Ben Agu met us and took us through some brown doors and dark passageways to his office, which was as cold and dank as a leaking mausoleum. A curling Maerskline calendar hung on one wall and another from AMObank behind Ben’s head. The window was covered with a piece of orange material which had been used as a field dressing. A fly, suffering from whatever’s terminal for flies, buzzed, lost height dramatically and ditched into a cup of pens where it buzzed throatily on and off for a couple of minutes.
The chief had not arrived. Ben offered coffee. We accepted. He tried to show us that his intercom was working. It wasn’t. He left.
‘A man could die in here,’ I said.
‘And they wouldn’t know for a week.’
‘Not by the smell, anyway.’
‘Are we sure we want this coffee?’
‘If it means we’re jet-ambulanced out of here.’
I looked at the Daily Times which was open on Ben’s desk at the funeral pages. When people die in West Africa the family put a notice in the newspaper with a photograph of the deceased. Staring out from the centre of the page with a forlorn expression on his face was Emmanuel Quarshie. There was no mention of the cause of death. I flicked back through the pages to the local news section and saw the headline—‘Engineer found dead at home’. A quick scan revealed that Emmanuel Quarshie had died of a gunshot wound to the head—suicide, it was thought.
Ben came back to say that the big man had arrived. I thought I’d heard a fanfare from the air-con duct. We went up to the next floor. The chief’s office was about eight of Ben’s in one. The white carpet was so thick it had had to be snipped to get the door open. The chief, in white robes at his desk, looked like a snowbound polar bear. He had heavy specs on, stretched wide by his fat head. He spoke on the phone, holding the piece between finger and thumb as if he was listening to a good cigar.
We took the two seats available, which were comfortable but low, and I looked at a photo of the Nigerian national football team up on the wall. Ben stood at a respectful distance. The chief finished his call in his own good time.
‘My friends,’ he said, ‘you are welcome.’
The girl came in with the coffee. The chief took the Manchester United mug and crashed back into his chair. Selina had Norwich City while I toyed with Blackburn Rovers.
‘Cantona!’ roared the chief, sipping his coffee. I looked at Ben, assuming this was a Yoruba exhortation to get on with it. ‘Eric Cantona!’ said the chief.
‘A great player,’ I said.
‘No, no,’ said the chief, wagging a huge finger, ‘a visionary.’ He looked at Ben. ‘Is this Nescafé?’
Ben glanced at the girl, who’d just made it to the door. She nodded.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘If I find this is Red Mountain, heads will ro-o-oll.’ He roared with laughter.
‘I think coffee would be a good thing to get into,’ said Selina, taking up the torch.
‘Coffee?’ asked the chief.
‘Robusta coffee. It’s cheap on the London market at the moment. Too cheap for most people to start buying out here. What do you think you could deliver that for in Lagos?’
‘Coffee? Cheap?’ asked the chief. ‘Have you ever noticed, Miss Aguia, that no matter how cheap the coffee price in Africa, Nescafé never goes down?’
‘Well, sir, the beans represent less than ten per cent of the retail price and robusta a fraction of that.’
‘Quite so,’ said the chief. ‘A travesty. The people of my country break their backs planting and nurturing and harvesting for a pittance so that multinationals can make a fortune from advertising, marketing, packaging, labelling, wholesaling and retailing.’
‘And there’s the speculator’s cut too, which is what we’re here to discuss.’
‘How much would that be?’ he asked, pouncing with both paws on to the desk.
‘Last year the robusta market gave as much as one thousand eight hundred dollars a ton clear. I don’t think it will get that high again, but maybe one thousand three hundred dollars is attainable.’
‘But...’
‘There’s transport to...’
‘We have our own haulage companies, our own agents,’ said the chief.
‘Well, if the market moves there could be a gain of around one thousand four hundred dollars a ton.’
‘Then we should buy a hundred thousand tons at once,’ said the chief.
That was about three times the total world robusta crop so I left Ben to answer that one and drank coffee. Selina’s mouth remained open for some time.
We talked like that for about half an hour, throwing figures around, discussing the merits of cocoa versus sheanut, how palm oil was coming along, what would happen to cotton this year. Then I said:
‘Have you ever considered rice?’
