Blood Is Dirt (24 page)

‘Like all women do, Bruce. I listened to him, I flattered him, I hung on his every word. He might look like a tough guy but he's vulnerable, which is why he plays it close and keeps it clean and likes others to keep it clean. Nothing excessive. He liked you, said you knew how to behave.'

‘Did he talk about Graydon and the chief?'

‘Only in passing. We were talking more personally.'

‘How's he vulnerable?'

‘His wife died four years ago, and then only just last year his daughter.'

‘Out here?'

‘The daughter got malaria which went cerebral and she didn't pull out of it. The wife died in a head-on collision with a truck.'

‘Happens all the time. They're crazy bastards on the roads. How old was the daughter?'

‘Franconelli did that all the time. Talked about one thing and then asked a question about something totally different.'

‘It's catching.'

‘She was twenty-five. Same age as his wife when he married her.'

‘Same age as...'

‘We know.'

‘You going to see him?'

‘I'm invited to dinner tomorrow night.'

‘He didn't invite me.'

‘He likes you but not that much.'

Lagos. Monday 26th February.

 

Over breakfast I told Selina about the connection between the containers shipped out on the
Paphos Star
containing toxic waste and the two haulage companies Seriki Haulage and Awaya Transportation. I linked in the sweet-natured welcome I received at the former with the information from Companies House about the two managing directors Ben Agu and Bof Nwanu. I mentioned their relationship to Chief Babba Seko. I asked her about Quarshie and drew a blank. I gave her Quarshie's lesson in Nigerian politics. She got very excited. I cemented the story in by telling her that Bagado's investigation had shown that Quarshie's car was used to abduct Napier and that Bondougou, who'd masterminded the trashing of Bagado's career, was now effectively blocking any communication between Cotonou and Lagos.

‘Chief Babba Seko killed my father.'

‘It
looks
like it. There are some links, like the toxic waste, but they aren't direct. Babba Seko doesn't
own
those haulage companies. We don't
know
the owner of the land in Western Nigeria where the waste was dumped. Your father was a pal of Quarshie's, but does Quarshie
know
Babba Seko?'

‘Well, I'm there. Agu and Nwanu are close enough to the chief to
be
him.'

‘We'll do some work for the chief, we'll get into his business, his office and then we'll find the link.'

‘And then we'll sting him.'

‘Sting him?'

‘The police aren't going to do anything about it so we will,' she said. ‘I don't kill people, and I don't think you do either. So we'll do the next best thing. Whack them in the bank balance.'

‘Hold on a minute,' I said. ‘I don't remember that bit of my contract.'

‘There's got to be retribution, Bruce.'

‘I don't remember you saying that I was going to be involved in handing it out.'

‘I smell milk.'

‘Burning?'

‘No. You. Skimmed milk. Virtually not milk at all.'

‘Come on, Selina. I've got to live here. You get your justice and fly away. I
live
in Cotonou... and there's Heike to think about too.'

Silence.

‘Maybe there's a way of stinging him
and
serving him up,' she said.

‘I'm listening.'

‘I don't know it yet. I don't know who I'm dealing with. I mean, I've got a good idea but I'd like to get a bit closer... Could we get a newspaper to take the story? Find a rag supporting another candidate...'

‘Army. The army was out on the toxic-waste site. Bagado reckons the labourers were lifers. Nobody would touch it.'

‘Unless they weren't actually army.'

‘How long's it going to take you to prove that?'

‘OK, we just don't tell them about the army.'

‘Do you know how many newspaper editors are in prison? This is the “climate of fear” you've always heard about and never been in. They're not going to print it just because you're white. Go take a look at Kirikiri Prison. From the outside, that's all you need. It's a big stinking rat trap of a deterrent. It's not Ford Open Prison with newspapers, afternoon tea and racing on the telly. They'll check you and your story out.'

‘Ideas, Bruce. I'm trying to save your ass, remember.'

‘Let's nail him down first, then you can smother him in honey and leave him for the ants.'

