Instruments Of Darkness (20 page)

    Nina was still talking to Charlie, who was looking stone-faced at nothing in particular, in the middle of the room. He sipped his drink and turned his head slowly towards her. He said something. She turned and walked out of the room with her chin on her chest. A drink came into my hand and my empty was removed from the other. The service element of the party had improved now that I wasn't desperate. Jack lumbered off through the crowd towards Charlie and knocked the official photographer on the back on the way through. Charlie was having his face kissed by
Yvette
and it was having the same effect on him as a perfect punch on the point of the chin.

    Nina came back into the room, strode across to me and flung the plait around my neck, pulled me to her and kissed me on the mouth. A flash went off. Some people laughed. I pulled back. The plait was like a silk rope on the back of my neck. Nina held on to the other end.

    'You could strangle someone with that.'

    'I'd have to get very close to do it.'

    She let go of the plait and it slipped down my shoulder like a snake moving off. I wasn't feeling very comfortable about this manoeuvre of Nina's. Her kiss had sent a bolt of electricity straight down my spine. I had enough problems of my own without adding hers. She sniffed at me as if a little upset.

    'I'm only kidding,' she said. 'I've a reputation for being outrageous. I gotta keep it up.'

    'It's a big talent,' I said.

    'Are you for real, Bruce? Are you one of the few men who doesn't want a piece of Nina Sorvino.' She put one hand on her hip and flung the other around herself. 'He wants my tits, he wants my ass, he wants my pussy, he wants my mind, he wants my feet,' she said with a deep voice, 'but he's a bit weird.'

    'But nobody wants the whole Cadillac,' I finished.

    She sniffed again and I thought she was going to cry, but her head came up bright-eyed. 'I'm the spares department.'

    We whipped some drinks off a passing tray and looked around. Charlie was shaking hands with the massive Nigerian from AAICT who was held in position across his meaty shoulders by Jack, who seemed to be coming first in an international grinning league. Nina said his name was Bof Awolowo and that he'd made huge money in the seventies from the Nigerian oil boom. He'd somehow managed to squeeze out of Nigeria when they had the clampdown in the eighties.

    'He was a lot slimmer then,' she said. 'Now he's back and trying to be legit and getting big in politics. You can imagine, it's not ideology that's gettin' him there.'

    'You're impressed.'

    'He just wants to put himself in a position where he can rip his country off again.'

    'What's he like in business?'

    'I met an oil man from Port Harcourt who said: "His name sounds like a fart in a tub and that's all you get when you do a deal with him."'

    Awolowo's shoulders were shaking and the boom- boom of his laughter rebounded off the walls. His head rocked back and the creases multiplied in his neck. A waiter arrived with a tray and he turned to take a drink; the humour drained from his face and his eyes flickered.

    'Has Charlie worked with him?'

    'I don't know, but he likes a challenge.'

    'You know Jack?'

    'I never been to bed with him,' said Nina, giving me a sideways glance with slitty eyes and a mouth that should have had a cigar in the corner.

    'You're a rare breed.'

    'Maybe I'm gonna be extinct the way things are happening round here.'

    Nina was carried off by some Embassy people. A small, fat woman with sweat beading through the powder on her nose tapped my elbow and stared up at me. She held a heavily ringed hand with an orange juice in it towards me as if to chink glasses. We juggled our names around until the coaster stuck on the bottom of her glass fell off, then we knocked heads bending down. She was an American and lived in the Hotel Golfe in Abidjan. Her husband was head of Global Bank. She pointed him out. I didn't know whether I was supposed to say he looked nice. I asked her why she was living in a hotel and she told me that Abidjan was very dangerous and they hadn't found secure accommodation. I hadn't thought it was that bad, I said, and she put me right. She was worried about having her head cut off by a machete. I asked her where she came from in the States and she said New York; I mentioned that they had a hell of a lot more crazies in New York than they did in Abidjan and that was the end of it.

