Blood Is Dirt

  ‘Room twenty-two,’ said Bagado. ‘His name is Martin Taylor.’

  ‘You’re not coming in?’

  ‘There’s a Mercedes been found on a dump out towards Porto Novo. The driver’s neck’s been broken. There’s two armed men in the back who’ve been shot and there’s two bodies in the boot. Bondougou’s sent a twenty-three-year-old down there to sort it out.’

  ‘He’ll need some help.’

  ‘And I know Bondougou doesn’t want me there.’

  Bagado’s wheels spun in the sand, gripped and he moved off. I watched him turn right round the back of the hotel and thought—Bondougou, a Franconelli man. I went up to room twenty-two before the hopelessness diverted me to the bar.

  Martin Taylor was a big, good-looking man, in a model way, of around thirty years old. He took care of himself. He was wearing loose, baggy jeans and a viscose short-sleeve shirt with a pattern thought up on LSD. He liked running his hand through his thick black hair and he shaved to a charcoal stubble.

  He sat cross-legged on the bed in a practised way as if he did regular yoga. I straddled a chair, rested my arms on the back, laid my chin on them and let gravity do what it wanted with my eyelids.

  ‘You look tired.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Bagado says you want to talk about Napier.’

  The name jolted him and a terrible look of loss came over his face. I knew why I was here.

  ‘You’re “Y”, aren’t you?’ I asked.

  ‘“Y”?’

  ‘You’re Napier’s new lover.’

  ‘New?’

  ‘You didn’t know about “X”?’

  ‘He said he had a complicated business situation down in Nigeria which he was going to resolve, that’s all. No Xs and no Ys.’

  ‘You don’t know David Bartholomew?’

  ‘No. Napier just left and I didn’t hear from him for some time.’

  ‘Like ten days?’

  ‘Yes. Then he called me, said he was in Benin, that it was nearly finished and he’d be back in a few days. We were going to Barbados. I booked the flights.’

  ‘Did he give you my name in case there was trouble?’

  ‘Yes, you’ve been difficult to get hold of. The gardien told me where to find Bagado.’

  ‘How long had you known Napier?’

  ‘Six months. We’d been close for three.’

  ‘You never called him in Africa?’

  ‘He called me that one time, that’s all.’

  ‘You know his body’s gone back?’

  ‘With his daughter, they told me. I didn’t even know he had one. I missed the funeral,’ he said. ‘Do you know who killed him?’

  ‘I know who bad him killed.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘If you wait twenty-four hours I’ll find out for you.’

  I took a taxi moto back to the Sûreté and picked up my car. I drove back home and got the videotape of David and Ali. I was just drinking chilled water from the fridge when I saw that guy again, in daylight this time, standing out on his balcony looking into the garden. I opened the kitchen window and I was about to shout at him when I saw what he was looking at—his dog taking a shit in the garden.

  I left for Lagos and had one of my worst trips ever. It took me ten hours to get to David Bartholomew’s house, by which time it was 7.30 p.m.

  I found a surprising situation there. The front gate was still manned by a watchman but there was nobody else in the compound—no gardener, no cook, no maid. The door to the house had been left open. I walked down a dark corridor towards a room at the back of the house which was lit by wall lights only. The central chandelier of the room had been disconnected and lifted off a hook in the ceiling. It lay on its side on the floor. A chair stood underneath the hook.

  David was slumped on the sofa in the living room. He was staring at an ashtray that had four burning menthol cigarettes in it. His lips and chin were wet. He blinked infrequently. He had a bottle of Red Label in one hand—a litre bottle half full—and a glass in the other. He drained the glass and refilled it, spilling a quantity on to his trousers.

  ‘Can you spare a glass of that for me, or is it all yours?’ I asked.

  ‘Fuck off,’ he said, and his hair flopped down over his forehead.

  ‘You don’t look as if you’re in any state to be repairing light fittings, David.’

  ‘Fuck off.’

  I found a glass in a cabinet across the room and a forgotten bottle of Chivas in the back. I poured myself a slug from it rather than wrestle with David on the sofa for the Red Label. I sat in the armchair opposite him.

