A baby mewled. Lying on a piece of cardboard in the corner of the room was another, younger woman. The baby was lying on her stomach and she pulled it up, lifting her T-shirt, and torpedoed her breast into its mouth. She stroked the back of the baby's head and played with the sputnik points of her hair looking off at the wall, stoned. Ron picked at the beard on his chin with his thumb and forefinger and looked at her as if she was a life form off the evolutionary scale.
The manioc in the pot chupped and popped steam like a mud geyser. The air was thick with smoke collecting under the corrugated iron roof with no way to get out into the still night outside. The woman came over with a bowl of water and I washed my hands; so did Ron. Then she filled two bowls with manioc and splashed some sauce over it which looked red and chilli-hot. I took one and Ron asked me what I thought.
'It's vegetarian.'
'But, you know, hygiene?'
'It'll take your stomach three days to break the manioc down before it gets to the dysentery.'
'What'd you say it was?'
'In-fill and chilli. She's getting upset now, so decide.' He took the bowl and watched me eat with my fingers. 'What do we do after dinner?'
'We give it twenty minutes, let the police patrol through, and then we get out of here.'
'You've got a torch?'
'No.'
'How are we going to get out of here?'
'Be positive, Ron.'
'I would be if I could see where I was going.'
'You got a torch, they got something to shoot at.'
'Shoot?'
'They're armed, Ron.'
'Why're they going to shoot at us?'
'Because we're running away.'
'Maybe we should stay put.'
'I need to get to Korhogo and I don't want to spend the night in jail. You don't either.'
We ate the food, the piquant sauce branded my tongue and the manioc re-formed and sat in my stomach like a tumor. The night was stiller than before, the village silent, even the cicadas seemed a long way off or were playing it pianissimo. The woman on the cardboard ran a horny foot up and down her shin. The baby had fallen off her breast and was sleeping.
Since the fire had been going, the room had got hotter and the smoky air was thick and rough on the throat. Ron started dozing with his back up against the wall. The flame from the fire dropped so that the only things visible were the sheen on Ron's forehead and the smooth skin of the woman's arm. The younger woman, abandoned on her piece of cardboard, slept. I felt my head going down, a reflex tugging at it.
Something jerked my string hard and I came awake in a burst of noise and adrenaline. There was a hammering on the door, hard and constant, not fists. Ron was stumbling around the room on stiff knees. The woman unlatched the door which crashed back against the wall and two boys, eighteen years old apiece, walked in. The first one with the flashlight gave the woman a back-hander in the face. She scrabbled across the floor to the corner with the younger woman and her baby. The boy pointed the torch after her and we got a glimpse of pure fear before he turned it on us.
They were both armed with automatic rifles. The second boy, who was stripped to the waist, wore army fatigues but had bare feet. He carried a heavy stick. The one with the torch wore a torn Black Sabbath T-shirt, fatigues and a pair of red and white basketball pumps. He picked up the holdall and pointed us out of the door with his rifle. Ron asked him who the bloody hell he thought he was, and the boy bridged the language divide by showing him the butt of his gun. We stood outside while the second boy gave the two women a beating which they took in complete silence, not wanting to antagonize him with any screaming.
They ran us down the village alleyways in a night that had thickened to tar. We fell, they kicked us. We stumbled, they butted us on with their rifles, enjoying themselves, giggling high-pitched laughter, out of their heads. We broke out of the village at a fast trot and moved towards the electric lighting of the police station's compound. We arrived pouring with sweat and shit-stained from falling into the drainage channels.
We waited at the foot of the steps that went up to the covered concrete verandah of a well-lit building that lacked paint, but had filth and flophouse stains to compensate. The boy with the holdall climbed the steps and walked down a long corridor with a single light. He reached the door at the end and knocked. The door opened, silhouetted him, and closed behind him.
