Blood Is Dirt

by Robert Wilson

  By 10.30 I’d gone back to the basic principles of trousers and got into them. Minutes later I was behind a cup of coffee and thinking of other uses for the slab of sweet Nigerian bread. I found one. Covering the soft-boiled eggs.

  After twelve hours’ air con the heat outside was like walking into a warehouse of boiler lagging. I stabilized myself in the back of a cab and breathed back crises and counted palm trees. They were building security barriers at both ends of the Strudwicks’ street. When the cab driver saw the state of the gates to the house he dropped me off.

  I rang the bell and looked up at the video camera as instructed. Behind it a small sign said ‘This fence is electrified’ and behind that were five pronged spikes along the wall and four strands of angled wire beyond them. It was not a light decision to shake this place down. A small door opened in the solid steel gates and a uniformed guard beckoned me on to the tarmac drive.

  Inside, set back from the perimeter wall about fifteen feet, was another fence, a chainlink job with barbed wire on top.

  ‘Is that mined?’ I asked the gateman.

  He whistled. My ears rang. He looked down the run made by the fence. A cloud of dust appeared and out of it two black-and-tan monsters. They flung themselves against the chainlink which ballooned and bounced them back on to their size-twelve paws.

  He ripped his cap and pointed me up the drive. The house wasn’t visible. The tarmac drive snaked through huge mounds of hibiscus and was lined at intervals by fanned voyager palms which looked like unpaid attendants ready to cool the odd person on foot. I broke through a line of shrubs and headed across the lawn rather than put a mile on my hike by following the drive. The house was a large white cube with a flat roof and shuttered windows all encased by steel bars.

  The solid mahogany door had a brass seahorse a foot long facing out of it. I was going to give it a swing but the door opened on Teflon hinges and a liveried boy took me through the house, which had the smell of a private collection. The stairs and the gallery above the entrance hall were sealed off tastefully by thick Spanish-style bars and the rooms off the gallery all had steel doors.

  The boy and I burst through some French windows and trotted down stone steps to an Olympic-size pool. There were four wooden-framed calico awnings arranged at one corner, under which were some wrought-iron, pewter-coloured Roman campaign chairs with fat yellow cushions. They surrounded a wrought-iron table with a two-inch-thick piece of glass on top the size of a Harrods window. I sat at the table and watched a large, expensive-looking cat make its way around the pool.

  The liveried boy left me, returned a moment later and hefted a twenty-pound ashtray on to the table. He placed a packet of Kent, a silver lighter and a little brass bell next to it. The cat approached, gave a disdainful left and right glance and hopped up on to the table. She nosed around a little and sat down. The pool lapped, the heat rapped, the birds stayed in the bushes.

  ‘Get off the table, Carmen!’ Gale shouted.

  Carmen flung a leg up in the air and set about washing her bottom.

  ‘Frigging cat,’ said Gale. Carmen looked up briefly and went back to it.

  Gale thumped into a chair and lit a cigarette. She tinkled the bell and straightened her sunglasses, which were two ovals suspended from a horizontal red wood line. Her long blonde hair crashed around her shoulders and her lipstick added a peach stripe to the white filter of her cigarette.

  ‘She’s Graydon’s,’ she said, easing the lapel of her peach silk robe open and crossing her legs, which were still long and slim.

  ‘Graydon?’

  ‘Graydon Strudwick the third—husband.’

  ‘Fourth, surely?’

  ‘Fourth husband, third Strudwick.’

  ‘That’s my first Graydon, I think.’

  ‘Graydon Hepplewhite Strudwick,’ she said. ‘Not a Christian name in sight. Drink?’

  ‘I’ll take a beer off you.’

  ‘Bring Mr Medway a beer, please, Ali.’

  The name cut through the skeins of dead brain tissue.

  ‘Löwenbrau, Heineken, Budweiser or Labatts?’

  I turned to look at Ali and was thrown to find it wasn’t the same boy who’d opened the front door. Ali was an older, bigger, tougher specimen and even in the purple-and-green-trimmed livery I could see that those shoulders belonged to David’s little hard man.

  ‘Lowenbrau, please, Ali.’

