My Name is N

‘I’m saying he needs some help with that…and I can give it to him.’

‘Help with what?’

‘Help with the five dead men and his cotton seed on the same ship.’

‘How do you know…?’

‘Of course, I’d have to see him personally on the subject.’

‘But…’

‘And you seem to be the only one who can…facilitate that.’

All the talk about the Kluezbork II had confused her. She didn’t seem to know about the dead stowaways, but she was aware of the cotton seed and that the repercussions could be expensive. I walked across to the window and parted the Venetian blinds with two fingers. The warehouse was very quiet, nobody in there at all.

‘And I’d still like to talk to him about veg oil, if that’s possible?’ I said, moving back round to her side of the desk.

She picked up the phone and dialled a Benin mobile phone number, one of the new ones which had come in since the Francophonie conference last year. I memorized the number.

She spoke in rapid French, with her little mouth kissing the mouthpiece. I heard nothing. Then she shut up and listened. After a minute she put the phone down and tapped the polished desk top with her red fingernails. She kicked off her shoe and I heard her foot rasping up and down a calf that hadn’t been razored recently.

‘You and Jean-Luc been married long?’ I asked.

She looked up into her head.

‘Four years,’ she said.

‘You like it in Africa?’

‘Very much.’

‘Where do you come from in France?’

‘Lille.’

‘The weather’s not so nice in Lille.’

‘Ça c’est vrai.’

I lowered myself into one of the black leather chairs. Carole kicked off her other shoe and wriggled her feet back to life after they’d been crammed to the points of her five-inch highs with their prissy little bows. The phone went off louder than a ref’s pea whistle. It jolted her. She snatched at it and listened and then held it out to me.

‘What the fuck do you want?’ asked a voice in English with barely a trace of French accent.

‘Nice English, Jean-Luc. Where’d you pick that up?’

‘I know who you are. Now what the hell do you want?’

‘To meet,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to talk on the phone.’

‘Too bad,’ he said. ‘I only talk on the phone. Who’re you working for?’

‘Myself.’

‘Bullshit. The kind of work you do, you don’t get off your ass unless somebody’s paying. So who’s paying?’

‘A man’s got to live even if he doesn’t have any clients.’

‘So what’s all this stuff about veg oil?’

‘OK, you’re right. I’m not interested in veg oil. I had to get started somewhere. Your wife wasn’t blowing your trumpet for you.’

‘With a mouth that size she doesn’t blow anything,’ he said crudely, and laughed with congested lungs, which set him off coughing.

‘Maybe you’d like to talk about the Kluezbork II.’

‘What’s that about?’

‘You know, Jean-Luc.’

‘Yeah, I know. What can you do about it?’

‘Those stowaways came in on one of your cotton seed stevedore shifts.’

‘And?’

‘You know how it works, Jean-Luc. You’re responsible. You’re the white man, for Christ’s sake. You’re as good as a monarch.’

‘OK. So you can get the ship out. How much?’

‘My fee is two hundred and fifty thousand CFA…upfront. Plus some grease to get things rolling. And if you’re going to be as shy as this you’re going to have to make provision for expenses.’

‘I have to be shy.’

‘If we meet, Jean-Luc, maybe you can tell me about that problem as well and perhaps you can start living a life again.’

‘I’ll call you,’ he said, and hung up.

Carole stood by the door with a little bag under her arm and some gold-rimmed sunglasses with red lenses on. She’d made a bad mistake. The lipstick she’d applied was dark purple. Her mouth looked like a split plum and didn’t go with anything else.

‘I’ve got to leave now,’ she said.

5

I sat in my Peugeot 504 saloon, picking at the piping on the seat cover. After a few minutes, Carole tottered around the puddles to an electric-blue Renault 5 Turbo. She smoothed her hands over her microskirt-encased bottom which showed no trace of visible panty line, got into the car, shucked her heels and took off at a fair lick. She had a grinning furry monkey hanging off four yellowing sucker pads in the rear window.

I let her get ahead and put four cars between her and myself on the Porto Novo/Cotonou road going back into town. She cut away from the line of traffic heading across the Ancien Pont, which she could see was backed up, probably because of the dead schoolgirl. The Renault 5 dodged through the muddy backstreets of Akpakpa and humped on to the metalled road going across the Nouveau Pont.

