At the traffic lights by the south-west corner of the market the back doors suddenly opened and Jean-Luc Marnier appeared in my rearview. An African threw a heavy holdall in the boot, got in next to him and laid a thick arm across the back of the seat. He surveyed people and traffic behind. We drove in silence out to the Place d’Etoile and then on to the stadium and out of town towards Ouidah and Grand-Popo.
At Ouidah there was a police post manned by two armed soldiers and a boy holding a rope connected, on the other side of the road, to a metal rack of spikes on rollers which looked as if they’d seen active service. Marnier handed me his passport, a Belgian one in the name of Bertrand Corbusier, and the African’s ID. The soldier leant in to take a look at us and gave a squeak of surprise when he saw Marnier. The soldier looked back at the passport.
‘C’est vous?’
‘Avant,’ said Marnier, economically.
He waved us on without looking in the boot.
We dropped down on to a causeway across a lagoon. A fishing village, built on an island, wavered in the harsh light. A solitary man stood thigh deep in the flat gunmetal water, still as a heron. He flung a silver filigree net which scarred and melted into the panel-beaten surface.
The walls of the houses close to the road were hand-painted with vivid hoardings but not for Coca-Cola, Camels or Bank of Africa. These advertised the shivering haystack cones of the fetish priests who’d whirl through your village taking the evil spirits with them—VOUDOUN AGBO, VOUDOUN AGNUNON. We were in a different world now.
The rains had swollen the lagoon and we drove through water up to the sills. A truck had slipped off the road ahead and suddenly Marnier’s face was between the seats looking. Kids held out their hands and screamed, ‘Cadeau, cadeau,’ until they saw Marnier. He eased back into his seat. The jungle, silent as menace, rolled over the water’s edge, thriving, burgeoning and stretching as far as the heat-dazed afternoon would allow you to see.
Marnier sat soldier-straight, the two fingers of his wrecked hand tapping on the seat cover, some music simmering in his head or some wild genius that had got into him before his face, riven by machete steel, had closed back over. The African dozed with his twenty-five-kilo head on his shoulder, the tendons in his neck as thick as primeval lianas.
It was late afternoon when Marnier stopped me from taking the turning to Grand-Popo and told me to continue to the border, where we pulled up ten metres short of the barrier. The African got out and we watched him nod through immigration, customs and the man operating the exit barrier. He crossed the dust-blown and puddled fifty metres of no man’s land into Togo, and Marnier and I U-turned and drove back to Grand-Popo.
We dropped off the tarmac on to a long straight beaten track that ran through the village as far as the Auberge. As the afternoon turned, Marnier had me pull up alongside a graveyard. We walked through the stones, some of them simple grey slabs on the ground, others travesties of sarcophagi clad in bathroom tiles of pink and orange. Small black pigs were about their business amongst the graves. We broke through a line of palm trees to a beach. The sky over the sea was now blood-red.
‘Very rare,’ said Marnier, referring to the sunset.
I said nothing. I was doing some fear management and thinking about what good shape Jean-Luc was in suddenly, or was it only stairs that puffed him out? The heavy smoker of last night had clean air pipes and he wasn’t heavy on his feet. For a man in his fifties, who’d taken the beating he had and spent a hot afternoon in a car, he was nimble.
We staggered back through the graveyard in the failing light, and drove to the Auberge and parked up in the darkness. The terrace of the restaurant was packed with a few expats and twenty Australian travellers from an overland truck parked in the campsite, but Marnier went through such a dramatic physical change in mounting the steps that a young French couple vacated their table for us. The place hovered around silence when the company saw Jean-Luc’s face, but the Australians sawed through it.
‘You thought you were ugly, Micky,’ said a ponytailed bum. ‘Take a look at that fucker.’
‘Shit, Darleen,’ said Micky to a girl as broad-beamed as a tipper, ‘you haven’t been sitting on people’s faces again, have you?’
‘Why on earth,’ said Darleen slowly, ‘would I want to do a thing like that?’
