The Big Killing (32 page)

'I don't like it,' said Martin. 'Why can't they bring Ron across and check the diamonds on the Ivory Coast side of the Nipoué?'

'Because,' said Malahide slowly, 'that's the way it's foggering well going to be and there's no changing it now.'

'Are they straight, Sean?' I asked.

'They'll play straight as long as you play straight. As long as Mr Fall here doesn't start playing British professional soldiery out there. He does and you're all dead men. I can assure you.'

'We're not going to do it,' said Martin. 'Tell them the deal's off.'

'In that case, Mr Fall, your Mr Collins will be floating down the Nipoué tomorrow morning with a bullet in his skull,' said Malahide, his voice soft and gentle. 'That was the deal. The diamonds delivered as specified or Mr Collins dies. If you don't turn up, it's all over for him.'

'Bruce?' asked Martin.

If I hadn't known how useful Martin was with his hands I might have tried to punch him out over the balcony.

'Is there any way you can contact the rebels now, Sean?'

'No, there isn't,' he said, flat as a pan in the face.

'Then we're in a very fine negotiating position,' I said to Martin, letting him know.

'It stinks,' said Martin. Malahide held his hands open. I finished my drink. Martin stood up. 'Let's go.'

'I'll send Kwame at twelve-fifteen, should you decide to use him. Good night.'

We drove back down to Man. I kept some hard silence going in my corner while Martin dented the night air with squaddy language. At the hotel the insect life were working through the night, sawing and planing and rasping off each second towards morning, the noise filling every corner so that if you started listening the brain could get feverish and the nerve shaky. I still hadn't spoken and Martin had run out of words to hate the Irish with. I opened the door to my room and stood in it with some 'no entry' body language.

'You're a professional, Martin. This is your job. I'm employed by you. And I just want to say I thought you handled that like a man right at the top of his game. Brilliant strategy, tactics, vision, anticipation, originality...'

'Fuck off, Bruce,' he said conversationally. 'How many tours of Northern Ireland have you done? Right. You don't know them. Tricky little bastards, they are. It's all poetry and Guinness and then they'll blow your legs off in the name of a united Ireland. You don't trust them, you play hard ball with them because it's the same game they play.'

'You don't think Malahide could have talked to the rebels tonight. You don't think he's got a radio in his back room so that he can discuss business with them on a daily basis. You think he's sending runners round with slips of paper in cleft sticks, or what! We had an outside chance of negotiation before you spat in his drink.'

'I can tell you now, you'd have sat there all night kissing each other's arses with poetry and you'd have got no further with him.'

'Maybe I'd have had a decent drink,' I said. 'Now will you get me the diamonds, I'm going to bed.'

He gave me the tube, more subdued now, and wished me luck.

'I've lost a lot of friends to the kind of talk he was giving us tonight,' he said.

I went to bed and listened to the alarm clock clipping off the seconds for half an hour. Then there was a knock—Martin thinking of another reason he was justified in knee-capping Malahide tonight. It was Corben.

'You've got a sense of timing, Howard.'

'I saw you'd checked in. Thought I'd buy you a drink on your expenses, go through a few things with you, but I see ... you're in bed. Kinda early, isn't it?'

'It keeps me young and my complexion smooth. I'll see you tomorrow, say ten. There's a flight leaves at eleven-thirty. I want to be on it.'

'It's happening tonight, isn't it?' he asked, his little black peepers suddenly alive in his shaggy grey head. 'Where?'

'Don't even think about it, Corben. They'll kill the lot of us. I'll see you tomorrow.'

I went back to bed and slept for an hour and a half and woke with a jolt at midnight, the air conditioning off again, the sweat beading and the insect workshop closer than before, rubbing down the dark.

Tuesday 5th November

It was 1.30 a.m., Kwame sat rigid, his head back as if he'd been speared to the head rest of the front seat. I sat in the back counting traffic—three taxis, two trucks—the lights illuminating the car with rushes of geometry as we sat on the verge outside the Tia Etienne hotel. The back door opened and a young African wearing a white shirt got in and sat as far away from me as possible in his corner.

'You're not going to catch anything, make you white,' I said.

