Night fell and I locked up, wondering where the boy I’d sent after Daniel had got to. I found him curled up in the tailor’s shack. He said he’d lost Daniel in the Dan Tokpa market. I didn’t believe him. I especially didn’t believe him when he refused my money. I got down to his level and saw the fear in his eyes. I gave him a little rub on the head, pressed a 100-CFA coin into his hand and told him not to worry about it.
Back home I waited for Heike until a quarter to eight, then wrote her a note. I loaded myself up with a couple of hundred thousand CFA and headed for the Restaurant Guinéen.
No rains for a couple of days and it was hot out there, hot and still and thick with pollution. I was nervous and sick and this kind of unrefreshed atmosphere of pillaring pressure gave me breathing difficulties, made me panic that the motor would miss a few beats and not restart.
I took a seat in the restaurant and ordered a beer. I hadn’t eaten since the pizza slices, but strong liquids were the only things that were going to stay down. The clientele was mainly African, the few other white people were travellers on a peanut budget, their clothes so faded from the sun and washing they were diaphanous.
Eight o’clock slipped by and I filled the minute after it by ordering another beer and a plate of cashew, my guts improving with time and the hope of a no-show. The travellers full of rice and sauce, left. An electric fan tried hard but couldn’t cut it. Thunder rumbled a long way off and the remaining Africans approved, confirming the release to come.
By nine o’clock there were three of us in the place and only one of us a customer. I’d taken some yam pâté and sauce for the feeling of something solid in there with the butterflies, and the beer around it was starting up some secondary fermentation. I belched and gave myself hiccups. The waiter sat down to his meal. I left money on the table and got out into the sallow light on the pavement. A Mercedes pulled up with Lagos plates. Daniel got out of the front passenger seat wearing the same clothes as this afternoon. A big guy got out the back and there was another one in there in the dark trying to encourage me with a smile you wouldn’t trust from your sister.
‘Who’re your friends?’ I asked.
‘They lookin’ the same thing.’
‘I’ll take a window seat.’
‘We air-conditioned in there.’
‘I like the view.’
‘At night?’
I took another look at the big guy who was leaning against the boot of the Merc, arms folded, dressed European, short-sleeve white shirt hanging outside black trousers, no socks, black scuffed lace-ups. Muscle.
‘Let’s take a look at the guy with the smile,’ I said.
Daniel leaned in and said something in Yoruba. The guy got out into the road, put his arms up on the roof, the smile still there and I could see what was so trustworthy about it now. A gold tooth in the middle. Heavy, rudimentary cicatrices on his face. More muscle.
‘These two can go and do some window shopping.’
‘Uh?’
‘They’re out or the deal’s off.’
‘They...’
‘Do it, Danny boy.’
He spoke to them in Yoruba at some length, no doubt making more arrangements with my comfort in mind. They shoved themselves off the car and seeped into the night.
Daniel and I got in the back seat. I was relieved to find the driver thin as hanger wire and the seat leather cool. We drove out of the Jonquet, heading north. The driver, with the lightest of touches on the steering wheel, only moved his hands. Our eyes connected in the rearview three times a minute until the streetlighting ran out and the tarmac cratered—the Francophonie rehab not getting as far as this.
The driver eased us in and out of the potholes which were water-filled to within an inch of the brim. Then we were on to a beaten mud piste, moving swiftly over the bumps and the odd stretch of washboard. We could only be heading for the lagoon. There was nothing else out here apart from jungle and, beyond the headlight cone, the thick dark which came alive every so often with lightning crackling up and down the high-stacked cloud in the eastern sky.
We made a couple of turns and came out at a collection of houses at the edge of the lagoon. All the houses were made of wood and on stilts, most of them up to their knees in water. We turned back on ourselves and went up on to some higher ground where there was a concrete and brick building with a walled compound. It was the only house with fighting and there was a continuous whine from a small petrol generator at high revs. We parked in the compound and Daniel spoke for the first time since leaving Cotonou.
