Blood Is Dirt

  ‘There’s not a lot I can do about it, and that’s been the story of my life.’

  David drove me back to Y-Kays. We didn’t talk. He had the radio on. That charming voice was telling us how good things really were underneath it all.

  Chapter 23

  By midnight I was having a rare shopping dream in which I was getting everything I wanted and had the money to pay for it. I came out of it into the humming, frigid darkness and a knocking that wasn’t the ancient air con. I turned a light on, stumbled to the door in a T-shirt and underpants and unlocked it. Selina was leaning on the door jamb, smelling of perfume, liquor and Franconelli’s cigars. I held on to the top of the door and closed my eyes. I was suddenly very wide awake as a cool hand slid into my underpants and gripped my penis. I grabbed her wrist, her sculler’s wrist and she tightened her grip.

  ‘I’ll yank it off,’ she said, her face close now, her lips nearly at my chin, her lipstick-and-cigarette breath mingling with mine. She smiled and planted a kiss.

  ‘Let go, Selina.’

  She kissed me again and moved her hand up and down firmly so that I hardened. I let go of her wrist. She relaxed slightly. I pinched her hard on the underside of her arm. She squealed and let me go. I reeled backwards.

  ‘You little bugger!’ she said, and kicked the door shut with her foot. She threw her handbag down and stepped out of her shoes. We faced off like a couple of wrestlers. She darted in at me. I grabbed her wrists and swung her round so that she landed on her back on the bed.

  ‘So masterful,’ she said.

  ‘Just stop it, Selina,’ I said. ‘Just fucking stop it!’

  ‘Jesus,’ she said, propping herself up, ‘that’s the first time I’ve heard you say “fuck”.’

  I pulled on a pair of jeans, sat on the end of the other bed and ran my hand through my hair.

  ‘I guess that means you really don’t want to do it,’ she said.

  ‘That’s what it means.’

  ‘It was only meant to be a bit of fun,’ she said, ‘and I can tell you, that’s been pretty thin on the ground this evening.’

  She found her handbag and shoes, lit a cigarette and sat down in front of the whisky bottle and two glasses.

  ‘In the absence of a decent fuck I suppose I’ll have to settle for a drink.’

  ‘Didn’t Franconelli come through?’

  ‘Not on the first date, Bruce. What do you take me for?’

  ‘I’ve no idea.’

  ‘Not with Franconelli,’ she sneered. ‘The guy’d think I was a whore. You’ve got to tickle these Eyeties like trout in a fast stream. You can’t just go in there and grab.’

  ‘Unlike...’

  ‘You’re not married, Bruce. It was only a bit of fun. I had a hard time with Roberto and I was a bit... fruss.’

  ‘Pour the drinks.’

  She splashed it into the glasses and handed one over.

  ‘I could tell you were enjoying it,’ she said.

  ‘I like sex, Selina. You’re an attractive woman. But I’ve messed around before, so many times before, it’s amazing how long it takes to learn the lesson. Sleeping around does my head in. So I don’t do it any more.’

  ‘You love Heike?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You should tell her.’

  ‘How do you know I haven’t?’

  She shrugged and sipped her drink with her little finger raised.

  ‘Well, I thought you were fair game,’ she said, wiggling her pinky at me. ‘But if you’ve got a ring on your finger...’

  ‘Heike tell you I was fair game?’

  Silence, the rasp of a match, smoke folded into the draught from the air con.

  ‘She told me about her “affairs”.’

  ‘Was that a plural?’

  She nodded, cocky now.

  ‘While she was with me?’ I asked.

  ‘There was Wolfgang,’ she said, holding up her hand and counting off the fingers. ‘The one she worked with in Porto Novo.’

  ‘That’s one.’

  She laughed dirtily and looked up in the air for inspiration and counted through to her fourth finger, irritating the hell out of me.

  ‘I made a mistake,’ she said. ‘It was “affair” singular.’

  ‘Pour yourself another drink. You’re going to need it.’

  I was raw now, livid and I wanted to hurt. She looked anxious.

  ‘Why was it you said your mother left your old man?’

