Blood Is Dirt (20 page)

‘Apart from the way I was getting trodden on in Lagos when I started sniffing around, no. But our friend Napier wasn't a poor boy scrabbling in the gutter.'

‘Ah! There was a will?'

‘A safe-deposit-box key with a jackpot of US dollars seven mil.'

‘He's not sounding like a four-one-niner any more.'

‘All that paperwork smells right. The scam letters and then the sting, but I've always wondered how the gang knew when to hit his account. Broking houses don't often hold that kind of cash, and if they do they don't hold it for long. It goes straight on to the overnight money markets before being passed on to the clients.'

‘He cheated his own clients?'

‘You don't end up with seven million dollars in a Swiss box unless you've been a bad boy and you know a lot about being one.'

‘So he could have been going into the
cocotiers
to pick up his
own
money.'

‘There's a lot we don't know about Briggs, but I'm flying to Lagos with Selina tomorrow and we're partying with the people he worked for. Maybe some clams'll start opening. I'll keep an ear open for Bondougou too.'

‘Do that. He's nesting over there and I don't know who with.'

I drank beer and popped cashew. Bagado sawed his chin and communed with Gauguin. The clock chimed twelve.

‘How did they get Briggs out of the
cocotiers?'
I asked.

‘You want to know whether you should be embarrassed?'

‘I'm embarrassed, Bagado.'

‘I wish I could say you learned from your mistakes.'

‘Is this a knuckle rap?'

He shrugged.

‘Briggs was chloroformed. You must have left him alone for a few moments. They weren't very subtle about their business.'

‘They didn't have to be with the police on their side.'

‘I like your spirit, Bruce. Just listen. They bought a one-litre bottle of chloroform from the major supplier in Cotonou. I have a description of the buyer from the manager of the shop. The car they used must have been around some time on the Boulevard de la Marina because several of the girls out there saw it. Two of them went up to it. One of them talked to the driver. The other even remembered the registration number in case she saw it later on. A different girl saw Briggs thrown into the back of the car and watched while it took off and turned right just before the conference centre. They must have been playing gangsters in the car because we had no trouble finding their route to a derelict warehouse in Cadjehoun. One other passer-by even took the registration. You know we had that carjacking and street-shooting incident in Porto Novo last month? Citizens have been very vigilant since then.'

‘When did they dump the body?'

‘About three a.m. The car crossed the border to Badagri just after four fifteen.

‘How was he killed?'

‘Broken neck eventually.'

‘And they were all African? No whites involved.'

He nodded.

‘Nothing from the Land Office still?' I asked.

‘I'm hopeful.'

I told him about the car, my beating at Seriki Haulage and the dead body of the driver. That brought him out of the chair and set him pacing around the room, flicking his teeth with his thumbnail. I gave him the haulage companies' directors' names, Ben Agu and Bof Nwanu. I ran him through my conversation with Quarshie.

‘He doesn't say anything, does he?' said Bagado.

‘Played for time until meals on wheels came.'

‘I keep thinking about the army—what they were doing around Akata village, keeping people out, protecting the waste dump...'

‘Making sure nobody ran away.'

‘That too. Those soldiers were nervous. They seemed scared, their guns always ready. Those workers must have been prisoners.'

‘Lifers looking for a half chance?'

‘If that's true then what Quarshie is saying about presidential candidates feels right. What happened to you, the driver who was going to talk—it all fits.'

Bagado wrote down the names of the three presidential candidates in his notebook and said he'd do some digging on them.

‘If the level we're operating at is as high as Quarshie makes out I'm headed for the meat grinder,' I said. ‘They know who I am now.'

‘At one level. The lowest.'

‘Quarshie can't be that low down.'

‘True. You'd better stay out of his way.'

‘He'll talk. He'll give some kind of description.'

‘First, you didn't use your own name, and second, an African's description of a white man is... you know... you all look the same. Like we do to you. Black curly hair, flat nose, brown eyes, dark skin... useless.'

‘That's cheered me up, Bagado. The guy went to London University, for Christ's sake, he's used to white people.'

