The Big Killing (23 page)

The strangeness, the dark vitality of the first hours came back to me. She was the same age as Katrina now when she'd had her, thirteen years old when she'd conceived. Katrina herself, a strange girl standing in those squares of light from the window, eating a biscuit, nails chewed off, leaning against my leg—a mixture of girlishness and early sexual confidence with something off beam, not quite right in the head, the teeth of certain cogs spinning free. Dotte, vulnerable and hard, the child-mother, the drug smuggler, the woman out on her own in Africa, her partner killed and telling Kofi to go and boil the sheanut.

There was a soft knock at the door. I picked up the stool, my brain leaping from the Korhogo compound to the abattoir I'd found in the Hotel La Croisette in Grand Bassam.

'Who is it?'

'Dotte,' she said, and I had that cable-snapping sensation. Her hair was wet and she was back in a T-shirt and the African-print wrap, but this time with two inches of bare waist between. 'I couldn't sleep.'

She made me aware of our bodies under little clothing. I handed her a Red Label, a glass and the untouched Perrier.

'I need to talk,' she said, taking the drinks, parts of us touching—wrists, forearms, a hip. 'I haven't done much of that for a long time.'

She left a smell of clean skin, no perfume. She put the drinks down on the bedside table and propped up a pillow on the unused single bed and lay down, crossing her legs at the ankles.

'You saw, didn't you?' she said. 'At the airport.'

'Your age, Katrina's and that your middle name is Sarah.'

'My mother was English. She died when I was eleven. Cancer.'

'Your father?'

'Half Danish, half German. Dead, too. In an accident when I was fifteen. Are you sure you're not a policeman?'

'You've known a lot of policemen?'

'I've been off the rails enough times, even before I met Kurt.'

'Drugs?'

'And the stuff that goes with them. Shoplifting, thieving. I was a pretty good burglar, too. They called me the Kitten because of the small spaces I could get through.'

'You never got caught?'

'Only once. It was good, though. They got me off the smack which meant I kept Katrina.'

'You're very close.'

'Not just in age. She needs me,' she said, and paused, looking off to the bathroom as if she'd heard something. 'I need her.'

'Is she all you've got?'

'One uncle,' she said, wagging her finger and twitching her face. The uncle was a no-no. 'You're all alone, then?'

'Never for long,' she said. 'Somebody always finds me.'

'Like Kurt,' I said, and she grunted. 'He had twenty years on you.'

'Old enough to be my father.'

'Was he?'

'Yes, he was. To start with, he was. A big, strong, gentle guy, but crazed too—not every father uses his daughters to smuggle drugs. That's what he called us, his daughters.'

She sipped her whisky and looked around the room which was no different to hers and said she didn't like too many questions at once. It reminded her of interrogation rooms and conversations with other men.

'Have you got a girlfriend, Bruce?' she asked. 'I know you're not married.'

'I ... yes ... how?'

'Not so easy answering questions, is it?' she said, giving me a flat ironic smile. 'I'm used to it ... and not answering too.'

'I might still have a girlfriend. I don't know. She went back to Berlin. She got involved in some bad business the last job I was on. She needed a break back in civilization.'

'Do you always get involved in bad business?'

'I didn't used to. It's just the way things have been turning out lately.'

'Am I "bad business"?'

'Not yet. Kurt was. The other job I'm doing is.'

'What's that?'

'I was chaperoning a diamond trader who got kidnapped.'

'Diamonds and all?'

'That's right.'

'Very bad business,' she said. 'Do you want her to come back? Your girlfriend.'

'Yes, I do.'

'What was she doing in Africa?'

'She ran an aid project in Benin.'

'A do-gooder,' she said. 'Do you smoke?'

'Not any more.'

'Pity. I like the occasional one.'

'How did you know I wasn't married?'

'Your ego's a little fragile at the moment.'

'Eggshell right now.'

'People think loners are romantic. I think they're just men who aren't comfortable with themselves. They have to keep moving, keep looking, trying to pick up their own trail. Women don't marry men like that. They have sex with them, give them a little comfort and watch them leave.'

'You're very knowledgeable.'

