A Darkening Stain

  The boats knocked against the stilts. Bondougou was pressed against the wall now, he seemed to be more aware than any of us that there was some terrible avenging presence in the room. I rolled and stood, moving away from him, Marnier retreated two steps, Carole shrank further into her corner, none of us knowing why or what was making us back off.

  Bondougou’s legs shook in his trousers. His eyes rolled in fear and his hands fluttered about him as if he was trying to protect himself from a bat loose in the room. He dropped to his knees and shouted something out, an appeal, in his own language, to some greater ancestral power. He fell forward on all fours and stared into the floor and was transfixed by it. He grimaced, his head reared back, jiggling on its neck. And only then did I see the barrel of the Browning appear through the planking.

  The gun roared three times.

  Bondougou’s pumpkin head split and sprayed.

  The force of the shots knocked him back against the cane wall which cracked and splintered. He fell sideways, landing inches from Carole who was crammed into the corner and looking out of the side of her face.

  The water lapped underneath us. Blood, from Bondougou’s appalling head wounds, leaked through the planking. A boat knocked into the stilts of the house.

  Bagado, stripped to the waist, shining wet, stepped into the room. He had two weapons, the Browning .380 hung at his side in his left hand, the other, Daniel’s revolver, was held at waist height. His face was set as hard as the gunmetal he was carrying.

  Madame Sokode was still making grotesque noises. Her life, hard, gritty and stubborn, hung on. Bagado stood beside her and looked at Bondougou’s lifeless form. His left hand jumped at the sixth roar of the night and Madame Sokode’s stomach arched off the floor and thumped back into it.

  Bagado took a step towards Marnier and levelled the Browning. Marnier looked straight down the outstretched arm and said:

  ‘If you’re looking for your daughter, I didn’t bring her with me.’

  Chapter 31

  Tuesday 30th July, on the lagoon near the Nigerian border.

  ‘Count the girls, Bruce,’ said Bagado.

  ‘You’ll need these,’ said Marnier, throwing me the keys.

  I picked up the torch and went down into Marnier’s boat. I unlocked the cabin. The girls were all asleep, drugged, with their hands and feet cuffed, mouths taped and arranged like the cargo diagram for a slave ship. There were six and José-Marie wasn’t one of them.

  I crossed over on to Madame Sokode’s boat and tore open the cabin door. Sophia was squealing a rat-like noise in her throat, a pure terror noise, convinced that she was next. I stroked her back down, tore the gaffer tape off her face, wrists and ankles. I found my holdall, gave her some clothes and told her to get on to Marnier’s boat. She hadn’t got a hold of herself yet and I had to carry her across with my bag. I went back into the house.

  Two pairs of eyes were fixed on Bagado, whose face was still as hard and as stubborn as pig iron. The gun was still levelled at Marnier. Carole had slid to the floor and was looking at Bondougou’s ruined head with fascination. There’d been no chat while I’d been gone.

  ‘José-Marie’s not there,’ I said.

  Bagado, who hadn’t seemed to be breathing, suddenly sucked in a deep involuntary breath and sighed it out. Marnier looked away from the gun barrel and shrugged.

  ‘Security,’ he said, ‘or is it insurance?’

  Bagado shivered and adjusted the gun in his hand.

  ‘There’s a plastic bag in the pirogue underneath the house. Throw it in the boat for me. See if there’s a spare tank of gasoline in the other launch and spray it over this place. We’d better set fire to it and get moving before someone comes out here. What’s in the briefcase?’

  I kicked it open. It was packed with old copies of the Lagos Daily Times.

  I threw the plastic bag from the pirogue into Marnier’s boat and found the spare jerry can of petrol in the cabin of the other launch. Bagado moved Marnier and Carole into the boat. I sprayed the petrol over the launch and then through the four rooms and over the bodies in the house. I picked up the two hurricane lamps and hurled one into the far room, heard the thump of the gas as it caught, and ran. I threw the second lamp into Madame Sokode’s launch and jumped into Marnier’s boat, which was already moving away.

