Blood Is Dirt

  A harsh grating sound of metal on metal shattered the silence of Ben’s last struggle. A man came through the sliding doors and walked swiftly towards the chief. He had a gun in his hand. A rope looped into the light from above. The gunman bent and scooped it up without breaking his stride. He fitted the loop over the chief’s shoulders and tugged it down to his hips. The rope, which disappeared into the darkness of the roof, tightened. The chief shifted. He still hadn’t had time to be astonished. The loop slid to his thighs. The rope tightened again. The chief put his hands out and fell to his knees. He was on all fours when, with a tendon-snapping wrench, his legs shot into the air as Carlo and another guy jumped from the stack of cotton-seed sacks holding the other end of the rope.

  The chief ended upside down about a metre off the ground, his robes hanging down over his head, his hat a flat blue circle on the floor. He reached for the ground with his hands and grunted thickly as the blood pounded into his head.

  Franconelli came in through the sliding doors followed by Gale and another man pushing a wheelchair in which was strapped a person who looked a lot like Graydon but with a clear plastic horror mask superimposed. In the lap of this spectre was some folded yellow PVC and a pair of boots with large steel toecaps. I’d seen a pair of boots like that before. My father had bought me some on the cheap for my first labouring job. They had special flaps that fitted over the laces and were kept in place by a strap and buckle around the ankle. He’d got them from a friend who worked in an abattoir. The flaps stopped the blood leaking into the boots and ruining your socks.

  Two more men came in carrying a brown plastic-backed tarpaulin. They unfolded it and dragged it underneath the chief. Franconelli flapped a hand and Carlo lowered the chief to within a few inches of the floor. One of the tarpaulin men took out a penknife and cut away the chief’s robes just leaving him with his trousers. He took some plastic cuffs out of his pocket and went for the chief’s hands. The chief grabbed him and attempted to haul himself upright but found he didn’t have the condition to do it. The man shrugged him off and cuffed the chief’s wrists behind his back. The chief’s belly, tits and jowls sagged to the floor. He was finding breathing difficult and was sweating heavily. Franconelli flapped his hand again and Carlo lowered the chief to the floor, where he floundered like an elephant seal.

  I took a closer look at the man in the wheelchair and decided it was Graydon, but he’d aged twenty years overnight. That smooth, tanned opulence had gone. He was sucked dry, wrinkled and jaundiced. His left leg and hand trembled. His chest was concave. When he bared his teeth to swallow, they looked horsey and loose.

  ‘Yes,’ said Franconelli, ‘Graydon likes to take his turkey cold.’

  ‘He didn’t come across with it?’ I asked. Franconelli ignored me.

  ‘Fifteen years,’ said Franconelli. ‘Fifteen years on cocaine. How much is he up to a day now, Carlo? We gotta be talking grammes of the stuff. Two heavy shots of heroin a day, a speedball or two at the weekends, freebasing, dragon-chasing. Graydon wasn’t Graydon. We don’t know where the fuck Graydon is.’

  Gale was wearing the same cream dress from last night. She was rubbing at some bites on her bare legs with the sandals she had on her feet. She wouldn’t make eye contact. Selina took some spray out of her handbag and threw it to her. It landed at her feet. She didn’t pick it up.

  Franconelli flicked his fingers at the other tarpaulin man, who took the boots and PVC from Graydon’s lap. Roberto slipped off his loafers, took hold of the PVC and shook it out into a pair of trousers. He put them on over his own. He fitted his feet into the boots and the tarpaulin man did them up for him. Franconelli stamped his feet. He checked his watch.

  ‘All of us here like to play games,’ he said. ‘People who play games like to win. If there’s a winner there has to be a loser. These two had me pegged as a loser. They took advantage of a situation. A personal situation. And they’re going to pay for that. Now I’m the winner,’ he looked at Selina, ‘and because of that you’re going to win.’ She didn’t know how to respond.

  ‘And what about me?’ said Gale.

  ‘I kept my word to you. You didn’t win because Graydon didn’t want you to win. The guy’s nuts. What can I say?’

  ‘Just get on with it, Roberto,’ said Gale. ‘Don’t give us any more of this shit about winning and losing. It’s a crock.’

