LITMIR.BIZ

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sheep?’

      ‘What did you think it was? A white man?’

      ‘No, I … Jesus. What’s he blowing down its leg for?’

      ‘Get some air under the hide. Makes it easier to skin.’

      ‘Don’t they have a shop or anything?’

      ‘No,’ I said, ‘I don’t think they have, Mr …?’

      ‘Briggs. Napier Briggs.’

      ‘Bruce Medway,’ I said, without holding out my hand.

      ‘I know,’ he said. ‘Why the hell do you think I’m here?’

      ‘I’ve never been a great guesser.’

      ‘No, what I meant was …’

      ‘I know what you meant.’

      He ran his hand through some hair on his head in a way that made me think it had been a lot thicker until recently.

      ‘I’ve lost some money,’ he said, looking shambolic enough so that we’d believe him. ‘A great deal of money. I want you to get it back.’

      We didn’t say anything. I looked him up and down and thought about two things. The first, his name. How to make ‘Briggs’ more interesting – stick ‘Napier’ in front of it, get yourself an eyepatch and a black silver skull-topped cane. The man was missing some props. The second thing was whether he had enough money left to pay us to find what he’d lost.

      Bagado’s head came out of the wreckage of his blue mac like a tortoise that’s caught a whiff of spring. He had his hands steepled and the spired fingers were itching up and down a scar he had in the cleft of his chin.

      ‘How much is a great deal?’ he asked, and Napier jumped as high as he had when he’d seen the dead sheep. He rushed at me and drove me out on to the balcony.

      ‘Who the fuck is he?’

      ‘My partner, Bagado. M & B. Medway and Bagado.’

      ‘He’s not …?’ he asked with ferocious intensity.

      ‘What?’

      Briggs wiped the sweat off his face with his hand and flicked it on the ground. He dropped on to the balcony rail with his elbows and looked over. He reared back.

      ‘Oh, my God.’

      The sheep’s intestines were out of the belly now. They slipped and jostled against each other, still warm. The sheep was on its back, skinned, the hide underneath it to keep the meat clean.

      ‘Take a seat, Mr Briggs,’ I said. ‘Take a seat in here.’

      I got him on to a chair. Bagado raised his eyebrows.

      ‘Coffee?’ I asked.

      ‘Black,’ he said. ‘I mean black-black.’

      ‘White,’ said Bagado, ‘au lait.’

      I roared down the stairwell to the gardien who came up to take 2000 CFA off me and I added three croissants to the order. Briggs moved his chair back from the desk. He took out a packet of Camels from his linen jacket which had now become a relief map of a mountainous desert in the thick unsliced heat. He took three matches to light up and flicked each dud through the hole in the wall where the air conditioner should have been.

      At least he wasn’t overwhelmed by our new office. The single plant on the floor in its concrete pot, the view of the neighbouring block out of one window, a mango tree and a tailor’s shack out of the other, a local stationer’s calendar on the wall, and the two of us evidently with only one desk to sit behind, didn’t even have any schoolboy chic let alone adult consequence.

      ‘Ours is a new business,’ said Bagado, trying to pull some cheer into his voice.

      ‘Delicately balanced between start-up and instant bankruptcy,’ I added.

      ‘A great deal of money could be as much as …’

      ‘… five hundred dollars,’ I said. ‘We need perspective, Mr Briggs.’

      He sucked on the Camel, pulling an inch of it into his lungs without even glazing over. His yellow cigarette fingers were shaking and his thumb flickered against the filter. He was tall and thin. The sort who could eat like a pig and never get themselves over 150 pounds, the sort who kickstarted the day with four espressos and five Camels, the sort who could live off whatever their latest stomach ulcer was secreting. His eyes were sunken and dark, his face lined deeply with creases that dropped from the outsides of his eyes to the corners of his mouth. He tugged at his tie, which was down by his sternum, as if it was crimping his windpipe.

      ‘You do do this kind of thing?’ he asked. ‘Getting my money back. I mean, that is your … bag?’

      ‘We run a debt-collection service. We call it debt to be polite. People feel better about returning money which has been “extensively borrowed” rather than “stolen”.’

      He nodded and threaded an arm through the back of the chair, trying to break it off.

      ‘Has your money been “extensively borrowed''?’ asked Bagado.

      ‘No. It’s been stolen. I’ve been ripped off like you wouldn’t believe.’

      ‘Oh, we would, Mr Briggs,’ said Bagado. ‘Have no fear of that, we would.’

      Napier Briggs screwed the cigarette into the corner of his mouth and struggled out of his jacket as if he’d been strapped in there and we were a paying audience. He sat back exhausted with one wrist still stuck in a sleeve’s gullet. Bagado opened a drawer and produced an empty sardine tin, which was the office ashtray. He nudged it towards him. Briggs tore his fist out of the sleeve and whipped the cigarette out of his mouth, taking a lungful of quality filter. He lit another from the butt and crushed it out in the tin and licked and blew on a finger. He looked blasted by sun, booze and nerves. His skin was stretched tight over his skull, and the remains of his blond hair looked as if it had been stitched in. His lower teeth were stained brown from nicotine and bitumen coffee.

      ‘How much money, Mr Briggs? You didn’t say.’

      ‘One million eight hundred and fifty-seven thousand and small … dollars.’

      ‘Gold bars in a trunk? Cash in a suitcase? Diamonds in a condom?’

      Napier Briggs bent over and gripped his forehead. The pain and suffering of money loss getting the better of him for a moment. A man bereaved. You’d have seen more control at an English graveside.

      ‘Take your time, Mr Briggs. Ours has been passing slowly enough without you,’ said Bagado. ‘Begin at the beginning; now that we know the end we just need to fill in the middle. Colouring by numbers. It couldn’t be easier. What do you do for a living? That’s a start.’

      He took a card from his wallet and flipped it across the desk at us.

      ‘Napier Briggs Associates Ltd. Shipbrokers,’ read Bagado. ‘How many associates?’

      ‘One.’

      ‘Who’s that?’

      ‘A sleeping one. Nonexecutive. Nothing to do with the business. Just an arrangement.’

      ‘So a one-man band,’ I said, ‘with nearly two million dollars in liftable cash.’

      ‘A specialist in chemical, and clean and dirty fuel transportation,’ read Bagado. ‘You didn’t get muddled up in a Bonny Light Crude scam, did you, Mr Briggs?’

      ‘What’s a Bonny Light Crude scam?’

      ‘It’s not as cheerful as it sounds.’

      ‘Businessmen come here,’ I said, ‘they get introduced to people who are close personal friends of the president of the Nigerian National Oil Corporation. They visit

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