The Big Killing (33 page)

'Where's Ron?'

I didn't answer and went straight into my room and knocked back a Red Label. Then I ran a bath, ordered a room-service breakfast and opened another Red Label. Martin sat on the bed asking: what happened, what happened, for God's sake?

'Somebody shot Ron,' I said. 'I don't know where the shot came from. I didn't even hear it. The bullet went straight through him, through the chest. We came off the bridge. I lost him in the water. I got lucky, made my way back to the village. No car, no Kwame. Think about it.'

Martin didn't say anything. I stripped and got into the bath. The breakfast came. Martin brought coffee and cognac into the bathroom.

'And you?' asked Martin.

'Bruised, battered, and concussed from the piss drilling into my head from a great height.'

I sank the laced coffee and went underwater. Martin was there with more when I came up.

'What we're going to do, Martin, is go into town and see if we can buy a couple of steel baseball bats and then drive up to Malahide's crow's nest and snap him off at the knees.'

'Who needs steel baseball bats?'

'Whatever, we're going to alter him for good.'

At 9.20 a.m. we were in a taxi going up into the mountains. As we started climbing, just on the outskirts of town there was a group of people at the side of the road looking down a steep bank. Some men were scrambling down the bank while women stood with their fingers in their mouths and anything from pineapples to a water butt on their heads. The driver wanted to stop. We said he could, but on the way back.

Malahide's gates were open. The taxi driver stopped across the threshold when he saw the police car and reversed out saying he'd rather wait outside. In the courtyard two young policemen were standing over a body in the flowerbed
gardien.
Malahide's car was parked up with the boot open. Kwame's body was in there, his head at a grotesque angle to his body. We walked up the steps into the living room where a group of four officers stood in a huddle, all talking at the same time. They parted when we came in. I told them we had a meeting with Sean Malahide and they all looked down at what they were standing over.

Malahide was in a pair of red and white striped pyjamas, the jacket wide open and his stomach torn apart, the guts straggling in his crotch. They'd thrown the leopard skin over his face which they now pulled off. Malahide's eyes bulged out of their sockets, his tongue purple and swollen between his teeth and around his neck a wire garrotte. There was an open book on the floor not far from the body, something that Malahide had been reading when he died. A book bound in red leather and much used, judging by the way most of the gold-leaf design on the cover had rubbed off. The collected poems of William Butler Yeats.

They asked us when we'd last seen Malahide and we told them about the fifteen-minute drink last night. They asked us where we were staying and we said Les Cascades and they lost interest in us. I told them that this looked like the Leopard's work. They thanked me for my help. I said that the Abidjan police, Commissaire Gbondogo, was already talking to a close associate of the Leopard and they told me that they watched the news as well.

On the way back down to Man we stopped at the crowd of people. A taxi had come off the road. The driver was dead, broken neck, the car was a write-off, too. It was turning into a magnificent morning.

Howard Corben was waiting for us, leaning against the wall between our rooms looking hungover and irritable.

'The fuck you been?' he asked.

'Making sure I was ten minutes late for you, Howard,' I said, and introduced Martin.

'Make it worth my while.'

'Malahide's dead. How's that?' I said. 'The Leopard.'

'Shit. The police say they got him in Abidjan. It says so in the fucking newspapers. Can't believe the fuck you read these days. Journalists,' he tutted.

'I've got a tape I want you to listen to.'

'You're looking kinda morose, you guys. D'it all fuck up for you last night?'

I gave him a long, steady look.

'Guess so,' he said and the three of us went into the room. I took out the dictaphone and checked the tape. 'Did you get the names?'

'Yeah, I did. You want 'em?'

'Listen to this first.' I clicked on the machine. 'The guy wearing the wire is James Wilson. Who's he talking to?'

Corben listened, irritated by the sound quality, telling James Wilson, the stupid fuck, to sit still and say the guy's name.

'Rewind,' he said. 'I wanna hear when the dumb bastard sits down again.'

Then a few minutes later: 'Truelove, I know her. Legs right up to her can.'

