Blood Is Dirt

by Robert Wilson

  ‘You were shot at by the army?’ asked Heike.

  ‘I ran into a tree while I was being shot at which is why I’m not dead. Bagado came through too. The army were being oversensitive and a little renegade too.’

  ‘You mean...’

  ‘I mean there was an informal and impromptu burial of a man who died after a tub of acid fell on him.’

  The silence was broken by Heike slapping her leg. The mosquito was full of blood—very full.

  ‘Do you think,’ I asked Selina again, calmly, ‘that Napier arranged the shipping for the dump I’ve just seen?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Selina started, uncertain of her ground for a moment, unable to detect the tone. ‘How many shipments are going to the site in Western Nigeria mentioned in that file. Heike just told me you’ve been investigating a village in the same area. You come back saying it’s toxic waste. We can make an assumption but we can check it too. There are copies of the bills of lading in the file, there are the container numbers and the discharge port which, in this case, was Tin Can Island, Lagos.’

  ‘How much of it was there?’ I asked.

  ‘Three hundred and eighty tons in drums, in forty-five containers.’

  ‘There was over a thousand two-hundred-litre drums at the dump which, if they all had water in them, would be about two hundred tons. But toxic waste is heavy—acids, metallic sludges, chemical wastes, they all have specific gravities much higher than water... so the quantities could be about the same. If it’s relevant, the language on the drums was Italian.’

  ‘OTE were the shippers,’ said Selina. ‘They’re Italian based out of Leghorn.’

  ‘Aguia?’ I asked. ‘Is that Italian?’

  ‘I was married to an Italian fashion designer for six long months. I was telling Heike about it before...’

  ‘The cufflinks man?’ I asked.

  ‘Handcuffs,’ she said, getting shrewd.

  Something uncomfortable hung in the room and, after we’d sent out enough signals to agree on that, we all laughed.

  ‘Let’s go to La Verdure,’ said Heike, ‘before I kill him.’

  We drove the short distance to the La Verdure restaurant. I offered Selina a bed at our place for the night. Heike had already moved her in. I told her she could stay as long as she liked, as long as she could stand the friction. She said she’d test the friction for at least tonight and she wanted to talk some business with me in the morning. She said she was glad of the company. So was Heike. She didn’t have to say it. But she did.

  We sat out in the garden under an awning where there was some crappy fishing montage consisting of a stuffed varnished fish, some rotting net and some spherical blue-glass floats. We ate steak and chips with salad and drank a lot of cold red. Selina had the sharpened senses of the recently bereaved. She savoured everything—the food, the wine, new people, the dippy waiter, the size of the three white guys in the bar, the beauty of the six hookers waiting for someone to buy them a drink, even the heat, which was monstrous because the fans were being ornamental rather than working. Death brings the living to life, has a way of showing you that at your worst moment it’s still worth going on.

  We went back home and took it in turns in the shower. Heike and I drank whisky. I was allowed to after I told her what Bagado had said about the Scots and gout. I said a couple of funny things about it but she didn’t laugh. Maybe they weren’t funny but it was that time of night after a good time when you’re prepared to cough at anything. I had that uneasy feeling that she could only bear me in company, could only bear me as long as she didn’t have to talk to me directly.

  I was last in the shower and found Heike lying naked under a damp-patched sheet, staring at the ceiling, when I came into our room with a towel around my waist. Only a small lamp was on at the bedside, just enough to read by. A single rectangle of light shone in the top left corner of the window frame—a room lit in a higher floor of another house. A man stood with his hands on the windowsill looking down into his black garden. An aura of streetlighting hung over the roofs.

  Heike propped herself up on an elbow and looked me up and down. The antagonism was still there, along with plenty of drink.

  ‘What’s going on, Heike?’

  ‘Ach, nothing.’

  ‘You haven’t liked me much since Bagado called the other morning.’

  She didn’t say anything but fell back on to her pillow and looked at the ceiling again through half-closed eyes.

