A Darkening Stain (11 page)

‘Who's Gifty?'

‘He saw with his own eyes what she did to the Indian fellow from Accra.'

‘I don't know who the Indian fellow is either.'

‘Sudip. The currency kid, they called him. Not any more. He rims a cloth stall in Kumasi now. He started using his customers' money to run Gifty, who was expensive and not what any man would call ... constant.'

‘So Michel fell for Gifty and ran out of money. Enter Jean-Luc Marnier running Lomé's expat bank who found some stolen credit cards and became a friend. Who had the credit cards?'

‘Ah, Bruce, you don't know how much pleasure it gives me to find somebody who understands Africa,' he said. ‘Of course, you are right, Gifty had the credit cards.'

‘Gifty was a friend?'

‘I pursued Gifty myself.'

‘But you are made of a different stuff to other mortals.'

‘Not me, Bruce. In that department I'm as weak as any man. But ... I do listen. And Gifty, for all her sins, was very fair. Before you dipped into her little bag of delights she would warn you. She would say, and she told me she said the same to every man and I believe her, she would say, “If you put your cock into me I will destroy you. I don't mean for this to happen but it will. So if you want to keep your life ... keep your life the same ... put your cock away”.'

‘And
you
did?'

‘I was at an advantage. I had seen Gifty with other men and I had noticed something about those men that I couldn't pin down. I mean, they looked very much themselves, as you'd expect men who were blissfully happy to be, but ... something was missing. Their real selves had gone to another place. Gifty used that word “destroy” in her little speech. And I realized that was what had happened to them. They had become incapable with love. They'd have had a better chance with heroin in their veins. They'd been destroyed.'

He laughed to himself, a goose of a memory walking over him.

‘Ah, Gifty, she wasn't so fair. She would issue the warning lying naked in your bed, looking down at you kneeling between her legs with a hard-on so painful you could faint, her hands framing her open sex, pink and glistening like an open papaya. My God, it nearly destroyed me not to have had her.'

‘Was this voodoo or what?'

‘Gifty was deeply Christian,' said Marnier, horrified. ‘This was no voodoo.'

‘And she never fell in love with any of these guys herself.'

‘At first, of course, but how can you love someone who has gone, who is not there, who is lost? There was nothing for her to love in these men.'

‘Maybe she loved you, Jean-Luc. The only one who didn't.'

I'd hit the mark with that. Jean-Luc was going to flatter me with some more guff about ‘understanding Africa' or ‘having the eye', but he thought better of it and the steaks arrived. He jammed the knife into the corner of his two-fingered right hand and set to it.

‘What happened to Gifty?'

‘She died,' he said, mincing the steak up in his jaws, his open-plan eating style revolting and transfixing in one. ‘She was murdered, in fact, by a Greek who ran a haulage business in Zaire. He stabbed her fifty-two times in the chest. A very jealous type. They still don't use the hotel room where it happened.'

‘And the Greek? Is he rotting in a Lomé jail?'

‘No, no, no. He got out. Paid his money. But if it's justice you're interested in you might like to know that he had a fall on one of those transport boats on the Zaire river. He was crushed from the waist downwards by two barges lashed together. It took him three weeks to die.'

A mountain of
frites
arrived and Marnier had Adèle spoon a load on to his blood-flooded plate. I liked this girl more. She wasn't disturbed by Marnier, his face was his business, she dealt with him like anyone else. Jean-Luc concentrated on his food, only pausing to throw a glass of red into the mix. I had a feeling I knew who'd given the Greek a shove in the back on the Zaire river.

Marnier insisted on finishing the meal with a
crème brûlée
apiece and strong black coffee, which Jean-Luc sent back twice until it was tarry enough for his taste. His fingers twitched, wanting a smoke, but he didn't light up. A small boy appeared on his shoulder and murmured something in his ear. He stroked the boy's head and gave him a couple of coins. We paid up. Adèle said maybe next time. Marnier replied for the both of us.

