A Darkening Stain

by Robert Wilson

  Chapter 30

  It was past ten o’clock and I was waiting under the corrugated-iron overhang of a small shack drinking bottled Guinness and looking at the rain, trying to see Madame Sokode’s Mercedes through the rain. The shack was barely twenty yards from the quay for the ferry at Mile Two, which was invisible through the downpour. The weather forecast was not good. It was definitely not a good time for trips out on the lagoon, with storms predicted most of the night. It meant one thing. We were unlikely to get any trouble from the authorities out there.

  Madame Sokode’s Mercedes glided past, stopped and reversed. The driver got out, opened an umbrella and came to fetch me. I got into the back seat next to Madame Sokode, who started the night off strongly by handing me a glass of Black Label from the bar. We cruised up on to the Badagri Expressway and headed west, away from the city.

  Madame Sokode sat in a corner far away from me and looked out of the window. She was wearing black jeans, black trainers, a black poloneck and she’d removed the hair extensions leaving herself with a close crop, unplaited. Reduced to this simplicity she looked completely beautiful.

  The rain pounded on the roof leaving no room for talk. Elizabeth had her elbow up on the window ledge, a hand to her face, a finger tapping her cheek. The rain suddenly stopped. The wipers squeaked on the windscreen, wincing through her.

  ‘I hope you’ve got a cabin on this boat,’ I said, treasuring the Black Label. ‘They say it’s not the last of the rain.’

  ‘There is a cabin, but it’s stuffy in there and stinks of fuel. We’ll sit under a canopy at the back. It’s more comfortable.’

  For a woman who didn’t like the cold that didn’t sound right and my seed paranoia shot up the length of me, thick and prickly as a desert cactus.

  ‘You told your seller not to get there before twelve thirty?’ she asked.

  ‘I told him.’

  ‘He’s not African, is he?’

  ‘He’ll be there twelve thirty exactly unless he capsizes the boat.’

  ‘Does he have a name?’

  ‘He does,’ I said, but I couldn’t think of it. I couldn’t think of anything about him. All I could hear was Jean-Luc Marnier’s name and see his leery face.

  ‘Are you going to tell me?’

  ‘If you like. If you think it’s important.’

  ‘You don’t have to protect your principal now.’

  ‘Bo,’ I said, surprising myself. ‘His name’s Bo.’

  ‘Bo?’

  ‘An odd name. It’s Danish,’ I said, remembering the real Bo, who was a half-mad kleptomaniac I’d met in the Sahara.

  ‘Does that mean he’s not?’

  ‘No, no. He’s Danish too. As Danish as his name ... Danish as bacon ... Danish as ... what other things are Danish? Pastry?’

  ‘You didn’t tell me where Bo got all this gold from,’ she said, and I noticed that she was playing with my bonus lump on the seat in between us.

  ‘He nicked it,’ I said, widening my eyes, unnerved at how that one had slipped out.

  Her head turned slowly towards me.

  ‘Only joking, Elizabeth,’ I said. ‘He bought it in Togo. You know that stuff that comes across the border there. He buys that.’

  ‘Pity,’ she said, ‘it would have been more interesting if he’d stolen it.’

  ‘Have you got some scales to weigh this gold with? I wouldn’t want you to take his word for it.’

  ‘There’re scales on the boat. I had them taken out there this afternoon but I hope we’re not going to get down to haggling over three sixteenths of an ounce out there tonight.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘You said he’s shaky. Maybe he’s fussy too.’

  ‘I’m sure he’ll want to take his money and run along home as fast as he can.’

  The Mercedes ploughed through a small lake across the Expressway, sending out two huge curtains of spray into the night, water thumped on the undersill. On the other side of the road a taxi up to its doors in water was being pushed by its passengers through the flood. A four-wheel drive overtook it at speed, horn going solid, and our combined bow waves shifted the taxi to the edge of the road.

  We passed through Badagri and went out north on a mud road to a southern shore of the lagoon. We parked up on some higher ground. The driver went to the boot and took out a briefcase and a coat and opened Madame Sokode’s door. She turned into the coat. I joined them and we walked through the still dripping vegetation to the water’s edge. There was a small jetty which was half submerged after the endless rains, and a man of some width was standing on it with his hands, on the ends of very long arms, folded over his crotch. The driver gave him the umbrella and the briefcase and went back to the car.

