Blood Is Dirt (34 page)

He asked me if I knew somewhere where we could go and drink some beer and watch women take their clothes off. He said that would use up some time, you know, in a nice way. I told him stripping was not something they did a lot of in Africa. You either went the whole hog or not at all—no halfway house. Viktor smoothed his beard over his face and shook his head. AIDS, he said, it was a problem.

We could always go and play pinball in La Verdure, I said. He wasn't terrorized with excitement until I told him that there were always two or three girls there and he shouldn't find it too difficult to persuade one of them to go upstairs and take her clothes off for him. He shrugged and asked me if I'd ever had sex with a black girl. I said it was none of his business. He asked me if I knew a lyric from a rock song which went something like, ‘Black girls, they just wanna get fucked all night, but I ain't got that much jam.' It sounded like the Rolling Stones, I said, but I didn't have Jagger's phone number so he could talk it over with him. I was beginning not to like Viktor very much.

We drove to La Verdure. I parked up against the railings and we went in and ordered two
demi pressions.
There were no girls, just a shrunken French alcoholic in a red shirt four sizes too big for him. I took five games of pool off Viktor and then we had Sunday lunch. We ate a
terrine de lapin, côte de porc grillé,
and a
marquise de chocolat
in a thin
crême anglaise.
We drank the quarter
pichet
of red each that came with the set menu. The girls turned up. Viktor went back into the bar. Time was dead on its feet and wouldn't move on even if I looked at the second hand.

Viktor negotiated with one of the Beninois girls to go upstairs and take her clothes off, but even he realized this was not going to push the clock forward too much as the girl was wearing a blouse, a skirt, a pair of knickers and two shoes. Even if she was a master of the art, which I doubted, she was going to have her work cut out to stretch that over five minutes. I told him to go and buy seven veils. He renegotiated to include a
pipe,
a blow job. I felt sick. They went upstairs.

Another girl who looked as if she'd have had to jump from the fourth floor to get into the lycra sheath she was wearing twanged her way over to me. She was grabbed by a sailor whose gut rested on the glass of the pinball machine, a tattoo of a pair of breasts danced on his bicep as he played it. He smelled of ripe cheese and I could tell that the girl had to search for the hero inside herself just to put an arm around him. I needed to get out of here. I was resenting Viktor's stamina for the situation. He'd been up there six hours now, well, eighteen minutes, but you know how it is when you're the gooseberry.

Viktor came down around teatime. I was playing pool against my alter ego. The dark side was winning. Things had progressed. They were holding hands. They walked over as if I was Daddy and could take them home now. I said I had to get some sleep and that we'd take a bungalow in the Aledjo. I didn't want to be anywhere where anybody could find me. I drove like a good cabbie with the two in the back kicking the doors out in a struggle that should have left them wearing each other's clothes.

I went to the reception and booked a two-bedroomed bungalow. I found a critical situation in the back of the car when I came back. I asked them if they couldn't just hang on for a moment. The answer was, apparently, no.

I got them into a bedroom using some sheepdog skills I'd picked up from afternoon television when I was a lot younger. I fell on to the bed in the other room and folded a pillow over my head. I dropped into a world which was no less complicated and terrifying, but had the dubious benefit of jerking me awake so that at least I knew it wasn't real.

It was 10 p.m. Sunday night. Two columns of oblongs lit the wall behind the bed. The air con couldn't subdue the concentrated pumping from the next bedroom—Viktor finding something out for himself, not having to listen to a rock singer tell him. I hammered on the door.

‘Allons-y, Viktor!'
I shouted.

‘Fe viens,'
he said, and increased the tempo.

‘Oui,'
whinnied the girl.

Right.

I checked the car. It was hot out there and the air coming off the sea a few hundred metres away had halitosis which followed me around like those people in offices who feel the need to get close and breathe on you, see if you faint. The product was still in the boot.

There was the faintest flicker of lightning far away over Nigeria, so far that there was no sound. Viktor shambled out of the bungalow.

‘Quelle heure est-il?'
he asked.

‘Dix heures et quart.'

