Blood Is Dirt (30 page)

I stayed like that all night. I reckoned that I'd feel her if she tried to slip away and hold on, dig my heels in.

 

Cotonou. Thursday 29th February.

 

In the morning, dawn took fifteen minutes to paint us into the room. We were still here. Outside the traffic cleared its throat. The cobblers walked along tapping their boxes, looking for work. The night shift left, putting one foot in front of the other.

At 9 a.m. the doctor came back in and took another blood film. The result of the last one had come through at an astronomic 2000 parasites per cubic millilitre. She said they'd put her on another drip after lunch and told me to go home for a while, change my clothes, shower.

I got home at lunchtime and listened to the answering machine. Vassili and Bagado had called and wanted returns. Selina too. She sounded nervous and left a Lagos number I didn't know. My gums tingled.

I called Vassili and told him I was in room six at the Polyclinique. He said Mr K would be in touch. I called Selina, a houseboy answered and said she was unable to come to the phone. I wanted to avoid Bagado for the moment. I packed some clothes for Heike, my stomach turning at her body's imprint on an old dress, a pair of shoes. The phone rang.

‘Was that you before?' asked Selina.

‘Where are you?'

‘The chief's.'

‘Why didn't you come to the phone?'

‘They're being difficult. They know somebody's been in their computer system. There's a floppy missing from the office. Are you getting anywhere?'

‘Heike's unconscious in hospital. Malaria.'

‘Christ.'

‘Is this whole deal going off?'

‘Not yet.'

She hung up. I went back to the hospital. Heike was on another quinine drip. The parasite count was still high. She was shivering now and under blankets.

I watched another afternoon die, holding on to Heike's wrist feeling her pulse—a thin, thready, tinkering beat. Sweat began to bead on her forehead and I tore off the blankets. I put my head on her lap, reassured by the gurglings of her intestines and watched the glass darken in the windows. I closed my eyes and squeezed out that thought that was hammering to come in. If she...

I surfaced in the dark, in a desolate sob, and ransacked my brain to find out where I was. There was a hand on my ear. It wasn't mine. I lifted my head. Heike had moved her hand. It was cold, but not that cold. Her eyes were moving under her lids.

‘My ears are ringing,' she said.

‘It's the quinine.'

‘I'm thirsty.'

I poured her several glasses of water and she drank them down.

‘I'm going to vomit,' she said.

She half filled a bucket. I had a bizarre vicarious satisfaction in her release. She slumped back on to the pillow.

‘What the hell is going on?' she asked, as if this was something completely unnecessary for her to be going through.

‘You've been in a malarial coma.'

She looked at herself in the narrow bed. She felt the plasters on her arm from the intravenous drip. Her fingers were shaking.

‘Why am I shaking?'

‘You've just had your second pint of quinine solution.'

‘You were right.'

‘You scared the living shit out of me.'

‘Did I?'

‘You can slip away, just like that, you know?'

‘Come here,' she said, and held my face with trembling hands. ‘This is a terrible admission—I should have listened to you.'

‘It's not in your nature.'

‘You
can
talk an awful lot of shit.'

I told her I loved her and that we didn't have to fight straight after her brush with death, we could leave it a couple of days.

‘Why do I always have to nearly die before you say you love me?'

‘Is that true?'

‘The last time you said you loved me was when you rescued me from that American creep.'

‘No, I've said it since then.'

‘I'm not counting any time when you've had more than a bottle of wine and four whiskies and that's...'

‘...nearly all the time.'

‘But you can kiss me, if you want,' she said. ‘If you don't mind me being a bit pukey.'

There was a knock at the door. The nurse poked her head in and said there was a boy in the reception area who wanted to talk to me. Heike gave me one from her stack of long-suffering sighs and I tried to make it better by kissing her hand. She waved me away. I followed the nurse.

It was 9 p.m. The boy saw me and started walking out of the hospital, through the gates and round the back of the parked cars under the trees outside. He took me to an old jeep which I recognized as one of Vassili's. He opened the back door and I got in.

