A Darkening Stain (15 page)

‘This isn't
au revoir,
Jean-Luc. This is goodbye. That's
adieu
to you because you need His help more than anyone I know.'

‘I think you'll find it's
au revoir.
; Bruce.'

I pushed myself off the table.

‘You need me,' he said.

I walked to the door and opened it.

‘You're going to need that gold too,' he said.

I left.

‘Don't forget to call the Hotel de la Plage,' he shouted after me.

I went back to the office and called the Hotel de la Plage and asked for Carlo and Gio. I was told they'd checked out the day before. I sounded surprised, left a message and my name and number in case they returned. Another round of lying had begun.

The thought of phoning Franconelli brought me out in a cold sweat, so I went back home and caught up on some sleep. Terrible sleep. Deep, traumatic sleep where dreams came thick and fast and combined hideously graphic sex with faceless people and, of course, with blood. In the final moments of this hell ride I found myself rutting madly with a nobody who I knew was Adèle, the sand of the beach smoothing my knees as I held the hips of her raised behind before me. We were snorting, like pigs troughing, and when I withdrew, the shaft of my penis was a bloodied stump. I woke with a shout, rolling and yawing in the sweat-drenched sheets and pillows.

It was dark. I was not alone in the room. Heike's smell was there. Her silhouette, vague through the mosquito netting, held a glass of water.

‘You should drink this,' she said.

‘Christ,' I said, wringing the whimper out of my voice. ‘What time is it?'

‘Ten o'clock. You've been wrestling with yourself since I got back a couple of hours ago. The noise you were making I thought you had a woman in here.'

There came a nanosecond of frost-brittled silence.

‘Six hours' sleep,' I said. ‘And I'm bloody exhausted.'

Heike came in under the net. I drank the water and sank back.

‘You stink of booze.'

‘The client bought me lunch.'

‘The gout's going to come back on you again and I'm not going to have any sympathy.'

‘I don't remember much the last time,' I said, a little more brutal than I intended.

She hardened on me but not for long. She ran a hand through my sodden hair.

‘Ugh, is that sweat?'

‘I think it might be Chablis, or a distilled version of it.'

‘You've got to stop this...'

‘Don't start, Mrs Clean.'

‘Ms Clean. It's still Ms Clean.'

‘Well, I can recall a few sessions Ms Clean has had in her time. I'm sure you could have got on a national team. The German one, maybe. Not the British.'

‘Don't be so brutish.'

‘What was that?'

‘Brutish. Not British. I said don't be so brutish.'

‘OK, I won't be,' I said. ‘Neither of those things.'

‘You haven't asked me how I've been.'

I felt stabbed by that, but rode it out and thought for one clear moment I might tell her the whole thing. Vomit it into her lap and lie back feeling clean and empty of the trouble. But I couldn't do it. Not to her.

‘Did you hear me, Bruce?'

‘How's it been?' I said, rubbing her tummy, my sweaty hands catching on her skirt material, awkward.

‘We're fine,' she said, and stood up.

She told me to take a shower and left the room.

I stripped and got under the shower and washed myself as clean as I could without flaying myself with the pumice. I stayed under, comforted by the rush of water. Heike came into the bathroom. I heard her clothes drop to the floor.

Something was missing.

The sound of her skirt falling, the flutter of her knickers down her slim legs and I'd get the prickling at the base of my spine, the weakening tingle in my groin as the blood started thumping down there. There was nothing. I was as flaccid as shop-tired celery. I faced the wall as she came in under the shower. I felt her breasts on my back, the nipples hard. She ran her hands up the back of my thighs, over my buttocks, over my hips.

I was in a panic. The automatic desire had gone. By now there should have been some roaring down there, the bellowing of a provoked bull sea lion with mating rights. Her fingers found me and I felt them question what they'd found. She turned me round and dropped to her knees, running her hands up my stomach, down my loins. Still nothing. She gripped my buttocks and the darting, flickering flame of her tongue gave me the first squirm of desire, the first draining moment.

I felt saved. Guilty but saved.

