A Darkening Stain

by Robert Wilson

  ‘Did he have any other money?’

  ‘Yes. In a holdall. Maybe four million CFA...’

  ‘We didn’t find it. Where has it gone? Tell me what you have done with the money and the gun. And tell me now or I will have you beaten again.’

  Who said truth never hurts the teller? I’ll kill him. It was time to call in the artillery.

  ‘We have a mutual friend,’ I said. ‘I think our friend can help explain some things to you. I think he can help you understand my situation.’

  The change of direction wrong-footed Bondougou for a moment. Mutual friends was not something he was expecting to have with me.

  ‘Who is this friend?’

  ‘Roberto Franconelli,’ I said.

  ‘Franconelli?’ said Bondougou. ‘What has Franconelli to do with this?’

  ‘I think you should call him. I’m doing a very important job for him and I think you should call him and let him explain it to you.’

  I looked over the lip of the desk. Our eyes connected. Bondougou’s were intense and astonished. A realization crept into them that perhaps he hadn’t got me in the bag. Franconelli was not a man he could dismiss. Whatever Bondougou was doing for him, and I only knew of that one cover-up some months ago, he was taking some heavy cream. Bondougou left the room. The jailer came in and stood over me.

  ‘Ça va?’ he asked.

  I nodded and clicked at the same time that the money he’d taken off me had worked. The beating he’d ladled out had left me barely bruised. He’d held back on the full meat.

  ‘Merci,’ I said. ‘je vais arranger quelque chose pour toi.’

  He tapped me on the shoulder with the truncheon and smiled.

  Bondougou was back in ten minutes. He bustled into the room in a nervous flurry, sent the jailer out and sat down, his feet working overtime under the desk. He told me to stand up. His slit eyes were blinking a lot, his finger and thumb up his nostrils thinking, thinking.

  ‘You spoke to him,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, yes, yes.’

  ‘He explained things to you?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Can I have my clothes back?’

  Bondougou shouted out an order to the jailer whose footsteps retreated.

  ‘He told me he has sent you to find Jean-Luc Marnier.’

  ‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘I understand it’s a personal matter.’

  ‘You must do something for me when you find Jean-Luc Marnier.’

  ‘Anything, M. Le Commandant, please, tell me.’

  ‘You must report to me before you talk to M. Franconelli.’

  ‘No problem,’ I said. ‘Is there any particular reason?’

  ‘I want to speak to him. He owes me money.’

  ‘Perhaps I can help ... if he owes you money.’

  ‘Yes, but—’ he started, and changed his mind. ‘Just tell me.’

  ‘I heard there was some trouble on a ship called the Kluezbork II. Some men found dead. Stowaways, I think.’

  ‘That’s enough,’ he said. ‘You can leave now ... but when you find him tell me before you ... before you do anything.’

  Bondougou walked to the door and opened it. The jailer was standing with my clothes, about to knock. He was surprised by the turnaround. Bondougou took the clothes and waved him away. He handed them to me with a long reappraising look, a look which told me that the firm ground he thought he’d been standing on was on the shake now. It was an uncertainty I thought I could use.

  Chapter 23

  Nobody would ever tell you that Cotonou air was sweet, cut with two-stroke fumes, dodgy drainage and an accumulation of sweat it would never win a clean city prize, but that day, beyond the Sûreté gates, it was ambrosia.

  By the time I got home it was dark and I got the free-fall gut feeling at what was behind the doors. But the place had been cleaned up. Bagado must have stroked Helen into a stupor to get it done. He’d left my watch in the kitchen for me too, but no whisky. I cleaned myself up, put some money in my pocket and went down to the office, buying a couple of beers on the way.

  The day gardien was sleeping on some breezeblocks. The night gardien, a Muslim, had spread out a length of cardboard pointing east and was preparing to pray. I nudged the day gardien awake. He looked over his shoulder at me like a dog in the stm who’s not moving for no one unless it’s a thirty-five-ton truck. I asked him if anybody had dropped by.

  ‘Deux hommes.’

  ‘Blancs?’