In front of the huge sprawl of rust-roofed stalls around the Dan Tokpa market she slowed and rocked up on to the central reservation and stopped next to a petrol hawker. She messed around in the car for a few minutes and came out wearing trainers. She crossed the road and went into the market, past the squatting money changers who must have said something other than Deutschmark, Dollar, Franc Français because she lashed a young guy with a caning look that had all the old hands laughing.

The market was heaving with people and filth from after the rain. The corrugated-iron roofs were set at decapitation height for my 6’ 4”. Carole’s trim, fatless, five-foot-nothing figure was more suited to this terrain, and I lost her in amongst the electrical goods no more than fifty yards in. I took time to extricate myself. A white man gets a lot of attention in a market like this and I was sold to every inch of the way. I arrived at the exit in time to see Carole’s Renault 5 hop off the central reservation and heard the whistle of her turbo as she nipped through the traffic lights and headed up Boulevard Saint Michel.

I’d just passed my first stupidity test with an alpha. I wasn’t a great one for punching the roof of my car and damning my eyes under these circumstances. It had happened many times before and I’d always been surprised at how many of my clients didn’t mind hiring someone more stupid than themselves. People like me served a purpose. The trick was to find out the purpose before my usefulness ran out. Jean-Luc Marnier was doing some planning around me and I realized I was going to need more dirt on him before we met.

I went back down Sekou Touré to the centre of town and parked outside the Gerbe d’ Or patisserie. There was a guy called Al Hadji Bélijébi who came from Niger and had some offices above a pharmacy near here. I knew him because he was a rice importer and his rice had been occupying my warehouse space in the port. He was impressed by the politeness of my pressure. He didn’t move his rice but we did become friends of a sort and he’d help me out if he could.

The secretary in the cold dark hallway up to his office buzzed me through. Al Hadji was sitting in magnificent blue robes behind the usual businessman’s ninety-cubic-foot desk, which he must have lowered through the roof, or built his office around it. We shook hands. He chucked his new mobile lovingly under the chin and offered coffee.

‘Is this business?’ he asked.

‘Do you know a guy called Jean-Luc Marnier?’

Bélijébi’s face stilled at the name. He nodded.

‘I know him,’ he said. ‘But if you don’t, it might be better for you to keep it that way.’

‘Does that mean he is a crook?’

Bélijébi didn’t answer.

‘When did you last see him?’ I asked.

‘Not for months.’

‘What’s his game?’

‘This is only talk, you understand. But the men I’ve heard this from are not idle gossipers.’

‘As long as you tell me more than he’s in import/export, I’ll listen.’

‘It’s what he imports and exports that’s important.’

‘Not just veg oil and cotton seed?’

‘No,’ he said, screwing a massive gold ring up and down a finger. ‘He exports people.’

The round pin finds the round hole.

‘There’s a long tradition of that kind of thing along this coast,’ I said. ‘Didn’t it all start from that place west of here, Ouidah? Some Brazilian supplying slavers with…’

‘Not slaves. These are paying customers. People paying to get an EC passport and passage.’

‘Full paperwork service supplied.’

‘I don’t know the details.’

‘Does he import anything interesting?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said, staring at the desk.

‘Is this something else I shouldn’t know about?’

‘I really don’t know,’ he said, not looking up.

‘Does Marnier have any friends, or just dissatisfied business associates?’

‘There’s a Frenchman who runs a bar down in the Jonquet zone. Michel Charbonnier. I think he’s supposed to be a friend but if you go and see him don’t use my name.’

‘That sort of bar?’

‘Are there any others down there?’

‘Does it have a name?’

‘L’ouistiti.’

‘What’s a ouistiti?’

‘A marmoset, I think you call it.’

‘How cute.’

‘You’ll see,’ he said, finishing his coffee, ‘if you can stay up that late without getting into trouble.’

I went back home with a baguette from the Gerbe d’ Or in the passenger seat and let Helen make me a salad. I was going to sleep out the afternoon, which was oppressive with more storm clouds building. I didn’t manage it. I ended up lying in bed thinking in very tight circles about Marnier.

