Blood Is Dirt (16 page)

‘You're not looking for Napier, are you, Bruce?'

‘No.'

‘But you're interested.'

‘That's why I brought it up.'

‘I'm not going to seduce it out of you now, Bruce. You either bring yourself off or put it away.'

‘Such sweet words.'

‘It's to do with my sex life with Graydon.'

‘What are you after, Gale?'

‘You first.'

‘Napier's been murdered. I want to know why.'

‘Spicy. Hot.'

‘You?'

‘I want to get some dirt on Graydon so I can bust this PNA.'

‘Is there any dirt to be found?'

‘If you've got green fingers there's always dirt under the fingernails.'

I finished the Lowenbrau. Gale filled the other flute, topped up her own. The cat walked over to Gale's end of the table.

‘Are we celebrating?' she asked.

‘I don't usually do divorce work.'

‘This isn't divorce work. It's a criminal investigation into my husband's affairs.'

‘Criminal?'

‘Now you're gonna tell me you don't do criminal work either. Whaddya do, Bruce? Candy monitor for kiddywinks?'

‘If I know it's criminal I try to stay clear. African jails aren't so nice.'

‘Well, pal, you're cutting yourself off from ninety-five per cent of the business population in West Africa. You ever give someone a bribe?'

‘Sure...'

‘You're a criminal. Revise your company code of ethics. Christ, you're investigating a frigging murder, if that's not criminal... now raise your goddamn glass.'

‘Wait on, Gale. What do I get out of this?'

‘I am gonna give you access to the Lagos business community at the very highest level. You'll be flying in exactly the same circles as Napier Briggs used to and if you can't find out from those guys what happened to him, you ain't never gonna find out.'

We chinked glasses. The champagne went off in my head like a firework. She turned her back to the table and the cat put its head on one side as if sizing things up.

‘You need a front, Bruce. You can't come snooping around my parties as a gumshoe.'

‘How about a commodity trader?'

‘D'you know anything about it?'

‘Back of a stamp's worth.'

‘Forget it. These guys'll open you up.'

‘But I do know somebody who is a commodity trader and I'm strong enough on shipping to be able to pass myself off as her chartering department.'

‘You eating her?'

‘No.'

‘What's her angle?'

‘You don't have to know everything.'

‘Gimme a name.'

‘Selina Aguia.'

‘Italian.'

‘—ish.'

‘Cool. We got some Italians. She blab the lingo?'

‘Yes.'

‘She like to go to bed?'

‘Christ, Gale. Ask her yourself. You're not shy.'

She moved away from the table. The cat stretched out a paw and a claw caught in the fine silk and opened up a silent rent about a foot long across Gale's behind.

‘Hey,' said Gale, so that I thought she'd noticed, but no, she knocked back the Veuve and made an expansive gesture to the sunlight on the pool, ‘you know something? I'm enjoying myself for the first time in months.'

Lagos. Wednesday 21st February.

 

I slept off the champagne in the first three hours of a ride up to the Ojota Motor Park. In the last half hour I held on to my head and thought about what Gale had on offer. She'd invited Selina and I to party on Sunday afternoon. All the big hitters were going to be there to kiss the ass of one of the new presidential candidates, some chief whose name she couldn't remember. After that she'd got into the second bottle of Veuve and invited me down to the pool house to see her new stippling technique. I hadn't fallen for that and had refused everything else, including the fish-paste sandwich.

It was a hot and dusty late afternoon in Ojota. The sun was scarfed with some horrible bruise-coloured chiffon and the breeze was set at the right level for zero cool and maximum crap to pick out of your eyes. The Awaya Transportation yard was empty apart from a flat-bed on blocks and a watchman who looked as if he'd been tyre-ironed.

There were three trucks in Seriki Haulage and two of them had registration numbers I was interested in, both of them big old Leylands with the stuffing knocked out of them. The yard was small, walled in by breeze blocks with broken bottles on top. There was space only for the trucks, a wooden shed of a sales office and a corrugated-iron shack of a service area where the earth was stained black and piled high with engine blocks, axles and old pistons.

