A Darkening Stain (2 page)

‘So, tell me,' I said, once we were up on the platform.

‘He has to be...' Bagado's voice faded, as he leant over the rail.

‘Come again.'

‘He has to go.'

‘And you think I'm the man for the job or I'm the man who can find you the man to do the job?'

‘Be serious, Bruce.'

‘So, what does “he has to go” mean? I assume you're talking about into the ground six foot under or stuffed head first down a storm drain after heavy rain. He's not the kind to take early retirement just because he's upset a few of his detectives.'

‘That would be a very satisfactory outcome. The storm drain I think is the more likely ... but you know me, Bruce. It's just not possible for me to even think like that.'

‘Whereas I...'

‘Quite.'

‘... go
grasping the wrong end of the stick,' I said. ‘We used to be partners, didn't we, Bagado?'

‘And very complementary ones too, I thought.'

‘I don't remember getting any compliments.'

‘I can't think why,' said Bagado, his neck disappearing into the collar of his mac.

‘So what's Bondougou's game? What's he done to...?'

‘He's gone too far,' he said, to the dense knot of his dark tie.

‘Well, I thought he must have done more than scribble over your prep,' I said, wiping a finger across my forehead and dropping a hank of sweat through the metal grating of the platform floor.

‘Five girls have gone missing...'

‘In Cotonou?'

‘Schoolgirls,' he nodded. ‘The youngest is six, the eldest, ten.'

‘And he won't let you near it?'

‘He's put one of his resident idiots on it.'

‘Any bodies turned up?'

‘No.'

‘You think all five are connected?'

‘Things like that are always connected.'

‘Why do you think this is Bondougou's business?' I asked. ‘Just because he won't let you near it, or what?'

‘He's on it. He reads everything that comes in. Takes all the reports verbally first. He's very interested.'

Bagado started to snick his thumbnail against his front teeth, a tic that meant he was thinking—thinking and worrying.

‘How am I supposed to fit myself in on this?' I asked. ‘If Bondougou finds me sniffing around he'll hit home runs with my kneecaps. And the usual usual—I've got a living to earn somehow.'

‘I know, I know,' he said, and stared down into the hold at the five dead men. ‘How are we going to get these men out of here?'

‘Put them in a cargo net and lift them out.'

‘Let's go,' he said. ‘Before I get morbid.'

‘You mean you
aren't
morbid yet?'

We climbed back up on to the hot metal deck and leant over the ship's rail, gulping in air cut with bunker fuel and some
muck they had boiling in the ship's galley—whatever, it was fresh after all that. The full weight of the afternoon heat was backing off now, the sun tinting some colour back into things.

‘I want you to help me, Bruce.'

‘Any way I can, Bagado,' I said. ‘As usual I'm running this way and that, feet not touching the ground.'

‘Who's that for?'

‘Irony, Bagado. Don't go losing your sense of irony.'

‘I'm losing my sense of everything these days ... because there
is
no sense in anything. It's all non-sense. How did I get to this pretty pass, Bruce?'

‘This pretty what?'

‘Pass.'

‘Is that one of your pre-independence colonial expressions?'

‘Concentrate for me, will you?'

‘OK. You've been manoeuvred into a position by Bondougou and now you've decided to manoeuvre your way out and I'm going to help you.'

‘How?'

‘You've only just saddled me with the problem. Let me run around a bit, break myself in on it.'

‘No hit men.'

‘I don't
know
any hit men. How would I know any, Bagado? Just because I mix in that...'

‘Irony, Bruce. I was being ironical.'

I drove out of the port, the sky already turning in the bleak late afternoon. People were still standing over where the boy's arm had been crushed, the stain darkening into the tarmac. I turned right on to the Boulevard de la Marina, heading downtown. Bagado had told me to keep my mouth shut about the stowaways and the fresh timber theory. If he wanted to land the marlin instead of the minnows he needed some tension to build up on the outside and the best way was to let the rumour machine run amok.

The traffic was heavy in the centre of town, with the going home crowd heading east over the Ancien Pont across the lagoon. The long rains had been going on too long and the newly laid tarmac for last year's Francophonie conference was getting properly torn up. Cars eased themselves into crater-like potholes. Bald truck tyres chewed off more edges as they ground up out of the two-foot trenches that had only been a foot deep the week before.