If Bélijébi was hearing right, the five dead men on the Kluezbork II were Marnier’s stowaways – another good reason, alongside the Franconelli factor, for him to keep his face off the street and his wife on the hop. I was sure Marnier would want to hear my ‘inside’ on the Kluezbork II and I was equally certain that I was going to get to meet him, but that any face-to-face would be a big surprise, even bigger for me because I had no solution to his problem.

Bagado was also in this equation, which had the look of one of those differential jobs I never got the hang of in maths. He’d kiss me if I served up Marnier the marlin just as certainly as he would brickbat my balls if he found I’d slipped one past him, even if it was to save my own ass. And that, after all, was the nub as far as I was concerned – Marnier or me.

There was no question it was going to be Marnier, but I wanted a better feel for what Franconelli’s men had in mind and why. Now that I knew we weren’t dealing with a Simple Simon I had to get myself tutored up. At least I’d made contact with Marnier and had a mobile number for him, which could give me a quarter chance of squeezing more juice out of Carlo.

I left a message at the Hotel de la Plage for Carlo and Gio to meet me at the La Verdure restaurant/bar in downtown Cotonou. I certainly didn’t want them coming to the office now that I knew Marnier was out there keeping himself informed.

I slept a brain-damaged sleep and woke up with an eye glued shut and the realization that I hadn’t checked out Marnier’s home address. I had to do that before I went to the La Verdure. Get rid of all the obvious stuff first.

The home address that Carlo had given me was up in Cadjehoun, an area next to the smart Cocotiers district, which had gone through a rebuilding project to house minions for the Francophonie. I found Marnier’s house at the end of an afternoon darkening early with rain clouds. It wasn’t new and was built on the same principle as mine – servants’ quarters and a garage on the ground floor, and an apartment on the first. There was a chain across the short drive and a gardien’s stool positioned by the open gate. The gardens out front were in superb condition, with a variety of palms and shrubs getting high on the long rains. I parked, stepped over the chain and shouted for the gardien. Two ribbons of fresh tyre marks went into the empty garage, taking mud with them.

A young guy stripped to the waist and sweating appeared out of the shrubbery with a hoe in one hand and a heavy chopping machete in the other.

‘Le patron il est ici?’ I asked.

‘Il est parti depuis longtemps.’

‘Et la patronne?’

‘Il n’y a pas une patronne.’

Interesting.

‘Qu’est-ce que c’est la derniére fois que tu a vu le patron?’

‘Cinq ou six mois.’

‘Qui t’ a payé?’

‘Uhn?’

‘Tu n‘as été pas payé?’

Floored by that question he looked off into the garden. It was nearly night by now, with the storm brewing. I slipped him 500 CFA which he kept in his hand and looked at. A trickle of sweat slipped down his chest.

‘Le patron n’est jamais ici,’ he said.

‘Il habite oú maintenant?’

‘Je ne sais pas, monsieur. Vraiment.’

He tried to give me back the money. I told him to keep it and asked if I could take a look around. He didn’t like it but the money had complicated things. I went up the outside stairs and looked into the living room. In the failing light a basically furnished place revealed itself. The only expensive item a big TV and stereo system. I looked up on the roof and sure enough there was a large and expensive satellite dish. The place wasn’t abandoned and I was sure people had lived here until very recently. There were drinks and glasses out on a tray on a sideboard and a book with a bookmark in it on a pile of glossies on the coffee table. I should have come straight here once Carole had lost me. The alphas were coming up thick and fast on the stupidity tests.

I left. The gardien looked as if he was going to cry. I drove back into town. The evening fish market was up and people were buying steadily under the orange glow of the streetlights. Parking boys kept trying to usher me into vacant slots in front of the smartest shops in Cotonou. Girls with pyramids of oranges on trays on their heads begged me to buy. I parked up outside the railings of the La Verdure.

I was ten minutes late. Carlo and Gio were sitting on the back terrace in front of a beer and a Coke. The girls were hovering. The Italians talked without looking up at each other, as if there was some kind of confessional going on. A tall Nigerian girl I knew from playing pool in here with Heike of a Saturday night bumped a hip into Gio and risked running her hand through his hair. He braced a shoulder which was enough to tip her away and then he leaned across and slapped her hard on the long bare thigh she had on show below her miniskirt. There wasn’t anything playful about the slap and she yelped. She retreated to the other girls in the bar, where I was ordering a demi pression, and showed off Gio’s perfect paw mark purpling up into a soft welt she’d have for a week. I told the girl to get some ice on it and went out to join the funsters.

