A Darkening Stain

by Robert Wilson

  Light shot out across the bush. Marnier and his African glowed red in the taillights. The car reversed and disappeared round the side of the house. Marnier’s face flashed momentarily out of the dark as he lit himself his first cigarette of the day. The man perversely unpredictable down to the last detail, taking the cigarette, which he said he’d given up, just when the tension had left the scene.

  ‘That trunk looked heavy,’ I said.

  ‘Let’s have a drink,’ he said, coming up on to the stoop. ‘Felix, amenes le whisky.’

  We went back into the front room. Felix brought in a bottle of Ballantines and a couple of glasses.

  ‘I’ve got some Possotomé in the car if you give me the keys.’

  ‘We’ll take it neat,’ he said. ‘You pour.’

  ‘That’s what I had to be sharp for,’ I said, laying out the drinks, ‘watching Felix and the driver stick a trunk in my boot?’

  ‘Anything could happen out here.’

  ‘When you’re transporting gold across borders, you mean?’

  Marnier gave me a teacher/pupil smile.

  ‘Ashante gold,’ he said.

  ‘So it’s stolen too. Ashante gold is Obuasi gold is Company gold.’

  ‘I didn’t steal it.’

  ‘You bought it from all those unofficial miners that hang around Obuasi.’

  ‘I’ve never been to Obuasi.’

  ‘You wouldn’t have to go there. There’s thirty per cent of the mine’s production that’s stolen every year and finds its way across the border to Lomé. A mining engineer told me that years ago, and I know at least one guy in Lomé who buys the stuff. An Indian. Maybe you’re another like him.’

  ‘Well, don’t you think that’s a fairer distribution of wealth than say the Company taking all the profit?’

  ‘Or the freely elected Ghanaian government?’

  ‘Santé’ said Marnier, and we drank.

  The booze blissed over my nerves, which had been speaking in tongues since we left the restaurant and risen to a clamour when the car arrived. Christ, I was relieved it was stolen gold and not the Italians. Marnier sank back into his lounger, brought his knees up and did some concentrated smoking while staring at a hole in the plasterwork. I tried to come up with conversation pieces that didn’t involve Italians, long grass or ... straight violence, because that, if I hadn’t wanted to be sure of it before, I was certain of it now sitting with this smoking buccaneer, was what was coming our way.

  ‘Are you going to tell me something?’ asked Marnier. A line which leapt in my chest like a springing cat.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘We hardly know each other. You must have things to tell me. Like things we were talking about before.’

  ‘Like Gifty?’

  ‘Like Gifty.’

  ‘I’m going to be a father,’ I said, the damn thing out of me and across the table before I could get something more sensible up and running.

  Marnier unlocked his eyes from the wall and turned his head to me slowly as if this was a most surprising revelation.

  ‘Don’t tell me, Jean-Luc. I know. I don’t look like one.’

  ‘You don’t ... yet.’

  ‘What happens when I do?’

  ‘You look like me.’

  ‘That...’

  ‘No cheap jokes,’ he warned.

  ‘How many children have you got?’

  ‘None ... any more.’

  ‘Does that mean they died?’

  ‘They’re still alive. I just don’t see them, or they don’t see me. They wouldn’t recognize me anyway. No,’ he said, drawing on his cigarette, flicking the ash on the floor, running a finger across his face, ‘I’m hurt. Worse than any of these scars. You see, my children were the only two people on this earth who had my unconditional love. They are of me. And they turned against me. They rejected me. The pain of that is with me and it will stay with me until I’m buried. You know, even when they were hacking at me with the machetes and I thought I was finished, I could see my children. So when you’re a father this is how you will be.’

  ‘If I’m unfortunate enough to lose my child’s love.’

  ‘No. Once you have given your unconditional love ... it weakens you.’

  ‘Why did they reject you?’

  ‘Because their mother told them I was a man of violence.’

  ‘Are you?’ I asked, the question coming out on a ludicrous croak in my voice so that Jean-Luc and I roared with unconscious laughter, quietened ourselves and roared again.

