Instruments of Darkness
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We crawled past the PTT waiting to get on to Avenue Clozel and I noticed a tickering sound from the car when it was moving which must have come from Moses’s off-piste run. A man with brown, decaying teeth put his head in the window and tried to sell me a stick which he said would keep me hard all night. I asked him if I had to eat it or put in my pants and he said all I had to do was hold it and I told him it would cramp my style. Moses said I should have bought it and I asked him how he knew I needed it.
We were trying to get to my house, not a place that I’d had to fight hard to rent but comfortable enough for me. The rooms were big. The open plan living and dining room had breeze coming in from two sides. The bedrooms each had a wall of window. The bathroom worked and the kitchen was big enough for me to create a lot of washing up when I did the cooking. There was a large covered balcony on one side of the living room where I ate breakfast, and dinner if I felt like having my blood thinned by adventurous mosquitoes. The furniture was a mixture, some of it cane which I didn’t like but was cheap, the rest of it was carved wood which I did like, but couldn’t sit on. There were a lot of carpets, mainly from Algeria and Morocco, and cushions covered in the same designs. I spent most of the time on the floor. You couldn’t fall further than that.
There was a garage at the side of the house, and in the courtyard a huge and ancient palm tree with orange and purple palm oil nuts hanging off it in swagged clusters. The walls of the garden were covered in purple bougainvillaea. A green leafy creeper grew up the banister of the stairs at the front of the house which led up from the garage to my apartment.
The place I rented was on the west side of the lagoon. Most expats lived on the east side in Akpakpa or around the Hotel Aledjo. I preferred living with the Africans. They enjoyed themselves. The expats hated Cotonou. It was depressing to live with them and their wives who looked at you as if you could liven up their afternoons.
Moses kept up a monologue on Benin medicine, dog cuisine and great movie car chases he had seen. He let up occasionally to roar at cyclists so that they veered off and crashed into market stalls rather than hit the car.
‘Africans fear dogs,’ I said.
‘Thassway we no eat um.’
‘You fear them because they bite you.’
‘Thass it, Mister Bruce, they bite us.’
‘But if you eat um then you get the power of the dog and you no fear no more.’
Moses stopped the car, throwing me against the dashboard. A cyclist had come off in front of us. Two children put their hands through my window and were pulled away by a couple of Nigerians who shoved cheap ghetto blasters in my face. A girl offered Moses some water from a plastic jug on her head and another barbecued meat which congealed under greasy grey paper in a blue plastic bowl.
‘You clever, Mister Bruce. You be right. But not the dog the Chinaman kill. He sick dog. You eat dog, you find big, strong dog, then you eat him.’
‘You can’t get near a big, strong dog.’
‘Thassway we always fear the dogs.’
After half an hour in the traffic, with Moses yelling at cyclists to stop cadging lifts off the car, we turned off Clozel and started up Sekou Touré with nothing more to look at than crumbling, ill-painted buildings. The tickering noise from the car was still there as we turned left into the grid of mud streets where I lived. We bought some kebabs from a girl who was cooking them just outside the house. I opened the gate and, in the shade of the garage, saw Heike Brooke waiting for me, sitting on a step with her skirt up over her thighs keeping herself cool. She leaned forward and rubbed her shins and stood up letting the skirt fall to her knees. She leaned against her 2CV which she was considering taking off life support.
I’d met Heike two years ago when she was twenty-eight and I was thirty-six. It was in the Algerian Sahara about a hundred miles north of Tamanrasset. I was lying in a small square of shade under a tarpaulin fixed to the side of my dead car. The battery and the alternator were finished and I was on the way out. I had been there for three days without seeing anyone and was beyond the hallucinatory stage of thinking that every rock was a truck coming towards me. I was reading Dombey and Son which was taking the edge off the 120-degree heat and just about letting me forget that I only had three and a half litres of water left.
When I heard the rumbling noise of a truck, I thought it was from the truck route that I couldn’t see thirty miles to the east, but knew was there. Then I saw the Hanomag radiator grille from over the top of my book and I came out from under that tarpaulin as if I’d just had a kiss from a scorpion. As the truck came nearer I saw the driver and passenger were two guys, both with thirty foot of cloth wound around their heads and faces, so that all I could see was a sinister slit where the eyes should have been.
