'The big girl,' Bagado reminded him.

  'Oh, no, no, no, please sir,' said Moses in a deepening voice as if we were going to make him do something again that had taken a terrible physical toll first time around. 'She too much, Mister Bruce. Too many. She brekkin' me no small. I no, no please sir, Mister Bruce.'

  'Bagado and I are going to Cotonou. You are staying here. We drop you at Charlie's bar and you keep watch. See what happen. You be inconspicuous.'

  'Whassat please, Mister Bruce?'

  'Invisible which doesn't mean "not there".'

  'No please, sir.'

  'You leave Grace alone small.'

  'Yes please, Mister Bruce.'

  'Let big fellow sleep small.'

  'Yes please, Mister Bruce.'

  'Or Mercy she comin' back brekkin' you no small.'

  Moses's face widened in horror and then, if it was possible, broadened further into a wide smile. 'But she likin' me no small, Mister Bruce, you unnerstan'.'

  'I think I do, Moses.'

  We dropped Moses off at Charlie's just after two o'clock and he took off across the wasteland like a car thief. The sun was high in the sky and the pressure and humidity as normal as West Africa allowed. We drove with the windows open, Bagado hunched in his raincoat. I told him about Yvette, who didn't concern him, and Kate Kershaw, whose theft of the photos and night-time sortie did. He had the five photos I'd had printed this morning in his hands and was going through them over and over again, waiting for the epiphany.

  'Why does the wife lie?' he asked.

  'She went to see somebody.'

  'Who did she see that's worth lying about?'

  'Somebody who knew her husband.'

  'Somebody who killed her husband?'

  'She doesn't look the type, and how would she fit in with the Perec killing?'

  'This killing might not be about Françoise Perec, it might just be about other women, and a million dollars,' he said. 'And what does Mrs Kershaw look like?'

  'In need of food.'

  'Thin people can still get upset by their husband's infidelity and have a taste for luxury.'

  'She is upset by her husband's infidelity but she says she doesn't like luxury,' I said.

  'The Perec killing could be connected to Kershaw's death,' said Bagado, tapping his lips as another wild theory curved into his brain. 'Mrs Kershaw tells her "friend" that she wants to get rid of her husband. Her "friend" needs to get rid of Perec. The "friend" provides the connection. He gets rid of his problem and uses Kershaw to do it and maybe gets paid for it.'

  'You'd have to be very trusting with the money.'

  'I was just thinking she might not know about the million dollars. That might have been something between Kershaw and the big man. She's found out about another woman, and she's had enough of her husband's infidelity and is angry enough to have him killed.'

  'How would she know the "friend" who's going to do this for her, how's she going to find the money when she's broke?'

  'Somebody who knows the Kershaws, somebody who's in contact with both of them, somebody who knows Jack, somebody '

  'B.B.,' I said, without thinking. 'He wouldn't be doing it for the money.'

  'What about love?'

  'That's nearly unimaginable.'

  'Charlie?'

  'His bar's not too far from the Hotel de La Paix.'

  'It's an interesting possibility,' said Bagado, looking out of the window at some diseased coconut palms. 'I had a call from Brian Horton in London. He found out about the girl in the psychopath lecture. Her name was Cassie Mills, born 15th March 1937. Murdered 23rd September 1954 in Rockford, Illinois. Case unsolved. No suspects.'

  'Perec was killed on the 23rd September,' I reminded him.

  'Coincidence.'

  'It's a pity there aren't degrees of coincidence.'

  'When I first beat Brian Horton at darts he said to me: "Bagado, nobody likes a smart-arse."'

  'I've noticed that myself,' I said.

  We crossed the lagoon at Aneho and watched a lonely figure far out on the tip of the sandbar staring out to sea.

  'I'm beginning to feel like a pawn,' said Bagado.'

  'I hope it's a strategic one?'

  'No, as usual, an expendable one.'

  'Only a bad player throws away his pawns.'

  'A small hope for us to cling to.'

