‘This isn’t the place to get fighty,’ I said, not giving a damn whether he understood. ‘Unless you like long, hot nights in a malarial stink hole. There’s a wagon up the street full of policemen waiting for your kind of custom.’
‘Englander?’ he asked, looking up, passing a dog-sized tongue over his lips.
‘I can’t say that in German. You’ll have to live with the English version,’ I said, and moved off.
‘Wait,’ he said, and got himself up. I kept moving. ‘Wait.’
He came alongside and hooked a hand around my elbow. I turned and shrugged it off. He was a short, stocky guy who had to look up a long way to anyone. He passed a hand through his jagged hair and patted his face with a handkerchief. He wasn’t drunk.
‘What are you looking for?’ he asked.
‘What do you mean, what?’
‘Who then?’
‘And who are you?’
‘Someone with experience.’
‘The experience to come horizontally out of a bar?’
‘Yes, well, I went too far. They’re not as understanding as they are in Thailand, don’t you think?’
I twigged it then. A sex punter. I shuddered. Now I really was getting down and dirty, in the street mulch with the paedophiles and necrophiles, the sodomites and catamites, the flagellators and fustigators ... all of us having fun.
‘I’m looking for somebody.’
‘We’re all looking for somebody,’ he said. ‘But who for what?’
‘Agbabu. Wilfred Agbabu.’
‘What does he do?’
‘He supplies virgins.’
‘Ah, yes-s-s,’ he said, his eyes alight with possibility.
‘You know him?’
‘No. But I understand the problem. Myself, I avoid all that. No exchange of bodily fluids.’
‘Is that your motto?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Good night.’
‘Wait, don’t be so...’ He didn’t finish. ‘Have you tried the L’Ouistiti. There’s a Frenchman there. He’s very knowledgeable.’
I gave him a long steady look.
‘It’s a bar up there...’
‘I know it,’ I said.
‘I’m sorry. That’s all I know, but...’
‘But what?’
His damp handkerchief slowed on his cheek and he fixed me with a gleaming eye. I realized he was going to share one of his proclivities with me.
‘You wouldn’t beat me up, would you?’ he asked, balling his little fist.
‘I’m saving myself for somebody else,’ I said, and barged past him.
Michel’s hophead guard had been replaced by two more responsible-looking individuals. I backed out and went next door to a bar called La Gloire du Matin and paid a thousand CFA to get myself into the toilet where I’d have paid five grand to get out. I found a back door down the corridor from the stinking cubicles and beyond it a beaten earth courtyard with a solitary, diseased tree, some broken furniture and three high mud walls. I got up on to the wall via the tree and dropped down into the L’Ouistiti’s back yard.
Through a crack in the back door I could see the anteroom to Michel’s office was empty. The light was still on behind the blinds at Michel’s window. The man was there in his customary position, plimsolled feet up on the desk, spliff in hand, but he was not alone.
Marnier’s claw was wrapped around a tumbler. They were talking to each other in rapid French with southern accents. Michel was reliving my visit, showing Marnier the paf, paf, paf of the beating he’d had to take. Marnier flicked questions at him. Agbabu didn’t exist but somebody like him did. Michel didn’t give Marnier a name, the man not interested in that.
A different opportunity was presenting itself. A chance to follow Marnier to one of his Cotonou hideaways. Something that might help me in my Franconelli negotiations. I was torn between getting ready to follow him and listening in some more to see how interested Marnier was in my sudden and inexplicable requirements. But then he threw back his drink and stood up and I got up and over the wall, through La Gloire du Matin and snapped up the first taxi moto I could find.
Marnier was on the same kind of transport, his chauffeur wearing the yellow numbered jacket of a licensed taxi moto driver. I noted the number. The streets were too empty for tailing and I was too tired. I followed as far as the Nouveau Pont and saw him turn left up into the northern part of Akpakpa.
