Instruments Of Darkness (12 page)

Chapter 11

    I came into Dama's house the back way. A large crowd lined the main Kpalimé road which "ran by Dama's house up to a crossroads where a knot of people hung around waiting for someone to do something. The
gardien
opened the gate and I parked behind Dama's Peugeot. The owner of the funeral parlour next door picked up the board with his coffin prices on it and took it back into his shop. A few people on the road looked back. There was nothing aggressive about them. Dama's garden was full of people painting his cane furniture.

    Dama sat in a large wicker chair on a verandah in front of his living room watching the painters. He was a small, muscly, pugnacious man with thinning short grey hair. His eyes darted about in his head as if he was playing bar football. He sat forward in his chair, a packet of cigarettes in the breast pocket of his white shirt and his grey trousers hitched up so that his hairless shins were visible almost to the knee. He rested his elbows on his thighs and bobbed like a lizard in the sun.

    We drank Perrier water with ice and lemon. Dama swirled his ice around in his glass and looked down the vortex.

    'There's an advantage to living next to a funeral parlour,' he said.

    'A discount,' I said, 'but you can never be sure they'll give it to you.'

    He held up his glass. 'Ice,' he said. 'They've always got ice.' Which made me check for floating hairs.

    Dama had met Kershaw three times in the bar of the Hotel Sarakawa before he told him about B.B.'s job. Dama liked him. Kershaw had drive, he said, and he laughed at his jokes, which was always seductive.

    'The ladies liked him and I knew B.B. would like him too,' he said, 'because there was something… different about him.'

    'Different?'

    'You know, he might need some control but things are going to happen around him. Life won't be dull.'

    'B.B. likes "different" people?'

    'He doesn't need any more money. People are all that's left.' He offered me a cigarette and then lit one for himself. 'Where have you looked for him?'

    'His house here. I've spoken to Charlie and a woman from the US Embassy he knew.'

    'Charlie? What did Charlie say?'

    'He'd seen him three days ago.'

    'How did Charlie look?'

    'Like he always does.'

    'I hear he's taken some bad hits.'

    'Trading?'

    'Gold. Was he drinking?'

    'He's always drinking.'

    'Of course, but was he sipping or gulping?'

    'What's your interest?'

    'We compete. I want to know if it's true. Charlie never tells anybody anything; we have to find out for ourselves. I think the rumour is true.'

    'He was gulping.'

    The crowd in the road roared. Dama and I walked to the edge of the verandah, which was higher than the garden wall, and watched. There were more people now and a road block had been set up. It was a large rock. It meant that cars had to drive close to the pavement, where the crowd drummed on their roofs with the palms of their hands. Occasionally, someone stalled and the car was surrounded by the exuberant crowd who developed interesting rhythms on the bodywork until the panicked driver managed to get it together to move on.

    Dama and I noticed two or three young men in coats. At 110 degrees, it wasn't coat-wearing weather. They introduced some more elements to the road block. The traffic stopped. Drivers began to get annoyed. There was a loud gong sound as a rock hit a car roof. The driver started trying to move the road block. A group closed around and there was a lot of pulling and shouting and the odd flash of a fist.

    There was the sound of an army diesel truck pulling up at the crossroads, its engine still running. Dama and I went into the house and upstairs to a balcony outside his room where there was a view of the road, crossroads and some wasteground, which was one of the largest taxi ranks in Lomé. It should have been full of people coming from outside Lomé to work and sell, but today the wasteground was empty because of the strike.

    Another army truck pulled up. The knot of people around the road block loosened. A rock arced out from the crowd and hit the radiator grille of the truck in front. The truck edged forward and the engine roared. The crowd squealed at the reaction. Three more rocks clanged in. We heard the rubber soles of army boots jumping off the trucks. They lined up with batons ready behind the trucks. A helicopter stuttered in the distance.

    More rocks rained in on the trucks, some of the wilder ones skittered around our feet and rattled the shutters. The furniture painters ran for cover. A group of soldiers moved off behind Dama's house. Another group moved in the opposite direction heading for the wasteland. The second truck drew alongside the first and they both moved over the crossroads.