  We crossed the border and got through a congested Cotonou using Bagado's lung power and a police motorcyclist who I dashed some money for petrol. We rolled into Porto Novo at half past four. Bagado had been interrogating and I had been spilling it about Heike.

  'She wants children. They all want children/ he said.

  'She's never talked about children.'

  'Women don't. They think about it and the need just creeps up on them. They wake up one day and want to be pregnant. How old is she?'

  'Thirty.'

  'That's the age. They think it's their last chance. They have to act quickly.'

  'She just talks about her work. She's down here for a conference and to sort out her career move. She hasn't, as far as I know, been found standing with her head to one side and her mouth open outside primary school playgrounds. What she's been thinking about is whether she stays in Africa or goes back to Berlin.'

  'And what's the first thing she does?'

  'I don't know what

  'You do.'

  'What?'

  'She comes to see you.'

  'I live down here.'

  'You've never been married.'

  'No.'

  'You've never been close to marrying.'

  'No.'

  'You've had girlfriends, but nobody important.'

  'But I'm not a virgin.'

  'You're how old?'

  'Thirty-eight. I'm a late developer.'

  'Do you love her?' asked Bagado, slipping in the crucial question amongst the easy ones in that natural policeman-like way.

  There was a bit of a pause while I wrestled that question to the ground and pinned it down, only for it to wriggle away and get me around the neck with its knee in my back.

  'She's different,' I said.

  'Isn't that what people say about modern art when they don't like it?'

  'I didn't say I was fond of her.'

  'That would have been worse, but different is a failure. A woman doesn't give you everything if she's just different to you. She wants you to look her in the eye and say you love her.'

  'She asked me how I felt about her leaving. I said - "Bad". She told me that wasn't good enough because it was negative.'

  'Ah, Heike, I like her,' he said, grunting at his inadvertent rhyme. 'She came here to test you. She's confused. She's got the ache for children. Work is still important but everything has changed. Her life still seems to be the same but it isn't. She's begun to look around her and she sees you - the right man in the wrong circumstances.'

  'What are these "wrong circumstances"?'

  'The nest, security, someone who will look after her, someone reliable with money coming in '

  'Someone who doesn't get visits from hitmen in the night. Someone who doesn't go looking for trouble with his new pal Bagado, who, incidentally, isn't paid and spends days away from his home and loving wife and children.'

  'We all have to make our choices,' he said. 'It may be small consolation to you, but I know of women who have got over this need for children The right man wasn't there at the time and the feeling faded.'

  Bagado stretched his arms forward and put his hands on the dashboard. 'Bah!' he said lifting them off. 'You people in Europe are too selfish anyway.'

  We stopped at a traffic light and looked at the people crossing the road. A group parted as it straggled across and Heike, the only white person in the crowd, appeared in the road almost in front of us.

  'Christ, that's her!' I said, getting out of the car, confused at seeing her, not thinking what I was doing. Bagado held my arm. I shrugged him off, thinking he was just worried about the traffic, but I looked back and he jerked his head in Heike's direction. She was walking away from us, her skirt swinging on her hips. I had only seen her at first, but now, with a sharp shock, I saw that her hand was held by another, bigger hand. She was walking alongside a European man a little taller than her. They were talking and Heike's head was toppling back, she was showing him her throat and laughing about it. The man kissed her there on the neck and horns went off behind me.

  The car stalled, I restarted it and pulled away from the slogans on my stunted manhood. Bagado folded in on himself and looked out from behind the collar of his raincoat. 'Choice complicates/ I said to myself, and understood the look Heike had given me. It was a look I'd seen on a few other faces recently.

  It wasn't an elbow-out-the-window-shirt-flapping-in- the-breeze kind of drive to the Benin/Nigeria border. A lot of concentration poured through "the windscreen but it wasn't directed at the road. I hunched over the wheel and found that it wanted to remain attached to the steering column. Bagado applied a lot of brake in his foot well. We arrived and I uncoiled myself while Bagado went to the warehouse alone.

