Instruments Of Darkness (30 page)

Chapter 25

    Bagado looked like the relieved accomplice who hadn't been snitched on. I thought he might ask me how many I'd got, but he just climbed in the car and pointed east. We wanted to get to the Nigerian side of the border to where the porters were bringing the rice across, so we went east to Badagri, turned north to Ado, and finally west back to Idiroko which was on the Nigerian side of the border from Porto Novo. Bagado was surging forward in his seat like a jockey and twitching me on with a whiplash voice when he wanted me to overtake. He had seen that the warehouse on the Benin side was nearly empty. Madame Severnou had moved the rice in half the time I'd expected.

    We took the road out of Idiroko to the border and on the outskirts of town saw a truck loaded with rice turning off the main road. We followed it for about a mile to a warehouse with other trucks of rice waiting to unload outside. Whitened stick men in soiled loincloths walked up and down wooden planks, storing the rice in the warehouse.

    Opposite the warehouse, which had its own chain- link compound, were three crumbling buildings and to one side some mud-walled houses with corrugated iron roofs. There were some trees with good shade and some homemade wooden seating with no ground clearance.

    Beyond was another street and some more mud-walled houses. We parked up behind the crumbling buildings in a street where a black stinking liquid ran in the gutters. A dog stood looking at us, a nothing dog, neither big nor small and with a rough coat the same colour as the red dust. It shook with fever and tics. Blood gathered at the teddy bear point of his lips. Flies settled there, took off and relanded.

    We found a dark corner by one of the mud-walled houses which was shaded by a tree with thick heavy leaves coloured red by the dust. We sat on some wood with our backs to the mud wall and waited. For a moment, the sun turned the whole sky a deep orange pink, a rare West African sunset against which some skeletal trees blackened, faded and merged when it was finally dark. It was just after six o'clock. Lights came on around the compound and in the warehouse.

    It didn't take someone with an MBA to realize that they shouldn't have been unloading here at all. The rice was destined for Lagos and Ibadan and it didn't make sense to load and unload twice.

    As the sacks were taken off, two tall, well-built young Africans in grey slacks and white shirts, looking as if they were off an American college football team, ran detectors over each sack as it came into the warehouse. In the hour after dark, one sack was put aside to join four others in a corner by the warehouse office and something was recorded on a clipboard attached to a string on the wall.

    Women with bundles of washing on their heads walked past without seeing us. Children played by the road in the light from the compound. A boy beat a hoop with a stick. The hoop outpaced him and crossed the road, missed by a truck and a car, it lodged itself in a ditch. Another truck arrived, the sacks queued off. Not a lot was happening, apart from phase three of an international drugs operation.

    Bagado's distant voice was telling me how clever this operation was. The idea of smuggling something more valuable inside something else being smuggled was, to his mind, brilliant.

    'Why make something look clean when it's already dirty?' he said. 'Anything clean here stinks like hell.'

    He was right. It was a regular piece of Nigerian business and what was more, it wasn't happening in a port, nor in a city warehouse, nor in an airport with a lot of curious people around who talk to other people who cost money. It was happening in a dusty, shitty little border town sixty miles from Lagos with people who were glad to get some work.

    Other thoughts turned over with the weight and monotony of ploughed earth. The film clip of Heike with her lover played and replayed itself in my head. Bagado and Heike were right. I'd never made a decision about her. I hadn't realized how much my own stability relied on her. I hadn't understood what a difference she made, or maybe I had and chose to ignore it because things like that can get difficult.

    The truth was I didn't want to lose her, and not just because I could see her being taken away but because I realized in my near-forty dotage that I needed her - positively needed her* Things I knew already but kept back behind the fences crept to the front of my mind. I admired her for the work she did, I respected her for the way she did it - the toughness, the resilience, and I loved her for the hair at the back of her neck, the large hands holding the cigarette in its holder, the way she sat in that big dress and drank with me, glass for glass. And I knew I believed it because the feeling I had didn't come from my mushy, inconsistent head nor that over-flattered fragile organ, the heart, but high up in the stomach, around the diaphragm, where a sharp tap can take all the wind out of you.

