Blood Is Dirt

  ‘You’ve got a choice, Quarshie,’ I said. ‘You can speed up our little chat so that we get to the nub a little quicker than we are right now or I’ll stick this through your hand, nail you to the bar, get round the other side of it and pummel your kidneys so you piss blood for a week.’

  Well, people had been getting a lot tougher with me over the last few days. I’d call that piano rather than fortissimo. Quarshie didn’t. He backed away from the bar. I got out from behind it.

  ‘I’m in a bad mood, Quarshie. Now let’s get down to it.’

  ‘Put the ice pick down.’

  ‘Sick it up or sweat it out. I don’t care what you have to do but tell me the Napier Briggs story.’

  ‘He was a bloody fool,’ he said, and I knew it was going to take time to get Quarshie to tell the truth.

  ‘Or just inexperienced in the African way?’

  ‘Both,’ he said. ‘How much do you know about the Nigerian situation?’

  ‘Politics?’ I asked. ‘You’ve got a military dictatorship that wants to stay in power but it’s being forced by the people, by outside pressure, to return the country to civilian, democratic government. There were some elections. Big Chief Billionaire was, how did they put it on the BBC, “widely recognized” to have won them. They were annulled. There was a bit of a crisis, the Big Chief announced himself president, the military came down hard. The man’s in jail and not feeling very well.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Quarshie. ‘It quietened down for a bit. Then the military made a mistake. They executed the environmental activists for the murder of the four tribal chiefs. Now the pressure is on again for democratic elections, not just from the West but other African countries as well. The military is looking for candidates.’

  ‘Very nice, Quarshie. What’s it got to do with Napier?’

  ‘An example.’

  ‘Make it a short one.’

  ‘A chief customs officer in this country has a privileged position. You can make a lot of money. It’s a much-sought-after job.’

  ‘You’re going to tell me about “fronting”, how these guys have to pay their superiors to maintain their position and lifestyle.’

  ‘Yes, and of course this goes very high. Right to the top.’

  ‘Where’s Napier, Quarshie?’

  ‘You can imagine how expensive it is to become a presidential candidate.’

  ‘Napier was scammed for a campaign contribution?’

  ‘There are three candidates lobbying. Chief Benjamin Oshogbo. Chief Babba Seko and Chief Kaura Namoda.’

  ‘Napier thought he was going to pick up a couple of million dollars in Benin and instead he got killed. Why and which of that lot killed him?’

  There was a crash outside. Quarshie’s next visitor had just taken a tumble over the box. I hung on to the ice pick.

  ‘People who know something and look as if they’re going to start talking have been killed in this business, Quarshie. I hope you’re not next.’

  ‘I have no option,’ he said, opening his arms. ‘It’s all out of my hands.’

  I went back out through the verandah and hopped over the garden wall, skirted a pool and ran down by the side of a house. I vaulted the front gate and landed in a parallel street to Quarshie’s. I ran into the dark. I ran to the Ritalori. I ran up to my room. I locked the door. I slept with my hand under the pillow, the handle of the ice pick in my fist.

  Chapter 15

  Cotonou. Friday 23rd February.

  I’d got back around lunchtime to find that Heike hadn’t gone into work and that Moses had gone back to his village. She’d tried to stop him, had tried to convince him that Western medicine was the only way to tackle HIV at this stage, but he had to go and see his man. He’d said that his village doctor had already cured people with AIDS let alone HIV He’d gone down the Jonquet taxi park at seven in the morning and taken a car to Accra. There was nothing to be done.

  Heike and I shared a bottle of wine over lunch and did what we always did with a long afternoon ahead of us and nothing much to do. We made love and slept.

  ‘What is this vile thing?’ asked Heike.

  ‘A stiletto,’ I said. ‘Is it?’

  ‘No, it’s an ice pick.’

  ‘Wasn’t Trotsky killed with one of those?’

  ‘In Mexico and what the hell was he doing there?’

  ‘It’s creepy. I’d rather it lived outside.’

  ‘You don’t have to kill people with it, you can just use it to break up ice.’

  ‘Could you?’ she asked, getting back into bed with me.

  ‘You mean, am I cold-blooded enough, or is it sharp enough for the job?’