  The car was parked away from the border amongst fifty overladen trucks with skewed chassis waiting to cross into Nigeria. Bagado checked out the warehouse while I waited and ran the gauntlet of every emotion going. I finished by getting on the highest horse there was and stared down its snorting nostrils at Heike's deceit, only to come to the lurching conclusion that this rearing, tooth-baring, nostril-flaring stallion wasn't righteous indignation, it was far worse, and again, something that I'd seen in a few other people recently.

  Bagado appeared running up the road from the border, his raincoat flapping like crows' wings. In West Africa, only athletes and children under twelve run, so I started the car and turned it around ready to go south across the coastal border. Bagado got in and the car squirmed on the grit, the engine howling before the tyres caught and we kicked off the blocks.

  By five o'clock, Bagado had got us through the Benin part of the frontier and was working on the Nigerians. They weren't so understanding and he called me over.

  'They want to see the white man.'

  I took out my fold of money and peeled off two 5000 CFA notes and put one in each breast pocket of my shirt. I rolled the rest up and shoved it in my sock.

  As I walked to Immigration, there was a shout from the Customs shed and a crowd of people scattered, slowed and then turned. In the clearing were two men, one with a bottle. The one without the bottle shouted: 'I kill you,' which struck me as unlikely since he had as much muscle on him as a praying mantis. The man with the bottle was winding it round in his big fist. He had a divoted, shaved head with a two-inch white scar above the ear where they must have taken the brain out. His neck was built with industrial grade steel rods and his arms hammered out of some bronze alloy. He was smaller than a scrap metal truck, which was the only human observation I could make. The crowd urged them to get on with it.

  A policeman barged through the people, snicking them out of the way with his truncheon. He burst into the clearing and with no introduction cracked the bottle man across the bridge of the nose with a straight-armed sweep across his body. The man dropped to his knees with his hands on his face, the red blood filling them and seeping through the cracks in his fingers. The policeman rose on his toes and came down with his truncheon on the back of the ridged, shaved pate and there was a noise like a distant cricket match. His opponent threw his hands up in the air, victorious. He strutted to the crowd who wide-eyed him in silence.

  The policeman stepped forward like a batsman on to his front foot and drove the man's head into the boundary of the crowd. He hit the deck with the face of a moron.

  A sign at the end of the Customs shed said: 'Welcome to Nigeria.' I went into Immigration, leaving the policeman surveying the crowd and washing his truncheon under a tap with the meanest look I've seen on a human outside prison.

  We went into a dark and dirty office which had a slit window big enough for a rifle, but too little for a view. A weak light bulb developed four Immigration officers in light brown uniforms like an ancient sepia print. Bagado was told to wait outside. A policeman shut the door. The Immigration officers positioned their sneers.

  Each had his elbows and forearms horizontal on the table with hands on top of each other. They had the slim, fine features of northerners. Two of them asked a different question at the same time. The one with the most ribbons stared down the table and then said: 'Your ticket, please.'

  'No ticket.'

  'You need a ticket for onward travel out of Nigeria.'

  'I'm in a car.'

  'But you have to prove that you will leave Nigeria on a certain date.'

  'I promise '

  The officer with the ribbons stood up and kicked the chair back. He put his hands behind his back and paced round his colleagues in a perfect imitation of a British official, circa 1950. There was a little game to be played now and I had to show that I had all the time in the world to play it.

  'You have broken the law of our country, Mr Medway,' said an officer.

  'You haven't let me in to break it.'

  'And you, one of our previous colonial masters,' said another.

  'I should have known better.'

  'You are on Nigerian soil now,' said the man with the ribbons, staring at the floor with a look so grave I thought he was going to make me plough it.

  A policeman opened the door and threw a bundle in which landed on the floor behind me. He closed the door again. The bundle was alive. He was a pitiful wretch. He looked up from the floor with the undefiant look of something hog-tied for market. The officers peered over the desk. They spoke to each other in Hausa saying: 'Let's get some money off the white man and let him go.'

