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Chapter 3 (#ulink_c5a14235-4c45-5fdc-a7fc-53fc0dfe6e0d)
Heike was smoking cigarettes through a two-inch holder which took out most of the tar. After the hundredth time I’d seen her cleaning it, I gave up smoking and took up watching. She held the holder between her teeth at the side of her mouth and snorted smoke while she counted bundles of small denomination notes.
In the late afternoon, we stopped for a while and drank some sugary mint tea. Heike lay on her back with her legs bent and crossed at the knee. She told us that she had persuaded the women in her aid project to plant aubergines which would grow in the poor soil up north. It had taken some time because the men were suspicious of a new vegetable. The clincher had been to get the men and women together and deliver a seminar on the aphrodisiacal properties of aubergines. She had selected a number of priapic specimens as examples and had nearly been trampled to death in the stampede.
We continued and the sun gave us a warm yellow light to work by, which quickly turned pink and then orange. Then the sun dropped like a penny in a slot and we turned the lights on. The atmosphere changed to smoky poker room and we cracked some cold beers.
At eight o’clock I stood up. Moses, sitting crosslegged on the floor, fell backwards. I picked up the warm beer, went into the kitchen and threw it down the sink. Moses said he was going to get some chicken. Heike came into the kitchen and drank mineral water from the bottle in the fridge.
‘I hate money,’ I said, looking at Heike who was reflected in the darkness of the window, looking at me out of the corner of her eye with the neck of the mineral water bottle in her mouth.
‘Money’s all right, but not all the time,’ she said, pouring some of the chilled water into her hand and patting her breast bone. She walked over to the sink and I felt her body leaning against me.
‘What are you looking at?’ she asked.
I turned and our faces were very close together. We were breathing a little faster and my hand slipped to her bare waist. Her eyes were darting around and her mouth opened. I moved my lips to hers so that they were almost touching. Our eyes held each other’s. My hand slipped around to the small of her back and I put two fingers on either side of her spine and pushed up very slowly. We both swallowed. Our lips touched. My fingers were nearly between her shoulder blades. A long arm snaked across my back and her fingers ran up my neck and spread out through my hair. She crushed my lips to hers and her tongue flickered in my mouth. I didn’t mind the taste of tobacco and lipstick. I felt her breasts pressed to my chest and her legs trembling against mine. The inside of my body lifted as if I’d just hit a hump in the road. We both heard Moses coming back into the house and drew away from each other.
‘It’s been a long time,’ I said, holding her wrist and letting my hand slip down into hers. She breathed heavily, licking her lips and said nothing. Moses came in the kitchen. Heike looked across at him, her shoulder against mine. Moses grinned. His sex radar was infallible.
We ate the chicken with some hot Piment du Pays that I’d brought over from Togo. I opened up a bottle of cold Beaujolais that had had Heike’s name on it for the last couple of months. Moses stuck to beer. Afterwards, we dragged ourselves back into the living room and carried on counting the money.
It was 10.30, we were taking it in turns sighing, me like a horse on a cold morning, Moses like a dog left in a car, and Heike like someone who’s into her third day in Immigration. She stood up, stretched and went to her bag and came back with a pack of cards in her hand.
‘Poker?’ she asked.
Moses, who had fallen back with his head resting on some blocks of cash, sat up.
‘You deal, Miss Heike.’
‘Miss Heike beat us no small,’ I said to Moses.
‘There’s nothing like playing with other people’s money,’ she said and riffled the pack of cards. The noise from the cards shot through me and I sat rigid. The tickering from the car, but not the car, the noise of a playing card flicking over the wheel spokes of a bicycle. There was always fifty bicycles behind you in Cotonou. That was the tail. The noise had stopped as soon as we’d got to the house. Vasili was right – Madame Severnou’s first lesson. How to outwit the Oyinbo
(#litres_trial_promo) without raising a sweat.
‘Something the matter?’ asked Heike.
There was a click at the gate. Moses turned on to his knees and was up at the window looking down like a cat.
