The Big Killing (30 page)

'Let's go and sit outside with the bottle,' she said. 'Wait for the rain. It's coming. That's what does it.'

We sat facing each other, leaning against a post each on the verandah.

'Aren't you going to start?' she asked.

'No questions. I'm all quizzed out.'

'Been asking too many?'

'And answering.'

'It would be good to just be, wouldn't it?'

'If they'd had prelapsarian pizza Adam would never've gone for the apple and we wouldn't have any of this crap.'

'You believe in original sin?'

'People's sins are getting more original every day.'

I drank, poured another measure and looked into the night to see if the storm was coming to loosen up the atmosphere.

'Talking in the dark is easy,' said Dotte.

'Listening is easier.'

'You're not helping me.'

'All right. Tell me what happened to Kurt. You said he killed a man.'

She took a couple of long drags on the cigarette, gathering herself.

'We were in Hamburg. Kurt was doing a deal with a guy who ran girls at a live-performance sex club just off the Reeperbahn. They bought the stuff by the kilo, I mean, a girl has to get out of her head to go on stage with a pig. Kurt had just bought a gun. A guy had pulled a knife on him and taken him for half a kilo and twenty-five thousand marks, so he bought a gun. I was watching from the car. Kurt went up to the guy at the back of the sex club, where they kept the bins. They talked. The guy didn't pull a knife or anything. He was leaning against the gate with his hands in his back pockets, looking cocky—stubborn. Then they stopped talking. Kurt took his gun out and pointed it at the guy. The guy took his hands out of his pockets and shook his head. He had the money for the dope in his hand. Kurt shot him and took the money. He got in the car, and we drove out of Hamburg. He didn't say a word. He never said anything about it. I watched it play on his mind, break him down, but he never let me talk about it with him.'

She got up, went into the kitchen and came back with the cigarettes.

'We don't
have
to talk about this,' I said.

'It's on my mind. He's dead and it's on my mind.'

'Was that what was on your mind when we came out here?'

'No.'

The light from the kitchen picked out the strands of her wet hair, but kept her face in shadow. Then she turned and the half light opened up her cheek and painted round an eye socket, the corner of her mouth, the cigarette going up to it. She seemed as far away as the night she first stood in the squares of light from the window ... and yet...

'Do you remember the first thing that changed you?' she asked.

'There are degrees of change...'

'I mean the first time you realized that innocence was not a permanent state.'

'My father died when I was sixteen. That was the end of childhood, but it is for most people anyway.'

Dotte smoked. I took an inch off my watery whisky and replaced it with an inch of neat stuff. Bagado was right. There wasn't much light coming from this woman. Especially now, talking about this stuff—Kurt killing a man because the guy wanted to talk money. Dotte's head clicked back against the post.

'You saw when we left Korhogo the first time...'

'You don't have to tell me this, Dotte. I don't
need
to know. I'm curious but you don't
have
to tell me.'

'They all want to know,' she cut in. 'They all want to know why I'm like this. The "mystery woman", some of them call me. I'd ask them if they really wanted to know what it's like being me. I'd give them a look and they'd get scared. They didn't really want to know, you see. They'd prefer it served up as a fiction. If it's too brutal they think that some of it might rub off on them. Taint their lives. But to me there's no mystery. It's a very simple tale. But they never saw that because they were thinking how much it would enrich their lives to know it.'

'That's why I'm saying, Dotte: you don't
have
to tell me.'

'But I want to tell you,' she said. 'That first night in Abidjan I saw the same in you ... and Kurt's the only person I've told and he's dead now.'

'Is it going to help?'

'It's not a question of help or understanding, if that's what you mean. I don't know what it's like to have killed a man, but doesn't it help you that somebody ... sympathetic knows?'

'You mean empathetic...' I said, and thought about that. I thought about if Bagado hadn't been there when I killed the man in that warehouse over a month ago, if there hadn't been someone who understood why it had to be done, the circumstances. I thought about the relief at seeing Eugene, a death that could have played on my conscience because I hadn't needed to do it.

