Instruments of Darkness

They didn’t bother to search the car at the Benin/Togo border and it was still dark when I left the Togo side of the frontier. I couldn’t make out the sandbar at the mouth of the lagoon at Aneho but by the time I came to the roundabout for Lomé port, it was light. The morning was fresh, unlike my shirt.

After commercial Cotonou, Lomé was a holiday resort. There were European luxury hotels and restaurants which fronted on to the beach and air-conditioned supermarkets with more than tomato purée in them. Most of the buildings had seen paint during the decade and a lot of the roads were metalled and swept clean. There was greenery in the town which backed on to a lagoon traversed by causeways which took you out to the suburbs. Lomé is a freeport where booze and cigarettes are cheaper than anywhere else in the world. Life was a permanent happy hour.

The coast road passed the Hotel de La Paix, which still looked like the architect’s children doctored the plans. It seemed empty. Closer to Lomé on the left was the five-star Hotel Sarakawa with a snake of taxis outside and a fight for rooms on the inside. The sea appeared motionless but didn’t fool anybody. Nobody swam. The currents were well-known killers along this coast.

People were beginning to make their way to market. The polio cripples hauled their torsos up to the traffic lights and arranged their collapsible legs beside them ready for another day in the sun scraping together the money for a meal.

I drove past the 24 Janvier building and Hotel Le Benin, turned right and arrived at the wrought iron gates of the white-pillared pile that Jack Obuasi rented for a million CFA a month. The gardien opened the gates for me and I cruised the botanical gardens up to the house. The drive cut through a manicured jungle of shrubs and bamboo before breaking through a line of palm trees where the lawns started. The two bowling green-sized expanses of grass were rolled and snipped, snipped and rolled, by a gang of gardeners who could have had a football tournament between them.

The house was whiter than a Christmas cake and had a central portico with four fluted pillars. It was the kind of portico that should have had a motto carved in it. Jack favoured La lutte continue. There was an east and a west wing on either side of the portico. Each wing had five bedrooms upstairs, all with bathrooms and all air-conditioned, with white shutters, which, if you had the energy to throw them open, would give you a view of the old wooden pier that strode out into the Gulf of Guinea. Underneath these bedrooms was enough space for living rooms, dining rooms, games rooms, jacuzzi rooms and cricket nets if you felt out of practice. There was also Jack’s office, and in his office, a desk that a family of four could have lived in without him noticing.

The walls of the office were bare, but, in the other rooms, were covered with African masks, animal skins and ancient weaponry. Man-sized carvings hung around the place like servants of long standing who couldn’t be sacked. Some rooms were taken over by collections of African paintings which crammed the walls from floor to ceiling. The floors were entirely of white marble only broken by large rugs whose tassels were kept in line by Patience, Agnes and Grace, the three maids.

In the rooms he never used he had much better cane furniture than I did, which wasn’t difficult. In the rooms he did use were tables and chairs of every hard wood the jungle had to offer, as well as armchairs and sofas from France and England that formed exclusive circles about the place like people at a cocktail party who wouldn’t mix. The one failure was a table and six chairs carved from a single tree, but the table was too low and a man’s bottom couldn’t fit in between the snarling carved heads on the arms of the chairs even if it had wanted to.

There was a large verandah above the garage and maids’ quarters at the end of the east wing and another at the back of the house overlooking the swimming pool. They were both surrounded by a nursery of potted plants. I parked the car behind Jack’s Mercedes in the garage.

It was breakfast time. Patience, the most senior of Jack’s maids, with the eyes of a murderess and the shoulders of a mud wrestler, came out of her quarters and pointed to the verandah above the garage. I locked the car. Patience adjusted her wrap and slouched off to the kitchen. Mohammed, a tall, rangy, immensely strong servant of Jack’s who could polish a Mercedes down to the base metal came from the back of the house hunched over, holding a monkey by the hand. Jack had bought the monkey and found that Mohammed came with it. The monkey saw me and hid behind Mohammed’s legs like a shy little girl.

‘How are you, Mohammed?’ I asked.

‘Yessssir,’ he said with the intensity of a truck’s air brakes.

A parrot in a cage started running through its repertoire of clicks and whistles, calling for Patience and doing imitations of her cleaning the verandah: little sweeping sounds with the odd chair scraping thrown in. I walked up the spiral staircase to the verandah and heard the murmur of the video-taped soaps that were recorded for Jack and sent from England. He played them in the big gaps of his light-scheduled day. Christ, he played them all the time.

‘Mister Jack will see you now,’ the parrot said to the back of my head.

Jack wasn’t seeing anything. He was lying on a lounger with a cup of coffee the colour of his skin on his stomach, the video zapper on his chest. His eyes were closed. One big finger was crooked through the coffee cup handle. He wore a pair of shorts and nothing else.

He was a large man, probably as tall as six foot four, with heavy shoulders and a broad chest which must have housed solid slabs of pectoral when he was younger, but was now on the turn to flabby dugs. He had a big hard, round belly which shone like polished wood. He flicked his feet to keep the flies off and his sandals made a loud flopping sound on the soles of his feet.

Jack was a good-looking man, but it was the mixture of African and European in him that made him peculiar and fascinating. His hair was black but not as tightly curled as a full African’s. His skin was the colour of a walnut shell. He had blue eyes from his English mother and a straight sharp nose with a mouth fuller than most, but not African. He had long flat cheeks that fell from his sharp cheekbones and he kept these and the rest of his face clean-shaven. He had small, perfectly formed African ears.

