Chapter 34

Friday 4th October

    I asked Moses to drive me into Accra along the coast road. We stopped at the point where the road first hit the sea. On the right, was a deep green malarial marshland and on the left, rows of very high diseased coconut palms. In front of them was a rocky strip on to which the tight tubular waves burst, creating a fine mist. Accra, which normally looked like the innards of a TV set, looked its best through the chiffon haze.

    A woman begged me to come to her fish stall, taking my forearm in her two strong hands which, flaked with fish scales, gave me a jolt of anxiety that she was passing on a touch of wet leprosy. I let her take me to her table where she threw back a piece of sacking and I met the reproachful, gelatinous eye of a large silver fish.

    I asked her to cut me a good hunk and she tried to persuade me to buy the whole thing. Moses stepped into the discussion, speaking to the woman in Gaa, and I looked down the coast and watched a group of boys playing soccer on the beach a mile away. The action was around the far goalmouth which was just visible through the zest coming off the sea. The goalkeeper nearest me was practising diving saves of greater and greater swank, leaping further and further from his goal. The action moved. The goalkeeper was embedded in the sand. The ball sailed through the unprotected goalmouth and his team mates fell on the stranded goalie with less mercy than a jackal pack.

    When Heike and I had got back into Lomé on Wednesday morning, we took a room in the Hotel Golfe in the centre of town. Heike went to sleep and I called the big man and left a message on the answering machine. This time he called me back.

    'What happened to you?' I asked.

    'What?'

    'I left a message last night on your answering machine.'

    'You did?' he said. It was a reply that made me feel very tired.

    I told him that his million dollars had left the country in a suitcase owned by Mrs Kate Kershaw who took off on a KLM flight early that morning. I told him that if he'd listened to his messages last night he could have had the opportunity of a face-to-face discussion with Steve Kershaw himself. As it was, the man was taking a long bath in the Harveys' mansion with a hole where his heart should have been. The big man didn't understand this and it wasn't a matter of five minutes to explain it all to him.

    What he did do was arrange a reception committee for Kate Kershaw at Schipol airport, but she didn't show. It was only later when he checked the KLM manifest that he found that Kate Kershaw didn't leave on that flight after all. She had taken a storm-delayed flight to Rio de Janeiro on which Michael Caswell and

    Nina Sorvino were supposed to be but didn't make it.

    Nina Sorvino probably waited until half an hour before that flight until she took some kind of action to find out where Kershaw was. She may have called the Harvey mansion and received no reply. She may have gone to the house and found Kershaw dressed in black taking a blood red bath.

    There wasn't that much speculation because there wasn't a lot that Nina Sorvino could tell anybody. She had mixed herself a large speedball, a mixture of cocaine and heroin, and injected it into her left arm on the inside of the elbow joint with a syringe taken from her emergency anti-HIV kit. She was found dead. The left side of her body on which she was lying was grape dark where the blood had settled, her lips were the colour of sloes and her swollen tongue, bigger than a black plum, protruded between her teeth. Needle marks were found on the soles of her feet.

    Bagado had contacted his friends in Interpol who linked up with the Nigerian police and boarded the Osanyin before it left the Apapa docks. There was an exchange of fire which only two of the pirate gang survived. They then woke up Bof Awolowo, who, half an hour later, barefoot and dozy, wearing a pair of pyjamas made with enough silk to kit out a parachute regiment, found himself being fingerprinted in a police station in central Lagos. Madame Severnou, whose ear had been closer to the ground than Awolowo's on his pillow, had disappeared.

    The Togolese police spent a long time in Charlie's living room getting sick from the smell of blood. Charlie had been taken to the clinic and had his wound cleaned, as had Yvette, who had ended up in the same ambulance. They didn't speak.

    Elizabeth Harvey woke up at four o'clock in the afternoon on Thursday 3rd October after a long drug- induced sleep during which her whole life changed. She didn't find Bobo, her houseboy, waiting by the side of her bed with a cup of china tea, but an Interpol detective who was looking for an explanation of her movements on the night of 1st October and the morning of 2nd October.

    She was astonished to hear that Steven Kershaw was found dead in her sunken bath and remembered to collapse into instant grief at the news of her husband's traumatic and fatal chest wounds. She was very helpful in explaining the intricacies of the drug-trafficking operation that her husband and Steve Kershaw had been running for the last few years.

    Jack was the same as when I had left him except a little colder in his eight-foot sliding cabinet in the hospital morgue.

    Heike had gone back to Germany. The day after her kidnap she seemed to be over-calm. She brought the Teutonic side of her character in to deal with the trauma. At night, however, she woke me with a scream loud enough so that, once I'd unhooked my claws from the ceiling, I found that most of the hotel's clientele were in the corridor outside our room. They wouldn't leave until they saw her alive and they weren't easily convinced by my appearance, nor by the Heike-shaped lump hiding under the sheet.

    Yesterday I took her to the airport. Clifford's money paid for the ticket. This whole mess had cleaned me out. We had a discussion about my 'job' on the way. It wasn't healthy for me - nothing broken, but well flayed. I tried to explain that while she was a high noble creature intent on helping others, I was a lower animal who loved to scrabble about in other people's dirt. She didn't buy it, but in several moments of the time we'd spent with each other since the early hours of Wednesday morning, I'd told her that I loved her and this had persuaded her to come back, just to see if I was worth the trouble. I still had the feeling of her trembling birdlike body against mine from when we kissed goodbye at the airport.

