The Big Killing (25 page)

'He had told me, yes.'

'The Danish police also tell me you have an extensive criminal record yourself.'

'One conviction.'

'That is true,' he said, looking at papers on the desk that weren't his. 'I've spoken to the Danish police and under the circumstances...'

'Which are?'

'The fact that the prisoner is dead, that you are in Africa...'

'And they have no evidence?'

'This has contributed to their decision, yes, to let the matter of the Nielsen/Tinning escape rest. You will, however, be required to speak to the Abidjan police about the circumstances that led to your partner's murder.'

'Circumstances I know nothing about.'

'I must still ask you to accompany this officer to the'Sûreté.'

After that display of taut diplomacy we all stood. The creaking of Andersen's leather shoes was the only noise. We shook hands and left. When you expect trouble by the truckload it has a habit of discharging itself elsewhere.

I told Dotte to stay in the Novotel until we got back from Man. Bagado and I went to the airport where we caught our flight, which had been delayed by a politician who needed to get to Man for Sunday's elections. We took off at 1.30 p.m. and as soon as we'd flattened out and Bagado had released the arm rests from his white-knuckle grip, the questions started coming from over the blue collar of his mac.

'What did Heike have to say?'

'Why're you asking me that question now?'

'It's my question, I'll ask it when I want to.'

'She said that she was keeping herself occupied, that she was staying in Berlin and she was looking at a project in Tanzania.'

'Don't make me try, Bruce.'

'She said she missed Africa and me, too.'

'And you?'

'It's been better since I started working.' An interesting answer.'

'And true. I've thought about her every day almost all day, chasing my tail for three weeks. I've caught it a few times, gnawed it, it hasn't helped.'

'And now you've got a rabbit to chase.'

'What does that mean?'

'Dotte?'

'You're always there, Bagado, aren't you? Watching.'

'It's my job. What about Dotte?'

'She's got something.'

'Think of it as leprosy, it'll help.'

'You liked her.'

'It's not a question of like,' he said, looking down the aisle after a small girl who'd built up some momentum. 'Have you ever been afraid of the dark?'

'When I was as small as that,' I said. 'And you've given me a couple of scares standing in rooms during power cuts.'

'Remember that.'

'Bagado, you're talking in crossword clues again.'

'That woman is a dark person. She's learnt about the dark before the light and it's been from ugly experience. She has depth but it's nothing you can learn from. Leave her alone because she will never bring happiness with her. And don't listen to me, I'm just a silly old African "gumshoe",' he said, trying to get himself used to the word. 'I wish I had my father's voice. When he talked about these things he sounded like distant thunder and we believed everything.'

'You don't think I do.'

'I've never known another human being take advice in affairs of the heart. In fact, they always do the opposite, because they believe in their heart. If they feel something in it, it must be right. And there's no known quantity of talk that can shift that.'

'So you tell me these "dark" things and you dig yourself a hole at the same time.'

'I have to satisfy my conscience.'

'That you warned me. Don't worry, Bagado, she's warned me herself.'

'And she can do that because she knows it doesn't make any difference.'

'I'm not getting involved.'

'Those, my friend, sound like famous last words.'

We landed somewhere and took off again. We drank beer and dozed until, maybe for the benefit of the politician on board, we circled the mountains of Man and looked down on the rain-forested ridges surrounding the grid and sprawl of the town before heading south and landing in hot sunshine at just after 3.30 p.m.

We took a taxi and checked into the Hotel Les Cascades, which overlooked the town. Bagado called the Armenian, Ajamian, who said he could see us at 5.00 p.m. We walked into town and ate some chicken in the Restaurant La Prudence in the Quartier Commercial and then took another short walk to Ajamian's office, which looked as if it had been recently shelled.

Ajamian was a large, dark and hairy man who didn't bother to explain why he was working in a room where the rubble from a destroyed wall still remained in a pile in one corner. His office furniture was draped in sheets which he threw off for us to sit on. He poured us a whisky without going through any unnecessary formalities and sat down, putting his feet up on his sheet-covered desk. He fitted an oval-shaped Turkish cigarette into a small bamboo cane holder, lit it and through a very heavy, broom-bristle moustache, asked us, in French, if he could be of assistance. Bagado gave him Dr Felix Bost's card and started to explain about Malahide. Ajamian smoked and looked down his cheeks at the card and the hair sprouting through the gaps of his shirt buttons, raising his eyebrows every so often as if he'd spotted an insect or some birdlife nesting in there.

