A Darkening Stain (35 page)

I opened the Ballantines bottle, rolled the diamond of skin and fed it down the neck of the bottle into the formaldehyde. I asked Marnier if he had any bandages and lint and he nodded me to the bathroom. I got him sitting with a glass of whisky in his hand and strapped him up around the ribs.

‘Very regrettable,' I said.

‘What?'

‘That you've had to lose a piece of your hide to Franconelli.'

‘He was always going to have his pound of flesh.'

‘You got off lightly then.'

‘I'll be going now, if that's all right with you,' he said, easing a buttock off the table.

I pulled the towel off my head, stripped the apron off. I tried to think my vision straight but it wouldn't hold. The sweat came out of me, not like before in streams, but in fat ripe figs. The blood seemed to drain out of me and Marnier's voice arrived in my head from a long way off. I staggered back from the table and grabbed the back of the sofa and tried to get the revolver out of the back of my trousers. The room tipped. I fell back into one of the chairs.

I had the gun out but my palm was so slippery with sweat and the revolver so heavy I could barely keep a hold of it. I sensed Marnier advancing on me. Then my vision clicked and the fever rush backed off. I wiped my hand on the chair and fixed the gun on Marnier.

‘You're sick,' he said.

‘I'll be OK,' I said. ‘We're going to empty the boat now. You and I.'

‘If you're up to it.'

‘I'm OK now.'

‘You don't want a fever like that to get out of control, believe me. You want some quinine?'

‘I'm OK now.'

I got to my feet. The room held. Marnier was looking at me so intently I could feel his brain roaming around the back of my eyeballs.

‘You're not going to let me go, are you?' he said.

‘Let's get this done, Jean-Luc.'

We went back out through the kitchen and on to the balcony. Marnier eased himself down the steps, shaky, shock creeping in or maybe just some more acting.

‘You didn't tell me one thing, Jean-Luc,' I said to the back of his head. ‘You didn't tell me what you owed Bondougou that you had to get involved in a shitty piece of business like this.'

‘What makes you think I owed him anything?' he said, facing me at the bottom of the steps, backing off across the yard.

‘I can see you in the stowaway business, Jean-Luc, but little girls, sending little girls to get infected with AIDS ... to cure some fat cats who think having sex with a virgin is going to get rid of a virus like that. It doesn't sound like your kind of work. T. S. Eliot, remember, your greatest poet of the twentieth century... or was that just your one and only redeeming quality?'

Marnier stopped. He looked down and thought for a moment, then up at me in vague surprise, running his claw hand through his thick, dyed hair.

‘They're only blacks, Bruce,' he said.

Those words spiked me like a white-hot needle and found pure anger burning inside me with a blue-coned flame. I raised the revolver on him and that was the first time I saw it in Marnier. It leaked into his ruined face and eyes as if he'd suddenly felt the hemlock growing up his body. It was fear. I knew then that the power wasn't in the gun and I was feared because of it.

I shot him twice in the chest, watched the shots throw him into a large, muddy puddle in the yard, saw his legs trying to pedal him backwards through it, saw his hands clawing at his life escaping through the red blooming holes in his shirt. Then his hands dropped away and he was quiet, the water rippling away from him.

I knelt down. I suddenly had to get down.

I had to get down on to the floor and put my face on the ground.

Put my face on the cool African ground.

Thursday 1st August, Cotonou.

 

The rats were running the tunnels. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of rats were running the tunnels, scrabbling, seething through the black-blood sewer arteries, the blueblood storm drains, the red-blood runnels, running, running. Hot little bodies running, running. Squealy throats running, running. Scratchy claws running, running from the rains, from the huge rains that broke open the purple-black sky, that filled the city to the rooftops and flushed the half-billion rats into the ocean where they choked on sea water, rushed into the thumping propellers, drowned into a thick, cold, rat-fur sludge, twelve tails deep.

And the city was clean, scrubbed through, washed and the air was sweet under the blue-white dome. Music was trickling like cool water behind ears and stiff table nappery snapped in the bright breeze.

‘Jesus,' I said, ‘what is that?'

‘Bruce,' said a voice.

‘What is it?'

‘We don't know what it is.'

‘Is it spring?'

Something popped in my head like a decent idea. My eyes opened as slowly as the metal shutters on a Lebanese emporium. Vague shapes shimmered as if I'd been snorkelling without goggles. Edges hardened into yellow bottle glass, a clear yellow
tube into my arm. Were they filling me with urine? Were they taking the piss?

‘What is this?'

‘You're in the Polyclinique, Bruce.'

Heike firmed up in my vision.

‘Where did you think you were?' she asked.

‘Somewhere postmodern,' I said. ‘What's this?'

‘Quinine.'

‘How long have I been out.'

‘A couple of days.'

‘You're here.'

‘Are you surprised?'

‘I think I probably am,' I said. ‘Things weren't going so well, were they?'

‘They weren't.'

‘Did something happen?' I asked and reached out to her belly, her small round belly.

‘It's all fine.'

‘And you?'

‘I'm fine.'

‘With me?'

‘Even with you.'

‘That sounds like an historical turnaround.'

‘I went to Grand-Popo. Gerhard took me.'

‘Did you speak to the girl? Adèle?'

‘She'd gone travelling.'

‘Has Bagado explained something?'

‘They told me everything I needed to know at the Auberge. They remembered you, the big tall guy and the other one with the face.'

‘Le grand Marnier.'

‘They told me Adèle left with her boyfriend, a guy called Shane, who was the driver of the Australian overland truck. They said they never saw you again after you finished your meal and if you'd tried getting into bed with Adèle there probably
wouldn't have been much left of you. Shane, apparently, was a rock ape on testosterone.'

