Blood Is Dirt (6 page)

Nobody misses love walking into a room.

Heike was self-conscious. She knew the attention she was getting and she knew I was there watching her get it. I now realized that she hadn't let me into the sanctity of her workplace for the simple reason of a cheap job. There were messages. How to read them, that was the thing. There was no doubt that Gerhard had got himself all atremble with Heike in the room, but what was I there for? Was this Heike telling Gerhard, ‘This is my man, back off'? Was Heike telling me, ‘I'm still attractive, watch your step'? This could be Heike giving Bagado and I a break, knowing we needed the money, or it could be a little punishment, a helping of self-knowledge.

I didn't think Heike was going to try anything on with Gerhard. He seemed too reasonable and she'd already run that one past me with another guy she'd worked with—Wolfgang. They'd gone back to Berlin together after some ugly business of mine had spilled over into our private life. Wolfgang had been no match for her. When she'd disappointed him he'd cried in the street, sat on the edge of the pavement with his elbows on his knees and his fists banged into the side of his head and added to the rains in the gutter—inconsolable.

I'd spent some time thinking about Wolfgang's scene while Heike slept beside me with the sweat of sex still on us. She'd always accused me of holding things back from her, not letting her in, building up walls around myself. Maybe she was right and I was just doing some self-protection, making sure I didn't end up crouched in a street somewhere making mud out of dust.

‘Bruce?'

I looked up to find three pairs of eyes on me. Bagado's were the friendliest.

‘What was the question?' I asked. ‘I was thinking of the good god Orishala.'

‘There was no question,' said Gerhard, sounding German for the first time, and looking more triumphant than he should have been.

‘You were looking strange,' said Heike.

‘You're sending me up country to find out why Orishala is angry and you think
I
look strange?'

‘Yes,' said Gerhard, smiling and walking behind his desk to sit in his leather swivel chair, ‘I see your point.'

Heike's eyes remained wide open, two divots of concern on her forehead, looking good with no make-up, no perfume, just with an African pin I'd bought for her up in Abomey in her hair and a light tan. She softened her mouth into a smile and her teeth showed white against her dark lips with the defined cupid's bow. Heike wasn't a model beauty. She had too much intelligence and resilience in her features for that—you'd take your eye off the clothes—but I hadn't met the guy who wouldn't sit up straight for her.

Bagado had released his face from his grasp now that the sex had subsided in the room and was staring at a wooden African head on Gerhard's desk, being patient, which was one of his great strengths. Bagado and Heike had become good friends over the last few years. She'd conveniently forgotten how he'd led me off the winding path of my bread-and-butter business work and into the jungle of more sinister crimes. He wasn't just my partner. He had a much higher status than that. He was a husband, a father and a totally honourable man. I was the lover, the bastard and as dependable as an island of weed in a mangrove swamp.

Heike crossed her legs and cued Bagado.

‘What do you want us to do, M Gerhard?'

‘We respect Orishala,' said Gerhard, ‘but we are not convinced. I want you to find out what is happening across the border. I can't, and I don't want to involve my own people. They have enough trouble in Benin. You will have to be discreet. You'll have to come up with your own reasons for being over there. Anything that doesn't bear the agency's name. Talk to our people in Kétou if you like, they may have something to add.
Sie haben den Akten, bitte, Heike.'

Heike gave him some files and he stood them on end and tapped the desk.

‘Perhaps, first, we should talk about money,' he said. ‘Unless, of course, you don't want the job.'

‘We're interested,' I said. ‘The money, well, the money's got a little complicated since devaluation. We used to charge a hundred thousand CFA a day for the two of us.' A wince shot across Gerhard's brow like a snake across tarmac. ‘We've been finding it difficult to double our rate since devaluation. But that's what we'd like to do. Two hundred thousand a day plus expenses.'

‘Impossible,' said Gerhard. ‘I can't justify that. I have no budget for private investigations, you understand.'

‘You have contingency, don't you, Gerhard?'