    We lost the sound of the helicopter until it clattered over us, wheeling low around the rooftops. The crowd raised their fists and roared. The helicopter pivoted on an unseen axis over the wasteland, and bucking and roaring like a rodeo bullock, it kicked up a dust cloud about fifty yards wide which it manoeuvred towards the cheering crowd.

    Troops appeared in the side road by the entrance to Dama's house. The crowd saw them late, panicked and ran towards the wasteland and into the dust cloud. The troops chased them, some lingering and fanning out to close off escape routes. On the wasteland, through the haze of the dust cloud, we could see from our height the other troops waiting for them, their batons ready, angled for the first cut.

    The helicopter tipped to its starboard side and rolled off over the lagoon. The cloud stayed, the panic continued. People tried to climb over Dama's wall and were hauled off. Some were pushed around, others were given a beating and thrown into the back of a van, red running down their black skin and soaking into their shirt collars.

    The dust began to settle. A young man, head down, was pushing his bicycle up the hill from the lagoon. There were no cars on the road now. He pushed the bicycle off the pavement and on to the rough grass leading up to the wasteland. He didn't know what was going on. A soldier with a baton confronted him and for the first time he looked up. The baton cracked him on the side of the head and he fell down flat in the grass as if his feet had been whipped out from under him. His mouth had opened in surprise but nothing had come out. He lay there, arms by his side, his cheek in the dust and the bicycle wheel spinning behind him.

    The van with a dozen bloodied young men moved off. They looked frightened. They were headed for another beating. The soldiers moved back towards the trucks. We turned because of a ferocious shout by the gate. There was the booming sound of juddering sheet metal and one of Dama's houseboys vaulted the gate and landed on the roof of my Peugeot. The soldiers started to climb over and Dama shouted at them. They trotted off. The houseboy slid off the roof. A cut across his forehead bled down his face and white T-shirt, which had a faded black and white print of Jimi Hendrix on it.

    Dama told me that there had been a bad scene at the port in the morning. The dockers had refused to open the gates. There was a fight with the soldiers. A minister had turned up and promised some pay rises.

    The gates were opened but no ships were unloaded and no ships came in.

    The people were smelling desperation. But nothing was clear. Who was who in the rioting? There had been provocateurs in the crowd. Men and women had been shot last night. Twenty-one bodies floated in the lagoon that morning.

    Ambitious men were getting hungry and people were behaving like a herd of antelope that's smelt the big cats in the long grass.

    Dama had nothing more to say to me. He hadn't seen Kershaw since he started working for B.B. I drove back down the hill into central Lomé. It was very quiet now on the streets. The helicopter still circled above to remind people that somebody was watching.

    An impromptu police post had been set up in the road and I stopped and showed my passport. The junior officer called to his senior and asked me to park up by the pavement. The senior officer asked me to get out of the car. He checked my mug against the shot in the passport and called over two other policemen who were armed with rifles. They marched me around the corner and told me to get into the police car. When I tried to ' sit down in the back, they shouted at me to lie on the floor. The senior officer's eyes told me that this wasn't a time to get huffy, so I lay down in the footwell. The two policemen got in and rested their feet and rifle butts on my back. My arms were pulled behind me and tied with plastic cuffs. The senior officer said something in his own language and a blindfold was tied over my face. The car moved off.

    It was difficult not to be scared by the scare tactics, but I've found on the few occasions this has happened to me that deep breathing helped and not getting angry. Getting angry often earned a rifle butt in the face and you still ended up blindfolded and in the footwell, except your throat was full of blood and your looks altered for good.

    After fifteen minutes, the car stopped and I was pulled out into the smell of motor oil on concrete and helped along into a building, and then a room in which there was an overhead fan but without the usual smell of the municipality. They sat me down and left the room. My nose told me I was in the company of leather and books.

    'There's nothing to be afraid of,' said a deep voice, in French.

