The Big Killing

‘Bloddy daily rate! Bloddy ting! You teef man wid your daily rate!’

‘What do you want, B.B.?’ I asked, measuring out the syllables. B.B. bubbled some more, chewed over his anger and spat it out like gristle.

‘First ting,’ he belched. ‘You go, you go tomorrow. Kurt, he gone. He not dere. I don’ know where he gone. De wife, she say he still dere. I aks to spik to him. She say he always out. You go, you find de problem. You still haf de Kurt passport detail?’ he asked, knowing I still had it from the last time he’d asked me. He coughed a quantity of phlegm into his mouth and I felt him search for his hanky. ‘Second ting,’ he said, spitting the oyster, ‘you go to Danish Embassy?’

‘Not yet.’

‘What you doin’ all day?’

‘I’ve got a tight schedule.’

‘Mebbe you try wokking in de day like rest of us. Sleep at night, you know.’

‘I’ll make a note of that.’

‘You go to Danish Embassy this afternoon; this Kurt man a criminal, I know it. T’ird ting, de Japanese, dey come.’

‘Which Japanese?’

‘De company dat buy de sheanut. Dey have de croshing plant in Japan.’

‘I know, but what are their names?’

‘My God, dis difficult ting. Har-ra-ra-ra-ra…’

‘Was that one or both of them?’

‘No, de udder one is, Ka-ka-ka-ka-ka…’

‘Fax me.’

‘You tinking correck.’

‘What about money?’

‘Wait de monny!’ he shouted, irritated. ‘De Japanese…you show dem round, show dem de operascharn, you give dem good time, tek plenty whisky. Kurt wife, she help make some food tings an’ such. OK?’

‘Fine. The money for this?’

‘You always aksing de monny!’

‘I haven’t got any and it often slips your mind.’

‘Is there anything left in Korhogo?’

‘No. All gone. You find de books and tell me where it gone. OK. You better horry or de bank it shut,’ he finished, the phone clattering into its cradle.

I called the Danish Embassy and made an appointment to see a vice-consul called Leif Andersen at 4.00 p.m. The sky had clouded over by the time I left the hotel at 3.15 and looked ready for rain. I took a taxi to the bank in the Alpha 2000 building and told the car to wait while I withdrew both B.B. and Martin Fall’s money. I put it in a plastic carrier bag from Le Coq Sportif that I’d brought with me. The taxi was gone when I came out, which was a small worry. I didn’t want to dally too long in the street with a bag holding nearly 3 million CFA – $12,000 doesn’t look much like a pair of running shoes.

Up the street a rangy kid of about twenty, in a sweatshirt with a big number thirty-two on it, strolled out of a shop doorway with his hands in his baggy jeans pockets. He had his hair razored up over the ears and cut flat top. Across the street another punk looked over the roof of a car, wearing a baseball cap the wrong way round and a black T-shirt with something white on it. These kids had been watching movies, I thought, and turned to walk down the hill. Two boys walked out of a garage in front of me, one lifting his T-shirt to get some air up there and to show me what he had in the waistband of his jeans, the other with an ear missing. These two were shabbier, old jeans cut tight, faded T-shirts. The one with two ears had Mr Smile on the front without the smile, both with no shoes. I turned back and the other kid was standing by the door to the bank, his friend starting to cross the road now. The taxi rounded the block and started cruising down the hill in no hurry. I walked up the hill towards it, the kid outside the bank with his hands out of his pockets now, wiping them on his shirt front, nervous, like me. I ran at him. His eyes widened, looking for his friends. I could hear a pair of trainers and the slap of bare feet on the pavement. I kicked the kid outside the bank hard on the inside of his left knee and he went down so fast on to the concrete slabs of the pavement that his head hit the ground first. I turned, the taxi coming in front of me now, the kid from across the road in between the parked cars and the one with both ears between the taxi and me, a flash of silver in his hand. The driver, still coasting, opened the passenger door and hit the kid on the point of the elbow. The kid went down and the knife span across the pavement. I got in the taxi, the other two boys backing off.

I told the driver that when a man goes into a bank and tells the taxi to wait it wasn’t just out of a feeling of importance. He said he knew that but the traffic police didn’t give a damn. Then he thought about it and said he reckoned they were on the take. They were always there for a parking fine and nowhere near a bag snatch. I told him it was the same the world over.