  ‘Calmez-vous, Bruce,’ she said, getting desperate, ‘that’s “chill out” in baby boomer.’

  ‘Something about her promiscuity, wasn’t it? Your father not giving a damn, being weak.’

  ‘He just let her rim around...’

  ‘It was because he was queer, Selina.’

  ‘Queer? I think gay is the term you’re reaching for, Bruce. We say “gay” in the nineties.’

  ‘Not any more, Ms PC. The preferred term is “queer”. More manly, less trite.’

  ‘Whatever.’

  ‘She came back and found him banging a boy on her bed.’

  I regretted that. One step too far. Her chin wobbled and tears rolled down her face. I felt about as lovely as four-day-cold lamb.

  ‘And how the fuck do you know that?’ she shouted through the wreck of her face, snot and tears pouring down the corners of her mouth.

  ‘I had dinner with his lover tonight.’

  ‘Oh, fuck you! Fuck everybody!’ she said.

  The bathroom door slammed behind her. The taps ran. I gritted my teeth and tried to force the last few moments out of existence.

  She came back in after five minutes and sat at the table.

  ‘They fuck you up, they really do,’ she said and lit up. ‘My dad and his algebraic fucking love life. Who needs Z when X and Y are blokes? Jesus. And he never told me. My mother punishing him, chasing and screwing all those guys in front of him. What a mess. And... and this was supposed to be a celebration.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Roberto can get the rice.’

  ‘Where from?’

  ‘Thailand.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  ‘They can’t talk to each other, these guys, can they?’ she said.

  ‘What did you and Roberto have to talk about?’

  ‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘that was pretty hard going. I mean, he looks sophisticated enough, he’s wealthy, he’s been around, but the guy hasn’t seen a film or read a book in his life and he won’t talk about anything interesting like politics because it’s man’s business.’

  ‘Did you try football?’

  ‘It was close, Bruce,’ she said. ‘There was something else going on there tonight. His men were around. Carlo and a couple of other guys. I think Roberto is having a respect problem.’

  ‘Anything specific?’

  ‘They didn’t like me being there and they showed it. They shouldn’t have had the nerve. The capo should be the man of steel and the men should be prepared to die for him. There just wasn’t that total devotion. I had the feeling they thought Roberto was losing it. Going soft.’

  She went back into the bathroom and came back with her face in the towel.

  ‘That guy in the video. The white guy. He wasn’t my father’s lover, was he?’

  I nodded. She shuddered.

  ‘What a life.’

  ‘He told me why the chief wanted to get rid of your father.’

  ‘So it was the chief?’

  ‘I thought it might have been Franconelli but he was getting information out of Napier on construction projects. David, the guy in the video, was feeding him.’

  ‘Why Franconelli?’

  ‘Just the way they killed him. It wasn’t very African.’

  ‘How sure are you about the chief?’

  ‘David negotiated a way out for your father with the chief. He used an intermediary called Quarshie. Bagado said Quarshie’s car picked up Napier in the cocotiers.’

  ‘What was the deal?’

&n
bsp; ‘Two-point-seven million dollars to get out and shut up. David said Napier was after ten mil to retire. It looked as if he was going to get it.’

  ‘Cheaper to kill him.’

  ‘Except Napier had it confirmed to him that he was going to be allowed to pick up. He told me he had had it from the highest authority.’

  ‘Who was that?’

  ‘The chief himself, I don’t know,’ I said, ‘but he still asked me if I had the gun.’

  ‘He was being greedy,’ she said, and I saw an idea spark in her head. ‘Greedy.’

  ‘There’s something you should know about Gale.’

  ‘She’s greedy too?’

  ‘She’s not for free.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘She got us in this far and she has to be paid off.’

  ‘Yeah, I know, but how much?’

  ‘Not money. Just dirt on Graydon so she can break her prenup and bust him for ten million dollars.’

  ‘What is it with ten million?’

  ‘The difference between Moët and Krug.’

  ‘So, we do some digging.’

  ‘David talked about the big three, said there wasn’t exactly a free flow of information between them, said there’s always one who wants to be bigger.’