He whistled to himself, amazed at his own stamina, letting me know he was impressed. We got in the car. I drove.

‘Elle va rester ici?'
I asked.

‘Je vais revenir après,'
he said, sticking an elbow out of the window, putting a foot up on the dash.

We cruised into the industrial zone a half kilometre from the Aledjo. The traffic was light off the main Cotonou-Porto Novo road but the air was still thick with heat and fumes. We drifted through a residential area. Africans who'd made something in the communist era had bought for nothing out here and now small concrete palaces were going up. We merged back with the industrial zone and turned up the sandy track to the warehouse. A single
gardien
slept on a wooden bench outside. There was nobody else around. The few houses opposite the warehouse were either unfinished and boarded up or just footings in the sand with long grass growing in them. It was 10.30 p.m.

I paid the
gardien
to get lost until dawn. Viktor opened up the gates and drove into the compound. I unlocked the warehouse doors in the middle and Viktor reversed up the ramp. He cut the engine and left the lights on. I closed the doors and found the light switch. Two of the three lights came on, one in the middle and one over the Renault. Viktor killed the headlights. I took a torch from the glove and walked up and down the warehouse. It was still empty apart from the stacks of cotton seed in sacks. I checked the roof. In the centre, on the other side from the Renault, a pulley hung from the lowest girder and a rope dropped from it to the top of the cotton-seed stack which was maybe three metres below the roof.

Viktor stayed in the car, sprawled across the front seats with the door open, one foot hanging out, the other resting on the frame of the open window. I sat on a couple of sacks and listened to cars crescendo and diminuendo. The storm I'd seen earlier came fractionally closer—thunder creaked lengthily. Eleven o'clock came and went. I killed four mosquitoes, one fat with blood from a snort off Viktor who was now snoring.

An old tiredness settled on me, one which had started maybe five years ago and never been slept off. It was the kind of fatigue that probably occurred in eighty-year-olds, that pushed them down into the bed and helped them decide that maybe it would be quieter if they gave up the struggle and fertilized the soil instead. It was a weight but a comfortable one. One that sat easy on the body, didn't chafe...

The warehouse door I was facing slid open two inches, then a foot. Ben Agu came in with a flashlight. He didn't acknowledge me, but walked up and down the warehouse. Then he stood under the central light, turned off the torch, and tucked it under his arm. He took a mobile out of his pocket and pressed buttons. He spoke quietly.

‘You're late,' I said.

He went back to the sliding doors and looked out. After a few minutes he flashed his torch. A car reversed up outside. Red lights glowed on the wall of the other warehouse. A car door opened. Ben slid the warehouse doors to a four-foot gap. The chief came in, followed by Selina. The car's engine ticked over. Its lights died. Ben shut the doors. The chief entered the cone of light in the centre of the warehouse. Selina remained at the edge. Ben Agu joined her but not with a torch in his hand. He had a.38 with a suppressor attached.

‘I said no guns.'

‘You did,' said the chief. ‘I thought security was more important.'

‘You've got a driver with you. That makes four not three.'

‘There's two men on the gates as well,' said Ben. ‘That's six not three.'

‘This is Viktor,' I said. He was sitting up now with his heels on the sills of the door. ‘The plutonium-reprocessing expert.'

‘Is he satisfied?'

‘As far as he can be without opening the boxes. He says the documents show where the product originated and that it's weapons-grade plutonium, and he says the containers are genuine too.'

‘Where does it come from?'

‘Originally Tomsk-7 but it was stolen from a research reactor in Tblisi.'

‘He hasn't looked at it.'

‘It's not the sort of thing you can fry up in your kitchen.'

‘We know where to find you,' said the chief. ‘By the time we take the second lot we'll be equipped to inspect the product properly. I have a Russian working on the project already.'

The chief smoothed his hands down the blue robes he was wearing and repositioned his hat. The car's engine cut suddenly. Ben faced the doors which he'd left open a crack. There was a pop as if a milk carton had been rim over on the road. Ben jumped backwards, staggered two steps, dropped the gun, put a hand out to break his fall and fell on his hip. He twisted his body towards the light where the chief was standing and tried to say something. His chin hovered an inch above the floor, his eyes widened and his teeth appeared red in his mouth. His shirt darkened rapidly.