  ‘Ah, mon Dieu, Bruce,’ said Marnier, wiping at his left eye with his good hand, the tears running down that cheek only. ‘You know something?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Ach,’ he said, rummaging for a handkerchief, ‘since they cut me I only cry with one eye. What do you think that means?’

  ‘The tear duct’s damaged?’

  ‘Yes, but it must have some significance. A man who can only half cry.’

  ‘Perhaps that is what men are like. Half steel, half...’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Sentimentality?’

  ‘I was hoping for something more noble.’

  ‘Nobility’s thin on the ground these days.’

  Marnier nodded, refilled the glasses, lit another cigarette and crushed the old one into the concrete floor.

  ‘What can I say, Bruce? I like you.’

  ‘I bet you used to like Michel.’

  ‘Forget Michel,’ he said. ‘I think you’ll be a good father. Tell me something more.’

  He fell back on the lounger. I sat on the edge of the chair, the seat frame cutting me across the back of the legs. I rocked with the tension. The violence was getting closer, but this time there was a different pull on it. This time I wanted to tell Marnier ... but I still couldn’t get it out. Still a question hung.

  ‘Go on,’ said Marnier.

  ‘My father died when I was sixteen.’

  ‘Was he ill?’

  ‘The smoking killed him, Jean-Luc. Sorry about that.’

  ‘Smoking,’ said Marnier, looking at his cigarette, ‘is the least of my problems.’

  ‘He gave me some advice.’

  ‘I hope you didn’t listen. Deathbed advice ... pah!...worthless.’

  ‘He said never do anything for the money and always follow through.’

  ‘Then he was a misguided fool, his brain maddened by impending death. You should only do things for people for money and you should only follow through if you can win.’

  ‘And he didn’t have anything to say about women either.’

  ‘He was English. They don’t know anything about women. What do you want to know? Tell me.’

  ‘Of course, the French are experts in everything. I forgot. Van d’amour, L’art culinaire, and probably just plain L’Art too.’

  ‘We know how to love women ... and food ... and, yes, painting as well.’

  ‘Maybe, like food, you love too much at once.’

  ‘To love a woman,’ he said, ignoring me, ‘you have to give her your undivided attention. She has to feel that she occupies the only important place in your brain. She is above work, above money, above everything else in your life, including your mother. If for one moment she suspects that she has slipped down the ladder...’

  ‘You’ll never get her into bed,’ I said. Marnier laughed.

  ‘Maybe you’re right,’ he said. ‘Maybe that’s all we know or want to know.’

  ‘How to act.’

  ‘All men,’ said Marnier, refitting his glass on the table, ‘are actors. Have you ever thought of this? That the only honest men are the ones who pay for it. The rest of us pretend ... to get what we want.’

  We lapsed into silence. I had no appetite for the argument. I slid my glass round in tight circles on the table top. The sweat stood out on the back of my hand. The heat in the room with the hurricane lamp going should have been intolerable, only the pressure of outside things made it bearable. Something clattered on the outside
of the wooden shutters. I stiffened and twisted. A brain-damaged beetle crawled through the slats, fell to the floor and spun on its back. There was no glass, no netting.

  ‘Tell me something more,’ said Marnier.

  ‘What more? What can I tell you that you don’t know already,’ I said, suddenly irritable, the cracks appearing.

  ‘Talk. It will pass the time. Who knows, we may stumble across a universal truth and change our lives and perhaps mankind.’

  ‘Let’s just finish our drinks and go home instead.’

  ‘I’m waiting, and anyway, you know better than to drive in Africa at night.’

  ‘You’re waiting?’ I asked, the sweat suddenly streaming into my eyes, making me blink.

  Marnier turned his face on me and I found myself looking into the eyes of the man who was going to kill me. The one eye, the only one with any potential for sadness, was glistening ... sorry for the fact. I started talking. It was the only thing to do.

  ‘We were followed today,’ I said. ‘We’ve been followed all day by two of Franconelli’s men. Gio and Carlo, you might know them. They say they want to talk to you, and I don’t believe that what they have in mind will be unaccompanied by violence.’

  I breathed deeply, not finding the air enough in the room. Marnier sucked on his loosely packed cigarette, which crackled. He exhaled through his nostrils, looking at nothing in particular, his face unreadable.

