Blood Is Dirt (29 page)

That was why she'd been looking so athletic at the Sheraton that night. She had a one-megabyte floppy in her briefcase which told the whole story and she'd just made $80,000 on her own crude shipment without raising a sweat.

Now she was lying on the sofa with a splash of Black Label and thinking about Viktor and what his knowledge of plutonium reprocessing could contribute to the end of Chief Babba Seko's political career.

‘I've already spoken to the chief,' she said.

‘About the nuclear stuff?'

‘I just ran it past him. Said it in a conversational way that a Russian friend of mine had been offered some gear.'

‘Did he bite?'

‘No.'

‘Nibble?'

‘No.'

‘Sniff?'

‘No.'

‘He had his mind on other things.'

‘It was before Isabelle arrived.'

‘He wasn't in the right mood. Not thinking about the right thing. Not thinking about his presidency.'

‘Why don't you try him? You hooked him on the rice. Maybe he only listens to men. He didn't treat Isabelle like a hotshot lawyer, did he?'

‘Maybe you've done enough already. It's planted. Let's see if it grows. Even if it doesn't you can always dob him in to Roberto and walk away.'

‘You hope.'

‘Yes, I do.'

‘No sense of challenge.'

‘Just a sixth sense for trouble and—as Bagado says—it always finds me.'

‘Am I with the right guy?'

‘You're the trouble,' I said.

‘You going to lend me your car keys?'

‘Goodnight,' I said, and lobbed them over.

 

Cotonou. Wednesday 28th February.

 

In the morning, Heike was hot but not sweating. I was losing my nerve about the malaria diagnosis. She said she was feeling OK apart from the diarrhoea. I told her to go to the Polyclinique. We had a fight. She called in sick to her office. I told her to take something for her stomach. We had another fight. I made an appointment at the Polyclinique. She asked me if I was ill. I gave up. She was old enough.

Selina gave me the floppy of the BASOLCO accounts and I put it in the poetry section of the bookcase between Heaney and Hughes. We drove downtown and took our coffee and croissants in La Caravelle before driving out to the port area for our meeting with the agents at 8.30 a.m.

The agents' director was a Nigerian, an Igbo, who spoke fluent French through a permanent wince from a stomach ulcer. He was the only African I'd ever met with one of those. Ben and the chief were on time and we were filing into the director's office when Ben turned and put his hand on my chest.

‘This is an African thing,' he said. ‘You understand?'

We went back to reception and sat the meeting out amongst the rubber plants and magazines called
Container Week
and
Commodities Hotline
from last year. Selina was puce with fury. She didn't know how lucky she was. A European can't stand the African Way. A European likes to get to the point. The African likes to discuss everything but the point. I've been in meetings where Africans have danced around the point for hours with no noticeable drift towards the nub and then, suddenly, an agreement has been reached, hands shaken, the office vacated, and old whitey's been left still drumming his fingers on the desk with nothing written on his notepad.

At about 11 a.m. there was a cheer from the office, as if they hadn't been discussing business but had hunkered down in front of some old replays of the Africa Nations Cup. They filed out with an agreement written over their faces. Ben steered Selina off to a waiting taxi and the chief put his hand on my shoulder and leaned on me all the way to my car. We drove downtown.

‘I had a Peugeot once,' said the chief, as if it had been a favourite toy when he was eight.

‘Good cars.'

‘Oh yes.'

‘Paris/Dakar.'

‘Quite. An African car.'

‘They make them in Nigeria, don't they?'

‘Mmmmmm,' he murmured, as if relieving himself in a swimming pool. ‘What do you think of Nigeria, Mr Medway?'

‘It's a mess and it shouldn't be.'

‘And why do you think it's a mess?'

Careful here, I thought.

‘There's nobody
running
the country, they're just
controlling
it.'

‘A fine distinction,' he said. ‘You should be a politician.'

‘I don't have the necessary qualities.'

‘Which are?'

‘Unshakeable vision and unfathomable optimism,' I said. Well, I didn't want to blow it with ‘unshakeable arrogance and unfathomable insincerity'.

‘I have a vision,' said the chief, quietly, as if he was admitting that he'd written a short story and would I like to read it.

