Blood is Dirt

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‘I don’t know …’ he said, without letting his confidence falter, before he remembered not to lie. Pressure.’

‘Tell me about the kind of person who can exert that kind of pressure.’

‘Well, you know, like you say, you meet people. You tell them what’s on your mind. Sometimes they help you. Sometimes they don’t even have to be asked. You coming?’

‘Napier, you’re going to have to tell me what you’re talking about.’

‘I want you to hold my hand.’

‘That’s not …’

‘I’ll give you five. No. I’ll give you ten thousand … dollars.’

‘What’s wrong with your hand?’

‘Nothing you’re going to catch.’

‘I don’t know about that,’ I said, and drained the first grande pression and started in on the second. ‘Let’s get this straight. The gang that stole your money from your UK bank account have called you here in your luxurious Beninois hotel and have volunteered to give you your money back. In cash. In dollars.’

He nodded.

Ten hours ago you came into my office so frazzled you wouldn’t even tell me their shoe size. Half an hour ago you tell me you’re petrified … seem to think your death is required in all this. Ten minutes ago you get a phone call and you’ve kissed and made up. Now you want me to hold your hand out there in the dark. What annoys me, Napier, what you have to tell me right now is-do I look that much of a sucker?’

He nodded.

‘You’re on your own,’ I said, and stood up to finish the beer.

‘No, no, Bruce. Sorry. I didn’t mean that. What I meant was that if I start telling you what it’s all about we’re going to be here until six in the morning and the meeting is at nine tonight. There just isn’t the time to fill you in. You’ve got twenty minutes to say “yes” and get me there. But look, what I can tell you is that the person gave me a name. The name of a very powerful man who has guaranteed the handover and my personal safety.’

‘What about mine?’

‘Yours too.’

‘What the hell do you need me for?’

‘How do you get a moped taxi to stop in this town?’

‘You shout kekeno. It’s Fon for “stop”.’

‘Now you don’t want me to get on the back of a moped with two million dollars in a suitcase, do you?’

‘I’m your chauffeur,’ I said, getting it. Napier laughed.

‘If you like.’

Since when have you paid your chauffeur ten thousand bucks for a night’s work?’

‘As a matter of fact this is the first time,’ he said, and socked back the chaser.

What’s the name of your guarantor?’

‘You don’t need to know and you don’t want to know.’

‘Maybe I’d like to know. See if he’s on my party list. Get an invitation to him for my next one. If he’s this powerful I could use him in my business.’

Napier got another Camel under way and used his thumb to get an imaginary plank out of his own eye.

‘The less you know about this the better. You help me. You take your money. We never see each other again.’ ‘Just as we were getting beyond the small-talk stage, getting to know each other a bit …’

‘Nobody knows me, Bruce, least of all myself. Time’s short. Are you in or out?’

‘Where’s the meet?’

‘Are you in or out?’

‘Why do you think I’m asking?’

‘That’s not a yes and it’s not a no.’

‘It means if we’re meeting in a private room in the Sheraton it’s a “yes''. If we’re meeting in an empty warehouse in the industrial zone it’s a big “no''. There are places to do these kind of things. I did one of these out in the bush in the Côte d’Ivoire and nearly found myself as dead as the guy I was supposed to be meeting.’

‘In a coconut grove opposite the Hotel Croix du Sud. They tell me there’s a bit of beach there where people go for picnics at the weekend.’

‘Harmless enough during the day.’

‘But you need your hand held at night.’

‘This is not a good idea, Napier,’ I said. ‘What if I say no.’

‘Nothing’s going to stop me going out there to take a look.’

‘You’re a bastard.’

‘Am I?’ he asked, innocent as cherry blossom.

‘You’re the one who said you wanted to make some money out of my … out of me, if it could be made.’

‘That’s right. I’m upfront about what I want. You, on the other hand, won’t tell me a damn thing and then you corner me into feeling responsible for you … a white man in West Africa with …’

‘You’re not doing it for free,’ he said, and smiled. Now that his face wasn’t a chiselled mess of fear and worry I could see what got him into a lot of trouble and what probably got him a lot of women too – a little-boy look. I dropped the chaser down the hatch and we went out to the car. I fitted the keys into the ignition and thought ten thousand dollars could solve a lot of problems and then stopped myself in case the next time I looked in the mirror I’d find Napier staring back at me.

‘I don’t suppose you’ve got a gun, have you?’ he asked.

Firing a piece of lead into human flesh, watching a man drop with a gut shot, seeing his life crawling away from him, takes something that I haven’t got. And you-if I remember rightly, Napier Briggs-got spooked from seeing a dead sheep in the car park, got the vom from seeing a little offal on the pavement. I don’t think you’re in any frame of mind to be going around pointing guns at people.’

We drove back across the lagoon, up the main drag past the remains of the evening fish market and past the port which was lit up with ships being worked and loaded trucks queuing to get out on the road. The ship’s agents offices were dark and quiet on either side of the Boulevard de la Marina. We continued up past the Hotel du Port, the Présidence, the Hotel Croix du Sud and the huge expanse of cocotiers between the road and the sea. Napier watched it all go.

