Instruments Of Darkness (33 page)

    I phoned Bagado and left the house by the same route as I'd arrived. I drove to Jack's house, trying to kill a mosquito that I could hear whining in my ear with the insistence of an untrapped idea.

Chapter 28

    As I passed the wall to the side of Jack's house I could see a low light in his bedroom and the rest of the house in darkness. I parked behind the house several streets down, where local people sat outside a bar drinking beer and jiving in their seats to music. I took the gun out, unscrewed the silencer which I put in my pocket and jammed the gun in the waistband of my jeans, folding the T-shirt over it. I walked around Jack's house and listened. Everybody had been given the night off. I hopped over the wall, which didn't do the ribs any good, and nearly emasculated myself on the gun. I let myself in at the back of the house through the double doors of the dining room. What noise I made was drowned by the air-conditioner breathing out of Jack's room into a night thick with wet heat, cicada noise and bamboo growing audibly in the garden.

    I ran up the carpeted stairs, screwing the silencer on the gun, and padded down the marble-tiled corridor, the air-conditioner's breathing getting louder and louder. Above the noise came a sound of methodical, concentrated grunting and a bedstead bucking against the wall. I waited until the condenser in the air-conditioner cut in with a metallic whingeing and opened the door.

    Jack was naked with his back to the door, kneeling on the bed, his buttocks pumping and squeezing as he thrust at the raised white bottom of a woman in front of him. His dark hand was stark against the creamy white skin where he gripped her hip. Her blonde head lay on the pillow, her arms thrown out on either side, her hands clenching wads of sheet, her back sloping up, her sex abandoned to the vehemence of Jack's powerful and quickening shunts. Their moist skins slapped together. Jack's breathing grew harder and a low growl came from the woman's throat. I placed the barrel of the silencer on the nape of Jack's neck. He shuddered to a halt, his back quivering with the lost rhythm.

    'Come on!' said the woman, thrusting her bottom back. 'Come on, for God's sake!'

    'You won't be doing that for a long time, Jack,' I said.

    'I hope that's a gun, Bruce. I'm not the sharing type.'

    'I'm not finding things so funny these days.'

    'Don't go losing your sense of humour on me…'

    'Shut up, Jack,' I said quietly, and he did.

    As soon as the woman heard an alien, voice in the room, she'd thrown herself forward from Jack and turned, scrabbling for the sheet to cover herself. It was Elizabeth Harvey. Her hair no longer piled high on her head but torn apart like a hayrick in a gale.

    'Success at last,' I said, prodding Jack with the gun.

    'Nearly.'

    'Into the bathroom please, Mrs Harvey,' I said. She skipped in there, sporting Jack's paw marks on her hips. I told Jack to get dressed.

    'It's time to see what you and Charlie have got to say to each other.'

    As I shut the bathroom door, Elizabeth Harvey opened her lips to show me those sloping back teeth of hers. There was no fear in her, but her eyes were black with humiliation and anger. I closed the heavy mahogany bathroom door and locked it. That was one guest list I was never going to get on.

    Jack limped around the room picking up his clothes, his semi-erect penis making him look foolish. Mrs Harvey's clothes lay neatly folded on a chair weighed down by a densely packed purse. There'd been no passionate ravishment in
her
corner.

    Jack was dressed. I stood in front of him and held the gun in his gut. I raised my knee so hard into his groin that he came off the floor and slid backwards off my leg on to the polished tiles where he held his aching genitals and bit the air.

    'That's for involving Heike in this business.'

    I followed up by drilling a penalty kick into his partially protected testicles and he slid across the floor, cracking his head on the wardrobe.

    'And that's for involving me in this business.'

    I picked him up by the scruff of his shirt and hauled him out of the room, pushing him down the corridor and stairs, kicking him out on to the portico and dragging him to his car. I let him squirm on the floor for a few minutes until his breath stopped coming out in lumps, and then I kicked him in the legs until he stood up. I pushed him into the passenger seat and shoved him over the gear shift into the driver's seat.

