The Big Killing

The mirror showed something that looked human but had been kept underground for a long time. Moses appeared on my shoulder and I told him to look at the back of my neck. He drew the collar down, sucked on his teeth and took a pair of tweezers out of the penknife on the table. After a sharp pain that travelled down my spine to my coccyx and back up again he showed me the diamond of glass that had embedded itself in my neck.

‘You be lucky,’ he said.

‘Maybe I am.’

‘You be lucky bullet stoppin’ in head rest passenger side.’

‘And not in me, you mean?’

‘No, please sir, not goin’ on brekkin’ other window, you pay two and ibbe costly.’

‘Thanks for your concern.’

‘Your good health is mine. You are my mastah,’ he said in a tone of voice I knew well.

‘How much do you want?’

Moses grinned. When he used the words ‘sir’ and ‘mastah’ it always meant money. He looked off into his head somewhere, pretending to do a calculation when he’d already cheated the answer.

‘Two thousand.’

‘Cedis?’

‘We in Ivory Coast,’ he said. ‘They speakin’ French here and asseptin’ CFA. Cedis gettin’ me nothin’ ‘cept Ghana side.’

‘Is it cheaper Ghana side?’

‘Oh, no, please sir. Ghana girls are very demandin'.’

‘These girls sucking you dry, Moses. This rate you never afford yourself a wife, you owing me too much money.’

Moses took the money with his right hand, his left holding the wrist, his head bowed. ‘Thanks for your concern,’ he said.

He slipped past me out of the door and I called him back.

‘I go-come,’ he said.

The girl was leaning against the hired Peugeot with a pair of strong arms folded. She saw Moses and stood. Her breasts were high, almost on her shoulders, and the white nylon blouse, with its frilly trim at the shoulders and neck, looked incongruous against the developed shoulders and biceps. She rolled Moses’s money in the top of her wrap. Moses was talking fast. She ignored him and pushed off the Peugeot with her rock-hard bottom, and moved off into the trees.

‘Strong girl,’ I said to Moses, who had returned with the body language of someone now completely at my service.

‘Not jes’ inne arms, Mr Bruce,’ he said, and snapped a finger as if he’d just picked up something hot.

Moses cleaned and dressed my wound after I’d showered. We stripped the black tape off the number plates and packed our things into the car. I had an argument with the landlady who’d heard I was moving to the Novotel which made her push for a full week’s rent. She had a baby girl on her back, who looked around her mother’s hips at the action, occasionally stretching out a small hand at the money in mine as if she understood the game and couldn’t wait to get started. We left at 9.30 a.m., the woman lobbing insults at us while the baby, who’d taken a fat elbow in the cheek, cried.

We found a garage in Zone 4C which could repair the hire car’s window. Two young and violent-looking boys wearing sawn-off corduroys and sandals made out of old tyres were slapped away from the car by a more cultured-looking fellow in a white coat who removed the panel from the door. Moses, who’d seen a crowd gathering across the street, pulled me over the road.

We went into a walled compound of a two-storey concrete office block. The sun, already high, was hot and the surface of the red earth in the compound was drying into crushed chillies. Steam hugged the surfaces of large crimson puddles. In a clearing amongst the crowd stood a group of dejected Africans and a large Lebanese in a white robe which was stained red at the bottom. A grey-haired African in a white shirt and lime-green trousers stood next to him. The local witch doctor, they said.

The witch doctor had come to find out who was thieving money from the Lebanese. He told the first man to kneel and, detaching a bag from his belt, poured a mound of sand in front of the kneeling man who leaned forward over it. He looped a cotton noose over the man’s head and poked the loose hanging strand into the mound of sand. He asked him in his own language if he had stolen the money and the man with quivering thighs said that he hadn’t. There was a pause. Nothing happened. The noose was removed and the man joined the crowd.

The witch doctor repeated the ritual with the others who all passed. The Lebanese was perplexed until somebody suggested the accountant and he perked up. The cry went up and a moment later the small, fine-featured accountant came down the steps of the office building weighed down by his own dignity and an array of pens and a wafer of a calculator in the breast pocket of his shirt. The crowd instantly disliked him.

