Instruments Of Darkness (22 page)

    'I wouldn't know.'

    'Charity then?'

    'My turn,' she said, tapping a fingernail on the floorboard. 'Do you know what you're doing in your work?'

    'I had to find Steve Kershaw. I did. He was dead.'

    'And now?'

    'I'm waiting for his wife to identify the body.'

    There was a shift of material, like the weight of her jacket falling off her shoulders. A cigarette slid out of a tight pack. A match ignited. Her face, shoulders and breasts wavered in a light that stilled, and remained, and remained and then was gone.

    'Then what?' she asked, the smell of the spent match between us.

    'I'll go back to Cotonou and buy sheanut.' I said, my eyes as wary as a bird's in a hedge.

    'You know Charlie is a little annoyed with you?'

    'No.'

    'He thinks you're chickenshit… Is that the word?'

    'He's a sweet-natured guy.'

    'And you get on with women. He doesn't like that so much, either.'

    'He didn't like that in Kershaw. Has Charlie got a problem with women?'

    'Why do you ask?' she said, and the glow of her cigarette brightened, her lips came and went. Her chin rested on a round bare shoulder, the arm straight to the floor.

    'You look as if you might know.'

    'Have you ever seen him with a woman?'

    'No, but I'm not as close up to him as you are.'

    Tobacco and paper crackled and Yvette drew her breath in tight.

    'He wants to fuck me,' she said exhaling long and hard.

    'Is that unreasonable?'

    'He doesn't know how to get me to do it.'

    'Are you helping?'

    'Why should I, he's old enough now.'

    'In some ways.'

    'He's good at business.'

    'Sure he is.'

    'He's ruthless too.'

    'He has to be.'

    'He's very strong.'

    'That's why you said you liked him.'

    'But he's a little boy.'

    The nose of her cigarette found the candle plate. I felt her breath on my cheek, her breast touched my bare arm. She kissed me on the lips, her small tongue flickered over mine. Our lips parted, her mouth stayed close.

    'You're the second woman to kiss me tonight without my asking.'

    'We need permission?'

    'You need a reason and my good looks aren't enough.'

    She shrugged her jacket back over her shoulders. Her smell moved away. A droplet of sweat careened down my spine. The cicadas renewed their whistling, unless they'd been there all along.

    'How did you know about the woman in Kershaw's apartment in Cotonou?'

    'I had dinner with a friend of mine from the French Embassy last night.'

    An aching memory bank told me she was eating with Charlie in the Sarakawa last night. She didn't look like the kind of woman who was taking two dinners a night.

    Yvette stood up, I joined her with a rush of blood. I couldn't make out what time it was. I was sobering badly. Somewhere in the room was a half bottle of vaporized whisky. We found our way into and out of the alley
between the maid's quarters and the house. In the street, a light had come on but it had no interest in illuminating beyond itself. Outside the front gate, Yvette's taxi with the blue furry dashboard stood with its driver sprawled back in his seat as if he'd had his throat slit. I opened the door for Yvette and the driver hit his seat mechanism which jack-knifed him against his windscreen.

    As she got in, I could see in the dim neon light that her face had collapsed with tiredness. She said good night and closed the door. Her head clicked back as if a screw had loosened, her arms supported her on either side. The driver got the engine started seventh go. Yvette didn't move. The taxi rocked over the mud road. Its single working tail light blinked and went out. I stood in the shadow of the wall, my head hung on my chest. After a few moments, a dark car with no lights on pulled out fifty yards further on and settled behind the taxi.

    I couldn't find any keys to the gate or the front door so I left them open. I found a mosquito net in the bottom of Kershaw's wardrobe, rigged it up and flopped down underneath it in the nude. It was still and hot and sleep didn't come as easily as I expected. In the tumble dryer of my desiccated brain turned the questions: Who was Yvette? She came here for information, but for who? She talked Charlie down and vamped me out. She looked as tired as an actress after a long West End run.

    The reel changed. Heike came back on and looked at me and smoked. It was a shrewd look, one that I didn't much like. The straining street light collapsed and died. The celluloid ran out on Heike. I slept.