    Nina was half a mile away by now talking to a large sandy-haired fellow who was fingering her plait and murmuring things to her that might have been offers of money. She was leaning away but the plait moored her to him. I had some telepathic understanding with a waiter who could intuit when the ice in my glass had got to rattling point and would coast by with his tray at just the right speed and level to put a dead glass on and take a live one off.

    The official photographer was lining up the Harveys and a bunch of executives from the aluminium smelting plant. One of the team had enough drink inside him to think that he could put his hand on Elizabeth Harvey's bare shoulder. It wasn't there for long and when he took it off he checked it as if he'd lost some skin on cold metal.

    Yvette was doing something to the back of Charlie's neck and he had the uncertain look of a man who was thinking that maybe everybody around him could hear his heart beating in his ears as loud as he could. She was wearing a Fortuny-pleated silk cardigan in silver and its intimate rustle was devastating Charlie's hold on himself. He was swallowing a lot. It was a thick lustful swallow which sent whatever was coming up right back down to his loins. Awolowo and Jack had moved on so there was no audience to his restraint.

    Yvette whispered something in Charlie's ear. Her lips and tongue made contact with his lobe and his legs trembled in his trousers. She broke away from him, the Fortuny-pleated silk flared trousers she was wearing hushed the conversation where she walked. She reached me and folded the cardigan across herself.

    'They tell me you found a body this morning, Bruce,' she said, rolling my name on her tongue.

    'Why are women so interested in death?'

    'Sex and death is what it's all about. Power and money is for boys.'

    'A black widow speaks.'

    'That was Jasmin who said that,
I
've never killed a man… in cold blood,' she said, laughing in the back of her throat.

    'Remind me not to get involved.'

    She took a cigarette out of her purse, put one in her mouth and was about to light it when she remembered that she was in the American Cultural Centre and the marines were on passive smoking duty. She twiddled the unlit cigarette in her smoking fingers and tickled the gap in her teeth with her tongue.

    'This body,' she said. 'It belonged to Mr Kershaw. They tell me another body was found in Mr Kershaw's apartment in Cotonou. That body belonged to a woman.'

    'Who's they?'

    'I don't remember.'

    'You're not trying very hard.'

    'Was it suicide?'

    'I don't know.'

    'He drowned,' she said, neither as a fact nor a question.

    'I suppose it's not a normal way of killing yourself,' I said.

    'Suicide isn't normal and they say drowning is very nice.'

    'If you've had such a nice life that you don't mind it flashing before you.'

    'I see your point. An overdose of painkillers is perhaps more usual. How would you…?'

    'I wouldn't.'

    'How do you know?'

    'Suicide is for romantics,'

    'And "ruined" financiers/ she said. 'You are not a romantic?'

    'There's comfort in escape but no solutions.'

    'Perhaps you're more profound than you look?'

    'Which is how?' I said, wondering if her English stretched that far.

'Beau,'
she said, stroking me with her violet eyes.

    'You
are
a romantic,' I said, taking a good slug of whisky while I thought about bottling whatever it was that was getting me all this attention.

    'I am,' she said, making her top lip shine with the tip of her tongue.

    'You should be careful.'

    'And why is that?'

    'You're opening yourself up to disappointment.'

    'Hi, Bruce,' said Charlie, appearing between us. 'What's goin' on. You two comparing notes on marriage again?'

    'We're talking about death, as usual,' said Yvette, smiling.

    'Americans never talk about death,' said Charlie.

    'You just spend a lot of money putting it off,' I said.

    'Let's go live some life at my place,' said Charlie, biting his bottom lip and taking Yvette's arm and leading her away.

    People were leaving. The tray floated past once more. At the door, Charlie detached himself from Yvette and she passed through first. Nina appeared in the doorway and blocked Charlie's path. Charlie warned her with his index finger and walked through her. By the time I got out, Nina was nowhere to be seen.

    She came out of a door down a corridor with her make-up in place. She told me she was tired and was going to go home. She was sniffing and blinking. We walked to the car, she opened the door, turned and held my face in both hands and kissed me hard. She got in, stared straight ahead, started the car, reversed out of the parking spot and drove off into the darkness with my overnight bag in her boot.