We drove away from the restaurant area past the hotel and took a right turn up a dirt track moving away from the sea. The grasses were high after the rains, and the mosquitoes large and aggressive. After a few hundred metres we turned right again into a narrow single-laned track which took us to a small clearing where there was a mud-walled house with a tin roof of
ondulé.

I parked round the back. Jean-Luc's African was back from Togo. He was waiting for us on the covered concrete stoop at the rear of the house, which was lit by a couple of hurricane lamps. We climbed up on to the stoop. There was a shovel by the back door and a polypropylene sack of what looked like tools.

We went into the house, which had bare concrete floors and consisted of four rooms. The two bedrooms at the back each had a bed and one a broom leaning against a wall. One of the rooms at the front was empty and the other had a table, four rafia-seated wooden chairs and a split-cane lounger. Marnier lowered himself on to the lounger and seemed to go into a doze. I sat at the table.

Our shadows leapt up the walls in the uncertain light from the hurricane lamp we'd brought in with us. Heavy beads of sweat formed on my eyebrows and dripped on to the table top. I listened. There was nothing to hear but the sea breeze moving through the tall grasses and Marnier's steady breathing.

The African returned and cleared his throat. Marnier's eyes snapped open. He brushed the hair away from his missing ear. He sat forward on the lounger. A quiet, well-tuned engine came through the swishing grasses and the room was suddenly filled with white slatted light.

A vertical line swept across the wall, erasing our shadows, taking the slats with it, as the car swung right and went round the back of the house. Marnier, alert now, looked at me and jerked his head to the door. We left the room. He gripped my arm as we stumbled down the unlit corridor to the stoop. I had nothing to grip.

A black Peugeot 505 saloon drew alongside my car. The driver turned the engine off. The headlights died, sucking the tall grasses into blackness. The boot clicked. Marnier's African opened it and waited for the driver. They lifted something out of the boot, something shiny, black, metallic, a trunk which was extremely heavy by the way their faint silhouettes were staggering. They put it down at the back of the Peugeot and tried the boot, which was locked. Marnier took the keys from me, dropped down off the stoop and opened the boot for the two men. They grunted the trunk into my Peugeot. Marnier shut the boot, locked it and pocketed the keys. He took a billfold out of his shirt pocket and peeled off a note for the driver, who got back in his car.

Light shot out across the bush. Marnier and his African glowed red in the taillights. The car reversed and disappeared round the side of the house. Marnier's face flashed momentarily out of the dark as he lit himself his first cigarette of the day. The man perversely unpredictable down to the last detail, taking the cigarette, which he said he'd given up, just when the tension had left the scene.

‘That trunk looked heavy,' I said.

‘Let's have a drink,' he said, coming up on to the stoop.
‘Felix, amenes le whisky.'

We went back into the front room. Felix brought in a bottle of Ballantines and a couple of glasses.

‘I've got some Possotomé in the car if you give me the keys.'

‘We'll take it neat,' he said. ‘You pour.'

‘That's what I had to be sharp for,' I said, laying out the drinks, ‘watching Felix and the driver stick a trunk in my boot?'

‘Anything could happen out here.'

‘When you're transporting gold across borders, you mean?'

Marnier gave me a teacher/pupil smile.

‘Ashante gold,' he said.

‘So it's stolen too. Ashante gold is Obuasi gold is Company gold.'

‘
I
didn't steal it.'

‘You bought it from all those unofficial miners that hang around Obuasi.'

‘I've never been to Obuasi.'

‘You wouldn't have to go there. There's thirty per cent of the mine's production that's stolen every year and finds its way across the border to Lomé. A mining engineer told me that years ago, and I know at least one guy in Lomé who buys the stuff. An Indian. Maybe you're another like him.'

‘Well, don't you think that's a fairer distribution of wealth than say the Company taking all the profit?'

‘Or the freely elected Ghanaian government?'

‘Santé'
said Marnier, and we drank.

