Blood Is Dirt

  ‘How do you know all this, Vassili?’

  ‘The Kazakh bastard tell me last week.’

  ‘How long’s your friend going to be around?’

  ‘Some time.’

  ‘Have you spoken to Selina?’

  ‘Not since the night she drank the piri-piri vodka. My God, she’s some woman. If I wasn’t so fat,’ he said, slapping his gut.

  Vassili introduced me to his friend, Viktor. He gave me the keys to the Peugeot and went through the documents. I drove back across the lagoon and didn’t even notice how the car was running, purring like Vassili’s wife. I was thinking about Russians. How they all come together in one place. How suddenly they all know something about nuclear bombs. How they’re all so well tuned in to the boodle frequency... for communists. Or maybe it was the vodka culture that brought them out of themselves.

  Heike was asleep when I came in at 9 p.m. I called a lawyer friend of mine. A woman with the unlikely name of Isabelle Lawson, a Togolese with Ghanaian family, bilingual and very strong on Francophone and Nigerian law. I asked her if she was interested in advising on the Letter of Credit and told her to wear something suitable for the Italian evening and wait for my call.

  I was late but the chief didn’t mind. He had Selina, who had miraculously arrived at 8.30 p.m., to talk to. She had the look of an athlete at the top of her game. She radiated confidence and the chief was basking in it like a sunbathing python with a pig inside.

  We talked about the meeting with the Cotonou rice agents, and in covering the AMObank Letter of Credit details, I mentioned Isabelle Lawson. The chief told me to bring her on. Within half an hour we were eating bowls of pasta and talking scaloppine like any bunch of business people on a jolly. Ben was sitting with his hands clasped behind the back of his chair. He could see the chief’s boiler was close to the red line over Isabelle, and it was the only way to stop his own hands dancing across the table and losing him his job.

  We split at midnight, as pumped as a sales crew after a guru session. I dropped Isabelle off at her home in the Cocotiers district and took Selina back to the house. She wanted to hit the New York New York with me but I told her Heike was off games. I asked her what she’d been doing all day.

  ‘Covering ground,’ she said.

  ‘Does the chief know how you got the rice?’

  ‘No way.’

  ‘But Franconelli knows who it’s for?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Does Franconelli get anything?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘He agrees things on a “maybe”?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Is this the client talking?’

  ‘Nice car,’ she said, and lit a cigarette.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘You still want to sell the chief some nuclear material?’

  ‘I don’t think there’s anything he wouldn’t buy off me now.’

  ‘I might have the answer to a problem.’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘Verifying the product,’ I said. She didn’t leap. ‘Not so interested after all?’

  She shrugged. We continued in silence. I eased the car up and down the troughs of the dirt road and pulled up at the gates. I opened them and drove in behind Heike’s Pathfinder.

  ‘Did you tell Heike about our little tussle last night?’ she asked.

  ‘There didn’t seem much...’

  ‘So, no. Right?’

  ‘Vassili knows you, Selina,’ I said. ‘You’re a tow bitch.’

  ‘That’s not what Franconelli thinks. Roberto to me.’

  ‘Wait ’til he gets to know you better.’

  ‘He’s in love with me.’

  ‘That was quick.’

  ‘Older men fall for me.’

  ‘So the rice deal’s a gift. A love token.’

  ‘He’s not that sentimental.’

  ‘I thought he might be after what he’s been through.’

  ‘That’s true. It wasn’t as expensive as it should have been.’

  ‘What’s he want?’

  ‘He wants to know how Graydon’s oil deal goes.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He’s involved.’

  ‘So how come he doesn’t know?’

  ‘They don’t trust each other, these guys.’

  ‘So what was all the ground you covered?’

  ‘The next bit’ll cost you.’

  ‘Forget it, Selina.’

  ‘No sex.’

  ‘Just a chaste little kiss?’

  She laughed, ditched her cigarette and crushed it with her foot. She tapped her bottom lip with her finger.

  ‘You have to promise me something.’