  ‘You’re not going to kill yourself, David.’

  ‘What makes you think I want to?’

  ‘What’s the chandelier doing on the floor?’

  ‘Haven’t you heard what we buggers get up to?’

  ‘I’ve brought you your video.’

  ‘Send it to my boss. Sir George Kingsmill, British High Commission, 11 Eleke Crescent, Vic Island, Lagos. He’d be charmed. There’s a distinct lack of decent entertainment out here, you know.’

  The air con was on full blast but the sweat was pouring off David. His chair was wet from it. He squeezed the bottle between the cushions of the sofa and brushed it back. He found a hanky and wiped his face off. He looked at his trousers, which must have felt wet and said, ‘Fucking hell.’

  ‘Still care about your clothes, David.’

  ‘That’s all I have to care about.’

  ‘I found out about Napier.’

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘Franconelli killed him.’

  ‘The bastard.’

  ‘You probably knew that.’

  He snorted, and two jets of snot shot out of his nose. He found the hanky again.

  ‘What a fucking state...’ he said to himself.

  ‘Do you know why he killed him?’

  ‘I know everything,’ he said extravagantly.

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Ah, yes. The big confession.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘You’re not going to kill yourself.’

  ‘Course I’m not.’

  ‘I’ll make sure you don’t.’

  ‘Course you will.’

  ‘Now tell me.’

  He pushed himself up off the sofa and took an inch off the whisky in his glass and swallowed it as if it was nitric acid. He put the glass down on the table.

  ‘Don’t breathe a word,’ he said, bug-eyed suddenly and comical.

  ‘David, I’ve just seen Franconelli kick Chief Babba Seko to death. I’m not feeling talkative. Now get on with it.’

  ‘You see,’ he said, looking up to where his next length of bullshit was coming from and fumbling for one of the smoking cigarettes in the ashtray, ‘the toxic waste wasn’t an isolated problem for Franconelli. It was something he got into for his brother. He should never have done it. He didn’t need the money but the chief kept pushing him to do it, to use this land he had up there. The chief wasn’t in it for the money either. He just wanted something he could pin on Franconelli if the situation required it. Franconelli had a lot more to lose. He has building projects in the delta region and offshore. Natural-gas storage, floating jetties.’

  ‘The stuff you were giving him help on.’

  ‘Through Napier.’

  ‘Sure,’ I said, not really having to listen to all this stuff.

  ‘Franconelli had already put a lot of money in there...’

  ‘David!’ I shouted at him, tiring now. He stiffened. ‘I don’t want to hear about Franconelli’s financial problems. I want to know why he killed Napier and, if you like, I’ll help you. Get you on the right track. The chief and Graydon were close, weren’t they?’

  ‘They were working together.’

  ‘On the same projects as Franconelli,’ I said. ‘Information supplied by N. Briggs. They didn’t want Napier dead until they got their information so they agreed to move the toxic waste and give him th
e money he’d stripped out of his own company on the four-one-nine scam.’

  ‘That was my idea,’ shouted David, gleeful as a kid and nearly on his feet until the knees buckled and he crumpled back into the sofa.

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘I told him,’ he said, ‘I told Napier there was a way out. He’d brokered the toxic-waste deal so he was implicated and it sickened him. He wanted it cleaned up. I told him to offer the building project information I was giving him to the chief and Graydon in exchange for moving the toxic waste.’

  ‘It was in the chief’s interests to move it too. He could have ended up in...’

  ‘Of course it was. So there was another element to the deal. They would have to pay him money. There was some owing to Napier from Graydon and the rest...’

  ‘Up to the magic ten million dollars.’

  ‘...came from Napier’s company through the four-one-nine scam.’

  ‘You’re clever, David, aren’t you? No losers. Not bad,’ I said. ‘What happened to the money?’

  ‘The money?’

  ‘Why didn’t anybody show with the money in the cocotiers? Napier was going in there to pick it up which means he must have known that Graydon and the chief had the information.’

