Blood Is Dirt

by Robert Wilson

  ‘Why didn’t you send him to Adjeokuta?’

  ‘We’ve been asked to screen people beforehand. If they’re time-wasters. If they’re not prepared to talk. If they’ve done something illegal themselves. We generally don’t send them on to him. He has his hands full enough, as you’d expect.’

  ‘Did he come to you at the High Commission?’

  ‘Briggs? Yes, eventually. But I met him at a party first. An American woman. Strudwick. Her husband’s an international lawyer, Graydon Strudwick. She’s called Gale. Your type, I’d say. You know, blonde, actressy. I think Graydon’s her fourth husband.’

  ‘Since when has that been my type?’

  ‘Just something to say, Bruce. Try to relax, for God’s sake. What do I know about what men want from women. I can’t even see the point of breasts.’

  I knew a Gale from my London days, who, apart from having a very good nose for sex and money, had also developed an intuition for the right marriage. She’d married her boss, then her boss’s boss and finally her boss’s boss’s banker. She’d been living in some department-store cake of a house in the Ivory Coast capital, Abidjan, the last I’d heard. After that many marriages I couldn’t remember the name of the last one.

  ‘Gale,’ I said. ‘Her maiden name’s not Glass, is it?’

  ‘We’re boring out here, but not that bloody desperate.’

  ‘Blonde, you said.’

  ‘She’s pretty voracious by all accounts. Doesn’t stick to her husband, unless that’s locker-room talk.’

  ‘I didn’t know you played sport.’

  ‘It’s never stopped me going into the locker room.’

  ‘This Gale, she’s blonde, ice-blue eyes, little bee-stung mouth, medium height, slim, in fact very slim, with very slim long legs that blokes are always on about wanting to die between?’

  ‘You’re boring me to death now, but yes, you’ve got her. That bee-stung mouth. I thought she’d had collagen implants and I asked her what it felt like. No, she didn’t like that at all. I shouldn’t use me as an intro. Now I remember, she was married before to somebody called Teller, a banker in Abidjan.’

  ‘Grant Teller. That’s Gale. Good old reliable Gale, she’s pulled it off again. Strudwick. That’s good,’ I said. ‘Sounds like densely packed money being stacked on a table. Very much her kind of thing.’ I knocked back the whisky and took a pull of the Lowenbrau straight from the bottle.

  ‘There’s no need to behave as if you’ve come straight off the rigs, Bruce.’

  ‘You got an address and phone number for her?’ I asked. He slipped a pocket diary out and read it off to me. ‘When did you meet Napier at this party?’

  ‘Sunday the eleventh.’

  ‘And after that?’

  ‘Afternoon of the twelfth.’

  ‘You didn’t see him again?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘In those two meetings he didn’t mention any names, where he’d been, anything?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ll have to look at my day book. I wrote up a report on him in case we had trouble later.’

  ‘So you weren’t that surprised?’

  ‘Oh, no. He had it written all over him, Bruce. Victim. They find their killers, those people. They can’t resist them. I was mildly surprised at how violent his death appeared to be.’

  ‘Anything on the inside track I should know about? Have you got somebody over there apart from the Honorary looking into it?’

  David’s brain didn’t even stop to think. He had synapses in there that could cross-reference and still let him talk.

  ‘Your car problem, was that to do with Napier Briggs?’

  ‘You don’t miss much, David.’

  ‘Are you working on something?’

  ‘What’re you going to give me, if I tell you?’

  ‘Like?’

  ‘Could you check a couple of truck registrations for me?’

  ‘What!?’

  ‘You heard.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Come on, David.’

  ‘I can. Of course I can. But I’m not going to.’

  ‘It’s two numbers...’

  ‘Forget it, Bruce. I like my official car. If I poke around in your business I might lose it. Get your numbers checked elsewhere.’

  ‘I haven’t asked you to do anything about my car, have I?’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘you know you’re on your own with that kind of thing.’

  ‘As British citizens abroad we’re on our own with everything unless it’s business and there’s a drink in it for the lads.’

  ‘Don’t get like that, Bruce. We’ve always been what I think the Americans like to call “nonparticipatory”.’