  Marnier opened the throttle full and the two outboards dug in, the nose came up and we spanked across the black and flame-lit waters of the lagoon, heading for Benin. In a matter of moments the canes, thatch and raffia of the house were cracking thirty-foot licks of flame and belching burnt detritus high into the night sky. After a few minutes, only a roaring skeleton remained until the main tank of Madame Sokode’s launch went up and the explosion blew the supports out from under one end of the house. The platform dipped violently, the house broke in half and part of it slid into the orange flickering water.

  Carole and Sophia sat at the back, not talking, Sophia still shaking. Bagado, in his mac now, was up front with the gun nosed into Marnier’s left kidney. I was sweating hugely as if I’d done twelve rounds in a hot town hall. My guts trembled and I felt the first rush of fever.

  ‘Where are we going?’ I asked.

  ‘Another house on the lagoon, on the Benin side,’ said Marnier. ‘You can tell your friend he doesn’t have to point the gun any more. This is a rough ride and I don’t want it going off by accident.’

  Bagado rested the gun on his knees but kept his eyes on Marnier. I leaned in between them, thought we could get one little thing out of the way before we started on the bigger stuff.

  ‘Tell Bagado what happened that night in Grand-Popo,’ I said to Marnier.

  ‘What night?’

  ‘Don’t be difficult, Jean-Luc,’ I said. ‘Your Italian night, remember?’

  ‘The night of your infidelities, you mean?’

  ‘I can see this is going to take some time.’

  ‘But I think we’re getting somewhere,’ said Marnier. ‘I don’t think your friend is going to shoot me like he shot those other two.’

  ‘They had to be killed,’ said Bagado. ‘They were too powerful to let live. You’re not.’

  ‘I can tell you I’m not going to an African jail for the rest of my life.’

  ‘That depends if you murdered the girl we found in the lagoon.’

  ‘That was an accident,’ he said. ‘Very regrettable.’

  ‘The girl was strangled,’ I said, hardening up on him. ‘That doesn’t sound very accidental.’

  ‘Don’t you start getting angry,’ he said, ‘you need me too.’

  We rounded a point on the north shore of the lagoon and the flaming house behind us disappeared. Marnier shut down the searchlight and throttled back. The engine ticked over and we drifted in the dark. Marnier folded his arms.

  ‘Let’s negotiate,’ he said.

  ‘You know what I want,’ said Bagado.

  ‘And you’re not going to get it, not all of it,’ said Marnier. ‘I’ll take you to your daughter. She’s in a house a few miles away but then I’m going to leave you there ... with the other girls. I want some time to get back to Cotonou and across the border to Togo. And that’s all I want. Free passage. But if you want revenge, well ... you won’t see your daughter again.’

  ‘I don’t think I can accept that,’ said Bagado.

  ‘Nor can I,’ I said.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ he said, turning to me. ‘There’s the question of your debt to Mr Franconelli. What does he want?’

  ‘You know what he wants.’

  ‘I know he wants you to kill me and I know you won’t do it; your friend here might but you won’t. But what does Franconelli want ... my scalp this time? He’s already had my dick...’

  ‘He wants that tattoo off your back. The one of the joker.’

  Marnier roared.

  ‘And you?’ he said to Bagado. ‘What’s your problem?’

  ‘Tell the girl to come up here.’

  Carole joined us. Bagado cli
cked the torch on to their faces.

  ‘Which of you killed the girl we found in the lagoon?’

  Carole looked up into her head.

  ‘She did,’ said Marnier, and she shot a look at him that should have left him pinned and wriggling on the deck.

  ‘You can go,’ said Bagado, ‘but she stays with us.’

  The French that came out of Carole was not the sort you’d pick up at the Alliance Française, it was the sort you found under whores’ shoes on the Pigalle. Marnier smacked her brutally across the face with the back of his hand and she shut up. He pounded her with some thick dialect that could have come from Mount Igman and then lapsed back into French again, telling her she shouldn’t have killed the fucking girl. She shrieked at him, a sound so terrible and piercing that he had to hit her again harder with a half-closed fist that dropped her to the floor. She curled up, foetal, and Marnier looked down at her with nothing in his face.

  He opened the throttle and we moved off. He turned the searchlight on as the nose of the boat came out of the water.

