobes. I had some success because by the time I got to the mirror I could see that where my eyes weren't bloodshot there were pink threads, and you don't pick up that kind of detail unless you're sharp.

  I shaved with a razor that seemed to have been used on seven women's legs before it got to my face and the foam ran pink in the sink. By the time I got to reception I looked like the start of a papier-mache mask.

  Ron was propped up against the front desk as if he was about to be moved into a window display for safari gear. There was a Great White Hunter's hat on the desk and there was nobody else around which meant it was his, and he was going to wear it. His hair was done up in a ponytail so that everybody would get to see the gold earring. The oblong wafer watch had gone and he was wearing the kind of thing you'd expect to see on a lone round-the-world yachtsman with time on his hands to work out what everything's for. He had a pair of Timberland boots on his feet which had done twenty-five yards of walking on carpet. The man looked attractive—attractive to people with no money and hours to spare to think up ways of relieving people with too much of it. He was dozing on his feet, and enjoying it by the look of his lips which were searching for a bare shoulder.

  It took some time to compute the mini-bar takings. The girl, who was wearing a very bright and complicated African print which raked across my eyeballs like a currycomb, fetched my carrier bag from the safe and checked to make sure the paper wasn't going to run out on the printer. I took B.B.'s two million out, along with the sealed package which Fat Paul had given me yesterday. I left Martin Fall's cash in the bag and handed it back to the girl. She felt sorry for me and gave me a little bag of cakes which she told me she'd made herself. I signed the bill. Ron jolted himself awake.

  'Bloody hell,' he said.

  'Don't worry. I'm just the hangover. He sent me down to settle the bill. He'll be along in a minute.'

  'You missed a bit,' he said, looking around the corner of my face, 'and you slept like shit.'

  The lift doors opened and Ron glanced over as if he was expecting the real me to come out. It was empty.

  'I had a busy night,' I said. 'You got rid of those Alfas yet?'

  'They didn't show.'

  'They will. I'll get the car. Wait outside and don't forget your bullwhip.'

  'Funny guy,' said Ron, fitting the hat on his head.

  In the basement I stripped some money off the block and stuck the rest in an old plastic bag. I opened the rear passenger door, unscrewed the panel, and taped the block inside the door and replaced the panel. Fat Paul's package I taped to the back of the glove compartment. At street level Moses was walking towards the hotel, swinging his Ghana Airways bag with as many cares in the world as I'd have liked to have. He didn't recognize me at first with all the tissue stuck to my face but then he slapped his leg and shook his head, marvelling at me as if I'd been up all night preparing it as a school project.

  I gave Moses his prescription and told him to load up while Ron and I had coffee and croissants in a café down from the hotel. The Alfas were waiting for us when we got back. They saw Ron and fell on him like a couple of labradors who'd seen someone they knew and had to tell him about their day. I stood back from the tail-wagging and watched Ron give them the kiss-off.

  The Alfas were both wearing raincoats, reminding me to look at the weather which had made no impression because it was one of those grey nothing days, neither hot nor cold, neither rain nor shine. Ron surprised me with the flashiness of his brutality in getting shot of the Alfas. I could tell he hurt. They skewered him with a couple of looks that would have made a more sensitive man wriggle.

  We made good time on the motorway from Abidjan to Yamoussoukro, once the car had got over being insulted by Ron, and we'd listened to how fast an Alfa Romeo Spyder can go.

  Ron slept for the first hour to show how impressed he was. I held my hand out the window and thought about things I shouldn't have thought about—Heike. It didn't do me any good covering that old ground again; I'd never got used to the high hurdles, the deep water jumps and the elephant pitfalls but once I'd got started I had to go through with it.

  I was interrupted by a dog which had come out of the dense vegetation at the side of the road and loped along at the edge of the tarmac looking over its shoulder at the passing cars. Just as we pulled alongside it, for no reason at all, it veered into our path and clobbered against the car, dying ins
tantly. Moses didn't stop but looked into the rearview mirror at the body basking on the tarmac. I had a sudden vision of Eugene disappearing into the black lagoon and decided that dark thoughts brought on others and it was time to recapture some of the positivism of last night.

  We rolled into Yamoussoukro at around 10.00 a.m. The President of the Ivory Coast had built this huge, expensive, grid-planned metropolis, in which not enough people were living, as a tribute to his mother. He had also made his 'deal with God' here and erected a cathedral so massive it made the Pope nervous that he was going to have to pay for the servicing.

  We bought a crate of Aiwa mineral water and six bottles of Black Label from a supermarket and found a garage where I bought a new tyre to replace the one that Eugene had shot out the night before. Ron stood over the guys and supervised the work so that they looked at each other a few times, as if they were wondering what sort of a dent a tyre iron would make in the white man's hat. When they stripped off the old tyre a piece of metal fell to the floor which Ron picked up and inspected.

  'This is a bullet,' he said.

  'It is,' I confirmed.

  'How did a bullet get in there?'

  'I might ask you how you know what an impacted bullet looks like.'

  'I've been to the movies.'

  'The bullet was fired from a gun.'

  'That's unusual.'

  'I could go into it if you want.'

  He held the bullet between his thumb and forefinger and straightened his hat with his free hand and walked off towards the car doing some kind of breathing exercises.

  'Oh boy,' he said, putting his hands into the back pockets of his trousers and shaking his head. 'Here comes trouble.'

  'This your first time?'

  'What?'