'Danané,' he said to Kwame, ignoring me. We pulled away.

At the two police posts we went through they checked the boot. Kwame dashed them something small. We came out on the Toulépleu road. The young man's second word of the night being 'Left', his third 'Right'.

We came off the road between two towns, Zouan-Hounien and Bin-Houyé, and headed west down a dirt track, passing through some thatched huts and only stopping when the rainforest blocked our way. The young Liberian got out and set off into the trees down a narrow path which dropped steeply at first, then flattened out. I heard the river, swollen with the heavy rains, rushing past on my left. My guide had no torch but he knew the path and I could follow his shirt in the clear night, the air smelling strongly of the rain-forest's rot and renewal.

The path climbed high above the river, and we were moving at a pace that was making me sweat and breathe heavily, which was no pace at all. Maybe I should 'work out' as Martin said. I was at the age when the extra pounds got belligerent, the heart started to want some time off and might take it without asking. I was nervous, the brain setting off on tangents. What did I care about a few extra pounds? Martin thought I was a dead man doing this. I tried to think of getting back to Les Cascades with Ron, keep my head focused. I couldn't see it and it worried me. I could see Dotte and Katrina, Bagado and Heike. I could always see Heike. The footage I had of her, I'd need a foundation to archive it. Was she in Berlin? Could I see sweat patches on her?

I couldn't see anything for a moment; we were running away from the river back into the trees, still following the path but it was darker now and I had a job to keep my eyes on the white shirt flitting in the forest. Through a break in the vegetation I saw it for the first time, out there in some strange light with no apparent source, the liana bridge, about thirty yards of it, across the river. It was 3.00 a.m.

The Liberian stopped at the four wrist-thick liana cords which had been tied to trees within the forest, securing the bridge to the bank. He shook one of the liana railings and a flash of light came from the other bank. He shook the railing again. Two flashes. He stepped on to the bridge's planking, holding on to both rails, and we both started walking down to the centre of the bridge. It wasn't as easy as it looked, the bridge keen on tipping you in the water unless you kept time with the man in front. It wasn't too bad with the light out there in the open, but I made it more difficult for myself looking for the moon which wasn't there.

The tent was up on the other side, the brown canvas lit from inside and shadows standing and sitting, motionless. The Liberian put a hand on my chest. He went into the tent and two soldiers came over and frisked me in places I didn't think it was possible to hide a weapon. They took an arm each and manoeuvred me into the tent.

A wooden trestle table was laid out with a blotter and some scales. A neatly dressed, smiling fellow sitting behind it. Ron, with cropped and spiky hair, stood in the clothes I'd given him on the other side of the tent with a guard. There was an officer, but not one I knew.

'You OK, Ron?' I asked. 'Apart from that haircut.'

'Fine. It's my new rebel look...'

'The diamonds,' said the officer. I handed the tube to the smiler at the table. He pulled out the plastic and popped the diamonds out of the pimples.

'I hope they're good,' said Ron. 'There's not too many of them.'

'I want him next to me,' I said to the officer, who nodded Ron over.

'Very nice,' said Ron, looking over the smiler's shoulder. 'Where'd they come from?'

'Somewhere where the sun shines,' I said. 'They're supposed to be forty thousand dollars per carat.'

'They look it.'

'I didn't think your old man would stint you.'

'Have you spoken to him?'

'No.'

'How did you...?'

'Forget it, Ron.'

'Sure. I'm nervous, that's all.'

'You'll be in Tel Aviv Friday night.'

'Do you want to come?'

'I'm broke.'

'I'll pay.'

'Maybe I will, then.'

'Bring someone with you, too.'

'I don't know whether I've got anyone to bring.'

'I geef you my seester.'

'I don't know how she's going to feel about that.'

'Her husband won't like it either,' he said. There was something different coming off Ron. It wasn't something born again, with that frightening light behind the eyes and the labrador smile, but it was something new and clean, uncreased. He wasn't bored or aloof any more. He seemed vulnerable and didn't use his arrogance to hide it. He had humility about him but it didn't taint his self-respect. He hadn't found God in his shitty cell in the middle of the civil war, there wasn't much of Him about. He'd stripped off the layers like onion skins and found he was one of the lucky ones with something there.

