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‘The seventh?’
‘Americans always have Christian names like surnames and numbers like royalty.’
‘What do you think?’
‘She doesn’t look like one night stand material to me.’
He gave me an alarming grin followed by a diabolical laugh and some vestiges of smoke left in his lungs from the last toe-reaching drag came out of it.
He took the final drag from his cigarette, which was so hot he had to whip it out of his mouth before his lips blistered. He crushed it mercilessly into the ashtray.
‘You’re right.’
‘I think she’s Catholic, too.’
‘You’ve seen her kicking with her left foot.’
‘I’ve seen her coming out of a Catholic church.’
‘Perfect,’ said Jack. ‘To attain the unattainable, Bruce. That’s an excitement in life. What are you doing hanging around churches?’
‘Hoping for a bit of salvation to rub off.’
Jack laughed, a high-pitched giggling laugh, and shook his head.
‘Oh Bruce,’ he said with mock pity, ‘sometimes I think you’re my brother, other times my son.’
‘Naivety’s one of my strongest suits.’
Jack looked up like a dog over its dinner. He lit another cigarette and rolled it across his bottom lip. The paper and tobacco crackled as he drew on it.
‘I forgot to tell you. Heike called.’
‘Thanks.’
‘I told her you’d gone to Accra. She said something in German.’
‘Did it hurt?’
‘She said she was going to Porto Novo tonight and she’d be back at your place tomorrow afternoon.’
I chewed my thumbnail for a minute and Jack inspected the video zapper which told me the interview was over. I asked if I could stay the night, saying I’d go to Charlie’s bar and see if anybody there knew anything about Steven Kershaw.
‘Do you want to bet, Bruce?’ Jack asked as I juddered down the spiral staircase.
‘On what?’ I said without looking up, just hearing his voice.
‘That I can bed Elizabeth Harvey before you find Steven Kershaw.’
‘You’re a sick man, Jack. You’re making too much money. It’s creasing your moral fibre.’
He wasn’t listening. The soap opera voices had started another crisis in another world.
Chapter 7 (#ulink_d7b7d97c-fd61-57ef-9e42-6df102e9288f)
I showered and changed and went out into the cool night and the smell of wet grass. The cicadas were practising. The inside of my car smelt of wet newspaper and damp carpeting. I shut the car door waiting for the satisfying thunk and heard a chord from a cheap guitar with a broken string.
The lights were back on in downtown Lomé and the place was full of music. A shop selling cassettes had set up some speakers on the street and for half a mile nobody was walking without a wriggle or a jerk. Three girls with snack food in large aluminium bowls on their heads stood together and bobbed up and down and turned around in time.
I came out on to the coast road and headed east out of Lomé. A wind was blowing through the low palms along the beach. The stiff leaves knocked against each other and made a harsh clapping noise like a few sarcastic people in an audience.
The Hotel Sarakawa looked like a recently landed space craft illuminating the dark and attracting humans for observation. The port was lit and it looked as if there might be work going on. Charlie’s bar was on the beach a mile beyond the port. There was a rough track through some wasteland from the metalled road up to his compound which continued a further two hundred yards to another bar called Al Fresco’s where the track looped back to the Lomé/Benin road.
At the entrance the gardien checked the car and opened the barrier. I parked outside a huge paillote which was the restaurant part of the bar. The paillote was a massive thatched cone supported by wooden beams. There was seating for a hundred people and a bar underneath. It was empty. It always was after rain. Next to the paillote was a concrete building which Charlie had built a couple of years ago with profits from all those fingers he had in all those pies. This was the real bar. A huge open plan room looking out to sea with a thirty-foot bar on the back wall, seating for fifty around a piano and a lot of room to stand and fall in.
I walked into the air conditioning and piano music. The hum of the distant generator that ran Charlie’s compound disappeared. A light-skinned African girl with close cropped hair and a long neck was playing some Billie Holiday and looking out to sea through the arched windows. There was nothing out there except the dark.
