Chapter 28

    

    As I passed the wall to the side of Jack's house I could see a low light in his bedroom and the rest of the house in darkness. I parked behind the house several streets down, where local people sat outside a bar drinking beer and jiving in their seats to music. I took the gun out, unscrewed the silencer which I put in my pocket and jammed the gun in the waistband of my jeans, folding the T-shirt over it. I walked around Jack's house and listened. Everybody had been given the night off. I hopped over the wall, which didn't do the ribs any good, and nearly emasculated myself on the gun. I let myself in at the back of the house through the double doors of the dining room. What noise I made was drowned by the air-conditioner breathing out of Jack's room into a night thick with wet heat, cicada noise and bamboo growing audibly in the garden.

    I ran up the carpeted stairs, screwing the silencer on the gun, and padded down the marble-tiled corridor, the air-conditioner's breathing getting louder and louder. Above the noise came a sound of methodical, concentrated grunting and a bedstead bucking against the wall. I waited until the condenser in the air-conditioner cut in with a metallic whingeing and opened the door.

    Jack was naked with his back to the door, kneeling on the bed, his buttocks pumping and squeezing as he thrust at the raised white bottom of a woman in front of him. His dark hand was stark against the creamy white skin where he gripped her hip. Her blonde head lay on the pillow, her arms thrown out on either side, her hands clenching wads of sheet, her back sloping up, her sex abandoned to the vehemence of Jack's powerful and quickening shunts. Their moist skins slapped together. Jack's breathing grew harder and a low growl came from the woman's throat. I placed the barrel of the silencer on the nape of Jack's neck. He shuddered to a halt, his back quivering with the lost rhythm.

    'Come on!' said the woman, thrusting her bottom back. 'Come on, for God's sake!'

    'You won't be doing that for a long time, Jack,' I said.

    'I hope that's a gun, Bruce. I'm not the sharing type.'

    'I'm not finding things so funny these days.'

    'Don't go losing your sense of humour on me…'

    'Shut up, Jack,' I said quietly, and he did.

    As soon as the woman heard an alien, voice in the room, she'd thrown herself forward from Jack and turned, scrabbling for the sheet to cover herself. It was Elizabeth Harvey. Her hair no longer piled high on her head but torn apart like a hayrick in a gale.

    'Success at last,' I said, prodding Jack with the gun.

    'Nearly.'

    'Into the bathroom please, Mrs Harvey,' I said. She skipped in there, sporting Jack's paw marks on her hips. I told Jack to get dressed.

    'It's time to see what you and Charlie have got to say to each other.'

    As I shut the bathroom door, Elizabeth Harvey opened her lips to show me those sloping back teeth of hers. There was no fear in her, but her eyes were black with humiliation and anger. I closed the heavy mahogany bathroom door and locked it. That was one guest list I was never going to get on.

    Jack limped around the room picking up his clothes, his semi-erect penis making him look foolish. Mrs Harvey's clothes lay neatly folded on a chair weighed down by a densely packed purse. There'd been no passionate ravishment in her corner.

    Jack was dressed. I stood in front of him and held the gun in his gut. I raised my knee so hard into his groin that he came off the floor and slid backwards off my leg on to the polished tiles where he held his aching genitals and bit the air.

    'That's for involving Heike in this business.'

    I followed up by drilling a penalty kick into his partially protected testicles and he slid across the floor, cracking his head on the wardrobe.

    'And that's for involving me in this business.'

    I picked him up by the scruff of his shirt and hauled him out of the room, pushing him down the corridor and stairs, kicking him out on to the portico and dragging him to his car. I let him squirm on the floor for a few minutes until his breath stopped coming out in lumps, and then I kicked him in the legs until he stood up. I pushed him into the passenger seat and shoved him over the gear shift into the driver's seat.

    Jack drove down the coast road with a gun under his ribs and his eyes wincing from his aching, undischarged testicles. To the left, the town was very quiet and to the right, the sea barely turned in a wave. There was nobody out and no cars on the road. A tyre burned where the road forked at the Mobil garage. As we passed the Sarakawa, I looked back and saw, far behind us, a single set of headlights.

