Purgatory Gardens

by Peter Lefcourt

  By the time that Colonel Jean-Baptiste Zenbo occupied the presidential palace, after a bloodless coup, Blaise Gbadabo was a frequent visitor. A few months later, the colonel made him the new Minister of Economics and Finance in the not-so-provisional government of Haute-Volta. Promised elections were continually put off due to “threats of tribal violence and election irregularities.”

  Now Blaise had his hands not only on the cotton market, but also on the tax revenue of the republic. And plenty of influence to peddle. His office featured a Directoire desk and a Louis XV armoire filled with Napoleon brandy and Davidoff cigars. He had a deputy minister, with an office right beside his, and three personal secretaries.

  Supplicants were in and out of his office—regional governors asking him for more development funds for their districts, foreigners wanting contracts to do business in Upper Volta, and, of course, anybody and everybody who had known him before his success.

  Blaise Gbadabo skillfully made himself invaluable to the country’s rulers with his talent for manipulating money. He knew enough about finance to make them rich without looking like they were plundering their own country. He set them up with Swiss bank accounts and foreign residences.

  Inevitably, the educated underclass began to understand that Upper Volta under the army was no better than Upper Volta under the French. Now they were merely being exploited by their own people. Anti-government sentiment began to sprout.

  At first, Colonel Zenbo blithely ignored the protesters, claiming that they were “neo-colonialist elements” or communists, depending on whom he was talking to. Then he expropriated their property and tossed a few in jail on trumped-up charges—income tax evasion, illegal foreign speculation, or the convenient catch-all “activities detrimental to the democratic republic of Upper Volta.” Finally, he just shot people.

  Though Blaise Gbadabo was never called upon to shoot anyone, he was instrumental in keeping money flowing to the colonels, permitting them to retain power by an artful mixture of bribery and intimidation. And with his impeccable French and undeniable charm, he became a diplomat.

  Zenbo dispatched him to Paris to reassure the French that their former colony was still a democracy, albeit in transition. It would require time for democratic institutions to become fully rooted in a country still torn apart by tribal rivalries, he told them. Rivalries that were made worse by their fifty years of colonial exploitation. Very effectively, Blaise mined the residual guilt that the liberal elements in Europe still felt about their former possessions.

  Blaise spent a week at the Georges V, had dinner at Le Tour d’Argent, and went to the Folies Bergère, enjoying all the luxuries he couldn’t afford when he was a student there. He was invited to give a talk at Sciences-Po on economic development in West Africa and was the guest of honor at a cocktail reception at the Élysée Palace, where he assured Charles de Gaulle that he was beloved throughout West Africa and told Andre Malraux that French culture was thriving in the République de Haute-Volta. Neither of which was true, but it went down easily with the Dom Perignon.

  On his way back to Ouagadougou, Blaise stopped off in Zurich to deposit the letters of credit he was carrying from the French government into the people of Upper Volta’s account, with some spillage into the colonels’ accounts and his own.

  To consolidate his position in Ouagadougou society, Blaise married one of Colonel Zenbo’s nieces—a plump nineteen-year-old named Marie-Laure, who besides being cheerful and compliant, was a member of the ruling Mossi tribe. It was a dynastic marriage that would keep him insulated from any sort of tribal purge within this or future governments.

  Marie-Laure bore him two children in quick succession and was content to stay at home in their spacious colonial house, paddling around the swimming pool and ordering the servants around—and not interfering with either her husband’s political life or his dalliances.

  Blaise got richer, put on weight. He had three more children, out of wedlock, with three different women, and provided generously for all of them.

  Nevertheless, he made an effort to keep his profile low enough to stay below the radar of the growing underground opposition. Blaise was enough of a student of politics to know that if the government fell, he would be out the door with them—or worse, lined up against a wall. There were only so many people that Colonel Zenbo could throw in prison before the Bastille would be stormed.

  The country was a mess, and Blaise Gbadabo knew it. By 1980, he had made sure that he had enough money stashed abroad so that when the time came, he would be able to get out quickly. He avoided going to public places without a security detail, convinced that his name was on someone’s hit list.

