Blood Is Dirt

by Robert Wilson

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I had to go to Lagos,’ I said.

  ‘Problem?’

  ‘Nothing’s easy.’

  ‘It’s solved?’

  ‘We’re ready.’

  ‘A set of keys will be delivered to your office. They belong to a Renault 18 parked where the jeep was the other night in the Sheraton.’ He gave me the registration. ‘You should be there no earlier than eight fifteen a.m. The goods and documentation are in the boot. Leave a message with Vassili when you have the car. I hope you still have the money.’

  The line cut. Fifteen minutes later Viktor arrived. I sent the gardien out again for more breakfast. Viktor, in a loose-fitting short-sleeve shirt which he wore outside his jeans, laid a palm on the desk top and tapped it with his thumb. I asked him to stop. He went out on to the balcony, his Reebok sneakers squeaking on the floor. Time passed in rashers. The boy came back with some croissants ordinaires because the au beurre were finished. Viktor asked him to go and buy a pain chocolat. I opened some windows but the heat was everywhere. The caffeine made me sweaty and breathless.

  There was a knock at the door. I shouted for the boy to come in. No answer. I opened the door and found an envelope leaning against the jamb. The car keys. The boy arrived with the pain chocolat.

  We left for the Sheraton, me driving, Viktor with the keys and spitting flakes of pastry from the pain chocolat over the front of the car. We pulled up alongside the blue Renault in the Sheraton car park. Viktor got out and slid into the driver’s seat. We drove back to the house. I parked the Peugeot outside and got Viktor to reverse up to Moses’s apartment. I opened the door. Viktor popped the boot on the Renault. There were four boxes in some kind of heavy-duty plastic with the nuclear insignia on each and a black vinyl briefcase. We lifted them out. They must have weighed around twenty-five kilos each. Viktor took the briefcase into the apartment and sat on the bed with the bedside lamp on. He lifted the documents out which were broken up into four batches, each one in a clear plastic zip-up sachet. All the typing was in Cyrillic script. I read off the codes on the sides of the boxes and Viktor placed a set of corresponding documents on each. He opened up the first sachet.

  ‘This is seven hundred grammes of Plutonium 239. It’s originally from Tomsk-7 Western Russia. It’s made up from eighteen batches.’

  He flicked through all the papers, counting off the batches and checking a signature at the bottom.

  ‘These are all signed by Major-General Dimitri Lentov who runs the Tomsk-7 facility. This plutonium is made up from small consignments sent from Tomsk-7 to a research laboratory in Tblisi. Three hundred grammes here, two hundred and fifty there. Then as the product moves around the Tblisi facility, slowly, slowly it gets lost.’

  ‘So all the documents show is where the material originated?’

  ‘You can’t get official documentation for material stolen from the Tblisi facility. Ça, mon ami, c’est impossible.’

  ‘So the material could be bogus?’

  ‘Of course. If you were selling to a government, like the Pakistanis, say, they have a facility to check the quality of the goods. Here we just have copies of the documents of origin and the boxes to go on. The documents tell me this is genuine weapons-grade plutonium and to my eyes the boxes look genuine. What’s actually in them? Ah, well. But let’s not open them up.’

  I left Viktor to his work and went upstairs to phone Mr K. Heike was up and eating. She was looking sharp, which made me nervous. If she knew what was downstairs it would be the end.

  ‘They said I have to eat,’ she said. ‘Fe dois bouffer fort.’ She put an arm around my neck and kissed me. ‘Tense?’

  ‘Still.’

  ‘Don’t be about me.’

  ‘I’m coming down from it.’

  ‘We should go away for a weekend. I should get some rest. We could go to Grand Popo, as long as they take all those gouty anchovies out of the salade Niçoise.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘I’m drowning in your enthusiasm.’

  ‘Just a few things to sort out first.’

  ‘I won’t ask,’ she said. ‘What are you doing in Moses’s flat?’

  ‘I thought you said you wouldn’t ask.’

  She sucked in air as if she’d cut herself with a knife.

