'It has been known,' I said.
'You look a little clean for a barfly,' he said, 'but you're all we've got.'
'Is this stuff going to make me start shouting?'
'I'm a bit loud for you, am I?' he hollered. 'No more than your shirt.'
Ah-ha!' He turned to Ron. 'We'll be having a bit of gentle wit and banter here. We haven't heard any of that for a wee while, have we?'
'You're right there, Sean,' said Ron, in a voice hammered flat.
'I'm not boring you, am I?'
'Don't be so sensitive, Sean.'
'There you go again,' he said, wheeling round. 'You'll be after having another drink.'
Ron slumped on his bar stool and started looking for his second, the one with the bucket of water and the towel. He held out his glass and dropped his head.
'Don't stint me this time, Sean,' he said. 'I'd rather be unconscious...'
'...than what?' said Malahide, the bottle hovering over the rim.
'...than not.'
'That's me lad,' he said, pouring out a measure that looked as if it would do the trick, 'there's no excuse for rudeness. I won't tolerate it when I'm buying. Now where was I?' He looked around him as if he was going to find the thread of his conversation hanging off the furniture. His knees gave and he took two tiny steps which was all the momentum his gut needed to send him rushing to the bar.
'Hup!' he said, crushing a bar stool. He picked up his glass and stuck his nose in it and then took some time refitting it on the level.
'The Liberian civil war!' he said suddenly, the nub of his gist bouncing back.
'Give us a break, Sean,' said Ron, leaning forward. 'Can't you get it into that patchy Irish head of yours that we don't give a shit about the Liberian civil war. In the real world, where I come from, we don't bloody care if a bunch of Afs want to bash each other up. It's their problem. A little local difficulty, we call it, so stow it, will you?'
Malahide frowned at himself, nodded and pouted his lips into a massive cartoon kiss, sizing the situation up. He might have got himself annoyed if he hadn't been so roaring drunk.
'Liberia is the state given by the Americans to their freed slaves in the last century. They think it's pretty important,' he said quietly. He blinked with concentration. Ron slumped back. 'So—the Liberian civil war. Samson Talbot and Jeremiah Finn—they used to be chums, you see. Then they split. Old Jerry thought he had a better chance with the Americans without Samson. So now you've got'—he held up his thumb—'the late President's national guard still in the palace—they're Israeli-trained, Goldstein, and the palace was Israeli-built, so you're represented. You've got the ECOWAS* troops, that's the West African alliance, the so-called peace-keeping force. There's the Americans sticking their oars in. The French are sniffing around. Jerry Finn's getting pally with the Yanks and Samson Talbot's kissing Gadaffi's arse. That's what I call a foggering mess.'
He turned back to the bar and his head dropped on to his chest, his eyes closed and he breathed through his nose and a sheen of sweat appeared on his face which made it look like a plastic horror mask. A long low snore started in his small bowel and finished with a grunt that kicked him in the back and jerked him awake. He looked at us, bewildered for a moment, as if we'd invaded his living room, but the girl triggered something off in him which wasn't the Liberian war and he pulled her to him, growling. She, pliant as an ironing board, didn't resist.
'What's your business?' he asked me, mid-grapple.
'Sheanut,' I said.
'What the fog are you doing down here, then?'
'I'm going north.'
'You'll be going to Korhogo, then?' he said, and I looked into his face, which had now taken on the colour of something a butcher would throw into his dog bin, to see if he was thinking of coming with me.
'Not me,' he said. 'No. No. Goldstein here. He's a diamond man, needs to get to Tortiya.'
'The name's Ron, Sean.'
'That'll be short for Aaron,' said Malahide, his head floating about a bit, being annoying, paying Ron back. 'Fuck off, Sean,' said Ron quietly.
'I'm getting in there now, aren't I?' said Sean. 'Getting behind that nice silk shirt of yours, getting behind that nice gold earring in your tab.'
'I bought some diamonds from some Swiss guys in Geneva,' said Ron, picking the words out and fitting them in the sentence. He gave Sean a sideways glance, and then dropped his voice to make him strain. 'Really nice stones and cheap ... a fucking steal, man, I tell you. They told me they came from Tortiya.'
