A Darkening Stain (10 page)

I was standing by the door of his office. A girl had come in. One of Michel's girls from the bar. She'd squeezed past me in her lime-green vest and a blue and yellow wrap over the shelf of her well-padded bottom. Had Michel buzzed her in there? I didn't remember. She'd gone to him and sat in his lap, dead-eyed.

‘This is Chantale,' he'd said. ‘Very beautiful. Don't you think? In a little-girl way.'

I didn't think she was beautiful. Young, yes. But those onyx eyes she had, you didn't see those on a little girl. There was none of the sweetness you see in other girls of her age. She'd seen things she shouldn't have and then done them.

‘She's sixteen,' said Michel, as if it was necessary to be legal. ‘
Regardez la belle fille.
'

The girl pouted. Michel turned the lamp head towards her face.

‘Ouvres ta bouche,'
he whispered, like a lover building up to an unreasonable demand. Her mouth popped open. ‘Look inside, M. Medway.'

He pushed the girl forward across the desk with his shoulder. I didn't like this.

‘Vous voyez?'

He parted her lips and got his two fingers in between her teeth as if she was an animal to be sold. There were white patches on the gums and the insides of her lips and cheeks.

‘That's enough, Michel,' I said, and he let her go. He pulled her back and put an arm around her shoulder. He drew her head into his neck as if she were his poor little daughter. Pet-like, she complied.

‘Candida albicans,' said Michel. ‘Not unusual in small kids. Rare in adults. I think in England it's called oral thrush. Chantale
will have full-blown SIDA
^*
in three months unless she's one of the lucky ones.'

‘The lucky ones?'

‘The strain running around West Africa quite often stops at the VIH stage. The T-cells are depleted so that they pick up these bizarre infections: oral thrush, shingles, diarrhoea, pneumonia ... but the T-cells never drop so low that they have foil SIDA.'

‘You've done some reading.'

‘I have to,' he said. ‘She's been living in my house and I've been fucking her since she was twelve years old.'

‘Twelve?'

‘Are you shocked? That's not so young for these girls,' he said, stroking her shoulder, shaking his head. ‘These girls. A man gives her a pair of sandals, she goes to bed with him. Another a T-shirt ... she goes to bed with
him. Ach! c'est la culture Africaine.'

I paid for my beer and drove down the road to the Novotel, where I was told to go back into town and across the lagoon to the Hotel Aledjo, where it was almost impossible to follow someone discreetly. From the Aledjo I went to the Hotel du Lac and by 1 p.m. I was keen on some hours in the back seat catching flies. At the Hotel du Lac I was told by the barman to head for the Place d'Etoile Rouge via the Nouveau Pont, which meant passing the crowds around the Dan Tokpa market.

At the traffic lights by the south-west corner of the market the back doors suddenly opened and Jean-Luc Marnier appeared in my rearview. An African threw a heavy holdall in the boot, got in next to him and laid a thick arm across the back of the seat. He surveyed people and traffic behind. We drove in silence out to the Place d'Etoile and then on to the stadium and out of town towards Ouidah and Grand-Popo.

At Ouidah there was a police post manned by two armed
soldiers and a boy holding a rope connected, on the other side of the road, to a metal rack of spikes on rollers which looked as if they'd seen active service. Marnier handed me his passport, a Belgian one in the name of Bertrand Corbusier, and the African's ID. The soldier leant in to take a look at us and gave a squeak of surprise when he saw Marnier. The soldier looked back at the passport.

‘C'est vous?'

‘
Avant
,' said Marnier, economically.

He waved us on without looking in the boot.

We dropped down on to a causeway across a lagoon. A fishing village, built on an island, wavered in the harsh light. A solitary man stood thigh deep in the flat gunmetal water, still as a heron. He flung a silver filigree net which scarred and melted into the panel-beaten surface.

The walls of the houses close to the road were hand-painted with vivid hoardings but not for Coca-Cola, Camels or Bank of Africa. These advertised the shivering haystack cones of the fetish priests who'd whirl through your village taking the evil spirits with them—VOUDOUN AGBO, VOUDOUN AGNUNON. We were in a different world now.