A fat guy was doing something fiddly with the valves and jets of a carburettor. Two boys were rewinding copper wire around an alternator. A charcoal brazier shimmered the air where three soldering irons were being heated in the red-hot coals. Another man sat on a tyre worn smooth which he slapped and thumped like a tam-tam.

I went over there. The boys looked up and said,
‘Oyinbo,'
and laughed. The big man kept on with his carby. The tam-tam didn't break time.

‘One of you a driver?'

The drummer worked up to a frenzied pitch and finished on a loud
tok!

‘How can I help you?' he asked.

‘Do you drive one of those Leylands?'

‘The sales office be over dere,
oyinbo,'
said the fat man without looking up from his work.

‘I don't want to hire the truck. I want to ask some questions. That's all.'

‘He not free to answer you questions,' he said, looking up now. ‘Sales office over dere. Dey answering you questions.'

A man stood in the doorway of the sales office, his hands on his hips, a neat round pot of a belly stretching his white T-shirt which had some red scribble on it, as if he was doing some light bleeding.

‘Do you remember,' I asked the driver, ‘around early to mid-January, taking some containers from Tin Can Island...?'

‘Listen,' said the fat man, putting down the carby, and twitching at one of the boys who sprinted across the yard, ‘he don' know nothing. He be de driver. He jes' pickin' the load, he don't know wass in it. You wanna aks question this be de man.'

The man from the sales office was on my shoulder now. He wasn't pretty. His face was pitted from smallpox and, along with the tribal scars, he had some that came from unsuccessful social interaction. They talked in Yoruba. The word
oyinbo
occurred frequently. The boy closed the yard gates. The driver picked his nose. The other boy fanned the brazier.

The sun was still hot and the Veuve was giving me a splitter. I moved to the doorway of the shack. There was a work bench in there with a couple of table vices on either side and on the wall a range of tools all outlined on a board.

‘You got some questions,' said the sales office man.

‘I wanted to ask about a load he carried back in January.'

‘That your business?' he said, his face nastying up, not having far to go.

‘Yes, it is.'

‘You working for somebody?' he asked, riveting the words into me.

‘Myself,' I said, twisting a bit of sneer into it, trying to get tough, making a big mistake. The man's eyes flickered at the mechanic.

‘You!' he said, pointing at me so that all I could do was look down his hammerhead finger. Then one, two, hup! The mechanic hit me with a right and left in the gut and lifted me on his shoulder and slammed me down on the work bench. My head flicked back, hitting the wood hard and the green roof closed in on me.

My tongue was out a foot trying to lick some air into my lungs, which had been squashed flat by my diaphragm and was all up around my thyroid. They'd locked my hands into the vices and the mechanic was winding wire flex around my legs and the table.

Then the ugly guy appeared in frame above me. I looked away into the corner of the shed. There were two gas cylinders—oxyacetylene. I went back to Ugly. Anything could happen in here.

‘Who you working for?'

‘I told you.'

‘You looking for drugs? What you looking for?'

‘Information.'

Ugly flicked his head and spat some Yoruba over his shoulder. The mechanic appeared with a soldering iron glowing red in the darkness of the shed. It was out of control now. The guy was either psychotic and I was headed for the lagoon with a truck axle around my ankle or they were doing the best job of scaring me I'd seen in five African years.

‘What you wan' aks?' he asked.

‘Nothing important.'

‘Why you wan' aks it then?'

‘Pass the time of day.'

Ugly didn't like that. He gave the iron to the mechanic and stripped my trousers and pants down. The boy brought a fresh iron and I did some very convincing whimpering.

‘Now you tell me,
oyinbo.'

‘I wanted to ask him where he went with a truck back in January.'

‘You wan' know the answer?'

‘If he remembers.'

‘None of you fucking business,
oyinbo.
Thass the answer.'

There was a sizzle and a crackling and a sharp scorching pain that made me scream and filled the shed with the stink of burnt hair. I thought about digging for a deeper scream but the pain didn't go any further. My hands came out of the vices. I leaned over and puked. They released my legs. I was drenched in sweat.

