Instruments of Darkness

It was breakfast time. Patience, the most senior of Jack’s maids, with the eyes of a murderess and the shoulders of a mud wrestler, came out of her quarters and pointed to the verandah above the garage. I locked the car. Patience adjusted her wrap and slouched off to the kitchen. Mohammed, a tall, rangy, immensely strong servant of Jack’s who could polish a Mercedes down to the base metal came from the back of the house hunched over, holding a monkey by the hand. Jack had bought the monkey and found that Mohammed came with it. The monkey saw me and hid behind Mohammed’s legs like a shy little girl.

‘How are you, Mohammed?’ I asked.

‘Yessssir,’ he said with the intensity of a truck’s air brakes.

A parrot in a cage started running through its repertoire of clicks and whistles, calling for Patience and doing imitations of her cleaning the verandah: little sweeping sounds with the odd chair scraping thrown in. I walked up the spiral staircase to the verandah and heard the murmur of the video-taped soaps that were recorded for Jack and sent from England. He played them in the big gaps of his light-scheduled day. Christ, he played them all the time.

‘Mister Jack will see you now,’ the parrot said to the back of my head.

Jack wasn’t seeing anything. He was lying on a lounger with a cup of coffee the colour of his skin on his stomach, the video zapper on his chest. His eyes were closed. One big finger was crooked through the coffee cup handle. He wore a pair of shorts and nothing else.

He was a large man, probably as tall as six foot four, with heavy shoulders and a broad chest which must have housed solid slabs of pectoral when he was younger, but was now on the turn to flabby dugs. He had a big hard, round belly which shone like polished wood. He flicked his feet to keep the flies off and his sandals made a loud flopping sound on the soles of his feet.

Jack was a good-looking man, but it was the mixture of African and European in him that made him peculiar and fascinating. His hair was black but not as tightly curled as a full African’s. His skin was the colour of a walnut shell. He had blue eyes from his English mother and a straight sharp nose with a mouth fuller than most, but not African. He had long flat cheeks that fell from his sharp cheekbones and he kept these and the rest of his face clean-shaven. He had small, perfectly formed African ears.

Jack’s overall impression, which he’d had to work on, was one of lazy power. He was a lion that turned up for his prepared meals, ate, lounged about, never had to move too quickly but had a look in his eye when he turned his big head that told you who was the patriarch. He had great charm, a boyish smile and he loved to laugh. When he walked into a room of people all you could hear were women’s hearts fluttering like a colony of fantails. He left a wake of despair. He was ruthless in his pursuit of sex. A man who couldn’t sleep alone but couldn’t bear the same woman twice. Women knew this. His bed was never empty.

He’d had another hard night. He slept more on that lounger than he did in his bed. The parrot tutted as if he knew. Jack’s eyes opened.

‘Bruce,’ he said in a thick sleepy voice. He glanced at the coffee cup in his hand, leaned his head forward with an effort and drained it. ‘My God,’ he said, sinking back. It was difficult to find any sympathy for him. I took the zapper off his chest and shut down the TV which sat in its little roofed shelter in the corner of the verandah.

‘Madame Severnou’s left you fifty mil short.’ I paused for a moment while his supine brain took this in. ‘And last night she sent some muscle round to my house to pick up the rest.’ Jack’s eyes opened and flickered as he registered. ‘And I’m pretty sure that right now she’s unloading the rice without the original bill of lading.’

Jack didn’t move for a moment until his tongue came out and licked the nascent bristle below his bottom lip. He stared down through his feet at the blank TV with half-closed eyes.

‘Can you turn that on again?’

‘Can you listen for a minute?’

If there’s any good news,’ he sighed, staring off over the wall into the palm trees of the next-door garden with ostentatious lack of interest.

‘I’ve got five hundred and eighty-odd million in the Peugeot.’

He let the hand with the coffee cup in it fall by his side. A dribble of coffee leaked out on to the tiles. He put the cup down and with a sudden jerk shot himself up off the lounger and walked like a man with diving boots on to the rail of the verandah. He leaned on it as if he was catching his breath. On his back were four deep, six-inch long gouges on each scapula.

‘And this after you’ve been in bed with a polecat all night,’ I said.

‘A lioness, Bruce, a bloody lioness,’ he said as if he was talking to someone in the neighbouring garden.