Corben was leaning so far forward now his head was nearly between his knees. He was nodding though, not pained. We were nearly at the end of Wilson's meeting. Truelove had gone. We'd had the bit about 'a part of history' and then the last line and Corben sat up.

'Got him,' he said. '"Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God." That's Al Trzinski.'

Howard Corben took a folded sheet of paper out of his breast pocket and handed it to me. There were two lists of names.

'The guys on the left: the first eight are the West African policy unit responding directly to the Oval Office, OK? Underneath them are four more names. They're military advisors seconded to the policy unit—tell 'em which way the guns are pointing. The first three are straight military guys. My friends in Washington tell me that the last one, Big Al, or Colonel Al as he's called, even though he's never made full colonel, has been with the Agency.'

'Why call him colonel if he isn't?'

'It gets him real pissed. The list on the right are nongovernment and non-military and have nothing to do with the Agency, as far as my friends know, but they help out. They do business. They offer specialized advice on shit the policy unit think they need to know about, so they can fuck up their decisions.'

'You've got a guy called François Marin on this list. You got anything on him?'

Corben flicked through his notebook.

'Shit. He's a trader from the north. That's it.'

'What's this line connecting Trzinski on one list to Godwin Patterson on the other?'

'Patterson is the Americo-Liberian I was tellin' you about, the friend of the late president. Right? The one who put Wilson close to his old buddy. Patterson and Trzinski are close personal friends, if you know what I mean?'

'They kiss and hug and hate each other's guts.'

'I'd pay ringside to see it, believe me, 'cause Patterson's blacker than a coalminer's asshole and Big Al has a red strip across the back of his neck a mile wide.'

'How'd you know it was Trzinski on the tape?'

'I interviewed him yesterday in a refugee camp outside Danané and his last words to me were: "Blessed are those fucking peacemakers: 'cos those assholes shall be called the children of God."'

'He was in Danané yesterday?'

'That's what I said, Bruce. I wanted to interview him today after we'd had our pow-wow but he said he had to get back. Affairs of state and all that shit.'

'Did he say where he was going?'

'No, he didn't. We didn't get on, Al and I, did not see eye to eye, asshole to asshole. He thinks I'm a pinko which, given that he can't stand journ-O-listas, puts me stratospheric on his shit list.'

'Did you ask him what he was doing here?'

'I sure did, Bruce, and he told me to quit bein' an asshole and ask some proper questions. Been to media school. The big fuck.'

'It's time I was getting out of here,' I said.

'You gotta spill your guts first, Brucey. The deal. We had one. Remember you're English—fair play and all that shit. Come on, let's have the tiffin or whatever you fuckers call it.'

'You've got the tape, Howard. Trzinski is the Leopard. You're going to tell the world.'

'Is somebody going to tell
me
what's going on?' asked Martin.

'Al Trzinski,' I said, 'has some very strong views about war. He thinks war should be stopped in any way possible. I don't believe he is the kind of man to discuss his ideas with people in authority, he just gets out there and does what he thinks is best.

'He arranged for Jeremiah Finn's troops to go into the port in Monrovia fully armed and take out the Liberian president who was supposed to be there for peace talks. He found out that his mole in the President's entourage, James Wilson, had covered his arse by making the tape of their conversation. He then went on a killing spree to try and get that tape, which he still hasn't succeeded in doing.

'I met Al in Korhogo; he said he was a consultant looking at diamond mining. My guess is that he was monitoring arms movements from Burkina-Faso across Ivory Coast to the rebels. The consultant cover was so that he could find the money source for the arms and who was delivering. He was also trying to find the James Wilson tape.

'He must have wet his pants when I came into the Le Mont Korhogo Hotel bar. The man with his tape comes to sit in his lap. Then I tell him about the Ron Collins kidnap. He decides I'm worth keeping alive, worth keeping an eye on. Remember, the guy wants to stop war at all costs. Any exchange of money for Ron Collins means money in rebel coffers to buy arms. According to the Trzinski anti-war policy this must not be allowed to happen. He has Ron Collins killed and screws up the deal.'

'I'm confused,' said Corben. I explained to him what happened last night.

