Instruments Of Darkness (10 page)

    'I laughed.'

    'I heard you,' said Charlie. 'You wanna see one of my brother's films?'

    'No thanks, I got to go.'

    'It's a short,' said Charlie, leaning over, picking up the zapper and the TV came to life. There was a picture of African straw-roofed mud huts and two girls pounding yam.

    'This is Africa.'

    'This is Togolese TV, asshole.'

    Charlie clicked on the video and a dark ill-lit picture came on in which only the movement of things could just be discerned.

    'Is this wildlife or something?'

    'Kinda.'

    As the camera pulled back, Charlie turned the sound up and the telltale tinny music and sobbing ecstasy accompanied a shot of a woman laid out face down on a bench, her wrists and ankles tied underneath. A huge and hairy man who looked as if he drove trucks during the day held her thin waist in large and sinisterly gloved hands while he worked on her from behind. Another man sat in dazed concentration at the other end of the bench with the woman's head nodding in his lap.

    'Good night, Charlie,' I said, and lurched out of the room.

    'Good night, chickenshit,' he shouted after me, without taking his eyes off the screen.

    I needed some fresh air. Things appeared cut together like a film. There was no feeling of time passing. The dark corridor, the bird-like flower in the pot, the door, the warm wet darkness, the bar door. The bar door was locked. I walked down towards the sea.

    I knew there was a steep bank of red earth down to the sandy beach but it was very dark and the bar was shut down so there was no light. I eased forward with one foot ahead of me until I felt stupid enough, then I stopped and looked out. My eyes got used to the dark. I was very close to the bank. It was closer to the bar than I remembered it. The sea was slowly eating its way into Charlie's compound. It wasn't going to be long before it all tipped into the Gulf of Guinea.

    Standing in the dark was giving me sensory deprivation rather than sobering me up. I walked back to the bar; Charlie was still sitting in his living room, his brother's film flickering on the screen. I fell heavily on my shoulder and kicked out at whatever I had fallen over, which groaned. I crawled back, and in the dim light I could just make out the slack features of the drunken Lebanese. I called the
gardien
and we hauled him up to the paillote, which left me speechless with a huge quantity of blood crashing through my head. The boy was covered in ants and his face and hands were swollen with mosquito bites. The
gardien
said he would put him in one of the guest rooms. After ten minutes, my pulse went back down from my ears to my wrist and I got in the car and drove back to Lomé.

    There were street gangs operating in the centre of town and on the coast road at night. They wanted money in the name of democracy. I decided to go around town and headed for one of the causeways across the lagoon that hardly anybody used at night. There was no street lighting. There was nobody out. The noise from the cicadas closed in. A tyre burned in the middle of the road, the thick black smoke making the night thicker and blacker.

    A group on a piece of wasteland stood around a blazing oil drum whose flames slashed out at the night. As I approached the lagoon, two kids ran across the road and into the dark. Further on; a young woman trotted with her hands covering her cheeks. A young man stood at the side of the road as I rolled past with my elbow out of the window. He slapped my arm.

    'Go back. Go back,' he said.

    I cut the lights, got out of the car and looked down on to the causeway. A car was parked diagonally across the road, its headlights flaring out across the lagoon. In the light, three people stood looking out into the lagoon, their hands behind their backs as if inspecting something. They crumpled forwards off the road. The sound of three shots, delayed, cracked across the water. The black, still lagoon rippled out in silver lines before the lights died on the causeway.

    'Go now. They're coming,' the young man said to the back of my head.

    'Who's they?' I asked.

    'Nobody knows,' said the young man.

    We heard the car approaching. The young man ran, his shirt tail flapping. I drove down a side street and parked by a house out of sight of the road, got out and looked back down the street. A single car drove past at walking pace with no lights on.

    Ten minutes later I drove across the lagoon. The mosquitoes screamed across the water.

Chapter 9

Thursday 26th September

    By morning, my face was welded to the bed, I had an arm like a plastic leg and a brain as dry as a monkey nut and no bigger. Something rattled in my inner ear as I sat up. I drank the best part of a litre bottle of water and felt intimidated by the brightness of the sunlight slanting through the slats of the shutters forming white bars on the marble-tiled floor. I stared into them for a while until they lost what little meaning they had.