  That jerked Franconelli’s string. He went over to her, the boots clicking on the concrete floor. He said something to her which nobody heard but it left Gale pale and a lot less brassy. Franconelli walked back on to the tarpaulin.

  ‘The Big Man,’ he said. ‘The great presidential candidate for this “great country of ours”.’

  The chief looked up at him from the floor with a big question mark in his face that he couldn’t articulate.

  ‘This country will never be great,’ said Franconelli, ‘until they cut out all the little people like you. The greedy, the corrupt, the stupid, the inefficient—the nobodies who make themselves into somebodies who rule everybody. You’re depraved, you’re dishonest, you’re vulgar. And you have only one ambition... to fuck everybody that comes your way. I despise you. I despise your stinking, dirty, noisy capital. I despise your country.’

  The chief broke in with something which nobody, including Franconelli, heard. The Italian jerked his head up and Carlo pulled on the rope until the chief’s head was an inch off the tarpaulin. Then he got down on his hands and knees, put his face up to the chief’s and asked him what he’d said.

  ‘What about you? What about your country?’ said the chief.

  Franconelli sprang up on to the balls of his feet and paced back to the edge of the tarpaulin. He had the white rim to his dark lips again. The carotid was pulsing in his neck.

  ‘The only thing we got in common,’ he said, ‘we both like football.’

  He ran at the chief with surprising speed and kicked him with all his weight in the head. The chief’s body swung on the end of the rope. Blood poured from a wound in the chief’s face. He roared like a cow in labour. The blood pattered on the plastic tarpaulin.

  Franconelli gripped the chief’s legs to still him. He bared his teeth. His tongue protruded, bigger than a snake’s tail, and with frenzied brutality, he kicked him to death. I didn’t watch. The sound of those boots on human tissue was terrible enough. It was over in less than a minute. Viktor watched it all, his eyes unblinking as if perhaps he’d seen this kind of thing before. Maybe even done it.

  Carlo lowered the chief into the appalling quantity of thick, gelatinous blood that had emptied from his body. Franconelli stepped back. One of the tarpaulin men came forward and cut him out of his trousers and then out of the boots. He stepped into his loafers again and walked off the tarpaulin. They loosened off the rope around the chief’s ankles and rolled him into the middle of the tarp. Viktor appeared and helped them move Ben next to the chief. Then they rolled everything up in the tarpaulin and it took the four of them to carry it out.

  Gale was sitting on the floor with her head between her knees. There was a large patch of vomit around her. Selina was shaking and white. Franconelli stood in front of her at a distance of three feet. He didn’t look like a man who was in love any more, and he’d just executed a demonstration of ruthlessness that no woman, no human being, could stomach. Graydon was wheeled out of the warehouse. Selina glanced over Franconelli’s shoulder at the passing Graydon. Then went back to the impassive heavy features of the Italian.

  ‘You killed my father,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t kill people,’ said Franconelli, reminding us what we hadn’t just seen.

  ‘Her father was Napier Briggs,’ I shouted across the warehouse.

  ‘You can shut the fuck up too,’ he said brutally. ‘I found that out for myself this morning. Got a call from Naples telling me who Mrs Aguia used to be. I ask you to fucking do something for me and you lie in my face.’ He spat sideways without looking, without taking his eyes off Selina.


  ‘Why did you have to kill him like that?’

  ‘The chief?’ asked Franconelli. He looked behind him. Carlo and the other men stood there in a state of respectful awe. ‘Family matters,’ he said. ‘You’ll find that.’

  ‘And my father,’ asked Selina. ‘What terrible thing did he do to you that you had to torture and murder him?’

  ‘You can’t ask me that question.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because if I answer that you’d have to go the same way.’

  The chill in his voice stopped Selina’s trembling. Franconelli turned his back on her. He looked down at Gale and nodded to one of his men who helped her to her feet. They left the warehouse. Two cars pulled away. A distant clap of thunder strode out into the night.

  Chapter 30

  Early morning. Monday 4th March.