‘What the hell’s going on with her?’ he asked his stomach, which percolated some coffee through his intestines. He turned and walked back to the table by the lounger, squatted with a loud crack from both knees and poured himself some more coffee and filled a cup for me. He took a croissant from a plate and bit into it. His brain wasn’t getting the spark to turn itself over. He heaved himself on to the lounger.

‘I got the beef out of Tema, it’s on its way up to Bolgatanga,’ he said without thinking and blowing out flakes of croissant on to his hairless chest. I checked the coffee for insects. He was telling me things I didn’t need to know. Jack’s mobile phone rang. On automatic, he pulled up the aerial, clicked the switch to ‘Talk’, and then said nothing, but listened for some time, his eyebrows going over the jumps. I took a slug of the coffee which kicked into my nervous system. It was robusta and strong and bad for you if you’re the shaky type.

‘Can I think about it?’ Jack asked the phone, and then waited while he was told why he couldn’t. ‘I can help, but you have to let me talk…’ He held out a hand to me with eyes that said you can’t tell anyone anything these days. ‘I can’t. I haven’t got the time,’ which was a lie. ‘I have…No you don’t…’ He turned his back to me and I missed a snatch; he came back with some more croissant in his mouth. ‘I have to talk to him first.’ Pause. ‘Let me talk to him.’ Jack looked into the earpiece, pushed the aerial down and switched the phone to ‘Standby’.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘I’ll take this lot down to your man Jawa and then I’ll get back to Cotonou.’

‘What for?’ he asked.

‘If not the rice, Jack, the fifty million might be useful.’

‘I have to think about this.’

‘Did Moses call?’ I asked.

‘No,’ he said thinking elsewhere. ‘Moses didn’t call.’

I listened to the sound of Lomé getting itself together. Some women walked past the wall at the back of the house with piles of washing on their heads and babies on their backs who were sleeping on the rhythmical movement of their mothers’ hips. It seemed like a good place to be, rather than up here feeling seedy and bitter-mouthed from the coffee.

‘You’ve done business with her before,’ I said. ‘She’s always been straight with you, she’s always paid, it’s not as if you’re a one-off. So what’s going on?’ Jack nodded at each element with his chin on his praying hands. I looked at the top of his head. ‘Is it me?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said, looking up.

I stared into his blue eyes and all I saw was a big problem. The phone went in the house and Patience’s flip flops slapped across the tiles.

‘It’s Moses for Mister Bruce.’

‘Can she put it up here?’

‘Different line,’ said Jack, and I went down into the house.

Moses said the rice was being off-loaded and that nothing had been touched in the house. Heike tore the phone out of his hand. She was angry and spoke to me in barbed wire German which left my ear ragged and bleeding. She was in no mood to be apologized to. I didn’t try. The plastic split as her phone hit the cradle. I hauled myself back up to the verandah.

‘Africa. Africa. Africa,’ said Jack after Moses’s news.

‘I’ll drop the money at Jawa’s and go back.’

‘No,’ said Jack, holding up his hand. ‘She’s got the rice now. You won’t even get in the port. I’ll talk to her about the fifty million. I want you to do something else for me. My uncle in Accra needs some help in Cotonou.’

‘I didn’t know you had an uncle in Accra.’

‘I don’t. He’s a family friend, a Syrian multimillionaire. He did a lot of business with my father over the last forty years.’

‘Was that him before?’ I asked. Jack nodded. ‘What does he want?’

‘He needs someone he can trust in Cotonou and I’m volunteering you.’

‘I’ll give him a call.’

‘He wants to see you.’

‘What the hell for?’

‘He likes to see people he employs.’

‘I don’t want to go to Accra.’

‘It’s good money.’

‘To hell with the money. Heike’s in town and she’s bloody furious.’

‘You didn’t make her count the money?’

‘What the hell else was she going to do?’

Jack shook with high giggling laughter and drummed his fingers on his taut belly.

‘If you go now you’ll be back in Cotonou this evening.’

‘Ready for action,’ I said.

Jack ducked his head and turned his mouth down.

‘It’s a new client for you. He’ll pay you a lot better than anyone else around here.’

‘You mean his currency is money rather than promises.’

‘He does have money.’

‘Giving-type money or keeping-type money?’

‘Money-type money.’

‘I don’t care. I don’t want to go.’ I was searching for something. ‘I’ve got lunch with Madame Severnou.’

‘Lunch!’

