The Big Killing (21 page)

'I'd like to talk about your particular interest in diamonds in the Ivory Coast and how you came to know about Mr Rademakers.'

'Why's that?' he asked in such a sweet-natured way I was tempted to kick him to the floor. Instead I gave him an undramatic account of Ron Collins's kidnap. He was very interested. He leaned forward, occupying most of the table and a great deal of light.

'That's a terrible thing, Bruce. It surely is,' he said. 'Such lawlessness. It'll have to be in my report, you understand.'

'Who's that report going to?' I asked, and he ignored it.

'One thing I'm not clear about,' he said, rubbing his head, trying to buff some clarity in there, 'is where you fit in. What is your role, exactly? You and Mr Collins were in business together?'

'No, I'm not in the diamond business. I'm in sheanut.'

'And what, may I ask, is that?'

'It's a nut that grows wild at this latitude. The locals pick it and dry it, we ship it and factories crush it and put it in chocolate.'

'That's very interesting,' he said, 'but I'm still confused.'

I clarified it for him and he asked who I was working for. I asked him who he was sending his report to. We smiled at each other for some time.

'What about Rademakers?' I asked.

'The Chamber of Commerce in Antwerp gave me his name, Bruce.'

'You went to see him when? Last Thursday the twenty-fourth?'

'That's right, Bruce. I can understand your concern. You're doing the right thing. Check me and Foley out. You gotta do it.' He sat back. 'Lemme see. Mr Collins was kidnapped Wednesday. I was here. Foley was at the Abidjan Hilton. But that doesn't prove a thing, does it?'

He sipped some milk, smiled and left me looking for another question, which I didn't have.

'You read this?' he asked, pointing at the
Ivoire Soir.

'On the plane.'

He leafed through the paper and stopped at a piece about the ceasefire Samson Talbot had just rejected because no Libyan troops were allowed on the peace-keeping force.

'You think Mr Collins was taken by the rebels. Take a look at that,' he said. 'Do those guys think we're dumb or what? Nobody's gonna let a buncha towelheads in there. The guns're pouring out of Trip-O-lee faster than he can use 'em and he thinks the international community are gonna put them on the peace-keeping force? Give us a break.'

'What's your point?'

'If I was Samson Talbot I wouldn't wanna ceasefire, that's for sure, so I'd come up with cockamamie suggestions like Gaddafis on the peace-keeping force while I built up a stock of arms. But I'd need some money to do that. Right? You see where I'm coming from. You see how Mr Collins is fitting into the scenario. What I don't like is the way it's done, Bruce. No respect. No respect for the US of A. It gets me mad.'

'I thought Samson Talbot had a lot of Americo-Liberian support? They send him money, don't they?'

'The Liberian president's been killed,' he said. 'That was the main thing the A-Ls wanted, the President outa the game. They got it. Their money's dried up. The problem
now
is that Jeremiah Finn took the President out, not Samson Talbot. Finn's in Monrovia, Talbot's not. Finn's getting financial support, Talbot's out there in the marketplace. Geddit?'

'Have you got a personal interest in this war?' I asked, and Trzinski gave me the full force of his long-distance eyes. 'You seem to know what's going on.'

'When I do a report for a client who's going to put maybe fifty million bucks of investment into a country, I check out
all
the angles and that means ugly political situations in neighbouring countries.'

'Where've you been so far?' I asked, and something like amusement passed behind Trzinski's eyes.

'In Ghana we went to the Birin basin and Akwatia, here I'm due to go down to Tortiya, then I go on to Sierra to Panguma and Yengema but I don't hold out much hope—Talbot's gonna be across that western border by the end of the year.'

'Have you got any military experience, Al?' I asked, the look of the man and the way he talked still bothering me.

'As a matter of fact, I have,' he said. 'You ever been in a war yourself, Bruce?'

'Nothing more than street violence.'

'I was in Nam,' he said.

'How did that leave things with you?'

'Things?'

'I imagine you have a different perspective on life after you've been through a war like that.'

'Yea-a-h,' he said slowly and folded his arms. He stared at his milk. I looked over the
lvoire Soir
and sipped my beer.