I gave them a good evening and pulled up a chair to the table for two. They said nothing. Carlo took the foam off his demi. Gio’s peasant hands rested on the table top, taking a momentary break from violence.

‘I’ve made contact with Marnier,’ I said.

‘Where is he?’ asked Carlo, sucking in an inch of beer, glass held between two fingers.

‘He’s inside the cellphone footprint of Cotonou.’

‘That’s something,’ said Carlo.

‘He’s got another reason to keep quiet.’

‘What’s the first reason?’

‘You guys.’

‘Does he know about us?’

‘How much work did you do before you came to me?’

‘I went to his office and his home.’

‘You didn’t take Gio with you, did you?’

‘No,’ he said, and nodded at Gio to keep him calm. Christ, the guy was on no fuse at all.

‘Did you speak to anyone?’

‘Una ragazza.’

‘Bleach-blonde, miniskirt, nails?’

‘Yeah.’

‘So Marnier knew about you before I got to him.’

‘What’s the other reason he’s hiding?’

‘Five dead stowaways were found on a ship he was working yesterday.’

‘So?’

‘They’re his. He put them there. It’s a sideline.’

‘You telling us you can’t do the job?’

Gio’s body odour was starting to get a little feral.

‘I’m doing it, aren’t I? I’m here telling you how it is,’ I said. ‘Now look, maybe there’s a few things you can do for me. First of all, never come to my office for whatever reason. He’s going to come and see me sometime…’

‘Then we’ll come and talk to him.’

‘No. I’ll fix up a meeting and you can turn up and talk to him then. If you sniff around my office he’ll never show in the first place.’

‘What’re the other things?’

‘Why do you want to find him and what’re you going to do to him when you find him?’

‘When you find him,’ he said, and then started blabbing to Gio in some dialect which sounded like a couple of Portuguese talking about opera.

‘You said he’s on a cellphone,’ said Carlo.

I wrote the number for him on a beer mat. They talked some more and Carlo nodded into the bar. Then he got up and said he’d speak to Franconelli, ask permission. Gio sucked on his Coke through the lemon and ice cubes.

‘You speak any English, Gio?’

‘No.’

Well, I tried.

We sat there for ten minutes. Two sailors were playing pinball in the bar and the girls were all over them. They shrugged off the flashier-looking but tougher Nigerian girls. They preferred the smaller, plumper Beninois girls who had a sweeter act but were no less focused on the bottom line.

Gio ordered another Coke to slurp. The waiter didn’t have to ask me. Carlo rejoined us.

‘Mr Franconelli says you’re to do what you’re fucking told and find Jean-Luc Marnier and don’t ask any questions about stuff that doesn’t concern you.’

‘Right.’

‘You ask me you’re better off not knowing dick. That way it’s safer.’

‘You mean if I was indiscreet…’

‘Mr Franconelli will know and he will not be happy.’

‘As unhappy as he is with Marnier?’

‘Maybe more unhappy…I don’t know. I don’t know why you want to know this shit.’

‘Only that it’ll help me know where to walk and not to walk with Marnier. He sounds like a complicated man who’s sensitive to trouble. If he’s going to trust me enough to come out of hiding I’d like to know where he’s sensitive, don’t want to lean on his bad arm if he has one.’

Carlo and Gio exchanged a look.

‘But now that you’ve put it the way you’ve put it maybe I don’t want to know as much as I thought,’ I said.

‘Probably you don’t,’ said Carlo.

‘Maybe what I’ll do is ask you some questions and you give me “yes” and “no” answers. How about that?’

‘We could try that.’

‘Does Marnier import goods for Franconelli, here, in Benin?’

‘Yeah. He has done.’

‘Has he handled it the way Franconelli expected it to be handled?’

‘Not quite.’

‘Has he been cheating on you guys?’

Carlo ducked and weaved as if this was not the real issue but could be part of the problem.

‘Is this a wrist-slap or is Marnier headed for the big elsewhere?’

Carlo rattled a couple of sentences out to Gio. Gio shrugged, said nothing, giving his usual expert opinion.

