‘You know someone who wants to buy a Mercedes 300 series diesel?’
‘Do I look like it?’
‘Mmmm,’ he said, doubtfully. ‘What do you want? The Peugeot OK?’
‘The Peugeot’s fine,’ I said. ‘I want to meet your Kazakh friend.’
The beer stopped halfway to his mouth. He looked steadily and directly into my eyes for a minute. One of his dogs barked in the yard. He didn’t flinch. The air hissed in the room like a gas fire.
‘Does he have a name, your Kazakh friend?’ I asked.
‘No,’ he said. ‘We call him Mr K. Why do you want to see him?’
‘I’m interested in what he has.’
‘Don’t joke with me, Bruce.’
‘No jokes.’
‘You have a buyer?’
‘Well, it’s not me, Vassili.’
‘What’s he want? Your buyer.’
‘I don’t know what Mr K’s got.’
Vassili nodded and fed his mouth with cashew from the silo of his fist.
‘Mr K,’ he said, ‘never deals direct.’
‘With the principal?’
‘That’s right. It’s a big responsibility for you. The money. The product.’
‘Why doesn’t he deal direct?’
‘Experience. He learn to stay clear. Friends have been killed. Set-ups are common. This isn’t a set-up?’
‘It won’t worry him if it is, will it?’
‘I mean you. You’re not being set up?’
That spanner went clanking into my machinery and lodged itself somewhere, not vital, but where I could feel it.
‘She’s a very interesting woman,’ he said, ‘Selina.’
The beer bottle clinked against his teeth. He tipped it, looking at me out of the side of his face.
‘Just ask Mr K if he’ll see me.’
‘He’ll talk to you. You won’t see him. He’s a careful man.’
‘Viktor can call me too. If he wants to make some money.’
‘My God,’ he said. ‘And me?’
‘You’ll find a commission somewhere out of all this.’
He grinned. I stood and drained the beer. Vassili struggled to his feet. He slapped me on the back twice but didn’t say anything.
I drove back across the lagoon, the water shivered in the wind coming off the sea, the jungle bristled on the shoreline. Dust swirled around the Dan Tokpa market so that people walked with their arms across their faces. Clouds bunched in the sky due north and my Peugeot’s engine missed a couple of beats.
As soon as I walked in the house I knew there was something wrong by the quality of the silence. Helen was sleeping on the kitchen floor. Heike’s bedroom door was shut. My ears were ringing as I reached for the door handle. I looked over my shoulder but it was only the tension in the room pushing me forward. I opened the door.
Heike’s head and neck were drenched in sweat. Her hair plastered over her face in oily streaks. There was a dark halo on the pillow where her head lay. The blue sheet twisted, and dark too, stuck to her body. Her eyes were shut and she was panting, muttering as if in a religious trance. Malaria.
I tore the wet sheet off her, wrapped a dry one around her and a blanket, picked her up and ran down to the car with her. Twelve minutes later I was carrying her up the steps to the Polyclinique. Three minutes after that she was in a private room with air con and a French woman doctor holding her eyelids open and shining a torch in there but getting nothing back. My insides felt like bagged freezer meat.
‘Does she take anything?’ asked the doctor.
‘No.’
She rolled Heike over and stuck a thermometer in her anus and issued a rattle of instructions to the two Béninois nurses who ran out of the room. Four minutes later she removed the thermometer.
‘Forty-point-six,’ she said. That was a hundred and five in my language and the fear crept up my neck and banged around in my brain like a madman amongst the dustbins.
The nurses came back in with a bottle of lime-coloured Quinimax solution with glucose. The doctor asked if they’d put the nausea suppressant in and the nurses, wide-eyed and as scared as me, nodded. The doctor plugged the needle into Heike’s vein and turned the drip on. The nurses bathed her temperature down with cool water. The doctor shone her torch into Heike’s eyes again.
‘Has it gone cerebral?’ I asked. The doctor didn’t answer.
