My Name is N

I took another look at Gio, at the slab-of-concrete forehead, the short neck with black hair sprouting up it from his deep chest, forearms like animals’ thighs, rower’s wrists and agricultural hands, the odd knuckle missing from thumping the mule straight whilst ploughing.

‘He’s got intelligent hands,’ I said. ‘I can see that.’

‘Careful, Bruce. His English is not so good but he has a good ear for tone and if he thinks you don’t take him seriously he has a number of very short lessons he can give.’

‘Look, Carlo, I’m not being difficult. You’ve just asked me to find a guy and in not so many words you’ve told me that when I find him you’re going to…’

Carlo tapped me on the forehead with an envelope. I shut up. He laid the envelope on the desk.

‘There’s some money in there and I put a little item in with it that I think you’ll find very interesting. I don’t think it’s something you’ll want to talk to Mr Franconelli about, but it should help you make your mind up. Now, you’ve got forty-eight hours to find Marnier. We’ll be staying in the Hotel de la Plage – walking distance, but don’t come and see us. Leave a message at the desk for us to call by or meet up someplace. OK?’

Carlo let go of my shoulder and stood up. He opened up his can, sprayed me down with the spurting beer and emptied the foam over my head.

‘Thanks for the beer.’

‘Don’t mention it, Carlo,’ I said.

They left the office.

Fifteen minutes to trash my life, that was all it took. I turned the envelope over. It was stuck down. I felt the thickness of the money and couldn’t find the strength to open it just yet.

Now Bagado and I both had our millstones and Bagado was going to have to tread water with his while I got out from under my own.

3

Heike wasn’t home. She’d taken to working late, getting all virtuous since she’d started on her health kick. She’d stopped smoking, which meant I didn’t have to listen to the tar bubbling in the stem of those plastic holders she used to use. She’d hung up her drinking waders too, except for the odd glass of wine at dinner. I’d always thought her beautiful even with her vices, maybe because of her vices, now, without them she was the same but just more so. The health aura seemed to bring out her intelligence too, or maybe she just remembered things when all the parking spaces weren’t taken up by hangovers. I confess, it was making me nervous having her out there in this condition.

I waved at Helen, our cook, who was out on the balcony grilling chicken. I stripped and showered off Carlo’s beer shampoo. I tried not to think about Jean-Luc Marnier or Roberto Franconelli by thinking about my first night with Heike instead. How we’d met in the desert, she with her girlfriend in a live Hanomag truck, me on my own in a dead car being towed behind.

We’d stopped and eaten dinner around a fire, it being brisk in the desert at night. She hadn’t said a word to me, the girlfriend did all the talking. Afterwards I went for a walk by myself to look at the stars, breathe in the emptiness and feel the African continent pulsating under my feet, thumping in my chest as if I had a bull’s heart.

I thought I was on my own but then Heike was next to me. We exchanged looks but still no words and in a matter of moments we’d struggled and wrenched ourselves out of our disobedient clothes and were lying naked on the desert floor in a mad, frantic embrace. Our limbs and genitals locked together, the live ground pumping something so exotic through us we shouted when we came. The girlfriend had heard the ruckus and was forced to ask shyly and from some way off whether Heike was all right. Heike had croaked something back at her which she must have heard before from cheap hotel rooms, backs of cars, dark garden ends, because the clear desert air carried her gooseberry weariness back to us.

Having dispatched some of the nastiness, I wedged myself in amongst the floor cushions, stiffened myself with a gulp of Red Label and opened the envelope Carlo had given me. There was 250,000 CFA in it, $300, enough for 48 hours work plus expenses. There was also the other item. A newspaper cutting from the Guardian in Lagos. This is what it said:

Yesterday a police autopsy revealed that Gale Strudwick, who was discovered dead in the swimming pool at her home on Victoria Island three days ago, had died of drowning. A police spokesman said: ‘There was a large quantity of alcohol in her system and she had recently eaten a heavy meal. We do not suspect any foul play.’ Friends had described her as ‘severely depressed’ after her husband, Graydon Strudwick, died of renal failure in Akimbola Awoliyi Memorial Hospital in March.

