Heike gave him some files and he stood them on end and tapped the desk.
‘Perhaps, first, we should talk about money,’ he said. ‘Unless, of course, you don’t want the job.’
‘We’re interested,’ I said. ‘The money, well, the money’s got a little complicated since devaluation. We used to charge a hundred thousand CFA a day for the two of us.’ A wince shot across Gerhard’s brow like a snake across tarmac. ‘We’ve been finding it difficult to double our rate since devaluation. But that’s what we’d like to do. Two hundred thousand a day plus expenses.’
‘Impossible,’ said Gerhard. ‘I can’t justify that. I have no budget for private investigations, you understand.’
‘You have contingency, don’t you, Gerhard?’
‘Yes, but you are asking me to pay more than three hundred dollars a day which is my budget for the Kétou station, and this is not our business. Our mandate is for Benin.’
‘But it affects you.’
‘Yes, but when the accountants ask, “What is this thousand dollars?” I have to give an answer within the mandate or I have to ask my boss in Berlin to... to... pacify the money men. I can’t do that very often in a year. I need to keep favours in reserve.’
‘Don’t want to use them up early on?’
‘Precisely.’
‘What sort of money did you have in mind?’
‘That for the whole job... including expenses.’
‘Two hundred thousand? You’ve got to be kidding. Three hundred and seventy-five dollars for the lot? It’ll cost seventy-five dollars to get up there and back. Three-day job. A hundred dollars a day. Fifty dollars each if we don’t eat, sleep or bribe anyone. That’s very little, Gerhard. That’s so little...’
‘You might as well do it for free?’ he said, finding some cheek to slap me with.
‘Not that little.’
‘Two hundred and fifty thousand is my limit.’
I looked long and hard into his unflinching, blue, Aryan eyes. The sort that had spent their youth looking out over cornfields and thinking of Valhalla. There wasn’t even a hairline crack of pity in their blue glassiness. I felt Heike’s tension. She was sitting three feet from me and looked ready to snap up like a roller blind any second. She hated talking about money. I did it so rarely I loved it.
‘Gerhard, I don’t know what Heike’s told you about me. I can be difficult. Unconventional. In this case, I believe your intentions are good. I know Heike’s are. If it wasn’t for her we wouldn’t be here so, for that, and because of the charitable nature of the work, we’ll do it. But you mentioned favours earlier, favours from your boss. Favours are something I’m big on. Favours are my kind of barter system. I’ll do this job for two hundred and fifty thousand and one favour.’
‘What is this favour?’
I thought I might get it over with now and tell him to keep his Teuton muscle out of Heike’s fishing limits and go and be handsome, stable and bossy elsewhere. But that would not be cool.
‘I don’t know, Gerhard. It’ll come to me. It won’t be anything dangerous or unpleasant. It won’t involve money out of your precious budget. You might have to put yourself out a little, that’s all. Are we on?’
Gerhard liked it. He leaned across his desk like a winner and shook hands as if he was crushing beer tins. He handed me the file. We all stood and Heike shook herself out. Gerhard’s jaw muscles were as bunched as a chipmunk’s cheeks.
Chapter 5
We read the file in Heike’s office. It was a longer version of what Gerhard had covered in the meeting. Heike walked us to the car. When I kissed her goodbye our noses somehow got in the way, which they hadn’t done before. She touched me on the shoulder as I got in the car. I looked back and her face crumpled a little with pity or worry, I couldn’t decide. Things had been smooth for just over a year, and now, since this morning, I could sense the levels changing, could feel myself being brought to the edge of something.
I checked the camera for film, there was still some in. We bought some whisky and mineral water and drove north in the late afternoon.
It was hot enough for the sweat to curl round the back of my ears like a little girl’s silky hair. Bagado opened up his mac a little and let the hair-dryer-air warm his flat belly. I hadn’t found the day that could make Bagado sweat. His mother called him her little lizard because he always had to be out in the sun. He’d been with the police in both Paris and London. The cold and a desire to find a wife had driven him back, and in that order. He still had nightmares about London—being down on the Thames on a January afternoon with an east wind direct from Siberia blowing up the estuary. I just had to say ‘chill factor’ to him and he’d go into the foetal position.