'I'm still confused,' he said. 'Why kill Collins? Why not kill the guy bringing the diamonds? That's you, Bruce, in case you're as confused as I am. That way he stops the cash flow into rebel coffers, and the diamond guy gets maxed for non-payment of ransom. A nice clean piece of CIA business.'

'The man has a point,' said Martin.

'Unless,' said Corben, scratching at his beard, 'and this is not an unlikely scenario amongst American military folk, Trzinski or the men on the ground fucked it up.'

'He'd have to be clinically insane to fuck it up,' said Martin.

'We know he's that,' said Corben. 'What I'm saying is, maybe he missed Bruce going in with the diamonds and did the next best thing, which is shoot the guy coming out. That would blow one element of the arms deal, which is the free passage of weapons from Burkina trans Ivory Coast, and it would guarantee the freezing of rebel accounts held in the IC. Fuckload of good that is when they've already got their money out.'

'I'll clear it up with Al tonight,' I said, 'if you will just let me go to the airport and get my flight.'

Martin said he'd have to start work on retrieving Ron Collins's body and getting the paperwork together to airlift the body back to London. I said I'd call him from Korhogo. Corben and I went to the airport together. I asked him to do two things for me. The first was to find out when Malahide died and the second was Trzinski's movements in and around Danané after he interviewed him.

'How do you know you're going to see Trzinski tonight?'

'I know where he'll be looking for me.'

I didn't sleep on the way back to Korhogo, a ganglion of pain in my left knee made sure I didn't stop thinking about Trzinski. Flying north out of Bouaké we hit some turbulence and even after a 200-foot free fall during which a woman let out a scream loud enough to remind God he had a job on his hands, I didn't for one moment stop thinking about Colonel Al Trzinski.

In Korhogo I bought some heavy-duty painkillers and took four straight off so that by late afternoon I could walk across Kantari's compound without a limp. I had a single light-brown, red-wax-sealed package in my hand for all the world to see. It contained a video showing the torture of the late Liberian president but no audio tape. I went into the house. The door to the left was open. Inside was a large high room about thirty yards long. There was a basic lighting grid in the roof with ladders going up to it. Below that were a number of free-standing lights around a set of a kitchen. The same crappy kitchen set from Fat Paul's porno film about plumbers. Someone slammed the door shut.

Before I knocked on the door upstairs I arranged one of the old heavy-duty telescopic light stands so that it was within easy reach. I went through the usual performance with Patrice, who, I could see when he opened the door a crack, was wearing a long blond wig. He let me in and showed me he knew how to walk in a short black leather skirt and high heels. 'Am I interrupting something?'

Patrice sat down on his bed and looked at himself in a hand mirror. I walked through to Kantari's office, shut the door and then opened it again when I saw Clegg coming out from behind the Chinese screen, drying his hands.

'Run along, Cleggy.'

'You and I are going to meet one night,' he said.

'Not unless I go to the same sleazy pick-up joints you do. Now go and be muscly somewhere else.'

I shut the door after him, sat on the sofa and showed Kantari the sealed package.

'I don't suppose you have any of that Laphroaig left?'

'Teacher's only.'

'Blended for the big deal. You're kidding. Break open the single malt and let's have a dram. We're celebrating.'

'What, exactly?'

'You're getting your package. I'm getting four million for delivering it safe and sound.'

Kantari stuck the tip of his tongue out at me and poured me a glass of Teacher's.

'Think cheaper,' he said.

'Like?'

'The million Fat Paul was going to give you.'

'This isn't a question of greed, M. Kantari. Just need. It took me some time but now I know what I'm selling. The thing is, I can't put a value on political influence so let's talk about need rather than value. My need. I need four million and I think that's cheap.'

'Two,' said Kantari through the steepled point of his fingers at his mouth.

'Now
you're
being cheap.'

'You talk about need. I talk about risk. I'm taking a risk getting involved. We all read the newspapers, watch the television. I'm buying a big risk.'

'If you listen to the news they'll tell you they've caught the Leopard.'

'They're fools.'

'And anyway, risk improves value.'