  ‘But Franconelli,’ said David, ignoring me, ‘Franconelli’s different. Nobody gets away from him. He wasn’t going to have Napier out there with a case full of Franconelli skeletons.’

  ‘The vertical hold on that pinstripe’s gone again, David.’

  ‘Eh?’ he grunted, refocusing on me several times.

  ‘First, the money—why wasn’t it there? Second, the chief and Graydon had their information so Napier was free to go and Franconelli, well, maybe he was cool about it too until he found something out... How did he find it out, David?’

  ‘Nobody gets away from Franconelli,’ he repeated to himself, and belched over his whisky. ‘There was nothing for Franconelli to find out. I don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re losing me on this, Bruce.’

  ‘I’m losing the man who knows everything,’ I said. ‘Well, let’s come at it from a different angle. I met somebody today.’

  ‘Nice?’ asked David, slipping into social ease.

  ‘A friend of Napier’s.’

  ‘I was Napier’s only friend.’

  ‘What about Martin?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Martin Taylor, I met him today. Tall, good-looking, thirty-ish. Says he was going to Barbados with Napier. Start a new life.’

  David changed colour. He motded to a yellowing bruise like a sky getting sick before an electric storm.

  ‘The mysterious fucking Martin,’ he said, with more venom than a puff adder. ‘The young mysterious fucking Martin.’ David stoked himself up, the booze heating his brain to boiling point in seconds. ‘You know, Napier without me, without my understanding, without my comprehension of what the fuck was going on here in Nigeria. Without me, Napier would have been lost. I made him, Bruce. I made him all that fucking money. I gave him the contacts. I did all his thinking for him. I did fucking everything. And now he’s going to leave me in this fucking shit hole, with these stinking worthless people and ran off with his great love. His great love. That’s what he called him. Shit. I was his great love. I did everything. Napier couldn’t have done anything without my brain.’

  ‘Why did you send him to me, David?’

  ‘You’d help him,’ he said, suddenly uncertain.

  ‘You mean Fd help you. I’d keep Napier away from Lagos, away from you where he could be an ugly problem, where he could turn up like shit on your own doorstep. I’d keep him in Cotonou where he could be killed without any messy inquiry.’

  ‘How could I know...?’

  ‘You knew about Martin,’ I said, cutting through him. ‘And you’re the man who knows everything... but only when you want to.’

  David sat forward and dumped the cigarette, which was burning his finger.

  ‘I imagine you and Franconelli have got to know each other pretty well by now, David?’ I said. ‘Or maybe it’s Roberto. Now that you’ve cut out the middleman. Gone direct. I hope he paid you enough.’

  David breathed heavily through his nose, the alcohol thumping around his system.

  ‘For what?’ he asked.

  ‘For calling Napier in the Hotel du Lac on his last night,’ I said. He didn’t answer. ‘When you told him he could go into the cocotiers to pick up the money and you knew he was going to get killed.’

  ‘He shouldn’t have been so greedy,’ he said, desperately. ‘If he hadn’t been so greedy he’d have been all right.’

  I threw the videotape at him. It hit him in the chest and silenced him.

  ‘Ali couldn’t punish you enough for what you’ve done, could he, David?’

  He looked at the tape which had fallen into his lifeless hands. He let it fall to the floor.

  ‘You don’t really need that now,’ I said. ‘Graydon’s as good as dead too. You’ve made Franconelli king, David. How did you kick it off? Did you tell Franconelli that the information he was getting from Napier wasn’t exclusive and that it could be with one little phone call? Jesus Christ, David, you gave Napier the idea and then you killed him with it.’

  David yanked the whisky bottle out of the sofa cushions and plugged it between his lips. His Adam’s apple jumped as he pulled on the alcohol, trying to get all that horrible stuff out of his brain. I tore it from his hands.

  ‘Don’t you be greedy now, David,’ I said, pouring myself a splash. ‘We’ve still got to talk about the money, and there’s Quarshie too. What was Quarshie doing over there? The engineer, for Christ’s sake. What was he doing driving killers around Cotonou?’

