The Big Killing (34 page)

'Three,' he said. 'That's my last offer. Three, or you can keep the damn thing.'

'Three it is. Now. Cash.'

Kantari opened a drawer in his desk and took out a carrier bag. He slid back a section of bookcase behind him and opened a safe. He took out three blocks of money and put them in the carrier bag. He held out his hand. I gave him the package. He checked the seal, put it in the safe, closed it and span the dial. I took the carrier bag.

'How did you and Fat Paul get to meet?' I asked.

'We have the same interests.'

'Porn, you mean?'

'Erotica is the technical term.'

'How did they know Kurt Nielsen wasn't just doing another porn deal with Fat Paul?'

'
That
is something I do not know.'

'Why did Fat Paul send the dummy with me?'

'Because they found James Wilson in the lagoon. He was playing safe.'

'Who're you going to sell the tape to?'

'The Libyans like this kind of thing.'

I picked up the light-green Chinese bowl on my way to the door.

'That wasn't in the deal,' said Kantari, holding on to himself.

'You're right,' I said, and lobbed the bowl back at him so that it would drop short of the desk. I opened the door, hearing Kantari squawk, and saw Clegg lying on the bed where Patrice was sitting. I opened the next door, ripping the key out, and got myself round the other side of it and locked it just as Clegg's shoulder thumped into it. I put the money on the floor and picked up the light stand. Clegg was through the door in a matter of seconds and I jabbed the six-foot length of the light stand into the washboard rack of his stomach. He folded. As he went down I clipped him across the back of the head with the foot of the stand and watched it bounce up off the floorboards. Patrice appeared in his whore's gear in the broken frame of the door. He took the scene in, clicked open his compact, and tugged at the fringe of his wig, concerned.

I told the cab driver to take me to the back of the Banque Société Genérale where I hammered on the door until the manager opened it in a pair of slippers and a dressing gown. I asked him if he would accept a deposit of two million CFA into B.B.'s company account. He wasn't thrilled but he did it.

Back at the compound I took a shower and sank a half tumbler of whisky with four more painkillers, just to see if the body could take it. I got into bed naked and slept like a fallen statue.

I woke up flailing at something that had run me to ground. I had no strength in my arms and my left knee had a G-clamp, but no pain, across it. Two hands held my wrists and pressed them to my chest. A face, Dotte's face, leaned over me.

'You were dreaming,' she said. 'Badly.'

'What now?' I asked, confused, my head all over the place, feeling drugged.

'I was watching you. You've been still as stone for quarter of an hour and then the last two minutes you started.'

I shook my head, which didn't shift the thick dullness, the strange distance.

'What time is it?'

'Nine o'clock.'

'At night? Where is everybody?'

'They haven't come back.'

'From where?'

She shrugged. 'Do you want a drink?'

'I don't know. Probably.'

'How was Man?'

'A disaster. I don't want to talk about it.'

She ran her hand through my hair, stroked my face—maternal. Then she pushed herself away from the bed and left the room, passing through the squares of light that were slapped up on the wall again from the light in the compound. I tried to squeeze some reality into my forehead, blink away the strange distance. Dotte came back with two glasses and put one on my chest. I sipped the whisky and felt instantly languid, the spirit slipping into my veins like a lethal injection.

Dotte was wearing a loose sleeveless cotton blouse with just a single button done up. I could tell from the way the material shifted that her breasts were hanging free underneath. She'd split her wrap open and brought her heel up on to the metal frame of the bed. Her chin rested on her knee and she rolled her whisky glass over her foot.

'I've been packing,' she said. 'Time to move on.'

'Do you know where you're going?'

'Not far on the money I've got.'

'I can stand you some.'

'You see, I told you you were a good man. Katrina's never wrong.'

'I've got a place you could stay, too. Until you get yourself organized.'

'In Cotonou?'

'There are worse places.'

'Lagos, Luanda, Kinshasa, Bangui ... Monrovia.'

'Abidjan, too. They're all going to hell.'

'And Cotonou isn't?'

'Best of the lot right now.'