'Nice of them to tell you where they came from,' I said.
'Well, that's it. They told me if I wanted more I'd have to go and get them myself.'
'Why do you think they said that?' asked Sean, suddenly on Ron's shoulder. Ron shrugged him off.
'They gave me the contact and I fixed myself up with them. They met me at the airport. A couple of guys from Guinea, both called Alfa.'
'That means "king" in Fula,' said Malahide. 'They're all called that over there. A very modest bunch of fellows.'
'These guys pick me up in a taxi and bring me here. On the way they tell me they don't have a car and I'm going to have to hire one to get us to Tortiya.'
'How much did they say?'
'Two hundred and fifty grand,' said Ron. 'A thousand bloody dollars.'
'They're scamps,' said Malahide, laughing, 'absolute fogging scamps.'
'So I told them I was here to buy a million dollars', at least a million dollars', worth of diamonds through them and they could hire the goddam car.'
'You don't understand, Goldstein, those poor foggers haven't got a bogger between them.'
'Maybe that's why the Swiss told you where the diamonds came from.'
'Ah-haaaa,' said Malahide, with his eyebrows up to his hairline.
'You still want to go?'
'What sort of car have you got?' asked Ron. 'A Peugeot 504 Estate,' I said, trying to remember the last time somebody asked me that.
'Ah,' he said, trying to picture it.
'Fifteen years old,' I said, developing some small dislike for Ron. 'Mmm.'
'Bald tyres. No aircon and the stereo doesn't work. Still want to come?'
'Sure,' he smiled, making something of a bad job.
'We leave at six,' I said. 'No Alfas, and I don't want to carry a million dollars either.'
'You won't be. There's a Belgian guy here in Abidjan who'll cover me up to a million and a half. If I buy, he'll pay.'
'Sounds like a trusting fellow,' said Malahide. 'Must be Rademakers.'
'How do you know Rademakers?'
'There's only one man who does that business here.'
'Yes, well, that's the way the business works. He knows I'm good for it.'
'That's all right then, isn't it?' said Malahide.
'Rademakers pays out,' I said, 'but what happens to the diamonds?'
'One of the hajis selling the stuff brings them down here. We settle up. Rademakers organizes the export. There's no risk, I'm telling you.'
'You should go in a bush taxi,' said Malahide, 'get some local colour, see the country.'
He went back to the bar and poured himself some more whisky. Ron poured some of the huge measure Malahide had given him earlier into my glass. The Irishman had his arm around the girl and was snoring again, but without jerking himself awake. Ron leaned over and flicked him on the forehead with his finger as if he was nothing more than a little bug. Malahide's eyes opened.
'You're drifting away, Sean,' he said.
'I am. What're we drinking?'
'What about tomorrow? You're supposed to be giving a talk.'
'I am?'
'On pineapples.'
'That's right. We've still time for another.'
Malahide supported himself on the bar and snatched the bottle away from the barman, who backed off. He gave the bottle to Ron and made circular motions with his finger. He beckoned the barman and pulled some notes out of his bent wallet. The barman counted them and folded the n
otes lengthways while he did a nifty calculation.
'Encore cinq mille,' he said.
Malahide pulled out another note which the barman snaffled. He turned to the girl, blinked several times, took out another wad and gave her two notes. She looked at them, tilting her head from one side to the other to get a good 3-D understanding of their value.
'Encore cinq mille,' she said.
Malahide wiped his face dead, but the girl fixed him with her lurid mask and showed him a pair of empty hands as if the money had already gone on bills and other expenses. She whipped a note out from the sheaf in his hand and slid it down the front of her skirt with long, delicate fingers which looked torn and bloody but were just shabby with flakes of old varnish.
The bar had filled up behind us and all the comfortable people took time out to watch the girl leave, checking out her stick-thin legs jacked up on red stilettoes, her heels swollen over the edges of her shoes and a black pit in her calf from an old sore. The piped music resumed. Ron's sneer took shape.