    'I'm sorry,' said Jack, gnawing at his lower lip trying to think how to get started.

    'I believe you.'

    'OK, you're right,' he said, thinking again, looking for a way in. 'I'm not sorry.'

    'Go on, Jack, bare your bleeding heart and try not to make me puke.'

    'Why the fuck d'you have to poke your nose in so far?'

    'Why did you stick my nose in it in the first place?'

    'Because you were there,' he said, and that was enough to set me off.

    'Jack,' I said, staring out of the windscreen, 'you've got an honesty span of about three words. Maybe you started out in life thinking straight, I don't know, but somebody made the big mistake of teaching you how to speak and you picked up a vocabulary of concentrated shit to draw on. And since then, when you haven't been balls-out lying, you've been persuading yourself, and all the poor bastards who've bothered to listen, that you're OK, that you're as big on the inside as you are on your feet. But there's nothing there, is there, Jack? Maybe that's why you never sleep with the same woman twice. It's not because you get bored easily. It's because they find out they've been had. Been had by one of the hollow men, a shit-filled rubber doll, a stupid prick on the end of a bladder.'

    'Buzz me when you're finished/ he said, bored.

    'Don't tell me you're sorry, or you're not sorry. I don't want to know. Like all the other stuff that comes out of you, it doesn't mean anything. You shoved me in it with Madame Severnou because you didn't want to get dirt down your own shirt front. You threw me into the Kershaw business to get me away from the rice and to keep whatever information there was around coming your way. But you don't tell the gofer anything, you just use him to keep all the nasty stuff away. You're chicken. Jack, corn-fed, yellow-belly with skimmed milk for blood in your veins. All that crap about "sometimes I think you're my brother, other times my son" - it's just video pap, soap bubbles - you'd tip your brother and your son into a meat grinder if it was going to save your ass.'

    Jack pulled up on the roundabout by the port for a road block - not a police or a military road block but a multi-party democracy road block. A young man stuck his head in the window and took a good look in the car.

    'What do you want?' I asked.

    'You give us something. Show you support democracy.'

    'Open the barrier.'

    'You give us something first.'

    'I give you nothing.'

    'Maybe we think you love the President,' he said, taking out a knife.

    'That's an undemocratic-looking knife you've got there,' I said.

    'You pay, yovo!' he said through tight lips.

    This is my undemocratic-looking gun,' I said, putting the muzzle of the gun into the eyeball of the young man. 'Open the barrier!'

    He shouted something and two boys pulled away the rocks and tyres in the road.

    'Vive le Mouvement Togolais pour la Démocratie,' I said and waved.

    The headlights behind us had disappeared.

    Jack buzzed the window up and we returned to our air-conditioned bubble. A few minutes later, we pulled over to cross the wasteland to Charlie's bar. I looked back at the road and a car drove past towards Cotonou, and then slowed and took the right turn to A1 Fresco's, keeping parallel with us across the wasteland.

    'Two hundred thousand dollars,' said Jack, with a green tinge across his features from the luminous dashboard.

    'You're going to buy me like you buy your women?'

    'It's all about money, isn't it?'

    'You seem to think it is. What's two hundred thousand dollars?'

    'Half the money from the heroin deal.'

    'Sounds like you're getting ripped off.'

    'I'll throw in the profit from the rice on top. Thirty- five thousand.'

    'What do I have to do?'

    'Let me drive back home. Forget all about it.'

    'What about Heike?'

    'I'll sort that out.'

    'Just like you sorted Madame Severnou out,' I said. 'Let's face it together, Jack - sorting out is not one of your talents. We're driving along and you think it's still all nicey-nicey, don't you, Jack? You think your part of the deal's done and you're going to get paid just like you do in any ordinary piece of business.

    'But even ordinary business screws up. Product gets lost. People don't pay. Cheques bounce. But you've always got the law to fall back on. The only thing is, now you're outside the law and we both know that you're not a hard enough man to provide your own law. That's why you employ me to do your dirty work for you in Cotonou. You haven't got the stomach for it. You want to be liked too much. Smiling Jack of the Gold Coast.