She sipped the whisky and licked it off her lips. There was something different about her. She'd found some hope. The idea of moving on, getting out from under the shadow of things that had happened here. She turned to find me watching her. She smiled though, not annoyed to have my attention on her.

'A fresh start,' she said. 'I need a fresh start.' Something warm and prickly was moving in the lower part of my back. She put her whisky on the chair and leaned over me. 'What do you think?' she asked. 'You could use one.'

'I've had some in my time.'

'You're free,' I reminded her.

'That's a word to roll around with,' she said, and kissed me on the mouth; this time her lips were warm, pliant and wet. Her tongue played over mine.

'This hasn't happened to me before,' she said, stroking my chest.

'What?'

Silence. I felt the weight of her breasts on my chest. She collapsed on top of me and lay her head on my shoulder. I felt her thin warm tears trickle off my skin on to the sheet. I rubbed the back of her neck. The cicadas filled in the rest.

'I never let go—never had anybody to let go with,' she said, standing up. 'I'll finish my packing.' She left the room.

I sat on the edge of the bed, looked at the door and thought that it might not have happened. I socked back the whisky left in the glass. A door clicked shut off in the house somewhere. I went to the window and looked out into the compound where flames flattened against the bottom of the boiling vats and steam joined the darkness. It wasn't the clichés that nagged. We, the movie generation, have rafts of them that we talk in all the time. No, it was me. Was I being 'a good man'? Nobody's that good. I put my forehead against the cool glass and steeled myself up again.

'Mummy doesn't love you, you know,' said a voice from the doorway, bristling the back of my neck with its shrillness. I whipped the sheet off the bed and covered myself. Katrina was leaning up against the doorjamb, giggling. Her legs were crossed at the ankles, she was wearing a pair of small white knickers and nothing else that I could see. Her head and a shoulder were in the squares of light on the wall. Her hands were up to her mouth, her arms covering her upper body.

'Why're you peeking at me?'

'I wasn't
peeking,
" she said. 'I was
looking
.'

'Do you like peeking at people?'

'I
wasn't
peeking.'

'You should knock.'

She tapped the door cheekily, showing me her left breast, high and taut by her shoulder. She grinned.

'Go and put some clothes on, Katrina.'

'No,' she said, and dropped her other hand to her hip and gave me a 'dare you' look.

'Go on, get out of here.'

'She doesn't love you, you know. Just because you did it, doesn't mean she loves you.'

'We didn't do it,' I said, and she laughed. It fluttered her stomach and broke over my head like sheet glass. Silence and something ugly was in the room.

'Did she love Kurt?' I asked.

'No...' she said quickly, shaken by the question. 'Yes.'

'And you?'

'Sometimes.' She laughed again, high, shrill and penetrating, putting her hand back up to her mouth now. 'When he was being nice,' she said, misunderstanding my question and opening up a cold black hole in my stomach.

'When was that?'

'When we were together. The two of us on our own. Do you want to be my daddy?'

'I can't be your daddy.'

'Kurt was. You could be my daddy too. We could do things together, like Kurt and me did...' She faltered and coughed. 'I like you. You're funny.'

She made a noise like a kid pretending to fire a tommy gun and began clawing at her face and speaking in the local Senoufo language.

'We can do things together,' she said, desperate, 'like me and Kurt did. I can make you happy.'

'No, Katrina,' I said gently, moving towards her. 'Go back to your room now. Go to bed. Try and get some sleep.'

A startled, terrified look came into her eyes. She tried a grin, but it came over as a snarl, as a cat's hiss. Then she threw something which missed me but clicked against the window. She turned and ran. I heard the lock snick in her door. I turned the light on. Kurt's juju was lying on the floor below the window.

I scooped up Kurt's juju in a dustpan, took it out to the vats and threw it on the fire. David was out there stacking wood. There was one cage, still hooked up to the crane but on the ground, empty.

'Is this the last load?' I asked.

'Yes, Mr Bruce, I go puttin' this wood on, then sleepin' small. Tek um out morning time.'

'When you sleeping tonight, you listen for me. I'm expecting trouble. Big trouble. Trouble with gun.'

'Something wrong this place, Mr Bruce,' he said. 'Everything wrong here. Is bad place.'

