The Big Killing (7 page)

'That's the way he wanted it.'

'Like hell he did.'

'You just in it for the money, what do you know?'

'My mistake.'

'You too hungry. No chop enough.'

'So why didn't we do it at a petrol station, or a bar outside Abidjan? Why did we go out there in the boondocks?'

'Boondocks, snags, you teachin' me things I don't know. Is good,' he said, patting his molten-tar hair. 'But you aksin' too many questions, my likin'. What you wan' know everything for? You the paid help.'

George pulled himself back through the hole in the wall, slipping on the rubble outside. He held up a hand, the lump in his armpit visible. I took out the package and shook the cassette out into my hand and threw it on the floor towards Fat Paul. Kwabena came from behind me and picked it up.

'Not what I'd call an "important film".'

'You learnin' fast,' said Fat Paul, now standing and giggling. 'You enjoy the show? They big boys, huh? Mekkin' you white boys feel small?'

'So now you know the competition's out there,' I said. 'One man dead, nearly two. The real thing must be important.'

'You still wan' make some money?'

'I made that mistake already.'

'No, you right. This corruption thing with money too bad. You do it for free this time. Is better for you.'

'You know how to annoy people, Fat Paul.'

'People been annoyin' me all my life,' he said, quick and loud. 'White people tellin' me I'm fat. Tellin' me that all the time, like I don't remember. So I call myself Fat Paul jes' so
they
know,
I
know.'

'I'll be leaving now and I won't be seeing you.'

'You staying right where you are and doin' what you told,' he said.

'Is that right?'

'You got no option.'

'Don't order me around, Fat Paul, and don't make threats. That way we might stay friends the last thirty seconds I know you.'

I walked back down the pillared corridor until I heard a noise like a golf ball being hit into a mattress and a piece of wooden beam in between two pillars disappeared in a burst of powder. I stopped and turned to see George with his gun in his right hand and the suppressor he'd attached resting in his left palm.

'You involved now, Bruce Medway,' said Fat Paul, smiling. George slapped the heavy suppressor on his palm. Kwabena put his hand down his trousers and straightened himself out.

'For the moment,' I said.

'To the finish,' said Fat Paul, shaking his head. 'The only stupid thing you doin' is lookin' too much the money. Mebbe I give you no money you do it right.'

'I lose interest when I work for free.'

'I tell you something might help you,' he said, beckoning me with a flap of his hand. I walked over to him. He took a package off the oil drum where Kwabena had been sitting, identical to the one I'd had, and tapped it on his thumbnail. 'You a clever man, Bruce. It make sense not to use your car. Hirin' the Peugeot was good thinkin', and changin' the numbers a good idea, tekkin' out the light a better idea...'

'The policeman?'

'And the bartender.' He nodded. 'You drink three beers. Leave eight-fifteen. They find a Land Cruiser with a dead man down by the lagoon this mornin'. Tyre marks clear in the mud after the rain. They doin' autopsy findin' time of death, should be eight/eight-thirty. This lookin' dicey for you, they find you were there. You understandin' you involvement now?'

'It's coming to me.'

He held the package over his shoulder and Kwabena took it and handed it on to me. Another film?'

'You no need to know nothin' this time.'

'Who's it for?' I asked, looking at the blank envelope. 'There's no Kantari this time.'

'Mebbe we findin' there's other people in the market.'

'So where's the drop?'

'We call you.'

'I'm in the Novotel. I've got another job starting tonight.'

'That's nice. You gettin' popular. This thing all over before nine tonight.'

'What time are you going to call?'

"Tween five and six. 'safternoon.'

'And if you don't call?'

'I'm only half African.'

'And the other half?'

'American,' he said, stroking his neck. 'My fadder like them white girls. You know them aid workers. He fuck one, she havin' me then leavin' me with my fadder when she go back to the States. They don't like white girls comin' back home with little black piccaninny under they arms.'

'You staying out here in Grand Bassam?'

He thought about that for a moment, shook a hanky out and polished his face round and round getting slower.

'We in the Hotel La Croisette on the front.'

'You don't like Abidjan?'

'They nervous in Abidjan. I like keepin' calm.'

'You mean you don't want to get seen, a man your size in that shirt.'

'Time for lunch,' he said, looking at his watch. 'We no chop yet ... you?'

