Chapter 18

    

Sunday 29th September

    I didn't feel so amusing in the morning. I woke up with a mouthful of bad-egg saliva and a lump on my head like a horse's knee. Strange messages made their way down some bad wiring in my spine and my leg fizzed as if it was shorting out. My stomach made a noise like a dog yawning and I thought it might force me into another gruesome duet with my old pal.

    On the way to the bathroom, I looked in on Bagado, who had gone. I showered and put on one of Kershaw's shirts and would have looked quite fetching with a foot of bare torso showing if it had been ridged and rock hard. It wasn't and the shirt came off with the sound of an ill-treated sack. I put on last night's shirt and smelled like a night club barman's table wipe at four o'clock in the morning.

    Overnight, the stairs had become impossible to negotiate and the banister proved invaluable as my feet seemed to be doing both parts in the world's most complicated fandango. The fridge opened on to a grapefruit and a soggy pawpaw. The pawpaw didn't hold out both hands and I took the grapefruit, which had more pith on it than an Oscar Wilde aphorism. The first segment made me coy and put my parotid glands on red alert.

    My head stepped in with some lefts and rights to the lower cortex and I put the grapefruit down and gave myself a minute's silence.

    The car keys to my Peugeot were on the side next to the instant coffee, which backed away from me. The photographs were in their packet leaning up against a jar of gherkins. I picked them up and left the house, shouting for Moses and wearing somebody's sunglasses that held my head like a pair of ice tongs. The phone went and I returned and picked it up. It was B.B. confirming that the man in the photo was Armen Kasparian, the son of his Armenian friend who had been killed by the car bomb. B.B. was as keen to chat as I was to throw up so I just cut him off mid-sentence.

    I made another attempt to leave the house and this time got as far as the alley when the phone went off again. I thought it might be B.B. looking for a rematch and was going to ignore it, but then I realized it might be Bagado or Moses. Clifford Harvey surprised me by remembering my name and inviting me to his house that night for a drink.

    'Seven o'clock sharp, don't be late and don't be early.'

    'Are you going to tell me why?'

    'Not on the phone. It'll only take five minutes.'

    'Short drink.'

    'It's not social. G'bye.'

    The third time I made it to the car, which was half under the shade of a bougainvillaea. It was the wrong half. The sun had carved itself a good space in the cloud and was hammering down. Moses hadn't showed and the driver's seat was hotter than a griddle. I threw the photographs in the glove compartment and, alternating buttocks, drove north out of town to Kamina Village, a smart community for expats and rich Togolese with neat houses and gardens full of gardeners.

    I passed the English school and the tennis club whose baked red courts were empty, but whose swimming pool fought it out with a hundred dive-bombing children with cream puffs on their arms. I asked a European woman, who was directing her gardener from a deck chair on her verandah, where Nina Sorvino lived. She took in my car, my unbrushed hair and unshaven face, and said she didn't know.

    I cruised around feeling unwelcome amongst the hissing water sprinklers until I saw a guy in his late fifties who looked worse than I did, washing his car. Nobody washed their car who lived in this neighbourhood, so he stood out like a skull cap in Mecca. His limbs, sticking out of a tennis shirt and a pair of shorts that lost the Empire, were shaking more than an agoraphobic greyhound. He cared as much for Nina's security as he did for washing his car. He told me the way, and with a sly eye seemed to be on the brink of asking me in for a drink, when his wife came to the porch and shouted something that would have made a dog salute.

    I left and watched in the rearview as the wife came down the drive and gave him a slap on the back of the legs and pulled him into the house by his ear. This rare scene left me feeling cold and depressed, even with the sun rippling through the high trees and children's voices not giving a damn for Sunday morning sleepers.

    I took his directions past houses walled up against the surrounding poverty beyond the Village and found Nina's house in a quiet corner on the outer perimeter. Her car was parked in an open garage. I walked up the short driveway, and the next-door neighbour's dog, which had been noisily lapping its genitals, stopped, looked up, flicked an ear and went back to his laborious task.

    I knocked on the front door, then saw the bell, which must have been set at a pitch that only the dog could hear because he let out a belching growl. I went back to knocking then walked along the verandah and, after a scuffle with an aggressive banana palm that slapped me about and let me go, reached an air-conditioning unit that sighed even hotter air into the steamy late morning. There was a sleeping form beyond the light curtains in the room. It was after 11.30 which seemed respectable enough, even for the old soak washing his car, so I thumped on her window frame. I pounded, rattled and tapped. I whistled, hollered and roared. The dog came up on to the fence with his front paws, ears up and a look of total consternation across his intelligent face. He barked but it didn't help. I was getting uneasy.

    At the end of the garage was a door. It opened into the. kitchen and there was a door to the left into the living room. On the other side of the living room was a curtain and behind that two doors, one of which opened into Nina's frozen room.

    She lay on the bed, twisted in a white sheet like a body committed to the deep. She had a black sleeping mask on that I had thought was strictly Hollywood. Her face was white, her lips pale. I expected to see a mist of snow sweeping across the Arctic floor. On the bedside table was a plastic container of pills with nothing in it.