'I know. We're leaving. Soon.'

I went into the kitchen and poured a drink. There was a note on the table from this morning saying: 'Bagado called from Tortiya. Will call back.' I sipped the drink and left it on the table. I took the mattress and mosquito net out of my room and set them up on the half-lit verandah. I took the bottle and glass from the kitchen and sat on the concrete platform and leaned against the post. I drank without enjoying it, while some mosquitoes tuned in on my frequency and I got under the net and watched them nudging into it, whining, frustrated.

I've woken up in the dark before with something evil in the room, some red-eyed beast looking over me reminding me of the loneliness of the human condition, something you don't need at two in the morning with your hangover flinging weights around your head. I'd run film clips of the good things in life, a family holiday in Norfolk, the coolness of summer grass on my bare back, taking the foam off my father's beer—a treat that got me started on a lifelong affair. I tried the same trick now, running clips of Heike in her big dress, legs crossed underneath her, puffing on the cigarette holder, drinking, looking at me with those aquamarine eyes. Then wrapping her slim arms around my neck telling me she'd been waiting for hours. I always kept her waiting, and it was always for hours. Then stepping out of that dress, sitting astride me, feeling her soft breasts rising and falling against my chest and losing ourselves together in the hot African night. Like some kind of subliminal advertising, illicit frames cut into that world—Ron's face staring up at me, the blood on his chin and the flower growing on his chest, the skinned heads of the vultures in Fat Paul's hotel room, Malahide's torn gut and bulging eyes, Dotte's lost tears, and the frail, abused body of a little, mad girl.

The phone rang the bell on the outside of the house. Nobody answered it except me. It was Bagado.

'Where are you?'

'In the police station in Tortiya.'

'I've been there.'

'They're being very difficult.'

'Haven't you got enough money?'

'Not for the problem in hand,' he said, calmly. 'Borema's dead.'

'You found the body?'

'They're being very awkward.'

'I'll come down. It'll have to be tomorrow. I've got something on.'

'Listen to this. Between Wednesday, thirtieth October and Friday, first November, three and a half million dollars' worth of diamonds left Tortiya.'

'Sounds a lot.'

'They've never had it so good. There's hardly a diamond left in the place. Borema left with some clients and went down to Bouaké with them on the Friday. He didn't come back until Sunday. Then he turned up dead on Monday. A lot of his face had been burned away with hydrofluoric acid before he was strangled with a wire garrotte and...'

'...his stomach torn open by the Leopard.'

'Exactly. The diamond buyers were all from out of town. A place in the south, a port called San Pedro.'

'Samson Talbot using his Ivorian assets to buy diamonds. I thought they were still frozen then.'

'This is Africa, Bruce. Nothing stays frozen in this heat,' he said. 'How did it go with the Lib—'

The line went dead. I got back under the net. Sleep didn't come easy, lying there expecting a redneck with a leopard claw and a wire garrotte. I fell into it like a decabled lift plummeting ten floors before the emergency brakes left me hovering, in extreme tension, above an empty shaft. It wasn't exactly a relief to be woken up by Trzinski's snub-nosed .38 fitting itself into the hollow behind my right ear, but I didn't lash out wildly and get a crack in my jawline for the trouble. He was down on one knee staring over me, sweat pouring down his forehead, cheeks and neck.

'What're you doing sleeping out in the open like some jig?'

'Making it easy for you, Al, so you don't have to go trying all the rooms and waking everybody up and killing them too.'

'Walkies,' he said, pulling me up by the hair.

We faced each other on the verandah, the .38 in his bloodstained fist was pointed at my gut as he wiped his eyes with his spare hand, thinking about what he had to do. He shook his head and the sweat flicked off into the night.

'A hot night to be out working, Al.'

'Just one more job and I'm done.'

'Got your tape?'

'Yeah, and it didn't come cheap.'

'Didn't you use that negotiating tool you've got in your hand there?'

'Sure I did. Got the price down some.' He looked at the blood on his fist. 'Had to pull rank on Corporal Clegg. Beat up on those good looks of his a little more. Got himself a bit of a headache now. But I figured the colour of blood was the only thing'd help Kantari make up his mind.'