Instruments Of Darkness (35 page)

Chapter 29

    By the time I hit the roundabout by Lomé port, the democratic road block had been moved away and I put my gun down on the passenger seat and enjoyed the clear run through down the coast road back to Jack's house. I was glad it was clear because I found that Jack's Mercedes was capable of 154 m.p.h.

    I parked by my own car to pick up the photographs and checked them: even in the dim courtesy light of the Peugeot the missing detail stood out. All it had needed was a change of thinking, instead of looking for what was in the picture I looked for what wasn't. Then I drove to Kamina Village in Jack's Mercedes, but didn't go in because it was barriered off at night. I parked outside on the road by the hedge around Nina Sorvino's garden, put the photographs in my breast pocket and pushed the gun down the front of my trousers with the T-shirt over it.

    I skipped over the shallow ditch and ran straight through the half-hearted hedge, which brought me out at the back of Nina's house. I walked around to the front and up on to the terrace outside her bedroom window. The light was on in the empty bedroom and there was an open packing case on the bed.

    Through the living room window, I saw Nina in her stockinged feet standing in front of a full-length mirror on the far wall, her hair tied in a temporary ponytail. She was wearing a red raw silk suit and was looking over her shoulder to see what her bottom looked like with all that material stretched over it. She turned and positioned her feet so that she looked slimmer, less curvaceous and placed both hands on the tops of her thighs and leant back slightly. She pouted and then she laughed as if she was the luckiest bitch in the world.

    I went into the garage and tried the door at the end of it, which, like the last time, was unlocked. I waited and listened to Nina shuffling in front of the mirror and then I heard her go into the bedroom. I went into a living room redolent of expensive perfume and sat on the sofa which backed on to her bedroom wall and stared at the empty TV screen and full bottles on the sideboard in front of me. There were three other suitcases parked by the front door.

    She came back in again, at a swift pace now, with some high heels chocking the tiled floor and her hair loose, holding a red hat in her hands which she set on her head in front of the mirror. I got up and stood about five metres behind her. She was so in love with her situation that she didn't see me for a while and when she did she walked towards the mirror as if there was a problem with it. It was only when she turned that reality closed in on her and she squeaked.

    'Going somewhere?'

    'As a matter of fact, I am.'

    'Far?'

    'Up north, Kara for a few days.'

    'Four suitcases for a few days?'

    She moved towards the table and I lifted the T-shirt and showed her the gun.

    'No cheap lines, Nina.'

    'I wanna cigarette.'

    'You're going to need more than that to get you through.'

    She lit a cigarette. I asked her to get some whisky. She poured two stiff ones into some glasses on the sideboard with the TV.

    'Four suitcases?'

    'I travel heavy,' she said, taking a good suck on the whisky.

    'When are you going?'

    Tomorrow morning.'

    'Who with?'

    'On my own.'

    'You always like to look good and smell nice for yourself, on your own? You always like to dance around in front of the mirror with your new clothes on and your fancy new hat before you hit the hot spots of the Hotel Kara on your own? You always pout and laugh at yourself in the mirror the night
before
you go somewhere… on your own?'

    Nina sucked hard on her cigarette in the hope that the nicotine could do more for her than calm her down. She wanted something with a little more punch to it that was going to make all this nastiness go away. I handed her the photograph of Kasparian and Kershaw. She took it and stiffened.

    'There are three people involved in that photograph. Kasparian, he's the one on the left, Kershaw, you know, and the third guy's behind the camera. Two of them are dead. Now, this is by way of a test, Nina. I want to make sure you don't start off our discussion by lying to me, which is what you seem to like doing. So I ask a question and you tell the truth and if you don't…' I took out the gun, pointed it at her and clicked off the safety. 'Which two are dead?'

    'Kasparian… and… Kersh…'

    She didn't finish and I'd just found out how difficult it was to shoot straight with a handgun with a silencer attached. I'd aimed a yard to her right but the bullet, I could tell from the mark on the wall behind her, must have passed close enough to go through that thick black mane of hers. She screamed, dropped her glass, cigarette and the photograph and wet herself. A dark patch spread out in the raw red silk of her skirt.