‘Yeah, first course is a ground glass soufflé.’

‘You’re not going to lunch.’

‘No, and I’m not going to Accra either.’

‘I’ll get someone else. Fine. No problem.’ Jack was giving me the lion look now.

‘I owe Heike. We were counting until three in the morning.’

‘No problem. Forget it.’ Jack looked off into his neighbour’s garden again.

‘Jack,’ I said. ‘I’ll go as long as you promise never to say “no problem” to me.’

‘No problem,’ he said smiling. I didn’t laugh.

It was a game that had to be played. Jack knew I needed the money. I knew I needed the money. Jack knew that I owed him. But appearances have to be kept up. I also wanted to find out what was going on with Madame Severnou and I thought I might be able to catch Jack right now with the stabbing technique.

‘What’s going on, Jack?’

‘With what?’ he said.

‘Madame Severnou.’

Our eyes fixed; Jack’s were steady.

‘Croissant?’ he said, holding up the plate and shrugging.

‘I’ve got to get rid of this first,’ I said, pinching the fat on my stomach. Jack smiled and breathed out.

‘You have nothing to fear, Bruce,’ he said, standing up and slapping his wooden gut. We shook hands and clicked fingers Ghanaian style.

‘My uncle’s name is unpronounceable. Everybody calls him B.B. He lives on the airport side not far from the Shangri La Hotel. Ask for the Holy Church of Christ. His house is next door, on the left as you look at the church.’

I started down the spiral staircase, back into the garage.

‘By the way,’ added Jack, picking up the zapper, ‘he’s a little unusual for a millionaire.’

‘He gives people money for nothing?’ I said.

Jack laughed and the TV came on so I left him. I kept a few things in a room in Jack’s house. I had a shower and changed.

Patience accepted my dirty clothes which she dropped on the floor and walked off to go and be surly somewhere else. Jack was leaning over the balcony waiting for me.

‘What were the heavies like?’ he asked.

‘Big and heavy,’ I said, not feeling like telling him anything.

‘Did they have guns?’

‘Either that or very long arms.’ That impressed him.

‘You keep me informed,’ he said.

‘What about?’

‘About B.B. and things. You might need some help. He’s not so easy to deal with.’

‘Is anybody?’

‘Come and see me when you get back.’ I got in the car and drove down to Jawa’s compound near the DHL office in town.

Jawa’s boy let me into the garage underneath the office and disappeared. I filled up some cardboard boxes with the currency and went upstairs to Jawa’s office through several rooms of dead-eyed men counting huge quantities of money.

Jawa was a small, balding Indian with muddy quarter-circles under his eyes. He was thinner than an African dog. He didn’t eat food, but nourished himself by chewing the ball of his palm. He sat at his desk surrounded by ashtrays, each with a burning cigarette, and took drags from them all in turn, as if he were a beagle in a scientific experiment. The idea was that he should be smoking in the same order at the end of the day as he was at the beginning. It was something to do in the gaps between making money. He poured some tea and started to play with a lump of gold, weighing it in his palm and looking it over.

‘There’s going to be more trouble here, Bruce.’ He spoke very quickly, as if the words were going to outstrip him.

‘With what?’

‘This multi-party democracy.’

‘Jack called me last week from the Hotel Golfe. He said he was trapped, they were throwing stones at each other in the street.’

‘And shooting…There was shooting, too. It’s going to get hot, Bruce, very hot.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I’m listening. The people are getting angry. They told me at the flour mill they asked for a hundred per cent pay rise. They’re going to close the port and the taxi drivers are going on strike. It’s going to get very, very hot.’ He put the lump of gold down and leaned forward. ‘Does he want this in London or Zurich?’

‘Zurich.’

‘They’ll blame it on the Ghanaians, close the border, the usual things. But it won’t work this time. They’ll be fighting, looting…’ He sipped his tea and kept some cigarettes going. He booted up the computer, took the slip of paper I’d given him and entered the money in Jack’s account.

‘How’s Cotonou?’ he asked.

‘Still good,’ I said.

‘They had big trouble there, too. Nothing’s easy in Africa. Nothing stays good for long…We’re going to see blood.’

‘You’ll be all right, Jawa.’

‘If they don’t shoot me. You don’t know these people. I know them. Tea?’

‘I’ve got to get going.’

I left him worrying his lump of gold, scrolling through his accounts, smoking his cigarettes, chewing his palm, thinking about blood. He was a busy man.