    I touched her arm which was cold, but not as cold as Kershaw had been. I tore off the mask, took hold of both shoulders, shook her and yelled her name. Her head lolled around and the sound of a very drunk person trying to say the word 'ululation' came out of her. I laid her back on the pillow and -slapped her face gently from side to side until she showed me the whites of her eyes and begged me to stop. I made a cup of coffee that would have woken the entire audience of a Rotarian's after-dinner speech. She got it down and began to say my name in just two syllables. I got her on her feet and let her pin-ball her way to the bathroom for a half-hour shower. She came out with a towel round her head and a long T-shirt on. Her eyes looked like fresh picked mushrooms.

    'Who cut me out of the freeway bridge?' she said.

    'Who poured you in there? How many of these did you take?'

    'I don't know. I couldn't sleep. Is there any more coffee?'

    I poured her another cup. She stepped backwards as if she was on the gym beam and sat on a chair with her last night's clothes under her. Big fat tears started to roll down her cheeks and her shoulders began to shake. Her mouth came open with strings of saliva between her teeth and she let out a terrible wail. I took the coffee from her and she seemed to fall in on herself, shuddering from the wide black sobs that the pit of her stomach sent up through her body. After a minute, she stopped and held out her hand for the coffee as if she had been through nothing more than a mild choking fit.

    'I get these crying jags,' she said, as if it might have slipped past me.

    'You've just taken enough sleeping tabs to put the whole of Brooklyn under…'

    'Yeah, tell me about it, Bruce. What you doin' here anyway?'

    'You drove off with my bag.'

    'I did? That's why you smell like the bottom of last night's glass.'

    'Can I use your shower?'

    'Maybe I'll hose you down in the garden. You might ruin the bacteria balance in my septic tank.'

    She gave me the keys and I took the bag out of the boot. I showered and shaved, which did my head no good, and I looked in her medicine cabinet for an aspirin. I took three and put the bottle back and found a razor blade, a hand mirror and a little baggie of white powder at the back of the bottom shelf. I dipped a wet finger in and rubbed my gums. It was cocaine. She was snorting herself up with the coke and bringing herself back down with the sleepers.

    She was still sitting on her clothes when I came out. She stared at the S-bend of the sheets on her bed and held the coffee cup in the palm of her hand.

    'Do your crying jags have anything to do with Kershaw?' I said to the back of her head.

    'He's dead.'

    'You were upset last night.'

    'I was?'

    'More upset than you should be for someone you ditched as a pervert.'

    Her towelled head straightened and after a few moments she turned and looked at me out of the corner of her eye. Too much was going on in the puffy eye that she fixed on me for me to understand a fraction of what was happening in there. She turned back as if she was performing her morning stretch exercises.

    'I'm pregnant,' she said.

    'By Kershaw?'

    Her neck shook as if it was suddenly too fragile to support her piled head. She held out the coffee cup and said: 'Gimme a drink and I'll tell you about it.'

    I filled the cup in the kitchen and came back to find Nina on the sofa in the living room with a bottle of brandy in her lap and a cigarette in her mouth. She put the cigarette down on the edge of the table and took the coffee, sipped it and poured a slug of brandy in, then sipped it again and poured some more brandy in.

    'Do you want ice and soda with that?' I asked, and she answered by plugging the cigarette back into her mouth.

    'Six months ago I started a relationship with Charlie. Shit, relationship - I call it that but it was more like seeing a married man who's getting the blahs from sex with his wife. I go round to his place, we fuck, he comes round to my place, we fuck. Hell, a girl gets tired of being a semen deposit.

    'I pushed him for more; you know, something really demanding like dinner out together once in a while. He gave me the: "Yeah, sure honey", and two weeks later I'm still the exercise bike. The problem is, I like him. He's a big strong guy and… hell, there ain't nobody else, that's for sure. But I reckon I got some class so I tell him' - she sipped her coffee and dragged on the cigarette - 'I tell him I'm gonna have to look for someone else who gives me a bit more of their time. He laughed at me.

    'I meet Steve. Not really my type. He made me feel kinda big. But a hell of a lot better than the Lebanese. We date. I stop seeing Charlie. Charlie's pissed as hell. Gets all proprietorial and shit. I mean, the guy's shown me as much attention as a rubber doll and then when somebody else gets on, he flips.

    'He says he can't stand Steve. Says he's gonna kill him. All that kinda baby stuff. The guy's shit hot in business, he pulls off deals that nobody else can, he talks to anyone from the President down to the gardien but with women he's like a kid with a toy.

    'So, Steve starts to get weird. I make a mistake. I tell Charlie. I mean, I need to talk to somebody and Charlie's the guy I want to notice me so I tell him. Charlie sends someone round to "talk" to Steve. I mean, you gotta understand the hate going on here. The sexual jealousy was incredible.'

    'When did all this happen?'

    'A couple of weeks ago. I told you I saw him in the restaurant a couple of weekends ago. Charlie had already "spoken" to him by then.'

    'What did he say?'

    'He told me he asked Steve to leave me alone or he'd have him killed.'

    'What sort of talk was that?'

    'Unnecessary. Steve didn't give a shit about me any more.'