'Nam,' said Trzinski, surprising me after a long ruminative silence, the milk going through his nine stomachs. 'Nam left me with the belief that there is no greater evil on this earth than war. That everything should be done to prevent it. And if you can't prevent it, everything should be done to stop it.'

'Laudable thinking, Al; you'll go down in history.'

'All that time I was in Nam, I never got hit. Not even a graze. I saw men lose their legs, arms, have their heads blown off, their guts torn out but
l
never got more'n a scratch from a thorn bush. And, you know, I came back to the States and I sat there right in the middle of the US. That's where Omaha, Nebraska is, if you didn't know it, Bruce. And I had nothing inside of me. It was like everything had been blown out ... and then,' he said, and this was the first time I realized what was coming. I should have seen this herd of beef cattle coming from a lot further off, well before it was on top of me. 'And then, I found Him.'

'Who?' I asked, thinking Trzinski might have wrong-footed me after all.

'The Lord, Bruce. I found the Lord.'

'And He told you to get into business consultancy.'

'I'm being serious,' he said, the irony stripped out from behind his eyes.

Al, this is very personal...'

'Yeah, Bruce, it is, but I don't mind telling you about it.'

'No, I mean it's personal to me. I don't want to hear about your experiences with the Lord. It doesn't mean I don't believe. It means I don't want to talk about it.' Hard and firm, it's something I've learned.

'OK. I respect that,' he said, and sucked on his milk while I wrestled with the three facets of his personality he'd thrown at me in the last half hour.

'You went to Tortiya with Mr Collins?' he asked.

'That's where he bought the diamonds that were taken with him in the kidnap. We had some trouble. Spent a night in jail there.'

'That kinda place,' said Trzinski, nodding.

'Some advice for you, Al—even if you're just looking, go and see the police first and be nice to them.'

'Thanks for that, Bruce,' he said, his manner changing, getting more urbane. 'You know anybody there who could help me, like I said, just to look around?'

I gave him Borema's name, he slotted it into his memory and glanced at his watch. I stood and he asked where he could contact me if anything valuable should come to mind. I gave him the compound number and told him where it was.

'One thing, Al,' I said, 'you've been here a long time and not gone down to Tortiya...'

'There're people who handle diamonds here. They've been filling me in on the scene.'

'And they don't have a contact name for you down in Tortiya?'

'Not the same as yours.'

'Who are they, if you don't mind me asking?'

'A French guy called François Marin, and a Lebanese called Kantari.'

'It's always useful to know names in Africa, Al.'

'It surely is, Bruce. It surely is.'

The taxi dropped me off at the compound around 5.00 p.m. Kofi, one of B.B.'s Ghanaian boys, was sleeping by the gate but he woke up to show me around. He explained that 'sistah Dotte' was out collecting sheanut but she'd be coming back because the police had been looking for her since yesterday.

The compound was massive, maybe sixty or seventy yards long, with corrugated-iron awnings on three sides and some unpainted grey and brown accommodation with red dirt spattered up the walls on the fourth side. In the middle were two huge black iron vats which looked as if they'd been used for boiling tar but were now filled with water to boil sheanut. They were surrounded by scaffolding and a walkway of planks. In between the vats was a primitive crane for lifting the cages of sheanut into the water.

Next to the vats was a pile of rusted engine parts and three glassless truck cabs which had been torn from their chassis. Goats nosed about in the interiors, stripping off the plastic door panelling. In front of all the awnings were the old truck chassis with boards on their backs and sheanut drying in the sun.

We walked up on to the concrete verandah of the accommodation block. Kofi showed me the bathroom, which was outside, and took me into a hot, oppressive room with a bed in it where I could wait for Dotte. Kofi was uneasy in the house and left as soon as he could. I checked the other rooms which were all locked, except the one next to mine which was strangely cool without air conditioning or fan, just with the windows curtained off.

It had an identical bed, a chest supported by three hardbacks under one corner and a doorless wardrobe with some musty male clothing in it. I flicked through the clothes in the chest and found some stuff that you'd expect to see from emptied pockets. Kurt Nielsen's cholera vaccination was in there, some gutted biros, an old packet of Marlboro with two left. I opened up a book of matches from Le Mont Korhogo Hotel which had no telephone numbers inside but some doodling from a brain floating on a toke of weed, of which there was a little baggy and some super-long Rizlas.