It was dark in the car and apart from the aura coming through the trees and shrubs from the hospital there was no light. I could see that the man in front had very long hair but that was all. The rearview was turned up.

‘I'm Mr K,' he said in English. ‘Vassili said you want to talk to me.'

‘You have something for sale.'

‘You have an interested party?'

‘What are you selling?'

‘Vassili says you work with a policeman.'

‘Not any more.'

Some time struggled past. He shifted in the front seat as if he was about to turn round.

‘I know you very well,' he said.

My guts dropped. The silence built inside the car. He lit a cigarette that smelled like dried camel dung. He didn't offer me one. He straightened a length of his hair, fanning it out to the shoulder. He had a gold ring on the third finger of his right hand.

‘Your girlfriend's sick. Her name is Heike Brooke. She works in Porto Novo for Gerhard—'

‘Are we doing business, Mr K?' I cut in. ‘Because if we're not I'd like to go back in there and look after her. I'm sure you're very knowledgeable about me. Vassili knows everything there is to know. I respect that. But you're either going to tell me what you've got or not, and we can take ten minutes less time to do it if you start now.'

‘I have six and a half kilos of Plutonium 239, ten kilos of red mercury. Half a kilo of Californium 252. The price is ten million dollars. I am already talking to the Libyans. Do you understand the products I have for sale?'

‘I'll find out.'

‘Leave the car. Contact Vassili if you want to proceed.'

I got out and went back into the hospital, thinking everything's $10 million these days. The car's headlights came on and it pulled away in the direction of the airport.

I left Heike sleeping at 10 p.m. and went home. I called Vassili and asked for Viktor. We arranged to meet in my office downtown in twenty minutes.

Viktor and I sat in the bare essentials of my office, without a light because the fuse had blown downstairs. We drank beer while he gave me a layman's brief on nuclear bombs in the simplest French he could muster.

The red mercury that Mr K was selling would be in the form of a high-density gel. It was made by dissolving mercury antimony oxide, which was red, into mercury. That was irradiated for twenty days in a reactor and any excess mercury evaporated off, leaving the gel. To make a bomb the Californium 252 would be added to the gel and that compound would become the explosive chemical detonator that surrounded the Plutonium 239 at the core of the bomb.

The red mercury, he told me, had a high density which gave good compression to the plutonium which was necessary to bring it to critical mass. The californium produced neutrons which would initiate the fission reaction early. The ultimate effect was, in fact, a neutron bomb, and even I remembered that the neutron bomb had the desired effect of killing people while leaving property intact.

The advantage of buying the red mercury and californium with the plutonium was that the buyer would get more bangs for his buck. A normal bomb would need either 5 kilogrammes of Plutonium 239 or 15 kilogrammes of Uranium 235, but by using red mercury a bomb maker could significantly reduce the plutonium/uranium required. By how much, Viktor did not know.

Viktor could see he was making me nervous with the cool and detached way he talked about these weapons of mass destruction, which were in raw form perhaps not far from where we were speaking. He tried to reassure me that anybody with these ingredients would still be a long way from making a bomb.

‘Unless,' I said, ‘he wants to pay one of you guys a million bucks to come over and fix it.'

Viktor gave me an acknowledging jump of his eyebrows. I asked him if he would be able to identify genuine product without opening the boxes and killing us all. He said there would have to be some documentation with the product and he would certainly be able to tell if it had been properly packaged and came from somewhere in Russia.

‘If your buyer wants to go ahead,' he asked, ‘how much are you going to pay me to help you out?'

‘That depends on what he buys it for.'

‘How many people are in the deal at your level?'

‘Two.'

‘So how about we split it three ways... whatever the difference is between the seller's price and the buyer's?'

‘That's not a decision I can make on my own.'

‘Have to talk to the lady?' he asked, wringing the contempt out of his voice as he spoke.

