The Big Killing (3 page)

'You look like shit,' said Fat Paul, irritated now and trying another strategy. Trying to get tough with a line I hadn't heard before.

'My mother loves me,' I said without looking up. 'You got no money,' he said. 'No money to chop.'

'How do you know, Fat Paul?'

'You let me buy you chop.'

'You have to pay for what you want. Lunch lets you sit at the same table.'

'You not workin' for you'self.'

'How do you know that too, Fat Paul?'

'No self-respect,' he said.

'I suppose you think you know me pretty well?'

'I know shit when I see it.'

'I've got a good eye for it myself,' I said, looking at his brow which was swollen as if recently punched. Beneath it his eye sockets had no contour and his piggy peepers looked black and aware. Sweat ran down his cheeks as if he was crying. He didn't look as if anything could hurt him unless you tried to take away his plate.

'You just give the man the package...' intoned Fat Paul. I held up my hand.

'Thanks, I've got it. Listen...'

'No, no,' he said. 'You listen. First I show you where you mek the drop, out Abidjan west side, down by the lagoon Ebrié in pineapple plantation. You go there in the afternoon. The man he comin' from the north, he comin' late, he only get there after dark. You check the place, mekkin' sure you comfortable. Then go down Tiegba side fifteen-minute drive, nice bar, you waitin' there, the other man come. Relax some, drink beer, look at the lagoon. They's a village there on legs, ver' nice, the tourists like't ver' much. Then the time come. You ver' smooth now widde beer and the pretty place an' you gettin' in you car an mek the drop. 'S very easy thing, you know.' He sat back and put a hand up to his face and dipped the little finger in the corner of his mouth.

'Most nights,' I said, 'my motor reflexes put on a good show. I wake up in the mornings alive even if I don't feel it. Then, if I haven't been kissing the bottle too hard I find I have the coordination to stand up and move around. Getting somewhere, putting my hand inside my shirt and pulling out a package and giving it to someone is a cinch for a man with my kind of skills. What's more, I have the in-built ability to take something with my left hand while I'm giving something else with my right. I can also count and eat a biscuit at the same time, but you tell me this job doesn't take such talent.' I stopped while Fat Paul's lip took on another cigarette. 'Now you're beginning to see you're talking to someone who's done a few things in life. Someone who knows the difference between a French-restaurant cheese and a curl of dogshit, someone who knows where the grass is greenest there's twenty years of slurry underneath. So don't pretend to me that this job's a snap. Don't tell me about relaxing with beers and a tourist village on legs and all I've got to do is give a man a package when the postman does it every day and nobody gives
him
two hundred and fifty thousand CFA. Don't tell me there's no snags when there's money...'

'Snags?' Fat Paul interrupted. 'What are these snags?'

'Snags are problems, difficulties, obstacles.'

'Snags,' said Fat Paul, weighing the word on his tongue and giving me a good idea of what a cane toad with a bellyful of insects looks like. 'Lemme write these snags down.'

He reached around him for a pen and paper and then pretended to write on the palm of his hand. He knew we were coming to it now. I could see him blinking the shrewdness out of his eyes.

Are you blackmailing somebody, Fat Paul?' I asked.

'Keep you voice down,' he said, looking up at the barman who didn't understand English. 'Blackmail? I not blackmailin' nobody. This no blackmailin' thing. This a secret thing is all.'

'What sort of secret?'

'I'm tellin' you that, it no a secret no more.'

'I asked you what
sort
of secret, not what it is. Personal secret, political secret, economic secret, arms secret...?'

'Is a business secret.'

'Show me the cassette.'

Fat Paul surprised me by flicking his fingers at Kwabena, who took the package out from under his shirt and gave it to him. With one eye closed to the cigarette smoke he broke the wax seal on the package, took out a wad of paper around the cassette, threw the empty envelope on the table. The heavy-duty envelope was still addressed to M. Kantari, Korhogo. He handed me the cassette. There was nothing unusual about it. The cassette didn't look as if it had been tampered with or opened. I couldn't see anything in it apart from 180 minutes of magnetic tape.

'See?' said Fat Paul.