‘It’s Helen,’ he said.
‘What’re we nervous about?’ asked Heike.
I found myself staring down at over a million pounds in cash and feeling things going wrong. With Heike here I’d lost concentration, hadn’t thought things through. I’d had that feeling in the port this afternoon that Madame Severnou was going to be trouble. I’d done nothing about it and now lesson number two was coming. How to burn the Oyinbo for the lot.
Moses knew what I was thinking and was already packing the tied-up blocks of money into carrier bags.
‘Let Heike do that,’ I said, tying up the bedsheet. ‘Tell Helen to go back to her sister and get the car ready.’
Heike was on the floor packing the money. I picked up four carrier bags and the sheet and ran downstairs. Moses was reversing the car into the garage. Helen slipped out through the gate. I flung the money into the boot and ran back up the stairs. Moses was out and opening the gates. I hit Heike coming through the doors telling me she had it all.
I left the lights on, checked the floor and dropped down the steps two at a time. Moses drove the car out and I closed the gates. The car pitched and yawed over the mud road. Heike leaned forward from the back seat. We parked up under some bougainvillaea that fell down the walled garden of the house on the opposite corner to mine. We could just see the gates. It was very dark and the light cast from the living room window was blocked by the head of the palm tree in the garden. We sat with our breath quivering like sick men waiting to die.
After fifteen minutes the paranoia wore off. Moses played a drum solo on the steering wheel. Heike sat back, looked out the window and hummed something from Carmen. I sat with my back against the window and my arm hung over the top of the seat and played with her fingers.
‘So,’ asked Heike, with a little German creeping into her accent to show me she was annoyed. ‘What’s going on?’
‘It’s a lot of money,’ I said, only half concentrating, ‘and the person who gave it to me wasn’t very happy about what she got in return. I think we might be getting a visit. We were followed out of the port this afternoon but I thought we’d lost them.’
‘It’s a lot of money for rice.’
‘It’s for parboiled rice,’ I said. ‘Seven thousand tons of it. The Nigerians won’t touch anything else. There’s an import ban, too, which gives it a premium.’
‘You’re going to smuggle seven thousand tons of rice into Nigeria?’
‘Not smuggle, exactly. The Nigerian government have said that each man can bring in a bag of rice legally. We’ve got five hundred guys who are going to take two hundred and eighty sacks each, one at a time, through the border at Igolo, north of Porto Novo.’
‘You can do that?’
‘It needs a bit of help which is why my client, Jack Obuasi, cut this woman, Madame Sevenou, into the deal. She can oil the Customs.’
‘Have I met Jack?’
‘If you had it would have probably been in his bed, and I think you would have remembered that.’
‘So who is he?’
‘He’s an English/Ghanaian who lives in Lomé. This isn’t the first job I’ve done for him, but it’s only the second time with this Severnou woman. She’s not easy. For a start, I can tell there isn’t enough money. I reckon we’re short about fifty to a hundred mil. She’s a greedy woman…with an appetite.’
‘It was only Helen, remember.’
‘So far.’
‘And you’ve still got the documents?’
‘Yes, but that doesn’t mean very much. A non-negotiable bill of lading with a bit of tippex, some faxing and a couple of million CFA could get to be negotiable.’ I gripped her finger and she bit back the next question.
Headlights lit up the mud road and were killed. A quiet engine cut out and a car rocked over on its expensive suspension and stopped in front of the gates to the house. The doors opened. Four men got out. They didn’t close the doors. They weren’t carrying violin cases but they did have long arms. They went through the gates. Moses started up the Peugeot which made a noise like a tractor and baler and we rode up on to the tarmac and went into town.
We bought some pizza at La Caravelle café to take away. We had a beer while we waited. Some white people came in. We must have looked tense. They walked straight back out. Heike had thrown away the cigarette holder and was smoking for Germany.