  ‘It looks evil enough... but are you?’

  I took a handful of breast and kissed her nape. She squirmed away and faced me.

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘No, I couldn’t.’

  ‘I’m not sure I believe you.’

  ‘Then what are you doing in bed with me?’

  ‘I have asked myself that question.’

  I slid a hand between her thighs. She squeezed me out.

  ‘I wanted to ask you something about Selina.’

  ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘Do you think she’s a lesbian?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You sound definite.’

  ‘The cufflinks guy?’

  ‘That only lasted six months.’

  ‘And she made a pass at me,’ I said. ‘Well, she let me know there was some chemistry.’

  ‘Same here. What did you do?’

  ‘I went to Lagos. You?’

  ‘I spilled whisky down my front.’

  ‘On purpose?’

  ‘No, I missed my mouth.’

  ‘Come on, Heike, that must have happened to you before.’

  ‘Don’t be guilty of the most pathetic male fantasy, Bruce.’

  ‘I’m not. Men have made passes at me.’

  ‘When you were younger... a lot younger.’

  ‘Thanks for the boost,’ I said. ‘Is Selina back yet?’

  ‘She got in from Paris at two in the afternoon yesterday, dropped her bags off and I haven’t seen her since.’

  I liked that about sex in the afternoon. All that time for lazy inconsequential talk. None of that urgency about having to sleep to get up in the morning. There was an added dimension to the intimacy with the noise outside of people having a day while we played truant in bed. It also took four and a half hours out of the afternoon and I could walk straight from the bedroom and into a drink without a hint of guilt, which was what I did. Selina was there lying with her feet over the end of the sofa. She looked up from her magazine.

  ‘What have you been doing?’

  ‘Sleeping.’

  ‘It sounded like afternoon sex to me.’

  ‘I’m a lively dreamer. And you?’

  ‘I never dream.’

  ‘The sign of an atrophied inner life. You should seek spiritual renewal or maybe just a drink.’

  ‘Got one.’

  I poured a beer and filled a bowl of pistachios.

  ‘Where’ve you been all night?’

  ‘Heike noticed.’

  ‘Over thirty your maternal instinct comes on strong.’

  ‘You mean you worry all the time.’

  ‘OK, don’t tell me. I don’t give a shit.’

  ‘I met a Nigerian guy on the plane. We had a drink at the Sheraton, we sang to each other in the karaoke bar, I went to his room and finished with him at about four o’clock this afternoon. OK?’

  ‘I’m proud of you.’

  ‘He’s forty-one years old, married with two wives and eight children.’

  ‘I feel unaccomplished.’

  ‘He wore a condom too. Fifteen, in fact.’

  ‘How was England?’

  ‘Bad,’ she said. ‘My mother didn’t turn up to the funeral. Said she would and didn’t. There were only four of us at the crematorium.’

  ‘Blair?’

  ‘He was
there. Dad’s brother too. And an African.’

  ‘What did the African have to say?’

  ‘He stood at the back and left before the end. What happened in Lagos?’

  I told her about the car, the beating and the body. I gave her Gale’s invite and told her our roles, but I didn’t say what I was going to have to do for Gale.

  ‘I suppose I owe you a car,’ she said.

  ‘It wasn’t much of a car, but there’ll have to be something on the expense sheet.’

  ‘How much do you need for a new one?’

  ‘I’ll have to talk to Vassili.’

  ‘Who’s he?’

  ‘A Russian who deals in second-hand cars across the lagoon.’

  Selina went into her room and came back with a small holdall. Inside was one and a half million French francs. She picked up a block of about a hundred thousand francs and gave it to me.

  ‘Enough?’

  ‘For three of the cars I’ve got in mind. You’re planning a long campaign with this kind of money.’

  ‘Things might be about to get complicated.’

  ‘Not more so?’

  ‘More so. You know where this money came from?’

  ‘Selina Aguia Limited?’

  ‘Thanks for the compliment,’ she said, ‘but no. I was the only beneficiary in my father’s will and there was only one thing in it that wasn’t repossessable by the bank, the building society and the leasing company. A safe-deposit-box key in the ALPbank in Zurich.’

  ‘And I thought he was a busted flush.’