The rains had swollen the lagoon and we drove through water up to the sills. A truck had slipped off the road ahead and suddenly Marnier's face was between the seats looking. Kids held out their hands and screamed, ‘
Cadeau, cadeau
,' until they saw Marnier. He eased back into his seat. The jungle, silent as menace, rolled over the water's edge, thriving, burgeoning and stretching as far as the heat-dazed afternoon would allow you to see.

Marnier sat soldier-straight, the two fingers of his wrecked hand tapping on the seat cover, some music simmering in his head or some wild genius that had got into him before his face, riven by machete steel, had closed back over. The African dozed with his twenty-five-kilo head on his shoulder, the tendons in his neck as thick as primeval lianas.

It was late afternoon when Marnier stopped me from taking the turning to Grand-Popo and told me to continue to the border, where we pulled up ten metres short of the barrier. The African got out and we watched him nod through immigration, customs and the man operating the exit barrier. He crossed the dust-blown and puddled fifty metres of no man's land into Togo, and Marnier and I U-turned and drove back to Grand-Popo.

We dropped off the tarmac on to a long straight beaten track that ran through the village as far as the Auberge. As the afternoon turned, Marnier had me pull up alongside a graveyard. We walked through the stones, some of them simple grey slabs on the ground, others travesties of sarcophagi clad in bathroom tiles of pink and orange. Small black pigs were about their business amongst the graves. We broke through a line of palm trees to a beach. The sky over the sea was now blood-red.

‘Very rare,' said Marnier, referring to the sunset.

I said nothing. I was doing some fear management and thinking about what good shape Jean-Luc was in suddenly, or was it only stairs that puffed him out? The heavy smoker of last night had clean air pipes and he wasn't heavy on his feet. For a man in his fifties, who'd taken the beating he had and spent a hot afternoon in a car, he was nimble.

We staggered back through the graveyard in the failing light, and drove to the Auberge and parked up in the darkness. The terrace of the restaurant was packed with a few expats and twenty Australian travellers from an overland truck parked in the campsite, but Marnier went through such a dramatic physical change in mounting the steps that a young French couple vacated their table for us. The place hovered around silence when the company saw Jean-Luc's face, but the Australians sawed through it.

‘You thought you were ugly, Micky,' said a ponytailed bum. ‘Take a look at that fucker.'

‘Shit, Darleen,' said Micky to a girl as broad-beamed as a
tipper, ‘you haven't been sitting on people's faces again, have you?'

‘Why on earth,' said Darleen slowly, ‘would I want to do a thing like that?'

They roared. The restaurant crowd pulled itself back together again. Marnier nodded and spoke to me in French.

‘Now you see what I have to put up with. Sometimes for a moment I can forget I've had two faces—watching the sunset, seeing the fisherman throwing his net in the lagoon, the jungle—ah yes! What were those lines from the greatest poet of this century?'

‘I don't know any French poets.'

‘This one's not French ... T. S. Eliot. He's one of yours.'

‘Then you'll be thinking of “The jungle crouched...”'

‘“...humped in silence”,' he finished for me. ‘Bruce, you didn't disappoint me. You have the look of a man who understands poetry.'

‘To most people I have the look of a drunken bum.'

‘These are people who are only looking at the surface.'

‘Thanks,' I said. ‘Now you're going to tell me I'm a beautiful human being on the inside.'

‘Don't worry,' he said, grinning. ‘I won't tell you that.'

‘Because you don't think it's true?'

‘We all have redeeming qualities.'

‘Liking poetry is a very small one.'

‘I don't think so. It shows an inclination to examine more than meets the eye. It implies intelligence and a heightened sensitivity to the human condition. These are not small things.'

‘But they don't make a man good,' I said. ‘I'm sure you could find some celebrated psychopaths with all these redeeming qualities.'

‘Such is the nature of a redeeming quality.'

We looked at each other after that unexpected exchange to the point of uneasy silence. Then a waitress came to our table, a white girl in a loose purple shirt, braless, maybe more less. We
ordered a couple of beers and the menu. Marnier silenced the Australians to a nervous giggle by struggling past their table on his way to the toilet. Darleen farted, inadvertently, I assumed.