'What're you looking at?' he asked.

'You,' I said. 'D'you want to step outside, make something of it?'

'Yeah, I think I do.'

'We're going now,' I said to the officer. He looked at the smiler, who nodded.

'Best I've seen in a long time,' said Ron and we stepped out of the tent, the officer shouting something to the soldiers outside who backed off.

I went down the bridge first, Ron following my steps five yards behind. The light still there, as if there was a floodlit stadium off behind the rain-forest somewhere, illuminating the sky, silhouetting the branches of the trees. We reached the lowest point of the bridge and started to climb and I looked down through the liana rails at the water flowing fast beneath, roaring, boiling in parts, the white foam highlighted against the greater surge of oily blackness. Then the bridge shook violently.

I turned and lost my footing. Ron was on his front, his face over one side of the planking, his feet over the other, a hand still holding on to a liana strand, a black mark on the light shirt on his back. His hips slid over the edge, the bridge twisting now, helping him along, and I had to throw myself at him and grab hold of anything to stop him sliding over and down into the water. I had a hold of his waist but his weight was dragging him through my hands. I secured one of his flailing arms and locked on to his wrist, my leg hooked around one of the liana cords connecting the rail to the planking.

The bridge turned through ninety degrees and Ron was hanging free fifteen feet above the water. I was upside down now, my leg feeling the strain of our combined weights and slipping, burning against the liana cord. Ron looked up at me, his eyes wide open, amazed. He had a black carnation on his front as well. Terrible noises came from his throat, his lungs filling up with blood. His eyes said it to me. His eyes said what came up through his throat on the back of a black gout of blood that spilled over his chin and down on to his chest. And then we fell. In the fall, rather than the fear of losing my brains to some rocks in the Nipoué, I thought of how I hadn't heard anything. I hadn't heard the shot. He was there and then he was gone.

We hit the water and the impact separated us. Now noise was everywhere. The water crashing and rolling, filling every orifice, wrapping and twisting itself around my body, dragging at me, pitching and spinning me until I didn't know what was up or down, along or across. For a second my head came clear into the open and I caught two shots of a tree, one upright, the other horizontal and then I was down again. I got my feet pointing down river and felt myself being channelled through a rocky gully, getting a crack on the shoulder and an elbow on the way down, the water crashing overhead, my lungs raw and slashed.

At the end of the gully my feet connected with solid rock, the impact juddering through my knees and hips straight up to the back of my head. I popped out into the night air, the water pushing me in the back so that I was falling forwards.

Out of the water, life was moving much slower. I saw the bank close by, and a tree. They were still, but coming towards me, each motor-driven frame clear in my vision. Then I hit the tree and knew, suddenly, how fast I was going, branches, twigs and foliage crashing and flapping past me to blackness.

I came to in a rush of fear, startled by why I was lying up to my waist in a pool of stagnant water with a smell of soap in my nostrils and the noise of nearby water crashing over rocks. Odd yards of what had happened came back to me, flickering through my head with too much light behind them. I pulled myself out of the water and crawled around the edge of it. I'd been in a pool hacked out of the bank by the locals so that they could wash their clothes and themselves without ending up twenty miles down river. The smell of the harsh carbolic and the beaten earth meant that there had to be a path up to the village. I found it and zigzagged up the steep incline, thinking I was going to have trouble with my left knee later on. I came out of the trees and saw where the car should have been. No car and no Kwame.

I limped up the rough track to the Danané/Toulépleu road. It was close to 5.30 a.m. by the time I got there and twenty minutes later I was sitting in the back of a pick-up with two women and a dozen chickens hog-tied for market. The women looked sullen, depressed, and the chickens knew what was coming, too. They dropped me in the centre of Danané at 6.30 a.m. I walked out towards the Tia Etienne, found the
gare routière
and bought a ticket with some sodden money on the first bush taxi to Man.

The day had come up with some fierce sunshine and clear air so that my clothes were almost dry when I got back to Les Cascades just before 9.00 a.m. Martin was pacing up and down outside his room.