He refused to submit to the black magic and was rewarded with a low grunt from the crowd. The Lebanese told him there would be no job for him unless he did. The accountant knelt before the mound of sand. The crowd thickened. The witch doctor looped the thread over the man’s head and asked him the question. The denial was on the way out of the man’s throat when it was strangled by the cotton noose which seemed to have been pulled taut by an unseen hand. It bit into his neck, jerked his head down, popped his eyes and forced his tongue out till the stalk showed at his teeth. The crowd surged and the accountant erupted above their heads flailing, the pens and the calculator already gone from his breast pocket, his shirt torn open and his trousers already down his thighs. Moses pushed me out of the compound.

‘They go beat him now,’ he said.

It was midday by the time I’d returned the car and checked into the Novotel whose main entrance backed on to the busy Avenue Général de Gaulle, where you could buy hi-fi, hardware and haberdashery during the day but only whores at night. I sent Moses out to buy a blank VHS tape which, after the car expenses, took me down to the last few thousand CFA I had.

Martin Fall had booked me into room 205 on the second floor which the management changed to 307 on the third because an agronomist convention had taken the whole of the second. I asked at reception if they had any private video viewing and recording facilities and the girl said she would set something up for me. I took my bags up to the room and called B.B.; he wasn’t there. I left a message with his maid that I was in the Novotel.

I came back down with Fat Paul’s package. Moses appeared with the blank tape. I told him to get lost for half an hour. I was taken to a small conference room where a TV and two VCRs had been set up next to a whiteboard and an overhead projector. I broke the seal on the envelope and slotted the original and blank tape into the two machines and played and recorded at the same time.

There was some snow and then the film’s title appeared and, in case you couldn’t read, a lazy, Afro-American dude’s voice told you what it was: ‘Once you tasted chocolate…’ and I realized that this wasn’t the film that the Métis was expecting to have to kill for. I watched it all the same, in case Fat Paul’s ‘business secret’ was thrown in there somewhere. It was a tawdry tale, shot on a low-budget set, of a white, heavily wigged and made-up housewife who, having waved her husband goodbye, is immediately visited by two large black plumbers with tool boxes and wrenches for verisimilitude. The three of them went into the kitchen which shook when the door closed. The woman knelt down to show the plumbers what was going on under the sink and the sorry state of her underwear. At this point there should have been something flashing on the screen for the benefit of all plumbers and would-be plumbers like, ‘This only happens in porn'. In an indecently short time the woman’s skirt was up around her waist and there were two implausibly hung plumbers in front of and behind her. It went on like that. There were a few close-ups of nearly surgical detail and plenty of the rear plumber’s view, who ground into the girl’s bottom with sickening thrusts, which shuddered a butterfly tattoo she had at the top of the cleft. After a few changes of position and what seemed like half a day but was only fifteen minutes it was all over and they left, that’s right, without doing the plumbing job. She didn’t seem to mind which is where the suspension of disbelief really broke down badly. You’d have thought after that they’d have done the work for free. Then the girl was on a sofa and hubby came home and he was straight from the office and dead keen but she wasn’t having any of it and the punchline came up delivered for the non-readers in the same voice: ‘…you can’t never go back to vanilla.’ The double negative giving some cohesion to the film. Then there was more snow which I stopped after a few minutes.

The tapes rewound, I boxed them and I went back up to reception to find Moses sitting in the lobby looking hang-dog at his flip-flopped feet.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘I pissing glass, please, Mr Bruce,’ he said a little too loudly for a hotel lobby. We watched the pink newspaper that had been sitting next to Moses close and fold and a businessman took his full head of side-parted hair elsewhere. I sat in his place. Moses shrugged and played with his fingers.

‘What about the condoms I gave you?’

‘They finish.’

‘They finish?’

‘Yes please.’

‘No, you finish when they finish. When they finish you stop.’

‘I don’ understand.’

‘When you no have condom, you stop, you no stop you go get AIDS.’

‘I try,’ he said, showing me a pair of clean palms. ‘They no let me.’

‘I can tell you really protested,’ I said, and told him to get the car.

I went up to my room and split open Fat Paul’s cassette. There was nothing inside it except tape. I stuffed it back inside the envelope with its broken seal. I dropped the copy into reception and kept the original with me. Moses was waiting outside.

We drove around the Baie de Cocody past St Paul’s Cathedral and into the residential suburb of Cocody itself. I left Moses at the Polyclinique and gave him the last of my money.