  ‘A bottle of Veuve Cliquot on ice and two flutes, Ali. Go.’

  ‘Veuve Cliquot,’ I said out loud, straight in from the pueblo.

  ‘For the Veuve Strudwick,’ she said. ‘I feel like a goddamn widow out here. Oh my Gad!’ She ripped off her sunglasses. I sat forward expecting a body to float to the surface of the pool. She leaned over and kissed me on the lips firmly with nothing in it. ‘I forgot to say hello. Jesus. I see the same assholes day in day out I can’t even raise a sneer. I’m sorry, Bruce, forgive me.’

  ‘It’ll cost you your first born.’

  ‘You got a lo-o-o-ong wait.’

  She gnawed at the arm of her sunglasses and sat down. Her peach robe was open all the way down now. She wasn’t wearing underwear and the bikini waxing had been drastic. She smiled at me and slowly folded the robe over herself.

  ‘What does a poor little rich girl do with herself all day?’

  ‘You tell me, my imagination’s dry right now.’

  She put her sunglasses back on and bit a thumb. Ali brought the drinks. The Lowenbrau sweated while Ali popped the Veuve and filled a flute with a practised trickle. He backed away. We drank. I cried.

  ‘How is it with number four?’ I asked.

  ‘OK... to begin with. The money’s great. The sex was good. We came here. The end.’

  ‘The money still looks good.’

  ‘Yeah, but we’re here.’

  ‘You were in Abidjan before with Grant.’

  ‘I didn’t like that either. Something happens to guys when they get out here. They make dough like you wouldn’t believe, they chew fat with ministers, they kiss our ruler’s ass, they get to feel all important and then the rest of their lives look like fat-free frigging milk.’

  ‘But do you love the guy?’

  ‘Love? You still reading novels and poetry and shit?’

  ‘You don’t love him. Leave him. You’ve done it before.’

  She rubbed her money fingers at me.

  ‘And, hey, I’m not so young any more. I mean you, you’re handsome. OK, so you lost your beauty but at least you’re kinda rugged, good-looking. Me? I’m getting like a wrinkly old red capsicum.’

  ‘You’ll get a settlement.’

  ‘PNA. That’s prénuptial agreement to you, and thanks for disagreeing.’

  ‘The PNA’s got to be more than a ten spot a week.’

  ‘I get the house on Kiawah Island and two hundred thou... a year, Bruce, a goddamn year. I need that a month.’

  ‘The tears are welling, Gale.’

  ‘That’s because you’re cheap. Anyone in the US’ll tell you they need ten mil to quit.’

  ‘And Graydon’s got that kind of salad?’

  ‘The guy’s got green fingers. What d’you think we’re here for?’

  ‘The sunshine and the rain?’ ‘Oil.’

  ‘I thought he was a lawyer.’

  ‘The kinda law he was doing out here was guys’d call him from the john and ask if they could zip up without getting caught. I mean, Jesus. He doesn’t mess with that stuff any more. The guy moves for his own account. He kisses ass where he has to and shovels it away.’

  ‘You ever come across a guy called Napier Briggs in any of his stuff?’

  ‘Sure,’ she said, without thinking about it, ‘Napier was one of Graydon’s brokers.’

  She stood up then and moved off as if she’d had an idea that needed walking about. She rearranged her robe and smoothed it over her buttocks that were still as taut as a teenager’s—the word ‘cellulite’ not allowed in the house.

  ‘I’m s
till all there, Bruce,’ she said, used to having men’s eyes on her. Insulted if they weren’t. ‘You had your chance way back and you blew it.’

  She was referring to a time back in London when she’d sat next to me in a bar, bought me a whisky sour and asked, straight out, if I wanted to have sex with her. I said I’d like some small talk about poetry and ballet first. She’d said she didn’t have the time. She was competing with a friend to see who could bed the most men in twenty-four hours. I passed. She gave me her number in case I changed out of a pumpkin before midnight. I didn’t, but I had seen her again. She’d won with twelve.

  ‘You’re not looking for Napier, are you, Bruce?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But you’re interested.’

  ‘That’s why I brought it up.’

  ‘I’m not going to seduce it out of you now, Bruce. You either bring yourself off or put it away.’

