The Big Killing (19 page)

'You won't take off before midday.'

'Sleep?'

'I'm awake now,' he said, and walked to the door. He fished in his pocket and came up with a letter. 'Don't hold back on me, Bruce. I know you are, I know you've got something. Tell me about it ... soon.' He threw me the letter and left.

The letter landed on the empty bed, German stamp, Berlin postmark, Heike. I didn't want all that now, to read it and let it burn a hole in the bits of sleep I was still getting. I stripped and cleaned up and lay on the bed with a glass, the bottom painted amber, what the French call
un fond.

White square on the dark counterpane. I turned the light out. It was still there, maybe answers inside it to questions I didn't even know about, maybe just more questions, no answers, maybe the kiss-off, maybe some well-worn clichés and
then
the kiss-off. I turned the light on. The letter was written a week after she'd flown back and it was short, thank Christ, no streams of heart-pouring consciousness.

Berlin, 15th October

Dear Bruce,

I'm working at my mother's café. A double shift which uses up the days, six in the morning to midnight with a break 3.00 to 6.00 in the afternoon and I walk all over Berlin. West to East, East to West. I still can't believe we can do that now. I keep moving. If I had sharper teeth and a predatory nature I'd say I was a shark, just moving to stay alive and keep the water running through my gills. I don't feel like a shark. I only say it because I feel isolated and lonely here in Berlin, where it can rain for a week without stopping. Damn. I wasn't going to use that word 'feel', nor
'emotion', nor 'relationship' but there you are—feelings everywhere.

I miss Africa. Everything about it. The people—you know how Africans wrap you up in their lives. They keep their distance here. Who needs people when you've got the rain to keep you company all day? I'm dying to sweat, that free-flow sweat, and drink an ice-cold Eku and ask Moses to buy kebabs. I even miss diarrhoea—they're so constipated here. But ... I'm staying. Wolfgang is over here and I'm seeing him (not in that way). He wants me to work on a project in Tanzania. He's being (and I know this will annoy you) very supportive. It helps to see an old Africa hand.

The only thing I can't resolve and haven't, the only thing that tugs away at my insides every day that I can't get rid of however much I walk or work—is you. Feeling important now? My mother said you'd called. I was there and I know you knew I was there, too. I can't speak to you on the phone. There are things that, even when they digitalize them, don't fit down phone lines. My mother says it's sex, but that's just because she can't keep her hands off my father (and vice versa). They still go at it three times a week after thirty-five years of marriage. When I left we seemed to be on the brink of something and it's that, I think, which cuts me. I'll never know what we would have made of it.

Love, H.

There must be a detective in all of us. We all
have
to know something—lovers, friends, family. Bagado had seen it. I saw it in myself. 'What we would have made of it' left a permanent hunger. Other women, like Anne, Martin Fall's wife, had left me full, up to the neck, couldn't cram anything more down even with the back of a spoon. Heike left me starving.

There was an opening for me in Heike's letter, maybe you had to be on the receiving end to see it. There was something about that 'But ... I'm staying' which was wavering and if she couldn't speak on the phone about the unanswered questions then it had to be in person. A letter from me and she could either melt into the capital of the new unified Germany or be sitting at a table opposite me in her big white dress, with a cold beer and a cigarette in its holder giving the raggedy wolf a last chance.

Abidjan, 30th October

Dear Heike;

I've been drinking with Bagado, he brought me your letter this evening. The nights have been dark recently, I know because I don't sleep in them any more and I spend them thinking about you. The thinking moves in tighter and tighter circles so that I feel drilled through in the mornings. You're right, we were on the brink of something—it just happened that on the brink there was a very complicated situation that was my fault and you should never have been involved in it. It won't happen again. You love Africa. I want to make it even more worth your while coming here, but if I can't you shouldn't abandon both loves because the one can't live up to the other. Let me try. I should be back in Benin in a week's time. I'll call, if you don't want to speak leave your flight number with your mother.

Love, B.

