The Big Killing (29 page)

'Turn around,' he said.

'Eugene,' I said, almost pleased to see him. 'What took you so long? It's been nearly a week.'

'The name's Red,' he said. 'I been busy with other things.'

'You couldn't find me?'

'It took some time. You a lucky man, Bruce Medway. Been moving around, making things hard for me.'

'I've spent a couple of nights in the Novotel. It shouldn't have been too difficult.'

'I been sick.'

'The lagoon?' I asked, and he nodded. 'You lied to me, Eugene.'

'I did? How come?'

'You said you couldn't swim.'

'Oh, right. What I meant was, I don't like to get wet. Misunderstanding, you get me? Where's the package?' he asked, tightening up.

'In my room.'

'What's in the bag?'

'A dictaphone. I have some letters to tape.'

'Sounds like you found something you shouldn't have.'

'What would that be?'

'Is there somebody else in the room?' I didn't answer. 'Right, so there's somebody else in the room,' he said. 'We get there, you tell him to lie on the bed, face down, hands behind his head. You open the door and stand in the doorway. He not on the bed, I'm gonna put a bullet in the back of your leg. He on the bed, we go in. You pick up the tape. We leave.'

'You going to shoot the guy on the bed or make it worth his while?'

'We'll have to see.'

'No deal.'

'Whaddyamean, no deal?'

'I'm not going to do it.'

This was not in Eugene's script, so he decided to give himself some more time by aiming the gun at my right leg, just above the knee. The wind was thumping around the alley and making him nervous with odd, unexpected noises. An empty plastic bag ripped past his back and took off into the sky and his head twitched. He wasn't wearing gloves this time.

'Keep calm, Eugene...'

'Red.'

'I don't say it to annoy you. I just forget. You don't look like a Red to me, that's all. Too sensitive for a Red.'

'Shut the fuck up. We going to the room.'

'I'm not. I told you it's no deal and I don't know how you're going to make me do it. You shoot me in the leg and I'm definitely not going to do it. I'm going to sit down and cry. So let's have a talk.'

'The man said, "If he get difficult, kill him." You gettin' difficult's my opinion.' He raised the gun, aiming at my head this time, with a different look coming down the barrel.

'He said that, did he?'

'Hm-mmmmm.'

'Who's the man? Maybe we could talk about this with him.'

'He don't want to see you,' he said, his voice weak and a little distant for my liking. 'He just want the tape.'

'What happens after I give you the tape?'

'You free to go.'

'Is that what Mr Malahide said?'

'You think I got pigshit for brains, don't you?' he said, and fired a bullet across my face about four inches past my right ear, which took a chunk of concrete out of the building five yards behind me. 'Heee, this wind strong. I don' normally miss this kinda range. Lemme try again. Get it right, Red. Get it right.'

He moved to his left and leaned against the wall, the gun still head high, his arm out straight. I was looking hard at that gun, the sweat coming off me in pint drops into my eyes so that I wasn't sure if my vision was on the button or not. It looked as if David had appeared at the corner of the alley, a couple of yards behind Eugene.

'OK, Red,' I said, 'we'll go and get the tape.'

'Now you talking sense at last,' he said, and pushed himself off the wall lowering his gun arm. David closed in on it. Eugene, suddenly aware of shadow in the alley, pulled his arm up and swung round, his wrist slapping into David's massive palm. I leapt forward, there was a thud from the gun and a chip of concrete flew, then there was a cracking and grinding noise which was Eugene's wrist, both radius and ulna, snapping in David's cocoa-cutter's hand. The gun fell to the ground and I side-kicked it towards the opening of the alley. David was holding Eugene, who was sagging to the ground, by his broken wrist. I told him about the knife and David cuffed Eugene across the face with a short six-inch jab from his other fist and Eugene's head clicked back as if it was broken at the neck.

'Mebbe this a good time to aks you the job again?'

'You've got the job, David. Now wait here. Don't touch the gun. I'm going to call Gbondogo.'

It wasn't so easy to get through to Gbondogo on election day. Maybe he had his hands full terrorizing voters. I told him I had Eugene Amos Gilbert and he said he'd have two officers and a car around there in ten minutes. By the time I got back to the alley Eugene still hadn't come round.

