Blood Is Dirt

by Robert Wilson

  ‘What about mine?’

  ‘Yours too.’

  ‘What the hell do you need me for?’

  ‘How do you get a moped taxi to stop in this town?’

  ‘You shout kekeno. It’s Fon for “stop”.’

  ‘Now you don’t want me to get on the back of a moped with two million dollars in a suitcase, do you?’

  ‘I’m your chauffeur,’ I said, getting it. Napier laughed.

  ‘If you like.’

  ‘Since when have you paid your chauffeur ten thousand bucks for a night’s work?’

  ‘As a matter of fact this is the first time,’ he said, and socked back the chaser.

  ‘What’s the name of your guarantor?’

  ‘You don’t need to know and you don’t want to know.’

  ‘Maybe I’d like to know. See if he’s on my party list. Get an invitation to him for my next one. If he’s this powerful I could use him in my business.’

  Napier got another Camel under way and used his thumb to get an imaginary plank out of his own eye.

  ‘The less you know about this the better. You help me. You take your money. We never see each other again.’

  ‘Just as we were getting beyond the small-talk stage, getting to know each other a bit...’

  ‘Nobody knows me, Bruce, least of all myself. Time’s short. Are you in or out?’

  ‘Where’s the meet?’

  ‘Are you in or out?’

  ‘Why do you think I’m asking?’

  ‘That’s not a yes and it’s not a no.’

  ‘It means if we’re meeting in a private room in the Sheraton it’s a “yes”. If we’re meeting in an empty warehouse in the industrial zone it’s a big “no”. There are places to do these kind of things. I did one of these out in the bush in the Côte d’lvoire and nearly found myself as dead as the guy I was supposed to be meeting.’

  ‘In a coconut grove opposite the Hotel Croix du Sud. They tell me there’s a bit of beach there where people go for picnics at the weekend.’

  ‘Harmless enough during the day.’

  ‘But you need your hand held at night.’

  ‘This is not a good idea, Napier,’ I said. ‘What if I say no.’

  ‘Nothing’s going to stop me going out there to take a look.’

  ‘You’re a bastard.’

  ‘Am I?’ he asked, innocent as cherry blossom. ‘You’re the one who said you wanted to make some money out of my... out of me, if it could be made.’

  ‘That’s right. I’m upfront about what I want. You, on the other hand, won’t tell me a damn thing and then you corner me into feeling responsible for you... a white man in West Africa with...’

  ‘You’re not doing it for free,’ he said, and smiled. Now that his face wasn’t a chiselled mess of fear and worry I could see what got him into a lot of trouble and what probably got him a lot of women too—a little-boy look. I dropped the chaser down the hatch and we went out to the car. I fitted the keys into the ignition and thought ten thousand dollars could solve a lot of problems and then stopped myself in case the next time I looked in the mirror I’d find Napier staring back at me.

  ‘I don’t suppose you’ve got a gun, have you?’ he asked.

  ‘Firing a piece of lead into human flesh, watching a man drop with a gut shot, seeing his life crawling away from him, takes something that I haven’t got. And you—if I remember rightly, Napier Briggs—got spooked from seeing a dead sheep in the car park, got the vom from seeing a little offal on the pavement. I don’t think you’re in any frame of mind to be going around pointing guns at people.’

  We drove back across the lagoon, up the main drag past the remains of the evening fish market and past the port which was lit up with ships being worked and loaded trucks queuing to get out on the road. The ship’s agents offices were dark and quiet on either side of the Boulevard de la Marina. We continued up past the Hotel du Port, the Présidence, the Hotel Croix du Sud and the huge expanse of cocotiers between the road and the sea. Napier watched it all go.

  ‘Where are we going?’ he asked.

  I took a left before the conference centre on to a short causeway out to the new Novotel and parked up in its floodlit car park. The flags of all nations snapped in the sea breeze, their ropes pinged against the metal poles.

  ‘The Croix du Sud was back...’

  ‘Your two million dollars is out there,’ I said, pointing across him back towards the port. ‘About three hundred metres.’

  ‘You’re still going with me... aren’t you?’