  I had enough Hausa to offer a contribution to the Immigration Officers' Holiday Fund and they all roared with laughter and one said: 'I see you have imbibed some of our culture.'

  'A man can't move without imbibing the culture.'

  They all laughed again and clapped their hands. I gave them one 5000 CFA note between them and that was enough. As I left, the policeman outside the door was practising cuts with a three-foot piece of cane, which gave me some painful reminders of black days at a school where discipline was enjoyed.

  Chapter 25

  Bagado looked like the relieved accomplice who hadn't been snitched on. I thought he might ask me how many I'd got, but he just climbed in the car and pointed east. We wanted to get to the Nigerian side of the border to where the porters were bringing the rice across, so we went east to Badagri, turned north to Ado, and finally west back to Idiroko which was on the Nigerian side of the border from Porto Novo. Bagado was surging forward in his seat like a jockey and twitching me on with a whiplash voice when he wanted me to overtake. He had seen that the warehouse on the Benin side was nearly empty. Madame Severnou had moved the rice in half the time I'd expected.

  We took the road out of Idiroko to the border and on the outskirts of town saw a truck loaded with rice turning off the main road. We followed it for about a mile to a warehouse with other trucks of rice waiting to unload outside. Whitened stick men in soiled loincloths walked up and down wooden planks, storing the rice in the warehouse.

  Opposite the warehouse, which had its own chain- link compound, were three crumbling buildings and to one side some mud-walled houses with corrugated iron roofs. There were some trees with good shade and some homemade wooden seating with no ground clearance.

  Beyond was another street and some more mud-walled houses. We parked up behind the crumbling buildings in a street where a black stinking liquid ran in the gutters. A dog stood looking at us, a nothing dog, neither big nor small and with a rough coat the same colour as the red dust. It shook with fever and tics. Blood gathered at the teddy bear point of his lips. Flies settled there, took off and relanded.

  We found a dark corner by one of the mud-walled houses which was shaded by a tree with thick heavy leaves coloured red by the dust. We sat on some wood with our backs to the mud wall and waited. For a moment, the sun turned the whole sky a deep orange pink, a rare West African sunset against which some skeletal trees blackened, faded and merged when it was finally dark. It was just after six o'clock. Lights came on around the compound and in the warehouse.

  It didn't take someone with an MBA to realize that they shouldn't have been unloading here at all. The rice was destined for Lagos and Ibadan and it didn't make sense to load and unload twice.

  As the sacks were taken off, two tall, well-built young Africans in grey slacks and white shirts, looking as if they were off an American college football team, ran detectors over each sack as it came into the warehouse. In the hour after dark, one sack was put aside to join four others in a corner by the warehouse office and something was recorded on a clipboard attached to a string on the wall.

  Women with bundles of washing on their heads walked past without seeing us. Children played by the road in the light from the compound. A boy beat a hoop with a stick. The hoop outpaced him and crossed the road, missed by a truck and a car, it lodged itself in a ditch. Another truck arrived, the sacks queued off. Not a lot was happening, apart from phase three of an international drugs operation.

  Bagado's distant voice was telling me how clever this operation was. The idea of smuggling something more valuable inside something else being smuggled was, to his mind, brilliant.

  'Why make something look clean when it's already dirty?' he said. 'Anything clean here stinks like hell.'

  He was right. It was a regular piece of Nigerian business and what was more, it wasn't happening in a port, nor in a city warehouse, nor in an airport with a lot of curious people around who talk to other people who cost money. It was happening in a dusty, shitty little border town sixty miles from Lagos with people who were glad to get some work.

  Other thoughts turned over with the weight and monotony of ploughed earth. The film clip of Heike with her lover played and replayed itself in my head. Bagado and Heike were right. I'd never made a decision about her. I hadn't realized how much my own stability relied on her. I hadn't understood what a difference she made, or maybe I had and chose to ignore it because things like that can get difficult.

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31