Blood Is Dirt

  I drove to the hospital with some food for Heike. She was going through her third and last quinine drip. Her parasite count was down but they wanted her to stay another night and take a course of Fansidar. I sat with her through the afternoon and, while she dozed and ate, developed a range of stress-management exercises. I left at 5.30 p.m. to pick Ben up from the airport. He came in late and brought some chill air down with him from 20,000 feet. Suddenly I’d become lower than dirt.

  He was silent on the way to the Sheraton while I gave him the nuclear briefing and told him about Viktor’s role. He took a room and kept me waiting in the marbled lobby until two minutes to eight. I decided not to waste my time and gulped down a few pints of draught lager which came in dimpled mugs and gave me a pang for Clapham and a seat in the dark at the back of the Prince of Wales.

  Ben smelled the beer on my breath. I was free fall in his estimation. We went out into the night, another hot and humid one but with a stiff breeze whacking off the sea. The tall palms in the massive car park rattled, but not in the nervous way that they did in the cocotiers. They were calmer, more self-assured, moneyed. The jeep was off in the corner. I knocked on the rear window and Mr K popped the rear door locks. Ben sat behind Mr K’s long-haired head.

  ‘No names,’ said Mr K as soon as we were settled. ‘Talk.’

  ‘You have some goods,’ said Ben. ‘We’re interested in buying them but before we go anywhere I have to know whether ten million dollars is your final price because if it is we can terminate discussions now.’

  ‘The product is under offer to the Libyans.’

  ‘That doesn’t answer my question.’

  ‘This is Africa.’

  ‘Is that an African price?’

  ‘No.’

  Some cars streamed past on the road outside the Sheraton’s grounds. They turned left at the security gate and drove swiftly up to the entrance. Silence resumed apart from the wind in the palms.

  ‘Tell me how the business will work,’ said Ben.

  ‘The English here is the intermediary. When we have agreed terms you will make a deposit of fifty per cent of the value of the goods to him. When he has received the money he will inform me. I will tell him where to find the goods. He will have twenty-four hours to hand over the goods to you and for you to inspect them. At the end of the twenty-four hours he will bring the money to me.’

  ‘And if we’re not satisfied with the goods?’

  ‘You complain to the Consumer Protection Society,’ I said, letting the beer do some talking. Silence. Unimpressed silence.

  ‘You return them and keep your money,’ said Mr K quietly. ‘And if that works to your satisfaction we’ll proceed with the second drop.’

  ‘The second drop?’

  ‘I’m not giving you all the goods for half the money.’

  ‘Why can’t we do it in one exchange?’ I asked.

  ‘Because it takes time to get the goods into position and this is how I like to work. It’s safer for you too.’

  ‘Yeah, what about me?’ I said. ‘There’s a lot of weight on my shoulders.’

  ‘You,’ said Mr K, ‘had better make sure you’re getting well paid.’

  ‘But why me? Why can’t there be another intermediary.’

  ‘Because you’re here,’ said Mr K, and lit one of his camel dung smokes.

  ‘There are others. Plenty of others.’

  ‘You approached me. You’ve been vouched for. Any complaints from the buyer?’

  ‘No,’ said Ben. ‘Let’s talk money.’

  That was the end of my involvement. Five lines for the one most likely to get killed. I didn’t listen to the haggling. Tomatoes, cars, nuclear bombs, it’s all the same. The final figure was $6,350,000, $3 million payable as the deposit.

  Then came the shock.

  Ben said he would need until 3 p.m. tomorrow to confirm. Only eighteen and a half hours to confirm this deal. This was going too fast. This was going too fast for the people who were supposed to be planning the sting. This was being taken out of our hands. I needed air.

  Ben and I walked back to the hotel. There should have been plenty of air out there, fresh and with a sea bite to it, but I couldn’t breathe it. I leaned on the back of my car and tried to loosen my throat off.

  ‘Where’s Selina?’ I asked.

  ‘We think it’s better that she stays with us until this is over, in Lagos. It’s more comfortable for her there.’