I pulled her up and she excited me further by refusing. Then she stood. She was ready and trembling, her throat and cheeks, flushed as usual. Another stab of guilt.

I lifted her off her feet, pushing her back against the wall, and eased into her. I thought I was ready now, thought I was back to my good self and went to it, but overkeen and frenzied so that I shot my bolt weakly and fizzled out to nothing. I dropped my head on to her shoulder and found myself looking at the vortex of water twisting down the plug hole. I let her down and whispered a lame ‘sorry' in her ear. She said nothing.

I got out. She stayed in and washed herself off. I dried myself, looking at her fogged form in the steam beyond the shower curtain.

‘Bruce?' she asked, and I felt a bad question coming. ‘Bagado called. He left a message on the answering machine while you were asleep.'

I was disappointed not to get the question. Sorry not to get a more intimate enquiry.

‘Did you hear me?' she asked.

‘I heard you,' I said, and lost her in the mist.

I called Bagado, who sounded burnt out, frayed at the edges. He wanted to speak to me, it had to be tonight and it had to be private. I said I'd be in the office in half an hour.

I was examining a wood knot through the bottom of a whisky glass and contemplating the nature of infidelity, infidelity of the mind. Wasn't there a president of the United States who said: ‘I've committed adultery many times in my mind but never in my body'? That must have cheered the First Lady no end. I had to amuse myself with this kind of thought to prevent the seepage of unhappiness, to try and cling on to that moment after Heike had told me she was pregnant.

Bagado barged into the office shortly after 11 p.m. He was clenched in his mac and stood in front of me, his forehead ridged and troughed with a deeper geological worry.

‘José-Marie is missing,' he said.

‘Your daughter, José-Marie?'

‘The nine-year-old. She's missing.'

‘Since when?'

‘Since four o'clock this afternoon. She didn't come back from school,' he said, knots tightening in his throat, the man unable to swallow, having to stroke his Adam's apple to get the lump down.

‘Is this...?' I started. ‘Look, you'd better sit down, old man. Get this out right. I'll start work on it now. Don't worry. But just take a seat for the moment.'

‘I can't sit,' he said, and began pacing the room. ‘Since we found the girl on the sand bar we've had reports of two other girls who've gone missing. A seven-year-old and a six-year-old ... again both schoolgirls, we think picked up on their way
home. José-Marie is the third. I think that makes it eight in total. One dead, seven missing.'

‘Did you get anything from the autopsy on the girl off the sand bar?'

‘I haven't seen the report, if that's what you mean. I'm picking up crumbs from anybody prepared to drop them. I saw for myself that the flesh was eaten away from the underside of her forearms, the palms of her hands and around her knees.'

‘What does that mean?'

‘I think she climbed a wall topped with broken glass. The fish did the rest.'

‘Any signs of abuse?'

‘She'd been caned across the back and buttocks. I suspect to show the others that trying to escape would not be tolerated.'

‘Sexual abuse?'

‘No, thank God for that very small mercy.'

‘Cause of death?'

‘Strangulation.'

‘What with?'

‘Bare hands.'

‘Jesus Christ,' I said. ‘Do you think they beat her and strangled her in front of the others?'

Bagado stood in the middle of the room and pinched the bridge of his nose, his eyes screwed tight to block out the horror.

‘I don't know,' he agonized.

‘Have you spoken to the parents?'

‘I'm not on the investigation team. I have been told to stay away from it.'

‘Bondougou?'

‘Still with a very close personal interest.'

‘Why haven't the parents been storming the police station?'

‘They have. They sent the riot police out to break them up.'

‘What does that say to you?'

‘Powerful people.'

‘Why do you think they're picking exclusively on schoolgirls? I mean, these are kids who will be missed. There must be plenty of street girls who could be taken...'

‘I think, Bruce,' said Bagado, a tortured plexus on the other side of the desk, ‘I think it's because they're more likely to have their virginity intact. You know the fear of AIDS is very great, but the need for sex in Africa, as you've seen with Moses, is even greater. Politicians, businessmen, aach!... You know how it is, Bruce.'

