Chapter 23

    At ten past eight, I was sitting in my car two hundred yards down the road from Nina Sorvino's house with a view through some low palms of her red Citroen which was parked in her garage. At half past eight she got into the Citroen and left Kamina Village for downtown Lomé. If she was going to the Embassy she was taking the long way round.

    I tailed her to the Pharmacie pour Tous on the Route de Kpalimé which was as far from the Embassy as you could get and had a lab that did analysis. She walked in and came straight out with an envelope which she opened in her car. I followed her to the German Restaurant in the centre of town, where she went in and made a telephone call. She came out after five minutes and I went straight in and asked to use the phone while the owner asked me since when did he become the PTT. I hit the 'Redial' button and waited. The phone rang four times before it was picked up by Elizabeth Harvey, who gave her name.

    She had been very low down on my list of people that Nina Sorvino would call and I just managed to throw an American accent together and pass myself off as Sal Goblowski. I asked for her husband, who she told me was in his office and had been for the last hour. I went back to the house and passed the Embassy on the way. Nina Sorvino's car was there.

    Bagado was asleep upstairs on his bed with a three- month-old Times crossword on his chest. I showered and shaved and changed into my last set of clothes. I sat on the bed and stared at a beetle that had recently landed in an undiscovered world and was finding it hard going through the wisps of fuzz on the floor.

    One of the best teachers in my short academic life taught me English. She wanted me to write poetry, which goes to show that people can be good at some things and still have terrible judgement. She managed to persuade me that there were other ways of thinking than with your brain and from between your legs.

    Always go for the idea you don't know you have.

    Ah, right, I thought, assuming a standing start and coming up with a big blank.

    The idea that bobs into your consciousness and then slips away. That's the right idea for you.

    I was the poet from hell but I learnt how to think. Something had been nagging at me for the last twenty-four hours which was nothing to do with Nina Sorvino's pregnancy test. It had something to do with the photographs.

    I went to the car and took them out of the glove, went back upstairs and laid them all out on the bed. There were several photos of each piece of work, a wide shot then some close-ups. I compared them to the originals on the walls. I looked for any differences but they were shots of the finished paintings and there were no differences.

    Had it been something in the shot that I'd let Kate take away? I checked the negative but couldn't tell anything from it. I gathered the photographs and went back to the car and drove to a shop in the Rue du Commerce where I gave them the strip of negative for the two-shot of Kasparian and Kershaw and they said they could do it for me while I waited. They gave me prints of all five shots on the negative strip. I looked closely at the two-shot and the background which was the right-hand half of the girl with the fruit bowl. It didn't say anything to me. I put the main packet of photographs in the glove compartment. The five prints that had just been done, I kept in the map shelf under the steering wheel so that I could get at them if I felt the need. By this time it was half past ten and I had to get to the Sarakawa to pick up Kate Kershaw for the body identification.

    At reception they called Kate's room and while I waited I spoke to the guy I'd asked to look out for her. He told me that she'd left the hotel just after seven- thirty last night and hadn't come back until eleven o'clock. The taxi she had used stood in line in the car park and I found the driver sleeping at the wheel with his hand down his trousers. She had asked him to take her to a restaurant in town and he'd dropped her at the German place in the centre. She wasn't in there when he'd cruised past the open air restaurant on his way back to the Sarakawa.

    Kate appeared in reception and we drove to the hospital in silence. She wasn't looking chatty and I wasn't looking forward to smelling hospital again. The sterilized instruments, syringed medication, rattling trolleys, distraught relatives, the noise of nurses' starched uniforms knifing through the air and the occasional groan from the patient with the untreated gunshot wound who's been left in the corridor brought on an anticipation of nausea.

    The nausea nearly culminated in another bowl- hugging melodrama when I saw the pickled sweetmeats in large Le Parfait jars on shelves around the medical examiner's office.

    The policeman with the bad feet was already there when we arrived, holding a plastic bag with Kershaw's effects in it which he gave to Kate as I introduced them. She looked in the bag and nodded. The policeman and the medical examiner spoke to each other in the Ewe language and looked at us. We shuffled out of the office in file through swing doors into the morgue. The smell of formaldehyde was one I knew well from post-school lunch dissection classes with unlucky newts and frogs. Renewing its acquaintance was not the nostalgic trip I'd been looking for.

    In this part of the morgue there were just four tables, three with white sheets laid over lumps and the fourth empty. The medical examiner stopped at the first table, raised the corner of the sheet and his eyebrows as he revealed a long black foot with a card attached to the big toe. The second table, the foot was smaller with painted toenails but still black, and the third had no foot at all, just a rounded black stump.