  ‘What do I get if I promise?’

  ‘You get to give Gale what she needs.’

  ‘I wouldn’t call paying Gale off my responsibility.’

  ‘You also get a bonus.’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘Whatever’s left in the bag by the time we’re finished. You’ve already got the car.’

  ‘I lost one too.’

  ‘That’s right, you did. It feels such a long time ago.’

  ‘Is that it?’

  ‘And I’ll leave you alone for ever.’

  ‘Don’t go and break down crying now.’

  She gave me a withering smirk and folded her arms.

  ‘Well?’ she asked.

  ‘So what have you got?’

  ‘Promise first.’

  ‘What do you want me to do?’

  ‘I want to pull the plutonium scam on the chief, but you’ve got to help me right to the end. No chickening out.’

  ‘Babba Seko must not end up with any of that material.’

  ‘He won’t. I promise.’

  ‘And you mustn’t say a word to Heike.’

  ‘About last night?’

  ‘About selling plutonium to people like Babba Seko.’

  She giggled and flicked her lighter on and off.

  ‘OK, it’s a deal,’ I said. ‘Your turn.’

  ‘I’ve got proof that the chief and Graydon between them have ripped off Roberto for around twelve million dollars on these oil scams.’

  ‘You know, all you got to do is tell Roberto that and those guys’ll be concrete moorings for floating jetties out in the Gulf.’

  ‘I know,’ she said, ‘but where’s the fun in that?’

  Chapter 25

  When Franconelli told Selina he wanted to know about the oil scam she’d read him absolutely right. As soon as we were out of the office she hit the nearest PC. She had one piece of information from Roberto, which was the name of the company through which they worked the Nigerian end of the oil operation—BASOLCO. One snag. She needed a password. Not even Babba Seko was that stupid and, anyway, it was Ben who’d set up the system.

  It didn’t take female intuition to know that the password was going to have something to do with the boss. She spoke to his secretary. She was the daughter of the chief’s wife’s brother which gave her the chief’s wife’s maiden name. Great. It didn’t work. Misread the man. Not personal enough. This did get her into the chief’s office though, tagged by the secretary and there it was, up on the wall—the photograph of the Nigerian national football team. Who was the chief’s favourite player? Rashidi Yekini. She volleyed that at the screen and scored.

  The BASOLCO accounts were done by shipment. The sale was made. The money was paid into the Caymans, Neruda account. The expenses were deducted—the freight to the shipowner, the larger bribes directly into safe-haven accounts and the smaller ones in a lump in Nigeria. There was nothing strange about any of this except that fifty-eight of the seventy-two shipments made over the last four years had been done by four ships—the Limnos III, the Ohio Warrior, the Red Solent and the Mithoni VII. They were all Panamanian flag vessels. Each ship was owned by an individual Panamanian company and those companies were owned by a holding company called LUNEXCO’S.A. of the Cayman Islands. What drew Selina was the name of the managing director of the Panamanian compan
ies—José Marcos. She remembered the phone call Graydon took in his office—‘Hi José.’—and we were dismissed.

  She called a friend in London who was an expert on offshore companies and asked if he could do some digging around on LUNEXCO. He came back within the hour to say that LUNEXCO was solely owned by Graydon Strudwick. Then she looked at the freight rates. She spoke to a broker in the oil department at Clarksons in London. The freight rates were consistently between $1 and $2 per ton above the market level and there had always been other ships in the area who would have, in the broker’s opinion, been prepared to drop the market rate even further. The only time the cargoes were fixed at market levels were on the fourteen occasions when one of Graydon’s ships weren’t around.

  That seemed typical of Graydon—not in it for the money but the humiliation. He wanted to be able to sit on the swing sofa with Franconelli and think, ‘I’m ripping you off, spico.’ Just like his videos did, it gave him power.

  If Franconelli got hold of this it wouldn’t be the money that would get Graydon killed, it would be the lack of respect, and, if Selina was right, respect was something Roberto was having trouble with right now.

