A Darkening Stain

  At 6.30 p.m., I called Traudi. I had nothing to say to her and Heike wouldn’t be talking, but I had to know she was all right.

  ‘Kann ich mit Heike sprechen?’ I asked.

  ‘You don’t fool me, Bruce Medway. Not even in German on the phone,’ said Traudi.

  ‘I wanted to make sure she was OK.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know.’

  ‘You haven’t seen her?’

  ‘She’s not here and I haven’t been in today.’

  ‘When’s she coming back?’

  ‘To you?’

  ‘No, to you.’

  ‘She’s not staying with me.’

  ‘Who’s she staying with?’

  Silence.

  ‘Are you still there, Traudi?’

  ‘I’m still here,’ she said, weighing something up. ‘She’s staying with Gerhard.’

  A little fanfare of triumph came down the line. I slammed the phone down, didn’t want to hear any of Traudi’s crowing, and collapsed on the sofa writhing as if a kidney stone had come loose.

  There was a knock on the door.

  ‘Entrez,’ I roared, and headed for the kitchen and the fridge. I poured a whisky, downed it and poured another. I went back into the living room. Carole was standing by the door in a black sheath that just about covered the gusset of her panties. She was on some black stilettos so high she didn’t dare look down.

  ‘What do you want?’ I asked her in savage French.

  ‘Same as you,’ she said.

  ‘How would you know?’

  ‘Whisky. I like whisky,’ she said, and with a practised sashay she tok-tok-tokked to the couch, ‘with soda.’

  I turned back into the kitchen and laid out a whisky with ice and Perrier. She’d managed to sit down somehow without her dress snapping up around her waist. Her muscly legs were crossed tight. I handed her the drink, noticed the lipstick, red this time, and the heavy eye make-up.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I came to see how you were.’

  ‘For Jean-Luc?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I heard an interesting thing last night.’

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘This person said the only wife of Jean-Luc’s he knew about died.’

  ‘Jean-Luc means wife in the broadest sense of the word,’ she said. ‘Where’s yours?’

  ‘I’m not married and she’s not here.’

  ‘Still working?’

  ‘No. She’s not coming back.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘That lie I had to tell about what happened in Grand-Popo, I had to tell it in front of her. She wasn’t happy.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘You don’t sound it.’

  ‘Why don’t you sit down?’

  ‘Just tell me what you want.’

  ‘I came to see you,’ she said, putting her drink down. She stood up and walked over to me, shoulder height to me in her heels.

  ‘I’m not seeing anybody,’ I said. ‘Does Jean-Luc know you’re here?’

  ‘He doesn’t control me.’

  ‘He controls most people.’

  ‘You know,’ she said, her finger in the corner of her tiny mouth, ‘he can’t do it any more ... since his accident.’

  ‘I guessed.’

  ‘But he still likes me to have fun.’

  ‘And report back ... with all the details.’

  She smiled up at me, glossed her lips with her tongue and then dropped her eyes. She hooked a finger in my trouser belt. I locked my hand on to her wrist. There was a knock at the door. Everybody crowding round to see me all of a sudden.

  ‘Entrez,’ I shouted.

  Carole didn’t move.

  The door opened. Bagado walked in and took in the tableau. Two uniformed policemen appeared behind him. Carole unhooked her finger. I let go of her wrist.

  ‘I was just leaving,’ she said, and tottered away from me.

  The dress had ridden up at the back over the lower part of her buttocks so she had to tug it down as she walked deliberately past the three men at the door, one of the policemen tracking her all the way out and down the stairs.

  ‘I’ve been trying to call you,’ I said.

  ‘We’ve just come from your office,’ said Bagado.

  ‘We must have just missed each other,’ I said. ‘Do you want a drink? Your friends probably do. Take a seat.’

  ‘Not this time.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I’m taking you in for questioning. I’ve been ordered to bring you in for questioning,’ he rephrased.

  ‘And these two?’

  ‘They’re going to search the premises,’ he said, motioning them forward.