'I hope you didn't kill him, David,' I said, trying to get Eugene's eyes to work on their own inside his slack face.

'I only smack him small like pikin.'

David was wearing some oily shorts and a T-shirt that was running about him trying to keep the whole thing covered. I gave him some money and told him to buy some trousers and T-shirts that fitted.

'And no palm wine or beer,' I said. 'You work for me, I can't afford the furniture.'

Eugene started coming round out of the black and into some bright, white pain. His eyes were pinched closed and his mouth racked open tight at the corners.

'What the fuck happened?'

'You got hit by a train. Now listen, Red. Who's the tape for? I need a name.'

'Go fuck yoursel',' he said, looking down at his wrist which lay at an impossible angle on his stomach.

'When the police arrive I can either say you've been cooperative or you've been a pain in the arse. You talk to me and they might even fix up your wrist so that you can use it. You don't and you'll never make a hit with your right hand again. You'll never get out into the fresh air to make a hit with your right hand again. What's it to be?'

'Like I said, go fuck yoursel'.'

'OK If you can't give me a name, just nod. Is it Sean Malahide?'

The air hissed between his teeth. His wrist was swollen, fat as a puff adder and a lump had appeared on the side of his face.

'Suck my cock, kwi man.'

'I'd tell you to go and see some decent movies, improve your vocabulary, but you're going to a dark hole, Eugene, and you're never going to come out.'

The police arrived and bagged the knife and gun. I didn't need to tell them Eugene was a pain in the arse, they knew. They threw him in the back of the van and cuffed him and he passed out. I told the officers that if he talked to Gbondogo I wanted to know what he said and gave them 2,000 CFA each to make sure.

Bagado was clean, in bed and asleep when I nudged him. He looked at his watch from under a hand held to his frown as if it was a long way off.

'They gave you a choice of seven and you had to read all the manuals?'

'I met Eugene and I've employed a monster.'

'You youngsters,' said Bagado, taking the bag.

Bagado spliced the tape into the cassette. We sat on the bed and listened to it. It opened on a toilet flushing, a tap running, hands being washed, people talking about a preseason game between the Cowboys and the 49ers and none of it that clear because whoever was wearing the mike had it located under clothing. Footsteps in the corridor, the man sat down. Other footsteps approached, quicker, staccato with heels. A woman's voice said, 'Hi, Jimmy.'

'You're looking very nice, Miss Callahan.'

'Thanks, Jimmy.'

Some throat-clearing. Then back to the toilet. Locking the booth. The wire was clicked off, then back on again. Toilet flushing again. Back down the corridor, taking a seat. A door opened.

'You can go in now, Jimmy,' said Miss Callahan's voice. Footsteps. Another door opening. Then a voice, distant, boomy and indistinct.

'Hi, Jimmy, take a seat. You OK?'

'Bad stomach...' He spoke as he sat down and if he said the man's name we lost it.

'OK, I'll be quick,' the other man's voice said, pacing up and down now and speaking, the voice coming and going. 'ECOWAS can vouch for port security for one hour between fourteen hundred hours and fifteen hundred hours in the afternoon tomorrow, ninth September. The President and his entourage should get there fifteen minutes before fourteen hundred hours. It's gonna take that kinda time for them to disarm. So latest thirteen-forty-five, you understand? How many in the entourage, Jimmy?'

'A hundred and twelve.'

'That's a lot of people to talk peace, Jimmy. Does he need that many?'

'There's nothing I can do 'bout it. They just decided that today. The guard go where he goes. They don't want him running away without them.'

'I see. So. Fourteen hundred hours, Jeremiah Finn arrives.'

'How are ECOWAS gonna play it in the port?'

'Whaddyamean?'

'I mean, they're gonna have enough soldiers on the ground to move a hundred and twelve palace-guard troops away from the gates, so that when Finn arrives...'

'They won't see a thing. We'll put up a wall of twenty-foot containers. Finn's men'll arrive and the ECOWAS people'll be out there. Finn's men have the layout of the port. They know exactly where everybody's gonna be. They'll walk in there and take the big man out.'