    The street light was on again when I rolled out from under the mosquito net. I walked to the bathroom and relieved myself lengthily until something hard pressed into my right kidney and stopped my flow. A voice said: 'Whatever you're doing or thinking of doing, drop it.' There was a flash of white and then the edges of my vision turned green, the floor rushed up to meet me and the lavatory became my friend.

    I came to with my arms around the base of the toilet and my face cold against the tiled floor. I drew my head up to the bowl and vomited something ghastly into it, then crawled back to bed and lay down, shivering.

Chapter 18

Sunday 29th September

    I didn't feel so amusing in the morning. I woke up with a mouthful of bad-egg saliva and a lump on my head like a horse's knee. Strange messages made their way down some bad wiring in my spine and my leg fizzed as if it was shorting out. My stomach made a noise like a dog yawning and I thought it might force me into another gruesome duet with my old pal.

    On the way to the bathroom, I looked in on Bagado, who had gone. I showered and put on one of Kershaw's shirts and would have looked quite fetching with a foot of bare torso showing if it had been ridged and rock hard. It wasn't and the shirt came off with the sound of an ill-treated sack. I put on last night's shirt and smelled like a night club barman's table wipe at four o'clock in the morning.

    Overnight, the stairs had become impossible to negotiate and the banister proved invaluable as my feet seemed to be doing both parts in the world's most complicated fandango. The fridge opened on to a grapefruit and a soggy pawpaw. The pawpaw didn't hold out both hands and I took the grapefruit, which had more pith on it than an Oscar Wilde aphorism. The first segment made me coy and put my parotid glands on red alert.

    My head stepped in with some lefts and rights to the lower cortex and I put the grapefruit down and gave myself a minute's silence.

    The car keys to my Peugeot were on the side next to the instant coffee, which backed away from me. The photographs were in their packet leaning up against a jar of gherkins. I picked them up and left the house, shouting for Moses and wearing somebody's sunglasses that held my head like a pair of ice tongs. The phone went and I returned and picked it up. It was B.B. confirming that the man in the photo was Armen Kasparian, the son of his Armenian friend who had been killed by the car bomb. B.B. was as keen to chat as I was to throw up so I just cut him off mid-sentence.

    I made another attempt to leave the house and this time got as far as the alley when the phone went off again. I thought it might be B.B. looking for a rematch and was going to ignore it, but then I realized it might be Bagado or Moses. Clifford Harvey surprised me by remembering my name and inviting me to his house that night for a drink.

    'Seven o'clock sharp, don't be late and don't be early.'

    'Are you going to tell me why?'

    'Not on the phone. It'll only take five minutes.'

    'Short drink.'

    'It's not social. G'bye.'

    The third time I made it to the car, which was half under the shade of a bougainvillaea. It was the wrong half. The sun had carved itself a good space in the cloud and was hammering down. Moses hadn't showed and the driver's seat was hotter than a griddle. I threw the photographs in the glove compartment and, alternating buttocks, drove north out of town to Kamina Village, a smart community for expats and rich Togolese with neat houses and gardens full of gardeners.

    I passed the English school and the tennis club whose baked red courts were empty, but whose swimming pool fought it out with a hundred dive-bombing children with cream puffs on their arms. I asked a European woman, who was directing her gardener from a deck chair on her verandah, where Nina Sorvino lived. She took in my car, my unbrushed hair and unshaven face, and said she didn't know.

    I cruised around feeling unwelcome amongst the hissing water sprinklers until I saw a guy in his late fifties who looked worse than I did, washing his car. Nobody washed their car who lived in this neighbourhood, so he stood out like a skull cap in Mecca. His limbs, sticking out of a tennis shirt and a pair of shorts that lost the Empire, were shaking more than an agoraphobic greyhound. He cared as much for Nina's security as he did for washing his car. He told me the way, and with a sly eye seemed to be on the brink of asking me in for a drink, when his wife came to the porch and shouted something that would have made a dog salute.

