Blood is Dirt

ROBERT WILSON

Blood is Dirt

For Jane and my mother and in memory of João

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About the author

by the same author

Praise for Robert Wilson

Copyright

About the Publisher

1

Cotonou, Benin. Friday 16th February.

The sheep stood in the car park looking at its African owner with interest but no concern, which was a mistake. The animal had arrived from the market on a moped lying across the lap of its executioner whose sackful of knives was resting on the sheep’s back. He’d lifted the sheep off with a gentleness normally reserved for sick children. The sheep was no more than dazed at seeing life passing it by a little quicker than usual. The butcher tethered it to the bumper of a Land Rover and arranged his knives on the sack.

A boy arrived in a sweat on a bicycle which he leaned against the wall. He ran into the building. His feet slapped on the tiles in the stairwell. A while later the feet came back down again. And a while after that someone wearing steel tips on their shoes followed. They appeared in the car park.

The sheep looked from the owner to the boy and then to the very tall, athletic Lebanese with the steel tips who was about to be the new owner but with one drastic difference that the sheep had not, as yet, rumbled. The Lebanese inspected the sheep, drumming the fingers of one hand on his washboard stomach and using the other hand to spin his gold chain around his neck. He nodded.

The African took hold of a horn on the sheep’s head and wiped a blade across its neck opening up a red, woolly grimace. The animal was puzzled by the movement and its consequences. It fell on its side. Blood trickled down the concrete ramp of the car park, skirted a large patch of black oil and pooled in the dirt of the road where a dog licked it quickly before it soaked into the sand. The Lebanese clipped away.

I’d come out of the office to catch what could hardly be called a breeze that was playing around on the balcony, but it was better than sitting in the rise of one’s own fetor. I had nothing on my plate which was why I was taking an interest in alfresco butchery and it was lucky I did. Glancing up from the twitching life struggling to get away from the future mutton roast, my eyes connected with the only white man in the street. He was looking at the sign hanging on my first floor balcony which said ‘M & B’ and below that ‘Enquêtes et Recouvrements’, ‘Investigations and Debt Collection'.

The white man was wearing a cream linen suit which must have seemed like a great idea in the shop window in London but out here quite quickly achieved the crumpled, downtrodden look of a copywriter or a graphic artist. He slipped a card into his pocket and was about to walk across the car park when he noticed the dead sheep with accusatory eyes and lolling head. The sight of it jerked something between his shoulder blades. His head flicked up, he looked left and right and went on to his back foot, preparing for a cartoon scram. The butcher, who was kneeling down by now, took out a wooden tube and with a small knife made a nick in the back leg above the sheep’s elbow. He inserted the tube and blew down it. The boy stood adjacent with a machete in his hand almost trailing on the ground. At a nod from the butcher he raised the machete. I pushed myself off the balcony rail and shouted, ‘Yes!’ at the white man and pointed at the entrance to the building below me. It gave him just enough courage to skitter past the sheep and gave me half a chance at our first client in more than a week. The boy beat on the belly of the sheep with the flat of the machete blade. Whump, whump, whump.

I stepped back from the balcony into the office. Bagado, my partner, who had been a detective on the Cotonou force up until a few years back, looked up from behind the single bare desk in the room. The door opened without being knocked.

‘What the hell is going on out there?’ asked the white man.

‘They’re butchering a sheep.’

Whump, whump, whump.

‘A sheep?’

‘What did you think it was? A white man?’

‘No, I … Jesus. What’s he blowing down its leg for?’

‘Get some air under the hide. Makes it easier to skin.’

‘Don’t they have a shop or anything?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘I don’t think they have, Mr …?’

‘Briggs. Napier Briggs.’

‘Bruce Medway,’ I said, without holding out my hand.

‘I know,’ he said. ‘Why the hell do you think I’m here?’

‘I’ve never been a great guesser.’

‘No, what I meant was …’

‘I know what you meant.’

He ran his hand through some hair on his head in a way that made me think it had been a lot thicker until recently.

‘I’ve lost some money,’ he said, looking shambolic enough so that we’d believe him. ‘A great deal of money. I want you to get it back.’