The sweat was beading in Ron's beard and his stomach was pumping after the half-mile run in the heat. He alternated between the words 'fuck' and 'shit' and the kid with the rifle whose age I'd revised downwards a couple of years was telling him to 'Tais-toi' until he'd had enough and aimed a flashy-looking kung-fu kick at Ron's leg. The kick hit Ron on the hip with no effect, except the boy fell over and fought with his gun in the dust until he ended on his back, the rifle pointing at Ron, who hadn't moved.
'These kids watch too many kickboxer movies,' I said.
The gun pointed at me. 'Tais-toi!' screamed the boy, who stood up and took two lengths of plastic out of his pocket and cuffed our hands behind our backs.
A door opened in the corridor and a guy in shorts was thrown into the wall opposite the door. Two policemen with bowling-ball guts on each of them came out after him and picked him up by the shoulders and dragged him, blubbering, to the neon-lit concrete verandah. Their tunics were open, showing white vests, and they each had three-foot clubs in their hands and talked to each other as if their minds weren't on what they were doing. The prisoner's mouth was open with no sound coming out and his cheeks were running with tears.
The policemen threw him down and shrugged their shirts loose of their shoulders and gripped the clubs with both hands. They were still talking to each other, about football, or what they had for supper that night, when they started in on the guy on the floor. He found something to scream with and tried to protect himself. They clubbed him, breaking his arms, hands and fingers and kept on clubbing him for some time after he'd turned the scream off. The clubs ran with blood and their white vests were flecked with red. They threw him off the platform into the dark compound and, still talking, went back down the corridor into their room. The heap didn't move. The night painted over him.
'What did he do?' I asked the boy in French.
'Stole a radio.'
'What's French for "fucking hell"?' asked Ron. 'Try "Sacre bleu". They'll think you're sweet and old-fashioned.'
'Tais-toi,' said the boy, more subdued, prodding us in the kidneys with the barrel of his rifle, a little bored now. He walked over and sat on the steps, looked at his feet and picked his nose.
The two police officers came back out, one of them bent over clapping his hands and laughing at what the other was saying. They turned right on to the concrete platform, walked its length and went down some steps to a cage at the side of the building. One opened the cage while the other shone the torch at the frightened faces of the men inside. The cage door opened and a figure was pulled out. He tried to stand straight and the policeman with the torch kicked his legs away. They picked him up under the armpits and hauled him up the steps. In the light of the verandah we could see it was Borema, shaky on his legs, his tongue working around his lips, trying to get some moisture there, get rid of the dryness. They took him into their room down the corridor.
'Moses is still out there,' said Ron.
'Finding us a lawyer, you mean?'
'Doing something.'
'Hiding in the bush, shitting his pants. He's not coming anywhere near here if he's using his head.'
'You know, Bruce, you're a great travelling companion. A real calming influence.'
'You start relying on other people, you stop thinking.'
'Thinking about how much I don't want to be clubbed half to death.'
'Thinking about how we're going to get out of here.'
'Where's the fucking law in this country, that's what I want to knowl'
'Right here,' I said. 'You want to go stealing radios?'
'
But we haven't done anything.'
'They're thinking of something. Something expensive.'
The door on the left of the corridor opened. Moses came out. Not only was he not finding us a lawyer, he was stark naked with a badly swollen face, a stitched slit for a right eye and blood at the corner of his mouth and nostril. He hunched forward covering his genitals. They marched him back to the cage. He had blood trickling down the back of his leg from his backside.
'What the fuck happened there?' asked Ron.
'Anal search,' I said. 'Moses got nasty.'
'This is going off,' said Ron, 'badly off.'
'We should have moved.'
'Why are they doing this?' he asked. 'I don't understand why they're doing this, I bought some fucking diamonds, what's wrong with that? I mean that's what they want, isn't it?'
'It is. Now somebody's taking their cut. A big man some-where's got himself short of money. You're loaded. They're softening you up. Showing you how ugly it can get, so when the time comes, you stretch out and let them rub your tummy. How much money you got?'
'Five hundred thousand CFA in the false bottom of the holdall.'
'That'll do.'
'All of it?'
'You can ask for some change if you want.'