‘That's why you're a presidential candidate,' I said.

‘Not yet, but yes.'

‘Am I allowed to know your vision?'

‘Of course. It's that Nigeria will be strong again. That we will be the number-one country in Africa. That the continent will look to us for leadership in economic affairs and... for defence.'

This is the African Way—from Peugeots to plutonium without mentioning it. We sat outside AMObank and discussed Nigerian foreign policy for fifteen minutes while Ben and Selina sat in the taxi behind. By the end still nothing had been said, but I was in no doubt that the chief was in the market for any amount of weapons-grade plutonium we could lay our hands on, and he was in no doubt that I would be able to supply it.

We were included out of the meeting with AMObank and Isabelle Lawson. Selina was shaking and I had to grip her upper arm and drag her to the indoor shrubbery before she mauled someone.

‘What are we doing here?' she asked.

‘We're entourage. The chief's an important man. He's so important he has two white people who sit outside his meetings waiting for him.'

‘I'm humiliated.'

‘Your time will come,' I said. ‘He wants the gear.'

‘He does?' she said. ‘Oh boy, am I going to enjoy fucking this guy over.'

After the meeting, on the way to lunch, Isabelle told us the terms of the deal. The chief was required to deposit $500,000 with the bank. As soon as the ship was loaded the bills of lading would be sent to AMObank, who would hold them until the balance was paid by the buyers sent by the agents. When the value of the cargo was reached the bills of lading would be released to the chief. Nice business if you can get it.

The chief retired after his lobster and Ben made it clear that Selina would be needed in Lagos while I should start moving things in Cotonou. I dropped Isabelle off and headed across the lagoon to Akpakpa.

Vassili was in his yard pacing around and yabbering in French down one of the new mobile telephones which had been available since the Francophonie conference. He nodded me into the house, where I sat alone for two minutes until his eldest daughter came in with two Petite Beninoise beers and a bowl of cashew. She looked as if she'd lost a kitten, and rebuffed my four stabs at conversation with monosyllables.

Vassili collapsed into an armchair and threw his feet up on the table. He grabbed the beer and slugged half the bottle. His daughter watched him from behind a curtain to the kitchen. He flashed her an irritated look and she bled away into the house.

‘You know someone who wants to buy a Mercedes 300 series diesel?'

‘Do I look like it?'

‘Mmmm,' he said, doubtfully. ‘What do you want? The Peugeot OK?'

‘The Peugeot's fine,' I said. ‘I want to meet your Kazakh friend.'

The beer stopped halfway to his mouth. He looked steadily and directly into my eyes for a minute. One of his dogs barked in the yard. He didn't flinch. The air hissed in the room like a gas fire.

‘Does he have a name, your Kazakh friend?' I asked.

‘No,' he said. ‘We call him Mr K. Why do you want to see him?'

‘I'm interested in what he has.'

‘Don't joke with me, Bruce.'

‘No jokes.'

‘You have a buyer?'

‘Well, it's not me, Vassili.'

‘What's he want? Your buyer.'

‘I don't know what Mr K's got.'

Vassili nodded and fed his mouth with cashew from the silo of his fist.

‘Mr K,' he said, ‘never deals direct.'

‘With the principal?'

‘That's right. It's a big responsibility for you. The money. The product.'

‘Why doesn't he deal direct?'

‘Experience. He learn to stay clear. Friends have been killed. Set-ups are common. This isn't a set-up?'

‘It won't worry him if it is, will it?'

‘I mean you. You're not being set up?'

That spanner went clanking into my machinery and lodged itself somewhere, not vital, but where I could feel it.

‘She's a very interesting woman,' he said, ‘Selina.'

The beer bottle clinked against his teeth. He tipped it, looking at me out of the side of his face.

‘Just ask Mr K if he'll see me.'

‘He'll talk to you. You won't see him. He's a careful man.'

‘Viktor can call me too. If he wants to make some money.'

‘My God,' he said. ‘And me?'

‘You'll find a commission somewhere out of all this.'

He grinned. I stood and drained the beer. Vassili struggled to his feet. He slapped me on the back twice but didn't say anything.