  ‘Are you telling me she’s a hostage, Ben?’

  ‘A gilt-edged security, Bruce. This is a dangerous business. We’re insuring ourselves. Three million dollars is a lot of money.’

  This is what happens when you try to sting the stingers, I thought, the wasp meets the scorpion. We were going to get creamed.

  ‘I want to meet Viktor tomorrow,’ said Ben. ‘Arrange it for eight a.m. here. I want to get the ten o’clock back to Lagos.’

  ‘If you confirm, where do we exchange?’

  ‘Nigeria is very sensitive now. The military are too nervous. There’s too many people listening in Lagos. We’ll do it here. I have a brother with a warehouse in the industrial zone. The keys will be delivered to you once we’ve confirmed. It’s a big place for storing cotton seed, but it’s empty now apart from a few hundred tons. I think that will work. Anything else?’

  There had to be something else. There had to be something to slow this thing down. Ben turned and started back to the hotel.

  ‘There has to be a payment for this. I mean a fee. Viktor isn’t for free, and there’s me and Selina.’

  Ben turned fifteen yards off.

  ‘It’s normally the seller who pays the commission, isn’t it?’ he said, and disappeared through the glass doors of the hotel.

  He was right. What had I been thinking of? I knew what I’d been thinking of. I’d been thinking—‘Where’s my sting? I haven’t got one. The one with the big idea was in Lagos.’

  I went home and called Vassili and asked for Viktor, who wasn’t there. I told him to get Viktor to contact me. I sat on the edge of a chair and forced a beer down, which sat in a tight plastic bubble in my chest. I converted to whisky but it wouldn’t go down past the bubble, it kept backing up, hot and sour into my mouth.

  Viktor called at 10 p.m. I told him to be at the Sheraton in the morning. I wondered if Ben spoke French or Russian. Well, that might slow things down a bit.

  I didn’t sleep. I wrestled with the pillow, I fought with the sheet and then I went subliminal and woke up shattered and flayed as if I’d been pushed down the Cresta run in my birthday suit.

  Cotonou. Saturday 2nd March.

  At 9 a.m. I got a call from Ben summoning me to the Sheraton. As I was leaving, the hospital called asking me to pay a bill and pick up my wife. Things were moving so fast and out of control that I’d even got married without knowing it.

  Ben was satisfied with Viktor. I didn’t ask how they communicated. He said that if he confirmed at 3 p.m. I should go to an address in the Cocotiers district and ask for Mr White. He would be arranging the $3 million. He suggested I take a suitcase. I thanked him for doing my thinking for me. It annoyed him and I felt his radar lock on to me.

  ‘You might have heard,’ Ben said, ‘of a British businessman who was killed in Cotonou a week or so ago.’

  ‘Killed or murdered?’

  ‘I suggest you find out for yourself. It might concentrate your mind. His name was Napier Briggs.’

  I paid the bill at the Polyclinique and took Heike home. She was weak, too weak to notice that I couldn’t eat, that I was holding on to my stomach and bringing up acid, that my bowels were liquid. I put her to bed and looked for somewhere to hide $3 million.

  I went down into Moses’s apartment and fingered his few belongings and found myself missing him badly. But then I tried to think of him, and I couldn’t remember him, I couldn’t picture his face or imagine what he would say. It was different now and he wouldn’t be the same man again.

  I went into the
bathroom and found a room off that which Moses used to store some cooking things. There was a ledge above it which stretched out over the garage and became its roof. It looked perfect for the money.

  Ben called at 2.45 p.m. I hoped it was to cancel, to say that he couldn’t get the money together, that the whole thing smelled bad. But no. He confirmed and told me that I was going to have to pick up the keys to his brother’s warehouse from his office next to the Hotel Babo. He suggested I check the place over and I told him not to patronize me. There was a thick silence and I knew I’d pissed him off again.

  ‘Did you find out about Napier Briggs?’ he asked, and hung up.