  ‘Such sweet words.’

  ‘It’s to do with my sex life with Graydon.’

  ‘What are you after, Gale?’

  ‘You first.’

  ‘Napier’s been murdered. I want to know why.’

  ‘Spicy. Hot.’

  ‘You?’

  ‘I want to get some dirt on Graydon so I can bust this PNA.’

  ‘Is there any dirt to be found?’

  ‘If you’ve got green fingers there’s always dirt under the fingernails.’

  I finished the Lowenbrau. Gale filled the other flute, topped up her own. The cat walked over to Gale’s end of the table.

  ‘Are we celebrating?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t usually do divorce work.’

  ‘This isn’t divorce work. It’s a criminal investigation into my husband’s affairs.’

  ‘Criminal?’

  ‘Now you’re gonna tell me you don’t do criminal work either. Whaddya do, Bruce? Candy monitor for kiddywinks?’

  ‘If I know it’s criminal I try to stay clear. African jails aren’t so nice.’

  ‘Well, pal, you’re cutting yourself off from ninety-five per cent of the business population in West Africa. You ever give someone a bribe?’

  ‘Sure...’

  ‘You’re a criminal. Revise your company code of ethics. Christ, you’re investigating a frigging murder, if that’s not criminal... now raise your goddamn glass.’

  ‘Wait on, Gale. What do I get out of this?’

  ‘I am gonna give you access to the Lagos business community at the very highest level. You’ll be flying in exactly the same circles as Napier Briggs used to and if you can’t find out from those guys what happened to him, you ain’t never gonna find out.’

  We chinked glasses. The champagne went off in my head like a firework. She turned her back to the table and the cat put its head on one side as if sizing things up.

  ‘You need a front, Bruce. You can’t come snooping around my parties as a gumshoe.’

  ‘How about a commodity trader?’

  ‘D’you know anything about it?’

  ‘Back of a stamp’s worth.’

  ‘Forget it. These guys’ll open you up.’

  ‘But I do know somebody who is a commodity trader and I’m strong enough on shipping to be able to pass myself off as her chartering department.’

  ‘You eating her?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What’s her angle?’

  ‘You don’t have to know everything.’

  ‘Gimme a name.’

  ‘Selina Aguia.’

  ‘Italian.’

  ‘—ish.’

  ‘Cool. We got some Italians. She blab the lingo?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She like to go to bed?’

  ‘Christ, Gale. Ask her yourself. You’re not shy.’

  She moved away from the table. The cat stretched out a paw and a claw caught in the fine silk and opened up a silent rent about a foot long across Gale’s behind.

  ‘Hey,’ said Gale, so that I thought she’d noticed, but no, she knocked back the Veuve and made an expansive gesture to the sunlight on the pool, ‘you know something? I’m enjoying myself for the first time in months.’

  Chapter 13

  Lagos. Wednesday 21st February.

  I slept off the champagne in the first three hours of a ride up to the Ojota Motor Park. In the last half hour I held on to my head and thought about what Gale had on offer. She’d invited Selina and I to party on Sunday afternoon. All the big hitters were going to be there to kiss the ass of one of the new presidential candidates, some chief whose name she couldn’t remember. After that she’d got into the second bottle of Veuve and invited me down to the pool house to see her new stippling technique. I hadn’t fallen for that and had refused everything else, including the fish-paste sandwich.

  It was a hot and dusty late afternoon in Ojota. The sun was scarfed with some horrible bruise-coloured chiffon and the breeze was set at the right level for zero cool and maximum crap to pick out of your eyes. The Awaya Transportation yard was empty apart from a flat-bed on blocks and a watchman who looked as if he’d been tyre-ironed.

  There were three trucks in Seriki Haulage and two of them had registration numbers I was interested in, both of them big old Leylands with the stuffing knocked out of them. The yard was small, walled in by breeze blocks with broken bottles on top. There was space only for the trucks, a wooden shed of a sales office and a corrugated-iron shack of a service area where the earth was stained black and piled high with engine blocks, axles and old pistons.