I shook my head. He turned and walked to the hole in the wall with surprising speed, Kwabena just in front of him. He took the big man's arm to support himself going down the rubble pile.

'Bon
appétit,
" he said over his shoulder. 'We call you.' No need to bother about me now. No need to buy me lunch. No need to work on me any more. Someone calls you a clever man, it's always because he's cleverer.

From the hole in the wall I watched George swing open the Cadillac's heavy door and get into the driver's seat. Kwabena opened the back door. Fat Paul sat on the edge of the seat while Kwabena stirruped his hands. Fat Paul put his foot in them and pushed himself across the back seat into some cushions arranged against the other door. George waited with his hand on the ignition until Kwabena was sitting next to him. The engine roared and then bubbled. The car moved off.

The flat blue-grey lagoon lay stagnant in the afternoon heat. There were no boats out. Two men lay under some palm-leaf thatch down by the water, sleeping. A car started, off in the buildings behind me somewhere, and I leaned against the broken wall and thought about how neatly I'd been stitched.

I replayed Fat Paul buying me lunch, opening the package, showing me the contents, resealing it, being open, frank, talking me through it, gaining my trust, letting me think he was a bit of an idiot, letting me bargain him up for a payoff he was never going to have to make. He'd got himself into an all-win situation. If I'd been killed he'd have known he had a problem. I didn't get killed, he still knew he had a problem and he could use me to clear it up. Saved himself some money, too.

I picked up Moses at the Polyclinique. He'd lost his hang-dog look and was waving his prescription at me as if it was a winning lottery ticket.

'No money,' I said, and his face crashed.

'I still pissing glass, Mr Bruce.'

'I'm sure you are. Don't drink anything,' I said. 'We might get some money this afternoon. Mebbe you shouldn't have given the girl the two thousand she giving you trouble down there.'

'Two thousand CFA don't catch for this thing,' he said, shaking the paper, 'and I don't know she giving me trouble down there. I know, mebbe I beat her doing this thing.'

'She looked as if she could give
you
a beating, you ask me.'

'Mebbe you right, Mr Bruce. She stroooong woman.'

We parked up in the Novotel garage. Moses gave me his prescription and I told him to come and see me first thing in the morning. I asked reception to put Fat Paul's new sealed package in the hotel safe and went up to my room, double-locked the door and flaked out on the bed. I dreamt, no doubt something meaningful which would catch up with me later, and just as an unanswered ringing had begun to annoy me, I woke up with the phone on the other side of the bed, insisting. Somebody had filled my mouth with those things the dentist puts in to soak up the goo, but it didn't matter because it was B.B. on the line and he was speaking through a mouthful of four bananas.

'You tek your time,' he said.

'I was sleeping.'

'It three in de afternoon.'

'All this leisure tires me out.'

'I see...' he said, swallowing something that must have been the size and furriness of a tennis ball because it took him several goes and left him out of breath. 'Ra-ra-ra-ra Mary!' he stammered at a roar to the maid and I heard the slip, slap, slop of her arrival at his side. 'Drink,' he said. He put the receiver on his stomach and I heard some subterranean noises that would have made a potholer rush for the surface.

'What you doing in the Novotel?'

'I'm staying here.'

'For your own accoun'?'

'Unless you want to pay?' I said, hearing that line fizz through his brain.

'I not payin' for dat!' he roared. 'Gah! You tanking for one...'

'B.B., calm down. I'm paying.'

'Mebbe you pay me de monny you owe me 'fore you go stayin' in de Novotel.'

'You'll get it, and when you do I'm up to my daily rate, remember.'

'Bloddy daily rate! Bloddy ting! You teef man wid your daily rate!'

'What do you want, B.B.?' I asked, measuring out the syllables. B.B. bubbled some more, chewed over his anger and spat it out like gristle.

'First ting,' he belched. 'You go, you go tomorrow. Kurt, he gone. He not dere. I don' know where he gone. De wife, she say he still dere. I aks to spik to him. She say he always out. You go, you find de problem. You still haf de Kurt passport detail?' he asked, knowing I still had it from the last time he'd asked me. He coughed a quantity of phlegm into his mouth and I felt him search for his hanky. 'Second ting,' he said, spitting the oyster, 'you go to Danish Embassy?'

'Not yet.'

