The Trade (A Hans Larsson Novel Book 2) (23 page)

“You mentioned your daughter?”

“She’s been abducted.”

“And you think
I
did it?” Logan looked horrified.

“I have – or at least I
had
– good reason to believe
that.”

“Then I’m gonna do everything I can to help you and prove my
innocence, honest. But let’s get this boat out of here first before the coastguard
comes.”

“Okay,” said Hans. “I know just the place.”

L
ogan dropped anchor in the inlet by
Karen’s villa. “I don’t know about you, Hans, but I could do with a drink,” he
said, nodding to the saloon.

Hans took his drenched and defunct cell phone from the
pocket of his jeans and sat down on one of the plush white leather couches.

“Give that to me,” said the Englishman.

“Sorry?”

“Your mobile. I’ll put it in Eddy’s onboard repair shop.”

“You can fix it?”

“Ha! If you knew how many people have been pushed in the
drink off this baby, then you’d know why we have a system,” said Logan, chuckling
as he opened the back of the phone and removed the battery. After rifling
through a drawer in the galley, he pulled out a clothes peg tied to a length of
cord with a wire hook at the other end. “Wait a minute.”

Hans watched, intrigued, as Logan disappeared down the
ladder to the deck below. He returned a minute later with a grin on his face

“I’ve hung it below the hand drier in the head,” he
explained and then pressed down on the jazzy coffee table. Its smoked-glass top
rose up like something from a sci-fi movie to reveal a fully stocked liquor
cabinet and glasses. “Ice?”

“Be rude not to.” Hans forced a beleaguered smile.

Logan went to the galley area and peeled off his T-shirt,
exposing his dragon tattoo. He wet a corner of the shirt under the faucet and
wiped the blood from his face. Then he opened the refrigerator and hit a
button, dispensing an avalanche of ice cubes into a built-in plastic bucket.

“Pretty neat,” Hans mused aloud.

“Yeah, but a pity it doesn’t make this.” Logan pulled a
half-eaten sleeve of chocolate chip cookies from its box and tipped a fat
packet of cocaine out onto the drinks table.

“Oh.”

“The South Americans” – Logan shook ice from the bucket into
their glasses – “often slip a kilo or two in with the artifacts. “The guys I deliver
it to think I don’t notice or they don’t care.”

“And you charge a little tax?”

“I take a bit out for my personal use, mix some milk powder
– formula – in with the rest so they can’t tell and—”

“Tape up the packets with the duct tape.”

Hans dropped his head into his hands as the last piece of
the puzzle fell into place.

“Here.” Logan slid a tumbler brimming with whiskey across
the tabletop. “You look like a man who needs a drink.”

Hans let out a long sigh and downed it in one.

“So, who are you anyway?” Logan’s eyes flicked to the bag of
coke, like the proverbial kiddy in a candy store. “A vigilante or something?”

“Private detective,” Hans replied, and told Logan the bones
of the story, feeling a pang of guilt his head butt put paid to the man’s powdery
pleasure.

“So were you on my boat the other night?” Logan reached for
the scotch. “I wasn’t sure if the phone call was one of my mates having a laugh.”

“How do you mean?” Hans’ antenna pricked up.

“Some guy called from a Cape Verde number saying my boat was
being broken into and I should get down to the dock right away. I didn’t see
anything, but my dog was behaving pretty weird.”

“Was the guy a Westerner or local?”

“He spoke English, put it that way. But I was pretty drunk, and
his voice was muffled.”

“Is the number still on your cell phone?”

“Yeah, but I Googled it already – a pay phone in Praia.”

Hans thought back to the murders of the Fulani, Alvarez and
Silvestre. The traffickers always seemed to be one step ahead. He admitted to Logan
that he’d broken into the boat and explained his reasons, then accepted another
drink and turned the subject back to Jessica.

“They call it the Trade here.” Logan shrugged. “Everyone
knows about it, but . . . you know, it’s underground.”

“Do kids ever go missing from the orphanage you visit?”

“Hell, Hans, I hadn’t even thought about it.”

“Do you think your contacts might know anything?”

“I can ask around.”

“And to clear up a couple of loose ends, where were you the
evening the fishing boat blew up in the harbor?”

“Saturday I was at the restaurant. In fact, Sergio Horne walked
in. He’s an actor, pretty famous in these parts. I texted a photo to Krystal.
Here, check it out.”

Hans looked at the picture on Logan’s cell phone and read
the date and time of the text.

“And my sources mentioned something about you being arrested
for having a kid on the boat.”

“Ha! Police harassment more like. Look, Hans, I did a
stretch in jail in the UK for laundering profits for a cigarette smuggling ring
through a betting shop I ran. I got completely ripped off and didn’t make a penny.
But when I was released from prison early, they expected me to pay a whole load
of money back under the Proceeds of Crime Act. I didn’t have any bloody proceeds,
so I skipped the country and moved to Cape Verde. The authorities here have
been on my back since I arrived.” He paused to dab his finger in the coke and
rub it around his gums.

“And the boy?”

