A Darkening Stain (6 page)

‘Probably you don't,' said Carlo.

‘Maybe what I'll do is ask you some questions and you give me “yes” and “no” answers. How about that?'

‘We could try that.'

‘Does Marnier import goods for Franconelli, here, in Benin?'

‘Yeah. He has done.'

‘Has he handled it the way Franconelli expected it to be handled?'

‘Not quite.'

‘Has he been cheating on you guys?'

Carlo ducked and weaved as if this was not the real issue but could be part of the problem.

‘Is this a wrist-slap or is Marnier headed for the big elsewhere?'

Carlo rattled a couple of sentences out to Gio. Gio shrugged, said nothing, giving his usual expert opinion.

‘That depends on what he says to us,' said Carlo.

‘Why didn't you get Gio to talk to the
ragazza
? I'm sure she'd have sung to him if he'd asked her nicely.'

‘That's not how Mr Franconelli wanted to work it.'

‘Good family man?'

‘If you like.'

I finished my beer. Gio looked into the bar at one of the Beninoise who had her hands down one of the sailor's trousers
while he was playing the pinball machine. He wasn't fighting too hard and he was losing a lot of balls.

‘Anything else?' asked Carlo.

‘I don't think so,' I said, a little nervous at how things were coming to a close, worried that Franconelli had chosen me specifically for the job and that once it was done maybe I'd find myself taking a look down the barrel of a Beretta and getting an eyeful—visions of Gale Strudwick face down in a Lagos swimming pool, the rain coming down on her hardening flesh.

We stood. Gio's chair fell backwards and landed with a sharp crack that made me start. Gio smiled at me, which was not nice. Worn teeth with a discoloured crust up by the gums over a dark, hollow Palaeolithic mouth, maybe a stalactite coming down at the back there.

‘Twenty-four hours,' said Carlo.

Gio patted my cheek with a surprisingly soft and dry palm.

The usual evening train pushed through the traffic, horn honking, heading out across the bridge to the industrial zone with a line of empty cars that screeched and grated on the rails embedded in the tarmac. I stopped off at the Lebanese supermarket round the corner from the La Verdure and bought a half of Bell's and some black wrinkly olives imported directly from the Bekaa Valley. I went back to the office with my goodies. The
gardien
was off somewhere doing what
gardiens
do best, not looking after the place. The door of the office wasn't locked as it should have been. I opened it, stood on the threshold and looked in. It didn't stink of beer any more, which was good. I put a hand in to turn on the light.

‘Leave it off,' said a voice in English with plenty of French sewn into it. ‘Come in and shut the door behind you.'

Someone was sitting in my chair, backlit by the glow from the streetlights and supermarket hoardings on Sekou Touré. The people who come to my office these days just don't recognize their side of the desk. I got annoyed.

‘Who the hell are you?' I asked.

‘You've been looking for someone. Have you forgotten already?'

‘Well, you're not Marnier, not with all that
ronronnement
in your voice.'

‘Only cats
ronronnent.'

‘You know what I mean. So who are you?'

‘I'm representing Marnier. Jean-Luc's not ready to come out into the open yet.'

‘Well, that's tough because I'm only going to talk to Marnier, the man himself. And while we're talking about talking, you can do your talking from the client side of the desk and let me sit in my own chair.'

‘I don't want to be involved in this business. I'm doing a favour for Jean-Luc. I'd rather you didn't see my face.'

‘If you're worried about your ugliness, don't be. There's plenty of that in this business.'

‘What do you know about ugliness?' he said, as if I was new on the playground.

‘It's not skin deep like yours probably is.'

‘You've got a very strong backhand, M. Medway.'

‘That wasn't a compliment,' I said, and nodded at him. ‘How'd you like my forehand?'

‘
Vous êtes un peu fâché. M. Medway. ûa ne va pas en Afrique,
' he said, imitating a French West African accent.

‘It's just been one of those days,' I said. ‘The rainy season or my biorhythms, I don't know which.'

‘I don't want to be here, you know.'

