The Big Killing (24 page)

'How did he know about Kantari, you mean?'

'Maybe James Wilson knew Kantari and gave his name.'

'To protect Fat Paul? Possibly. So why hasn't Kantari been raked by the Leopard?'

'Red Gilbert knew that Kantari was the buyer. He knew that he was
going
to receive the package which was why he followed Kurt Nielsen.'

'How does he know to follow Kurt Nielsen?'

'Somebody told him to,' said Bagado. 'Kantari sounds a slippery fellow.'

'He's a player,' I said. 'Maybe Dotte can help there, she knows
of
him, she says.'

'Americans, Krahns, Kantari. I want to see that video.'

Katrina appeared at my elbow, still puffy with sleep and looking as if she might rub herself out if she continued working her eye over with her knuckle. She pointed over to Dotte and asked what we were supposed to be doing. I said I had to make a call. Her shoulders sagged and she shuffled back through the tables.

'She's pretty,' said Bagado, 'and not
so
strange.'

'Her mother says she can be a little off beam. But then everything about this job is a little off beam. You should have been there last night, the boys felt it and bolted, they knew about that juju. Tell me about Hadet.'

'Hadet is nothing, he just gave the Alfas a beating for not paying up. More interesting is who works for Rademakers.'

'There is somebody?'

'Yes, but perhaps it's not the work you had in mind. Her name is Chantale Leubas. A married woman with expensive tastes, big blonde hair, Parisian clothes, painted nails and plenty of gold jewellery. She has a husband who works in the Peugeot sales department.'

'Rademakers's mistress?'

'Maybe not just Rademakers's. The garage boy says Rademakers keeps a room at the Hotel Tiana in Plateau for "siestas". She works three mornings a week for him, they have lunch and take a "nap" afterwards. The doorman confirmed it and told me about the husband. The Leubases have a nice house in Deux Plateaux. Not cheap. She was picked up by a chauffeur-driven Mercedes around seven-thirty in the evening. I followed her around Abidjan; take my word for it, she's a
fille de joie
.'

'Did you speak to her?'

'I was going to leave that to you. I couldn't see that she'd have anything to say to a fifty-four-year-old unemployed Beninois policeman.'

'What about Malahide?'

'He'd left. No address. Paid cash. The only thing I could get out of the girl was that he had a lot of Libyan stamps in his passport. The rest of the conference delegates left after lunch yesterday and I talked to most of them. They all knew him. He gave a talk about pineapples. I met someone called Dr Felix Bost who lives here in the Ivory Coast and he knew a lot more about him than most. He's a conservationist, which means he doesn't like Malahide because Malahide is in the logging business. He operates out of Man near the western border with Liberia. Dr Bost says that the Ivorian forest has already been decimated and there's barely enough left to make an operation worthwhile. Conclusion?'

'Malahide buys Liberian logs. The logging territory is in Grand Gedeh and Nimba County just across the border from Man.'

'Which is held by Samson Talbot's rebels. Dr Bost told me about an Armenian, called Ajamian, who trades out of Man and can give us better information about Malahide's business. I have Dr Bost's card as an introduction.'

'We'd better go to Man.'

'We're booked—eleven-thirty. Don't worry, it'll be late.'

I called Gbondogo at 9.00 a.m. and asked him if he could have an officer available for the body ID. He said he could, but not before 10.00 a.m. because of a meeting about the national elections coming up. The officer would join us at the University Hospital in Cocody where Kurt Nielsen's body was being held. I called Martin Fall and left a message for him to call me back. Then I called B.B., whose maid, Mary, answered the phone, and she slopped to the staircase and yelled, 'Mastah! Mistah Bru-u-u-u!' which went up the stairwell like a chill wind. B.B. roared back through four concrete walls from what was probably his bathroom, and an image of a pink hippo with his chin on the bath's rim flashed before me. I could hear him stoking himself up from the top of the stairs, the house trembling as he thundered down them, his hand slapping the wooden bannisters.

'Lemme spik to him,' he said, as if he'd ever had to ask Mary permission for anything. He whumped into his chair and those terrible feet crashed on to the table. 'Where you bloddy hell!'

'Abidjan.'

'What you bloddy f-f-fool, what you doing darn dere? You supposed to be in Korhogo.'

