A Darkening Stain

by Robert Wilson

‘If I give you more money than you need do you think you could buy your way into some good information?’

  ‘It’s very tight here,’ he said, and the phone went dead as if to confirm it.

  Bagado was not thinking well, his head in a spin over this, his professionalism out the window, Bondougou’s magic working on him. As soon as I’d thought it, I knew I was right. Magic. Now this was going to cost. Finding a medicine man stronger than Bondougou’s was going to take some heavy change. Bagado wasn’t going to like it either. He’d been a Christian all his life and didn’t hold with Voudoun, but there was no denying the power of it. The president had just made it Benin’s official religion and I’d seen enough of it at work along this coast to know that it wasn’t just men dancing around in hayricks. I’d been told never to take a Beninoise housegirl because they were great poisoners and I’d pooh-poohed the -ism, whatever it was. But ... I’ve always had Ghanaians in my house, didn’t want to risk it with that stuff.

  I went back to thinking about how Daniel got to me. The German sex punter was not out of the question. Information did its rounds in the Jonquet, especially when there was money in it. And as for finding me, a 6’ 4” white man in a piddling little city like Cotonou, no problem.

  If it wasn’t the sex punter, if this was something put together by Marnier or Charbonnier, then that had a more interesting slant to it, a slant worth a good slice of my time.

  I was giving it the slice when Bagado showed up looking grey-skinned and as torpid as the late afternoon. I gave him 50,000 CFA to use in the port and he might have drifted straight back out into the pollution if I hadn’t made him sit down.

  ‘You know what you need?’ I asked, but he didn’t look up, lost in some circular thought. ‘You need a witch doctor.’

  His head clicked up, muddy brown eyes locked on.

  ‘You know better than to talk about that to me.’

  ‘Get one. You can bet Bondougou’s got one.’

  ‘I’m depressed. I’ve lost one of my children. That’s all.’

  ‘Your brain’s gone. You look terrible. There’s no fight in you. Where’s all that professionalism you’re so proud of?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘He’s working on you. Find a man. A good one. I’ll pay ... but do it now. Tonight.’

  He nodded. I didn’t know whether I’d got through. He stood and went to the door and wrenched it open.

  ‘Bagado,’ I said, and he stopped, stared straight out down the stairway, ‘remember all that good versus evil stuff? This is part of the battle. Get some of the dark forces on your side.’

  A gust of wind fluttered his mac. He walked into it and left.

  Chapter 17

  Night fell and I locked up, wondering where the boy I’d sent after Daniel had got to. I found him curled up in the tailor’s shack. He said he’d lost Daniel in the Dan Tokpa market. I didn’t believe him. I especially didn’t believe him when he refused my money. I got down to his level and saw the fear in his eyes. I gave him a little rub on the head, pressed a 100-CFA coin into his hand and told him not to worry about it.

  Back home I waited for Heike until a quarter to eight, then wrote her a note. I loaded myself up with a couple of hundred thousand CFA and headed for the Restaurant Guinéen.

  No rains for a couple of days and it was hot out there, hot and still and thick with pollution. I was nervous and sick and this kind of unrefreshed atmosphere of pillaring pressure gave me breathing difficulties, made me panic that the motor would miss a few beats and not restart.

  I took a seat in the restaurant and ordered a beer. I hadn’t eaten since the pizza slices, but strong liquids were the only things that were going to stay down. The clientele was mainly African, the few other white people were travellers on a peanut budget, their clothes so faded from the sun and washing they were diaphanous.

  Eight o’clock slipped by and I filled the minute after it by ordering another beer and a plate of cashew, my guts improving with time and the hope of a no-show. The travellers full of rice and sauce, left. An electric fan tried hard but couldn’t cut it. Thunder rumbled a long way off and the remaining Africans approved, confirming the release to come.

  By nine o’clock there were three of us in the place and only one of us a customer. I’d taken some yam pâté and sauce for the feeling of something solid in there with the butterflies, and the beer around it was starting up some secondary fermentation. I belched and gave myself hiccups. The waiter sat down to his meal. I left money on the table and got out into the sallow light on the pavement. A Mercedes pulled up with Lagos plates. Daniel got out of the front passenger seat wearing the same clothes as this afternoon. A big guy got out the back and there was another one in there in the dark trying to encourage me with a smile you wouldn’t trust from your sister.

