A Darkening Stain (25 page)

‘They suffocated.'

‘I thought we knew that already.'

‘It's been confirmed.'

‘That doesn't sound very interesting. What about the fresh timber?'

‘The postmortem budget for stowaways doesn't extend to minute examination of lung tissue to find toxic and volatile traces.'

‘So we'll never know?'

‘We'll never know,' he said, and looked out of the window with the bland face of a man who's added another blank to his ignorance.

At the Sûreté I was taken down into the basement where a jailer uncuffed me and told me to strip to my underpants. He put his hands down there, up under my balls, and came out with the roll of money. He nodded at me and put it in his pocket. He picked up a truncheon and walked me down a long corridor of cells to a door at the end. He put the key in the lock, readied the truncheon, opened the door and pointed me in.

It was like walking into a sick animal's pen, or up its arse, more like. The heat was double what it was outside and the stink of shit as strong and thick as if they were burning it. I coughed back the gag that rose in my throat. I had time to see four men sitting with their backs to the walls, all of them naked with their eyes screwed up to the light. Two bodies lay on the floor. The door shut behind me.

The floor was wet and slippery. All the men in the room were coughing. I found a wall. It was wet too, dripping with what felt like recently spat mucus—bubbly, slimy. I trod on another body which groaned. A hand, hard and tight as a manacle, snapped around my wrist and jerked me down fast. My feet
slipped away from me and I landed on the point of my shoulder, my lips making contact with the sludge on the ground.

‘C'est un blanc,'
said a voice.

Hands went down my pants, rummaged my balls, the crack of my arse. I had a wild moment of panic that gang rape was going to be added to my CV, but that wasn't the African way and these men hadn't been without sex for that long. They were looking for the money the guard had already taken. They let me go.

‘Il est trop petit,'
said a voice close to me.

A few men managed a laugh.

I crawled to the wall and was pushed around to an empty section. The men fell silent apart from the coughing—Cotonou's high-water table oozing through the walls clogging the bronchials.

The mosquitoes whined. The sweat poured off me. I wiped the shit off my mouth, calmed down. Everybody in here was keeping something back for themselves. Violence was for another place. I brought my knees up, dropped my head and let the stink creep into me, become a part of me like another membrane until it didn't stink any more.

 

Friday 26th July, Sûreté,Cotonou.

 

At dawn the light seeped into the room from three barred slits fifteen feet up in the metre-thick outside wall. There were fourteen men in the room, which was four by three metres. Two open buckets were filled to the brim with piss and faeces. As the light came up the men who could stood. Four remained lying in the middle of the floor. They'd taken some heavy beatings. The one nearest me looked out from his one eye that wasn't closed and bloody. The eye said nothing to me. It had no fight in it, no interest. It was just hanging on in a face that was going to get broken some more.

Last man in, I was on shit-bucket duty. Then I was on cleaning up the piss and shit that overflowed from the buckets down the corridor. Later a hose was put through the grill of the door and we hosed ourselves down and the men on the floor, one of whom was moved, groaning in pain, off the drain hole.

Breakfast came. A calabash of thin millet gruel. We ate from the communal pot. The injured men were force fed by the others. Then it was backs to the wall again and think your own hollow thoughts, keep your strength for the questions and the beatings.

It was the middle of the afternoon when they sent for me. I was weak from the insufferable heat which had built through the day. The jailer cuffed me and took me into the toilet where he hosed me down. He prodded me up the stairs to another corridor where a solitary woman was working her way down, scrubbing the floor to a dull sheen. The jailer told me to get down on my haunches. He knocked on the door and rested his truncheon on the back of my head, telling me to keep it down and not to get up from this position. A voice called us in. I waddled in after him. My eyes at desk level saw a uniform. The jailer tapped my head down again and left the room.

Under the desk were some well-shined black Oxfords and a pair of legs in some dark-blue trousers crossed at the ankles. There was nothing in the room except the desk and the man's chair and the smell of lino. I was not comfortable. The crouch was breaking my knees.

