Instruments Of Darkness (26 page)

    'Who said CFA?'

    'If it's francs that's more the ticket.'

    'Dollars/ he whispered.

    I could hear him sweating now, and shaking out a large piece of cloth to mop it up with. I've found that with being in the presence of men who've taken bad financial hits in their lives the best policy was respectful silence. The thought of losing a million dollars could bring on sudden spasms of violence. Things could be bad - your wife could have left you, you could have a terminal disease but if you wanted to discuss those things with someone it's best not to choose a million- dollar loser because they'd just think you're whingeing.

    When the big man finally spoke he'd got himself under control and I didn't think he'd start any casual baseball practice around my head.

    'Whoever killed M. Kershaw has got my money. I want you to find him and I want you to get my money back.'

    'What's wrong with the police?'

    'This is not a police matter.'

    'I'm not talking about official police. What about the people who took away the body, the officer with Kershaw's bag, the goons who bring me here. Why not them?'

    'They are very loyal. They are my people. But I cannot have my people involved in my private affairs. You understand, I think.'

    What I understood was that the big man had given Kershaw a million dollars of kick-back money to trade with and either somebody knew about it or Kershaw was careless and had got himself killed and the money stolen. The only person I knew who needed that kind of money and could get ugly enough to kill for it was Charlie Reggiani.

    'I'll get back to you,' I said.

    'I hope with good news this time,' said the big man from behind my head.

    'You took your time coming back to me considering the money involved.'

    'You've been away. I've had affairs of state. I have appearances…' He trailed off.

    'When did you give Kershaw this money?'

    'Last Sunday evening.'

    'Why didn't you just take the money to Switzerland, for Christ's sake, like everybody else does?'

    'You have to pay to keep it in Switzerland

    'Not as much as it's cost you to give it to Kershaw.'

    '… and these days, they're more careful about whose money they take.' He searched around in his head for another good reason. 'And M. Kershaw was a very capable man.'

    'Is that it?'

    'It's time for you to leave,' he said, irritated again, moving to the door.

    'One thing,' I said. 'I need a favour from you. Mrs Kershaw is here to identify her husband's body and take it back to England. You don't need that body any more. I don't want any obstacles and I don't want to have to pay anything.'

    'I guarantee it,' he said.

    He knocked on the door. The boys came in.

    'Do I have to travel underneath their boots?'

    'If you're not seen you have a better chance of staying alive.'

    I had another dark, uncomfortable drive back home during which I didn't protest, but calculated from the coolness of my sweat that the level of threat in the big man's final words might merit some measure of respect.

    It was nearly ten o'clock by the time they dropped me off. I found a new bottle of Ballantines in the cabinet in the sitting room and went to meet Gerard. I thought about walking it but there was barely enough oxygen in the stagnant heat outside to light a match.

    I parked outside Gerard's large crumbling house and pulled the metal hand that hung on a chain underneath the bougainvillaea that rolled over the walls. A boy came to the gate in a luminous white shirt.

    He showed me to the living room. The walls were covered with shelves of books, and most of the floor space was occupied by piles of books, some of which had collapsed. In one corner, a drift of books reached four feet up the walls. Gerard lay on an ancient divan that spewed thick bolts of stuffing from several holes. His head was propped up on a faded rose bolster. He was reading by the light of two hurricane lamps, holding the book so close to his half-moon specs they must have been making contact.

    He wore a faded blue shirt, open, with the tails hanging out and a pair of brown shorts. His gut rose and fell with the lack of rhythm of a man who fights hard for his air. I touched his bare calloused foot and he dropped the book on to his chest. I put the whisky on the table and Gerard muttered something. His boy must have had the hearing of a bat-eared fox because he came in with a pair of glasses and some ice.