  ‘Who’re your friends?’ I asked.

  ‘They lookin’ the same thing.’

  ‘I’ll take a window seat.’

  ‘We air-conditioned in there.’

  ‘I like the view.’

  ‘At night?’

  I took another look at the big guy who was leaning against the boot of the Merc, arms folded, dressed European, short-sleeve white shirt hanging outside black trousers, no socks, black scuffed lace-ups. Muscle.

  ‘Let’s take a look at the guy with the smile,’ I said.

  Daniel leaned in and said something in Yoruba. The guy got out into the road, put his arms up on the roof, the smile still there and I could see what was so trustworthy about it now. A gold tooth in the middle. Heavy, rudimentary cicatrices on his face. More muscle.

  ‘These two can go and do some window shopping.’

  ‘Uh?’

  ‘They’re out or the deal’s off.’

  ‘They...’

  ‘Do it, Danny boy.’

  He spoke to them in Yoruba at some length, no doubt making more arrangements with my comfort in mind. They shoved themselves off the car and seeped into the night.

  Daniel and I got in the back seat. I was relieved to find the driver thin as hanger wire and the seat leather cool. We drove out of the Jonquet, heading north. The driver, with the lightest of touches on the steering wheel, only moved his hands. Our eyes connected in the rearview three times a minute until the streetlighting ran out and the tarmac cratered—the Francophonie rehab not getting as far as this.

  The driver eased us in and out of the potholes which were water-filled to within an inch of the brim. Then we were on to a beaten mud piste, moving swiftly over the bumps and the odd stretch of washboard. We could only be heading for the lagoon. There was nothing else out here apart from jungle and, beyond the headlight cone, the thick dark which came alive every so often with lightning crackling up and down the high-stacked cloud in the eastern sky.

  We made a couple of turns and came out at a collection of houses at the edge of the lagoon. All the houses were made of wood and on stilts, most of them up to their knees in water. We turned back on ourselves and went up on to some higher ground where there was a concrete and brick building with a walled compound. It was the only house with fighting and there was a continuous whine from a small petrol generator at high revs. We parked in the compound and Daniel spoke for the first time since leaving Cotonou.

  ‘Five hundred thousand.’

  ‘I haven’t done anything yet.’

  ‘Pay me the money, go into the house, do your business and we take you back.’

  ‘What if I don’t like the girls?’

  ‘You like them. They ver’ sweet.’

  The driver leaned forward and took something from the glove. He shifted sideways in his seat and looked at me mildly over the headrest. I went to open the door.

  ‘The money,’ said Daniel.

  The door wouldn’t open, child locks on.

  ‘You said I had a choice.’

  ‘You do, when you pay the money.’

  ‘I want to go in there see if I like what I see. If I don’t I want to come out, get in the car a
nd go home. No money.’

  ‘Show me your money,’ he said. ‘Just want to see. Make sure you got it.’

  The driver clicked the courtesy light on. I fanned the couple of hundred thousand I had on me and put the roll back in my pocket. He nodded. The driver let me out. After the air con the night’s breath was all over me like a dance-floor flirt. I walked to the building, resisting the urge to turn at the steps up to the verandah for encouragement.

  I opened one half of the cracked and peeling double doors and walked into a steel blue glow which was not chilly but stifling. It lit an anteroom and a long corridor which ran the length of the building, the blue light not quite making it to the back wall. A large woman in an African-print dress struggled to her feet from one of two easy chairs up against the wall behind a coffee table which had a spray of plastic flowers in an old gin bottle on it.

  This was my first time in a bordello. I’d been in hotels which turned out to be bordellos if that was the service you wanted, but a purpose-built bordello, never. I was expecting some false joie de vivre, giggling girls in basques and garters running from room to room, pursued by fatties in string vests, knee-length boxer shorts and suspendered black socks. If I could have heard anything above the howl of the tortured genny it would have been grim silence broken by tears.