I thought about going back to L’Ouistiti to thump the toke-bag for being so smart, but I’d used up my reserve tank of ugliness and anyway, the sky was a flamingo-pink in the east and the first fishermen were paddling out on to the dark lagoon. There was a moment’s peace up there on the apex of the bridge, a moment when the air was nearly fresh with a saltine zest coming in from the sea. Then the traffic cleared its throat, the gears of the day ground through the synchromesh and the monoxide gargle began again.
Chapter 16
Tuesday 23rd July, Cotonou.
‘Where have you been, for Christ’s sake?’ asked Heike, whipping back the shower curtain on me, standing there in her T-shirt and knickers, a fist in her side and a rash of anger going up her neck, dark rings around her eyes.
‘Out and about,’ I said, turning my back on her. ‘Getting a bit too close to street level even for my liking.’
‘It’s six in the morning. What the hell have you been doing all night?’
‘Is that rhetorical or do you want to know?’
‘I want to know. I want to know what’s so important that you can’t spend ten seconds to call me.’
‘José-Marie...’
‘José-Marie? Who’s she?’
‘Bagado’s nine-year-old daughter, remember?’
‘Well, thank Christ for that. I didn’t think even you would do that to me.’
‘What?’
‘Will you look at me while we do this?’
I turned. Heike reached in and cut the shower.
‘Do what?’ I asked, Heike still a blur in my water-filled eyes.
‘That you’d give me something like that full in the face with your backside turned to me.’
‘Like what?’
‘Do what? Like what? What is this?’
‘You tell me.’
‘I thought you were off with somebody else.’
‘Who?’
‘Another woman, Bruce.’
‘I just told you José-Marie is Bagado’s nine-year-old and, if you’d have let me bloody finish, I’d have told you...’
‘Don’t give me any shit, Bruce Medway,’ she leaned in with the finger. ‘Don’t give me any shit.’
‘I haven’t and I’m not going to. So stop winding yourself up.’
‘I’ve been lying in bed all night, not sleeping, waiting for you to come home...’
‘Winding yourself up about “other women”.’
‘Waiting for a call from the father-to-be of my child...’
‘Our child. Let’s start that off on the right foot.’
She hit me, quite hard, a hatchet thump on the chest which boomed through me. I grabbed her wrist and the other one before it managed a repeat. We wrestled for a moment until I let go and got an arm around her shoulders and pulled her into the shower, her face pressed hard into my chest. The fight went out of her and she started sobbing, her lashes blinking on my nipples, hot tears on my skin.
‘Come on now, Heike,’ I said. ‘Don’t do this to yourself.’
‘I got worried,’ she said, holding me round the waist now, turning her head to one side. ‘I’ve got all these hormones crashing around inside me. I didn’t know where you were. I started thinking and thinking and I couldn’t get myself out of it.’
‘Hormones, Heike. You just said it. You’re pregnant. Your body’s changing. You want to feel secure. You don’t want to take on too much thinking when you’re in that kind of state.’
I manoeuvred her out of the shower, grabbed a towel and we crushed through the bathroom door
, awkward as hell, the jamb taking skin off my back. I got her on to the sofa and she put herself back together again.
‘I’m being stupid.’
‘You’re not. Somebody just swizzle-sticked your chemicals.’
‘Yep.’
‘And I should have called.’
‘So it was your fault?’
‘It usually is.’
‘Give me a kiss.’
I kissed and cuddled her and we fell sideways on the sofa. She ran her hand through my chest hair and spoke to my belly.
‘I don’t know how I started thinking like that. When you didn’t come home I started thinking you’d been killed and I went through the whole process of telling your mother, sending your body home, the funeral arrangements and feeling sad.’
‘For a couple of minutes before...’
‘Shut up. Then I thought you didn’t want me any more, and you were off with another woman and I drove myself mad with that. I remembered how we were crazy for each other’s bodies when I worked up in the north. Then I thought, we’re not doing it so much, and I didn’t know whose fault that was.’
