The Big Killing (37 page)

She backed away to the wall.

'The butterfly,' I said, 'I saw it in a film. It was called "Once you've tasted chocolate"...It was the film that Kurt was sent down to the lagoon to pick up, to see if he got killed. I had the film. When I saw that a man had been killed for it I played it back. I saw the butterfly. When I went to Kantari's I saw the kitchen set.'

Her hand came out of her pocket—in it was Trzinski's shiny black .38.

'I nearly believed you,' I said, strangely relieved to see that gun, glad the beast was out of the long grass.

'You wanted to believe me.'

'My mistake,' I said. 'You were paying Kurt back.' I took a pull on the whisky. She eased a cigarette out of her pocket and lit it, the gun still on me. 'You were the reason Trzinski knew to follow Kurt down to the lagoon drop. Trzinski didn't know Kantari was a buyer. He didn't know Kurt was the bag man. Somebody told him. François Marin. And
you
told François Marin during your late-night "jazz sessions".'

'You're right, they weren't late-night jazz sessions,' she said, with a glassy look in her eye that put her some way off from the rest of humanity.

'How did you know the drop at the lagoon was going to be a set-up?'

'When Kantari asked me if I knew a white man who wanted to make some money I knew he wanted me to ask Kurt. I didn't know what it was about so I spoke to Patrice. Patrice and I are close.'

'That figures.'

'Patrice told me about the tape and he told me that it was a dummy run. I made sure by telling François Marin about the tape. I just missed out the bit about the dummy run.'

'Did you sell him any other information?'

'About you?' she asked. 'The man with the tape down at the lagoon. You were so stupid, Bruce.'

'I was.'

'The thing about a good man who wants to do the right thing is that he's so predictable.'

'Not everybody has found me so predictable.'

'No. But this time you were vulnerable as well. No Heike. Do you think I don't know a lonely man when I see one? They're all over Africa. Every bar you go into there's half a white man looking to get whole. You get Heike back, Bruce. She's saved you once. She'll do it again.'

'And last night—"This hasn't happened to me before", "I never let go—never had anybody to let go with". Clichés
and
tears. You must have been confident to trowel it on so thick.'

'I'll tell you, Bruce, it's been a strange day for me. I had a brush with happiness. Driving. You know how soothing driving can be. That illusion that you're going somewhere, that you have a purpose, that the past is only the road you've just been on and the future is all ahead. I had that. With you. I had the feeling, just for a moment, of a clean slate. Then we got to Man. The drive was over. The past caught up. The past covered those four hundred kilometres of rough road in no time. Everything I thought I could get away from jumped straight back on. My little girl and the juju.

'I've known all along. My type never get away. I was just kidding myself for a moment. I'll never be able to stop the cracks opening up between who I want to be and what I am because I know I'll never be good. There's just too much badness. One of the things about being abused is that you know somewhere, right in your middle, you know it with a certainty that no therapy can move. You know that it's your fault. That you tempted him. That you're bad.

'Katrina put the juju under Kurt's bed. He'd abused her, then he'd left her, went back to Soumba. He'd done what he wanted to do. He'd got his power back. All that strength he'd lost being mothered by me. He raped my daughter. He paid me back. I didn't know that Katrina had planted the juju, but whatever the spirit was she summoned, it found me. There was justice in that juju and it knew where to look to find someone bad enough to do its work.' She stopped for a moment, transfixed by some ine, sharp blade of rage. 'How could Kurt do that to her when he knew what had happened to me?'

'Humans are always reinviting history on themselves,' I said, remembering Malahide's words down on the Nipoué river before we crossed into Liberia for the first time.

'"Reinviting"—what sort of word is that?'

'Not mine.'

'It's not history "reinviting" itself. There wasn't even a generation between what my father did to me and what Kurt did to Katrina. It's just evil and it's here and all around, all the time.'

'What are you doing about it?'

She didn't answer for some time.

'I'm embracing it.'

'Is that why you've got that gun in your hand?'

'You didn't really think I wanted sex, did you? I've had enough of that for three lifetimes. I'll be reincarnated as a nun. I came for what I
do
need. The money.'