  ‘Power,’ said Selina, landing on it hard. ‘It’s all about power. The three of them’re trying to fuck each other over and we’re the go-betweens. They can’t talk to each other so they use us. Well, now, maybe we can do something here.’

  She threw the towel on the bed, grabbed a cigarette and paced the room without lighting it.

  ‘That chief’s a greedy little fucker,’ she said, ‘and he wants to get one up.’

  ‘You’re not thinking about Gale.’

  ‘Don’t worry about her. We’ll get the dirt on Graydon. What I want to do is nail the chief and I think I know how we can do it.’

  ‘This does involve me.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The retribution bit.’

  ‘Don’t go soft, Bruce, because this is going to need some spine.’

  ‘I’ll try.’

  ‘We’re going to sell the chief a nuclear bomb...’

  ‘You want to hear me say it for the second time? Fuck.’

  ‘...or at least the basic ingredients for one. You remember Vassili’s friend? The Kazakh bastard? What did he have? Plutonium, enriched uranium. Whatever. We have a supplier. What we need is a set-up.’

  ‘How is this going to be a hardship for the chief, you know, to be the proud owner of a Little Boy?’

  ‘Little Boy?’

  ‘That’s what they dropped on Hiroshima, just so you don’t think we’re playing with toy guns and caps.’

  ‘Well, that’s the point. The chief’s ripe for it. Think about it—having his own, personal nuclear device—he’d love it, almost as much as he’d love his own football team.’

  ‘But how does this hurt him, how does it end up stuffing him?’

  ‘The endgame is that the chief loses a lot of money and he gets caught holding nuclear material for which I believe the penalty is death.’

  ‘And we at this stage are suddenly and miraculously uninvolved.’

  ‘I didn’t say it would be easy but you’ve got to admit there’s potential.’

  ‘For complete disaster. You’re not an adrenaline freak, are you, Selina? You don’t go paragliding, sheer-face rock climbing, or shoplifting in a bikini?’

  ‘Are you with me or not?’

  ‘You’ve given me an idea with no plan. How are we going to persuade the chief to buy? How are we going to persuade him that what the Kazakh bastard has got is genuine? How are we going to get money out of the chief for nothing but the promise of delivery? How are we going to set him up without implicating ourselves?’

  ‘Small print, Bruce. Fine tuning.’

  Chapter 24

  Lagos. Tuesday 27th February.

  It rained heavily in the night for an hour. The power went off, cutting the air con. The sweat and the roar of the rain on the corrugated-iron roof woke me. I’d slept for three hours and a wedge of hangover had been sledgehammered into my head. I thought about David and Napier in a tumble-dryer sort of way—just rolled them around, hypnotizing myself. Napier had stayed with David. David had negotiated a deal and sent him to Benin. Napier had been certain about the money. We’d gone in to get it. He’d been killed. It didn’t hold together. I felt suddenly nauseous.

  I drank water and ate aspirin. The rain stopped. I drifted like a shoal of fish and suddenly rushed into sleep to be woken instantly by Selina’s knocking.

  We walked most of the way to Elephant House, but it was cool from the rain and still overcast. Ben was waiting for us like a cougar for a couple of she-goats. He’d got a fax addressed to Selina on behalf of the chief from a Thai supplier confirming availability of 15,000 tons of parboiled rice at a good price for immediate shipment ex Bangkok subject to Letter of Credit terms.

  Within an hour there was still no Babba Seko, but Selina had agreed a price with the Thais and had found a ship which could meet the supplier’s delivery dates. She fixed it subject to charterers’ confirmation.

  The chief came in at eleven and arranged a meeting with AMObank in Cotonou to discuss the Letter of Credit terms. At eleven thirty the chief, Ben and I left for the airport to pick up the late-afternoon flight to Benin. Selina said she would wait for Bof Nwanu who was due to show her a parcel of coffee in a warehouse in Lagos. She would take the evening hop to Cotonou and join us at the Sheraton.

  The traffic was solid. The chief and Ben slept. I frayed my nerves thinking what Selina would do left in the office on her own. We just made the flight and got out of Cotonou airport as night was falling.