  The woman stepped into her flip-flops and slouched over to me. She didn’t speak but set off down the corridor, her behind kissing the walls with each stride.

  ‘Il m’a dit que tu as des vierges ici,’ I said to the hair she had plaited in rails on her head.

  She threw open a door on the left and turned to me.

  In the yellow light of the table lamp lay a small girl in a little white dress undone at the back. She was sleeping curled up with her hands to her mouth. The tragedy of this terrible business hit me hard then—the little girl needing her sleep, the only ministration required was a parental kiss on an unconscious cheek. She stirred, knowing she was being observed.

  ‘C’est tout?’ I asked.

  The girl came awake on my question and I saw the first thing in her eyes. Fear. The next thing was nothingness. The lights went out in her. She disengaged from the world. The one thing certain—she wasn’t a virgin.

  The woman closed the door and crossed the corridor. The story was different in this one. The girl was screwed up tight as a ball of paper in the corner of her bed furthest from the door. She was darting fast animal looks about her and shivering, even though the room was hotter than an infected wound. This feral kitten might have been a virgin about a week ago but she still hadn’t found the way to detach the brain from the body. I stepped back into the corridor.

  ‘Il m’a dit que tu as des élèves ici.’

  The woman shot the girl a mean look which almost completely unravelled her and closed the door. We went to a room at the end of the corridor. The girl lay flat on her back, stretched out, taller than the others. She wore pink pants and nothing else. She covered the nubbins of her young high breasts with her hands and looked at me as if she was remembering my face to take with her to eternity. The madame pointed to the wall. Hanging off a nail on a crippled hanger was a small brown uniform.

  ‘Comment t’appeles tu?’ I asked.

  ‘Veronique,’ said the woman quickly, the improbability of the name straightening me.

  ‘Tu es en école?’ I asked, looking at her face, knowing now she didn’t understand French.

  ‘Elle est élève,’ said the madame.

  ‘Je crois que non.’

  ‘T’as vu ça,’ she said, pointing at the uniform.

  ‘Elle ne comprend pas français.’

  ‘Tu es professeur ou bien quoi?’ asked the woman, so I had to check her for irony. I stormed back down the corridor, past the doors with their veneer of tacky varnish, and into the steel lighting at the front of the building.

  ‘Oú vas-tu main’nant?’ she shouted after me.

  I didn’t answer. I wanted to get out of there now. I was on the last rung over the abyss, one more room of that place and I’d be falling. I got out on to the verandah and found myself looking at the muscle I’d told Daniel to fade to black back in Cotonou.

  ‘Il n’a pas payé!’ hollered the woman, gasping up the corridor.

  ‘Je n’ai rien fait.’

  The gold tooth winked at me. The bigger guy stood with his hand up his shirt stroking a flat hard belly. Daniel stood at the bottom of the steps. The car was pointing out of the compound. Lightning flickered far to the north of the lagoon.

  ‘Now you pay,’ said Daniel.

  ‘I didn’t like what I saw,’ I said. ‘No bunny, no money. That was the deal.’

  ‘We not goin’ nowhere ’til you pay.’

  Gold tooth stepped forward to reinforce the situation. With what I had boiling inside me I felt no fear but I yelled in his face, a high-pitched scream, and waved my hands in the air like a lunatic. It did what I expected—got him on to the back foot and rooted him. Then I swung from a long way off, from way back behind my knee, over my shoulder, over my head and hit his friend full on the solar plexus with getting on for 200 lbs behind it. Even over the whine of the generator I heard the air go out of him. He doubled over, fell back, ricocheted off the roof support and fell the two feet off the verandah to the beaten earth of the compound. That put gold tooth in two minds, neither of them his own. My wave of anger started curling and breaking now, so that the kick I unleashed into his crotch lifted him on to his points and must have left him adenoidal for life.

  Daniel backtracked to the car, a wild look on his face that said, let’s get away from the bully boy. I shuffled down the steps after him, cocky, and nasty with it. He joined the car whose motor was running. The driver’s window was down, which does little for the air con, and I noticed his arm was out straight. I was almost on it before I saw it. In the driver’s hand was an old revolver, a long-nosed job right out of a forties ‘noir’. I stopped about three feet from it, close enough to know it was real.