‘Well, you are. So you're in it.'

‘I
have
to be here.'

‘You owe Marnier?'

He ducked his head as if weighed down by his dues.

‘I've a feeling Marnier's debts could run very deep, the kind of man he is,' I said, and the man nodded. I sat down and put the whisky and the olives on the desk. ‘There should be a couple of glasses in the top drawer, help us relax a little in each other's company.'

‘C'est mieux comme ça,'
he said, and took out the glasses.

I filled them.

‘Olive?'

We sipped whisky and ate olives, made mounds of pits on the desk top.

‘What's your task, Monsieur...?'

‘Jacques will do.'

‘Tell me, Jacques.'

‘The name of your company is M & B. Who is the “B”?'

‘Bagado. He's a police detective. He lost his job a few years back and we worked together for a while. Now he's back on the force. Been back three or four months now. So he doesn't work with me any more.'

‘What's your involvement with him?'

‘We talk. We like each other. We're friends. My girlfriend likes him a lot too. They're friends. We don't talk about work. Not much, anyway.'

‘Do you exchange information?'

‘I don't tell him about all my bad-boy clients, if that's what you mean. If I did, I wouldn't get any work, might even get myself uglied-up a little, like you or worse. You know what business can be like out here, Jacques.'

‘I know,' he said, sounding miserable about it.

‘Does Marnier have something in mind for me? Something for me to do? I mean, I've already met his wife but maybe he doesn't trust her opinion, maybe the words come out too small from that little mouth of hers. Yeah, he certainly didn't seem to think much of her in one department.'

‘I don't know what Jean-Luc is thinking. He asked me to come and talk to you so I do. Carole? I don't know what he thinks about Carole. I don't know where she is any more. Maybe you coming along was all they needed to know that things were getting ... hot.'

‘So now they've disappeared. They're not at the office. I dropped by their home and they're not there either. Do you know where they are?'

‘Why were you in their office?'

‘Ambulance-chasing. Looking for work. I had some privileged information.'

‘From your police friend?'

‘Maybe,' I said. ‘I thought the information might make his life less problematic and fatten my pocket at the same time.'

‘Tell me.'

‘Only Marnier. Face to face.'

‘He says he wants you to do something for him.'

‘Then he'll have to tell me himself. And if he wants me to pick something up from somebody or drop something off to somebody, at night, on a lonely road in the rain ... forget it. Not for any money. Go and tell him that, Jacques.'

‘But...'

‘I don't want to hear any more. Tell Marnier to make direct contact or what I know stays with me and what he wants me to do, I won't. Now buzz, busy bee, because I'm tired of this.'

The phone rang. Jacques jumped. I tore it off the handset.

‘Bruce Medway.'

‘Jean-Luc Marnier.'

‘We were just getting bored with each other, me and Jacques.'

‘I could tell,' he said, which made my neck bristle.

I stood and looked through the windows and out on the balcony.

‘Are you watching this?'

‘Tell him to leave.'

I buzzed Jacques off and he stalked out, keeping his face away from me.

‘He's shy, your friend. Are you coming up?'

‘Doucement, doucement, nous sommes en Afrique.'

I got round my side of the desk with my ear still connected and settled uncomfortably into the warmth left over by Jacques.

‘Carole tells me you're “
beau
”... Is that right?' asked Marnier.

‘I've just been talking to your friend about ugliness...'

‘But are you “
beau
”?'

‘That's a strange question, Jean-Luc.'

‘Not for me, it isn't.'

Something about the slant of those words reined me in, so I didn't forget myself and crash in there and say that in the photo I'd seen of him he didn't look too leprous.

‘Well?' he asked.

‘I never made the May Queen but I've had my moments,' I said. ‘I was just telling Jacques that ugliness doesn't bother me too much. There's a lot of it around in this world.'

‘That's unusual for someone pretty.
Normalement les beaux aiment seulement les autres beaux.'

‘Who said that?'

‘Me.'