  ‘Your child will not be fatherless,’ he said. ‘Come, it’s time to move. Bring the light.’

  We left the room and walked down the corridor to the bedrooms. Marnier beckoned me into his. He pulled the holdall out from under the bed, unzipped it and took out a 9 mm handgun and a clip of bullets, a different beast altogether to the .380 revolver he’d had in my office. That was a cap gun compared to this. He shoved the clip up the handle of the gun and worked the slide. He took a torch out of the bag and tested it. Then he threw the bag under the bed and lay down on it.

  ‘Go to your room. Shut the lamp down. Sleep ... if you can.’

  I turned and he added some words to the back of my head.

  ‘One thing about women. Once they have their children you’re number two. That’s not fair, is it ... after they’ve been number one all that time?’

  I lay down on the bed in my room and dowsed the lamp. It was brutally hot under the ondulé and sleep was out of the question, even if I hadn’t a brain full of the choice I’d just made. Mosquitoes whined for blood, the long grass and swamp land around producing a fine pedigree for aggression and prophylactic resistance. I got under the sheet, pulled it over my head, breathed my own breath and started living with my own stink.

  A stillness settled over the house. The grasses hushed to nothing. Night colours came and dissolved in the undiluted darkness. Ideas drifted, merged and disintegrated. My brain rushed towards incoherence until, as crisp as scissors through card, reality cut back in.

  From some way off I heard the wind blundering through the trees, scything through the grass until it thumped into the back of the house, charged through the back door and opened a shutter in the front room, which snapped back on to the wall and cracked back into its frame. Fresh, cool air roamed the house. I tore the sheet back and gulped it in. The wind rolled on, dragging the rain after it, reluctant at first—a dash of pebble on the ondulé—and then a crash and the rooms were full of noise and a blue/white halogen light.

  Marnier was standing at his window looking out, the gun in his good left hand. He registered something and turned before the house imploded to black. I got to my feet with no idea in my head, just a carbon copy of Marnier floating in front of me. I waited. The rain smashed into the ondulé so hard that it should have caved in under the five-mile-high clouds full of it. The thunder pounded and the light that came with it burst white and fizzled then burst again. This time there was a figure between me and Marnier. The figure turned to him and took from him the only sound louder than the storm. Then blackness again, roaring blackness. A collision and the feeling of a wet shirt, a warm body underneath, muscle, sinew and something solid, heavy, clipped my cheek, a head, hair on my lips. Then the hard concrete of the floor. A weight on top of me. A weight slipping down my body. A weight wet through. More thunder. More light. Carlo’s head in my lap, his mouth wide open, a black hole, a mess on his shirt, high on the chest, another black hole there too, a large nickel-plated gun in his right hand.

  ‘FELIX!’ roared Marnier.

  I rolled out from under Carlo, kicking his dead weight away from me, suddenly panicked. I crawled and staggered to the door, the percussion of the rain still deafening.

  ‘FELIX!’ roared Marnier again.

  The lightning showed Marnier out on the stoop, gun in hand, the torch in the other. A wall of white vertical rain in front of him so that nothing was visible beyond the torrent coming off the roof of the stoop. The platform where he was standing was covered in water and, with the rain not so loud outside, I could hear him splashing backwards and forwards.

  ‘FELIX!’ he shouted again, but this time his voice rang out into the night. The rain stopped dead. On the back of the rain-rinsed air came not only the smell of wet earth and flushed grasses, but also the sound of two men in some monumental struggle. Marnier’s torch found them. A few feet from the back of the car Felix and Gio were on their feet locked together in an impossible octopodial embrace. The tendons of Felix’s neck standing out like bridge struts while Gio’s agricultural hands encircled, squeezed and crushed.

  I grabbed the shovel by the back door and leapt off the stoop and ran at Gio’s back.

  ‘Don’t kill him!’ roared Marnier.

  Gio heard me coming and turned in time to take the blade of the shovel a glancing blow on his concrete forehead. He let Felix go but didn’t go down. I brought the shovel up again to take Gio out but Marnier roared again from the stoop.