‘Doesn't make any difference,' he said, sweeping the room with a levelling hand.

‘I'm six foot four inches tall.'

‘And Quarshie?'

‘Short and stocky.'

‘Right, everybody looks tall to him.'

‘I will still be going to Lagos, Bagado. I'm not backing out. I'm being paid. Remember what you said about me to Bondougou.'

‘I think,' said Bagado, stopping in the middle of the room, ‘I feel a speech coming on.'

‘Already?'

‘A small one. Your mettle needs strengthening. You're lacking purpose.'

‘Did you ever think of going into the holy orders?'

‘As a matter of fact...'

‘Good career move. You'd be a star.'

‘Nigeria is a country that should be a showcase for Africa. Oil brought us the biggest financial opportunity of any country on the continent, and that includes the South African gold and diamond mines. There are one hundred million Nigerians and most of us are hard-working, intelligent and love life. And yet our country is a broken-down, polluted, utterly corrupted place with most of our oil wealth either going to numbered Swiss bank accounts or paying interest on the national debt. Are we going to stand silent while this country is taken over by a man who imports toxic waste, who has dealings with organized crime, who has people killed? I say no.

‘You maintain this stance, Bruce, that you are only interested in the money, but I don't believe it. You've been in Africa for more than five years, you've never been back to Europe in that time...'

‘Never had the money.'

‘You're African now whether you like it or not. You're one of us.'

‘And I know my duty.'

‘Right.'

‘Let's find out who we're up against. If it's a presidential candidate with access to army help and the mafia. Then we'll have to see.'

‘Remember your client. Your precious client. Maybe she'll decide something different. Her father was brutally murdered and revenge is a strong-burning fuel.'

‘Her appetite's carnivorous too.'

‘All I ask, Bruce, is that you don't do anything illegal. Not here in Benin.'

‘Thanks for the warning.'

‘I'm a policeman now.'

‘And I'm a
Private
Investigator.'

‘But you'll still tell me things I need to know.'

‘If it doesn't breach client confidentiality.'

‘I see.'

‘You've got to hand it to Bondougou,' I said. ‘He knew what he was doing.'

I was back home at 1 p.m. The flight left at 3 p.m. The door was locked to Selina's room. Heike made a salad. I fried up a cheese omelette. We called Selina. No answer. We ate and made coffee.

‘Maybe she's not in there,' said Heike.

‘You think she's taken a twelve-foot jump into the neighbour's garden and talked her way through their house just so she doesn't have to face us in the morning?'

Heike gave me a slow shrug, plugged a cigarette into her holder and lit it.

‘I would,' she said quietly.

‘I don't think she gives a shit about last night. You would, but she doesn't.'

‘I wouldn't sexually assault my hostess in the back of the cab.'

‘Why are you whispering?'

‘Oh, fuck off.'

‘Five minutes, Selina,' I shouted. ‘If you're not out in five minutes it's all off.'

I slumped on the sofa and sipped coffee. Heike watched her smoke stretch itself out in the languid air. We waited the full five minutes.

Selina's door opened. She stood for a moment in her flat sandals, khaki shorts, a long-sleeved white silk shirt and a pair of very black wraparound sunglasses. She cocked her head at the door and left. We followed her down to the Pathfinder. I noticed a large bruise on the inside of her thigh as she got in the back. We drove in silence to the airport.

Heike stopped outside the airport entrance. Selina got straight out and walked into the terminal. I told Heike not to hang around.

‘She doesn't look too happy to me,' she said. ‘Talk to her.'

‘Do you think she'll talk back?'

‘Be charming, Bruce, you used to be good at that.'

Selina handed me a boarding pass. We went into the departure lounge, sat on some plastic seats and sweated while two guys put together some pallets of crates of whisky out of the duty-free store. They wheeled them out to the Nigeria Airways plane which stood on the tarmac a hundred yards from the building. They called our flight and the anarchy started. We ran for the doors and burst out into the thick, hot afternoon air.

