‘Hi, Jacques,’ I said, getting it quicker than usual.
‘What the fuck are you...?’
‘I got lucky,’ I said. ‘Want me to call you Michel now?’
‘Take a seat,’ he said, going back to his work. ‘I hope you smoke.’
‘I gave up.’
‘Tobacco?’ he asked. ‘There’s no tobacco in this.’
He started to roll the monster spliff which was his bulkhead against a long night of Christ knows what nastiness he had raking through his brain. I took the seat in the hot room across from him, my back to an open netted window. The glow from the desk lamp picked up his thin face, a worn and sweating face that was lined in a way that meant he sneered a lot ... probably at himself in the mirror of a morning if he could bear it. He’d lost most of his hair, apart from a few strands he’d combed over the creamy whiteness of his pate. He had a tan line across his forehead from wearing a hat, a Panama that was hanging on the wall behind him.
While he finessed the joint I found my gaze locked on to a framed line drawing on the wall which I thought was a still life of a bowl of fruit, but on closer inspection proved to be an Oriental woman weighing a pair of huge balls and about to fellate an impossibly large cock.
‘That one gets the girls every time,’ he said.
‘On the first train out of here?’
‘You’d be surprised,’ he said, and licked the papers to his joint with a very red and glistening tongue that didn’t look as if it could mind its own business for very long. He smoothed off the spliff and put a twist in the end. He tore a strip off a Marlboro packet, roached it and sat back to admire the craftsmanship.
‘So what brings you to me, M. Medway?’
‘I thought we could have a chat about a mutual friend.’
‘Jean-Luc? No. I don’t talk about Jean-Luc. You think of something else.’
The sweat stood out on his forehead and I felt my own Tunnelling down my spine.
‘It’s hot in here.’
‘The air con’s broken. It’s going to rain.’
He lit the joint, puffing at it to get it going, and then took a huge drag and held it in for so long he squeaked. He let the smoke out slowly and repeated. His eyes glazed and his face softened to a concentrated luxuriousness.
‘You don’t happen to have any whisky?’
He opened a cabinet, poured me a shot of something and handed over the glass.
‘If you want to talk, you have to smoke as well.’
‘Too paranoid?’ I said.
He leaned over and bug-eyed me.
‘Who?’ he said, and smiled with as close to a good nature as he could get without borrowing a Ronald Reagan mask.
‘Maybe that stuff’s good for you,’ I said. ‘Smoothes you out. Stops your nerves jangling in your ears.’
‘In my ears?’ he asked, nicely stoned now.
‘Whatever.’
‘Smoke,’ he ordered, and held out the reefer.
I took a tentative drag and didn’t cough my heels up. All the pollution I’d been breathing had taken the virginity off my lungs.
‘Enjoy,’ he said. ‘There’s not much else around here.’
I nodded at his porno drawing and took another quarter drag from the joint, not wanting to get wrecked in the first minute and waste my time here.
‘Not here, M. Medway. Not in Africa. There’s plenty of girls to fuck, but, you know how it is for them, fucking the white man c’est comme un travail de ménage.’
‘You shouldn’t knock yourself like that, Michel.’
‘Knock myself?’ he asked, rapping his head.
‘Tu ne dois pas dire du mal de toi-même,’ I said. ‘There’s plenty of other people around who’ll do it for you.’
He grunted and leaned back in his chair.
‘You need to smoke some more, M. Medway. Take it in ... deep.’
‘Marnier,’ I said, sipping the whisky, the strong flavour of the grass like a hay espresso in my mouth. ‘Tell me about Marnier. Why do you have to do little jobs for him? Especially when you don’t like doing them for him ... do you?’
‘I have no choice.’
‘What’s he going to do to you if you don’t?’ I asked. ‘Kill you?’
‘Kill me. Pah!’ he roared, and rocked back on his wooden chair. He fought his feet out from under the desk and put them up on an unopened ream of paper he had sitting next to the phone. He was wearing dirty white plimsolls with no laces. He drew a hand down his gaunt features, picking up some sweat on the way which he wiped on to the thigh of a pair of grey cotton trousers which had been pounded that colour by an African washerwoman. ‘What would he get out of killing me?’
