Nobody would ever tell you that Cotonou air was sweet, cut with two-stroke fumes, dodgy drainage and an accumulation of sweat it would never win a clean city prize, but that day, beyond the Sûreté gates, it was ambrosia.
By the time I got home it was dark and I got the free-fall gut feeling at what was behind the doors. But the place had been cleaned up. Bagado must have stroked Helen into a stupor to get it done. He’d left my watch in the kitchen for me too, but no whisky. I cleaned myself up, put some money in my pocket and went down to the office, buying a couple of beers on the way.
The day gardien was sleeping on some breezeblocks. The night gardien, a Muslim, had spread out a length of cardboard pointing east and was preparing to pray. I nudged the day gardien awake. He looked over his shoulder at me like a dog in the stm who’s not moving for no one unless it’s a thirty-five-ton truck. I asked him if anybody had dropped by.
‘Deux hommes.’
‘Blancs?’
‘Non, non, noirs, de Nigeria. Ils ne parlent pas français.’
‘C’est tout?’
He fell back to sleep. I nodded at the Muslim, who dropped to his knees with the suddenness of a man who’d seen a 5000-CFA note, and prostrated himself to Mecca. I went upstairs and sat in the streetlight crossing the floor of my office and drank beer and whisky chasers until the Night Club was a distant speck on the horizon of my memory.
I put a call through to Die in Lagos. No answer from the office so I hit him at home. One of his children picked up the phone, roared over the battle on TV and dropped the phone out of the window. Die’s wife was still in hospital in Beirut after an operation and the kids were out of control.
‘Visitors?’ I asked.
‘I wish they were but they’re all my kids and they stay here and this is the noise they make and I pay for the pleasure. Don’t do it, Bruce, you got the right idea.’
‘How many did you say you’ve got now?’
‘Eight.’
‘Look, Die, you remember we talked about that woman, Madame Sokode? You told me about Nexim and the construction business and it all sounded very nice. But now I need some different information.’
‘Like what?’
‘The real thing. The dirt. I’ve heard things about her.’
‘You have?’ he said, as if this was a big surprise.
‘Maybe you already heard something.’
‘Me? No.’
‘Did you hear she ran girls? Prostitutes. Whores.’
‘I didn’t hear anything,’ he said. ‘But I haven’t been listening. Leave it with me. Let me look into it. I’ll call you. I can’t talk with all this...’
We hung up. More cold beer. More whisky. My heart thumped magnificently. Maybe I should eat something. I went down to the street with the second cold beer and ordered a kebab and ate it in front of the guy. It was good. I had another with extra chilli, felt my insides kicking in.
I stopped a taxi moto and headed for the Jouet Doux in the Jonquet. I had a couple of things to do here. Find the German sex punter and hunt out the moped driver who’d taken Marnier home the other night.
Business was slack in the Jouet Doux. I ordered a beer and slumped. Girls came and went but no whites slid in. I started tramping the bars again.
I went down an unlit sidestreet where there were cheaper bars, shacks with thatched awnings and blue and white painted tables outside. The clientele was African. The music, some Afrobeat stuff, was loud and distorted from high amps and bad speakers. The Africans didn’t mind, they liked being buried in sound. I had a drink by candlelight but couldn’t see anything in the street so upped and moved on.
I got to a point in the mud road where it widened and there seemed to be nothing more of the bars and nightlife. There was a building site with bricks piled up inside a skeleton structure and slag heaps of sand and gravel outside. I’d just decided to give up on the sex punter and concentrate on finding Marnier when I saw him. He was crossing the road back down towards the bars and heading for the Rue des Cheminots, stumbling over the rough puddled road. I caught up with him.
‘Remember me?’ I asked.
A car rocked and rolled down the road towards us, lighting his face. He’d taken a little more hammer since I last saw him.
‘Der Engländer,’ he said. ‘Did he find you? The man. I don’t know his name. The one with the young girls.’
‘That’s what I wanted to know. You sent him to me.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘And who are these people? Are they friends of yours?’
Out of the dark came two men. A big, reinforced concrete type and a slimmer version carrying the brains for the two of them. A fist the size of a small lintel came out of the night and connected with the already sensitive tissue on the German’s face. There was a crunch which did not sound like the concrete man’s knuckles breaking up. The German hit the ground faster than rubble down a chute and went foetal, holding his face.