  ‘He shot himself,’ roared David, as if that had not been an option for him.

  ‘The plans he did for Graydon were the same plans he’d done for Franconelli, weren’t they?’

  David nodded.

  ‘Nobody two-times Franconelli, so Napier, who “came up with the idea”, had to die and Quarshie’s punishment was to take him to his death. His old university pal. I tell you, David, Napier didn’t need his friends around him, did he?’

  ‘If Napier hadn’t been greedy...’ he tried again, and looked up at me as if I’d confirm this to him. I gave him nothing back.

  ‘And talking about greedy, David, what happened to the money? The four-one-nine money. Graydon had the plans, he mentioned them to me when I commented on Quarshie’s funeral notice, so... You didn’t do that as well, David? You didn’t take the money as well?’

  David’s head dropped, the hair hanging from his head in rats’ tails.

  ‘It was my idea...’ he said, and let the words drift away.

  ‘How did it work, David?’

  ‘Quarshie gave him the plans,’ he said quietly, to the floor.

  ‘As the first part of the deal?’ I asked, and he nodded. ‘Then Napier told you about Martin and you sent him to me in Cotonou.’

  ‘And I gave Graydon the contract information.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I told him he didn’t have to deal with Napier, that I was the original source.’

  ‘And he paid you the four-one-nine money while you sent Napier to his death in the cocotiers.’

  He threw his head back and looked up to some greater power who was never going to be there for him.

  ‘No wonder Graydon took that videotape of you and Ali,’ I said. ‘You were going to be a very important man to him.’

  He picked the tape up off the floor and turned it over in his hands.

  ‘What’s the house doing in this state, David? Why are you pissing your brains away? Had one too many visits from your conscience?’

  ‘No. Just Carlo.’

  ‘Franconelli’s man, Carlo?’

  ‘I don’t know any other Carlo.’

  ‘What did he want?’

  David fell sideways on the sofa and sobbed, a jolting retch of a sob.

  ‘Did he explain some ho
use rules to you, David?’

  Tears rolled down his cheeks and nose as he nodded against the leather cushions.

  ‘I’m in it now,’ he said, to the sofa. ‘I’m in it.’

  ‘And just like Napier, David, there’s no getting out.’

  He folded his arms around his chest, brought his knees up and pulled a face as if he’d just been skewered. Then his features went slack, saliva escaped from the corner of his mouth. He was unconscious.

  I drank a good two fingers of whisky and arranged him so he wouldn’t drown in his own vomit. I put the chandelier back up on its hook and reconnected the light. I put the chair back in the dining room. I polished off another two fingers and washed the glass out in the kitchen. I drove to the gate, said good night to the watchman and headed back home.

  Benin. Tuesday 5th March.

  I slept for a few hours on the Benin side of the border, too exhausted to go on. An African woke me at first light, worried that I was oversleeping and might miss the best part of the day. He asked me for a lift to Cotonou. I told him to get in.

  There was a lot of traffic pouring into Cotonou at that time and a truck had shed its load, which slowed things down. I got home at 7.30 a.m. and only the thought of slipping into bed next to Heike got me to the top of the stairs.

  Heike was sitting at the table with a cup of coffee. She was wearing a light cotton robe and had her heels up on the front strut of the chair. The sun, which had just got up, was slanting through the windows and her dishevelled hair, lit from behind, looked golden. In my broken-down and shattered state I had a flash of certainty. It was something I wanted and dreaded at the same time. I leaned on the table with both hands. She was concerned. I must have looked fresh from a train wreck.

  ‘I think we should..

  She started and looked over my shoulder at someone who’d come through the open door behind me. I turned to see Moses standing there looking thin but grinning.

  ‘You’re back,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, please, Mr Bruce.’

  ‘How was the village medicine?’ I asked.

  He didn’t reply.

  ‘He needs some help,’ said Heike.

  I crawled to the phone and dialled Heike’s office number. I asked to be put through to Gerhard Lehrner.