  By that time, he had already divorced Marie-Laure in an amicable settlement, offering a generous sum of money and the use of his name—the latter of which she politely declined as the political situation darkened.

  “I don’t want to have to collect your body from the firing squad,” she told him in her usual affable manner. “And I don’t want my children to have to live with your legacy.”

  “That’s very considerate of you,” he said.

  When the inevitable coup came, Blaise was fortunate enough to be in Lomé attending a conference on economic development, the pretext for a trip to visit a phosphate mine he had invested in. When he heard the news that Colonel Zenbo had been arrested, Blaise didn’t bother returning to his suite at the Hotel Benin. He went directly to the Air Afrique office and bought a one-way ticket to Paris.

  He arrived at Orly Airport at 2:00 a.m. with nothing but a toothbrush, purchased at the airport, and ten thousand Central African francs—just enough to get him on a train to Zurich, where he withdrew a comfortable sum of money and checked into the Baur Au Lac under an assumed name. He lay in the marble bathtub, sipping Courvoisier, watching television reports on the chaos in Ouagadougou, and contemplated his next move.

  Switzerland, fortuitously, had no extradition treaty with Upper Volta and, even better, was the home of some of the world’s most adroit international lawyers and plastic surgeons. It was a country where you could get almost anything done discreetly if you had enough money—in short, the perfect place for a man with several million dollars and a desire to bury any trace of his former life.

  It cost him $48,000 to have a new identity created and $73,000 to have his face redone. He was now Didier Onyekachukwu from Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire. He barely resembled Blaise Gbadabo, from Ouagadougou. The surgeon added tribal scars that identified him as a member of the Ashanti tribe in Ivory Coast, and while he was at it, he altered the nose just enough to give him a more European look.

  As soon as the bandages were off, he shaved his head, started a beard, and considered where he wanted to live. Wherever it was, it shouldn’t be on the continent of Africa, where there were traces of the former Blaise Gbadabo. He had no doubt that the new rulers of Burkina Faso, as Upper Volta was now called, had put his name on a list for prosecution. He could be facing twenty years in a prison in the north, on the fringe of the Sahara, where the temperature hit 120 degrees.

  In the end, he decided to go to Nice—because it was warmer, because they spoke French, and because he had liked what he had seen when he’d visited the place en route to Colonel Zenbo’s villa in Juan les Pins. Compared to Zurich, the place was Sodom and Gomorrah. It was full of restaurants, discos, color. And, of course, women. Lots of them, walking the streets in heels and designer dresses, an aroma of $200-an-ounce perfume trailing after them, or lying topless along the gravelly beaches, breasts saluting the Mediterranean sky.

  He found an apartment on a street off the Promenade des Anglais, with a balcony from where he could gaze out across the Mediterranean and imagine Africa burning.

  For several months, Didier enjoyed getting up late, brewing coffee in his De Longhi coffeemaker, reading through Le Figaro, taking walks on the beach, having dinner at one of the excellent seafood restaurants along the Promenade, watching Starsky and Hutch dubbed in French, and going to sle
ep to the sound of the surf lapping the shore.

  But he began to realize that this wasn’t a life. It was an existence. Outgoing and charming by nature, he missed people. He had avoided making friends because of his residual paranoia that someone would recognize him and he would be dragged back to Africa in chains.

  And, more serious, if he continued to live as well as he had been accustomed, he would eventually burn through his money. The cost of living on the Cote d’Azur was not cheap, and neither were his tastes.

  It took him a while to find something that could occupy him and, at the same time, serve as a front for laundering his Swiss francs. The idea occurred to him while observing women—an activity he indulged in often, sitting in cafes sipping pastis and watching the parade go by him. He noticed that the French women and the African women were borrowing fashion ideas from one another, creating an unconscious fusion of chic, an amalgamation of styles that reflected both cultures.

  It came to him all at once: a Franco-African fashion line. The idea seemed so self-evident to him that he was surprised no one had thought of it already. The fact that he knew absolutely nothing about haute couture did not deter him. What had he known about cotton before he made a fortune speculating in it?