I addressed the envelope but didn't stick it down. I licked up the
fond
of whisky, turned out the light and slept like a dog that's been out on the hills all day.

Thursday 31st October

At 7.00 a.m. Bagado joined me for breakfast in a grey dining room, made greyer by the low cloud over the iron lagoon outside. He sat hunched in his mac, and mumbled through his croissant, looking about a quarter of the size he had last night.

'You're shrinking,' I said.

'I'm getting old.'

'How old?' He looked up. 'You never said.'

'I'll be fifty-four on Christmas day if you want to make a note of it.'

'You're looking good.'

'It's not how you look, it's how you feel and I feel ninety-seven until midday.'

Moses appeared at the entrance to the restaurant. I beckoned him over. Bagado stood. They shook hands.

'My brother,' said Moses.

'He flatters me,' said Bagado, slapping him on the shoulder and sinking back into the chair.

'This food mekking you body weak,' said Moses. 'Mebbe you need African food. Fufu
^*
mek you strong.'

'All fufu does is lower your centre of gravity,' I said.

'Better than Obroni"
^†
" food,' he said, pointing at the croissant. 'These things all air. They good for nothing 'cept mekking you wind strong.'

We left the Novotel, driving out of the high-rise Plateau district across the lagoon on a still, close morning and into the low-level, grid-designed Treichville quarter. The African Abidjan was already humming at that time in the morning, the people converging on the huge marketplace. We found the corner of 18 and 23 and Moses stayed with the car while Bagado and I side-stepped street kids with flat palms and
cadeau-cadeau
on their lips.

The Alfas' room was above a shop selling motor parts. We went through a door at the side of the shop and climbed the stairs up to the first floor. We went into a small dark room with two beds with an Alfa on each. Even in the half light of the room we could see that they'd each taken a severe beating. The pillows were smeared with blood, their faces swollen and split. They told us about the money they owed M. Hadet and how unimpressed he had been with the lack of the Ron Collins commission. They'd had a visit yesterday afternoon. The discussion had been short, the aftermath violent. They had nothing for us and we left them to count their teeth.

We arrived at the Polyclinique at 8.30 a.m. Bagado waited in the car while a crisp nurse took me up to Rademakers's private room. She said he was stable but not to stay too long.

He lay in bed, unconnected to tubes and electrodes. A body barely making a lump in the bed. His face was ashen. His eyes were open but without his glasses they had a far-off look, as if he was enjoying a choir of celestial angels. I gave him his glasses and held up a hand so he didn't have to speak.

'If you want me to find Ron I'm already looking,' I said. 'We think he's been taken by Liberian rebels but we haven't heard yet. Are you strong enough to answer a few questions?'

'It wasn't a local job,' he said, answering my first two.

'How do you know?'

'I keep up my payments.' he said.

'They had information to do the job. They knew about the office, the security system and the steel door. They knew a deal was going to be done. Does anybody work for you?'

'No.'

'I was just wondering about the other desk in your office.'

'Nobody works for me.'

'Have you had any unusual visitors in the last month?'

'Unusual?'

'Not in the normal line of business.'

'I don't do so much now, you know,' he said, trying to jog his memory. 'I do some diamonds, some currency. Only for friends. Ten years ago it was different. Now ... I'm an old man.'

'So you know everybody who comes into that office?'

'Yes. But I'm thinking. There was somebody different at the end of last week. A consultant. He came to see me for information on the Ivory Coast diamond business. He was writing a report for a US conglomerate who wanted to invest in a West African diamond mine. Trzinski. That was his name. He worked for himself. He had an assistant called Foley. Americans.'

'Do you have a card ... know where they were staying?'

'They were in the Hilton. Their card is in the office. Washington DC address.'

'Is there anybody in Abidjan who doesn't like you or wants your business?'

'I told you, I'm an old man, I don't do anything. If you want someone with enemies, Ron is your man. Not well-liked. Very arrogant. Too much money. Samuel, his father, spoils him. All his enemies are up there, though—London, Antwerp, Geneva, New York. This is his first time down here. They would have had to be very organized, and anyway ... they dislike him, but not
so
much.'