‘And Bagado explained the lie.'

‘He didn't have to. I was there. I saw Franconelli for myself and I don't want to see him again.'

‘Oh, Christ,' I said. ‘Franconelli.'

‘My mother's not coming any more,' said Heike, digging in her handbag, switching away from the nastiness.

‘You put her off after all that?'

‘Do you know what these are?'

‘They look like airline tickets.'

‘These tickets are going to take us from Cotonou to Accra, Accra to Frankfurt, Frankfurt to Berlin.'

‘And you booked the registry office?'

She smiled, leaned over and kissed me and slid her mouth round to my ear.

‘Go on,' she said. ‘Say it.'

I said it.

 

Monday 5th August, Cotonou.

 

The rainy season had ended. Nobody could remember a rainy season ending so late.

Moses, back to full strength, drove me down to my office. His T-cell count had stabilized. They'd decided at the agency's AIDS clinic that he had HIV 2, a strain peculiar to West Africa which didn't seem to develop into full-blown AIDS.

Bagado was sitting in my office, the bottle of Ballantines on the desk in front of him filled with its grotesquerie. His arm was in a sling but he was still wearing the mac, the holes lovingly repaired. José-Marie was out on the balcony shouting at the boys in the tailor's shack, Bagado not letting her out of his sight.

I ordered coffees and croissants and picked up the phone and dialled the Lagos number that always got me in a sweat.

‘Mr Franconelli, please.'

‘Who's that?'

‘Bruce Medway.'

‘Hold the line.'

‘Hello.'

‘Mr Franconelli?'

‘No.'

‘Is he there? I'd like to talk to him.'

‘What you want to say?'

‘It's between me and him, a personal thing.'

A hand went over the receiver. Things were discussed in Italian. The voice came back on.

‘Mr Franconelli died two days ago.'

‘He died?'

‘A heart attack.'

‘Please accept my condolences. I had no idea.'

‘Grazie.'

I hung up and looked across at Bagado, who was studying me carefully.

‘He died,' I said.

‘I heard you.'

‘Heart attack.'

‘Lucky.'

‘It's about time I had some of that,' I said. ‘Maybe you'll get lucky. Doesn't it come in threes?'

‘I thought that was death.'

‘How does luck come?'

‘In small timely squirts.'

‘Maybe you'll get to be Commandant after all this. You're a hero now.'

‘I don't think so,' he said. ‘This hero can't front enough money to hold a job like that down.'

‘Go and see your medicine man again. He did all right by you the last time.'

‘I thought he was a little too strong on the black stuff. If I get him on to something like this, I'll end up the Prince of Darkness.'

‘That's only two ranks above Commandant, isn't it?'

He laughed. The coffees arrived.

‘The problem with voodoo is that it's a double-edged sword,' he said. ‘My medicine man gave me the power to destroy monsters like Bondougou and Madame Sokode but there was another one in Nigeria who was creating monsters by offering AIDS cures through having sex with virgins.'

‘The Nigerian football team won the Olympic gold medal too,' I said. ‘Have you thought about that?'

‘That's just because they're good at football, Bruce.'

He picked up the whisky bottle.

‘What are you going to do with this?' he asked.

‘Chuck it,' I said. ‘I don't want to stagger in here one night and drink it by mistake.'

Bagado handed me the bottle. The few times I'd looked at this macabre souvenir I'd replayed those last moments of Marnier's life in the yard, tried to relive it to see if Jean-Luc was lying or, as always, he knew exactly what he was doing. This time I thought nothing and held it up to the window and watched the flap of Marnier's skin swirl behind the brown glass and the leery harlequin slipped into the light, and twisted and scrolled in the slow liquid.

 

1

 

11.15 P.M., FRIDAY 9TH MARCH 2012

 

Covent Garden, London

 

 

The leaving party's last team effort: climb out of the tapas bar basement, up through the bottle-neck of the spiral staircase, everyone off their faces. Alyshia, their twenty-five-year-old manager, caught her heel in the grid of the cast iron steps. The scrum below, sensing a blockage, surged upwards to force it out. The rubber on Alyshia's expensive heel was ripped clean off as she was belched out of the stairwell, the room above reeling as the ragged band staggered out of the bowels. Bar stools rocked as they ricocheted through the savage crowd of baying drunkards, voices pitched louder than traders in the bear pit.

They were out in the street, Alyshia clip-clopping around in Maiden Lane like a lame pony, the freezing night air cooling the patina of sweat on her face. Was it the extra oxygen doubling her booze intake? Focus, refocus, as faces of atrocious ugliness loomed in and out of the sickeningly flexible frame of her vision.

‘You all right, Ali?' asked Jim.

‘Lost my heel,' she said, her knees buckling. She hung onto him.

‘She's
pissed
,' said Doggy, always on hand to tell you the obvious. Jim shoved him away.

‘We're
all
pissed,' said Toola triumphantly, whose legs went as if felled and she dropped hard on her bottom, legs akimbo.

‘I told you,' said Jim in Alyshia's ear, ‘you'd end up in Accident & Emergency if you went out with this lot. Last piss-up before jobseeker's allowance.'

It was the only decent thing to do, she thought, as the street tilted up and her head felt as huge and tight as a barrage balloon.

‘You all right, Ali?' asked Jim, holding her shoulders, his face frowning in her pulsing vision.

‘Get me out of here,' she said.

‘Where's Doggy?' said Toola.

Doggy got pinballed towards her.

‘Give us a hand here, amigo,' said Toola as she staggered to her feet.

‘Give us a kiss,' said Doggy, pulling her up, tongue out.