Malahide was subdued. His head looked as if it was hurting him already and his scalded face needed a cucumber and yoghurt bath. Sweat marks had appeared on his shirt, even in the air-conditioned cool, and he'd started to scratch the side of his gut.
'I'd give up the drink,' he said, patting his cheek, 'but it'd empty my evenings and the evenings are terrible long in Africa.'
'You live here?' asked Ron.
'I get about.'
'On contract?'
'You're asking a terrible lot of questions.'
'Only two,' said Ron.
'Would you mind putting some whisky on top of this ice,' he said, holding out his glass. Just the sight of him killed any conversation so I told Ron about the witch doctor I'd seen that morning.
'A very interesting thing, don't you think?' said Malahide. 'Mumbo jumbo,' said Ron.
'Well, I didn't expect anything less from a member of the Judaic faith.' He paused. 'Or d'you know what you're on about?'
Ron cranked his arm to tell Malahide to get on with it. Malahide licked his white, crusty lips and told us about the Mandingos' tribal god called Muma dyumbo. When they were captured and sent to the States and Caribbean islands as slaves they took their god with them so that any African religious nonsense was known by the slavers as mumbo jumbo.
'That's very interesting,' said Ron, picking at his coaster.
Sean asked him what he knew about voodoo.
'Zombies. Haiti. Night of the Living Dead,' said Ron, with his eyelids closed, the weight of all that disdain making him tired.
Malahide scratched away at a nodule beneath his shirt and, suddenly sober, told him that voodoo came from West Africa, that although there were a lot of Muslims and Christians now, there were still a lot of animists and a fair amount who did both. He told Ron about the fetish markets where you could buy dried split birds, old bones, skulls, jujus to put curses on people, potions to appease gods, get fertile, cure impotence and a lot of other things which a modern medical bill put out of reach for the average native.
'Not that the witch doctor's cheap.'
'You used one?' asked Ron.
'My boys use them.'
'You ever found a red-haired wax effigy stuck with pins?'
'I'll tell you something else...' he said, ignoring him, 'something that might help you up there in the north while you're out of civilization. I was working out near Man when a local chief died. My boys disappeared for a week. They all came back thin and starving hungry and I asked them where the hell they'd been. Hiding, they said, because of the heads, they said. They bury heads with the big man's body and they didn't want any of them to be theirs.
'When this president dies, and he's the big man of all big men, the world's greatest Catholic, apart from yer man himself—when he dies, they say he'll need a few hundred heads to keep him quiet. My boys tell me at least one of the heads has to be a white man's. So if the old man dies while you're here, Ron, you'd better keep your head down.'
'I didn't know you cared, Sean.'
'I don't, but maybe you have someone who does.'
Ron Collins picked his beard and flicked his hair behind his ear, but Malahide wasn't finished.
'This is something else for you, Ron,' he said. 'Something very relevant to you. Some years ago I supplied a Nigerian who ran a chain of supermarkets in Lagos and Ibadan. The man didn't pay and he didn't pay and I kept calling him and he was never there. I thought he was one of them slippery types you find over that way, so I flew to Lagos to sit on his chest. He was in jail. He'd come back from the Cameroon and his suitcase fell open in Lagos airport. He had a caseful of babies' heads on him. Thirty foggering heads in his suitcase.'
'What's that got to do with me?' asked Ron, sounding bored but listening hard.
'They're for burying. They say it brings on the diamonds. There y'are, you didn't think when you were hunched over your magnifying glass in your smart Hatton Garden office you'd be contributing to the rise in infant mortality on the Dark Continent, did you?'
'But is it true?' asked Ron quietly.
'People get sick, have accidents, drive themselves mad over African girls. Maybe something'll happen to you while you're up there. Watch what you're eating, Ronny boy, or you might start giving a better price for your diamonds than you want to.'
'Now I know you're talking crap.'
'You're probably right there, Ronny. You're probably right.'
Chapter 9
The bar closed. Ron slid off his stool. Malahide began manoeuvring himself like a horse and dray in a cul-de-sac. We all made it to the lifts where there was a gathering of loose-limbed people telling each other stuff they didn't need to hear—most of it in Danish. Ron and I ordered a five o'clock alarm call and picked up our keys. Malahide announced his first pee of the evening and went off in search of the conveniences. Both lifts arrived at the same time.