'Men tell me things about themselves. Without my asking. I recognize the types.'

'You get a lot of attention from men?'

'I'm attainable. Not so beautiful that they feel inadequate. Not ugly. Men find me sexy. They want to get me into bed. You can't imagine how dull it is listening to what they have to say when you know their intention. Some men ... I let them. They all think it's going to make them feel complete. It never does. They end up finding more gaps in themselves, that's all.'

'What about the ones you comfort and watch them leave?'

'They're all right,' she said, and held up her glass. I poured another measure and one for myself. 'Do you love her? Your girlfriend. You didn't say her name.'

'What's in a name?'

'Something personal.'

'Heike.'

'Do you love Heike?'

'I don't know.'

'You miss her now she's gone.'

'Yes,' I said, watching the conversation swerve out of my control. 'I thought you said
you
wanted to talk.'

'I do. We are. About you. I get bored talking about myself, like I said, answering people's questions all the time.'

'What about listening to men telling you things you don't need to know. Things they hope will get them into bed with you.'

'You haven't started on that yet. And those sort of men were more revealing when they were in bed with me already. They wanted the sex to have meaning.'

'Which it didn't for you?'

'It doesn't when you're on the game.'

'I didn't realize that was what we were talking about.'

'I didn't say. Shoplifting, thieving, burglary
and
occasional whoring. It was the easiest way to make money for drugs. I didn't like doing it, but stealing was time-consuming.'

'And after you met Kurt?'

'What's Heike like?' she asked, knuckling me down again. 'Give me some adjectives.'

'Strong. Resilient. Intelligent. Likes to drink...'

'You don't see her as very feminine.'

'Women in Africa ... working in Africa, don't always have the opportunity to be feminine. But I do see her like that too, it's just that she needs to use other qualities more often.'

'Did you ever see her outside Africa?'

'I broke down in the Sahara. She pulled me and my car out.'

'Your saviour,' she said, and we both thought about that for a moment.

'Kurt,' she said, 'was a lost man. Africa found him out, stripped him down to what he was. Big body, small heart, no morals, no integrity, nothing to hold on to, a hollow man. They could beat him like a drum. I can't find many tears for him. The man who took me off that beach near Al Hoceima was long gone. Too many drugs for too long. That stay in prison—he drank too much of the stuff they make out of potatoes. Before that though, the worst thing that happened, what changed him and the way he was with me ... he killed a man. He was the big daddy until then, and after that I mothered him. I mothered him in prison, out of it and down here. He hated it. He wanted it to be how it was before the killing. The problem was that he couldn't satisfy himself that there was a reason for it.'

I stared hard at the carpet between the two beds, rolling the killing, maybe the two killings, I'd done over and over. I'd satisfied myself of the reason for killing them. They were both killers who would have killed me, but it didn't matter how long I kicked that rationale around, if I thought about it it did me no good at all.

'I'm talking to you,' a voice said, off somewhere.

'What?' I said, irritated now to find Dotte's eyes on me. She was kneeling on the bed, her face at my level, big blue eyes staring in. 'It's late,' I said quietly.

'I'm going,' she replied, just as quietly. 'Whatever you've done you've coped with it better than Kurt. He still wakes up screaming.'

'Not any more, and how do you know I don't?'

'No,' she said, getting her legs out from under her, standing up. 'Your reason must have been better than Kurt's.'

I felt sick now, sick, strained, probed, opened up and inspected like a post-op or how women tell me they feel after the gynie's been there with a cold speculum. I stood and she put her hand on my shoulder and drew me down and kissed me on the cheek. 'You're a good man, Bruce.'

'You wouldn't know.'

'Katrina told me. She likes you. She might not be all there. But in some things she's never wrong.'

'And you?'

'I'm no judge,' she said, and left.

'I spoke to Fat Paul's Lagos partner,' said Bagado, sitting over his breakfast in his mac, looking sullen. 'He'd heard about the firebombing and the murder. He didn't think Fat Paul had any political connections but he said Fat Paul's father was a Krahn and had some kind of government position.'

'So Fat Paul might have known people, even if he wasn't directly involved. Did you ask him about James Wilson?'

