LITMIR.BIZ

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asked the driver if he’d seen the last car to pass him on the road. He looked at me as if he’d had a bellyful of something that wasn’t food, and I was there to tread on his toes, while he patched up the inner tube of a tyre that wore its tread like a race memory. I left him to it and went up to the bar.

      I nodded at a long-limbed guy slouched across a table. He nodded back. I washed in the two-man lavatory packed with seven desperate people jogging on the spot, their trainers squeaking on the tiled floor. The only things that were communicating were pacemakers and brand names.

      ‘The john don’t flush,’ said a weary voice from one of the cubicles. The room groaned. I got out of there.

      I ordered a beer and sat at the old guy’s table. He introduced himself as Harold and told me about his trip, told me how many people had died on his trip, without my asking. I cut through it after five minutes and asked him if he’d seen the car. He said he had and that it was a dark saloon which was a big help – probably a Peugeot too, an even bigger help.

      It was suddenly dark. Harold still hadn’t moved anything apart from his hat across his face. There was an intensity in the atmosphere, a stillness that meant that rain was charging down the coast towards us. Nobody spoke. A woman sighed and a man added a rattly cough –we could have been in the end ward of an old people’s home, the ward closest to the Chapel of Rest.

      Lamplight flickered across the lagoon in the village. Low African voices coaxed the boats through the water. Toad-talk puckered the darkness and insects worked through the night. The air was stuffed into the room.

      ‘Gonna rain,’ said Harold.

      The sprung fly-screen door whinged open and snapped shut. Harold’s hat stopped for a moment. A younger man in his early sixties came in and told them they were going to leave. They moved as one. Harold straightened and said something about not wanting to die on the premises and an old woman from the group chastised him. He looked through me over my shoulder, out of the slatted windows and mosquito netting into the dark.

      ‘I wouldn’t wanna die out here,’ he said, and then focused on me as if I was a candidate.

      They filed out. Trousers hanging off bottoms with no buttocks, backs curved, forearms withered, breastless concave chests breathing shallow in the deep, thick air. The screen door slapped shut on the last of them.

      I moved further into the bar and sat by the window which should have shown the lagoon or given at least the comfort of water lapping but showed only the grey haze of netting on black and the sound of air fizzing. The minibus moved off. A light breeze fanned off the water and guttered the candles on the tables. I had two more hours to kill.

      The rain filled in the time. I helped it along with a few beers served by the barman who came from Sierra Leone and who demanded payment as soon as the bottle hit the table. He took the note and flattened it on the table, picking out any folds and creases and then folded it in half lengthways. He talked all the time, concentrating on his work and telling me he had left Sierra Leone because there was no work there and he reckoned the Liberian war was going to drift across the border and stir up trouble in the eastern part of his country where all the diamonds were.

      ‘They look for diamonds, buy guns,’ he said.

      ‘Where do they get the guns from?’

      ‘They have logs…timber…in Liberia, but no diamonds.’

      ‘But where do they get the guns from?’

      ‘On the east side, they have plenty wood. Fetch plenty money. You work in the logging camps?’

      ‘No. You?’

      ‘The guns,’ he said, and stopped. The fly screen slapped behind a policeman wearing a black plastic bin liner which he stripped off. He sat down and the barman served him a drink he didn’t pay for.

      The rain roared. The water ran down the mosquito netting and the wind blew spray through it on to my face. It was good to breathe cool air with oxygen in it. The barman went behind his counter, the rain too loud for conversation. I felt the policeman’s eyes on me as I sipped the beer and replaced the glass on the same ring on the table top.

      I was sharing Harold’s reluctance to die. His talk, the pointlessness of dying people touring the world when all they wanted to do was sit on the stoop sipping Diet Coke, had weakened my hands. I could barely pour the bottle, hardly grip the glass. The beer had soured my mouth and I began to think I was heading into something which if it didn’t finish me off might put some years on me in a single, compact, fear-loaded minute.

      Unlike Harold my objection was not to dying out here. The location wasn’t the problem. What did I care? Maybe Harold would rather belly up in the Piggly Wiggly car park in Fort Lauderdale. Me? I didn’t give a damn – as long as it wasn’t now. That was all I cared about.

      My flesh was as chill as a fridged goose and the policeman’s eyes were thinning the hair on the back of my head. I started, several times, to think of Heike sitting in a Berlin café stirring coffee, waiting for someone, but I canned each one before I let myself slide into that particular darkness.

      The rain eased off, the policeman got up, rolled his bin liner and left. The insects started up again. The barman blew out the candles in the bar. I went down to the car. My teeth itched. I looked for the policeman, but it was too dark to see anything in the weakening light from the closing bar.

      With the headlights on I wiped off the number plates and altered two of the numbers with the black tape I’d brought with me. It was probably a pointless exercise now that I’d been seen at the drop point, but pointlessness seemed to be the night’s theme. Inside the car I removed the bulb from the interior light and rolled down the window.

      I drove towards Abidjan breathing in the cool air full of the smell of wet earth from the pineapple plantation. I found the orange arrow and the track down to the lagoon. I rolled into the thick vegetation which covered the track dropping down to the bare, beaten earth in front of the jetty a few minutes after my 8.30 appointment. Large drops of water fell from the high trees as the tyres unstuck themselves from the mud.

      The car skidded, as it came out of the trees, down on to the now puddled expanse of bare earth. My stomach lurched with it at the thought of trying to make it up the steep slope, at the other end of the clearing, if I needed to get away in a hurry.

      The cone of light from the headlights was broken by the corner of another car. The radiator grille and mud-tread tyres belonged to a dark-coloured Toyota Land Cruiser. The paranoia kicked in. This was not the car driven by whoever had been watching me that afternoon. The dark saloon was still out there. I cut the headlights and the darkness shut down around us. If he was out there, he had to be close, because the night was black enough to have texture, so black that you knew that any light was inside your head.

      I left the engine running and opened the door and, without getting out, shut it. I fixed my eyes on the patch of night where I knew the Land Cruiser’s windscreen was and waited, the car in gear, my foot cocked on the accelerator.

      A superior lock clicked. A lozenge of yellow light appeared twenty-five yards away. In the barley-sugar glow, head thrown back and mouth open as if napping in a layby, was the driver, a white man. Moving fast out of the passenger seat an African’s head joined the night. His dark jacket, white shirt, black tie followed. A thin shaft of light, as solid as a blade, angled out. A white spot wobbled over the vegetation. The beam arced across the night sky, the white spot finding nothing out there, before it slashed through the blackness spearing my windscreen.

      I dumped the clutch and picked up speed moving at an angle to the Land Cruiser, no headlights, using the cabin glow from the open Land Cruiser door to aim for where the African stood, a gun in one hand, the torch in the other. A shot – a crack of flame opened and closed. Then the torch was falling, my tyres slapping the puddles. The African’s empty left hand gripped the Land Cruiser’s roof rack. His right hand, still with the gun, pushed up off the door frame. His legs kicked up behind him. Another shot, another white line across the retina, and brown water burst in a puddle to my left. Then impact – the right

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