‘I wasn’t being serious.’
‘Smoke some more.’
I took a longer drag on the reefer, which seemed to satisfy him. I fitted the joint between his fuck-you fingers and he nestled back into his chair.
‘The only reason I’m living is because of Jean-Luc. So why would he want to kill me?’
‘I didn’t say he would.’
‘Non?
The dope was ungluing the conversation fast. A warm glow emanated from my stomach which was being fuelled by my extremities which felt like frozen chicken parts. My eyeballs prickled. My tongue was lilo size and dry and musty like sun-scorched canvas. The whisky added no lick to my mouth. The silence I was in now felt long and ruminative of such things as the wood grain in Charbonnier’s desk, the two missing eyelets in his plimsolls and the crepey quality of the skin on the back of his hands.
‘How did Jean-Luc get cut up?’ I asked, after a small century of chair creaking.
‘Uhn?’ said Michel, resettling himself and tilting back in his captain’s chair. I repeated the question. Time leaked through my fingers.
‘Sierra Leone,’ said Michel, while I tried to remember the question. He handed back the joint. I waved it away. He insisted.
‘What happened in Sierra Leone?’ I asked, the smoke leaking out of me everywhere, the corners of my eyes, my knuckle joints. ‘What was he doing there?’
‘Buying diamonds,’ he said, from what seemed a long way off now.
He eased the joint out of the back of my hand, which was no longer mine, but lay quietly on the desk top ready to be put on.
‘He trades diamonds?’ I asked.
‘No.’
‘Why did he buy them?’
‘Jean-Luc is an opportunist. He sees a rebel army taking over a diamond mine. He thinks those diamonds are going to be cheap. All I have to do is risk my ... my life and ... to get the diamonds ... and then...’
‘What went wrong?’
‘There are factions in these rebel armies. He bought from one. He headed north to Guinée and met another. They didn’t like the white man so much. They cut him with machetes. He was lucky if you... comment dit-on ça: “chérir”?’
‘Cherish.’
‘... if you cherish your life so much that you are happy to live the rest of it as a monster.’
‘He hasn’t always been a monster then?’ I asked, the drug drawing together previously unengaged synapses. Michel blinked.
‘That was four months ago,’ he said.
I blinked back at him with a shutter speed of several seconds and found somebody else inside me asking another question.
‘How did you meet Jean-Luc?’
The reefer was now barely a couple of inches long and, after the toke Michel took, red hot, so that he came off it hissing and licking his lips. He slotted it into an ashtray which had a mini Michelin tyre around it and lifted his legs off the desk one after the other as if they were spastic. He opened up a drawer in the middle of his desk and pulled out a pack of old photographs of different sizes held together by an elastic band. He flicked through them and extracted one. He held it face down on the desk top. He threw the rest in the drawer and shut it. He turned the photo up and laid it in front of me as if that was the one that was going to give me a royal straight flush at Binion’s Horseshoe,
Vegas.
The photo was of a young guy, late twenties/early thirties, with a mane of shoulder-length black hair. He was wearing extremely brief swimming trunks and had the face and body of somebody who could have modelled pants pour homme, and all the women would have run out and bought the stock thinking the pants are the man. He was standing on tiptoe on a beach which I knew was in the front of the Hotel Sarakawa in the Togolese capital, Lomé.
Michel’s face just outside the scoop of light across the desk was intense and taut and heavily focused on me.
‘Is this you?’ I asked.
‘Oui, c’est moi,’ he murmured, as if he’d been in a perfume ad after all.
‘A long time ago, Michel. That’s what West Africa does to you. It’s very unkind to white-skinned Euro—’
He slammed his fist down on the table and roared a spray of spit into the light marking the worn leather inlay of the desk.
‘Six years ago!’ he said.
He wrenched the head of the Anglepoise towards him and shone it full in his own wreck of a face.
‘Look!’
He scrabbled a claw across the desk and tore the photo from me and held it up to his face.
‘I’ve lost everything.’
The paranoia I’d hinted at earlier was creeping up on me. The heat, lack of air, the brain-smacking strength of the grass and Charbonnier’s eerie transformation had sent the jitters going in my head like a techno tropical night bird. I wanted out but I was pinned to my seat.
