The truth was I didn't want to lose her, and not just because I could see her being taken away but because I realized in my near-forty dotage that I needed her - positively needed her* Things I knew already but kept back behind the fences crept to the front of my mind. I admired her for the work she did, I respected her for the way she did it - the toughness, the resilience, and I loved her for the hair at the back of her neck, the large hands holding the cigarette in its holder, the way she sat in that big dress and drank with me, glass for glass. And I knew I believed it because the feeling I had didn't come from my mushy, inconsistent head nor that over-flattered fragile organ, the heart, but high up in the stomach, around the diaphragm, where a sharp tap can take all the wind out of you.

  Bagado hit me on the arm and told me it was all over. The last truck had arrived half loaded. Another sack had been put aside and one of the college boys was doing a final count. He let the clipboard fall and spoke to his friend who gave him his detector, walked out of the compound and crossed the road into one of the crumbling buildings. The other guy was winding his arm around as if he was cranking an engine and the workers broke into a run. They took the ramps off the two trucks they had been unloading whose diesel engines farted thick smoke and reversed out of the compound. The half-loaded truck crawled in. The ramps were attached. The other college boy crossed the road back to the compound. The workers unloaded the last truck at a sprint.

  In a quarter of an hour, the last truck left. The workers queued up to be paid. They crossed the road with their clothes over their arms, counting their money. The fierce halogen light in the compound imploded.

  The metal sheeting of the warehouse doors walloped against the frames as they ran the doors closed. A padlock clicked into place. In the weak light cast from one of the crumbling buildings we could see the college boys' white shirts. One appeared to be jogging on the spot, just lifting his heels, hands behind his back. The other stood still. The only car that passed in the next three quarters of an hour had one headlight and a knocking sound from one of the front wheels.

  We heard the sound of expensive wide tyres kissing the metalled road. Madame Severnou's graphite grey Mercedes slowed, feinted left and swung right into the compound. The boys opened the doors and the car reversed in.

  We ran for the Peugeot. The light shed as we opened the doors showed the dog lying on its side like an abandoned toy whose trolley had been ripped off to make a skateboard. Flies busied themselves over the already swollen body. We waited in the car under the tree where we had been sitting. The Mercedes, low at the back, rolled out; one of the boys shut the warehouse doors. The Mercedes continued out of the compound and the boy followed with a length of chain hanging from his hand and locked the gate. He got in the car which accelerated up on to the tarmac. We followed with sidelights only until we joined the main road into Idiroko.

  We made quick time to the Abeokuta turn-off on the road to Lagos, but as we came into Ikeja, just after Lagos's Murtala Mohammed airport, the traffic solidified. We crawled past the Sheraton, the fumes thick in the still night air. The Mercedes was seven or eight cars ahead in the fast lane of a three-lane highway which had now become six lanes of cars. Taxi drivers swore with monumental gestures. A large woman with a gold watch that cut into her fat wrist stared out of her red air-conditioned BMW at the stock car race she'd found herself in.

  Madame Severnou's Mercedes pulled away. We remained. Bagado rolled down his window and sat on the ledge. Twenty yards ahead, two taxi drivers were throwing abuse at each other like old china until one of them produced a wrench and the other didn't like the size of it and moved off, his fan belt screeching like a pig that's seen the knife. We moved again, seething into any available pocket. Bagado thumped the roof with his hand and slid back in. We'd lost them.

  We drifted into some orange street lighting, which poisoned an already polluted scene, and I saw the Mercedes coming towards us on the other side of the highway. Bagado watched it turn right into an estate about a quarter of a mile behind us. Its taillights dodged from tree to tree and disappeared.

  The Peugeot took a few knocks to the body as we crossed four lanes of cars to the next exit and Bagado shredded his larynx on some razor-wire invective. Ten minutes later, we were cruising the lanes of the estate where the Mercedes had gone. The estate was set out in a grid system on three parallel roads. The first two roads were private houses for middle-class Nigerians. The third road had private houses on one side and office buildings and storage on the other. Beyond this was a tree-lined wall. We found the Mercedes parked in a cul-de-sac on two strips of concrete which ran down into weeds and long grass. The boot was open and one back door.

