Instruments Of Darkness (19 page)

    The phone wrenched me out of my coma. It was light outside. My scalp was drenched in sweat. Heike lay on her back with beads of moisture between her breasts. The phone insisted. She clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth. I crawled to the angry phone. On the third croak, someone spoke. It was Nina Sorvino. I said hello, which came out as a single syllable beginning with 'B'. Nina spoke very softly for my well- wrung brain and asked me to an Embassy party in Lomé that evening. We arranged to meet at the Hotel Le Benin, not far from Jack's house, at seven o'clock.

    The day was hot and grey like motorway service station coffee. It passed with hostage slowness. There should have been a sense of triumph, a post-row euphoria. I'd asked Heike to live with me. The offer had been received but, I noticed, not accepted. I had that feeling of being on the edge of something great but without knowing whether it was good or bad.

    We went to the Sheraton and lay face down on a couple of loungers under some low palm trees. Once an hour, I slid into the pool on my belly while Heike remained on the lounger with her arms over the side, her cheek flat against the mattress as if weighed down by something. Later she came in and I manoeuvred her around the pool while she stared up at the overcast sky. I was doing what Bagado had told me, I was listening; the only problem, Heike wasn't talking.

    The heat and humidity didn't let up and this time the storm didn't even bother to pass drily overhead but slunk off round the side without even a breath of wind. On the way home, I said I wanted to go to Kershaw's office. Heike wasn't happy about it. 'It's not bloody finished yet, is it?' she said, and slouched against the door jamb with her arms folded while I looked around. There wasn't a lot in the room. In the desk was a ledger of the sheanut Kershaw had bought, at what prices and from whom. The filing cabinet was empty, and so was the ashtray. The office plant was a dried yellow husk. There was a clean block of paper on the desk with no imprints left by any previous note. There was an empty coat hanger on a picture hook.

    'Where would you put a dirty shirt?' I asked Heike.

    'In a plastic bag on the door handle,' she said, yawning. I looked. Nothing.

    'That's what people do with dirty shirts, Bruce. They take them home and wash them. Try the answering machine, Sherlock,' she said. 'It's flashing.'

    The phone was on a separate shelf below the window, the answering machine next to it. I rewound the tape and played it. B.B.'s voice came on.

    'Steef? You dere? Pick up de phone. Bloddy hell!

    Steeef! Gah! You call me. (A slurping noise.) Tell me how many ton you haff now. Send sample. De last sheanut we send to Aarhus from Lomé de FFA more dan four per cent. Dey not payin' me. You hear? Bah!' The phone clattered. B.B.'s message was laid over another, a different voice speaking French. '…
a vingt- trois heures le vingt-trois septembre. D'accord. Au revoir.'
Then a voice I recognized as Kate Kershaw's. 'It's me. This stuff, where do you want it' sent? Lomé or Cotonou? The sable brushes cost a fortune. Bye.' Then blank tape.

    'What do you make of it?' asked Heike, sarcasm on full, a cigarette going now.

    'I've got to go home before you take me to the taxi station.'

    Back at the house I found the direct number of the harbour master's office in Cotonou port. Nobody answered for some time, and then with a Saturday afternoon voice that was sitting around in its vest with its bare feet up on the table next to a radio. I asked him which ship gave an ETA of 23.00 hours on the 23rd September. It took him forever to tell me what I already knew. The
Naoki Maru.

    Heike dropped me at the taxi station. She said she was staying in Porto Novo until Monday or Tuesday, depending on how things went with the conference and job interviews. We kissed and she squeezed my shoulder. She couldn't hold my look. I got out of the car, closed the door and she drove off like a cab driver after a new fare.

Chapter 16

Saturday 28th September

    The Hotel Le Benin looked refreshed as if it had just flown in from a short holiday in the Cote d'Azur. It had a smart, cool grandeur to it that night, with the lights trained on to its creamy facade. In the darkness of the gardens, I changed my shirt. Headlights cut through the night as cars swung round the circular driveway. Car doors opened and shut and shoes gritted on the loose surface. There was smoke and chat and the rustle of silk and folding money. The open air restaurant and bar was filling up but there was no Nina there, so I went into the air-conditioned lobby, which was freezing after the smothering heat of the evening, and wandered around like a paying guest.

