'Jack's rice was shipped in from Thailand on a vessel called the Naoki Maru. That was the ship that Perec was getting too warm on and why you had to find out what she knew. There's a rice ban in Nigeria so Madame Severnou is brought in to smuggle it across the border at Idiroko. But she's been in on it all the time because it wasn't just rice in those sacks.

  'Some of the sacks unloaded at a warehouse in Idiroko were taken to another warehouse in Ikeja where they were emptied out and small kilo-size brown packages were found inside. These brown packages contained a white powder which wasn't rat poison but just as good. They were stuffed into cotton bales which were purchased at one thousand four hundred and twenty-five dollars per ton c.i.f. delivered Oporto from AAICT by the buyer, one Carlo Reggiani at the AAICT offices in Ikeja, Lagos in the presence of Jack Obuasi, Madame Severnou and Bof Awolowo on Sunday 29th September. The cotton bales are being shipped ex Lagos probably tonight, 1st October, on the vessel Osanyin aka Naoki Maru. Have I left anything out? Oh yes, the dirt around town is that Charlie Reggiani took some bad hits playing with gold they say the man needs some money. They say it was seven hundred thousand dollars.'

  Charlie had walked over to a sideboard with a set of shelves above it and pulled down an ebony bowl which was full of credit, cards. He flicked through them all and put the bowl back up on the shelf.

  'What was that about a million dollars?' asked Jack.

  'Shut the fuck up,' said Charlie, cuffing Jack across the back of his head with the tips of his fingers. He sat back down on the sofa, looking hard at Jack who did his best to stay still and failed. He put his left ankle on his right knee and held it there with both hands and tried to stare Charlie out. Charlie turned to me and asked the one question I hadn't expected.

  'What's with you and Yvette?'

  'What do you mean?'

  'You came in here sniffing the air, asking after her. You got something going together?'

  'Like what exactly?'

  'You wanna be English about this, I'll be American. Are you fucking her?'

  'Charlie, I'm the punchbag in this. I nose around in dirty laundry, get caught and get the shit beaten out of me. I don't have time '

  'You've fucked her,' he said. 'You have. First time you saw her all that marriage and concubinage shit You fucked her.' His lips had gone white at the edges and the teak dome of his head had taken on a purplish colour.

  'I haven't done anything to anyone, apart from kick Jack in the balls and he's had that coming a long time,' I said, finding myself looking down what seemed to be a one-inch hole which was the Colt Python's barrel.

  'Just tell me the truth. Nothing will happen if you tell me,' said Charlie. 'Just don't lie to me.'

  I didn't want to tell him the truth because he would think I'd lied to him and I didn't want to lie to him because the size of the bullet that would come out of that hole was going to make me an instant airhead. I came up with: 'She's your woman,' which didn't end in a big bang.

  'I know that,' he said sweetly, 'but it didn't stop her from going round to your place after the party Saturday night and it didn't stop you two dickering over something outside the Sarakawa yesterday, and didn't stop you going into the Sarakawa with her and staying in there for Christ knows however long it took you to give her a good schtupping.'

  The barrel of the gun was shaking. He was gripping the butt so hard his forearm stood out swollen with pumped muscle, his flexed triceps were set solid, his neck was bright red where it came out of his chest hair, his mouth was closed, and his clenched jaw muscles worked hard. Jack was sitting forward on his sofa. I was pressed back hard into the corner of mine.

  The door opened. Charlie's head twitched and he lowered the gun behind a cushion on the sofa. Yvette came in, followed by a vapour trail of perfume. She was in a blue short-sleeved dress and no shoes with a purse held tight against her hip.

  'Honey, this is business,' said Charlie. 'Can you give us a few minutes?'

  Yvette stood between the two sofas at the end of the glass-top table. Her face was still and white, her mouth closed in a bloodless line. Her body was taut, a line of muscle ran the length of her calf from knee to ankle. Her flat stomach pumped in and out as she panted air through her nose. She slipped past me and stood in front of Charlie between the sofa and the table. She clicked open her purse. Charlie spoke to her in a quiet, intimate way, as if we weren't supposed to hear.