    I made it to the shower and rehydrated to full size underneath it. I shaved with limited success. I flossed for the first time in a month and ended up with a cat's cradle in my mouth. I dressed as if I'd done it before but could use some maternal supervision. I flipped off the air conditioner, opened the shutters and staggered back as the sun slapped a white rhomboid across the room. By the time I'd got to the bottom of the stairs I was ready for bed.

    On the verandah, Jack was asleep in the lounger with the radio murmuring on his stomach, the TV quiet for once. I poured some coffee, ate some pineapple and retreated to a shady corner with a pair of sunglasses.

    'Morning,' said Jack.

    'Should be,' I said.

    Jack opened one eye and found me with it.

    'What happened to you?'

    'Man to man with Charlie. The usual. Half pints of whisky, no water.'

    'Did he get ugly?'

    'He's never been pretty.'

    I sipped the coffee. It was that robusta again. It rippled through my system as if I'd mainlined it.

    'They found twenty-one dead bodies in the lagoon this morning,' said Jack.

    The black and white images of last night played themselves through my head.

    'There's a taxi strike. We're going to have trouble,' he said.

    'Who did it?'

    'Nobody knows.'

    'That's what the guy said to me last night.'

    'Which guy?'

    I told Jack what I had seen.

    'Did they say whether they came from the north or south?' I asked.

    'Both.'

    . 'A mixture?'

    'No. Some people say all northerners, others all southerners.'

    'Who's trying to scare who?'

    'I'd say the army were scaring the southerners.'

    'And the army says the southerners are trying to discredit the army and are killing their own people.'

    'Dead people make everybody think about what's going on. Everybody's thinking twice about changing their nice, boring stable lives. Trotsky's bloody omelette; just give me fried eggs sunny side up any time,' said Jack, with a full stomach and an empty head.

    'Don't talk to me about fried eggs.'

    'Restraint…'

    'Don't talk to me about that either. You are no authority.'

    'I myself had an evening of ecstasy and restraint.'

    'Acid house comes to Lomé?'

    'I spent an evening in the company of…'

    Jack who was already supine managed to sink even further back into the lounger.

    'Elizabeth Harvey. You don't waste your time.'

    'It's my challenge.'

    'What are you doing on your lounger then?'

    'I didn't restrain myself
all
night.'

    'I'd hate to think you were slacking.'

    I finished my coffee and called the US Embassy and arranged to meet Nina Sorvino at the German Restaurant for lunch. She said she knew who I was from Charlie, so I didn't need a carnation and a copy of
The Times.
Her accent was from the wrong side of the tracks. I called Dama, the friend of B.B.'s who had introduced Kershaw. We arranged to meet after lunch in his house up the Kpalimé road.

    I drove to the house where Kershaw was supposed to stay at the weekends. Lomé was very quiet, the taxi strike had taken hold. The house was a big place near the Grand Marche, not far from the US Embassy. It was smart, but not so smart that it didn't have a mud road outside full of puddles with kids playing in them. I pulled up outside the front door and a solid- looking iron gate that needed a new coat of paint.

    The house was colonial French with long shuttered windows and wrought iron balconies. The front door had a tiled porch with creeper growing over it and the door a large knocker of two brass ducks hanging upside down with a bar in their beaks. Hanging from the bar was a tortoise. I identified with that tortoise. The gate was locked. To the left, in a small courtyard to the side of the house, was Kershaw's Nissan Sunny.

    There was another house over a high wall on the other side of the car. It was crumbling badly, and the roof was several hundred tiles short of a full head. The windows were boarded up and the visible part of the front door had a plank nailed across it. To the right, a couple of hundred yards away, a smaller crowd than usual waited to file into the Grande Marche. On that side of the house there was only a wasteland which should have been filled with people selling what they'd grown, but was empty because of the strike.

