Chapter 9

Cotonou. Tuesday 20th February.

 

I woke up as stiff and sore as a wind-dried duck. Heike’s space was empty. I was lying diagonally across the bed. She was in a T-shirt and knickers looking out of the window, her hair wet, staring at the overcast day.

‘It’s six thirty,’ she said. ‘I’m late.’

‘Did it rain?’

‘No.’

‘I didn’t ask you last night... what was all that about with Gerhard?’

‘All what about with Gerhard?’ she said, some needle in her voice.

‘There was something going on with Gerhard... In the meeting.’

‘Why did you have to be so tough with him... about money?’ she said.

Well, even I knew that wasn’t the reason but we were started now.

‘Why I had to be so tough?’

‘We’re an aid agency. Aid not ad. We don’t have the money for it.’

‘I’d like to be a charity too but I don’t want to see Bagado’s kids starve...’

‘I still have to pay the rent whatever...’

‘Stick it in, Heike.’

‘Look, Bruce, I have to work with Gerhard. He assesses me and reports back to Berlin. He puts pressure on me.’

‘So you wanted to say to him, “This is my man.” You didn’t have him in mind as a role model?’

‘Gerhard. A role model for you? You’ve got to be committed, Bruce Medway. It’s dangerous having you and your ideas out there.’

She stepped into a skirt and left the room. I pulled on a pair of jeans, went into the kitchen and squeezed the juice out of some oranges from the fridge. Why did my eye always land on the whisky bottle? The last thing I wanted was a drink, wasn’t it? Heike poured herself a glass of juice. I wondered how these things happened to people. How did people bring themselves to the marks? What do people say these days, you know, to take things forward? Let’s get married? Get off the grass. Nobody gets married these days. Let’s have kids? Yikes. One minute I’m an arm’s-length bachelor, the next I want little versions of ourselves running around. Who’s going to believe that? Not me. There’s got to be a halfway house, for Christ’s sake. Then you find yourself saying words like ‘sharing’ and before you know it...

‘What’s going on in there?’ asked Heike.

‘Nothing.’

‘The usual,’ she said.

‘You’re a bit sharp this morning, aren’t you?’

‘I’ve a small hangover and I’m a little annoyed.’

‘About the Gerhard thing?’

‘No, about the you thing.’

‘More juice?’

‘Why should I introduce you to the role model? Why not just run off with him? You know, cut out the duffer, go straight to the real thing.’

‘Maybe you wanted me to learn something from Gerhard.’

‘He’s a divorced workaholic.’

‘And talking about workaholics. Do you think I’m a deadbeat?’ She snorted a laugh out at that.

‘You don’t want to ask that question looking like you do this morning.’

‘Do you mind paying the rent?’

‘I get a housing allowance. You’re broke.’

‘It’s not drawing us together though, is it?’

She laughed at that too.

‘You’re like a dog wandering around a park barking up trees.’

‘I’m working my way round.’

‘Good luck,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to go to work.’

 

Out of the kitchen window, I saw the same man I’d seen last night but on the balcony this time, staring down into the same garden, looking as if he’d got nowhere in a whole night-time.

Bagado arrived while I had my head over the sink contemplating a puke.

‘I was just on my way down to my new office,’ said Bagado.

‘You’re sounding cheerful. I suppose you’ve got your own desk and phone, your own office plant, don’t have to share with whitey any more.’

‘There’s something about a fresh start I’ve always liked. Even this one, which will stay fresh for as long as a calabash of fish in the sun.’

I took another slug of the orange juice, which burned down my oesophagus. I tried to get some baguette down after it to stop it stripping off my stomach lining but it got stuck in my neck and I had to cough it back up.

‘I’ve got to go,’ said Bagado, slapping my back.

‘Hang on. There’s somebody for you to meet.’

I knocked on Selina’s door. No answer. I pushed the door open. The room was empty. I told Bagado about Selina Aguia and we opened up the OTE/Chemiclean file which had been left on the table. The telexes and letters had been filed in chronological order. This whole big bad problem started with the simplest inquiry you could imagine:

 

380 mts Chemicals
Ex Leghorn
IMMY

 

‘No destination but immediate shipment,’ said Bagado. ‘Is that usual?’