'We still don't know what it's about.'
'Money. That's all it's ever about.'
A car's engine that wasn't used to full throttle screamed out not far off. The synchromesh growled and the clutch thumped in. Tyres span in the dust and caught. A rattling, shambolic noise came closer, the suspension finding its limits on a rough road, the undercarriage ripping into and over humps of baked earth. My Peugeot stormed into the compound and just before it hit the concrete verandah of the police station there was the trouser-ripping sound of a handbrake being applied and the car swung 180 degrees and stopped and rolled forward. Through the tall dust came some high-pitched giggling and a hand slapped the steering wheel.
Two young police officers in uniform got out of the car and started unloading, taking the cases, including the whisky and water, inside to the room at the end of the corridor. They came back with a torch and lifted a carpet out of the boot and threw it off somewhere. Then they opened the bonnet and looked in the air filter and under the battery. One of them took a screwdriver from the tool box and started to undo the driver's-door panel while the other searched under the dashboard. They called to each other for the torch every now and again. They found B.B.'s block of money in the passenger door, pulled it out, and took it inside.
Borema came out of the room down the corridor, naked, hands cuffed in front of him with the bored look of someone who's had these problems before. A single policeman walked him back to the cage. He didn't look as if he'd taken any sort of a beating.
'Maybe that fucker set us up,' said Ron.
'Possibly.'
'Maybe the little bastard owes somebody.'
'Just think about what you're going to say to those guys in the end room rather than who you're going to brain when you get out of here.'
The policeman came back from the cage empty-handed. A few minutes later the door opened at the end of the corridor and we were ordered up. A rifle prodded us forward. Close up, the corridor looked dirtier, with flying cockroaches performing acrobatics in the light.
In the room four neon strips dropped harsh light on to two policemen, with a metal filing cabinet between them, going through the bags. The boy in the Black Sabbath T-shirt was grinning, sitting with his leg up on the windowsill, playing with his rifle. There was a desk with Ron's empty holdall on it with the false bottom rucked up inside. Behind the holdall was a large shorn head sitting on two fat shoulders with striped epaulettes. A meaty forearm brushed the holdall aside and the shorn head looked up with eyes spaced wide apart, a flat, huge-nostrilled nose and a big mouth with a lot of white teeth in there. He stuck a finger and thumb in each nostril and said, 'Ce que ça pue!'
He said something fast in African and the kid came off the windowsill with the grin off his face. The senior officer stood up behind his desk, leaned forward with one paw in the middle of it, and swung his arm around like a yacht's boom. He hit the boy on the side of his head with his open palm and the blow sprawled the kid halfway across the room where he landed on his shoulder. There was an explosion which made everybody jump and the metal filing cabinet rocked backwards. Cordite smoked from the boy's rifle. One of the officers knelt down and fingered the bullet hole in the filing cabinet's gut. The boy looked at his rifle and clicked on the safety. Ron and I opened up our reserve tanks of perspiration.
'I am the chef,' said the guy in French, running his hand over his shorn head, looking at Ron. 'What does that mean—
"Moolah"?'
'Don't tell him,' I said. 'It'll only encourage him.'
'I don't know what it means myself.'
'Think of something.'
'It means bullshit,' said Ron, in French. Everybody laughed.
'They liked that.'
'These guys are easy to please.'
'So far.'
'You stink,' said the chef, laughing. 'You stink like bullshit.'
'Laugh till your hernia pops,' I said, and we roared.
When we'd quietened down a bit, and repeated the chefs joke to ourselves a few times and had a few more spurts of laughter and an oh-dear-lordy-lordy, he said we could shower and change.
By the time we got back our clothes had been stuffed back in the cases and the chefwas swinging a key with a tag on it like a hotel room key and reading a telex.
'We have two problems,' he said, which was a bad sign because in Africa you only needed one and the shit would be piled two feet above your head.