‘Even if that’s true, which it isn’t, it’s nobody’s fault.’
‘I know, but it didn’t stop me thinking it had happened. And I couldn’t believe that would happen to us. After the baby, maybe, but before...’
‘We’re in Africa too, remember. A long way from home.’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘and I started thinking about that too. About home and Berlin. I got homesick. For Berlin. Me.’
‘I think if we had a baby manual this would all be under the chapter called “Nesting”.’
She stroked my belly and snuck a hand down underneath my towel. She palmed my flaccid penis.
‘He looks tired.’
‘Been out all night.’
‘Not in places he shouldn’t though.’
‘Just down the Jonquet. It doesn’t want to go down there too often either. Puts it off the whole business.’
She toyed with me in a desultory fashion. Not interested, vaguely proprietorial.
‘What chapter heading would you appear under?’ she asked.
‘There might be a section called fatherhood ... we get involved somewhere along the line.’
‘Shouldn’t there be a little subsection about you under “Nesting”? Like “Holding on to your Man”.’
She gripped me, vice-like, threatening and clinging in the same fist. I ooched. She kissed me. Helen arrived and we floundered like teenagers. She looked across with half-lidded eyes of total disinterest.
‘Mornin’, sah, madam,’ she said, and slopped into the kitchen.
We went into the bedroom. I fell on to the bed naked, exhausted. Heike looked at her watch, stripped and went for a shower. I heard it come on. It mingled with the sea snarl of the traffic. I tried to do some thinking about change and got as far as the rains. How the rains in Africa changed everything.
I woke up at midday with the side of my face flatter than a spade and a map of creases down one side from deep, immobile sleep. I ironed out over coffee and popped my face back. I hit the office at 1 p.m. with two slices of cold pizza and a beer. I wasn’t going out after the taxi moto driver. He was on a night shift and, even if he wasn’t, downtown traffic was no place to be for a man with my sensitivities.
No Leads Medway, I thought. Not an unusual state to be in. I cradled the beer and put my feet up, hoped the blood would run to my brain more easily. But, as was so often the case in Africa, I found that someone was thinking exactly what I was, and at the same time, and the man doing it chose that moment to come into my office. It occurred to me that the collective unconscious worked a lot better in Third World society. The first world spent too much time tapping into it on the Internet rather than doing what they should do, which was to let it come to them.
The man, an African, wore a simple yellow cotton knee-length shift, matching trousers and oxblood loafers with tassels. He came in hunched low, about four feet behind an ingratiating smile. He wanted to sell me something—no honours degree needed to read that body language. I summoned one hundred and twenty per cent disinterest, achieved by thinking of chiropody.
‘Excuse me, sah,’ he said.
Heel skin and hard pads.
He nudged his smile forwards, tweaked it at the corners.
‘Please, sah, may I sit down?’ he asked, in English, Nigerian.
Corn plasters and mycota powder.
He sat right on the edge of the chair, maybe even hovered in case I decided he couldn’t.
‘I have something for you, sah.’
Verrucas and ingrowing toenails.
He stuck a forefinger and thumb in each nostril, pinched the septum.
‘I unnerstan’ you looking for something, sah.’
I turned my head with t’ai chi slowness. Not slow enough. He knew he had me.
‘Agbabu?’ I asked, forgetting for a moment that the man didn’t exist.
‘Agbabu?’ he repeated, the name careened round the back of his head, pinballed between his ears and went straight down between the flippers—no score.
‘Not Agbabu,’ I said.
He leaned forward off the chair and placed a tentative elbow in the middle of the desk. He said something in a voice so low that only a wild animal with nothing else on its plate could pick up.
‘What?’ I asked.
‘Girls,’ he breathed.
‘Who sent you to me?’ I snapped, and he leapt back like the goalie off his line who’d seen the lob.
‘No, sah, no one, sah.’
‘What are you doing here then?’