They roared. The restaurant crowd pulled itself back together again. Marnier nodded and spoke to me in French.
‘Now you see what I have to put up with. Sometimes for a moment I can forget I’ve had two faces—watching the sunset, seeing the fisherman throwing his net in the lagoon, the jungle—ah yes! What were those lines from the greatest poet of this century?’
‘I don’t know any French poets.’
‘This one’s not French ... T. S. Eliot. He’s one of yours.’
‘Then you’ll be thinking of “The jungle crouched...”’
‘“...humped in silence”,’ he finished for me. ‘Bruce, you didn’t disappoint me. You have the look of a man who understands poetry.’
‘To most people I have the look of a drunken bum.’
‘These are people who are only looking at the surface.’
‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘Now you’re going to tell me I’m a beautiful human being on the inside.’
‘Don’t worry,’ he said, grinning. ‘I won’t tell you that.’
‘Because you don’t think it’s true?’
‘We all have redeeming qualities.’
‘Liking poetry is a very small one.’
‘I don’t think so. It shows an inclination to examine more than meets the eye. It implies intelligence and a heightened sensitivity to the human condition. These are not small things.’
‘But they don’t make a man good,’ I said. ‘I’m sure you could find some celebrated psychopaths with all these redeeming qualities.’
‘Such is the nature of a redeeming quality.’
We looked at each other after that unexpected exchange to the point of uneasy silence. Then a waitress came to our table, a white girl in a loose purple shirt, braless, maybe more less. We ordered a couple of beers and the menu. Marnier silenced the Australians to a nervous giggle by struggling past their table on his way to the toilet. Darleen farted, inadvertently, I assumed.
The beers arrived, cold in dimpled pint mugs. The waitress hovered.
‘Tu vas manger?’ she asked in an English accent.
‘We’d like to,’ I replied in English.
‘I thought you were Dutch, the height of you.’
‘Not my brilliant French?’
She smiled and we knew we liked each other.
I took a gulp of the beer and ordered another instantly, and one for the waitress. She left and I took my first pression down to an inch from the bottom. I looked out across the beach, into the dark beyond the rim of light from the bar. The unseen ocean repeated itself against the shore. Jean-Luc Marnier was reading me easier than a kid’s nursery rhyme with pictures. Or was I still paranoid from last night’s dope. He was seeing the same things I was seeing. The fisherman’s net. The crouching jungle. Mind you, there wasn’t that much to look at. I calmed myself with the rest of the beer and blinked away the tears and the strain of having Carlo and Gio on my tail out there somewhere with Christ knows what in store. My second beer arrived.
‘You got a name?’ the girl asked, startling me.
‘Bruce. You?’
‘Adèle,’ she said, ‘but an English one. I’d rather have that beer after I’ve finished if that’s OK.’
‘Sure.’
‘You could join me if you like.’
‘I...’
Marnier lowered himself into my vision. Adèle scooted off.
‘Don’t drink too much, Bruce. I need you to be sharp tonight.’
‘What do I have to be sharp for? I don’t want any more of your big surprises, especially ones requiring sharpness. Not tonight.’
‘Big surprises? I don’t remember any big surprises.’
&nb
sp; ‘You calling me at Michel’s last night.’
‘A small coincidence.’
‘What about the dramatic improvement in your health since last night?’
‘I have good days and bad days.’
‘And your breathing?’
‘The country air. Cotonou is very polluted now with all those mopeds ... and I gave up smoking.’
‘Twenty-four hours ago.’
‘So, I act a little.’
‘I noticed. That’s how we got the table.’
‘A little bit of fun. I don’t get so much these days,’ he said. ‘She’s attractive, no? The waitress?’
I still had Marnier’s money folded in its envelope in my pocket, untouched. I had a screaming need to slide it back across the table at him and go and drink beer with Adèle and sleep on a couch somewhere, but even I, with my brain of hot fudge, knew that I had to see this little bit of fun through and do a fair amount of acting myself.