The first was that we hadn't registered ourselves as diamond buyers; whether you buy diamonds or not you still had to register. Ron pointed out that I wasn't a buyer and the policeman nodded and said that was fine, which worried me because it shouldn't have been. It should have been discussed, analysed, joked over and presents given, but no, all it did was bring him to the second problem.
'This key,' he said, 'it's the key to room 208 in the Hotel La Croisette in Grand Bassam.'
'What's he talking about?' asked Ron.
'You thought we were in shit before...'
'We?' asked Ron. 'I'll take the rap for the gear, but you're solo for the trip he's talking about.'
The chef raised an eyebrow. Ron shut up and listened to him reading the telex in his hand. It was a police report about the killing of a Liberian and two Ghanaians in room 208 of the Hotel La Croisette in Grand Bassam. It gave a clinical description of the nature of their deaths, down to the locations of the bullet holes, the split abdomen and the missing fingers and genitals. There was a synopsis of a statement by the hotel manager referring to a white man close to two metres tall, around ninety kilogrammes in weight, dark-brown hair and blue eyes, who the police would like to talk to. 'Explain,' said the chef.
A gust of wind drove its shoulder into the side of the building and a couple of doors slammed shut. The chefsaid something to the youngest boy. Raindrops hit the roof like grape shot. The boy produced some hurricane lamps which he lit. He left the room and the generator cut and the lights went out. The rain roared on the roof, too loud for talk, and we stood in the half-lit room which flared on and off with blue-white lightning so that we could see the rain falling in a white wall outside.
The rain gave me ten minutes to think. One minute to sort out what I was going to say and the nine minutes mulling over the response permutations should they look under the driver's seat and find Eugene Amos Gilbert's silenced .38.
When the rain had eased off, the chef nodded at me and I told them how I came to be in Fat Paul's hotel room on Monday night. I even mentioned the vultures and how I'd beaten them out of the room to show that I was a nice guy with respect for the dead. The chef said it didn't explain the key. I told him I took the key when I first came into the hotel so that I could go up and check the room. If the key had been on the hook
the woman would have said they were out and I'd have had no reason to go upstairs and see.
The shorn head thought about that and then asked me why the key was there in the first place if the people were in their room. I gave him the scenario of the empty hotel with Fat Paul's car outside, the killer finishing his work, locking the door and putting the key back on the hook. He didn't like it. He asked me why I hadn't made a statement to the police. I said that I didn't want to spend four hours in a police station when I had to drive to Korhogo the next day and anyway, the manager had the story. He produced Fat Paul's ring, the one with the scorpion on it.
'What's this?'
'A ring.'
'Yours?'
'Yes.'
He gave it to me to try on. It might have cut into Fat Paul's fingers but on mine there was a pencil width's difference.
'You've slimmed,' he said, smiling, so that I had to tell him about Eugene Amos Gilbert, also known as 'Red'. How we'd met in the hotel, how I'd disarmed him and seen his ID. How we'd fought in the basement and ended up on the bridge where we'd had another fight and he'd fallen in the water.
'Where's the gun?' asked the chef, which was a good and well-timed question and had me thinking that if they find that gun with my prints all over it and make the ballistic connection I'm on my way to a very long time in an Ivorian penal establishment.
'In the lagoon,' I said.
'And Eugene Amos Gilbert's ID?'
'In the lagoon. I gave it back to him.'
He asked for my timetable between three and six yesterday afternoon. I went over that and my story six or seven times until he'd got it absolutely straight. When the storm had passed and they restarted the generator, the neon lights came back on and after several hours of brutal light and step-by-step repetition my mind was like four eggs, scrambled. One of the other policemen typed it out, the guy needing a course badly, and not from the Pick 'n' Mix school. They had it off in triplicate and asked me to sign it. The same typist typed out the statement on the telex, the keys kicking and slapping and the tape spewing. I signed that too. As if this wasn't enough ugliness for one night I had another surprise when I asked the chef about the block of money in the Coq Sportif bag that was taken from my car. There were a lot of puzzled faces and muttering of 'Coq Sportif' and one of the boys left the room and came back shrugging.