The Big Killing (2 page)

And no fucky-fucky business,' finished Fat Paul.

'I've not heard it put like that before.'

'Sorry,' he said, beckoning to Kwabena for a cigarette, "swat 'sall about, you know, jig-a-jig, fucky-fucky. I no blame you. Thass no man's business. But transactions. Now there's some-thin'. Somethin' for you. Make you some money.'

'What did you have in mind?'

Fat Paul clicked the fingers he'd been sucking and George opened a zip-topped case and handed him a package which he gave to me. It was a padded envelope with a box in it. The envelope had been sealed with red wax and there was the impression of a scorpion in the wax. It was addressed to M. Kantari in Korhogo, a town in the north of the Ivory Coast, where I was expecting to be sent any day now to sort out a 'small problem'.

'How d'you know I was going to Korhogo?' I asked, and Fat Paul looked freaked.

'You gonna Korhogo ... when?'

'I don't know. I've got a job to do there. I'm waiting for instructions to come through.'

'No, no—this not for Korhogo.'

'That's what it says here.'

'No. You deliver it to someone who take it to Korhogo.'

'I see,' I said, nodding. 'Is that strange, Fat Paul?'

'Not strange. Not strange at all,' he said quickly. 'He gonna give you some money for the package. You go takin' it up Korhogo side then you up there wid the money and we down here wid...'

'Waiting for me to come back down again.'

'That's right. We got no time for waitin'.'

'Why don't you deliver it yourself?'

'I need white man for the job,' said Fat Paul. 'The drop ibbe made by 'nother white man, he only wan' deal with white man. He say African people in this kind work too nervous, too jumpy, they makin' mistake, they no turnin' up on time, they go for bush, they blowin' it. He no deal with African man.'

'There can't be that many white people up in Korhogo.'

'Ten, mebbe fiftee', 's 'nough.'

'The drop? Why did you call it the drop?'

'You callin' it transaction. I callin' it a drop.'

'Where and when is this drop?'

'Outside of Abidjan, west side, down by the lagoon Ebrié, eight-thirty tomorrow night.'

'Why there?'

'The white man no wan' come to Abidjan, he no wanbe seen there, he have his own problems, I donno why.'

'Why don't you just go to Korhogo and cut out the middlemen?'

'We'—he pointed to himself who could easily pass for plural—'we no wango Korhogo, too much far, too much long.'

'Well, it sounds funny to me, Fat Paul. Nothing criminal. Remember.'

'I rememberin' everythin' and this no funny thin', you know. You jes' givin' a man a package an' he givin' you some money. You takin' you pay from the money an' givin' us the rest. I'm not seein' anythin' criminal,' he said, getting the word wrong and not bothering to go over it again.

'What's in it?' I asked rattling the package, and Fat Paul didn't say anything. 'A video cassette?'

Fat Paul nodded and said, 'What you puttin' on a video cassette that's criminal?'

'How about child pornography?'

'Hah!' He sprung back from the table. 'This nothin' like that kind thin'.'

I gave him his package.

'You not gonna do it?'

'I'm going to think about it.'

He smiled and raised his eyebrows.

'Mebbe I'm helpin' you think. I'm payin' two hundred and fifty thousand CFA do this job, a thousand dollars, you understandin' me?'

'But none of it upfront?'

'You workin' for African people now, we no have the money 'fore somebody give it. Not like white people, they always havin' money...'

'Well, now I know what you want, I'll think about it.'

'You got any questions you wan' aks?' Tomorrow. I'll have some questions tomorrow.'

'You tekkin' long time think up you questions. How many you got?'

'If I knew that I'd ask them now.'

'You jes' give the man the package. And the man'—he slowed up for my benefit—'the man he give you an envelope, wax sealed like this one. In the envelope is the money. You don't have to coun' it. Just tek it. Give one hand, tek the other. Is ver' simple thin'. I mean, Kwabena he could do it without troublin' he head 'cept he black. He only jes' come down from the trees. Still scratching hisself under the arms. No be so, Kwabena?'

Kwabena grinned at Fat Paul's insult with a twinkling set of ivories and so little malevolence it would concern me if he was my bodyguard.