If you hit malaria hard early on there was nothing to fear. The parasites injected by the mosquito when it bit didn’t get a chance to multiply in the bloodstream. If, however, the malaria was allowed to get on with it, the parasites multiplied, poured around the body in the bloodstream and entered the vital organs, including the brain.
It then became cerebral malaria and the chances of dying were very high. Pure quinine was the only antidote. That and a lot of luck.
The nurses left when Heike’s temperature dipped below the 100 mark. I walked around the bed obsessively checking the drip. Then I leaned with my forehead against the slatted window and watched the afternoon dying. I had the terrible thought that this is what happened. This was how it ended. On an unremarkable sunny afternoon a long way from home.
Outside people came and went. Nurses changed shift. Cars arrived and moved off. Night fell. The traffic thickened as everybody left work and thinned as the evening meals were taken. Then it was quiet. Heike didn’t move. The doctor came in again and removed the drip, checked her temperature and looked into her eyes.
‘It’s up to her now,’ she said. ‘Does she like to fight?’
She waited for an answer until she realized that she wasn’t going to get one. I was stunned by the black hole I found myself looking into, tipping into, falling into. I was going to lose her.
A cool touch on my forearm made me start. The doctor, a very small woman, no bigger than a twelve-year-old, looked up at me. She had bags under her eyes, puffy skin from working indoors in the tropics and maternal hair. She’d seen the despair, the complete desolation in my face, seen me looking out across some night-time rocky desert. I knew because looking back into her fifty-year-old green eyes I saw something unusual, something I hadn’t seen for a while, something I didn’t come across in my line of work. It pricked my eyeballs.
‘Does she?’ she asked again.
‘Oh yes,’ I said, and I was going to add to it, but this whole life opened out in front of me, not in scenes, not in takes of film that have always flickered and whirred in my head, but just light, a strong, far-reaching light. I swallowed but the conker in my throat stayed. The doctor left.
A nine-inch striplight shone above Heike’s head and lit her face in what seemed to be an anagram of her own. Black-and-white shapes which produced an effect which wasn’t her. I felt foolish and angry, in fact I felt everything. I found myself on the cutting edge of feeling—a thousand cuts and still living. I turned the light out, sat by the bed, held her hand and, like the drip she’d just had removed, drained my will into her.
I stayed like that all night. I reckoned that I’d feel her if she tried to slip away and hold on, dig my heels in.
Cotonou. Thursday 29th February.
In the morning, dawn took fifteen minutes to paint us into the room. We were still here. Outside the traffic cleared its throat. The cobblers walked along tapping their boxes, looking for work. The night shift left, putting one foot in front of the other.
At 9 a.m. the doctor came back in and took another blood film. The result of the last one had come through at an astronomic 2000 parasites per cubic millilitre. She said they’d put her on another drip after lunch and told me to go home for a while, change my clothes, shower.
I got home at lunchtime and listened to the answering machine. Vassili and Bagado had called and wanted returns. Selina too. She sounded nervous and left a Lagos number I didn’t know. My gums tingled.
I called Vassili and told him I was in room six at the Polyclinique. He said Mr K would be in touch. I called Selina, a houseboy answered and said she was
unable to come to the phone. I wanted to avoid Bagado for the moment. I packed some clothes for Heike, my stomach turning at her body’s imprint on an old dress, a pair of shoes. The phone rang.
‘Was that you before?’ asked Selina.
‘Where are you?’
‘The chief’s.’
‘Why didn’t you come to the phone?’
‘They’re being difficult. They know somebody’s been in their computer system. There’s a floppy missing from the office. Are you getting anywhere?’
‘Heike’s unconscious in hospital. Malaria.’
‘Christ.’
‘Is this whole deal going off?’
‘Not yet.’
She hung up. I went back to the hospital. Heike was on another quinine drip. The parasite count was still high. She was shivering now and under blankets.