  The boat was large, more of a launch. There was a win-dowed cabin in the hull and a shielded area behind that for the helmsman. The back was open, apart from a fibreglass canopy with plastic windows. Whatever the motors were, they were inboard. It was an expensive and fast-looking piece of work.

  The big man got into the boat and helped Elizabeth down. He took my small holdall off me and dropped it at his feet. He helped me down too and ran a hand over the small of my back which went through me like a thousand volts.

  ‘I’ll put the bag in the cabin,’ I said.

  ‘Sam will bring it back here for you,’ snapped Elizabeth. ‘Come.’

  I joined her under the canopy. I heard Sam squeezing the bag behind me before he slid it, along with the briefcase, under our seat. He went back up to the front and started the engine, which sounded as if it had some wrist, and cast off.

  I could have used that Black Label from the back of the Merc to keep down the case of body shingles I had. The boat slid out into the channel, the engine thumping, the exhaust bubbling quietly behind. The fibreglass canopy throbbed. We weren’t in the main body of the lagoon, but a narrow inlet no more than thirty yards across, and Sam was being careful to steer a course down the middle.

  The wind freshened as we got beyond the point but still he didn’t open up and the searchlight he had above his head remained switched off. It was black out there, not a glimmer of light on the water, not a spark on the banks of the lagoon, just a faint glow from Badagri and Lagos further east.

  We eased across to the left and islands of reeds passed nearby, brushing the side of the boat. This wider channel we were in was still shallow. We moved no faster than jogging pace for twenty minutes. Time clipped past the 11.30 mark. When he’d manoeuvred us out into the middle of the lake he cut the engine and let us drift in the wind which chopped the water with gentle cuffs. Sam got up on his seat and looked out across the lake. Stubby waves slapped the side of the boat. A storm lit the sky over Lagos about thirty or forty miles off.

  ‘Does he know where he’s going?’ I asked.

  ‘Sam’s lived out here all his life,’ she said.

  Thunder, distant and to the north, crumped like artillery fire. Then a light came on out in the darkness, once, twice, three times. Sam dropped into his seat and restarted the engine. He flashed the light once but didn’t open the throttle full. We moved at a steady speed in the direction of the blinking light.

  As we covered the water the light out on the lagoon continued to reel us in. I had plenty of big questions lined up for Elizabeth—why, for instance, in her HIV-positive state was she still hungry for this kind of business, yet cancelled the furniture? Why, after her own childhood but with her privileged education, was she prepared to sell children off for what she knew was a hopeless cure?—but I couldn’t ask them. And even if I did and she gave me an honest answer what would it be? I’m weird and evil? Thanks for that. I was better off trying to see myself three hours from now, calm and serene in a tub of Red Label, but I couldn’t wring the pictures out of my imagination. The here and now, even if it was a boat chugging dully across the darkness, was too demanding.

  Elizabeth uncrossed and recrossed her legs. I couldn’t see her face or hands. There was nothing coming off
her. No tension. No anticipation. If anything there was boredom. In half an hour one of us could be dead. Would it be any different than slipping through the cool blackness as we were now?

  I pulled myself back from the brink and concentrated on the task. In a few minutes I had to produce guns and control a situation. I hadn’t thought about the driver, Sam. Somebody else who wouldn’t be going home tonight, somebody else for Marnier to deal with, a third body to add to the two under the concrete in Grand-Popo, and however many others there were that didn’t trouble Jean-Luc’s conscience.

  A chill shivered through me. The same chill with the same slick of sweat as this morning. I was getting sick, cold from standing out in the rain last night.

  As we closed in on the blinking light it stopped, and Sam took out a torch which he used to check the location of the other abandoned buildings. We drifted past the bare stilts, the caved-in platforms. He cut the engine. The sky lit up again. The storm, closer, moved up on Badagri, the flash strong enough for us to see the main house and the boat from Marnier’s yard already moored to the southern corner of the platform.