    The policeman hobbled forward and let out a yell and the swing doors at the other end of the morgue exploded open and blasted out two hospital porters, the one taller than the other by about a foot and a half. They stood in front of us, hands clasped in front of them, heads bowed and eyes searching the floor like cabaret spotlights. The medical examiner gave them seven blasts of a verbal shotgun and they ran back through the swing doors which fanned each other on their maligned hinges to a standstill.

    After several minutes of silence, during which the policeman stared at the swing doors so hard they looked as if they might open on their own just to please him, we heard the far-off manoeuvrings of a trolley. We all turned as the doors behind us banged open and, preceded by his two big feet, came another hospital porter riding on the front end of a trolley with a sheet-covered lump on it, pushed with toe-digging effort by his sweaty colleague. They sailed through us, the front porter unable to throw himself off without being run over, and disappeared through the other swing doors.

    The policeman and the medical examiner didn't appear too uncomfortable with this farce and, satisfied with the very frightened African voices on the other side of the doors, turned to us and smiled. The trolley came back in at a funereal pace. The two porters lifted the body on to the table with undertakers' solemnity and the medical examiner lifted the sheet corner over a white foot. He checked the card and nodded at us.

    Kate, whose only noises this morning had been a mumbled thank you to the policeman, moved forward on stiff legs. She looked as if she'd had a bad night, but it was difficult to tell given her normal haggard look. It was a feeling she gave off - a feeling of 'don't get too close', 'definitely don't touch or stroke', 'just keep your distance and you won't have claw marks down your face'. I stood next to her at the head of the body.

    The examiner's cherubic black face looked up and he peeled back the sheet. Kershaw looked no better, in fact, he looked worse - as if he'd been left out in the sun with the old folk. More skin had decomposed so that more of the skull was visible. His teeth snarled through where his cheek used to be. Kate took her bottom lip between her teeth and bit it white. She touched the brown hair, her face twitching. Then she took the sheet and whipped it off down to the cadaver's legs. The chest and torso weren't decomposed. There were the roughly stitched, brutal autopsy scars but all eyes skated over these to Kershaw's genitals. The policeman's eyeballs sprung out at me. Kershaw's penis lay between his thighs, long, thick, fat and misshapen like a homemade chorico. Kate threw the sheet back over the head and said: 'That's him,' and left the morgue.

    The policeman's shoulders were shaking and he showed me a set of brilliant white teeth and a twelve-ounce raw burger tongue and said: 'There're some things a woman never forgets.'

    'Like the mole on the top of the left thigh,' I said. The policeman peeked under the sheet and roared and grabbed at my shoulder for support.

    In the examiner's office, all the paperwork for the release of the body was ready. The cause of death was given as drowning and the verdict, misadventure. Kate signed them and the policeman witnessed. We talked about the airline and the time of the flight, which was just after midnight that night. Hands were shaken, no money was in them. It was the cleanest piece of African red tape I've ever seen.

    We arrived at KLM's offices just before they closed at 12.00 and a very efficient woman with the inauspicious name of Fafa said she would handle all the arrangements and Kate gave her the release papers.

    Twenty minutes later, we sat at the traffic lights and a boy knocked on Kate's window and she opened it. He raised a filthy bandage over his eye and showed Kate the empty socket, who yelped and grabbed a handful of my shirt. I gave the boy some coins and he left with the whimper of a dying lettuce.

    'You were out last night?' I asked.

    'I was,' she said.

    'Anything wrong with the hotel?'

    'I don't like luxury. It makes me feel dead. Steve was crazy for it. Room service, mini bars, buffets, drinks by the pool, all that kind of thing - he'd have killed for it.' She shrugged her expression off with her eyebrows.

    'Where did you go?'

    'I wanted to go to a restaurant. The taxi driver dropped me off at a German place which wasn't what I wanted. I found a place with a more African menu and ate there. It's called Keur Rama, do you know it?'

    'My favourite place. Are you hungry?'

    'No thanks.'

    I took Kate back to the Sarakawa. She said she didn't need me to take her to the airport so we said goodbye. I watched her go up to her room. I asked reception if room 405 had made any calls last night and they said she hadn't but that she had received one. They didn't know whether it was local or long distance.

    On the hotel steps, I met Yvette with a spinnaker of blue silk billowing out behind her.

    'Did she identify the body?' she asked, her eyes searching me under her bluebottle sunglasses.

    'She did,' I said. 'I didn't know art buyers were so nosey.'

    'It must have been very difficult for her,' she said, raising her sunglasses. 'The body was in the water a long time - in very warm water with lots of things in it.' She hooked and unhooked her finger at me like a small aquatic beast picking at its food.

    'Her husband had a big dick,' I said, and her sunglasses slipped down and slammed her eyes shut like a visor.

    'That helps,' she said, with a pout of her lips.

