A Darkening Stain (16 page)

‘Part of the problem with being a good man is that it makes you predictable. Somebody said that to
me
once.'

‘He's turning me ... turning me into something I couldn't bear to be.'

Bagado opened the door, leaned his arm up against it.

‘When I said that about you not just getting fired, Bagado, I don't think I was perceiving anything. I just didn't want you to go. You've been important to me and since you've gone there's been some falling apart.'

‘I know,' he said. ‘I've seen it. Heike and I have talked. We've talked since she told you what I thought of you. She
probably shouldn't have done that, but I understand why she did. I also know you're a good man and I know you will do the very best for me.'

‘I will, Bagado. But what's this lose-lose business about?'

He sighed and I thought he might be about to tell me, but he lost his energy. The talk just went out of him and without a word he left. I went to the door, but he was off and away and down the stairs. I crunched out on to the balcony in time to see his shrinking frame melt into the shadows.

‘I know someone in the Jonquet, Bagado,' I shouted down to him. ‘He'll be able to help. I'll find her.'

He waved at me without turning. He reached the streetlighting on Sekou Touré, looked left, turned right and was gone.

I slumped back into my chair. Lose-lose. Lose-lose. I'd never seen Bagado so low, so helpless, so stifled. That quality about him, that quality of goodness had dimmed to a candle flicker in an ocean. His children were everything. What had he said to me that first time? More children than trousers, that was the way to be. But lose-lose ... what did that mean?

I stabbed the ‘play' button on the answering machine, just to jog myself out of the lose-lose groove and got message after message from Bagado searching for me. Then a different voice. No name but an unmistakable inflection.

‘Call me.'

There was only one voice that could turn my bowels to water with a single amoebic order. Franconelli. It was 11.30 p.m. Too late. They were an hour ahead. It wouldn't wash. I had to call him. Tomorrow would be suspiciously late. I dialled the number and got no reply for a long time until an answering machine kicked in. I left a message, thought I was home free but someone tore the phone off the hook and cut the tape.

‘Wait.'

Some brutal Italian followed and footsteps retreated. Seconds ticked into minutes, expensive minutes. I fingered the ‘fast forward' button, wanting to zip myself through this patch of time, get out the other side of the nastiness. Then the phone was picked up.

‘Franconelli.'

‘Bruce Medway,' I said, and felt the tension wrap round my throat. ‘What happened?'

It came out as a shout, overcompensating. I didn't want to croak it. The static on the line roared back.

‘What happened?' asked Franconelli, as if he hadn't heard me ask it first.

‘What happened to Carlo and Gio? We had an arrangement. I organized a meeting with our friend. They didn't turn up. I called the Hotel de la Plage when I got back. They checked out yesterday. So what happened?'

More static. Voices in the ether squabbled.

‘You'd better come to Lagos,' he said. ‘Explain it to me.'

‘I can explain it now. I went out of my way to set this thing up for them. I kept them fully informed about where we were going. I admit I didn't see them on the day. I wasn't aware of being followed but when I tried to tell Carlo that he had to be discreet he gave me some shit about not telling him how to do his job, so I assumed he was out there. I did the job that was asked of me by our friend. I wait. Nothing happens. Carlo and Gio don't show up. In the morning we leave. I get back to Cotonou for lunch. I call the hotel. Nothing,
nada, rien du tout.
I get some sleep and I've been trying to call you for the last hour. So that's why I'm asking what happened. You don't have to tell me. I don't need to know. I just want you to be sure that I kept up my end of the deal.'

‘Come to Lagos.'

‘When?'

‘Now.'

‘I can't.'

‘You can.'

‘I've got some important work to do ... for a friend of mine. His daughter...'

‘
This
is the most important thing.'

‘Does this mean you don't know what's happened to Gio and Carlo?'

‘You come to Lagos now and make everything clear.'

‘I've told you. I'm not being difficult but I can't come right now, not immediately.'

‘No, Bruce. You will come now.'

‘I
will
come, but not yet.'

‘Now, you
stronzzo,
you will come NOW!' he roared down the line.

‘Mr Franconelli...'