'Kurt Nielsen was murdered on Monday night.'

'Get me cigarette!' he roared at Mary.

'Sah!' she shouted, from what sounded like her usual position just behind his right shoulder, where it was an effort for him to turn and see her.

'I donno ... dis ting,' he said, suddenly subdued and petulant. 'It ... bloddy hell ... matches? Tank you. He mordered. Bloddy f-f-fool. Is no surprisin', de man ... a uzeless man, neffer doin' what I tell him to do. He always goin' off an' doin' what he tinkin' an' now look. Morder-èd. De wife?'

'She's here with me to identify the body. She's all right.'

'De man, uzeless, he don't deserve de job. But morder-èd. Is locky I organize de replacemarn,' he said, dragging hard on his smoke.

'Where is he?'

'He comin' from Englarn.'

'Has he worked in Africa before?'

B.B. paused.

'No, he neffer wok in Africa before.'

'Does he speak French?'

B.B. rapped the arm of his chair with his knuckles.

'No.'

'Is he the right man for the job?'

'He ver' chip.'

'Sometimes cheap is expensive.'

'Sometimes, Bruise, you tinking correck.'

'I have things to do down here. I won't be in Korhogo for a few days. Kofi is processing the sheanut which Dotte brought in last night. Maybe you should rethink your employment policy.'

'Dis life,' said B.B., depressed down to his long yellow toenails, 'dis life is ver' long. It tekkin' too much time and monny. You get my point? Mebbe is time, you know, mebbe is time...' he trailed off, and the phone rattled into its cradle. B.B. was going to hate me by the end of this job, hate me so bad that I'd never work for him again.

The girl on the desk told me that Martin Fall had come through. I ran through Martin's checklist, finishing on Malahide and our planned trip to Man.

'There's a political situation your end, Bruce,' he said.

'Surprise me, Martin.'

'The Americans have been putting pressure on the Ivorians to stop Libyan weapons coming through Ivory Coast from Burkina-Faso to Samson Talbot in Liberia. Talbot holds the Liberian port of Buchanan which ECOWAS are trying, not very successfully, to blockade. They haven't, or rather they can't, stop the rebels' business empire operating out of the Ivorian port of San Pedro, near the Liberian border. The Ivorians maintain that they've frozen Talbot's assets in Ivory Coast and that they're working on preventing arms coming through, but there's no government will behind it, which means the rebels pay and they get their arms. I'd say that they're using Ron, not just for money, but to get concessions to move arms freely, which the Americans and ECOWAS don't like. We're talking to the Ivorians now. Still no news from the rebels or whoever's got Ron.'

I threw Trzinski's views into the pot and Martin scribbled while he asked me half a dozen more questions about how Trzinski fitted in. He told me to stay in the biggest hotel in Man called Les Cascades and he'd contact me there if necessary. I told him the water was getting deeper and hotter and it might be an idea to send somebody more qualified down here. He gave me a lifetime achievement's worth of flattery and we hung up.

I asked the girl at the desk to arrange the video facilities again and went out into the street to buy a blank tape, an identical jiffy bag to the one Fat Paul had given me and some sealing wax. I retrieved Fat Paul's package from behind the glove compartment. I saw Moses in the lobby and told him to bring the car around to the front in half an hour. I told Dotte to be ready to leave then.

Bagado and I took the package down to the conference room. I set up the television. Bagado cracked the seal on the envelope and took out the cassette which was wrapped in crepe paper. He shook out the envelope on to a blotter on a desk and then the crepe paper. Nothing. He looked over the cassette and handed it to me. It was a 180-minute tape. I recorded on to the blank tape at the same time.

There was a minute of white noise and then darkness and a confusion of voices. The screen changed between black, brown and dark green and the voices were shouting in an African language I didn't understand.

'They're arguing about who's going to hold the camera,' said Bagado.

There was a single imperative which silenced the screen and the camera whip-panned on to an impressive-looking man in army fatigues who was drinking Budweiser from a can and having his temples dabbed by a young woman.

'Jeremiah Finn,' said Bagado.