We crossed the lagoon and turned off down towards the coast and the Hotel Aledjo where we took a bungalow and finished counting the money at three in the morning. The total was fifty million CFA short, a hundred thousand pound commission for Madame Severnou. By this time, I had a half bucket of sand up my eyelids and Heike was asleep sitting on the floor with her head on the bed. Moses and I packed the money inside the car so that it looked empty from the outside. Moses lay down on a mat on the porch of the bungalow with the bedsheet from the money.
I put Heike on the bed and threw a sheet over her; as it landed, she opened her eyes. There was nobody behind them. Her voice said, ‘I’m going.’ Her eyes closed. She was asleep. Normally, when she came down from up country, the first night we made love of the desperate, savage kind that two months’ celibacy encourages. It was something we liked to do besides drinking, something that kept us going together. This time I left her a note. I gave Moses some money and told him to look after Heike in the morning and then drove the 100 miles west along the coast to Lomé, the capital of Togo.
Chapter 4 (#ulink_04dfc09e-3d8e-5d6b-83aa-eb7011c75a7f)
Wednesday 25th September
They didn’t bother to search the car at the Benin/Togo border and it was still dark when I left the Togo side of the frontier. I couldn’t make out the sandbar at the mouth of the lagoon at Aneho but by the time I came to the roundabout for Lomé port, it was light. The morning was fresh, unlike my shirt.
After commercial Cotonou, Lomé was a holiday resort. There were European luxury hotels and restaurants which fronted on to the beach and air-conditioned supermarkets with more than tomato purée in them. Most of the buildings had seen paint during the decade and a lot of the roads were metalled and swept clean. There was greenery in the town which backed on to a lagoon traversed by causeways which took you out to the suburbs. Lomé is a freeport where booze and cigarettes are cheaper than anywhere else in the world. Life was a permanent happy hour.
The coast road passed the Hotel de La Paix, which still looked like the architect’s children doctored the plans. It seemed empty. Closer to Lomé on the left was the five-star Hotel Sarakawa with a snake of taxis outside and a fight for rooms on the inside. The sea appeared motionless but didn’t fool anybody. Nobody swam. The currents were well-known killers along this coast.
People were beginning to make their way to market. The polio cripples hauled their torsos up to the traffic lights and arranged their collapsible legs beside them ready for another day in the sun scraping together the money for a meal.
I drove past the 24 Janvier building and Hotel Le Benin, turned right and arrived at the wrought iron gates of the white-pillared pile that Jack Obuasi rented for a million CFA a month. The gardien opened the gates for me and I cruised the botanical gardens up to the house. The drive cut through a manicured jungle of shrubs and bamboo before breaking through a line of palm trees where the lawns started. The two bowling green-sized expanses of grass were rolled and snipped, snipped and rolled, by a gang of gardeners who could have had a football tournament between them.
The house was whiter than a Christmas cake and had a central portico with four fluted pillars. It was the kind of portico that should have had a motto carved in it. Jack favoured La lutte continue. There was an east and a west wing on either side of the portico. Each wing had five bedrooms upstairs, all with bathrooms and all air-conditioned, with white shutters, which, if you had the energy to throw them open, would give you a view of the old wooden pier that strode out into the Gulf of Guinea. Underneath these bedrooms was enough space for living rooms, dining rooms, games rooms, jacuzzi rooms and cricket nets if you felt out of practice. There was also Jack’s office, and in his office, a desk that a family of four could have lived in without him noticing.
The walls of the office were bare, but, in the other rooms, were covered with African masks, animal skins and ancient weaponry. Man-sized carvings hung around the place like servants of long standing who couldn’t be sacked. Some rooms were taken over by collections of African paintings which crammed the walls from floor to ceiling. The floors were entirely of white marble only broken by large rugs whose tassels were kept in line by Patience, Agnes and Grace, the three maids.
In the rooms he never used he had much better cane furniture than I did, which wasn’t difficult. In the rooms he did use were tables and chairs of every hard wood the jungle had to offer, as well as armchairs and sofas from France and England that formed exclusive circles about the place like people at a cocktail party who wouldn’t mix. The one failure was a table and six chairs carved from a single tree, but the table was too low and a man’s bottom couldn’t fit in between the snarling carved heads on the arms of the chairs even if it had wanted to.