  ‘Can’t stand being in the same room as me?’ I asked.

  She shrugged, which meant she knew what was bothering her and I did too, but how to get it out. She stuck the heels of her palms into her eyes.

  ‘I was glad you went away for a couple of days,’ she said. ‘Then I wasn’t glad. Then I was again. It’s been like that. Moody. It was good having Selina around. She pulled me out of myself.’

  ‘How do you feel about me now?’ I asked. ‘Am I on the couch?’

  ‘Not with her next door,’ she said, taking her hands away from her face. She propped herself up on an elbow and smiled with some resignation in there. She looked me up and down with other things starting to work inside her head. It excited me. She saw it and sighed from down around the back of her knees at what she recognized in herself.

  She threw back the sheet, sat on the edge of the bed, her legs apart, the dark triangle visible, and pulled the towel off my waist. She gripped my buttocks and pulled me to her and kissed my belly, her breasts nudging at the painful hardness of my erection, her nipples hard and cool around my loins. I stroked her head and bent down to kiss her. She turned her back on me, crawled to the wall and leaned a forearm up against it. She stretched the other hand behind her, took hold of me and guided me into her. I kissed her madly over her shoulder, our lips never quite touching, the column of tendon in her neck frequently between my teeth. I smoothed a hand down her belly to her thighs, to our moist, tense connection. We moved rhythmically, her face up against the cool wall, the sweat pouring down my chest, rivulets running down her arched spine. My hands were full of her breasts. I clamped my mouth on to the roll of muscle at her shoulder and desperately tried to thrust harder, and further in, so that I could become a part of her.

  At the last moment, Heike already trembling in my hands like a frightened bird, a feeling shivered over me. We were being watched. It was so strong that I turned on shuddering thighs to see the door open, the light from the street painting the edges of things in the living room and something, someone. Then an ecstatic light burned fast and wide in my head with the brightness of magnesium and I collapsed against the wall which was slick with sweat gone cold and clammy.

  We parted and slid down to the pillows, Heike feverish now with her hands up to her mouth. I pulled the sheet over her. Where our bodies touched were like spot welds. I could hear Heike’s clotted breath from her overwrought throat. She turned into the wall. I stroked her back and she started as if my fingers were live. Her shoulders shook with each breath and then smoothed out. She slept.

  I got up and glanced around the living room. I checked the front door. Selina’s bedroom door was shut. I padded back to bed, lay down and watched the ceiling recede. Emptiness grew in my stomach as the moment of union seeped out of my mind. In the absence of something new we’d always fallen back on the old way of communicating.

  The line had been crossed twice. Forwards but then, as usual, backwards. Now I was out in the cold again, which even the hot African night, jammed into the room, couldn’t warm.

  Chapter 9

  Cotonou. Tuesday 20th February.

  I woke up as stiff and sore as a wind-dried duck. Heike’s space was empty. I was lying diagonally across the bed. She was in a T-shirt and knickers looking out of the window, her hair wet, staring at the overcast day.

  ‘It’s six thirty,’ she said. ‘I’m late.’

  ‘Did it rain?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I didn’t ask you last night... what was all that about with Ger
hard?’

  ‘All what about with Gerhard?’ she said, some needle in her voice.

  ‘There was something going on with Gerhard... In the meeting.’

  ‘Why did you have to be so tough with him... about money?’ she said.

  Well, even I knew that wasn’t the reason but we were started now.

  ‘Why I had to be so tough?’

  ‘We’re an aid agency. Aid not ad. We don’t have the money for it.’

  ‘I’d like to be a charity too but I don’t want to see Bagado’s kids starve...’

  ‘I still have to pay the rent whatever...’

  ‘Stick it in, Heike.’

  ‘Look, Bruce, I have to work with Gerhard. He assesses me and reports back to Berlin. He puts pressure on me.’

  ‘So you wanted to say to him, “This is my man.” You didn’t have him in mind as a role model?’

  ‘Gerhard. A role model for you? You’ve got to be committed, Bruce Medway. It’s dangerous having you and your ideas out there.’