  Twenty minutes later we coasted up to a broken-down jetty which had a house at the end of it which the locals had probably used for drying or smoking fish. Marnier nudged Carole with his feet, pulled her up.

  ‘She’ll take you down there and unlock the door,’ he said.

  Bagado told Marnier to point the light down the jetty and asked him if it would work on batteries alone, then didn’t wait for an answer and tore the keys out. The light stayed on. He gave me Daniel’s revolver and got out of the boat with Carole in front of him while I tied up to the jetty. Carole set off down the warped wooden planking. Bagado let her get ahead. She reached the door of the house which was padlocked. She asked if she could get the keys. Bagado told her to move slowly.

  He adjusted the gun in his hand. Carole’s hand went up under the eaves of the house at the right-hand corner of the door frame. Bagado moved forward a pace, shrugged his shoulders in his mac. Carole’s hand came back out from under the eaves, but quick, and she span on her heel, her hand coming up in front of her, her body in a crouch, something black and solid in her fingers. Bagado was the perfect silhouette, back lit by the searchlight from the boat. His gun arm was still down by his side when he saw her turning and realized his mistake. He was too square on but he got his gun up and the two guns cracked together in the cone of light.

  The force of the bullet from the Browning slammed Carole backwards against the door frame and a noise came out of her throat like the sound of fresh offal hitting a butcher’s tiled floor. The door jamb didn’t give and seemed to kick her forward so she fell on her face. Bagado twisted and fell. The gun flew out of his hand and into the water. He was still close to the boat and I saw his eyes wide with surprise and the kind of pain El Greco could find in his saints. His mouth was open but no sound came out. He hit the jetty hard, his face bouncing on the wood, one hand reaching out to grab a rung of the nothing night. I wheeled round on Marnier and cracked him on the side of the head with the revolver and he dropped to the deck. Then I was out of the boat and on the jetty and over Bagado who was not moving, one hand down by his side, the other still stretched out. I was panting, sobbing, sweat-drenched as I rolled him. His eyes were closed but his tongue was moving over his lips as if he was desperate to wet them. I reached for the lapels of his mac, felt the stab of horror and a strange compression of thought. Everything I loved about this man came to me then and a black chasm opened up should I lose him, should he be lost to these worthless bloody people. I wrenched open the mac and ran my hands over his chest, his abdomen, his flanks. Clean.

  ‘My shoulder,’ he said.

  I could have kissed him.

  I eased the mac off his shoulder. There was a black hole through the muscle and out the other side.

  ‘Your mac’s ruined,’ I said. ‘The bullet’s gone clean through.’

  ‘Stupid,’ he said, screwing his face, ‘bloody stupid. I knew it was wrong. I was thinking about José-Marie. Took my eye off her.’

  I got him up on his feet. His legs had gone and I humped him to the boat and set Sophia to work with the iodine and first-aid kit. Marnier was coming to on the floor. I picked up a baling bucket and sluiced him with lagoon water. Blood trickled over his missing ear. His eyes banged open and he sunk his teeth back into life and held on with jackal jaws. I knelt over him.

  ‘Are you with me?’

  ‘I’m with you.’

  ‘If you’d killed him, Jean-Luc...’

  ‘Yeah?’ he jeered.

  ‘That would have been enough.’

  ‘Even you could see he wasn’t going to let me go. It was in his face. He’s not the forgiving type. I had to get that gun out of his hand.’

  ‘Where’s the girl?’

  ‘Look ... you can have the tattoo. Cut the damn thing off my back. It’s no bigger than a cigarette pack. I can handle it. But I can’t go to prison. Not here.’

  ‘We’ll talk about that ... where’s the girl?’

  ‘Back at my house, the one on the lagoon.’

  I cast off, took the keys out of Bagado’s mac, stuck them in the ignition and hauled Marnier to his feet.

  ‘Now drive.’

  Marnier looked back at the body lying face down in front of the house. The light swung slowly away from it and pointed out over the lagoon.

  ‘Is she dead?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m surprised you care.’

  He answered by opening the throttle and we pulled away.

  Within an hour the glow of Cotonou appeared and we came off Lac Nokoué and into the Lagune. Marnier pointed the nose of the boat towards the house, I lifted the outboards and we coasted in up to the gate to the yard at the back of Marnier’s house.

