The Big Killing (12 page)

'I told you, I can't swim.'

'You're going to learn,' I said, 'and if you don't...' I thumped him in the back.

There was a splash, a moment of quiet, and a light uncertain breeze, looking for somewhere to blow, fluttered my shirt. Over the rail it was black with the odd glint from the lights on the shore but there was no sound. The clouds which had been spraying rain most of the evening still hung around up above, applying pressure but not much else. A car zipped past on the other side of the still-wet road. I sorted through the rings and found the one with the scorpion on it and threw the rest in after Eugene. I waited, listening for the sound of splashing, the sound of Eugene taking a huge gulp of air, but there was nothing but the smell of the sea coming in on the nothing breeze.

I walked around the back of the car to the driver's door and, as I reached for the handle, one of those assholes Eugene was worried about appeared in a black string vest, crouching with his arms out. He showed me a nasty but very white grin and a pair of malevolent eye-whites which flickered to his right hand which held a knife. He pointed the blade at my pocket and grunted the word
'Argent.'

I put my arm straight out in front of me so that the suppressor ended up a couple of inches from his nose. He stopped moving forward and straightened a little so that the gun was pointing at his throat. He was blinking now and the malevolent eye-whites had turned to lightly fried egg-whites and he'd reined in his greedy grin to a nervous smile. He turned and ran without looking back.

I tucked the gun up underneath the driver's seat and drove back to the hotel. I got into bed with a miniature of Courvoisier in the absence of Johnny Walker. I stared at the ceiling and had the thought that for the first time in four weeks I'd got hold of something and hadn't pissed on my hand.

Tuesday 29th October

The phone told me it was 5.00 a.m. My body told me it was a lie. I crawled to the mini-bar and polished off everything nonalcoholic, including some very gaseous tonic water which lodged itself behind my sternum like a heart attack.

I let the shower needle my scalp for some time to see if it would loosen some of the grey phlegmy stuff that had seeped into my frontal lobes. I had some success because by the time I got to the mirror I could see that where my eyes weren't bloodshot there were pink threads, and you don't pick up that kind of detail unless you're sharp.

I shaved with a razor that seemed to have been used on seven women's legs before it got to my face and the foam ran pink in the sink. By the time I got to reception I looked like the start of a papier-mache mask.

Ron was propped up against the front desk as if he was about to be moved into a window display for safari gear. There was a Great White Hunter's hat on the desk and there was nobody else around which meant it was his, and he was going to wear it. His hair was done up in a ponytail so that everybody would get to see the gold earring. The oblong wafer watch had gone and he was wearing the kind of thing you'd expect to see on a lone round-the-world yachtsman with time on his hands to work out what everything's for. He had a pair of Timberland boots on his feet which had done twenty-five yards of walking on carpet. The man looked attractive—attractive to people with no money and hours to spare to think up ways of relieving people with too much of it. He was dozing on his feet, and enjoying it by the look of his lips which were searching for a bare shoulder.

It took some time to compute the mini-bar takings. The girl, who was wearing a very bright and complicated African print which raked across my eyeballs like a currycomb, fetched my carrier bag from the safe and checked to make sure the paper wasn't going to run out on the printer. I took B.B.'s two million out, along with the sealed package which Fat Paul had given me yesterday. I left Martin Fall's cash in the bag and handed it back to the girl. She felt sorry for me and gave me a little bag of cakes which she told me she'd made herself. I signed the bill. Ron jolted himself awake.

'Bloody hell,' he said.

'Don't worry. I'm just the hangover. He sent me down to settle the bill. He'll be along in a minute.'

'You missed a bit,' he said, looking around the corner of my face, 'and you slept like shit.'

The lift doors opened and Ron glanced over as if he was expecting the real me to come out. It was empty.

'I had a busy night,' I said. 'You got rid of those Alfas yet?'

'They didn't show.'

'They will. I'll get the car. Wait outside and don't forget your bullwhip.'

'Funny guy,' said Ron, fitting the hat on his head.

