Blood Is Dirt

by Robert Wilson

  Then came the sting.

  M. M. Aounou

  Victor Ballot No 28

  Porto Novo

  Rep. Bénin

  Postal Address

  BP, 741

  Porto Novo.

  Rep. Bénin.

  29th November

  Dear Mr Briggs,

  I am senior accountant with the Ministry of Finance in the Benin Republic. I have been given your name by Daniel Emanalo, the Operations Manager at Chemiclean. He has told me that you have recently concluded a very successful business transaction with OTE in Leghorn. He has asked me to contact you with my proposal as a reward, I think you call it a ‘success fee’, for bringing Chemiclean and OTE together.

  In my position at the Ministry of Finance I have many contacts in government and in the banking system. Some friends of mine at the Banque Beninoise de Development (BBD) discovered a government account containing $38,742,480. Through my files here in the Ministry of Finance I have traced this money to the overinvoicing of a contract awarded to a Danish company for clearing untreated toxic waste which had been illegally dumped in Benin during the previous administration. As you know from your dealings in West Africa, the powers of the old regime were dramatically reduced by the multipartite national conference in March 1990 and a new cabinet resulted with a new Prime Minister. This new administration know nothing about this account.

  Through my offices at the Ministry I have been able to effect a payment authority but I require a foreign company account to make the transfer, it being in dollars and originally designed for a foreign firm. I hope you can see how your cooperation in this business might be of mutual benefit.

  We have decided to offer you 40 per cent of the fund if you will allow us to make use of your bank account to make the transfer. Out of your 40 per cent you will have to pay 5 per cent to Daniel Emanalo for making the introduction but this would still leave you with a net gain in excess of $13,000,000.

  All we would require from you is the following:

  1) Three (3) blank copies of your company’s letterhead, signed.

  2) Three (3) blank copies of your company’s invoices.

  3) Name and address of your bank, account number and telephone/fax and/or telex numbers.

  The invoices will be used to show goods and services which your company supplied and the letterheads will act as covering letters to back up the invoices. We will fill them in with all the necessary information that would have pertained to the original contract and can then push them through the BBD system and effect the transfer.

  Please note that your letterhead and invoices should not only be signed but stamped as well as is the custom in West Africa. All communications should be sent by DHL as the local postal system is too unreliable.

  We will update you with the progress of the transfer. On the day that the monies arrive in your account two officials will make contact with you in London—Mr B. Segun and Mr A. Idris—they will effect disbursement of the funds.

  Please keep this business strictly private and confidential.

  Awaiting your immediate response.

  Yours sincerely,

  M. Aounou.

  A copy of a letter from Napier to M. Aounou showed that he sent the letterheads and invoices out on 6th December. Selina had typed up his December/January diary making the note that the secretary, Karen, had left the office on 21st December and gone on holiday until 5th January. Napier had been all over the place—Genoa for the launch of a gas ship called the Amedeo Avogadro, Madrid for a meeting with a broker called Navichem, Hamburg for a meeting with a shipowner called Hamburger-Lloyd, Copenhagen for a Christmas party, Bergen to see an owner’s broker called Steensland, Paris to discuss a Far East time charter with some brokers called Gazocean and Manchester to see a Shell refinery. He didn’t go back into his office until after the Christmas break and he didn’t see a bank statement until Karen tried to effect a freight payment to an owner on 10th January and was informed by the bank that there were insufficient funds.

  The printout of the January statement which Karen had asked for immediately and had gone to the bank to pick up showed the accumulation of money in Napier’s account while he was travelling. He hit a maximum of $1,932,724 before three debits on 5th January of $728,965, $514,496 and $613,768 which took $1,857,229 out of his account.

  He applied for a Nigerian visa on 10th January afternoon but didn’t receive it until 29th January. It took him six days to get a flight to Lagos, where he arrived early in the morning on Monday 5th February. He spent the first night in a hotel called the Ritalori but there was no record of subsequent nights. He moved to Cotonou on the 14th February and set himself up in the Hotel du Lac where he spent two nights, getting himself killed on his third night on Friday 16th February. The last three sheets in the file were copies of the signed letterheads received by Napier’s bank instructing them to transfer three different amounts to three different banks in three cities in the UK.

  ‘How did they know how much money he would have and when it would be in the account?’ I asked.

  ‘Somebody in the bank, somebody in Briggs’s office or outside information.’

  ‘They timed it well, didn’t they? Over the Christmas break.’

  ‘What did he do and who did he see for those ten days he spent in Lagos?’

  ‘That’s what I want you to find out,’ said Selina, who’d come in silently and was standing by the door with all her hair cut off into a spiky bleached crew cut. She had a plastic bag in her hand.

  ‘That’s a bit radical, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘The hair.’

  ‘You don’t like it?’

  ‘It looks cool.’

  ‘I’ll take that both ways.’

  I introduced Bagado. It was clear we’d looked through the file.

  ‘What do you think, Mr Bagado?’

  ‘Very nice,’ he said, ‘but I didn’t see the “before”.’

  ‘It’s in the bag. I thought I’d bury it with Napier,’ she said, lightly. ‘My father always loved my hair.’