The booze blissed over my nerves, which had been speaking in tongues since we left the restaurant and risen to a clamour when the car arrived. Christ, I was relieved it was stolen gold and not the Italians. Marnier sank back into his lounger, brought his knees up and did some concentrated smoking while staring at a hole in the plasterwork. I tried to come up with conversation pieces that didn't involve Italians, long grass or ... straight violence, because that, if I hadn't wanted to be sure of it before,
I was certain of it now sitting with this smoking buccaneer, was what was coming our way.

‘Are you going to tell me something?' asked Marnier. A line which leapt in my chest like a springing cat.

‘About what?'

‘We hardly know each other. You must have things to tell me. Like things we were talking about before.'

‘Like Gifty?'

‘Like Gifty.'

‘I'm going to be a father,' I said, the damn thing out of me and across the table before I could get something more sensible up and running.

Marnier unlocked his eyes from the wall and turned his head to me slowly as if this was a most surprising revelation.

‘Don't tell me, Jean-Luc. I know. I don't look like one.'

‘You don't ... yet.'

‘What happens when I do?'

‘You look like me.'

‘That...'

‘No cheap jokes,' he warned.

‘How many children have you got?'

‘None ... any more.'

‘Does that mean they died?'

‘They're still alive. I just don't see them, or they don't see me. They wouldn't recognize me anyway. No,' he said, drawing on his cigarette, flicking the ash on the floor, running a finger across his face, ‘I'm hurt. Worse than any of these scars. You see, my children were the only two people on this earth who had my
unconditional
love. They are
of
me. And they turned against me. They rejected me. The pain of that is with me and it will stay with me until I'm buried. You know, even when they were hacking at me with the machetes and I thought I was finished, I could see my children. So when you're a father this is how you will be.'

‘If I'm unfortunate enough to lose my child's love.'

‘No. Once you have given your unconditional love ... it weakens you.'

‘Why did they reject you?'

‘Because their mother told them I was a man of violence.'

‘Are you?' I asked, the question coming out on a ludicrous croak in my voice so that Jean-Luc and I roared with unconscious laughter, quietened ourselves and roared again.

‘
Ah, mon Dieu,
Bruce,' said Marnier, wiping at his left eye with his good hand, the tears running down that cheek only. ‘You know something?'

‘What?'

‘Ach,' he said, rummaging for a handkerchief, ‘since they cut me I only cry with one eye. What do you think that means?'

‘The tear duct's damaged?'

‘Yes, but it must have some significance. A man who can only half cry.'

‘Perhaps that is what men are like. Half steel, half...'

‘Well?'

‘Sentimentality?'

‘I was hoping for something more noble.'

‘Nobility's thin on the ground these days.'

Marnier nodded, refilled the glasses, lit another cigarette and crushed the old one into the concrete floor.

‘What can I say, Bruce? I like you.'

‘I bet you used to like Michel.'

‘Forget Michel,' he said. ‘I think you'll be a good father. Tell me something more.'

He fell back on the lounger. I sat on the edge of the chair, the seat frame cutting me across the back of the legs. I rocked with the tension. The violence was getting closer, but this time there was a different pull on it. This time I wanted to tell Marnier ... but I still couldn't get it out. Still a question hung.

‘Go on,' said Marnier.

‘My father died when I was sixteen.'

‘Was he ill?'

‘The smoking killed him, Jean-Luc. Sorry about that.'

‘Smoking,' said Marnier, looking at his cigarette, ‘is the least of my problems.'

‘He gave me some advice.'

‘I hope you didn't listen. Deathbed advice ... pah!...worthless.'

‘He said never do anything for the money and always follow through.'

‘Then he was a misguided fool, his brain maddened by impending death. You should only do things for people for money and you should only follow through if you can win.'

‘And he didn't have anything to say about women either.'

‘He was English. They don't know anything about women. What do you want to know? Tell me.'

‘Of course, the French are experts in everything. I forgot.
Van d'amour, L'art culinaire,
and probably just plain
L'Art
too.'

‘We know how to love women ... and food ... and, yes, painting as well.'

‘Maybe, like food, you love too much at once.'