Night fell at the traffic lights in central Cotonou. Beggars and hawkers worked the cars. Mothballs, televisions, dusters, microwaves. I didn't do too much thinking about Bagado's problem. Disappearing schoolgirls was not my business and the only way Bondougou was leaving was if he overplayed a hand against somebody a lot nastier than I and they gave him the big cure. That might happen ... eventually. But me? I'd rather steer clear of that stuff. Make some money. Keep my head down. Things were going better than usual. I had money in my pocket and Heike, my English/German girlfriend, and I were getting along
with just the odd verbal, no fisticuffs. I got a surge just thinking about her and not only from my loins.

A cailloused hand, grey with road dust, appeared on my windowsill. It belonged to one of the polio beggars I supported at what they called ‘my traffic lights'.

‘
Bonjour, ça va bien?
' he asked, arranging his buckled and withered limbs underneath him.

‘Ça marche un peu
,' I said, wiping my face off. I gave him a couple of hundred CFA.

‘Tu vas réussir. Tu vas voir. Tu vas gagner un climatiseur pour ta voiture.'

Yes, well, that would be nice. These boys understand suffering. I could do with some cool. I could do with an ice-cold La Beninoise beer. I parked up at the office, walked back to the Leader Price supermarket and bought a can of cold beer. I crossed the street to the kebab man, standing in front of his charcoal-filled rusted oil drum, and had him make me up a sandwich of spice-hammered meat, which he wrapped in newspaper.

The
gardien
at the office said I had visitors. White men. I asked him where he'd put them and he said he'd let them in. He said that they'd said it would be all right.

Did they?

I went up, thinking there was nothing to steal, no files to rifle, no photos to finger through, only back copies of
Container Week
and such, so maybe I'd find a couple of guys eager to see someone to brighten the place up and keen to part with money just to get out of the place.

Sitting on my side of the desk, just outside the cone of light shed from a battered Anglepoise, was a man I recognized as Carlo, and on the client side a guy I only knew by sight. Suddenly my lamb kebab didn't taste so good. These two were Franconelli's men. Roberto Franconelli was a mafia capo who operated out of Lagos picking up construction projects and Christ knows what else besides. We'd started our relationship by
hitting it off and then I'd made a mistake, told a little fib about a girl called Selina Aguia, said she was interested in him when she wasn't (not for that reason, anyway). Now Mr Franconelli had a healthy, burgeoning dislike for my person and I knew that this little visit was not social.

‘Bruce,' said Carlo, holding out his hand. I juggled the beer and kebab and he slapped his dark-haired paw into mine. ‘This is Gio.'

Gio didn't take the heel of his hand away from his face and gave me one of those minimalist greetings I associate with coconuts.

Carlo sat back out of the light and put his feet up on my desk, telling me something I didn't need to be told.

‘I'd offer you a beer...' I said.

‘Thanks,' he said. ‘Gio?'

Gio didn't move an eyelid.

‘He'll have a Coke. He don't drink.'

I slammed my can of beer down and slid it across to Carlo. I shouted for the
gardien
and gave him some money for another beer and a Coke. I took the third chair in the room and drew it up to the desk. Carlo nestled the beer in his lap and pinged the ring-pull, not breaking the seal. I continued with the lamb kebab and gave Gio a quick once-over. Brutal. Trog-brutal.

‘You eat that shit off the street?' asked Carlo.

‘Keeps up my stomach flora, Carlo,' I said. ‘I don't want you to think I actually
like
it.'

Carlo said something in Italian. Gio wrinkled his nose. Animated, heady stuff.

‘You don't mind if I smoke?' asked Carlo. ‘While you do your stomach flora thing.'

‘I'm touched you asked.'

He lit up. The
gardien
came back with the drinks. Gio and I opened our cans.

‘Chin-chin,' I said.

Carlo kept on pinging.

‘This a social?' I asked, wiping my fingers off on the newspaper.

‘Mr Franconelli's got a job for you.'