    Seven o'clock came and went, as did seven-thirty. A young African girl came up to me and asked me if I liked dancing; I said yes and she left the hotel without a backward glance. The doorman came up to me and apologized.

    'These girls,' he said. 'Very…
bad
girls.'

    I thought about following and doing some bad dancing with her because I was getting chill from the air conditioning. Then I started thinking that something had happened to Nina as a quarter to eight assumed the position on the lobby clock.

    Boredom got its arm round my shoulder and pushed me into an African art boutique and I started playing a game of
wari
with the girl behind the counter who tore me to shreds. My mind wasn't on it. At least that was what I told myself.

    'You're pissed, right?' said Nina, in a low wary voice behind me.

    'I wish I was.'

    She was wearing a blue Chinese silk dress with a high collar and cut at the shoulders. Her hair was tied in a long plait which hung over her right shoulder and needed only six more inches to the top of her thigh. She said it took her an hour to do the plait which she thwacked me with on the arm. It was as solid as a dog's tail.

    We drove to the party which was being held in the US Cultural Centre opposite the Embassy. I was wondering whether to tell her about Kershaw, and decided that if she was a New Yorker she must be able to take just about anything, when she asked me if I'd found him. I told her and she didn't like it one bit. She had a lit cigarette in her mouth in less time than it took her to run the red light. She rolled down the window to get some air and all that came in was thick, heavy heat which covered her face like a gloved hand. She threw the cigarette out, rolled up the window and turned up the air conditioning.

    We arrived at the Cultural Centre in silence. Nina's jaw was shut tight so that the tendon sprang out by her ear. She had a wide look to her blinking eyes as if she was paranoid. She wasn't just upset about Kershaw, she was scared.

    'Nina?'

    'What?' she said, with a viciousness that came from speaking with her jaw shut. 'I'm upset, that's all. Haven't had an ex-boyfriend die on me before. You?'

    'No.'

    'Well, it's like this.' She dropped her head on to the steering wheel. 'Jesus. I'm sorry. I keep you waiting for an hour and then tear your throat out. I'm outa line.'

    We sat in the darkness, couples walked past on the way to the party. Nina looked out not seeing them and not blinking either.

    'Let's get a drink,' she said. I didn't drag my feet.

    We went into the party and immediately ran aground on some of Nina's colleagues who wouldn't let us get near a drink. The waiters with their trays of ready-made drinks sensed a couple of desperate people and kept well away from us. It must be something drummed into them early at waiting school. Nina broke free from the mob with the verbal equivalent of an elbow in the eye. We stood by a waiter, Nina holding him by his arm, and drank two drinks apiece from his tray and took a third. A hand came down on my shoulder and Jack took my arm and spoke in my ear: 'You won.'

    'How do you know?'

    'Everybody knows, but only I knew you found him.'

    'And now everybody knows that.'

    He was about to introduce me to a small but very attractive Asian woman with long shiny purple nails, but she sent out a complex message in social semaphore that brought Jack up short. He let go of my arm and followed the Asian woman to a far corner where he stood bent at the middle looking at the ground over her shoulder and made a good show of listening.

    Nina returned and introduced me to Elizabeth Harvey who, she explained, was English and married to a prominent banker in the US community. Mrs Harvey was tall enough on her high heels to look me straight in the eye, which she did while I remembered Jack's decadent bet. She had a glassy coolness to her and I felt as if she'd picked me up by the scruff and was inspecting me as she would a yobbish kitten. Her blonde hair was piled high on her head, a single string of pearls circled her neck. Her shoulders were bare and she was thin, so that her clavicles stood out, along with a few other bones that I hadn't seen on myself for a long time. I could just see the top of her raw silk dress which had a blue green sheen and showed that cleavage was not something she possessed. I didn't look any lower.