‘Where are we going?’ he asked.

I took a left before the conference centre on to a short causeway out to the new Novotel and parked up in its floodlit car park. The flags of all nations snapped in the sea breeze, their ropes pinged against the metal poles.

‘The Croix du Sud was back …’

‘Your two million dollars is out there,’ I said, pointing across him back towards the port. About three hundred metres.’

‘You’re still going with me … aren’t you?’

‘Now that we’re away from the bar, the beers and the chasers, now that you can see how black it is out there in the cocotiers, now that you can hear the sea and the wind, I thought I’d give you a chance to think about whether you reckon there’s somebody standing out in the middle of that lot with two million in a suitcase.’

Napier looked to where I’d been pointing. In the bright lights of the Novotel car park I saw the sweat start out on his forehead. He wiped a finger across his brow and dabbed the palms of his hands on his trousers. His tongue came out to try and put some lick on his lips.

‘Where’s this guarantor you’ve just spoken to on the phone?’

‘Lagos,’ he said, turning back, his mind drifting off to a time when this was all over and he was on a flight back to Paris with his cash in the overhead.

‘Why don’t we drive in there?’ he asked, the light bulb coming on in his head.

‘We could, but there’s only one way in and one way out and once we’re in there we’re stuck in the car, an easy sedentary target. If we’re on the hoof we can leg it through those palm trees and there’s nobody who’d be able to get a clear shot at you through that lot.’

They were good words to use, ‘target', ‘leg it', ‘shot', but they didn’t infect his judgement with a germ of terror. He sat in silence, staring into the dash, mouth open, jaw tense, gunning himself up.

‘You don’t think this is a funny place to hand over two million dollars?’

‘No,’ he said, pinching the septum of his nose, thinking about something else now, and then making up his mind about it.

‘If anything goes wrong out there, Bruce, you should … you will get a visit from my associate.’

‘The nonexec one you didn’t tell us anything about?’

‘That one,’ he said.

‘She’s my daughter. The company put her through an MBA, that’s all. She runs her own business, nothing to do with me.’

‘She have a name?’

‘Selina,’ he said.

‘Well, I hope I never get to meet her.’

‘No,’ he said, turning to the window where he set about filtering all the doubt out of his mind while his eyes drank in the blackness of the wind-rattled coconut palms.

He started out of the car. I grabbed his arm.

‘No talking. Quiet as possible. If they’re out there they’ll know we’ve arrived. The first person to talk is me and’ – I whipped the Camel out of his mouth and tossed it out of the window–

‘no smoking.’

We walked to the edge of the tarmac. The security guards at the gate had their backs to us. We dropped off the raised car park and trotted into the coconut palms. We waited a few minutes until our eyes were used to the dark and walked on. The ground was firm between the palms. It wasn’t long before we found the patch of beaten earth and a rough table where the city people came to drink beer and breathe air with a dash of the sea in it.

I sat on the ground with my back to a coconut palm and watched Napier in almost no light at all sitting on his hands on the table under a palm-leaf lean-to trying to forget about smoking Camels. We sat there for more than half an hour. The wind whistled up quite a few false alarms for us but in the end nobody showed. A little before a quarter to ten I stood up and whacked the back of my jeans.

‘I’ve got to take a piss,’ I said. All the beer I’d drunk sat like a medicine ball in my lap. Napier hissed.

A car, with its headlights on full beam, rippled across the coconut palms and silhouetted two figures on the pavement. The car slowed and stopped. The lights died. One of the figures bent to window height. There was a discussion. The door opened and the figure who’d done the talking got in.

‘It’s a pick-up, Napier. This is a smart part of town. Girls come here to get taken for a ride by men in Mercedes. That could have been you if they’d showed.’

I walked off to the edge of the palms about thirty or forty metres and kicked a hole in the sand.

‘Maybe they didn’t show because of you,’ he said to the back of my head.

‘I didn’t crash, I was invited, remember. You cleared me with your big man. And anyway, I’m going now. I’ve got dinner. You want to stay, you can find your own way back.’

I urinated for at least two minutes. I closed my eyes to the relief spreading through me. The wind got up and blew with some force through the palms and their leaves clacked together like empty scabbards. I walked back to the table shivering, suddenly cold and clammy in the salty breeze.

‘Napier,’ I called, seeing he’d moved from the table. I looked around for the red glow of a cigarette butt, knowing he wouldn’t have been able to hang on. I made a 180-degree sweep of the coconut grove. The Hotel Croix du Sud’s gate lights winked on the other side of the boulevard, the aura of the new conference centre lit the night sky, the Novotel and its car park looked as if they were out in a sea of black, but there was no Napier. I shouted his name. The breeze took it off me and shuttled it through the trunks of the palms, but nothing came back.

Just like that-he’d gone.