‘This no catch for nothin', Mr Bruce, please sir.’

‘It’ll have to catch because that’s all I’ve got.’

‘You go-come?’

‘I go-come.’

‘ ‘Cause if the money no catch ibbe big plobrem. They callin’ police and things.’

‘Nobody’ll touch you, Moses, when they know what you got.’

I arrived in Grand Bassam centre ville just after 1.00 p.m. and turned right past a somnolent gore routière and headed out across the lagoon to the Quartier France. This used to be the main trading centre and port of the Ivory Coast until yellow fever hit the town at the end of the last century. The French moved out and opened up the Vridi canal in 1950 which made Abidjan the country’s port. The old trading houses still existed, most of them broken down and crumbling like any African economy you’d care to look at. It was in one of these that I was due to meet Fat Paul. I saw the Cadillac parked outside a building which fronted on to the lagoon. It had a large hole in the wall and a drift of rubble down to street level. I turned left 100 metres in front of the Cadillac and parked up on the other side of the building from it.

I walked up some steps through a cracked and splintered wooden door into a cool dark room whose plaster lay shattered on the floor. There was a short passage from the room into a large and warmer warehouse, still with most of its roof on. At the far end, by the hole, was Fat Paul wearing a short-sleeve shirt of cobalt blue with red palm trees on it. He was sitting on a packing case with Kwabena next to him, up on an oil drum, his trousers tight across his thighs, bare ankles showing, his feet just off the ground. George was leaning against the wall by the hole, looking out over the lagoon and fingering his tie.

The warehouse had a wooden pillared corridor three metres wide. The pillars supported a mezzanine whose floor had been ravaged by a type of beetle that did for wood what the pox did for a port whore’s face. Through the opiate quiet of the early-afternoon heat came the ticking sound of small jaws undermining the structure and powdering the air with dust motes which hung, dazed, in the shafts of light coming through the roof where the tiles had shifted or broken.

Kwabena pushed himself off the oil drum, picked up a strip of packing-case wood with a nail in the end and went over to where George was standing by the hole in the wall. He tried to push the nail out with his fingers and failed, so swung it against the wall where it made a sharp crack like a festive squib. The thin man inside Fat Paul jumped about a foot, and nearly got away, but his elephant-seal body caught him and set off a crescendo tremble which he quelled manually.

George’s sunglassed head turned under beta-blocker control. A gun came from under his jacket in the armpit. He swept the room and put the gun back in his armpit again and turned to look out across the lagoon, thinking he was the Ice Man in some sharp, smart, budget thriller. Fat Paul said something rapid and savage in Tui and restuck a slick of hair that had fallen loose.

‘Fuckin’ man,’ he said for my benefit. ‘I send you back to the forest…you fuckin’ person!’ he yelled over his shoulder.

‘Nervous?’ I asked.

‘No,’ he said loudly, then calm again: ‘What you got for me?’

‘I’m surprised you’re here.’

‘Why?’

George’s right hand was down by his side, the fingertips tapping the outside of his thigh. Kwabena dropped the strip of wood. Fat Paul held his cheek and chewed the end of his little finger.

‘Remember what we talked about on the beach?’

‘We said lot of things.’

‘Snags. Remember that?’

‘Fuckin’ snags,’ said Fat Paul bitterly, so that I nearly laughed. ‘Tell me.’

‘Maybe you know already.’

‘Tell me anyway.’

I was standing in a shaft of light, the sun hot on my head and a shoulder. I moved towards a pillar. Kwabena moved opposite me four or five yards off, his smell strong in the heat.

‘I checked the drop point in the afternoon,’ I said. ‘Someone was watching. I thought it might be the guy who was going to give me the money, thought he might be checking to see if I was white and reliable. I went after him and got close enough to see he was in a dark saloon. When I went back to make the drop at eight-thirty the other car was there, but not a saloon – a Toyota Land Cruiser. The white guy was in the driver’s seat but there was an African sitting next to him. The white man was taking a long nap with a piece of wire around his neck, tied to the head rest. The African had things to say, but with a torch and a gun. That’s what I mean by snags. Big snags. Big snags you didn’t tell me about.’

‘You’re here,’ he said, as if I was making a big fuss.