    'Oh Christ!' she said, holding her cheeks. 'Oh, my God!'

    'Two people you haven't had much contact with recently,' I said. 'Now, pick up the photograph.' She knelt in the tight skirt, cutting a knee on the broken glass. The cigarette had been doused by the whisky. She slipped the photograph off the wet floor.

    'Cigarette?' she said.

    I picked one out of the packet on the table, lit it and gave it to her.

    'Try again.'

    'Kasparian,' she said and dragged on the cigarette, 'and Gildas Sologne.'

    'Thanks. I didn't know who he was, but I knew he was dead. He's the painter who was in the pool, right?'

    She nodded, finding her mouth with the cigarette.

    'Do you want to know how I know?'

    She nodded again.

    'Look in the bottom right-hand corner of the painting.' She looked. 'There's nothing there.'

    'So?'

    'There should be a signature that says "Kershaw", but it doesn't because Gildas Sologne is still alive and Steve hasn't painted on his signature yet.'

    'Next question. Ready, Nina? Where's Kershaw?'

    'I don't…' She didn't finish again, and this time I shot straight and over her other shoulder, and with a splat a hole appeared in the mirror glass which held for a moment and shifted and then fell to the floor in pieces.

    'There doesn't seem to be any point in asking you these questions. You're just a junkie. A compulsive, lying junkie.'

    'The Harveys,' she said in a half scream, looking back at the mirror which no longer reflected her tight, red, stained backside.

    'Good. That's right. That's why when I followed you from the Pharmacie pour Tous on Route de Kpalimé and you went to the German Restaurant in town, you called the Harveys. I went in there after you and hit the 'Redial' button but I didn't know why someone like you would want to talk to someone like Elizabeth Harvey about you being pregnant.'

    Nina was shaking now and it was with some difficulty that she took the cigarette out of her mouth.

    'Last question before we leave. Where's Heike?'

    She held out both her hands, waving them at me, the hot long cone of the over-smoked cigarette fell off and hissed in the liquid at her feet. The red of her lipstick had broken its boundary and huge fat tears were rolling down her cheeks, bringing black mascara that left tracks to the corners of her mouth. She coughed her first sob. I picked her handbag up and checked it, then took some Kleenex out of a box on the sideboard and handed them to her.

    'Clean up; we're going.'

    'Why?' she asked, with some distant logic for her present position.

    'You're my currency of exchange. I hope you're worth something.'

    While Nina patched up the damage to her face, I picked up the phone and left a very quiet message on an answering machine which I hoped would get listened to.

    Nina wasn't capable of driving. I pushed her through to the passenger seat and drove myself with her curled in the corner of the seat looking into the ball of tissue in her hand. The Harveys' house was back on the east side of town between the Sarakawa and the Hotel de La Paix. We were there in a quarter of an hour and Nina had got herself back together. I told her to leave her high heels behind. She took two minutes to put some make-up back on so that she looked just right for the man in her life.

Chapter 30

    A twelve-foot wall stood between us and the front door of the Harvey mansion which was in darkness. Two wrought iron gates showed a driveway up to the garage at the side of the house, but these gates had harpoon- barbed spikes on the top so that it would take a surgeon with a ladder to get you off them. A small Peugeot was parked in the road which was probably Elizabeth Harvey's runabout and I thought for a couple of seconds that we could climb up on the roof and scale the wall from there, but my body staged a wild-cat strike that brought the management to its knees.

    Next to the Peugeot was another gate which was fitted into the wall and was the one where Clifford and I had exchanged views what seemed like a few months ago. There was no way round it, over it or under it unless you were an airmail envelope. There was a
chien mechant
sign on the gate. I clicked back the latch and pushed the gate. It opened on to a narrow path which took us between two massive palms and twenty feet of lawn to the front door.

    Bad 'bad dogs' tell you where they are from some way off. They growl, tap dance with their toenails on the concrete, slaver large quantities of goo and bark. Good 'bad dogs' are preceded in the last moments only by a rush of air before a white-toothed, hot-breathed necklace clamps on to your carotid. I held Nina by the collar of her suit and pirouetted up that path like a pansy up a drag queen catwalk and we reached the front door without Dobermans hanging off our necks.