‘That depends on what he says to us,’ said Carlo.

‘Why didn’t you get Gio to talk to the ragazza? I’m sure she’d have sung to him if he’d asked her nicely.’

‘That’s not how Mr Franconelli wanted to work it.’

‘Good family man?’

‘If you like.’

I finished my beer. Gio looked into the bar at one of the Beninoise who had her hands down one of the sailor’s trousers while he was playing the pinball machine. He wasn’t fighting too hard and he was losing a lot of balls.

‘Anything else?’ asked Carlo.

‘I don’t think so,’ I said, a little nervous at how things were coming to a close, worried that Franconelli had chosen me specifically for the job and that once it was done maybe I’d find myself taking a look down the barrel of a Beretta and getting an eyeful – visions of Gale Strudwick face down in a Lagos swimming pool, the rain coming down on her hardening flesh.

We stood. Gio’s chair fell backwards and landed with a sharp crack that made me start. Gio smiled at me, which was not nice. Worn teeth with a discoloured crust up by the gums over a dark, hollow Palaeolithic mouth, maybe a stalactite coming down at the back there.

‘Twenty-four hours,’ said Carlo.

Gio patted my cheek with a surprisingly soft and dry palm.

6

The usual evening train pushed through the traffic, horn honking, heading out across the bridge to the industrial zone with a line of empty cars that screeched and grated on the rails embedded in the tarmac. I stopped off at the Lebanese supermarket round the corner from the La Verdure and bought a half of Bell’s and some black wrinkly olives imported directly from the Bekaa Valley. I went back to the office with my goodies. The gardien was off somewhere doing what gardiens do best, not looking after the place. The door of the office wasn’t locked as it should have been. I opened it, stood on the threshold and looked in. It didn’t stink of beer any more, which was good. I put a hand in to turn on the light.

‘Leave it off,’ said a voice in English with plenty of French sewn into it. ‘Come in and shut the door behind you.’

Someone was sitting in my chair, backlit by the glow from the streetlights and supermarket hoardings on Sekou Touré. The people who come to my office these days just don’t recognize their side of the desk. I got annoyed.

‘Who the hell are you?’ I asked.

‘You’ve been looking for someone. Have you forgotten already?’

‘Well, you’re not Marnier, not with all that ronronnement in your voice.’

‘Only cats ronronnent.’

‘You know what I mean. So who are you?’

‘I’m representing Marnier. Jean-Luc’s not ready to come out into the open yet.’

‘Well, that’s tough because I’m only going to talk to Marnier, the man himself. And while we’re talking about talking, you can do your talking from the client side of the desk and let me sit in my own chair.’

‘I don’t want to be involved in this business. I’m doing a favour for Jean-Luc. I’d rather you didn’t see my face.’

‘If you’re worried about your ugliness, don’t be. There’s plenty of that in this business.’

‘What do you know about ugliness?’ he said, as if I was new on the playground.

‘It’s not skin deep like yours probably is.’

‘You’ve got a very strong backhand, M. Medway.’

‘That wasn’t a compliment,’ I said, and nodded at him. ‘How’d you like my forehand?’

‘Vous êtes un peu fâché, M. Medway. Ça ne va pas en Afrique,’ he said, imitating a French West African accent.

‘It’s just been one of those days,’ I said. ‘The rainy season or my biorythms, I don’t know which.’

‘I don’t want to be here, you know.’

‘Well, you are. So you’re in it.’

‘I have to be here.’

‘You owe Marnier?’

He ducked his head as if weighed down by his dues.

‘I’ve a feeling Marnier’s debts could run very deep, the kind of man he is,’ I said, and the man nodded. I sat down and put the whisky and the olives on the desk. ‘There should be a couple of glasses in the top drawer, help us relax a little in each other’s company.’

‘C’est mieux comme Ça,’ he said, and took out the glasses.

I filled them.

‘Olive?’

We sipped whisky and ate olives, made mounds of pits on the desk top.

‘What’s your task, Monsieur…?’

‘Jacques will do.’

‘Tell me, Jacques.’

‘The name of your company is M & B. Who is the “B”?’

‘Bagado. He’s a police detective. He lost his job a few years back and we worked together for a while. Now he’s back on the force. Been back three or four months now. So he doesn’t work with me any more.’