  ‘Take a shower,’ she said, ‘and call Bagado.’

  ‘He’s called?’

  ‘Left messages. Two.’

  ‘I can’t talk to him now.’

  ‘You don’t look that busy.’

  ‘I’m taking a shower.’

  ‘All day?’

  ‘That was a public announcement.’

  ‘We’re gratified.’

  After the shower, even in new clothes, I still felt dirty. I found the icepick in the kitchen drawer and slipped it into my chinos pocket, which was just long enough to take it. I went back downstairs. Viktor had packed away the documents. I told him we had to move the product out. We packed it in the car again and drove down to my office.

  They were killing another sheep outside on the concrete ramp below the balcony. I parked up next to the butcher who was hauling the guts out of the carcass. I trod in the blood as I got out of the car. My foot skidded away from me and I just saved myself from landing on my arse in it. In the office, my sticky shoe kissed the tiles and left perfect prints in the dust. Viktor sat on the client side of the desk while I called Lagos. Ben Agu answered.

  ‘Are you ready?’ he asked.

  ‘I’d like to speak to the chief.’

  ‘I’m handling the details.’

  ‘Let me speak to the chief, Ben,’ I said, cheerfully. He hesitated and put the phone down. I heard the chief lumber across the room and sink into a leather chair which gasped.

  He didn’t say anything but breathed in a congested way down the mouthpiece.

  ‘I’m ready,’ I said. He didn’t respond. ‘I have some conditions.’ He tapped the side of the phone and sighed. ‘You’ll have to come to the warehouse and bring Selina with you.’

  ‘Not this time,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, this time.’

  ‘Only when we complete the transaction.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘It won’t work like that. I want to see her every step of the way.’

  ‘You can talk to her now.’

  ‘I don’t need to because you’re bringing her with you tonight.’

  ‘Tonight?’

  ‘This isn’t a business where hanging around is advisable.’

  ‘What time?’

  ‘Eleven o’clock. That should give me enough time.’

  ‘She’ll go back with us.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘How many people will you bring?’

  ‘Just me and one other. Ben knows him. We don’t want the world there.’

  ‘No, no. You are right.’

  ‘And your side?’

  ‘The three of us.’

  ‘And no arms.’

  ‘Arms?’

  ‘Firearms.’

  The chief started laughing, slowly at first but he built it into a guffaw, a gut laugh, a tear-jerker, a bowel-loosener. There must be other people who would find that funny—tell a guy not to bring a pistol when you’re selling him a nuclear bomb—but not me. I slammed the phone down.

  I pulled the gardien up again and asked for more coffee. I put my feet up on the desk. The phone rang. I let the answering machine take the call. It was Bagado. I clasped my hands tight across my stomach. He said he knew I was there and shouted at me to pick up the phone. Viktor licked his lips. Bagado said he had important information on Napier Briggs. It was nothing that could help me or him now. I let Bagado use up tape. He clicked off after a minute. Viktor didn’t inquire.

  I paced the office and grew some sweat patches on my shirt. Distant music came over the traffic—drums, trumpets. The coffee arrived. I went out on to the balcony and breathed in some disgusting air. Viktor joined me. The music was louder. A straggle of people stopped at the
roadside to watch. A phalanx of robed dignitaries preceded a coffin held aloft. A group of women followed supporting one of their number who was the distraught widow. The band played out of tune and time as if the man’s death had destroyed the natural order of things. They walked to the junction. The traffic stopped. They crossed the road to the cathedral.

  I went back into the office, drank coffee and put funerals out of my head. Viktor stayed out on the balcony. I called Franconelli and gave him the time for the product exchange. I told Viktor we had to kill some time.

  He asked me if I knew somewhere where we could go and drink some beer and watch women take their clothes off. He said that would use up some time, you know, in a nice way. I told him stripping was not something they did a lot of in Africa. You either went the whole hog or not at all—no halfway house. Viktor smoothed his beard over his face and shook his head. AIDS, he said, it was a problem.