I was either going to be rescued or robbed. The truck stopped and the driver jumped out. The driver had breasts and hips and was wearing a calf-length tea gown; the passenger had breasts too and was wearing a denim shirt and a pair of baggy trousers that I’d seen the Mozabites wearing in Ghardaia. They unwound the cloth around their heads and revealed themselves to be two women in full make-up. In my confused state I thought that these hermaphrodites were the desert sprites that an Algerian soldier had told me about, or that perhaps I was having some contact with a strange simultaneous world where the genders had united. They introduced themselves as Heidi and Heike, two Berliners going to West Africa. They towed me to Tamanrasset which was a real enough experience and saved me from a thirsty death.
Heidi had driven back across the desert six months later, but Heike had stayed and was running an aid project in the north of Benin. Every few months she came to Cotonou to drink us into a very dark world beyond oblivion and find out if I was worth loving. I tried to tell her these two activities were not compatible but she insisted that for her alcohol was the only approach road to love. By coming to Africa she had thrown in her job as a TV commercials producer and left her director and first ‘serious’ boyfriend. She had discovered he was over-generous with nothing except one part of his anatomy and not exclusively to her. She was looking for a purer life, less complicated, but like a lot of us couldn’t always make up her mind. The drink parted her from her memories, gave her just enough courage to try again and, like me, she liked it.
Heike was a beautiful woman despite this punishment. She was the daughter of a British army officer and a Berlin café owner which meant she was bilingual and disinclined to listen to anyone’s bullshit. She was tall, just under six foot, with a long whippy body that wasn’t skinny but carried no extra flesh. She had thick brown hair which she always wore put up in a way that looked as if she’d just slammed a clip in any old place, but it was always just right. The style accentuated her long neck and fragile bones. Her eyes were intimidating. They were very clear light blue and green, like aquamarines.
I knew from the beginning that although she looked breakable she was tough. She had access to a temper that on a few occasions had caused her rather large hands to form fists and lash out on the ends of her long arms and hurt people. People like me.
Sometimes I deserved to be hit, but never because I couldn’t keep my trousers done up. That wasn’t my style at all. I found out early on in life that playing around messed up my head, dealt me the clap and gave me a better understanding of the blues than I really wanted. No, she would hit me, because she couldn’t get in there. She would tell me she was breaking down walls. I wasn’t always sure why the walls were up in the first place or what they were guarding, but whatever it was, she wanted to get to it. I wasn’t disinterested myself.
Heike was standing in the garage, her hands on her slim hips. She was wearing a white broderie anglaise top which showed about a foot of lean torso between it and her skirt, which was red with a light brown and white pattern. The lips of her small mouth were pursed, she was gnawing at the inside of her cheek. She looked at me with disdain as I walked up to her and kissed her. She threw her long arms around my shoulders and kissed me back.
‘I’ve been waiting for hours,’ she said in a voice that had been waiting with her.
Moses slid past me into the garage, nudging me with the wing mirror. The tickering noise had stopped. He got out, opened the boot and pulled the bedsheet out, grinning at Heike who said hello to him in the form of a suppressed smile. He walked up the stairs and Heike and I followed.
‘You’ve got a lot of laundry, Bruce.’
‘The biannual wash,’ I said.
Some money fell out from the top where the corners of the sheet were drawn together. She picked it up.
‘You should empty the pockets first,’ she said like a good little hausfrau, which is one thing she isn’t. The door to my part of the house opened straight into the living room. Moses threw the sheet on the floor. The knot gave and two corners of the sheet burst open and the money spewed out on to the floor. Heike was not impressed.
‘Can you count?’ I asked her.
‘I think I’ve just forgotten how.’
‘It’ll all come flooding back once you get started.’
‘Can I have a drink or do I just get straight down into it?’