  She stepped into a skirt and left the room. I pulled on a pair of jeans, went into the kitchen and squeezed the juice out of some oranges from the fridge. Why did my eye always land on the whisky bottle? The last thing I wanted was a drink, wasn’t it? Heike poured herself a glass of juice. I wondered how these things happened to people. How did people bring themselves to the marks? What do people say these days, you know, to take things forward? Let’s get married? Get off the grass. Nobody gets married these days. Let’s have kids? Yikes. One minute I’m an arm’s-length bachelor, the next I want little versions of ourselves running around. Who’s going to believe that? Not me. There’s got to be a halfway house, for Christ’s sake. Then you find yourself saying words like ‘sharing’ and before you know it...

  ‘What’s going on in there?’ asked Heike.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘The usual,’ she said.

  ‘You’re a bit sharp this morning, aren’t you?’

  ‘I’ve a small hangover and I’m a little annoyed.’

  ‘About the Gerhard thing?’

  ‘No, about the you thing.’

  ‘More juice?’

  ‘Why should I introduce you to the role model? Why not just run off with him? You know, cut out the duffer, go straight to the real thing.’

  ‘Maybe you wanted me to learn something from Gerhard.’

  ‘He’s a divorced workaholic.’

  ‘And talking about workaholics. Do you think I’m a deadbeat?’ She snorted a laugh out at that.

  ‘You don’t want to ask that question looking like you do this morning.’

  ‘Do you mind paying the rent?’

  ‘I get a housing allowance. You’re broke.’

  ‘It’s not drawing us together though, is it?’

  She laughed at that too.

  ‘You’re like a dog wandering around a park barking up trees.’

  ‘I’m working my way round.’

  ‘Good luck,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to go to work.’

  Out of the kitchen window, I saw the same man I’d seen last night but on the balcony this time, staring down into the same garden, looking as if he’d got nowhere in a whole night-time.

  Bagado arrived while I had my head over the sink contemplating a puke.

  ‘I was just on my way down to my new office,’ said Bagado.

  ‘You’re sounding cheerful. I suppose you’ve got your own desk and phone, your own office plant, don’t have to share with whitey any more.’

  ‘There’s something about a fresh start I’ve always liked. Even this one, which will stay fresh for as long as a calabash of fish in the sun.’

  I took another slug of the orange juice, which burned down my oesophagus. I tried to get some baguette down after it to stop it stripping off my stomach lining but it got stuck in my neck and I had to cough it back up.

  ‘I’ve got to go,’ said Bagado, slapping my back.

  ‘Hang on. There’s somebody for you to meet.’

  I knocked on Selina’s door. No answer. I pushed the door open. The room was empty. I told Bagado about Selina Aguia and we opened up the OTE/Chemiclean file which had been left on the table. The telexes and letters had been filed in chronological order. This whole big bad problem started with the simplest inquiry you could imagine:

  380 mts Chemicals

  Ex Leghorn

  IMMY

  ‘No destination but immediate shipment,’ said Bagado. ‘Is that usual?’

  ‘Very unusual for this kind of business. They might fix crude oil from the Persian Gulf with no destination or just Med or Western Europe, but chemicals are products you don’t ship without a buyer. They’re too specific, especially only three hundred and eighty tons of the stuff. It’s not as if it’s three thousand tons of benzene or toluene. It also says “chemicals”, which would normally mean a number of parcels. Even more specific.’

  ‘So he should have known it was wrong from the start.’

  Selina had photocopied notes from Napier’s day book. There was an Italian phone number, then OTE and scribbled alongside ‘ready-treated industrial waste’ and the name Fabrizzio Franconelli. Underneath the name Napier had written, ‘45 X 20 ft containers. Chemical products in drums’. There was a line and the workings of some cargoes for a North Sea contract for BP Chemicals. On the next sheet was a massive doodle of what could have been the left flank of an armadillo and underneath a circle with OTE and Chemiclean in it. Then there was a fax from Chemiclean.