We didn’t say anything. I looked him up and down and thought about two things. The first, his name. How to make ‘Briggs’ more interesting – stick ‘Napier’ in front of it, get yourself an eyepatch and a black silver skull-topped cane. The man was missing some props. The second thing was whether he had enough money left to pay us to find what he’d lost.

Bagado’s head came out of the wreckage of his blue mac like a tortoise that’s caught a whiff of spring. He had his hands steepled and the spired fingers were itching up and down a scar he had in the cleft of his chin.

‘How much is a great deal?’ he asked, and Napier jumped as high as he had when he’d seen the dead sheep. He rushed at me and drove me out on to the balcony.

‘Who the fuck is he?’

‘My partner, Bagado. M & B. Medway and Bagado.’

‘He’s not …?’ he asked with ferocious intensity.

‘What?’

Briggs wiped the sweat off his face with his hand and flicked it on the ground. He dropped on to the balcony rail with his elbows and looked over. He reared back.

‘Oh, my God.’

The sheep’s intestines were out of the belly now. They slipped and jostled against each other, still warm. The sheep was on its back, skinned, the hide underneath it to keep the meat clean.

‘Take a seat, Mr Briggs,’ I said. ‘Take a seat in here.’

I got him on to a chair. Bagado raised his eyebrows.

‘Coffee?’ I asked.

‘Black,’ he said. ‘I mean black-black.’

‘White,’ said Bagado, ‘au lait.’

I roared down the stairwell to the gardien who came up to take 2000 CFA off me and I added three croissants to the order. Briggs moved his chair back from the desk. He took out a packet of Camels from his linen jacket which had now become a relief map of a mountainous desert in the thick unsliced heat. He took three matches to light up and flicked each dud through the hole in the wall where the air conditioner should have been.

At least he wasn’t overwhelmed by our new office. The single plant on the floor in its concrete pot, the view of the neighbouring block out of one window, a mango tree and a tailor’s shack out of the other, a local stationer’s calendar on the wall, and the two of us evidently with only one desk to sit behind, didn’t even have any schoolboy chic let alone adult consequence.

‘Ours is a new business,’ said Bagado, trying to pull some cheer into his voice.

‘Delicately balanced between start-up and instant bankruptcy,’ I added.

‘A great deal of money could be as much as …’

‘… five hundred dollars,’ I said. ‘We need perspective, Mr Briggs.’

He sucked on the Camel, pulling an inch of it into his lungs without even glazing over. His yellow cigarette fingers were shaking and his thumb flickered against the filter. He was tall and thin. The sort who could eat like a pig and never get themselves over 150 pounds, the sort who kickstarted the day with four espressos and five Camels, the sort who could live off whatever their latest stomach ulcer was secreting. His eyes were sunken and dark, his face lined deeply with creases that dropped from the outsides of his eyes to the corners of his mouth. He tugged at his tie, which was down by his sternum, as if it was crimping his windpipe.

‘You do do this kind of thing?’ he asked. ‘Getting my money back. I mean, that is your … bag?’

‘We run a debt-collection service. We call it debt to be polite. People feel better about returning money which has been “extensively borrowed” rather than “stolen”.’

He nodded and threaded an arm through the back of the chair, trying to break it off.

‘Has your money been “extensively borrowed''?’ asked Bagado.

‘No. It’s been stolen. I’ve been ripped off like you wouldn’t believe.’

‘Oh, we would, Mr Briggs,’ said Bagado. ‘Have no fear of that, we would.’

Napier Briggs screwed the cigarette into the corner of his mouth and struggled out of his jacket as if he’d been strapped in there and we were a paying audience. He sat back exhausted with one wrist still stuck in a sleeve’s gullet. Bagado opened a drawer and produced an empty sardine tin, which was the office ashtray. He nudged it towards him. Briggs tore his fist out of the sleeve and whipped the cigarette out of his mouth, taking a lungful of quality filter. He lit another from the butt and crushed it out in the tin and licked and blew on a finger. He looked blasted by sun, booze and nerves. His skin was stretched tight over his skull, and the remains of his blond hair looked as if it had been stitched in. His lower teeth were stained brown from nicotine and bitumen coffee.