‘Very unusual for this kind of business. They might fix crude oil from the Persian Gulf with no destination or just Med or Western Europe, but chemicals are products you don’t ship without a buyer. They’re too specific, especially only three hundred and eighty tons of the stuff. It’s not as if it’s three thousand tons of benzene or toluene. It also says “chemicals”, which would normally mean a number of parcels. Even more specific.’

‘So he should have known it was wrong from the start.’

Selina had photocopied notes from Napier’s day book. There was an Italian phone number, then OTE and scribbled alongside ‘ready-treated industrial waste’ and the name Fabrizzio Franconelli. Underneath the name Napier had written, ‘45 X 20 ft containers. Chemical products in drums’. There was a line and the workings of some cargoes for a North Sea contract for BP Chemicals. On the next sheet was a massive doodle of what could have been the left flank of an armadillo and underneath a circle with OTE and Chemiclean in it. Then there was a fax from Chemiclean.

 

CHEMICLEAN INTERNATIONAL LIMITED

 

Postal Address:	Office Address:
PO Box 735 Lagos.	28, Campbell Street
	Lagos Island
	Lagos. Nigeria.
Napier Briggs	CIL LAGOS W. AFRICA.
Napier Briggs Associates	Dealer in Chemical Materials
204, Old Street	Disposition of Chemical Waste
London ECI	Oil Materials. Company
	representation
	Import/Export services.
	Phone (234) 01-441 441
	Fax (234) 01-441 442

 

30th August

FAX MESSAGE

Dear Mr Briggs,

We have been informed by the International Chamber of Commerce that your company specializes in the transportation of hazardous chemicals.

I am writing to introduce our company to you with the hope that you might be of our need or help in scouting out some industries in Europe in need of evacuating waste products emanating from their company’s productive activities.

My name is Daniel Emanalo (Operations Manager). My father is a tradition ruler in the Western State of Nigeria. We own a vast tract of land close to the border with the Republic of Benin. On this land we have built a reinforced concrete bunker 60 ft below the surface for the storage of industrial waste.

Please note that we are only able to accept pretreated industrial waste. We are not having the facilities or know-how to treat waste products. We cannot accept any radioactive material as this is a serious offence under our nation’s penal code and punishable by death.

Our handling, transportation and storage charge is fixed at $30,000 per ton of chemical products as a one-off payment for life.

If you would in anyway assist in scouting out for some industries in Europe who need our services we would pay a commission on all trade of 5 per cent. Please don’t hesitate to contact us immediately to enable us to furnish you with our operative modalities.

Looking forward to hearing from you and doing business with you.

Yours sincerely,

 

Daniel Emanalo (Operations Manager)

 

PS. All communications will be in strictest confidence.

 

After this fax Selina had filed a permit from the Office of the Pharmacist’s Board of Nigeria allowing Chemiclean to import pretreated industrial waste and a notice from the Federal Ministry of Health, Environmental Protection Agency confirming that the Chemiclean facilities had been inspected and pronounced Al.

All the negotiations had been typed up on to a single sheet of paper. Napier had fixed a vessel called the Paphos Star, some Cypriot rust bucket, for $2500 per container ex Leghorn/Tin Can Island Lagos on a laycan of 10/15 October subject to contract. Napier’s opening offer to OTE had been for $30,500 per ton and they’d come back with $7000 per ton which looked like an unbridgeable gap and would have been between serious business people. As it turned out, Chemiclean would have agreed to store the waste at $12,000 per ton but not in the concrete bunker—OTE wanted to be in that concrete bunker and eventually agreed a price of $23,000 per ton.

‘A lot of money,’ I said.

‘A lot of money,’ agreed Bagado. ‘Too much money. I looked over some files I kept at home on a toxic-waste-dumping scandal in Benin four years ago. The cost of disposing a two-hundred-and-five-litre drum of intractable hazardous waste in Europe is somewhere between four and seven thousand dollars, depending on what it is. OTE are supposed to be shipping pretreated waste so it should cost even less. Even if the waste has a specific gravity of water that’s still more than four thousand dollars per drum. It’s not what you’d call commercial business.’

‘Money laundering?’

