A Darkening Stain Read online

  ‘The people.’

  ‘The people?’

  ‘If I thought I wasn’t going to see Bagado or Moses or Helen again for the rest of my life, I’d feel...’

  ‘Yes? What would you feel?’ she asked, teasing me a little, big Bruce Medway talking about his feelings.

  ‘I’d feel impoverished.’

  She kissed me.

  ‘You’re all right, really,’ she said, patting my face, running her hand through my hair again, stroking the old dog.

  ‘Am I?’

  ‘And anyway, Mum’s not coming for the climate or the cuisine or the people. She’s coming to see us.’

  ‘Us?’

  ‘That’s you and me, Bruce. The loving couple.’

  ‘She doesn’t know me.’

  ‘I know this may sound strange, but she wants to. She wants to get to know you.’

  ‘Why would she want to do a thing like that?’ I asked, suddenly feeling myself on the brink of something, not the yawning black ravine but something bigger than me, like a view that goes on for ever to some distant mountains.

  ‘I’m pregnant.’

  Chapter 4

  Saturday 20th July, Cotonou.

  It rained in the night, louder and longer than Buddy Rich could have ever coaxed out of his snare. I stared at the slice of window reflected on the wall, at the water rippling shadows down the pane. I listened to Heike sleeping, felt the warmth of her hip on my thigh, her ribs feathering my flank. Happiness crept into my chest and curled up there tight as a ball of kitten. But no sooner was it there than I felt this terrible despair at ever being able to hang on to it. Happiness was a moment rather than a state.

  I fainted into sleep without realizing it. I thought I was still staring at the rain running, running down the wall to nowhere, but somehow I’d got up and was looking down at myself. My shadow blocked the slice of window. A terrible darkness fell so that I no longer knew whether I was the one standing or lying, no longer knew if I’d been happy even for a moment.

  I left for work in the morning—disturbed. Part of me was flinging myself around like a ballerina born to it but the rest, the bigger part, was weighed down, burdened by some unknown foresight. I drove and let yesterday crash over me, haul me down to its root, and roll me around in the airless, noisome turbulence.

  Five men dead, schoolgirls disappearing off the streets of Cotonou, Le Commandant Bondougou, Carlo, Gio and Franconelli. What Bagado didn’t know, something that had come my way by accident in that ugly business at the beginning of March when Franconelli set his terrible example, was that Bondougou, the Cotonou Chief of Police, was a Franconelli man. Bondougou covered up all the murders, and there were a number, from that horrific night and not a peep was heard in any of the media. That knowledge sat on my chest like a 300 lb bench press that I’d been foolish enough to think I could lift.

  For me to find Carlo and Gio waiting in my office after Bagado had implied that he wouldn’t mind seeing Bondougou end up as the main dish in a shark fest was a cruel irony. Me help Bagado sideline Bondougou? If miracles came my way and I found myself well placed to nudge him into the feeding frenzy I could only see myself going straight in after him.

  I parked up at the office, tweaked the gardien awake and sent him across to the Caravelle café for coffee and croissants. The tailor’s shack opposite my office was coming alive into the grey, sodden morning with the aid of the usual North Korean folk music from the radio. I wasn’t talking to those guys. I’d asked them to make me a pair of trousers out of the last two metres of super-lightweight cotton I could find in Cotonou and they’d ballsed it up and left themselves no extra to adjust. Still, there were always spare boys around to run errands for me, do a bit of following and such, so I didn’t dress the boss down too much for botching my trews.

  The office stank of beer. I opened the windows and went out on to the balcony with my phone book and flicked through to the number of the biggest shipping agents in Cotonou. I put a call in to my friend Appollinaire Agossa, a young dude type who listened out for me.

  ‘Polly? It’s me, Bruce.’

  ‘No need to introduce yourself, M. Bru, you’re the only man I know who calls me Polly.’

  ‘Am I? My privilege. Do you know a guy called Jean-Luc Marnier?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Can you find out for me? He runs an import/export company called La Cote Oueste. Looks like a crook too.’

  ‘They’re all crooks. How long have I got?’