  ‘Now that we’re away from the bar, the beers and the chasers, now that you can see how black it is out there in the cocotiers, now that you can hear the sea and the wind, I thought I’d give you a chance to think about whether you reckon there’s somebody standing out in the middle of that lot with two million in a suitcase.’

  Napier looked to where I’d been pointing. In the bright lights of the Novotel car park I saw the sweat start out on his forehead. He wiped a finger across his brow and dabbed the palms of his hands on his trousers. His tongue came out to try and put some lick on his lips.

  ‘Where’s this guarantor you’ve just spoken to on the phone?’

  ‘Lagos,’ he said, turning back, his mind drifting off to a time when this was all over and he was on a flight back to Paris with his cash in the overhead.

  ‘Why don’t we drive in there?’ he asked, the light bulb coming on in his head.

  ‘We could, but there’s only one way in and one way out and once we’re in there we’re stuck in the car, an easy sedentary target. If we’re on the hoof we can leg it through those palm trees and there’s nobody who’d be able to get a clear shot at you through that lot.’

  They were good words to use, ‘target’, ‘leg it’, ‘shot’, but they didn’t infect his judgement with a germ of terror. He sat in silence, staring into the dash, mouth open, jaw tense, gunning himself up.

  ‘You don’t think this is a funny place to hand over two million dollars?’

  ‘No,’ he said, pinching the septum of his nose, thinking about something else now, and then making up his mind about it. ‘If anything goes wrong out there, Bruce, you should... you will get a visit from my associate.’

  ‘The nonexec one you didn’t tell us anything about?’

  ‘That one,’ he said. ‘She’s my daughter. The company put her through an MBA, that’s all. She runs her own business, nothing to do with me.’

  ‘She have a name?’

  ‘Selina,’ he said.

  ‘Well, I hope I never get to meet her.’

  ‘No,’ he said, turning to the window where he set about filtering all the doubt out of his mind while his eyes drank in the blackness of the wind-rattled coconut palms.

  He started out of the car. I grabbed his arm.

  ‘No talking. Quiet as possible. If they’re out there they’ll know we’ve arrived. The first person to talk is me and’—I whipped the Camel out of his mouth and tossed it out of the window—‘no smoking.’

  We walked to the edge of the tarmac. The security guards at the gate had their backs to us. We dropped off the raised car park and trotted into the coconut palms. We waited a few minutes until our eyes were used to the dark and walked on. The ground was firm between the palms. It wasn’t long before we found the patch of beaten earth and a rough table where the city people came to drink beer and breathe air with a dash of the sea in it.

  I sat on the ground with my back to a coconut palm and watched Napier in almost no light at all sitting on his hands on the table under a palm-leaf lean-to trying to forget about smoking Camels. We sat there for more than half an hour. The wind whistled up quite a few false alarms for us but in the end nobody showed. A little before a quarter to ten I stood up and whacked the back of my jeans.

  ‘I’ve got to take a piss,’ I said. All the beer I’d drunk sat like a medicine ball in my lap. Napier hissed.

  A car, with its headlights on full beam, rippled across the coc
onut palms and silhouetted two figures on the pavement. The car slowed and stopped. The lights died. One of the figures bent to window height. There was a discussion. The door opened and the figure who’d done the talking got in.

  ‘It’s a pick-up, Napier. This is a smart part of town. Girls come here to get taken for a ride by men in Mercedes. That could have been you if they’d showed.’

  I walked off to the edge of the palms about thirty or forty metres and kicked a hole in the sand.

  ‘Maybe they didn’t show because of you,’ he said to the back of my head.

  ‘I didn’t crash, I was invited, remember. You cleared me with your big man. And anyway, I’m going now. I’ve got dinner. You want to stay, you can find your own way back.’

  I urinated for at least two minutes. I closed my eyes to the relief spreading through me. The wind got up and blew with some force through the palms and their leaves clacked together like empty scabbards. I walked back to the table shivering, suddenly cold and clammy in the salty breeze.

