Instruments Of Darkness (31 page)

    Madame Severnou stood with her jewelled hands clasped in front of her. The bright blue and yellow cloth of her dress was new and her headpiece in the same material looked like an exotic bird landing. Her face, however, was still. Her unblinking stare permafrosted the sweat-filled air. Her mouth was open a crack and her tongue rested between her teeth.

    'Kill him,' she said, without moving her lips, and her tongue disappeared.

Chapter 26

    I was relieved to find that there wasn't an immediate reaction to this command. From my position of towering strength, lying in the bath with rice up my sweaty forearms, I could see the two college boys in their white shirts, grey slacks and Gucci loafers had the kind of body language I liked - very reluctant. The bone-headed, rat-flattening rice porter, with the body recently panel beaten out of half-inch bronze sheeting, didn't have any body language. He was just a natural, absent-minded, killing sort of a guy.

    There was a long pause which was about to expand into a silence when one of the college boys said: 'Who?' which just seemed to be a way of filling time and space because there were no options.

    'Dayo,' said Madame Severnou, cocking her head at the obvious candidate.

    'How?' said the other college boy.

    'I go break his neck,' said Dayo, holding up a pair of unartistic hands that would have found the task trifling.

    'What about the body?'

    'Throw it in the lagoon,' said Madame Severnou.

    Messrs Harvard and Yale didn't like it. Their intelligent faces looked for a way out. Dayo spat on his hands. This was his kind of work. That was what those hands had been made for.

    'It's not so easy/ the boys said together.

    'It's very difficult to throw big things away/ I said. 'You get seen.'

    'Shut up/ said Madame Severnou, her voice hitting a very flat high C and she flung her heavy hand out in my direction and half a pound of gold slashed across my face. It was like getting hit with a brick. My teeth tore into the inside of my cheek and blood spilled on to my chin.

    'He has to be killed. He's seen everything,' she said.

    'But not now.'

    'We kill him now and we have to get rid of him. He'll stink within hours.'

    'We get rid of him and we get seen, or his body's found.'

    'A white man's body in the lagoon is big trouble.'

    'And the shipment goes tomorrow. Why not keep it quiet until then?'

    It was a virtuoso performance by the college debating team and Madame Severnou was vicious, mean and tough but not stupid. She thought for a few minutes while I decided how long it would be before Bagado showed this crowd his nine-millimetre, semi-automatic finger.

    'OK,' said Madame Severnou, drawing out the 'K'. 'Keep him here tonight. Dayo and you stay-' She pointed to one of the boys. 'You and I will bring two more cotton bales tomorrow. One for these packages and the other for him. We load him on the ship and put him over the side at sea. No problem.'

    And it wouldn't be, the college boys loved it, no dirty work. Dayo was disappointed and slouched off to the door, leant against it and looked out into the courtyard like a spoilt kid. Madame Severnou thought of something else.

    'How did you get here?'

    'Taxi.'

    The jewelled hand flashed in the corner of my eye, my head kicked back. The inside of my mouth was all ploughed up. Dayo grabbed the front of my shirt and held me up to his face and I bubbled blood at him. Madame Severnou tapped him on the shoulder and said something in Yoruba, he dropped me and left the hut, clipping the door frame with his shoulder and rocking the whole structure.

    Behind my head, in the alleyway, I heard Bagado pulling back the trigger of his thumb. The trick wasn't so effective front on, even to someone of Dayo's academic standing. There was the sound of someone being squeezed very hard and Dayo reappeared in the doorway with Bagado under his arm, limp as a roll of cheap carpeting. He dropped him by the bath and Bagado clawed his way up to my level.

    'Who is he?' said Madame Severnou.

    'My driver.'

    'Where's Moses?'

    'Sick.'

    Madame Severnou's face stilled again, her lids seemed to puff out and her eyes slitted. After a minute's silence in which nobody moved, not even the rats, Madame Severnou spoke.

    'I told Jack Obuasi you big mistake.'

    'Jack's never been a great listener.'

    'If my men in Cotonou kill you from start, we no have problem we have now.'

    'Is that why you sent them?'