  ‘Ages. Ten minutes?’

  I hung up. The gardien came in with the best thing of the morning and I gave him a tip to go and buy his bouille, the wet sugary bird food they like to eat for breakfast. I gave him some extra to go and find a girl to clean the office up properly too. I drank coffee and fluffed eating the croissant badly so it was all over me when Polly called back.

  ‘That was quick,’ I said.

  ‘Only because we’ve been working the ship for Marnier’s company, loading cotton seed.’

  ‘The Kluezbork II?’

  ‘You’ve heard?’

  ‘I was on it yesterday afternoon.’

  ‘They think the crew did it and they were going to throw them to the sharks when they got out to sea.’

  ‘That’s not logical, Polly.’

  ‘That’s the rumour.’

  Bagado’s machine working already.

  ‘You got anything sensible or interesting on Marnier?’

  ‘He imports veg oil in drums and bottles it here in Cotonou to sell locally. He exports cotton seed and fibre. Somebody said he’s done cashew but I don’t remember the name La Côte Oueste. I’ve heard he does business out of Lomé and Abidjan too. That’s it.’

  ‘Well, that all sounds very legal to me.’

  ‘He doesn’t have to be a crook.’

  ‘The people I know he’s dealing with say he does,’ I said. ‘Anyway, thanks. When’s your birthday?’

  ‘You missed it.’

  ‘I’ll make it up to you, Polly.’

  ‘Don’t call me Polly, that’ll do.’

  ‘You’re lucky you’re not pretty.’

  ‘That’s not what the girls say in the New York, New York club.’

  ‘It’s dark in the New York, New York, and you’re black.’

  ‘Au revoir, M. Bru.’

  I got in the car in a sweat from the coffee and headed east to cross the lagoon to Akpakpa and the industrial zone where Marnier’s company had their offices, about four kilometres out on the Porto Novo road. Bagado’s car was sitting beside a large puddle near the Ancien Pont, and there was a big crowd streaming down the bank to one side of the bridge. I parked up and went with the flow. I knew it was bad because some wailing had started up towards the front and people were crowding on the bridge looking down at the water’s edge, the Catholics among them crossing themselves.

  An ambulance arrived and reversed down the bank. I followed it in and broke through the police cordon to find Bagado standing alone by a small skiff with sails made out of polypropylene sacks. His hands were jammed down into his mac pockets, stretching it tight across his back. His body language was grim. I drew alongside. His jaw muscle, working over some high-density anxiety, popped out of the side of his cheek.

  His head turned five degrees to me and then went back to the skiff. In the belly of the boat, blown up to the point where the brown school pinafore was stretched taut, was the decomposing, fish-ravaged body of what I assumed was one of the missing schoolgirls. On the ground by the skiff, with his head between his knees, was the boat’s owner. His skin was grey and there was a patch of vomit between his heels.

  ‘He found her up on the sand bar. She was on her way out to the Gulf and the sharks and we wouldn’t have known anything more about her,’ said Bagado.

  ‘Where’s Bondougou?’

  ‘He’s coming. You’d better get out of here. This crowd could go off any minute.’

  ‘You’d better get going too, Bagado.’

  ‘I just
want to look at this a moment. Hone my wrath.’

  I worked my way back through the jostling crowd. Younger men at the back were beginning to get excited. They had sticks and rocks and their fists were jabbing the air. Some of them were hawkers from the traffic lights, looking to break up the boredom of their day with a bit of blood-letting. I got into my car and crawled across the bridge, pedestrians pounded on the roof.

  La Côte Oueste Sari wasn’t difficult to find. The gardien let me in through a gate that could handle plenty of trouble should it come along. He pointed me up to some offices flanking the warehouse where I could see a bottling plant not in use. Most of the offices had their blinds down, but I found one with a glass door and beyond it a white woman in a short, tight red skirt, black vest and red high heels with little leather bows on the back. She had her back to the door and was spraying a huge umbrella plant. She was stretching up with one leg bent at the knee as if she was hoping that there was somebody else in the office to take notice. The air was freeze-dried inside and I didn’t disturb the woman’s work by coining in. She persisted with the disapproving atomizer—tsk, tsk—tsk, tsk.

