A Darkening Stain (12 page)

‘To love a woman,' he said, ignoring me, ‘you have to give her your undivided attention. She has to feel that she occupies the only important place in your brain. She is above work, above money, above everything else in your life, including your mother. If for one moment she suspects that she has slipped down the ladder...'

‘You'll never get her into bed,' I said. Marnier laughed.

‘Maybe you're right,' he said. ‘Maybe that's all we know or want to know.'

‘How to act.'

‘All men,' said Marnier, refitting his glass on the table, ‘are actors. Have you ever thought of this? That the only honest men are the ones who pay for it. The rest of us pretend ... to get what we want.'

We lapsed into silence. I had no appetite for the argument. I slid my glass round in tight circles on the table top. The sweat stood out on the back of my hand. The heat in the room with the hurricane lamp going should have been intolerable, only the pressure of outside things made it bearable. Something clattered on the outside of the wooden shutters. I stiffened and twisted. A brain-damaged beetle crawled through the slats, fell to the floor and spun on its back. There was no glass, no netting.

‘Tell me something more,' said Marnier.

‘What more? What can I tell you that you don't know already,' I said, suddenly irritable, the cracks appearing.

‘Talk. It will pass the time. Who knows, we may stumble across a universal truth and change our lives and perhaps mankind.'

‘Let's just finish our drinks and go home instead.'

‘I'm waiting, and anyway, you know better than to drive in Africa at night.'

‘You're waiting?' I asked, the sweat suddenly streaming into my eyes, making me blink.

Marnier turned his face on me and I found myself looking into the eyes of the man who was going to kill me. The one eye, the only one with any potential for sadness, was glistening ... sorry for the fact. I started talking. It was the only thing to do.

‘We were followed today,' I said. ‘We've been followed all day by two of Franconelli's men. Gio and Carlo, you might know them. They say they want to talk to you, and I don't believe that what they have in mind will be unaccompanied by violence.'

I breathed deeply, not finding the air enough in the room. Marnier sucked on his loosely packed cigarette, which crackled. He exhaled through his nostrils, looking at nothing in particular, his face unreadable.

‘Your child will not be fatherless,' he said. ‘Come, it's time to move. Bring the light.'

We left the room and walked down the corridor to the bedrooms. Marnier beckoned me into his. He pulled the holdall out from under the bed, unzipped it and took out a 9 mm handgun and a clip of bullets, a different beast altogether to the .380 revolver he'd had in my office. That was a cap gun compared to this. He shoved the clip up the handle of the gun and worked the slide. He took a torch out of the bag and tested it. Then he threw the bag under the bed and lay down on it.

‘Go to your room. Shut the lamp down. Sleep ... if you can.'

I turned and he added some words to the back of my head.

‘One thing about women. Once they have their children you're number two. That's not fair, is it ... after they've been number one all that time?'

I lay down on the bed in my room and dowsed the lamp. It was brutally hot under the
ondulé
and sleep was out of the question, even if I hadn't a brain full of the choice I'd just made. Mosquitoes whined for blood, the long grass and swamp land around producing a fine pedigree for aggression and prophylactic resistance. I got under the sheet, pulled it over my head, breathed my own breath and started living with my own stink.

A stillness settled over the house. The grasses hushed to nothing. Night colours came and dissolved in the undiluted darkness. Ideas drifted, merged and disintegrated. My brain rushed towards incoherence until, as crisp as scissors through card, reality cut back in.

From some way off I heard the wind blundering through the trees, scything through the grass until it thumped into the back of the house, charged through the back door and opened a shutter in the front room, which snapped back on to the wall and cracked back into its frame. Fresh, cool air roamed the house. I tore the sheet back and gulped it in. The wind rolled on, dragging the rain after it, reluctant at first—a dash of pebble on the
ondulé
—and then a crash and the rooms were full of noise and a blue/white halogen light.