‘And I wouldn’t mind knowing what’s going on.’

‘Sure you would. Were you followed?’

‘I didn’t look.’

Fat Paul fluttered his fingers and George disappeared out of the hole and Kwabena set off past me down the pillared corridor.

‘Why’d you make the drop out there, Fat Paul?’

‘That’s the way he wanted it.’

‘Like hell he did.’

‘You just in it for the money, what do you know?’

‘My mistake.’

‘You too hungry. No chop enough.’

‘So why didn’t we do it at a petrol station, or a bar outside Abidjan? Why did we go out there in the boondocks?’

‘Boondocks, snags, you teachin’ me things I don’t know. Is good,’ he said, patting his molten-tar hair. ‘But you aksin’ too many questions, my likin'. What you wan’ know everything for? You the paid help.’

George pulled himself back through the hole in the wall, slipping on the rubble outside. He held up a hand, the lump in his armpit visible. I took out the package and shook the cassette out into my hand and threw it on the floor towards Fat Paul. Kwabena came from behind me and picked it up.

‘Not what I’d call an “important film”.’

‘You learnin’ fast,’ said Fat Paul, now standing and giggling. ‘You enjoy the show? They big boys, huh? Mekkin’ you white boys feel small?’

‘So now you know the competition’s out there,’ I said. ‘One man dead, nearly two. The real thing must be important.’

‘You still wan’make some money?’

‘I made that mistake already.’

‘No, you right. This corruption thing with money too bad. You do it for free this time. Is better for you.’

‘You know how to annoy people, Fat Paul.’

‘People been annoyin’ me all my life,’ he said, quick and loud. ‘White people tellin’ me I’m fat. Tellin’ me that all the time, like I don’t remember. So I call myself Fat Paul jes’ so they know, I know.’

‘I’ll be leaving now and I won’t be seeing you.’

‘You staying right where you are and doin’ what you told,’ he said.

‘Is that right?’

‘You got no option.’

‘Don’t order me around, Fat Paul, and don’t make threats. That way we might stay friends the last thirty seconds I know you.’

I walked back down the pillared corridor until I heard a noise like a golf ball being hit into a mattress and a piece of wooden beam in between two pillars disappeared in a burst of powder. I stopped and turned to see George with his gun in his right hand and the suppressor he’d attached resting in his left palm.

‘You involved now, Bruce Medway,’ said Fat Paul, smiling. George slapped the heavy suppressor on his palm. Kwabena put his hand down his trousers and straightened himself out.

‘For the moment,’ I said.

‘To the finish,’ said Fat Paul, shaking his head. ‘The only stupid thing you doin’ is lookin’ too much the money. Mebbe I give you no money you do it right.’

‘I lose interest when I work for free.’

‘I tell you something might help you,’ he said, beckoning me with a flap of his hand. I walked over to him. He took a package off the oil drum where Kwabena had been sitting, identical to the one I’d had, and tapped it on his thumbnail. ‘You a clever man, Bruce. It make sense not to use your car. Hirin’ the Peugeot was good thinkin', and changin’ the numbers a good idea, tekkin’ out the light a better idea…’

‘The policeman?’

‘And the bartender.’ He nodded. ‘You drink three beers. Leave eight-fifteen. They find a Land Cruiser with a dead man down by the lagoon this mornin'. Tyre marks clear in the mud after the rain. They doin’ autopsy findin’ time of death, should be eight/eight-thirty. This lookin’ dicey for you, they find you were there. You understandin’ you involvement now?’

‘It’s coming to me.’

He held the package over his shoulder and Kwabena took it and handed it on to me.

‘Another film?’

‘You no need to know nothin’ this time.’

‘Who’s it for?’ I asked, looking at the blank envelope. ‘There’s no Kantari this time.’

‘Mebbe we findin’ there’s other people in the market.’

‘So where’s the drop?’

‘We call you.’

‘I’m in the Novotel. I’ve got another job starting tonight.’

‘That’s nice. You gettin’ popular. This thing all over before nine tonight.’

‘What time are you going to call?’

“Tween five and six. ‘safternoon.’

‘And if you don’t call?’

‘I’m only half African.’

‘And the other half?’