  We turned left and parked out of sight, to the side of a private house. I told Bagado I wasn't going to sit around waiting any more, replaying my least favourite film clip, and he said he'd give me fifteen minutes.

  'Before what?'

  'Before I go in there myself.'

  'And get us both caught.'

  'All right, I'll leave you to die.'

  'OK. Come in with your thimble blazing.'

  One side of the cul-de-sac was a two-storey office building and behind it a low Nissen hut with a walled yard. A shaved head bobbed along the wall and came out through a narrow gate attached to a body, which was naked apart from a pair of shorts. The body was wide, the shoulders, pectorals and abdominals cast like an armoured breast plate, the fingers of the ribs dovetailing with the muscle. The quadraceps wobbled and set as the man walked.

  He bent over the boot and as he uprighted a pair of sacks, the ridges and plateaux of muscle in his back shifted along the deep rift of his spine. He wiped his hands on his shorts, they were as big as a statue's. He scratched the back of his calf with an unshod foot - it would have needed a shipyard to build it a shoe. He picked each fifty-kilo sack up by the ear with his thumb and forefinger and walked sideways through the gate as if he had nothing more than the weekend's groceries.

  I walked across the front of the office building and went down an alleyway on the other side of it. The wall at the end was about eight foot high, and with a short run I hooked my leg up on to it, knelt and stood up. The courtyard behind the Nissen hut was full of broken pallets and a fork lift with an empty pallet sheathing the forks. The corrugated asbestos roofing of the hut overhung the front walls and made a narrow verandah. A pair of dusty shoes crossed a shaft of light from the hut which showed the planking of the verandah and the ground of the courtyard covered in weeds, empty cardboard cartons and skeins of plastic sheeting.

  The shoes I'd seen darted out of the light and a large rat pelted into the courtyard, followed by the grotesque feet of the rice porter. There was a squeal, a high laugh and a crunch and the rat, flattened, came from the dark of the courtyard and landed on the verandah. The dusty shoes came back out and kicked it off. There was no way down into the courtyard from the wall; I let myself down and walked back to the Mercedes whose doors and boot were now closed.

  I walked through the gate without thinking about it, and to my right saw that there was a three-foot gap between the hut and the office building. It stank of stale urine. A light from the hut was cast on to a window sill of the office building from a ventilation grate.

  The grate was a foot above my head; I pulled myself up on the window sill and looked over my left shoulder into the hut. There was a partition wall over which I could see a store room stacked to the ceiling with lavatories, bidets, wash basins and cisterns. Over my right shoulder were pallets of floor and wall tiles positioned at random around the room and, in a clearing in the middle of the hut, Madame Severnou was watching the rat-crushing porter unstitch a sack. There was a plastic sheet with a bathful of rice on it. The two college boys were refilling empty sacks with rice from the bath using aluminium jugs.

  The porter emptied the sack into the bath and the boys picked out the four brown paper packages that fell out. These were stacked on a table next to Madame Severnou with twenty other packages. I let myself down and let my shoulders burn through my shirt.

  Grit twisted under shoe leather. Somebody appeared at the end of the gap and grunted. A zipper rippled the air. There was an ill-tempered rustle and then the sound of piss hitting concrete and a man breathing through his nose. He must have had a bladder the size of a zeppelin because his jet of urine drilled at the concrete for several minutes and streams trickled around my feet.

  He left and I pulled myself up again. The bath was empty and a pair of hands stitched a rice sack. By the table was a cotton bale. Madame Severnou looked at the stack of packages and said something in Yoruba. I only understood the words 'Awolowo' and 'cotton bale' and from the way the college boy jotted it down in his notebook, they needed another one. The rat crusher began stuffing the packages into the cotton bale and I dropped to the floor, lathered in sweat.

  After a few minutes, I paddled through the urine to the end of the gap. The voices were muffled inside the hut. I took five steps to the gate and arrived at the same time as the rat flattener coming the other way.