‘You know why you're here,' said the deep and unmistakable voice of Le Commandant Bondougou speaking in French.

‘Is there any water?' I asked, and bang, the edge of the desk cracked me across the forehead. I went over on my back and beetled there until Bondougou called the jailer back in to right me. He told him to bring some other guy along and to wait outside. Now that I'd seen the huge, fat, sinister head—the eyes angled down to the nose that spread across his face as thick and as soft as a boxing glove—I got into a more sensible frame of mind.

‘You know why you're here,' he said again.

‘You think I killed someone.'

‘Tell me what you were doing the night before last from about eight in the evening.'

‘I went down to the Jonquet, had something to eat in the Restaurant Guinéen.'

‘Do you normally spend your evenings in the Jonquet?'

‘No. My wife's pregnant at the moment. She's not interested in sex. I was looking for girls. Clean girls.'

‘Did you find any?'

‘There aren't any in the Jonquet.'

‘Does that mean you went home?'

He knew things. I knew he knew things. I shut up. There was a knock on the door.

‘Attends,'
he roared.

I breathed in the refreshing lino, inspected the shiny shoes.

‘Did you meet a man called Daniel Ayangba?'

‘Daniel? Yes. A German guy sent him to me.'

‘Did you meet him that night?'

How did Bondougou know all this?

‘Yes. He took me to a brothel outside Cotonou near the lagoon. I looked at his girls. I didn't like any of them. They were too young. When I came out his driver pointed a gun at me and they stole two hundred thousand CFA.'

‘And after that?'

‘They drove off.'

‘What did you do?'

‘I borrowed a moped and went back to Cotonou.'

‘Where in Cotonou?'

The lino had been laid in tiles, square tiles. They were green with cream flecks. They offered no assistance.

‘Where did you go?' he asked again.

‘Home.'

‘You didn't go to the Hotel Paradis.'

‘Where's that?'

He wrote something on a piece of paper. The pen creaked across the desk, gave a dull thud for the full stop.

‘It's a hotel on the coast just off the Porto Novo road. You don't know it?'

‘I might do if you took me there in daylight.'

‘And at night?'

Back to the lino tiles. Nothing for me to say.

‘Face the door and read this out,' he said, giving me the paper. ‘Shout it out.'

Ça peut rester dehors,
' I shouted.

‘Entrez,'
said Bondougou.

Behind the door was the barman from the Hotel Paradis.

‘C'est lui, c'est lui,'
he said, as if he'd been paid.

The door shut. I turned back to Bondougou.

‘You were seen leaving the hotel. The barman heard your voice. You are white, tall, people don't make mistakes about you.'

‘OK. I followed Daniel to the hotel. I went up to his room, beat him up and took my two hundred thousand CFA. Then I left and went home.'

Bondougou nodded.

‘Why did you lie to me?'

‘I forgot the name of the hotel.'

Bondougou roared something incoherent. The door opened. The jailer rushed in and clubbed me across the shoulders. I went down. He started laying into me. I had a flash of the broken men lying in
La Boîte de Nuit.
The blows rained down.

‘Arrêtes, arrêtes!'
I shouted.

Bondougou called the guy off. The jailer righted me on my haunches and left the room.

‘You said you beat him up?'

‘That's right.'

‘How?'

‘I knocked him into the wardrobe, split his eyebrow, put his head through the wardrobe door, slapped him about a little.'

‘Was he still conscious when you left?'

I shut up again. No sense in going on about hitting him over the head with a gun which was still in my possession.

‘He wasn't conscious, was he?' said Bondougou. ‘You left him naked in the bath, his face beaten to mince meat ... barely recognizable ... then you shot him in the head.'

‘No.'

‘You've been positively identified by the barman. You've admitted you were there. You said you beat him up. Now I want you to admit you shot him and I want you to tell me what you have done with the gun.'

There was no way out. There was nothing I could say to persuade even a free and fair court that I hadn't killed Daniel Ayangba. I'd give it one more try and then I'd have to call on a friend.

