A Darkening Stain

‘You get involved in events. You get carried away. No objectivity.’

‘Very interesting. Is that it now? Can we…?’

She came around my side of the table. I pushed my chair back and she sat astride me and put her arms around my neck and her lips up to mine.

‘That’s it,’ she said.

‘You know something,’ I said, pushing her top up over her head, finding no bra. ‘Talking about solving crimes. I solved one of Bagado’s yesterday. Five men dead in a ship’s hold. Suffocated, no sign of violence. How did they die? I came up with fresh timber. Then Bagado came within an inch of telling me he wouldn’t mind somebody taking Bondougou out of the game. What does that sound like to you?’

‘Role reversal,’ she said, and pressed my head down on to her breasts.

‘Thanks.’

‘Now shut up.’

I lifted her up on to the table and stripped her panties off. She tore at the front of my trousers. I sucked on her nipples until they were nut hard. She grabbed me and steered me into her and my knees gave at the feel of her soft, wet warmth. I drove into her lifting her off the table, my hands and arms full of her creamy back. She held my face to hers with the back of her hand round my head and rucked up my shirt.

‘Turn the lights off,’ she said. ‘I’m not entertaining the whole street.’

She wrapped her legs around me. I walked to the wall and lashed out at the lights. Half her face appeared in a corner of light from the street. Her head rose and fell against the wall. My trousers sank to the floor with the weight of keys and money and the jolt of each thrust.

‘Just don’t go indifferent on me,’ she said, and dug her heels into my buttocks, urging me on.

8 (#ulink_96875b23-0df9-556c-8194-513fedd03718)

I left Heike sleeping and took a taxi into the Jonquet at midnight. I found the L’ouistiti in front of the taxi rank to Parakou. The bar left you in no doubt as to its intentions. Even the name, to my ear, had a girlie mag, fluffy bra, stripper’s pout to it.

The building’s plasterwork was as flaking and pitted as an old doxy’s make-up and, rather than redo it, they’d just slapped some blue paint on top – gloss, as if that would make it better. Now the paint had started coming off in dermatological skeins so that ‘scabby’ was not being unfair. The lighting, beyond the plastic strips of the fly curtain, was red and sore as if the room had been chafed raw. The girls standing in the rasping light, who weren’t hitting on customers yet, had their smiles up on the shelf with the bottles of grog. They were neither drinking nor smoking. They were talking amongst themselves but not chit-chat. It looked more medicinal than that.

I’d hardly got my leg over the back of the moped when my arms were taken up by a girl on either side, so that trying to pay the driver left me in an Olympic wrestling hold requiring a knot expert. They bundled me towards the entrance. The bar was narrow and stretched a long way back and looked intestinal in the light, the few punters inside ulcerating against the walls.

A sailor type was slumped across two high-backed wooden chairs, leaning on an elbow, his face sweating, his eyes tearful and his Adam’s apple working overtime swallowing bad memories. A girl had a hand in his pocket, massaging his wad. My two girls tried to steer me in there next to him but I sailed on past, heading to the back of the place where there was a big guy sitting on a high stool next to a door. He had to be stoned, the way he was sitting, both legs hanging off the stool, his body doubled over, an elbow on one knee and his head floating in his hand like a nodding dog. He straightened when I hove into his tunnel vision.

‘Charbonnier?’ I asked.

The guy’s lids, heavier than obols, stayed at half mast, so I leaned in on him and gave it to him louder in his ear. He reached over to the door with the speed of a hog-filled anaconda and rapped on it twice, finishing with a flourish and a how-about-that look. I wouldn’t have minded giving him a how-about-this elbow in his what-the-hell mouth, but one of the girls had started work rubbing my already sore penis and I shrugged the two of them off.

Inside there was a small-boned Beninois fellow with an accounts book and a calculator in front of him. He stuck a pen behind his ear and folded his arms.

‘Le blanc? Il est dedans?’ I asked.

He nodded. All these guys had been to some French waiters’ school.

‘Je veux le voir,’ I said

He leaned back and pressed a button on the wall, speedier than his friend. A door buzzed open. A pair of hands was sitting behind a desk. The hands, in a cone of light, were arranging a line of grass on three cigarette papers stuck together. The owner of the hands was in the dark and it took time to get used to the contrast and pick him out and when I did he still hadn’t adjusted the astonishment out of his face.

‘Hi, Jacques,’ I said, getting it quicker than usual.

‘What the fuck are you…?’

‘I got lucky,’ I said. ‘Want me to call you Michel now?’

‘Take a seat,’ he said, going back to his work. ‘I hope you smoke.’

‘I gave up.’

‘Tobacco?’ he asked. ‘There’s no tobacco in this.’

He started to roll the monster spliff which was his bulkhead against a long night of Christ knows what nastiness he had raking through his brain. I took the seat in the hot room across from him, my back to an open netted window. The glow from the desk lamp picked up his thin face, a worn and sweating face that was lined in a way that meant he sneered a lot…probably at himself in the mirror of a morning if he could bear it. He’d lost most of his hair, apart from a few strands he’d combed over the creamy whiteness of his pate. He had a tan line across his forehead from wearing a hat, a Panama that was hanging on the wall behind him.

While he finessed the joint I found my gaze locked on to a framed line drawing on the wall which I thought was a still life of a bowl of fruit, but on closer inspection proved to be an Oriental woman weighing a pair of huge balls and about to fellate an impossibly large cock.

‘That one gets the girls every time,’ he said.

‘On the first train out of here?’

‘You’d be surprised,’ he said, and licked the papers to his joint with a very red and glistening tongue that didn’t look as if it could mind its own business for very long. He smoothed off the spliff and put a twist in the end. He tore a strip off a Marlboro packet, roached it and sat back to admire the craftsmanship.

‘So what brings you to me, M. Medway?’

‘I thought we could have a chat about a mutual friend.’

‘Jean-Luc? No. I don’t talk about Jean-Luc. You think of something else.’

The sweat stood out on his forehead and I felt my own runnelling down my spine.

‘It’s hot in here.’

‘The air con’s broken. It’s going to rain.’

He lit the joint, puffing at it to get it going, and then took a huge drag and held it in for so long he squeaked. He let the smoke out slowly and repeated. His eyes glazed and his face softened to a concentrated luxuriousness.

‘You don’t happen to have any whisky?’

He opened a cabinet, poured me a shot of something and handed over the glass.

‘If you want to talk, you have to smoke as well.’

‘Too paranoid?’ I said.

He leaned over and bug-eyed me.

‘Who?’ he said, and smiled with as close to a good nature as he could get without borrowing a Ronald Reagan mask.

‘Maybe that stuff’s good for you,’ I said. ‘Smoothes you out. Stops your nerves jangling in your ears.’

‘In my ears?’ he asked, nicely stoned now.