A Darkening Stain

by Robert Wilson

  ‘Vous êtes un peu fâché. M. Medway. ûa ne va pas en Afrique,’ he said, imitating a French West African accent.

  ‘It’s just been one of those days,’ I said. ‘The rainy season or my biorhythms, I don’t know which.’

  ‘I don’t want to be here, you know.’

  ‘Well, you are. So you’re in it.’

  ‘I have to be here.’

  ‘You owe Marnier?’

  He ducked his head as if weighed down by his dues.

  ‘I’ve a feeling Marnier’s debts could run very deep, the kind of man he is,’ I said, and the man nodded. I sat down and put the whisky and the olives on the desk. ‘There should be a couple of glasses in the top drawer, help us relax a little in each other’s company.’

  ‘C’est mieux comme ça,’ he said, and took out the glasses.

  I filled them.

  ‘Olive?’

  We sipped whisky and ate olives, made mounds of pits on the desk top.

  ‘What’s your task, Monsieur...?’

  ‘Jacques will do.’

  ‘Tell me, Jacques.’

  ‘The name of your company is M & B. Who is the “B”?’

  ‘Bagado. He’s a police detective. He lost his job a few years back and we worked together for a while. Now he’s back on the force. Been back three or four months now. So he doesn’t work with me any more.’

  ‘What’s your involvement with him?’

  ‘We talk. We like each other. We’re friends. My girlfriend likes him a lot too. They’re friends. We don’t talk about work. Not much, anyway.’

  ‘Do you exchange information?’

  ‘I don’t tell him about all my bad-boy clients, if that’s what you mean. If I did, I wouldn’t get any work, might even get myself uglied-up a little, like you or worse. You know what business can be like out here, Jacques.’

  ‘I know,’ he said, sounding miserable about it.

  ‘Does Marnier have something in mind for me? Something for me to do? I mean, I’ve already met his wife but maybe he doesn’t trust her opinion, maybe the words come out too small from that little mouth of hers. Yeah, he certainly didn’t seem to think much of her in one department.’

  ‘I don’t know what Jean-Luc is thinking. He asked me to come and talk to you so I do. Carole? I don’t know what he thinks about Carole. I don’t know where she is any more. Maybe you coming along was all they needed to know that things were getting ... hot.’

  ‘So now they’ve disappeared. They’re not at the office. I dropped by their home and they’re not there either. Do you know where they are?’

  ‘Why were you in their office?’

  ‘Ambulance-chasing. Looking for work. I had some privileged information.’

  ‘From your police friend?’

  ‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘I thought the information might make his life less problematic and fatten my pocket at the same time.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Only Marnier. Face to face.’

  ‘He says he wants you to do something for him.’

  ‘Then he’ll have to tell me himself. And if he wants me to pick something up from somebody or drop something off to somebody, at night, on a lonely road in the rain ... forget it. Not for any money. Go and tell him that, Jacques.’

  ‘But...’

  ‘I don’t want to hear any more. Tell Marnier to make direct contact or what I know stays with me and what he wants me to do, I won’t. Now buzz, busy bee, because I’m tired of this.’

  The phone rang. Jacques jumped. I tore it off the handset.

  ‘Bruce Medway.’

  ‘Jean-Luc Marnier.’

  ‘We were just getting bored with each other, me and Jacques.’

  ‘I could tell,’ he said, which made my neck bristle.

  I stood and looked through the windows and out on the balcony.

  ‘Are you watching this?’

  ‘Tell him to leave.’

  I buzzed Jacques off and he stalked out, keeping his face away from me.

  ‘He’s shy, your friend. Are you coming up?’

  ‘Doucement, doucement, nous sommes en Afrique.’

  I got round my side of the desk with my ear still connected and settled uncomfortably into the warmth left over by Jacques.

  ‘Carole tells me you’re “beau”... Is that right?’ asked Marnier.

  ‘I’ve just been talking to your friend about ugliness...’

  ‘But are you “beau”?’

  ‘That’s a strange question, Jean-Luc.’

  ‘Not for me, it isn’t.’

  Something about the slant of those words reined me in, so I didn’t forget myself and crash in there and say that in the photo I’d seen of him he didn’t look too leprous.