'Don' be fool',' said Fat Paul, reading my thoughts, 'he lookin' kind and nice like mama's bo' but, you see, he got no feelin'. He got no feelin' one way 'rother. You go run wid the money. I say, "Kwabena, Mr Bruce go run with the money." He find you, tek you and brek you things off like spider thing. You got me?'

'No plobrem,' said Kwabena slowly.

'Time we goin',' said Fat Paul, looking at a watch on a stretch-metal strap which was halfway up his forearm. 'Leave Mr Bruce time for thinkin'. Time for thinkin' all these questions he gonna aks. I'm goin' rest, lie down, prepare mysel' for the big game.'

Kwabena helped Fat Paul to his feet. The waist of his dark-blue trousers had been made to go around the widest part of his body so that the flies were a couple of feet long, the zipper coming from an upholsterer rather than a tailor. He was bare-ankled and wore slip-on shoes because he couldn't get over his stomach to put on complicated things like socks and lace-ups.

'I like you, Bruce,' said Fat Paul.

'How do you know?'

'You smell nice,' he said, and laughed. He laughed hard enough so that I hoped he wouldn't bust his gut and he was still laughing when he left the shack, hitting the doorjamb a glancing blow and nearly bringing the whole thing down. A dog appeared at the door, attracted by the laughter, thinking it might mean good humour and scraps handed down with abandon. The barman hit him on the nose with a beer-bottle top and he got the picture and took off with his bum close to the floor, leaving us with only a thin thread of music on the radio for entertainment.

With Fat Paul gone and the
Ivoire Soir
finished I sucked on the
grande modèle
and fingered my face which still had a few livid marks from a beating I'd taken nearly a month ago. This was just the surface damage and it reminded me why I was even passing the time of day with a lowlife like Fat Paul who deserved the kind of attention you give a dog turd on the pavement.

Heike, the half-English/half-German woman I loved, who'd got mixed up in the ugly piece of business I had been involved in last month, had left Africa and gone back to Berlin from where she'd written saying she was looking for work.

B.B., the overweight Syrian millionaire to whom I still owed money after my last job working for him, was employing me, not on my daily rate, but on a small monthly salary and some expenses, which made the little I owed him feel like a twenty-five-year mortgage.

I was supposed to be handling the sacking of a Dane called Kurt Nielsen who was running B.B.'s sheanut operation in Korhogo. This was what B.B. had called his 'small problem in Korhogo' which didn't seem to be a problem at all, just a way of B.B. amusing himself by keeping me dangling on a string.

Kurt Nielsen had been messing with the local girls, keeping bad books and, worst of all, not calling B.B. I'd asked him what was wrong with playing around.

'Thass what I'm saying, Bruise,' B.B. had said. 'He not playing. He fall in lov'. Dese girls you don't fall in lov', you play. Is nice and light. You fall in lov' an' ever'ting spoil.'

B.B. didn't want him sacked until he had a replacement which he was finding hard to get. That's what he said anyway. I knew different. I knew it was because we'd agreed that I would start charging my daily rate when I'd got rid of Nielsen and B.B. hated the sound of my daily rate.

He'd made life sound attractive by offering an all-expenses-paid holiday in Grand Bassam until I was needed. Then I'd found that any expense was too much for B.B. and we'd been fighting over small change ever since. The only expense he considered legitimate were telephone calls which I had to make every day and which would finish with the same line: 'Calm, Bruise. Wait small. Now is not de time.'

Bagado, my Beninois detective friend, who had suffered a cracked collar bone during our last job, had come out of plaster and into continued unemployment in Cotonou. He had no money and the resources of his extended family were already overextended. I sent him money which I was borrowing from my Russian friend, Vassili, who was also helping me run Helen, my cook, who, although she wasn't cooking for me, was looking after a sick uncle of hers who needed medicine.

Moses, my driver, was with me but we couldn't afford much expensive Ivorian petrol so the car stayed put and Moses practised whatever it was he felt he hadn't perfected with the local girls. This was proving expensive for him and therefore for me, and I was threatening to cut out the middleman.

'Who the middleman, Mr Bruce?' he would ask.

'You, Moses.'

He clapped his hands and laughed at this and went through a succession of deep thoughts without finding the hidden meaning.

