'Like I said, go fuck yoursel'.'
'OK If you can't give me a name, just nod. Is it Sean Malahide?'
The air hissed between his teeth. His wrist was swollen, fat as a puff adder and a lump had appeared on the side of his face.
'Suck my cock, kwi man.'
'I'd tell you to go and see some decent movies, improve your vocabulary, but you're going to a dark hole, Eugene, and you're never going to come out.'
The police arrived and bagged the knife and gun. I didn't need to tell them Eugene was a pain in the arse, they knew. They threw him in the back of the van and cuffed him and he passed out. I told the officers that if he talked to Gbondogo I wanted to know what he said and gave them 2,000 CFA each to make sure.
Bagado was clean, in bed and asleep when I nudged him. He looked at his watch from under a hand held to his frown as if it was a long way off.
'They gave you a choice of seven and you had to read all the manuals?'
'I met Eugene and I've employed a monster.'
'You youngsters,' said Bagado, taking the bag.
Bagado spliced the tape into the cassette. We sat on the bed and listened to it. It opened on a toilet flushing, a tap running, hands being washed, people talking about a preseason game between the Cowboys and the 49ers and none of it that clear because whoever was wearing the mike had it located under clothing. Footsteps in the corridor, the man sat down. Other footsteps approached, quicker, staccato with heels. A woman's voice said, 'Hi, Jimmy.'
'You're looking very nice, Miss Callahan.'
'Thanks, Jimmy.'
Some throat-clearing. Then back to the toilet. Locking the booth. The wire was clicked off, then back on again. Toilet flushing again. Back down the corridor, taking a seat. A door opened.
'You can go in now, Jimmy,' said Miss Callahan's voice. Footsteps. Another door opening. Then a voice, distant, boomy and indistinct.
'Hi, Jimmy, take a seat. You OK?'
'Bad stomach...' He spoke as he sat down and if he said the man's name we lost it.
'OK, I'll be quick,' the other man's voice said, pacing up and down now and speaking, the voice coming and going. 'ECOWAS can vouch for port security for one hour between fourteen hundred hours and fifteen hundred hours in the afternoon tomorrow, ninth September. The President and his entourage should get there fifteen minutes before fourteen hundred hours. It's gonna take that kinda time for them to disarm. So latest thirteen-forty-five, you understand? How many in the entourage, Jimmy?'
'A hundred and twelve.'
'That's a lot of people to talk peace, Jimmy. Does he need that many?'
'There's nothing I can do 'bout it. They just decided that today. The guard go where he goes. They don't want him running away without them.'
'I see. So. Fourteen hundred hours, Jeremiah Finn arrives.'
'How are ECOWAS gonna play it in the port?'
'Whaddyamean?'
'I mean, they're gonna have enough soldiers on the ground to move a hundred and twelve palace-guard troops away from the gates, so that when Finn arrives...'
'They won't see a thing. We'll put up a wall of twenty-foot containers. Finn's men'll arrive and the ECOWAS people'll be out there. Finn's men have the layout of the port. They know exactly where everybody's gonna be. They'll walk in there and take the big man out.'
'I don't want them to take out the whole of the palace guard.'
'I hope they won't, too. But that is not under our control. Now, you've got the President primed. He's coming to the port to discuss standing down. That means: when he's gonna do it, when he's gonna leave the country, the number of visas he wants for his people, his future, their future. No talks unless that is understood. Right? You gotta keep that side of the story straight. You start making other things look possible, he's gonna smell something. The guy's paranoid enough as it is.'
'Everything's OK.'
'Once this is over the ECOWAS troops will assume control of Monrovia. An interim government will be appointed and free elections will take place within one year.'
'What about Jeremiah Finn?'
'Jeremiah Finn is in control of some key locations in and around Monrovia. He has to allow the transition of power. Don't worry...' We lost the end of that sentence under door-knocking and opening.
'Miss Truelove, what can I do for you?'
'General Akosombo is here, we're taking him down to the conference room.'