  ‘Up and down?’ I said, but he didn’t react. ‘What are you looking for? What’s the questioning about?’

  ‘I’m just bringing you in.’

  ‘And the questioning?’

  ‘Commandant Bondougou.’

  ‘And these guys?’

  ‘They’re looking for a weapon. A murder weapon. That’s all I know.’

  ‘You’d better get on with it then,’ I said, and socked back the whisky.

  Chapter 22

  The uniformed boys, and they were on the brink of puberty, tossed the place into a heap, making free use of the army-issue boots they were wearing and enjoying themselves as much as any adolescent in an amusement arcade. Possessions for the possessionless African were fascinating and all my things were handled, sniffed, squeezed and bunged on the central heap. Bagado looked into the void, his head still, his mind ticking, his jaw muscles working over his spearmint thoughts.

  ‘Who did I kill?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said, without looking round.

  The boys went into the kitchen. Bagado’s eyes followed them. Pans cascaded on to the floor. He shook his head. Ice trays and precious amber bottles followed.

  ‘Happy Hour,’ I said. ‘Don’t take them downstairs, Bagado.’

  ‘Is it down there?’

  ‘Something’s down there. Something they could make something of if they wanted to ... but it’s nothing. I haven’t killed anyone. I don’t even know who I’m supposed to have killed.’

  ‘I know, I know,’ he said. ‘My sense of humour’s warping with my circumstances.’

  ‘Bondougou must have enjoyed sending you.’

  ‘Have you got any insect repellent?’

  ‘Not on me.’

  ‘You’re going to need some where you’re going.’

  ‘Where’s that?’

  ‘The locals call it La Boite de Nuit.’

  ‘The Night Club?’

  ‘Because it’s hot, sweaty and dark and unspeakable things can happen in there. They hope the name takes the spike out of the horror. I’m told it doesn’t.’

  The boys crunched out of the kitchen and into the bedroom. The mosquito net tore. The mattress shot out into the dining room.

  ‘How long?’

  ‘Depends how badly he wants to speak to you. Anything from six hours to six days. You’d better give me your watch if you want to see it again. Put some money down your underpants.’

  ‘This is getting a little Devil’s Island for my taste.’

  ‘We learnt a lot from the French. How to soften men up. But Africans are very hard. Maybe you won’t have to be down there for so long.’

  ‘A night out of my own bed and I’m all aquiver.’

  ‘Two hours off the whisky...’ said Bagado, leaving it open ended, giving me a sad, sleepy look.

  ‘That medicine man of yours is working.’

  ‘I’m trying not to let it show.’

  ‘Maybe you should get him working on Bondougou.’

  ‘We haven’t got that far yet,’ he said. ‘Now put your hands behind your back, I’m going to have to cuff you.’

  The pre-pubes came out of the bedroom with some of my clothes stuffed down their tunics.

  ‘Rien.’

  ‘Allons y,’ said Bagado, snapping t
he cuffs.

  We went down the stairs. The boys looked at Moses’s flat. Bagado told them to take me to the car. Carole’s Renault 5 was still across the street. They folded me into the back seat. Bagado came in after me. Carole’s headlights flared and swung across the back of our heads as she turned the Renault towards Sekou Touré.

  We drove to the Sûreté. Bagado tried to lighten my load with some chit-chat. The boys’ ears wagged in front but didn’t understand.

  ‘I didn’t tell you about the postmortem on those five stowaways we found on the Kluezbork II.’

  ‘No. No, you didn’t,’ I said, my mind trying to veer off La Boîte de Nuit.

  ‘They suffocated.’

  ‘I thought we knew that already.’

  ‘It’s been confirmed.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound very interesting. What about the fresh timber?’

  ‘The postmortem budget for stowaways doesn’t extend to minute examination of lung tissue to find toxic and volatile traces.’

  ‘So we’ll never know?’

  ‘We’ll never know,’ he said, and looked out of the window with the bland face of a man who’s added another blank to his ignorance.

