A Darkening Stain

by Robert Wilson

  He nodded.

  ‘Those girls I saw tonight, were they your girls?’

  ‘Not any more.’

  ‘Explain.’

  ‘I buy them from the villages. Take them to Cotonou. Sell them.’

  ‘You sell them to the woman?’

  ‘No, no, she jus’ run the place.’

  ‘You know these schoolgirls...’

  ‘You and schoolgirls. You sick in the head...’

  I inched off the bed and slapped him hard, twice, with the front and back of my hand. He drivelled and sank back on to the pillow.

  ‘You’re forgetting you’re the asshole pimp, Daniel. You’re the one peddling little girls into a life of misery and pain. You keep your opinions to yourself and answer my questions and I might not be inclined to leave you pulped in the bath, because, I tell you, with what I’ve got humped up inside me I could do a lot worse than that.’

  He put the cold towel compress to his face, shivering with twitchy fear, the room sauna-hot.

  ‘You know who sell me the girls?’ he asked, quietly.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The parents,’ he said. ‘You like that?’

  ‘And I suppose you tell the parents that their daughters are going to short happy lives of torn pudenda and diseases? Don’t justify your shitty life to me.’

  ‘I’m jus’ tellin’ you...’

  ‘Tell me something else. These schoolgirls who’ve gone missing off the streets of Cotonou over the last few weeks. Eight girls, seven still alive, one found dead on the sand bar in the lagoon. You know what I’m talking about?’

  He nodded. There was a knock at the door, his dinner arriving.

  ‘Ça peut rester dehors,’ I shouted, and I heard the tray go down on the floor and the flip-flops retreat. ‘Now tell me what you know about the schoolgirls.’

  ‘You know,’ he said, taking the towel away from his face for a moment, to see if the blood still ran free, ‘you know you a dead man.’

  I probably was too, but I was so crazed I didn’t care, not a trace of ice in my veins, not the slightest tremor in my gut. I just leaned over to him and slapped him again, a downward stroke that fattened his lip nicely.

  ‘Someone told me that the other day, Daniel, and he’s six foot under concrete now with most of his face blown off. People are telling me all the time how they’re going to hang me by the gizzard and feed my entrails to the dogs but, look, I’m still here, still here with the task of slapping you about until you tell me something sensible. Now get on with it, my hands don’t need this much work.’

  I could see he was confused. The beating he’d taken and a lot of English he didn’t want to understand. I calmed myself down and a couple of things occurred to me. The first was that Daniel was a middle man, low down in the chain, the boy not having any presence of mind at all. That meant a boss in Benin for him to report to, and, probably, a Mr Big in Lagos above it all. I saw how I could give him a problem, a big problem which, with any luck, would get him killed well before the cross-hairs landed on me. The other thing that came to mind was the first squirming wriggle of an idea like an elite sperm heading for the egg. The only problem, I didn’t understand it—my mind operating faster than my brain. I shrugged it away. Daniel flinched.

  ‘Who do you work for, Daniel?’

  No answer.

  ‘Who do you pay the money to, Daniel?’

  ‘He comin’ soon. Bring you some trouble.’

  ‘I don’t know anybody who doesn’t bring me trouble. What’s he do with the money you give him?’

  ‘He tek it to Lagos.’

  ‘Who in Lagos?’

  ‘I don’ know.’

  I opened up the holdall and took out the revolver. It really was an antique with a hammer and everything. Daniel froze. I placed the nozzle of the gun on the back of his hand covering his genitals.

  ‘I don’t know how to work these things too well but I know it’s something to do with pulling back the hammer.’

  I eased it back.

  ‘But you know, Daniel, I had trigger thumbs when I was a kid. Doctor said it might weaken them.’

  ‘Madame Sokode,’ he said, quickly so that he could pretend he hadn’t.

  ‘Tell me where I can find her,’ I said, and brought the revolver back into my hands where I examined it further. Daniel gave me an address. ‘Talk to me about Madame Sokode.’

  ‘I don’t know her,’ he whined. ‘I jus’ take the orders, pay the money.’

  ‘You do anything else for her?’

  ‘What you mean?’

