My Name is N - Robert Karjel

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I think is the more likely…but you know me, Bruce. It’s just not possible for me to even think like that.’

      ‘Whereas I…’

      ‘Quite.’

      ‘…go grasping the wrong end of the stick,’ I said. ‘We used to be partners, didn’t we, Bagado?’

      ‘And very complementary ones too, I thought.’

      ‘I don’t remember getting any compliments.’

      ‘I can’t think why,’ said Bagado, his neck disappearing into the collar of his mac.

      ‘So what’s Bondougou’s game? What’s he done to…?’

      ‘He’s gone too far,’ he said, to the dense knot of his dark tie.

      ‘Well, I thought he must have done more than scribble over your prep,’ I said, wiping a finger across my forehead and dropping a hank of sweat through the metal grating of the platform floor.

      ‘Five girls have gone missing…’

      ‘In Cotonou?’

      ‘Schoolgirls,’ he nodded. ‘The youngest is six, the eldest, ten.’

      ‘And he won’t let you near it?’

      ‘He’s put one of his resident idiots on it.’

      ‘Any bodies turned up?’

      ‘No.’

      ‘You think all five are connected?’

      ‘Things like that are always connected.’

      ‘Why do you think this is Bondougou’s business?’ I asked. ‘Just because he won’t let you near it, or what?’

      ‘He’s on it. He reads everything that comes in. Takes all the reports verbally first. He’s very interested.’

      Bagado started to snick his thumbnail against his front teeth, a tic that meant he was thinking – thinking and worrying.

      ‘How am I supposed to fit myself in on this?’ I asked. ‘If Bondougou finds me sniffing around he’ll hit home runs with my kneecaps. And the usual usual – I’ve got a living to earn somehow.’

      ‘I know, I know,’ he said, and stared down into the hold at the five dead men. ‘How are we going to get these men out of here?’

      ‘Put them in a cargo net and lift them out.’

      ‘Let’s go,’ he said. ‘Before I get morbid.’

      ‘You mean you aren’t morbid yet?’

      We climbed back up on to the hot metal deck and leant over the ship’s rail, gulping in air cut with bunker fuel and some muck they had boiling in the ship’s galley – whatever, it was fresh after all that. The full weight of the afternoon heat was backing off now, the sun tinting some colour back into things.

      ‘I want you to help me, Bruce.’

      ‘Any way I can, Bagado,’ I said. ‘As usual I’m running this way and that, feet not touching the ground.’

      ‘Who’s that for?’

      ‘Irony, Bagado. Don’t go losing your sense of irony.’

      ‘I’m losing my sense of everything these days…because there is no sense in anything. It’s all non-sense. How did I get to this pretty pass, Bruce?’

      ‘This pretty what?’

      ‘Pass.’

      ‘Is that one of your pre-independence colonial expressions?’

      ‘Concentrate for me, will you?’

      ‘OK. You’ve been manoeuvred into a position by Bondougou and now you’ve decided to manoeuvre your way out and I’m going to help you.’

      ‘How?’

      ‘You’ve only just saddled me with the problem. Let me run around a bit, break myself in on it.’

      ‘No hit men.’

      ‘I don’t know any hit men. How would I know any, Bagado? Just because I mix in that…’

      ‘Irony, Bruce. I was being ironical.’

       2

      I drove out of the port, the sky already turning in the bleak late afternoon. People were still standing over where the boy’s arm had been crushed, the stain darkening into the tarmac. I turned right on to the Boulevard de la Marina, heading downtown. Bagado had told me to keep my mouth shut about the stowaways and the fresh timber theory. If he wanted to land the marlin instead of the minnows he needed some tension to build up on the outside and the best way was to let the rumour machine run amok.

      The traffic was heavy in the centre of town, with the going-home crowd heading east over the Ancien Pont across the lagoon. The long rains had been going on too long and the newly laid tarmac for last year’s Francophonie conference was getting properly torn up. Cars eased themselves into crater-like potholes. Bald truck tyres chewed off more edges as they ground up out of the two-foot trenches that had only been a foot deep the week before.

      Night fell at the traffic lights in central Cotonou. Beggars and hawkers worked the cars. Mothballs, televisions, dusters, microwaves. I didn’t do too much thinking about Bagado’s problem. Disappearing schoolgirls was not my business and the only way Bondougou was leaving was if he overplayed a hand against somebody a lot nastier than I and they gave him the big cure. That might happen…eventually. But me? I’d rather steer clear of that stuff. Make some money. Keep my head down. Things were going better than usual. I had money in my pocket and Heike, my English/German girlfriend, and I were getting along with just the odd verbal, no fisticuffs. I got a surge just thinking about her and not only from my loins.

      A calloused hand, grey with road dust, appeared on my windowsill. It belonged to one of the polio beggars I supported at what they called ‘my traffic lights’.

      ‘Bonjour, ça va bien?’ he asked, arranging his buckled and withered limbs underneath him.

      ‘ça marche un peu,’ I said, wiping my face off. I gave him a couple of hundred CFA.

       ‘Tu vas réussir. Tu vas voir. Tu vas gagner un climatiseur pour ta voiture.’

      Yes, well, that would be nice. These boys understand suffering. I could do with some cool. I could do with an ice-cold La Beninoise beer. I parked up at the office, walked back to the Leader Price supermarket and bought a can of cold beer. I crossed the street to the kebab man, standing in front of his charcoal-filled rusted oil drum, and had him make me up a sandwich of spice-hammered meat, which he wrapped in newspaper.

      The gardien at the office said I had visitors. White men. I asked him where he’d put them and he said he’d let them in. He said that they’d said it would be all right.

      Did they?

      I went up, thinking there was nothing to steal, no files to rifle, no photos to finger through, only back copies of Container Week and such, so maybe I’d find a couple of guys eager to see someone to brighten the place up and keen to part with money just to get out of the place.

      Sitting on my side of the desk, just outside the cone of light shed from a battered Anglepoise, was a man I recognized as Carlo, and on the client side a guy I only knew by sight. Suddenly my lamb kebab didn’t taste so good. These two were Franconelli’s men. Roberto Franconelli was a mafia capo who operated out of Lagos picking up construction projects and Christ knows what else besides. We’d started our relationship by hitting it off and then I’d made a mistake, told a little fib about a girl called Selina Aguia, said she was interested in him when she wasn’t (not for that reason,

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