'It's not an impulse stick-up then?'

'Why do you think I'm here with you?'

'You thought there were possibilities after my phone call.'

'Possibilities to solve a little financial problem. Treatment for Katrina.'

'Take it.'

'I can't trust you.'

'I haven't been able to get it open.'

'Not that.'

'I'm too tired to squeal.'

She shook her head and produced some handcuffs from her pocket.

'One of François Marin's little perversions,' she said. 'So useful.'

We went into the bathroom and she locked my hands behind my back and around the base of the toilet. She stuffed a hand towel in my mouth and told me the key to the cuffs was on the bedside table. She took the briefcase and the Land Cruiser's keys.

'You know,' she said, as she was leaving. 'You might not think it but you've done something for me, Bruce. I was going to shoot you out there with Martin Fall. But I couldn't do it.'

Sunday 10th November

We left Abidjan at dawn. The four of us, Moses, David, Bagado and I, grim and silent in the cool morning which was still dark with low cloud just off the tree tops. Driving down to Grand Bassam the sea looked cold and hard with no waves, no spray and the sand still pock-marked from the drilling it had taken from a heavy storm the night before. The coconut palms were depressed, their heads hanging limp like mad people after an exhausting night revisiting traumas in their dreams. Some traders had begun to put up their stalls, but most people sat around, morose, preparing for a day's zero take. We skirted Grand Bassam and thick vegetation closed in on the road to Ghana, darkening the morning further.

The maid had found me at 11.00 on Thursday morning. I hadn't been able to get that hand towel out of my mouth and she wasn't prepared to oblige me. The owner came through as if he'd seen most things in hotel bedrooms and a naked man, gagged and handcuffed to the toilet, wasn't even going to break his stride. He honoured me by listening to my story without believing a word.

The Land Cruiser was found in the Treichville district of Abidjan and by some miracle hadn't been broken into. Martin Fall's briefcase had been forced open, his papers were scattered over the interior and the lining of the case had been torn away. There were tape marks underneath the torn lining, indicating that something had been stuck there and ripped away.

I had a drink with Leif Andersen that night. I was angling for an informal chat about Dotte. He gave me some privileged information instead. An Englishman called Martin Fall had been found shot, but not robbed, outside the airport in Man. His body had been autopsied in the presence of a British vice-consul. They'd removed two .38 bullets, one from the left ventricle of the heart and the other from the fourth rib on the other side of the left lung. The victim had emptied his bowels into his trousers and a metal tube had been found. It contained, at a conservative estimate, $6.5 millions' worth of diamonds.

I did John Smith, Kurt's replacement, the service of exorcizing the house and compound, which didn't come cheap. A Senoufo witch doctor said the medicine required was very strong and he needed a day's work to dislodge the evil spirits. I paid, and I paid big because I didn't want B.B. calling me and sending me up there to box John Smith back to Newcastle.

I spent an evening with John Smith in Abidjan. We were just about communicating by the end. He'd taken some French lessons so I let him order in the restaurant. The Ivorian waiter prepared himself to memorize the order. John Smith set to it and the waiter looked at him as if experiencing pain in his root canals.

We flew up to Korhogo the next morning. I spent the day giving him a seven-hour induction course on Africa. I introduced him to Hanamaki and Yuzawa who had already revolutionized the sheanut process. That night they took him off and showed him how they drank whisky in Yokohama. They understood every word he said. He was still warm when I left for Abidjan the following morning, but so pale he was translucent.

The election results came out. The President won with eighty-two per cent of the vote which, if you wanted to take a positive view of things, meant that he'd lost eighteen per cent of his popularity since 1985, when he'd regained the presidency with the first ever hundred per cent victory in African history. The FPI opposition leader made a few comments about stuffed ballot boxes and voter intimidation, delivering a final message which would have appealed to Martin Fall: 'It's like a game of football. We're about to score and they close the goalmouth.' It was touching that he even thought there
was
a goalmouth, that nobody had told him that the one he thought he could see was a hologram of his own.