This was Bagado’s season. The dry season, when the heat squirmed up off the tarmac and the beaten earth so that after two minutes out in it a white man would feel sure he’d eaten a bad prawn somewhere. The abnormal rains had unsettled him. He didn’t like rains. They brought malaria with them and he always caught it—hit him like a flu bug, nearly killed me, gave me a headache like the earth must have had when the Grand Canyon opened up.
‘What did you think of our German friend?’ asked Bagado.
‘Looked more of a director for Mercedes or Siemens than an aid agency.’
‘He wasn’t wearing any socks.’
‘Well, yeah, apart from that.’
‘Heike looked... very pretty,’ he said. Bagado had a liking for non sequiturs. He looked out of the window, as if there was anything out there that could interest him. Trees, earth, more trees.
‘Yes,’ I agreed.
We carried on in a silence that not even a town called Pobé could break.
‘She seems to like him,’ said Bagado, and then, ‘Gerhard,’ as an afterthought.
‘That’s a shame,’ I said.
‘Oh, why’s that?’
‘Because he’s a vain, arrogant, opinionated, self-centred fake-liberal with the sensitivity of an Alabaman cockfighter,’ I said, as calm as a triangle of cucumber sandwich.
‘I thought he handled us very well.’
‘Did you?’
‘Two hundred and fifty thousand for all this talent.’
‘Plus the favour. You’ve no idea how expensive that favour’s going to be.’
‘You said no money.’
‘Services, Bagado, services.’
‘I see.’
Another half hour went past, the car packed tight with the unsaid thing.
‘So what did Bondougou say?’ I asked. Bagado looked blank. ‘You tore my ears off before that meeting and now you don’t remember?’
‘I remember,’ he said, quietly so that my nerve quivered. ‘Bondougou offered me my job back.’
‘He wants you on the inside pissing out and you told him where to go...’ Bagado didn’t respond. ‘You did tell him where to go, Bagado?’
‘The way he put it was that since the trouble in Togo and with the regime in Nigeria, Cotonou has become the new business centre. More business, more money, more crime.’
‘And if there’s anybody who should know about crime, Bondougou should. He’s a one-man gangland.’
‘The job offer is political. The politicians want a safe place. They don’t, for instance, want dead British shipbrokers with their mouths cut off lying face down across the railway tracks. Bondougou has to make a show of getting things done. The Cotonou force is short of the right kind of manpower and, for a change, they have money to spend. I am one of the most experienced people in Benin.’
Bondougou was right. The Togolese capital, Lomé, had been an important centre of the business community in West Africa. It was a free port with hard currency, good restaurants, smart hotels and a congenial atmosphere. It had also been the largest exporter of gold along this coast and it didn’t even have a gold-mine. There’d been political problems, multiparty democracy riots and one day the army had opened fire indiscriminately on a crowd of civilians and hundreds had been killed or inj
ured. In the three days after the incident three hundred and fifty thousand people left Togo for Benin. Lomé was a ghost town now, the people who remained imposed their own curfew. All the business was in Cotonou, which was itself a free port and had hard currency too, but more important, the army didn’t feel the need to impose its authority on the civilian government, something that had happened in Nigeria. There, the elections had been annulled, pressure applied on the press, and key figures put under house arrest. On top of that there were strikes, petrol shortages, piles of stinking refuse in the streets and the odd corpse. The locals were getting very restless.
Bondougou needed policemen in Benin, good ones, who could handle big numbers and get the politicians off his back. The only thing he’d never liked about Bagado was that the man didn’t have a corrupt cell in his body. That made Bondougou nervous. He didn’t know where Bagado was coming from and he could never rely on him to keep his mouth shut at the right time.