  ‘Non, non, noirs, de Nigeria. Ils ne parlent pas français.’

  ‘C’est tout?’

  He fell back to sleep. I nodded at the Muslim, who dropped to his knees with the suddenness of a man who’d seen a 5000-CFA note, and prostrated himself to Mecca. I went upstairs and sat in the streetlight crossing the floor of my office and drank beer and whisky chasers until the Night Club was a distant speck on the horizon of my memory.

  I put a call through to Die in Lagos. No answer from the office so I hit him at home. One of his children picked up the phone, roared over the battle on TV and dropped the phone out of the window. Die’s wife was still in hospital in Beirut after an operation and the kids were out of control.

  ‘Visitors?’ I asked.

  ‘I wish they were but they’re all my kids and they stay here and this is the noise they make and I pay for the pleasure. Don’t do it, Bruce, you got the right idea.’

  ‘How many did you say you’ve got now?’

  ‘Eight.’

  ‘Look, Die, you remember we talked about that woman, Madame Sokode? You told me about Nexim and the construction business and it all sounded very nice. But now I need some different information.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘The real thing. The dirt. I’ve heard things about her.’

  ‘You have?’ he said, as if this was a big surprise.

  ‘Maybe you already heard something.’

  ‘Me? No.’

  ‘Did you hear she ran girls? Prostitutes. Whores.’

  ‘I didn’t hear anything,’ he said. ‘But I haven’t been listening. Leave it with me. Let me look into it. I’ll call you. I can’t talk with all this...’

  We hung up. More cold beer. More whisky. My heart thumped magnificently. Maybe I should eat something. I went down to the street with the second cold beer and ordered a kebab and ate it in front of the guy. It was good. I had another with extra chilli, felt my insides kicking in.

  I stopped a taxi moto and headed for the Jouet Doux in the Jonquet. I had a couple of things to do here. Find the German sex punter and hunt out the moped driver who’d taken Marnier home the other night.

  Business was slack in the Jouet Doux. I ordered a beer and slumped. Girls came and went but no whites slid in. I started tramping the bars again.

  I went down an unlit sidestreet where there were cheaper bars, shacks with thatched awnings and blue and white painted tables outside. The clientele was African. The music, some Afrobeat stuff, was loud and distorted from high amps and bad speakers. The Africans didn’t mind, they liked being buried in sound. I had a drink by candlelight but couldn’t see anything in the street so upped and moved on.

  I got to a point in the mud road where it widened and there seemed to be nothing more of the bars and nightlife. There was a building site with bricks piled up inside a skeleton structure and slag heaps of sand and gravel outside. I’d just decided to give up on the sex punter and concentrate on finding Marnier when I saw him. He was crossing the road back down towards the bars and heading for the Rue des Cheminots, stumbling over the rough puddled road. I caught up with him.

  ‘Remember me?’ I asked.

  A car rocked and rolled down the road towards us, lighting his face. He’d taken a little more hammer since I last saw him.

  ‘Der Engländer,’ he said. ‘Did he find you? The man. I don’t know his name. The one with the young girls.’

  ‘That’s what I wanted to know. You sent him to me.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘And who
are these people? Are they friends of yours?’

  Out of the dark came two men. A big, reinforced concrete type and a slimmer version carrying the brains for the two of them. A fist the size of a small lintel came out of the night and connected with the already sensitive tissue on the German’s face. There was a crunch which did not sound like the concrete man’s knuckles breaking up. The German hit the ground faster than rubble down a chute and went foetal, holding his face.

  The big guy turned to me, the slim one behind him looking over his shoulder as if he was operating the levers.

  ‘You owe us some money,’ said Slim, in a silly high-pitched voice.

  ‘I don’t even know you,’ I said. ‘And I’m not giving you anything if you want to knock me around like that.’

  ‘We’re friends of Daniel.’

  ‘Maybe you’re the same friends who shot him.’

  ‘Mebbe we are.’

  The German was making a terrible noise at our feet and it was winding Slim up some. He fluttered his hand at the big guy who leaned down into the dark and with a short jab there was silence. Slim breathed out with relief and that’s when I hit him. Not even I was drunk or stupid enough to try my fragile metacarpals on the other guy.