‘Five hundred thousand.’
‘I haven’t done anything yet.’
‘Pay me the money, go into the house, do your business and we take you back.’
‘What if I don’t like the girls?’
‘You like them. They ver’ sweet.’
The driver leaned forward and took something from the glove. He shifted sideways in his seat and looked at me mildly over the headrest. I went to open the door.
‘The money,’ said Daniel.
The door wouldn’t open, child locks on.
‘You do, when you pay the money.’
‘I want to go in there see if I like what I see. If I don’t I want to come out, get in the car and go home. No money.’
‘Show me your money,’ he said. ‘Just want to see. Make sure you got it.’
The driver clicked the courtesy light on. I fanned the couple of hundred thousand I had on me and put the roll back in my pocket. He nodded. The driver let me out. After the air con the night’s breath was all over me like a dance-floor flirt. I walked to the building, resisting the urge to turn at the steps up to the verandah for encouragement.
I opened one half of the cracked and peeling double doors and walked into a steel blue glow which was not chilly but stifling. It lit an anteroom and a long corridor which ran the length of the building, the blue light not quite making it to the back wall. A large woman in an African-print dress struggled to her feet from one of two easy chairs up against the wall behind a coffee table which had a spray of plastic flowers in an old gin bottle on it.
This was my first time in a bordello. I’d been in hotels which turned out to be bordellos if that was the service you wanted, but a purpose-built bordello, never. I was expecting some false joie de vivre, giggling girls in basques and garters running from room to room, pursued by fatties in string vests, knee-length boxer shorts and suspendered black socks. If I could have heard anything above the howl of the tortured genny it would have been grim silence broken by tears.
The woman stepped into her flip-flops and slouched over to me. She didn’t speak but set off down the corridor, her behind kissing the walls with each stride.
‘Il m’a dit que tu as des vierges ici,’ I said to the hair she had plaited in rails on her head.
She threw open a door on the left and turned to me.
In the yellow light of the table lamp lay a small girl in a little white dress undone at the back. She was sleeping curled up with her hands to her mouth. The tragedy of this terrible business hit me hard then—the little girl needing her sleep, the only ministration required was a parental kiss on an unconscious cheek. She stirred, knowing she was being observed.
The girl came awake on my question and I saw the first thing in her eyes. Fear. The next thing was nothingness. The lights went out in her. She disengaged from the world. The one thing certain—she wasn’t a virgin.
The woman closed the door and crossed the corridor. The story was different in this one. The girl was screwed up tight as a ball of paper in the corner of her bed furthest from the door. She was darting fast animal looks about her and shivering, even though the room was hotter than an infected wound. This feral kitten might have been a virgin about a week ago but she still hadn’t found the way to detach the brain from the body. I stepped back into the corridor.
‘Il m’a dit que tu as des élèves ici.’
The woman shot the girl a mean look which almost completely unravelled her and closed the door. We went to a room at the end of the corridor. The girl lay flat on her back, stretched out, taller than the others. She wore pink pants and nothing else. She covered the nubbins of her young high breasts with her hands and looked at me as if she was remembering my face to take with her to eternity. The madame pointed to the wall. Hanging off a nail on a crippled hanger was a small brown uniform.
‘Comment t’appeles tu?’ I asked.
‘Veronique,’ said the woman quickly, the improbability of the name straightening me.
‘Tu es en école?’ I asked, looking at her face, knowing now she didn’t understand French.
‘Elle est élève,’ said the madame.
‘Je crois que non.’
‘T’as vu ça,’ she said, pointing at the uniform.
‘Elle ne comprend pas français.’
‘Tu es professeur ou bien quoi?’ asked the woman, so I had to check her for irony. I stormed back down the corridor, past the doors with their veneer of tacky varnish, and into the steel lighting at the front of the building.
‘Oú vas-tu main’nant?’ she shouted after me.
I didn’t answer. I wanted to get out of there now. I was on the last rung over the abyss, one more room of that place and I’d be falling. I got out on to the verandah and found myself looking at the muscle I’d told Daniel to fade to black back in Cotonou.