A harsh grating sound of metal on metal shattered the silence of Ben's last struggle. A man came through the sliding doors and walked swiftly towards the chief. He had a gun in his hand. A rope looped into the light from above. The gunman bent and scooped it up without breaking his stride. He fitted the loop over the chief's shoulders and tugged it down to his hips. The rope, which disappeared into the darkness of the roof, tightened. The chief shifted. He still hadn't had time to be astonished. The loop slid to his thighs. The rope tightened again. The chief put his hands out and fell to his knees. He was on all fours when, with a tendon-snapping wrench, his legs shot into the air as Carlo and another guy jumped from the stack of cotton-seed sacks holding the other end of the rope.

The chief ended upside down about a metre off the ground, his robes hanging down over his head, his hat a flat blue circle on the floor. He reached for the ground with his hands and grunted thickly as the blood pounded into his head.

Franconelli came in through the sliding doors followed by Gale and another man pushing a wheelchair in which was strapped a person who looked a lot like Graydon but with a clear plastic horror mask superimposed. In the lap of this spectre was some folded yellow PVC and a pair of boots with large steel toecaps. I'd seen a pair of boots like that before. My father had bought me some on the cheap for my first labouring job. They had special flaps that fitted over the laces and were kept in place by a strap and buckle around the ankle. He'd got them from a friend who worked in an abattoir. The flaps stopped the blood leaking into the boots and ruining your socks.

Two more men came in carrying a brown plastic-backed tarpaulin. They unfolded it and dragged it underneath the chief. Franconelli flapped a hand and Carlo lowered the chief to within a few inches of the floor. One of the tarpaulin men took out a penknife and cut away the chief's robes just leaving him with his trousers. He took some plastic cuffs out of his pocket and went for the chief's hands. The chief grabbed him and attempted to haul himself upright but found he didn't have the condition to do it. The man shrugged him off and cuffed the chief's wrists behind his back. The chief's belly, tits and jowls sagged to the floor. He was finding breathing difficult and was sweating heavily. Franconelli flapped his hand again and Carlo lowered the chief to the floor, where he floundered like an elephant seal.

I took a closer look at the man in the wheelchair and decided it was Graydon, but he'd aged twenty years overnight. That smooth, tanned opulence had gone. He was sucked dry, wrinkled and jaundiced. His left leg and hand trembled. His chest was concave. When he bared his teeth to swallow, they looked horsey and loose.

‘Yes,' said Franconelli, ‘Graydon likes to take his turkey cold.'

‘He didn't come across with it?' I asked. Franconelli ignored me.

‘Fifteen years,' said Franconelli. ‘Fifteen years on cocaine. How much is he up to a day now, Carlo? We gotta be talking grammes of the stuff. Two heavy shots of heroin a day, a speedball or two at the weekends, freebasing, dragon-chasing. Graydon wasn't Graydon. We don't know where the fuck Graydon is.'

Gale was wearing the same cream dress from last night. She was rubbing at some bites on her bare legs with the sandals she had on her feet. She wouldn't make eye contact. Selina took some spray out of her handbag and threw it to her. It landed at her feet. She didn't pick it up.

Franconelli flicked his fingers at the other tarpaulin man, who took the boots and PVC from Graydon's lap. Roberto slipped off his loafers, took hold of the PVC and shook it out into a pair of trousers. He put them on over his own. He fitted his feet into the boots and the tarpaulin man did them up for him. Franconelli stamped his feet. He checked his watch.

‘All of us here like to play games,' he said. ‘People who play games like to win. If there's a winner there has to be a loser. These two had me pegged as a loser. They took advantage of a situation. A personal situation. And they're going to pay for that. Now
I'm
the winner,' he looked at Selina, ‘and because of that you're going to win.' She didn't know how to respond.

‘And what about me?' said Gale.

‘I kept my word to you. You didn't win because Graydon didn't want you to win. The guy's nuts. What can I say?'