Chapter 5

I drove back down to the coast road and headed west to the Ghanaian border. The sun on the sea and the breeze through the coconut palms washed off Jawa’s depressing office and morose talk. For a while, I kept pace with a young white woman on horseback. The dappled grey seemed to be smiling through gritted teeth as his hooves kicked up the sand. The girl was out of the saddle, her bottom in the air, her head and shoulders leaning over the horse’s ears, her mouth wide open.

I looked at her and wondered what I was doing grubbing around in this half-lit world of trade and commerce, making a bit here, getting shafted there, listening to people talking very, very seriously and watching the insincerity flicking from face to face until all you could be sure of was that nothing was going to happen as agreed.

I crawled into the crowds around the border. The horse eased. The girl sat back a little. The horse’s head came up with its front legs. She turned him and was gone.

The Togo/Ghana border was always full of people. The Ghanaians poured across with their goods to pick up the hard CFA. I parked up in the border compound and a group of money changers gathered around me intoning the names of the currencies like priests at Communion. I bought some cedi for petrol and Moses expected me to buy Ghanaian bread for him. I paid a boy to go and get my name entered in the exit ledger and have my passport stamped. A soldier with a rifle over his shoulder was enjoying himself frisking all the women traders. Jawa was right. They were expecting trouble.

I drove across the baked mud to the Ghana side. Ten minutes later, I coasted through the border town of Aflao and bought a half dozen of the usual tough, green-skinned oranges from an alarmed young girl who scored them for me and cut a hole in the top so I could squeeze out the juice.

It was a fast, flat, boring drive to Accra and I arrived at the airport roundabout in a couple of hours. It was hot. I drove past the Shangri La Hotel and thought about going in there for a Club beer or six and a long lie down. I found the ‘uncle’s’ house four streets back from the main road. I followed the music. They were singing in the open plan church next door.

The garden boy opened the gates and I went up the short drive past a frangipani tree and parked in front of a double garage. There was a huge woman sitting in the darkness. All I could see was the size of her white bra, which must have been a 90 double Z. She threw a wrap over herself. I asked for B.B. and she pointed to a door at the back of the garage which led to the battleship-grey front door of the main house. The house looked like a municipal building. It was L-shaped and tall with white walls and grey woodwork. There was nothing pretty about it. There were no plants or flowers. It was functional.

I knocked. There was an echoing rumbling noise of someone clearing their throat in an empty room. The noise rose to a crescendo and ended in a cough and a sneeze which bounced around the walls inside the house. There was an exhausted sigh. A different noise started, a man with a stammer.

‘Ra-ra-ra-ra-ra-Mary!’ he finished surprisingly.

There was the neat sound of someone who picked up their feet when they walked and the door opened. Mary had a round bush of hair and a smile a foot wide to go with it. I walked up a few steps and found myself in the main living room. There was a table and a few chairs which dated back to the British colonial days, then a large space before a four-piece suite which I could tell was going to be hot from where I was standing. A fifties ceiling light of a cluster of brass tubes held in a wooden circle had six lamps but only three bulbs. The walls on either side had two massive grey frames holding eight columns of slatted windows which were netted against mosquitoes. Between the frames, the walls were bare and white. The wall at the far end of the room was occupied entirely by a scene of snow-capped mountains, pine trees and a lake which should have been in the Swiss Tourist Board’s offices, circa 1965. I blinked hard at the hoarding because treetops rather than bottoms appeared to be coming out of the lake. I could see that a whole section in the middle was missing. Sitting in the left-hand corner of this scene was B.B.

‘You like?’ he said in a thick, throaty voice.

‘I…there’s something…’ I fished.

‘It get wet in de airport,’ B.B. explained. ‘You get de idea anyhoare.’

We shook hands.

‘Bruise?’ he asked, as if I did easily.

He stood up for some reason. He was holding his shorts up with one hand. He had such a tremendous stomach that they had no chance of being done up. He wore a string vest which stretched over his belly and creaked under the strain like a ship’s rigging. The vest was badly stained with coffee and a few other things, one of which was egg. He had short, recently cropped grey hair and snaggled grey eyebrows which fought each other over the bridge of his fleshy nose. His mouth was small and sweet and looked as if it might whistle. His neck was like a gecko’s. It hung from below his jowls and fanned out to his clavicles.

