Instruments Of Darkness (34 page)

    'The Python's making me nervous.'

    'Percy?' said Charlie, looking at the gun. 'Yeah, that's what he's supposed to do.'

    'Are we going to talk like real people?' I said, suddenly needled by Charlie and his big boy's gun. 'Or do we just get our dicks out on the table and measure up?'

    'You just tell me what you fucking know,' said Charlie, putting the gun in my cheek. 'And don't try and run this show. It's not yours to run. Now sick it up like a good boy.'

    'Where's Heike?'

    'Goddammit, start at the fucking beginning.'

    'Why're you making me tell you what you already know?'

    'I like hearing stories about myself.'

    Jack sat with his arms straight, hands on either side of him on the sofa, back stiff, the tendons of his neck standing out, legs splayed, his testicles probably still pulsating. He was comfortable but not as comfortable as he would have been with a gun in his hand. His eyes didn't know which of us to look at. Charlie flicked the gun back with his wrist, the nickel-plated sight flashed and before it ripped across my nostrils I came up with a version of the story so far delivered at pace.

    'On the 23rd September, Françoise Perec, an operative for the International Maritime Bureau, was tortured and killed in Steve Kershaw's apartment in Cotonou. Kershaw found her, panicked and ran for it back to his house in Lomé. Somebody caught up with him, suffocated him, framed him with the Perec killing tools, stole a million dollars cash from him and dumped him in the pool, making it look a bit like suicide, which it wasn't. The maid was found floating face down in the lagoon and an Armenian businessman's wealth was redistributed by a car bomb in Abidjan.

    'You, Charlie, told me three things. The first that Kershaw had been with a blonde Frenchwoman in your bar; the second, that Kershaw had had an affair with Nina Sorvino which ended on a sick note; and the third, that you didn't much care for Steve. There were a few things you didn't tell me. You didn't tell me that you had had a relationship with Nina, that you hated Kershaw because he walked off with your woman, that you knew exactly what had happened between Nina and Kershaw and gave Kershaw a "talking to" about it.

    'On 23rd September you were in Cotonou. The same day Perec caught it. An expired Bloomingdale's store card in your name was found in the garden of the house where Kershaw died. I got two visits from people telling me to back off; the first hit me on the head with something hard, heavy and Pythonesque. The second showed me what happened to Kershaw before he was dumped in the pool. Both used the same terminology which was: Drop it!

    'When I told Nina about Kershaw's "drowning" she got scared. I watched her at the Embassy party trying to give you a hard time. You'd implicated her in Kershaw's death because you persuaded her to tell me about Kershaw's bondage tastes, and she didn't like it. You reckoned you'd paid off the police in Cotonou and the big man's illegally acquired million dollars was enough to keep the heat off in Lomé and she'd got nothing to worry about.

    'The next day I trod on Nina. She told me about your very romantic liaison. She told me she's pregnant and she wants to get back with you, which was maybe another reason she was leaning on you at the party. She told me that you bent Kershaw's arm about how he got his kicks. And I found she's got a drug problem. Where was she getting the drugs from, Charlie?

    'Jack's rice was shipped in from Thailand on a vessel called the
Naoki Maru.
That was the ship that Perec was getting too warm on and why you had to find out what she knew. There's a rice ban in Nigeria so Madame Severnou is brought in to smuggle it across the border at Idiroko. But she's been in on it all the time because it wasn't just rice in those sacks.

    'Some of the sacks unloaded at a warehouse in Idiroko were taken to another warehouse in Ikeja where they were emptied out and small kilo-size brown packages were found inside. These brown packages contained a white powder which wasn't rat poison but just as good. They were stuffed into cotton bales which were purchased at one thousand four hundred and twenty-five dollars per ton c.i.f. delivered Oporto from AAICT by the buyer, one Carlo Reggiani at the AAICT offices in Ikeja, Lagos in the presence of Jack Obuasi, Madame Severnou and Bof Awolowo on Sunday 29th September. The cotton bales are being shipped ex Lagos probably tonight, 1st October, on the vessel
Osanyin
aka
Naoki Maru.
Have I left anything out? Oh yes, the dirt around town is that Charlie Reggiani took some bad hits playing with gold… they say the man needs some money. They say it was seven hundred thousand dollars.'

