A Darkening Stain

by Robert Wilson

  ‘Tell me,’ he said, leaning forward, so that I knew why we were in the striplit neon. He wanted to see every facial nuance.

  ‘I don’t think there’s any need for my wife to be in the room.’

  ‘I’m not your wife,’ said Heike. ‘He keeps saying that...’

  We both looked at her.

  ‘... but I’m not.’

  ‘Tell me,’ said Franconelli. ‘From what you said to me on the phone you’ve got nothing to hide, not from me, not from your ... from her.’

  ‘I don’t think this is woman’s talk, that’s all.’

  ‘Fuck you,’ said Heike. ‘These people dragged me out of my car at gunpoint, Bruce. Did you hear that? Gunpoint. That’s not women’s talk either. So you’ve involved me and I want to know what this is all about. Now tell him and let’s get the hell out of here.’

  Silence.

  ‘Maybe you should give her your trouser, she gonna talk like that,’ said Franconelli, smirking.

  I leaned an elbow across his desk and bolted my eyes on to his.

  ‘I’m not saying a word while she’s in the room.’

  A spear of light traversed my vision from left to right, the noise, louder than a shotgun blast, span me. The desk, PC, wall, ceiling, Heike’s feet, the rug on the tiled floor flashed through my head. I lay still and blinked at the clawed feet of the desk and registered that Franconelli had swiped me off my perch. A handful of my hair was grabbed from above and I found myself looking at Roberto’s raised hand and white-rimmed mouth. He slapped me a tearing backhander across the face and my mouth flooded metallic and warm.

  ‘By dawn, maybe ... just maybe you gonna understand the word respect,’ he said. ‘I don’ care about your woman. You know what I mean? I will hit you in front of your woman. You will talk to me in front of your woman. You will give me respect.’

  He dropped my head. I got up on all fours and crawled up the corner of the desk and back into my chair. Heike was moulded to the sofa now, her hand up to her mouth, eyes wide and unblinking. The violence up and running, close to, and real. It had rubbed some of the brass off her, taken the blade off her edge. My ear was ringing hot, and my lip torn and fat. I rolled my head on my neck, a crick in there from the first slap, and started.

  I got as far as sitting outside the Hotel du Port, waiting to go in and find Marnier, when Franconelli stopped me and said he didn’t want diagrams, he wanted oil paintings. I started again, this time I threw in the stuff about the sausage-stuffed pastry, the cold Possotomé. He nodded me on, watching me all the while, careful as a pro poker player. He asked me to go over things occasionally, let other things drift. He liked the Australians, what they said about Marnier’s face. Heike didn’t. He was interested in what we ate. Heike wasn’t. He was mesmerized by my description of the waitress, Adèle. So was Heike. Her legs twisted so tight her toes went white.

  The screw turned in the room. The air-conditioned air didn’t feel so conditioned. The glare from the neon shot my eye whites to blood. Franconelli was crouched, his chin not far from the desk, looking up into my skull, waiting for it.

  I told him about the house, the Togolese car arriving, the heavy trunk the driver and I put in the house, the 5000 CFA for the man’s trouble, his leaving, the drink with Marnier, what we talked about and then his going to bed.

  ‘And you didn’t go to bed?’ asked Franconelli.

  ‘I was too nervous. I told Marnier I was going back to the Auberge for a drink.’

  ‘With the waitress, Adèle? Like you said you would before?’

  ‘That’s right. And I wanted to see if Gio and Carlo were out there. I hadn’t seen them all day. And anyway, even if I didn’t see them it was none of my business what they wanted to talk to Marnier about. I didn’t need to be there. I didn’t want to be there.’

  ‘But Marnier let you go?’ he asked, frowning.

  ‘Why shouldn’t he?’ I asked, feeling a chasm starting to open.

  ‘What was in the trunk?’

  ‘I told you, it was gold. He didn’t make it clear where it had come from. I put it to him that it was illegal mining...’

  ‘That’s the point. You left him on his own with the gold. He asks you down there as his bodyguard and you leave him with a trunk full of the stuff under the bed.’