The big guy turned to me, the slim one behind him looking over his shoulder as if he was operating the levers.
‘You owe us some money,’ said Slim, in a silly high-pitched voice.
‘I don’t even know you,’ I said. ‘And I’m not giving you anything if you want to knock me around like that.’
‘We’re friends of Daniel.’
‘Maybe you’re the same friends who shot him.’
‘Mebbe we are.’
The German was making a terrible noise at our feet and it was winding Slim up some. He fluttered his hand at the big guy who leaned down into the dark and with a short jab there was silence. Slim breathed out with relief and that’s when I hit him. Not even I was drunk or stupid enough to try my fragile metacarpals on the other guy.
Slim went down with a whinny and I hurdled him and sprinted back down the street to the building site, the big guy after me, the ground shaking. I got into the concrete cage, picked up a breezeblock and waited with a trampolining heart.
Mr Big wasn’t so sharp without his friend. He rounded the pile of bricks and walked his face straight into my breezeblock swung from yards back. The breezeblock shattered. The man stood up straight. I hit him with another across the jawline, which turned his head a good fifteen degrees and probably knocked everything back into focus. He put one foot forward and winched back his arm. It was time to do some more running.
I leapt through the concrete cage and kneed my way through the pile of gravel and took a tumble down the other side. That side swipe must have slowed Mr Big down. He didn’t seem to be following but I ran anyway. I ran past the German, who was still lying in the road, and Slim who was on all fours spewing black. I got into the streetlights down Rue des Cheminots and started walking, trying to get my heart back behind its ribs. I crossed the road at a traffic light and saw the taxi moto I wanted, the yellow jacket with the right number, but he had a ride. The lights changed and I was off down the road towards Sekou Touré after him, my eyes bursting out of my head, my tongue stream ing behind me, a vapour trail of beer and whisky chasers in my wake.
The phalanx of mopeds stopped for the red light. I was fifty metres away when they changed to green and I had to put some beef into my legs to get across the lights myself. The moped crossed the road and went into the second-hand clothes market whose metal doors were all shut for the night. A moped pulled alongside me and the guy nodded behind him. I jumped on and pointed.
We drove past the Dan Tokpa and across the Nouveau Pont. We were heading for the Porto Novo road when the moped turned left and stopped outside a four-storey apartment building. The ride got off. I pulled alongside and transferred. The driver leaned forward so I didn’t drip on him.
He remembered the slashed face of Jean-Luc Marnier and he knew where he’d taken him. I offered him 3000 CFA to take me to the same place. He thought about being greedier but I leaned over him and he decided against having me soak into his jacket any more.
We drove back to the Nouveau Pont and turned right just before it. We came off the broken tarmac after a couple of hundred metres and on to beaten track. About a kilometre later we turned off down towards the lagoon. He took me to a corner house with a two-and-a-half-metre-high wall and only slightly shorter gates. No light seemed to be coming from the front of the house. I told the driver to wait.
I walked down the side of the house. There was another wall at the back but lower, only two metres. It went right down to the edge of the lagoon. I clamped my hands on to the top of the wall to haul myself up. Agony. Glass-topped. I unhooked myself and dropped to the floor oozing blood from my palms. I had a short burst of film in my head—the girl blown up in her brown uniform in the bottom of the skiff, the palms of her hands, forearms and knees eaten away. I swallowed hard and leaned against the wall, easing back the nausea.
The sound of groaning metal pulled me back. The gates were opening at the front. Carole’s car came out into the road and stopped. She got out and closed the gates. A bolt slid across from the other side. She got back into the car and pulled away, the lights sweeping across the boy astride his moped, shielding his eyes.
I crossed the road and told him to take me home, where I dressed my hands. I found an old piece of matting and went down to the car. I drove back to Marnier’s house and parked up five streets away and walked back down with the matting.
A car’s headlights flared across the street and I drifted into the shadows. A black official-looking Peugeot pulled up by the gates and gave a single honk on the horn. A man got out and leaned on the roof of his car, impatient. He walked around the front of the car and into the headlights. Then he heard the bolt slide and backtracked. He reversed the car into the gateway.
The man in the headlights was Commandant Bondougou.