“Hmm.” Logan licked his lips. “A local street urchin, Hans.
I told you, me and Krystal love kids. It’s not like the UK or the States here.
You don’t have to undergo a criminal record check or sign your life away to the
health and safety muppets to take a youngster for a spin in your boat. You just
have to make sure the little beggars don’t rob you blind while you’re doin’ it!”

From his own experiences, Hans knew it to be true. The sense
of community and extended family in African culture meant children were far
more trustful of adults. He didn’t bother interrogating Logan further. He’d heard
enough. But one question remained.

“Eddy?”

“Shoot.”

“Can you think why anyone would want to set you up for my
daughter’s disappearance?”

“How do you mean?”

“Is my cell working yet? I wanna show you something.”

While Logan put the Samsung back together, Hans told him about
his meeting and the subsequent demise of Djenabou, the Fulani.

“Look at this.” Hans flicked through the phone’s picture
gallery.

“That’s harsh,” said Logan, squinting at Djenabou’s ugly
bloody scrawl. “But to me that’s not a dragon’s claw.”

“What is it then?” said Hans, taking the phone back to look
for himself.

“It’s a downwards-pointing arrow.”

“And why would she write that next to your name?”

Logan shrugged. “I have no idea.”

C
obra
Azul, “Blue Snake,” ripped a slip of paper from his youngest sister’s
schoolbook and formed a V-shaped tray, into which he sprinkled a good amount of
ground-up marijuana. He took a rock of crack from a vial worn on a thong around
his neck and placed it on a CD case lying on the simple wooden table. After
bashing the rock into powder with the base of his cigarette lighter, he added
it to the potent tray of herb, twisted it into a reefer and sparked it up.

Cobra always smoked his crack this way, since the pipe
method produced too intense a high, one that only lasted a few seconds, leaving
you craving for more. He’d witnessed many of his fellow pimps and dealers go
down that route, desperately chasing another hit to produce the elusive initial
euphoria, spending all their earnings and then hustling and cheating to buy more.

Adelina, the middle of his five sisters, curled up on the
shack’s dilapidated couch watching cartoons on a beat-up television set. Every
so often her eyes flicked to her brother, for in the shantytown of Rocinha most
kids smoked the rock, and this eleven-year-old was no different.

“
Nau
!” Cobra yelled in Creole. “You wanna get high,
you buy it yourself!”

“Phuh!” she pulled a face and went back to watching
ThunderCats
dubbed in Portuguese.

Cobra’s real name was Artur, after his late father, stabbed
to death in an argument over a card game when the boy was four. His mother, a
crack addict, smoked herself into the sanitarium, recovered and returned home
only for the cycle to repeat. She would get cleaning jobs and sex work to
provide for the kids, staying sober for a while until the addictive psyche took
hold, conning the poor woman into scoring “just once,” seeing her mental
health, promises and earnings go up in bittersweet smoke.

The young mestizo stood up and looked in the mirror. He
fingered the mini-dreads in his bob-length hair into place before putting a
black baseball cap on backwards. Then he reseated his faux-gold chain and
medallion and admired his trademark blue eyes. He was Cobra Azul, and it was
time to go to work.

T
wo
blocks over, fourteen-year-old Angel sat in the front room of her grandfather’s
shack as the drunken pig slept in a chair. Listening to emphysemic snores
emanating from a pathetic skinny chest, she wished the half-empty bottle of
cane spirit he clutched like a baby would slip and pour all over his filthy
pants. Angel hated the sick old pervert for subjecting her to so many heinous
acts over the years but knew if she didn’t take the bottle from him she would
pay dearly: the cigarette burns on her arms testified to that.

The teenager went to the bathroom and filled a bucket with
cold water from a sole faucet, then stripped off and rinsed herself down with a
wetted washcloth. Cobra would sniff her armpits before work that evening, and
if they smelled of body odor she could expect another beating and an even
smaller share of the cash.

Angel shut the door of her bedroom and pressed “Play” on an
antiquated cassette player, her mood lifting to the
na-na-na
of Kylie
Minogue. After putting on a skintight pink minidress and a pair of hand-me-down
yellow heels – two sizes too big – she began gyrating in the mirror the way the
girls in the lap-dancing clubs taught her.

The mirror was a triangular shard not much bigger than a
dinner plate. Angel had to keep adjusting its angle on the tea chest serving as
her dressing table and repeat the dance routine to analyze her moves top and
bottom. She fantasized about the day she would be old enough and suitably
accomplished to work the poles herself.

A bottle of cedar oil perfume she had bought from a Moroccan
in the Várzea quarter sat alongside an Afro comb and a pair of earrings on the
purple, sequined headscarf draped over the tea chest for decoration. Angel
shook a drop of the oily, woody-scented essence onto her fingertip and rubbed
it behind each ear, intending to make the tiny amount of perfume in the small
but deceptively bulbous bottle last. It was the only fragrance she had ever
owned, and buying it used up all her savings. The earrings were a cheap
mock-gold hooped affair. Angel inserted one into her left piercing without a problem,
but the right lobe was infected and swollen, and having located the hole, she
forced the dirty wire through, resulting in a trickle of pus and blood running
down her neck.

Angel didn’t own a cell phone or a watch but could tell from
the growing darkness that it was time to leave the slum and meet Cobra on Rua
Ribeiro in the red-light district near to the harbor.