48
To complete my investigation, all I had left to do was pay a visit to the protagonist in this case. I parked in the cargo area at Bamako-Sénou International Airport and went through security by paying off an Air Transport officer. On the tarmac, my cane sank into the hot asphalt. The sweat dripping down my back and under my armpits had a chemical smell, like the pills I had to take every day. I found Stéphane Humbert in the little office of his two-plane hangar. He was doing paperwork next to an air conditioner that was sending out a weak flow of tepid air.
“Mr. Camara?” he said, raising his head. “Are you hurt? What happened to you?”
I dismissed the question with a wave of my hand.
“Hello, Stéphane. I’ve come to tell you that Bahia Tebessi’s murder has been solved.”
He invited me to sit down. “I’m relieved to hear that, even though I’ll always feel guilty. In a way, I’m responsible.”
“In a way,” I repeated, nodding.
Stéphane Humbert offered me a beer, which I happily accepted. He brought out two Flags from his little fridge and uncapped them. We drank the first few sips in silence.
I picked up the conversation again. “To be honest, I wanted to check out a few things you mentioned during our first meeting, primarily your little lovers romp in the Keyes region, near Sadiola.”
Humbert smiled. “That was an amazing trip.”
“To think how much better off you’d have been if you kept your mouth shut. By bringing up that little getaway, you pretty much handed over the key to my investigation.”
“I don’t understand,” Humbert said, his eyes growing wider.
“I went to the site, and I made some interesting discoveries. That mine hasn’t been worked in quite some time, and yet, according to Cartagena’s website, it extracted gold ore valued at more than three hundred million dollars last year. You have to admit that raises some flags.”
Humbert was silent. He looked worried.
“I imagine Bahia wondered why you were taking her to an inactive mine, a mine that was very productive, according to the company that owned it.”
I took a sip of my nicely chilled beer.
“You underestimated Bahia,” I continued. “She wasn’t stupid. She was a law student. I imagine it didn’t take her long to realize that the Cartagena mine was one gigantic machine for laundering the dirty money generated by the company’s coke trafficking. I’m guessing our friends at Cartagena used part of their profits to make off-the-books purchases of gold ore from some other mine. Then they claimed the gold was extracted from their own mine.”
Humbert nodded in agreement.
“When Bahia got out of jail, she called you. She most likely wanted to blackmail you and your employers.”
Humbert let out a fatalistic sigh.
“She was very angry,” he said. “She tried to contact me while she was being held. She wanted me to intervene, but I didn’t want to get involved. I played dead, and when she got out, she called me again, demanding to see me, or else she’d leak everything to the press—Cartagena, the mine, all of it. I was terrified. I thought Rafael and Rodrigo would kill me for being so careless.”
My gut was killing me, and I was beginning to feel feverish. I took a pill while Stéphane Humbert watched me, his eyes full of anxiety.
“How did she die?” I asked wearily.
“I didn’t want to tell Rafael and Rodrigo, but I figured I had to. Rafael sent me a thug—the worst out there. A guy named Samaké. I thought he was the one who was going to…”
He started sobbing, and the tears streamed down his face.
“But Rafael had decided that killing her was my job. He wanted to teach me a lesson. We went to get her when she was released, and we took her to the river, where the new bridge was being constructed. That’s where…”
He was weeping like a baby, but I was incapable of feeling any pity. I had run out of sympathy cards.
“I couldn’t do it,” he continued. “I mean… It was too hard. I can’t even kill a rabbit. So Samaké gave me a hand. It was horrible.”
I couldn’t take his crying any longer. I changed the subject.
“What’s your role in this business of transporting the cocaine?”
He gave me a stunned look.
“You know about that?”
I nodded, telling him to go on with his explanation.
“I get permission for territory flyovers and handle administrative details—that kind of thing.”
“Who else is involved in this?”
“Everyone, all the way to the highest levels of government.”
His eyes suddenly filled with fear. “Rafael will kill me if he finds out I told you all of this.”
“Don’t worry about Rafael.”
I took out my phone and entered a number.
“Who are you calling?”
“The police commissioner. He’ll be taking care of you.”
Humbert leaped to his feet and grabbed a monkey wrench. He brandished it as if he were planning to smash my skull.
“And what if I killed you right here and now? You’re in no condition to resist. And then I could flee the country.”
I gave him an annoyed look.
“Probably, but while I may be in no shape to fight, I’m still bigger than a rabbit. And as for fleeing, I hate to break it to you, but living on the run isn’t so easy. Believe me. I’ve been there. You’re not built for it, Stéphane. So sit back down and put that thing away before you hurt yourself.”
The monkey wrench hit the concrete with a loud clonk.