  ‘So did I.’

  ‘So what was in the lucky box?’

  ‘Just over seven million dollars in four currencies.’

  ‘Lottery money?’

  ‘Let’s buy a car,’ she said.

  Heike came with us to Vassili’s, not because Vassili was the best company in Cotonou but for the simple reason that he had the best vodka in Cotonou. He had a collection of twenty-four vodkas in his freezer and all the flavours were home made. He had a piri-piri vodka which he made by soaking red chillis in fifty-two per cent alcohol. He had another which was made with Scotch bonnet chillis and I’d seen big strong men drink that and buckle like thirteen-year-olds at pop concerts. Heike was coming because she knew if she didn’t she’d never catch up.

  We found a wreck of a Renault 4 taxi which took us past the sprawl of the Dan Tokpa market and crawled us over the slope of the Nouveau Pont into Akpakpa. Vassili lived with his Beninois wife and three children in a house with a large yard full of cars, none of which would get through an MOT in their country of origin. Occasionally he pulled in a Mercedes or a BMW for a special client and we’d see him swanning around Cotonou in air-conditioned bliss for a few days.

  He’d started the business by buying stolen cars ripped off from the streets of Paris and driven trans-Sahara to Benin. Then the heat came down in the early nineties and the Algerians started fighting each other and that killed the business. Now his cars came in on huge Ro-Ro ferries and all the paperwork was legit.

  Although Vassili hadn’t been on a Russian diet for more than a decade there didn’t seem to be anything that could stop him from getting fat and blubbery. He had a head like a big, round cabbage and a body like a sack of spuds. He drank huge quantities of beer and vodka and his face was as red as borscht. The only time he wasn’t bright red was the ‘morning after’ when he was grey and on those occasions he disconcerted by looking like Brezhnev in state outside the Kremlin. He spoke fluent French but had only learnt English since being in Benin. I had confused his brain by telling him there were eight ways to pronounce the letters ‘ough’ and now any word with anything approximating those letters would get scrambled. ‘Daughter’ came out as ‘dafter’ and ‘laughter’ as ‘lawter’, ‘ought’ as ‘ufft’ and ‘tough’ as ‘tow’. Things got even more complicated after the vodka and we usually lapsed into French or I’d get started on the Russian.

  We did the business first. He turned the genny on to light the yard and pulled the dogs out. He didn’t bother with gardiens, who spent their time thinking of ways to roll him over, but had four German shepherds who were unbribable and only fed once a day, in the mornings.

  ‘Your end down there, Bruce,’ he said, pointing into a corner. ‘This all jet set up here.’

  ‘Any five-oh-fours?’

  ‘Two,’ he said, holding his gut on either side as if he was about to punt it over the wall. He waddled to the corner, gasping in the heat. He had a shirt/short combo on made out of Dutch wax whose major design feature was car number plates. His heart must have leapt when he saw that stuff in the market but why an African should want to buy it was one of those retailing mysteries.

  Vassili kicked a 504 with a brand new Sebago Docksider and said: ‘This one for you.’

  ‘You got a special price for an old friend?’

  ‘No, but I tell you this car work good.’

  ‘How much?’

  He took an unfiltered Gitane out of his pocket and lit it.

  ‘Everything good inside. Perfect motor. New clutch. Gear change like lawing in the sun.’

  ‘Lawing in the sun?’

  ‘Yes, easy, like that,’ he said, and flung an arm back as if he was with his girl on the coast road from Monterey to Big Sur.

  ‘Steering?’

  He grunted and set himself solid as a sumo.

  ‘But listen,’ he said, and ran his hand through his black greasy hair and put the Gitane in his horse-hoof mouth. He started the engine. ‘Like my wife at night.’

  ‘How are the kids?’

  ‘Ach! You know. The eldest still miserable. She don’t like being a métisse* I bufft her a bicycle for her birthday. She cry. Hah! She cry as if I smack her. Nevertheless,’ he said, another favourite word used for holding attention, ‘the boy is good. Lawing all the time. He never complain. The baby? The baby is a baby. Crying all thruff the night. Drive me mad, but lovely. You gonna buy it? Listen.’