    Bagado hit me on the arm and told me it was all over. The last truck had arrived half loaded. Another sack had been put aside and one of the college boys was doing a final count. He let the clipboard fall and spoke to his friend who gave him his detector, walked out of the compound and crossed the road into one of the crumbling buildings. The other guy was winding his arm around as if he was cranking an engine and the workers broke into a run. They took the ramps off the two trucks they had been unloading whose diesel engines farted thick smoke and reversed out of the compound. The half-loaded truck crawled in. The ramps were attached. The other college boy crossed the road back to the compound. The workers unloaded the last truck at a sprint.

    In a quarter of an hour, the last truck left. The workers queued up to be paid. They crossed the road with their clothes over their arms, counting their money. The fierce halogen light in the compound imploded.

    The metal sheeting of the warehouse doors walloped against the frames as they ran the doors closed. A padlock clicked into place. In the weak light cast from one of the crumbling buildings we could see the college boys' white shirts. One appeared to be jogging on the spot, just lifting his heels, hands behind his back. The other stood still. The only car that passed in the next three quarters of an hour had one headlight and a knocking sound from one of the front wheels.

    We heard the sound of expensive wide tyres kissing the metalled road. Madame Severnou's graphite grey Mercedes slowed, feinted left and swung right into the compound. The boys opened the doors and the car reversed in.

    We ran for the Peugeot. The light shed as we opened the doors showed the dog lying on its side like an abandoned toy whose trolley had been ripped off to make a skateboard. Flies busied themselves over the already swollen body. We waited in the car under the tree where we had been sitting. The Mercedes, low at the back, rolled out; one of the boys shut the warehouse doors. The Mercedes continued out of the compound and the boy followed with a length of chain hanging from his hand and locked the gate. He got in the car which accelerated up on to the tarmac. We followed with sidelights only until we joined the main road into Idiroko.

    We made quick time to the Abeokuta turn-off on the road to Lagos, but as we came into Ikeja, just after Lagos's Murtala Mohammed airport, the traffic solidified. We crawled past the Sheraton, the fumes thick in the still night air. The Mercedes was seven or eight cars ahead in the fast lane of a three-lane highway which had now become six lanes of cars. Taxi drivers swore with monumental gestures. A large woman with a gold watch that cut into her fat wrist stared out of her red air-conditioned BMW at the stock car race she'd found herself in.

    Madame Severnou's Mercedes pulled away. We remained. Bagado rolled down his window and sat on the ledge. Twenty yards ahead, two taxi drivers were throwing abuse at each other like old china until one of them produced a wrench and the other didn't like the size of it and moved off, his fan belt screeching like a pig that's seen the knife. We moved again, seething into any available pocket. Bagado thumped the roof with his hand and slid back in. We'd lost them.

    We drifted into some orange street lighting, which poisoned an already polluted scene, and I saw the Mercedes coming towards us on the other side of the highway. Bagado watched it turn right into an estate about a quarter of a mile behind us. Its taillights dodged from tree to tree and disappeared.

    The Peugeot took a few knocks to the body as we crossed four lanes of cars to the next exit and Bagado shredded his larynx on some razor-wire invective. Ten minutes later, we were cruising the lanes of the estate where the Mercedes had gone. The estate was set out in a grid system on three parallel roads. The first two roads were private houses for middle-class Nigerians. The third road had private houses on one side and office buildings and storage on the other. Beyond this was a tree-lined wall. We found the Mercedes parked in a cul-de-sac on two strips of concrete which ran down into weeds and long grass. The boot was open and one back door.

    We turned left and parked out of sight, to the side of a private house. I told Bagado I wasn't going to sit around waiting any more, replaying my least favourite film clip, and he said he'd give me fifteen minutes.

    'Before what?'

    'Before I go in there myself.'

    'And get us both caught.'

    'All right, I'll leave you to die.'

    'OK. Come in with your thimble blazing.'

    One side of the cul-de-sac was a two-storey office building and behind it a low Nissen hut with a walled yard. A shaved head bobbed along the wall and came out through a narrow gate attached to a body, which was naked apart from a pair of shorts. The body was wide, the shoulders, pectorals and abdominals cast like an armoured breast plate, the fingers of the ribs dovetailing with the muscle. The quadraceps wobbled and set as the man walked.