  ‘The money,’ said Daniel, his voice going a bit F-sharp with panic and fear.

  The driver resighted his aim from my belly to my chest, which made no difference to me—gut shot, cardio shot, I wasn’t into either. I handed over the money. Daniel got into the car, sweating, relieved. He badgered the driver to get on with it and the car pulled away very slowly. Slowly enough for me to see the mozzarella smile in the bony features of the pipecleaner driver. Never trusted those thin guys.

  The muscle was still scrabbling in the dust, one trying to get a bite of air, the other on all fours vomiting off the verandah, back arched like a dog after green meat. I found the little Yamaha scooter they’d arrived on and went after Daniel and his handyman, my rage still clean and focused, wanting to finish this more than I’d wanted to do anything.

  I was glad of the driver’s arrogance. He purred back to Cotonou without ever taking it above forty m.p.h. I followed with no lights on until we hit the city and I could join the anonymous peloton of a thousand other mopeds.

  We went past the Dan Tokpa, over the Nouveau Pont and joined the main Porto Novo road, direction Nigeria. I’d have followed them all the way to Lagos if I’d had to, but they came off at PK 12 and went up to a cheap and unfinished beach hotel called Le Paradis. The driver dropped Daniel off with a small holdall, turned the Merc and floated back past me on his way to a cheaper joint.

  I parked the Yamaha and took a peek in the empty concrete bar. Daniel was at the foot of the stairs swinging a room key and ordering some food and drink from a solitary barman, asking him to bring it up to his room. Daniel went up the stairs taking slow nonchalant steps, a little celebratory bounce on each one, the fear forgotten, pleased with himself now.

  The barman went into the kitchen leaving the grim neon-lit bar empty. In reception, room eight was the only missing key. I gave it five minutes and went up to the first floor. I found room eight along an untiled corridor with electric wire hanging from the ceiling between the lights. I knocked on the
door. Daniel opened it so cool and happy he didn’t even bother to check it wasn’t his dinner. He was already stripped and heading across the dark blue tiles to the bathroom, a towel round his waist. I padded up behind him and gave his head a slight change in direction so that it hit the corner of a built-in louvre-doored wardrobe. He dropped to his knees, shouting, both hands over his eyebrow. I grabbed him by the back of his neck and slammed him forward so that his head cracked through the wardrobe door and he came to rest with his windpipe crimped against the louvre slats, unconscious and choking. I yanked him out and massaged his throat. I went through his clothes and found my roll of 200,000 CFA amongst another 100,000 or so and a bunch of niara. I was tempted to cover my expenses from the remainder, but got a little flash of Heike and Bagado giving me a finger-wagging. I checked the holdall, which was even juicieir the CFA all blocked off, five million of it, getting on for $10,000 and the revolver on top. I hauled Daniel away from the wardrobe, dragged him over to the bed. I ripped his towel off, soaked it in cold water and cleaned his face up, which was covered in blood, the eyebrow bleeding like a stuck pig’s throat. He started moaning and I got up and closed the door to the room, locked it.

  I dabbed his face some more and got him up on to the bed. I sat on the other twin bed and waited for him to stop making a fuss, the guy with a head of glass to let a few louvre slats knock him out. He wasn’t happy coming back into a world of red flooded pain, which pleased me. His black skin was tinged green too, so I got him a bucket from the bathroom and he puked his headache up.

  ‘A few questions, Danny, before I leave you to your dinner.’

  He focused on me and modestly covered his genitals with a hand. Blood leaked through the fingers of his other hand from the eyebrow. I leaned forward with the towel. He flinched. I tossed the towel at him.

  ‘You’re in this business, aren’t you? I can see from the money,’ I said, nodding down at the holdall.

  ‘What business?’

  ‘Don’t make it too slow, Daniel, or your level of suffering’s going to angle up sharply. You understand? Now, you’re in the business of procuring young girls, isn’t that right?’