The Big Killing (27 page)

'What're you people from Ghana side doing here?' I said. 'I thought this was Liberian war, not Ghana war.'

'We getting paid,' said the colonel, 'in dollars.'

'Better than Ghana job,' said one of the others.

'What about the killing? This big killing no be so?'

'The killing is very bad, but that between the people. The Gio and Mano people want revenge on the Krahn people. We not doing nothing for that.'

'But you see it.'

'Sometime, but most time we're not looking for the killing.'

'What about the checkpoints on the road to Gbarnga?'

'They are sick people, their heads in a muddle from cola, and weed.'

'You can't talk to them. They are lost people. They gone for hell,' said the colonel, and in those few short sentences I knew they wanted me to think better of them.

'Are you going to let me see this prisoner?'

'No problem,' the three of them said, and all looked at each other, amazed at the consensus.

An orderly took me out across the compound to another low building where the stink of incarcerated humanity hit me from thirty yards off. The jailer checked the bag of clothes I had for Ron and took me down a filthy shit-stinking corridor with cells on either side and hands coming at me through all the barred windows in the doors. The jailer cracked the arms and wrists with a thick, heavy cane. He opened up the penultimate door and showed me into a room which looked like it had been under dirty protest for a month. The light coming through the high window in the cell lit about a foot of ceiling and nothing more.

'What the fuck do you want?' said a voice from low down.

'Sounds like you, Ron.'

There was a sudden movement and Ron's head and bare shoulders appeared in the light that had crept a little further into the room.

'Fuck me. It's you.'

'You smell like an old badger. What happened to your clothes and your earring?'

'They left me with my Calvin Kleins. Nicked the rest.'

'Africans don't believe in fifty-dollar underpants. If they did you'd be naked. Do you fancy a nip?' I said, and handed him the hip flask. 'How did you pitch up in this hole?'

It was a long story with more horrors thrown in than I'd seen coming into Gbarnga. They'd crossed the Cavally river into the south east of Grand Gedeh and went into a village where two Krahn men had recently been captured. This being logging country, there was no shortage of chain saws and Ron had witnessed the execution of the two Krahns. The first by having his arms and legs sawn off, the second, who was naked hanging upside down, his wrists and ankles tied to a wooden frame, was sawn in half from the crotch to the cranium.

'The noise,' said Ron. 'You wouldn't believe the noise a chain saw makes going through flesh and bone.'

They'd got drunk on palm wine and smoked some grass, which took the edge off things. He'd been stripped at the same checkpoint we'd stopped at. There was a truck with a flat tyre with the legend 'Death no problem' and soldiers in women's clothes—dresses and housecoats, with bras on the outside—dancing to heavy metal. He'd been glad to get into the police cell.

I gave him the clothes, the belt I was wearing and the playing cards. He asked me why I was here.

'To get you out.'

'Now?'

'Soon. A few more days.'

'I've been thinking of Anat ... a lot.'

'Play cards instead.'

'I have to marry that girl.'

'You will, Ron.'

'I don't and my life will go to shit.'

'Don't even think about it. Patience is a time-consuming game.'

'I want to tell you something. In case it all fucks up.'

'Don't tell me; it's not going to.'

'I want to tell you anyway.'

'Then tell me.'

'I love her...' he said, which was all that came out because something the size of a football got lodged in his chest and after those three words all he could do was swallow. I put my arm around him and he took a standing count of about thirty seconds, breathing it down, and then he asked about the terms.

'Two million dollars in uncut diamonds,' I said, which cheered him up, so I told him he'd be unbeatable at patience by the time he was released and he nearly fell for it.

I went back across the compound and into the colonel's office again. He was on his own, pretending to read some papers.

'We take good care of the prisoner?'

'He's OK for a man who's been in his underpants for a week,' I said.

'Those terms of yours. You're talking to the Ivorians about the first two?' He nodded. 'Where and when for the exchange?'

'On the border. We'll give you the time and location when we've finished talking to the Ivorians.
You
will make the exchange, nobody else. No guns, only the diamonds.'