  Selina came across the second set of BASOLCO accounts as she was closing down. In these accounts everything was the same except that the bribes paid to the important people with offshore accounts (one of whom was Robert Keshi, the guy from the storage department at NNPC) were twenty-five per cent higher than in the original BASOLCO accounts. She flicked through some of the chief’s offshore bank accounts and came across one in Madeira which had amounts corresponding to the loading on the bribes. The chief was doing the same thing, gently ripping off Franconelli for around $100,000 a shipment.

  One thing that Selina couldn’t find was any indication that these cargoes of oil were paid for. There seemed to be no sums of money going from BASOLCO into NNPC, although she matched a lot of names from the NNPC personnel listed in their published Year Accounts with the people receiving bribes into offshore banks from BASOLCO. Another thing that wasn’t clear from these accounts was whether Graydon knew what the chief was doing and vice versa.

  The reason Selina had been talking to Clarksons was that she wanted to fix a ship from Port Harcourt to a refinery in Rotterdam with the 120,000 tons of oil Graydon had offered her. There were three ships and she worked all of them. One of them was the Ohio Warrior.; which fell out of the running early on because she wouldn’t drop her rate from $2 per ton above the market. The broker was puzzled and Selina fixed the cargo on a vessel at 25 cents per ton below the market rate. It looked as if Graydon was using her to persuade Franconelli that the BASOLCO shipping operations were straight up.

  That was why she’d been looking so athletic at the Sheraton that night. She had a one-megabyte floppy in her briefcase which told the whole story and she’d just made $80,000 on her own crude shipment without raising a sweat.

  Now she was lying on the sofa with a splash of Black Label and thinking about Viktor and what his knowledge of plutonium reprocessing could contribute to the end of Chief Babba Seko’s political career.

  ‘I’ve already spoken to the chief,’ she said.

  ‘About the nuclear stuff?’

  ‘I just ran it past him. Said it in a conversational way that a Russian friend of mine had been offered some gear.’

  ‘Did he bite?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Nibble?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Sniff?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘He had his mind on other things.’

  ‘It was before Isabelle arrived.’

  ‘He wasn’t in the right mood. Not thinking about the right thing. Not thinking about his presidency.’

  ‘Why don’t you try him? You hooked him on the rice. Maybe he only listens to men. He didn’t treat Isabelle like a hotshot lawyer, did he?’

  ‘Maybe you’ve done enough already. It’s planted. Let’s see if it grows. Even if it doesn’t you can always dob him in to Roberto and walk away.’

  ‘You hope.’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘No sense of challenge.’

  ‘Just a sixth sense for trouble and—as Bagado says—it always finds me.’

  ‘Am I with the right guy?’

  ‘You’re the trouble,’ I said.

  ‘You going to lend me your car keys?’

  ‘Goodnight,’ I said, and lobbed them over.

  Cotonou. Wednesday 28th February.

  In the morning, Heike was hot but not sweating. I was losing my nerve about the malaria diagnosis. She said she was feeling OK apart from the diarrhoea. I told her to go to the Polyclinique. We had a fight. She called in sick to her office. I told her to take something for her stomach. We had another fight. I made an appointment at the Polyclinique. She asked me if I was ill. I gave up. She was old enough.

  Selina gave me the floppy of the BASOLCO accounts and I put it in the poetry section of the bookcase between Heaney and Hughes. We drove downtown and took our coffee and croissants in La Caravelle before driving out to the port area for our meeting with the agents at 8.30 a.m.

  The agents’ director was a Nigerian, an Igbo, who spoke fluent French through a permanent wince from a stomach ulcer. He was the only African I’d ever met with one of those. Ben and the chief were on time and we were filing into the director’s office when Ben turned and put his hand on my chest.

  ‘This is an African thing,’ he said. ‘You understand?’