‘I think I’ll have the contrefilet,’ said Marnier to Adèle. ‘Saignant. Bruce?’
‘The barre, please.’
‘No, no, no,’ said Marnier, so that I thought he was going French on me, controlling my diet, ‘not fish tonight. You need something stronger. Something to fill your stomach.’
‘I don’t plan on any heavy work.’
‘Have the contrefilet.’
‘Why can’t he have the barre? asked Adèle.
‘Because he needs the contrefilet,’ said Marnier, firmly.
Adèle tilted her head at me. I had the contrefilet. Bloody too. Marnier found a drinkable Côte du Rhon and Adèle was dispatched.
‘So you’re an actor as well,’ I said.
‘An expert in the comédie humaine.’
‘What sort of range have you got?’
‘Just character parts now. I can’t lead with such a face.’
‘When are you the real you?’
‘When I’m in bed with my wife. A good woman won’t tolerate liars in her bed.’
‘Does acting have to be lying?’
‘I think you understand me, Bruce. I act to observe people without being observed myself. As you know most people are concerned with surfaces so it is easy to divert their attention.’
‘You think people are foolish...’
‘Unworthy.’
‘Is that why you destroyed Michel’s life...?’
‘Me? Destroyed Michel’s life? Is he still telling people that? We make our own choices, Bruce, and when we find ourselves lacking in the vital traits that will see us through those choices, then we seek to blame others for our failings.’
‘He says ... he implied that you took away his youth, his beauty.’
‘Michel is wearing on the outside what he had on the inside. That is all.’
‘But what happened? He sounded like he had a pretty good life going for himself until you came along.’
‘He came to me, remember,’ he said. ‘And I didn’t force him into his relationship with Gifty.’
‘Who’s Gifty?’
‘He saw with his own eyes what she did to the Indian fellow from Accra.’
‘I don’t know who the Indian fellow is either.’
‘Sudip. The currency kid, they called him. Not any more. He rims a cloth stall in Kumasi now. He started using his customers’ money to run Gifty, who was expensive and not what any man would call ... constant.’
‘So Michel fell for Gifty and ran out of money. Enter Jean-Luc Marnier running Lomé’s expat bank who found some stolen credit cards and became a friend. Who had the credit cards?’
‘Ah, Bruce, you don’t know how much pleasure it gives me to find somebody who understands Africa,’ he said. ‘Of course, you are right, Gifty had the credit cards.’
‘Gifty was a friend?’
‘I pursued Gifty myself.’
‘But you are made of a different stuff to other mortals.’
‘Not me, Bruce. In that department I’m as weak as any man. But ... I do listen. And Gifty, for all her sins, was very fair. Before you dipped into her little bag of delights she would warn you. She would say, and she told me she said the same to every man and I believe her, she would say, “If you put your cock into me I will destroy you. I don’t mean for this to happen but it will. So if you want to keep your life ... keep your life the same ... put your cock away”.’
‘And you did?’
‘I was at an advantage. I had seen Gifty with other men and I had noticed something about those men that I couldn’t pin down. I mean, they looked very much themselves, as you’d expect men who were blissfully happy to be, but ... something was missing. Their real selves had gone to another place. Gifty used that word “destroy” in her little speech. And I realized that was what had happened to them. They had become incapable with love. They’d have had a better chance with heroin in their veins. They’d been destroyed.’
He laughed to himself, a goose of a memory walking over him.
‘Ah, Gifty, she wasn’t so fair. She would issue the warning lying naked in your bed, looking down at you kneeling between her legs with a hard-on so painful you could faint, her hands framing her open sex, pink and glistening like an open papaya. My God, it nearly destroyed me not to have had her.’
‘Was this voodoo or what?’
‘Gifty was deeply Christian,’ said Marnier, horrified. ‘This was no voodoo.’
‘And she never fell in love with any of these guys herself.’
‘At first, of course, but how can you love someone who has gone, who is not there, who is lost? There was nothing for her to love in these men.’
‘Maybe she loved you, Jean-Luc. The only one who didn’t.’
