Instruments of Darkness

‘What about?’

‘About B.B. and things. You might need some help. He’s not so easy to deal with.’

‘Is anybody?’

‘Come and see me when you get back.’ I got in the car and drove down to Jawa’s compound near the DHL office in town.

Jawa’s boy let me into the garage underneath the office and disappeared. I filled up some cardboard boxes with the currency and went upstairs to Jawa’s office through several rooms of dead-eyed men counting huge quantities of money.

Jawa was a small, balding Indian with muddy quarter-circles under his eyes. He was thinner than an African dog. He didn’t eat food, but nourished himself by chewing the ball of his palm. He sat at his desk surrounded by ashtrays, each with a burning cigarette, and took drags from them all in turn, as if he were a beagle in a scientific experiment. The idea was that he should be smoking in the same order at the end of the day as he was at the beginning. It was something to do in the gaps between making money. He poured some tea and started to play with a lump of gold, weighing it in his palm and looking it over.

‘There’s going to be more trouble here, Bruce.’ He spoke very quickly, as if the words were going to outstrip him.

‘With what?’

‘This multi-party democracy.’

‘Jack called me last week from the Hotel Golfe. He said he was trapped, they were throwing stones at each other in the street.’

‘And shooting…There was shooting, too. It’s going to get hot, Bruce, very hot.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I’m listening. The people are getting angry. They told me at the flour mill they asked for a hundred per cent pay rise. They’re going to close the port and the taxi drivers are going on strike. It’s going to get very, very hot.’ He put the lump of gold down and leaned forward. ‘Does he want this in London or Zurich?’

‘Zurich.’

‘They’ll blame it on the Ghanaians, close the border, the usual things. But it won’t work this time. They’ll be fighting, looting…’ He sipped his tea and kept some cigarettes going. He booted up the computer, took the slip of paper I’d given him and entered the money in Jack’s account.

‘How’s Cotonou?’ he asked.

‘Still good,’ I said.

‘They had big trouble there, too. Nothing’s easy in Africa. Nothing stays good for long…We’re going to see blood.’

‘You’ll be all right, Jawa.’

‘If they don’t shoot me. You don’t know these people. I know them. Tea?’

‘I’ve got to get going.’

I left him worrying his lump of gold, scrolling through his accounts, smoking his cigarettes, chewing his palm, thinking about blood. He was a busy man.

Chapter 5 (#ulink_605af714-a03d-5f00-8ec8-fba9c03877c8)

I drove back down to the coast road and headed west to the Ghanaian border. The sun on the sea and the breeze through the coconut palms washed off Jawa’s depressing office and morose talk. For a while, I kept pace with a young white woman on horseback. The dappled grey seemed to be smiling through gritted teeth as his hooves kicked up the sand. The girl was out of the saddle, her bottom in the air, her head and shoulders leaning over the horse’s ears, her mouth wide open.

I looked at her and wondered what I was doing grubbing around in this half-lit world of trade and commerce, making a bit here, getting shafted there, listening to people talking very, very seriously and watching the insincerity flicking from face to face until all you could be sure of was that nothing was going to happen as agreed.

I crawled into the crowds around the border. The horse eased. The girl sat back a little. The horse’s head came up with its front legs. She turned him and was gone.

The Togo/Ghana border was always full of people. The Ghanaians poured across with their goods to pick up the hard CFA. I parked up in the border compound and a group of money changers gathered around me intoning the names of the currencies like priests at Communion. I bought some cedi for petrol and Moses expected me to buy Ghanaian bread for him. I paid a boy to go and get my name entered in the exit ledger and have my passport stamped. A soldier with a rifle over his shoulder was enjoying himself frisking all the women traders. Jawa was right. They were expecting trouble.

I drove across the baked mud to the Ghana side. Ten minutes later, I coasted through the border town of Aflao and bought a half dozen of the usual tough, green-skinned oranges from an alarmed young girl who scored them for me and cut a hole in the top so I could squeeze out the juice.

It was a fast, flat, boring drive to Accra and I arrived at the airport roundabout in a couple of hours. It was hot. I drove past the Shangri La Hotel and thought about going in there for a Club beer or six and a long lie down. I found the ‘uncle’s’ house four streets back from the main road. I followed the music. They were singing in the open plan church next door.