  'Honey. Look, this is serious. Fix a drink if you want, but it's better you wait outside.'

  She was pulling out a pack of cigarettes and Charlie leaned forward to pick up the table lighter for her and his face ran into a small shiny black gun that Yvette held in her hand. He sank back into the sofa with his face in his lap. Jack's mouth opened slowly with the weight of his jaw. I managed the least moronic look in the room just by holding my teeth together.

  'Put the gun down on the table,' she said, her small tongue wetting her lips. Charlie hesitated, still in shock. 'Put it on the table, you fucking bastard!'

  Charlie was looking at me as if I was responsible for this. He slid the gun out from under the cushion until it was flat on the sofa and angled towards me.

  'You did, didn't you?' he said to me, the gun now up off the sofa, going towards the table.

  There was the sound of a shot. A pane of glass from one of the windows cracked and collapsed; large shards fell on to the floor and shattered as Jack's head kicked back with the snapping sound of a dry twig and most of the back of his head sprayed itself over the sofa, sideboard and living room wall.

  Yvette fired her gun on a reflex and Charlie his. The noise filled the room like a jet engine in a public toilet. Charlie's body twitched and arched up off the sofa, while Yvette's feet left the ground, her body twisted, and she came down on her face across the glass tabletop, which shattered. Then the lights went out and the faint hiss of the air conditioning cut.

  Through the high-pitched whine in my ears, I could hear Charlie grunting in the dark as if he was lifting a big weight off his chest. There was the sound of dripping and the sea had come closer. Warm, wet air rolled in from outside and the cicadas blew the whistle on the show.

  'She shot me,' said Charlie, as if he was speaking through a rag someone was stuffing down his throat. 'The bitch shot me.'

  Yvette was silent. Her perfume still hung in the air, as did some acrid sweat and cordite. And there was another smell, sweet and metallic, that grew in the room with the heat.

  'She fucking shot me,' said Charlie from the back corner of his mouth.

  I slid off the sofa and knelt. I found Yvette's leg amongst the glass and moved my hand up over her thigh and hip. My fingers moved up her back, up her shoulders to her neck. There was still a pulse. She moaned and I moved my hand away to the point of her shoulder which was wet and ragged.

  'You hit her, Charlie.'

  'I'm hit myself, for Chrissakes,'

  I found the table lighter whose yellow flame illuminated the scene. The predominant colour was black. The floor was black, the back of Jack's sofa, the sideboard and the wall were black. I turned to Charlie and pulled his hand away and wrestled his shirt up over his gut. There was a small black hole in his flank but not as much blood as I expected. I felt behind him. There was an exit hole.

  'Straight through, Charlie. Blubber only,' I said, and he grunted.

  I called for an ambulance from Charlie's study. Charlie told me where the torch was. I picked up my gun from where it was tucked in under Yvette's body and ricocheted out of the house towards the beach to the generator house.

  Bagado had been right, Charlie was in the clear. That Bloomingdale's card had been one piece of evidence too much for Bagado's liking. Jack must have lifted the card and somebody planted it at the house. Charlie didn't know what was going on; as soon as I told him about his cotton shipment he let me play him in so that he could nail Jack. Just as I was beginning to doubt Bagado and believe my own bullshit, Charlie leant in with what he really wanted to know from me. What was I doing with Yvette? Christ, what a thing to ask me - the man with a love life like a train wreck.

  The generator house door was open. I called out to Moses whose confidence had taken a huge knock since Grace had built it up. I found the starter key to the 13.5 Kva Lister and it roared and then settled. A dim light came on. Moses was standing behind four drums of diesel.

  'Did you see him?'

  'No please, sir.'

  Outside, there was a clear line of sight to the house. In the red dust were some footmarks, a trainer of some kind without a brand name in the sole. I shone the torch down the fence and found more marks. He must have opened up the generator house, shot Jack, cut the generator and run back down the beach to Al Fresco's. Whoever it was had been sent to kill Jack at his own house and followed us to Charlie's.