'Felix doesn't like Sean,' he said, getting himself started. 'Do you?' I asked.

'Sean is very boring when he is drunk and when he has that Irish poet on his mind. Up to eleven and between four and six, after his siesta, he can be very charming. The rest...' His arm floated away with the smoke from his nostrils and ended up behind his chair.

'Dr Bost said he's in the logging business.'

'Sean's been in Africa a long time. He's run down the Ivorian rainforest almost single-handed and he and the Lebanese did a very good job in Ghana too. He goes where the business is, and the business is in Liberia and has been, for his kind of operation, for a year or more. He buys logs from Samson Talbot who controls this end of Liberia, and he ships them ex San Pedro in the Ivory Coast up to Europe, mainly France and the UK. As far as I know, the money for the logs is deposited in dollars in accounts held in Ouagadougou, the Burkina-Faso capital, but he also keeps money in CFA here ... so I am told.'

'The money comes direct from European buyers?'

'I think from Sean's offshore European accounts.'

'You know a lot about Malahide's business.'

'If I want to sit at the table I have to know my opponents.'

And the rebels use the money to buy arms?'

'Yes. The arms come from Libya. They ship them across the Ivory Coast. Some come direct from Tripoli into Buchanan and soon he'll be flying them in when M. Talbot finishes lengthening the runway at his headquarters in Gbarnga, two hundred kilometres north east of Monrovia. M. Talbot has promised to become a good Libyan socialist when he wins.'

'Is Malahide involved in any of these arms deals?'

Ajamian looked at me with coal-black eyes buried deep in their nests. Smoke snaggled on the tufts of nasal hair as he sucked and breathed the bamboo cane cigarette holder. He played with one of the oval-shaped cigarettes he'd taken from the box on his desk.

'Perhaps now you should tell me what your inquiries are about,' he said. 'Now that we know we are not engaged in idle gossip.'

I told Ajamian about the kidnap, the Liberian connection, Malahide's knowledge of Rademakers's office and the nature of Ron's business. When the word 'diamonds' came up, Ajamian didn't stiffen but he became very still.

'Is there something wrong, M. Ajamian?' asked Bagado.

Ajamian ran his hand over the burnt stubble on his chin and checked his palm.

'One of the things that the Ivorians have done to keep the Americans sweet is to make it more difficult to move large sums of money out of the country. It's not easy at the best of times. There's a limit. Now it's impossible without outside help. A way round this is to use CFA made in the Ivory Coast to buy diamonds. Moving diamonds is easier than suitcases of cash. This is all very inconvenient. The rebels would like to have more flexibility. It would seem logical that your client has been kidnapped to secure such flexibility and to turn a profit from their work. It will be interesting to see what they ask for in exchange.'

'And Malahide?'

'Well ... he knows everybody concerned.'

'Does he deal in arms?' I asked.

'I'm told he has a lot of Libyan stamps in his passport,' said Bagado.

'How much logging is there in Libya?' I asked.

'You're answering your own questions,' said Ajamian, removing the spent cigarette and plugging in the fresh one in his hand. As you probably realize, we are now talking in areas where certain things cannot be known. I don't know whether it would be of interest to you, but he has a timber yard on the outskirts of town on the Danané road, two hundred metres after the Mobil garage on the right. You can't miss it. It's a very well-protected compound.'

Ajamian let us know it was all over. We finished our drinks and left.

I called Malahide from the Restaurant La Prudence and asked him if he remembered me and he unnerved me by saying I was the sheanut man he'd met in the Novotel in Abidjan. Drunk, but not unconscious. We agreed to meet at 7.00 that evening. He said he lived up in the hills over Man but he'd send a driver to pick me up at the hotel.