  ‘Well?’ he asked.

  ‘I never made the May Queen but I’ve had my moments,’ I said. ‘I was just telling Jacques that ugliness doesn’t bother me too much. There’s a lot of it around in this world.’

  ‘That’s unusual for someone pretty. Normalement les beaux aiment seulement les autres beaux.’

  ‘Who said that?’

  ‘Me.’

  ‘The truth is, Jean-Luc, I might have made the cut at the school dance when I was a youngster, but now I’m in that battle zone over forty, you know what it’s like, wrinkle and sag, wrinkle and sag.’

  ‘Stay out of the sun. Drink water, my friend.’

  ‘We’re not going to stay friends for long with that kind of advice.’

  He laughed. A crackle of static shiwed my right ear.

  ‘Now, Africans, M. Medway, now they have skin. Beautiful skin. But maybe that’s the nature of beauty ... it’s always flawed. We wrinkle and sag and they’re ... well, they’re born black.’

  ‘I’m sure they don’t see it that way.’

  ‘You’d be surprised.’

  I could hear him coming up the stairs now. His feet sliding until they stubbed the next step, his breathing wheezing up badly even after five steps. The man out of condition on all those French filterless cigarettes he stained his hair with.

  ‘Smoker’s lungs, Jean-Luc, maybe it’s time for you to give up before you belly up.’

  ‘Look who’s got the advice now,’ he said, stopping on the stairs, the air roaring over the webs of phlegm in his lungs.

  ‘I’ll shut up, Jean-Luc, let you get to the top of the stairs...’

  ‘Without annoying me. If I get angry I can’t breathe.’

  ‘I’ll remember that.’

  He got to the top of the stairs and coughed his heart up and spat it out on the floor in the hall.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, creeping round the door, ‘for the mess.’

  Whatever crap I was going to come up with stopped in a lump under my voice box. I’d done my bit of bragging about how much ugliness I could take, but I wasn’t prepared for what Jean-Luc Marnier sprang on me. His face was hardly a face any more. It wasn’t even an anagram. Not even an anagram put back together by a surgeon speaking a different language. It was an onomatopoeia. It yelled horror.

  A scar like a bear-driven stock market collapse travelled from his right eye socket, across his cheek whose bone was knocked flat, underneath his nose where it joined the rip of his mouth for a second before going down to his jawline and into his shirt. There was nothing neat about the stitching. The skin was puckered and bulged in torn peaks. The end of his nose was missing and there was a deep divot across the bridge, which meant he breathed exclusively through his mouth and his right eye was a glazed wall, its socket shattered. Where there should have been a left eyebrow there was a thick, livid welt which ran round to his left ear, which wasn’t there. Below the ear a chunk of his neck was missing and the skin had been stretched over it. The other side of his neck looked like molten lino.

  He straightened up at the doorway and walked to the chair like an old soldier pulling himself together, General Gordon, maybe. He sat down and reached into the pocket of his light-blue sleeveless shirt with only two fingers and a thumb
on his right hand. Scars like a railway terminus ran up his arms and it wasn’t difficult to see that he’d been cut to the bone. He jogged a cigarette out of the packet and drew it into his mouth. He lit it with a Bic and blew smoke out on the end of a residual cough. Something else different to his photo. He’d dyed his hair black. There was some desperation in that.

  ‘Now you see why your looks are interesting to me,’ he said, shyly, like a schoolboy with gravel-ripped knees.

  I searched for vocabulary but found only first syllables. I reached for Jacques’s whisky and slid it across to Marnier and took a half inch off my own.

  ‘That’s what I bring out in people,’ he said. ‘Is that Jacques’s glass? Would you mind washing it out?’

  ‘What happened to you, Jean-Luc?’ I asked, taking another glass out of the drawer and filling it for him.

  ‘Machete attack. Typical Africans ... they didn’t finish the job.’

  ‘Not here, in Benin?’