The beers arrived, cold in dimpled pint mugs. The waitress hovered.

‘Tu vas manger?'
she asked in an English accent.

‘We'd like to,' I replied in English.

‘I thought you were Dutch, the height of you.'

‘Not my brilliant French?'

She smiled and we knew we liked each other.

I took a gulp of the beer and ordered another instantly, and one for the waitress. She left and I took my first
pression
down to an inch from the bottom. I looked out across the beach, into the dark beyond the rim of light from the bar. The unseen ocean repeated itself against the shore. Jean-Luc Marnier was reading me easier than a kid's nursery rhyme with pictures. Or was I still paranoid from last night's dope. He was seeing the same things I was seeing. The fisherman's net. The crouching jungle. Mind you, there wasn't that much to look at. I calmed myself with the rest of the beer and blinked away the tears and the strain of having Carlo and Gio on my tail out there somewhere with Christ knows what in store. My second beer arrived.

‘You got a name?' the girl asked, startling me.

‘Bruce. You?'

‘Adèle,' she said, ‘but an English one. I'd rather have that beer after I've finished if that's OK.'

‘Sure.'

‘You could join me if you like.'

‘I...'

Marnier lowered himself into my vision. Adèle scooted off.

‘Don't drink too much, Bruce. I need you to be sharp tonight.'

‘What do I have to be sharp for? I don't want any more of your big surprises, especially ones requiring sharpness. Not tonight.'

‘Big surprises? I don't remember any big surprises.'

‘You calling me at Michel's last night.'

‘A small coincidence.'

‘What about the dramatic improvement in your health since last night?'

‘I have good days and bad days.'

‘And your breathing?'

‘The country air. Cotonou is very polluted now with all those mopeds ... and I gave up smoking.'

‘Twenty-four hours ago.'

‘So, I act a little.'

‘I noticed. That's how we got the table.'

‘A little bit of fun. I don't get so much these days,' he said. ‘She's attractive, no? The waitress?'

I still had Marnier's money folded in its envelope in my pocket, untouched. I had a screaming need to slide it back across the table at him and go and drink beer with Adèle and sleep on a couch somewhere, but even I, with my brain of hot fudge, knew that I had to see this little bit of fun through and do a fair amount of acting myself.

‘I think I'll have the
contrefilet,
' said Marnier to Adèle. ‘
Saignant.
Bruce?'

‘The
barre,
please.'

‘No, no, no,' said Marnier, so that I thought he was going French on me, controlling my diet, ‘not fish tonight. You need something stronger. Something to fill your stomach.'

‘I don't plan on any heavy work.'

‘Have the
contrefilet.'

‘Why can't he have the
barre?
asked Adèle.

‘Because he needs the
contrefilet,
' said Marnier, firmly.

Adèle tilted her head at me. I had the
contrefilet.
Bloody too. Marnier found a drinkable Côte du Rhon and Adèle was dispatched.

‘So you're an actor as well,' I said.

‘An expert in the
comédie humaine.'

‘What sort of range have you got?'

‘Just character parts now. I can't lead with such a face.'

‘When are you the real you?'

‘When I'm in bed with my wife. A good woman won't tolerate liars in her bed.'

‘Does acting have to be lying?'

‘I think you understand me, Bruce. I act to observe people without being observed myself. As
you
know most people are concerned with surfaces so it is easy to divert their attention.'

‘You think people are foolish...'

‘Unworthy.'

‘Is that why you destroyed Michel's life...?'

‘Me? Destroyed Michel's life? Is he still telling people that? We make our own choices, Bruce, and when we find ourselves lacking in the vital traits that will see us through those choices, then we seek to blame others for our failings.'

‘He says ... he implied that you took away his youth, his beauty.'

‘Michel is wearing on the outside what he had on the inside. That is all.'

‘But what happened? He sounded like he had a pretty good life going for himself until you came along.'

‘
He
came to
me,
remember,' he said. ‘And I didn't force him into his relationship with Gifty.'