  At the Sûreté I was taken down into the basement where a jailer uncuffed me and told me to strip to my underpants. He put his hands down there, up under my balls, and came out with the roll of money. He nodded at me and put it in his pocket. He picked up a truncheon and walked me down a long corridor of cells to a door at the end. He put the key in the lock, readied the truncheon, opened the door and pointed me in.

  It was like walking into a sick animal’s pen, or up its arse, more like. The heat was double what it was outside and the stink of shit as strong and thick as if they were burning it. I coughed back the gag that rose in my throat. I had time to see four men sitting with their backs to the walls, all of them naked with their eyes screwed up to the light. Two bodies lay on the floor. The door shut behind me.

  The floor was wet and slippery. All the men in the room were coughing. I found a wall. It was wet too, dripping with what felt like recently spat mucus—bubbly, slimy. I trod on another body which groaned. A hand, hard and tight as a manacle, snapped around my wrist and jerked me down fast. My feet slipped away from me and I landed on the point of my shoulder, my lips making contact with the sludge on the ground.

  ‘C’est un blanc,’ said a voice.

  Hands went down my pants, rummaged my balls, the crack of my arse. I had a wild moment of panic that gang rape was going to be added to my CV, but that wasn’t the African way and these men hadn’t been without sex for that long. They were looking for the money the guard had already taken. They let me go.

  ‘Il est trop petit,’ said a voice close to me.

  A few men managed a laugh.

  I crawled to the wall and was pushed around to an empty section. The men fell silent apart from the coughing—Cotonou’s high-water table oozing through the walls clogging the bronchials.

  The mosquitoes whined. The sweat poured off me. I wiped the shit off my mouth, calmed down. Everybody in here was keeping something back for themselves. Violence was for another place. I brought my knees up, dropped my head and let the stink creep into me, become a part of me like another membrane until it didn’t stink any more.

  Friday 26th July, Sûreté,Cotonou.

  At dawn the light seeped into the room from three barred slits fifteen feet up in the metre-thick outside wall. There were fourteen men in the room, which was four by three metres. Two open buckets were filled to the brim with piss and faeces. As the light came up the men who could stood. Four remained lying in the middle of the floor. They’d taken some heavy beatings. The one nearest me looked out from his one eye that wasn’t closed and bloody. The eye said nothing to me. It had no fight in it, no interest. It was just hanging on in a face that was going to get broken some more.

  Last man in, I was on shit-bucket duty. Then I was on cleaning up the piss and shit that overflowed from the buckets down the corridor. Later a hose was put through the grill of the door and we hosed ourselves down and the men on the floor, one of whom was moved, groaning in pain, off the drain hole.

  Breakfast came. A calabash of thin millet gruel. We ate from the communal pot. The injured men were force fed by the others. Then it was backs to the wall again and think your own hollow thoughts, keep your strength for the questions and the beatings.

  It was the middle of the afternoon when they sent for me. I was weak from the insufferable heat which had built through the day. The jailer cuffed me and took me into the toilet where he hosed me down. He prodded me up the stairs to another corridor where a solitary woman was working her way down, scrubbing the floor to a dull sheen. The jailer told me to get down on my haunches. He knocked on the door and rested his truncheon on the back of my head, telling me to keep it down and not to get up from this position. A voice called us in. I waddled in after him. My eyes at desk level saw a uniform. The jailer tapped my head down again and left the room.

  Under the desk were some well-shined black Oxfords and a pair of legs in some dark-blue trousers crossed at the ankles. There was nothing in the room except the desk and the man’s chair and the smell of lino. I was not comfortable. The crouch was breaking my knees.

  ‘You know why you’re here,’ said the deep and unmistakable voice of Le Commandant Bondougou speaking in French.

  ‘Is there any water?’ I asked, and bang, the edge of the desk cracked me across the forehead. I went over on my back and beetled there until Bondougou called the jailer back in to right me. He told him to bring some other guy along and to wait outside. Now that I’d seen the huge, fat, sinister head—the eyes angled down to the nose that spread across his face as thick and as soft as a boxing glove—I got into a more sensible frame of mind.