‘Italian company. Mafia money?’

‘Drug money.’

‘Maybe the full circle. The drugs come into Nigeria from Columbia and the Far East. They courier them to Europe. The money goes through OTE, through Napier Briggs, back to Nigeria, by which time it’s clean.’

‘How much are we talking about?’

Bagado flipped over to the next sheet. An early December bank statement showed an underlined credit for $8,740,000 and another for $112,500—the product and the freight. The mid-December section of the statement showed $8,303,000 going out, followed by another $110,250—the product money less the 5 per cent commission and the freight less a 2 per cent commission. Napier Briggs had cleared nearly $440,000 with a few phone calls.

Then came the sting.

 

	M. M. Aounou
	Victor Ballot No 28
	Porto Novo
	Rep. Bénin
	Postal Address
	BP, 741
	Porto Novo.
	Rep. Bénin.

 

29th November

Dear Mr Briggs,

I am senior accountant with the Ministry of Finance in the Benin Republic. I have been given your name by Daniel Emanalo, the Operations Manager at Chemiclean. He has told me that you have recently concluded a very successful business transaction with OTE in Leghorn. He has asked me to contact you with my proposal as a reward, I think you call it a ‘success fee’, for bringing Chemiclean and OTE together.

In my position at the Ministry of Finance I have many contacts in government and in the banking system. Some friends of mine at the Banque Beninoise de Development (BBD) discovered a government account containing $38,742,480. Through my files here in the Ministry of Finance I have traced this money to the overinvoicing of a contract awarded to a Danish company for clearing untreated toxic waste which had been illegally dumped in Benin during the previous administration. As you know from your dealings in West Africa, the powers of the old regime were dramatically reduced by the multipartite national conference in March 1990 and a new cabinet resulted with a new Prime Minister. This new administration know nothing about this account.

Through my offices at the Ministry I have been able to effect a payment authority but I require a foreign company account to make the transfer, it being in dollars and originally designed for a foreign firm. I hope you can see how your cooperation in this business might be of mutual benefit.

We have decided to offer you 40 per cent of the fund if you will allow us to make use of your bank account to make the transfer. Out of your 40 per cent you will have to pay 5 per cent to Daniel Emanalo for making the introduction but this would still leave you with a net gain in excess of $13,000,000.

All we would require from you is the following:

1) Three (3) blank copies of your company’s letterhead, signed.

2) Three (3) blank copies of your company’s invoices.

3) Name and address of your bank, account number and telephone/fax and/or telex numbers.

The invoices will be used to show goods and services which your company supplied and the letterheads will act as covering letters to back up the invoices. We will fill them in with all the necessary information that would have pertained to the original contract and can then push them through the BBD system and effect the transfer.

Please note that your letterhead and invoices should not only be signed but stamped as well as is the custom in West Africa. All communications should be sent by DHL as the local postal system is too unreliable.

We will update you with the progress of the transfer. On the day that the monies arrive in your account two officials will make contact with you in London—Mr B. Segun and Mr A. Idris—they will effect disbursement of the funds.

Please keep this business strictly private and confidential.

Awaiting your immediate response.

Yours sincerely,

 

M. Aounou.

 

A copy of a letter from Napier to M. Aounou showed that he sent the letterheads and invoices out on 6th December. Selina had typed up his December/January diary making the note that the secretary, Karen, had left the office on 21st December and gone on holiday until 5th January. Napier had been all over the place—Genoa for the launch of a gas ship called the Amedeo Avogadro, Madrid for a meeting with a broker called Navichem, Hamburg for a meeting with a shipowner called Hamburger-Lloyd, Copenhagen for a Christmas party, Bergen to see an owner’s broker called Steensland, Paris to discuss a Far East time charter with some brokers called Gazocean and Manchester to see a Shell refinery. He didn’t go back into his office until after the Christmas break and he didn’t see a bank statement until Karen tried to effect a freight payment to an owner on 10th January and was informed by the bank that there were insufficient funds.

The printout of the January statement which Karen had asked for immediately and had gone to the bank to pick up showed the accumulation of money in Napier’s account while he was travelling. He hit a maximum of $1,932,724 before three debits on 5th January of $728,965, $514,496 and $613,768 which took $1,857,229 out of his account.