We drove around the block. I pointed him down Avenue Chardy and into a car park at the back of some buildings. I went into a travel agent called PanAfricAbidjan and found a Swiss guy in there who spoke seven languages, one of which was mine. I asked him if he could make 75,000 CFA available in a travel agent called Bénin-Bénin in the quartier Zongo in Cotonou. He made a phone call and said he could. I gave him the money from my Coq Sportif bag.

At the Novotel reception I took some more money out of the bag and asked them to put the rest of it in the hotel safe. I went into a chemist and picked up Moses’s prescription and bought a large supply of condoms for him which they were decent enough to wrap. It was a short walk from the chemist’s to the Danish Embassy and I was shown straight into the vice-consul’s office with its windswept off-white carpeting that looked like snow on its way to sludge.

Leif Andersen was a short, powerful, mid-thirties guy with a friendly brown moustache and a face that had enjoyed a few too many drinks, as it was puffy with vein maps leading nowhere on his cheeks. He was wearing a sports jacket, a white shirt, and some kind of club tie with wine glasses and bottles all over a burgundy background. He sat with his fingers dovetailed across a bit of a belly beneath a painting of some bleak North Sea-whipped Danish coastline which made me grit my teeth in the overstrong air conditioning.

‘How can I help you?’ he asked.

‘Got a visitor’s jacket?’

‘Sorry,’ he said, opening his hands. ‘The AC’s stuck.’

‘At minus five?’

‘Plus sixteen, zero humidity.’

‘Any chance of something to drink?’

‘Tea?’ he asked, and I shook my head.

‘I’m looking for a guy called Kurt Nielsen.’

‘The one running a sheanut operation in Korhogo?’

‘You know your nationals pretty well.’

‘What’s your interest?’

‘My client’s a Syrian businessman in Accra. He owns the sheanut operation.’

‘Kurt Nielsen’s wife was looking for him, too.’

‘Was?’

She called a couple of weeks ago. We asked for passport details and photographs and she called two days later and said he’d reappeared.’

You weren’t curious?’

‘Not really. Men take time off from their wives. They spend a lot of time together in these isolated places.’

‘So the men go off without telling their wives where they’re going?’

‘We don’t do marriage guidance here.’

‘So you didn’t do anything about it then?’

He shook his head. ‘One, he reappeared. Two, there are a lot of Nielsens in Denmark, and Petersens and Andersens. We all have the same names. We need more than “Nielsen” to help us find him.’

I held out the photocopy of the passport details which B.B. had given me and he looked at them for a few seconds and left the room. I did some running on the spot to keep the circulation going and looked around Leif’s minimalist office for a drinks cabinet with something warming in it. Ten minutes later he came back with a computer print-out and a pair of black-framed glasses on his nose.

‘I’d like to find Kurt Nielsen as well,’ he said.

‘He’s on the run?’

‘No, he’s dead.’

The Kurt Nielsen who’d owned the passport was born in Alborg in 1954. He left school when he was sixteen and started work on the fishing boats, Danish and later British. He served two short stretches for robbery, the first in ‘70, the second in ‘74. After the second term he started working on British ships and spending shoretime in England. He seemed to have developed a taste for young girls and served three years for sexual assault on a twelve-year-old in Middlesbrough. He got out in ‘85. He died a year later in Nottingham. He had been a lodger with the Cochrane family. Mr Cochrane came back early from his job as a scaffolder after a fall and found Kurt Nielsen having sex with his thirteen-year-old daughter over the sink in the kitchen. Cochrane hit him over the head with a full bottle of cider which had been on the kitchen table and stuck the broken end in his neck. Kurt Nielsen died 3rd June, 1986.

‘What are you going to do about it?’

Leif Andersen sat on the edge of his desk with the print-out resting on his thigh and said nothing for several minutes.

‘I don’t want to rush you, Mr Andersen, but it’s bloody cold in here and I don’t want to be the first man five degrees off the equator to get hypothermia.’

‘Do you drink, Mr Medway?’

‘Not tea, for Christ’s sake.’

‘Aquavit?’

‘Now I’m with you.’

He locked the door of the office and produced a bottle and two glasses from his bottom drawer.

‘Not what you British would call consular behaviour, but we are in Africa.’

‘How do you think the Falklands War got started?’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Consular behaviour,’ I said. ‘Skol.’

