A Darkening Stain (20 page)

‘Franconelli,' he said, calm, clear, nearly sing-song.

‘Medway,' I said. ‘Is she with you?'

‘Not yet. The traffic's been bad,' he said. ‘Tell me.'

‘You didn't have to do that, you know. I was coming.'

‘You don't show me any respect. I don't show you none. Not you. Not your family.'

‘She's pregnant, Mr Franconelli. I'd appreciate it if you'd be careful with her. I'm coming now.'

‘Nothing's going to happen to her. You're coming now. That's all.'

He put the phone down.

Bagado stared me down to my core, which felt gaunt and haggard.

‘What do you want?' I asked.

‘You'd better go.'

‘What are you doing sleeping outside the door if it's not important?'

‘I wanted to speak to Heike.'

‘You're the only man she trusts, you know that? Including me.'

‘This isn't about that. I need money. A lot of money.'

‘Like how much?'

‘Haifa million CFA.'

‘Come with me and don't ask any questions.'

We went down to Moses's flat. I stripped off a half million from one of Daniel's blocks while Bagado sat on the bed.

‘There's more and I'd give it to you,' I said, handing it over, ‘but this is just about the dirtiest money you've ever laid your hands on.'

‘I'm not asking questions any more. Lose-lose, remember, and anyway, what you said about the forces of darkness ... maybe you're right ... maybe the light's not strong enough for this.'

‘What does all that mean?'

‘You were right.'

‘How do you know?'

‘My wife told me.'

‘I thought she was a Christian.'

‘But she's a Beninoise too. She knows the power of Voudoun when she sees it. She never dared talk to me about it. She's tried going to a doctor on my behalf, without telling me, but the medicine was too strong.'

‘Or the money too weak?'

‘
C'est ça
,' said Bagado, managing a smile.

I told Bagado about Daniel, about the little-girl bordello outside Contonou and the schoolgirls in a hideout somewhere in the lagoon system before shipment to Lagos. He swallowed hard and took the half million out of his pocket and looked at it in the dim light of Moses's room. For a moment I thought he was going to give it back, the stuff too tainted, but he just nodded and rerolled it and put it in his mac.

‘This should do the trick. Strong money,' he said, trying to brighten himself. ‘You see how I'm changing, Bruce?'

‘I can see how you're going to win.'

‘I don't think so,' he said.

I turned the light off and locked up. I swung myself behind the Peugeot's steering wheel. Bagado opened the gates.

‘What is all this lose-lose stuff?' I asked.

He shrugged as I reversed past him.

‘You'd better stay away from me unless you need more money,' I said. ‘I think there are some bad things going to happen.'

‘Bad things have already happened and will carry on happening,' he said. ‘I'll be here when you need me.'

I pulled out into the street. Bagado closed the gates. I leaned out across my elbow.

‘Are you going to bust up that bordello?' I asked.

‘I don't think it's going to be as easy as that. Not yet.'

I left him, hands jammed into his pockets, his head turned
sideways, looking off into the night as if he was expecting to be followed. I gunned the Peugeot to Sekou Touré, took a right down to the cathedral, ran the red light and crossed the lagoon on the Porto Novo road to Lagos, where I tried to wring a dew drop of hope out of Bagado's ‘not yet'.

It was fast going to the border and I was through all that in half an hour and a few thousand. The fifteen or so roadblocks on the Badagri/Lagos stretch took some time but I cruised on to the Expressway into the city at a cooling fifty m.p.h. which was a miracle. The traffic situation even at 3 a.m. could be as bound up as a cancerous bowel.

It was a lava crawl across the bridge on to Lagos Island. The place never changed, still stank because the rubbish was never collected but left to accumulate and degrade under the violent rains and triturating heat. At least there wasn't the stench of putrefaction you sometimes got from bodies floating in the harbour and nobody shoved a shotgun up my nose, took my all and blew my face off anyway. Lagos could be like that.

