The Big Killing (11 page)

I ended up at the back of one lift, jammed up against a bleach blonde who was either as tall as me or was just riding up the wall in the crush. She sneered and turned her head to show me a pair of scimitar earrings which promised castration should anyone think of trying anything furtive. The doors remained open long enough for people's breathing to become audible. As they began to close, an African moved into frame, turned his back and pressed himself into the lift and a small woman grunted at my back.

Through the heads I could see the African's small ear. He turned his head to the woman next to him and I saw his profile. Something colder than a toad ran up my back and settled across my neck so that the hackles rose. There were three one-inch scars on his cheek. I turned my face back to the blonde and scratched my cheek on some appliqué on her T-shirt which said 'Heaven'.

The doors closed and a sense of panic moved through the lift. The crush tightened. We went straight up to the second floor. The lift slowed. The doors opened and everybody exploded out. The blonde ripped past me, spinning me back into the lift and I lunged forward and hit the 'Close Doors' button, which didn't respond. In the corridor people fought to get past a couple who'd fallen on each other's lips. The lift doors closed uncertainly and in their own sweet time. I went up to the third floor on my own. The doors opened on to a silent corridor.

I poked my head out of the lift to see if he wanted to shoot that off first. The corridor was badly lit and empty. I walked past the second lift and looked down the short passageway which gave access to the stairs. There was no one. I opened the door to my room and started looking for a weapon.

The owners of this hotel knew a few things about people. The only two appliances in the room that approached being heavy, blunt and movable were the TV and the mini-bar. I took a penknife out and dismantled the towel rail and found myself holding a thin and hollow metal rail which might have concussed a trusting hamster with a thin skull. Then I remembered the fax, where reception had put it, and thought that room 205 might be about to get some room service they hadn't banked on.

In the corridor I found a wall-mounted fire extinguisher. I threw the towel rail back into the room, lifted the extinguisher off the wall and walked to the stairs. I opened the door and listened to the thick humid air sliding down the bannisters. I went down the stairs, weighing the fire extinguisher, trying to decide how hard I was going to have to hit him to knock him out. It wasn't so long ago that I'd killed a man with a lavatory and I wasn't keen to repeat that with another household appliance.

I opened the door and stepped back into the dark shadow of a corner. At the junction with the main corridor was a single downlighter which dropped a cone of light on to the apex. I heard a couple giggling down the corridor and the sound of key tags knocking against doors. Then quiet. Room 205 was right down the corridor and to the left with a view out of the front of the hotel. There were no sounds from any of the rooms. A lift came down and passed straight through the floor. I looked at the dust hanging in the cone shed by the downlighter. It moved, suddenly turbulent. Into it, from the left, moving fast, his feet silent on the carpeting, came the triple-scarred African. His right arm was by his side and in its gloved hand was a gun with a suppressor attached. He didn't stop. I hefted the fire extinguisher, took four steps, turned right into the corridor and, missing my aim, caught him a glancing blow on his right shoulder. The gun fell from his dead arm. He turned and I hit him under the ribs with a right hand and then batted him with the flat of my left hand so that his head cracked sharply against the metal frame of the lift and he collapsed.

I called the lift, picked up the gun and stuck it in the waistband of my trousers in the small of my back. The doors opened on an empty chamber and I dragged him in and pressed the basement button. I frisked him as we went down and found a wallet which I put in my back pocket. On his right leg there was a knife in a scabbard strapped above his ankle. I removed it.

The doors opened on to the oil and petrol smell of the garage and I pulled him out and sat him up against the wall. It was hot and still in the yellow light of the garage but there was a tremendous noise in my ears which reminded me of a jet engine going into reverse thrust. I stopped to listen and found that this was the noise that whisky made when pumped around hardened arteries. Sweat was dripping off my nose on to the man's jacket which I was holding by the lapels as I straddled him. I lifted him and drove him up the wall and hoisted him over my shoulder in a fireman's lift, holding on to his legs, and set off across the car park—so far, so professional.