  In the living room, Yvette, her face cut up, had rolled over on the broken glass and was sobbing and trying to reach her torn shoulder with her hand. Charlie was half conscious and blabbering on a red mess on the leather sofa which wasn't soaking in, but dripped on to the carpet. I wrapped some towels around Yvette's shoulder and moved her into the bedroom, where she fainted. I found some more linen for Charlie's middle and bandaged him up. He was silent now and breathing heavily. I hoped they'd stay that way until the ambulance arrived. I didn't think they were two people who were going to socialize much in the future, given that their first penetrative exchanges had been bullets.

  Jack was lying with one leg off the sofa, half his back on the seat, the other half up the back of the sofa, his head in the apex. A huge quantity of blood and white and grey bits in it and black skin and curly hair spattered the sofa and wall and sideboard. His eyes didn't see the hole where his nose had been. He still showed his teeth, but not even a madman could call it a smile.

  Outside, I called for Moses, who had lost his nerve and ran off into the night risking the beach muggers. The gardien had fled as well. I'd already decided on my third visit of the evening as the adrenaline rushing my brain decoded the confusion of what had just happened. I opened the barrier, fixed it and drove Jack's Mercedes out into the wasteland, out there, in the bleak and suffocating darkness, the missing detail from the photographs came to me and although I still didn't know who was behind the camera taking the shot on that sunny afternoon when Kasparian and Kershaw posed for him, I did know where he was.

  Chapter 29

  By the time I hit the roundabout by Lomé port, the democratic road block had been moved away and I put my gun down on the passenger seat and enjoyed the clear run through down the coast road back to Jack's house. I was glad it was clear because I found that Jack's Mercedes was capable of 154 m.p.h.

  I parked by my own car to pick up the photographs and checked them: even in the dim courtesy light of the Peugeot the missing detail stood out. All it had needed was a change of thinking, instead of looking for what was in the picture I looked for what wasn't. Then I drove to Kamina Village in Jack's Mercedes, but didn't go in because it was barriered off at night. I parked outside on the road by the hedge around Nina Sorvino's garden, put the photographs in my breast pocket and pushed the gun down the front of my trousers with the T-shirt over it.

  I skipped over the shallow ditch and ran straight through the half-hearted hedge, which brought me out at the back of Nina's house. I walked around to the front and up on to the terrace outside her bedroom window. The light was on in the empty bedroom and there was an open packing case on the bed.

  Through the living room window, I saw Nina in her stockinged feet standing in front of a full-length mirror on the far wall, her hair tied in a temporary ponytail. She was wearing a red raw silk suit and was looking over her shoulder to see what her bottom looked like with all that material stretched over it. She turned and positioned her feet so that she looked slimmer, less curvaceous and placed both hands on the tops of her thighs and leant back slightly. She pouted and then she laughed as if she was the luckiest bitch in the world.

  I went into the garage and tried the door at the end of it, which, like the last time, was unlocked. I waited and listened to Nina shuffling in front of the mirror and then I heard her go into the bedroom. I went into a living room redolent of expensive perfume and sat on the sofa which backed on to her bedroom wall and stared at the empty TV screen and full bottles on the sideboard in front of me. There were three other suitcases parked by the front door.

  She came back in again, at a swift pace now, with some high heels chocking the tiled floor and her hair loose, holding a red hat in her hands which she set on her head in front of the mirror. I got up and stood about five metres behind her. She was so in love with her situation that she didn't see me for a while and when she did she walked towards the mirror as if there was a problem with it. It was only when she turned that reality closed in on her and she squeaked.

  'Going somewhere?'

  'As a matter of fact, I am.'

  'Far?'

  'Up north, Kara for a few days.'

  'Four suitcases for a few days?'

  She moved towards the table and I lifted the T-shirt and showed her the gun.

  'No cheap lines, Nina.'

  'I wanna cigarette.'

  'You're going to need more than that to get you through.'

  She lit a cigarette. I asked her to get some whisky. She poured two stiff ones into some glasses on the sideboard with the TV.