    She didn't seem too displeased with what she saw in me and she put me down and gave me a little stroke. She smiled with a small mouth whose lips looked as if they might be hard to kiss - not difficult, just not very yielding. Her eyes were very blue, too blue to be believable. She must have been wearing coloured contacts.

    'I hear you found a body,' she said, and showed me a set of perfect but very small teeth that pointed into her mouth so that if she got them into you, you might find it hard to get them out.

    'There've been a lot of them about lately,' I replied.

    'I wouldn't like to find one.'

    'I didn't enjoy it myself.'

    'Was it stiff?'

    'Yes, and hard, and bloated and it stank.' It was a hard line to take, but then, she had showed an interest and I saw no reason to hold back. She shivered.

    A tall man with grey hair which was swept back and curled above his red and white striped collar appeared at her side and took her elbow. He wore a light grey, lightweight suit and a tie that joined him to a club where people talked quietly while the world haemorrhaged money into their bank accounts. Mrs Harvey introduced me to her husband, Clifford Harvey, without taking her eyes off me. He didn't waste his time shaking my hand and behaved like someone who'd chipped neatly out of the rough and come to pick up his golf bag.

    'Darling,' said Mrs Harvey in a bright voice that could shatter crystal.

    Clifford held out his hand and we shook. He'd been to handshaking school. He threw the spare hand over his hair and it came to rest half on his neck and half on his cheek with the little finger in the corner of his mouth. His brow had the right concentration lines, his eyes had the alert tiredness of the hardworking, capable, corporate man.

    . 'Mr Medway found a body,' said Elizabeth Harvey. 'What was its name?'

    'Steven Kershaw.'

    'Who is Steven Kershaw?' drawled Clifford, as if he might be a potential client.

    'Was. He's dead now,' said his wife, blinking.

    'Who
was
he?' said Clifford, stringing out his already strung-out American accent to show his wife that her irritating little shots were coming right off the meat.

    'An Englishman who did some sheanut business out of Cotonou,' I said. 'I found him in the pool of a house a couple of hundred yards from here.'

    Clifford had heard all he wanted to hear. He gripped his wife's elbow and gave her a gentle shunt with his shoulder. She didn't budge. She was more interested in death than hanging off her husband at a party. After all, she was a Catholic and her whole life was invested in death.

    'You found him in a pool?' she asked.

    'With an urn attached to his feet.'

    'Was it suicide?'

    'It looked like it.'

    'Is this your job?' asked Clifford Harvey, amazed that people could earn a living doing this kind of thing.

    'Finding people, not necessarily dead ones. This is the first. I do other things too.'

    'You're a private eye,' said Clifford, who in his privileged life had probably run into some things other than bankers, but they'd only made a mess on his windscreen.

    'Not exactly. There's not much call for that kind of work on this coast. It's not what you'd call California.'

    'You gotta line in acute perception there, Mr…?'.

    'Medway, darling,' said Mrs Harvey, and I watched my name zip through his head once more without troubling his memory.

    Elizabeth Harvey had begun to look about her as if she was fresh off the deck of a sinking liner. Something had clicked inside her and she'd moved into another phase of her programme. She asked me if I was alone and I told her I had come with Nina who was off on the far side of the room talking to Charlie. Of course, she remembered that Nina had introduced us, so I asked her if she knew her. She didn't like that and her eyes popped open and she took a look down her nose at me of the sort that shoe-shine boys must get used to. Clifford was breathing pure steam into her ear and Elizabeth Harvey let herself be led away to meet the owner of an aluminium smelting plant.

    'What do you think?' asked Jack from behind my shoulder.

    'Very cool.'

    'Just right for these hot nights we've been having,' he said, giggling.

    'Maybe a little brittle.'

    'I can be careful.'

    'How does Clifford feel about it?'

    'These people only sleep together in the back of limousines after boring bankers' dinners.'

    'Does she know your reputation?'

    'She's too pure for that.'

    'Or too stupid.'

    'I'm the only one who's daring enough.'

    'The secret of your success.'

    Jack was rubbing his hands and looking around.

    'Nina Sorvino,' he said.

    'Forget it, Jack.'

    'Not me, you.'

    'I know.'