I crossed Five Cowrie Creek on to Victoria Island, through embassy land and into the smart residential zone where piefin-gering businessmen, politicians and customs officials snuggled together. Franconelli lived in a secure street, one with armed guards at both ends with radio phones and visitor lists. They let me through and down to Franconelli's oversized pillbox of a house. One of those structures that hadn't been built but poured. The gateman made a show of opening the armour-plated gates and I did my bit by tipping him extra.

I drove up the short driveway. No light came on in the barred and shuttered house. I felt a sense of doom stronger than those night frights that thump you awake into the black freezing roar of the first leg to hell, but somehow I didn't think I was going to get the reprieve of finding it was just lousy air con.

The doom wasn't just because of Franconelli. Heike was in this now. The Italian's move had been shrewd and calculated for maximum damage. He'd done his research. Heike would not
forgive this easily, being taken off the streets by the mafia, for God's sake. I could feel the hurricane building. What I didn't know was that this was the least of my problems. When I look back on that moment I gave myself, parked outside Franconelli's house in my dark, heat-racked bubble, I realize it was a final moment. The last seconds before any residual innocence, any smattering of the real childhood stuff, finally burnt out.

A crack of light appeared at the front door and a figure. I shouldered my carcass out of the Peugeot and went to meet it. The figure moved to let me past, the steel door was thicker than a ship's bow. One of Franconelli's boys shut it behind me. We didn't say anything. These guys never do. I followed his short, wide frame up the stairs to where Franconelli kept his office for security reasons. I looked at the muscles working in the man's legs and banished my last wincing recall of Marnier's machete at work to submerge myself in the lie. The bigger lie that was going to save my hide.

The guy let me into the harsh, neon striplit office and shut himself out of it. Heike was sitting on the sofa, legs crossed, foot nodding, a finger in her mouth. The only thing keeping her from smoking was the concentration required to distil her anger down to one hundred per cent pure.

Roberto Franconelli was parked up behind his desk to the right of his computer. He was wider than I remembered, his head bigger, the jowls jowlier from the weight of his concerns, even his wire hair looked heavier. He looked at me with his dark, charcoal-smudged eyes, sleep not the sweet visitor it had been since his wife and daughter died. He wore a long-sleeved white shirt with cuffs pinched by heavy gold studs, no tie, his neck at his throat ageing him. His hands were clasped, a thick finger tapped a signet ring. It didn't look as if there'd been much chitchat.

I went to kiss Heike and was given the back of her head. Franconelli nodded me into a chair in front of his desk. I sat down with Heike still in my peripheral vision but my eyes fixed
on the Italian's mouth, the dark, full-lipped mouth which went white-rimmed with anger.

‘Tell me,' he said, leaning forward, so that I knew why we were in the striplit neon. He wanted to see every facial nuance.

‘I don't think there's any need for my wife to be in the room.'

‘I'm not your wife,' said Heike. ‘He keeps saying that...'

We both looked at her.

‘... but I'm not.'

‘Tell me,' said Franconelli. ‘From what you said to me on the phone you've got nothing to hide, not from me, not from your ... from her.'

‘I don't think this is woman's talk, that's all.'

‘Fuck you,' said Heike. ‘These people dragged me out of my car at gunpoint, Bruce. Did you hear that? Gunpoint. That's not women's talk either. So you've involved me and I want to know what this is all about. Now tell him and let's get the hell out of here.'

Silence.

‘Maybe you should give her your trouser, she gonna talk like that,' said Franconelli, smirking.

I leaned an elbow across his desk and bolted my eyes on to his.

‘I'm not saying a word while she's in the room.'

A spear of light traversed my vision from left to right, the noise, louder than a shotgun blast, span me. The desk, PC, wall, ceiling, Heike's feet, the rug on the tiled floor flashed through my head. I lay still and blinked at the clawed feet of the desk and registered that Franconelli had swiped me off my perch. A handful of my hair was grabbed from above and I found myself looking at Roberto's raised hand and white-rimmed mouth. He slapped me a tearing backhander across the face and my mouth flooded metallic and warm.

‘By dawn, maybe ... just maybe you gonna understand the word respect,' he said. ‘I don' care about your woman. You know
what I mean? I will hit you in front of your woman. You will talk to me in front of your woman. You will give
me
respect.'