I watched another afternoon die, holding on to Heike’s wrist feeling her pulse—a thin, thready, tinkering beat. Sweat began to bead on her forehead and I tore off the blankets. I put my head on her lap, reassured by the gurglings of her intestines and watched the glass darken in the windows. I closed my eyes and squeezed out that thought that was hammering to come in. If she...
I surfaced in the dark, in a desolate sob, and ransacked my brain to find out where I was. There was a hand on my ear. It wasn’t mine. I lifted my head. Heike had moved her hand. It was cold, but not that cold. Her eyes were moving under her lids.
Chapter 26
‘My ears are ringing,’ she said.
‘It’s the quinine.’
‘I’m thirsty.’
I poured her several glasses of water and she drank them down.
‘I’m going to vomit,’ she said.
She half filled a bucket. I had a bizarre vicarious satisfaction in her release. She slumped back on to the pillow.
‘What the hell is going on?’ she asked, as if this was something completely unnecessary for her to be going through.
‘You’ve been in a malarial coma.’
She looked at herself in the narrow bed. She felt the plasters on her arm from the intravenous drip. Her fingers were shaking.
‘Why am I shaking?’
‘You’ve just had your second pint of quinine solution.’
‘You were right.’
‘You scared the living shit out of me.’
‘Did I?’
‘You can slip away, just like that, you know?’
‘Come here,’ she said, and held my face with trembling hands. ‘This is a terrible admission—I should have listened to you.’
‘It’s not in your nature.’
‘You can talk an awful lot of shit.’
I told her I loved her and that we didn’t have to fight straight after her brush with death, we could leave it a couple of days.
‘Why do I always have to nearly die before you say you love me?’
‘Is that true?’
‘The last time you said you loved me was when you rescued me from that American creep.’
‘No, I’ve said it since then.’
‘I’m not counting any time when you’ve had more than a bottle of wine and four whiskies and that’s...’
‘...nearly all the time.’
‘But you can kiss me, if you want,’ she said. ‘If you don’t mind me being a bit pukey.’
There was a knock at the door. The nurse poked her head in and said there was a boy in the reception area who wanted to talk to me. Heike gave me one from her stack of long-suffering sighs and I tried to make it better by kissing her hand. She waved me away. I followed the nurse.
It was 9 p.m. The boy saw me and started walking out of the hospital, through the gates and round the back of the parked cars under the trees outside. He took me to an old jeep which I recognized as one of Vassili’s. He opened the back door and I got in.
It was dark in the car and apart from the aura coming through the trees and shrubs from the hospital there was no light. I could see that the man in front had very long hair but that was all. The rearview was turned up.
‘I’m Mr K,’ he said in English. ‘Vassili said you want to talk to me.’
‘You have something for sale.’
‘You have an interested party?’
‘What are you selling?’
‘Vassili says you work with a policeman.’
‘Not any more.’
Some time struggled past. He shifted in the front seat as if he was about to turn round.
‘I know you very well,’ he said.
My guts dropped. The silence built inside the car. He lit a cigarette that smelled like dried camel dung. He didn’t offer me one. He straightened a length of his hair, fanning it out to the shoulder. He had a gold ring on the third finger of his right hand.
‘Your girlfriend’s sick. Her name is Heike Brooke. She works in Porto Novo for Gerhard—’
‘Are we doing business, Mr K?’ I cut in. ‘Because if we’re not I’d like to go back in there and look after her. I’m sure you’re very knowledgeable about me. Vassili knows everything there is to know. I respect that. But you’re either going to tell me what you’ve got or not, and we can take ten minutes less time to do it if you start now.’
‘I have six and a half kilos of Plutonium 239, ten kilos of red mercury. Half a kilo of Californium 252. The price is ten million dollars. I am already talking to the Libyans. Do you understand the products I have for sale?’
‘I’ll find out.’
‘Leave the car. Contact Vassili if you want to proceed.’
I got out and went back into the hospital, thinking everything’s $10 million these days. The car’s headlights came on and it pulled away in the direction of the airport.
I left Heike sleeping at 10 p.m. and went home. I called Vassili and asked for Viktor. We arranged to meet in my office downtown in twenty minutes.