    Jack drove down the coast road with a gun under his ribs and his eyes wincing from his aching, undischarged testicles. To the left, the town was very quiet and to the right, the sea barely turned in a wave. There was nobody out and no cars on the road. A tyre burned where the road forked at the Mobil garage. As we passed the Sarakawa, I looked back and saw, far behind us, a single set of headlights.

    'I'm sorry,' said Jack, gnawing at his lower lip trying to think how to get started.

    'I believe you.'

    'OK, you're right,' he said, thinking again, looking for a way in. 'I'm not sorry.'

    'Go on, Jack, bare your bleeding heart and try not to make me puke.'

    'Why the fuck d'you have to poke your nose in so far?'

    'Why did you stick my nose in it in the first place?'

    'Because you were there,' he said, and that was enough to set me off.

    'Jack,' I said, staring out of the windscreen, 'you've got an honesty span of about three words. Maybe you started out in life thinking straight, I don't know, but somebody made the big mistake of teaching you how to speak and you picked up a vocabulary of concentrated shit to draw on. And since then, when you haven't been balls-out lying, you've been persuading yourself, and all the poor bastards who've bothered to listen, that you're OK, that you're as big on the inside as you are on your feet. But there's nothing there, is there, Jack? Maybe that's why you never sleep with the same woman twice. It's not because you get bored easily. It's because they find out they've been had. Been had by one of the hollow men, a shit-filled rubber doll, a stupid prick on the end of a bladder.'

    'Buzz me when you're finished/ he said, bored.

    'Don't tell me you're sorry, or you're not sorry. I don't want to know. Like all the other stuff that comes out of you, it doesn't mean anything. You shoved me in it with Madame Severnou because you didn't want to get dirt down your own shirt front. You threw me into the Kershaw business to get me away from the rice and to keep whatever information there was around coming your way. But you don't tell the gofer anything, you just use him to keep all the nasty stuff away. You're chicken. Jack, corn-fed, yellow-belly with skimmed milk for blood in your veins. All that crap about "sometimes I think you're my brother, other times my son" - it's just video pap, soap bubbles - you'd tip your brother and your son into a meat grinder if it was going to save your ass.'

    Jack pulled up on the roundabout by the port for a road block - not a police or a military road block but a multi-party democracy road block. A young man stuck his head in the window and took a good look in the car.

    'What do you want?' I asked.

    'You give us something. Show you support democracy.'

    'Open the barrier.'

    'You give us something first.'

    'I give you nothing.'

    'Maybe we think you love the President,' he said, taking out a knife.

    'That's an undemocratic-looking knife you've got there,' I said.

    'You pay, yovo!' he said through tight lips.

    This is my undemocratic-looking gun,' I said, putting the muzzle of the gun into the eyeball of the young man. 'Open the barrier!'

    He shouted something and two boys pulled away the rocks and tyres in the road.

    'Vive le Mouvement Togolais pour la Démocratie,
' I said and waved.

    The headlights behind us had disappeared.

    Jack buzzed the window up and we returned to our air-conditioned bubble. A few minutes later, we pulled over to cross the wasteland to Charlie's bar. I looked back at the road and a car drove past towards Cotonou, and then slowed and took the right turn to A1 Fresco's, keeping parallel with us across the wasteland.

    'Two hundred thousand dollars,' said Jack, with a green tinge across his features from the luminous dashboard.

    'You're going to buy me like you buy your women?'

    'It's all about money, isn't it?'

    'You seem to think it is. What's two hundred thousand dollars?'

    'Half the money from the heroin deal.'

    'Sounds like you're getting ripped off.'

    'I'll throw in the profit from the rice on top. Thirty- five thousand.'

    'What do I have to do?'

    'Let me drive back home. Forget all about it.'

    'What about Heike?'

    'I'll sort that out.'

    'Just like you sorted Madame Severnou out,' I said. 'Let's face it together, Jack - sorting out is not one of your talents. We're driving along and you think it's still all nicey-nicey, don't you, Jack? You think your part of the deal's done and you're going to get paid just like you do in any ordinary piece of business.