I’d hit the mark with that. Jean-Luc was going to flatter me with some more guff about ‘understanding Africa’ or ‘having the eye’, but he thought better of it and the steaks arrived. He jammed the knife into the corner of his two-fingered right hand and set to it.
‘What happened to Gifty?’
‘She died,’ he said, mincing the steak up in his jaws, his open-plan eating style revolting and transfixing in one. ‘She was murdered, in fact, by a Greek who ran a haulage business in Zaire. He stabbed her fifty-two times in the chest. A very jealous type. They still don’t use the hotel room where it happened.’
‘And the Greek? Is he rotting in a Lomé jail?’
‘No, no, no. He got out. Paid his money. But if it’s justice you’re interested in you might like to know that he had a fall on one of those transport boats on the Zaire river. He was crushed from the waist downwards by two barges lashed together. It took him three weeks to die.’
A mountain of frites arrived and Marnier had Adèle spoon a load on to his blood-flooded plate. I liked this girl more. She wasn’t disturbed by Marnier, his face was his business, she dealt with him like anyone else. Jean-Luc concentrated on his food, only pausing to throw a glass of red into the mix. I had a feeling I knew who’d given the Greek a shove in the back on the Zaire river.
Marnier insisted on finishing the meal with a crème brûlée apiece and strong black coffee, which Jean-Luc sent back twice until it was tarry enough for his taste. His fingers twitched, wanting a smoke, but he didn’t light up. A small boy appeared on his shoulder and murmured something in his ear. He stroked the boy’s head and gave him a couple of coins. We paid up. Adèle said maybe next time. Marnier replied for the both of us.
We drove away from the restaurant area past the hotel and took a right turn up a dirt track moving away from the sea. The grasses were high after the rains, and the mosquitoes large and aggressive. After a few hundred metres we turned right again into a narrow single-laned track which took us to a small clearing where there was a mud-walled house with a tin roof of ondulé.
I parked round the back. Jean-Luc’s African was back from Togo. He was waiting for us on the covered concrete stoop at the rear of the house, which was lit by a couple of hurricane lamps. We climbed up on to the stoop. There was a shovel by the back door and a poly
propylene sack of what looked like tools.
We went into the house, which had bare concrete floors and consisted of four rooms. The two bedrooms at the back each had a bed and one a broom leaning against a wall. One of the rooms at the front was empty and the other had a table, four rafia-seated wooden chairs and a split-cane lounger. Marnier lowered himself on to the lounger and seemed to go into a doze. I sat at the table.
Our shadows leapt up the walls in the uncertain light from the hurricane lamp we’d brought in with us. Heavy beads of sweat formed on my eyebrows and dripped on to the table top. I listened. There was nothing to hear but the sea breeze moving through the tall grasses and Marnier’s steady breathing.
The African returned and cleared his throat. Marnier’s eyes snapped open. He brushed the hair away from his missing ear. He sat forward on the lounger. A quiet, well-tuned engine came through the swishing grasses and the room was suddenly filled with white slatted light.
Chapter 10
A vertical line swept across the wall, erasing our shadows, taking the slats with it, as the car swung right and went round the back of the house. Marnier, alert now, looked at me and jerked his head to the door. We left the room. He gripped my arm as we stumbled down the unlit corridor to the stoop. I had nothing to grip.
A black Peugeot 505 saloon drew alongside my car. The driver turned the engine off. The headlights died, sucking the tall grasses into blackness. The boot clicked. Marnier’s African opened it and waited for the driver. They lifted something out of the boot, something shiny, black, metallic, a trunk which was extremely heavy by the way their faint silhouettes were staggering. They put it down at the back of the Peugeot and tried the boot, which was locked. Marnier took the keys from me, dropped down off the stoop and opened the boot for the two men. They grunted the trunk into my Peugeot. Marnier shut the boot, locked it and pocketed the keys. He took a billfold out of his shirt pocket and peeled off a note for the driver, who got back in his car.