‘Yes, but you are asking me to pay more than three hundred dollars a day which is my budget for the Kétou station,
and
this is not our business. Our mandate is for Benin.'

‘But it affects you.'

‘Yes, but when the accountants ask, “What is this thousand dollars?” I have to give an answer within the mandate or I have to ask
my
boss in Berlin to... to... pacify the money men. I can't do that very often in a year. I need to keep favours in reserve.'

‘Don't want to use them up early on?'

‘Precisely.'

‘What sort of money did you have in mind?'

‘That
for the whole job... including expenses.'

‘Two hundred thousand? You've got to be kidding. Three hundred and seventy-five dollars for the lot? It'll cost seventy-five dollars to get up there and back. Three-day job. A hundred dollars a day. Fifty dollars each if we don't eat, sleep or bribe anyone. That's very little, Gerhard. That's so little...'

‘You might as well do it for free?' he said, finding some cheek to slap me with.

‘Not
that
little.'

‘Two hundred and fifty thousand is my limit.'

I looked long and hard into his unflinching, blue, Aryan eyes. The sort that had spent their youth looking out over cornfields and thinking of Valhalla. There wasn't even a hairline crack of pity in their blue glassiness. I felt Heike's tension. She was sitting three feet from me and looked ready to snap up like a roller blind any second. She hated talking about money. I did it so rarely I loved it.

‘Gerhard, I don't know what Heike's told you about me. I can be difficult. Unconventional. In this case, I believe your intentions are good. I know Heike's are. If it wasn't for her we wouldn't be here so, for that, and because of the charitable nature of the work, we'll do it. But you mentioned favours earlier, favours from your boss. Favours are something I'm big on. Favours are my kind of barter system. I'll do this job for two hundred and fifty thousand and one favour.'

‘What is this favour?'

I thought I might get it over with now and tell him to keep his Teuton muscle out of Heike's fishing limits and go and be handsome, stable and bossy elsewhere. But that would not be cool.

‘I don't know, Gerhard. It'll come to me. It won't be anything dangerous or unpleasant. It won't involve money out of your precious budget. You might have to put yourself out a little, that's all. Are we on?'

Gerhard liked it. He leaned across his desk like a winner and shook hands as if he was crushing beer tins. He handed me the file. We all stood and Heike shook herself out. Gerhard's jaw muscles were as bunched as a chipmunk's cheeks.

We read the file in Heike's office. It was a longer version of what Gerhard had covered in the meeting. Heike walked us to the car. When I kissed her goodbye our noses somehow got in the way, which they hadn't done before. She touched me on the shoulder as I got in the car. I looked back and her face crumpled a little with pity or worry, I couldn't decide. Things had been smooth for just over a year, and now, since this morning, I could sense the levels changing, could feel myself being brought to the edge of something.

I checked the camera for film, there was still some in. We bought some whisky and mineral water and drove north in the late afternoon.

It was hot enough for the sweat to curl round the back of my ears like a little girl's silky hair. Bagado opened up his mac a little and let the hair-dryer-air warm his flat belly. I hadn't found the day that could make Bagado sweat. His mother called him her little lizard because he always had to be out in the sun. He'd been with the police in both Paris and London. The cold and a desire to find a wife had driven him back, and in that order. He still had nightmares about London—being down on the Thames on a January afternoon with an east wind direct from Siberia blowing up the estuary. I just had to say ‘chill factor' to him and he'd go into the foetal position.

This was Bagado's season. The dry season, when the heat squirmed up off the tarmac and the beaten earth so that after two minutes out in it a white man would feel sure he'd eaten a bad prawn somewhere. The abnormal rains had unsettled him. He didn't like rains. They brought malaria with them and he always caught it—hit
him
like a flu bug, nearly killed me, gave me a headache like the earth must have had when the Grand Canyon opened up.

‘What did you think of our German friend?' asked Bagado.

‘Looked more of a director for Mercedes or Siemens than an aid agency.'

‘He wasn't wearing any socks.'