'I'll be right along.'
Door closed.
'You got the money, Jimmy?'
'I got it.'
'Get the President there for thirteen-forty-five tomorrow afternoon and prepare yourself to become a part of the history of your country.'
Barely audible under the rustling of clothes, the footsteps and the door opening came the line, 'Blessed are the peacemakers...' The rest was lost. James Wilson returned to the toilet and the tape finished.
'James Wilson sets himself up for life,' I said.
'He did that very well. It's not so easy to get somebody to say something when you're wearing a wire, and he got him to say what he wanted, except the most important thing. He didn't get him to say his name.'
'He did, we lost it. It doesn't matter, somebody's going to recognize the voice. We'll try it on Corben.'
I put the video cassette back in its envelope and sealed it, using Fat Paul's scorpion ring and the wax I'd bought; the copy I threw in the bin. The audio cassette I put in my pocket.
I called Martin Fall at his Hampshire farmhouse and got Anne, his wife, my ex, who sounded affectionate and cosy, which wrenched at the thought of what might have been if ... If I'd been a different person. She told me that he'd gone, not out of the country, just to the London office. He was due to call before takeoff. He was flying private, she said, in a Lear jet hired by Collins and Driberg. That was all I wanted to know.
I called Rademakers at the hospital but they said he wasn't available to talk. I arranged to see Chantale Leubas, Rademakers's 'secretary', and as I drove out to Deux Plateaux to see her I felt the trail cooling on me.
Once Chantale Leubas had let me in, puffed her hair, played with her diamond rings and tamed her loose and disobedient gown, she set about disarming my questions with amused honesty. She told me what she did for Rademakers, how she served him coffee and allowed him certain privileges. How at other times she had to be a little stricter.
'He has very fast hands,' she said. 'I think from playing with small things for too long.'
I didn't stay long. She told me what I already knew. That I was sniffing in the wrong place. She stopped me with her arm as I was leaving and whispered in my ear, her lips making contact.
'Ce n'est jamais la putain.'
She opened the sliding doors for me and tapped the aluminium frame with her rings.
'Have you ever done anything for a man called Sean Malahide?' I asked.
'No,' she said, the rings getting impatient on the metal, so that I was reminded of someone else with an interest in diamonds.
'Al Trzinski?'
She grunted and shuddered.
'That man is an animal,' she said, and slid the door shut.
Chapter 25
We rolled into Korhogo at 10.00 at night and the post-election parties were swinging. We drove through streets full of people who'd just exercised their democratic right in what passed for a free and fair election. We'd had another hard day on African roads and the six of us looked as if we knew who'd won and had come to poop the party. The compound was dark and empty but we could hear the thump of the music coming from the bar in the middle of the shanty town across the street.
Everybody went to bed. I sat in the kitchen and listened to the bass track which came into my head via my feet, and a heaviness came over me—not physical tiredness, but a malaise, a soul sickness that settled on me whenever I was in this house. I poured whisky over a handful of ice and sipped it and waited to ease into the cure, looking at the striplight reflected in the window. Dotte came in with wet hair, a wr
ap around her waist and a very loose-knit vest on top, through which her nipples were protruding. She found a pack of cigarettes on a shelf, lit one and leaned against the sideboard.
'Do you like this place?' I asked.
'It suits my mood sometimes.'
'You don't look the suicidal type.'
'Let's go and sit outside with the bottle,' she said. 'Wait for the rain. It's coming. That's what does it.'
We sat facing each other, leaning against a post each on the verandah.
'Aren't you going to start?' she asked.
'No questions. I'm all quizzed out.'
'Been asking too many?'
'And answering.'
'It would be good to just be, wouldn't it?'
'If they'd had prelapsarian pizza Adam would never've gone for the apple and we wouldn't have any of this crap.'
'You believe in original sin?'
'People's sins are getting more original every day.'
I drank, poured another measure and looked into the night to see if the storm was coming to loosen up the atmosphere.