  I called Vassili and asked him to have Mr K call me at 7 p.m. I drove out to Mr White, whose security man told me to come back at 6 p.m. I picked up the warehouse keys from Ben’s brother’s office and went downtown to buy the cheap suitcase I should have bought before I went to see Mr White. I could see Ben grinning and thinking, ‘What an asshole.’

  I went across the Ancien Pont to Akpakpa and turned off the main Porto Novo road into the industrial zone. It was another three kilometres of rough road to the warehouse, which was itself on a deep sandy track.

  There were two warehouses, each a hundred metres long with about ten metres of beaten earth in between the two. Behind them was some scrubland and another unfinished warehouse with just the concrete cage of the structure but no floors, walls or roof. The gardien pointed me to the warehouse that was more or less empty. I gave him the keys and he opened it up.

  There were four doors evenly spaced down each side. Each door was big enough to admit a truck for loading. The warehouse was a concrete cage filled with unrendered brick and had a steel-gabling structure in the roof supporting some corrugated sheeting. The few hundred tons of cotton seed in four stacks were in the middle of the warehouse. There were two doors at that point and about five metres between the stacks. There was light overhead too. I opened the door on the far side. There was a ramp up to the warehouse floor from a dirt track. I locked up and left.

  Mr White was ready to see me this rime. I walked up some outside stairs and into a large room on the first floor of the house. There were two large men by the door and both were armed. Air White was an American, a balding guy of fifty with gold-rimmed specs which put me in mind of the advertising hoarding for glasses out on the wasteland in The Great Gatsby— all-seeing but no feeling. I sat down on a chair about three metres from his ludicrously small desk and put the suitcase down. An Oriental was feeding notes into an electronic counter behind him and stacking them off into a old cardboard bleach box. A single netted bed stood in the middle of the room. Mr White clasped his hands and made his thumbs talk to each other.

  ‘I had a bit of trouble getting this together at such short notice,’ he said.

  I nodded and looked at his wrecked feet twitching in his cheap blue flip-flops. The phone went. He snatched it up.

  ‘Yeah, he’s here,’ he said and held out the phone to me.

  ‘There’s no need to count it,’ said Ben.

  ‘You’re always trying to tell me my business.’

  ‘You can trust Mr White.’

  ‘I don’t know how much you told him to put in there.’

  ‘Ask him.’

  Mr White held up three fingers. I gave him the phone. He listened for a few seconds and put it down. The Oriental boy brought the box to the desk. Mr White presented it to me. I picked out a block of $100 bills.

  ‘Most of it’s hundreds,’ he said. ‘The last four hundred thou’s in twenties.’

  I spot-checked the blocks of currency and added them all up. I put it in the suitcase and left.

  I drove home fast and put the suitcase in Moses’s flat. There were no messages on the machine upstairs. I sat on the edge of the sofa and waited. At 7.10 Mr K called. I told him I had the money.

  ‘I’ll call you at... four thirty tomorrow morning,’ he said.

  ‘Nine hours? You can get it together in nine hours?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It’s a Sunday, for God’s sake. I mean, don’t you need more time?’

  ‘Not at this stage.’

  ‘I need more time.’

  ‘You’ve got twenty-four hours from four thirty tomorrow morning. You haven’t got anything else to do, have you?’

  ‘What about my commission?’ I asked, not giving a damn about my commission, just trying to haul back on the reins somehow.

  ‘Go on,’ he said, and when I didn’t answer immediately he added, ‘but be reasonable. Percentage men piss me off.’

  ‘I’ll think about it.’

  ‘Just say it.’

  ‘Ten per cent.’

  ‘I’ll be looking for someone else to do the second deal.’

  ‘What about this one?’

  ‘Two and a half is fair,’ he said.

  ‘Fairness doesn’t come into it. If we were being...’

  ‘Maybe you should think about it some more,’ he said, and hung up.

  I pulled my scalp back with both hands and gritted my teeth to try and get some thought into my brain. All I saw was myself being charged down a narrow road.

  I drove to the office for something to do and picked up some beer from the supermarket on the corner. The gardien gave me a DHL slip and said there’d been a delivery this afternoon. It was something else to do. I cracked one of the beers and swigged it as I drove out to the DHL office in the Cocotiers district.