  ‘Maybe you do drugs too. You got five million CFA in the bag. That’s money.’

  ‘I don’ do drugs. That’s Lagos business. I only work in Benin.’

  ‘What about these schoolgirls? What do you know about them?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Is Madame Sokode involved?’

  No answer.

  I leaned over him like a bad sky and gave him a look down the pipe of the revolver. I hit him with the heel of my free hand in the forehead and his head cracked back against the wall. Once, twice, three times.

  ‘I don’t think you know how angry I am, Daniel,’ I said and eased back the hammer again. He started blubbing. ‘Where are they keeping the schoolgirls?’

  ‘I don’t know. On the lagoon. I don’t know the place.’

  ‘Where are the girls going?’

  ‘Lagos.’

  ‘Are they going to be sold in Lagos?’ I said, sitting back down.

  ‘They already bought.’

  ‘What sort of money do they fetch?’

  ‘Thirty, forty thousand dollar.’

  ‘That’s a hell of a lot more than five hundred thousand CFA.’

  ‘If they virgin. Genuine...’

  ‘Sounds like good business, Daniel. What sort of people can afford that kind of money?’

  ‘Big people,’ he nodded.

  ‘When are they going to move the girls?’

  ‘I don’ know the time. It soon. But I don’ know the time.’

  ‘Do they need more girls?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘You think this is good business, Daniel? Taking girls off the street and selling them to die?’

  His eyes slitted at that. Revenge already in there. Don’t get moral with those that don’t have it unless you want a lapful of spite. My translation.

  ‘You got any children?’ I asked, standing up and pacing away from him, suddenly nervous about the money man due tonight. He didn’t answer me but I knew he had them. I picked up the holdall and took out three blocks of CFA and tucked them down the front of my chinos. I threw the holdall down by the side of the bed. Daniel was blinking fast, wondering if he was coming to his time and thinking if he wasn’t, how he was going to explain that all the money hadn’t been stolen.

  ‘Keep your kids indoors, Danny,’ I said. ‘Now stand up and turn around.’

  I got him to the end of the bed. It was hard because he thought that this was it and his legs wouldn’t work properly and there were tears. I tapped him on the head and he dropped on to the bed and bounced. I made sure he could breathe. I brought his dinner in from outside, scraped it down the toilet and poured the drink after it and put the tray on the table.

  It wasn’t until I got back on the scooter that I realized I still hadn’t found out who’d sent him, a question that fidgeted on my mind all the way back to Cotonou.

  Chapter 18

  Wednesday 24th July, Cotonou.

  It was just after midnight when I dragged myself back up the stairs to the house, having put the money and the revolver in the usual hiding place in Moses’s ground-floor flat. Bagado was lying asleep curled up with his head on the front step. My first thought—where was Heike?

  I let myself in and went for the answering machine. No messages. Bagado came in and shut the door, still not looking good, thin, wasted. I checked the bedroom, knowing she wasn’t there.

  ‘She’s not here,’ said Bagado.<
br />
  ‘You know where she is?’

  ‘I’ve been out there since ten.’

  I went back to the answering machine. Still no messages. Panic crept in and made its house. I flipped through the address book by the phone. Then I smiled. Heike getting back at me for not phoning her last night. That didn’t work though. Not in her nature, and gone midnight was stretching the tease. I leafed through the book past Gerhard Lehrner, Heike’s boss, to Traudi Linke, a work colleague, an insomniac vegan who read Brecht and ate carrots until she snatched an hour of sleep between four and five in the morning.

  I dialled the number. Traudi picked up the phone, breezy, fresh from a couple of hours with Mutter Courage. Her voice went flat when she heard it was me. We didn’t get along. Something to do with my ostentatiously wearing shoe leather in her company and telling her that vegetables have families too.

  ‘Have you seen Heike tonight?’ I asked.

  ‘Have you been fighting again?’ she replied, a barbed question guaranteed to snag my dander.

  ‘She left this morning. She hasn’t come home. No messages.’

  ‘She went for a drink with Gerhard after work. That’s all I know,’ she said. ‘And you shouldn’t fight with her in that condition, you know? If she has a miscarriage...’