'You'd better tell me,' I said, and she lit another cigarette for strength.

'When I was ten I found myself looking through a crack in my bedroom door at my father coming out of the bathroom. He knew I was watching. He turned, his towel fell away and I felt my whole body blush. I threw myself back into bed and lay there with the sheets over my head, the cold sheets on my hot body with the first sight of my father's penis in my head.

'It was like coming alive. I was fascinated by it. A silly girl's fascination with no brother to help out. I didn't think about it any more after that. But my father did.

'He'd come into my room while I was dressing. He'd pull me on to his lap and I'd feel him hardening underneath me. He'd take a pee while I was in the bath. Then the next summer my mother was diagnosed with cancer. She had a hysterectomy and that was the end of their sex life. My father had cooled off a lot since my mother was at home all the time. Then she died and he was broken up by it. I slept in his bed to comfort him. I was lonely myself. And that was how it happened. I didn't know how to say no. I couldn't say no to my own father.

'After a year or so I got pregnant and that was the end of it. He tried to make me terminate it. I wouldn't. I felt so bad by then I didn't want to feel worse. I was just under fourteen when I had Katrina. A year and a half later my father was killed in a car accident. I went to live with his elder brother and it would have happened all over again, but I was older by then. I knew how to say no.

'So you see, it's a simple tale, with a long repercussion. People from the social services told me it explained a lot. Why I took drugs, why I stole things and prostituted myself. It never explained anything to me.'

'How much does Katrina know?'

'She doesn't know that my father is hers. She hasn't asked for some time. She attached herself to Kurt as if he was her father. He was very good with her. I told you, she's not quite right, but Kurt—OK, she couriered drugs for him—but he gave her a lot of love.'

The last cigarette was finished. She threw the butt into the compound where it sparked and smouldered in the dust, the smoke hanging over it in the still night air. The music was still thumping off in the darkness. The first flickers of lightning appeared in some stacked clouds which were some way off, but coming. The thunder rumbled around us. Dotte poured herself some more whisky. David came through the gates and walked across the compound past the water vats. He went into the drying sheds, where he lay under one of the chassis which the boys had already pushed in, expecting the rain.

More lightning, a lot closer than we'd expected, made Dotte turn suddenly. The edges of things in the compound looking jagged in the blue-white light.

'Where did that come from?'

'A different storm. It's coming from the east.'

The music stopped. Dotte eased herself off the verandah and came over to me. We were eye to eye, with me sitting.

'I don't want you to think badly of me,' she said, and kissed me on the lips. There was nothing warm or seductive or lingering about the kiss. I was expecting a more chemical reaction but the kiss sat on my lips, going no further than if it had been stuck there like joke lips. Then a wind bolted through the compound, plastering Dotte's hair across her face and whipping the strange moment away with it.

She swung herself up on to the verandah just as the first rain kicked up the dust.

'What are you doing tomorrow?'

'We should look at the books early; I might have to go to Man.'

'You have to go back?'

'Sometime.'

'Why?'

'The kidnap. The guy is going to be released as soon as the Ivorians agree to the terms and I turn up with the diamonds.'

'Is it rude to ask how much they want?'

'Two millions' worth.'

'He's not cheap.'

'He can afford it.'

'I'm going to bed,' she said. 'I can't add unless I have eight hours' sleep. Not that there's much to add in those books, you'll see. Good night.'

She went back to the kitchen, whose light failed as she reached the door, along with all the other lights in Korhogo. I leaned against the post and watched the rain and let the sound of it, on the rusted corrugated-iron roofs, drum my brains out.

Monday 4th November

It was still dark at 5.40 in the morning, and cool. Cool enough to wake up wrapped in a sheet with no sweat in the scalp and the unusual feeling of having rested. I dressed and went into the corridor with my shoes in my hand. Dotte's bedroom door was ajar. I listened and then pushed it open—nobody home. The bed was made, there were crossed ironing creases on the pillows, and a dent in the edge where someone had sat.