  'Four suitcases?'

  'I travel heavy,' she said, taking a good suck on the whisky.

  'When are you going?'

  Tomorrow morning.'

  'Who with?'

  'On my own.'

  'You always like to look good and smell nice for yourself, on your own? You always like to dance around in front of the mirror with your new clothes on and your fancy new hat before you hit the hot spots of the Hotel Kara on your own? You always pout and laugh at yourself in the mirror the night before you go somewhere on your own?'

  Nina sucked hard on her cigarette in the hope that the nicotine could do more for her than calm her down. She wanted something with a little more punch to it that was going to make all this nastiness go away. I handed her the photograph of Kasparian and Kershaw. She took it and stiffened.

  'There are three people involved in that photograph. Kasparian, he's the one on the left, Kershaw, you know, and the third guy's behind the camera. Two of them are dead. Now, this is by way of a test, Nina. I want to make sure you don't start off our discussion by lying to me, which is what you seem to like doing. So I ask a question and you tell the truth and if you don't ' I took out the gun, pointed it at her and clicked off the safety. 'Which two are dead?'

  'Kasparian and Kersh '

  She didn't finish and I'd just found out how difficult it was to shoot straight with a handgun with a silencer attached. I'd aimed a yard to her right but the bullet, I could tell from the mark on the wall behind her, must have passed close enough to go through that thick black mane of hers. She screamed, dropped her glass, cigarette and the photograph and wet herself. A dark patch spread out in the raw red silk of her skirt.

  'Oh Christ!' she said, holding her cheeks. 'Oh, my God!'

  'Two people you haven't had much contact with recently,' I said. 'Now, pick up the photograph.' She knelt in the tight skirt, cutting a knee on the broken glass. The cigarette had been doused by the whisky. She slipped the photograph off the wet floor.

  'Cigarette?' she said.

  I picked one out of the packet on the table, lit it and gave it to her.

  'Try again.'

  'Kasparian,' she said and dragged on the cigarette, 'and Gildas Sologne.'

  'Thanks. I didn't know who he was, but I knew he was dead. He's the painter who was in the pool, right?'

  She nodded, finding her mouth with the cigarette.

  'Do you want to know how I know?'

  She nodded again.

  'Look in the bottom right-hand corner of the painting.' She looked. 'There's nothing there.'

  'So?'

  'There should be a signature that says "Kershaw", but it doesn't because Gildas Sologne is still alive and Steve hasn't painted on his signature yet.'

  'Next question. Ready, Nina? Where's Kershaw?'

  'I don't ' She didn't finish again, and this time I shot straight and over her other shoulder, and with a splat a hole appeared in the mirror glass which held for a moment and shifted and then fell to the floor in pieces.

  'There doesn't seem to be any point in asking you these questions. You're just a junkie. A compulsive, lying junkie.'

  'The Harveys,' she said in a half scream, looking back at the mirror which no longer reflected her tight, red, stained backside.

  'Good. That's right. That's why when I followed you from the Pharmacie pour Tous on Route de Kpalimé and you went to the German Restaurant in town, you called the Harveys. I went in there after you and hit the 'Redial' button but I didn't know why someone like you would want to talk to someone like Elizabeth Harvey about you being pregnant.'

  Nina was shaking now and it was with some difficulty that she took the cigarette out of her mouth.

  'Last question before we leave. Where's Heike?'

  She held out both her hands, waving them at me, the hot long cone of the over-smoked cigarette fell off and hissed in the liquid at her feet. The red of her lipstick had broken its boundary and huge fat tears were rolling down her cheeks, bringing black mascara that left tracks to the corners of her mouth. She coughed her first sob. I picked her handbag up and checked it, then took some Kleenex out of a box on the sideboard and handed them to her.

  'Clean up; we're going.'

  'Why?' she asked, with some distant logic for her present position.

  'You're my currency of exchange. I hope you're worth something.'

  While Nina patched up the damage to her face, I picked up the phone and left a very quiet message on an answering machine which I hoped would get listened to.

 

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