Jack’s overall impression, which he’d had to work on, was one of lazy power. He was a lion that turned up for his prepared meals, ate, lounged about, never had to move too quickly but had a look in his eye when he turned his big head that told you who was the patriarch. He had great charm, a boyish smile and he loved to laugh. When he walked into a room of people all you could hear were women’s hearts fluttering like a colony of fantails. He left a wake of despair. He was ruthless in his pursuit of sex. A man who couldn’t sleep alone but couldn’t bear the same woman twice. Women knew this. His bed was never empty.

He’d had another hard night. He slept more on that lounger than he did in his bed. The parrot tutted as if he knew. Jack’s eyes opened.

‘Bruce,’ he said in a thick sleepy voice. He glanced at the coffee cup in his hand, leaned his head forward with an effort and drained it. ‘My God,’ he said, sinking back. It was difficult to find any sympathy for him. I took the zapper off his chest and shut down the TV which sat in its little roofed shelter in the corner of the verandah.

‘Madame Severnou’s left you fifty mil short.’ I paused for a moment while his supine brain took this in. ‘And last night she sent some muscle round to my house to pick up the rest.’ Jack’s eyes opened and flickered as he registered. ‘And I’m pretty sure that right now she’s unloading the rice without the original bill of lading.’

Jack didn’t move for a moment until his tongue came out and licked the nascent bristle below his bottom lip. He stared down through his feet at the blank TV with half-closed eyes.

‘Can you turn that on again?’

‘Can you listen for a minute?’

If there’s any good news,’ he sighed, staring off over the wall into the palm trees of the next-door garden with ostentatious lack of interest.

‘I’ve got five hundred and eighty-odd million in the Peugeot.’

He let the hand with the coffee cup in it fall by his side. A dribble of coffee leaked out on to the tiles. He put the cup down and with a sudden jerk shot himself up off the lounger and walked like a man with diving boots on to the rail of the verandah. He leaned on it as if he was catching his breath. On his back were four deep, six-inch long gouges on each scapula.

‘And this after you’ve been in bed with a polecat all night,’ I said.

‘A lioness, Bruce, a bloody lioness,’ he said as if he was talking to someone in the neighbouring garden.

‘What the hell’s going on with her?’ he asked his stomach, which percolated some coffee through his intestines. He turned and walked back to the table by the lounger, squatted with a loud crack from both knees and poured himself some more coffee and filled a cup for me. He took a croissant from a plate and bit into it. His brain wasn’t getting the spark to turn itself over. He heaved himself on to the lounger.

‘I got the beef out of Tema, it’s on its way up to Bolgatanga,’ he said without thinking and blowing out flakes of croissant on to his hairless chest. I checked the coffee for insects. He was telling me things I didn’t need to know. Jack’s mobile phone rang. On automatic, he pulled up the aerial, clicked the switch to ‘Talk’, and then said nothing, but listened for some time, his eyebrows going over the jumps. I took a slug of the coffee which kicked into my nervous system. It was robusta and strong and bad for you if you’re the shaky type.

‘Can I think about it?’ Jack asked the phone, and then waited while he was told why he couldn’t. ‘I can help, but you have to let me talk…’ He held out a hand to me with eyes that said you can’t tell anyone anything these days. ‘I can’t. I haven’t got the time,’ which was a lie. ‘I have…No you don’t…’ He turned his back to me and I missed a snatch; he came back with some more croissant in his mouth. ‘I have to talk to him first.’ Pause. ‘Let me talk to him.’ Jack looked into the earpiece, pushed the aerial down and switched the phone to ‘Standby’.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘I’ll take this lot down to your man Jawa and then I’ll get back to Cotonou.’

‘What for?’ he asked.

‘If not the rice, Jack, the fifty million might be useful.’

‘I have to think about this.’

‘Did Moses call?’ I asked.

‘No,’ he said thinking elsewhere. ‘Moses didn’t call.’

I listened to the sound of Lomé getting itself together. Some women walked past the wall at the back of the house with piles of washing on their heads and babies on their backs who were sleeping on the rhythmical movement of their mothers’ hips. It seemed like a good place to be, rather than up here feeling seedy and bitter-mouthed from the coffee.

‘You’ve done business with her before,’ I said. ‘She’s always been straight with you, she’s always paid, it’s not as if you’re a one-off. So what’s going on?’ Jack nodded at each element with his chin on his praying hands. I looked at the top of his head. ‘Is it me?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said, looking up.

I stared into his blue eyes and all I saw was a big problem. The phone went in the house and Patience’s flip flops slapped across the tiles.

‘It’s Moses for Mister Bruce.’

‘Can she put it up here?’

‘Different line,’ said Jack, and I went down into the house.

Moses said the rice was being off-loaded and that nothing had been touched in the house. Heike tore the phone out of his hand. She was angry and spoke to me in barbed wire German which left my ear ragged and bleeding. She was in no mood to be apologized to. I didn’t try. The plastic split as her phone hit the cradle. I hauled myself back up to the verandah.

‘Africa. Africa. Africa,’ said Jack after Moses’s news.

‘I’ll drop the money at Jawa’s and go back.’

‘No,’ said Jack, holding up his hand. ‘She’s got the rice now. You won’t even get in the port. I’ll talk to her about the fifty million. I want you to do something else for me. My uncle in Accra needs some help in Cotonou.’

‘I didn’t know you had an uncle in Accra.’