    There isn't?' I asked, the sweat pouring down my face under the blindfold.

    'Very English of you, M. Medway. Don't worry, this won't take long.'

    'I'm feeling more cheerful already. You are M. Yao's
patron?'

    I heard his fingers slap on the edge of his desk.

    'I am. He tells me you are looking for Steven Kershaw. So am I. Why do you want to find him?'

    'I have a client.'

    'Who is?'

    'A businessman in Accra. Kershaw is supposed to be buying and shipping sheanut for him out of Cotonou…'

    'Is he?'

    '… and he hasn't called him for a week.'

    'I see.'

    'And you?'

    He didn't answer. I heard him get up from a chair whose leather farted against his bottom. A desk whinged as it was knocked into by a large thigh. Then the big man spoke, but this time all the charm was stripped out of his voice which now clicked and snapped like bolt cutters through chain link.

    'You will find Steven Kershaw, M. Medway, and when you find him, the first person you will tell will be me. You will not contact your client until I give you permission.'

    'Any particular reason?'

    'Have you ever spent time in an African jail?'

    That kind of response meant that I didn't have to tinker too long balancing out the pros and cons. The curious dog in me which liked to sniff around other people's affairs suddenly came across one of its own kind, dead under the sofa, and cringed away, asking to be let out into the garden.

    'Is there an easier way of making contact?'

    'You ring this number and leave a message on the answering machine.' He tucked a piece of paper into my top pocket and walked to the door and knocked. The police bundled me back into the car and we drove into the centre of Lomé, where they released me a short walk from my car.

    I went back to Jack's house and lay down to sleep in a darkened air-conditioned room, but sleep never came. My head was full of Kershaw's paintings, black leather strips, Nina Sorvino's hair, broken heads, the lagoon at night, floating bodies with a single black hole in the base of the skull, blood red fingernails and the voice of a man who could make life very painful for me.

Chapter 12

    By four o'clock in the afternoon, I felt no worse than an old horse that's come into a yard to find a man waiting for him with a black hood and a hammer. I decided to go to Cotonou and see if Kershaw's apartment threw any light on him.

    I heard Jack playing snooker with the TV on in some far off corner of the house. He was alone in the games room, unless you call
Neighbours
company.

    'You're winning as usual,' I said.

    'Fancy a frame?' he asked.

    'I'm going back to Cotonou.'

    'Any news?'

    'Nothing here,' I said, deciding to keep him out of it. 'You heard any dirt on Charlie?'

    'He got burned playing with gold,' said Jack, his cue stroking the underside of his chin as he aimed. 'But is it true?'

    'You know Dama?' Jack nodded.
'He
thinks it's true. Who did you hear it from?'

    'Jawa. He said he went down for seven hundred thousand dollars, but Jawa loves to exaggerate.'

    Jack hit the ball which cannoned off all the cushions, hitting nothing, which was an achievement with only two reds off the table.

    'You been practising that one long?'

    'Goodbye, Bruce, safe journey… and' - I stopped at the door - 'let me know how things go. You need anything - call me.'

    In the centre of town, the afternoon heat was close and fierce. The World Service news had reported an 'uneasy calm'. There was nothing calm about these streets and there was a great deal that was uneasy. They were empty. Doors opened a crack as I rolled by. Split fruit, dizzy with flies, lay spattered in the middle of the road. A pair of empty blue flip flops sat neatly on the pavement. A wrap used for carrying a baby hung off a parked car's bumper. A soldier stood on a street corner, more stood on others.

    On Rue du Commerce there were broken paving stones across the street. A hi-fi shop had been looted. The people weren't hungry, they just wanted to listen to music. The street was normally full of people buying and selling, full of hustlers offering you currency, and full of mammas cooking food. Balls of paper and torn plastic rolled in the dust, the stalls were empty - there was nobody. A torn poster attached itself to the windscreen advertising flights to Rio, 14 days for 150,000 CFA. I pulled it off and threw it in the back seat.