I sank the whisky in my glass and poured another good two inches and socked it back. Then I poured another inch and in the spirit calm thought that must have been one hell of a meal to sink her to the bottom of the pool, and Gale was not a big eater. She wasn’t a depressive either, not about Graydon, anyway.

Gale Strudwick had been a friend, someone I’d known from my London days who, before she’d confused herself with money, sex and power, I’d liked as well. We’d got ourselves knotted up together in some bad business with Roberto Franconelli and her husband three or four months back. We’d both witnessed some example-setting from the Italian one night which had left me feeling like never talking again in my life, especially about football. Gale was a drinker and more lippy, more provocative, more aggressive about the money she needed to maintain the five-mile-high lifestyle she craved and which she wasn’t going to get from her dead husband’s estate. The cutting was a warning: Be sweet and you shall continue, be sour and you shall be sucking the mud from the bottom of the lagoon.

I rammed the money and clipping into my pocket and stared into my glass thinking about Gale – tough, sexy Gale – who’d talked herself a yard too far over the edge.

Heike breezed in trailing health and efficiency, and I had that feeling of looking up from the complexities of my life to see an aeroplane leaving a chalk mark on a clear blue sky and wanting to be there and out of this.

‘You look whipped,’ she said, dumping her bag on her way into the kitchen. How do women know your mental state just by walking into a room? She came back sipping a beading bottle of Possotomé mineral water, holding a glass of ice cubes.

‘I was feeling bullish,’ I said.

‘I like bullish,’ she said, kneeling down, straddling my lap and giving me a big, cool kiss. ‘What happened?’

‘You first. Yours looks better.’

‘I pulled in six hundred thousand marks from that company Wasserklammer today and they only attached strings to half of it so our little Nongovernmental Organization can expand the AIDS project in Porto Novo.’

‘You must be the boss’s blue-eyed girl.’

‘I’ve always been Gerhard’s blue-eyed girl,’ she said, exuding stuff from glands to make stallions whinny.

‘True,’ I said, damping my bitterness.

‘Now he thinks I’m a star.’

‘You don’t want him thinking you’re going to take over. I don’t think his ego could handle it.’

‘The agency’s not so far advanced that they think a woman could cut it as a boss in Africa.’

‘But we know they’re wrong.’

‘Are you trying to get round me?’

‘Why would I want to do that?’

She kissed me again and let me know through some uncrack-able eye semaphore that the long empty African evening was going to be full. I asked after Moses, my driver, who was being treated for HIV by Heike’s agency. It was one of our evening rituals, and not a bad one because he was always improving, getting stronger. This time she said I might even have him back behind the wheel in a week’s time.

I put my hands up underneath her skirt and stroked her thighs. She ran a cool, wet hand through my hair and I nuzzled her breasts.

‘Not yet,’ she said. ‘You haven’t told me yours.’

‘You don’t want to know.’

‘You’ve been doing well recently. All that work in the port.’

‘Something’s just caught up with me and I have to jump.’

‘Try saying no.’

‘I did. It was rephrased in a way that begged the answer yes.’

‘Couldn’t have been that bad if they were begging.’

‘Sorry. Wrong word. These guys do not go around begging. They ask, then they lean and then…’

‘I don’t know how you get involved.’

‘They come into my office and involve themselves, Heike, for Christ’s sake. I don’t even have to be in.’

‘So you knew them?’

‘Yeah, well, something left over from that Selina Aguia business back in March.’

‘Oh God, not her.’

‘Not exactly, but someone we both got to know around that time.’

‘We were going through one of our bad patches at the time, I seem to remember,’ she said.

‘One of those momentary dark clouds that used to flit across the sunshine of our lives.’

‘Flit? I don’t remember it being as a quick as a flit.’

‘Forget about all that,’ I said. ‘I want to think about something else. I want to think about going away.’

‘Back to Europe?’

‘I was just thinking about that first night in the desert. Our first time.’

‘Oh, you mean the ground,’ she said.

‘Yeah, the ground. You remember that ground.’

‘Let’s do it,’ she said. ‘Let’s go up to Niger and lie on the ground.’

‘We can do a bit more than just lie.’