  ‘Napier,’ I called, seeing he’d moved from the table. I looked around for the red glow of a cigarette butt, knowing he wouldn’t have been able to hang on. I made a 180-degree sweep of the coconut grove. The Hotel Croix du Sud’s gate lights winked on the other side of the boulevard, the aura of the new conference centre lit the night sky, the Novotel and its car park looked as if they were out in a sea of black, but there was no Napier. I shouted his name. The breeze took it off me and shuttled it through the trunks of the palms, but nothing came back.

  Just like that—he’d gone.

  Chapter 3

  I ran like a wild man through the trees looking up and down and all around until I was dizzy and freaked at finding myself in the imagery sequence of a sixties TV drama. I walked back to the car and drove home, trawling the streets like an idiot, hoping for a sight of Napier. Everybody was African apart from four huge sailor types who’d washed their hair in beer and, now that they were fragrant, had their rods out casting for some dangerous sex.

  The lights were on at my house, our house. I parked up behind Heike’s year-old Nissan Pathfinder, a car that came with her job, that came with a housing allowance to pay the rent. I sat with my forehead on the steering wheel and worried at the Napier Briggs fiasco like a cat with a dead mouse trying to pretend there’s still some life in it.

  I went upstairs to our part of the house and found a single place setting on the dining-room table with an empty bottle of Bourgogne Aligoté beside it, which was better than our usual Entre-Deux-Mers. With Heike’s smarter salary we’d moved off the paint-stripper gut rot from tetrapaks and we didn’t drink whisky called Big V any more. It was minimum Red Label now.

  Heike was asleep on some cushions on the floor, a half-full ashtray next to her head and a tumbler with melted ice in the bottom with nearly a full bottle of nothing less than Black Label by the chair leg. Were we celebrating? I took a right turn into the kitchen and found the lamb tagine on the stove and lit the gas underneath it. I went back into the living room and snitched the Black Label and poured myself a good two fingers. I stirred the tagine and found some cold cooked rice in the pot next to it.

  ‘I waited and I waited for the birthday boy,’ said a tired voice from the door.

  My birthday! Goddamn. Hit forty and go senile. What year is it?

  ‘How old am I?’ I asked her reflection in the window.

  ‘Come on, Bruce, it’s not all that bad.’

  ‘Forty-one?’

  ‘There you are—mind like a steel trap. What happened to you this evening?’

  ‘I got held up.’

  ‘What’s new?’

  ‘I lost someone.’

  ‘Someone you’d already found?’ asked Heike.

  ‘Worse. Someone who was right bang next to me.’

  ‘Jesus,’ she said, as sympathetically as possible. ‘They beamed him up?’

  ‘As if, Heike, as if. And who’s “they”, anyway?’

  She shrugged and concentrated on fitting a cigarette into her holder.

  ‘I drank your share of the wine,’ she said, lighting up.

  ‘I saw.’

  ‘I started on your birthday present too.’

  ‘The Black Label? Yeah, thanks. I mean for the present.’

  ‘Don’t mention it. How’s the foot?’

  ‘It’s OK. I haven’t thought about it.’

  ‘In the heat of the moment?’ ‘Right.’

  ‘Too scared?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  She sighed. A birthday treat. Most other times she’d have hardened up, cool as marble, no give at all until the whisky loosened off her throwing arm. Heike didn’t like my job, but it had nearly got her killed one time which was why she’d put me out to that kennel down the road. She kneaded my shoulder and turned me round. We kissed. My hand went up her bare back. She didn’t bother with a bra after her evening shower. I cupped a breast and ran a thumb over the nipple. She tensed and backed off.

  ‘Eat first. Shower. Then I’ve got another present for you. Two, in fact.’

  I finished off the tagine. Heike and I shared the second bottle of Bourgogne Aligoté. I was about to join my Black Label but Heike pushed me off to the shower. I cleaned up and sat on the sofa in a towel. Heike dropped some ice into my glass and splashed another finger over the top.

  ‘Birthday treats,’ I said.

  She shrugged her eyebrows and sat behind her knees in a corner of the sofa. She sipped her Scotch and smoked at me.

  ‘What about these presents then?’

  ‘Gerhard wants to meet you,’ she said.

  ‘Who’s Gerhard?’

  ‘Bruce,’ she said, her voice taking on a serrated edge. I raised an eyebrow. She reined back. ‘Gerhard Lehrner. He’s my boss. The new one.’