‘Rice?’ roared the chief, who had taken to standing at the window looking out over the lagoon with his fists in his kidneys. ‘We don’t grow enough rice as it is.’
‘I mean importing rice.’
‘But there’s a ban on imports, Mr Medway.’
‘Of course there is. But not into Benin...’
‘Tell me about rice going into Benin,’ said the chief.
‘You open up a Letter of Credit for say fifteen thousand tons of parboiled rice in the Bank of Africa in Cotonou. You don’t have to put up too much cash because rice is as good as money. The bank regards its own Letter of Credit as security. As soon as the ship is loaded in, say, Thailand, and has left with an arrival date in Cotonou you send buyers to the bank to deposit money against the lots they want to buy. By the time the ship arrives, about a month later, all the rice is sold. Some buyers turn up at the ship’s side with trucks, others you warehouse it for them in the port.’
‘How do we access the buyers?’ asked Ben.
‘Through agents in Cotonou. There are three agents with the whole business sewn up. You have to do a deal with them.’
‘What’s the money?’
‘The difference between the landed cost and the retail price in Cotonou is about four hundred per ton.’
‘But here,’ said Ben, ‘because of the ban, the retail price is much higher.’
‘I think perhaps you’ve seen the potential.’
‘But here,’ said the chief airily, turning away from the view, ‘as you so rightly say, Ben, there is a ban.’
‘Which is why there’s a premium,’ said Ben.
‘Which is why the future president of the Federal Republic of Nigeria cannot be seen to be smuggling, cannot be seen to be profiting from putting food into the mouths of the common people.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Ben.
The chief turned back to the lagoon and straightened his hat, which didn’t need straightening. I could hear his brain working like a barrel calculator. Duty, plus transport, plus bribes, plus Nigerian customs, plus warehousing, equals... well, I knew what it equalled. I’d done the deal in my head a thousand times before. Even selling on to a wholsesaler there was at least $200 per ton in it. Over 15,000 tons, that was looking very like $3,000,000. From rice? How could that be right?
But it was. The problems were finding a supplier, getting in with the bank and hitting the right deal with the agent. Three things that were impossible for me, but for someone with the chief’s connections... I remembered the AMObank calendar in Ben’s office.
‘You could open a Letter of Credit with AMObank,’ I said. ‘They’re Nigerian, aren’t they? And they have an office in Cotonou.’
The chief’s ear was tuned to me. He flapped his palms on his backside. As soon as we were out of the room he was going to be on that phone, snapping and snarling down it like a hyena.
‘You’ll have to excuse us,’ I said. ‘Selina and I are having lunch with Graydon. Should we call later?’
‘No, no. Yes. All right. Very good. Yes, yes. You must go. Mustn’t keep Graydon waiting. Send him my regards. Thank you.’
Chapter 21
‘Rice,’ said Selina, looki
ng at the traffic and annoying the driver by flicking the door lock up and down.
‘It just hit me in the meeting.’
‘Oh yeah?’
‘We were thinking about export not import. It was a lateral hop.’
‘You sounded as if you knew what you were on about, sounded as if you’d done some thinking, sounded as if this wasn’t the first time...’
‘Hey, Selina, back off. You’re not the only one who’s allowed ideas. I happen to have an office opposite a warehouse where once a month about five hundred tons of rice comes in and five hundred tons goes out. I’m curious. I’m not always crowded out with things to do. I go down to a friend of mine at an agent’s in Cotonou and ask him about rice. He tells me how I can make three million dollars if I know the right people. He tells me because there’s the outside chance that I’ll bring him somebody who can help him do the deal. He tells me...’
Selina leaned over and shut me up with her lips on mine. She thrust her tongue in between my teeth, held my head and worked me over good.
‘Now shut up,’ she said. ‘You’re boring the shit out of me.’
‘Why did you have to go and do that?’
‘Kiss you, you mean?’ she asked, and my eyes connected with the driver’s in the rearview.
‘If that’s what it was?’
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘A bit of a snog.’