‘The truth is, Jean-Luc, I might have made the cut at the school dance when I was a youngster, but now I'm in that battle zone over forty, you know what it's like, wrinkle and sag, wrinkle and sag.'

‘Stay out of the sun. Drink water, my friend.'

‘We're not going to stay friends for long with that kind of advice.'

He laughed. A crackle of static shiwed my right ear.

‘Now, Africans, M. Medway, now they have skin. Beautiful skin. But maybe that's the nature of beauty ... it's always flawed. We wrinkle and sag and they're ... well, they're born black.'

‘I'm sure they don't see it that way.'

‘You'd be surprised.'

I could hear him coming up the stairs now. His feet sliding until they stubbed the next step, his breathing wheezing up badly even after five steps. The man out of condition on all those French filterless cigarettes he stained his hair with.

‘Smoker's lungs, Jean-Luc, maybe it's time for you to give up before you belly up.'

‘Look who's got the advice now,' he said, stopping on the stairs, the air roaring over the webs of phlegm in his lungs.

‘I'll shut up, Jean-Luc, let you get to the top of the stairs...'

‘Without annoying me. If I get angry I can't breathe.'

‘I'll remember that.'

He got to the top of the stairs and coughed his heart up and spat it out on the floor in the hall.

‘Sorry,' he said, creeping round the door, ‘for the mess.'

Whatever crap I was going to come up with stopped in a
lump under my voice box. I'd done my bit of bragging about how much ugliness I could take, but I wasn't prepared for what Jean-Luc Marnier sprang on me. His face was hardly a face any more. It wasn't even an anagram. Not even an anagram put back together by a surgeon speaking a different language. It was an onomatopoeia. It yelled horror.

A scar like a bear-driven stock market collapse travelled from his right eye socket, across his cheek whose bone was knocked flat, underneath his nose where it joined the rip of his mouth for a second before going down to his jawline and into his shirt. There was nothing neat about the stitching. The skin was puckered and bulged in torn peaks. The end of his nose was missing and there was a deep divot across the bridge, which meant he breathed exclusively through his mouth and his right eye was a glazed wall, its socket shattered. Where there should have been a left eyebrow there was a thick, livid welt which ran round to his left ear, which wasn't there. Below the ear a chunk of his neck was missing and the skin had been stretched over it. The other side of his neck looked like molten lino.

He straightened up at the doorway and walked to the chair like an old soldier pulling himself together, General Gordon, maybe. He sat down and reached into the pocket of his light-blue sleeveless shirt with only two fingers and a thumb on his right hand. Scars like a railway terminus ran up his arms and it wasn't difficult to see that he'd been cut to the bone. He jogged a cigarette out of the packet and drew it into his mouth. He lit it with a Bic and blew smoke out on the end of a residual cough. Something else different to his photo. He'd dyed his hair black. There was some desperation in that.

‘Now you see why your looks are interesting to me,' he said, shyly, like a schoolboy with gravel-ripped knees.

I searched for vocabulary but found only first syllables. I reached for Jacques's whisky and slid it across to Marnier and took a half inch off my own.

‘That's what I bring out in people,' he said. ‘Is that Jacques's glass? Would you mind washing it out?'

‘What happened to you, Jean-Luc?' I asked, taking another glass out of the drawer and filling it for him.

‘Machete attack. Typical Africans ... they didn't finish the job.'

‘Not here, in Benin?'

‘No, no, Liberia. I shouldn't have been there. Some tribal problem. The village I was in was attacked. Ten men moved through the village hacking at anything that moved. They sprayed the place with a little gasoline and whumph! They killed twenty-eight people in less than ten minutes. When they left, the locals, who had run, came back. They stitched me up, did what they could for me, got me transport back to Côte d'Ivoire. But, you know how it is, these refugee hospitals they don't have much call for cosmetic surgeons. So...' he finished, and revealed himself with what remained of his hands.

‘How long ago was all that?'

‘Must be three or four months now. I was lucky. None of the wounds got infected. The local people covered them in mud. That's where all our best antibiotics come from.'