‘Well, yeah, apart from that.'

‘Heike looked... very pretty,' he said. Bagado had a liking for non sequiturs. He looked out of the window, as if there was anything out there that could interest him. Trees, earth, more trees.

‘Yes,' I agreed.

We carried on in a silence that not even a town called Pobé could break.

‘She seems to like him,' said Bagado, and then, ‘Gerhard,' as an afterthought.

‘That's a shame,' I said.

‘Oh, why's that?'

‘Because he's a vain, arrogant, opinionated, self-centred fake-liberal with the sensitivity of an Alabaman cockfighter,' I said, as calm as a triangle of cucumber sandwich.

‘I thought he handled
us
very well.'

‘Did you?'

‘Two hundred and fifty thousand for all this talent.'

‘Plus the favour. You've no idea how expensive that favour's going to be.'

‘You said no money.'

‘Services, Bagado, services.'

‘I see.'

Another half hour went past, the car packed tight with the unsaid thing.

‘So what did Bondougou say?' I asked. Bagado looked blank. ‘You tore my ears off before that meeting and now you don't remember?'

‘I remember,' he said, quietly so that my nerve quivered. ‘Bondougou offered me my job back.'

‘He wants you on the inside pissing out and you told him where to go...' Bagado didn't respond. ‘You did tell him where to go, Bagado?'

‘The way he put it was that since the trouble in Togo and with the regime in Nigeria, Cotonou has become the new business centre. More business, more money, more crime.'

‘And if there's anybody who should know about crime, Bondougou should. He's a one-man gangland.'

‘The job offer is political. The politicians want a safe place. They don't, for instance, want dead British shipbrokers with their mouths cut off lying face down across the railway tracks. Bondougou has to make a show of getting things done. The Cotonou force is short of the right kind of manpower and, for a change, they have money to spend. I am one of the most experienced people in Benin.'

Bondougou was right. The Togolese capital, Lomé, had been an important centre of the business community in West Africa. It was a free port with hard currency, good restaurants, smart hotels and a congenial atmosphere. It had also been the largest exporter of gold along this coast and it didn't even have a gold-mine. There'd been political problems, multiparty democracy riots and one day the army had opened fire indiscriminately on a crowd of civilians and hundreds had been killed or injured. In the three days after the incident three hundred and fifty thousand people left Togo for Benin. Lomé was a ghost town now, the people who remained imposed their own curfew. All the business was in Cotonou, which was itself a free port and had hard currency too, but more important, the army didn't feel the need to impose its authority on the civilian government, something that had happened in Nigeria. There, the elections had been annulled, pressure applied on the press, and key figures put under house arrest. On top of that there were strikes, petrol shortages, piles of stinking refuse in the streets and the odd corpse. The locals were getting very restless.

Bondougou needed policemen in Benin, good ones, who could handle big numbers and get the politicians off his back. The only thing he'd never liked about Bagado was that the man didn't have a corrupt cell in his body. That made Bondougou nervous. He didn't know where Bagado was coming from and he could never rely on him to keep his mouth shut at the right time.

‘Has Bondougou told you your duties?'

‘In outline. Nothing specific.'

‘But we know there's no such thing as a gift from Bondougou. Did you talk about Napier Briggs?'

‘No. He started off playing the patriotic card. He teased me about working for the white man. He told me I had more important things to do for my country. He called me
un caniche Parisien.
A Parisian poodle. He made it sound as if I'd thrown it all in for the money. I felt like showing him our accounts. I felt like reminding him why I lost my job in the first place. It made me very, what's that word Brian used, you know, my detective friend in London... narked. That was it. He go' me bloody narked.' Bagado finished with a perfect glottal stop in his imitation South London accent.

‘Bondougou is a...'

‘We know what Bondougou is.'

‘Bondougou is the biggest bastard in the Gulf of Guinea. You go work for him again and you know where you'll end up...'

‘The same place as last time.'

‘Uh-uh, Bagado, no way, not the shitheap this time. You won't just get fired
this time...'