  'Excuse me,' I said and he stepped to one side. I passed through. A hand came down on my shoulder and took a big handful of me in a grip with some kind of built-in steel clip. It spun me round and sent me back through the gate and I hit the Nissen hut face first.

  A steel baseball bat was the minimum requirement for handling this specimen and I had a set of house keys.

  A part of my brain with a sense of humour reminded me to put everything I'd got into the first assault and not to go for the head. I looked at the head that I wasn't supposed to hit and it looked back with eyes that told me it had a cranium filled with solid bone. I put enough beef into a right hook to his heart to have put a pit pony out of the game for life and I got a coat hanger grin back from my opponent. He balled his fist and weighed it on the end of his arm like a sack of bolts. My jawline suddenly felt like the finest crystal. I held my good hand up in a gesture of surrender and he picked me up, tucked me under his arm and carried me head first into the hut, where he threw me in the bath.

  Madame Severnou stood with her jewelled hands clasped in front of her. The bright blue and yellow cloth of her dress was new and her headpiece in the same material looked like an exotic bird landing. Her face, however, was still. Her unblinking stare permafrosted the sweat-filled air. Her mouth was open a crack and her tongue rested between her teeth.

  'Kill him,' she said, without moving her lips, and her tongue disappeared.

  Chapter 26

  I was relieved to find that there wasn't an immediate reaction to this command. From my position of towering strength, lying in the bath with rice up my sweaty forearms, I could see the two college boys in their white shirts, grey slacks and Gucci loafers had the kind of body language I liked - very reluctant. The bone-headed, rat-flattening rice porter, with the body recently panel beaten out of half-inch bronze sheeting, didn't have any body language. He was just a natural, absent-minded, killing sort of a guy.

  There was a long pause which was about to expand into a silence when one of the college boys said: 'Who?' which just seemed to be a way of filling time and space because there were no options.

  'Dayo,' said Madame Severnou, cocking her head at the obvious candidate.

  'How?' said the other college boy.

  'I go break his neck,' said Dayo, holding up a pair of unartistic hands that would have found the task trifling.

  'What about the body?'

  'Throw it in the lagoon,' said Madame Severnou.

  Messrs Harvard and Yale didn't like it. Their intelligent faces looked for a way out. Dayo spat on his hands. This was his kind of work. That was what those hands had been made for.

  'It's not so easy/ the boys said together.

  'It's very difficult to throw big things away/ I said. 'You get seen.'

  'Shut up/ said Madame Severnou, her voice hitting a very flat high C and she flung her heavy hand out in my direction and half a pound of gold slashed across my face. It was like getting hit with a brick. My teeth tore into the inside of my cheek and blood spilled on to my chin.

  'He has to be killed. He's seen everything,' she said.

  'But not now.'

  'We kill him now and we have to get rid of him. He'll stink within hours.'

  'We get rid of him and we get seen, or his body's found.'

  'A white man's body in the lagoon is big trouble.'

  'And the shipment goes tomorrow. Why not keep it quiet until then?'

  It was a virtuoso performance by the college debating team and Madame Severnou was vicious, mean and tough but not stupid. She thought for a few minutes while I decided how long it would be before Bagado showed this crowd his nine-millimetre, semi-automatic finger.

  'OK,' said Madame Severnou, drawing out the 'K'. 'Keep him here tonight. Dayo and you stay-' She pointed to one of the boys. 'You and I will bring two more cotton bales tomorrow. One for these packages and the other for him. We load him on the ship and put him over the side at sea. No problem.'

  And it wouldn't be, the college boys loved it, no dirty work. Dayo was disappointed and slouched off to the door, leant against it and looked out into the courtyard like a spoilt kid. Madame Severnou thought of something else.

  'How did you get here?'

  'Taxi.'

  The jewelled hand flashed in the corner of my eye, my head kicked back. The inside of my mouth was all ploughed up. Dayo grabbed the front of my shirt and held me up to his face and I bubbled blood at him. Madame Severnou tapped him on the shoulder and said something in Yoruba, he dropped me and left the hut, clipping the door frame with his shoulder and rocking the whole structure.

