Blood Is Dirt

by Robert Wilson

  ‘They used the letterheads to clear out your account?’ I asked, trying a new line.

  ‘They said the invoices would show goods and services I’d supplied,’ said Napier, ‘the letterheads would be used to give covering information. They’d put the whole lot through the system and effect a transfer. They needed a foreign company account to pull it off.’

  ‘What were you doing with nearly two million dollars in your account?’

  ‘They were freight payments from contracts and time charters and I’d had some good months on the spot market. It was all money due to go out to the shipowners in the New Year... apart from my two per cent.’

  ‘Timely,’ I said. ‘All that money being there, Napier?’

  ‘Not for me. Not for my owners.’

  ‘Who would have known about that kind of money being in there?’

  ‘The charterers, the owners, the bank... myself.’

  ‘You have someone else in your office?’

  ‘Karen. Out of the question, she’s been with me for years.’

  ‘She’d have known, though?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Your associate?’

  ‘I told you. Nonexec. Remember?’

  ‘Do you have a wife, an ex, a girlfriend, a partner in life?’

  ‘Divorced. Three years ago.’

  ‘Bitter?’

  ‘This isn’t relevant.’

  ‘You’re not giving us much to go on this end, Napier. I’m just coming at it from a different angle. Did your wife know about your business?’

  ‘She used to.’

  ‘You talked about it with her?’

  ‘She was a broker. She covered the Mediterranean small ships market.’

  ‘Was there anyone else involved at that time?’

  ‘Back off,’ Napier snarled. ‘This is none of...’

  ‘It’s only a question. Has your company always been called Napier Briggs Associates?’

  ‘No. It used to be Atkin Briggs Shipbrokers Ltd.’

  ‘What happened to Atkin?’

  ‘Blair Atkin.’ He said it as if he’d just got a mouthful of coffee grounds.

  ‘Your wife ran off with Blair?’

  Napier had his back to us now, his hands above his head, leaning against the window, two fingers trailing smoke.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, taut as a drum skin.

  ‘You’re sure this isn’t relevant?’

  ‘They split up a year later. I haven’t seen or heard from her since. Nor has... anyway, she was a bitch.’

  ‘Was?’ asked Bagado.

  ‘Still is. I doubt it was the kind of expertise she could drop.’

  ‘You broke with her?’

  ‘She broke with me. I was very bitter about it. It bust up the marriage, tore the company in half, screwed up lives, all because she couldn’t keep her knickers on. Now let’s forget my wife, my ex-wife. She’s not involved. She’s out of the picture.’

  ‘How do you suggest we get ourselves into the picture, Napier? No letter. No proof. Scant information which we have to wring out of you and you turn down the offer of the Lagos fraud squad. What do you want us to do? Hang around on street corners in downtown Lagos looking at people’s back pockets? Time-consuming. Expensive. How much money have you got on you? Maybe not much beyond your own expenses. You’re not giving us anything, Napier. Chuck us a bone, for God’s sake. Spill your guts or bow out. We’ve got some paperclip chains to make.’

  ‘Perhaps Air Briggs is concerned that he’s done something illegal,’ said Bagado. Napier kicked himself back off the window and turned on him. ‘Transferring funds from overinvoicing on a government contract. Whose money is it?’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ said Napier, backing down, leaning against the window, easing another smoke out, keeping the chain going. ‘Embarrassing.’

  ‘What percentage did they offer you?’

  ‘Forty. Thirty-five for...’

  ‘Who was the other five for?’

  ‘Someone called Dan Emanalo. He doesn’t exist, nor does the company he works for.’

  ‘Which was?’

  ‘Chemiclean Limited. I supplied them with chemicals in drums. They had a government contract to supply sewage treatment systems.’

  ‘But they didn’t exist?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But they miraculously paid you for supplying the chemicals?’

  Napier Briggs fell silent. He wasn’t a topnotch liar. He was pretty good at shutting up or spinning out half truths and he was an outstanding smoker, but lying... he just didn’t have it.

  ‘You’re binding up on us again, Napier.’

  ‘I have to think about this.’