    'Only to frighten small and…' she stopped herself.

    '… and take some more money?'

    'Why not?'

    'Jack was upset.'

    'Jack,' she said, as if it was something cockroaches fed on. 'He come tellin' me you lookin' for Kershaw man now. Keepin' you away from this thing we doin' here. Now look' - she pointed at me and looked up at the college boys - 'this what happen when Mister Jack done thinkin'.'

    'Sounds like you've got a lot of respect for him.'

    Her eyes swivelled and fastened on Bagado who had taken on the miserable look of the boss's driver who was about to die.

    'Three cotton bales,' she said, and Harvard took his notebook out again.

    'How much heroin did you bring in?' I asked.

    'Beat them,' she said and moved to the door.

    Dayo warmed to this like a pyromaniac with a box of matches and a licence to torch the joint. He hauled me out of the bath and lifted Bagado to his feet. He put the bath on top of a pallet of floor tiles, took an empty pallet and broke off three lengths of wood. He threw two at the college boys. There was a swift crack, our knees buckled and we hit the plastic sheet. We put our hands over our heads and the blows rained down. We rolled on to our sides and the pine planks continued to cut through the air, thudding into us sometimes with a sharper snapping sound if the wood hit a bone close to the surface. The first minute was bad. The pain was new, unexpected and specific. Later, my body reached a plateau of agony above which the nerves and brain were not prepared to go.

    Madame Severnou said something in Yoruba from the doorway. They rolled us on to our fronts. Bagado's raincoat was stripped off, our ankles and knees tied and then our wrists behind our backs. Dayo picked up Bagado by the waistband of his trousers and took him to the store room where the lavatories, bidets and wash basins were stacked to the ceiling and threw him in. Bagado let out a half shout, half scream and then was silent. Dayo came back for me and hurled me into the same room, my forehead connecting with the rim of a toilet bowl. The room tilted and things seemed far off and infused with green. White lights arced in the dark planetarium of my skull and nothing seemed familiar, not even my huge tongue in the vast, unmapped cavern of my mouth.

    The concept of time passing came back as slowly as it took for the picture in my eyes to click sharp without drifting or fish-eyeing. Sweat poured off me into a dark patch where my head made contact with the grit on the concrete floor. Nausea crept up my throat and I breathed it back down. My head was huge and somebody else's, all the joints in my body ground into each other. A weak light came from under the door and over the top of the partition wall. There was the sound of crying in the room. I rolled over and pain shunted down the nerve tracks. Bagado lay with his back to me, his shoulders shaking.

    'Are you all right?' I asked.

    The sobbing became more intense.

    'Are you crying?'

    'I'm laughing.'

    'I didn't hear the punchline.'

    'There's no joke. It's just very bleak… the outlook. I get hysterical. I think my collar bone is broken.'

    A chair scraped, footsteps approached through the pallets next door. A body brushed against some plastic wrapping around the cartons of tiles outside. I rolled back. The door opened, a torch light bounced around the room. The door closed, the footsteps retreated, two voices exchanged something.

    The smooth, rounded, glazed contours of the sanitaryware offered little in the way of comfort and nothing to cut through rope. I squirmed around on the floor looking between the stacked columns for something with an edge. Bagado asked me what I was doing and then told me about the penknife in his sock. I worked my way round to Bagado's feet and with my crushed and split fingers eased the penknife out. We opened it between us and fixed it in Bagado's hand.

    The rope was a very tough kind of hemp and the one and a half inch blade didn't rip into it with chainsaw enthusiasm. Bagado's collar bone, a couple of visits from Dayo, and the awkwardness of the angle meant that after three quarters of an hour we were still not through the rope.

    I reminded Bagado that the inside of a cotton bale is a very warm place to be with a limited supply of oxygen and the only water to look forward to, salty. I strained at my wrists against the rope and felt the strands of hemp snapping. A chair toppled. Bagado stopped sawing. I urged him on. A table leg shifted.

    Bagado forced the blade down. Footsteps neared and then receded and came back again quicker. The hemp snapped. I came up on to my knees. The door handle turned. I stood and leaned against the columns of toilets. The door opened. I picked up a lavatory and in one movement swung it across my body, lifted and slammed the thick rim of the bowl into Dayo's face.