There was a large verandah above the garage and maids’ quarters at the end of the east wing and another at the back of the house overlooking the swimming pool. They were both surrounded by a nursery of potted plants. I parked the car behind Jack’s Mercedes in the garage.
It was breakfast time. Patience, the most senior of Jack’s maids, with the eyes of a murderess and the shoulders of a mud wrestler, came out of her quarters and pointed to the verandah above the garage. I locked the car. Patience adjusted her wrap and slouched off to the kitchen. Mohammed, a tall, rangy, immensely strong servant of Jack’s who could polish a Mercedes down to the base metal came from the back of the house hunched over, holding a monkey by the hand. Jack had bought the monkey and found that Mohammed came with it. The monkey saw me and hid behind Mohammed’s legs like a shy little girl.
‘How are you, Mohammed?’ I asked.
‘Yessssir,’ he said with the intensity of a truck’s air brakes.
A parrot in a cage started running through its repertoire of clicks and whistles, calling for Patience and doing imitations of her cleaning the verandah: little sweeping sounds with the odd chair scraping thrown in. I walked up the spiral staircase to the verandah and heard the murmur of the video-taped soaps that were recorded for Jack and sent from England. He played them in the big gaps of his light-scheduled day. Christ, he played them all the time.
‘Mister Jack will see you now,’ the parrot said to the back of my head.
Jack wasn’t seeing anything. He was lying on a lounger with a cup of coffee the colour of his skin on his stomach, the video zapper on his chest. His eyes were closed. One big finger was crooked through the coffee cup handle. He wore a pair of shorts and nothing else.
He was a large man, probably as tall as six foot four, with heavy shoulders and a broad chest which must have housed solid slabs of pectoral when he was younger, but was now on the turn to flabby dugs. He had a big hard, round belly which shone like polished wood. He flicked his feet to keep the flies off and his sandals made a loud flopping sound on the soles of his feet.
Jack was a good-looking man, but it was the mixture of African and European in him that made him peculiar and fascinating. His hair was black but not as tightly curled as a full African’s. His skin was the colour of a walnut shell. He had blue eyes from his English mother and a straight sharp nose with a mouth fuller than most, but not African. He had long flat cheeks that fell from his sharp cheekbones and he kept these and the rest of his face clean-shaven. He had small, perfectly formed African ears.
Jack’s overall impression, which he’d had to work on, was one of lazy power. He was a lion that turned up for his prepared meals, ate, lounged about, never had to move too quickly but had a look in his eye when he turned his big head that told you who was the patriarch. He had great charm, a boyish smile and he loved to laugh. When he walked into a room of people all you could hear were women’s hearts fluttering like a colony of fantails. He left a wake of despair. He was ruthless in his pursuit of sex. A man who couldn’t sleep alone but couldn’t bear the same woman twice. Women knew this. His bed was never empty.
He’d had another hard night. He slept more on that lounger than he did in his bed. The parrot tutted as if he knew. Jack’s eyes opened.
‘Bruce,’ he said in a thick sleepy voice. He glanced at the coffee cup in his hand, leaned his head forward with an effort and drained it. ‘My God,’ he said, sinking back. It was difficult to find any sympathy for him. I took the zapper off his chest and shut down the TV which sat in its little roofed shelter in the corner of the verandah.
‘Madame Severnou’s left you fifty mil short.’ I paused for a moment while his supine brain took this in. ‘And last night she sent some muscle round to my house to pick up the rest.’ Jack’s eyes opened and flickered as he registered. ‘And I’m pretty sure that right now she’s unloading the rice without the original bill of lading.’
Jack didn’t move for a moment until his tongue came out and licked the nascent bristle below his bottom lip. He stared down through his feet at the blank TV with half-closed eyes.
‘Can you turn that on again?’
‘Can you listen for a minute?’