  ‘Wrong. I was his driver. I was never his bodyguard. He didn’t tell me we were going to pick up gold. He said he didn’t want Carole to have to drive him down there. And look at me. I don’t carry firearms. I’m not violent. What use am I to him as a bodyguard?’

  ‘Did he have a gun?’

  ‘He might have. In the holdall. I didn’t see it, if he did.’

  ‘So you went to the Auberge.’

  ‘I drank beer with Adèle. We watched the Australians playing with petrol bombs in the bonfire on the beach.’

  ‘What did you talk about?’

  I shot a quick glance at Heike. She was riveted. Franconelli saw it too.

  ‘We talked about England, not much. She’d been on the road for a year and a half. I haven’t seen the place in five. We talked about Africa, the Sahara, about the big open spaces in the desert ... we talked about the ground.’

  ‘The ground? said Franconelli.

  ‘This might not be something you know about Africa, Mr Franconelli. The earth has its own pulse. You can lie on the ground and feel its energy, the force of nature...’

  ‘Yeah?’ he said. ‘You’re right. I wouldn’t know that. I sleep on a bed, on the floor, in a house like normal fucking people do.’

  He leaned back and looked across at Heike. He didn’t quite understand what was in her face. To me it was as if it was carved there in her bark. Betrayal. She felt betrayed by the intimacy, our intimacy, that I shared with another woman. It interested Franconelli. He couldn’t take his eyes off her and I knew I was winning, had that hook firmly in his gullet, but Jesus Christ, what a cost.

  ‘So you had your conversation about the ground. Then what?’

  ‘We bought a couple of bottles of beer and went for a walk down the beach.’

  Franconelli got it then. He saw what was dropping through Heike, what that look had meant. He turned back to me. His tongue went right to left, taking the relish off his lips.

  ‘How far?’ he asked.

  ‘Quite a long way. Beyond the hotel and campsite. Way into the dark. I remember a graveyard off behind the palms.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘We stripped and went swimming.’

  I heard the sharp intake of breath from the sofa, not just cold water on the genitals but a stab in the heart.

  ‘And after that?’ asked Franconelli, knowing it was coming.

  ‘We had sex on the beach.’

  Heike gasped, lurched forward in a kind of vomit of breath that brought her to her feet. Franconelli span to look up at her. I couldn’t not look at her. What I saw was a deep hurt in her eyes, black and deep as a mine shaft. It put a fear in me, a fear of something profound like the fear of swimming in a fathomless lake. I didn’t know how we could ever be the same again. I felt damned.

  ‘Mr Franconelli,’ she said to my face, drawing on her reserve tank of dignity, ‘do you have a driver who could take me back to my car?’

  Franconelli looked at me, then back to Heike. He didn’t have to have any culture to know that this wasn’t acting.

  ‘Sure,’ he said, and buzzed up one of his guys.

  We waited in silence. The air in the room suddenly went cold and splintered into slivers. Heike’s breath came out in pants. The man arrived. Franconelli gave his instructions. I stood to face her, to try and communicate something.

  ‘Heike,’ I said, with nothing farther to add.

  She reached back and wheeled round, uncoiling an arm to fall stretch, and landed a stinging slap on the same side of my face as Franconelli’s blow. My head snapped round. The eyebrows jumped on the face of the guy at the door, not used to domestics round here.

  ‘Look at me,’ said Heike.


  I brought my head back round and looked into her glazed eyes.

  ‘I don’t want to have to look at you ever again,’ she said. ‘I just want to make sure you’ve seen it.’

  I don’t know what I had on my face at the time. I don’t know what could have possibly come through but I saw the hurt again and, on top of the hurt, a small, quizzical frown, as if I was the rarest specimen she’d seen. Then she was gone.

  The door closed. Footsteps receded. I was left with a fluttering in my chest like a frightened, caged bird beating against bars.

  ‘One more thing,’ said Franconelli.

  Chapter 19

  I sat back down, my hands clenched and twisted between my knees, my face alive with the slap, and the shame. I asked for a drink. Franconelli took a bottle of whisky out of a mini-bar and poured me a good measure. I sucked it in and let it burn through me. I stared into the floor, a sucking black hole opening wide and dark in my gut. I spoke on automatic.

