The Big Killing (16 page)

'It's not all sleaze. Some of it's called "real life".'

'I don't know about that. Sleaze, I mean, any of it. I can tell you about diamonds, no problem.'

'I was impressed, Ron. I mean it. You don't have to tell me. Last night I was impressed. You're not a jerk when it...'

'Think of the diamond trade and think of Beauty and the Beast. I told you last night, I get all excited about the beauty of the stones. I meant it. But what it comes down to in the end is the beast. The one with green backs. And everybody wants my beast. I have to make sure the assholes stay over there. That's how I do it. Believe me, it doesn't discourage them. They still come back for more. They'd take anything for a slice.'

'You're trying to tell me—underneath all that you're not a jerk.'

'You're very...'

'Candid?' I asked. 'I don't need your business and I don't need your money. I don't even need your company. What can you tell me that's different? Diamonds. Diamonds and pennies. What else? You going to tell me how to get out of the shit?'

'I don't know how you stand it,' said Ron, trying to cuddle up now.

'It's not like this all the time,' I said, 'and this isn't really shit. Shit is when you don't have the money to get yourself out of it, and it
is
only money, Ron, after all. Small money. I mean, what're you going to clear on one and a half million dollars' worth of diamonds? Three, four, five per cent?'

'Two, two and a half.'

'Two and a half of one and a half million, that's...'

'Thirty-seven and a half.'

'Thanks. Glad to see they still teach mental arithmetic. Thirty-seven thousand five hundred dollars, less two thousand dollars for police expenses, less one thousand five hundred dollars for legitimate expenses, less something for Rademakers. Whichever way you look at it you're thirty up for the week.'

'And you?'

'Well, that's the nature of the poverty trap. Once you're down in it, it's hell to get out. You see the sky every now and again but you never get your knee over the lip. Nobody's ever told me about the poverty springboard—you?'

'We can talk about it.'

'What?'

'The money.'

'Forget it. It was bad luck. I'll work it out. I've got something in mind. Anyway, I don't think I could bear to have you negotiate me into a hole.'

Ron went back to looking out of the window and picking at his beard. Maybe his future wife was going to stop him doing that.

'You're worrying something to death in there, Ron. I think it's a better idea you drop it.'

'I'm twenty-seven years old. I'm getting married in a week. I've got a ton of money behind me. I
know
I'm going to have a very nice life.'

'Then sit back and enjoy it. There's plenty of people's lives you don't want. Mine, for instance. All that shit and sleaze. I can tell you about that if you've got some tears to spare.'

'I haven't done anything and I've never
had
to do anything.'

'Don't get morose on me, rich boy,' I said, and Ron grunted a laugh.

'I'm well protected from life. I didn't tell you, my father wanted to send a chaperon with me out here, make sure I wiped my arse properly.'

'I'm told it's not a talent men are renowned for,' I said.

'What it does is drive me fucking crazy. It makes me worse. It makes me more of an arrogant little fucker than...'

'You missed out "narcissistic",' I said, which disarmed him and he shook his head and laughed into the hot air coming through the window. One thing I didn't need to hear was a rich boy's hard-luck story.

'I'm two million CFA down. You?' I asked, getting back down to the business in hand.

'I haven't looked, but I guess the five hundred thousand's gone.'

'Have you got any other money?'

'Need my company now, Bruce?' he asked, finding that reservoir of cockiness again.

I asked him to do a few things for me when we got back to Abidjan. The first was to call Leif Andersen at the Danish Embassy and get him to call the Sûreté to confirm that I was with him from 4.00 p.m. until 5.00 p.m. on Monday and that he spoke to me at the Novotel at 6.30 p.m. later that same day. On the money side I asked him if he could get some off Rademakers and I'd sort him out from Martin Fall's float in the Novotel safe. I told him to bring four blocks of 250,000 CFA each. I had a feeling things might get difficult. People were going to get greedy and there could be more than one of them to cover. Ron was still on schedule to meet Rademakers and the haji at 8.30 p.m. It was nearly 2.00 p.m. by now. We'd be in Abidjan by 5.00 p.m. I told him to come to the'Sûreté at 7.30 p.m. with the money. I hoped I'd be ready for him.