Ten yards from the car I stopped dead. The two litres of sweat lathering my body iced. The gun was out of the waistband of my trousers and pointing into my spine.

'Slowly...' he said, speaking with an American accent. 'Let me down, man, but slowly.'

I still had the knife but I wasn't keen to test my ability with it against a .38. I lowered him to the floor. He was small and it was a long way for him to go off my six-foot-four-inch frame. I still held his right wrist as his feet touched the ground and remembered that he had held the gun in his right hand in the corridor. He must have been groggy still from the smack on the head because he moaned. I felt the gun come off my spine and he twisted his wrist out of my grip. I straightened and he started falling backwards trying to change the gun into his right hand as he was going down. The heavy suppressor tilted the gun and his fingers turned into a full set of dislocated thumbs. Then I was on him. I grabbed his right hand which held the gun and it coughed out a shot. A Mercedes's tyre burst, kicking up concrete dust from the floor and the car slumped on to its right buttock.

I had a problem. The knife was in my left pocket. My left hand held his right, my right was groping around at his flailing fist which was punching me in the head. The gun went off again and this time one of my Peugeot's tyres popped. I dropped my forehead hard on to the bridge of his nose. There was a crack and a bit of a grind, which I felt in the back of my head. I reared back, preparing to butt him again and he said, quietly, as if to himself, 'No.'

The gun fell from his fingers and I picked it up and stood back from him. He sat up and held his broken nose with both hands while blood poured on to his shirt.

'It's broke,' he said. 'You broke my goddam nose.'

I'd given up my English instinct for apologizing a long time ago so I didn't say anything. He told me he'd never broken his nose before in a way that made me think that perhaps we hadn't just been trying to kill each other. He asked me what he should do about it and I told him that was the least of his problems and that he should get on and change the tyre he'd just shot out on my car.

'Me?' he asked, as if this was well below his normal line of duty, and I had to explain to him that I wasn't going to do it because I had the gun, and in those circumstances the one without the gun did the dirty work. He shrugged and said he didn't know how to change a tyre.

For a moment I'd begun to like him. He was sitting on the ground like a youngster who'd just executed a brave rugby tackle and found that, in life, not only is bravery not always rewarded, but it can also damage your looks. I was on the brink of giving him a hand when a movie still came into my head of Fat Paul, George and Kwabena in their hotel room and I kicked him hard in the leg.

'You fuck!' he shouted, rolling to one side, so I hoofed him up the backside. He scrabbled to his feet and straightened his jacket. I lined him up for another message from my size-twelve boot and he limped to the car, overdoing it.

I asked him his name while he got the tyre and jack out and he said it was Eugene, '...but they call me Red.'

'Sounds tougher than Eugene, is that it?'

He didn't answer.

'You a Liberian?' I asked.

'Yeah, I am. What's it to you?'

I took his wallet out of my back pocket and read his ID. Eugene Amos Gilbert, born 1958, profession: businessman. I checked through the wallet which had a little currency in it and not much else. I asked him who sent him and he didn't answer so I asked him who he worked for and he still didn't say anything. Then I told him I was talking to him and he said he was concentrating on changing the tyre because he hadn't done one before and he didn't want to screw it up and get us involved in an accident. I was touched.

He changed the tyre like someone who'd changed a couple of thousand tyres in his lifetime and then suffered a stroke in that very specific part of his brain. I told him I was going to check the wheel nuts and that for every loose one I was going to break a finger. He tightened all the nuts.

I gave him his wallet and told him he was driving. He said he didn't know how to drive so I asked him what the hell he was doing in his car at the lagoon yesterday. He shrugged. I told him to give me his hand. He held it out without thinking. I took his middle finger and just before I snapped it back he had a sudden and total recall of how to drive.