The camera pulled back to a wide shot, and, sitting on the floor in his underpants with his hands and arms tied behind his back and a small head wound trickling blood down the side of his face, was the late Liberian president. He was alert, his head making the jerky movements of a terrified man who didn't know where he was going to be hit next. The camera closed in on his shins, which had several bullet holes in them.

'US Embassy, sah. I got the US Embassy,' said another voice, and the camera moved to the radio operator and Finn, who was now standing there with an earphone held to his head. He moved the microphone around to his mouth and said: 'We got him. We got the President.'

There was a bang and the camera rocked and rolled on to the President, who was flat on his face, his head turned towards camera, the sweat pouring off him now, his neck muscles standing out. The air hissed between his teeth as they applied the rifle to the back of his other knee and, bang, his whole body jerked off the ground so that the soldier fell back into the men watching.

'What the hell's all this about?' I asked Bagado, who was screwed up in his mac.

'I've heard about this film,' he said. 'They tortured him for twelve hours before they killed him. What I don't understand is ... this is nothing new. Journalists have already seen this, or a version of it. Finn played it to them to show that he had American backing for the President's capture. Their reports showed that they weren't impressed by the quality of human rights on display. When they asked a US Embassy official in Sierra Leone about it he denied any US involvement. He said the tape proved nothing—"Finn must have been talking to his grandmother because he wasn't connected to the US Embassy." I think those were the man's words.'

'So how did Finn get the President?'

'I don't know. We'll have to find a journalist.'

'Where did you hide the money?' asked Finn's voice on the video.

'I am your brother,' said the President. 'Loosen me. I will talk.'

'Bring me his ear.'

One of the soldiers took out a bowie knife and straddled the President, who was sitting up now. He took hold of the man's ear and sawed it off and gave it to Finn, who asked for the other. With four or five cuts the other one was severed. Then Finn forced them into the President's mouth and told him to eat them. The President looked up, shit-scared, chewed. The blood from his ears leaked down his chin and the film turned to snow.

We unplaited ourselves. The snow continued for several minutes. I stopped the tapes, and after fast forwarding the original to check for any more film, rewound them. I handed the original to Bagado and slipped the recorded one into the envelope I'd just bought. Bagado took a penknife out of his sock and unscrewed the five cross-headed screws at the back of the cassette, opened it, lifted out the two spools of tape and checked the spools themselves, which were hollow. The cassette was empty. He put it back together again.

'The film has to be the clue,' he said. 'This is what it's all about.'

'That the Americans were involved?'

'That would be worth killing for, wouldn't you think?' said Bagado.

'I can feel the stakes getting higher.'

'But high stakes for what game? This is a handful of nothing. It looks like a bluff.'

'Then who are we bluffing?'

We're
not bluffing anybody, we're somebody else's bluff.'

'You think there's somebody out there who knows we've got a handful of nothing and we're running a diversion on their behalf?'

'Let's hope he doesn't fold his hand.'

I asked reception to put the copy and the original in the hotel safe. Dotte sat in the lobby with her head resting against a wall and sunglasses down over her eyes. Katrina leaned on her. I introduced Bagado. We drove to the University Hospital. The cloud had dispersed now and the sun had dried out the roads, putting the humidity up there in the high thousands. We sat in silence and watched the sweat patches grow as we eased through the traffic out of Plateau.

A policeman, a medical examiner and a doctor met us at the door to the morgue. Dotte and I went into the cool room in which there were ten slabs but only one occupied. The doctor checked the toe tag and lifted off the sheet. Even from the murky photocopy B.B. had given me I could see it was a very still version of Kurt Nielsen. Dotte nodded and left the room. I eased the sheet back further and saw Nielsen's roughly stitched abdomen. The scratch marks from the metal leopard claws were still visible around the sternum where they'd grazed the skin before cutting through the soft flesh over the diaphragm.

The policeman led us into an office. Sitting behind the desk was Leif Andersen, his hands clasped together as tight as his crossed legs—tense. We shook hands. Dotte was cooler than Nielsen on his slab. She took the sunglasses off for the first time and gave Leif Andersen the benefit of her blue eyes, which sat him up. He gave his best diplomatic condolences and got to work.

'The Danish police have informed me that Kurt Nielsen is in fact a Mr'Søren Tinning who had eighteen months to serve of a drug-smuggling sentence. Were you aware of this, Ms Wamberg?'