But she was off and thinking about it, planning it all in her head. I took my hands out from under her skirt and eased them up her T-shirt and cupped her breasts and she pressed her sex down on to my lap so I hardened. We kissed some more and I was all keen on doing some re-enactment, but Helen came in from the balcony, slapping her thigh with a wooden spoon and asked us whether we wanted our yam boiled or fried.

‘We could go up there when my mother comes out.’

‘When your mother comes out?’ I asked. ‘Your mother’s coming out here to Cotonou?’

‘Why not?’

‘The holiday destination on the mosquito coast apart from maybe Lagos,’ I said. ‘I noticed you didn’t say your father was coming.’

‘No. He’s been before. Spent a couple of years in Ghana in the fifties. He says he doesn’t need to come again.’

‘Well, that means he’s told her it’s not lion and hippo country out here.’

‘She knows that already.’

‘And she knows about the malaria, the heat, the sweat, the pollution…’

‘Why do you live here, Bruce Medway?’

‘I’m just saying it’s not Mombasa beach around here. It’s not jambo country.’

‘I know. I just want you to tell me why you live here.’

‘It’s not the climate. It’s not the cuisine.’

‘Just tell me why.’

‘I’m just saying that those two things are important holiday…’

‘I don’t want to know about what’s important for holidays. I want you to tell me why you live here.’

‘The people.’

‘The people?’

‘If I thought I wasn’t going to see Bagado or Moses or Helen again for the rest of my life, I’d feel…’

‘Yes? What would you feel?’ she asked, teasing me a little, big Bruce Medway talking about his feelings.

‘I’d feel impoverished.’

She kissed me.

‘You’re all right, really,’ she said, patting my face, running her hand through my hair again, stroking the old dog.

‘Am I?’

‘And anyway, Mum’s not coming for the climate or the cuisine or the people. She’s coming to see us.’

‘Us?’

‘That’s you and me, Bruce. The loving couple.’

‘She doesn’t know me.’

‘I know this may sound strange, but she wants to. She wants to get to know you.’

‘Why would she want to do a thing like that?’ I asked, suddenly feeling myself on the brink of something, not the yawning black ravine but something bigger than me, like a view that goes on for ever to some distant mountains.

‘I’m pregnant.’

4

Saturday 20th July, Cotonou.

It rained in the night, louder and longer than Buddy Rich could have ever coaxed out of his snare. I stared at the slice of window reflected on the wall, at the water rippling shadows down the pane. I listened to Heike sleeping, felt the warmth of her hip on my thigh, her ribs feathering my flank. Happiness crept into my chest and curled up there tight as a ball of kitten. But no sooner was it there than I felt this terrible despair at ever being able to hang on to it. Happiness was a moment rather than a state.

I fainted into sleep without realizing it. I thought I was still staring at the rain running, running down the wall to nowhere, but somehow I’d got up and was looking down at myself. My shadow blocked the slice of window. A terrible darkness fell so that I no longer knew whether I was the one standing or lying, no longer knew if I’d been happy even for a moment.

I left for work in the morning – disturbed. Part of me was flinging myself around like a ballerina born to it but the rest, the bigger part, was weighed down, burdened by some unknown foresight. I drove and let yesterday crash over me, haul me down to its root, and roll me around in the airless, noisome turbulence.

Five men dead, schoolgirls disappearing off the streets of Cotonou, Le Commandant Bondougou, Carlo, Gio and Franconelli. What Bagado didn’t know, something that had come my way by accident in that ugly business at the beginning of March when Franconelli set his terrible example, was that Bondougou, the Cotonou Chief of Police, was a Franconelli man. Bondougou covered up all the murders, and there were a number, from that horrific night and not a peep was heard in any of the media. That knowledge sat on my chest like a 300 lb bench press that I’d been foolish enough to think I could lift.

For me to find Carlo and Gio waiting in my office after Bagado had implied that he wouldn’t mind seeing Bondougou end up as the main dish in a shark fest was a cruel irony. Me help Bagado sideline Bondougou? If miracles came my way and I found myself well placed to nudge him into the feeding frenzy I could only see myself going straight in after him.