I folded the wad of paper around the cassette, put it back in the envelope and handed it back to Fat Paul, shaking my head.

'Now you jes' tell me two things,' said Fat Paul, ready for it now and finished with the game. 'One, if you gonna do it. Two, how much you wan' for doin' it.'

'A million,' I said, 'CFA. Four thousand dollars, you understanding me?'

The quality of the silence that followed could have been exported to any library in the world. George glanced across Fat Paul's inflammable hair at Kwabena who looked as if he'd taken a blow from a five-pound lump hammer and was wondering whether to fall backwards. Fat Paul clasped his bratwurst fingers with the implanted rings and checked his watch, not for the time but because it seemed to be hurting him, cutting into his forearm. He pushed it down to his wrist and shook it. He breathed and kissed in the smoke from the glued cigarette on his lip in little puffs. He breathed out and the smoke baffled over his bottom lip.

'Too much. We find cheaper white man.'

'Go ahead. It'd be interesting to see the one you get who's going to make a drop of a "video of a business secret" at night in the middle of nowhere with money involved
and
at seven hours' notice, unless you can delay it some more?'

Fat Paul suddenly started to manage his hair with both hands like a forgetful toupé-wearer. He settled back down again.

'Seven hundred and fifty...' he started and I shook my head. He knew it. I had him down on the floor with both feet on his fat neck.

'Show him the place,' he said, smiling, and in that instant I saw that he thought he had won. He clicked it away with his fingers and Kwabena produced a stick of red sealing wax and a lighter and melted off a pool on to the envelope. Fat Paul planted his ring in it as it cooled and then blew on his finger. 'I need some expenses.'

'For a million CFA, you supplyin' you own expenses.'

'So where do we meet tomorrow?' I asked.

'Grand Bassam, one o'clock. There's an old warehouse lagoon side Quartier France, near the Old Trading Houses. You see the car. You find us.'

Time was speeding up, now that the theoretical pay scale had jumped a few points, so I went back to my room and lay down to get used to it. There was a lot to do if I didn't want to drift into this exchange unprepared and I reckoned some thinking might help and, although I could do it on my feet, I preferred to be on my back with something liquid in a glass on my chest.

I didn't want to use my own car for the drop. It was a mess, which attracted attention, and it had Benin plates which are beacon red on a white background. I'd have to hire a car. My Visa card was in a hospital burns unit somewhere recovering from a seared hologram and couldn't take a day's car hire without going into intensive care. B.B. was going to have to be tapped. If he didn't come through then I was going to have to rely on the money from the drop materializing. If it did, I could pay the car hire but I was still going to have to be careful. Fat Paul looked like the kind of businessman who, when he got money, thought gross rather than net and let his suppliers talk things over with George and Kwabena.

I found I was thinking more about the money than I was about what was supposed to happen between now and getting it, so I walked to the nearby crappy hotel, which doubled as a whorehouse, where I made my phone calls. There was a woman and a young girl in the lobby, both painted up like Russian dolls. The older and larger woman was asleep with her head on the back of her chair, while the girl sat on her hands and looked across the room as if there was a teacher telling her something useful. She was that young. There was no teacher, but some broken furniture behind the door in the corner which was gradually being used for firewood and above it all an old wooden fan turned with a ticking sound without disturbing any air.

The madame zeroed the meter without looking at it. I dialled B.B.'s number in Accra. She moved off with a sashay shuffle of such indolence that it took her twelve of my dialling attempts to reach the end of the counter which was three yards long. She was interrupted by a large-bellied African in a white shirt with the cuffs halfway up his forearms and a man's purse in his armpit. He nodded at the young girl and the madame's arm struck out for a room key. The man took it and followed the young girl's neat steps out of the lobby.

The satellite took my call and beamed it into Accra. B.B. picked up the phone before it had started ringing.

'My God,' he said, on hearing my voice. 'Bruise?'

'Yes.'

'My God. Is ver' strange ting. I'm tinking 'bout you dan ... you on de phone.'

'A miracle.'

'Yairs,' he said, and I heard him slapping the wooden arm of his chair. 'What you want?'

'I'm still here.'