‘Four days after this photograph was taken I met Jean-Luc Marnier.’
‘What were you doing in the Sarakawa?’ I asked, going for the camomile question.
He leaned back out of the light and slipped the photograph back in the drawer. It took some doing, my arms were as heavy as a dead man’s legs, but I managed to get the glass of whisky up to my lips and drain it. Michel took a bottle of J & B out of the cabinet and poured me a careful quarter inch.
‘I was a journalist,’ he said. ‘I was planning to canoe the length of the Niger river from Bamako in Mali right through to its mouth in Nigeria. While I was planning the trip up in Niamey I heard there was trouble in Lomé so I stopped the recce and came down to the coast. I filed reports on the troubles from the Sarakawa.’
‘And you met Marnier.’
‘He was running an alternative and user-friendly bank for expats and travellers. I had my wallet and credit cards stolen in the Grand Marché and he had them picked up off the street in a matter of hours. He saved me a lot of trouble. We became friends.’
Something like chilli from a hot soup got stuck in his throat on the word ‘friends’.
‘What sort of friends?’
‘I was naive...’
‘Naive people don’t always make the best journos.’
‘I didn’t say I was a good journalist. I was very sportif, journalism let me do what I wanted to. Paid for my ideas. I cycled across the Sahara. I’ve skied down the Himalayas. I’ve crewed round-the-world yachts. I’ve ballooned across the Gobi.’
‘Did you canoe down the Niger?’
‘No,’ he said, hitting the buffers in the terminal.
I had a queue of questions in three lanes for Charbonnier but I knew if I asked one of them we’d be gridlocked for the night. He’d rambled across some old painful episodes which hadn’t been aired for some years and the spliff had brought them back pin sharp. He looked over the wall by his desk as if it was a surface to which he was about to expose his genius. His hands hung off the arms of his chair above his lap. His tongue, pointed and muscular, came out of the crevice of his mouth in the enquiring way of a mollusc on the slab. His eyelids drooped. I thought he was laying the onion skins over the ugliness until I saw, with a stink of disgust, that he was sporting the contour of an erection in his lap.
‘Michel,’ I said, which brought him round. He pulled his knees up and rested his heels on the edge of his chair so that his balls bulged graphically in the crotch of his soiled trousers. I was getting the Heike-eye view of Charbonnier now.
‘You were saying,’ he said.
‘I thought you were.’
‘Ah, c’est le tour de la’sèche fines herbes,’ he said, and reached for the now dead joint and relit it.
‘Have you got any advice?’
‘Me? Advice for you? Nobody asks me for advice, M. Medway. Do you really think that anyone would look at me any more and say, “I must have that man’s advice”? No, M. Medway, advice is not something I keep in reserve.’
‘I was talking about dealing with Jean-Luc. He must be one of your specialist subjects by now. I’d have thought you could write...’
‘On doit voir ce qu’on regarde.’
‘Well, that is the shit talking now, Michel. Come on, give me...’
The phone rang, a single piercing trill that stiffened the two of us, tipping Michel back in his captain’s chair so that he smacked his head on the wall. He cracked his knees getting them underneath the desk to reach the phone.
‘Oui, allo?’ he said, and then listened for a full minute, his eyes boring into the desk, his smoking fingers trembling with the joint. He handed me the receiver.
‘Pick me up at midday at the Hotel du Port,’ said Jean-Luc Marnier. ‘I’ll be around the pool.’
The phone went dead. I gave it back to Michel.
‘Do you still need my advice?’ he asked.
I got myself to my feet. Charbonnier chewed on a nail, while his other hand drummed the unopened ream of paper. I opened the door.
‘What’s all that paper for?’ I asked.
He bent down and picked up an old typewriter off the floor. He cradled it in his lap.
‘I’m going to write a book.’
‘What about?’
He gnawed at his lip for a few moments and his eyes drifted across to the line drawing on the wall. I didn’t know whether that was his subject or if he just hadn’t got that far in his thinking.
Chapter 9
Sunday 21st July, Cotonou.