We slept until we got to the'Sûreté in Abidjan at a few minutes after 5.00 p.m. I reminded Ron to be there at 7.30 p.m. He left without saying a word and I thought I might have trodden on him too hard, but then, you can never tread on someone like that too hard.

They took me down to the cells, which weren't air-conditioned and lacked mini-bars but had been cleaned at least three days ago. They put me in the only cell where the occupants weren't lying on the floor and in the only one with just one other inmate. He stood in the middle of the nine square feet and gave me a steady recidivistic look with a pair of hooded yellow eyes which should have been set in rubber in the middle of the road. His stare came off the top of a body which had worked hard for most of its life, including the struggle out of the womb. He had the body of a cane-cutter, or a truck-loader—not white collar, in fact, no collar at all. The jailer let me in and shut the door quickly. I edged around this statue to delinquency and slid down the wall to the floor.

'T'as assassiné quelqu'un?'
I asked.

His head turned slowly on his body, some complicated robotics going on in there, but he didn't answer.

'Did you kill someone?' I tried, and a huge smile opened up in his face which worried me that I might have triggered off a pleasant memory.

'Ingliss?'

'That's right,' I said, and held out a hand. 'Bruce.'

He took what I'd offered him into his own tarpaulin-skinned hand as if it was a fluffy chick. He patted it and let me have it back after a minute or two.

'David,' he said, 'from Ghana side. Kumasi.'

'Ashanti?'

'I'm ver' happy,' he said, which was a cheering turn-around. 'What d'you do? Kill someone?'

'Oh no, Mr Bruce. I drinkin' too much palm wine. Gettin' drunk and brekkin' things.'

'Just things or people too?'

'Mebbe people too. The police, when they come ... I throw them.' And he gave me an energetic action replay which left me thinking of policeman-shaped holes in walls. 'More police, they come ... they hittin' me with sticks. I brek the sticks!' he roared, showing me how those sticks went down to matchwood. 'More police, they come, mebbe twenty, mebbe more. They come runnin'. They get me down. They beat me,' he said, and showed me the back of his head which looked like a sack of conkers. 'I wek up in here, my head hurt no small.'

'That's quite a beating you took.'

'No, no, Mr Bruce. From the palm wine. The beatin', I no feel the beatin',' he said, shaking his hangover-free head and making me feel glad that I'd somehow pulled the thorn from his paw.

'What you doin' in here, Mr Bruce?' he asked, sitting down opposite me.

'They think I kill three people, mebbe four.'

David came forward, his eyes out on stalks and he let out a little squeak.

'They go see the error of their ways, Mr Bruce. You don' kill nobody with those hands. They too small for killin'.'

'They think I shot them with a gun.'

'Ah-haaa!' said David, clocking something he hadn't considered. 'But you no do it. You no kill the men.'

'No' I said, and he sat back satisfied and the tension drained from his body.

Half an hour slipped by, with David telling me a lot of things I didn't need to know about his brother's petrol station in Kumasi. I kept him going with some grunts and an occasional 'Ah-haaa'. The jailer came and found us sitting next to each other with David counting off gallons of petrol and pints of oil on his massive hands. He called his mate to come and look. They took me away, with David shouting after me, 'I beg you, Mr Bruce, I beg you! Release me! Release me!'

They took me up to the first floor of the building along a strip-lit corridor and into a room with the same lighting. The dark-green carpeting on the floor overlapped some pipes which were four inches off the floor around the gloss-painted light-green walls. There were police-academy photographs on three walls and, on the fourth, a picture of the President which was hung behind a uniformed man sitting at an important desk with green leather inlay. A mug on his desk for pens had the Prince of Wales crest and
'Ich dien'
underneath, which worried me.

'Je suis le Commissaire Gbondogo,'
he said, and waved the other policemen out of the room. 'Or would you rather speak in English?'

He nodded me into a chair and continued in English while flicking through my passport.

'An unfortunate situation, I think, is how you English would describe your predicament.'

'I hope you're not talking about our capacity for understatement.'

'Alas, Mr Medway, I am.'

'Alas? Where did you learn this outstanding English?' I asked, going for the bootlicking option, given Gbondogo's opening gambit.

