The Big Killing (22 page)

'Let's have a drink,' she said. 'You look the sort who does that.'

I liked her even better.

Dotte Wamberg didn't have the looks to slay millions at the box office; if she had she wouldn't have been out here in the middle of Africa shovelling sheanut, she'd be working at a supermarket check-out waiting to be discovered. She had the kind of face that drew a man in, not just me, lots of men. She promised something different, something a long way from mortgages, summer sales, car washes and underwear in packets of three.

She put two glasses on the table and stuffed them full of ice, not thinking about what she was doing. She took a bottle of Red Label with a flow-control stopper and turned it upside down in the glasses, her dark-brown eyebrows frowning a little underneath her blonde hair at something that wasn't in the glass. She put the bottle down and gave me a full frontal with blue eyes, tired after a long day which made them look intense and a little chill for diving into. They were creased at the edges, too, from squinting at the sun or the unseeable distance. Her mouth was her feature. It had a soft, pliable big top lip whose underside caught against the smaller lower one, swelling it, making it look kissable.

'Water?' she asked. I nodded.

She went to the fridge, tearing the towelling band off her ponytail and shaking her hair out, which was still crappy with dust and sweat. She was neither tall nor small, neither fat nor thin, she had a compact body used to hard work outdoors. She wore a white T-shirt, a wrap of African print in dark red, orange and yellow. Her black espadrilles were dusted with red from the compound. She poured the water into her glass and left it for me. I splashed it into mine and sat back, looking at her which she seemed used to from men and which irritated her as well. She was frowning again.

'How did you know?'

'About Kurt? I went to the Danish Embassy.'

'B.B.?' she asked, grasping the situation quicker than I'd have thought.

'He thought it might make my job easier.'

'Sneaky bastard.'

'Him or me?'

'Both, probably.'

'Did they tell you he was murdered? They want you to identify the body. There's a plane leaving for Abidjan at nine o'clock tonight. We should be on it.'

Her eyes were a lot older than the rest of her and they didn't leave my face. They were eyes that had seen things, that had got her used to suffering, that had twenty more years filled into them than the rest of her thirty-year-old body.

Kofi appeared at the door, shiny with sweat. He started to say something but stopped when he saw the set of Dotte's face, her eyes open and still.

'You all right, sistah Dotte?'

'The police, Kofi.'

'What they want you for?'

'To tell me Mr Kurt is dead.'

'Mr Kurt ... he dead?' said Kofi, shocked, reaching deep to say the last word and a terrified look creeping into his face.

'As soon as the water's ready, start the boiling,' she said.

I heard Kofi's feet thumping out into the compound and a rush of voices as he explained in Tui to the other boys. Then Katrina was standing at the door, her hair wet, African print wrapped around her body, a towel over her arm and her eyes occupying most of her face.

'Is that true?' she asked. 'Is that what they said?' Dotte beckoned to her but Katrina turned and fled down the corridor. Dotte followed. She came back as I was pouring my third.

'Is Katrina Kurt's daughter?'

'No, but she's known him for the last six years. They were close.'

'But you weren't so close?'

'People talk.'

'B.B.,' I said. 'Mr Kantari, too, and I saw his things in the spare room.'

'Kantari,' she said, surprised at hearing the name. 'You knew him?'

'I knew of him.'

'Kurt was doing a job for him when he was killed.'

'What job?'

'A drop. He was picking—'

'I know what a drop is,' she said quickly. 'How do you know about it?'

'I was on the same drop.' That stiffened her back and got the blues eyes working on me.

'You get around.'

'I live a life but not always the one I want to.'

'Do you know who killed him?'

'He was already dead when I got there. It was a set-up. I thought you might be able to tell me something about it.'

'Are you police?'

'B.B. sent me, remember?'

'Police, but not official.'

'The man who killed Kurt is known in the Ivory Coast now as the Leopard. He killed a man before Kurt and then killed another three after him and then he tried to kill me. He's a Liberian working for somebody—I'd like to know who it is. You might not have loved Kurt any more, but you go back six years and it's probably been a long six years. I thought you might like to help me find out what's going on.'