  He would need a partner—someone who could execute his idea creatively by designing the clothes that he would sell, both to French and African women. He found Jean-Marc Métanu, a young, high-strung gay man who had worked for Givenchy in Paris and spent some time in a boutique in Dakar.

  “We can call it VPD—Via Paris Dakar.”

  “How about just PD—Paris/Dakar?”

  “There is the unfortunate pun PD . . . Pédé.”

  And Didier laughed, the first good belly laugh he’d had in a while. Jean-Marc joined him. They drank a little more pastis and talked some more. And decided that PD, the word play on pédérast, might just be the kind of inside joke that would give the enterprise both pizzazz and notoriety.

  “It is better to be shocking than to be ignored, n’est-ce pas?”

  In September they had a gala opening at their boutique on the Avenue Felix Faure. Members of the fashion press, glasses of Veuve Clicquot in their hands, watched the French and African models, at 2,000 francs an hour, display the line. Didier stayed in the background as Jean-Marc was interviewed and photographed by Paris Match and Elle. In spite of the plastic surgery, Didier did not want any traces of Blaise Gbadabo’s face in magazines.

  For the first year or so, the line sold well. Didier expanded PD with a store in Paris and explored starting another one in Abidjan. He took his first trip back to Africa with his Ivorien passport and discovered that he was now on the other side of the table. This was Africa, after all, and there were a number of people he had to bribe. In effect, he was dealing with himself just a few years ago, when he was extorting businessmen for payoffs in Ouagadougou.

  The good times didn’t last. Within a year, he was starting to lose money. The fashion business, he was learning, didn’t follow the same economic principles as the cotton business. Cotton was cotton, but fashion was whatever was fashionable at any given moment. The initial success of PD created a number of imitators—rip-offs, knockoffs, hybrids—all taking a bite out of his sales.

  It took some time to find a buyer, and when he did, he dumped the business fast, getting out with his shirt and little more. He was back walking on the beach and reading the paper, licking his wounds, trying to understand what had gone wrong. Nothing, he concluded. He had just chosen the wrong product. What he needed was a product like cotton, with a steady demand that was not subject to the quirks of malleable taste. Something like drugs. Why not? Limited supply, high demand.

  So Didier Onyekachukwu became a drug dealer. As usual, he did his homework, learning what he could about sources and markets. Most of the narcotics business in France came through Marseille, where the French mob had a stranglehold on import and distribution throughout Europe. He knew enough to understand that he didn’t want to mess with these people—Corsicans with nasty manners who had little compunction about slicing you up into small pieces and scattering you in the Mediterranean.

  The heroin came from Central Asia, transshipped through Tbilisi, Baku, and Istanbul. Didier decided to take a trip to Uzbekistan to see if he could find a supplier. Tashkent, recently liberated from the Soviets, was a frontier town that reminded him of Ouagadougou after the French had left. The Uzbeks were figuring out how to get along without the Russians and weren’t doing much better than the Africans thirty years previously.

  He sat in nightclubs with fat strippers and blaring music, drinking vodka and writing numbers on a napkin, just as he’d done with Jean-Marc in Nice. He learned that he could get as much as he wanted at a very decent price. The distribution end of the business was trickier. He needed people in France to peddle the product for him—a squad of street-level salesmen who would deal directly with the users, a population he had no desire to have personal contact with. In short, a subcontractor.

  Finding the right man took some time. Didier hung around the bars near the old port in Nice among the unsavory population of the drug business, keeping his eyes and ears open.

  The right man turned out to be a woman, and an African to boot. Fidèle Kpajagba was from Chad, another former French colony on the edges of the Sahara that was even more god-forsaken than Upper Volta. A large, garrulous woman, she had made money in N’Djamena cornering the melon market, branching out into palm oil and manioc and eventually opium.

  She took her cash to France, where there were more addicts with more money than in Chad, and started selling heroin, hashish, and anything else she could get hold of. She operated out of a tiny couscous restaurant on the Quai Lunet with a largely North African clientele. Close to three hundred pounds, she sat at a table in the corner of the restaurant drinking rosé and dispensing envelopes to customers. She was not reluctant to confide her difficulties to Didier.