‘Il n’a pas payé!’ hollered the woman, gasping up the corridor.
‘Je n’ai rien fait.’
The gold tooth winked at me. The bigger guy stood with his hand up his shirt stroking a flat hard belly. Daniel stood at the bottom of the steps. The car was pointing out of the compound. Lightning flickered far to the north of the lagoon.
‘Now you pay,’ said Daniel.
‘I didn’t like what I saw,’ I said. ‘No bunny, no money. That was the deal.’
‘We not goin’ nowhere ’til you pay.’
Gold tooth stepped forward to reinforce the situation. With what I had boiling inside me I felt no fear but I yelled in his face, a high-pitched scream, and waved my hands in the air like a lunatic. It did what I expected—got him on to the back foot and rooted him. Then I swung from a long way off, from way back behind my knee, over my shoulder, over my head and hit his friend full on the solar plexus with getting on for 200 lbs behind it. Even over the whine of the generator I heard the air go out of him. He doubled over, fell back, ricocheted off the roof support and fell the two feet off the verandah to the beaten earth of the compound. That put gold tooth in two minds, neither of them his own. My wave of anger started curling and breaking now, so that the kick I unleashed into his crotch lifted him on to his points and must have left him adenoidal for life.
Daniel backtracked to the car, a wild look on his face that said, let’s get away from the bully boy. I shuffled down the steps after him, cocky, and nasty with it. He joined the car whose motor was running. The driver’s window was down, which does little for the air con, and I noticed his arm was out straight. I was almost on it before I saw it. In the driver’s hand was an old revolver, a long-nosed job right out of a forties ‘noir’. I stopped about three feet from it, close enough to know it was real.
‘The money,’ said Daniel, his voice going a bit F-sharp with panic and fear.
The driver resighted his aim from my belly to my chest, which made no difference to me—gut shot, cardio shot, I wasn’t into either. I handed over the money. Daniel got into the car, sweating, relieved. He badgered the driver to get on with it and the car pulled away very slowly. Slowly enough for me to see the mozzarella smile in the bony features of the pipecleaner driver. Never trusted those thin guys.
The muscle was still scrabbling in the dust, one trying to get a bite of air, the other on all fours vomiting off the verandah, back arched like a dog after green meat. I found the little Yamaha scooter they’d arrived on and went after Daniel and his handyman, my rage still clean and focused, wanting to finish this more than I’d wanted to do anything.
I was glad of the driver’s arrogance. He purred back to Cotonou without ever taking it above forty m.p.h. I followed with no lights on until we hit the city and I could join the anonymous peloton of a thousand other mopeds.
We went past the Dan Tokpa, over the Nouveau Pont and joined the main Porto Novo road, direction Nigeria. I’d have followed them all the way to Lagos if I’d had to, but they came off at PK 12 and went up to a cheap and unfinished beach hotel called Le Paradis. The driver dropped Daniel off with a small holdall, turned the Merc and floated back past me on his way to a cheaper joint.
I parked the Yamaha and took a peek in the empty concrete bar. Daniel was at the foot of the stairs swinging a room key and ordering some food and drink from a solitary barman, asking him to bring it up to his room. Daniel went up the stairs taking slow nonchalant steps, a little celebratory bounce on each one, the fear forgotten, pleased with himself now.