  Our boat was hardly moving as it knocked into the wooden supports under the house, the tyre buffer squeaked and groaned. Sam tied a line to one of the supports and swung the boat round using some impressive upper body strength so that we could get out easily on to the steps. He secured the launch.

  There was a faint glimmer of yellow light, hurricane-lamp light coming from behind the windows of the house which were covered with torn raffia matting. People moved inside on uneven planking. Madame Sokode reached underneath her for the briefcase, stood and ducked out of the canopy. I reached down for my bag without thinking, ready to follow her, and found the torchlight on me.

  Something solid filled the beam, something that moved slowly towards my head until it connected firmly with my eyebrow. The cold of the metal ran through me. I slitted my eyes to the light, winced at the hardness of the gun barrel that slipped to the corner of my eye socket.

  ‘You’re not a stupid man,’ said Madame Sokode. ‘You’re just an unlucky one.’

  ‘Bondougou?’ I asked.

  ‘Not Bondougou,’ said Madame Sokode, mildly puzzled, and the driver grabbed a handful of hair and hauled me across the boat. I slipped on the wet decking. He brought me up to my knees, the gun resting on the back of my neck

  ‘Look in the cabin,’ she said.

  I opened the door. Sam shone the torch in and lit a white naked body, the thighs and buttocks of a naked woman torn by welts and dotted black. The body turned, sensing movement. There was no pubic triangle, a slit and a shaved pubis. The abdomen was smeared with dark blood that had flowed from her ripped nipples. Her head was wound with gaffer tape round the eyes and mouth. Where the skin showed through it wasn’t white but blue, bloody, black. The body jerked and trembled. It was a very white body and I didn’t need the tape removed to know that it was the Ukrainian girl, Sophia.

  I was panting and the sweat was coursing, the girl’s terror communicating itself through her uncontrollable trembling. Sam shut the door, pulled me to my feet. Madame Sokode stepped over the side of the launch and on to the wooden stairs. I tried to stop my head shaking on the stump of my neck to see if the guns were there, to see if I had a chance of stumbling up the steps, reaching out...

  Sam held my shirt collar and pulled me over the side. He kicked my ankles up the steps, my legs not wanting to operate. I fell at the top and rammed my arm through the gap in the steps and felt around crazily for the weapons. They weren’t there. Sam cuffed me on the back of the head with the gun barrel, hard enough to move me on. I staggered into the room where two hurricane lamps burned wavering shadows up the wall. Bondougou, eyes bulging, stood with his back to the window, Carole was in a corner and Marnier sat with his back to the far wall, his head below another window.

  ‘What the fuck is he doing here?’ he said, seeing the gun connected to my head, struggling to his feet. It was an inspired moment.

  The driver took me to the middle of the room and pressed me down on to the uneven, wide-spaced planks of the floor.

  ‘Have you checked the other rooms?’ said Madame Sokode in perfect French, laying her briefcase on a table.

  ‘There’s nobody here,’ said Marnier.

  ‘Have you checked the other rooms?’ she asked again.

  Bondougou picked up a hurricane lamp and went to check the other rooms. I could only see Carole now, dressed in a black lycra body suit, night wear for night work. She wasn’t looking that scared, a little rigid, her face tauter over her bones, but her eyes, if they weren’t smiling, they were satisfied and there was nothing else to be read in them.

  ‘There’s nobody here,’ said Bondougou, coming back into the room.

  ‘Have you checked under the platform?’ she asked.

  ‘I’ll go,’ said Marnier, which was when I knew we were in big trouble because it meant he didn’t have the guns either.

  ‘You stay here,’ snapped Madame Sokode. ‘Give him the torch.’

  Bondougou went out and down the steps, came back up again. Thunder rolled out long and rough as a wooden-wheeled, ox-drawn tumbrel.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Bondougou, getting emphatic now that he’d done what he was supposed to have done before we’d got here.

  ‘What’s he doing here?’ asked Madame Sokode, giving me a kick in the leg.

  No answers, not even from Marnier who had answers for most things. Bondougou shifted uneasily.

  ‘He told me there was going to be someone here to sell me two thousand ounces of gold. Is there?’