‘Has Bondougou told you your duties?’
‘In outline. Nothing specific.’
‘But we know there’s no such thing as a gift from Bondougou. Did you talk about Napier Briggs?’
‘No. He started off playing the patriotic card. He teased me about working for the white man. He told me I had more important things to do for my country. He called me un caniche Parisien. A Parisian poodle. He made it sound as if I’d thrown it all in for the money. I felt like showing him our accounts. I felt like reminding him why I lost my job in the first place. It made me very, what’s that word Brian used, you know, my detective friend in London... narked. That was it. He go’ me bloody narked.’ Bagado finished with a perfect glottal stop in his imitation South London accent.
‘Bondougou is a...’
‘We know what Bondougou is.’
‘Bondougou is the biggest bastard in the Gulf of Guinea. You go work for him again and you know where you’ll end up...’
‘The same place as last time.’
‘Uh-uh, Bagado, no way, not the shitheap this time. You won’t just get fired this time...’
Bagado nodded. The tyres roared on the hot tarmac, which glistened in the sun as if glass had been shattered across it. He passed a hand over the dusting of white in his hair—tired of all this.
‘He’s giving me no choice,’ he said.
‘You’re going back to him?’
‘If I don’t, we’re finished. That was his last card, Bruce—he’ll close us down, strip you of your carte de séjour and have you deported.’
A dog slunk across the road and I braked. The tyres squealed in the heat and women walking with their heads loaded into the sky shot off the road into the bush followed by their children who maintained line like chicks after a hen. The car kicked up a jib of dust from the edge of the road. The women stopped and turned, their necks straining under their loads to see if anybody had been hit.
‘Christ, Bagado, what did I ever do to him?’
‘You know me, that’s enough.’
‘This is it then?’
‘What?’
‘The last job.’
‘Until...’
‘...until they find Bondougou down a storm drain. The pies he’s got his fingers in are very hot.’
‘Yes. It might not be so long.’
‘Then it’ll be Commandant Bagado, maybe, and we’ll all have to bow and scrape.’
‘Kiss the hem of my mac.’
‘I’d rather worship the ground you walk on, if that’s OK.’
‘You don’t sound very annoyed.’
‘Oh, I am, Bagado. I am. But what can a poor boy do?’
We drove on in silence. The car fuller now with that and the unsaid thing still there. Another half hour passed.
‘What did you make of the Napier Briggs thing?’ I asked.
‘It looked like a warning to me. Don’t see, don’t hear, don’t speak.’
‘To who?’
‘Anybody that’s got half a mind to be nosy.’
‘From who?’
‘A big man. Probably the guarantor you talked about who said it would be fine to go out into the cocotiers and pick up two million dollars of an evening... What the hell were you thinking of, Bruce?’ said Bagado, suddenly annoyed.
‘I’ll tell you exactly what I was thinking of, and I’m not proud of it.’
‘Ten thousand dollars?’
‘You got it in one, Bagado. You’re wasted here, you should be a criminal psychologist.’
‘Criminal?’ he asked the inside of the car. ‘I suppose it bloody nearly was, what you did.’
He looked off out the window and shook his head. We drove on in silence. The unsaid thing still inside me, bigger than a full set of luggage.
‘Has Heike spoken to you?’ I asked, unable to bear listening to the roar of the road any longer.
‘Aha!’ said Bagado. ‘No.’
‘What was the “Aha!” about?’
‘Nearly an hour and a half for you to get it out.’
‘What?’
‘What’s been on your mind since first thing this morning. You’re improving.’
‘I am?’
‘A year ago you’d have waited until nightfall and the third whisky.’
‘I’ve given up whisky.’
‘During the week.’
‘It hasn’t helped.’
‘Take it up again.’
‘The gout’s still niggling.’
‘I don’t suppose you know that there’s almost no incidence of gout in Scotland.’
‘You’re kidding.’