    'I have something for you,' I said, walking to the car. I opened the glove to take out the sackcloth which wrapped the bell heads and noticed that the photographs in there had gone. I leaned further in and saw that the prints I'd had done earlier were still in the map tray. I stood and opened up the sackcloth on the car roof.

    'What do you think?' I said, standing the bell heads up.

    She put her sunglasses on the roof and examined the bronzes. She could see that the sharper bronzes were fakes but she thought the primitive imitation bronzes were genuine and offered 4000 French francs a piece. I rewrapped the bell heads and put them back in the glove and turned to Yvette.

    'Yvette Dussolier,' I said, 'if that's your name, you know as much about African art as an Eskimo, and that's being tough on Eskimos.'

    Yvette didn't like me looking at her and she didn't like being without the protection of her sunglasses, which she reached for on the roof. I got to them first.

    'It's time we talked, don't you think?'

    She led me back into the Sarakawa and up to her room. She knocked three times on the door and waited. The door opened an inch. Yvette paused a second and went in. I followed. Jasmin startled me by appearing from the bathroom, but she had nothing in her hand and just filed in behind me. I sat down on the bed opposite Yvette. Jasmin stood behind her.

    'You were saying,' said Yvette.

    'I was saying you don't know anything about African art, which you don't. You know less than I do, which for someone who's said they know enough "not to get rolled" means you must have a big hole in your bank account. You do know a lot about Françoise Perec and Steve Kershaw. And I get the feeling you'd like to know more. So would I. You've been using the one big advantage you've got in life to try and do that, by getting close to Charlie Reggiani and, on one occasion, me, except… I know you don't like men, not in that way anyway.' Yvette didn't flinch. Jasmin tucked her T-shirt into her jeans. 'What I don't know is why you're going to all this trouble, unless it's the sad old reason why anybody does anything. The money.'

    'The money?' asked Yvette.

    'Your turn.'

    Yvette stood up, went to her purse and took out an ID card.

    'Françoise Perec was my colleague. I work for the IMB out of Abidjan.' She handed me her ID card. 'I am not here in an official capacity. I am here because I don't like what happened to my friend. I am trying to find out who killed her and, as it turns out, Steven Kershaw. Michel, the same Michel as your friend knows in the French Embassy in Cotonou, has been helping me with information. I am interested in Kershaw because he was the last person that we knew of who saw her alive, and I am interested in Charlie because according to her report, that was the last place she'd been before her death. I could have joined you and your friend Bagado, but that is not how I work. I always work alone. The less people know about me the better.' She paused and lit one of her thick white cigarettes. 'What money?' she asked.

    I told her as much as I could remember at the time and we came to an agreement. Bagado and I would continue with what we were doing and she would keep her hooks into Charlie. She said that she couldn't spend all her time with Charlie, that he was cooking her dinner the following night but that it wasn't very classy to sit around on his white leather sofas painting her nails all day like a gangster's moll. I told her that Moses, if I could find him, would do his usual excellent job of hanging around doing nothing in Charlie's compound. When I stood up to leave, I held out my hand to Yvette.

    'Still angry with me?' she asked.

    'Not any more,' I said. 'Since we're on the same side.' She took my hand and kissed me on both cheeks as if she were about to present me with the Legion d'Honneur. 'You're making me feel as if I'm on my way to certain death.'

    She laughed and said, 'And we never got married.'

    I left the Sarakawa at one o'clock and drove to the Keur Rama and spoke to the owner, who told me that no foreigners had eaten in his restaurant last night.

    Outside the German Restaurant there were four or five fruit and vegetable stalls run by young women selling the same, but more expensive, versions of what you could get in the market. A 1000 CFA bought me the information that Kate Kershaw had taken another taxi from the restaurant. A further 1000 CFA to one of the women who knew the driver a lot better than others bought me the taxi's number and she told me through all the giggling that its usual hangout was in the rank outside the Sarakawa.

    The cab driver was fourth in line and asleep but wasn't too annoyed at being woken up by a 1000 CFA fluttering under his nose. He remembered Kate Kershaw and said he'd dropped her off at eight o'clock outside the Hotel de La Paix which was further along the coast road than the Sarakawa and would have been much easier to get to with one taxi than two.

    I drove to the Hotel de La Paix and found a waiter who had served Kate Kershaw with a gin and tonic. She'd sipped it for fifteen minutes and then left, her glass still half full. I asked the hotel doorman if he'd seen Kate Kershaw or ordered a taxi for her and tried to jog his memory with my last 1000 CFA note, which he accepted before telling me he wasn't on duty last night. I stripped the note out of his hand before it found its way into his pocket and after I'd spoken to everybody I could find who'd been there last night, I gave up and headed back to the house.