Marnier was standing at his window looking out, the gun in
his good left hand. He registered something and turned before the house imploded to black. I got to my feet with no idea in my head, just a carbon copy of Marnier floating in front of me. I waited. The rain smashed into the
ondulé
so hard that it should have caved in under the five-mile-high clouds full of it. The thunder pounded and the light that came with it burst white and fizzled then burst again. This time there was a figure between me and Marnier. The figure turned to him and took from him the only sound louder than the storm. Then blackness again, roaring blackness. A collision and the feeling of a wet shirt, a warm body underneath, muscle, sinew and something solid, heavy, clipped my cheek, a head, hair on my lips. Then the hard concrete of the floor. A weight on top of me. A weight slipping down my body. A weight wet through. More thunder. More light. Carlo's head in my lap, his mouth wide open, a black hole, a mess on his shirt, high on the chest, another black hole there too, a large nickel-plated gun in his right hand.

‘FELIX!' roared Marnier.

I rolled out from under Carlo, kicking his dead weight away from me, suddenly panicked. I crawled and staggered to the door, the percussion of the rain still deafening.

‘FELIX!' roared Marnier again.

The lightning showed Marnier out on the stoop, gun in hand, the torch in the other. A wall of white vertical rain in front of him so that nothing was visible beyond the torrent coming off the roof of the stoop. The platform where he was standing was covered in water and, with the rain not so loud outside, I could hear him splashing backwards and forwards.

‘FELIX!' he shouted again, but this time his voice rang out into the night. The rain stopped dead. On the back of the rain-rinsed air came not only the smell of wet earth and flushed grasses, but also the sound of two men in some monumental struggle. Marnier's torch found them. A few feet from the back of the car Felix and Gio were on their feet locked together in an impossible octopodial embrace. The tendons of Felix's neck
standing out like bridge struts while Gio's agricultural hands encircled, squeezed and crushed.

I grabbed the shovel by the back door and leapt off the stoop and ran at Gio's back.

‘Don't kill him!' roared Marnier.

Gio heard me coming and turned in time to take the blade of the shovel a glancing blow on his concrete forehead. He let Felix go but didn't go down. I brought the shovel up again to take Gio out but Marnier roared again from the stoop.

‘NO!'

I swung, missed, and, as I staggered round, Gio's stone fist connected with the side of my head and I went down into the mud. Gio moved towards me in triplicate. I tried to scrabble away from him, from the fists he held raised like rock-breakers' hammers. Then he was on me, his breath in my face stronger than a wild dog's, his lips pulled back over the worn teeth. The fists came up, wavered, and wouldn't work any more. The fight went out of him. He collapsed forward, his face as close to mine as a lover's cheek. The shovel blow had just taken that bit longer to work its way down the fossilized synapses to Gio's ‘off' switch. Felix pulled him away from me. He now had a knife in his hand. Marnier appeared with some nylon rope and the polypropylene sack, the torch in his armpit. Felix sliced through Gio's sodden shirt, tore it off his back and set to binding the man's hands up behind him.

‘Get Carlo,' said Marnier to me, the wind buffeting without moving a strand of his hair.

‘Get him?' I shouted, stoking some anger. ‘He's bloody dead.'

‘Bring him here. Carry him.'

‘You shot him. You bring him.'

‘Young man's work.'

‘Like it's old man's work to shout idiot suggestions during a fight with this complete mad bastard?'

‘I didn't want you to kill him.'

‘Kill him?' I roared. ‘The only way to kill a guy like that is to drop a bridge on him.'

Marnier did that rare thing ... he chuckled.

‘Go on,' he said, giving me some matches. ‘It's getting late.'

I crawled around the bedroom trying to find the hurricane lamp. I brought the light up in the room along with the hairs on the back of my neck. Carlo wasn't there. There was a dark patch on the concrete, but no Carlo.

I crawled on all fours along Carlo's trail of blood to the bedroom door. I've always hated farce—all that painful inevitability before the tragedy. The dark smears went down the corridor to the front of the house. Why hadn't he gone out on to the stoop? He was confused, half dead, a hole in his chest, an animal crawling off to die. The trail of blood came back up the corridor from the locked front door and went into the room with the tables and chairs. I didn't want to stick my head round that door.

I went back to the bedroom and found the broom and hung the hurricane lamp off the end of it. Back in the corridor I eased the lamp waist-high into the centre of the doorway. Three shots of colossal loudness rang out and shattered the lamp, which burst into flames on the ground. See what I mean about farce?

