Blood is Dirt

‘Yes.’

How does an unregistered company import goods from overseas?’

‘We’re talking about Nigeria, my friend, not Benin. You couldn’t do it here, but over there …’

‘You pay your money,’ I said.

‘So your next expensive call was to …?’

‘Colonel Adjeokuta, the head of the four-one-nine squad, the man I offered to put Mr Briggs in touch with. He hadn’t heard of Chemiclean, but he was going to make it his business to find out if there was anybody in his department who had. He wasn’t surprised about the Benin connection on the second scam. There’s been a number of those recently.’

‘They never stop, these guys.’

‘It costs a stamp and an envelope and there’s a sucker born every day,’ said Bagado. ‘So what happened to you last night?’

‘Do I look that bad?’

‘No worse than usual, but you said you were going to see Napier at the Hotel du Lac. Did you?’

‘I did. He got a call from the boys while I was there saying they wanted to give him his money back.’

Bagado chuckled to himself.

‘So we went and had a look.’

‘You did what?’ he said, setting solid on the rail as if he’d seen a train coming. ‘What did you want to go and do a thing like that for, he wasn’t even a …’

‘Yeah, yeah, Bagado. I know. He offered me ten grand to hold his hand. Dollars. He said there was a big man who’d guaranteed his personal safety. I went because if I hadn’t he’d have gone by himself and …’

‘Got himself killed.’

‘Point taken.’

I told him how it had happened.

‘Now that’s a problem,’ he said, and we did a quick stick-and-paste job on what were going to tell Bondougou if he was predictable enough to ask what the hell we were doing out on the railway tracks at that hour of the morning.

Commandant Bondougou arrived a little after 8.30 a.m. and stood over the dead body with his hat in his armpit. His head was fat and broad with the eyes widely spaced, as sinister as a halloween pumpkin. He passed a hand over his shaved head and plugged a finger and thumb in each of his nostrils to keep his brain in neutral. A junior policeman muttered something. He glanced Bagado’s way and looked as if he’d spit if he could be bothered to drag up the phlegm. I wouldn’t have liked to rely on him for an introduction to Cotonou society, we were lower than bilharzia on his dance card. We kept our distance.

An ambulance arrived. The policemen rolled the body over and stepped back in formation horror. All we could see between their legs was the mass of blood which had poured down Napier’s chest and was now clogged with dust and insects. Bondougou checked Napier’s wrists for a watch and his pockets for money. Nothing. He found a passport in the jacket and opened it. A card fluttered out which a junior pounced on. Bondougou beckoned us over. It was one of our cards. We looked down at Napier. It was a shock.

Around his neck was a length of rope and two knots evenly spaced along it. It must have been used to squeeze the eyeballs out of their sockets because two black holes stared out of Napier’s face. From his ears, protruding about two inches, were the ends of what must have been two six-inch nails. Most horrific of all was his mouth. It gave him the appearance of an African mask because it was set in a terrible grimace-all teeth and gums. Too many teeth, too much gum and too black inside. Whoever had picked him up in the cocotiers last night had hacked out his tongue and then used the knife to cut off Napier Briggs’s mouth.

Commandant Bondougou released us at lunchtime. I’d been lucky not to get too much of his ugly attention. Bagado had caught most of that. I’d been lying on a bench outside his office and the few occasions the door had opened I’d seen a surprisingly tranquil scene. Bondougou slouched with his tunic open, his gut humped up under a string vest, a toothpick jammed between his teeth which he was sucking on when he wasn’t talking. Bagado upright in a chair, his mac rucked up on his shoulders, his head still, listening.

We’d both written up short and inconclusive statements about our meeting with Napier Briggs which, after our mulling, fortunately matched. We left the station and picked up some sandwiches at La Gerbe d’Or patisserie and drove thirty kilometres east, nose to tail with a thirty-five-ton Titan, to the Benin capital Porto Novo, for our meeting with Heike’s boss.

We parked in the agency’s compound, empty except for Heike’s Pathfinder and a Land Cruiser, just before 2 p.m. I broke the silence by asking Bagado if he’d mind me doing the talking during the meeting.

‘White man to white man, you mean?’