The barman went into the kitchen leaving the grim neon-lit bar empty. In reception, room eight was the only missing key. I gave it five minutes and went up to the first floor. I found room eight along an untiled corridor with electric wire hanging from the ceiling between the lights. I knocked on the door. Daniel opened it so cool and happy he didn’t even bother to check it wasn’t his dinner. He was already stripped and heading across the dark blue tiles to the bathroom, a towel round his waist. I padded up behind him and gave his head a slight change in direction so that it hit the corner of a built-in louvre-doored wardrobe. He dropped to his knees, shouting, both hands over his eyebrow. I grabbed him by the back of his neck and slammed him forward so that his head cracked through the wardrobe door and he came to rest with his windpipe crimped against the louvre slats, unconscious and choking. I yanked him out and massaged his throat. I went through his clothes and found my roll of 200,000 CFA amongst another 100,000 or so and a bunch of niara. I was tempted to cover my expenses from the remainder, but got a little flash of Heike and Bagado giving me a finger-wagging. I checked the holdall, which was even juicieir the CFA all blocked off, five million of it, getting on for $10,000 and the revolver on top. I hauled Daniel away from the wardrobe, dragged him over to the bed. I ripped his towel off, soaked it in cold water and cleaned his face up, which was covered in blood, the eyebrow bleeding like a stuck pig’s throat. He started moaning and I got up and closed the door to the room, locked it.
I dabbed his face some more and got him up on to the bed. I sat on the other twin bed and waited for him to stop making a fuss, the guy with a head of glass to let a few louvre slats knock him out. He wasn’t happy coming back into a world of red flooded pain, which pleased me. His black skin was tinged green too, so I got him a bucket from the bathroom and he puked his headache up.
‘A few questions, Danny, before I leave you to your dinner.’
He focused on me and modestly covered his genitals with a hand. Blood leaked through the fingers of his other hand from the eyebrow. I leaned forward with the towel. He flinched. I tossed the towel at him.
‘You’re in this business, aren’t you? I can see from the money,’ I said, nodding down at the holdall.
‘What business?’
‘Don’t make it too slow, Daniel, or your level of suffering’s going to angle up sharply. You understand? Now, you’re in the business of procuring young girls, isn’t that right?’
He nodded.
‘Those girls I saw tonight, were they your girls?’
‘Not any more.’
‘Explain.’
‘I buy them from the villages. Take them to Cotonou. Sell them.’
‘You sell them to the woman?’
‘No, no, she jus’ run the place.’
‘You know these schoolgirls...’
‘You and schoolgirls. You sick in the head...’
I inched off the bed and slapped him hard, twice, with the front and back of my hand. He drivelled and sank back on to the pillow.
‘You’re forgetting you’re the asshole pimp, Daniel. You’re the one peddling little girls into a life of misery and pain. You keep your opinions to yourself and answer my questions and I might not be inclined to leave you pulped in the bath, because, I tell you, with what I’ve got humped up inside me I could do a lot worse than that.’
He put the cold towel compress to his face, shivering with twitchy fear, the room sauna-hot.
‘You know who sell me the girls?’ he asked, quietly.
‘Who?’
‘The parents,’ he said. ‘You like that?’
‘And I suppose you tell the parents that their daughters are going to short happy lives of torn pudenda and diseases? Don’t justify your shitty life to me.’
‘I’m jus’ tellin’ you...’
‘Tell me something else. These schoolgirls who’ve gone missing off the streets of Cotonou over the last few weeks. Eight girls, seven still alive, one found dead on the sand bar in the lagoon. You know what I’m talking about?’
He nodded. There was a knock at the door, his dinner arriving.
‘Ça peut rester dehors,’ I shouted, and I heard the tray go down on the floor and the flip-flops retreat. ‘Now tell me what you know about the schoolgirls.’
‘You know,’ he said, taking the towel away from his face for a moment, to see if the blood still ran free, ‘you know you a dead man.’
I probably was too, but I was so crazed I didn’t care, not a trace of ice in my veins, not the slightest tremor in my gut. I just leaned over to him and slapped him again, a downward stroke that fattened his lip nicely.
‘Someone told me that the other day, Daniel, and he’s six foot under concrete now with most of his face blown off. People are telling me all the time how they’re going to hang me by the gizzard and feed my entrails to the dogs but, look, I’m still here, still here with the task of slapping you about until you tell me something sensible. Now get on with it, my hands don’t need this much work.’