  ‘Thanks, Traudi.’

  The phone went down on me hard. I called Gerhard, not an enjoyable call to have to make, as he’d been holding a candle for Heike since he took up his post and the news would definitely boost. The phone rang for ever until I was blinded by irrational jealousy and panic, livid if she was there, mad if she wasn’t. Gerhard finally answered. He’d clearly been in a deep, possibly booze-induced, sleep.

  ‘Gerhard. Bruce. Do you know where Heike is?’

  ‘Heike? She left hours ago.’

  ‘From your place?’ I asked, unable to resist the question.

  ‘We were drinking in the Beaurivage. She said she was going back to Cotonou. That was seven, eight o’clock, something like that.’

  I dumped the phone. Blind panic leading by a full lap now. Bagado took the phone and dialled a number in Porto Novo. He spoke rapidly in a mixture of Fon and French, giving Heike’s car description and registration. He got nothing back, no accident report, no sighting. He did the same with Cotonou and got the same response.

  Then it hit me. The final admission of the truth, of the irrefutable evidence, like giving up on rechecking your pockets looking for the wallet you knew had been stolen all along. Marnier’s voice came back to me.

  ‘He will make you go.’

  I dialled Franconelli’s number in Lagos. The usual hard-boiled Italian answered. I gave my name and waited, thinking, damn Franconelli and his bloody respect. I should have known he’d think up a suitable punishment for my refusal to come, bundling me off the street too easy.

  ‘Franconelli,’ he said, calm, clear, nearly sing-song.

  ‘Medway,’ I said. ‘Is she with you?’

  ‘Not yet. The traffic’s been bad,’ he said. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘You didn’t have to do that, you know. I was coming.’

  ‘You don’t show me any respect. I don’t show you none. Not you. Not your family.’

  ‘She’s pregnant, Mr Franconelli. I’d appreciate it if you’d be careful with her. I’m coming now.’

  ‘Nothing’s going to happen to her. You’re coming now. That’s all.’

  He put the phone down.

  Bagado stared me down to my core, which felt gaunt and haggard.

  ‘What do you want?’ I asked.

  ‘You’d better go.’

  ‘What are you doing sleeping outside the door if it’s not important?’

  ‘I wanted to speak to Heike.’

  ‘You’re the only man she trusts, you know that? Including me.’

  ‘This isn’t about that. I need money. A lot of money.’

  ‘Like how much?’

  ‘Haifa million CFA.’

  ‘Come with me and don’t ask any questions.’

  We went down to Moses’s flat. I stripped off a half million from one of Daniel’s blocks while Bagado sat on the bed.

  ‘There’s more and I’d give it to you,’ I said, handing it over, ‘but this is just about the dirtiest money you’ve ever laid your hands on.’

  ‘I’m not asking questions any more. Lose-lose, remember, and anyway, what you said about the forces of darkness ... maybe you’re right ... maybe the light’s not strong enough for this.’

  ‘What does all that mean?’

  ‘You were right.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘My wife told me.’

  ‘I thought she was a Christian.’

  ‘But she’s a Beninoise too. She knows the power of Voudoun when she sees it. She never dared talk to me about it. She’s tried going to a doctor on my behalf, without telling me, but the medicine was too strong.’

  ‘Or the money too weak?’

  ‘C’est ça,’ said Bagado, managing a smile.

  I told Bagado about Daniel, about the little-girl bordello outside Contonou and the schoolgirls in a hideout somewhere in the lagoon system before shipment to Lagos. He swallowed hard and took the half million out of his pocket and looked at it in the dim light of Moses’s room. For a moment I thought he was going to give it back, the stuff too tainted, but he just nodded and rerolled it and put it in his mac.

  ‘This should do the trick. Strong money,’ he said, trying to brighten himself. ‘You see how I’m changing, Bruce?’

  ‘I can see how you’re going to win.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ he said.

  I turned the light off and locked up. I swung myself behind the Peugeot’s steering wheel. Bagado opened the gates.

  ‘What is all this lose-lose stuff?’ I asked.

  He shrugged as I reversed past him.