The line went dead. I put the phone down slowly. Round One. He was going to be back with something bigger, have me hauled off the street, maybe, and taken to Lagos in a boot. Lose some weight that way. Or perhaps he'd get Bondougou to do it. We'd see.

I went out on the street and stopped one of the stream of
taxi motos
in the sodium night light. He took me to the Jonquet and the bar L'Ouistiti.

The girls were still there in their red cave. They bristled and shimmered as I walked in, all tongues and eye contact. I strode through and past the moribund guard into Charbonnier's inner sanctum. I buzzed myself in, the accountant giving me the swivel eye over his shoulder, and walked straight into the usual incense. Michel was sitting with his shins up against the edge of the desk, his joint held in prayer. I took the spliff off him and dowsed it in the tyre.

‘Are you moving in?' he asked, fitting his legs under the table. ‘Marnier's new boy.'

‘Is this his top job?'

He blinked at that, trying to compute whether he'd had enough toke to get over that depressing little thought.

‘I want to ask you something,' I said.

‘Me?'

‘That's why I'm taking it slowly, because I know how long you need to filter stuff through that sludge you've got between your ears.'

‘You know I don't talk about Marnier.'

‘This isn't about Marnier. It's your other specialist subject. Sex.'

‘You want some? You didn't have to come this far. It's all at the front door.'

‘What if I wanted you to supply me with a virgin?'

He laughed.

‘They're all virgins...'

I leaned over the desk and smacked him with the open palm of my hand across the side of his head hard enough so that he had to put a hand out to stop himself falling to the floor. He came back up looking more poisonous than a coral snake and I smacked him on the other side of his head, rocking him the other way. He wasn't so quick to come back up.

‘I can do this all night,' I said.

‘OK, OK, OK,' he said. ‘You didn't say it was urgent.'

‘Do you think I'd come into your burrow if it wasn't?'

‘Comment?'
he asked holding his head in his hands, the bells ringing in his ears all the way from Chartres.

‘Where can I find a virgin?
Une vraie vierge, Michel.
None of your shop-soiled goods.'

‘You don't look the type.'

‘What is the type?'

‘There are all types ... but you don't have the look.'

‘Maybe it's not for me.'

‘You'll have to come back later.'

‘Give me the name of the supplier and tell me where I can find him.'

‘Impossible.'

I hit him three times, bounced him back and forth like the rubber man in the rage room. His eyes went. His ears were red and throbbing. The full carillon ringing in his bonce. I sat down and oozed some more threat at him. He tore off an old sheet from his desk calendar and wrote the name Wilfred Agbabu on the back.

‘Nigerian?'

‘An Igbo.'

‘Where?'

‘He has a
friperie
business across the other side of Sekou Touré and a warehouse up north of Dan Tokpa where he rebales the clothes.'

‘Where would he be now?'

‘The bars.'

‘Which?'

‘Work your way through the Jonquet, I don't know.'

By 4.30 a.m. I looked and felt like a tranche of the stinking, black accumulation in the gutters and storm drains of the city. It hadn't rained but the pressure had built and the jauntlness had gone out of the whores' footwork. The dim yellow interiors of the bars down Rue des Cheminots barely lit the bruised purple night. Only God and the lucky voyeur knew what was going on out here.

I'd let 7000 CFA slip through my fingers trying to find Agbabu, but he was either very elusive or more likely a phantom. I thought I'd give it one last round, telling myself this was for José-Marie while the big emptiness in my guts tut-tutted that I just didn't want to go home.

I trudged the bars. Names flitted, amalgamated. A la Tienne, La Grande Joie, Bar Ravi, Avec Entrain. All exhorted fun, but the faces on the street weren't buying it or had bought too much of it. I drifted into a place called the Jouet Doux and got hit on the way in by 100 kilos of white man on the way out. I staggered back on to the pavement with my new friend hanging off my neck. I shook him off and he came at me, fists flailing, and I didn't have to reach too deep to find the ugliness to hit him hard in the flab he had over his liver. He went down on all fours, gasping, muttering to himself in German.

‘This isn't the place to get fighty,' I said, not giving a damn whether he understood. ‘Unless you like long, hot nights in a malarial stink hole. There's a wagon up the street full of policemen waiting for your kind of custom.'