  Bagado was experienced in grief. He knew how to handle these blank spaces where weighty things said breezily send emotions into free fall and paralyse speech. He didn’t suddenly start talking about the heat, which was folding itself into the room and expanding, or comment on the weather, which everybody knew was always hot. He radiated sympathy without tilting his head or drawbridging his eyebrows into a ‘sincere’ expression. He felt for the woman and she could sense it.

  ‘Maybe this isn’t a good time to be impulsive,’ he said. ‘You should think about your father now while everything is still fresh. You don’t have to do anything. Just reflect. If you don’t you’ll miss out and you may regret that later.’

  Nobody had ever spoken to Selina like that before in her life. She was astonished, as if Bagado had proposed some primitive rite that people like her just didn’t do.

  ‘It was hot,’ she said. ‘I didn’t think.’

  ‘What’s there to think about?’

  ‘My father and who killed him.’

  ‘That might take some time to uncover. You’ve done all that’s necessary by organizing the file for us. Now take care of yourself.’

  ‘But you’ve found the toxic waste.’

  ‘We’ve found some toxic waste.’

  ‘The same quantity my father shipped, Bruce said...’

  ‘We need more to go on than that. The toxic waste is out of our jurisdiction. I have to make contact with the Nigerians to see if they will cooperate. We have to tread carefully doing that. The army were present at the dump. That could mean government involvement or someone with a great deal of power. We don’t know who we’re up against and we are already in a political situation here in Benin starting with my appointment.’

  ‘I have some idea of who we’re up against,’ she said.

  ‘Somebody here?’

  ‘The Franconellis,’ she said, shaking her head.

  ‘You’ve spoken to them?’

&nb
sp; ‘I found out about them through my ex-husband’s contacts in Milan. They’re from a large Neapolitan mafia family. They have representation in government and powerful contacts in industry. They’re in construction and shipping, and further down the line olive oil, wine, the rag trade, almost everything you can think of. They also rim drugs—cocaine from Columbia and heroin from the Far East. The eldest son, Fabrizzio, is fifty-eight years old. He runs a shipping company out of Leghorn. Roberto is the youngest. He’s just hit fifty. He runs a construction company and an import/export business out of Lagos. Between them and their sons and one of the daughters they run a drug-distribution network in Europe and CIS countries. There are two other brothers in the States with three sons between them. Two of those sons are in Russia. The father is eighty-two years old and never leaves Naples.’

  ‘Well,’ said Bagado, ‘now you see that this is not such a simple investigation.’

  ‘If you want to do something,’ I said, ‘perhaps we could have a quiet look around in Nigeria and find out who we’re up against.’

  ‘I do want to do something,’ said Selina, ‘and I have money to do something.’

  ‘Bagado?’ I asked. ‘Where are you in this?’

  ‘I didn’t say? I’ve been put in charge of the Napier Briggs murder investigation, reporting directly to Bondougou.’

  ‘What do you think that means?’

  ‘I’ve been sent barefoot down a causeway of broken glass.’

  ‘Bondougou wants you in his lap with his hand up your back.’

  ‘As usual. But I don’t intend to allow that to happen.’

  ‘You reckon he has an interest beyond law enforcement?’

  ‘You know as well as I do that the only law Bondougou enforces is his own.’

  ‘You might be interested to know,’ said Selina, ‘that yesterday they said I could take my father’s body. They’re just doing the paperwork this morning and I can fly him back this afternoon.’

  ‘That’s quick,’ said Bagado, ‘and not strictly correct in a murder investigation. The defence can make a case for doing their own autopsy. But then, perhaps, they’re not anticipating a trial.’

  Selina paced the room like a caged panther needing bigger horizons. Bagado looked at his watch and said he had to be going now that he was a public servant. He didn’t interrupt Selina who wasn’t noticing anything outside the inside of her own head. More heat leaked into the room. Sweat started in my scalp, the orange juice staged a revolt and made me feel nauseous. I threw up in the bathroom.

  ‘Where’s Heike?’ asked Selina, when I came out.

  ‘Gone to work.’

  ‘I didn’t think you were supposed to drink during the week,’ she said, looking at me carefully so that I knew that she knew—women talk to each other all the time, even strangers.

  ‘I’m not, but I’m a shocking little rule-breaker when I want to be,’ I said, swallowing something nasty. Selina looked as if she was about to step in with something, but she didn’t feel sure of her ground yet and swerved away from it.

  ‘How much do you want?’ she asked instead.

  ‘To find out what Napier was up to in Lagos? Five hundred thousand CFA to get started.’

  ‘What’s your fee?’

  ‘Ten thousand a day.’

  ‘That’s more than a hundred quid,’ she snapped. ‘Are you worth it... without your detective friend?’

  ‘I’m double with him. He’ll help us out and draw official pay. You’re getting two for one.’

  ‘I thought you’d be cheaper. Heike...’

  Women talk about even more than you’d imagine.

  ‘Heike draws a salary. People who draw salaries don’t understand. You run your own business. You know that much.’