‘American,’ he said, stroking his neck. ‘My fadder like them white girls. You know them aid workers. He fuck one, she havin’ me then leavin’ me with my fadder when she go back to the States. They don’t like white girls comin’ back home with little black piccaninny under they arms.’

‘You staying out here in Grand Bassam?’

He thought about that for a moment, shook a hanky out and polished his face round and round getting slower.

‘We in the Hotel La Croisette on the front.’

‘You don’t like Abidjan?’

‘They nervous in Abidjan. I like keepin’ calm.’

‘You mean you don’t want to get seen, a man your size in that shirt.’

‘Time for lunch,’ he said, looking at his watch. ‘We no chop yet…you?’

I shook my head. He turned and walked to the hole in the wall with surprising speed, Kwabena just in front of him. He took the big man’s arm to support himself going down the rubble pile.

‘Bon appétit,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘We call you.’ No need to bother about me now. No need to buy me lunch. No need to work on me any more. Someone calls you a clever man, it’s always because he’s cleverer.

From the hole in the wall I watched George swing open the Cadillac’s heavy door and get into the driver’s seat. Kwabena opened the back door. Fat Paul sat on the edge of the seat while Kwabena stirruped his hands. Fat Paul put his foot in them and pushed himself across the back seat into some cushions arranged against the other door. George waited with his hand on the ignition until Kwabena was sitting next to him. The engine roared and then bubbled. The car moved off.

The flat blue-grey lagoon lay stagnant in the afternoon heat. There were no boats out. Two men lay under some palmleaf thatch down by the water, sleeping. A car started, off in the buildings behind me somewhere, and I leaned against the broken wall and thought about how neatly I’d been stitched.

I replayed Fat Paul buying me lunch, opening the package, showing me the contents, resealing it, being open, frank, talking me through it, gaining my trust, letting me think he was a bit of an idiot, letting me bargain him up for a payoff he was never going to have to make. He’d got himself into an all-win situation. If I’d been killed he’d have known he had a problem. I didn’t get killed, he still knew he had a problem and he could use me to clear it up. Saved himself some money, too.

Chapter 6

I picked up Moses at the Polyclinique. He’d lost his hang-dog look and was waving his prescription at me as if it was a winning lottery ticket.

‘No money,’ I said, and his face crashed.

‘I still pissing glass, Mr Bruce.’

‘I’m sure you are. Don’t drink anything,’ I said. ‘We might get some money this afternoon. Mebbe you shouldn’t have given the girl the two thousand she giving you trouble down there.’

‘Two thousand CFA don’t catch for this thing,’ he said, shaking the paper, ‘and I don’t know she giving me trouble down there. I know, mebbe I beat her doing this thing.’

‘She looked as if she could give you a beating, you ask me.’

‘Mebbe you right, Mr Bruce. She stroooong woman.’

We parked up in the Novotel garage. Moses gave me his prescription and I told him to come and see me first thing in the morning. I asked reception to put Fat Paul’s new sealed package in the hotel safe and went up to my room, double-locked the door and flaked out on the bed. I dreamt, no doubt something meaningful which would catch up with me later, and just as an unanswered ringing had begun to annoy me, I woke up with the phone on the other side of the bed, insisting. Somebody had filled my mouth with those things the dentist puts in to soak up the goo, but it didn’t matter because it was B.B. on the line and he was speaking through a mouthful of four bananas.

‘You tek your time,’ he said.

‘I was sleeping.’

‘It three in de afternoon.’

‘All this leisure tires me out.’

‘I see…’ he said, swallowing something that must have been the size and furriness of a tennis ball because it took him several goes and left him out of breath. ‘Ra-ra-ra-ra Mary!’ he stammered at a roar to the maid and I heard the slip, slap, slop of her arrival at his side. ‘Drink,’ he said. He put the receiver on his stomach and I heard some subterranean noises that would have made a potholer rush for the surface.

‘What you doing in the Novotel?’

‘I’m staying here.’

‘For your own accoun'?’

‘Unless you want to pay?’ I said, hearing that line fizz through his brain.

‘I not payin’ for dat!’ he roared. ‘Gah! You tinking for one…’

‘B.B., calm down. I’m paying.’

‘Mebbe you pay me de monny you owe me ‘fore you go stayin’ in de Novotel.’

‘You’ll get it, and when you do I’m up to my daily rate, remember.’