He crashed back into the armchair, swung his feet up on to the table and crossed them at the ankles. His big yellowing toenails arced out from the flesh by a couple of inches and he had hard pads of skin on his soles. They were high-mileage feet in need of some remoulds.

‘Sit, Bruise,’ he waved at a chair. ‘Ka-ka-ka-ka-ka-ka-Mary!’ he roared.

Mary was standing right behind his chair and said, ‘Yessah!’ which made him jump a bit. He turned as if he was in a seat belt and gave up.

‘I see,’ he said. ‘You want drink, Bruise?’

I asked for a beer. He tried to turn to Mary again and it brought on a wince of pain so he relaxed. ‘You bring beer for Mister Bruise and the ginger drink for me.’ Mary hadn’t even moved when B.B. said: ‘No, no, no, no, no. Yes.’ She went to the kitchen.

B.B. rapped the arm of his chair, alternating between his knuckles and the palm of his hand for a minute or two. Suddenly his eyes popped out of his face and he leaned forward as if he was going to say his last words, but instead let out a sneeze like a belly flop, showering me and the furniture. He pulled a yellow handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped his nose and took the sweat off his brow and then held it tumbling out of the back of his hand.

‘My God,’ he said. ‘I tink I have a cold.’

I was ‘tinking’ I was going to get a cold when Mary came in with the drinks. He sipped his daintily with his little finger cocked. He dabbed his mouth with the handkerchief and put the drink down. His face creased with agony. He lifted himself off one buttock and then settled back down again. His face calmed.

‘Yesterday I tink I eat someting funny. The ginger is good for the stomach,’ he said. ‘Lomé? Is hot?’

‘There’s going to be more trouble.’

‘Africa,’ breathed B.B. ‘Always problem. It getting hot in Ivory Coast now. De people, dey want to be free. Dan when dey free dey don’t know what to do. Dey make big trobble. Dey teef tings and kill. Dey ruin deir contry. Is very hot in Abidjan now. Very hot.’

I sipped my beer and felt very hot through the Dralon seat covers. B.B. went through a few more crises. I felt as if I’d been there a couple of hours. I didn’t feel awkward; he seemed to have things to occupy him.

‘Jack said you wanted to see me,’ I volunteered.

‘Yairs,’ he said and sipped his drink and looked out into the garden.

Mary flipped in and flopped out again. It reminded him of something.

‘Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-Mary!’ he hollered, and she reappeared.

‘We eat someting?’

‘Corn beef, sah!’

He looked at me, wanting some encouragement, so I nodded. Mary went back into the kitchen.

‘Jack –’ he said and stopped. The singing in the church stopped too and was replaced by a preacher who roared at his sinners, torturing them with feedbacks from his microphone. B.B. lost his track. His eyes looked up into his forehead as if he might find it up there. Something clicked, it sounded like a synapse from where I was sitting.

‘Jack,’ he repeated, and I flinched because his eyes had popped again, but the sneeze didn’t come, ‘is a nice man. His father too. His father dead now. He was a nice man, a good man. We do lot of business together. He know how to wok. We wok very hard togedder, all over Ghana, the north, the west side, east…Kete, Krachi, Yendi, Bawku, Bolgatanga, Gambaga, Wa…We wok in all dese places.’

He sipped his drink and I wondered where all this was going to. He breathed through his nose and mouth at the same time, the air rushing down the channels. His feet seemed to conduct an orchestra of their own. He talked for twenty minutes with a few coughing breaks in which he turned puce and became so still that I thought an impromptu tracheotomy was looming and I took a biro out for the purpose. What he talked about is difficult to remember, but it took a long time and part of it was about how hard he had ‘wokked’ with Jack’s father, which brought him back to Jack again.

‘Jack,’ he said, ‘has never wokked. Everting has been given. Is a problem, a big problem. If money is easy, you always want more, but more easy evertime.’

He winced again and leaned over, raising his left buttock as if he were about to break wind ostentatiously in the direction of something he disagreed with. The pain made him lose his track but his random access memory came up with something else. ‘Cushion,’ he said, and I looked around. ‘Cushion!’ he said again, wagging his finger with irritation. ‘When you want to cross the road you always look, if you walk and no look you get run over. Cushion. Always look. Take your time. Don’t be in hurry. Cushion is a very importarn ting. Jack is not careful. He no understand the word cushion.’