In an ideal world Heike would come back. Something awkward and sharp amongst all the food that B.B. shovelled into himself would get caught in his throat and he'd pass on into a better world. Bagado would get his job back in the police force. Helen's uncle would get better. I'd get some decent work and Moses would get a short sharp dose of the clap. Only the latter was a serious possibility.

So, I was bored—bored and broke. I needed something to do to take my mind off the things that were causing my brain to plod in tight circles, finding no answers to questions which didn't have any. I needed money. Fat Paul made out he was going to solve both problems.

In the late afternoon I went for a nap in my cheap room in a house on the furthest outskirts of Grand Bassam. It was a narrow cell on the flat roof of an old unpainted concrete block which had no glass in any of the windows and whose shutters had been used for firewood a long time ago.

After I'd jerked awake for the seventh time it was dark. I got up and took two shots of whisky as a mouthwash and then another two to cure the motion sickness. I called B.B. and he gave me the 'wait small' routine again. I didn't bother to check my answering machine at home in Cotonou, Benin, and instead I hit a place with beer and loud music called Le Cafard, the cockroach, a real sleazy joint for men who didn't shave and women who smelled strongly of cheap sex. I had shaved and I didn't buy any cheap sex, but people could tell I had the right temperament for the bar. I had
le cafard,
the blues, and they let me alone to get on with it.

I put away the last quarter of the bottle of whisky when I got back to my room and fainted into sleep, which came in short bursts of violent dreaming, and starts awake in blue-white flashes with instant fears of death, like travelling on a runaway subway train. I woke up face down, twisted in the sheet with sweat cold on my bare back. In the room the darkness was blacker than evil and the mosquitoes had found a note rarely played on the violin which stretched the brain to the thinness of fuse wire. I waited for dawn to paint itself into the room while I marvelled at the size and leatheriness of my tongue.

The bender, which I'd decided was my last, did me some good. I reckoned I'd bottomed out, which worried me because that was what politicians said about economic recessions when there was still some ways to go. I wrote down some pros and cons for doing Fat Paul's work for him and although his offer still looked as attractive as a flophouse mattress, it was beginning to show some merits. You could sleep on it as long as you held your nose and it would only be for one night.

Sunday 27th October

'You got it,' said Fat Paul after we'd been through the drop details for the third time. He leaned over his sloping gut to slap the table top but didn't make it. He settled a jewel-bitten hand on one of his pappy breasts.

He was dressed in the usual five square metres of face-slapping material. The blue and the white parakeets was off today. It was the red with green monkeys for Sunday. He snarled at Kwabena for a cigarette and took a handkerchief out and polished his face with it.

We were sitting at a table in my corner of the bar, which had annoyed Fat Paul because he had his back to the door and I had an angled view out of it down the beach to the sea. It was just coming up to one o'clock but Fat Paul had lost his appetite, maybe because it was hotter than yesterday with no rainfall for the last couple of days, or maybe he didn't like his back unprotected. He only ordered four pineapple fritters.

'It's not what you'd call a regular piece of business,' I said.

'How so?'

'One, the money. Two, the location for what you call "the drop". Three, the contents of the envelope. Four, the characters involved.'

'Characters?' he asked.

'Fat Paul, Silent George, Colossal Kwabena.'

'Colossal?'

'Very big.'

'Is good word. I like it. Colossal,' he said, trying it out for size. Then he changed, getting aggressive. 'Whass wrong these people?'

'What do George and Kwabena do?'

'They my bodyguards.'

'That's my point,' I said. 'Why do you need your body guarded?'

'I'm not so quick on my feet.'

'Why do you need to be quick?'

'I make money.'

'Doing what?'

'Videos.'

'You got an office?'

He handed me a card which gave the company name as Abracadabra Video, Adabraka and an address on Kojo Thompson Road in Accra, Ghana. The company ran video cinemas. They specialized in showing action movies, mainly kickboxer, to local neighbourhoods. It was a lucrative business, there was a high cash turnover and hardly any overheads. A lot of people were interested in taking over the business but not paying for it. Kwabena provided the muscle to persuade them otherwise and if he couldn't cope George leaned in with the old metal dog leg and people quietened down, talked sensible, played cards and drank beer as if nothing had been further from their mind.