‘La culture Africaine.'

‘And now it's a dangerous culture.'

‘You don't think these girls are going to be exported?'

‘I have no idea. I cannot get involved. I cannot even get my resignation accepted. I'm locked in.'

‘Drink this,' I said, and filled a glass for him. ‘It'll help you think because if I'm going to help you you've got to give me everything you've got and all the direction you can think of.'

Bagado tipped the glass back. I refilled my own and his. Bagado sat down, retreated into his mac and let the whisky do the work it knew best. I started to ask questions but Bagado held up his hand.

Now
I
wanted to talk. Talking was like walking for the mind. I didn't have to think. When silence yawned the horrors started, the stitches of old wounds split, the pus leaked and the gangrenous stench of unhappiness flared my nostrils.

‘Bondougou's purpose,' said Bagado, just as I'd decided that drinking was as good as talking for the mind, ‘is not just to suppress this investigation and hundreds of others because of the bribes he receives for doing so. Although the money is an important factor, there's something else that's pushing him.'

‘He's just a bad-ass, Bagado.'

‘He wants to break me, Brace. He wants to break me as a human being.'

I started in again but Bagado backed me off with his hand.

‘This is not ... and I've thought about it very carefully...
This is not my own paranoia. When I first lost my job some years ago, or rather, when Bondougou sacked me, for telling the media about the unpleasant death of that young Frenchwoman, he knew that this should have made my life very difficult. I survived through your charity, leaving the Cotonou scene for a while to do that job in the Ivory Coast and then more work from you and, of course, Heike.'

‘Heike?'

‘She has been very generous too. So you see, he knows that he can't break me financially. So what does he do? What is the worst that he can do?'

‘Break you professionally.'

‘Yes. But this isn't just a professional's job. In the best policemen, as my old English detective friend used to say, there is a moral drive.'

‘The good versus evil stuff.'

‘Exactly. So what's the worst that Bondougou can do? The worst is that he can embrace me. Bring me back into the fold and then render me useless to watch the crusade trampled underfoot ... under the feet of his corruption. And
you
know ... I know, because you saw it on the
Kluezbork II
the other day...
you
know he is succeeding. These girls disappearing and now my daughter. This is breaking me, Bruce. I can feel myself cracking.'

He sat and reached his hand across the table. I took it. It was fragile, bony, each joint a sharp but tender pressure in my palm. He brought his other hand round and gripped the meat of my shoulder. He stared into my face with the eyes of a man who knew he was falling.

‘You're still young and strong. Bruce. I'm getting to be an old man with all this. You have to help me but I'm not sure how much I can help you. I'm confused. I've lost that ability for straight, clean thought. It's as if the wiring's burnt out. I can only get so far ... and then I think of José-Marie. I've stopped being a policeman. Bondougou,' he said to himself, letting me go, walking off around the room again, ‘Bondougou is winning.'

‘Are you telling me that you think that Bondougou was responsible for having José-Marie lifted?'

He stopped by to sweep up the glass and dash the contents down his throat, then he took two strides and hurled the glass against the wall with such force that diamonds of it rebounded and skittered under the desk.

‘That,' he said, ‘is the extent of my powerlessness. Bagado, the great detective brain, is reduced to throwing glasses.'

He brushed his hand across the larger and whiter dusting he had in the hair on the top of his head.

‘I've been walking in the Jonquet,' he said, setting off again, crunching through the glass, ‘and I heard some Americans talking. Peace Corps workers. They are under pressure. The US government is cutting spending. You know how Americans can talk so that you wonder whether it's English. These two were throwing up various situations: “win-win” and “lose-win”. At the time these things meant nothing to me. But now I see it. I am in a lose-lose.'

‘Lose-lose?'

‘You know that time we were heading north and I told you that Bondougou had recalled me to the force ... split us up? You told me not to go. You said I wouldn't just end up on the shit heap this time. I wouldn't just get fired. You were right. I underestimated your powers of perception.'