I called the Collins family and they gave me Anat's telephone number in Tel Aviv. She seemed very young; young enough to start again, but who could ever cope with what might have been? She asked me about the trip and the kidnap. She was shocked at what had happened in the police station in Tortiya, and lapsed into silent terror at the Liberian hell. We both had trouble when I came to my last two meetings with Ron. She cracked when I told her what he'd said to me in the prison cell on that rainy day in Gbarnga. Then silent while I recalled the strange light as we crossed the bridge back into the Ivory Coast, but when I told her what I'd seen in his eyes when we were hanging from the liana bridge, she put the phone to her chest and I heard the wound opening up.

We crossed the border into Ghana. The sun came out west of Takoradi, just after we'd passed an advertisement for beer saying: 'It's a good life'. We felt ourselves coming out from under the shadow.

We arrived in Accra at two in the afternoon and I left them at the Hotel Shangri-La to drink some of that stuff that made life good.

The church next door to B.B.'s house was quiet for once. I parked up in the carless garage, knocked on B.B.'s door and let myself in. He was sitting in front of his Swiss Alp hoarding in his string vest and unbuttoned shorts with a bowl of nuts in his lap.

'Ah, Bruise,' he said, and prepared himself for the big one to call Mary.

'I'm in a hurry,' I said, stopping him with my hand. 'Here's your money.'

'Tankyouvermush,' he said, and counted it. He smoothed his hair down over his forehead and got his fingers caught up in the wire wool of his eyebrows.

'Beer?' he asked, flicking some empty nut shells out of his chest hair.

'No, thanks.'

'Groundnut?' he asked, and cracked off a shell and threw the nuts in his mouth. I shook my head.

'Smock?' he asked.

'I gave up, remember?'

'Like me,' he said, and threw some more nuts into the black hole. 'You know Kurt...'

'Let's not talk about Kurt.'

'No,' he said, pinching his nose. 'You know, I'm tinking. I'm tinking you giff me dis monny but I owe you someting small for de wok. No be so?'

'That's right,' I said and stopped. More nuts had hurtled into oblivion but this time they rattled down the wrong hole and B.B.'s eyes came out of their sockets. He stood up, the nuts in his lap spraying across the floor, and clutched at his neck with one hand and clawed at the air with the other. This is it, I thought, the moment. He kicked over the table and staggered to the centre of the room, his shorts slipping down his thighs. He pirouetted, both hands at his throat, and faced the Alps. I took four strides and dealt him a terrible blow on his back and the nuts came out like shrapnel—tock, tock, tock—and he set off across the room as if he'd forgotten to let go of a bowling ball. He thumped into an armchair head first and collapsed.

I righted him. He looked at me as if he'd just come up from the abyss and I suppressed the thought that B.B. would do anything rather than pay my daily rate.

'My God. Now I understand how de acorn kill de oak,' he said. Well,
I
knew what he meant, anyway.

I left B.B. asleep on his sofa and picked up the others from the hotel. Moses drove us across the Ghana/Togo border in the late afternoon. We crossed into Benin at dusk and it was dark by the time we reached Cotonou. The power was off in the town. We dropped Bagado in a dark and silent street and watched him open his door to get mobbed by his three children. My house was darker and even more silent. David installed himself with Moses in the ground-floor apartment. Moses made it clear to him that this was temporary, that he had an extensive love life to catch up on. David gave him some encouraging noises and looked around for a good place to dig his trench.

I walked up to my apartment and found it unlocked and thought Helen must be cooking in there by candlelight. As I walked in the light from a hurricane lamp came up slowly in the room. Heike was sitting on a cushion on the floor, a low table next to her with a bottle and a glass on it and a pack of cigarettes. She had a Bic lighter in her hand with which she tapped the table. She looked across to the bedroom. There were her four cases, a two-hundred pack of cigarettes and an empty Glenmorangie cylinder. She picked up her glass and took a sip.

'Do you know how long I've been waiting?' she asked.

'Hours?'

'Seven minutes.'

* Economic Community of West African States

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* Yam and manioc mash

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† Whiteman

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