Viktor and I sat in the bare essentials of my office, without a light because the fuse had blown downstairs. We drank beer while he gave me a layman’s brief on nuclear bombs in the simplest French he could muster.
The red mercury that Mr K was selling would be in the form of a high-density gel. It was made by dissolving mercury antimony oxide, which was red, into mercury. That was irradiated for twenty days in a reactor and any excess mercury evaporated off, leaving the gel. To make a bomb the Californium 252 would be added to the gel and that compound would become the explosive chemical detonator that surrounded the Plutonium 239 at the core of the bomb.
The red mercury, he told me, had a high density which gave good compression to the plutonium which was necessary to bring it to critical mass. The californium produced neutrons which would initiate the fission reaction early. The ultimate effect was, in fact, a neutron bomb, and even I remembered that the neutron bomb had the desired effect of killing people while leaving property intact.
The advantage of buying the red mercury and californium with the plutonium was that the buyer would get more bangs for his buck. A normal bomb would need either 5 kilogrammes of Plutonium 239 or 15 kilogrammes of Uranium 235, but by using red mercury a bomb maker could significantly reduce the plutonium/uranium required. By how much, Viktor did not know.
Viktor could see he was making me nervous with the cool and detached way he talked about these weapons of mass destruction, which were in raw form perhaps not far from where we were speaking. He tried to reassure me that anybody with these ingredients would still be a long way from making a bomb.
‘Unless,’ I said, ‘he wants to pay one of you guys a million bucks to come over and fix it.’
Viktor gave me an acknowledging jump of his eyebrows. I asked him if he would be able to identify genuine product without opening the boxes and killing us all. He said there would have to be some documentation with the product and he would certainly be able to tell if it had been properly packaged and came from somewhere in Russia.
‘If your buyer wants to go ahead,’ he asked, ‘how much are you going to pay me to help you out?’
&
nbsp; ‘That depends on what he buys it for.’
‘How many people are in the deal at your level?’
‘Two.’
‘So how about we split it three ways... whatever the difference is between the seller’s price and the buyer’s?’
‘That’s not a decision I can make on my own.’
‘Have to talk to the lady?’ he asked, wringing the contempt out of his voice as he spoke.
Viktor left. I called the chief and got Ben. I told him I’d opened the discussions. The chief came on the line and asked how much. I told him that it depended. He said he would send Ben across in the morning. I asked to speak to Selina. Ben came back on and said she’d gone to bed. We hung up.
I bought a pizza to take out. I didn’t turn the lights on at home but walked around in the polygons of light cast by the streetlamps outside. The fridge held a wrinkled tomato and enough booze for a party. I had to stop living like this. I poured myself a highball of white wine. I closed the fridge and saw him again. The man out on his balcony looking down into the black garden, his arms out stabilizing himself on the rail. What was he looking at? I got up on the kitchen sink and peered down there myself. Nothing. Maybe this was where he came to take a look at himself. Ah, well. We could all use some of that. Not too much. Not so much that the self-doubt crept in and the self-disgust, because all that left was the high dive into blackness.
Cotonou. Friday 1st March.
I woke up at midday with the phone going and my mouth dry and caked, as if I’d taken a bite out of a wax apple. It was the chief’s secretary calling from the office saying Ben would not be in Cotonou until five thirty that evening and that he would like a meeting with the seller of the goods tonight. I asked after Selina. She hadn’t been in.
Ben and the chief were keeping us apart.
This was how mistakes were made—when you were alone. I wouldn’t have minded a talk with Bagado but I was outside the law now and any hint of it to him and I had no doubt that he’d jug me for it. Heike was in no state. She’d kill me too. Viktor, I didn’t trust on the meetings we’d had. The way he’d pushed on the money, those eyes, and anyway, he was Vassili’s man. Vassili, well, in Vassili there was a conflict of interest now. I called him and asked him to arrange for Mr K to be in the Sheraton car park at 8 p.m.