  I poured my Lowenbrau out and sat back in the dark and watched people accustomed to luxury float about in the marbled cool interior of the hotel. David got another menthol going. He wanted to know about Napier Briggs, which meant that he had something on him too.

  ‘Who’s the lucky guy?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, nobody,’ he said, looking at his nails as if he’d just bagged a Hollywood star. ‘Just a waiter. God, it’s amazing what you have to go through.’

  ‘He doesn’t read Wittgenstein in his spare time?’

  ‘Fortunately there’s not much talking.’

  ‘You want to eat something?’

  ‘Very kind of you, Bruce, but I’m rather booked up... for a change.’

  ‘You want to be careful out there, David. Where that guy can lead you is a long way from the High Commission, a long way. You might not find your way back.’

  ‘And how would you know, Mr Politically Correct, Kiss My Arse, Liberal?’

  ‘You’ve already told me the type you go for.’

  ‘Oh, Ali, he’s OK. He’s just a waiter.’

  ‘I’m sure Ali’s OK. He’s got a job, some money. Maybe some more money now. It’s his friends I’d be worried about. His friends with no money, no jobs and sharp noses for the milky-white oyinbo*. You don’t know what it’s like outside the barbed wire compound, or maybe you’re guessing at it and you think it’s exciting.’

  ‘I’m not a hothouse flower, Bruce.’

  ‘You don’t have to be in this climate.’

  ‘Very clever. All us delicate little lovelies running around in the open, you mean? Unprotected.’

  ‘I wouldn’t like you to be a victim like our friend.’

  ‘Napier, yes, you didn’t say...’

  ‘I don’t get my truck numbers. What do I get?’

  ‘I can’t say.’

  ‘Then let’s talk when you can say.’

  David took me to a store where I bought some clothes and supplies. He dropped me at the guesthouse where a couple of guys were arguing with a cab driver over their fare. I got out of the car and leaned back in to have a final word with David but he beat me to it.

  ‘You didn’t tell me why you’re still chasing Napier Briggs?’

  ‘I’m being paid to.’

  ‘Who by?’

  ‘My clients’ details are always private and confidential,’ I said. ‘And who from your lot’s so interested in him anyway?’

  ‘You can read what you like into it, Bruce. But I can assure you all we’re doing is routine and the sooner we’re off it the better.’

  ‘It’s the first time I’ve been aware of a routine.’

  ‘We do our best to be inconspicuous.’

  I closed the door and he gave me a stiff backhand wave and put the car into reverse. The two guys rowing with the cab driver had carried their bags inside and the cabbie was getting back into his cockpit. David pulled away, heading back into town. I got in the passenger side of the cab and told the driver to follow David’s car.

  It was on an impulse. I had nothing better to do and I’d let this ugly side of my personality win for once—I was going to get some leverage on David. There was no telling, in this business, when it might come in useful.

  He looked as if he was going to cross the Five Cowrie Creek over t
he Falomo Bridge but he cut back and went down into embassy land and crossed the creek on to Lagos Island close to the British HC. He drove into a maze of streets in the Brazilian Quarter and parked up at the first opportunity. I paid the cabbie off and followed him on foot. There was no name to the street. It was off Bamgbose right in the middle of the island.

  We walked for some time, David easy to follow at some distance in his cream silk shirt. He was moving at quite a pace for the heat and I was disorientated and in a sweat by the time we reached a terrible little bar called the Gaiety at the bottom of a building which wore its structural problems on the outside. He went in through a door frame plastered with Guinness stickers. I crossed the road and stood on the other side of a line of parked VW Beetles. He looked around in the badly lit room and headed for a corner. In a few minutes he was out on the street again with company, an African, shoulder height to him but twice as wide, wearing a black T-shirt yelling NO OPTION. He wore it with the sleeves rolled up over some bonecrusher shoulder muscle and tucked into a pair of tight white jeans. They turned directly right into a black hole of a doorway in what looked like a burnt-out block but which had a single blue light on the top floor. David, appraising the man from the rear, hoiked out the T-shirt and jammed his hand down the back of the tight jeans in a rough proprietorial fashion. His friend yanked it out as if it was a hanky and he was on for a sneezing jag. He held on to David’s wrist and hauled him up the stairs, which he mounted two at a time.