He dropped my head. I got up on all fours and crawled up the corner of the desk and back into my chair. Heike was moulded to the sofa now, her hand up to her mouth, eyes wide and unblinking. The violence up and running, close to, and real. It had rubbed some of the brass off her, taken the blade off her edge. My ear was ringing hot, and my lip torn and fat. I rolled my head on my neck, a crick in there from the first slap, and started.

I got as far as sitting outside the Hotel du Port, waiting to go in and find Marnier, when Franconelli stopped me and said he didn't want diagrams, he wanted oil paintings. I started again, this time I threw in the stuff about the sausage-stuffed pastry, the cold Possotomé. He nodded me on, watching me all the while, careful as a pro poker player. He asked me to go over things occasionally, let other things drift. He liked the Australians, what they said about Marnier's face. Heike didn't. He was interested in what we ate. Heike wasn't. He was mesmerized by my description of the waitress, Adèle. So was Heike. Her legs twisted so tight her toes went white.

The screw turned in the room. The air-conditioned air didn't feel so conditioned. The glare from the neon shot my eye whites to blood. Franconelli was crouched, his chin not far from the desk, looking up into my skull, waiting for it.

I told him about the house, the Togolese car arriving, the heavy trunk the driver and I put in the house, the 5000 CFA for the man's trouble, his leaving, the drink with Marnier, what we talked about and then his going to bed.

‘And you didn't go to bed?' asked Franconelli.

‘I was too nervous. I told Marnier I was going back to the Auberge for a drink.'

‘With the waitress, Adèle? Like you said you would before?'

‘That's right. And I wanted to see if Gio and Carlo were out there. I hadn't seen them all day. And anyway, even if I didn't see
them it was none of my business what they wanted to talk to Marnier about. I didn't need to be there. I didn't
want
to be there.'

‘But Marnier let you go?' he asked, frowning.

‘Why shouldn't he?' I asked, feeling a chasm starting to open.

‘What was in the trunk?'

‘I told you, it was gold. He didn't make it clear where it had come from. I put it to him that it was illegal mining...'

‘That's the point. You left him on his own with the gold. He asks you down there as his bodyguard and you leave him with a trunk full of the stuff under the bed.'

‘Wrong. I was his
driver.
I was never his bodyguard. He didn't tell me we were going to pick up gold. He said he didn't want Carole to have to drive him down there. And look at me. I don't carry firearms. I'm not violent. What use am I to him as a bodyguard?'

‘Did
he
have a gun?'

‘He might have. In the holdall. I didn't see it, if he did.'

‘So you went to the Auberge.'

‘I drank beer with Adèle. We watched the Australians playing with petrol bombs in the bonfire on the beach.'

‘What did you talk about?'

I shot a quick glance at Heike. She was riveted. Franconelli saw it too.

‘We talked about England, not much. She'd been on the road for a year and a half. I haven't seen the place in five. We talked about Africa, the Sahara, about the big open spaces in the desert ... we talked about the ground.'

‘The
ground?
said Franconelli.

‘This might not be something you know about Africa, Mr Franconelli. The earth has its own pulse. You can lie on the ground and feel its energy, the force of nature...'

‘Yeah?' he said. ‘You're right. I wouldn't know that. I sleep on a bed, on the floor, in a house like normal fucking people do.'

He leaned back and looked across at Heike. He didn't quite understand what was in her face. To me it was as if it was carved there in her bark. Betrayal. She felt betrayed by the intimacy, our intimacy, that I shared with another woman. It interested Franconelli. He couldn't take his eyes off her and I knew I was winning, had that hook firmly in his gullet, but Jesus Christ, what a cost.

‘So you had your conversation about the
ground.
Then what?'

‘We bought a couple of bottles of beer and went for a walk down the beach.'

Franconelli got it then. He saw what was dropping through Heike, what that look had meant. He turned back to me. His tongue went right to left, taking the relish off his lips.

‘How far?' he asked.

‘Quite a long way. Beyond the hotel and campsite. Way into the dark. I remember a graveyard off behind the palms.'