  ‘There was a storm coming and we didn’t want to get caught out in it so I went back to her room. In the morning...’

  ‘You fuck her some more?’

  I nodded.

  ‘I wouldn’t want to think you gone through that just for one little fuck on the beach.’

  ‘In the morning I walked back to the Auberge and drove back to the house. Marnier was still sleeping. When he got up we loaded the trunk into my car and drove back to the Aledjo where his wife...’

  ‘His wife?’

  ‘Carole. I mentioned her before. He didn’t want her to have to drive him down there, to Grand-Popo, in the first place.’

  ‘His wife? The only wife I heard about died,’ he said, fingering a cigar he’d just slipped out of a tube and weighing up whether to smoke it at this godforsaken hour of the morning.

  ‘Marnier the Mystery Man,’ I said. ‘Anyway. We ate something. Carole and I transferred the trunk into her car. I drove back to the office. Called the Hotel de la Plage—no Carlo, no Gio. End of story. What happened? Do I get to know?’

  ‘I don’t know what happened,’ said Franconelli, sliding the cigar back into its tube.

  ‘What’s the one more thing?’ I asked. ‘You want me to find out what happened to them?’

  Franconelli opened his desk drawer and threw the cigar in there. He swivelled his chair a quarter turn and put an ankle up on a knee. He tapped the desk top with his ring finger.

  ‘When I first saw you, you know, I was impressed,’ he said. ‘That party. Gale’s party. You didn’t drink the champagne, didn’t fight for the caviare. You dumped that guy in the pool who was beating his wife in public even if she was a fucking whore and deserved it. Yeah. I thought you were OK. Someone to trust. Reliable. Then you lied to me.’

  ‘I lied to you for a good reason.’

  ‘No. You underestimated me. You thought I wouldn’t help you out. That was wrong. You made a mistake.’

  ‘OK. I made a mistake.’

  ‘You lied to me. You showed me disrespect. And now I can’t trust you.’

  ‘You can’t trust me? You mean you don’t believe what I’m saying?’ I asked, my insides congealing to a frozen jelly.

  ‘You have to show me you can be trusted.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know how I can do that. I gave Carlo and Gio all the information they needed. I’ve just given myself a big problem...’

  ‘You’re the only guy I know who can get close to Marnier,’ he said, holding up his hand, seeing me going off on a tangent.

  ‘If Marnier had anything to do with Carlo and Gio’s disappearance you think he’s going to tell me?’

  Franconelli stopped tapping his desk. Our eyes connected.

  ‘I want you to kill Marnier,’ he said.

  Silence. I unclenched my hands which were now freezing cold. I snorted and laughed, horrified and relieved.

  ‘I’ve never killed a man in my life,’ I lied without thinking, but still got the flash of the man’s face as I’d hit him with the toilet bowl all those years ago. What was his name?

  Franconelli didn’t say a word, but resumed his desk tapping.

  ‘I haven’t got a gun,’ I said. Jesus, another lie. ‘I’m not a man of violence.’ Another one. The lies popping like bubbles.

  ‘I’ll have a gun delivered to your office,’ he said, his lips barely moving, so that I panicked myself into a stupid question.

  ‘And what if I won’t do it?’

  He swivelled round in his chair, dismissing me, and would have looked out of the window if it hadn’t had a steel shutter across it.

  ‘Have you seen Lagos harbour?’ he asked, as if it was a tourist attraction or a marina full of yachts worth oohing about. I didn’t stumble into any more stupid questions. I tried to rein back, slow things down, but the team of horses dragging me through this bad patch were in a lather.

  ‘And I don’t want to hear from Cotonou that you’ve disappointed me.’

  I rummaged around my brain trying to find reasons not to run this errand.

  ‘You can go now.’

  I stood and he whipped round on me as if he’d seen me giving him the Vs in the window’s reflection.

  ‘And when you’ve killed him, I want you to bring me something.’

  I saw myself at a border post, the boot of my car open, a gaggle of policemen around and Marnier’s severed head staring up from an old wine box.