  ‘I thought you did a three-day job for two hundred and fifty thousand all in.’

  ‘Charity work. I nearly got killed doing it too. Now I know we’ve got the mafia thrown in there, some heavy hitters in Nigeria and Bondougou on the edges, I’m going to make sure I get paid this time.’

  ‘Maybe I’ll wait and see what the official police investigation comes up with.’

  ‘I’ll be in my office.’

  ‘Who pays the bills around here?’

  Women talk about literally everything.

  ‘None of your business, Selina.’

  ‘Probably the one with the salary.’

  ‘Still none of your business.’

  They must have gone through the household accounts once they’d sorted me out and slammed down a half bottle of Scotch. It wasn’t that surprising. Heike was low on sympathetic ears to gab to. The German girls in her agency were a little vegan for her taste. Well, she’d found a meat eater in Selina and the tough bitch was using everything she’d learned. I couldn’t think why she needed that MBA her father had put her through, she had the head and muscle of a barrow boy. Maybe those boys from the Lagos school of business were going to learn a few things. All I had left on me was the stonewall.

  ‘You know where the office is,’ I said, and headed for the door.

  ‘It’s all right. I’ve found the right man for the job,’ she said to the back of my head.

  ‘But not the right money.’

  ‘I opened an account in the Bank of Africa yesterday morning. They said I’ll have to wait a week for a cheque book. You’ll have to wait a few days before my transfer arrives from Paris. I’ll give you the half million cash as soon as it’s there. Is that going to delay you?’

  ‘That’s fine.’

  ‘Napier was a weak man, Bruce. It was my mother who wore the pants. She had more men after she married my father than before. He didn’t say a word or lift a finger. I think he was too scared of losing her. She took it as humiliation and she returned it in full by running off...’

  ‘...with Blair.’

  ‘The old man told you that?’

  ‘It took some time to prise it out of him.’

  ‘I don’t like weak men,’ she said, pinching her bottom lip. ‘I tolerated it in my father because I loved him but I won’t have it from others.’

  For a moment I became aware of the plus and minus ions in the room. Selina Aguia ran a hand through her new crop and painted a layer of gloss on to her top lip with the tip of her tongue.

  Chapter 10

  Benin/Nigeria border. Tuesday 20th February.

  You’d have thought there was a refugee situation at the Benin/Nigerian border that morning. The number of people and the quantity of gear they were carrying made me ask if there’d been some trouble, but no, it was just the regulars passing through and getting indignant with the customs officers who snitched something here and brutally shoved someone over there. I was through by 9.30 a.m. and started working through the police posts on the coastal road to Lagos.

  Before Selina Briggs had left the house to go and pick up Napier’s body and fly with it back to London, I’d agreed to do various things for the three days she would be away burying her father. I was now heading for Tin Can Island to find out what had happened to the containers Napier had shipped on the Phaphos Star. I wanted to get a handle on who was behind the toxic waste before I went to the Hotel Ritalori to find out what Napier had been doing in Lagos. I’d already called the foreign office man, David Bartholomew, and arranged to meet him for a drink in the evening. David and I had been drawn together by boredom and booze and he’d taken a stack of cards to hand out to the numerous unfortunates who broke down and wept in his office. Only the biggest losers made it to us because David Bartholomew’s policy was to hand out the advice that now the lesson had been learned, now that the welts across the wallet were still fresh and painful, it was time to go home and forget about making it big or getting it back in Nigeria.

  I joined the torrential traffic on the Apapa—Orowonsoki Expressway and let it channel me into Tin Can Island which lived up to its reputation, if for ‘tin can’ you read ‘container’. The island was a town, a huge bewildering grid of twenty-foot and forty-foot boxes stacke
d on top of each other. Gantry cranes rumbled to and fro on rusted rails while giant mobiles, hugely weighted at the rear with extendable arms out front and wheels higher than my Peugeot Estate, stalked the lanes between the high rises and removed blocks and placed them elsewhere for someone else to move on later. Tin Can Island was a good place to lose something whilst knowing exactly where it was.

  I found the offices of the agents Ogwashi & Ikare and parked up under the midday sun. The staircase up to their first-floor hole smelled of school right down to the stink of over-boiled cabbage. I knocked on the frosted-glass door and entered a long, narrow office where four men sat at wooden tables piled with stacks of paper. What was going on inside was a microcosm of what was happening outside. One wall of the office was floor to ceiling with cardboard boxes of soap powder and bleach filled with paper. At the far end was a glass partition, an isolation tent for a larger man who sat at a desk of polished mahogany with a computer monitor on one corner and a telephone on another. Behind the man’s head was an optimistic photograph of the current military leader which clashed with the sullen and brutal features on the live face below. He passed a finger across his forehead, wiping the sweat of accumulated bribes off his brow.

  I told the nearest clerk my business and handed him the container numbers I wanted him to check. I’d selected just two from Napier Briggs’s shipment and mixed them in with some of my own inventions. He nodded and looked at the numbers, hoping to divine the answer without having to hit the reference system. His concentration broke and he handed the paper on. All four men gave the numbers their very best but nobody could crack it. I sat down.