  Slim went down with a whinny and I hurdled him and sprinted back down the street to the building site, the big guy after me, the ground shaking. I got into the concrete cage, picked up a breezeblock and waited with a trampolining heart.

  Mr Big wasn’t so sharp without his friend. He rounded the pile of bricks and walked his face straight into my breezeblock swung from yards back. The breezeblock shattered. The man stood up straight. I hit him with another across the jawline, which turned his head a good fifteen degrees and probably knocked everything back into focus. He put one foot forward and winched back his arm. It was time to do some more running.

  I leapt through the concrete cage and kneed my way through the pile of gravel and took a tumble down the other side. That side swipe must have slowed Mr Big down. He didn’t seem to be following but I ran anyway. I ran past the German, who was still lying in the road, and Slim who was on all fours spewing black. I got into the streetlights down Rue des Cheminots and started walking, trying to get my heart back behind its ribs. I crossed the road at a traffic light and saw the taxi moto I wanted, the yellow jacket with the right number, but he had a ride. The lights changed and I was off down the road towards Sekou Touré after him, my eyes bursting out of my head, my tongue stream ing behind me, a vapour trail of beer and whisky chasers in my wake.

  The phalanx of mopeds stopped for the red light. I was fifty metres away when they changed to green and I had to put some beef into my legs to get across the lights myself. The moped crossed the road and went into the second-hand clothes market whose metal doors were all shut for the night. A moped pulled alongside me and the guy nodded behind him. I jumped on and pointed.

  We drove past the Dan Tokpa and across the Nouveau Pont. We were heading for the Porto Novo road when the moped turned left and stopped outside a four-storey apartment building. The ride got off. I pulled alongside and transferred. The driver leaned forward so I didn’t drip on him.

  He remembered the slashed face of Jean-Luc Marnier and he knew where he’d taken him. I offered him 3000 CFA to take me to the same place. He thought about being greedier but I leaned over him and he decided against having me soak into his jacket any more.

  We drove back to the Nouveau Pont and turned right just before it. We came off the broken tarmac after a couple of hundred metres and on to beaten track. About a kilometre later we turned off down towards the lagoon. He took me to a corner house with a two-and-a-half-metre-high wall and only slightly shorter gates. No light seemed to be coming from the front of the house. I told the driver to wait.

  I walked down the side of the house. There was another wall at the back but lower, only two metres. It went right down to the edge of the lagoon. I clamped my hands on to the top of the wall to haul myself up. Agony. Glass-topped. I unhooked myself and dropped to the floor oozing blood from my palms. I had a short burst of film in my head—the girl blown up in her brown uniform in the bottom of the skiff, the palms of her hands, forearms and knees eaten away. I swallowed hard and leaned against the wall, easing back the nausea.

  The sound of groaning metal pulled me back. The gates were opening at the front. Carole’s car came out into the road and stopped. She got out and closed the gates. A bolt slid across from the other side. She got back into the car and pulled away, the lights sweeping across the boy astride his moped, shielding his eyes.

  I crossed the road and told him to take me home, where I dressed my hands. I found an old piece of matting and went down to the car. I drove back to Marnier’s house and parked up five streets away and walked back down with the matting.

  A car’s headlights flared across the street and I drifted into the shadows. A black official-looking Peugeot pulled up by the gates and gave a single honk on the horn. A man got out and leaned on the roof of his car, impatient. He walked around the front of the car and into the headlights. Then he heard the bolt slide and backtracked. He reversed the car into the gateway.

  The man in the headlights was Commandant Bondougou.

  Chapter 24

  I laid the matting across the broken glass on the top of the wall, got up there and lowered myself into a courtyard. There was a boat on a two-wheeled metal trailer, a launch with a small cabin at the front and two sizeable Mercury outboards. Light filtered into the courtyard from rooms at the back of the house which had reed blinds over the windows. Figures moved in one of the rooms, shadows crossed the stern of the boat. A concrete stairway at the back of the house went up to a verandah with a thatched awning which ran the length of the house. There was a fly screen door to the kitchen which gave on to the verandah.