    The door was a large piece of mahogany with a shining brass dolphin leaping out of it. It wasn't the kind of door you took a run at and dropped your shoulder into unless you were so hardboiled you couldn't be eaten for breakfast. It opened on Teflon hinges with a push from one of my
merguez
fingers. The only thing that was missing was a gold-embossed invitation.

    There was no sign or sound of air conditioning. There was a fan in the hall but it wasn't doing anything interesting. I crossed the hall with the gun in my hand and pushed Nina through some double doors into a living room with a half mile of sofa in it. There was a lamp in one corner with a Chinaman's hat shade about three foot across and it showed that nobody was round for drinks and that the carpet was being held down by a perspex table with magazines under its veneer, which showed you how life should be lived and by whom.

    We hiked across the room and went through some sliding glass doors to the swimming pool and garden. The garden was walled with high, dreadlocked palms guarding it. A frangipani spread itself in one corner like a curtsying ballerina. The underwater-lit, kidney- shaped pool lapped and gurgled and simmered at my feet. I left Nina at the door and walked around the pool through the warm chlorinated air and looked up at the back of the house. A dim light shone in one room in the middle.

    By the time we got to the top of the stairs my T-shirt was like a tiresome girl at a disco. The stairs split in two at the second landing. I went left, pulling Nina, and found a bedroom with a sunken bath in the corner, full and steaming with nobody in it. The other stairway led us to a corridor with double doors off it on either side.

    Faint light shone from the crack under the doors to the back of the house. I opened one door into a huge room with little in it apart from an acre of carpet and a desk. A cone of light shone from a downlighter on to the desk. A fan above sliced shadows on to a man in a white shirt. Clifford Harvey sat in profile in a large scoop of black leather chair. There was an upright chair on the side of the desk nearest me.

    It was a jog to the desk but Nina and I walked it for effect. Clifford Harvey swivelled in his chair and put his elbows on a blotter in front of him that hadn't blotted anything since the ballpoint came in. He steepled his fingers. His shirt was advertisement-white with blade creases from the shoulders to the cuffs. The collar was detachable and starch-sharp and cut him across the carotid. His tie looked like open heart surgery.

    'You look like someone who's going to say: "I've been expecting you/" I said.

    'You took your time,' he drawled. 'Put the gun down and take a seat.'

    'I'll stick with the gun.'

    'It's better you put it down.'

    I backed away from the desk feeling for the chair. I didn't find the chair but I did find a rifle barrel in my spine. The voice that came with it was male and bored.

    'Put the gun on the table, Bruce.'

    'Not before I've put a hole through Nina, Steve,' I said in my best tough guy's voice.

    'You do that,' he said, and Nina shuddered.

    'Give me Heike and I won't have to.'

    Kershaw laughed. I adjusted my grip. Some silence eased past.

    'No bollocks,' he said. 'That's your problem. Go on, stick it to her,' he said, prodding me in the back with the rifle.

    There was some sweat coming off me now and Clifford had reached forward and put his glasses on so that he could get a better view of the show. Nina's head was wobbling on her shaky neck.

    'Come on, you bag of shit,' said Kershaw. 'Stick it to her… or put the fucking gun on the table.'

    Nina's whole body was trembling now which was unnecessary because I knew I couldn't shoot her. I put the gun on the table.

    'Rule number one,' said Kershaw. 'Don't threaten unless you can follow through. Your problem is you think too much. Don't think, just shoot. Bang. Next.'

    Kershaw was standing in front of me. He was more of a spidery-looking guy than I'd expected from his photograph. He held the rifle in one hand. He was dressed in black - black trainers, black ankle-length cycling slicks, black long-sleeved sweatshirt. His hands and clean-shaven face were blacked up and he had a black hat on. He was perspiring big gobs of sweat through his boot black. He pulled the hat off and revealed a brown fuzz of crew cut hair beneath. He prodded my stomach with the rifle and I sat down. Nina threw her arms around him and buried her face in his neck, just as she'd been taught from the best years of her life watching B movies.