Heike took a shower. I made a salad to go with the kebabs and broke open some beers and we sat on the floor and ate the food. Heike rubbed her wet hair with both hands and looked at the money as if it was sending her mad. We started counting. A light breeze blew through the mosquito netting over the slatted windows. Heike pulled up an ashtray. It was early afternoon. We had a long way to go.
Chapter 3
Heike was smoking cigarettes through a two-inch holder which took out most of the tar. After the hundredth time I’d seen her cleaning it, I gave up smoking and took up watching. She held the holder between her teeth at the side of her mouth and snorted smoke while she counted bundles of small denomination notes.
In the late afternoon, we stopped for a while and drank some sugary mint tea. Heike lay on her back with her legs bent and crossed at the knee. She told us that she had persuaded the women in her aid project to plant aubergines which would grow in the poor soil up north. It had taken some time because the men were suspicious of a new vegetable. The clincher had been to get the men and women together and deliver a seminar on the aphrodisiacal properties of aubergines. She had selected a number of priapic specimens as examples and had nearly been trampled to death in the stampede.
We continued and the sun gave us a warm yellow light to work by, which quickly turned pink and then orange. Then the sun dropped like a penny in a slot and we turned the lights on. The atmosphere changed to smoky poker room and we cracked some cold beers.
At eight o’clock I stood up. Moses, sitting crosslegged on the floor, fell backwards. I picked up the warm beer, went into the kitchen and threw it down the sink. Moses said he was going to get some chicken. Heike came into the kitchen and drank mineral water from the bottle in the fridge.
‘I hate money,’ I said, looking at Heike who was reflected in the darkness of the window, looking at me out of the corner of her eye with the neck of the mineral water bottle in her mouth.
‘Money’s all right, but not all the time,’ she said, pouring some of the chilled water into her hand and patting her breast bone. She walked over to the sink and I felt her body leaning against me.
‘What are you looking at?’ she asked.
I turned and our faces were very close together. We were breathing a little faster and my hand slipped to her bare waist. Her eyes were darting around and her mouth opened. I moved my lips to hers so that they were almost touching. Our eyes held each other’s. My hand slipped around to the small of her back and I put two fingers on either side of her spine and pushed up very slowly. We both swallowed. Our lips touched. My fingers were nearly between her shoulder blades. A long arm snaked across my back and her fingers ran up my neck and spread out through my hair. She crushed my lips to hers and her tongue flickered in my mouth. I didn’t mind the taste of tobacco and lipstick. I felt her breasts pressed to my chest and her legs trembling against mine. The inside of my body lifted as if I’d just hit a hump in the road. We both heard Moses coming back into the house and drew away from each other.
‘It’s been a long time,’ I said, holding her wrist and letting my hand slip down into hers. She breathed heavily, licking her lips and said nothing. Moses came in the kitchen. Heike looked across at him, her shoulder against mine. Moses grinned. His sex radar was infallible.
We ate the chicken with some hot Piment du Pays that I’d brought over from Togo. I opened up a bottle of cold Beaujolais that had had Heike’s name on it for the last couple of months. Moses stuck to beer. Afterwards, we dragged ourselves back into the living room and carried on counting the money.
It was 10.30, we were taking it in turns sighing, me like a horse on a cold morning, Moses like a dog left in a car, and Heike like someone who’s into her third day in Immigration. She stood up, stretched and went to her bag and came back with a pack of cards in her hand.
‘Poker?’ she asked.
Moses, who had fallen back with his head resting on some blocks of cash, sat up.
‘You deal, Miss Heike.’
‘Miss Heike beat us no small,’ I said to Moses.
‘There’s nothing like playing with other people’s money,’ she said and riffled the pack of cards. The noise from the cards shot through me and I sat rigid. The tickering from the car, but not the car, the noise of a playing card flicking over the wheel spokes of a bicycle. There was always fifty bicycles behind you in Cotonou. That was the tail. The noise had stopped as soon as we’d got to the house. Vasili was right – Madame Severnou’s first lesson. How to outwit the Oyinbo* without raising a sweat.
‘Something the matter?’ asked Heike.
There was a click at the gate. Moses turned on to his knees and was up at the window looking down like a cat.
‘It’s Helen,’ he said.