  We went back to reception and sat the meeting out amongst the rubber plants and magazines called Container Week and Commodities Hotline from last year. Selina was puce with fury. She didn’t know how lucky she was. A European can’t stand the African Way. A European likes to get to the point. The African likes to discuss everything but the point. I’ve been in meetings where Africans have danced around the point for hours with no noticeable drift towards the nub and then, suddenly, an agreement has been reached, hands shaken, the office vacated, and old whitey’s been left still drumming his fingers on the desk with nothing written on his notepad.

  At about 11 a.m. there was a cheer from the office, as if they hadn’t been discussing business but had hunkered down in front of some old replays of the Africa Nations Cup. They filed out with an agreement written over their faces. Ben steered Selina off to a waiting taxi and the chief put his hand on my shoulder and leaned on me all the way to my car. We drove downtown.

  ‘I had a Peugeot once,’ said the chief, as if it had been a favourite toy when he was eight.

  ‘Good cars.’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘Paris/Dakar.’

  ‘Quite. An African car.’

  ‘They make them in Nigeria, don’t they?’

  ‘Mmmmmm,’ he murmured, as if relieving himself in a swimming pool. ‘What do you think of Nigeria, Mr Medway?’

  ‘It’s a mess and it shouldn’t be.’

  ‘And why do you think it’s a mess?’

  Careful here, I thought.

  ‘There’s nobody running the country, they’re just controlling it.’

  ‘A fine distinction,’ he said. ‘You should be a politician.’

  ‘I don’t have the necessary qualities.’

  ‘Which are?’

  ‘Unshakeable vision and unfathomable optimism,’ I said. Well, I didn’t want to blow it with ‘unshakeable arrogance and unfathomable insincerity’.

  ‘I have a vision,’ said the chief, quietly, as if he was admitting that he’d written a short story and would I like to read it.

  ‘That’s why you’re a presidential candidate,’ I said.

  ‘Not yet, but yes.’

  ‘Am I allowed to know your vision?’

  ‘Of course. It’s that Nigeria will be strong again. That we will be the number-one country in Africa. That the continent will look to us for leadership in economic affairs and... for defence.’

  This is the African Way—from Peugeots to plutonium without mentioning it. We sat outside AMObank a
nd discussed Nigerian foreign policy for fifteen minutes while Ben and Selina sat in the taxi behind. By the end still nothing had been said, but I was in no doubt that the chief was in the market for any amount of weapons-grade plutonium we could lay our hands on, and he was in no doubt that I would be able to supply it.

  We were included out of the meeting with AMObank and Isabelle Lawson. Selina was shaking and I had to grip her upper arm and drag her to the indoor shrubbery before she mauled someone.

  ‘What are we doing here?’ she asked.

  ‘We’re entourage. The chief’s an important man. He’s so important he has two white people who sit outside his meetings waiting for him.’

  ‘I’m humiliated.’

  ‘Your time will come,’ I said. ‘He wants the gear.’

  ‘He does?’ she said. ‘Oh boy, am I going to enjoy fucking this guy over.’

  After the meeting, on the way to lunch, Isabelle told us the terms of the deal. The chief was required to deposit $500,000 with the bank. As soon as the ship was loaded the bills of lading would be sent to AMObank, who would hold them until the balance was paid by the buyers sent by the agents. When the value of the cargo was reached the bills of lading would be released to the chief. Nice business if you can get it.

  The chief retired after his lobster and Ben made it clear that Selina would be needed in Lagos while I should start moving things in Cotonou. I dropped Isabelle off and headed across the lagoon to Akpakpa.

  Vassili was in his yard pacing around and yabbering in French down one of the new mobile telephones which had been available since the Francophonie conference. He nodded me into the house, where I sat alone for two minutes until his eldest daughter came in with two Petite Beninoise beers and a bowl of cashew. She looked as if she’d lost a kitten, and rebuffed my four stabs at conversation with monosyllables.

  Vassili collapsed into an armchair and threw his feet up on the table. He grabbed the beer and slugged half the bottle. His daughter watched him from behind a curtain to the kitchen. He flashed her an irritated look and she bled away into the house.