‘I didn't think Mr Franconelli liked me any more.'

‘He don't.'

‘Does that mean he won't be paying?'

‘He'll pay. You're small change.'

‘What's the job?'

‘Find someone,' said Carlo, stretching himself to a shivering yawn.

‘You can tell me it all at once, you know, Carlo. I can take in more than one thing at a time—beer, kebab, your friend here, who you want me to find—all in one big rush.'

‘The guy's name is Jean-Luc Marnier.'

‘Would that be a full-blooded Frenchman, a
metis
or an African?'

Carlo flipped a photo across to me. Jean-Luc Marnier was white, in his fifties, with thick, swept-back grey hair that was longish at the collar and tonic-ed. It had gone yellow over one eye, stained by smoke from an unfiltered cigarette he had in his mouth. Attractive was just about an applicable adjective. He might have been movie-hunk material when he was younger and smoother, but some hardness in his life had cragged him up. He had prominent facial bones—cheeks, jaw, forehead all rugged with wear—a full-lipped mouth, surprisingly long ears with fleshy lobes and a blade-sharp nose—a seductive mixture of soft and hard. His dark eyes were shrewd and looked as if they could find weaknesses even when there weren't any. I thought he probably had bad teeth, but he looked like a ladies' man, which meant he'd have had them fixed. The man had some presence, even in a photo, but it was a rogue presence.

‘Is he a big guy?' I asked.

‘A metre seventy-five. Eighty-five kilos. Not fat, just a little heavy.'

‘What's he do?'

‘Import/export.'

‘For a change,' I said. ‘He have an office?'

‘And a home,' said Carlo, sliding over a piece of paper.

‘Why can't you find him yourself?'

Carlo pinged the ring-pull some more, getting on my nerves.

‘We've looked. He's not around. Nobody talks to us.'

‘Does that mean he's been a bad boy?'

‘Take a look at the guy,' said Carlo.

‘What do I do when I find him?'

Gio looked at Carlo out of the corner of his hand as if he might be interested in something for the first time.

‘You just tell us where he is.'

‘Then what?'

‘Finish,' he said, and crushed his cigarette out in the tuna can supplied.

‘You going to kill him? Is that it?'

Carlo and Gio stilled to a religious quiet.

‘Forget it, Carlo,' I said. ‘
That
is not my kind of work.'

Carlo's feet crashed to the floor. He slammed the beer can down on the desk top and leaned over at me so that our faces were close enough for beer and tobacco fumes to be exchanged.

‘I thought you were the one who liked me, Carlo.'

‘I do, Bruce. I like you fine. But not when you're dumb.'

‘Then I don't know how you ever
got
to like me.'

Carlo grunted about one sixteenth of a laugh. He put his hand on my shoulder and gave me a little massage, brutally thumbing the muscle over the bone.

‘I know a lot of smart people who tell me they're dumb.'

‘It's a trick we learn,' I said.

‘Now, Gio, you might be surprised to learn, is a very remarkable teacher 'cos he can make dumb people think smart and smart people think dumb. Not bad for a guy who's never been to school, still has trouble readin' a book with no pictures.'

I took another look at Gio, at the slab-of-concrete forehead, the short neck with black hair sprouting up it from his deep chest, forearms like animals' thighs, rower's wrists and agricultural hands, the odd knuckle missing from thumping the mule straight whilst ploughing.

‘He's got intelligent hands,' I said. ‘I can see that.'

‘Careful, Bruce. His English is not so good but he has a good ear for tone and if he thinks you don't take him seriously he has a number of very short lessons he can give.'

‘Look, Carlo, I'm not being difficult. You've just asked me to find a guy and in not so many words you've told me that when I find him you're going to...'

Carlo tapped me on the forehead with an envelope. I shut up. He laid the envelope on the desk.

‘There's some money in there and I put a little item in with it that I think you'll find very interesting. I don't think it's something you'll want to talk to Mr Franconelli about, but it should help you make your mind up. Now, you've got forty-eight hours to find Marnier. We'll be staying in the Hotel de la Plage—walking distance, but don't come and see us. Leave a message at the desk for us to call by or meet up someplace. OK?'