I ran back into the bedroom and tore the heavy horsehair mattress off the bed. On the way back out I hit Marnier coming in from the stoop and we both went down fighting the mattress between us.

‘What the ... fuck ... is going on!' hissed Marnier.

‘Carlo's in there, alive, with a gun. The place is on fire,' I said. ‘That's it.'

‘
Putain merde,
' said Marnier, and he left the house via the stoop. I threw the mattress over the flames. Carlo let off another shot, the mattress taking it in the gut, a terrible quantity of horsehair stuffing tore out the back of it as it went down. I slid to the floor by the smouldering door jambs.

‘You know somethin',' said Carlo, his voice coming out in
little pops and crackles from the blood collected in his lungs and throat.

‘Yeah,' I said, ‘I know you totally ballsed up this situation. It should be Marnier in there with his chest half out, not you.'

‘Fuck you,' said Carlo. ‘He was fuckin' waiting for us. You told him, you big fuck.'

‘I didn't
have
to tell him.'

‘You know what, fucker?'

‘I don't know anything any more.'

‘You're dead meat. You're dead the worse way you could ever possibly fuckin' imagine.'

‘That's not something I spend too much of my time thinking about.'

‘One day...' were Carlo's last words. A faint light clicked on in the room. Three shots. The noise, loud and continuous, careened around my cranium. The tinnitus staying and staying so that I knew this night would be in my head for years. I looked round the door jamb. The light from Marnier's torch was still on Carlo, who had jammed himself into the corner of the room. His eye, nose and jaw were missing. Marnier was standing by an open shutter, his torso in the room, the gun still extended in his left hand. He looked down at the floor.

‘Bring him out,' he said. ‘I'll hold the light on him.'

It was a business getting Carlo out. His shoulders, arms and chest were slippery with gore and although he wasn't a big-framed man he must have weighed in at around eighty-five kilos. I got him up in stages, using the chair and table, until I could slide him on to my shoulder. Marnier helped things along with a stream of suggestions from the window until I was half laughing, half crying. I plodded down the corridor and met Marnier out the back, who lit the way for me down into the yard where Felix was standing, crouched under Gio's weight, who was still out cold.

‘
Suivez-moi
,' said Marnier, picking up the shovel.

He took us down a path, among the tall grasses, that you wouldn't have known was there. We came to a pile of gravel in front of a wooden shed which was padlocked. Marnier had to go through his pockets a couple of times, with Felix and I grunting and Gio beginning to stir. He opened the shed.

Inside the shed, which was the size of a single-car garage, was a beaten earth floor in which three holes had been dug. Three grave-sized holes. There were maybe twenty sacks of concrete piled on some plastic sheeting at the far end.

‘Wait,' said Marnier, checking the holes with his torch. ‘Put Carlo in this one.'

I staggered to the graveside with the last of my strength and let Carlo slide off into the watery hole. I collapsed to my knees and elbows, forehead against the cool earth, my whole body coursing with acid, my shirt, slick on my skin, soaked with sweat and blood.

‘Glad you had the
contrefilet
now?' said Marnier. ‘Imagine trying to do that with a little
filet de barre
inside you.'

He took a camping gaz light off the wall and lit it and a cigarette. He hung the light from a steel crossbeam in the roof, where it hissed. Felix had let Gio fall to the ground and, now that I was unburdened, I realized with some nervousness that, first of all, Gio was stripped naked, and there were three holes in the shed and only two obvious occupants.

But, hell, I couldn't do anything about it. I was weaker than a licked kitten.

Gio rolled over on to his back to take a look at how dark his circumstances were. Marnier stared down at him and smoked.

‘
Amenes les machettes, Felix,
' he said, and I suddenly felt like sobbing.

Felix dumped the polypropylene sack at Marnier's feet and retreated to the door of the garage where he picked up the shovel and started filling in Carlo's hole. I slumped on to my side. Marnier took the machetes out of the sack. There were two types. A long thin whippy one for grasses and a short, heavy,
thick-bladed version for chopping through anything that was less strong than mild steel.