    'But people don't laugh very much when they're dealing drugs. The money's too big. They get a sudden feeling they don't like you, don't like your smiling face, don't like the way they have to pay you for doing not very much, don't like the way you've become an expensive, big-mouthed overhead that cuts into their percentage and then they just think: "Let's shut him down, wet him, clip him, whack him, waste him, top him, max him, rub him out." You ever wonder why these people have so many different ways of saying the same thing? It's because they do it everyday and they get bored of saying the word "kill".

    'So before you start offering me part of your share, you better make sure you've got the balls to make him give it to you. You didn't have the balls to make Madame Severnou give you back your fifty million, did you? But maybe you've got a better chance with Charlie than you have with her. She's got about as much respect for Iron Jack as a whore for a sad-arsed punter.'

    Jack blinked and passed a dry tongue over his lips, our bodies rocked together as the car dipped and rolled over the mud road, his cheeks shook.

    'You don't know shit,' he said.

    The car that had been making its way to A1 Fresco's had stopped, its lights cut; I couldn't see if anybody got out.

    Jack and I cruised through the barrier of Charlie's compound at 10.30. The gardien had lifted the red and white pole as soon as he had seen Jack's car. The restaurant and bar were shut. We walked down towards the sea and crossed in front of the bar to the door at the side of Charlie's house. Jack tried the door, which opened.

    The light coned down on to the jug which was still in the hall, the flower with the excited comb not looking as interested in life as it had before. I glanced down as I stepped in and sensed a movement. Jack wasn't in my line of sight any more. I angled the gun towards him and felt something hard nudge up behind my ear. That was when I knew the difference between a finger with a thimble on the end of it and a large-gauged handgun with a sight on the barrel.

    'Know what this is?' asked Charlie.

    'A gun?' I hazarded.

    'That's right, Brucey, but what type?'

    'A Smith and Wesson Schlong?'

    'Wise ass. It's a Colt Python.'

    'That's marketing for you,' I said. 'Nobody's going to buy a Colt Asp.'

    'Still feeling clever, huh? If I shoot this it'll take your head off. If I hit you with it you might wake up for Christmas.'

    'All right, you persuaded me. I'm dumb.'

    'Moses is here. Says you'll explain everything. He's been sweating it out in the genny house the last twenty- four hours. Let's have the gun.'

    I handed him the gun and walked down the corridor, smelling a familiar perfume. He jabbed me into the living room and pushed me down on to a sofa. Jack relaxed in the middle of the sofa opposite. Charlie fixed a couple of drinks. One wasn't for me.

    'Yvette here?' I asked.

    'What's it to you?' snarled Charlie.

    He put my gun down on the glass tabletop and sat down along the sofa from me, his leg crooked up and his tongue licking the whisky off his dark lips.

    'Let's go, Bru - shoot.'

    'Where do you want me to start?'

    'Let's start with why you got Moses snooping around and why you come here with a gun up Jack's ass.'

    'Moses loves the beach.'

    'Don't fuck with me, Bruce,' he said in that cold, quiet voice that came off the peg whenever I was in the room.

    'Moses was staking you out. I came here with "a gun up Jack's ass" because I wanted to hear the two of you discussing your cotton shipment out of Lagos tonight.'

    Jack slapped his leg and leant back on the sofa giggling.

    'You getting something out of this whisky I'm not?' asked Charlie, moving his eyes over Jack without turning his head.

    Jack sat back, threw his arm along the back of the sofa and closed his mouth.

    'What the fuck business is it of yours what I do with cotton out of Lagos?'

    'It's not my business,' said. 'It's yours, and that's bad news for you.'

    'What's this asshole talking about?' Charlie asked Jack, and Jack played dumb with all the natural talent he possessed. 'Bru, we don't know what you're talking about. Start at the beginning. It's easier for us.' Charlie looked at me with mock-enthusiasm and waved the big black hole of the gun barrel at me along the back of the sofa.

    'The Python's making me nervous.'

    'Percy?' said Charlie, looking at the gun. 'Yeah, that's what he's supposed to do.'