    For a moment, I thought he wouldn't fall but would just give me a last look at his clean white teeth before he put his hand through my chest and tore my spine out through the front. He did fall, straight as a plank, and the back of his head hit the concrete floor and didn't bounce. Something metallic skittered away amongst the pallets.

    I tore the knife out of Bagado's hands and sawed the rope between my knees. The boy who'd stayed with Dayo was muttering Yoruba in a hoarse whisper. I started on the ankle rope and looked round the door jamb and saw the college boy's head outside the hut. He was crouched below the window line. The only light was on the verandah. It shone across the plastic wrapping on the tops of the pallets of floor and wall tiles at the front of the hut. Here in the back it was dark. The boy crawled through the door. I heard his gun's action sliding and the safety snicking off.

    The ropes around my ankles loosened. There was a slap of a hand on plastic. Bagado panted with adrenaline. Sweat dripped off my face and spotted my shirt. A foot made contact with a wooden pallet. A shirt brushed against cardboard cartons. I picked up a handful of six inch by six inch wall tiles. They were thin with sharp corners.

    I crawled out of the store room and frisbeed a wall tile into the far corner of the hut. A silenced gun spat a bullet into the same corner. The boy was to my right, about fifteen feet away, and nervous that whatever was in here had chewed Dayo off and spat him out. His head ducked behind a palletful of tiles about three feet high. Dayo lay at my feet, his gorilla hands empty, the torch by his head, broken. The lavatory with a large chunk missing from the rim lay on its side beyond him. A dark stain edged out in the concrete by his left shoulder.

    The college boy moved again. Stealth was not his best quality. I stayed still, with my back against the wall next to the store room door, and hidden by two pallets of tiles stacked on top of each other about seven feet high. The boy was on the other side, breathing in too much air. I held two wall tiles, one in either hand in the shape of a diamond. His back shifted along the plastic covering of the pallet of tiles. I stood up, my knees didn't crack. His head appeared two feet off the ground, then his shoulders and a leg. He turned his back square to me and brought the gun up in front of him in both hands and rested it on some cartons. I took one step and jammed the two sharp corners of the wall tiles into his face.

    His scream was terrible, starting off as a bellow like a cow in labour and reaching the shriek of a frightened monkey. He twisted round and two shots thumped out of his gun into the roof before it toppled from the back of his hand and he fell backwards into me, tearing at his face. The back of my head cracked into the door jamb, a glancing blow. The college boy bounced off the partition wall, twisting and writhing, his hands at his face and just a high-pitched whine coming from his wide open mouth. I picked up the lavatory bowl next to Dayo and cuffed him across the face with it. He collapsed across a pallet of tiles.

    I dropped the toilet and in the light from the verandah saw that he had pulled one tile out of his right eye, which was punctured, and a clear, gelatinous liquid oozed on to his cheek. The other tile" remained stuck just below the left eye. I dropped to my knees and vomited a gob of bitter mucus on to the floor, where my hand found his gun.

    There was a Stanley knife on one of the pallets of tiles for slashing plastic and I used it to cut Bagado free. On the back of a chair on the verandah was a jacket with a clip of bullets in the pocket for the gun. My keys lay on the table, the car was in the courtyard. A warm wetness oozed from the old wound on the back of my head. Bagado had found his raincoat but couldn't put it on. He had split four packages from the table and was sprinkling heroin around the warehouse like rat poison.

Chapter 27

    It took some time for me to open the gates with a set of fat fingers which felt as if a microsurgeon had attached them to the wrong knuckles. So that by the time I'd scraped not just one, but both car doors getting out of the tight corner of the cul-de-sac, it was first light. Bagado sat with his arm crossed over to his opposite shoulder. We came out of the estate on to an empty highway and rather than go into Lagos continued back to Idiroko. I turned south off the Idiroko road to Ado where we stopped and cleaned ourselves up. There was blood down my shirt and I couldn't cross the border like that. Under my shirt I was almost the same colour as Bagado.

    'Now you know what it's like to be black,' he said.