I parked up at the office, tweaked the gardien awake and sent him across to the Caravelle café for coffee and croissants. The tailor’s shack opposite my office was coming alive into the grey, sodden morning with the aid of the usual North Korean folk music from the radio. I wasn’t talking to those guys. I’d asked them to make me a pair of trousers out of the last two metres of super-lightweight cotton I could find in Cotonou and they’d ballsed it up and left themselves no extra to adjust. Still, there were always spare boys around to run errands for me, do a bit of following and such, so I didn’t dress the boss down too much for botching my trews.

The office stank of beer. I opened the windows and went out on to the balcony with my phone book and flicked through to the number of the biggest shipping agents in Cotonou. I put a call in to my friend Appollinaire Agossa, a young dude type who listened out for me.

‘Polly? It’s me, Bruce.’

‘No need to introduce yourself, M. Bru, you’re the only man I know who calls me Polly.’

‘Am I? My privilege. Do you know a guy called Jean-Luc Marnier?’

‘No.’

‘Can you find out for me? He runs an import/export company called La Côte Oueste. Looks like a crook, too.’

‘They’re all crooks. How long have I got?’

‘Ages. Ten minutes?’

I hung up. The gardien came in with the best thing of the morning and I gave him a tip to go and buy his bouille, the wet sugary bird food they like to eat for breakfast. I gave him some extra to go and find a girl to clean the office up properly too. I drank coffee and fluffed eating the croissant badly so it was all over me when Polly called back.

‘That was quick,’ I said.

‘Only because we’ve been working the ship for Marnier’s company, loading cotton seed.’

‘The Kluezbork II?’

‘You’ve heard?’

‘I was on it yesterday afternoon.’

‘They think the crew did it and they were going to throw them to the sharks when they got out to sea.’

‘That’s not logical, Polly.’

‘That’s the rumour.’

Bagado’s machine working already.

‘You got anything sensible or interesting on Marnier?’

‘He imports veg oil in drums and bottles it here in Cotonou to sell locally. He exports cotton seed and fibre. Somebody said he’s done cashew but I don’t remember the name La Côte Oueste. I’ve heard he does business out of Lomé and Abidjan too. That’s it.’

‘Well, that all sounds very legal to me.’

‘He doesn’t have to be a crook.’

‘The people I know he’s dealing with say he does,’ I said. ‘Anyway, thanks. When’s your birthday?’

‘You missed it.’

‘I’ll make it up to you, Polly.’

‘Don’t call me Polly, that’ll do.’

‘You’re lucky you’re not pretty.’

‘That’s not what the girls say in the New York, New York club.’

‘It’s dark in the New York, New York, and you’re black.’

‘Au revoir, M. Bru.’

I got in the car in a sweat from the coffee and headed east to cross the lagoon to Akpakpa and the industrial zone where Marnier’s company had their offices, about four kilometres out on the Porto Novo road. Bagado’s car was sitting beside a large puddle near the Ancien Pont, and there was a big crowd streaming down the bank to one side of the bridge. I parked up and went with the flow. I knew it was bad because some wailing had started up towards the front and people were crowding on the bridge looking down at the water’s edge, the Catholics among them crossing themselves.

An ambulance arrived and reversed down the bank. I followed it in and broke through the police cordon to find Bagado standing alone by a small skiff with sails made out of polypropylene sacks. His hands were jammed down into his mac pockets, stretching it tight across his back. His body language was grim. I drew alongside. His jaw muscle, working over some high-density anxiety, popped out of the side of his cheek.

His head turned five degrees to me and then went back to the skiff. In the belly of the boat, blown up to the point where the brown school pinafore was stretched taut, was the decomposing, fish-ravaged body of what I assumed was one of the missing schoolgirls. On the ground by the skiff, with his head between his knees, was the boat’s owner. His skin was grey and there was a patch of vomit between his heels.

‘He found her up on the sand bar. She was on her way out to the Gulf and the sharks and we wouldn’t have known anything more about her,’ said Bagado.

‘Where’s Bondougou?’

‘He’s coming. You’d better get out of here. This crowd could go off any minute.’

‘You’d better get going too, Bagado.’

‘I just want to look at this a moment. Hone my wrath.’

I worked my way back through the jostling crowd. Younger men at the back were beginning to get excited. They had sticks and rocks and their fists were jabbing the air. Some of them were hawkers from the traffic lights, looking to break up the boredom of their day with a bit of blood-letting. I got into my car and crawled across the bridge, pedestrians pounded on the roof.