  ‘NO!’

  I swung, missed, and, as I staggered round, Gio’s stone fist connected with the side of my head and I went down into the mud. Gio moved towards me in triplicate. I tried to scrabble away from him, from the fists he held raised like rock-breakers’ hammers. Then he was on me, his breath in my face stronger than a wild dog’s, his lips pulled back over the worn teeth. The fists came up, wavered, and wouldn’t work any more. The fight went out of him. He collapsed forward, his face as close to mine as a lover’s cheek. The shovel blow had just taken that bit longer to work its way down the fossilized synapses to Gio’s ‘off’ switch. Felix pulled him away from me. He now had a knife in his hand. Marnier appeared with some nylon rope and the polypropylene sack, the torch in his armpit. Felix sliced through Gio’s sodden shirt, tore it off his back and set to binding the man’s hands up behind him.

  ‘Get Carlo,’ said Marnier to me, the wind buffeting without moving a strand of his hair.

  ‘Get him?’ I shouted, stoking some anger. ‘He’s bloody dead.’

  ‘Bring him here. Carry him.’

  ‘You shot him. You bring him.’

  ‘Young man’s work.’

  ‘Like it’s old man’s work to shout idiot suggestions during a fight with this complete mad bastard?’

  ‘I didn’t want you to kill him.’

  ‘Kill him?’ I roared. ‘The only way to kill a guy like that is to drop a bridge on him.’

  Marnier did that rare thing ... he chuckled.

  ‘Go on,’ he said, giving me some matches. ‘It’s getting late.’

  I crawled around the bedroom trying to find the hurricane lamp. I brought the light up in the room along with the hairs on the back of my neck. Carlo wasn’t there. There was a dark patch on the concrete, but no Carlo.

  Chapter 11

  I crawled on all fours along Carlo’s trail of blood to the bedroom door. I’ve always hated farce—all that painful inevitability before the tragedy. The dark smears went down the corridor to the front of the house. Why hadn’t he gone out on to the stoop? He was confused, half dead, a hole in his chest, an animal cra
wling off to die. The trail of blood came back up the corridor from the locked front door and went into the room with the tables and chairs. I didn’t want to stick my head round that door.

  I went back to the bedroom and found the broom and hung the hurricane lamp off the end of it. Back in the corridor I eased the lamp waist-high into the centre of the doorway. Three shots of colossal loudness rang out and shattered the lamp, which burst into flames on the ground. See what I mean about farce?

  I ran back into the bedroom and tore the heavy horsehair mattress off the bed. On the way back out I hit Marnier coming in from the stoop and we both went down fighting the mattress between us.

  ‘What the ... fuck ... is going on!’ hissed Marnier.

  ‘Carlo’s in there, alive, with a gun. The place is on fire,’ I said. ‘That’s it.’

  ‘Putain merde,’ said Marnier, and he left the house via the stoop. I threw the mattress over the flames. Carlo let off another shot, the mattress taking it in the gut, a terrible quantity of horsehair stuffing tore out the back of it as it went down. I slid to the floor by the smouldering door jambs.

  ‘You know somethin’,’ said Carlo, his voice coming out in little pops and crackles from the blood collected in his lungs and throat.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘I know you totally ballsed up this situation. It should be Marnier in there with his chest half out, not you.’

  ‘Fuck you,’ said Carlo. ‘He was fuckin’ waiting for us. You told him, you big fuck.’

  ‘I didn’t have to tell him.’

  ‘You know what, fucker?’

  ‘I don’t know anything any more.’

  ‘You’re dead meat. You’re dead the worse way you could ever possibly fuckin’ imagine.’

  ‘That’s not something I spend too much of my time thinking about.’

  ‘One day...’ were Carlo’s last words. A faint light clicked on in the room. Three shots. The noise, loud and continuous, careened around my cranium. The tinnitus staying and staying so that I knew this night would be in my head for years. I looked round the door jamb. The light from Marnier’s torch was still on Carlo, who had jammed himself into the corner of the room. His eye, nose and jaw were missing. Marnier was standing by an open shutter, his torso in the room, the gun still extended in his left hand. He looked down at the floor.