We got in the car and Eugene looked over the dashboard, steering wheel and gearshift as if he was buying it. I told him to get on and drive it across the Pont Général de Gaulle to Treichville. He responded by kangaroo hopping us up to the garage gates, which made me put the gun firmly in his ribs and explain in his little ear that the safety was off and this was no way to drive, whereupon we smoothed out and he began driving like a president's limo chauffeur. It took some time to raise the
gardien.
He opened up the grille for us with his eyes barely open and we went out into the black shiny night.

I asked him who he worked for and again he didn't respond, except to grunt with the barrel in his ribs.

'Why did you kill Fat Paul?' I asked, and he looked a little surprised.

'I found him and the other two covered in flies with a couple of vultures in his stomach. Why did you kill him?' He shrugged as if there didn't have to be a reason. 'What're you after?' I asked.

He checked the rearview and tried his nose with the fingers of his left hand as if he was modelling clay. 'OK. How did you find Fat Paul?'

'I followed you, man.'

'From where?'

'The Novotel, where d'you think?'

'You didn't follow me last night.'

'I saw the number of your car at the lagoon in the afternoon. I call a friend in that place in Abidjan where they keep the numbers, they told me it's a hire car and there's only four companies in Abidjan do that.'

'What did you want from Fat Paul?'

He didn't answer.

'What do you want from me?'

He thought about that for a moment.

'I gotta kill you.'

'Any reason?'

'You seen my face and you got the package.'

'We're getting somewhere,' I said. 'What's in the package, Eugene?'

'Red,' he said. 'The name's Red.'

Halfway across the bridge I told him to stop.

'Bad idea, man,' he said.

'It's the only one I got.'

'They's a lotta assholes on these bridges.'

'Now there's two more,' I said, 'and what's a hit man worrying about assholes for?'

He shrugged and looked out the window across the black leathery lagoon. I hauled him across the passenger seat and stood him on the pavement. There was no traffic and no pedestrians. All the assholes had mugged each other and gone to bed, bored.

I hoped Eugene was beginning to realize how bad things were looking for him. He felt his nose with both hands and then asked if he could do his shoelaces up, and before I remembered that he was wearing slip-ons he was down on one knee. I took the knife out of my pocket and tapped him on the head with it and he stood up and nodded. I threw it in the lagoon, asking him who he was working for again and what was in the package. He sighed and put his head to one side.

'Maybe I don't work for nobody.'

'You look like a pro with that ankle knife.'

'Maybe I'm doing things for my own account.'

'But are you?'

He shrugged again.

'What about Kurt Nielsen?'

He looked at me, blank. I tapped him on the forehead. 'You got anything in there?'

'I don't understand.'

'You killed Kurt Nielsen last night down by the lagoon. You just said that's where you saw the car.'

'I forgot. I mean I didn't know him.'

'Why did you kill him then?'

'I don't understand the fuck you talking about.'

'If you're working for yourself you should know who you're killing and why. Or were you just keeping your hand in? Doing some night practice? Getting ready for the big day.'

'I still don't understand the fuck you talking about.'

'It's a British thing. It's called "irony".'

'Irony,' he said. 'Is that heavy or what?'

'How did you know to go down to the lagoon?'

'Uh?'

'How did you know the drop point was down by the lagoon?'

'I followed the white man.'

'You were there in the afternoon.'

'He came early, like you.'

'You knew where the drop point was. Who told you?'

He didn't answer.

'Are you working for Kantari?'

'Who the fuck he?' he asked, and I gave up and told him that if he didn't spew it out I was going to kill him and he shook his head.

'You're not going to shoot me,' he said, which was perceptive given the gun in my hand pointing at him. 'How do you know that?'

'You gave me my wallet.'

He knew I didn't have whatever was needed to put a bullet in someone. He'd seen me looking inside myself for some cold brutality and come back up with warm English custard. I told him to step over the rail of the bridge and asked him again about Kantari while I searched his pockets. I found Fat Paul's rings. He told me through trembling lips that he couldn't swim and I said that he'd forgotten a lot of things that night and then remembered them under a little pressure.

'It's true. This time it's true. I don't know how to swim,' he said.

'You're going for a swim unless you talk. Who's paying you?'