  “I tell you, cheri, if I didn’t have to pay off half the cops in Nice . . .”

  “The cost of doing business, n’est-ce pas?”

  “In Africa, where you and I come from, perhaps, but here I thought it would be better. And my suppliers, they’re just as bad. They don’t deliver, they raise their prices, they give me bad stuff. If I could get a consistent supply at a decent price, I would do very well.”

  “What if I handled that end for you?”

  “You?” She looked at him and laughed, her whole body shaking like a bowl of couscous. “You are an Ashanti from Cote d’Ivoire. What do you know about the heroin market?”

  He told her. She became interested. After a few glasses of rosé, she said she would buy a shipment from him if it was good quality and the right price. And if that worked out, they’d be in business.

  He named a price. She looked at him skeptically. “How will you make your money?”

  “Quantity,” he explained. “I sell enough, I do very well.”

  What he didn’t mention was another of the principles of business he had learned while buying and selling cotton: develop a market first, then make money. Build demand, then manipulate supply.

  The drug business was both exhilarating and lucrative—beyond his expectations. Eventually, he needed a front to launder his profits, and he started a high-end gallery near the Hotel Negresco, where well-heeled customers could wander in and spend three thousand dollars on a watercolor of the old port. Prices could be moved up and down to satisfy his tax sheltering needs. To facilitate his dealings with the rich tourists who stayed at the high-end hotels along the Promenade des Anglais, he took English lessons. He had long, lovely lunches, cultivated artists, went to openings, parties, movies, concerts.

  It was around this time that he took up with an American woman. Nancy Nemeroff, an heiress and patroness of the arts, wintered every year in Nice, where she indulged her exotic sexual tastes. They met at a disco very late at night, both drunk, and wound up in her suite at the Negresco on a canopied Louis XV bed.

/>   In the morning, room service was brought by a waiter in eighteenth-century costume, replete with wig, gold-plated shoes, and knickers. They sat on the balcony in fluffy robes eating eggs Benedict and drinking coffee from Sèvres china, looking out over the beach.

  They spent most of that day, and the days that followed, in bed, with nourishment breaks from room service. He learned that she was the granddaughter of the man who invented Velcro and lived, when she wasn’t in the south of France, in Palm Springs, a hundred miles east of Los Angeles.

  Every year when Nancy Nemeroff relocated to Nice for a month, they got together. And it was because of the Velcro heiress that Didier sought refuge in Palm Springs when his drug business went south.

  Unlike the fashion business, where he was simply outmaneuvered by time and changing tastes, he was squeezed out of the drug business by the Corsicans and the cops. The Corsicans arrived first, offering to become his partner, taking 20 percent of his net in exchange for not tossing him to the seagulls. They were extremely cordial, smiling through capped teeth while assuring him that he would very much want to consider their proposition.

  The cops didn’t threaten him. He was tipped off by one of his paid informants, a lieutenant in the Gendarmerie Nationale, that his name was on a list of narcotics dealers that they were going to indict in the next few months.

  So Didier Onyekachukwu moved to his third continent in thirty years. This time, his exit was not quite as precipitous as the one that Blaise Gbadabo made from Africa years ago, but he was gone within a month, taking with him very little outside of the cash from the fire sale of his apartment and gallery.

  There were three places outside Europe where he knew people: Ouagadougou, Tashkent, and Palm Springs. The decision was a no-brainer.

  Nancy Nemeroff granted him asylum in her twenty-acre compound outside Palm Springs, consisting of a twelve-thousand-square-foot main house, and a couple of five-thousand-square-foot guest houses that she filled with an eclectic group of artists, writers, and hangers-on. Didier had the run of the place—the enormous swimming pool, the north/south tennis court, the wine cellar, and her—until he was replaced by a younger model. The heiress took up with an ex–Los Angeles Laker basketball player, half a foot taller than Didier and thirty years younger.