  ‘Nothing’s going out of this room, Napier. Strictly P and C and all that.’

  ‘Where’s that coffee?’ he asked.

  ‘Coming.’

  Napier clasped the back of his neck and tried to squeeze the anguish out.

  ‘Why can’t I think?’

  ‘Maybe you’re scared, Napier?’

  ‘Did you have particular need of this ten million?’ asked Bagado.

  ‘Ten million?’

  ‘Thirty-five per cent of thirty million dollars.’

  ‘Yes. No,’ said Napier, and his face crumpled. He was losing it. We sat in the silence left over by the traffic. The coffee and croissants arrived. Two cafés au lait for Bagado and I, and a double tarantula juice for Napier. He sipped it, rattling the cup back into the saucer each time. Thinking. Thinking. The brain turning and turning like a hamster’s wheel.

  ‘What did you make supplying the sewage treatment chemicals?’

  ‘Two per cent of the shipping, about three thousand dollars, but I did the product as well. Took five per cent of that. I don’t usually do product.’

  ‘Who did you get the product off?’

  ‘Dupont,’ he said, too quickly.

  ‘French Dupont?’

  ‘Yes, it was,’ he said, wanting to fill that out a bit more but having nothing else to say.

  ‘Sweet deal?’

  ‘Very.’

  ‘What are we talking about? Two hundred, three hundred grand?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘Takes care of your running costs for a bit.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Now, the ten million dollars, that’s different. That’s retirement money. Don’t have to push the pen any more, hump the phone to your ear. It can solve big problems, too, that kind of money.’

  ‘Like?’

  ‘Debts. Payoffs. Muscle.’

  Napier slugged back the last dram of tar and refitted the cup. He lit another cigarette and threw the old butt out on to the balcony. He folded his jacket over his arm and shook his legs in his trousers, which were clinging to those parts where dogs like to stick their noses. He picked up his zip-top briefcase by the ear.

  ‘It’s like going to a shrink, Napier,’ I said. ‘You have to relive the trauma to get over the neurosis. Have a think about things. Straighten them out in your head. Come back and talk to us again.’

  ‘Do you have a home number?’

  ‘I do, but I don’t give it out. This kind of business and a happy home life don’t go together. You’ve got a card, I take it?’

  ‘Yeah. The guy in the British High Commission gave it to me.’

  ‘We have an answering machine here. Office hours are eight a.m. to one p.m. and five p.m. to eight p.m. Where are you staying, Napier?’

  ‘The Hotel du Lac, just across the lagoon there.’

  Bagado and I listened to the man who’d nearly been our tenth client scuffing down the untiled concrete stairs.

  ‘That was close,’ said Bagado.

  ‘We can still nail him.’

  ‘You better be quick.’

  ‘With all the competition out there, you mean?’

  ‘I think he’s a dead man, or heading that way.’

  ‘Really? He just looked a little scared to me.’

  ‘Victim,’ said Bagado, shaking his
head.

  ‘Hotel du Lac,’ I said, thinking about that for a moment. ‘That’s middling, but they’re doing it up. It’s still cheapish. He must be a bit short. If he’d been in the Aledjo or the Sheraton, even the Golfe, I’d have felt better about him.’

  ‘Is that why you asked him?’

  ‘No. I thought I might go and hustle him some more this evening.’

  ‘Even if he’s a dead man and he hasn’t got any money?’

  ‘Nobody’s got less money than us, Bagado.’

  ‘Do you want his croissant?’

  ‘See what I mean?’

  Chapter 2

  Bagado didn’t show for the evening sitting-around session. He had a sick daughter and a wife who’d had to take to the streets selling live chickens from a calabash. Life was getting hard for him. All the money he earned went straight out into the extended family, and worse than that—there just wasn’t enough for his brain to chew on.

  If I hadn’t heard from Napier Briggs by the close of business I was going to go round to the Hotel du Lac and try and neck-lock him into being a client, even a nonpaying client. Maybe we could do something on a commission basis for him like those ambulance-chasing lawyers do. Us, desperate? Forget it.