  ‘No, no, Liberia. I shouldn’t have been there. Some tribal problem. The village I was in was attacked. Ten men moved through the village hacking at anything that moved. They sprayed the place with a little gasoline and whumph! They killed twenty-eight people in less than ten minutes. When they left, the locals, who had run, came back. They stitched me up, did what they could for me, got me transport back to Côte d’Ivoire. But, you know how it is, these refugee hospitals they don’t have much call for cosmetic surgeons. So...’ he finished, and revealed himself with what remained of his hands.

  ‘How long ago was all that?’

  ‘Must be three or four months now. I was lucky. None of the wounds got infected. The local people covered them in mud. That’s where all our best antibiotics come from.’

  ‘You must have lost a lot of blood.’

  ‘Not so much that I let them give me a transfusion. I couldn’t have black man’s blood run through my veins. Don’t know what it would do to me. Make me late ... unreliable, things like that.’

  ‘You don’t think much of Africans for a man whose life was saved by them.’

  ‘No, no, I like them. I was just joking. I’m very fond of Africans. They are marvellous people. Those local people who helped me. So innocent. So charming. So caring. But I have my prejudices too and at my age they’re difficult to get rid of.’

  ‘I don’t want you to think I’m being facetious, but for a man who’s suffered what you have and only four months ago ... you’ve made a good recovery.’

  He grunted out a laugh or a dismissal, I didn’t know which, and stuck his cigarette in his terrible mouth and loosened off the belt of his trousers.

  ‘Some of my less obvious wounds,’ he said, closing his eye to the smoke, ‘are still open and very badly infected. I’m nervous in crowds. I don’t like loud noises or sudden movements. I find people difficult ... to trust.’

  ‘But this isn’t the only reason you’re hiding, Jean-Luc, is it?’

  ‘This?’ he asked, pointing at his face and then laying a snub-nosed .380 revolver on my desk. ‘I’m not hiding because of this. I’ll say something for the Africans ... it doesn’t bother them. They look at me as if it is normal for a white man to have such a face. And they don’t pity me either. I like that. My own people. Pah! That’s something different. They look at me as if I’m an affront. They look at me as if I should have had the sensitivity to consider their feelings. I should have thought before offending their aesthetic senses. I should be in purdah. Our society is obsessed with beauty, don’t you think, M. Medway?’

  ‘And your wife?’ I asked, the question in my head and out of my mouth before I could snatch it back.

  ‘What about my wife?’ he said, quick and vicious.

  ‘How has she coped with a man who left her whole and came back ... It can’t have been easy.’

  ‘A lot of people underestimate Carole. They spend too long looking at her ass. You know, even before this I was not leading-man material. She didn’t marry me for my looks, M. Medway. And I was fifty-two years old. She was twenty-eight. What does that tell you?’

  ‘That maybe you’ve got a good sense of humour.’

  ‘Now you are being facetious.’

  ‘A little. But that’s what women like in a man, so they say. You look down their ads in the Lonely Hearts columns and they all ask for GSOH ... but they never tell you what jokes they laugh at.’

  ‘And the guys? What do the guys ask for?’

  ‘Sex, fun, zero commitment. But they do offer something very important to women. FHOH.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Full Head Of Hair.’

  Marnier roared. He ran a hand through his thick black locks.

  ‘I win,’ he said, and laughed some more.

  ‘So why did she marry you?’

  ‘That’s personal. I only mentioned it to illustrate a point.’

  ‘She keeps herself in very good condition.’

  ‘Perhaps you’re one of these guys who looks at her ass too long,’ he said, touchy.

  ‘She didn’t give me much opportunity.’

  Marnier roared again, hard enough to split any stitches he might still have left in him.

  ‘She lost you without even having to think about it,’ he said. ‘Ah, M. Medway, I think I’m going to like you.’

  ‘That worries me.’

  ‘I don’t like many people.’

  ‘If you’re including Jacques in your list, I might as well tell you he didn’t seem to like being your friend too much.’

  ‘Jacques?’

  ‘The guy who was in here just a minute ago.’

  ‘Him?’ he said, contemptuous. ‘He’s a fool.’

  Suddenly, for a whole load of very good reasons, I had the desire to get out of there, get back home, get away from all this ... all this manoeuvring, all this manly sizing up.