    'Are we going to talk like real people?' I said, suddenly needled by Charlie and his big boy's gun. 'Or do we just get our dicks out on the table and measure up?'

    'You just tell me what you fucking know,' said Charlie, putting the gun in my cheek. 'And don't try and run this show. It's not yours to run. Now sick it up like a good boy.'

    'Where's Heike?'

    'Goddammit, start at the fucking beginning.'

    'Why're you making me tell you what you already know?'

    'I like hearing stories about myself.'

    Jack sat with his arms straight, hands on either side of him on the sofa, back stiff, the tendons of his neck standing out, legs splayed, his testicles probably still pulsating. He was comfortable but not as comfortable as he would have been with a gun in his hand. His eyes didn't know which of us to look at. Charlie flicked the gun back with his wrist, the nickel-plated sight flashed and before it ripped across my nostrils I came up with a version of the story so far delivered at pace.

    'On the 23rd September, Françoise Perec, an operative for the International Maritime Bureau, was tortured and killed in Steve Kershaw's apartment in Cotonou. Kershaw found her, panicked and ran for it back to his house in Lomé. Somebody caught up with him, suffocated him, framed him with the Perec killing tools, stole a million dollars cash from him and dumped him in the pool, making it look a bit like suicide, which it wasn't. The maid was found floating face down in the lagoon and an Armenian businessman's wealth was redistributed by a car bomb in Abidjan.

    'You, Charlie, told me three things. The first that Kershaw had been with a blonde Frenchwoman in your bar; the second, that Kershaw had had an affair with Nina Sorvino which ended on a sick note; and the third, that you didn't much care for Steve. There were a few things you didn't tell me. You didn't tell me that you had had a relationship with Nina, that you hated Kershaw because he walked off with your woman, that you knew exactly what had happened between Nina and Kershaw and gave Kershaw a "talking to" about it.

    'On 23rd September you were in Cotonou. The same day Perec caught it. An expired Bloomingdale's store card in your name was found in the garden of the house where Kershaw died. I got two visits from people telling me to back off; the first hit me on the head with something hard, heavy and Pythonesque. The second showed me what happened to Kershaw before he was dumped in the pool. Both used the same terminology which was: Drop it!

    'When I told Nina about Kershaw's "drowning" she got scared. I watched her at the Embassy party trying to give you a hard time. You'd implicated her in Kershaw's death because you persuaded her to tell me about Kershaw's bondage tastes, and she didn't like it. You reckoned you'd paid off the police in Cotonou and the big man's illegally acquired million dollars was enough to keep the heat off in Lomé and she'd got nothing to worry about.

    'The next day I trod on Nina. She told me about your very romantic liaison. She told me she's pregnant and she wants to get back with you, which was maybe another reason she was leaning on you at the party. She told me that you bent Kershaw's arm about how he got his kicks. And I found she's got a drug problem. Where was she getting the drugs from, Charlie?

    'Jack's rice was shipped in from Thailand on a vessel called the Naoki Maru. That was the ship that Perec was getting too warm on and why you had to find out what she knew. There's a rice ban in Nigeria so Madame Severnou is brought in to smuggle it across the border at Idiroko. But she's been in on it all the time because it wasn't just rice in those sacks.

    'Some of the sacks unloaded at a warehouse in Idiroko were taken to another warehouse in Ikeja where they were emptied out and small kilo-size brown packages were found inside. These brown packages contained a white powder which wasn't rat poison but just as good. They were stuffed into cotton bales which were purchased at one thousand four hundred and twenty-five dollars per ton c.i.f. delivered Oporto from AAICT by the buyer, one Carlo Reggiani at the AAICT offices in Ikeja, Lagos in the presence of Jack Obuasi, Madame Severnou and Bof Awolowo on Sunday 29th September. The cotton bales are being shipped ex Lagos probably tonight, 1st October, on the vessel Osanyin aka Naoki Maru. Have I left anything out? Oh yes, the dirt around town is that Charlie Reggiani took some bad hits playing with gold… they say the man needs some money. They say it was seven hundred thousand dollars.'

    Charlie had walked over to a sideboard with a set of shelves above it and pulled down an ebony bowl which was full of credit, cards. He flicked through them all and put the bowl back up on the shelf.