  Although the chief had slept all day, like a lion who’d had his killing done for him, he was tired out and needed a lie-down before the important business of the day, which was the Italian theme night at the Sheraton. He told us to reconvene at 9 p.m. I took a taxi home.

  Heike was listless, depressed and running for the toilet in mid-sentence. She said Vassili had shot her sick day to pieces, phoning every hour to tell me that the car was ready. I asked her if she’d been to the doctor and she sneered and said there was no point for a stomach bug. I looked at the blackberry smudges under her eyes and told her that malaria could start with diarrhoea. She said that mosquitoes didn’t bite her, that she’d eaten fish last night which was a mistake and that I should leave her alone and pick up the car so that Vassili didn’t bother her any more. I didn’t mention Selina.

  I took a taxi moto out to Akpakpa and found Vassili with another white man, a heavily bearded guy with no fat on him and blue-white eyes that looked as if they belonged to a husky. They spoke in Russian. I wondered if this was the Kazakh bastard, but Vassili didn’t introduce me and I didn’t want to get involved. I sipped a couple of lemon vodkas with them and got irritated by the way their conversation stopped when they looked at me and resumed when they looked at each other.

  ‘How’s Selina?’ asked Vassili, when his friend stood up to go for a leak.

  ‘She’s coming over from Lagos tonight.’

  Vassili explained something to his friend, who listened by the door and leaned a hairy, sinewy forearm up against the wall. He grunted and played with his balls then went out into the yard.

  ‘He doesn’t speak English, your friend?’

  ‘Only French and it’s good for me to speak Russian. Makes me... you know... emotional for the old country.’

  ‘What’s his game?’

  ‘He has no game. He’s just visiting. We’re talking.’

  ‘What’s so interesting?’

  ‘He’s been telling me about something called red mercury. You know it?’

  ‘I’ve heard of it. I’ve heard it’s nothing. Expensive nothing.’

  ‘That’s what the Americans say. That’s what they hope.’

  ‘The Germans too.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Vassili, tossing back
a shot, ‘but my friend disagrees.’

  ‘How would he know?’

  ‘He used to work at Chelyablinsk-65 up in the Urals and after that at a research reactor in Tashkent.’

  ‘An interesting man.’

  ‘If you’re interested in that kind of thing. I prefer vodka.’

  ‘What’s he doing here?’ I asked. ‘Nobody just visits Benin.’

  ‘He looks for work.’

  ‘Selling cars?’

  ‘Why not? It’s money.’

  ‘It’s not nuclear science, though, is it?’

  ‘There are too many nuclear scientists. How many people want someone who can design a plutonium reprocessing plant? Who needs to reprocess plutonium? A lot more people want to buy cars and nobody wants to kill you if you do that.’

  ‘Why should anybody want to kill him?’

  ‘He has knowledge. He could sell it to unpopular people. Iraqis, for example. That would upset other people. Americans. He’s telling me it’s big problem. There are two thousand scientists, in Russia, now, who can build a bomb... but where’s the work? How do you earn a living?’

  ‘This guy can build a bomb?’

  ‘No, no, no. He worked in plutonium reprocessing. But now they dismantle the missiles. These missiles will produce a hundred tons of plutonium and four hundred tons of uranium. Where’s his job gone? Who needs to reprocess plutonium now?’

  ‘Tons? A hundred tons of plutonium?’

  ‘Tons, my friend, and it only takes five little kilos of plutonium to make a bomb. A hundred thousand kilos of plutonium stretched out over the whole of Russia. Well, that could easily become ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-five kilos, no? You see the problem. There are people who understand the technology with no work, and there’s the material, too much material.’

  ‘And then there are people like your Kazakh friend...’

  ‘Yes. He said he had six and half kilos. So you see...’

  ‘Your friend here... he really wants to sell cars?’

  ‘No. I try to persuade him. He wants me to speak to the government. Get him government job. You see, he’s a Russian, they like to work for the state. I tell him if the government want to start a programme like that, what they need him for? They buy the material, they buy the scientist but what they need more than anything is the engineering. A nuclear bomb isn’t just plastic explosive and a detonator. It takes precision. This is something we must thank God for.’