The Big Killing - Robert Thomas Wilson

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      ‘For a million CFA, you supplyin’ you own expenses.’

      ‘So where do we meet tomorrow?’ I asked. ‘Grand Bassam, one o’clock. There’s an old warehouse lagoon side Quartier France, near the Old Trading Houses. You see the car. You find us.’

      Time was speeding up, now that the theoretical pay scale had jumped a few points, so I went back to my room and lay down to get used to it. There was a lot to do if I didn’t want to drift into this exchange unprepared and I reckoned some thinking might help and, although I could do it on my feet, I preferred to be on my back with something liquid in a glass on my chest.

      I didn’t want to use my own car for the drop. It was a mess, which attracted attention, and it had Benin plates which are beacon red on a white background. I’d have to hire a car. My Visa card was in a hospital burns unit somewhere recovering from a seared hologram and couldn’t take a day’s car hire without going into intensive care. B.B. was going to have to be tapped. If he didn’t come through then I was going to have to rely on the money from the drop materializing. If it did, I could pay the car hire but I was still going to have to be careful. Fat Paul looked like the kind of businessman who, when he got money, thought gross rather than net and let his suppliers talk things over with George and Kwabena.

      I found I was thinking more about the money than I was about what was supposed to happen between now and getting it, so I walked to the nearby crappy hotel, which doubled as a whorehouse, where I made my phone calls. There was a woman and a young girl in the lobby, both painted up like Russian dolls. The older and larger woman was asleep with her head on the back of her chair, while the girl sat on her hands and looked across the room as if there was a teacher telling her something useful. She was that young. There was no teacher, but some broken furniture behind the door in the corner which was gradually being used for firewood and above it all an old wooden fan turned with a ticking sound without disturbing any air.

      The madame zeroed the meter without looking at it. I dialled B.B.'s number in Accra. She moved off with a sashay shuffle of such indolence that it took her twelve of my dialling attempts to reach the end of the counter which was three yards long. She was interrupted by a large-bellied African in a white shirt with the cuffs halfway up his forearms and a man’s purse in his armpit. He nodded at the young girl and the madame’s arm struck out for a room key. The man took it and followed the young girl’s neat steps out of the lobby.

      The satellite took my call and beamed it into Accra. B.B. picked up the phone before it had started ringing.

      ‘My God,’ he said, on hearing my voice. ‘Bruise?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘My God. Is ver’ strange ting. I’m tinking ‘bout you dan…you on de phone.’

      ‘A miracle.’

      ‘Yairs,’ he said, and I heard him slapping the wooden arm of his chair. ‘What you want?’

      ‘I’m still here.’

      ‘I see…’ he said, and I heard his fidgeting for a cigarette, the lighter snapping on and the first drag fighting its way down the skeins of phlegm in his lungs.

      ‘I’m short of money,’ I said.

      ‘Ever’body short…Ka-ka-ka-Mary!’ he roared for his housegirl, popping one of my eardrums so that it sang like a gnat. ‘Ashtray,’ he said, chewing over a forgotten sandwich in his jowls.

      ‘I want you to go to Danish Embassy tomorrow. Ask about Kurt. You got passport detail I give you?’

      ‘Ask dem. See if dere’s problem. You know, mebbe he haff problem back home.’

      ‘You’ve got a replacement?’

      ‘You want to make it easy for yourself.’

      ‘I’m thinking,’ he said. ‘I’m thinking I mek your job easy.’

      ‘I’m sure you were.’

      ‘What you say?’ he asked, catching that change of tone and not liking it.

      ‘About money, you mean?’

      ‘Not about de monny! Bloddy monny! Dis ting. Dis monny ting. Gah!’ I sensed him clutching at a twist in his gut. ‘Yuh!’ He sobbed and then relaxed. ‘My God. Stop talking de monny. I know de monny. You yong people got no pay-scharn, you always tinking de monny, always tinking de next ting. You never tinking calm, you always runnin', runnin'. You wok for me, you learn, you learn the ‘vantage of pay-scharn. De African he know it but you no’ learnin’ from him, you tinking he know not’ing, but I tell you, he know tings you never know. Wait small!’ he roared and slammed down the phone.

      There was going to have to be some money at the drop.

      The young girl came back into the lobby, the guy behind her hitching his trousers after what must have been a knee-trembler in the passageway the time it took. He left. She sat down. I called my home number in Cotonou, Benin. The madame walked over and the girl handed her the money and the key. Helen picked up the phone in my house and I told her to make sure Bagado was there between five and seven tomorrow evening. There were some phone messages for me and she put the receiver on the machine and turned it on.

      The four messages were all from a guy in England called Martin Fall. Two on Friday, another on Saturday morning and the last when he was roaring drunk on Saturday night. There was nothing from Heike which was crushing. I thought about calling her, but the last time her mother had answered and Heike wouldn’t come to the phone. Her mother covered for her, but I could tell she was there. I could even see her waving those long slim arms of hers, the big hands open, the face screwed up.

      I started dialling Martin Fall’s home number in Hampshire. He was an ex-Army officer who’d quit after ten years in the service and set up his own security company, based in London. He advised despots on how to stay in power, provided weapons training for elite guardsmen and, I didn’t know for sure, he probably brokered the odd arms deal as well. He was pretty sharp business-wise; he knew he wouldn’t get many repeat orders from these countries when the advice broke down and the despots got what was coming to them so he’d branched out into the commercial world. He now gave corporate executives training on how to be tough, aggressive and competitive. This, as far as I could tell, meant waking them up at four in the morning to drop them in rafts in the middle of the North Sea and letting them cope with the busiest shipping lanes in the world for a couple of days.

      He’d got into corporations at a high level and, with a mixture of a fabricated pukka voice and a tough exterior, had persuaded them to let him handle their security arrangements worldwide. So he advised these companies with offices and executives in dodgy parts of the world on how to avoid being blown up or kidnapped.

      He’d given me some training late at night once when I’d walked into his study and had found him nodding off in a chair with a glass of whisky in his hand. I’d tapped him on the shoulder and had found myself flat on my back with a forearm across my neck, a jagged whisky glass an inch from my eyeball and Martin’s horrible breath in my face.

      He’d married an old girlfriend of mine called Anne, and we’d met quite a few times. When I said I was leaving the old country he’d decided that I could be ‘his man in Africa'. This had meant nothing until now. I got through and told him to call me back, hearing the word ‘cheapo’ as I banged down the phone.

      ‘You should listen to your fucking answering machine,’ he started off sweetly.

      ‘I did.’

      ‘Once every three days. You must be rushed off your bloody feet. What are you doing out there? This is an Ivory Coast number you’ve given me.’

      ‘I’m on holiday.’

      ‘You anywhere near Abidjan?’

      ‘Yes.’

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