‘How much money, Mr Briggs? You didn’t say.’

‘One million eight hundred and fifty-seven thousand and small … dollars.’

‘Gold bars in a trunk? Cash in a suitcase? Diamonds in a condom?’

Napier Briggs bent over and gripped his forehead. The pain and suffering of money loss getting the better of him for a moment. A man bereaved. You’d have seen more control at an English graveside.

‘Take your time, Mr Briggs. Ours has been passing slowly enough without you,’ said Bagado. ‘Begin at the beginning; now that we know the end we just need to fill in the middle. Colouring by numbers. It couldn’t be easier. What do you do for a living? That’s a start.’

He took a card from his wallet and flipped it across the desk at us.

‘Napier Briggs Associates Ltd. Shipbrokers,’ read Bagado. ‘How many associates?’

‘One.’

‘Who’s that?’

‘A sleeping one. Nonexecutive. Nothing to do with the business. Just an arrangement.’

‘So a one-man band,’ I said, ‘with nearly two million dollars in liftable cash.’

‘A specialist in chemical, and clean and dirty fuel transportation,’ read Bagado. ‘You didn’t get muddled up in a Bonny Light Crude scam, did you, Mr Briggs?’

‘What’s a Bonny Light Crude scam?’

‘It’s not as cheerful as it sounds.’

‘Businessmen come here,’ I said, ‘they get introduced to people who are close personal friends of the president of the Nigerian National Oil Corporation. They visit offices with an NNOC brass plate on the wall. They part with money to register their company as a buyer of unbelievably cheap Nigerian crude oil. They part with money for advance expenses and ship’s bunkers. They part with money for a bill of lading for a few hundred thousand barrels of Nigerian crude that doesn’t exist. That’s a Bonny Light Crude scam.’

‘I take it you haven’t done business in West Africa before, Mr Briggs?’ asked Bagado. Napier looked up, confused, too many things bowling around in his head. ‘You specialize in dirty fuel transportation but you don’t know what a Bonny Light Crude scam is.’

‘No. Yes. I see what you’re getting at.’

‘The truth, Mr Briggs, that’s what we want to get at. That way we can help you. Many of these scams sound incredible in the telling and absurd on paper, but if you’re involved in them they become a part of your life, a part of your business hopes and aspirations. You’ve no need to be coy about …’

‘… my greed?’ asked Napier, his head tilted to one side like an intelligent dog.

‘Be brutal with yourself, by all means,’ said Bagado. ‘But tell us what happened too.’

‘I received a letter from a man who described himself as a senior accountant at the Ministry of Finance of the Benin Republic living and working in Porto Novo.’

‘Do you have this letter?’

‘The letter,’ said Napier, surfing over Bagado’s question, ‘offered me a percentage of something over thirty million dollars. The money came from overinvoicing on a contract awarded to a foreign company.’

‘All you had to do,’ Bagado cut in, ‘was supply them with signed letterheads, signed invoices and the name of your bank along with the account number and telephone/fax number.’

Napier Briggs sat rigid, Bagado’s words as good as a glance across a crowded room of Gorgons.

‘Hundreds of these letters are coming out of Nigeria every week. What’s happened to you Mr Briggs is that you’ve been four-one-nined.’

‘Four-one-nined?’

‘Obtaining Goods by False Pretences, section four-one-nine of the Nigerian Criminal Code. You really haven’t done much business in West Africa, Mr Briggs.’

‘I’ve done some deals,’ said Napier, finding a carat of professional pride from somewhere, and then giving himself away by scratching the crown of his head and picking at imaginary specks on his face.

‘The senior accountant at the Ministry of Finance in Benin, did he come to you via one of your successful deals … as a reward for something, perhaps?’

If we’d been impressed by the range of Napier’s nervous tics before, now we were spellbound by the sheer speed with which his hands shifted over his face and head. He tugged his ears, scratched his head, picked at the side of his nose, smoothed his eyebrows, pulled at the point of his chin, pinched his eyelids, the cigarette changing hands all the time, not having enough to do, he could have used six or seven smokes to keep himself occupied.