We banged back a slug apiece and he refilled the glasses. He banged that one back too, catching me on the hop so that he had to wait to fill up for thirds. He nodded and we threw the third one down, and I felt a moment’s abandon and thought it might be throwing-glasses-in-the-fireplace time. He put away the bottle and glasses and unlocked the door. He sat back down, gritted his teeth, tensed his biceps and hissed out the pent-up air in his lungs.

‘Good. Where were we?’

‘What are you going to do about the Nielsens?’

‘The Nielsens? Right. Yes, of course. You know,’ he started and got out from behind his desk and walked over to the window and looked out on to a dull, grey Avenue Noguès, ‘sometimes I look out of the window in the rainy season. The sky is grey. I can hear the wind off the sea around the building, the rain on the window. It’s cold in here, as you know. I have a couple of glasses of Aquavit and I think I’m back in Skagen, you know it? Right on the northern tip of Denmark. Terrible place, but I like it around there.’ He paused, letting the Aquavit shunt around his system, letting it take the edge off his cares. He swallowed something the size of a crab apple, as if he was trying to keep his longing down, and took his glasses off.

‘You know what I think?’ He turned to me. ‘Mrs Nielsen didn’t call herself Mrs Nielsen, she referred to Kurt Nielsen as her husband but she called herself Dotte Wamberg, she’ – he ran both hands through his hair – ‘she couldn’t find her husband, she called me, I asked for her husband’s details, she said she’d have to find them and send them on. Then she must have started thinking and realized that she was going to have some problems if she did that, so she had her husband reappear. How’s that?’

‘You’ve done some conclusion-leaping, Mr Andersen.’

‘Only since you came in asking about him and we’ve found that he’s on a dead man’s stolen passport.’

‘OK, I’ll buy it. What’re you going to do about it?’

‘I’ve a lot…’ He looked at his watch. ‘The ambassador’s coming back from Lagos, the agronomists, back to…’

‘Nothing, then?’

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘Will a fourth Aquavit get us through this hazy patch we’re in at the moment?’

Leif locked the door, and took the bottle and glasses out of the drawer again. We had a fourth and a fifth before he put the bottle away, but it didn’t make him any more expansive on what he had in mind. He slapped and kicked his desk around a bit and rolled himself back and forwards on his castored chair and laughed about things in his head without involving me, but he avoided definitive action on Kurt Nielsen and Dotte Wamberg.

Somebody knocked on the door and the vice-consul sat up and asked whoever it was to come in. The door was still locked and he said ‘shit’ under his fiery breath and took off out of his chair, which backed off into the far corner of the room so that he was in two minds as to whether to open the door or go after the chair. He unlocked the door. A woman with straight blonde hair, a light-blue dress and folders held to her bosom, came in. She looked from Andersen to me and then at the chair, which in my vision seemed a long way off. She wore a pair of blue steel-rimmed spectacles whose lenses were the size of throat lozenges. She put the files on the desk and left without turning to see Leif bowing with a flourish from his right hand, which would have given the game away if the alembic fumes hadn’t already. He shut the door, breathless.

‘She’s very attractive, isn’t she?’

‘Is she new?’

Leif didn’t have to answer and he didn’t have to tell me why he didn’t want to go up to Korhogo and find out what had happened to Kurt Nielsen, who was going to be some lowlife, probably an escaped convict. What did he care about all that? He said he’d fax the passport through to the Danish police authorities and get an ID on who Kurt Nielsen really was and ask them if they wanted any action taken. I said I’d appreciate it if he could give me the dirt on Kurt Nielsen and he gave me his card and said to call him in a couple of days.

Chapter 7

By ten to five I was back in the Novotel sitting on one of the twin beds in room 307 nearest the window. The high-stacked, bruised clouds of the storm building over Ghana were moving towards me. It would be raining by nightfall. I thought about going out in that storm and doing something for nothing for Fat Paul and that drew me to the secrets of the mini-bar, which I opened but only checked. I needed to be steady for what Fat Paul might have in mind.