I sat outside the Hotel du Port in my Peugeot 504 saloon eating a pastry stuffed with a Toulouse sausage. I sipped cold Possotomé between mouthfuls. My head felt as ponderously light as a barrage balloon and I couldn’t remember a damn thing about leaving the L’Ouistiti. Had something terrible gone down? It was not something I wanted to come across in dreams or otherwise in the next couple of days.
It was a few minutes before midday. I checked the mirrors to make sure Carlo and Gio were being discreet. After Marnier’s call I’d decided not to see the Italians again. I’d sent them to the Caravelle café and had a message delivered by a boy. There was no sign of them out there under the blanched sky, the silent heat. I got out, brushed myself down and walked straight through the reception into a central courtyard where some little métis kids were playing in the pool.
It was a Sunday and there were plenty of people lounging on loungers, slumped on towel-covered seats, and I looked at every one of them. You had to admire the courage of the turkey-skinned whites, stripped and sun-factored to the nines, they looked convalescent beside the casts in bronze of the loafing Africans. The kids whooped and splashed and fluttered in their bathing wings. No Marnier.
I sat in the shade of the bar/restaurant and ordered a beer and watched some French people eating steack frites and giggling as if their afternoon was taken care of. The waiter brought me a demi and asked if I was M. Medway. He handed me a note which said: ‘Enjoy your beer and then join me at the Novotel J-L.M.’ I reached for my glass, intent on obeying orders, and had an ugly flashback from the L’Ouistiti as I’d been leaving.
I was standing by the door of his office. A girl had come in. One of Michel’s girls from the bar. She’d squeezed past me in her lime-green vest and a blue and yellow wrap over the shelf of her well-padded bottom. Had Michel buzzed her in there? I didn’t remember. She’d gone to him and sat in his lap, dead-eyed.
‘This is Chantale,’ he’d said. ‘Very beautiful. Don’t you think? In a
little-girl way.’
I didn’t think she was beautiful. Young, yes. But those onyx eyes she had, you didn’t see those on a little girl. There was none of the sweetness you see in other girls of her age. She’d seen things she shouldn’t have and then done them.
‘She’s sixteen,’ said Michel, as if it was necessary to be legal. ‘Regardez la belle fille.’
The girl pouted. Michel turned the lamp head towards her face.
‘Ouvres ta bouche,’ he whispered, like a lover building up to an unreasonable demand. Her mouth popped open. ‘Look inside, M. Medway.’
He pushed the girl forward across the desk with his shoulder. I didn’t like this.
‘Vous voyez?’
He parted her lips and got his two fingers in between her teeth as if she was an animal to be sold. There were white patches on the gums and the insides of her lips and cheeks.
‘That’s enough, Michel,’ I said, and he let her go. He pulled her back and put an arm around her shoulder. He drew her head into his neck as if she were his poor little daughter. Pet-like, she complied.
‘Candida albicans,’ said Michel. ‘Not unusual in small kids. Rare in adults. I think in England it’s called oral thrush. Chantale will have full-blown SIDA* in three months unless she’s one of the lucky ones.’
‘The lucky ones?’
‘The strain running around West Africa quite often stops at the VIH stage. The T-cells are depleted so that they pick up these bizarre infections: oral thrush, shingles, diarrhoea, pneumonia ... but the T-cells never drop so low that they have foil SIDA.’
‘You’ve done some reading.’
‘I have to,’ he said. ‘She’s been living in my house and I’ve been fucking her since she was twelve years old.’
‘Twelve?’
‘Are you shocked? That’s not so young for these girls,’ he said, stroking her shoulder, shaking his head. ‘These girls. A man gives her a pair of sandals, she goes to bed with him. Another a T-shirt ... she goes to bed with him. Ach! c’est la culture Africaine.’
I paid for my beer and drove down the road to the Novotel, where I was told to go back into town and across the lagoon to the Hotel Aledjo, where it was almost impossible to follow someone discreetly. From the Aledjo I went to the Hotel du Lac and by 1 p.m. I was keen on some hours in the back seat catching flies. At the Hotel du Lac I was told by the barman to head for the Place d’Etoile Rouge via the Nouveau Pont, which meant passing the crowds around the Dan Tokpa market.