    'But even ordinary business screws up. Product gets lost. People don't pay. Cheques bounce. But you've always got the law to fall back on. The only thing is, now you're outside the law and we both know that you're not a hard enough man to provide your own law. That's why you employ me to do your dirty work for you in Cotonou. You haven't got the stomach for it. You want to be liked too much. Smiling Jack of the Gold Coast.

    'But people don't laugh very much when they're dealing drugs. The money's too big. They get a sudden feeling they don't like you, don't like your smiling face, don't like the way they have to pay you for doing not very much, don't like the way you've become an expensive, big-mouthed overhead that cuts into their percentage and then they just think: "Let's shut him down, wet him, clip him, whack him, waste him, top him, max him, rub him out." You ever wonder why these people have so many different ways of saying the same thing? It's because they do it everyday and they get bored of saying the word "kill".

    'So before you start offering me part of your share, you better make sure you've got the balls to make him give it to you. You didn't have the balls to make Madame Severnou give you back your fifty million, did you? But maybe you've got a better chance with Charlie than you have with her. She's got about as much respect for Iron Jack as a whore for a sad-arsed punter.'

    Jack blinked and passed a dry tongue over his lips, our bodies rocked together as the car dipped and rolled over the mud road, his cheeks shook.

    'You don't know shit,' he said.

    The car that had been making its way to A1 Fresco's had stopped, its lights cut; I couldn't see if anybody got out.

    Jack and I cruised through the barrier of Charlie's compound at 10.30. The
gardien
had lifted the red and white pole as soon as he had seen Jack's car. The restaurant and bar were shut. We walked down towards the sea and crossed in front of the bar to the door at the side of Charlie's house. Jack tried the door, which opened.

    The light coned down on to the jug which was still in the hall, the flower with the excited comb not looking as interested in life as it had before. I glanced down as I stepped in and sensed a movement. Jack wasn't in my line of sight any more. I angled the gun towards him and felt something hard nudge up behind my ear. That was when I knew the difference between a finger with a thimble on the end of it and a large-gauged handgun with a sight on the barrel.

    'Know what this is?' asked Charlie.

    'A gun?' I hazarded.

    'That's right, Brucey, but what type?'

    'A Smith and Wesson Schlong?'

    'Wise ass. It's a Colt Python.'

    'That's marketing for you,' I said. 'Nobody's going to buy a Colt Asp.'

    'Still feeling clever, huh? If I shoot this it'll take your head off. If I hit you with it you might wake up for Christmas.'

    'All right, you persuaded me. I'm dumb.'

    'Moses is here. Says you'll explain everything. He's been sweating it out in the genny house the last twenty- four hours. Let's have the gun.'

    I handed him the gun and walked down the corridor, smelling a familiar perfume. He jabbed me into the living room and pushed me down on to a sofa. Jack relaxed in the middle of the sofa opposite. Charlie fixed a couple of drinks. One wasn't for me.

    'Yvette here?' I asked.

    'What's it to you?' snarled Charlie.

    He put my gun down on the glass tabletop and sat down along the sofa from me, his leg crooked up and his tongue licking the whisky off his dark lips.

    'Let's go, Bru - shoot.'

    'Where do you want me to start?'

    'Let's start with why you got Moses snooping around and why you come here with a gun up Jack's ass.'

    'Moses loves the beach.'

    'Don't fuck with me, Bruce,' he said in that cold, quiet voice that came off the peg whenever I was in the room.

    'Moses was staking you out. I came here with "a gun up Jack's ass" because I wanted to hear the two of you discussing your cotton shipment out of Lagos tonight.'

    Jack slapped his leg and leant back on the sofa giggling.

    'You getting something out of this whisky I'm not?' asked Charlie, moving his eyes over Jack without turning his head.

    Jack sat back, threw his arm along the back of the sofa and closed his mouth.

    'What the fuck business is it of yours what I do with cotton out of Lagos?'

    'It's not my business,' said. 'It's yours, and that's bad news for you.'

    'What's this asshole talking about?' Charlie asked Jack, and Jack played dumb with all the natural talent he possessed. 'Bru, we don't know what you're talking about. Start at the beginning. It's easier for us.' Charlie looked at me with mock-enthusiasm and waved the big black hole of the gun barrel at me along the back of the sofa.