‘I heard.’
‘What sort of girls?’
‘Young girls, ’swat I heard,’ he said, getting sly now, the smile on a stick being reeled in.
‘There’s young girls everywhere.’
‘Virgins,’ he said in a tiny little voice no bigger than a hymen itself.
I had a rise in the gorge then, the cold Napolitana frothing in beer came up warm and acid. Now I knew what all those guys in bars were doing—breathing back their own self-disgust. The African sat back and crossed his legs, more comfortable now he was in the right place.
‘Where?’
‘Here ... in Cotonou,’ he said, examining his long little fingernail, which told the world he didn’t have to labour in the fields under the hot sun.
‘Where they from, these girls?’
‘They Benin girls.’
‘Good girls?’
‘They virgins, sah. They don’ know nothin’ bad.’
‘Have they been to school?’
The African smiled the horrific smile of a man who’s seen another’s deep corruption. I tensed, singing tight as a wire guy in a hurricane.
‘They been to school,’ he said.
‘How much?’
‘For the firs’ night ... five hundred thousand CFA.’
‘Five hundred thousand?’
‘Guaranteed virgin, sah. You never goin’ get sick from her.’
‘Five hundred thousand... I could...’
‘You don’t need condom, sah ... you never get sick.’
‘Do I get a choice for five hundred thousand?’
‘Oh, yessah.’
‘Where and when?’
He leaned forward again, so far that I could see his knees on my side of the desk. He examined its surface with the forlorn look of a man who was going to have to ask for money upfront. I got the whiff of a set-up, strong as a fart in a two-man lift.
‘No money upfront,’ I said, so he knew he wasn’t dealing with a greenstick. He nodded back his disappointment.
‘You come to Restaurant Guinéen, opposite the motor park for Lagos. Eight o’clock.’
‘You got a name?’
‘Daniel,’ he said, got up quickly and left, no handshaking in this dirty business, don’t know what you’d catch.
I ran out on to the balcony and hissed at one of the boys from the tailor’s. I nodded dow
n at Daniel as he appeared beneath me. One of the boys fell in behind him. They walked up through the swirling dust to the main road where Daniel hailed a taxi moto. My boy got one too and they disappeared up Sekou Touré.
I shuddered and rubbed my arms until I realized the goose flesh was on the inside. I ran on the spot trying to get rid of that crawling, seething sensation. I thought about how he could have found me—Charbonnier, Marnier, the sex punter German. The phone rang.
‘Where’ve you been?’ asked Bagado in the dead and tarnished voice of the clinically depressed.
‘I was out all night trying to get a lead.’
‘And?’
‘I started to get somewhere but it went cold on me.’ Bagado lowed like a team of oxen on a windy moorland. ‘But ... it came back ... just now. I’ve got a meeting at eight tonight.’
‘With who?’
‘I don’t want to get your hopes up. Let’s just leave it at that.’
‘Where?’
‘The Restaurant Guinéen ... but don’t show up, Bagado. I don’t know who knows you down there.’
Silence. Bagado’s oilless brain seized.
‘Have you got anything for me?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know whether my instinct’s anything to rely on any more, but I think they’re going to ship these girls out.’
‘Any reason?’
‘The girl on the sand bar tried to escape. It makes me think they’re holding them temporarily ... collecting more before shipping out.’
‘And holding them in Cotonou.’
‘At the time she tried to escape, yes. But I think they would have moved them by now, taken them into the lagoon system and that’s a big problem. You know you can go from twenty kilometres west of Cotonou all the way to Lagos without leaving the water?’
‘Interesting,’ I said, ‘there could be something in that. Is there any record of a trade in girls out of West Africa?’
‘Not, as far as I know, from Benin, but other countries, yes ... to Europe, the States, South America.’
‘Have you got friends in the port?’
‘Some.’
‘Anybody on the container side who could look out for you?’
‘Yes, but it’ll need some money.’