'What you doin' all day?'

'I've got a tight schedule.'

'Mebbe you try wokking in de day like rest of us. Sleep at night, you know.'

'I'll make a note of that.'

'You go to Danish Embassy this afternoon; this Kurt man a criminal, I know it. T'ird ting, de Japanese, dey come.'

'Which Japanese?'

'De company dat buy de sheanut. Dey have de croshing plant in Japan.'

'I know, but what are their names?'

'My God, dis difficult ting. Har-ra-ra-ra-ra...'

'Was that one or both of them?'

'No, de udder one is, Ka-ka-ka-ka-ka...'

'Fax me.'

'You tinking correck.'

'What about money?'

'Wait de monny!' he shouted, irritated. 'De Japanese ... you show dem round, show dem de operascharn, you give dem good time, tek plenty whisky. Kurt wife, she help make some food tings an' such. OK?'

'Fine. The money for this?'

'You always aksing de monny!'

'I haven't got any and it often slips your mind.'

'Is there anything left in Korhogo?'

'No. All gone. You find de books and tell me where it gone. OK. You better horry or de bank it shut,' he finished, the phone clattering into its cradle.

I called the Danish Embassy and made an appointment to see a vice-consul called Leif Andersen at 4.00 p.m. The sky had clouded over by the time I left the hotel at 3.15 and looked ready for rain. I took a taxi to the bank in the Alpha 2000 building and told the car to wait while I withdrew both B.B. and Martin Fall's money. I put it in a plastic carrier bag from Le Coq Sportif that I'd brought with me. The taxi was gone when I came out, which was a small worry. I didn't want to dally too long in the street with a bag holding nearly 3 million CFA—$12,000 doesn't look much like a pair of running shoes.

Up the street a rangy kid of about twenty, in a sweatshirt with a big number thirty-two on it, strolled out of a shop doorway with his hands in his baggy jeans pockets. He had his hair razored up over the ears and cut flat top. Across the street another punk looked over the roof of a car, wearing a baseball cap the wrong way round and a black T-shirt with something white on it. These kids had been watching movies, I thought, and turned to walk down the hill. Two boys walked out of a garage in front of me, one lifting his T-shirt to get some air up there and to show me what he had in the waistband of his jeans, the other with an ear missing. These two were shabbier, old jeans cut tight, faded T-shirts. The one with two ears had Mr Smile on the front without the smile, both with no shoes. I turned back and the other kid was standing by the door to the bank, his friend starting to cross the road now. The taxi rounded the block and started cruising down the hill in no hurry. I walked up the hill towards it, the kid outside the bank with his hands out of his pockets now, wiping them on his shirt front, nervous, like me. I ran at him. His eyes widened, looking for his friends. I could hear a pair of trainers and the slap of bare feet on the pavement. I kicked the kid outside the bank hard on the inside of his left knee and he went down so fast on to the concrete slabs of the pavement that his head hit the ground first. I turned, the taxi coming in front of me now, the kid from across the road in between the parked cars and the one with both ears between the taxi and me, a flash of silver in his hand. The driver, still coasting, opened the passenger door and hit the kid on the point of the elbow. The kid went down and the knife span across the pavement. I got in the taxi, the other two boys backing off.

I told the driver that when a man goes into a bank and tells the taxi to wait it wasn't just out of a feeling of importance. He said he knew that but the traffic police didn't give a damn. Then he thought about it and said he reckoned they were on the take. They were always there for a parking fine and nowhere near a bag snatch. I told him it was the same the world over.

We drove around the block. I pointed him down Avenue Chardy and into a car park at the back of some buildings. I went into a travel agent called PanAfricAbidjan and found a Swiss guy in there who spoke seven languages, one of which was mine. I asked him if he could make 75,000 CFA available in a travel agent called Bénin-Bénin in the quartier Zongo in Cotonou. He made a phone call and said he could. I gave him the money from my Coq Sportif bag.

At the Novotel reception I took some more money out of the bag and asked them to put the rest of it in the hotel safe. I went into a chemist and picked up Moses's prescription and bought a large supply of condoms for him which they were decent enough to wrap. It was a short walk from the chemist's to the Danish Embassy and I was shown straight into the vice-consul's office with its windswept off-white carpeting that looked like snow on its way to sludge.