I stared at the carpet, waiting for the phone, and had one of those existential lurches when I saw myself – a big man, getting drunk to hold himself together on a small bed in a hotel room in Africa, fresh from a meeting with another drunken bum and about to do something criminal for a vindictive slob. For a moment, I seemed to be on the brink of an explanation for the mystery and absurdity of my situation. Then the god controlling those moments of insight decided I’d be better off without the self-knowledge. A fluorescent light started flickering, pitched at an epileptic-fit-inducing frequency. I turned it off and lay down, relieved that I didn’t have to run down to the bar and tell all the other people deadening themselves to reality that I’d cracked it and we could all relax.

I woke up with the rain on the window and it dark outside and in the room. It was just before six o’clock. I phoned reception – no calls. I made sure they knew I was in 307, having moved me from 205 – still no calls. I took a bottle of mineral water out of the mini-bar and sat in the white light from the chamber and drank it until my teeth hurt. I kicked the door shut and lay back down on the bed in the dark, light coming in under the door.

I was missing something which wasn’t home but felt like it ten times over. Hotel rooms did this to me. I thought of individuals sitting in concrete boxes stacked on top of each other and the human condition got lonelier. I’d fallen for two women before Heike, one of them was now married to Martin Fall. I’ve been disappointed just as much as anybody closing in on forty has. I’d always bounced back, though. It might take a few months of rolling into the cold side of the bed before I’d get used to sleeping in the middle again, but I could always get used to being on my own. This time I wasn’t bouncing back, I was slipping further down the black hole. I was missing Heike more than an amputee missed a leg and people could see it, smell it, and feel it.

Some footage came into my head, black-and-white stuff, a little quick and faltering like an old home movie. Heike was sitting on the floor of my living room in my house in Cotonou, Benin. She wore her big white dress, her legs were crossed and covered by the dress, her long bare arms rested on her knees. She had a cigarette going in one of her large, almost manly, hands and in the other she held a glass with her little finger sticking out. Her hair, as usual, was pinned up any old how so that every loose strand said: ‘kiss this nape'. She sat there and occupied herself smoking and drinking and not saying anything and her completeness brought on a terrible ache, and I shut the film down and drifted off into a lumpy sleep.

I woke up and looked around the darkness in the room, thinking there was a bat flying around expertly missing walls and furniture. I turned on the neon and it blasted the room with light and dark until I’d fumbled around for the light switch by the door. It was 6.30 p.m. The rain still gusted against the window outside and thunder rumbled off in a corner somewhere. The phone went and I tore it off its cradle.

‘I thought you said you weren’t all African…’

‘…This is Leif Andersen, Mr Medway.’

‘Sorry, I was expecting somebody else. Have you got anything for me?’

There was a long crash, one that went on for fifteen, twenty seconds, of falling crockery followed by a roar of approval from down the phone.

‘Are you eating Greek tonight?’ I asked.

‘I’m in a place called Maison des Anciens Combatants in Plateau.’

‘War Heroes in Plate Crash.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Nothing, Mr Andersen. You called. Did the Danish police come through with an ID?’

‘Not yet. The Ivorian police came through with something. They’ve found our Kurt Nielsen down by the Ebrié lagoon about eighty kilometres outside Abidjan. In the pineapple plantations off the road down to Tiegba.’

‘They found him, what, walking around, taking a leak, out of his head…?’

‘Dead, Mr Medway. Strangled with a wire garrotte.’

‘Was he a floater?’

‘I’m not sure…’

‘Was he in the lagoon?’

‘No, he was in a Toyota Land Cruiser.’

‘His own?’

‘It belonged to M. Kantari in Korhogo. He reported it stolen this morning. The report made its way down through Bouaké and Yamoussoukro to Abidjan by this afternoon.’

‘Have you seen the body?’

‘No.’

‘How do they know it’s Nielsen?’

‘He had his passport on him. That’s why they called us.’

‘Did they find anything else?’

‘No, but if they did and it was valuable we wouldn’t hear about it.’

‘Well, Mr Andersen, thanks for your help…’

‘One thing more, Mr Medway. We need positive identification of the body.’

‘I never knew him.’

‘No, but Mrs Nielsen, or Dotte Wamberg, did and we have been unable to contact her.’

‘You want a phone number?’

‘We have one, but first of all there’s no answer and second, these things are better done in person.’

‘What about someone from the Danish Embassy?’

‘There’s no one available. We’ve informed the local police, but they cannot be relied on.’

‘I can’t guarantee I’ll get there tomorrow. You know how things are.’

‘He’s in the hospital morgue. He’s not going anywhere.’