I looked over the room, under the chest, the wardrobe and the bed—plenty of dust, not much else. I lifted the mattress and saw it immediately, up at the head end—a juju. It was made out of reddish-blond hair and some sort of bone and feathers tied round with twine. I dropped the mattress back down on it.

I lay down on the bed in my room. Sleep came as quickly as waking up, an hour or more later, in a cold sweat. It was dark outside with light from the compound coming into the room. A tight band of headache was wrapping itself around my head and someone was watching me. A young white girl, with long blonde hair, was standing by the door in squares of light thrown up against the wall from the window. She wore a white vest which covered her high, budding breasts and stopped just below her ribcage where there was a lean, bare torso down to the top of her white cotton shorts. Her legs were crossed at the ankle. She fiddled with a strand of hair, using both hands, and looked at me as if I might be dangerous. I shook my head which released a ball bearing into the bagatelle of my brain and it took forever to drop down the hole.

'Hello,' I said. 'What's your name?'

'Katrina,' she said, and put the strand of hair in her mouth, freeing up her hands which she had no place for on her body. 'What's yours?'

'Bruce.'

She disappeared, leaving me blinking and holding on to the cool metal of the bedstead and running a parroty tongue around the birdcage of my mouth. It was 6.30 p.m.

'That's a funny name,' she said, reappearing at the door, a biscuit in both hands, which she nibbled.

'Not as funny as Brian.'

'Brian?' She tasted it. 'That's a bear's name, isn't it?'

'Could be.'

'Do you like biscuits?'

'Sometimes.'

'You can have one of mine.'

'Thanks, but not now,' I said. 'I haven't got the mouth for it.'

'That's a funny thing to say.'

'You're not wearing my mouth.'

'You're funny,' she said, putting a hand up to her mouth and feeling it.

I'd blinked the crap out of my eyes by now and could see that Katrina was on the verge of being pretty. The features she was going to take into womanhood were all there, but not settled in her face. They were too big, making her gawky. She was tall with a straight body which had started to curve, the hips coming out, the thighs getting some shape. She walked over and sat on the edge of the bed, pushed her bottom back and leaned against my crooked knee. She nibbled the biscuit she was holding with fingers whose nails were down to the quick.

'Is Dotte here?' I asked.

'Mummy's talking to the boys in the yard,' she said. 'She can't find Kofi.'

'He was here an—'

'Don't you like me?'

'Course I like you.'

'How do you know?'

'I can tell.'

'How?'

'You talk quietly when I'm waking up.'

'I'm sorry I woke you up.'

'How do you know you woke me?'

'I looked at you and said to myself, "Wake up, wake up," and you did. Magic. Do you know how old I am?'

'No.'

'Guess.'

'Fourteen.'

'That's not fair. You knew.'

'No, I didn't.'

'Anyway, I'm not fourteen.'

'There you go then.'

'I'm thirteen and three-quarters.'

She sounded young for her age, but what do I know? Maybe it was a miracle she was talking at all and not plugged into a walkman listening to some hair-sprayed youth bounce around in their jockeys, pretending to play music. I wondered if she was Kurt's daughter, but then couldn't imagine B.B. not telling me about it. Then again, if he'd told me that I was throwing a family out into the street, I wouldn't have taken the job.

'What are you thinking about?'

'Nothing. I've just woken up.'

'But don't you think about things all the time?'

'I try not to.'

There was the sound of a footfall on the verandah and Kat-rina started and shot off the bed and out of the room. I didn't move and listened to voices outside talking too quickly and quietly to be heard. Then footsteps in the corridor and the door opened wide and standing in the squares of light was a woman. As soon as I saw her I knew I was in trouble.

'You're Bruce Medway,' she said. 'B.B. mentioned you.'

'What did he say?'

'He said you'd be coming. We reckoned you were going to sack Kurt.'

'You were right.'

'Somebody's done your job for you. The police've just told me he's dead.'

'I know,' I said, and she looked at me, her hand creeping up the doorjamb.