    In front of Kershaw's car were some large wooden gates. There was a boy lying face down on a bench like the abandoned child he probably was. I gave him a
'Bonjour'
and he snapped to attention, holding his bench under his arm. I asked him if anyone was in, but he didn't seem to understand. The wooden gates to the courtyard of the house were locked, so I climbed the iron gate and used the knocker on the front door. It made an impressive noise in what sounded like a hollow house. There was an alleyway at the corner of the courtyard which led to the garden at the back, and down this was a side door to the house. An aviary stood at the far end of the garden. I crossed an overgrown lawn through a smell of bad drainage and found, hanging upside down from the ceiling, a single grey parrot. He looked at me and slowly showed me his grey tongue as if encouraging me to show him mine. He wouldn't have wanted to see it.

    By the garden wall which butted on to the wasteland was a ten-metre long swimming pool which was covered with a scum of green algae and next to it, against the wall, a stone bench with a Small patio and stone urns at each corner except one. There were some very tall palm trees around the garden.

    The back of the house had the single twisted trunk of something dead crawling up the middle of it, like a subsidence crack. It was a secluded garden, quite dark even on a day like this and, like the house, melancholy.

    By the wall that gave on to the abandoned house was the garage and maid's quarters. The maid's door led out on to the garden. There was nobody in the maid's room, but the door opened. In the room was a bed with a Bible on it. There was a dent in the pillow and the bedclothes were pulled back and hanging off the end of the floor.

    A set of keys hung out of the lock of the side door to the main house and the door was open an inch, which made me wary. I walked down a corridor between the large kitchen and the staircase into a living room with a wooden floor like a squash court. To the left, was a set of french windows to the garden, two sofas, an armchair next to a table with a phone/fax on it and, in a gloomy corner, a wood carving. The living room occupied most of the ground floor, and the ceiling was made by the wooden beams of the roof of the house.

    A floorboard creaked in the long and unrestrained way that puts five years on a burglar's life. Standing at the top of the stairs was a man in the office worker's uniform of a worsted short-sleeved suit, buttoned up to short, sharp lapels above the sternum with no shirt or tie. A handbag hung from a loop around his wrist so that he didn't have to carry anything in the four pockets of his suit and ruin the cut, which wasn't one that Chanel would have been proud of.

    'Who are you?' I asked in French.

    'Yao,' he said, as if he'd just barked his shins on a low table.

    'What are you doing here, M. Yao?'

    'And you are?'

    'Bruce Medway.'

    'Doing what, M. Medway?'

    'I thought I just asked you that question.'

    'That's true.'

    'And?'

    'I'm looking for M. Kershaw.'

    'So am I.'

    'He's not here,' he said, walking down the stairs and turning into the corridor.

    'Any reason why you're looking for him, M. Medway?'

    'His
patron
wants to speak to him.'

    'So does mine.
Bonjour,'
he said, and was gone.

    I ran up the stairs into the master bedroom which overlooked the street and watched from the window as Yao climbed over the gate, straightened his suit, opened his bag and took a pen and paper out; he then wrote down my registration number. This shouldn't have concerned me too much, except that on one of Yao's lapels I'd noticed a small badge of the Togolese flag, which meant that he was a civil servant and that his
patron
was likely to be a
grand fromage
- a whole
gruyere
to my little
crottin.

    I paced out of the bedroom with a thumbnail between my teeth and looked at the gallery which ran along the alley side of the house. The walls along the gallery were completely covered in a primitive jungle painting. The green rainforest flashed with exotic flowers was the background for leopard, monkey, antelope, a variety of punky tropical birds and a large life-size baboon. The walls were ten-foot high and ran for forty feet. It looked like something Henri Rousseau would have done.

    There were figures in the forest, smaller than the animals. Some were standing amongst the trees, some moving with spears in their hands and over their shoulders, others drinking at a pool into which a waterfall cascaded down one of the door jambs of the bedrooms. I saw something in the corner about a foot above the floor which stirred. It was a lizard and it moved to reveal the signature painted in tiny letters. It said, simply, 'Kershaw'. B.B. had said he sketched, which made him sound like a street caricaturist, but the man was an artist.