    Charlie had walked over to a sideboard with a set of shelves above it and pulled down an ebony bowl which was full of credit, cards. He flicked through them all and put the bowl back up on the shelf.

    'What was that about a million dollars?' asked Jack.

    'Shut the fuck up,' said Charlie, cuffing Jack across the back of his head with the tips of his fingers. He sat back down on the sofa, looking hard at Jack who did his best to stay still and failed. He put his left ankle on his right knee and held it there with both hands and tried to stare Charlie out. Charlie turned to me and asked the one question I hadn't expected.

    'What's with you and Yvette?'

    'What do you mean?'

    'You came in here sniffing the air, asking after her. You got something going together?'

    'Like what exactly?'

    'You wanna be English about this, I'll be American. Are you fucking her?'

    'Charlie, I'm the punchbag in this. I nose around in dirty laundry, get caught and get the shit beaten out of me. I don't have time…'

    'You've fucked her,' he said. 'You have. First time you saw her… all that marriage and
concubinage
shit… You fucked her.' His lips had gone white at the edges and the teak dome of his head had taken on a purplish colour.

    'I haven't done anything to anyone, apart from kick Jack in the balls and he's had that coming a long time,' I said, finding myself looking down what seemed to be a one-inch hole which was the Colt Python's barrel.

    'Just tell me the truth. Nothing will happen if you tell me,' said Charlie. 'Just don't lie to me.'

    I didn't want to tell him the truth because he would think I'd lied to him and I didn't want to lie to him because the size of the bullet that would come out of that hole was going to make me an instant airhead. I came up with: 'She's your woman,' which didn't end in a big bang.

    'I know that,' he said sweetly, 'but it didn't stop her from going round to your place after the party Saturday night and it didn't stop you two dickering over something outside the Sarakawa yesterday, and didn't stop you going into the Sarakawa with her and staying in there for Christ knows however long it took you to give her a good schtupping.'

    The barrel of the gun was shaking. He was gripping the butt so hard his forearm stood out swollen with pumped muscle, his flexed triceps were set solid, his neck was bright red where it came out of his chest hair, his mouth was closed, and his clenched jaw muscles worked hard. Jack was sitting forward on his sofa. I was pressed back hard into the corner of mine.

    The door opened. Charlie's head twitched and he lowered the gun behind a cushion on the sofa. Yvette came in, followed by a vapour trail of perfume. She was in a blue short-sleeved dress and no shoes with a purse held tight against her hip.

    'Honey, this is business,' said Charlie. 'Can you give us a few minutes?'

    Yvette stood between the two sofas at the end of the glass-top table. Her face was still and white, her mouth closed in a bloodless line. Her body was taut, a line of muscle ran the length of her calf from knee to ankle. Her flat stomach pumped in and out as she panted air through her nose. She slipped past me and stood in front of Charlie between the sofa and the table. She clicked open her purse. Charlie spoke to her in a quiet, intimate way, as if we weren't supposed to hear.

    'Honey. Look, this is serious. Fix a drink if you want, but it's better you wait outside.'

    She was pulling out a pack of cigarettes and Charlie leaned forward to pick up the table lighter for her and his face ran into a small shiny black gun that Yvette held in her hand. He sank back into the sofa with his face in his lap. Jack's mouth opened slowly with the weight of his jaw. I managed the least moronic look in the room just by holding my teeth together.

    'Put the gun down on the table,' she said, her small tongue wetting her lips. Charlie hesitated, still in shock. 'Put it on the table, you fucking bastard!'

    Charlie was looking at me as if I was responsible for this. He slid the gun out from under the cushion until it was flat on the sofa and angled towards me.

    'You did, didn't you?' he said to me, the gun now up off the sofa, going towards the table.

    There was the sound of a shot. A pane of glass from one of the windows cracked and collapsed; large shards fell on to the floor and shattered as Jack's head kicked back with the snapping sound of a dry twig and most of the back of his head sprayed itself over the sofa, sideboard and living room wall.

    Yvette fired her gun on a reflex and Charlie his. The noise filled the room like a jet engine in a public toilet. Charlie's body twitched and arched up off the sofa, while Yvette's feet left the ground, her body twisted, and she came down on her face across the glass tabletop, which shattered. Then the lights went out and the faint hiss of the air conditioning cut.