'At school. From the radio. I've always had a good ear,' he said, flipping the passport on to the desk and leaning back, hands clasped across a flat stomach. 'A very good ear, and not just for languages.' He let that hang in the air like battle smoke and it had hardly cleared before he was coming over the top at me—bayonets fixed.

'We have some statements here about your activities, and not just on the night of Monday, twenty-eighth October. We have a statement from a policeman in Tiegba, and from a barman too. You were seen there on the night of Sunday, twenty-seventh October behaving suspiciously.' He slowed down. 'Changing the number plates on your car. Removing the internal light. You left Tiegba at eight-fifteen p.m. A body was found not far from the Lagune Ebrié. The autopsy says death occurred around eight-thirty p.m. The body was in the same state as the ones found in the Hotel La Croisette. We have a statement from the hotel manager saying that you were there on the night of Monday, twenty-eighth October at about seven-fifteen p.m. A full explanation is required. And Mr Medway, my ear is well tuned to lies in all languages.'

Commissaire Gbondogo was not a man to be fooled with and worse, he didn't look like a man who corrupted easily. He was small, wiry, intelligent and ruthless. I told him everything from the top and the only detail I missed out on was the package. I still maintained that Fat Paul hadn't given it to me. I had to hold on to my nerve when I asked him if Leif Andersen had called and he kept his laser eyes fixed on my eyebrows and shook his head.

It was just as well I spilled it clean out because the gun appeared from a drawer in his desk on cue. I got a bit of confidence together by the end and, to see if he was going to show a chink for me to fit through, I told him that the Tortiya police had ripped us off, but not by how much, just in case he turned out cheaper. He didn't flinch. I stopped talking and we sat in silence, a long one, of maybe five minutes.

'Eugene Amos Gilbert has not been found in the lagoon,' was all he said before a single blast from the phone made him pounce forward and wrench it to his ear. He stood up and took the phone with him over to the window and murmured in French to it, while looking at the night and our reflections in the glass. After five minutes he stuck the receiver to the phone, repositioned it on the desk and sat down.

'I don't think I've come across such a serious situation with a member of the expatriate community since I was made commissaire five years ago...'

'Was that Leif Andersen who just called?'

His eyes blinked once and I knew my chance was coming.

'It is the lies in your earlier statements which particularly disgust me and the fact that you are in possession of an illegal firearm. Both charges carry heavy jail sentences and punitive fines...'

'Perhaps we could come to an arrangement...' I said, and stopped when I felt Gbondogo's look open up my forehead. 'It's just that I know what Eugene Amos Gilbert looks like and you need to find him.'

'
That
is true,' he conceded, thawing now that he knew I wasn't so insensitive as to mention money at such an early stage of the negotiations. We kicked around various elements of my story, me concentrating on the positive things like Leif Andersen and the timing, and he emphasizing the gun and the statements.

'I think perhaps we are close to some sort of agreement,' he said, with no evidence for saying it. 'You will find Eugene Amos Gilbert and bring him to me. However, because of your earlier ... mendacity'—he enjoyed that one so much he had to repeat it—'because of the
disgraceful
mendacity of these statements I do not believe you can be trusted.'

'What about bail?'

'Bail?'

'Bail and a fine, perhaps.'

'Yes...' he said, and assumed the gravity of a judge—one which looked very low and immovable. 'A fine of seven hundred and fifty thousand and bail set at five hundred thousand. I think that is fair.'

'I was thinking more of a two hundred and fifty thousand fine and the same bail.'

'Out of the question. The charges are too serious.'

'I'll deliver Eugene Amos Gilbert within the next ten days.'

'A fine of five hundred thousand and bail set at two hundred and fifty thousand. Bail refundable when you deliver Gilbert.'

We haggled over this for some time and Gbondogo wouldn't budge off the 500,000 fine which, I assumed, was going straight into his pocket. I still needed to save face in the negotiation but couldn't move him off the money. I came up with a solution which startled him. I asked for the release of my ex-cellmate, David. He buzzed someone on his switchboard and a sergeant appeared at the door. They spoke in their own language and the sergeant was dispatched.