Blood is Dirt

I took a left before the conference centre on to a short causeway out to the new Novotel and parked up in its floodlit car park. The flags of all nations snapped in the sea breeze, their ropes pinged against the metal poles.

‘The Croix du Sud was back …’

‘Your two million dollars is out there,’ I said, pointing across him back towards the port. About three hundred metres.’

‘You’re still going with me … aren’t you?’

‘Now that we’re away from the bar, the beers and the chasers, now that you can see how black it is out there in the cocotiers, now that you can hear the sea and the wind, I thought I’d give you a chance to think about whether you reckon there’s somebody standing out in the middle of that lot with two million in a suitcase.’

Napier looked to where I’d been pointing. In the bright lights of the Novotel car park I saw the sweat start out on his forehead. He wiped a finger across his brow and dabbed the palms of his hands on his trousers. His tongue came out to try and put some lick on his lips.

‘Where’s this guarantor you’ve just spoken to on the phone?’

‘Lagos,’ he said, turning back, his mind drifting off to a time when this was all over and he was on a flight back to Paris with his cash in the overhead.

‘Why don’t we drive in there?’ he asked, the light bulb coming on in his head.

‘We could, but there’s only one way in and one way out and once we’re in there we’re stuck in the car, an easy sedentary target. If we’re on the hoof we can leg it through those palm trees and there’s nobody who’d be able to get a clear shot at you through that lot.’

They were good words to use, ‘target', ‘leg it', ‘shot', but they didn’t infect his judgement with a germ of terror. He sat in silence, staring into the dash, mouth open, jaw tense, gunning himself up.

‘You don’t think this is a funny place to hand over two million dollars?’

‘No,’ he said, pinching the septum of his nose, thinking about something else now, and then making up his mind about it.

‘If anything goes wrong out there, Bruce, you should … you will get a visit from my associate.’

‘The nonexec one you didn’t tell us anything about?’

‘That one,’ he said.

‘She’s my daughter. The company put her through an MBA, that’s all. She runs her own business, nothing to do with me.’

‘She have a name?’

‘Selina,’ he said.

‘Well, I hope I never get to meet her.’

‘No,’ he said, turning to the window where he set about filtering all the doubt out of his mind while his eyes drank in the blackness of the wind-rattled coconut palms.

He started out of the car. I grabbed his arm.

‘No talking. Quiet as possible. If they’re out there they’ll know we’ve arrived. The first person to talk is me and’ – I whipped the Camel out of his mouth and tossed it out of the window–

‘no smoking.’

We walked to the edge of the tarmac. The security guards at the gate had their backs to us. We dropped off the raised car park and trotted into the coconut palms. We waited a few minutes until our eyes were used to the dark and walked on. The ground was firm between the palms. It wasn’t long before we found the patch of beaten earth and a rough table where the city people came to drink beer and breathe air with a dash of the sea in it.

I sat on the ground with my back to a coconut palm and watched Napier in almost no light at all sitting on his hands on the table under a palm-leaf lean-to trying to forget about smoking Camels. We sat there for more than half an hour. The wind whistled up quite a few false alarms for us but in the end nobody showed. A little before a quarter to ten I stood up and whacked the back of my jeans.

‘I’ve got to take a piss,’ I said. All the beer I’d drunk sat like a medicine ball in my lap. Napier hissed.

A car, with its headlights on full beam, rippled across the coconut palms and silhouetted two figures on the pavement. The car slowed and stopped. The lights died. One of the figures bent to window height. There was a discussion. The door opened and the figure who’d done the talking got in.

‘It’s a pick-up, Napier. This is a smart part of town. Girls come here to get taken for a ride by men in Mercedes. That could have been you if they’d showed.’

I walked off to the edge of the palms about thirty or forty metres and kicked a hole in the sand.

‘Maybe they didn’t show because of you,’ he said to the back of my head.

‘I didn’t crash, I was invited, remember. You cleared me with your big man. And anyway, I’m going now. I’ve got dinner. You want to stay, you can find your own way back.’

I urinated for at least two minutes. I closed my eyes to the relief spreading through me. The wind got up and blew with some force through the palms and their leaves clacked together like empty scabbards. I walked back to the table shivering, suddenly cold and clammy in the salty breeze.

‘Napier,’ I called, seeing he’d moved from the table. I looked around for the red glow of a cigarette butt, knowing he wouldn’t have been able to hang on. I made a 180-degree sweep of the coconut grove. The Hotel Croix du Sud’s gate lights winked on the other side of the boulevard, the aura of the new conference centre lit the night sky, the Novotel and its car park looked as if they were out in a sea of black, but there was no Napier. I shouted his name. The breeze took it off me and shuttled it through the trunks of the palms, but nothing came back.

Just like that-he’d gone.

3 (#ulink_0260fbc2-33eb-5d53-96a9-f22aca04dd6f)

I ran like a wild man through the trees looking up and down and all around until I was dizzy and freaked at finding myself in the imagery sequence of a sixties TV drama. I walked back to the car and drove home, trawling the streets like an idiot, hoping for a sight of Napier. Everybody was African apart from four huge sailor types who’d washed their hair in beer and, now that they were fragrant, had their rods out casting for some dangerous sex.

The lights were on at my house, our house. I parked up behind Heike’s year-old Nissan Pathfinder, a car that came with her job, a job that came with a housing allowance to pay the rent. I sat with my forehead on the steering wheel and worried at the Napier Briggs fiasco like a cat with a dead mouse trying to pretend there’s still some life in it.

I went upstairs to our part of the house and found a single place setting on the dining-room table with an empty bottle of Bourgogne Aligote beside it, which was better than our usual Entre-Deux-Mers. With Heike’s smarter salary we’d moved off the paint-stripper gut rot from tetrapaks and we didn’t drink whisky called Big V any more. It was minimum Red Label now.

Heike was asleep on some cushions on the floor, a half-full ashtray next to her head and a tumbler with melted ice in the bottom with nearly a full bottle of nothing less than Black Label by the chair leg. Were we celebrating? I took a right turn into the kitchen and found the lamb tagine on the stove and lit the gas underneath it. I went back into the living room and snitched the Black Label and poured myself a good two fingers. I stirred the tagine and found some cold cooked rice in the pot next to it.

‘I waited and I waited for the birthday boy,’ said a tired voice from the door.

My birthday! Goddamn. Hit forty and go senile. What year is it?

‘How old am I?’ I asked her reflection in the window.

‘Come on, Bruce, it’s not all that bad.’

‘Forty-one?’

‘There you are – mind like a steel trap. What happened to you this evening?’

‘I got held up.’

‘What’s new?’

‘I lost someone.’

‘Someone you’d already found?’ asked Heike.