    Through the high-pitched whine in my ears, I could hear Charlie grunting in the dark as if he was lifting a big weight off his chest. There was the sound of dripping and the sea had come closer. Warm, wet air rolled in from outside and the cicadas blew the whistle on the show.

    'She shot me,' said Charlie, as if he was speaking through a rag someone was stuffing down his throat. 'The bitch shot me.'

    Yvette was silent. Her perfume still hung in the air, as did some acrid sweat and cordite. And there was another smell, sweet and metallic, that grew in the room with the heat.

    'She fucking shot
me,'
said Charlie from the back corner of his mouth.

    I slid off the sofa and knelt. I found Yvette's leg amongst the glass and moved my hand up over her thigh and hip. My fingers moved up her back, up her shoulders to her neck. There was still a pulse. She moaned and I moved my hand away to the point of her shoulder which was wet and ragged.

    'You hit her, Charlie.'

    'I'm hit myself, for Chrissakes,'

    I found the table lighter whose yellow flame illuminated the scene. The predominant colour was black. The floor was black, the back of Jack's sofa, the sideboard and the wall were black. I turned to Charlie and pulled his hand away and wrestled his shirt up over his gut. There was a small black hole in his flank but not as much blood as I expected. I felt behind him. There was an exit hole.

    'Straight through, Charlie. Blubber only,' I said, and he grunted.

    I called for an ambulance from Charlie's study. Charlie told me where the torch was. I picked up my gun from where it was tucked in under Yvette's body and ricocheted out of the house towards the beach to the generator house.

    Bagado had been right, Charlie was in the clear. That Bloomingdale's card had been one piece of evidence too much for Bagado's liking. Jack must have lifted the card and somebody planted it at the house. Charlie didn't know what was going on; as soon as I told him about his cotton shipment he let me play him in so that he could nail Jack. Just as I was beginning to doubt Bagado and believe my own bullshit, Charlie leant in with what he really wanted to know from me. What was
I
doing with Yvette? Christ, what a thing to ask
me
- the man with a love life like a train wreck.

    The generator house door was open. I called out to Moses whose confidence had taken a huge knock since Grace had built it up. I found the starter key to the 13.5 Kva Lister and it roared and then settled. A dim light came on. Moses was standing behind four drums of diesel.

    'Did you see him?'

    'No please, sir.'

    Outside, there was a clear line of sight to the house. In the red dust were some footmarks, a trainer of some kind without a brand name in the sole. I shone the torch down the fence and found more marks. He must have opened up the generator house, shot Jack, cut the generator and run back down the beach to Al Fresco's. Whoever it was had been sent to kill Jack at his own house and followed us to Charlie's.

    In the living room, Yvette, her face cut up, had rolled over on the broken glass and was sobbing and trying to reach her torn shoulder with her hand. Charlie was half conscious and blabbering on a red mess on the leather sofa which wasn't soaking in, but dripped on to the carpet. I wrapped some towels around Yvette's shoulder and moved her into the bedroom, where she fainted. I found some more linen for Charlie's middle and bandaged him up. He was silent now and breathing heavily. I hoped they'd stay that way until the ambulance arrived. I didn't think they were two people who were going to socialize much in the future, given that their first penetrative exchanges had been bullets.

    Jack was lying with one leg off the sofa, half his back on the seat, the other half up the back of the sofa, his head in the apex. A huge quantity of blood and white and grey bits in it and black skin and curly hair spattered the sofa and wall and sideboard. His eyes didn't see the hole where his nose had been. He still showed his teeth, but not even a madman could call it a smile.

    Outside, I called for Moses, who had lost his nerve and ran off into the night risking the beach muggers. The
gardien
had fled as well. I'd already decided on my third visit of the evening as the adrenaline rushing my brain decoded the confusion of what had just happened. I opened the barrier, fixed it and drove Jack's Mercedes out into the wasteland, out there, in the bleak and suffocating darkness, the missing detail from the photographs came to me and although I still didn't know who was behind the camera taking the shot on that sunny afternoon when Kasparian and Kershaw posed for him, I did know where he was.