  I left Sophia and Bagado in the boat, took the hold-all and pointed Marnier up to the house with the revolver. I was quaking inside again and the heat coming off me was not the sort you get from a chill. I was sweating crazily and my vision spasmed.

  We walked up to the balcony and into the house. Marnier took me through to the bedroom where José-Marie was cuffed to the bed, her mouth taped, sleeping. I stripped the tape off, uncuffed her and she balled up in the middle of the bed.

  ‘What are they drugged with?’

  ‘I don’t know. Carole bought the stuff. Some kind of barbiturate. They’ll come out of it. Ten to twelve hours.’

  I backed him out of the room.

  ‘You don’t look too good,’ he said.

  ‘You knew you’d be all right with me, didn’t you?’

  ‘I knew you wouldn’t shoot me. I thought you were more likely to let me run. We’ve been through things ... it joins you.’

  ‘Take your shirt off, lie face down on the table.’

  I went into the bathroom and found towels and flannels. Marnier stripped and got on the table. The harlequin tattoo was clear of the weals left by Gio’s machete job. It was a rough piece of work, like Franconelli said—prison artisan, nail and ink. The harlequin’s face, rather than a trickster’s smile, sported a sinister leer, the eyes slit, the mouth a blue-green upward gash in a round face, the tattooist not up to the delicate task of facial features. The diamond-coloured suit was what made it a harlequin and the colours, green, blue, red and flesh, gave it the right effect. Like Marnier had said, it was the size of a pack of cigarettes and was positioned just below the left scapula.

  ‘Where’s the whisky?’

  ‘There’s a half case in the cabinet.’

  I took a full bottle from the case and a half-empty one off the sideboard. I took a few pulls and gave Marnier the rest. I soaked a flannel with whisky and rubbed down the harlequin then rolled it into a cigar and handed it to him.

  ‘You might want to bite on that,’ I said.

  I took the scalpels out and the bottle of formaldehyde and laid them on the table.

  ‘You came prepared,’ said Marnier.

  ‘You wouldn’t want me to do this with a fish filleter.’

  I washed m
y hands in the kitchen, wrapped a towel around my head to keep the sweat out of my eyes and put on Marnier’s ridiculous lingeried girly apron. I caught sight of myself in a mirror in the living room and it nearly stopped me from going through with this madness. How could it have come to this?

  I chose a pointed blade and connected it to the scalpel handle. I recleaned the harlequin with more whisky and a flannel which I left in the small of Marnier’s back. I poured a few fingers into a glass and took a gulp. I looked down at Marnier.

  ‘This woman you and Franconelli were arguing about...’

  ‘How do you know it was about a woman?’

  ‘Carole told me.’

  ‘She liked you, you know.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Not in the end, but before...’

  ‘She seemed to have one thing on her mind and I wasn’t interested in it.’

  ‘She’s French. That’s what she thinks men want. She made a mistake with you. You’re English. Who knows what you want? Takeaway curry, probably.’

  ‘Tell me about this woman,’ I said, axeing through it.

  ‘You know her.’

  ‘I do?’

  ‘Gale Strudwick. Remember your old friend Gale?’

  ‘That’s how you knew I worked in shipping.’

  ‘C’est ça.’

  ‘And what happened?’

  ‘She was another one like Carole.’

  ‘She liked bad guys?’

  ‘They gave her a kick. Take a look at her husbands. They went from bad to worse.’

  ‘The one before Graydon was a banker.’

  ‘A banker who’s doing time.’

  ‘Graydon used to be a lawyer,’ I said. ‘Did she like turning these guys?’

  ‘She thought it improved their performance.’

  ‘Then she met the real thing. You and Franconelli.’

  ‘We were both fucking her after her husband died.’

  ‘I didn’t think Franconelli was her type and vice versa.’

  ‘As a matter of fact, she and Franconelli had been fucking for over a year,’ he said, and I had a flash of Gale dancing in front of Franconelli at a party and trying to get him to join her—‘Come on, Roberto,’ she’d said, and there was some intimacy in that, in the way she’d said it.