  We could always go and play pinball in La Verdure, I said. He wasn’t terrorized with excitement until I told him that there were always two or three girls there and he shouldn’t find it too difficult to persuade one of them to go upstairs and take her clothes off for him. He shrugged and asked me if I’d ever had sex with a black girl. I said it was none of his business. He asked me if I knew a lyric from a rock song which went something like, ‘Black girls, they just wanna get fucked all night, but I ain’t got that much jam.’ It sounded like the Rolling Stones, I said, but I didn’t have Jagger’s phone number so he could talk it over with him. I was beginning not to like Viktor very much.

  We drove to La Verdure. I parked up against the railings and we went in and ordered two demi pressions. There were no girls, just a shrunken French alcoholic in a red shirt four sizes too big for him. I took five games of pool off Viktor and then we had Sunday lunch. We ate a terrine de lapin, côte de porc grillé, and a marquise de chocolat in a thin crême anglaise. We drank the quarter pichet of red each that came with the set menu. The girls turned up. Viktor went back into the bar. Time was dead on its feet and wouldn’t move on even if I looked at the second hand.

  Viktor negotiated with one of the Beninois girls to go upstairs and take her clothes off, but even he realized this was not going to push the clock forward too much as the girl was wearing a blouse, a skirt, a pair of knickers and two shoes. Even if she was a master of the art, which I doubted, she was going to have her work cut out to stretch that over five minutes. I told him to go and buy seven veils. He renegotiated to include a pipe, a blow job. I felt sick. They went upstairs.

  Another girl who looked as if she’d have had to jump from the fourth floor to get into the lycra sheath she was wearing twanged her way over to me. She was grabbed by a sailor whose gut rested on the glass of the pinball machine, a tattoo of a pair of breasts danced on his bicep as he played it. He smelled of ripe cheese and I could tell that the girl had to search for the hero inside herself just to put an arm around him. I needed to get out of here. I was resenting Viktor’s stamina for the situation. He’d been up there six hours now, well, eighteen minutes, but you know how it is when you’re the gooseberry.

  Viktor came down around teatime. I was playing pool against my alter ego. The dark side was winning. Things had progressed. They were holding hands. They walked over as if I was Daddy and could take them home now. I said I had to get some sleep and that we’d take a bungalow in the Aledjo. I didn’t want to be anywhere where anybody could find me. I drove like a good cabbie with the two in the back kicking the doors out in a struggle that should have left them wearing each other’s clothes.

  I went to the reception and booked a two-bedroomed bungalow. I found a critical situation in the back of the car when I came back. I asked them if they couldn’t just hang on for a moment. The answer was, apparently, no.

  I got them into a bedroom using some sheepdog skills I’d picked up from afternoon television when I was a lot younger. I fell on to the bed in the other room and folded a pillow over my head. I dropped into a world which was no less complicated and terrifying, but had the dubious benefit of jerking me awake so that at least I knew it wasn’t real.

  Chapter 29

  It was 10 p.m. Sunday night. Two columns of oblongs lit the wall behind the bed. The air con couldn’t subdue the concentrated pumping from the next bedroom—Viktor finding something out for himself, not having to listen to a rock singer tell him. I hammered on the door.

  ‘Allons-y, Viktor!’ I shouted.

  ‘Fe viens,’ he said, and increased the tempo.

  ‘Oui,’ whinnied the girl.

  Right.

  I checked the car. It was hot out there and the air coming off the sea a few hundred metres away had halitosis which followed me around like those people in offices who feel the need to get close and breathe on you, see if you faint. The product was still in the boot.

  There was the faintest flicker of lightning far away over Nigeria, so far that there was no sound. Viktor shambled out of the bungalow.

  ‘Quelle heure est-il?’ he asked.

  ‘Dix heures et quart.’

  He whistled to himself, amazed at his own stamina, letting me know he was impressed. We got in the car. I drove.

  ‘Elle va rester ici?’ I asked.

  ‘Je vais revenir après,’ he said, sticking an elbow out of the window, putting a foot up on the dash.