    A couple from the party told me Nina lived in Kamina Village in the north of Lomé. I walked the couple of hundred yards back to the Armenian's house in the dreadful heat and sweated whisky.

Chapter 17

    The house was in darkness, the garden velvet black. The faint roar of the traffic and the sea widened the night, but the sky was starless, the low cloud hung overhead and sealed us in. I stumbled into the house expecting steps where none existed and frisked the walls for light switches, which must have been designed out of the house because I couldn't find them. The room pitched in my deprived senses and I reared away from things which turned out to be just more darkness with nothing in it.

    A hand locked on to my ankle and I crouched and gripped the wrist. Bagado was lying on the floor in his raincoat doing a very good job of blending in. I gave him the letter from his mother. He propped himself up on an elbow. A match rasped and the room opened up in the uncertain light from an inch of yellow candle at Bagado's side. He drew up his leg and sent two long fingers probing down his sock. They came back with a two-inch penknife between them. He opened the blade, slit the envelope and replaced the closed blade down his sock.

    'New socks?' I said.

    'Kershaw's.'

    'Why the sensory deprivation therapy?'

    'The power's off.'

    'Drink?'

    Bagado read his letter, I poured a couple of fingers of Scotch into two glasses, set one down next to Bagado and sat on the floor at a right angle to him. Bagado folded the letter and blew out the candle. A colony of mosquitoes had moved in from the pool and started a feeding frenzy. We slapped ourselves about a bit, sipped whisky and smelt the snuffed candle twisting in the dead air.

    Bagado's voice told me about his phone conversation with his friend Michel who worked in the French Embassy in Cotonou. Françoise Perec was not a French textile designer from Paris. She had been monitoring shipping for the International Maritime Bureau. The IMB was concerned at the increase in piracy along the West African coast and had sent a team to gather information. Françoise Perec had been assigned Lomé and Cotonou. She was ambitious, had done some undercover work before but couldn't be described as experienced. What interested Bagado was that her boyfriend worked for the French police's Drug Squad in Toulouse.

    'They are becoming more daring, these pirates,' he said. 'They used to just board the ship and steal money and jewellery. Now they kill the crew, repaint and rename the ship, change the flag and papers and steal the cargo, and any other cargo they can find. They keep going until the ship gets too hot, then they sell it for scrap.'

    'They couldn't do that working on their own,' I said.

    'Somebody would have to trade the goods for them.'

    'Somebody would have to organize them. That's a lot of forged paperwork for a bunch of ex-muggers, and how do they know which ships?'

    'Perec was following a ship.'

    'I found a message on Kershaw's answering machine in his office today. The Cotonou harbour master giving an ETA of the
Naoki Maru.'
Bagado sat up. 'That's the ship which brought in Jack's rice. The captain told me he'd also been to Lomé first to pick up some cashew and he'd already discharged in Abidjan and Tema.'

    'Michel told me that these IMB people use local traders for their information. Charlie said that Perec and Kershaw knew each other. They could have been working together. Is the
Naoki Maru
carrying anything apart from rice?'

    'Hi-fi.'

    'Good cargo to steal.'

    'Somebody tells Charlie that Perec and Kershaw are watching the ship. He doesn't like it. Follows them to Cotonou. Tortures Perec to find out what she knows and kills her. But he doesn't kill Kershaw there.'

    'He killed him here in the master bedroom. I've found clothing in splinters of the door jamb and down the stairs. It looks as if rigor mortis had set in. He slid him down the stairs like a plank.

    'He wanted Kershaw to run. It's more convincing. You could believe that Kershaw killed Perec by accident, panicked, got out of Benin, and drowned himself at the guilt of it. It's easier for the police to tie up and any investigations start moving the wrong way.'

    I told Bagado about the party, about Nina's reaction to Kershaw's death and how she and Charlie weren't hitting any high notes together. She was asking him for something he wasn't prepared to give, or she was under some kind of pressure that Charlie could lift but wasn't going to.