At the bar, balancing on one leg of a four-legged stool, was a Lebanese guy in his early twenties. He had his palms flat down on the bar, his head hung at a level which gave him a perfect view of the whisky in his glass as he spun from one side to the other on the axis of the bar stool’s leg. A Togolese girl was drying some glasses and looking at her single customer with concern and disdain. I stood at the bar and the Lebanese looked at me from under his armpit. His lips hung slackly.
‘Charlie?’ I asked the girl.
The Lebanese swung his head up to look at her too quickly and too hard and it took several adjustments for him to focus. The girl shrugged at me with her eyeballs. The Lebanese gave me an exaggerated translation which was too much for his tenuous equilibrium. The stool spun violently on the axis of the single leg and sent the Lebanese crashing against his back into the bar. The stool slipped away from him and entangled itself in his legs, impairing his recovery so he had to throw himself on the mercy of two other bar stools who wanted nothing to do with him. He came down hard on the tiled floor with the chrome bar stools bouncing around him like a street gang. The pianist stopped, swivelled around on her bottom and gave us a clanging discord with her elbow on the middle section of the piano keys. It had been a very quiet evening.
The Lebanese needed plenty of help but looked as if the exercise might sober him up. I walked to a door at the end of the bar, opened it and caught a faceful of sea air. It was only four or five yards across some damp, hard ground to Charlie’s house. There was a light on. I closed the door on the Lebanese who was finding new ways to say putain merde. Billie Holiday resumed.
Charlie’s maid answered my knock as if she’d been waiting on the other side of the door all evening. I stood in the hall which had a single light in it, shining down directly over a plinth with a slim-necked pot on it which spouted a flower with a long green stem and a head like a bird with an excited comb.
I was trying to work out what this image was saying to me when Charlie’s maid returned and led me down a dark corridor to the living room which, like the bar, looked out through arched windows on to the sea. There was no sound of air conditioning but it was very cool in the room, and although there was no smoke, the smell of Gauloise was strong.
Charlie was sitting on the edge of a ten-foot white leather sofa, right in the middle with his legs apart, his forearms resting on his thighs and his large hairy hands dangling in between his knees. There were two women each sitting in a corner of an identical sofa opposite him. There was a tiger skin rug laid out diagonally between the sofas held down by a large glass-topped table with three glasses and an ashtray the size of a cymbal on it. One of the women had her bare foot in the tiger’s mouth; a long canine slid in and out in between her big and second toes.
‘Bruce! My God!’ said Charlie in his expansive American businessman’s way. ‘How ya doing?’ He came over and clapped me on the shoulder and shook my hand in his strong paw. Charlie looked shorter than he was only because of his width. He was six foot and a little slimmer than a brown bear but with no less body hair. It would be a big mistake to say he was fat and an understandable mistake to think it. He had a covering. Something for the winter, he would say as we sat outside on a December evening in ninety-five degrees, sweating like pigs, drinking dry martinis made with gin and an olive and held in the general direction of Italy for the vermouth.
He was bald and employed no techniques for disguising it, although I’m sure he could have trained some hair up from his shoulders and worn his collar up if he’d wanted to. His bare head was tanned dark brown and shone like polished teak. His remaining black hair was cut very short. He had strong black eyebrows which you would have thought would meet in the middle but didn’t, and a thick bristly moustache. His eyes were dark green with long dark lashes, his cheekbones high, his jawline solid and square at the chin with a dimple on the point. The bottom lip of his mouth was full and tanned so that when he licked it, as he often did, it was the colour of fresh liver. Like most Americans, he had ten thousand-dollar teeth which were all his own but didn’t look it.
Charlie had a big head, a big tanned head for a big hairy body. He was very strong but with no use for his strength other than drumming figures into a calculator. He was benign when sober, hard but not unpleasant when he was doing business, affable and charming when he was being social, but when he was drunk there were probably only a couple of things in the world more unpleasant – a fighting bull that’s caught your eye in an open street is one of those things that springs to mind. He was wearing a pair of dark blue chinos, a yellow short-sleeved shirt and no watch. He kept that in his pocket on a long chain connected to his belt.
