The Big Killing (9 page)

I phoned reception again—still no calls, but there was a fax from Ghana. Then I remembered Bagado and put a call through to Cotonou. The phone rang and rang for minutes until a dull, thick voice answered.

'Bagado?'

'Yes.'

'You all right?'

'I've some fever. A little malaria. I was sleeping.'

'Do you want some work?'

'What sort of work?'

'Picking bananas,' I said, and he thought about it for ten seconds.

'Forget it,' he said.

'Detective work, Bagado. What the hell else would I call you for?'

'Picking bananas—I don't know. I'm nearly that desperate. My little girl is sick and I have nothing. I open the cupboard, and the cupboard is bare ... not even any shelves ... my wife has used them for firewood.'

'Go to a travel agent called Bénin-Bénin in the quartier Zongo; you know it. They have some money for you. Seventy-five thousand CFA. Give some to your wife and use the rest to get yourself to Accra. I want you to check out someone who calls himself Fat Paul who works out of an office in Adabraka called Abracadabra Video on Kojo Thompson Road. He has two bodyguards who call themselves George and Kwabena. The first one is a shooter, the second is just very big. He says he runs a video business, you know, a chain of video cinemas. See what you can find out about him. Then come to the Novotel in Abidjan as fast as you can. OK?'

'What's the hurry?'

I told Bagado about the failed drop, Martin Fall's job and the James Wilson/Kurt Nielsen killings and we signed off.

I put a call through to the Hotel La Croisette and the receptionist there answered in a thick, tired voice which came from a head that must have been asleep on the counter. She told me that Fat Paul and Co were in 208 and tried to call them—no answer. Then she started waking up a bit and told me the key to the room was in reception, which meant they must be out. I asked her to check the bar and restaurant. They weren't there. I asked her if there was a large American car parked outside the hotel and she said that was the only car parked outside the hotel. They were the only guests. The hotel didn't fill up except at the weekends. The phone went dead. I asked reception to reconnect me. They tried, but the woman said the phones were down with the storm. I left a message that if a Mr Paul called, to tell him I was going to meet him in the Hotel La Croisette in Grand Bassam. I said he might call himself Mr Fat Paul, I didn't know, and I heard her writing it all down. I told her if anybody else called not to give them that message and took the lift straight down to the basement.

There seemed to be several storms around taking their turn coming in. Thunder boomed off in the north and the sky lit up in the east over Grand Bassam. When I came out of the Novotel it was raining, but not as hard as it had done judging by the slow trickle in the road gutters and the huge bodies of water that had collected at the bottom of the steep streets of Plateau. The storm drains were choked and cars were cruising with water up to their sills.

I crossed the lagoon. The lights were out in Treichville, Marcory, Zone 4A and C, Koumassi, Biétri and Port Bouët. Just after the airport I had to pull over and let the storm through, the rain a solid wall at the end of the car, the wipers out of their depth even at that crazy double speed when you stop looking at the road and marvel at the insanity. The rain blasted full heavy metal on the roof for minutes, then backed off to light instrumental. I set off on full beam, down the black glass road to Grand Bassam.

There were no lights on there either. People were moving around as if an air raid had just finished. A car horn was sounding off constantly in the streets beyond the
gare routière
and a harsh white halogen light came on by the market, powered by a diesel generator which farted up to full speed somewhere in the dark. The light showed rain slanting silver and people hopping across the streets with plastic bags over their heads. I sank slowly into street-wide puddles and crawled across the lagoon to the Quartier France. I parked next to Fat Paul's Cadillac in front of the Hotel La Croisette. The sea fringe was invisible in the dark. The roar said it was rough out there. A stiff breeze blew on to the shore, snapping at my shirt.

There were two hurricane lamps lighting the lobby and the receptionist was asleep on a chair behind the desk, her head resting on the wall, snoring. I lifted the key to room 208 off its hook and palmed it as the woman woke up. She was dazed. I asked to go up to the room, showing her the key was out. She took a lamp from under the desk and lit it with the slow and gentle movements of someone on automatic.