  No light came on in the building. The blue light remained. I got bored and felt disgusted with myself for following someone who, although he wasn’t a close friend was a lot more than an acquaintance. Was I seriously going to use this? Was I going to get myself into a situation where I would go to the ambassador and tell him that one of his senior officers was enjoying some rough trade down at the Gaiety? The guy’d probably look down his nose at me and say, ‘We all go down there, my dear boy.’

  The African in the white jeans came out of the doorway and turned back into the bar without looking around. I waited, getting a little nervous now. Five minutes passed, ten minutes. Did he kill him?

  David’s cream shirt appeared in the gloom. He leaned up against the door jamb. His hair was hanging over his forehead and he was holding his silk shirt together at the chest because all the buttons had been ripped off. He ran his hand through his hair and set off down the street with his hand holding his side and a limp. He looked into the bar, his head floating on his shoulders, wanting to catch a glimpse, wanting to go back in there, for God’s sake. He thought better of it and headed back to his car. I followed him to make sure he got there. I checked on some landmarks so I’d remember the place and hailed a cab to take me back to Y-Kays.

  I sat in the back of the cab, the streetlighting rushing through the car in rhomboid flashes, and thought that Napier Briggs was proving to be a lot more complicated than even Bagado could have imagined. David was interested in him for sure, even a bit nervous about him. This time he’d cobbled together some crap to slip out of the slightly embarrassing fact that he hadn’t passed Napier on to the colonel at the 419 squad. So why did he send him to me? To get him out of Nigeria, which is one thing. Or maybe it went further and they wanted to push him into Cotonou where, seeing as he was a ‘victim’ and on the way out anyway, he could be shut down with a lot less fuss. It was going to be interesting to see how much more trouble I could get into while I was in Lagos.

  I called home from the reception of the hotel, hoping that Helen might still be there and could go over to Bagado’s house with the truck registrations. Bagado had plenty of friends in the Lagos force who could do a little job like that for him. Heike picked up the phone.

  ‘It’s me. I’m in Lagos,’ I said.

  ‘Right,’ she said, sounding flat, exhausted.

  ‘I wanted to get some truck numbers to Bagado. Is Helen still there?’

  ‘She’s gone for the night. Give them to me. I’ll drop them round.’

  I gave her the numbers.

  ‘Selina went back to London,’ she said.

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘I’m working for her. Are you all there, Heike?’

  Heike’s breathing came down the phone in pants with all the stresses uneven.

  ‘I’m all here...’ she said, now unable to conceal the distress. ‘I don’t want to tell you this over the phone, but you have to know. Moses’s blood-test results came today.’ She struggled, the ugly angles of the words catching in her throat. No sound came out. She started crying. I put my elbow up on the desk and dropped my head into my hand. My bone marrow had gone cold.

  ‘He’s HIV positive,’ she said.

  Chapter 12

  Lagos. Late Tuesday 20th February.

  I crawled on to the hard bed in my cell at Y-Kays and lay there in the dark with an early-model air conditioner giving me the sensory deprivation I needed. I’d taken the precaution of a bottle of whisky in my room and drank fingers of the stuff without concentrating on the measures. A multicar pile-up built in my head. Before the wreckage was complete I put a call through to Gale, who surprised me by picking up the phone when she must have had a regiment of gofers to lift a finger for her.

  ‘Gull Strud—’ I said, still on my back, my face and head numb as if I’d had four hours’ root-canal work.

  ‘Who is this?’ she snapped back.

  ‘Sorry, Gale Strudwick,’ I said, sitting up and getting it out straight.

  ‘I’m Gale Strudwick, who the... who are you?’

  ‘I’d like to be able to say I’m all Bruce Medway but I’m only half here.’

  ‘Who’s the other half?’

  ‘He’s called Johnny Walker.’

  ‘Well, let me speak to him—he’s always been the more interesting.’