  I turned the light out to save on electricity and hobbled out on to the balcony to see if I could hook any other passing suckers who’d want help from a couple of strapped Pis working from a stripped-down cell in a dog-poo coloured apartment block at the epicentre of Cotonou’s pollution.

  I hobbled because I’d had gout. A bad bout of it, but I was coming out the other end. Sympathy had been low on the ground—with lepers on the street it tended to be. I tried telling people it was the purine in anchovies and sardines rather than a weekly intake of a bottle of... what’s the point, you wouldn’t believe me anyway.

  I sniffed the air over Cotonou and caught the usual gagging mix of sea breath, rubbish, drains, grilled kebabs all wrapped in a heady concoction of diesel and two-stroke fumes. Yeah, the bicycles have gone and we’ve been overrun by a million mopeds. Marxism is finished.

  We had the Francophonie conference here at the end of last year and they stripped the place down, repainted it, repaired the roads and introduced mobile phones. In three months the Beninois became capitalists.

  The transition wasn’t completed without pain. The economy, in the jaws of the free market, was given a kick in the pants by the French who devalued the CFA franc by a hundred per cent to one hundred CFA to one French franc. The whimpering is still going on. Imports are hellishly expensive, trips to France are out, supporting kids in school in Europe is painful; on the other hand, exports are cheap. But who gives a damn about that if the wife can’t afford twelve metres of Dutch Wax African print to adorn her body? No one.

  I dragged myself back inside and called Heike—my English/ German girlfriend, the one who towed me out of the desert all those years ago, the one who works as a latterday saint for a German NGO* aid agency—to see if my priapic driver Moses’s blood-test results had come through. He’d been sick for a month and a half and my toe had been through hell on the brake pedal. Heike had persuaded him to go and see a doctor last week and it had been like a child’s first day at school.

  The receptionist told me that Heike had left the office, and the blood tests hadn’t come through.

  I sat in the dark and listened to the radio playing Africando from the tailor’s shack across the street until it seemed like the time to close up for the night and get down to the Hotel du Lac to see if Napier was in pieces yet and needed gluing.

  It was a thick, hot night and the stench in the stairwell from the overflowing septic tank added a ripeness that had the mosquitoes dancing for blood. I hacked through it and folded myself into my battered Peugeot estate which was so old and decrepit that I’d quite often been mistaken for a bush taxi on the open road.

  The mopeds were out in force and their blue exhaust had been changed into a sickly orange by the streetlighting. People were sitting on the first-floor verandah of the redecorated La Caravelle café. They were drinking and trying to stay alive in the small pockets of air still available. Some Lebanese lads with baseball caps on back to front hung over the balcony rail looking at a couple of policemen wrestling with a Nigerian street hawker. A huge diesel locomotive, pushing a line of open wagons, honked and grumbled between the stationary cars and trucks on its way across the lagoon. I turned left, overtook it without disappearing into the usual two-foot-deep Peugeot trap, and crossed the lagoon. The day-glo sign of the Hotel du Lac was easily visible from the bridge, as was the scaffolding on its side. I turned right past the Hotel Pacific, which seemed a long way from home, and parked up behind the hotel. The mosquitoes were screaming out here and I was all over myself like a flea-ridden dog.

  I walked by the pool and down the steps to the well-lit bar in the front. There were hunched people in there and a po-faced barman scraping foam off the pressions with a throat spatula.

  ‘Looking for me?’ asked Napier, jiggling something amber in my face from his side-saddle position on his bar stool. He nearly launched himself on to the floor and was only saved by the boniness of his elbow on the lip of the bar.

  ‘This isn’t one of my usual haunts.’

  ‘You’re a drinking man then?’

  ‘It has been known.’

  ‘What’ll it be?’

  ‘A beer.’

  ‘One of these to chase?’

  ‘I’ve never said no.’

  The barman settled the drinks and I backed up on to a stool. A woman eyed us coolly from the other side of the bar.

  ‘I told her to fuck off before she even got her bum up on the stool,’ said Napier.

  ‘You’re learning, but it pays to be polite here. It’s the French in them.’