After a courtesy knock Malahide came in, looking as if he'd just lapped the cream.

'Are you done, Bruce?'

'You're winning, Sean?'

'I'm not losing.'

We drove back to the regular border crossing in the same jeep, a light drizzle falling. We had little trouble from the checkpoints. Some of them were strangely silent, with just the sound of the light rain on leaves, the smell of woodsmoke, the sight of a pair of boots still on some feet, lifeless in a doorway, the dogs and rats going about their business and the shattered forest standing back, looking on.

Saturday 2nd November

Malahide's driver met us at the border and drove us back to Man with a fresh bottle of Bushmills on the back seat between us, our heads and shoulders soaked through and the rain still coming down, but heavier. They dropped me at the PTT. I called Martin Fall, who hit me with a couple of hundred questions until I was blethering anything that came into my head.

'We're talking to the Ivorians too,' he said. 'So are the Americans, and now the French have got involved, which has pissed the Yanks off mightily. The French put up a transmitter/ receiver for Samson Talbot some months back and the Yanks didn't much like that. The Ivorians are going to say one thing to keep the Americans happy and let everything flow for Samson Talbot. They think they're backing a winner. All the Americans can think of is Libya—Libya and Lockerbie. If Talbot's Libyan-backed they don't want him. As for the diamonds, well, I don't think that's going to be a problem for Collins and Driberg.'

I told him I was going back to Korhogo via Abidjan until the exchange; he could leave messages at the Novotel and I gave him the Korhogo number.

Bagado had been sleeping, his face was puffy. He lay under a cold towel and said he'd been boozing all afternoon.

'It's the only thing to do on a wet afternoon.'

'It was work.'

'My kind of work.'

'Where were you when I needed you?'

'Who were you drinking with?'

'Two businessmen from England.'

'Not many of them around here.'

'They don't speak French, either. They were cagey about what they were doing until we started drinking. I told them I was in sheanut and we were doing development work up north and around Guinée. They said they sold educational and scientific equipment. Like what? I asked them. Rain gauges, they said. They were both wearing hand-made shoes, thousand-pound lightweight suits, one's got a Rolex, the other a Patek Philippe. I thought, "We should be in the rain-gauge business". Then after an hour or two they told me they work for IMIT. International Machine and Instrument Technology based in Nuneaton. I remember the name but not what they do, but I know it's more than rain gauges. I call Brian, my detective friend in London, and he tells me they make weapons. They're arms salesmen.'

'Another supplier. They could be working with Malahide to take away some of the business from the Libyans. He was looking pleased with himself this afternoon.'

'It's another piece on the board,' said Bagado. 'This game's filling up.'

He gave me the bad news after that, which was that we'd missed the flight out of Man and there wasn't another until Monday. We were on the overnight bus to Abidjan. I went to my room and showered and slept. A knock on the door tugged me out of it.

It was a man I didn't know. A white man with straggly long grey hair and matching beard who smoked a cheroot which he must have rolled himself, using dried dung. He took it out of his mouth and spat on to the floor.

'Howard Corben,' he said, in an American accent, holding out a claw. He was wearing brown and very damp clothes. The shirt looked as if it was the first he'd ever made and he'd done it from memory rather than go through the fag of using a pattern. He had a leather satchel, stained dark from the rain, and a camera with a macramé strap. His trousers had a six-inch tuck in the waist and were held up with string, the bottoms were stuffed into woollen socks whose furred ends were iced with chocolate mud.

'Bruce Medway,' I said. 'I'd ask you in...'

'It might be better,' he said, and side-stepped past me into the room.

I dressed and shaved and asked Corben if he wanted a drink, but he was already in the mini-bar.

'I saw you coming out of Liberia this morning,' he said.

'Who are you?'

'Howard Corben. I told you.'

'Where'd you learn that sense of humour?'

'I'm a freelance journalist.'

'How'd you find me?'

'I saw you at the border. So I took a bush taxi to Man, came here, paid some money and they told me where the two-metre white guy's room was.'