In the basement I stripped some money off the block and stuck the rest in an old plastic bag. I opened the rear passenger door, unscrewed the panel, and taped the block inside the door and replaced the panel. Fat Paul's package I taped to the back of the glove compartment. At street level Moses was walking towards the hotel, swinging his Ghana Airways bag with as many cares in the world as I'd have liked to have. He didn't recognize me at first with all the tissue stuck to my face but then he slapped his leg and shook his head, marvelling at me as if I'd been up all night preparing it as a school project.

I gave Moses his prescription and told him to load up while Ron and I had coffee and croissants in a café down from the hotel. The Alfas were waiting for us when we got back. They saw Ron and fell on him like a couple of labradors who'd seen someone they knew and had to tell him about their day. I stood back from the tail-wagging and watched Ron give them the kiss-off.

The Alfas were both wearing raincoats, reminding me to look at the weather which had made no impression because it was one of those grey nothing days, neither hot nor cold, neither rain nor shine. Ron surprised me with the flashiness of his brutality in getting shot of the Alfas. I could tell he hurt. They skewered him with a couple of looks that would have made a more sensitive man wriggle.

We made good time on the motorway from Abidjan to Yamoussoukro, once the car had got over being insulted by Ron, and we'd listened to how fast an Alfa Romeo Spyder can go.

Ron slept for the first hour to show how impressed he was. I held my hand out the window and thought about things I shouldn't have thought about—Heike. It didn't do me any good covering that old ground again; I'd never got used to the high hurdles, the deep water jumps and the elephant pitfalls but once I'd got started I had to go through with it.

I was interrupted by a dog which had come out of the dense vegetation at the side of the road and loped along at the edge of the tarmac looking over its shoulder at the passing cars. Just as we pulled alongside it, for no reason at all, it veered into our path and clobbered against the car, dying instantly. Moses didn't stop but looked into the rearview mirror at the body basking on the tarmac. I had a sudden vision of Eugene disappearing into the black lagoon and decided that dark thoughts brought on others and it was time to recapture some of the positivism of last night.

We rolled into Yamoussoukro at around 10.00 a.m. The President of the Ivory Coast had built this huge, expensive, grid-planned metropolis, in which not enough people were living, as a tribute to his mother. He had also made his 'deal with God' here and erected a cathedral so massive it made the Pope nervous that he was going to have to pay for the servicing.

We bought a crate of Aiwa mineral water and six bottles of Black Label from a supermarket and found a garage where I bought a new tyre to replace the one that Eugene had shot out the night before. Ron stood over the guys and supervised the work so that they looked at each other a few times, as if they were wondering what sort of a dent a tyre iron would make in the white man's hat. When they stripped off the old tyre a piece of metal fell to the floor which Ron picked up and inspected.

'This is a bullet,' he said.

'It is,' I confirmed.

'How did a bullet get in there?'

'I might ask you how you know what an impacted bullet looks like.'

'I've been to the movies.'

'The bullet was fired from a gun.'

'That's unusual.'

'I could go into it if you want.'

He held the bullet between his thumb and forefinger and straightened his hat with his free hand and walked off towards the car doing some kind of breathing exercises.

'Oh boy,' he said, putting his hands into the back pockets of his trousers and shaking his head. 'Here comes trouble.'

'This your first time?'

'What?'

'In West Africa.'

'I've been to Banjul in the Gambia.'

'You went to a five-star hotel and sat on the beach behind the chain-link fencing you mean?'

'They
said
it wasn't a good idea to leave the compound. They
said
there could be trouble.'

'Trouble's what you get in Africa.'

'Yeah, so everybody's keen to tell me, but this isn't bureaucratic-red-tape-fill-it-all-out-in-triplicate-and-attach-your-original-birth-certificate-type trouble. I've had that shit before in Russia. This is different, this is sort of serious...'

'...gun-type trouble,' I said. 'You get that in Russia too.'

'Break it to me gently, Bruce. I'm a nervous traveller.'

'Somebody killed three guys in a hotel room in Grand Bassam last night and then tried to kill me. That's it.'

'I thought, for a moment, you were going to tell me something really fucking terrible.'

'We had a scrap and he shot the tyre out.'