I drove back across the lagoon, the water shivered in the wind coming off the sea, the jungle bristled on the shoreline. Dust swirled around the Dan Tokpa market so that people walked with their arms across their faces. Clouds bunched in the sky due north and my Peugeot's engine missed a couple of beats.

 

As soon as I walked in the house I knew there was something wrong by the quality of the silence. Helen was sleeping on the kitchen floor. Heike's bedroom door was shut. My ears were ringing as I reached for the door handle. I looked over my shoulder but it was only the tension in the room pushing me forward. I opened the door.

Heike's head and neck were drenched in sweat. Her hair plastered over her face in oily streaks. There was a dark halo on the pillow where her head lay. The blue sheet twisted, and dark too, stuck to her body. Her eyes were shut and she was panting, muttering as if in a religious trance. Malaria.

I tore the wet sheet off her, wrapped a dry one around her and a blanket, picked her up and ran down to the car with her. Twelve minutes later I was carrying her up the steps to the Polyclinique. Three minutes after that she was in a private room with air con and a French woman doctor holding her eyelids open and shining a torch in there but getting nothing back. My insides felt like bagged freezer meat.

‘Does she take anything?' asked the doctor.

‘No.'

She rolled Heike over and stuck a thermometer in her anus and issued a rattle of instructions to the two Béninois nurses who ran out of the room. Four minutes later she removed the thermometer.

‘Forty-point-six,' she said. That was a hundred and five in my language and the fear crept up my neck and banged around in my brain like a madman amongst the dustbins.

The nurses came back in with a bottle of lime-coloured Quinimax solution with glucose. The doctor asked if they'd put the nausea suppressant in and the nurses, wide-eyed and as scared as me, nodded. The doctor plugged the needle into Heike's vein and turned the drip on. The nurses bathed her temperature down with cool water. The doctor shone her torch into Heike's eyes again.

‘Has it gone cerebral?' I asked. The doctor didn't answer.

If you hit malaria hard early on there was nothing to fear. The parasites injected by the mosquito when it bit didn't get a chance to multiply in the bloodstream. If, however, the malaria was allowed to get on with it, the parasites multiplied, poured around the body in the bloodstream and entered the vital organs, including the brain.

It then became cerebral malaria and the chances of dying were very high. Pure quinine was the only antidote. That and a lot of luck.

The nurses left when Heike's temperature dipped below the 100 mark. I walked around the bed obsessively checking the drip. Then I leaned with my forehead against the slatted window and watched the afternoon dying. I had the terrible thought that this is what happened. This was how it ended. On an unremarkable sunny afternoon a long way from home.

Outside people came and went. Nurses changed shift. Cars arrived and moved off. Night fell. The traffic thickened as everybody left work and thinned as the evening meals were taken. Then it was quiet. Heike didn't move. The doctor came in again and removed the drip, checked her temperature and looked into her eyes.

‘It's up to her now,' she said. ‘Does she like to fight?'

She waited for an answer until she realized that she wasn't going to get one. I was stunned by the black hole I found myself looking into, tipping into, falling into. I was going to lose her.

A cool touch on my forearm made me start. The doctor, a very small woman, no bigger than a twelve-year-old, looked up at me. She had bags under her eyes, puffy skin from working indoors in the tropics and maternal hair. She'd seen the despair, the complete desolation in my face, seen me looking out across some night-time rocky desert. I knew because looking back into her fifty-year-old green eyes I saw something unusual, something I hadn't seen for a while, something I didn't come across in my line of work. It pricked my eyeballs.

‘Does she?' she asked again.

‘Oh yes,' I said, and I was going to add to it, but this whole life opened out in front of me, not in scenes, not in takes of film that have always flickered and whirred in my head, but just light, a strong, far-reaching light. I swallowed but the conker in my throat stayed. The doctor left.

A nine-inch striplight shone above Heike's head and lit her face in what seemed to be an anagram of her own. Black-and-white shapes which produced an effect which wasn't her. I felt foolish and angry, in fact I felt everything. I found myself on the cutting edge of feeling—a thousand cuts and still living. I turned the light out, sat by the bed, held her hand and, like the drip she'd just had removed, drained my will into her.