    'But did Charlie mean it?'

    'It was just talk, Bruce,' she said leaning forward giving me a deep dumbo voice. She lit another cigarette from the one she was about to put out and sipped the brandy. She put her feet up on the sofa, crossed at the ankles, and lay her head back in the cushioned corner and smoked at the ceiling.

    'You saw Charlie again after this?'

    'Whaddaya mean "saw". You going biblical on me?'

    'Did you sleep with Charlie again?'

    'Hell, Bruce, this is private. Jesus. What's with this cop stuff?'

    'A woman was found dead in Kershaw's apartment in Cotonou. Kershaw was found dead in his house in Lomé. It looks as if they caught it on the same day.'

    'What's that gotta do with me going to bed with Charlie?'

    'I'm trying to work out what was happening last night.'

    'I'm not following you.'

    'Between you and Charlie at the party.'

    'Oh, that. Nothing special.'

    'You were asking him for something he didn't want to give you.'

    'No, I wasn't and no, he wasn't.'

    'Do you know whose baby it is? Was that what it was?'

    I was standing in the middle of the floor looking down at her. She got up and stood in front of me, her face a few inches from my chest and tilted her head up to look at me.

    'I told you last night I liked you. Now I'm going to show you how much I like you.' She saw my eyes flicker. 'That means I'm gonna trust you, not fuck you. There's not many people round here who can say that.' She puffed aggressively on her cigarette and squinted at me through the smoke. 'How much more have you gotta do on Steve's case?'

    'Meet his wife this afternoon and identify the body tomorrow.'

    'Just do that and then drop it.'

    'Drop it?'

    That's what I said - it's American for quit.'

    'That's what somebody else said to me at four o'clock this morning.'

    'Who?'

    'I don't know, but they seemed to think I needed a close look at the bathroom floor.'

    Then take the advice,' she said, and went back to the sofa and crushed her cigarette out, stabbing at the ashtray.

    'Tell me about Yvette.'

    'She's a lady who's got her hooks into Charlie.'

    'What else?'

    'I don't know. She hasn't been around long enough.' She lit up again.

    'You've spoken to her?'

    'We've met,' she said, with nothing in her face except three strands of smoke.

    'What about the drugs?'

    'Bruce!' she said through gritted teeth. 'You're not doing what you've been told.'

    'You're snorting coke, popping downers and drinking brandy in your nightshirt.'

    'Back off!'

    'Are you scared?'

    'Not as much as you could be.'

    'Charlie supplies the drugs. What do you give him? Sex and soul?'

    'Get outa here,' she said taking a rip drag from her cigarette and pointing the two fingers that held it at me. 'I said I'd trust you and you're kicking me in the teeth.'

    'You haven't trusted me with anything.'

    'I've trusted you with the advice that's gonna keep you alive.'

    'Tell me something.'

    'This is a dangerous situation and a difficult person. If I tell you anything you'll stick your nose in and get your head taken off.'

    'I don't buy this crap about Kershaw and bondage. It's too pat. A dead girl's body is found in a bad way in Kershaw's apartment and a couple of days later you push me this line about Kershaw hurting you. Did Charlie put you up to that?'

    Nina shook from her head to her heels in one zigzag shudder and she reached for the brandy bottle. The neck didn't rattle against the coffee cup rim as she poured, but it wanted to.

    'Who's this girl you keep talking about?' she asked, looking into the cup.

    'Ask Charlie, he'll fill you in. Tell him not to spare the details. It might change your mind about going to bed with him again.'

    'I've got lunch at the golf club. You better go.'

    'Lucky I came along. You wouldn't have come out of that until Monday morning.'

    'If I need a nanny, I'll give you a call.'

    'Maybe Kershaw gave you the drugs, just like Kershaw got a kick out of hurting you. Dead men are good to have round. You can dump all the shitty stuff on them and they never squeal.'

    I went into her room and picked up my bag; she stood in the same spot, cup and cigarette attached.

    'If you are pregnant, I should ease up on the drugs, booze and fags or you'll give birth to a stand-up comedian.'

    'Fags?' she frowned.

    'Thanks for the shower.'

    'Any time, Mom.'

    We arrived at the front door together. She leaned against the jamb. We faced each other.

    'You're angry, which is not cool,' she said, weighing every word. 'Just calm down and take the advice.'

    'I thought advice was the stuff that businessmen give you a lot of before you succeed and after you fail.'

    'Sometimes it's the stuff that friends give each other so they can ignore it.'

    'You tell me why I should and I'll take it.'

    'But you won't and you'll get yourself killed.'

    'I still won't and I'll still get myself killed.'

    I turned and she said to the back of my head, 'Can you keep my out of hours habits to yourself. I've gotta job I need to keep.'

    I walked to the car thinking Charlie must have that on her as well. The next-door's dog kept pace with me to the gate and got his paws up on it. I threw the bag in the car and got in after it. Nina stood in the doorway with her arms folded and smoke curling off her shoulder. I started the car and the dog's ears flickered and he looked across at Nina, concerned. Maybe he came from a broken home. I drove out of the Village and headed east to the airport.