  We listened. I looked at Selina. She shrugged an eyebrow. We bought it. We went inside and did the business on the freezer. I said I’d pick it up as soon as the papers were ready. Vassili opened the freezer. He put on a pair of gloves and removed two bottles as if he was taking detonators out of a nuclear device. A cuckoo clock struck nine in the next room. Vassili roared into some distant corner of the house and his eldest daughter came in, long-faced, carrying a tray with four shot glasses and some cashew nuts.

  We flipped back two lemon vodkas each and then Vassili stopped us with a finger.

  ‘New one,’ he said. ‘Mango.’

  We worked on the mango for a few minutes.

  ‘Furthermore,’ he said, getting expansive post-sale, ‘the world is going off to shit.’

  He roared in Fon again and the daughter came in again with some sausage and gherkins. Vassili put the lemon and mango away and brought out pineapple and papaya.

  ‘Why’s the world going off to shit, Vassili?’ asked Heike.

  ‘I tell you, Heike, you have no idea. That Gerhard, he no want to buy that jeep?’

  ‘Is that all?’ I asked.

  ‘No, no. I just remember. He want a jeep. I got one. No, the world going off to shit because three days ago something happen. A Kazakh man came to me. Here. In my house. A tow-looking Kazakh bastard. We drink something. We speak Russian. He tell me he know I buy and sell car, maybe I want to try something different. Like what? You know what he got?’

  ‘A Lada?’ said Selina.

  ‘This not funny business, my friend. That Kazakh bastard offer me plutonium. Weapons grade. He offer me an atomic bomb. I tell you. That’s why the world going off to shit.’

  ‘Was he serious?’

  ‘He came to see me. He show me the paperwork, where it come from. I don’t know.’

  ‘Were you interested?’ asked Selina, pushing.

  ‘What am I going to do with atomic bomb and kids in the house too?’

  ‘He must have approached you for a reason,’ said Selina.


  Vassili gave her some pure Brezhnev in Red Square overlooking an army parade in -27°C.

  ‘I’m sure he didn’t stop off just because you’re a brilliant second-hand car salesman,’ she said.

  ‘Who is she?’ Vassili asked me, the room suddenly colder than Tomsk in January. I took him by the elbow and whispered to him about Napier Briggs’s murder and how Selina had just buried him. He defrosted down to -2°C. Selina wouldn’t let go.

  ‘I mean, Vassili, somebody wouldn’t approach you and expose themselves to you as a nuclear-arms smuggler if for one second they thought you were a legitimate trader who would dump the security forces on them.’

  An aircraft passed overhead on its way into Cotonou airport.

  ‘You tow bitch, that’s what you are,’ he said, and we laughed a little harder than we wanted to. Vassili poured the papaya vodka.

  ‘Maybe it’s time for me to try the piri-piri,’ said Selina.

  Vassili lifted out a bottle of clear red liquid encased in ice. He poured a shot, it was as viscous as syrup.

  ‘This one cold,’ said Vassili.

  ‘You going to answer my question, Vassili, or tell me to fuck off?’

  ‘Drink!’

  She flipped it back, a shudder passed through her body. She replaced the glass.

  ‘Peppery,’ she said, lightly, and Heike roared.

  Vassili went back into the freezer and came out with something that he had to beat the frost off. He poured something into the glass that flowed like black-cherry treacle.

  ‘More old,’ he said.

  Selina was in a sweat now. Her shirt dark between her shoulder blades.

  ‘Some history,’ said Vassili, looking at the glass. ‘In nineteen seventy-two they made coup in Benin. The president was successful and in nineteen seventy-five he made popular revolution. He made link with China, North Korea and Russia. I come here nineteen eighty-three. I am Russian. I do very well from contact with people. They like me. I am white but no imperialist. I know people in government and slowly the government making things easy for business. I am in good position. Bon bon. Très fort avec le président. Nineteen eighties very good for me. Then nineteen ninety the socialists out, and right-wing president come in. I’m still strong but I have to be careful. People look to my car business. I go more straight. Now this year we have another election. The socialist coming back. He an old man but they like him, say he going to win. Like Russian people the Béninois not all happy with the free-market reform. Maybe next month je suis plus fort avec le président. ‘