  ‘That Gerhard. Right. The new one. I’m not used to hearing his name.’

  ‘How many Gerhards...?’ She stopped herself. ‘Forget it.’

  ‘Come here,’ I said, lunging at her.

  ‘Not yet,’ she said, inching her feet back. ‘Gerhard’s going to stay in the office tomorrow afternoon. He wants to talk to you about a job when there’s nobody else around,’ she said. The glass of Black Label stuck to my lips. I sat up straighter and looked her in the eye. No kidding.

  ‘You’ve been telling him about my charitable soul,’ I said. ‘How long did it take?’ She smiled. I stroked her big toenail. She twitched it away.

  ‘I didn’t tell him about your charitable soul, in fact. I told him what a complete bastard you are. And you know, he’s interested.’

  ‘He’s got some poor people need kicking?’

  She laughed this time. Appealed to her, that, a man with gout kicking a poor person. The suffering.

  ‘He’s got a job for Medway and Bagado Investigations. He’s looking for someone who can’t be fobbed off, who doesn’t have the word “no” in their language, who will run something to ground and go down the hole after it and...’

  ‘Above all, someone who’s...’

  ‘Cheap.’

  ‘Thanks for the write-up,’ I said, and took a measure off the Scotch.

  ‘He tells me it could be dangerous. So you better listen to what he has to say before you say yes.’

  ‘Well, there’s never been any harm in listening.’

  ‘Then why don’t you do it to me?’

  Our eyes connected. Our whisky glasses hit the table together. She stretched a foot out and undid my towel with her toes. She kicked it away and toyed with what she found underneath until I was gritting my teeth. She sat astride me, yanking her skirt up around her waist and took hold of me with a surprisingly cool palm. Watching herself as she did it she lowered herself with infinitesimal slowness until our lips drew level.

  ‘Better?’

  The tension went out of me and I sat back and let Heike do all the work.

  I woke up at 6.30 a.m. with too much light in the room because, in the urgency of the moment, closing curtains had bee
n the last thing on our minds. Heike’s arm was across my chest and the phone was ringing. I was too content to answer it. It stopped.

  Heike’s hand slipped down below the sheet line and came across some eagerness she hadn’t expected which made her start and look me in the corner of the eye.

  ‘Is that for me?’

  ‘More presents.’

  She bit me hard on the shoulder so that I yelped. I rolled over her and she gripped my hips with her hands to steady me on. The phone started ringing again.

  ‘Shit,’ she said.

  I thrust, but she held me back. The phone banged on.

  ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘It’ll stop, for Christ’s sake.’

  ‘No. I can’t stand it.’

  I dropped on to my knees and waited. And waited. And waited.

  ‘Answer the damn thing and get back in here.’ I stormed into the living room and yanked the phone to my ear.

  ‘Bagado here. Sorry to disturb you. He’s been found.’ ‘Who?’

  ‘Who do you think?’

  ‘I don’t know. Who are we looking for?’

  ‘Napier Briggs.’

  ‘Where is he, the bloody idiot?’

  ‘Down on the railway tracks. He’s dead, Bruce. Dead as the sleeper he’s lying on.’

  Chapter 4

  Cotonou. Saturday 17th February.

  There’d been no harmattan this year. That cooling, drying wind, which made all the Africans miserable and me feel human for once in the year, never arrived. It stopped about 100 kilometres north of Cotonou and wouldn’t come any further. Some said it was the pollution, others that it was just a weak harmattan this year but most put it down to the devaluation—anything out of the ordinary just had to be.

  Now it should have settled down into the dry season before the April rains, but the weather, like the currency markets, the world economy and my left foot was a mess this year. Cotonou, and other cities along this stretch of coast, had been thumped about by short, savage night-time storms which had left it flat on its back, with no power and secreting fluids from orifices which should have been free and dry. The town got up groggy in the mornings, the people pasty-mouthed and irritable. The buildings shed their conference paint jobs and looked bruised and broken, with mud spattered up the sides from the rain’s kickback. The mud roads were steaming lakes and the first post-conference potholes opened up in the new tarmac like a teenager’s nightmare acne.