 

I was glad I hadn't shown my real talent at the party. We came out of Y-Kays and it was as if the day had taken both barrels of a shotgun in the chest. The air was dead and heavier than a corpse. We took a taxi which nudged its way forward on bald tyres and made my feet feel sore. We crossed Five Cowrie Creek and Selina saw her first body. Obscene and bloated, it bobbed like a tractor-tyre inner tube in the harbour. People stopped on the bridge to look.

We joined the Lagos Island traffic jam and didn't move for an hour. The pollution doubled. The sluggish heart of the city, this diseased muscle fed by furred and hardened arteries thick with lead-poisoned blood, stopped.

We paid the cabbie and walked to Elephant House. The lifts were working but there was a crowd waiting for them with the desperation of account holders in a banking crash. We went up to the sixth floor in a silence crammed with human desolation, the unspoken mantra singing in their heads ‘We are the lucky ones, we are the chosen.'

Ben Agu met us and took us through some brown doors and dark passageways to his office, which was as cold and dank as a leaking mausoleum. A curling Maerskline calendar hung on one wall and another from AMObank behind Ben's head. The window was covered with a piece of orange material which had been used as a field dressing. A fly, suffering from whatever's terminal for flies, buzzed, lost height dramatically and ditched into a cup of pens where it buzzed throatily on and off for a couple of minutes.

The chief had not arrived. Ben offered coffee. We accepted. He tried to show us that his intercom was working. It wasn't. He left.

‘A man could die in here,' I said.

‘And they wouldn't know for a week.'

‘Not by the smell, anyway.'

‘Are we sure we want this coffee?'

‘If it means we're jet-ambulanced out of here.'

I looked at the
Daily Times
which was open on Ben's desk at the funeral pages. When people die in West Africa the family put a notice in the newspaper with a photograph of the deceased. Staring out from the centre of the page with a forlorn expression on his face was Emmanuel Quarshie. There was no mention of the cause of death. I flicked back through the pages to the local news section and saw the headline—‘Engineer found dead at home'. A quick scan revealed that Emmanuel Quarshie had died of a gunshot wound to the head—suicide, it was thought.

Ben came back to say that the big man had arrived. I thought I'd heard a fanfare from the air-con duct. We went up to the next floor. The chief's office was about eight of Ben's in one. The white carpet was so thick it had had to be snipped to get the door open. The chief, in white robes at his desk, looked like a snowbound polar bear. He had heavy specs on, stretched wide by his fat head. He spoke on the phone, holding the piece between finger and thumb as if he was listening to a good cigar.

We took the two seats available, which were comfortable but low, and I looked at a photo of the Nigerian national football team up on the wall. Ben stood at a respectful distance. The chief finished his call in his own good time.

‘My friends,' he said, ‘you are welcome.'

The girl came in with the coffee. The chief took the Manchester United mug and crashed back into his chair. Selina had Norwich City while I toyed with Blackburn Rovers.

‘Cantona!' roared the chief, sipping his coffee. I looked at Ben, assuming this was a Yoruba exhortation to get on with it. ‘Eric Cantona!' said the chief.

‘A great player,' I said.

‘No, no,' said the chief, wagging a huge finger, ‘a visionary.' He looked at Ben. ‘Is this Nescafé?'

Ben glanced at the girl, who'd just made it to the door. She nodded.

‘Yes, sir.'

‘If I find this is Red Mountain, heads will ro-o-oll.' He roared with laughter.

‘I think coffee would be a good thing to get into,' said Selina, taking up the torch.

‘Coffee?' asked the chief.

‘Robusta coffee. It's cheap on the London market at the moment. Too cheap for most people to start buying out here. What do you think you could deliver that for in Lagos?'

‘Coffee? Cheap?' asked the chief. ‘Have you ever noticed, Miss Aguia, that no matter how cheap the coffee price in Africa, Nescafé never goes down?'

‘Well, sir, the beans represent less than ten per cent of the retail price and robusta a fraction of that.'