If there’s any good news,’ he sighed, staring off over the wall into the palm trees of the next-door garden with ostentatious lack of interest.
‘I’ve got five hundred and eighty-odd million in the Peugeot.’
He let the hand with the coffee cup in it fall by his side. A dribble of coffee leaked out on to the tiles. He put the cup down and with a sudden jerk shot himself up off the lounger and walked like a man with diving boots on to the rail of the verandah. He leaned on it as if he was catching his breath. On his back were four deep, six-inch long gouges on each scapula.
‘And this after you’ve been in bed with a polecat all night,’ I said.
‘A lioness, Bruce, a bloody lioness,’ he said as if he was talking to someone in the neighbouring garden.
‘What the hell’s going on with her?’ he asked his stomach, which percolated some coffee through his intestines. He turned and walked back to the table by the lounger, squatted with a loud crack from both knees and poured himself some more coffee and filled a cup for me. He took a croissant from a plate and bit into it. His brain wasn’t getting the spark to turn itself over. He heaved himself on to the lounger.
‘I got the beef out of Tema, it’s on its way up to Bolgatanga,’ he said without thinking and blowing out flakes of croissant on to his hairless chest. I checked the coffee for insects. He was telling me things I didn’t need to know. Jack’s mobile phone rang. On automatic, he pulled up the aerial, clicked the switch to ‘Talk’, and then said nothing, but listened for some time, his eyebrows going over the jumps. I took a slug of the coffee which kicked into my nervous system. It was robusta and strong and bad for you if you’re the shaky type.
‘Can I think about it?’ Jack asked the phone, and then waited while he was told why he couldn’t. ‘I can help, but you have to let me talk…’ He held out a hand to me with eyes that said you can’t tell anyone anything these days. ‘I can’t. I haven’t got the time,’ which was a lie. ‘I have…No you don’t…’ He turned his back to me and I missed a snatch; he came back with some more croissant in his mouth. ‘I have to talk to him first.’ Pause. ‘Let me talk to him.’ Jack looked into the earpiece, pushed the aerial down and switched the phone to ‘Standby’.
‘Look,’ I said, ‘I’ll take this lot down to your man Jawa and then I’ll get back to Cotonou.’
‘What for?’ he asked.
‘If not the rice, Jack, the fifty million might be useful.’
‘I have to think about this.’
‘Did Moses call?’ I asked.
‘No,’ he said thinking elsewhere. ‘Moses didn’t call.’
I listened to the sound of Lomé getting itself together. Some women walked past the wall at the back of the house with piles of washing on their heads and babies on their backs who were sleeping on the rhythmical movement of their mothers’ hips. It seemed like a good place to be, rather than up here feeling seedy and bitter-mouthed from the coffee.
‘You’ve done business with her before,’ I said. ‘She’s always been straight with you, she’s always paid, it’s not as if you’re a one-off. So what’s going on?’ Jack nodded at each element with his chin on his praying hands. I looked at the top of his head. ‘Is it me?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said, looking up.
I stared into his blue eyes and all I saw was a big problem. The phone went in the house and Patience’s flip flops slapped across the tiles.
‘It’s Moses for Mister Bruce.’
‘Can she put it up here?’
‘Different line,’ said Jack, and I went down into the house.
Moses said the rice was being off-loaded and that nothing had been touched in the house. Heike tore the phone out of his hand. She was angry and spoke to me in barbed wire German which left my ear ragged and bleeding. She was in no mood to be apologized to. I didn’t try. The plastic split as her phone hit the cradle. I hauled myself back up to the verandah.
‘Africa. Africa. Africa,’ said Jack after Moses’s news.
‘I’ll drop the money at Jawa’s and go back.’
‘No,’ said Jack, holding up his hand. ‘She’s got the rice now. You won’t even get in the port. I’ll talk to her about the fifty million. I want you to do something else for me. My uncle in Accra needs some help in Cotonou.’
‘I didn’t know you had an uncle in Accra.’