I ended up at the back of one lift, jammed up against a bleach blonde who was either as tall as me or was just riding up the wall in the crush. She sneered and turned her head to show me a pair of scimitar earrings which promised castration should anyone think of trying anything furtive. The doors remained open long enough for people's breathing to become audible. As they began to close, an African moved into frame, turned his back and pressed himself into the lift and a small woman grunted at my back.
Through the heads I could see the African's small ear. He turned his head to the woman next to him and I saw his profile. Something colder than a toad ran up my back and settled across my neck so that the hackles rose. There were three one-inch scars on his cheek. I turned my face back to the blonde and scratched my cheek on some appliqué on her T-shirt which said 'Heaven'.
The doors closed and a sense of panic moved through the lift. The crush tightened. We went straight up to the second floor. The lift slowed. The doors opened and everybody exploded out. The blonde ripped past me, spinning me back into the lift and I lunged forward and hit the 'Close Doors' button, which didn't respond. In the corridor people fought to get past a couple who'd fallen on each other's lips. The lift doors closed uncertainly and in their own sweet time. I went up to the third floor on my own. The doors opened on to a silent corridor.
I poked my head out of the lift to see if he wanted to shoot that off first. The corridor was badly lit and empty. I walked past the second lift and looked down the short passageway which gave access to the stairs. There was no one. I opened the door to my room and started looking for a weapon.
The owners of this hotel knew a few things about people. The only two appliances in the room that approached being heavy, blunt and movable were the TV and the mini-bar. I took a penknife out and dismantled the towel rail and found myself holding a thin and hollow metal rail which might have concussed a trusting hamster with a thin skull. Then I remembered the fax, where reception had put it, and thought that room 205 might be about to get some room service they hadn't banked on.
In the corridor I found a wall-mounted fi
re extinguisher. I threw the towel rail back into the room, lifted the extinguisher off the wall and walked to the stairs. I opened the door and listened to the thick humid air sliding down the bannisters. I went down the stairs, weighing the fire extinguisher, trying to decide how hard I was going to have to hit him to knock him out. It wasn't so long ago that I'd killed a man with a lavatory and I wasn't keen to repeat that with another household appliance.
I opened the door and stepped back into the dark shadow of a corner. At the junction with the main corridor was a single downlighter which dropped a cone of light on to the apex. I heard a couple giggling down the corridor and the sound of key tags knocking against doors. Then quiet. Room 205 was right down the corridor and to the left with a view out of the front of the hotel. There were no sounds from any of the rooms. A lift came down and passed straight through the floor. I looked at the dust hanging in the cone shed by the downlighter. It moved, suddenly turbulent. Into it, from the left, moving fast, his feet silent on the carpeting, came the triple-scarred African. His right arm was by his side and in its gloved hand was a gun with a suppressor attached. He didn't stop. I hefted the fire extinguisher, took four steps, turned right into the corridor and, missing my aim, caught him a glancing blow on his right shoulder. The gun fell from his dead arm. He turned and I hit him under the ribs with a right hand and then batted him with the flat of my left hand so that his head cracked sharply against the metal frame of the lift and he collapsed.
I called the lift, picked up the gun and stuck it in the waistband of my trousers in the small of my back. The doors opened on an empty chamber and I dragged him in and pressed the basement button. I frisked him as we went down and found a wallet which I put in my back pocket. On his right leg there was a knife in a scabbard strapped above his ankle. I removed it.
The doors opened on to the oil and petrol smell of the garage and I pulled him out and sat him up against the wall. It was hot and still in the yellow light of the garage but there was a tremendous noise in my ears which reminded me of a jet engine going into reverse thrust. I stopped to listen and found that this was the noise that whisky made when pumped around hardened arteries. Sweat was dripping off my nose on to the man's jacket which I was holding by the lapels as I straddled him. I lifted him and drove him up the wall and hoisted him over my shoulder in a fireman's lift, holding on to his legs, and set off across the car park—so far, so professional.