  ‘Couldn’t get any life into the old boy even if I wanted to.’

  ‘Anxious,’ I said, and we drank.

  ‘No,’ said Napier, squeezing his lips with his fist. ‘Fucking petrified.’

  ‘Petrified?’

  “Swat I said.’

  ‘Have you heard something?’

  ‘What’s it to you?’

  ‘I’m sitting next to you in a bar. That’s what people do. Tell each other what’s on their minds.’

  ‘What’s on your mind?’

  ‘Money. I want to make some.’

  ‘Out of me?’

  ‘If there’s any to be made.’

  ‘Do you mind getting killed?’

  ‘It’s not high on my list of goals.’

  ‘You have goals?’

  ‘No, it was just something to say.’

  ‘I had goals,’ he said, sniffing at his Scotch and then taking a pull of beer.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I scored too many in my own net.’

  ‘Don’t get maudlin on me, Napier.’

  ‘I thought we could say what was on our minds.’

  ‘You cheated. You were going to tell me why you were petrified. You lost some money. That’s worrying but it doesn’t make you scared. You asked me if I minded getting killed. Who’s going to kill me if I stick my nose in?’

  Napier waggled his finger at the barman. Two more grandes pressions arrived and two more Red Labels. He lit a Camel. The phone rang in the hotel.

  ‘Gardez l’écoute,’ said the receptionist.

  A short fat fellow came into the bar from the hotel and held up a finger. ‘M. Napier. Téléphone.’

  Napier squirmed off his stool and leaned back for his cigarettes in case it was a long one.

  ‘Keep my beer warm,’ he said, and let me know how drunk he was by pinballing his way out of our tight corner before getting on the straight and narrow.

  He was back in ten minutes, looking frisky and not half as drunk as he had been. He hopped up on to the bar stool and clapped me on the back. I didn’t like the turnaround in mood, especially as it looked as if it was going to involve me.

  ‘Still wanna make some money, Bruc
e?’

  ‘Not if I’ve got to lay down my life for it,’ I said. ‘You can’t take it with you, Napier, remember that.’

  ‘Sure I do,’ he said and socked back the chaser. ‘That was them on the phone.’

  ‘Who’s them?

  ‘They said there’s been a mistake.’

  ‘That’s big of them. Who’s they?’

  ‘They said they want to give me my money back.’

  ‘Why should they suddenly want to do a thing like that?’

  ‘I don’t know...’ he said, without letting his confidence falter, before he remembered not to lie. ‘Pressure.’

  ‘Tell me about the kind of person who can exert that kind of pressure.’

  ‘Well, you know, like you say, you meet people. You tell them what’s on your mind. Sometimes they help you. Sometimes they don’t even have to be asked. You coming?’

  ‘Napier, you’re going to have to tell me what you’re talking about.’

  ‘I want you to hold my hand.’

  ‘That’s not...’

  ‘I’ll give you five. No. I’ll give you ten thousand... dollars.’

  ‘What’s wrong with your hand?’

  ‘Nothing you’re going to catch.’

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ I said, and drained the first grande pression and started in on the second. ‘Let’s get this straight. The gang that stole your money from your UK bank account have called you here in your luxurious Beninois hotel and have volunteered to give you your money back. In cash. In dollars.’

  He nodded.

  ‘Ten hours ago you came into my office so frazzled you wouldn’t even tell me their shoe size. Half an hour ago you tell me you’re petrified... seem to think your death is required in all this. Ten minutes ago you get a phone call and you’ve kissed and made up. Now you want me to hold your hand out there in the dark. What annoys me, Napier, what you have to tell me right now is—do I look that much of a sucker?’

  He nodded.

  ‘You’re on your own,’ I said, and stood up to finish the beer.

  ‘No, no, Bruce. Sorry. I didn’t mean that. What I meant was that if I start telling you what it’s all about we’re going to be here until six in the morning and the meeting is at nine tonight. There just isn’t the time to fill you in. You’ve got twenty minutes to say “yes” and get me there. But look, what I can tell you is that the person gave me a name. The name of a very powerful man who has guaranteed the handover and my personal safety.’