'I see...' he said, and I heard his fidgeting for a cigarette, the lighter snapping on and the first drag fighting its way down the skeins of phlegm in his lungs.

'I'm short of money,' I said.

'Ever'body short ... Ka-ka-ka-Mary!' he roared for his housegirl, popping one of my eardrums so that it sang like a gnat. 'Ashtray,' he said, chewing over a forgotten sandwich in his jowls.

'I want you to go to Danish Embassy tomorrow. Ask about Kurt. You got passport detail I give you?'

"Yes."

'Ask dem. See if dere's problem. You know, mebbe he haff problem back home.'

'You've got a replacement?'

"Mebbe."

'You want to make it easy for yourself.'

'I'm thinking,' he said. 'I'm thinking I mek
your
job easy.'

'I'm sure you were.'

'What you say?' he asked, catching that change of tone and not liking it.

'About money, you mean?'

'Not about de monny! Bloddy monny! Dis ting. Dis monny ting. Gali!' I sensed him clutching at a twist in his gut. 'Yuh!' He sobbed and then relaxed. 'My God. Stop talking de monny. I know de monny. You yong people got no pay-scharn, you always tinking de monny, always tinking de next ting. You never tinking calm, you always runnin', runnin'. You wok for me, you learn, you learn the 'vantage of pay-scharn. De African he know it but you no' learnin' from him, you tinking he know not'ing, but I tell you, he know tings you never know. Wait small!' he roared and slammed down the phone.

There was going to have to be some money at the drop.

The young girl came back into the lobby, the guy behind her hitching his trousers after what must have been a knee-trembler in the passageway the time it took. He left. She sat down. I called my home number in Cotonou, Benin. The madame walked over and the girl handed her the money and the key. Helen picked up the phone in my house and I told her to make sure Bagado was there between five and seven tomorrow evening. There were some phone messages for me and she put the receiver on the machine and turned it on.

The four messages were all from a guy in England called Martin Fall. Two on Friday, another on Saturday morning and the last when he was roaring drunk on Saturday night. There was nothing from Heike which was crushing. I thought about calling her, but the last time her mother had answered and Heike wouldn't come to the phone. Her mother covered for her, but I could tell she was there. I could even see her waving those long slim arms of hers, the big hands open, the face screwed up.

I started dialling Martin Fall's home number in Hampshire. He was an ex-Army officer who'd quit after ten years in the service and set up his own security company, based in London. He advised despots on how to stay in power, provided weapons training for elite guardsmen and, I didn't know for sure, he probably brokered the odd arms deal as well. He was pretty sharp business-wise; he knew he wouldn't get many repeat orders from these countries when the advice broke down and the despots got what was coming to them so he'd branched out into the commercial world. He now gave corporate executives training on how to be tough, aggressive and competitive. This, as far as I could tell, meant waking them up at four in the morning to drop them in rafts in the middle of the North Sea and letting them cope with the busiest shipping lanes in the world for a couple of days.

He'd got into corporations at a high level and, with a mixture of a fabricated pukka voice and a tough exterior, had persuaded them to let him handle their security arrangements worldwide. So he advised these companies with offices and executives in dodgy parts of the world on how to avoid being blown up or kidnapped.

He'd given me some training late at night once when I'd walked into his study and had found him nodding off in a chair with a glass of whisky in his hand. I'd tapped him on the shoulder and had found myself flat on my back with a forearm across my neck, a jagged whisky glass an inch from my eyeball and Martin's horrible breath in my face.

He'd married an old girlfriend of mine called Anne, and we'd met quite a few times. When I said I was leaving the old country he'd decided that I could be 'his man in Africa'. This had meant nothing until now. I got through and told him to call me back, hearing the word 'cheapo' as I banged down the phone.

'You should listen to your fucking answering machine,' he started off sweetly.

'I did.'

'Once every three days. You must be rushed off your bloody feet. What are you doing out there? This is an Ivory Coast number you've given me.'

'I'm on holiday.'

'You anywhere near Abidjan?'

'Yes.'

'Good. You've got a job.'

'I know that.'

'What do you mean?'

'I'm being paid to sit around by one guy and I'm doing a job for another tonight.'