  ‘You know why you’re here,’ he said again.

  ‘You think I killed someone.’

  ‘Tell me what you were doing the night before last from about eight in the evening.’

  ‘I went down to the Jonquet, had something to eat in the Restaurant Guinéen.’

  ‘Do you normally spend your evenings in the Jonquet?’

  ‘No. My wife’s pregnant at the moment. She’s not interested in sex. I was looking for girls. Clean girls.’

  ‘Did you find any?’

  ‘There aren’t any in the Jonquet.’

  ‘Does that mean you went home?’

  He knew things. I knew he knew things. I shut up. There was a knock on the door.

  ‘Attends,’ he roared.

  I breathed in the refreshing lino, inspected the shiny shoes.

  ‘Did you meet a man called Daniel Ayangba?’

  ‘Daniel? Yes. A German guy sent him to me.’

  ‘Did you meet him that night?’

  How did Bondougou know all this?

  ‘Yes. He took me to a brothel outside Cotonou near the lagoon. I looked at his girls. I didn’t like any of them. They were too young. When I came out his driver pointed a gun at me and they stole two hundred thousand CFA.’

  ‘And after that?’

  ‘They drove off.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I borrowed a moped and went back to Cotonou.’

  ‘Where in Cotonou?’

  The lino had been laid in tiles, square tiles. They were green with cream flecks. They offered no assistance.

  ‘Where did you go?’ he asked again.

  ‘Home.’

  ‘You didn’t go to the Hotel Paradis.’

  ‘Where’s that?’

  He wrote something on a piece of paper. The pen creaked across the desk, gave a dull thud for the full stop.

  ‘It’s a hotel on the coast just off the Porto Novo road. You don’t know it?’

  ‘I might do if you took me there in daylight.’

  ‘And at night?’

  Back to the lino tiles. Nothing for me to say.

  ‘Face the door and read this out,’ he said, giving me the paper. ‘S
hout it out.’

  Ça peut rester dehors,’ I shouted.

  ‘Entrez,’ said Bondougou.

  Behind the door was the barman from the Hotel Paradis.

  ‘C’est lui, c’est lui,’ he said, as if he’d been paid.

  The door shut. I turned back to Bondougou.

  ‘You were seen leaving the hotel. The barman heard your voice. You are white, tall, people don’t make mistakes about you.’

  ‘OK. I followed Daniel to the hotel. I went up to his room, beat him up and took my two hundred thousand CFA. Then I left and went home.’

  Bondougou nodded.

  ‘Why did you lie to me?’

  ‘I forgot the name of the hotel.’

  Bondougou roared something incoherent. The door opened. The jailer rushed in and clubbed me across the shoulders. I went down. He started laying into me. I had a flash of the broken men lying in La Boîte de Nuit. The blows rained down.

  ‘Arrêtes, arrêtes!’ I shouted.

  Bondougou called the guy off. The jailer righted me on my haunches and left the room.

  ‘You said you beat him up?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I knocked him into the wardrobe, split his eyebrow, put his head through the wardrobe door, slapped him about a little.’

  ‘Was he still conscious when you left?’

  I shut up again. No sense in going on about hitting him over the head with a gun which was still in my possession.

  ‘He wasn’t conscious, was he?’ said Bondougou. ‘You left him naked in the bath, his face beaten to mince meat ... barely recognizable ... then you shot him in the head.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’ve been positively identified by the barman. You’ve admitted you were there. You said you beat him up. Now I want you to admit you shot him and I want you to tell me what you have done with the gun.’

  There was no way out. There was nothing I could say to persuade even a free and fair court that I hadn’t killed Daniel Ayangba. I’d give it one more try and then I’d have to call on a friend.

  ‘Commandant Bondougou,’ I said, ‘there’s nothing I can say to you to make you believe that I didn’t kill this man. But I think you know that I’m not a killer. I think you know that Daniel Ayangba was a pimp and in that line of business you deal with difficult people. I was there. I beat him up. I took the money he owed me...’