  ‘Bonjour,’ I said.

  She span round faster than if she’d been caught with her hands in the till and went over on one of her high heels. She fell back into a plump black leather chair which swallowed her with a gasp. The atomizer, which I could now see was a water pistol, was pointing at me.

  ‘You don’t frighten me with that,’ I said to her in French.

  She laughed badly, as if there was plenty needed tightening up in the nerves department.

  ‘You scared me,’ she said, putting the pistol down. ‘I didn’t hear you come in.’

  ‘You don’t look as if you’ve got a weak heart.’

  ‘I don’t,’ she said, and went behind the desk.

  To keep herself in that trim she must have had the heart of a steeplechaser. Her body had a fat percentage in the single figures and it looked as if it was monitored that way. She must have had a set of scales with the grams marked off and a red line for anything over fifty kilos.

  Her face was as taut as a jockey’s, the muscles evident under the stretched skin. She had a small mouth, very small. It couldn’t have used up more than an inch. It looked as if it was going to be very economical. She put a set of long red talons through her short bleach-blonde hair and kicked herself away from the desk on a castered chair. She crossed her legs, keeping her eyes on mine, seeing where they went, and leaned back, showing me the workings of her abdominals under the spray-on vest.

  ‘I’ve come to see Jean-Luc. Is he here?’

  ‘You should have called,’ she said.

  ‘Does that mean he isn’t?’

  She blinked once, slowly, and breathed in through her nose as if that was some kind of a reply.

  ‘Does that mean I need an appointment?’ I asked.

  A little tongue came out of the little mouth and nipped back in again.

  ‘I’m doing all the work here,’ I said, ‘and you’re the one behind the desk.’

  ‘What do you want to see him about?’

  ‘Veg oil.’

  ‘You don’t need to see him to buy veg oil. I can sell you that.’

  ‘I’m not buying, I’m selling.’

  ‘He’s not buying,’ she said. ‘I know.’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind hearing that from him.’

  ‘I speak with his voice.’

  ‘Since the operation,’ I said.

  She frowned.

  ‘Une petite blague,’ I said.

  ‘Très petite,’ she confirmed.

  ‘Are you his managing director, then?’ I asked. ‘You didn’t give me your card or tell me your name.’

  ‘Carole,’ she said, and as an afterthought, ‘Marnier.’

  ‘You must be his wife.’

  ‘I could be his sister, his half sister or his sister-in-law.’

  ‘If he had a brother ... which he doesn’t,’ I guessed.

  The knot of muscle at the back of her neck keeping her shoulders braced loosened about a millimetre.

  ‘You didn’t say your name.’

  ‘Bruce Medway.’

  ‘No card?’

  ‘No,’ I said, getting some of my own economy going.

  She uncrossed her muscly legs, pulled herself back up to the desk and tucked herself in tight underneath it.

  ‘Is Jean-Luc in trouble?’ I asked.

  ‘Trouble?’ she said, hitting the wrong note, making it sound like an understatement for his current situation.

  ‘Everybody gets trouble in Africa,’ I said. ‘Sooner or later. I heard there was some on board the Kluezbork II yesterday, not that...’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Not that it would have anything to do with Jean-Luc ... necessarily. But you know how Africans like to make trouble because ... well, trouble is money.’

  ‘What trouble?’

  ‘Five dead men.’

  She didn’t blink for some time, her eyes glazing and pinking at the rims in the cold air. Her mouth formed a perfect ‘o’, lower case.

  ‘Five?’ she said, interrogatively.

  ‘Should there have been more?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re saying ... what you’re asking. Are you asking anything?’

  ‘I’m saying he needs some help with that ... and I can give it to him.’

  ‘Help with what?’

  ‘Help with the five dead men and his cotton seed on the same ship.’

  ‘How do you know...?’

  ‘Of course, I’d have to see him personally on the subject.’

  ‘But...’

  ‘And you seem to be the only one who can ... facilitate that.’