  ‘Let’s get back to why you’re hiding, Jean-Luc.’

  ‘Is there more whisky?’ he asked, finishing his glass.

  I refilled him but not myself. Discourage the man. Let him drink alone. I showed him the olives.

  ‘Lebanese,’ he said, chewing one.

  ‘Time’s wingèd chariot, Jean-Luc.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s hurrying near.’

  ‘You have an education,’ he said. ‘Now look, I want you to do something for me.’

  ‘Is it to do with why you’re hiding?’

  ‘I’ll be honest with you...’

  ‘Is that unusual?’

  ‘You’re very interesting, M. Medway,’ he said, looking at me out of the corner of his head.

  ‘Call me Bruce, for God’s sake.’

  ‘You’re quicker than I thought, Bruce,’ he said.

  ‘I can be slow too. As Carole found out.’

  ‘And my gardien, he said. ‘It means you have a good understanding of your strengths and weaknesses. Self-knowledge is a rare thing.’

  ‘Pity I don’t adhere to the little that’s come my way.’

  ‘Then you’re unpredictable as well ... not a bad thing.’

  ‘Let’s get back to what you want me to do for you. The Kluezbork II, for instance.’

  ‘That will resolve itself.’

  ‘You’re not hiding from angry relatives.’

  ‘I don’t follow.’

  ‘Of the five dead men. Your stowaways.’

  ‘Mine? Where did you hear that from?’

  ‘It’s well known that you shift a little human cargo along with your cotton seed.’

  ‘They won’t be able to stick that on me.’

  ‘They’re talking to the chef d’équipe of that final shift...’

  ‘They won’t get anywhere.’

  ‘You don’t know the man who’s running the investigation.’

  ‘Your M. Bagado? He still won’t get anywhere.’

  ‘You’re covered then?’

  ‘You don’t think I can work out of Cotonou without a lot of ... support. Very expensive support, I might add. You must reali
ze by now, Bruce, that’s the beauty of Africa. Everything is possible avec la graisse.”

  ‘This isn’t port business. It’s police business. And Bagado doesn’t...’

  ‘Let me ask you something,’ he said, lighting another cigarette from the butt of the last. ‘Have you heard of Bondougou? Le Commandant.’

  The name disappeared into the smoke over Marnier’s shoulder and then on into the darkness of the room.

  ‘I see.’

  Marnier gave me a huge Gallic shrug and stubbed out the butt in the tuna can available. He picked up the refilled glass of whisky.

  ‘Your health.’

  ‘Yours too,’ I said, pouring myself one and joining him. ‘You need it more than I do.’

  ‘If I stopped smoking,’ he said, ‘I’d come apart. The tar glues me together.’

  ‘I don’t want to think about that for too long,’ I said. ‘Are you hiding or aren’t you? You went through quite a performance to get to me.’

  ‘You came to see me first. I don’t know all your connections yet. Maybe someone has asked you to find me,’ he said, shrewd eyes on mine.

  ‘Is that why you’re keeping my phone occupied?’

  ‘Expensive but safe.’

  ‘So somebody’s after you?’

  ‘Somebody’s always after me.’

  ‘You’re that kind of businessman.’

  ‘Sometimes people disagree with the way I make things work.’

  ‘For them or for yourself.’

  ‘Ha! Yes,’ he said, and fingered the couple of inches of thick scar tissue he had between the corner of his mouth and jawline.

  ‘Maybe you’re not being so honest about how your face was cut up,’ I said.

  ‘It was a machete attack.’

  ‘I can see that.’

  ‘Let’s talk about what you’re going to do for me.’

  ‘Good, I’ve got a home to go to.’

  ‘How nice,’ he said, irritable now, the breathing going suddenly. ‘I want you to take me to Grand-Popo.’

  ‘You’ve got a wife. She’s got a car. Renault 5 Turbo. Fast, comfortable.’

  ‘Carole’s been under enough strain as it is.’

  ‘What are we going to do in Grand-Popo?’ I asked. ‘The beach is nice.’

  ‘I’m going to meet somebody.’

  ‘For dinner. I’ve heard the Auberge isn’t bad. Better for lunch, though.’