La Côte Oueste Sari wasn’t difficult to find. The gardien let me in through a gate that could handle plenty of trouble should it come along. He pointed me up to some offices flanking the warehouse where I could see a bottling plant not in use. Most of the offices had their blinds down, but I found one with a glass door and beyond it a white woman in a short, tight red skirt, black vest and red high heels with little leather bows on the back. She had her back to the door and was spraying a huge umbrella plant. She was stretching up with one leg bent at the knee as if she was hoping that there was somebody else in the office to take notice. The air was freeze-dried inside and I didn’t disturb the woman’s work by coming in. She persisted with the disapproving atomizer – tsk, tsk – tsk, tsk.

‘Bonjour,’ I said

She span round faster than if she’d been caught with her hands in the till and went over on one of her high heels. She fell back into a plump black leather chair which swallowed her with a gasp. The atomizer, which I could now see was a water pistol, was pointing at me.

‘You don’t frighten me with that,’ I said to her in French.

She laughed badly, as if there was plenty needed tightening up in the nerves department.

‘You scared me,’ she said, putting the pistol down. ‘I didn’t hear you come in.’

‘You don’t look as if you’ve got a weak heart.’

‘I don’t,’ she said, and went behind the desk.

To keep herself in that trim she must have had the heart of a steeplechaser. Her body had a fat percentage in the single figures and it looked as if it was monitored that way. She must have had a set of scales with the grams marked off and a red line for anything over fifty kilos.

Her face was as taut as a jockey’s, the muscles evident under the stretched skin. She had a small mouth, very small. It couldn’t have used up more than an inch. It looked as if it was going to be very economical. She put a set of long red talons through her short bleach-blonde hair and kicked herself away from the desk on a castered chair. She crossed her legs, keeping her eyes on mine, seeing where they went, and leaned back, showing me the workings of her abdominals under the spray-on vest.

‘I’ve come to see Jean-Luc. Is he here?’

‘You should have called,’ she said.

‘Does that mean he isn’t?’

She blinked once, slowly, and breathed in through her nose as if that was some kind of a reply.

‘Does that mean I need an appointment?’ I asked.

A little tongue came out of the little mouth and nipped back in again.

‘I’m doing all the work here,’ I said, ‘and you’re the one behind the desk.’

‘What do you want to see him about?’

‘Veg oil.’

‘You don’t need to see him to buy veg oil. I can sell you that.’

‘I’m not buying, I’m selling.’

‘He’s not buying,’ she said. ‘I know.’

‘I wouldn’t mind hearing that from him.’

‘I speak with his voice.’

‘Since the operation,’ I said.

She frowned.

‘Une petite blague,’ I said.

‘Très petite,’ she confirmed.

‘Are you his managing director, then?’ I asked. ‘You didn’t give me your card or tell me your name.’

‘Carole,’ she said, and as an afterthought, ‘Marnier.’

‘You must be his wife.’

‘I could be his sister, his half sister or his sister-in-law.’

‘If he had a brother…which he doesn’t,’ I guessed.

The knot of muscle at the back of her neck keeping her shoulders braced loosened about a millimetre.

‘You didn’t say your name.’

‘Bruce Medway.’

‘No card?’

‘No,’ I said, getting some of my own economy going.

She uncrossed her muscly legs, pulled herself back up to the desk and tucked herself in tight underneath it.

‘Is Jean-Luc in trouble?’ I asked.

‘Trouble?’ she said, hitting the wrong note, making it sound like an understatement for his current situation.

‘Everybody gets trouble in Africa,’ I said. ‘Sooner or later. I heard there was some on board the Kluezbork II yesterday, not that…’

‘What?’

‘Not that it would have anything to do with Jean-Luc…necessarily. But you know how Africans like to make trouble because…well, trouble is money.’

‘What trouble?’

‘Five dead men.’

She didn’t blink for some time, her eyes glazing and pinking at the rims in the cold air. Her mouth formed a perfect ‘o’, lower case.

‘Five?’ she said, interrogatively.

‘Should there have been more?’

‘I don’t know what you’re saying…what you’re asking. Are you asking anything?’