'The Leopard? Five dead men, nearly six? A long six years? That was a very dense sentence; I think you'd better slow down a bit. Drink some whisky. Space it out for me.'

'The Leopard uses a metal claw to open up his victims after he's killed them, the men were killed because they had something the other wanted and, don't forget, I've been to the Danish Embassy.'

'Another dense sentence. You're a specialist, Mr Medway. What did the Danes tell you about Kurt?'

'That he wasn't Kurt Nielsen.'

She finished her drink, poured another measure and watched the amber filter down through the ice.

'I'm going to have some trouble if I identify his body.'

'That depends on the sort of trouble and if you're still in it.'

'I was in trouble from the day I met him.'

Dotte had met Kurt on a beach in the north of Morocco, just down from the Rif mountains in a small fishing village outside a town called Al Hoceima. She was smoking hash with the same guys Kurt was buying from. He persuaded her to come back on a trip with him to Denmark with a cargo, five kilos packed in beeswax blocks to fool the Spanish police dogs in Algeciras. They got through, no problem. They sold it in Copenhagen, made some money and did another trip and another, taking a bit more each time, expanding. That's what people in business do.

'Katrina and I were his good-luck charms,' she said. 'We even started selling gear up in Scotland. We teamed up with a Glaswegian girl and an Australian guy who were doing it and making a lot of money. We stopped after two trips when some Irish guys came to the door one night, put hoods over our heads and took us up a mountainside, put guns to our kneecaps and said they'd shoot us if we sold any more gear on their patch. IRA, very scary. Very quiet musical voices they had, too.

'So we stuck to our contacts in Denmark. Then Katrina was ill one time and I didn't want to take her down so Kurt went on his own for the first time in two years. He came back in on that road from Hemsburg, which we didn't normally do. The Danes caught him with only seven kilos, which was lucky because they gave him a year per kilo.

'He didn't like prison. I used some money we'd saved to get him a passport and I bought a Hanomag truck in Germany. After he'd done two years he came into his rehabilitation period. In Denmark they let you out for the weekends. One Saturday morning the three of us crossed the border on the train to Hamburg. We picked up the truck and drove non-stop to Marseille and caught the first boat out. By Monday morning we were in Tunis. We drove across the desert to Ghana, lived there for two years, ran out of money. Kurt met B.B. and we took this job here. So you can imagine the sort of trouble I'm going to have.'

'Did you meet him out of prison the day you left?'

'No, different people had been taking him out for the three months before. We didn't want to make it too easy, but it wouldn't have taken them long once they'd found I'd gone, too.'

'Why did you call the embassy that time when Kurt went missing?'

'I was scared.'

'You don't seem the type to scare easy.'

'He'd never done that before, just gone without telling me, for two weeks. When they asked for the passport I stopped it and he came back a couple of days later. He didn't tell me where he'd been.'

'That passport was a turkey,' I said, and told her its history. 'What colour hair did Kurt have?'

'Blond with a bit of red in it. Strawberry blond, you'd call it. His beard was the same colour when he had it.'

'I found a juju under his mattress, with a lock of his hair in it.'

Dotte seemed to judder at that, as if her insides had seized.

'Show me.'

We walked down the corridor, past the main entrance which was open to the compound where two fires burned under the water vats. The smell of woodsmoke was strong, but there was no sign of life out there.

'Where've the boys gone?' she asked, stepping outside and shouting for Kofi. Her voice fell flat into the night and nothing came back. We walked out to the vats in the now unlit compound.

'They're sensitive to this kind of thing,' I said. Dotte was standing close to me, her arms crossed, her hands holding on to her shoulders. She looked vulnerable. We walked back into the house in silence, then down the corridor to Kurt's cool room. I turned on the light and lifted the mattress with Dotte at my shoulder. There was no juju. I let the mattress fall.

'Well?'

'It's done its work. They've taken it away,' I said, looking at the time. 'Are you coming to Abidjan, or running away?'

'What makes you think I have a choice?'

'I'm not going to stop you.'

'No money, no truck?'

'Is that yours in Kantari's compound?'

'Kurt sold it to him for nothing. I didn't see any of the money.'

'It's going to be expensive for the Danes to send you back, and expensive to get enough evidence to convict you of aiding and abetting a fugitive, and they might not even be able to do it now.'