  From the verandah I could see Bondougou sitting on his own on a sofa resting a drink on the top of his gut. There were cooking smells coming from the left and Marnier appeared in the kitchen doorway, also holding a drink, and wearing an apron which bore the design of a pair of breasts cupped in a teasy-weasy bra, a navel and a triangle of pubic hair framed by suspenders and stockings. Bondougou looked at him with no concern, as if this was the most normal attire he could expect from a white man entertaining a senior policeman. They were speaking in French and an electric fan on the sideboard looked from one to the other.

  ‘Why so urgent all of a sudden?’ said Marnier.

  ‘Urgent?’ said Bondougou, the sound seeming to come from down the back of his trousers. ‘You don’t think this business has been urgent all the time? My God...’

  ‘Which one’s that you’re asking after?’ said Marnier.

  Bondougou grinned, which was not reassuring. His teeth were widely spaced and the tongue that came out from between them was twice the size of a whole pork fillet.

  ‘As you know,’ he said, ‘we have many ancestors who we can appeal to.’

  ‘Which one are you appealing to now?’

  Bondougou rubbed his face with his spare hand, picked his nose, squeezed his eyes shut and looked through the galaxy of his cranium and came up with nothing, no God nor ancestors.

  ‘How much time do you need?’ he asked.

  ‘Wait,’ said Marnier, who went into the kitchen, surprising me that he wasn’t wearing the reverse side of the apron on his back.

  Bondougou shifted in his seat. The sofa gulped him up a bit more.

  ‘I’ve already been waiting a long time,’ he said. ‘As you know, my position is very delicate. The questions are—’

  ‘I mean wait for the meal,’ shouted Marnier. ‘I’ll be back in a moment.’

  Behind the sofa was a table laid for two with an open bottle of red wine. Marnier, out of his apron now, added a steaming pot and a bowl of rice. Bondougou fought his way out of the sofa, socked back the remains of his whisky and pulled his shirt back down over his stomach. They sat down to eat. They didn’t talk, but concentrated on the food which they
finished in a matter of minutes. Marnier cleared the bowls, came back with some salad and a board of cheese. They motored through that, finished the wine and sat back with more whisky. Bondougou chewed his way through a number of toothpicks—anxious, frustrated, he wanted to get on with things. Marnier smoked and played him like a big daddy salmon.

  ‘When do you think you can make the transfer?’ asked Bondougou, annoyed at having to ask the question, hating to chase that fly.

  ‘I haven’t found a good enough place on the lagoon yet,’ said Marnier, flicking his ash as if he had all the time in the world.

  He was lying and letting Bondougou know it. It infuriated the big African, who realized he was going to have to touch on the one thing he didn’t want to.

  ‘The contract is very complicated, Jean-Luc,’ he said, picking up a Guinness coaster. ‘It’s a very large project. There’s more than two hundred pages of paperwork, fifty drawings. You don’t build a barracks, a hospital and a school with a contract written on the back of a beer mat.’

  The Guinness coaster flipped out of Bondougou’s hand and span over Marnier’s shoulder, who laughed.

  ‘Anything’s possible if you’re a minister,’ said Marnier. ‘Anything’s possible if you’re a senior officer in the military and a friend of the son of the President of the Republic of Nigeria. And let’s not forget that, M. Le Commandant. We are talking about Nigeria. We don’t have to discuss two-hundred-page contracts. We don’t have to leaf through fifty drawings. They just have to say yes and make the first payment. There’s no commitment on this continent without money and a contract from a Nigerian ... well...’

  Marnier scoffed and flourished his claw, dispatching the nonexistent contract into the ether.

  ‘That’s completely impossible,’ said Bondougou, throwing up his hands, scowling across the table, the two of them entering into the vaudeville with spirit. ‘These are government funds.’

  ‘They’re selling oil. Look at the oil price. It’s not fifteen dollars a barrel any more.’

  Marnier turned his chair to one side and stretched his legs out. Bondougou leaned across the table at him.