'You said Geneva. What about the Swiss who sold Ron the first parcel?'

'They want to do business with Collins and Driberg again, my friend.'

'What about M. Hadet? He was the contact for a couple of fixers...'

'Yes, I know Hadet. He's not in the business. He knows nothing about diamonds. He hasn't been to my office. Those two fixers probably owe him money. He gives them something to do to get his money back. M. Hadet is nothing, a small man of no consequence, not someone to waste your time on.'

He offered me money; I told him not to worry about any money just yet, that I was going to Korhogo and if he had any ideas to leave messages in the Novotel or speak to Bagado. He stopped me at the door.

'This is very important for me. Samuel and I go back a long way,' he said, tapping the number tattoo on his forearm. 'Ron has three older sisters but he is the only boy. You understand.'

I got back in the car and told Bagado that he was going to have to find out for himself who worked for Rademakers because the man didn't want to tell me.

'How do you know he has someone?'

'The other desk and the way he stonewalled me in there,' I said. 'Ask the
gardien
at the car park. Try treading on Hadet's feet too, see if he's got any corns. There's a card in Rademakers's office belonging to a Mr Trzinski, a consultant who operates out of Washington DC. Check it out, see if it's straight.'

I took Martin Fall's transfer out of Barclays Bank and split it down the middle with Bagado. We reached the airport by 10.30 a.m. with the flight not due to take off for another hour. I called Leif Andersen and told him my life's problems and he said that he'd already instructed the local Korhogo police to find Dotte Wamberg, who was out in the bush collecting sheanut. I called the Hilton, too, just in case Trzinski was still there. He wasn't, but his assistant, Deyton Foley, played a cagey game on his behalf until I told him my business. Trzinski was up in the north, looking at Tortiya and staying at Le Mont Korhogo Hotel in Korhogo. He said he'd make sure he knew I was coming. I looked over Heike's letter again and thought it read like hell in the light—those things always do. I asked a Dutch lobster buyer who was going back to Amsterdam to post it and bought an
Ivoire Soir
to read on the plane.

By 2.45 p.m. I was at the reception desk of Le Mont Korhogo Hotel. They knew about me and said Trzinski wasn't going to be there until 4.00 p.m. I went across to the PTT
^*
and found Kantari's name and address in the phone book. The taxi driver didn't know where it was. We cruised around until we found a young boy holding the hand of a painted red-haired albino who showed us Kantari's cul-de-sac.

A jumpy
gardien,
spaced on cola nuts, let me in and pointed me across a large earthen courtyard in which there was a Mercedes, a Peugeot and a three-ton Hanomag truck parked under a corrugated-iron awning.

'Premier étage, la porte à gauche.'

High walls ran along two sides of the courtyard and met a long French colonial period house, whose windows were all shuttered against the strong sun. I went through the open door in the middle of the house into a hallway with a naked bulb on a flex and doors to the left and right.

Another light bulb hung out on wires from a rough hole in the wall's plasterwork, halfway up the stairs. On the landing, railed off by some bannisters which ran to the front of the house, were gilt-framed pictures, dusty silk screens, some telescopic stands and rolls of wire extensions, with pieces of red, blue and yellow gel scattered about.

I knocked on the door on the left and it opened a crack on some black hair, a brown almond eye, coffee skin. The crack closed. I tried the door—locked. I tapped again.

'Oui,'
said a voice from behind the door.

'Je veux voir Kantari'
I said.

'Whass your name?' he asked, coming back in English with American threaded in.

'My French that bad, eh?'

'Yeah. Name?'

'Bruce Medway.'

'Whass it about?'

'I'll tell that to Kantari.'

'Tell me. I'll give him the message.'

'It's personal.'

'Lonely Hearts?'

'Fat Paul.'

'What you got?'

I didn't answer, let the curiosity do the work. The door opened and a Polynesian boy stripped to the waist in shiny shorts leaned against the door and looked at me with nothing in his face.

'You got something?'

'Just let me see Kantari.'