‘What’re we nervous about?’ asked Heike.
I found myself staring down at over a million pounds in cash and feeling things going wrong. With Heike here I’d lost concentration, hadn’t thought things through. I’d had that feeling in the port this afternoon that Madame Severnou was going to be trouble. I’d done nothing about it and now lesson number two was coming. How to burn the Oyinbo for the lot.
Moses knew what I was thinking and was already packing the tied-up blocks of money into carrier bags.
‘Let Heike do that,’ I said, tying up the bedsheet. ‘Tell Helen to go back to her sister and get the car ready.’
Heike was on the floor packing the money. I picked up four carrier bags and the sheet and ran downstairs. Moses was reversing the car into the garage. Helen slipped out through the gate. I flung the money into the boot and ran back up the stairs. Moses was out and opening the gates. I hit Heike coming through the doors telling me she had it all.
I left the lights on, checked the floor and dropped down the steps two at a time. Moses drove the car out and I closed the gates. The car pitched and yawed over the mud road. Heike leaned forward from the back seat. We parked up under some bougainvillaea that fell down the walled garden of the house on the opposite corner to mine. We could just see the gates. It was very dark and the light cast from the living room window was blocked by the head of the palm tree in the garden. We sat with our breath quivering like sick men waiting to die.
After fifteen minutes the paranoia wore off. Moses played a drum solo on the steering wheel. Heike sat back, looked out the window and hummed something from Carmen. I sat with my back against the window and my arm hung over the top of the seat and played with her fingers.
‘So,’ asked Heike, with a little German creeping into her accent to show me she was annoyed. ‘What’s going on?’
‘It’s a lot of money,’ I said, only half concentrating, ‘and the person who gave it to me wasn’t very happy about what she got in return. I think we might be getting a visit. We were followed out of the port this afternoon but I thought we’d lost them.’
‘It’s a lot of money for rice.’
‘It’s for parboiled rice,’ I said. ‘Seven thousand tons of it. The Nigerians won’t touch anything else. There’s an import ban, too, which gives it a premium.’
‘You’re going to smuggle seven thousand tons of rice into Nigeria?’
‘Not smuggle, exactly. The Nigerian government have said that each man can bring in a bag of rice legally. We’ve got five hundred guys who are going to take two hundred and eighty sacks each, one at a time, through the border at Igolo, north of Porto Novo.’
‘You can do that?’
‘It needs a bit of help which is why my client, Jack Obuasi, cut this woman, Madame Sevenou, into the deal. She can oil the Customs.’
‘Have I met Jack?’
‘If you had it would have probably been in his bed, and I think you would have remembered that.’
‘So who is he?’
‘He’s an English/Ghanaian who lives in Lomé. This isn’t the first job I’ve done for him, but it’s only the second time with this Severnou woman. She’s not easy. For a start, I can tell there isn’t enough money. I reckon we’re short about fifty to a hundred mil. She’s a greedy woman…with an appetite.’
‘It was only Helen, remember.’
‘So far.’
‘And you’ve still got the documents?’
‘Yes, but that doesn’t mean very much. A non-negotiable bill of lading with a bit of tippex, some faxing and a couple of million CFA could get to be negotiable.’ I gripped her finger and she bit back the next question.
Headlights lit up the mud road and were killed. A quiet engine cut out and a car rocked over on its expensive suspension and stopped in front of the gates to the house. The doors opened. Four men got out. They didn’t close the doors. They weren’t carrying violin cases but they did have long arms. They went through the gates. Moses started up the Peugeot which made a noise like a tractor and baler and we rode up on to the tarmac and went into town.
We bought some pizza at La Caravelle café to take away. We had a beer while we waited. Some white people came in. We must have looked tense. They walked straight back out. Heike had thrown away the cigarette holder and was smoking for Germany.
We crossed the lagoon and turned off down towards the coast and the Hotel Aledjo where we took a bungalow and finished counting the money at three in the morning. The total was fifty million CFA short, a hundred thousand pound commission for Madame Severnou. By this time, I had a half bucket of sand up my eyelids and Heike was asleep sitting on the floor with her head on the bed. Moses and I packed the money inside the car so that it looked empty from the outside. Moses lay down on a mat on the porch of the bungalow with the bedsheet from the money.