I could see he was confused. The beating he’d taken and a lot of English he didn’t want to understand. I calmed myself down and a couple of things occurred to me. The first was that Daniel was a middle man, low down in the chain, the boy not having any presence of mind at all. That meant a boss in Benin for him to report to, and, probably, a Mr Big in Lagos above it all. I saw how I could give him a problem, a big problem which, with any luck, would get him killed well before the cross-hairs landed on me. The other thing that came to mind was the first squirming wriggle of an idea like an elite sperm heading for the egg. The only problem, I didn’t understand it—my mind operating faster than my brain. I shrugged it away. Daniel flinched.
‘Who do you work for, Daniel?’
No answer.
‘Who do you pay the money to, Daniel?’
‘He comin’ soon. Bring you some trouble.’
‘I don’t know anybody who doesn’t bring me trouble. What’s he do with the money you give him?’
‘He tek it to Lagos.’
‘Who in Lagos?’
‘I don’ know.’
I opened up the holdall and took out the revolver. It really was an antique with a hammer and everything. Daniel froze. I placed the nozzle of the gun on the back of his hand covering his genitals.
‘I don’t know how to work these things too well but I know it’s something to do with pulling back the hammer.’
I eased it back.
‘But you know, Daniel, I had trigger thumbs when I was a kid. Doctor said it might weaken them.’
‘Madame Sokode,’ he said, quickly so that he could pretend he hadn’t.
‘Tell me where I can find her,’ I said, and brought the revolver back into my hands where I examined it further. Daniel gave me an address. ‘Talk to me about Madame Sokode.’
‘I don’t know her,’ he whined. ‘I jus’ take the orders, pay the money.’
‘You do anything else for her?’
‘Maybe you do drugs too. You got five million CFA in the bag. That’s money.’
‘I don’ do drugs. That’s Lagos business. I only work in Benin.’
‘What about these schoolgirls? What do you know about them?’
He shook his head.
‘Is Madame Sokode involved?’
No answer.
I leaned over him like a bad sky and gave him a look down the pipe of the revolver. I hit him with the heel of my free hand in the forehead and his head cracked back against the wall. Once, twice, three times.
‘I don’t think you know how angry I am, Daniel,’ I said and eased back the hammer again. He started blubbing. ‘Where are they keeping the schoolgirls?’
‘I don’t know. On the lagoon. I don’t know the place.’
‘Where are the girls going?’
‘Lagos.’
‘Are they going to be sold in Lagos?’ I said, sitting back down.
‘They already bought.’
‘What sort of money do they fetch?’
‘Thirty, forty thousand dollar.’
‘That’s a hell of a lot more than five hundred thousand CFA.’
‘If they virgin. Genuine...’
‘Sounds like good business, Daniel. What sort of people can afford that kind of money?’
‘Big people,’ he nodded.
‘When are they going to move the girls?’
‘I don’ know the time. It soon. But I don’ know the time.’
‘Do they need more girls?’
He shook his head.
‘You think this is good business, Daniel? Taking girls off the street and selling them to die?’
His eyes slitted at that. Revenge already in there. Don’t get moral with those that don’t have it unless you want a lapful of spite. My translation.
‘You got any children?’ I asked, standing up and pacing away from him, suddenly nervous about the money man due tonight. He didn’t answer me but I knew he had them. I picked up the holdall and took out three blocks of CFA and tucked them down the front of my chinos. I threw the holdall down by the side of the bed. Daniel was blinking fast, wondering if he was coming to his time and thinking if he wasn’t, how he was going to explain that all the money hadn’t been stolen.
‘Keep your kids indoors, Danny,’ I said. ‘Now stand up and turn around.’
I got him to the end of the bed. It was hard because he thought that this was it and his legs wouldn’t work properly and there were tears. I tapped him on the head and he dropped on to the bed and bounced. I made sure he could breathe. I brought his dinner in from outside, scraped it down the toilet and poured the drink after it and put the tray on the table.
It wasn’t until I got back on the scooter that I realized I still hadn’t found out who’d sent him, a question that fidgeted on my mind all the way back to Cotonou.