He introduced me to the two women who had both looked up with their eyes. Jasmin, who had her tanned foot in the tiger’s mouth, had very long legs inside some equally long, baggy blue jeans. She wore a white T-shirt with what looked like her DNA on the front. She had short, straight blonde hair, very big blue eyes, a long and pointed nose and a mouth full of £25.50 teeth which were all her own and looked it. She had to be English, which she was.
Her arms were long and slender with small hands, one of which played with a lighter, the other held a cigarette. She smoked like a schoolgirl, the cigarette held at the very tips of her fingers and puffed at like a pecking hen. She was nervous despite the relaxed sprawl. There was a lithe sexuality to her boyish body and a surprised innocence to her eyes which I am sure triggered off base thoughts in the minds of a lot of men. I realized that she was the woman I’d seen on horseback that morning on the way to Ghana.
Yvette, who sat at the other end of the sofa from Jasmin, had more sophistication than the rest of us put together. She had very dark, shoulder length brown hair, styled with a nostalgia for the fifties movie star. You could see the same head of hair with one of the non-hats and some netting that they used to wear in those days. Her eyes were quite wide apart and, although large and rounded, narrowed at the edges with an Oriental sharpness that wasn’t done with make-up. They were violet in colour and made her look more feline than any woman I’d ever seen. Her nose was small for her face, which had high wide cheekbones and a wide, full-lipped mouth with a pronounced cupid’s bow. She wore a pale purple lipstick and her teeth were small and white with a gap between the front two which she had a habit of tickling with the tip of her tongue. Her skin was perfect white with not even the first hint of a line or a crease. I was looking too hard and too long.
‘Did I miss something shaving?’ she said to me in a deep, cracked voice with a French accent.
‘No,’ I said, taking the opportunity to look over her face again. ‘Very close, no cuts. Perfect…not the first time, right?’
She threw her head back and laughed through some gravel in her throat which trembled the white skin and light blue veins of her neck.
I sat down opposite her and took another look while Charlie did something about everybody’s drinks and looked over his shoulder at Yvette – a lot. She wore a pink crêpe jacket, and a blood orange crêpe sarong which was split to mid thigh. The jacket wasn’t fastened and I could see from her exposed waist that she was naked underneath it. A long orange and pink silk scarf dropped down from around her neck and covered her breasts. Like Jasmin, she sat low on the sofa, her legs crossed at the knee, and her bare feet nodding. She smoked an untipped Gauloise, thick and fat as a chalk stick, with the relish of a true professional. Charlie handed me a Scotch with ice and sat on the sofa next to me.
‘Yvette tells me they don’t believe in marriage in France,’ Charlie said as he sat down. ‘Says they have this thing concubinage instead.’ He strained his whisky through his moustache. ‘Sounds kind of interesting, you know, concubines and that. Sounds to me as if you could trade ‘em.’
‘Like pork bellies, you mean?’ I asked Charlie, wondering how they got to be talking about this kind of stuff.
‘I was thinking more onna lines with “1987 Concubine convertible. Low mileage, one previous owner, swap plus cash considered”.’
‘I think you’re over-romanticizing it, Charlie,’ I said.
‘No, no, Bruce, you gotta understand, marriage – that ol’ roman’ic institution – is old-fashioned. Strictly wartime only before you fly off to a certain death. That’s what the lady says.’
‘Don’t you think so, Bruce?’ Yvette dared me, having dug deep to pronounce my name.
‘I’ve heard there’s a very high success rate when the man dies immediately.’
‘Whose side you on?’ asked Charlie. I ignored him.
‘The woman is left with a memory of perfect love and consummation…’
‘Yeah,’ said Charlie, with no encouragement.
‘…and, if it’s really a perfect marriage, a load of money.’