    'She go give you this mush. Mister Bruce, two thousand cedis,' said Moses.

    I nodded and the woman slid her knife into the silver skin. She wrapped it in newspaper. We drove to B.B.'s house. As we turned right to go on the ring road via the Trade Center, there was a stall with a sprawl of watermelons falling away from it. I bought one for B.B. Twenty minutes later, we arrived at his house.

    He opened the door himself, looking dressed this time. He wore a well-pressed short-sleeved shirt which just made it around the bole of his stomach. Several buttons' teeth gritted under the strain, which gave his string vest a view of the world. The shirt overhung some grey slacks which fell in folds like elephants' skin, and he wore a pair of shoes which looked as If they'd just played football on the gravel drive.

    'What happen to you?' he asked.

    'I fell over.'

    'Cushion, Bruise. You haff to look where you going.'

    I gave him the fish and the watermelon. He put the fish on the table and roared for Mary. He walked to his chair with the watermelon tucked under his arm.

    He crashed back into the chair, whose legs screeched across the marble floor. He put the watermelon in his lap and alternately tapped it with his knuckles and slapped it with his palm.

    'Ka-ka-ka-ka-ka-Mary!' he roared again.

    'Sah!' she yelled back from the kitchen, and came in tucking her wrap into her waistband. She slowed and walked swinging her arm wide like an army recruit taking the piss. B.B. held up the watermelon on his fingertips and Mary snatched it away.

    'Da-de-de-Mary,' he said, more subdued.

    'Sah!' she replied before he'd finished.

    'De fish, on de table, you fry it. And mek de hot peppy sauce. You want beer, Bruise?'

    I nodded and Mary threw the watermelon up in the air over her head and turned to catch it, which involved a desperate lunge and a near miss for her head and shoulders in the dinner service cupboard.

    'Yairs,' said B.B. after several minutes to the usual non-existent question. 'My God, is a terrible ting.'

    He tapped the arm of the chair and knocked his feet together. Mary put the sliced watermelon in front of him and B.B. hefted his feet off the table and nearly threw his shoulder out reaching for the quarter circles of green-rinded pink flesh.

    'Wait, B.B.,' I said.

    B.B. looked at me as if he'd never received a command in his life and never obeyed one either. I picked up ten napkins and laid them across his belly.

    'Very good, Bruise. You are tinking correck.'

    He dropped his head into the watermelon and like a good carnivore kept one wary eye up. He spat the pips into the fist of his spare hand.

    'You see what I tell you, Bruise?'

    'Tell me again.'

    'I tell you what I told you.'

    I nodded him on.

    'Now you see what happen,' he breathed through his nose, which wasn't occupied by the melon. 'Jack, he greedy. He say to me he doing a lot of business, he making lot of monny. But, I tell you, Bruise, is not so easy now. He see he haff to wok for de monny, and when de monny given to you in firs place you no like it. I see in his face he want more monny. But he no show me de eyes of a wokker. He show me de eyes of a lazy man, a foolish man.' He whimpered, suddenly petulant, and then shouted so that everything stood still. 'Why he need more monny! He haff a good life. He no need more monny. But' - he said softly, holding up a finger - 'he tink he does.'

    I inspected the cotton weave of my trousers until I heard a noise of somebody fighting for air. B.B. was leaning forward, his eyes popping, his face reddening. His spare hand opened and the small change of melon pips fell out. He coughed with his shoulders and a melon pip tore past me and ricocheted off the slatted windows and landed on the table, spinning.

    'Is difficult when you haff everting. Is no purpose. Why you want to have more dan everting? Thassway he never happy. Always different woman. Always tinking there someting better he no haff. I tell you, Bruise.

    I tell you and you no listen. You tink B.B. an old man, a stupid man, but I tell you correck.' He paused, stopped eating and frowned with neanderthal intensity. 'You haff my monny?' he asked.

    'Sorry,' I said, which he took to mean I'd misheard him.

    'My monny. You tek your fee, and expenses for de wife. You have some left?'

    'I owe you one hundred thousand CFA.'

    'You owe me? You no haff it? Where dit go?'

    'I'm broke.'

    'This no very good business you in.'

    'You don't need to tell me.'

    The sun shone on the back of B.B.'s head. He was thinking, and held a piece of melon up so that it glowed red in the light. The garden boy's machete whipped the grass outside. A banana palm flexed and flapped. B.B. sucked the flesh off the rind and bunched up the napkins in his fist, wiped his mouth and said: 'I haff small problem in Korhogo.'

    I sat back in the hot afternoon. I had no wish to listen to B.B.'s problems. Big or small, they were always about money and the talk of money now brought on a metallic taste in my mouth, not unlike blood, and I found myself thinking of Kate Kershaw, alone under the Brazilian sky with a straw hat and sunglasses, measuring her life in cigarette stubs, waiting for a hopeful glance, watching the pretty people, feeling hungry.