  They had a cuboid package for me. It felt like polystyrene with something weighty inside. The sender was Napier Briggs Associates from the Eko Meridien in Lagos. This felt like one of Ben Agu’s games. I drove back to the office and put the package on the desk and looked at it while I finished another beer.

  I slit open the DHL plastic envelope. There was a sealed polystyrene box inside. I stripped off the black tape and split the cube. I threw it across the room and, like an idiot, ducked below the desk. The damn thing was smoking. I looked to the door, the window, the balcony, and in those vital seconds it didn’t explode.

  What was smoking was now lying on the floor. They were two blocks of dry ice. There was also a clear plastic package. I picked it up and put it on the desk and studied it. Then I reeled back, stumbling over the chair and skidding on the polished floor tiles trying to get away from it.

  It was Napier Briggs’s mouth.

  Chapter 27

  That was enough for me. I didn’t want to spend any more time out in no man’s land—the unsupported pawn up for sacrifice. I wanted the backing, the cover of a major piece. I wanted to be one of those decisive pawns that stands out there and occupies a position.

  Ben and the chief had found out who I was. They had my office address now. I didn’t remember them knowing anything about me, which meant that Selina was talking, bargaining. I didn’t blame her. She was in a vulnerable position and an even more vulnerable position if the chief knew, as I now suspected, that Napier Briggs was her father.

  It was time to bring in a slogger.

  I called Gale. The houseboy took his time. The line crackled and echoed.

  ‘Who is it?’ she asked, in that glassy voice of hers when she was a little drunk and getting lippy.

  ‘Bruce. It’s time we had a talk. I’ve got something for you.’

  ‘Yeah? Like what?’

  ‘The dirt you were after.’

  Something broke, like that unseen membrane that can hold two lovers apart for what seems like a lifetime. Her voice oozed down the terrible line, rippled like honey from a spoon.

  ‘Then we should meet, Bruce, my darling.’

  ‘We should,’ I said, ‘and it had better be tonight.’

  ‘You’re in Lagos?’

  ‘No, but I’ll get there.’

  ‘At one in the morning, Bruce. That’s a border and some traffic you’ve got to deal with.’

  ‘Anything wrong with one in the morning?’

  ‘I’m not allowed out late.’

  ‘You a teenager?
’

  ‘I’m married.’

  ‘Go and play bridge with one of your pals and make a diversion on the way home. I’ll be in the Eko Meridien at one a.m.’

  ‘What’s so goddamn urgent? I mean, Jesus, Gray’s money’s not going to run away.’

  ‘One o’clock,’ I said and hung up.

  I phoned Vassili and told him to tell Mr K that 4.30 a.m. was not workable, that I would call later with a time that was. I drove home, checked Heike, who was calm and sleeping, picked up the floppy from between Seamus and Ted and, at 9 p.m., left for Lagos.

  Lagos. Sunday 3rd March.

  It’s only seventy-five miles to Lagos but you should never think of getting there in anything under four hours from Cotonou. It took me four and a half and I was lucky with the traffic downtown. I rolled into the Eko Meridien car park at a little after 1.30 a.m.

  I headed for the lobby but a light toot from a Mercedes 190 with its engine running stopped me. Gale was listening to the radio with the air con on and doing some concentrated smoking. I got in next to her. She was wearing a cream cotton strappy minidress with no bra. Her nipples had hardened against the material in the cold of the car.

  ‘I should do this more often,’ she said. ‘It’s been a blast for my confidence. I had guys hitting on me nonstop in that lobby. Three offers for “champagne in my room”. I mean, shit, that’s not bad for a little old housewife. Jesus, Bruce, you look like something Gray’s cat honks up once in a while.’

  ‘When you’ve put the strychnine in its food?’

  ‘You’re full of ideas.’

  ‘Yeah, and this is the best I’ve been feeling all day.’

  ‘You be careful. You don’t wanna end up round somebody’s roses.’

  ‘It’s the closest I’ll get to being in a bed of them.’