‘Now here is a man who really understands,’ said Yvette, uncrossing her legs and leaning forward.
‘And the guy?’ said Charlie. ‘What the hell does the guy get out of this perfect marriage?’
‘The guy gets to die at the pinnacle of his achievement. Wedding night followed by heroic death.’
‘What more could a man want?’ asked Jasmin.
‘To do it again?’ asked Charlie.
‘It’s never as good the second time,’ said Jasmin, ‘and anyway, men are always looking for the ultimate thrill.’ She pecked at her cigarette. ‘Sex and death. In Japan they don’t always need the sex…I’ve seen them sit down to eat puffer fish knowing that if the chef’s carved it up wrong any one of them could get the chop.’
‘Raw fish,’ said Charlie, ‘is not my kind of thrill.’
‘Yes,’ said Jasmin smugging at her Gauloise. ‘I think the spider gets it right. She shows her mate a good time, gets herself pregnant and has a problem free dinner.’
‘I think I’m coming round to concubinage,’ said Charlie. ‘I don’t wanna give you indigestion or anything.’
‘Don’t worry about us,’ said Yvette. ‘We have huge appetites. You must think of it as an act of kindness. We’re saving you from yourselves.’
‘Kindness was not the word I had in mind,’ said Charlie.
‘All this talk and now I’m hungry,’ said Yvette. ‘It’s time to eat.’
‘Will you be our guests?’ offered Charlie.
Yvette had stood up and looked Charlie over.
‘You look too tough for me. I like my meat very tender,’ she said baring her teeth.
‘The tender bits are inside,’ I said for Charlie.
Yvette raised an eyebrow. ‘Can I use a phone?’
Charlie pointed to the desk at the far end of the room behind our sofa. He saw Yvette hesitate. ‘Sorry, it’s the only one inna house. My rules. Somebody wants to use my phone, I wanna know what they’re saying. It’s business…’ he smiled, ‘something personal.’
She gave Charlie a look which left me charcoal broiled and I was only sitting next to him. She walked over to the phone and punched out some numbers.
‘Camilia?’ she asked and started speaking in Italian. Charlie nodded and drank some more and sneaked a look at Jasmin who had stood up and walked to the window to look at the dark.
Yvette put the phone down and walked back over. ‘I’m sorry…’ she said.
‘I heard,’ said Charlie.
‘You speak Italian?’ she asked.
‘I am Italian,’ he said. ‘Carlo Reggiani.’
Yvette and Jasmin slipped into their shoes. ‘We have to go. Tonight we are meeting someone for dinner who says they know somebody who probably knows lots of other somebodies who might be able to sell me something I want,’ explained Yvette.
‘That’s the only kind of business they have here,’ said Charlie.
‘African art, Bruce, is a terrible business. The worst,’ she said, smoothing her scarf inside the lapels of her jacket.
I put my drink on the table and we all walked out to the private parking area at the back of the house. There was a taxi with a powder blue furry dashboard waiting for them under a low palm tree. Charlie was kissed soundly on the cheek by Yvette, which might have disappointed him but he didn’t show it. The two women got into the car. The taxi took a while to get going and circled us before disappearing behind the paillote.
Chapter 8 (#ulink_6b2d44f7-3d97-5916-af62-9562e757cab0)
Charlie shivered.
‘She does something for me, that woman.’
‘Confuse you?’ I said.
‘There’s one thing I’m not confused about,’ he said, turning and putting his hand on my shoulder to steer me into the house.
‘They don’t make them like that any more,’ I said.
‘Right.’
‘Now that we’re all being genetically engineered.’
‘Something went wrong in my test tube,’ said Charlie, looking down at his big hairy body.
‘Not us, Charlie. You can still see the ape in us. In the future they’ll iron out all those blips and glitches that make someone extraordinary like Yvette and we’ll all look like leads from shampoo and shaving ads. We’ll be the bathroom people from planet Earth.’