'I don't want them to take out the whole of the palace guard.'

'I hope they won't, too. But that is not under our control. Now, you've got the President primed. He's coming to the port to discuss standing down. That means: when he's gonna do it, when he's gonna leave the country, the number of visas he wants for his people, his future, their future. No talks unless that is understood. Right? You gotta keep that side of the story straight. You start making other things look possible, he's gonna smell something. The guy's paranoid enough as it is.'

'Everything's OK.'

'Once this is over the ECOWAS troops will assume control of Monrovia. An interim government will be appointed and free elections will take place within one year.'

'What about Jeremiah Finn?'

'Jeremiah Finn is in control of some key locations in and around Monrovia. He has to allow the transition of power. Don't worry...' We lost the end of that sentence under door-knocking and opening.

'Miss Truelove, what can I do for you?'

'General Akosombo is here, we're taking him down to the conference room.'

'I'll be right along.'

Door closed.

'You got the money, Jimmy?'

'I got it.'

'Get the President there for thirteen-forty-five tomorrow afternoon and prepare yourself to become a part of the history of your country.'

Barely audible under the rustling of clothes, the footsteps and the door opening came the line, 'Blessed are the peacemakers...' The rest was lost. James Wilson returned to the toilet and the tape finished.

'James Wilson sets himself up for life,' I said.

'He did that very well. It's not so easy to get somebody to say something when you're wearing a wire, and he got him to say what he wanted, except the most important thing. He didn't get him to say his name.'

'He did, we lost it. It doesn't matter, somebody's going to recognize the voice. We'll try it on Corben.'

I put the video cassette back in its envelope and sealed it, using Fat Paul's scorpion ring and the wax I'd bought; the copy I threw in the bin. The audio cassette I put in my pocket.

I called Martin Fall at his Hampshire farmhouse and got Anne, his wife, my ex, who sounded affectionate and cosy, which wrenched at the thought of what might have been if ... If I'd been a different person. She told me that he'd gone, not out of the country, just to the London office. He was due to call before takeoff. He was flying private, she said, in a Lear jet hired by Collins and Driberg. That was all I wanted to know.

I called Rademakers at the hospital but they said he wasn't available to talk. I arranged to see Chantale Leubas, Rademakers's 'secretary', and as I drove out to Deux Plateaux to see her I felt the trail cooling on me.

Once Chantale Leubas had let me in, puffed her hair, played with her diamond rings and tamed her loose and disobedient gown, she set about disarming my questions with amused honesty. She told me what she did for Rademakers, how she served him coffee and allowed him certain privileges. How at other times she had to be a little stricter.

'He has very fast hands,' she said. 'I think from playing with small things for too long.'

I didn't stay long. She told me what I already knew. That I was sniffing in the wrong place. She stopped me with her arm as I was leaving and whispered in my ear, her lips making contact.

'Ce n'est jamais la putain.'

She opened the sliding doors for me and tapped the aluminium frame with her rings.

'Have you ever done anything for a man called Sean Malahide?' I asked.

'No,' she said, the rings getting impatient on the metal, so that I was reminded of someone else with an interest in diamonds.

'Al Trzinski?'

She grunted and shuddered.

'That man is an animal,' she said, and slid the door shut.

We rolled into Korhogo at 10.00 at night and the post-election parties were swinging. We drove through streets full of people who'd just exercised their democratic right in what passed for a free and fair election. We'd had another hard day on African roads and the six of us looked as if we knew who'd won and had come to poop the party. The compound was dark and empty but we could hear the thump of the music coming from the bar in the middle of the shanty town across the street.

Everybody went to bed. I sat in the kitchen and listened to the bass track which came into my head via my feet, and a heaviness came over me—not physical tiredness, but a malaise, a soul sickness that settled on me whenever I was in this house. I poured whisky over a handful of ice and sipped it and waited to ease into the cure, looking at the striplight reflected in the window. Dotte came in with wet hair, a wrap around her waist and a very loose-knit vest on top, through which her nipples were protruding. She found a pack of cigarettes on a shelf, lit one and leaned against the sideboard.

'Do you like this place?' I asked.

'It suits my mood sometimes.'

'You don't look the suicidal type.'