She thought about that for a few minutes and said she'd talk to Katrina. I socked back the whisky in the kitchen and went into the compound and out through the gates into the street. It was empty. Across from the compound was some shambolic housing with narrow mud roads in between. There was a distant thump of the bass track from some music. I followed it. It came from a bar about fifty yards into the shanty town. Sitting outside, with his head down and a bottle of beer dangling between his knees, was Kofi. I ordered two more beers and gave him one.

'I'm Mr Bruce.'

'Yessah.'

'You know me.'

'Yessah. Mastah send you.'

'That's right. Mastah send me.'

'You wan' something, sah?'

'This very bad thing here.'

'Is very bad, sah. Very bad.'

'Mr Kurt, you see him dying small-small?'

'I see him. Mr Kurt very sick man. In the head. Somet'ing in dere vexing him, sah.'

'Juju,' I said, and Kofi drained the bottle in his hand and started on the second I'd ordered for him.

'The med'cine here very strong, sah.'

'Who put the juju there?'

'The woman, sah, mebbe the woman.'

'Kurt's girlfriend?'

'Woman fro' Mali side, sah. She sendin' him food sometime. He don' eat with sistah Dotte. Mebbe she putting med'cine the food, sah. Thassway it happenin'.'

'The woman from Mali. What's her name?'

'Soumba, sah. Soumba. Mr Kurt mekking mistake fallin' in love dis woman. He wan' marry her.'

'Why did she put the juju on him?'

'Mek him sick for love, sah.'

'She overdid it,' I said. Kofi didn't understand. 'What happen when Mr Kurt disappear six weeks ago?'

'Is very bad t'ing, sah. He tekkin' Miss Katrina wid him, sah. Sistah Dotte goin' mad.'

'Why did he take Miss Katrina?'

'Mebbe he sick. Mebbe the med'cine working before.'

'Are you and the boys going back to work?'

'Mornin' time, sah. The men don' work now.'

I told him to start work at dawn tomorrow and that I was taking Dotte down to Abidjan and we'd be back in a few days' time.

Dotte and Katrina were waiting on the verandah, out of their African print and wearing European-style skirts. I changed my shirt and went looking for a taxi, which took us to the airport. I bought three tickets and they told us we could board immediately, that the plane might take off early. We went through the formalities, our names, dates of birth and jobs being entered into a four-inch-thick ledger. The policeman wrote slowly, with his tongue out the side of his mouth. He wasn't too disturbed by what he was writing, which wouldn't have seemed unusual to an African. I checked and rechecked my mental arithmetic because, while I made Katrina fourteen years old on January 27th next year, whichever way I tried it, I couldn't make Dotte any older than twenty-eight on the 4th April.

Friday 1st November

We didn't check into the Novotel before midnight. We'd had a forty-five-minute wait in Bouaké so that a 'big man' could make the flight. While we waited, the pilot came back and sat with us in case we unbolted the seats and rolled up the carpet to use in the privacy of our own homes. We landed in Abidjan at the same time as an Air Afrique flight from Paris and ended up brawling for taxis with some crew-cut Frenchmen. Six of us got into one cab with Dotte and Katrina across laps. The exhaust skidded against the road, showering sparks into the night.

I showered and fixed myself a Red Label and opened up a Perrier for show. I sat on the bed with a towel around my waist and a T-shirt on against the chill of the air conditioning. In the mirror on the dresser I saw a big fight going on between guilt and desire against a backdrop of confusion.

I imagined my letter making its way from Amsterdam to a Berlin sorting office. A letter that said something that the writer still felt but whose circumstances were, not changed exactly, but had shifted. Heike was important to me but there was a hole there where she'd been. Now I'd run into another woman, Dotte, just run into her, for Christ's sake, and I was already trying to fit her into that hole. I was attracted to her ... for a bad reason. There it was, the dilemma, no easier to solve for knowing what it was.

She looked like the kind of woman that a lot of men saw and started finding holes in themselves where there'd been none before. The dogs sniffing after the unknowable, loving the chase except, in this case, for us on the trail, the scent was always there, but the prey no nearer.