    We drank and Gerard stroked his short grey hair that was combed forward so that he had an inch of fringe at the top of his forehead. He disentangled himself from his wiry specs and rubbed the two divots on either side of his nose. His red face was lined with unmatching creases so that he looked as if he had two different sun-blasted faces put together. He began to brush the underside of his hairless chin with the back of his hand and his jowls quivered, connected as they were to his neck by two webs of slack, silky skin.

    Gerard was prepared to read in English but he didn't like speaking it, and as he now knew I wanted something from him we spoke in French, me not understanding much of his Cevennes accent and he shuddering at my butchery. I asked him if he could give me something that would test the skill of an African art buyer. He smiled showing me a set of teeth that would have made an American faint. He had a couple of black ones, three yellow, and one a disturbing green. He put a finger up in the air, which gave me something else to look at apart from his ailing maw.

    He had three goes at getting off the divan, slapping away my hands, and eventually opted for the western roll off the side on to all fours. He raised himself up and rested his hand on his belly and thought in silence for several minutes like a man with two storeys of chaos and no filing system. He picked up a lamp and limped off in one direction, sprawling a pile of books into another with his knee. He snapped the waistband of his shorts, and then, given his dire physical state, executed a competent sidestep and left the room.

    His leathery soles scuffed the dry marble floor in the hall. A banister creaked and he climbed the stairs with hollow, boxy thumps. He gathered breath on the landing and resumed. I threw the whisky down and poured another and flung my arm over the two-seater sofa I was sitting in. It hit something hard and hairy. I glanced over the back, and a hog's head with some vicious tusks stared me out. There was a shout from upstairs and the boy flitted through in his ectoplasmic shirt and stuttered up the stairs making sure he used each step.

    Their return journey was a laborious affair which saw off another glass of whisky and they emerged into the room with the boy carrying a sackcloth bundle and the lamp and Gerard holding the lad's head for support. Gerard sat down and hurled his drink into his mouth. The boy poured another, holding the bottle in two hands as if it was an elixir. Gerard brushed him away and the boy skipped off. He opened the sackcloth which held four bronze bell heads; two were identical figures cast sharp with all their edges and clappers intact. The other two were more primitive and pock-marked, without clappers.

    Gerard asked me which were the fakes. I pointed at the two perfectly cast ones and then handled the other two which looked more genuine but revealed nothing to me. Gerard told me it depended on the meaning of genuine. The perfectly cast bell heads were genuine fakes cast by a British foundry and sold openly in Nigeria at affordable prices for the local Yoruba people's religious ceremonies from the beginning of the century. The more primitive ones were made by local Nigerian foundries a couple of years ago, imitating the old 'lost wax' technique to produce 'genuine' bronzes that they could sell at high prices to gullible white people.

    He told me someone buying African* art should be able to tell as much as he could from the bell heads and, although they were worth less than the whisky left in the bottle, he wanted them back. I left the whisky with him and said I'd bring the bronzes back the next day.

    On the way back to the house, I found a second wind and decided to go and visit Charlie and see if there was a different smell to a man with a million-dollar solution to his problems. I also thought I might be able to get him to corroborate parts of Nina's story just to make sure she wasn't 'putting me on' again.

    Half an hour later it was just after eleven o'clock and I was approaching Charlie, who was dressed in a white dinner jacket and a black bow tie and was standing at the empty bar with a tumbler of whisky in front of him and a black look that could have started a monsoon. I wanted to get out as soon as I got in. The neat- haired pianist was clawing the air with her voice singing Patsy Cline's 'Crazy' and a frightened boy was clearing glasses off the tables. The boy looked up at me when I came in, like a cat who didn't care for strangers.

    A girl stood up behind the bar. I ordered a Scotch.

    'We're closed,' said Charlie.

    The girl ducked down behind the bar with the speed of someone who's just seen six-guns coming out of holsters.

    'I just want to talk, Charlie,' I said, feeling suicidal with the music.

    'I got nothing to say.'

    'You didn't tell me you and Nina had been an item.'

    'The boy's deaf,' said Charlie to himself.