'Talking in the dark is easy,' said Dotte.
'Listening is easier.'
'You're not helping me.'
'All right. Tell me what happened to Kurt. You said he killed a man.'
She took a couple of long drags on the cigarette, gathering herself.
'We were in Hamburg. Kurt was doing a deal with a guy who ran girls at a live-performance sex club just off the Reeperbahn. They bought the stuff by the kilo, I mean, a girl has to get out of her head to go on stage with a pig. Kurt had just bought a gun. A guy had pulled a knife on him and taken him for half a kilo and twenty-five thousand marks, so he bought a gun. I was watching from the car. Kurt went up to the guy at the back of the sex club, where they kept the bins. They talked. The guy didn't pull a knife or anything. He was leaning against the gate with his hands in his back pockets, looking cocky—stubborn. Then they stopped talking. Kurt took his gun out and pointed it at the guy. The guy took his hands out of his pockets and shook his head. He had the money for the dope in his hand. Kurt shot him and took the money. He got in the car, and we drove out of Hamburg. He didn't say a word. He never said anything about it. I watched it play on his mind, break him down, but he never let me talk about it with him.'
She got up, went into the kitchen and came back with the cigarettes.
'We don't have to talk about this,' I said.
'It's on my mind. He's dead and it's on my mind.'
'Was that what was on your mind when we came out here?'
'No.'
The light from the kitchen picked out the strands of her wet hair, but kept her face in shadow. Then she turned and the half light opened up her cheek and painted round an eye socket, the corner of her mouth, the cigarette going up to it. She seemed as far away as the night she first stood in the squares of light from the window ... and yet...
'Do you remember the first thing that changed you?' she asked.
'There are degrees of change...'
'I mean the first time you realized that innocence was not a permanent state.'
'My father died when I was sixteen. That was the end of childhood, but it is for most people anyway.'
Dotte smoked. I took an inch off my watery whisky and replaced it with an inch of neat stuff. Bagado was right. There wasn't much light coming from this woman. Especially now, talking about this stuff—Kurt killing a man because the guy wanted to talk money. Dotte's head clicked back against the post.
'You saw when we left Korhogo the first time...'
'You don't have to tell me this, Dotte. I don't need to know. I'm curious but you don't have to tell me.'
'They all want to know,' she cut in. 'They all want to know why I'm like this. The "mystery woman", some of them call me. I'd ask them if they really wanted to know what it's like being me. I'd give them a look and they'd get scared. They didn't really want to know, you see. They'd prefer it served up as a fiction. If it's too brutal they think that some of it might rub off on them. Taint their lives. But to me there's no mystery. It's a very simple tale. But they never saw that because they were thinking how much it would enrich their lives to know it.'
'That's why I'm saying, Dotte: you don't have to tell me.'
'But I want to tell you,' she said. 'That first night in Abidjan I saw the same in you ... and Kurt's the only person I've told and he's dead now.'
'Is it going to help?'
'It's not a question of help or understanding, if that's what you mean. I don't know what it's like to have killed a man, but doesn't it help you that somebody ... sympathetic knows?'
'You mean empathetic...' I said, and thought about that. I thought about if Bagado hadn't been there when I killed the man in that warehouse over a month ago, if there hadn't been someone who understood why it had to be done, the circumstances. I thought about the relief at seeing Eugene, a death that could have played on my conscience because I hadn't needed to do it.
'You'd better tell me,' I said, and she lit another cigarette for strength.
'When I was ten I found myself looking through a crack in my bedroom door at my father coming out of the bathroom. He knew I was watching. He turned, his towel fell away and I felt my whole body blush. I threw myself back into bed and lay there with the sheets over my head, the cold sheets on my hot body with the first sight of my father's penis in my head.
'It was like coming alive. I was fascinated by it. A silly girl's fascination with no brother to help out. I didn't think about it any more after that. But my father did.