  ‘You’d better stay away from me unless you need more money,’ I said. ‘I think there are some bad things going to happen.’

  ‘Bad things have already happened and will carry on happening,’ he said. ‘I’ll be here when you need me.’

  I pulled out into the street. Bagado closed the gates. I leaned out across my elbow.

  ‘Are you going to bust up that bordello?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t think it’s going to be as easy as that. Not yet.’

  I left him, hands jammed into his pockets, his head turned sideways, looking off into the night as if he was expecting to be followed. I gunned the Peugeot to Sekou Touré, took a right down to the cathedral, ran the red light and crossed the lagoon on the Porto Novo road to Lagos, where I tried to wring a dew drop of hope out of Bagado’s ‘not yet’.

  It was fast going to the border and I was through all that in half an hour and a few thousand. The fifteen or so roadblocks on the Badagri/Lagos stretch took some time but I cruised on to the Expressway into the city at a cooling fifty m.p.h. which was a miracle. The traffic situation even at 3 a.m. could be as bound up as a cancerous bowel.

  It was a lava crawl across the bridge on to Lagos Island. The place never changed, still stank because the rubbish was never collected but left to accumulate and degrade under the violent rains and triturating heat. At least there wasn’t the stench of putrefaction you sometimes got from bodies floating in the harbour and nobody shoved a shotgun up my nose, took my all and blew my face off anyway. Lagos could be like that.

  I crossed Five Cowrie Creek on to Victoria Island, through embassy land and into the smart residential zone where piefin-gering businessmen, politicians and customs officials snuggled together. Franconelli lived in a secure street, one with armed guards at both ends with radio phones and visitor lists. They let me through and down to Franconelli’s oversized pillbox of a house. One of those structures that hadn’t been built but poured. The gateman made a show of opening the armour-plated gates and I did my bit by tipping him extra.

  I drove up the short driveway. No light came on in the barred and shuttered house. I felt a sense of d
oom stronger than those night frights that thump you awake into the black freezing roar of the first leg to hell, but somehow I didn’t think I was going to get the reprieve of finding it was just lousy air con.

  The doom wasn’t just because of Franconelli. Heike was in this now. The Italian’s move had been shrewd and calculated for maximum damage. He’d done his research. Heike would not forgive this easily, being taken off the streets by the mafia, for God’s sake. I could feel the hurricane building. What I didn’t know was that this was the least of my problems. When I look back on that moment I gave myself, parked outside Franconelli’s house in my dark, heat-racked bubble, I realize it was a final moment. The last seconds before any residual innocence, any smattering of the real childhood stuff, finally burnt out.

  A crack of light appeared at the front door and a figure. I shouldered my carcass out of the Peugeot and went to meet it. The figure moved to let me past, the steel door was thicker than a ship’s bow. One of Franconelli’s boys shut it behind me. We didn’t say anything. These guys never do. I followed his short, wide frame up the stairs to where Franconelli kept his office for security reasons. I looked at the muscles working in the man’s legs and banished my last wincing recall of Marnier’s machete at work to submerge myself in the lie. The bigger lie that was going to save my hide.

  The guy let me into the harsh, neon striplit office and shut himself out of it. Heike was sitting on the sofa, legs crossed, foot nodding, a finger in her mouth. The only thing keeping her from smoking was the concentration required to distil her anger down to one hundred per cent pure.

  Roberto Franconelli was parked up behind his desk to the right of his computer. He was wider than I remembered, his head bigger, the jowls jowlier from the weight of his concerns, even his wire hair looked heavier. He looked at me with his dark, charcoal-smudged eyes, sleep not the sweet visitor it had been since his wife and daughter died. He wore a long-sleeved white shirt with cuffs pinched by heavy gold studs, no tie, his neck at his throat ageing him. His hands were clasped, a thick finger tapped a signet ring. It didn’t look as if there’d been much chitchat.

  I went to kiss Heike and was given the back of her head. Franconelli nodded me into a chair in front of his desk. I sat down with Heike still in my peripheral vision but my eyes fixed on the Italian’s mouth, the dark, full-lipped mouth which went white-rimmed with anger.