    'What was that about a million dollars?' asked Jack.

    'Shut the fuck up,' said Charlie, cuffing Jack across the back of his head with the tips of his fingers. He sat back down on the sofa, looking hard at Jack who did his best to stay still and failed. He put his left ankle on his right knee and held it there with both hands and tried to stare Charlie out. Charlie turned to me and asked the one question I hadn't expected.

    'What's with you and Yvette?'

    'What do you mean?'

    'You came in here sniffing the air, asking after her. You got something going together?'

    'Like what exactly?'

    'You wanna be English about this, I'll be American. Are you fucking her?'

    'Charlie, I'm the punchbag in this. I nose around in dirty laundry, get caught and get the shit beaten out of me. I don't have time…'

    'You've fucked her,' he said. 'You have. First time you saw her… all that marriage and concubinage shit… You fucked her.' His lips had gone white at the edges and the teak dome of his head had taken on a purplish colour.

    'I haven't done anything to anyone, apart from kick Jack in the balls and he's had that coming a long time,' I said, finding myself looking down what seemed to be a one-inch hole which was the Colt Python's barrel.

    'Just tell me the truth. Nothing will happen if you tell me,' said Charlie. 'Just don't lie to me.'

    I didn't want to tell him the truth because he would think I'd lied to him and I didn't want to lie to him because the size of the bullet that would come out of that hole was going to make me an instant airhead. I came up with: 'She's your woman,' which didn't end in a big bang.

    'I know that,' he said sweetly, 'but it didn't stop her from going round to your place after the party Saturday night and it didn't stop you two dickering over something outside the Sarakawa yesterday, and didn't stop you going into the Sarakawa with her and staying in there for Christ knows however long it took you to give her a good schtupping.'

    The barrel of the gun was shaking. He was gripping the butt so hard his forearm stood out swollen with pumped muscle, his flexed triceps were set solid, his neck was bright red where it came out of his chest hair, his mouth was closed, and his clenched jaw muscles worked hard. Jack was sitting forward on his sofa. I was pressed back hard into the corner of mine.

    The door opened. Charlie's head twitched and he lowered the gun behind a cushion on the sofa. Yvette came in, followed by a vapour trail of perfume. She was in a blue short-sleeved dress and no shoes with a purse held tight against her hip.

    'Honey, this is business,' said Charlie. 'Can you give us a few minutes?'

    Yvette stood between the two sofas at the end of the glass-top table. Her face was still and white, her mouth closed in a bloodless line. Her body was taut, a line of muscle ran the length of her calf from knee to ankle. Her flat stomach pumped in and out as she panted air through her nose. She slipped past me and stood in front of Charlie between the sofa and the table. She clicked open her purse. Charlie spoke to her in a quiet, intimate way, as if we weren't supposed to hear.

    'Honey. Look, this is serious. Fix a drink if you want, but it's better you wait outside.'

    She was pulling out a pack of cigarettes and Charlie leaned forward to pick up the table lighter for her and his face ran into a small shiny black gun that Yvette held in her hand. He sank back into the sofa with his face in his lap. Jack's mouth opened slowly with the weight of his jaw. I managed the least moronic look in the room just by holding my teeth together.

    'Put the gun down on the table,' she said, her small tongue wetting her lips. Charlie hesitated, still in shock. 'Put it on the table, you fucking bastard!'

    Charlie was looking at me as if I was responsible for this. He slid the gun out from under the cushion until it was flat on the sofa and angled towards me.

    'You did, didn't you?' he said to me, the gun now up off the sofa, going towards the table.

    There was the sound of a shot. A pane of glass from one of the windows cracked and collapsed; large shards fell on to the floor and shattered as Jack's head kicked back with the snapping sound of a dry twig and most of the back of his head sprayed itself over the sofa, sideboard and living room wall.

    Yvette fired her gun on a reflex and Charlie his. The noise filled the room like a jet engine in a public toilet. Charlie's body twitched and arched up off the sofa, while Yvette's feet left the ground, her body twisted, and she came down on her face across the glass tabletop, which shattered. Then the lights went out and the faint hiss of the air conditioning cut.