‘More like a buccal sap.’
‘Romantic.’
‘Dental.’
‘Why don’t we, you know,’ she said, putting her hand on my knee, ‘just for fun. You don’t have to tell Heike. I won’t.’
‘Just keep taking the pills and you’ll calm down.’
‘Fuck you.’
The driver’s eyebrows went over a speed bump.
‘Why doesn’t anything ever happen here?’ she asked.
‘Waiting’s the game in Africa.’
‘I don’t mind waiting if there’s something to do.’
‘Work on Franconelli,’ I said. ‘He knows things. He likes you. He wants to fit you in.’
‘Between his sheets.’
‘Not interested?’
‘He’s not the type to let a girl go on top.’
‘What about Graydon?’
She shot me a look which made the driver duck.
‘Graydon doesn’t do anything... not with other people, anyway.’
‘Is that what Gale said?’
‘He’s a spectator. Doesn’t like to get his knees dirty.’
‘And Gale?’
‘Don’t be sneaky, Bruce, it doesn’t suit you.’
‘Nobody tells me anything. I have to find it all out for myself.’
‘That’s your job.’
‘And what are you? My sleeping... client?’
‘I knew you wouldn’t say “partner”. You’re such a tease.’
The traffic eased up as we got on to Vic Island and the driver stunned himself by getting into second. Selina put her face on, which in the light breeze didn’t slip straight off. The cab dropped us off and because Gale knew the day was dead on its feet there was a Nissan Patrol waiting to take us up the drive.
‘Did Robert Keshi, that NNPC guy, say anything to you?’
‘No,’ she said, taking hold of my arm as she got out of the car.
‘He’s an oil man. Your father knew him.’
‘I know.’
‘Did your father know a lot about oil?’
She stopped and we faced off.
‘Are you a brilliant actor or just very dumb?’
‘I like asking obvious questions.’
‘My father was a shipbroker specializing in chems, gas, clean and dirty. Less than fifteen per cent of his business was chems and gas. The rest was putting crude into Northern Europe and shipping clean out of the refineries.’
‘So it’s all about oil?’
‘God, Bruce.’
‘Well, your father was a bit of an actor too.’
‘After Blair my father never let anyone near his business. Not even me.’
‘You learnt from him.’
‘Let me ask you a question,’ she said. ‘Why do you think the chief has asked us to work for him?’
‘Make him some money. He’s got an expensive patch coming up.’
‘You don’t think Graydon and Franconelli could solve that problem. You don’t think that what they’ve got going together is enough to keep the chief in Krug?’
‘I don’t know whether the word “enough” is part of Babba Seko’s vocab. In the oil-boom years when Bonny Light hit thirty-five dollars a barrel the president instigated a “clean hands” operation. They found people with ten billion dollars in their foreign accounts. Do you think they knew how much “enough” was?’
‘I think you ought to look at this as a bit of a game, Bruce. A game with three major pieces in it and a couple of little guys. Guess who we are?’
‘Let’s have some lunch.’
Ali met us at the door and led us down the hall to the living room with the cream leather sofas. The house was closed off to the outside world and the air con was wintery. Sitting on the sofa was like reclining on a dead man. Ali took the drinks order. We sat in silence. The time ached past. The art on the wall did little to fill the mind. A huge white canvas with an off-white square, off centre, off the wall.
Graydon came in with a cashmere cardigan on over his polo shirt. His shoes squeaked on the tiles and annoyed him. He slumped in a sofa, rubbing his fingers and thumbs together and seemed to take aim at something over Selina’s shoulder.
‘Central air con,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing we can do about it. Gale’ll bring you some clothes. How did it go with the chief?’
‘He listened to what we had to say,’ said Selina.
‘Amazing,’ he said, hitching a trouser. ‘You must have been talking about soccer.’
‘Eric Cantona featured,’ I said. Graydon glazed.
‘Ben there?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
‘That’s OK. He does the detail. Ali!’ he roared. ‘Perrier and nuts.’
‘Do you have any contacts in India or Thailand who could supply...’
‘Opium?’
We laughed nervously. Graydon didn’t.