  We crossed the Porto Novo road and the railway tracks at 12.40 a.m. and cut through some dirt tracks to another arterial road which went back across the lagoon to the Dan Tokpa market. We didn’t cross the lagoon but turned right and headed towards Vassili’s house. Selina held on to my arm as if she was going to fall off a cliff. We drove into Vassili’s yard.

  ‘Qu’est-ce que nous faisons ici?’ I asked Viktor, who didn’t answer but got out of the car and went into the house.

  Vassili came out with a bottle of vodka in his hand and some shot glasses on the end of his fingers. He set them on the bonnet and poured. We knocked back three apiece. Then Vassili and Viktor, speaking in Russian constantly, unloaded the product and put it into a garage in which a thirty-watt bulb was barely lighting the place. Vassili called me into the garage and put a meaty arm around my shoulders. He gripped my left bicep hard with his other hand.

  ‘Don’t run away,’ he said.

  ‘Do I need to?’

  ‘Take a look at this.’

  Viktor dropped to his haunches and snapped the catches on one of the plastic nuclear containers. He flicked up two metal handles and eased a metal inner case out of the foam-lined plastic sleeve. Two keys were required to unlock the case. He took them out of the briefcase and fitted them into the locks.

  ‘That’s far enough, Viktor,’ I said.

  ‘A small lesson,’ said Vassili, ‘in radioactivity.’

  Viktor turned the keys simultaneously. I stiffened. Vassili gripped me harder. Viktor lifted off the lid.

  ‘For Christ’s sake,’ I said. ‘What the hell is he...’

  Viktor picked up a dark-red slab from the top of the container.

  ‘Your first lesson on radioactivity,’ said Viktor, in English.

  ‘Plasticine is not radioactive,’ said Vassili, and roared with laughter.

  I turned to Selina who was leaning against the door of the garage with her ankles crossed, smoking and sipping another shot of vodka.

  ‘You see,’ said Vassili, ‘Africans think that they live in the only Africa. But Russia is Africa times two. Russia is white Africa.’

  ‘Was this your idea?’ I asked Selina. She nodded. ‘And you didn’t think it was a good idea to tell me.’

  ‘You wouldn’t have agreed.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I couldn’t force you. You had to be forced.’

  ‘And what if Franconelli hadn’t turned up tonight? What if he’d decided to leave us in it once he knew who your father was? What would we have done then?’

  ‘You going to Franconelli nearly fucked the whole thing up. This deal was supposed to be the smooth one. It was the next where things were going to go wrong. Still, three million dollars isn’t bad for a night’s work. Two nights for six million would have been better but...’

  ‘You didn’t get your murderer,’ I said.

  ‘That’s true,’ she said, and turned her back on me to look into Vassili’s yard of cars, ‘but what can you do against the mafia? We were lucky to get out of there. What do you think he meant by “family matters”? “Matters of the family” or “family is important”?’

  ‘You decide,’ I said. ‘It’s not an evening that’s going to go down in the Book of Deftness and Witty Repartee.’

  ‘Why do you think he had to kill him in front of us... like that, with his own feet, for Christ’s sake?’

  ‘You’re not feeling blabby, are you?’

  ‘Just to scare us?’ she asked.

  ‘What do you think his men thought of him afterwards?’

  She nodded, turned the corners of her mouth down and smoked some more.

  ‘Where’s the money?’ asked a voice behind me. A voice I recognized now as Mr K’s. Viktor had a big grin in his beard, a long black wig on his head and a gold ring on the third finger of his right hand.

  ‘Is he the Kazakh bastard?’ I asked Vassili.

  ‘No, no,’ said Vassili, grinning. ‘He work in plutonium reprocessing. It’s true.’

  ‘Have you got it?’ asked Viktor again.

  I looked at Vassili. He looked blank, sweaty.

  ‘Answer him,’ he said. ‘There’s no harm in answering him.’

  ‘Yeah, I’ve got it, Viktor.’

  ‘Then let’s go,’ he said, ‘and get it.’

  ‘It’s a million each, is it?’ I asked.

  ‘Between four it’s seven-fifty,’ said Selina.

  Silence apart from a buzz from the thirty-watt bulb.

  ‘So, let’s go,’ I said.