  CHEMICLEAN INTERNATIONAL LIMITED

  Postal Address: Office Address:

  PO Box 735 Lagos. 28, Campbell Street

  Lagos Island

  Lagos. Nigeria.

  Napier Briggs CIL LAGOS W. AFRICA.

  Napier Briggs Associates Dealer in Chemical Materials

  204, Old Street Disposition of Chemical Waste

  London ECI Oil Materials. Company

  representation

  Import/Export services.

  Phone (234) 01-441 441

  Fax (234) 01-441 442

  30th August

  FAX MESSAGE

  Dear Mr Briggs,

  We have been informed by the International Chamber of Commerce that your company specializes in the transportation of hazardous chemicals.

  I am writing to introduce our company to you with the hope that you might be of our need or help in scouting out some industries in Europe in need of evacuating waste products emanating from their company’s productive activities.

  My name is Daniel Emanalo (Operations Manager). My father is a tradition ruler in the Western State of Nigeria. We own a vast tract of land close to the border with the Republic of Benin. On this land we have built a reinforced concrete bunker 60 ft below the surface for the storage of industrial waste.

  Please note that we are only able to accept pretreated industrial waste. We are not having the facilities or know-how to treat waste products. We cannot accept any radioactive material as this is a serious offence under our nation’s penal code and punishable by death.

  Our handling, transportation and storage charge is fixed at $30,000 per ton of chemical products as a one-off payment for life.

  If you would in anyway assist in scouting out for some industries in Europe who need our services we would pay a commission on all trade of 5 per cent. Please don’t hesitate to contact us immediately to enable us to furnish you with our operative modalities.

  Looking forward to hearing from you and doing business with you.

  Yours sincerely,

  Daniel Emanalo (Operations Manager)

  PS. All communications will be in strictest confidence.

  After this fax Selina had filed a permit from the Office of the Pharmacist’s Board of Nigeria allowing Chemiclean to import pretreated industrial waste and a notice from the Federal Ministry of Health, Environmental Protection Agency confirming that the Chemiclean facilities had been inspected and pronounced Al.

  All the negotiations had been typed up
on to a single sheet of paper. Napier had fixed a vessel called the Paphos Star, some Cypriot rust bucket, for $2500 per container ex Leghorn/Tin Can Island Lagos on a laycan of 10/15 October subject to contract. Napier’s opening offer to OTE had been for $30,500 per ton and they’d come back with $7000 per ton which looked like an unbridgeable gap and would have been between serious business people. As it turned out, Chemiclean would have agreed to store the waste at $12,000 per ton but not in the concrete bunker—OTE wanted to be in that concrete bunker and eventually agreed a price of $23,000 per ton.

  ‘A lot of money,’ I said.

  ‘A lot of money,’ agreed Bagado. ‘Too much money. I looked over some files I kept at home on a toxic-waste-dumping scandal in Benin four years ago. The cost of disposing a two-hundred-and-five-litre drum of intractable hazardous waste in Europe is somewhere between four and seven thousand dollars, depending on what it is. OTE are supposed to be shipping pretreated waste so it should cost even less. Even if the waste has a specific gravity of water that’s still more than four thousand dollars per drum. It’s not what you’d call commercial business.’

  ‘Money laundering?’

  ‘Italian company. Mafia money?’

  ‘Drug money.’

  ‘Maybe the full circle. The drugs come into Nigeria from Columbia and the Far East. They courier them to Europe. The money goes through OTE, through Napier Briggs, back to Nigeria, by which time it’s clean.’

  ‘How much are we talking about?’

  Bagado flipped over to the next sheet. An early December bank statement showed an underlined credit for $8,740,000 and another for $112,500—the product and the freight. The mid-December section of the statement showed $8,303,000 going out, followed by another $110,250—the product money less the 5 per cent commission and the freight less a 2 per cent commission. Napier Briggs had cleared nearly $440,000 with a few phone calls.