Viktor left. I called the chief and got Ben. I told him I'd opened the discussions. The chief came on the line and asked how much. I told him that it depended. He said he would send Ben across in the morning. I asked to speak to Selina. Ben came back on and said she'd gone to bed. We hung up.

I bought a pizza to take out. I didn't turn the lights on at home but walked around in the polygons of light cast by the streetlamps outside. The fridge held a wrinkled tomato and enough booze for a party. I had to stop living like this. I poured myself a highball of white wine. I closed the fridge and saw him again. The man out on his balcony looking down into the black garden, his arms out stabilizing himself on the rail. What was he looking at? I got up on the kitchen sink and peered down there myself. Nothing. Maybe this was where he came to take a look at himself. Ah, well. We could all use some of that. Not too much. Not so much that the self-doubt crept in and the self-disgust, because all that left was the high dive into blackness.

 

Cotonou. Friday 1st March.

 

I woke up at midday with the phone going and my mouth dry and caked, as if I'd taken a bite out of a wax apple. It was the chief's secretary calling from the office saying Ben would not be in Cotonou until five thirty that evening and that he would like a meeting with the seller of the goods tonight. I asked after Selina. She hadn't been in.

Ben and the chief were keeping us apart.

This was how mistakes were made—when you were alone. I wouldn't have minded a talk with Bagado but I was outside the law now and any hint of it to him and I had no doubt that he'd jug me for it. Heike was in no state. She'd kill me too. Viktor, I didn't trust on the meetings we'd had. The way he'd pushed on the money, those eyes, and anyway, he was Vassili's man. Vassili, well, in Vassili there was a conflict of interest now. I called him and asked him to arrange for Mr K to be in the Sheraton car park at 8 p.m.

I drove to the hospital with some food for Heike. She was going through her third and last quinine drip. Her parasite count was down but they wanted her to stay another night and take a course of Fansidar. I sat with her through the afternoon and, while she dozed and ate, developed a range of stress-management exercises. I left at 5.30 p.m. to pick Ben up from the airport. He came in late and brought some chill air down with him from 20,000 feet. Suddenly I'd become lower than dirt.

He was silent on the way to the Sheraton while I gave him the nuclear briefing and told him about Viktor's role. He took a room and kept me waiting in the marbled lobby until two minutes to eight. I decided not to waste my time and gulped down a few pints of draught lager which came in dimpled mugs and gave me a pang for Clapham and a seat in the dark at the back of the Prince of Wales.

Ben smelled the beer on my breath. I was free fall in his estimation. We went out into the night, another hot and humid one but with a stiff breeze whacking off the sea. The tall palms in the massive car park rattled, but not in the nervous way that they did in the
cocotiers.
They were calmer, more self-assured, moneyed. The jeep was off in the corner. I knocked on the rear window and Mr K popped the rear door locks. Ben sat behind Mr K's long-haired head.

‘No names,' said Mr K as soon as we were settled. ‘Talk.'

‘You have some goods,' said Ben. ‘We're interested in buying them but before we go anywhere I have to know whether ten million dollars is your final price because if it is we can terminate discussions now.'

‘The product is under offer to the Libyans.'

‘That doesn't answer my question.'

‘This is Africa.'

‘Is that an African price?'

‘No.'

Some cars streamed past on the road outside the Sheraton's grounds. They turned left at the security gate and drove swiftly up to the entrance. Silence resumed apart from the wind in the palms.

‘Tell me how the business will work,' said Ben.

‘The English here is the intermediary. When we have agreed terms you will make a deposit of fifty per cent of the value of the goods to him. When he has received the money he will inform me. I will tell him where to find the goods. He will have twenty-four hours to hand over the goods to you and for you to inspect them. At the end of the twenty-four hours he will bring the money to me.'

‘And if we're not satisfied with the goods?'

‘You complain to the Consumer Protection Society,' I said, letting the beer do some talking. Silence. Unimpressed silence.

‘You return them and keep your money,' said Mr K quietly. ‘And if that works to your satisfaction we'll proceed with the second drop.'