    'You didn't tell me you had a "talk" with Kershaw about his "problem" with Nina.'

    'I don't have to
tell
you anything,' he said, turning his face to me and burying his tumbler in his hairy fist. He finished his drink without taking his eyes off me and put the glass down on the bar. His face was still.
'Arrétez la musique!'
he roared in an American accent and the pianist stopped as if she'd been garrotted and slammed the cover over the keys.

    'Did I get a visit from you last night?' I asked.

    'Blow away, Brucey,' he replied in the sort of quiet voice a man might use before he opened your face down to the bone with a cut-throat. I didn't hang around to find out if that was his intention.

    Something had happened since I'd seen Charlie last night. If he'd solved his cash flow problem he wasn't showing it. What he was showing was a healthy dislike for my person which he was stoking with some outside help. Nina must have told him about my visit and the ugliness of my questions. Charlie looked as if he was planning something personal to persuade me that my present occupation was not a great career move.

    Back at the house, I locked the metal gate that gave out on to the street and locked the side door in the alley. The power was off again indoors. Bagado wasn't back. He must have gone for the morning flight. I grovelled around the floor looking for the candle and some matches. In its tired light my huge shadow wavered across the painted walls in the gallery above. I went into the kitchen and hovered over the last drop of Bell's and found myself too weary'to go through with it. I took a couple of aspirin, filled a plastic bag with ice, went to bed, stuck the cool bag on the back of my head and slept.

    It doesn't take a medium for anybody to know that they're not alone in a room. The brain throws a switch and the body powers out of deep sleep into instant consciousness. A hand gripped the back of my neck, a knee came down hard in the middle of my spine, another hand tore a fistful of hair and rammed my face into the pillow. My brain crashed down a luge tube of panic into a tight black curve that replaced all body muscle with toasted marshmallow. Then my head was torn back, my throat stretched to ripping point, my mouth taut and wide open with as much scream in it as Munch's painting. An urgent, hoarse whisper scoured my ear.

    'Listen! When you're told to drop it, you drop it. I don't want to have to come back and hold you down for the last time.'

    The hands thumped my face back into the pillow. Red lights burned in my sockets, swimming to green, then black and white lines rushed towards me, going to black. Panic burst into every limb and they lashed out, my body bucking and twisting, my heart and lungs yowling at the white hot needle that eased in from spine to sternum until something broke and then there was nothing.

Chapter 22

Monday 30th September

    I came to in what I first assumed was the afterlife. A faint light was easing across a morning sky and I watched it grow from behind a gauze sheet, so that I began to think all those films were based on fact and that there was soft focus after death. I scooped the mosquito netting away and sat on the edge of the bed, the soft nylon on my shoulders. The plastic bag lay empty like a patch of saliva on the damp pillow case. I fingered my head, the bump was down to the size and texture of a strawberry left in the sun. The brain inside felt cramped and stifled. My neck had two steel struts riveted between the scapulae and lower cortex which made nodding a no-no. I pulled on a pair of trousers and went downstairs and made a cup of coffee, squeezing the remains of the Bell's into it.

    There was a knock on the door which was still locked. Bagado stood there yawning down to his knees with a paper bag in his hands. It was half past seven, he'd come straight off the morning flight. He could smell the whisky in my coffee and, showing his usual restraint, asked me if I had a problem. I told him how difficult I was finding it to get a full night's uninterrupted sleep in this house. We searched inside and out to find the point of entry but none of the locks had been picked, all the windows were intact and there were no marks on the floors or walls. Bagado knew the outside gate was still locked because he'd had to climb over it and there were no prints at the foot of the walls and no sign of disturbance on the top of them either.

    'He must have had the keys,' said Bagado, hunching his shoulders to shrug but not following through.

    'Whose?'

    'Kershaw's?'

    There was a set of keys in the door when I first got here and ran into Yao.'

    'Probably the maid's, but it's something to think about.'