‘You know how it is, Graydon. Powerful people can lay their hands on almost anything in these countries.’
‘I’ve never been in India and I’m out of Thailand now. Try Franconelli, he’s strong out there.’
‘What about the States?’ I asked.
‘For what?’
‘Rice. Parboiled.’
‘Too expensive.’
‘Could you get a price for us out of the US Gulf or East Coast?’
Gale came in wearing a baggy white polo-neck. She threw us some jumpers. Lunch was served. We never got our drinks. We sat down to a chef’s hat of crab soufflé, a rhombus of salmon in nectar, a cylinder of chateaubriand in mustard with a tower of julienned vegetables, an ingot of chocolate in what has to be called a jus or a coulis or you’re dead. We drank Puligny Montrachet with the fish, Chateau Batailley with the meat and a Setubal with the sweet. Gale ate a corner off each dish and drank most of the Puligny Montrachet. Graydon didn’t even touch the first three courses but ate three plates of chocolate. We talked about the sperm count of the Western male.
‘What’s the point in outproducing when you can be out-reproduced in a few generations?’ said Gale. ‘We’re the suckers. The Africans are playing the long game.’
‘And the Chinese?’ asked Graydon.
‘No women,’ said Selina.
‘Takes two to tango, Gray,’ tinkled Gale, which iced his Perrier over.
‘Plastics,’ said Graydon.
‘Oestrogen in the plastics,’ said Gale. ‘We’ll be a world of women, hermaphrodites and homosexuals.’
‘Well, it’ll make great TV,’ said Graydon. ‘Shall we go to my office?’
Graydon left, Gale waved us out after him. We followed him into his carefully lit
study, whose only natural light came from a single skylight high in the roof. A cabinet containing a collection of videos was open and Graydon slid it shut as he walked to his desk. He indicated that we should sit at a circular table away from the desk. Graydon picked up a newspaper off his desk and threw it in the bin. He sat and remained silent for some time. The gallery lighting in the room pointed up a singular cracked terracotta hand, an alabaster sandalled foot snapped off at the ankle, a set of marble genitals, and a hand, forearm and elbow emerging from a block of stone. The broken, the maimed and the incomplete. What did this say about Graydon’s psyche?
‘Excuse me a moment,’ said Graydon, and he got up and left the room.
‘Gray’s not with it,’ said Selina.
‘Hasn’t had his toot yet. He’ll be back,’ I said. ‘Just listen at the door a minute.’
I opened up the video cabinet. Good old anally retentive Graydon had them in alphabetical order. Each video was initialled. I picked out the only D. B., thinking of David. There was no N. B. for Napier which was interesting. I put the video in Selina’s handbag and retrieved the newspaper from the bin. I found it open at the same funeral page as Ben Agu’s—sad old Quarshie. Selina clicked her fingers. I flicked through the newspaper. Graydon swept back in. Selina was inspecting the genitalia.
‘Whose lunch is this?’
Graydon roared.
‘Lunch!? Oh, yeah,’ he said. ‘That was sold to me as a piece of a destroyed statue of Paris from Troy.’
‘No kidding.’
‘Well, maybe. It’s all stolen and sold on. Shall we?’ he asked, looking at me standing by his desk with his newspaper.
‘This guy Quarshie,’ I said, ‘I’ve heard his name somewhere. Wasn’t he at your party on Sunday?’
‘He was supposed to be. Goddam tragedy. The guy shot himself Friday morning.’
‘Oh, right. He was an engineer, wasn’t he?’
‘Yeah, he did some plans for me for a floating jetty off the coast at Port Harcourt.’
I dropped the newspaper back into the bin and we all sat down at the circular table. In five minutes Graydon outlined a deal where Selina’s company would buy 120,000 tons of Nigerian crude from a company based in the Caymans called Neruda. The interesting difference was that, although her company would take title to the product as soon as it was on board a ship she could charter herself, she wouldn’t actually have to pay for it until it was delivered in Europe. She would take a commission on the shipping and she was guaranteed a minimum of fifty cents per ton on the oil. Graydon was giving her the opportunity to become an oil trader without putting up any money.