‘Well, I won’t put it like that to Dotte Wamberg.’

‘You’re a sensitive man, Mr Medway, I can tell.’

‘How?’

‘Anybody who drinks Aquavit in the afternoon understands.’

‘I thought it was because I was a drunk.’

‘What does that make me, Mr Medway?’

‘You get diplomatic immunity.’

Andersen laughed. ‘Another thing for you that you should keep to yourself. Kurt Nielsen’s stomach had been ripped open by a set of metal leopard claws. I think they found someone called James Wilson in the lagoon here in Abidjan the other day. He had the same problem. Cheers,’ he said, and put down the phone.

I phoned reception again – still no calls, but there was a fax from Ghana. Then I remembered Bagado and put a call through to Cotonou. The phone rang and rang for minutes until a dull, thick voice answered.

‘Bagado?’

‘Yes.’

‘You all right?’

‘I’ve some fever. A little malaria. I was sleeping.’

‘Do you want some work?’

‘What sort of work?’

‘Picking bananas,’ I said, and he thought about it for ten seconds.

‘Forget it,’ he said.

‘Detective work, Bagado. What the hell else would I call you for?’

‘Picking bananas – I don’t know. I’m nearly that desperate. My little girl is sick and I have nothing. I open the cupboard, and the cupboard is bare…not even any shelves…my wife has used them for firewood.’

‘Go to a travel agent called Bénin-Bénin in the quartier Zongo; you know it. They have some money for you. Seventy-five thousand CFA. Give some to your wife and use the rest to get yourself to Accra. I want you to check out someone who calls himself Fat Paul who works out of an office in Adabraka called Abracadabra Video on Kojo Thompson Road. He has two bodyguards who call themselves George and Kwabena. The first one is a shooter, the second is just very big. He says he runs a video business, you know, a chain of video cinemas. See what you can find out about him. Then come to the Novotel in Abidjan as fast as you can. OK?’

‘What’s the hurry?’

I told Bagado about the failed drop, Martin Fall’s job and the James Wilson/Kurt Nielsen killings and we signed off.

I put a call through to the Hotel La Croisette and the receptionist there answered in a thick, tired voice which came from a head that must have been asleep on the counter. She told me that Fat Paul and Co were in 208 and tried to call them – no answer. Then she started waking up a bit and told me the key to the room was in reception, which meant they must be out. I asked her to check the bar and restaurant. They weren’t there. I asked her if there was a large American car parked outside the hotel and she said that was the only car parked outside the hotel. They were the only guests. The hotel didn’t fill up except at the weekends. The phone went dead. I asked reception to reconnect me. They tried, but the woman said the phones were down with the storm. I left a message that if a Mr Paul called, to tell him I was going to meet him in the Hotel La Croisette in Grand Bassam. I said he might call himself Mr Fat Paul, I didn’t know, and I heard her writing it all down. I told her if anybody else called not to give them that message and took the lift straight down to the basement.

There seemed to be several storms around taking their turn coming in. Thunder boomed off in the north and the sky lit up in the east over Grand Bassam. When I came out of the Novotel it was raining, but not as hard as it had done judging by the slow trickle in the road gutters and the huge bodies of water that had collected at the bottom of the steep streets of Plateau. The storm drains were choked and cars were cruising with water up to their sills.

I crossed the lagoon. The lights were out in Treichville, Marcory, Zone 4A and C, Koumassi, Biétri and Port Bouë. Just after the airport I had to pull over and let the storm through, the rain a solid wall at the end of the car, the wipers out of their depth even at that crazy double speed when you stop looking at the road and marvel at the insanity. The rain blasted full heavy metal on the roof for minutes, then backed off to light instrumental. I set off on full beam, down the black glass road to Grand Bassam.

There were no lights on there either. People were moving around as if an air raid had just finished. A car horn was sounding off constantly in the streets beyond the gare routière and a harsh white halogen light came on by the market, powered by a diesel generator which farted up to full speed somewhere in the dark. The light showed rain slanting silver and people hopping across the streets with plastic bags over their heads. I sank slowly into street-wide puddles and crawled across the lagoon to the Quartier France. I parked next to Fat Paul’s Cadillac in front of the Hotel La Croisette. The sea fringe was invisible in the dark. The roar said it was rough out there. A stiff breeze blew on to the shore, snapping at my shirt.