'He'd come into my room while I was dressing. He'd pull me on to his lap and I'd feel him hardening underneath me. He'd take a pee while I was in the bath. Then the next summer my mother was diagnosed with cancer. She had a hysterectomy and that was the end of their sex life. My father had cooled off a lot since my mother was at home all the time. Then she died and he was broken up by it. I slept in his bed to comfort him. I was lonely myself. And that was how it happened. I didn't know how to say no. I couldn't say no to my own father.
'After a year or so I got pregnant and that was the end of it. He tried to make me terminate it. I wouldn't. I felt so bad by then I didn't want to feel worse. I was just under fourteen when I had Katrina. A year and a half later my father was killed in a car accident. I went to live with his elder brother and it would have happened all over again, but I was older by then. I knew how to say no.
'So you see, it's a simple tale, with a long repercussion. People from the social services told me it explained a lot. Why I took drugs, why I stole things and prostituted myself. It never explained anything to me.'
'How much does Katrina know?'
'She doesn't know that my father is hers. She hasn't asked for some time. She attached herself to Kurt as if he was her father. He was very good with her. I told you, she's not quite right, but Kurt—OK, she couriered drugs for him—but he gave her a lot of love.'
The last cigarette was finished. She threw the butt into the compound where it sparked and smouldered in the dust, the smoke hanging over it in the still night air. The music was still thumping off in the darkness. The first flickers of lightning appeared in some stacked clouds which were some way off, but coming. The thunder rumbled around us. Dotte poured herself some more whisky. David came through the gates and walked across the compound past the water vats. He went into the drying sheds, where he lay under one of the chassis which the boys had already pushed in, expecting the rain.
More lightning, a lot closer than we'd expected, made Dotte turn suddenly. The edges of things in the compound looking jagged in the blue-white light.
'Where did that come from?'
'A different storm. It's coming from the east.'
The music stopped. Dotte eased herself off the verandah and came over to me. We were eye to eye, with me sitting.
'I don't want you to think badly of me,' she said, and kissed me on the lips. There was nothing warm or seductive or lingering about the
kiss. I was expecting a more chemical reaction but the kiss sat on my lips, going no further than if it had been stuck there like joke lips. Then a wind bolted through the compound, plastering Dotte's hair across her face and whipping the strange moment away with it.
She swung herself up on to the verandah just as the first rain kicked up the dust.
'What are you doing tomorrow?'
'We should look at the books early; I might have to go to Man.'
'You have to go back?'
'Sometime.'
'Why?'
'The kidnap. The guy is going to be released as soon as the Ivorians agree to the terms and I turn up with the diamonds.'
'Is it rude to ask how much they want?'
'Two millions' worth.'
'He's not cheap.'
'He can afford it.'
'I'm going to bed,' she said. 'I can't add unless I have eight hours' sleep. Not that there's much to add in those books, you'll see. Good night.'
She went back to the kitchen, whose light failed as she reached the door, along with all the other lights in Korhogo. I leaned against the post and watched the rain and let the sound of it, on the rusted corrugated-iron roofs, drum my brains out.
Chapter 26
Monday 4th November
It was still dark at 5.40 in the morning, and cool. Cool enough to wake up wrapped in a sheet with no sweat in the scalp and the unusual feeling of having rested. I dressed and went into the corridor with my shoes in my hand. Dotte's bedroom door was ajar. I listened and then pushed it open—nobody home. The bed was made, there were crossed ironing creases on the pillows, and a dent in the edge where someone had sat.
I put my shoes on, swigged a cup of coffee and at first light walked across the puddled compound to where the boys slept and found Kofi blowing on some kindling. I told him I wanted to go and see Soumba, Kurt's old girlfriend, and asked if she lived far. He said he would take me.
We drove through a hungover Monday morning in central Korhogo to an old colonial house on the other side of town. It looked derelict behind its high walls. There had been a fire in one half of the house. The rooms inside were blackened by smoke and only a single charred shutter remained on one window. A group of women and children sat outside in the compound between the house and what had been the servants' quarters.