‘Why don’t you just show us the letter, Mr Briggs?’ I asked.

‘Napier. For Christ’s sake, it’s Napier.’

‘Napier?’

He lit another cigarette from the butt, and dragged on the stub, hauling the most acrid smoke deep down into his lungs. Bagado nudged the tin again, wincing at what the X-rays must look like. Napier brutalized the tin with the butt and walked to the window holding his forehead with his free hand as if the nicotine rush might drop him.

‘Mr Briggs,’ said Bagado, still not comfortable with Napier, ‘I’m not one for turning down custom. As you can see, we need the money. But, in this case, I think you would be better served, and I will write a letter of introduction, by going back to Nigeria to see a man called Colonel Adjeokuta. He has set up an investigation bureau within the Lagos police force specializing in 419 cases. He knows how these gangs operate, he has case histories, he knows some of the gang members, he has some of them available for comment in the Kirikiri Maximum Security Prison in Lagos, some of them are on death row and are interested …’

‘I want a private investigation,’ said Napier Briggs, in a quiet intense voice that seemed to have stopped the traffic for a moment. ‘Anyway, this is a Benin thing.’

‘It’s a Lagos gang using a Benin scenario. Porto Novo is on the border. There are many crime links between Benin and Nigeria. Stolen cars, hi-fi, petrol, drugs …’

‘I don’t want the Nigerians involved.’

‘I’m half Nigerian myself, Mr Briggs.’

‘Then perhaps you’ll know why.’

‘Do you mean the Nigerian authorities?’

‘No,’ he said, his head seeming to operate independently of his neck, the puppeteer getting his fingers crossed. The three of us exchanged code through the volumes of smoke leaking out of Napier.

‘They used the letterheads to clear out your account?’ I asked, trying a new line.

‘They said the invoices would show goods and services I’d supplied,’ said Napier, ‘the letterheads would be used to give covering information. They’d put the whole lot through the system and effect a transfer. They needed a foreign company account to pull it off.’

‘What were you doing with nearly two million dollars in your account?’

‘They were freight payments from contracts and time charters and I’d had some good months on the spot market. It was all money due to go out to the shipowners in the New Year … apart from my two per cent.’

‘Timely,’ I said. ‘All that money being there, Napier?’

‘Not for me. Not for my owners.’

‘Who would have known about that kind of money being in there?’

‘The charterers, the owners, the bank … myself.’

‘You have someone else in your office?’

‘Karen. Out of the question, she’s been with me for years.’

‘She’d have known, though?’

‘Yes.’

‘Your associate?’

‘I told you. Nonexec. Remember?’

‘Do you have a wife, an ex, a girlfriend, a partner in life?’

‘Divorced. Three years ago.’

‘Bitter?’

‘This isn’t relevant.’

‘You’re not giving us much to go on this end, Napier. I’m just coming at it from a different angle. Did your wife know about your business?’

‘She used to.’ ‘You talked about it with her?’

‘She was a broker. She covered the Mediterranean small ships market.’

‘Was there anyone else involved at that time?’

‘Back off,’ Napier snarled. ‘This is none of …’

‘It’s only a question. Has your company always been called Napier Briggs Associates?’

‘No. It used to be Atkin Briggs Shipbrokers Ltd.’

‘What happened to Atkin?’

‘Blair Atkin.’ He said it as if he’d just got a mouthful of coffee grounds.

‘Your wife ran off with Blair?’

Napier had his back to us now, his hands above his head, leaning against the window, two fingers trailing smoke.

‘Yes,’ he said, taut as a drum skin.

‘You’re sure this isn’t relevant?’

‘They split up a year later. I haven’t seen or heard from her since. Nor has … anyway, she was a bitch.’

‘Was?’ asked Bagado.

‘Still is. I doubt it was the kind of expertise she could drop.’

‘You broke with her?’

‘She broke with me. I was very bitter about it. It bust up the marriage, tore the company in half, screwed up lives, all because she couldn’t keep her knickers on. Now let’s forget my wife, my ex-wife. She’s not involved. She’s out of the picture.’