He applied for a Nigerian visa on 10th January afternoon but didn’t receive it until 29th January. It took him six days to get a flight to Lagos, where he arrived early in the morning on Monday 5th February. He spent the first night in a hotel called the Ritalori but there was no record of subsequent nights. He moved to Cotonou on the 14th February and set himself up in the Hotel du Lac where he spent two nights, getting himself killed on his third night on Friday 16th February. The last three sheets in the file were copies of the signed letterheads received by Napier’s bank instructing them to transfer three different amounts to three different banks in three cities in the UK.

‘How did they know how much money he would have and when it would be in the account?’ I asked.

‘Somebody in the bank, somebody in Briggs’s office or outside information.’

‘They timed it well, didn’t they? Over the Christmas break.’

‘What did he do and who did he see for those ten days he spent in Lagos?’

‘That’s what I want you to find out,’ said Selina, who’d come in silently and was standing by the door with all her hair cut off into a spiky bleached crew cut. She had a plastic bag in her hand.

‘That’s a bit radical, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘The hair.’

‘You don’t like it?’

‘It looks cool.’

‘I’ll take that both ways.’

I introduced Bagado. It was clear we’d looked through the file.

‘What do you think, Mr Bagado?’

‘Very nice,’ he said, ‘but I didn’t see the “before”.’

‘It’s in the bag. I thought I’d bury it with Napier,’ she said, lightly. ‘My father always loved my hair.’

Bagado was experienced in grief. He knew how to handle these blank spaces where weighty things said breezily send emotions into free fall and paralyse speech. He didn’t suddenly start talking about the heat, which was folding itself into the room and expanding, or comment on the weather, which everybody knew was always hot. He radiated sympathy without tilting his head or drawbridging his eyebrows into a ‘sincere’ expression. He felt for the woman and she could sense it.

‘Maybe this isn’t a good time to be impulsive,’ he said. ‘You should think about your father now while everything is still fresh. You don’t have to do anything. Just reflect. If you don’t you’ll miss out and you may regret that later.’

Nobody had ever spoken to Selina like that before in her life. She was astonished, as if Bagado had proposed some primitive rite that people like her just didn’t do.

‘It was hot,’ she said. ‘I didn’t think.’

‘What’s there to think about?’

‘My father and who killed him.’

‘That might take some time to uncover. You’ve done all that’s necessary by organizing the file for us. Now take care of yourself.’

‘But you’ve found the toxic waste.’

‘We’ve found some toxic waste.’

‘The same quantity my father shipped, Bruce said...’

‘We need more to go on than that. The toxic waste is out of our jurisdiction. I have to make contact with the Nigerians to see if they will cooperate. We have to tread carefully doing that. The army were present at the dump. That could mean government involvement or someone with a great deal of power. We don’t know who we’re up against and we are already in a political situation here in Benin starting with my appointment.’

‘I have some idea of who we’re up against,’ she said.

‘Somebody here?’

‘The Franconellis,’ she said, shaking her head.

‘You’ve spoken to them?’

‘I found out about them through my ex-husband’s contacts in Milan. They’re from a large Neapolitan mafia family. They have representation in government and powerful contacts in industry. They’re in construction and shipping, and further down the line olive oil, wine, the rag trade, almost everything you can think of. They also rim drugs—cocaine from Columbia and heroin from the Far East. The eldest son, Fabrizzio, is fifty-eight years old. He runs a shipping company out of Leghorn. Roberto is the youngest. He’s just hit fifty. He runs a construction company and an import/export business out of Lagos. Between them and their sons and one of the daughters they run a drug-distribution network in Europe and CIS countries. There are two other brothers in the States with three sons between them. Two of those sons are in Russia. The father is eighty-two years old and never leaves Naples.’

‘Well,’ said Bagado, ‘now you see that this is not such a simple investigation.’

‘If you want to do something,’ I said, ‘perhaps we could have a quiet look around in Nigeria and find out who we’re up against.’

‘I do want to do something,’ said Selina, ‘and I have money to do something.’

‘Bagado?’ I asked. ‘Where are you in this?’