There was no question of flight attendants showing us to our seats. You sat where you could. The aisles and rear seats were taken up with whisky. We threw our bags into an overhead and got our backsides down. Three people got sent back to the terminal.

The plane manoeuvred its way out on to the runway with seven of the overheads flapping open and the back of my seat bust, supported only by the crates of whisky on the seat behind. The toilet door banged open and shut when they applied the brakes. There was no crew in sight and no word from the captain.

A couple of weeks earlier the military dictator's son had been killed in an aircrash in Nigeria and the minister of transport had come on to the World Service to tell us that most Nigeria Airways internal flights were ‘nothing better than flying coffins'. I didn't think I needed to mention this to Selina, and anyway, she wouldn't have twitched. She was cool. Those wraparounds said butt out to chit-chat.

It was a short hop to Lagos, the plane barely bothering to get above wave height over the Gulf of Guinea. Soon we were banking sharply over the sprawl of rusted corrugated-iron roofs with holdalls and hats flying around us. A man in a blue shirt with epaulettes and black trousers was thrown to his knees in front of us. He grinned insanely. He was probably the pilot working his way to the back for a pee. Anything was possible.

We landed at Murtala Mohammed airport, the pilot taking his time to go into reverse thrust so that we had to swing away a little wildly from the perimeter fence. There was no applause. We cruised to the terminal in silent tears.

Our papers were in order but it still cost us 5000 CFA each to get into Nigeria. They're like that there. We fought like Vandals with the cabbies and drove the price down 1000 per cent. Selina sat in the back like a mother accused of murdering her children and said nothing in the four hours it took us to get to Y-Kays.

We took our room keys. I drank beer and danced in the air con and put a call through to Selina, who didn't answer. I went out to the Peninsula restaurant and sat on their terrace and ate brilliant Chinese food and looked at the lights flickering on Five Cowrie Creek.

Back at Y-Kays there was no change. Selina was locked in her room and hadn't been out. I put a call through, she didn't answer again. I packed it in for the night. I'd just opened a slim volume of Philip Larkin I liked to travel with when the phone rang.

Any drink your side?'

‘Not any more.'

‘I'll bring some.'

I got dressed, made the bed, turned off the table light and put the overhead on. I sat at the table with the Larkin on show and slapped some unambiguous, sexless charm on my face thicker than pan stick. She knocked and brought a bottle of Red Label in with her. I found some glasses. She fingered the Larkin. Turned on the table light and cut the overhead.

‘They fuck you up, don't they?' she said, referring to the Larkin.

‘My parents didn't,' I said, pouring the whisky.

‘That you know of,' she said.

She sat on the end of one of the beds. She wore a black T-shirt over the same shorts, no shoes. She lit a cigarette.

‘I've been out of control,' she said. ‘Had to shut myself down for the day. Pull myself together.'

‘Did you eat?'

‘You sound like my mother.'

‘Ninety per cent of emotional trauma is hunger.'

‘For what?'

I called reception and asked them to send out for some jolloff rice and a bottle of beer.

‘It got out of hand last night. That piri-piri vodka. Then the grass. I went to the New York New York afterwards, met a couple of French guys and went back to their hotel with them. The Aledjo. They had a bungalow. We drank some stuff they had there. Pastis, I think. Then it sort of happened... one of the guys liked to get rough. I got this bruise and some burns...'

‘They raped you?'

‘It wasn't rape, Bruce.'

My mouth opened but the words didn't come.

‘I liked it.'

‘Selina, your father's just died. You were close to him. You've just buried him on your own. Now you're trying to...'

‘Spare me the bullshit, Bruce. Don't start telling me I'm trying to replace my father's love and using sex to do it because my head's not on straight, I'm emotionally distraught, I'm buggered up inside, because I'm not.'

‘I won't then.'

‘I've always been like this, ever since I was a kid playing games in the back garden I've been on for it. It's the way I am—I've just had a job admitting it to myself, that's all. Been feeling guilty about my appetite. Thought I should have a loving, monogamous relationship and couldn't understand why I wanted to go off with... with anything that moved. I thought there was something wrong with me.'