‘How do you suggest we get ourselves into the picture, Napier? No letter. No proof. Scant information which we have to wring out of you and you turn down the offer of the Lagos fraud squad. What do you want us to do? Hang around on street corners in downtown Lagos looking at people’s back pockets? Time-consuming. Expensive. How much money have you got on you? Maybe not much beyond your own expenses. You’re not giving us anything, Napier. Chuck us a bone, for God’s sake. Spill your guts or bow out. We’ve got some paperclip chains to make.’

‘Perhaps Mr Briggs is concerned that he’s done something illegal,’ said Bagado. Napier kicked himself back off the window and turned on him. ‘Transferring funds from overinvoicing on a government contract. Whose money is it?’

‘Ah, yes,’ said Napier, backing down, leaning against the window, easing another smoke out, keeping the chain going. ‘Embarrassing.’

‘What percentage did they offer you?’

‘Forty. Thirty-five for …’

‘Who was the other five for?’

‘Someone called Dan Emanalo. He doesn’t exist, nor does the company he works for.’

‘Which was?’

‘Chemiclean Limited. I supplied them with chemicals in drums. They had a government contract to supply sewage treatment systems.’

‘But they didn’t exist?’

‘No.’

‘But they miraculously paid you for supplying the chemicals?’

Napier Briggs fell silent. He wasn’t a topnotch liar. He was pretty good at shutting up or spinning out half truths and he was an outstanding smoker, but lying … he just didn’t have it.

‘You’re binding up on us again, Napier.’

‘I have to think about this.’

‘Nothing’s going out of this room, Napier. Strictly P and C and all that.’

‘Where’s that coffee?’ he asked.

‘Coming.’

Napier clasped the back of his neck and tried to squeeze the anguish out.

‘Why can’t I think?’

‘Maybe you’re scared, Napier?’

‘Did you have particular need of this ten million?’ asked Bagado.

‘Ten million?’

‘Thirty-five per cent of thirty million dollars.’

‘Yes. No,’ said Napier, and his face crumpled. He was losing it. We sat in the silence left over by the traffic. The coffee and croissants arrived. Two cafes au lait for Bagado and I, and a double tarantula juice for Napier. He sipped it, rattling the cup back into the saucer each time. Thinking. Thinking. The brain turning and turning like a hamster’s wheel.

‘What did you make supplying the sewage treatment chemicals?’

‘Two per cent of the shipping, about three thousand dollars, but I did the product as well. Took five per cent of that. I don’t usually do product.’

‘Who did you get the product off?’

‘Dupont,’ he said, too quickly.

‘French Dupont?’

‘Yes, it was,’ he said, wanting to fill that out a bit more but having nothing else to say.

‘Sweet deal?’

‘Very.’

What are we talking about? Two hundred, three hundred grand.’

‘Something like that.’

‘Takes care of your running costs for a bit.’

‘Sure.’

‘Now, the ten million dollars, that’s different. That’s retirement money. Don’t have to push the pen any more, hump the phone to your ear. It can solve big problems, too, that kind of money.’

‘Like?’

‘Debts. Payoffs. Muscle.’

Napier slugged back the last dram of tar and refitted the cup. He lit another cigarette and threw the old butt out on to the balcony. He folded his jacket over his arm and shook his legs in his trousers, which were clinging to those parts where dogs like to stick their noses. He picked up his zip-top briefcase by the ear.

‘It’s like going to a shrink, Napier,’ I said. ‘You have to relive the trauma to get over the neurosis. Have a think about things. Straighten them out in your head. Come back and talk to us again.’

‘Do you have a home number?’ ‘I do, but I don’t give it out. This kind of business and a happy home life don’t go together. You’ve got a card, I take it?’

‘Yeah. The guy in the British High Commission gave it to me.’

‘We have an answering machine here. Office hours are eight a.m. to one p.m. and five p.m. to eight p.m. Where are you staying, Napier?’

‘The Hotel du Lac, just across the lagoon there.’

Bagado and I listened to the man who’d nearly been our tenth client scuffing down the untiled concrete stairs.