The lamplight made huge shadows that loomed and wavered down the warm, bare corridor to Fat Paul's room. The hotel was silent apart from the loose change and keys in my trousers and my feet on the strip of sisal carpeting over the polished floor. Several rooms had their doors open, sheets piled on the floor in one, the maids slacking with the lack of business during the week. There was a smell of raw sewage that didn't surprise me after the rain.

Fat Paul's room was at the end of the corridor, the room on the corner, windows on two sides. The bad smell was getting stronger and changing with sweeter nuances over the sulphur that made my face twitch and my empty stomach sick. The hairs were up on my neck, the sweat cold. I went back down and told the receptionist to find the manager.

The manager was annoyed. He didn't like problems on a night with no power and with nobody in the rooms. He knew how little money he was making. He changed his tone when he hit the smell in the corridor; in fact, he shut up and got his handkerchief out. He had a master key which I wanted him to use, but his hand was shaking so much I took it and opened up the room.

The stench exploded out of the room, but worse than the smell was the noise. I'd heard that noise on African butchers' stalls in the market when they flick the black meat with a bloody cloth and with an irritated buzz a skin of flies takes off a foot and relands. That was the first noise. Behind it was something worse. Behind it came the sound of a flap. Something tense and feathery batted the air in the dark. Without thinking, I reached in and turned on the light switch, but the power was still off. I held the lamp in the room and heard the tearing of flesh, and the flap—the flap of a large bird's wing.

There in the yellow oily light, in the black shadows working their way up the walls, were two vultures. The one with its head down, the other looking up, its whole head covered in blood, black and red in the strange light, as if it had been recently skinned.

The manager's vomit slapped the polished floor between the carpet and the wall at the same time as the power came back on. Harsh electric light banged on in the corridor and room. The vultures shrieked at the sudden exposure and danced back into the centre of the room, their wings spread. The red-smeared muslin drapes at the windows open to the sea were lifted and twisted almost horizontal to the ceiling by the wind. The floor was covered in blood, the red and black of carnage. The ghastly yellow of Fat Paul's raw fat quivered as he lay there opened out, mostly naked, his clothes torn off. My vomit, consisting of nothing but soured and burning spirit, joined the manager's. I retched myself dry and breathless.

We went back downstairs and the manager called the police while the receptionist found me a broom. Back upstairs in 208 the vultures had been joined by a tornado of insects circling the light and speckling the walls. I closed all the shutters but one and beat the vultures out of the room—the two of them screeching, mad, angry, their heads bloodied, their wings heavy. I shut them out and they stayed outside and screeched, scraping their talons on the metal railing of the balcony.

Two of the three bodies in room 208 had been shot. George's hand was still inside his jacket reaching for his gun. One eye was missing. A large quantity of blood had soaked into his shirt, the jockey tie and the carpet. Kwabena lay with a collapsed wooden table underneath him, one of his large hands over a huge wound in his chest. Fat Paul's head rested on his shoulder. He had what seemed to be a set of giblets hanging out of his mouth and he'd been opened up the length of his abdomen. Some of his fingers had been sheared off. They lay like cocktail sausages next to him. The ones still attached had no rings on. His gold chain and watch had gone. High up on his chest, against the lighter coffee-coloured skin, I saw the marks that I hadn't seen on George and Kwabena. The leopard-claw marks. As I closed the door I saw the black hole where Fat Paul's genitals had been and realized what the giblets were.

I took my shoes off and washed them in another bathroom and walked through the empty reception into the sea air and the smell of wet tarmac. The manager sat in the hotel bar with a glass balloon of brandy in front of him.

I didn't feel like four or five hours in a police station explaining my relationship with the murder victims. I drove back to Abidjan, windows open, and listened to the wind rushing and the coconut palms clapping, with the smell of carrion still in my nostrils.