  We cruised into the industrial zone a half kilometre from the Aledjo. The traffic was light off the main Cotonou-Porto Novo road but the air was still thick with heat and fumes. We drifted through a residential area. Africans who’d made something in the communist era had bought for nothing out here and now small concrete palaces were going up. We merged back with the industrial zone and turned up the sandy track to the warehouse. A single gardien slept on a wooden bench outside. There was nobody else around. The few houses opposite the warehouse were either unfinished and boarded up or just footings in the sand with long grass growing in them. It was 10.30 p.m.

  I paid the gardien to get lost until dawn. Viktor opened up the gates and drove into the compound. I unlocked the warehouse doors in the middle and Viktor reversed up the ramp. He cut the engine and left the lights on. I closed the doors and found the light switch. Two of the three lights came on, one in the middle and one over the Renault. Viktor killed the headlights. I took a torch from the glove and walked up and down the warehouse. It was still empty apart from the stacks of cotton seed in sacks. I checked the roof. In the centre, on the other side from the Renault, a pulley hung from the lowest girder and a rope dropped from it to the top of the cotton-seed stack which was maybe three metres below the roof.

  Viktor stayed in the car, sprawled across the front seats with the door open, one foot hanging out, the other resting on the frame of the open window. I sat on a couple of sacks and listened to cars crescendo and diminuendo. The storm I’d seen earlier came fractionally closer—thunder creaked lengthily. Eleven o’clock came and went. I killed four mosquitoes, one fat with blood from a snort off Viktor who was now snoring.

  An old tiredness settled on me, one which had started maybe five years ago and never been slept off. It was the kind of fatigue that probably occurred in eighty-year-olds, that pushed them down into the bed and helped them decide that maybe it would be quieter if they gave up the struggle and fertilized the soil instead. It was a weight but a comfortable one. One that sat easy on the body, didn’t chafe...

  The warehouse door I was facing slid open two inches, then a foot. Ben Agu came in with a flashlight. He didn’t acknowledge me, but walked up and down the warehouse. Then he stood under the central light, turned off the torch, and tucked it under his arm. He took a mobile out of his pocket and pressed buttons. He spoke quietly.

  ‘You’re late,’ I said.

  He went back to the sliding doors and looked out. After a few minutes he flashed his torch. A car reversed up outside. Red lights glowed on the wall of the other warehouse. A car door opened. Ben slid the warehouse doors to a four-foot gap. The chief came in, follow
ed by Selina. The car’s engine ticked over. Its lights died. Ben shut the doors. The chief entered the cone of light in the centre of the warehouse. Selina remained at the edge. Ben Agu joined her but not with a torch in his hand. He had a.38 with a suppressor attached.

  ‘I said no guns.’

  ‘You did,’ said the chief. ‘I thought security was more important.’

  ‘You’ve got a driver with you. That makes four not three.’

  ‘There’s two men on the gates as well,’ said Ben. ‘That’s six not three.’

  ‘This is Viktor,’ I said. He was sitting up now with his heels on the sills of the door. ‘The plutonium-reprocessing expert.’

  ‘Is he satisfied?’

  ‘As far as he can be without opening the boxes. He says the documents show where the product originated and that it’s weapons-grade plutonium, and he says the containers are genuine too.’

  ‘Where does it come from?’

  ‘Originally Tomsk-7 but it was stolen from a research reactor in Tblisi.’

  ‘He hasn’t looked at it.’

  ‘It’s not the sort of thing you can fry up in your kitchen.’

  ‘We know where to find you,’ said the chief. ‘By the time we take the second lot we’ll be equipped to inspect the product properly. I have a Russian working on the project already.’

  The chief smoothed his hands down the blue robes he was wearing and repositioned his hat. The car’s engine cut suddenly. Ben faced the doors which he’d left open a crack. There was a pop as if a milk carton had been rim over on the road. Ben jumped backwards, staggered two steps, dropped the gun, put a hand out to break his fall and fell on his hip. He twisted his body towards the light where the chief was standing and tried to say something. His chin hovered an inch above the floor, his eyes widened and his teeth appeared red in his mouth. His shirt darkened rapidly.