  ‘Marnier has a tattoo on his back. One he had done in prison in Marseilles. It’s a kind of joker, like you see in cards. I don’t know what you’d call it. A harlequin, that’s it, a harlequin. That’s what I want.’

  ‘You want me to cut it off his back?’

  ‘That would be easiest.’

  ‘What the hell did Marnier do to you that...’ I stopped myself before I got into machetes and such, ‘... that you have to have this ... this...?’

  ‘You don’t have to know.’

  ‘But maybe I need to,’ I said. ‘To have a reason.’

  He pondered that while cleaning his teeth with his tongue.

  ‘The gold ... half of it’s mine. That reason enough?’ he said, and looked at his watch. ‘Seventy-two hours. You be back here with the harlequin.’ He winced as if he’d had a shot of pain through him. He massaged his chest and stretched his jowly neck up as if reaching for breath. There was nothing more going to come from him. I made for the door, thinking he was lying about the gold. I heard him open the desk drawer and the rattle of a pill bottle. Then I was out and down the stairs and the same man was opening the steel door again, letting me out into the lagging night.

  I sat in the car with the dawn coming up and tried to think my way out of the spiral, breathe back the hysteria. The only man who could tell Heike what really happened on that terrible night in Grand-Popo was the one I was going to have to knock off to save my own skin. A perverse and grunting laugh coughed out of me as I thought about flaying Marnier’s hide to save my own. Then the hieroglyph of that idea I’d had at the Hotel Paradis wriggled into my brain again. I snatched at it, nearly getting it whole, but found that somehow it was incomplete, that I wasn’t ready for it. I realized that the only way was forward, to run with events, let things muddy or become clear, resolve themselves or not.

  I eased down the drive, through the steel gates. The chassis rocked as the car climbed on to the street. The guards waved me through the barrier. The further away from Franconelli the less the bird fluttered in my chest, until by the time I’d got to a nearby hotel called Y-Kays my chest was still and I’d decided that responsibility for whatever was going to happen lay with the same powers Bagado was summoning against Bondougou.

  At Y-Kays they weren’t too concerned about the exhausted white man who’d come in at the wrong end of the night asking for a room. I got up there, showered and was surprised to sleep a clean, dreamless sleep until 11 a.m. when I woke up with Daniel on my mind, face down on the bed, in the Hotel Paradis, a golf ball growing out of his head. I reached for my trousers and pulled out Madame Sokode’
s address. I flicked through my little black book and found the name of a man who was going to help me with some local information, an Armenian businessman I’d done some work for in Cotonou and Lagos—Die Zangelian. I called him and arranged to meet at his office on Lagos Island.

  From the outside Dic’s offices were small and shabby. He spent nothing on the exterior. Inside looked like an Armenian’s idea of an English country house with leather sofas, patterned carpets, repro furniture and bad art on the walls. Die was sitting in his office with the door open looking like a horticulturist presenting a variety of rare palms to an unseen TV camera. He was obsessed with these palms as he was with things English. He always served Earl Grey in tea cups with saucers and offered shortbread on small flower-bordered plates. He smoked Marlboros constantly, dressed himself in four-ounce grey lightweight suits and did his best to look like Omar Sharif after an all-night bridge tournament.

  ‘I need to know about a woman called Madame Sokode,’ I said, sipping the Earl Grey.

  ‘Madame Sokode,’ he said, parting his moustache with a thumb and forefinger.

  ‘You can tell me the dirty as well as the clean.’

  ‘Is there any dirty?’

  ‘What’s her business?’

  ‘Construction,’ he said, ‘and supermarkets. She buys corner sites in residential areas, builds a block of flats with a supermarket underneath. Nothing big. Three floors, that type of thing.’

  ‘So she’s well connected.’

  ‘I would think so. She had a very powerful mother who died a few years ago.’

  ‘Does she do anything else?’

  ‘She trades.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Anything. Tyres, sugar, palm oil, timber. She likes making deals. I’m told she’s very open-minded, tough too, but with more of a European mentality when it comes to doing business. You know, things happen around her and ... she always makes money, which usually means you don’t.’