'He's never heard of him.'

'But Fat Paul's father probably did and Fat Paul and Wilson were about the same age.'

'Is this relevant?'

'Connections,' I said. 'You saw the film?'

'Pornography. Tame. I didn't recognize any faces. What I saw of them.'

'There's another film,' I said, and Bagado steeled up on me.

'You see,' he said quietly, dabbing his mouth with a napkin and looking out over the grey lagoon, at the sun just breaking through the cloud. 'I was right. You
were
holding back.'

'I wanted to see Kantari first.'

'Did it make any difference?'

'It made me think we should take a look at it, and not just hand it over.'

'So let's see it.'

'After breakfast. Did you hear anything more from Accra?'

'Maybe,' he said, looking around the room for someone more interesting.

'Come on, Bagado.'

'Don't do that again,' he said. 'Trust is all we've got in this game. You're making a lot of assumptions for someone who used to be a businessman.' He poured himself some more coffee, slowly, getting himself calm again. 'Now
you
tell me about
your
day.'

I told him about the meeting with Trzinski, what happened with Kantari, and in the compound afterwards. I mentioned the few odd things about Dotte and Katrina's ages but not about Dotte's criminal past. I didn't want to prejudice him—that's what I told myself.

'Any ideas on what this is about?' I asked.

'Whatever it is, it's serious. The police in Accra told me unofficially that Fat Paul's house was searched by two white men with short hair and dark suits. They paid in dollars to do it and have it kept quiet. They were Americans and very fast.'

'A bit of a quantum leap there, Bagado.'

'To the CIA, you mean?'

'One minute it's hoods getting whacked in a hotel room, now it's intergovernment business.'

'Liberia is very important to the Americans. It's their eyes and ears in Africa. They've got something called an Omega satellite tracking system and VCA transmitter/receivers there, and don't ask me what they are, I've only just stopped calling a radio a wireless. If there's anything that's going to affect their position, they want to know about it. Fat Paul might have had something. We're just about to find out. Who else is there?

'Red Gilbert came after me so he knew. He might have told his boss, or he might have survived the lagoon to tell his boss. But then if he did, why hasn't he come after me again?'

'Gilbert attacked you Monday night. If he survived the lagoon he wasn't going to come back the same night all in his wet clothes. Tuesday morning you checked out of the hotel. Who knew where you were going?'

'Sean Malahide.'

'What's he got to do with it?'

'Nothing. You asked a question.'

'Nobody knows you went to Tortiya. You spent a night with the police. You didn't get back to the Novotel until late Wednesday night after Collins was kidnapped. You were out again Thursday morning and didn't come back until after midnight. What would you assume if you were Red Gilbert or his boss?'

'That I'd left the country. What would you do?'

'If I was them I'd wait in the Novotel for a week.'

'That's your style. Very patient,' I said, 'but not very American. Do you think Red is employed by the Americans?'

'Careful what you say,' said Bagado. 'It might not be
the
Americans. It might be
some
Americans, or even
an
American.'

'Like the Iran/Contra affair wasn't anything to do with the Reagan administration?'

'A clever thing to say, but don't say it too loud, especially with what you have in your possession. And I can't remember the last government in the world to admit that their covert operations have resulted in deaths, mutilations, a firebombing and an illegal search, can you?'

'You're tearing ahead again, Bagado. Your Accra police said that US agents bought their silence to do a frisk of Fat Paul's house. What's been happening here in the Ivory Coast could still be a tribal thing. The
Ivoire Soir
wrote that James Wilson was implicated in the handover of the Liberian president to Jeremiah Finn and that's why he got done. The
commissaire,
Gbondogo, thinks the same.'

'And Fat Paul and Kurt Nielsen?'

'Were killed by a Liberian, possibly paid for by Krahn tribe members. Assuming that I've got Wilson's tape, which he'd given to Fat Paul to sell to Nielsen who was buying for Kantari. Then the Liberian was just following the trail.'

'The Liberian, and I assume we're talking about Red Gilbert, started at Kantari's end. He followed Nielsen to the drop.'