    Through the high-pitched whine in my ears, I could hear Charlie grunting in the dark as if he was lifting a big weight off his chest. There was the sound of dripping and the sea had come closer. Warm, wet air rolled in from outside and the cicadas blew the whistle on the show.

    'She shot me,' said Charlie, as if he was speaking through a rag someone was stuffing down his throat. 'The bitch shot me.'

    Yvette was silent. Her perfume still hung in the air, as did some acrid sweat and cordite. And there was another smell, sweet and metallic, that grew in the room with the heat.

    'She fucking shot me,' said Charlie from the back corner of his mouth.

    I slid off the sofa and knelt. I found Yvette's leg amongst the glass and moved my hand up over her thigh and hip. My fingers moved up her back, up her shoulders to her neck. There was still a pulse. She moaned and I moved my hand away to the point of her shoulder which was wet and ragged.

    'You hit her, Charlie.'

    'I'm hit myself, for Chrissakes,'

    I found the table lighter whose yellow flame illuminated the scene. The predominant colour was black. The floor was black, the back of Jack's sofa, the sideboard and the wall were black. I turned to Charlie and pulled his hand away and wrestled his shirt up over his gut. There was a small black hole in his flank but not as much blood as I expected. I felt behind him. There was an exit hole.

    'Straight through, Charlie. Blubber only,' I said, and he grunted.

    I called for an ambulance from Charlie's study. Charlie told me where the torch was. I picked up my gun from where it was tucked in under Yvette's body and ricocheted out of the house towards the beach to the generator house.

    Bagado had been right, Charlie was in the clear. That Bloomingdale's card had been one piece of evidence too much for Bagado's liking. Jack must have lifted the card and somebody planted it at the house. Charlie didn't know what was going on; as soon as I told him about his cotton shipment he let me play him in so that he could nail Jack. Just as I was beginning to doubt Bagado and believe my own bullshit, Charlie leant in with what he really wanted to know from me. What was I doing with Yvette? Christ, what a thing to ask me - the man with a love life like a train wreck.

    The generator house door was open. I called out to Moses whose confidence had taken a huge knock since Grace had built it up. I found the starter key to the 13.5 Kva Lister and it roared and then settled. A dim light came on. Moses was standing behind four drums of diesel.

    'Did you see him?'

    'No please, sir.'

    Outside, there was a clear line of sight to the house. In the red dust were some footmarks, a trainer of some kind without a brand name in the sole. I shone the torch down the fence and found more marks. He must have opened up the generator house, shot Jack, cut the generator and run back down the beach to Al Fresco's. Whoever it was had been sent to kill Jack at his own house and followed us to Charlie's.

    In the living room, Yvette, her face cut up, had rolled over on the broken glass and was sobbing and trying to reach her torn shoulder with her hand. Charlie was half conscious and blabbering on a red mess on the leather sofa which wasn't soaking in, but dripped on to the carpet. I wrapped some towels around Yvette's shoulder and moved her into the bedroom, where she fainted. I found some more linen for Charlie's middle and bandaged him up. He was silent now and breathing heavily. I hoped they'd stay that way until the ambulance arrived. I didn't think they were two people who were going to socialize much in the future, given that their first penetrative exchanges had been bullets.

    Jack was lying with one leg off the sofa, half his back on the seat, the other half up the back of the sofa, his head in the apex. A huge quantity of blood and white and grey bits in it and black skin and curly hair spattered the sofa and wall and sideboard. His eyes didn't see the hole where his nose had been. He still showed his teeth, but not even a madman could call it a smile.

    Outside, I called for Moses, who had lost his nerve and ran off into the night risking the beach muggers. The gardien had fled as well. I'd already decided on my third visit of the evening as the adrenaline rushing my brain decoded the confusion of what had just happened. I opened the barrier, fixed it and drove Jack's Mercedes out into the wasteland, out there, in the bleak and suffocating darkness, the missing detail from the photographs came to me and although I still didn't know who was behind the camera taking the shot on that sunny afternoon when Kasparian and Kershaw posed for him, I did know where he was.