    I left and watched in the rearview as the wife came down the drive and gave him a slap on the back of the legs and pulled him into the house by his ear. This rare scene left me feeling cold and depressed, even with the sun rippling through the high trees and children's voices not giving a damn for Sunday morning sleepers.

    I took his directions past houses walled up against the surrounding poverty beyond the Village and found Nina's house in a quiet corner on the outer perimeter. Her car was parked in an open garage. I walked up the short driveway, and the next-door neighbour's dog, which had been noisily lapping its genitals, stopped, looked up, flicked an ear and went back to his laborious task.

    I knocked on the front door, then saw the bell, which must have been set at a pitch that only the dog could hear because he let out a belching growl. I went back to knocking then walked along the verandah and, after a scuffle with an aggressive banana palm that slapped me about and let me go, reached an air-conditioning unit that sighed even hotter air into the steamy late morning. There was a sleeping form beyond the light curtains in the room. It was after 11.30 which seemed respectable enough, even for the old soak washing his car, so I thumped on her window frame. I pounded, rattled and tapped. I whistled, hollered and roared. The dog came up on to the fence with his front paws, ears up and a look of total consternation across his intelligent face. He barked but it didn't help. I was getting uneasy.

    At the end of the garage was a door. It opened into the. kitchen and there was a door to the left into the living room. On the other side of the living room was a curtain and behind that two doors, one of which opened into Nina's frozen room.

    She lay on the bed, twisted in a white sheet like a body committed to the deep. She had a black sleeping mask on that I had thought was strictly Hollywood. Her face was white, her lips pale. I expected to see a mist of snow sweeping across the Arctic floor. On the bedside table was a plastic container of pills with nothing in it.

    I touched her arm which was cold, but not as cold as Kershaw had been. I tore off the mask, took hold of both shoulders, shook her and yelled her name. Her head lolled around and the sound of a very drunk person trying to say the word 'ululation' came out of her. I laid her back on the pillow and -slapped her face gently from side to side until she showed me the whites of her eyes and begged me to stop. I made a cup of coffee that would have woken the entire audience of a Rotarian's after-dinner speech. She got it down and began to say my name in just two syllables. I got her on her feet and let her pin-ball her way to the bathroom for a half-hour shower. She came out with a towel round her head and a long T-shirt on. Her eyes looked like fresh picked mushrooms.

    'Who cut me out of the freeway bridge?' she said.

    'Who poured you in there? How many of these did you take?'

    'I don't know. I couldn't sleep. Is there any more coffee?'

    I poured her another cup. She stepped backwards as if she was on the gym beam and sat on a chair with her last night's clothes under her. Big fat tears started to roll down her cheeks and her shoulders began to shake. Her mouth came open with strings of saliva between her teeth and she let out a terrible wail. I took the coffee from her and she seemed to fall in on herself, shuddering from the wide black sobs that the pit of her stomach sent up through her body. After a minute, she stopped and held out her hand for the coffee as if she had been through nothing more than a mild choking fit.

    'I get these crying jags,' she said, as if it might have slipped past me.

    'You've just taken enough sleeping tabs to put the whole of Brooklyn under…'

    'Yeah, tell me about it, Bruce. What you doin' here anyway?'

    'You drove off with my bag.'

    'I did? That's why you smell like the bottom of last night's glass.'

    'Can I use your shower?'

    'Maybe I'll hose you down in the garden. You might ruin the bacteria balance in my septic tank.'

    She gave me the keys and I took the bag out of the boot. I showered and shaved, which did my head no good, and I looked in her medicine cabinet for an aspirin. I took three and put the bottle back and found a razor blade, a hand mirror and a little baggie of white powder at the back of the bottom shelf. I dipped a wet finger in and rubbed my gums. It was cocaine. She was snorting herself up with the coke and bringing herself back down with the sleepers.

    She was still sitting on her clothes when I came out. She stared at the S-bend of the sheets on her bed and held the coffee cup in the palm of her hand.

    'Do your crying jags have anything to do with Kershaw?' I said to the back of her head.

    'He's dead.'