I put Heike on the bed and threw a sheet over her; as it landed, she opened her eyes. There was nobody behind them. Her voice said, ‘I’m going.’ Her eyes closed. She was asleep. Normally, when she came down from up country, the first night we made love of the desperate, savage kind that two months’ celibacy encourages. It was something we liked to do besides drinking, something that kept us going together. This time I left her a note. I gave Moses some money and told him to look after Heike in the morning and then drove the 100 miles west along the coast to Lomé, the capital of Togo.
Chapter 4
Wednesday 25th September
They didn’t bother to search the car at the Benin/Togo border and it was still dark when I left the Togo side of the frontier. I couldn’t make out the sandbar at the mouth of the lagoon at Aneho but by the time I came to the roundabout for Lomé port, it was light. The morning was fresh, unlike my shirt.
After commercial Cotonou, Lomé was a holiday resort. There were European luxury hotels and restaurants which fronted on to the beach and air-conditioned supermarkets with more than tomato purée in them. Most of the buildings had seen paint during the decade and a lot of the roads were metalled and swept clean. There was greenery in the town which backed on to a lagoon traversed by causeways which took you out to the suburbs. Lomé is a freeport where booze and cigarettes are cheaper than anywhere else in the world. Life was a permanent happy hour.
The coast road passed the Hotel de La Paix, which still looked like the architect’s children doctored the plans. It seemed empty. Closer to Lomé on the left was the five-star Hotel Sarakawa with a snake of taxis outside and a fight for rooms on the inside. The sea appeared motionless but didn’t fool anybody. Nobody swam. The currents were well-known killers along this coast.
People were beginning to make their way to market. The polio cripples hauled their torsos up to the traffic lights and arranged their collapsible legs beside them ready for another day in the sun scraping together the money for a meal.
I drove past the 24 Janvier building and Hotel Le Benin, turned right and arrived at the wrought iron gates of the white-pillared pile that Jack Obuasi rented for a million CFA a month. The gardien opened the gates for me and I cruised the botanical gardens up to the house. The drive cut through a manicured jungle of shrubs and bamboo before breaking through a line of palm trees where the lawns started. The two bowling green-sized expanses of grass were rolled and snipped, snipped and rolled, by a gang of gardeners who could have had a football tournament between them.
The house was whiter than a Christmas cake and had a central portico with four fluted pillars. It was the kind of portico that should have had a motto carved in it. Jack favoured La lutte continue. There was an east and a west wing on either side of the portico. Each wing had five bedrooms upstairs, all with bathrooms and all air-conditioned, with white shutters, which, if you had the energy to throw them open, would give you a view of the old wooden pier that strode out into the Gulf of Guinea. Underneath these bedrooms was enough space for living rooms, dining rooms, games rooms, jacuzzi rooms and cricket nets if you felt out of practice. There was also Jack’s office, and in his office, a desk that a family of four could have lived in without him noticing.
The walls of the office were bare, but, in the other rooms, were covered with African masks, animal skins and ancient weaponry. Man-sized carvings hung around the place like servants of long standing who couldn’t be sacked. Some rooms were taken over by collections of African paintings which crammed the walls from floor to ceiling. The floors were entirely of white marble only broken by large rugs whose tassels were kept in line by Patience, Agnes and Grace, the three maids.
In the rooms he never used he had much better cane furniture than I did, which wasn’t difficult. In the rooms he did use were tables and chairs of every hard wood the jungle had to offer, as well as armchairs and sofas from France and England that formed exclusive circles about the place like people at a cocktail party who wouldn’t mix. The one failure was a table and six chairs carved from a single tree, but the table was too low and a man’s bottom couldn’t fit in between the snarling carved heads on the arms of the chairs even if it had wanted to.
There was a large verandah above the garage and maids’ quarters at the end of the east wing and another at the back of the house overlooking the swimming pool. They were both surrounded by a nursery of potted plants. I parked the car behind Jack’s Mercedes in the garage.