‘Englander?'
he asked, looking up, passing a dog-sized tongue over his lips.

‘I can't say that in German. You'll have to live with the English version,' I said, and moved off.

‘Wait,' he said, and got himself up. I kept moving. ‘Wait.'

He came alongside and hooked a hand around my elbow. I turned and shrugged it off. He was a short, stocky guy who had to look up a long way to anyone. He passed a hand through his jagged hair and patted his face with a handkerchief. He wasn't drunk.

‘What are you looking for?' he asked.

‘What do you mean,
what?
'

‘Who then?'

‘And who are you?'

‘Someone with experience.'

‘The experience to come horizontally out of a bar?'

‘Yes, well, I went too far. They're not as understanding as they are in Thailand, don't you think?'

I twigged it then. A sex punter. I shuddered. Now I really was getting down and dirty, in the street mulch with the paedophiles and necrophiles, the sodomites and catamites, the flagellators and fustigators ... all of us having fun.

‘I'm looking for somebody.'

‘We're all looking for somebody,' he said. ‘But who for what?'

‘Agbabu. Wilfred Agbabu.'

‘What does he do?'

‘He supplies virgins.'

‘Ah, yes-s-s,' he said, his eyes alight with possibility.

‘You know him?'

‘No. But I understand the problem. Myself, I avoid all that. No exchange of bodily fluids.'

‘Is that your motto?'

‘I'm sorry?'

‘Nothing,' I said. ‘Good night.'

‘Wait, don't be so...' He didn't finish. ‘Have you tried the L'Ouistiti. There's a Frenchman there. He's very knowledgeable.'

I gave him a long steady look.

‘It's a bar up there...'

‘I know it,' I said.

‘I'm sorry. That's all I know, but...'

‘But what?'

His damp handkerchief slowed on his cheek and he fixed me with a gleaming eye. I realized he was going to share one of his proclivities with me.

‘You wouldn't beat me up, would you?' he asked, balling his little fist.

‘I'm saving myself for somebody else,' I said, and barged past him.

Michel's hophead guard had been replaced by two more responsible-looking individuals. I backed out and went next door to a bar called La Gloire du Matin and paid a thousand CFA to get myself into the toilet where I'd have paid five grand to get out. I found a back door down the corridor from the stinking cubicles and beyond it a beaten earth courtyard with a solitary, diseased tree, some broken furniture and three high mud walls. I got up on to the wall via the tree and dropped down into the L'Ouistiti's back yard.

Through a crack in the back door I could see the anteroom to Michel's office was empty. The light was still on behind the blinds at Michel's window. The man was there in his customary position, plimsolled feet up on the desk, spliff in hand, but he was not alone.

Marnier's claw was wrapped around a tumbler. They were talking to each other in rapid French with southern accents. Michel was reliving my visit, showing Marnier the
paf, paf, paf of
the beating he'd had to take. Marnier flicked questions at him. Agbabu didn't exist but somebody like him did. Michel didn't give Marnier a name, the man not interested in that.

A different opportunity was presenting itself. A chance to follow Marnier to one of his Cotonou hideaways. Something that might help me in my Franconelli negotiations. I was torn between getting ready to follow him and listening in some more to see how interested Marnier was in my sudden and inexplicable requirements. But then he threw back his drink and stood up and I got up and over the wall, through La Gloire du Matin and snapped up the first
taxi moto
I could find.

Marnier was on the same kind of transport, his chauffeur wearing the yellow numbered jacket of a licensed
taxi moto
driver. I noted the number. The streets were too empty for tailing and I was too tired. I followed as far as the Nouveau Pont and saw him turn left up into the northern part of Akpakpa.

I thought about going back to L'Ouistiti to thump the toke-bag for being so smart, but I'd used up my reserve tank of ugliness and anyway, the sky was a flamingo-pink in the east and the first fishermen were paddling out on to the dark lagoon. There was a moment's peace up there on the apex of the bridge, a moment when the air was nearly fresh with a saltine zest coming in from the sea. Then the traffic cleared its throat, the gears of the day ground through the synchromesh and the monoxide gargle began again.