‘They don’t think whisky brings it on. Beer, red wine, port’s more the thing.’
‘What about the purine?’
‘The purine?’
‘All the Arbroath smokies, the oak-smoked kippers, the tinned pilchards, the wild salmon leaping up the glens—all that purine.’
‘What’s that got to do with it?’
‘Purine brings on gout.’
‘And you think...?’ Bagado roared and then settled back. ‘You better go back on the whisky before the rest of your brain packs in.’
I gave him a bit of slab-faced silence after that. He didn’t notice. So I told him what had happened before I left home this morning.
‘Maybe she doesn’t like you,’ he said.
‘Give it to me straight, Bagado. I can’t take all this faffing around the bush.’
‘Well, I don’t mean permanently. Just for the time being. She’s gone off you. It happens. I asked a woman in Paris once how she came to kill her husband. She said it all started when she saw him cleaning his ears with his little finger and wiping it on her furniture.’
‘I took your call in the living room, went back into the bedroom and she was off me. No reason. Just dead to me as if she was in a state of shock.’
‘Maybe in your distracted state you scratched yourself, you know, unattractively.’
‘That’s interesting,’ I said, dismissing it. ‘So what d’you think that was all about back at the office? The Gerhard thing.’
‘Maybe that an attractive woman like Heike could do better than the deadbeat she’s decided to live with.’
‘Deadbeat?’
‘Your expression, I think.’
‘Deadbeat?
‘I don’t think that’s it, by the way. She doesn’t mind you being a deadbeat.’
‘But I’m not a deadbeat. A deadbeat’s someone...’
‘It’s part of it, but it’s not it.’
‘I’m not a deadbeat. I get up in the morning. I go to work...’
Bagado gave me the yackety-yack with his hand.
‘What was your annual income last year?’
‘Come on, she’s got a job, Bagado. It’s different, for God’s sake. I’m a street hustler—different ball game altogether.’
‘We’re missing the point, but you understand me, I think.’
‘I do?’
‘Sex is not the only thing.’
‘The Great Leap Forward, Ba
gado, I missed something. The link. Let’s have it. And what do you know about my sex life?’
‘That it’s very good.’
‘She told you that?’
‘She didn’t have to. Whenever I come to your house the two of you are in bed together.’
‘What’s wrong with that?’
‘Nothing, but it’s not the only thing.’
‘Even a “deadbeat” like me knows that.’
‘What do you think the difference is between you and Gerhard?’
‘He’s stable, got a good job, he’s older, he’s German, he’s got a sense of humour like an elephant trap...’
‘He’s been married and he wants to get married again to someone who likes Africa.’
‘Heike’s not interested in Gerhard. We’ve been through all that crap with Wolfgang.’
‘And look how far you’ve come in a year. She needs some reassurance that there’s a point. A year’s a long time for a woman creeping through her thirties.’
‘She doesn’t creep.’
‘You’re being weak, Bruce. You make out you look and don’t see but you know better than I do. You just can’t bring yourself to the marks. You’re afraid that she’ll leave you. You’re afraid to move on. You’re being a modern man.’
‘That’s enough of that kind of talk, Bagado. Enough. You’re getting very close to using that word and I don’t want to hear that word in this car...’
‘Commitment? There, I’ve said it. Better in than out.’
‘You can hear the ranks of bachelors’ bowels weakening,’ I said, cupping a hand to my ear.
‘I don’t know what you’re afraid of,’ he said, sawing the scar in the cleft of his chin. ‘Compromise?’
‘You’ve been pulling some vocab. out of the bag today, Bagado.’
‘Is that it? You’re afraid of compromise? You should see what I’m going to have to do when I go back to Bondougou.’
‘I’ve already done some compromising. It wasn’t half as painful as I thought it was going to be. What I’m afraid of is that if I cross the line it might not work and I’ll be in a deeper problem than if I don’t cross the line in the first place.’
‘She’ll go,’ said Bagado. ‘That’ll solve your problem.’