The garden boy opened the gates and I went up the short drive past a frangipani tree and parked in front of a double garage. There was a huge woman sitting in the darkness. All I could see was the size of her white bra, which must have been a 90 double Z. She threw a wrap over herself. I asked for B.B. and she pointed to a door at the back of the garage which led to the battleship-grey front door of the main house. The house looked like a municipal building. It was L-shaped and tall with white walls and grey woodwork. There was nothing pretty about it. There were no plants or flowers. It was functional.

I knocked. There was an echoing rumbling noise of someone clearing their throat in an empty room. The noise rose to a crescendo and ended in a cough and a sneeze which bounced around the walls inside the house. There was an exhausted sigh. A different noise started, a man with a stammer.

‘Ra-ra-ra-ra-ra-Mary!’ he finished surprisingly.

There was the neat sound of someone who picked up their feet when they walked and the door opened. Mary had a round bush of hair and a smile a foot wide to go with it. I walked up a few steps and found myself in the main living room. There was a table and a few chairs which dated back to the British colonial days, then a large space before a four-piece suite which I could tell was going to be hot from where I was standing. A fifties ceiling light of a cluster of brass tubes held in a wooden circle had six lamps but only three bulbs. The walls on either side had two massive grey frames holding eight columns of slatted windows which were netted against mosquitoes. Between the frames, the walls were bare and white. The wall at the far end of the room was occupied entirely by a scene of snow-capped mountains, pine trees and a lake which should have been in the Swiss Tourist Board’s offices, circa 1965. I blinked hard at the hoarding because treetops rather than bottoms appeared to be coming out of the lake. I could see that a whole section in the middle was missing. Sitting in the left-hand corner of this scene was B.B.

‘You like?’ he said in a thick, throaty voice.

‘I…there’s something…’ I fished.

‘It get wet in de airport,’ B.B. explained. ‘You get de idea anyhoare.’

We shook hands.

‘Bruise?’ he asked, as if I did easily.

He stood up for some reason. He was holding his shorts up with one hand. He had such a tremendous stomach that they had no chance of being done up. He wore a string vest which stretched over his belly and creaked under the strain like a ship’s rigging. The vest was badly stained with coffee and a few other things, one of which was egg. He had short, recently cropped grey hair and snaggled grey eyebrows which fought each other over the bridge of his fleshy nose. His mouth was small and sweet and looked as if it might whistle. His neck was like a gecko’s. It hung from below his jowls and fanned out to his clavicles.

He crashed back into the armchair, swung his feet up on to the table and crossed them at the ankles. His big yellowing toenails arced out from the flesh by a couple of inches and he had hard pads of skin on his soles. They were high-mileage feet in need of some remoulds.

‘Sit, Bruise,’ he waved at a chair. ‘Ka-ka-ka-ka-ka-ka-Mary!’ he roared.

Mary was standing right behind his chair and said, ‘Yessah!’ which made him jump a bit. He turned as if he was in a seat belt and gave up.

‘I see,’ he said. ‘You want drink, Bruise?’

I asked for a beer. He tried to turn to Mary again and it brought on a wince of pain so he relaxed. ‘You bring beer for Mister Bruise and the ginger drink for me.’ Mary hadn’t even moved when B.B. said: ‘No, no, no, no, no. Yes.’ She went to the kitchen.

B.B. rapped the arm of his chair, alternating between his knuckles and the palm of his hand for a minute or two. Suddenly his eyes popped out of his face and he leaned forward as if he was going to say his last words, but instead let out a sneeze like a belly flop, showering me and the furniture. He pulled a yellow handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped his nose and took the sweat off his brow and then held it tumbling out of the back of his hand.

‘My God,’ he said. ‘I tink I have a cold.’

I was ‘tinking’ I was going to get a cold when Mary came in with the drinks. He sipped his daintily with his little finger cocked. He dabbed his mouth with the handkerchief and put the drink down. His face creased with agony. He lifted himself off one buttock and then settled back down again. His face calmed.

‘Yesterday I tink I eat someting funny. The ginger is good for the stomach,’ he said. ‘Lomé? Is hot?’

‘There’s going to be more trouble.’

‘Africa,’ breathed B.B. ‘Always problem. It getting hot in Ivory Coast now. De people, dey want to be free. Dan when dey free dey don’t know what to do. Dey make big trobble. Dey teef tings and kill. Dey ruin deir contry. Is very hot in Abidjan now. Very hot.’