Whoever had hit Fat Paul and company was not a hotel jewellery thief but somebody with a big axe to grind. Each time I played the hotel scene through my head I saw a clip, alongside, of the African, with the three tribal cicatrices on his cheek, getting out of the Land Cruiser and the white man next to him wired to the head rest. The wire garrotte connected the Kurt Nielsen and James Wilson killings and all of them had been opened up with the leopard claws. Only Kurt Nielsen hadn't been when I saw him. Somebody had gone back to do that, maybe the tribal scarred African or someone he was working for. Whoever it was had decided on the leopard claws as their trademark, but the reason I was sitting in my room ripping through my second Johnny Walker was that the only link that I could think of, between the last four killings, was myself. I'd been at the drop. I'd been to see Fat Paul afterwards and I now had the package. A package of a tape that had probably started life with James Wilson, whose insides were now fish food. The logic had me stroking my whisky-sore stomach.

I put on a pair of blue chinos and a dark-blue shirt and went to find Ron Collins. I was hoping he would be in the bar—some company and more tranquillizing liquor was what I needed. In reception I asked for the fax from B.B. while I remembered it. This took some time as it had gone to room 205's pigeonhole, but it meant that I could look at the reservations book and find out that Ron Collins had checked into room 312 and his key was out. I reminded the girl I was in 307, she nodded, the phone went, she picked it up and started flicking through the reservations book with a pen in her mouth. I used the internal phone to call room 312. No answer.

I read the fax on the way to the bar which gave the names of the two Japanese businessmen, Hanamaki and Yuzawa. It didn't surprise me that the second didn't begin with a 'K' because B.B. had a habit, when he stammered, of using one consonant to pull a completely different one out of the hat.

There were some nervous people standing outside the bar and one of them was the night manager. They looked scared, as if something had got loose in there and that if it got out it might pick up a few of them on its horns and toss them through the plate-glass window into the swimming pool twenty feet below. From inside the bar came the noise of a drunken Irishman who'd got into his stride and was well down the back straight and hurdling the furniture as he went. The night manager looked at me as if I might be a solution, which made me veer off to the restaurant and I saw the hope die in his face. The restaurant was roped off and it wasn't a night for wading through prostitutes out on to the streets of Abidjan in search of a quiet drink and people. So I went back to the bar and hoped that if Ron Collins was in there he wasn't too trampled.

I smelt him before I saw him. It was a cured-bacon-and-whisky smell that I hadn't come across before and whatever the bottle was that he'd got it from he hadn't just dabbed it behind his ears.

'Who the fog are you?' he asked as I walked in. 'Bruce Medway. You?'

'Sean Malahide!' he roared, and turned a wide back on me that he'd just managed to fit into the pillar-box-red shirt which held him tight under the armpits so he didn't fall over.

You'd expect someone with a name like that to have bad skin and Sean Malahide didn't let anybody down. Before he'd turned his sprouting-potato face away from me and presented the room with the fat slab of his porky back, I had enough time to register his livid and cratered features with a large wet mouth and glistening upper lip. I made a mental note not to put myself within slobbering distance.

There was a very tall and slim, blue-satin-skirted, red-vested African girl with a great mane of black
frisé
hair blasting out of her head standing next to him. Her bare legs were stilted up on some backless open-toed red high heels whose colour matched her lips and cheeks. She had a square foot of eye make-up on, as if she was off to a masked ball, but it didn't disguise the wide-open horror she had of Malahide's possible needs.

Next to her was a man who wore his hair long and looked as if he was over six foot when he wasn't perched on a bar stool. His thin, bearded face didn't fit with the good set of shoulders and broad chest he'd packed into a green silk shirt which he wore untucked from his cream, cotton, baggy trousers. There was a wafer-thin oblong of gold watch with a black alligator-skin strap on his left wrist and he had a small gold ring in his ear. He looked as if he kept himself well frocked up and that the Novotel bar wasn't one of his usual hang-outs. He was about thirty years old and judging by the way he was handling Malahide he hadn't had reason to lose any of his self-confidence. He ignored most of the stuff the Irishman dished out, mocked the rest when he could be bothered and kept himself aloof with a mild sneer on his lips as if the bar stool he was occupying had a two-foot spike on its seat.

Malahide directed the mud slide of his gut towards me. Under his failing red hair the scalp was scabbed with tropical disease. His forearms and prizefighter hands were massive and tinged with copper hair. One hand held a bottle, the other a glass. Each knuckle stood out so that you'd have no trouble guessing the impression they'd make on the wrong face.