‘I didn’t say? I’ve been put in charge of the Napier Briggs murder investigation, reporting directly to Bondougou.’

‘What do you think that means?’

‘I’ve been sent barefoot down a causeway of broken glass.’

‘Bondougou wants you in his lap with his hand up your back.’

‘As usual. But I don’t intend to allow that to happen.’

‘You reckon he has an interest beyond law enforcement?’

‘You know as well as I do that the only law Bondougou enforces is his own.’

‘You might be interested to know,’ said Selina, ‘that yesterday they said I could take my father’s body. They’re just doing the paperwork this morning and I can fly him back this afternoon.’

‘That’s quick,’ said Bagado, ‘and not strictly correct in a murder investigation. The defence can make a case for doing their own autopsy. But then, perhaps, they’re not anticipating a trial.’

Selina paced the room like a caged panther needing bigger horizons. Bagado looked at his watch and said he had to be going now that he was a public servant. He didn’t interrupt Selina who wasn’t noticing anything outside the inside of her own head. More heat leaked into the room. Sweat started in my scalp, the orange juice staged a revolt and made me feel nauseous. I threw up in the bathroom.

‘Where’s Heike?’ asked Selina, when I came out.

‘Gone to work.’

‘I didn’t think you were supposed to drink during the week,’ she said, looking at me carefully so that I knew that she knew—women talk to each other all the time, even strangers.

‘I’m not, but I’m a shocking little rule-breaker when I want to be,’ I said, swallowing something nasty. Selina looked as if she was about to step in with something, but she didn’t feel sure of her ground yet and swerved away from it.

‘How much do you want?’ she asked instead.

‘To find out what Napier was up to in Lagos? Five hundred thousand CFA to get started.’

‘What’s your fee?’

‘Ten thousand a day.’

‘That’s more than a hundred quid,’ she snapped. ‘Are you worth it... without your detective friend?’

‘I’m double with him. He’ll help us out and draw official pay. You’re getting two for one.’

‘I thought you’d be cheaper. Heike...’

Women talk about even more than you’d imagine.

‘Heike draws a salary. People who draw salaries don’t understand. You run your own business. You know that much.’

‘I thought you did a three-day job for two hundred and fifty thousand all in.’

‘Charity work. I nearly got killed doing it too. Now I know we’ve got the mafia thrown in there, some heavy hitters in Nigeria and Bondougou on the edges, I’m going to make sure I get paid this time.’

‘Maybe I’ll wait and see what the official police investigation comes up with.’

‘I’ll be in my office.’

‘Who pays the bills around here?’

Women talk about literally everything.

‘None of your business, Selina.’

‘Probably the one with the salary.’

‘Still none of your business.’

They must have gone through the household accounts once they’d sorted me out and slammed down a half bottle of Scotch. It wasn’t that surprising. Heike was low on sympathetic ears to gab to. The German girls in her agency were a little vegan for her taste. Well, she’d found a meat eater in Selina and the tough bitch was using everything she’d learned. I couldn’t think why she needed that MBA her father had put her through, she had the head and muscle of a barrow boy. Maybe those boys from the Lagos school of business were going to learn a few things. All I had left on me was the stonewall.

‘You know where the office is,’ I said, and headed for the door.

‘It’s all right. I’ve found the right man for the job,’ she said to the back of my head.

‘But not the right money.’

‘I opened an account in the Bank of Africa yesterday morning. They said I’ll have to wait a week for a cheque book. You’ll have to wait a few days before my transfer arrives from Paris. I’ll give you the half million cash as soon as it’s there. Is that going to delay you?’

‘That’s fine.’

‘Napier was a weak man, Bruce. It was my mother who wore the pants. She had more men after she married my father than before. He didn’t say a word or lift a finger. I think he was too scared of losing her. She took it as humiliation and she returned it in full by running off...’

‘...with Blair.’

‘The old man told you that?’

‘It took some time to prise it out of him.’

‘I don’t like weak men,’ she said, pinching her bottom lip. ‘I tolerated it in my father because I loved him but I won’t have it from others.’

For a moment I became aware of the plus and minus ions in the room. Selina Aguia ran a hand through her new crop and painted a layer of gloss on to her top lip with the tip of her tongue.