  We drove over a quiet lagoon, past a deserted market, through silent streets to my house. I unlocked Moses’s apartment and turned the light on. Selina and Vassili sat on the bed. Viktor stood by the door. I went into the back room and pulled the suitcase off the ledge. I took it into the room and dropped it on the floor in front of them. Selina leaned over and unzipped the case. She smiled and took out a block of money. Then the three of us looked up simultaneously, not because there’d been any noise, but because we all knew there was something bad in the room.

  Viktor had a gun in his hand. It looked like the one Ben Agu had when he’d come into the warehouse, the silenced.38. He pointed the gun at me and then at Vassili when some Russian language rushed at him from that quarter. They talked for a minute—fast and ugly words. I fingered the ice pick in my pocket but, apart from not wanting to risk my arse for the money, Viktor wasn’t exactly presenting me with his occipital bulge. At the end of it Vassili told Selina to put the money back in the case and kick it over to Viktor. He told me to throw Viktor the keys to the flat and to sit down on the chair. Viktor picked up the case and backed off to the door.

  ‘Don’t forget that girl you left in the Aledjo,’ I said.

  ‘She’s dead,’ he said, and locked us in the room.

  We looked at each other and listened to the Renault starting up and pulling away. Selina asked if we were going to do anything about it.

  ‘Like what?’ asked Vassili.

  ‘Kick the door down and go after him?’

  ‘Nobody touches that door,’ I said. ‘I’m not explaining this shit to Heike. We’re going to wait ’til Helen comes in the morning.’

  Nobody moved. It was 1.30 a.m. It was hot and airless with no window and the door closed.

  ‘Was he the Kazakh bastard?’ I asked Vassili.

  ‘I can’t believe he did that to me,’ he said, and we didn’t talk about it further.

  Helen let us out at 6.30 in the morning. Vassili went straight home on a taxi moto. Selina and I sat out on the verandah in the early-morning cool and waited for Helen to make some coffee and run down to La Caravelle for croissants.

  ‘I didn’t want the money,’ said Selina.

  ‘Nor me, not after that.’

  ‘You’re kidding.’

  ‘Can you see me explaining to Heike how I came by three-quarters of a million dollars in cash? And all that blood on it.’

  She nodded.

  ‘I lied,’ she said, ‘I really did want that money.’

  ‘To go with the other seven in Zurich?’

  ‘Yeah, that would have made the round ten.’

  ‘T
en if you’d had the gun. Eight if you were the sharing type.’

  She laughed.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ she said. ‘Silly me. I must be tired.’

  I listened to the messages on the answering machine. Bagado said that if I didn’t come down to his office this morning at 7.30 a.m. he’d have me arrested. The coffee and croissants came.

  ‘I’ll still keep my side of the bargain,’ said Selina. ‘You can have whatever’s in the bag.’

  I shook my head.

  ‘I don’t want it.’

  ‘You need it.’

  ‘Just give me the fee we agreed. I don’t need any more than that.’

  ‘You’re a sucker, Bruce.’

  ‘But not a bloodsucker, Selina.’

  I was at Bagado’s office for seven thirty. He was standing in his door in the blue mac looking agitated. We left immediately at Bagado’s walking sprint. We got into a police car at the back of the Sûreté and took off at speed.

  ‘What about my car?’

  ‘You’ve got a new one,’ he said. ‘Been busy?’

  ‘I’m on my own now. Double the work.’

  ‘Anything I should know?’

  ‘Just business.’

  ‘I thought so,’ he said, and gave me a sad look.

  ‘You know how it is, Bagado.’

  ‘I’m going to give you a break.’

  I didn’t respond because on the pavement outside the post office I’d just seen the girl Viktor had been with all yesterday afternoon and evening. She was hanging off the arm of a very tense-looking white guy and seemed very much alive. Viktor had learned something from Franconelli, or maybe he had it in him all the time.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, coming back to Bagado, ‘but I don’t know if I can return the favour.’

  ‘You will.’

  ‘If it’s about Napier Briggs, I finished with him a long time ago.’

  ‘And Selina?’

  ‘She’s still here.’

  ‘This might be something for her.’

  We pulled up outside the Hotel de la Plage, a renovated place downtown, with a beach which had a view of the port’s cranes and warehousing.