‘Now fuck off,' said Ugly. ‘And don' come back. You wan' aks questions, you aks you own people.'

I slid off the bench and did my trousers up and looked around for a piece of something that I could stick in the guy's head. The mechanic took hold of me and ran me out of the workshop so that I landed in the bald tyre the driver had been sitting on. I was surprised to see a look of concern in his face. I was still looking for that piece of piping when Ugly heaved me up and shoved me towards the gates. I ended up in the dust outside the yard, my flies open, minus a shoe and any shred of dignity.

I wasn't seeing so well but I did find the shoe. The sky was darkening. I made my way back to the motor park. A bar appeared with a wooden verandah painted blue and pink. I found myself holding on to its railing, needing some help. Two men dragged me to a table and I doubled over and did some sweating into the floorboards.

‘You want a drink?'

‘Hold on,' I said and leaned over the railing and vomited again. Somebody gave me a damp rag and I wiped myself down.

‘Just get me a taxi,' I said.

A smashed-up Peugeot came by a few minutes later. I crawled in and propped myself up in a corner.

‘Where you wan' go?' asked a voice.

‘Y-Kays, Vic Island,' I heard myself saying, and heard it repeated by seven voices.

The taxi took me across the lagoon on the Third Axial Road from Ojota to Lagos Island. I saw the water over the lip of the window, dark purple for a minute. I was breathing like a winded dog. Night fell while we were out there on the water. The city looked as friendly as home from the lagoon. If you didn't know about those hard, beaten streets, those stinking, overpopulated, jammed-solid streets and you hadn't been tickled with a poker you might be in danger of thinking that Lagos was a reasonable place.

 

It was after 8 p.m. by the time I got back into Y-Kays. The girl at reception said there'd been some calls for me, all from the same person, a Nigerian who hadn't left his name. I got myself to the room and under a shower. I inspected the burn which was a streak through my pubic hair, the skin scorched and blistered underneath. I had to get some antiseptic on that in this climate. The phone rang. I did some internal bleeding and made the monumental effort of answering it.

‘Yes,' I said, smoothing the hair across my bruised gut. ‘Yes,' I repeated.

‘Oyinbo?

‘That's me. Old whitey. Who's that out there in the Lagos sky? You the Prince of Darkness?'

‘No, no. I'm the driver.'

‘The driver from Seriki's yard?'

‘Yes, sir.'

‘How'd you get this number?'

‘I was there when they put you in the taxi.'

‘I hope you're more polite than your friends.'

‘That was a bad thing they did.'

‘Yes, well. What do you want? Tell me your name first.'

‘No names.'

‘OK So tell me what you want.'

‘To talk.'

I didn't say anything. The phone hissed. I dried myself off.

‘If you want to talk, my friend, you have to fill in the bits where I don't.'

‘We should meet.'

‘It's easier over the phone... and safer.'

‘No.'

‘I see.'

‘We should meet.'

‘Ah...' I clicked at last. ‘You want some money. How much?'

‘You have CFA?'

‘Better than niara.'

‘Fifty thousand.'

‘Forget it. Good night, my friend.'

‘What do you want to pay?'

We banged on for a few minutes and settled on ten thousand CFA. He said he wanted to meet tonight. I told him I was in no state to go anywhere. He said he would meet me in a blue Datsun Cherry at the entrance to the Tafawa Balewa Square by the horse statues at 10 a.m. tomorrow. We hung up. I told reception not to give my name to anybody under any circumstances.

I went to switch on the air con and heard a radio playing outside. It was the news read by the sweetest Nigerian voice I'd ever heard. ‘The situation tonight,' she said, ‘is somewhat dicey, and reinforcements will have to be sent to the region...' Now, why can't I meet people who talk like that?

 

Lagos. Thursday 22nd February.

 

I ate heavily in the morning and went out and bought a new shirt, electric blue with red slashes—not tailing gear. The girl in reception hauled me over and asked for money for the room. I gave her some for keeping her mouth shut plus my laundry. The phone rang. She said it was for me.