'And now?'

'I thought we could talk about what you were doing in Liberia with Sean Malahide.'

'You know him?'

'Sure.'

'Ask him, then.'

'He lives out of town and I don't have his home phone number.'

'You mean you've got a better chance with me.'

'Could be.'

'You tell me something, Howard. I'll tell you something back.'

'How 'bout vice versa.'

'Bye-bye.'

'Shoot.'

'James Wilson. Found dead in Abidjan last week.'

'Guts ripped out by the Leopard.'

'The paper I read said he was involved in the handover of the Liberian president to Jeremiah Finn and the President's Krahn tribe paid him back. What can you tell me about it?'

'You got something to blow that story open again?'

'We had a deal, Howard, don't go falling at the first fence.'

He poured himself a whole miniature and remembered to offer me one.

'Beer to chase?' he asked. I nodded. 'You got any real cigarettes?' I shook my head. He sat down. Comfortable.

'James Wilson. Now that is a can of worms, a goddam drum of worms with a nest of vipers on top. Shit. The first thing is I gotta go back to June this year. In June James Wilson went to the States with a delegation of Krahn supporters of the Liberian president. They wanted to tell the US what a great guy he was and the US told them, you gotta be kidding.'

'Who in the US?'

'A unit of West African specialists.'

'Appointed by the US president?'

'The President of the USA is well clear of this shit, not even in the same room as the fan. So, the US, I mean this policy unit, says the Liberian president has to go. That's the only way the fighting's gonna stop. On to the stage walks Godwin Patterson, an Americo-Liberian who's a friend of the Liberian president, same masonic lodge and all that shit, organized funds for him from the other A-Ls in the States. My Washington pals tell me Patterson and Wilson had meetings with each other, with none of the other delegates present. When the delegation goes back to Liberia, Patterson is with them. He introduces Wilson to the President, so Wilson goes from peripheral Krahn supporter to ace buddy.

'Now, that is something I found out after the President was captured in the port in Monrovia on September the ninth by Jeremiah Finn at what was supposed to be a three-way peace settlement between Finn, the ECOWAS peacekeepers and the Liberian president. I also found out that James Wilson visited the port twice in the morning before the President turned up on September the ninth to talk to the ECOWAS guys and Jeremiah Finn visited the US Embassy in Monrovia three times on the same morning ... September the ninth.'

'What was the peace settlement?'

'The President and his guard were going to get free passage out of Monrovia with US visas and money. Finn was going to get the bits of Monrovia he hadn't already secured. And ECOWAS were going to implement a peace plan, including an interim Liberian government. That, as you know, did not happen.

'From midday on September the ninth Finn's men were going around the port evacuating people, telling them something's gonna happen at two p.m. The presidential convoy turned up at the port at one-forty-five that afternoon. The ECOWAS troops disarmed the guard. At two o'clock Finn turned up with his troops and they let them in fully armed. They killed something like seventy people in the presidential guard, shot the President in the legs and took him. How does that sound to you, Bruce?'

'Everybody knew what was going on except for the President and his guard.'

'Right. A set-up. But there's no proof.'

'There's that film of Finn torturing the President and speaking to the embassy on the radio.'

'I've seen that piece of shit. Makes out he's got the embassy on line and says, "We got him, we got the President." It doesn't stand up. It's a crock.'

'So why'd James Wilson get it?'

'This is it. The can of worms I was talking about. This is the bit that nobody knows except for a few journalists who were still hanging out in Monrovia after the President bought it. I'm not sure
I
even know it. I mean, I don't know how I know it, if I do. You get me?'

'Drink some more whisky, Howard.'

'This is fact: An embassy cleaner called Joe Biécké was found dead in the Sinkor quarter of Monrovia, September the twelfth. He'd been shot in the head and his abdomen ripped open. His heart and liver were missing.'

'What about the wire garrotte?'

'One of the few differences.'

'What's the bit you don't know how you know?'

'Joe Biécké found a wire in the cistern in the men's bathroom in the US Embassy. No tape, just the device.'