  A fat guy was doing something fiddly with the valves and jets of a carburettor. Two boys were rewinding copper wire around an alternator. A charcoal brazier shimmered the air where three soldering irons were being heated in the red-hot coals. Another man sat on a tyre worn smooth which he slapped and thumped like a tam-tam.

  I went over there. The boys looked up and said, ‘Oyinbo,’ and laughed. The big man kept on with his carby. The tam-tam didn’t break time.

  ‘One of you a driver?’

  The drummer worked up to a frenzied pitch and finished on a loud tok!

  ‘How can I help you?’ he asked.

  ‘Do you drive one of those Leylands?’

  ‘The sales office be over dere, oyinbo,’ said the fat man without looking up from his work.

  ‘I don’t want to hire the truck. I want to ask some questions. That’s all.’

  ‘He not free to answer you questions,’ he said, looking up now. ‘Sales office over dere. Dey answering you questions.’

  A man stood in the doorway of the sales office, his hands on his hips, a neat round pot of a belly stretching his white T-shirt which had some red scribble on it, as if he was doing some light bleeding.

  ‘Do you remember,’ I asked the driver, ‘around early to mid-January, taking some containers from Tin Can Island...?’

  ‘Listen,’ said the fat man, putting down the carby, and twitching at one of the boys who sprinted across the yard, ‘he don’ know nothing. He be de driver. He jes’ pickin’ the load, he don’t know wass in it. You wanna aks question this be de man.’

  The man from the sales office was on my shoulder now. He wasn’t pretty. His face was pitted from smallpox and, along with the tribal scars, he had some that came from unsuccessful social interaction. They talked in Yoruba. The word oyinbo occurred frequently. The boy closed the yard gates. The driver picked his nose. The other boy fanned the brazier.

  The sun was still hot and the Veuve was giving me a splitter. I moved to the doorway of the shack. There was a work bench in there with a couple of table vices on either side and on the wall a range of tools all outlined on a board.

  ‘You got some questions,’ said the sales office man.

  ‘I wanted to ask about a load he carried back in January.’

  ‘That your business?’ he said, his face nastying up, not having far to go.

  ‘Yes, it is.’

  ‘You working for somebody?’ he asked, riveting the words into me.

  ‘Myself,’ I said,
twisting a bit of sneer into it, trying to get tough, making a big mistake. The man’s eyes flickered at the mechanic.

  ‘You!’ he said, pointing at me so that all I could do was look down his hammerhead finger. Then one, two, hup! The mechanic hit me with a right and left in the gut and lifted me on his shoulder and slammed me down on the work bench. My head flicked back, hitting the wood hard and the green roof closed in on me.

  My tongue was out a foot trying to lick some air into my lungs, which had been squashed flat by my diaphragm and was all up around my thyroid. They’d locked my hands into the vices and the mechanic was winding wire flex around my legs and the table.

  Then the ugly guy appeared in frame above me. I looked away into the corner of the shed. There were two gas cylinders—oxyacetylene. I went back to Ugly. Anything could happen in here.

  ‘Who you working for?’

  ‘I told you.’

  ‘You looking for drugs? What you looking for?’

  ‘Information.’

  Ugly flicked his head and spat some Yoruba over his shoulder. The mechanic appeared with a soldering iron glowing red in the darkness of the shed. It was out of control now. The guy was either psychotic and I was headed for the lagoon with a truck axle around my ankle or they were doing the best job of scaring me I’d seen in five African years.

  ‘What you wan’ aks?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing important.’

  ‘Why you wan’ aks it then?’

  ‘Pass the time of day.’

  Ugly didn’t like that. He gave the iron to the mechanic and stripped my trousers and pants down. The boy brought a fresh iron and I did some very convincing whimpering.

  ‘Now you tell me, oyinbo.’

  ‘I wanted to ask him where he went with a truck back in January.’

  ‘You wan’ know the answer?’

  ‘If he remembers.’

  ‘None of you fucking business, oyinbo. Thass the answer.’

  There was a sizzle and a crackling and a sharp scorching pain that made me scream and filled the shed with the stink of burnt hair. I thought about digging for a deeper scream but the pain didn’t go any further. My hands came out of the vices. I leaned over and puked. They released my legs. I was drenched in sweat.