  ‘Buh!’ I said. She laughed. ‘Sorry, he’s too far gone.’

  ‘That really is you,’ she said. ‘Still getting shit-faced and it’s way past your bedtime.’

  ‘I’m over forty now.’

  ‘Oh my God! I can’t bear to think what you look like. You were so beautiful. Where are you?’

  ‘Lagos,’ I said, ‘and thanks for the compliment, they’re thin on...’

  ‘Where in Lagos?’

  ‘Adeola Hopwell, Vic Island.’

  ‘That’s just round the corner. Why don’t you...’

  ‘Because, Gale...’

  ‘Right. You’re so shit-faced you don’t know the difference between your poontang and your pecker.’

  ‘Those bankers have made you poetic.’

  ‘Yeah, I’m doing creative-writing lessons for assholes.’

  ‘Are you around tomorrow?’

  ‘Am I around?’

  ‘At home.’

  ‘You mean rather than nipping down to the Sheraton for the Bruce Oldfield show, before hopping across town to choose the foie gras for luncheon, before zipping out to the beach, then cocktails, bridge at the club and dinner with my aunt. All that shit, you mean?’

  ‘Well...’

  ‘Nobody nips, hops or zips in this town. We hide behind walls, hover around panic buttons...’

  ‘Linked to the shrink,’ I said. She laughed. ‘You’re free, then?’

  ‘You know, I’ve missed that sledgehammer irony,’ she said. A lighter clicked, a sharp intake of breath. ‘I’m at my best at eleven thirty, that’s a.m. So come then. We’ll have a few drinks and... a few more. Then maybe I’ll let you have a sandwich. How’s that sound?’

  ‘What do I get in my sandwich?’

  ‘Oh, I’ve got some fish paste in the back of a cupboard somewhere.’

  ‘Is that what you call caviare now?’

  ‘I’m that rich, Bruce,’ she said, ‘but... yeah, anyway, what do you do with yourself these days?’

  ‘I meddle in people’s affairs.’

  ‘How nice.’

  ‘I collect debts, recover losses, find people, uncover mysteries, rummage in drawers, lift up carpet corners, take husbands out of freezers befo
re they get served for Sunday lunch...’

  ‘You’re a PI,’ she said.

  ‘Is the first word of that “Piss”?’

  ‘Right, see you tomorrow.’

  I refitted the phone, got my head up for some more Scotch, but it leaked everywhere and ran down my neck into the pillow. I drifted into sleep, hollow and miserable, trying not to think too much about Moses.

  I was stabbed awake later, terrified, as if I’d found myself in a mortuary fridge. I’d dreamt a dream with no pictures, just darkness and rippling over that an even blacker darkness. The air con was freezing, my trousers stiff. I kicked off my shoes, found a blanket, shivered and tried to think about lighter things, but they wouldn’t come. So I tried nothing. Nothing wasn’t allowed. Only blood was allowed. The deep dark, black arterial blood that thumps in the core of us and contains more than just cells and platelets.

  Sleep came in the gash between night and dawn. I dropped fathoms in seconds and surfaced in minutes without the benefit of decompression. The phone was ringing so loud it was shaking me by the head.

  ‘Duh,’ I said.

  ‘Bruce? Bagado.’

  ‘Guh.’

  ‘The trucking companies. I’ve got the names.’

  ‘Fuh.’

  ‘Pen?’

  ‘Nuh.’

  ‘Get one.’

  ‘Yuh.’

  ‘It’s nine thirty Bruce.’

  ‘Not six?’

  ‘Not six. Two names. Get the pen.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Seriki Haulage, Awaya Transportation. Both of them are up by the Ojota Motor Park. I’m calling the Land Office now—you’d better get moving.’

  He clicked off. I wrote the names on the Scotch bottle. I thought I’d been impaled on a railing. My neck and arm... and then it came back. The whole big, beautiful, blue yesterday came back to me. A vision wave set off down the room, hit the wall and slopped back up to me. I called reception and told them to send out a boy to get some over-the-counter analgesics. I made it to the bathroom and lay under the shower like a derelict in the last-resort city shelter.