'And after that?' asked Ron, flicking his ponytail.

'We ended up on the bridge, had another fight and he fell in.'

'You killed him?'

'He was a contract killer.'

Ron didn't say anything for a while but searched my face for something that would explain what had just darkened his day.

'Did you kill him?'

'He jumped off the bridge.'

'Jumped or pushed?'

I didn't answer.

'This is thrilling stuff,' he said. 'You know that?'

'I do my best,' I said, trying to lighten things up. Ron blew a valve.

'I'm a diamond trader. I'm a fucking di-a-mond trader,' he said, giving me a syllable count but not looking as hard as he sounded in his shop-stiff safari gear. 'D'you get that? Diamonds are highly transportable forms of cash. You can walk around with five million stuck up your arse if you want. You know what that means? People
like
diamonds. When people
like
things they want to
steal
them. Bullets, guns, contract killers, just those words make me fucking edgy. I don't even have to have the reality, just the fucking words make me edgy.'

'And you think I'm cock-a-hoop?' I asked. He wasn't listening.

'You drive me out of town, you don't say a fucking word, then it's, "Oh, what's that?" "It's a fucking bullet. I had to put someone away last night. Pop him off. Sorry, mate." Was this before or after the drink?'

'After,' I said, and he fixed me with a very steady look.

'Are you all right in there?'

'I'm trying to get a grip...'

'I'm relieved,' he said.

'...like you should, unless you're going back to Abidjan, then you can do what the hell you like.'

'No, no, it's OK, we'll carry on,' he said, feeling his ponytail, making it smooth.

'If you come, then be calm. If you're not calm, you'll upset the locals and then they'll upset you.' He nodded and stuck his hands under his armpits, tense.

'You want a cake?' I asked.

'Where did you get them from?'

'The girl on the desk. She said she made them herself.'

'No, thanks.'

'They're not going to kill you.'

'I don't know what's in them.'

'Sean getting to you, is he ... with all his black magic?' He faltered.

'Maybe?' I asked. 'Maybe.'

He sat on the bonnet, picking at his beard, and asked me how I'd killed Eugene. I didn't want to go through it again but he insisted and I slipped up by dropping Kurt Nielsen's name into the story, which opened up another tree-lined boulevard of inquiry. It made Ron even more unhappy, but Ron liked being unhappy. It gave him the opportunity to walk around looking big, to use manly language that made him sound tough. But he never got unhappy enough to give up and go home.

We left Yamoussoukro at 10.45 a.m. and fell off the tarmac on to the graded road north. At the Bouaké police post, 100 kilometres further north, the car was searched by four men overseen by a large-arsed senior officer who had the habit of gripping his own love handles. I offered him money and he asked me in a voice of rehearsed and quiet threat whether I was trying to bribe him. I told him it was more of a donation and he looked at me through half-closed lids as if this was the most suspicious thing he'd heard since the news had broken about Santa Claus. I made a rolled-up 5000 CFA note available to him and he tugged on one end of it while I asked him with the tilt of my forehead to call off the sniffer dogs.

His lids opened, suddenly startled, to show a pair of eyes which were coated with something you'd expect to see in a pneumonic lung. In the corner of one eye was a small orange worm of the type that burrowed through the foot, made its way up through the liver, laid eggs and, after a tour of duty, exited wherever it could. I let go of the note. He reared back and stumbled to his office calling off the search as he went.

We stopped by the railway station in Bouaké and picked up a meal of kedjenou—spicy chicken with vegetables and rice. Ron seemed to be designing a housing project in his food but not eating it. I told him that restaurants in Tortiya were not well known and this might be the last food before Korhogo tomorrow morning. He said he was a vegetarian. I told him he was going to lose some weight.

We left for Katiola in the dreadful afternoon sun. In the steam-bath heat Moses developed a pimpling of sweat on the end of his nose. Ron and I had dinner-plate sweat patches under both arms, wet hair with the pink scalp showing through, puffy faces, sweat hanging off the eyebrows and beggars' eyes. Ron's ponytail came undone, he let his hair hang loose and took to muttering, 'What a fucking shithole,' at everything he saw.