‘Quite so,' said the chief. ‘A travesty. The people of my country break their backs planting and nurturing and harvesting for a pittance so that multinationals can make a fortune from advertising, marketing, packaging, labelling, wholesaling and retailing.'

‘And there's the speculator's cut too, which is what we're here to discuss.'

‘How much would that be?' he asked, pouncing with both paws on to the desk.

‘Last year the robusta market gave as much as one thousand eight hundred dollars a ton clear. I don't think it will get that high again, but maybe one thousand three hundred dollars is attainable.'

‘But...'

‘There's transport to...'

‘We have our
own
haulage companies, our
own
agents,' said the chief.

‘Well, if the market moves there could be a gain of around one thousand four hundred dollars a ton.'

‘Then we should buy a hundred thousand tons at once,' said the chief.

That was about three times the total world robusta crop so I left Ben to answer that one and drank coffee. Selina's mouth remained open for some time.

We talked like that for about half an hour, throwing figures around, discussing the merits of cocoa versus sheanut, how palm oil was coming along, what would happen to cotton this year. Then I said:

‘Have you ever considered rice?'

‘Rice?' roared the chief, who had taken to standing at the window looking out over the lagoon with his fists in his kidneys. ‘We don't grow enough rice as it is.'

‘I mean
importing
rice.'

‘But there's a ban on imports, Mr Medway.'

‘Of course there is. But not into Benin...'

‘Tell me about rice going into Benin,' said the chief.

‘You open up a Letter of Credit for say fifteen thousand tons of parboiled rice in the Bank of Africa in Cotonou. You don't have to put up too much cash because rice is as good as money. The bank regards its own Letter of Credit as security. As soon as the ship is loaded in, say, Thailand, and has left with an arrival date in Cotonou you send buyers to the bank to deposit money against the lots they want to buy. By the time the ship arrives, about a month later, all the rice is sold. Some buyers turn up at the ship's side with trucks, others you warehouse it for them in the port.'

‘How do we access the buyers?' asked Ben.

‘Through agents in Cotonou. There are three agents with the whole business sewn up. You have to do a deal with them.'

‘What's the money?'

‘The difference between the landed cost and the retail price in Cotonou is about four hundred per ton.'

‘But here,' said Ben, ‘because of the ban, the retail price is much higher.'

‘I think perhaps you've seen the potential.'

‘But here,' said the chief airily, turning away from the view, ‘as you so rightly say, Ben, there is a ban.'

‘Which is why there's a premium,' said Ben.

‘Which is why the future president of the Federal Republic of Nigeria cannot be seen to be smuggling, cannot be seen to be profiting from putting food into the mouths of the common people.'

‘Yes, sir,' said Ben.

The chief turned back to the lagoon and straightened his hat, which didn't need straightening. I could hear his brain working like a barrel calculator. Duty, plus transport, plus bribes, plus Nigerian customs, plus warehousing, equals... well, I knew what it equalled. I'd done the deal in my head a thousand times before. Even selling on to a wholsesaler there was at least $200 per ton in it. Over 15,000 tons, that was looking very like $3,000,000. From rice? How could that be right?

But it was. The problems were finding a supplier, getting in with the bank and hitting the right deal with the agent. Three things that were impossible for me, but for someone with the chief's connections... I remembered the AMObank calendar in Ben's office.

‘You could open a Letter of Credit with AMObank,' I said. ‘They're Nigerian, aren't they? And they have an office in Cotonou.'

The chief's ear was tuned to me. He flapped his palms on his backside. As soon as we were out of the room he was going to be on that phone, snapping and snarling down it like a hyena.

‘You'll have to excuse us,' I said. ‘Selina and I are having lunch with Graydon. Should we call later?'

‘No, no. Yes. All right. Very good. Yes, yes. You must go. Mustn't keep Graydon waiting. Send him my regards. Thank you.'

‘Rice,' said Selina, looking at the traffic and annoying the driver by flicking the door lock up and down.

‘It just hit me in the meeting.'

‘Oh yeah?'

‘We were thinking about export not import. It was a lateral hop.'