A Darkening Stain

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Did they?

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘I’d offer you a beer...’ I said.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘Gio?’

  Gio didn’t move an eyelid.

  ‘He’ll have a Coke. He don’t drink.’

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘I’m touched you asked.’

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

  ‘Chin-chin,’ I said.

  Carlo kept on pinging.

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

  ‘Mr Franconelli’s got a job for you.’

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

  ‘He don’t.’

  ‘Does that mean he won’t be paying?’

  ‘He’ll pay. You’re small change.’

  ‘What’s the job?’

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

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

  ‘The guy’s name is Jean-Luc Marnier.’

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

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

  ‘Is he a big guy?’ I asked.

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

  ‘What’s he do?’

  ‘Import/export.’

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

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

  ‘Why can’t you find him yourself?’

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

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

  ‘Does that mean he’s been a bad boy?’

  ‘Take a look at the guy,’ said Carlo.

  ‘What do I do when I find him?’

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

  ‘You just tell us where he is.’

  ‘Then what?’

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

  ‘You going to kill him? Is that it?’

  Carlo and Gio stilled to a religious quiet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘It’s a trick we learn,’ I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘Thanks for the beer.’

  ‘Don’t mention it, Carlo,’ I said.

  They left the office.

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

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

  Chapter 3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘I was feeling bullish,’ I said.

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

  ‘You first. Yours looks better.’

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

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

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

  ‘True,’ I said, damping my bitterness.

  ‘Now he thinks I’m a star.’

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

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

  ‘But we know they’re wrong.’

  ‘Are you trying to get round me?’

  ‘Why would I want to do that?’

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

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

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

  ‘You don’t want to know.’

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

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

  ‘Try saying no.’

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

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

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

  ‘I don’t know how you get involved.’

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

  ‘So you knew them?’

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

  ‘Oh God, not her.’

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘Back to Europe?’

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

  ‘Oh, you mean the ground,’ she said.

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

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

  ‘We can do a bit more than just lie.’

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

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

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

  ‘Why not?’

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

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

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

  ‘She knows that already.’

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

  ‘Why do you live here, Bruce Medway?’

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

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

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

  ‘Just tell me why.’

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

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