Bagado and I took a taxi to the Danané road and sat in a food stall opposite Malahide's oversecure timber yard. Apart from the chain link topped with razor wire there were four savage dogs chained to metal poles in the yard. If a workman came too close they ran at him until the chain clicked tight and flung the dog up in the air and down on to the baked earth of the compound. Bagado retreated into his mac. An industrial saw started to rip through a length of mahogany and clouds of red-brown dust rolled out of the central warehouse into the yard covering passing workmen with a thin red film.

'Do you think you could get in there?' I asked Bagado.

'Not with those dogs.'

'I'm impressed you think you'd get as far as the dogs.'

'Old,' he said, 'but still nimble.'

'I don't want you to lose your manhood on that razor wire.'

'Is that what it is?'

'Maybe you should talk to some people without the white man on your shoulder. I'll see Malahide on my own.'

'You're not going to accuse him of anything?'

'I'm going to ask him to contact the rebels, see what they want. He's our only way in, even if he did set Ron Collins up.'

I slept in my room until they called me to say that Malahide's driver was in reception. I sat in the back of the dark saloon and watched the lights of Man spreading out as we climbed above the valley floor.

Malahide's house was a fifteen-minute drive from Man, but once the car had been videoed going through the gate and I was standing in the courtyard of his wooden, Alpine chalet—style house, the grid-lit town seemed a matter of a few hundred yards away. It was cooler up here, with firm breezes shaking the vegetation. A maid took me up some stone steps directly into a large living room with a complicated structure of beams in its roof which looked as if Braque had been involved. It was glassed on one side with sliding doors and beyond them was a half-covered, railed wooden verandah where Malahide was sitting at a table, staring into space with the back of his red head to me. The maid directed me towards a chair and let me know through some ancient tribal communication that I should sit and contemplate the inverted night that was the metropolis of Man.

'There y'are,' said Malahide, as if he'd been looking for me all day. 'Will you have a drink of something Irish?'

He poured three fingers of Bushmills into a tumbler on my side of the table and topped up his own.

'There's ice if you're feeling weak,' he said. 'Do you smoke?'

'No.'

'That's just as well. I can't tolerate smoking in my house. Can't abide the smell of it. Now then...' He roared something incoherent into the night and the maid materialized out of the darkness. Malahide spoke to her in her own language. She backed off. 'When I'm here,' he said, facing me, 'I look out there after dark and I have this tremendous feeling of control, you know, as if I'm operating a foggering great console. Are you with me? Then just as I get to feel like that, I kid myself that the stars have fallen to earth and I reach for the Bushmills and put everything in order.'

'That's very poetic of you, Sean,' I said, keeping it flat and straight.

'Yes, poetry,' he said. 'It's a very important thing to the Irish.'

'Do you have much use for it in your business?'

'In
my
business?' he said, cocking an eye in my direction. 'In my business and in life. I have use for it all the time. Some of us, of course, don't. Like that Goldstein chappy we were with in Abidjan. The man had nothing. The boy had nothing.'

'Ron Collins?'

'No poetry, that boy,' he said. 'No fogging soul. He'll go nowhere.'

'He's gone somewhere, Sean.'

'And what do you mean by that, Bruce?'

'He was kidnapped Wednesday night.'

'Maybe that'll teach him some humility.'

'It seems likely that he was kidnapped by Samson Talbot's men.'

The glass on the way up to Malahide's mouth stopped and he looked across at me. 'And?' he said.

'Apart from being an agronomist talking about pineapples, you buy logs from Samson Talbot.'

'Who've you been talking to?' I didn't answer. He sniffed.

'I thought as much,' he said. 'You've been talking to that Armenian bastard. I thought I could smell him on you. Those Turkish joss sticks he smokes.'

'He says Grand Gedeh's your second home.'

'He'd know. He's still living in that bomb site?'

'Bomb site?'

'He had a gas explosion in there. Killed a man walking in the street. He's lucky the building's still on its feet.'

'Ajamian says you do business with Talbot.'

And you want me to find Ronny boy. Ronny Wonder. What're you running after him for?'

'My job.'

'Yes,' he said, drawing it out. 'I didn't have you pegged as a sheanut man. What're you up to?'