  Bondougou jutted his head but fell short of letting his mouth go slack. Mean but not stupid.

  ‘You’re buying his gold?’ said Bondougou, turning his head on Marnier.

  ‘And who’s he?’ asked Madame Sokode, following Bondougou’s look to Marnier. ‘Don’t tell me. He’s the one who’s supplying the girls as well.’

  Bondougou looked at me as if I might have some suggestions, then changed the look to half a beat off murderous. Marnier knew it was his turn, he could hear the brains ticking even over the distant thunder, could see the way the combinations were falling, the assumptions beginning to be made. He came into Madame Sokode’s idea a bit further down the line than she expected.

  ‘Why?’ he asked.

  ‘Is he armed?’ she spat at Bondougou, cocking her head at Marnier.

  Sam’s gun went in Marnier’s direction.

  ‘I can see she isn’t,’ she said, glancing at Carole, who crossed her thighs as if she might pee herself, the lycra so tight you could see the outline of her spleen.

  ‘But what about him?’

  ‘He’s clean,’ said Bondougou.

  Marnier held his arms up, parted his legs.

  ‘Take a look,’ he said.

  Sam frisked him.

  ‘Why?’ said Marnier again.

  ‘I don’t understand why he,’ she said, toeing me in the ribs, ‘should come out here on his own. There’s a whore from Lagos on the boat out there who says he’s interested in what we’re doing here tonight with these schoolgirls. So why should he come out here on his own with no weapon?’

  Marnier stepped forward, trying to assert himself on the situation.

  ‘You get back over there,’ she said. ‘You don’t need to be in the middle of the room to answer that question.’

  ‘Why should I be working with him?’

  ‘He came into this on your gold.’

  ‘But he didn’t tell me who you were and even if he had it wouldn’t have meant anything to me because Le Commandant hasn’t told me your name. I still don’t know who you are,’ said Marnier.

  Madame Sokode glared at Bondougou, who nodded.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I think...’

  A sudden wind rushed through the house. Thunder boomed closer. The rain approached, hissing loud over the lagoon. It hit the thatched roof of the house with a dull roar, raising the pitch in the room which was a
lready crackling with high-voltage paranoia.

  ‘I don’t know what he’s doing here,’ said Marnier. ‘We’ve come here unarmed. We’ve brought the girls. I was expecting him to come later on with—’

  ‘Have you checked the girls?’ she asked Bondougou.

  ‘They’re in the boat,’ he said.

  ‘All of them?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, and even I heard the uncertainty.

  ‘You haven’t counted them.’

  ‘Why should he...?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Madame Sokode. ‘Go and count them.’

  ‘At least wait until the rain stops,’ said Marnier.

  ‘Where’s the gold?’ she snapped at him.

  ‘In the boat ... with the girls.’

  ‘So it exists,’ she said and another flicker of uncertainty twitched at the corners of Bondougou’s eyes.

  I didn’t hear anything but I felt something. Underneath me the plank shifted. Sam felt it too and the gun moved off Marnier. The rain stopped. Everyone in the room was on animal sense. The hiss of the rain moved away. Silence, now, apart from the lapping of the water against the stilts. Then a noise, unmistakable this time, in the next room. Madame Sokode slapped Sam’s arm. He left the room. The door closed behind him. A shot roared out immediately. A body hit the planking. I rolled on to my back. Madame Sokode snapped open her briefcase and produced a chrome-plated revolver. She knelt and pointed it at the door. She shook the gun at the door.

  ‘Sam?’ she said.

  Not a word. A grunt squeezed out from a crumpled mouth but no word. The water rippled underneath us. The door opened in the partition wall, framed a vacant black oblong, revealed Sam face down in the next room, but nobody came through it.

  Another roar and Madame Sokode’s jaw and cheek parted from her face, her head kicked back, her knees lifted up from the floor, the gun fell from her hand, clattered on the wood and slipped through the planking into the water below. She fell back with a cracking sound as if her knees had popped. Her legs and arms twitched. A gargling noise came from her throat. Her sharp pointed upper teeth were visible through the hole torn in her face. Her black eyes blinked at the roof. She coughed a spray of black blood.