‘Commandant Bondougou,' I said, ‘there's nothing I can say to you to make you believe that I didn't kill this man. But I think you know that I'm not a killer. I think you know that Daniel Ayangba was a pimp and in that line of business you deal with difficult people. I was there. I beat him up. I took the money he owed me...'

‘Did he have any other money?'

‘Yes. In a holdall. Maybe four million CFA...'

‘We didn't find it. Where has it gone? Tell me what you have done with the money
and
the gun. And tell me now or I will have you beaten again.'

Who said truth never hurts the teller? I'll kill him. It was time to call in the artillery.

‘We have a mutual friend,' I said. ‘I think our friend can help explain some things to you. I think he can help you understand my situation.'

The change of direction wrong-footed Bondougou for a moment. Mutual friends was not something he was expecting to have with me.

‘Who is this friend?'

‘Roberto Franconelli,' I said.

‘Franconelli?' said Bondougou. ‘What has Franconelli to do with this?'

‘I think you should call him. I'm doing a very important job for him and I think you should call him and let him explain it to you.'

I looked over the lip of the desk. Our eyes connected. Bondougou's were intense and astonished. A realization crept into them that perhaps he hadn't got me in the bag. Franconelli was not a man he could dismiss. Whatever Bondougou was doing for him, and I only knew of that one cover-up some months ago, he was taking some heavy cream. Bondougou left the room. The jailer came in and stood over me.

‘Ça va?'
he asked.

I nodded and clicked at the same time that the money he'd taken off me had worked. The beating he'd ladled out had left me barely bruised. He'd held back on the full meat.

‘Merci,'
I said.
‘je vais arranger quelque chose pour toi.'

He tapped me on the shoulder with the truncheon and smiled.

Bondougou was back in ten minutes. He bustled into the room in a nervous flurry, sent the jailer out and sat down, his feet working overtime under the desk. He told me to stand up. His slit eyes were blinking a lot, his finger and thumb up his nostrils thinking, thinking.

‘You spoke to him,' I said.

‘Yes, yes, yes.'

‘He explained things to you?'

‘Of course.'

‘Can I have my clothes back?'

Bondougou shouted out an order to the jailer whose footsteps retreated.

‘He told me he has sent you to
find
Jean-Luc Marnier.'

‘That's right,' I said. ‘I understand it's a personal matter.'

‘You must do something for me when you find Jean-Luc Marnier.'

‘Anything, M. Le Commandant, please, tell me.'

‘You must report to me before you talk to M. Franconelli.'

‘No problem,' I said. ‘Is there any particular reason?'

‘I want to speak to him. He owes me money.'

‘Perhaps I can help ... if he owes you money.'

‘Yes, but—' he started, and changed his mind. ‘Just tell me.'

‘I heard there was some trouble on a ship called the
Kluezbork II.
Some men found dead. Stowaways, I think.'

‘That's enough,' he said. ‘You can leave now ... but when you find him tell me before you ... before you do anything.'

Bondougou walked to the door and opened it. The jailer was standing with my clothes, about to knock. He was surprised by the turnaround. Bondougou took the clothes and waved him away. He handed them to me with a long reappraising look, a look which told me that the firm ground he thought he'd been standing on was on the shake now. It was an uncertainty I thought I could use.

Nobody would ever tell you that Cotonou air was sweet, cut with two-stroke fumes, dodgy drainage and an accumulation of sweat it would never win a clean city prize, but that day, beyond the Sûreté gates, it was ambrosia.

By the time I got home it was dark and I got the free-fall gut feeling at what was behind the doors. But the place had been cleaned up. Bagado must have stroked Helen into a stupor to get it done. He'd left my watch in the kitchen for me too, but no whisky. I cleaned myself up, put some money in my pocket and went down to the office, buying a couple of beers on the way.

The day
gardien
was sleeping on some breezeblocks. The night
gardien,
a Muslim, had spread out a length of cardboard pointing east and was preparing to pray. I nudged the day
gardien
awake. He looked over his shoulder at me like a dog in the stm who's not moving for no one unless it's a thirty-five-ton truck. I asked him if anybody had dropped by.