I put my shoes on, swigged a cup of coffee and at first light walked across the puddled compound to where the boys slept and found Kofi blowing on some kindling. I told him I wanted to go and see Soumba, Kurt's old girlfriend, and asked if she lived far. He said he would take me.

We drove through a hungover Monday morning in central Korhogo to an old colonial house on the other side of town. It looked derelict behind its high walls. There had been a fire in one half of the house. The rooms inside were blackened by smoke and only a single charred shutter remained on one window. A group of women and children sat outside in the compound between the house and what had been the servants' quarters.

I asked after Soumba and nobody answered, a little hostility rankling on the back of the woodsmoke coming in my direction. Two young women who'd been pounding yam stopped and looked at the white man. A kid with his finger in his belly button leaned against the thigh of a seated mama who was holding a small baby in swaddling.

'
Où est Soumba
?' I tried again.

A tall, slim young woman in a smart African print suit, of red and green cloth with a European-style cut, appeared at the door of the main house. She had gold sandals on and turned a heavy bronze wristlet on her left forearm. I introduced myself and followed her into the house, which had nothing in it except a red spray-painted slogan of the FPI opposition party on a blackened wall.

'Trouble?' I asked in French.

'The Ivory Coast is not yet a democracy.'

'Your men have been taken?' She nodded. I decided to make it quick. 'You know Kurt?' She nodded again. 'He's dead. Murdered last week.' No reaction. 'You were lovers, weren't you?' She shrugged. Tougher lines needed. 'I found a juju under his mattress.'

'It wasn't mine,' she said as a matter of fact, barely opening her mouth.

'Whose was it, then?'

'Ask the whore.'

'Which whore?'

She batted me away with her hand and walked off towards the wall with the slogan.

'I finished with Kurt some time ago,' she said. 'When did you last see him?'

'I saw him every day. He stood outside the gates there, looking in. He was a lost man. I told him he would be. Too weak.'

'Too weak or too poor?' I said, and she shot me a look that took most of the back of my head off.

'I don't have to speak to you, M. Medway.'

'You're wearing nice clothes. Good cloth. Good tailor.'

'I'm not bought, like you think African girls are bought.'

'How are you bought?
Cadeau-cadeau?
' I asked, needling to get an answer. It incensed her and she came at me with her arms flailing. She caught me on the side of the head with the bronze wristlet, but I got hold of her arms and held her close so that our noses nearly touched. 'The juju, Soumba?'

'It wasn't mine. He had his own juju. He didn't need any from me.'

'What does that mean?'

'He was already spoilt, broken.'

I let her go, pushing her away and shook my head to try and get the things to stop popping in there. She held on to her arms, looking over her shoulder at me, not so cocky, but not burnt out either.

'Ask the whore,' she said.

'Which whore?'

'The white whore,' she said.

I drove back to the compound; Katrina was at the gates, down on her haunches with a group of local kids. She was talking to them in their own language and they were looking at the words coming out of her mouth as if she was spewing pure silk.

Bagado was still sleeping; Dotte was having breakfast.

'Where've you been?' she asked.

'I went to see Soumba.'

'How did you know about her?'

'Kofi told me, said she might know something about the juju.'

'Did she?'

'She said ask the whore.'

'That's it?'

'The white whore.'

'She never liked me.'

'You knew each other?'

'Of each other.'

'That's quite some hate she's stoking.'

'I controlled the money. Kurt wouldn't have been nice about me.'

'So what about the juju?'

'I haven't got anything to say about the juju.'

'Why did she call you a whore?'

'It's her way of trashing me,' she said, and sat at the table, close to me, staring in. 'What's going on in there, Bruce?'

'I don't know. I'm confused. Maybe I'm worried about the Leopard, about this kidnap business, getting strange thoughts about them,' I lied.

'Don't think about it. Just like you don't have to think about the juju. It could have been anyone. And anyway, I thought you'd found Eugene.'

'Yes, but not who he was working for.'