‘No, it’s just that we have a habit of shouting each other down. I think it’d look better if one of us took control to start with until the meeting turns into a free-for-all. I’m volunteering.’

‘Or insisting?’

‘No. I like to talk. You’re a good listener.’

‘This isn’t what you British would call excluding me in? I’ve been in those meetings before. Token nigger in the corner whose word and opinion doesn’t count.’

We stopped in the car park and faced off.

‘What’s brought this on?’ I asked.

‘Since when have you been or felt excluded?’

‘I didn’t like the way you assumed to be boss.’

‘I have not assumed that. You want to control the meeting, that’s fine.’

Bagado shook his head. He put his hands in his mac pockets and slumped. He didn’t like himself for some reason.

‘What’s going on, Bagado?’ I asked, putting a hand on his shoulder.

‘Bondougou said something to you?’

‘Let’s do this meeting,’ he said, morose, looking at the dust on his shoes. ‘You do the talking. You’re right. I’m a listener. I listen too much.’

Gerhard’s office was as large and cool as Gerhard Lehrner himself. The man had all his blond hair on his head and all of his stomach behind his belt, even though Heike had told me he was on the nearside of fifty and had lost one wife to Africa – not killed, just couldn’t take it. He disposed of most preconceptions Englishmen drag up when they hear they’re about to meet a German. He had blue eyes in an uncreased face and a soft, full-lipped mouth which made him look kind to strangers, especially if they were women. He was courteous. He called me by my Christian name. He sat on the front edge of his desk so there were no barriers between us and revealed that he wasn’t wearing any socks under his brown loafers. He spoke perfect English and didn’t sound as if he was keen on extracting something without anaesthetic.

Heike wasn’t in on the meeting, otherwise I might have had to disguise the fact that Gerhard didn’t strike me as a bad guy at all. This, despite the fact that his first question was not one you’d come across in Trivial Pursuit.

‘What can you tell me about the Yoruba god, Orishala?’

Bagado smiled benignly and looked at me as if I’d recently vacated the Yoruba mythology chair at Lagos University. I waved him through.

‘Orishala,’ said Bagado, slitting his eyes, looking through the thin Venetian blinds of the window for inspiration and starting to sound like a lecturer with a roomful of captured arseholes to talk to, ‘is the creator god of the Yoruba. He’s not the supreme god. That is Olorun, “owner of the sky” and creator and judge of man. But the two are connected. In the beginning Olorun gave Orishala the task of creating firm ground out of the water and marsh that existed all around. To do this Orishala was given a pigeon, a hen and a snail shell full of earth. Orishala emptied the snail shell and the two birds scratched around and spread the earth over the marsh so that it became dry land.

‘Later on, Orishala made plants and people but, this is the important bit, he could only shape people. Olorun being the supreme god was the only one who could invest them with life. Orishala wanted to know how Olorun did this, but whenever he spied on him, Olorun would make him fall asleep. This made Orishala unpredictable so that when he saw human beings they would sometimes remind him of his frustration and the powerlessness he felt in his work. It could make him angry, incensed that he didn’t hold the ultimate power of life and because he could shape people he would take revenge by deforming them. This is the Yoruba people’s explanation for occasional aberrations.’

‘I’ve always liked that part about the pigeon, the hen and the snail shell,’ said Gerhard, letting us know he was on top of it all along and getting within a hair of thanking Bagado for handing in a good piece of prep. It was a line that wiped out previous goodwill and made me feel more expensive than I had done yesterday.

‘We have a small project in a town called Kétou just over a hundred kilometres north of Porto Novo. We’re very close to the Nigerian border. The project is agricultural but we have a medical service there too. Pregnant women have been coming from a small village called Akata across the border. They’re very frightened pregnant women. They’ve been talking about the anger of the god Orishala. Five women from the village have already given birth to deformed babies. They’ve been telling my staff about how their livestock are sick and their crops are dying.’

There was a knock on the door. Heike came in. Gerhard didn’t need to stand up, suck in his gut and swell his pecs but he did it anyway. His blue eyes flashed across the room like police lights at night. Now I knew at least one of the reasons why we’d got the job and that made me feel even less cheap. Bagado was leaning forward with his thumb on his chin and two fingers astride the ridge he had coming down his forehead to the bridge of his nose, squeezing.

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.