  All the talk about the Kluezbork II had confused her. She didn’t seem to know about the dead stowaways, but she was aware of the cotton seed and that the repercussions could be expensive. I walked across to the window and parted the Venetian blinds with two fingers. The warehouse was very quiet, nobody in there at all.

  ‘And I’d still like to talk to him about veg oil, if that’s possible?’ I said, moving back round to her side of the desk.

  She picked up the phone and dialled a Benin mobile phone number, one of the new ones which had come in since the Francophonie conference last year. I memorized the number.

  She spoke in rapid French, with her little mouth kissing the mouthpiece. I heard nothing. Then she shut up and listened. After a minute she put the phone down and tapped the polished desk top with her red fingernails. She kicked off her shoe and I heard her foot rasping up and down a calf that hadn’t been razored recently.

  ‘You and Jean-Luc been married long?’ I asked.

  She looked up into her head.

  ‘Four years,’ she said.

  ‘You like it in Africa?’

  ‘Very much.’

  ‘Where do you come from in France?’

  ‘Lille.’

  ‘The weather’s not so nice in Lille.’

  ‘Ça c’est vrai.’

  I lowered myself into one of the black leather chairs. Carole kicked off her other shoe and wriggled her feet back to life after they’d been crammed to the points of her five-inch highs with their prissy little bows. The phone went off louder than a ref’s pea whistle. It jolted her. She snatched at it and listened and then held it out to me.

  ‘What the fuck do you want?’ asked a voice in English with barely a trace of French accent.

  ‘Nice English, Jean-Luc. Where’d you pick that up?’

  ‘I know who you are. Now what the hell do you want?’

  ‘To meet,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to talk on the phone.’

  ‘Too bad,’ he said. ‘I only talk on the phone. Who’re you working for?’

  ‘Myself.’

  ‘Bullshit. The kind of work you do, you don’t get off your ass unless somebody’s paying. So who’s paying?’

  ‘A man’s got to live even if he doesn’t have any clients.’

  �
�So what’s all this stuff about veg oil?’

  ‘OK, you’re right. I’m not interested in veg oil. I had to get started somewhere. Your wife wasn’t blowing your trumpet for you.’

  ‘With a mouth that size she doesn’t blow anything,’ he said crudely, and laughed with congested lungs, which set him off coughing.

  ‘Maybe you’d like to talk about the Kluezbork IV

  ‘What’s that about?’

  ‘You know, Jean-Luc.’

  ‘Yeah, I know. What can you do about it?’

  ‘Those stowaways came in on one of your cotton seed stevedore shifts.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘You know how it works, Jean-Luc. You’re responsible. You’re the white man, for Christ’s sake. You’re as good as a monarch.’

  ‘OK. So you can get the ship out. How much?’

  ‘My fee is two hundred and fifty thousand CFA ... upfront. Plus some grease to get things rolling. And if you’re going to be as shy as this you’re going to have to make provision for expenses.’

  ‘I have to be shy.’

  ‘If we meet, Jean-Luc, maybe you can tell me about that problem as well and perhaps you can start living a life again.’

  ‘I’ll call you,’ he said, and hung up.

  Carole stood by the door with a little bag under her arm and some gold-rimmed sunglasses with red lenses on. She’d made a bad mistake. The lipstick she’d applied was dark purple. Her mouth looked like a split plum and didn’t go with anything else.

  ‘I’ve got to leave now,’ she said.

  Chapter 5

  I sat in my Peugeot 504 saloon, picking at the piping on the seat cover. After a few minutes, Carole tottered around the puddles to an electric-blue Renault 5 Turbo. She smoothed her hands over her microskirt-encased bottom which showed no trace of visible panty line, got into the car, shucked her heels and took off at a fair lick. She had a grinning furry monkey hanging off four yellowing sucker pads in the rear window.

  I let her get ahead and put four cars between her and myself on the Porto Novo/Cotonou road going back into town. She cut away from the line of traffic heading across the Ancien Pont, which she could see was backed up, probably because of the dead schoolgirl. The Renault 5 dodged through the muddy backstreets of Akpakpa and humped on to the metalled road going across the Nouveau Pont.