  Behind my head, in the alleyway, I heard Bagado pulling back the trigger of his thumb. The trick wasn't so effective front on, even to someone of Dayo's academic standing. There was the sound of someone being squeezed very hard and Dayo reappeared in the doorway with Bagado under his arm, limp as a roll of cheap carpeting. He dropped him by the bath and Bagado clawed his way up to my level.

  'Who is he?' said Madame Severnou.

  'My driver.'

  'Where's Moses?'

  'Sick.'

  Madame Severnou's face stilled again, her lids seemed to puff out and her eyes slitted. After a minute's silence in which nobody moved, not even the rats, Madame Severnou spoke.

  'I told Jack Obuasi you big mistake.'

  'Jack's never been a great listener.'

  'If my men in Cotonou kill you from start, we no have problem we have now.'

  'Is that why you sent them?'

  'Only to frighten small and ' she stopped herself.

  ' and take some more money?'

  'Why not?'

  'Jack was upset.'

  'Jack,' she said, as if it was something cockroaches fed on. 'He come tellin' me you lookin' for Kershaw man now. Keepin' you away from this thing we doin' here. Now look' - she pointed at me and looked up at the college boys - 'this what happen when Mister Jack done thinkin'.'

  'Sounds like you've got a lot of respect for him.'

  Her eyes swivelled and fastened on Bagado who had taken on the miserable look of the boss's driver who was about to die.

  'Three cotton bales,' she said, and Harvard took his notebook out again.

  'How much heroin did you bring in?' I asked.

  'Beat them,' she said and moved to the door.

  Dayo warmed to this like a pyromaniac with a box of matches and a licence to torch the joint. He hauled me out of the bath and lifted Bagado to his feet. He put the bath on top of a pallet of floor tiles, took an empty pallet and broke off three lengths of wood. He threw two at the college boys. There was a swift crack, our knees buckled and we hit the plastic sheet. We put our hands over our heads and the blows rained down. We rolled on to our sides and the pine planks continued to cut through the air, thudding into us sometimes with a sharper snapping sound if the wood hit a bone close to the surface. The first minute was bad. The pain was new, unexpected and specific. Later, my body reached a plateau of agony above which the nerves and brain were not prepared to go.

  Madame Severnou said something in Yoruba from the doorway. They rolled us on to our fronts. Bagado's raincoat was stripped off, our ankles and knees tied and then our wrists behind our backs. Dayo picked up Bagado by the waistband of his trousers and took him to the store room where the lavatories, bidets and wash basins were stacked to the ceiling and threw him in. Bagado let out a half shout, half scream and then was silent. Dayo came back for me and hurled me into the same room, my forehead connecting with the rim of a toilet bowl. The room tilted and things seemed far off and infused with green. White lights arced in the dark planetarium of my skull and nothing seemed familiar, not even my huge tongue in the vast, unmapped cavern of my mouth.

  The concept of time passing came back as slowly as it took for the picture in my eyes to click sharp without drifting or fish-eyeing. Sweat poured off me into a dark patch where my head made contact with the grit on the concrete floor. Nausea crept up my throat and I breathed it back down. My head was huge and somebody else's, all the joints in my body ground into each other. A weak light came from under the door and over the top of the partition wall. There was the sound of crying in the room. I rolled over and pain shunted down the nerve tracks. Bagado lay with his back to me, his shoulders shaking.

  'Are you all right?' I asked.

  The sobbing became more intense.

  'Are you crying?'

  'I'm laughing.'

  'I didn't hear the punchline.'

  'There's no joke. It's just very bleak the outlook. I get hysterical. I think my collar bone is broken.'

  A chair scraped, footsteps approached through the pallets next door. A body brushed against some plastic wrapping around the cartons of tiles outside. I rolled back. The door opened, a torch light bounced around the room. The door closed, the footsteps retreated, two voices exchanged something.

 

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