    He bent over the boot and as he uprighted a pair of sacks, the ridges and plateaux of muscle in his back shifted along the deep rift of his spine. He wiped his hands on his shorts, they were as big as a statue's. He scratched the back of his calf with an unshod foot - it would have needed a shipyard to build it a shoe. He picked each fifty-kilo sack up by the ear with his thumb and forefinger and walked sideways through the gate as if he had nothing more than the weekend's groceries.

    I walked across the front of the office building and went down an alleyway on the other side of it. The wall at the end was about eight foot high, and with a short run I hooked my leg up on to it, knelt and stood up. The courtyard behind the Nissen hut was full of broken pallets and a fork lift with an empty pallet sheathing the forks. The corrugated asbestos roofing of the hut overhung the front walls and made a narrow verandah. A pair of dusty shoes crossed a shaft of light from the hut which showed the planking of the verandah and the ground of the courtyard covered in weeds, empty cardboard cartons and skeins of plastic sheeting.

    The shoes I'd seen darted out of the light and a large rat pelted into the courtyard, followed by the grotesque feet of the rice porter. There was a squeal, a high laugh and a crunch and the rat, flattened, came from the dark of the courtyard and landed on the verandah. The dusty shoes came back out and kicked it off. There was no way down into the courtyard from the wall; I let myself down and walked back to the Mercedes whose doors and boot were now closed.

    I walked through the gate without thinking about it, and to my right saw that there was a three-foot gap between the hut and the office building. It stank of stale urine. A light from the hut was cast on to a window sill of the office building from a ventilation grate.

    The grate was a foot above my head; I pulled myself up on the window sill and looked over my left shoulder into the hut. There was a partition wall over which I could see a store room stacked to the ceiling with lavatories, bidets, wash basins and cisterns. Over my right shoulder were pallets of floor and wall tiles positioned at random around the room and, in a clearing in the middle of the hut, Madame Severnou was watching the rat-crushing porter unstitch a sack. There was a plastic sheet with a bathful of rice on it. The two college boys were refilling empty sacks with rice from the bath using aluminium jugs.

    The porter emptied the sack into the bath and the boys picked out the four brown paper packages that fell out. These were stacked on a table next to Madame Severnou with twenty other packages. I let myself down and let my shoulders burn through my shirt.

    Grit twisted under shoe leather. Somebody appeared at the end of the gap and grunted. A zipper rippled the air. There was an ill-tempered rustle and then the sound of piss hitting concrete and a man breathing through his nose. He must have had a bladder the size of a zeppelin because his jet of urine drilled at the concrete for several minutes and streams trickled around my feet.

    He left and I pulled myself up again. The bath was empty and a pair of hands stitched a rice sack. By the table was a cotton bale. Madame Severnou looked at the stack of packages and said something in Yoruba. I only understood the words 'Awolowo' and 'cotton bale' and from the way the college boy jotted it down in his notebook, they needed another one. The rat crusher began stuffing the packages into the cotton bale and I dropped to the floor, lathered in sweat.

    After a few minutes, I paddled through the urine to the end of the gap. The voices were muffled inside the hut. I took five steps to the gate and arrived at the same time as the rat flattener coming the other way.

    'Excuse me,' I said and he stepped to one side. I passed through. A hand came down on my shoulder and took a big handful of me in a grip with some kind of built-in steel clip. It spun me round and sent me back through the gate and I hit the Nissen hut face first.

    A steel baseball bat was the minimum requirement for handling this specimen and I had a set of house keys.

    A part of my brain with a sense of humour reminded me to put everything I'd got into the first assault and not to go for the head. I looked at the head that I wasn't supposed to hit and it looked back with eyes that told me it had a cranium filled with solid bone. I put enough beef into a right hook to his heart to have put a pit pony out of the game for life and I got a coat hanger grin back from my opponent. He balled his fist and weighed it on the end of his arm like a sack of bolts. My jawline suddenly felt like the finest crystal. I held my good hand up in a gesture of surrender and he picked me up, tucked me under his arm and carried me head first into the hut, where he threw me in the bath.