LITMIR.BIZ

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      ‘Five dead men.’

      She didn’t blink for some time, her eyes glazing and pinking at the rims in the cold air. Her mouth formed a perfect ‘o’, lower case.

      ‘Five?’ she said, interrogatively.

      ‘Should there have been more?’

      ‘I don’t know what you’re saying…what you’re asking. Are you asking anything?’

      ‘I’m saying he needs some help with that…and I can give it to him.’

      ‘Help with what?’

      ‘Help with the five dead men and his cotton seed on the same ship.’

      ‘How do you know…?’

      ‘Of course, I’d have to see him personally on the subject.’

      ‘But…’

      ‘And you seem to be the only one who can…facilitate that.’

      All the talk about the Kluezbork II had confused her. She didn’t seem to know about the dead stowaways, but she was aware of the cotton seed and that the repercussions could be expensive. I walked across to the window and parted the Venetian blinds with two fingers. The warehouse was very quiet, nobody in there at all.

      ‘And I’d still like to talk to him about veg oil, if that’s possible?’ I said, moving back round to her side of the desk.

      She picked up the phone and dialled a Benin mobile phone number, one of the new ones which had come in since the Francophonie conference last year. I memorized the number.

      She spoke in rapid French, with her little mouth kissing the mouthpiece. I heard nothing. Then she shut up and listened. After a minute she put the phone down and tapped the polished desk top with her red fingernails. She kicked off her shoe and I heard her foot rasping up and down a calf that hadn’t been razored recently.

      ‘You and Jean-Luc been married long?’ I asked.

      She looked up into her head.

      ‘Four years,’ she said.

      ‘You like it in Africa?’

      ‘Very much.’

      ‘Where do you come from in France?’

      ‘Lille.’

      ‘The weather’s not so nice in Lille.’

       ‘Ça c’est vrai.’

      I lowered myself into one of the black leather chairs. Carole kicked off her other shoe and wriggled her feet back to life after they’d been crammed to the points of her five-inch highs with their prissy little bows. The phone went off louder than a ref’s pea whistle. It jolted her. She snatched at it and listened and then held it out to me.

      ‘What the fuck do you want?’ asked a voice in English with barely a trace of French accent.

      ‘Nice English, Jean-Luc. Where’d you pick that up?’

      ‘I know who you are. Now what the hell do you want?’

      ‘To meet,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to talk on the phone.’

      ‘Too bad,’ he said. ‘I only talk on the phone. Who’re you working for?’

      ‘Myself.’

      ‘Bullshit. The kind of work you do, you don’t get off your ass unless somebody’s paying. So who’s paying?’

      ‘A man’s got to live even if he doesn’t have any clients.’

      ‘So what’s all this stuff about veg oil?’

      ‘OK, you’re right. I’m not interested in veg oil. I had to get started somewhere. Your wife wasn’t blowing your trumpet for you.’

      ‘With a mouth that size she doesn’t blow anything,’ he said crudely, and laughed with congested lungs, which set him off coughing.

      ‘Maybe you’d like to talk about the Kluezbork II.’

      ‘What’s that about?’

      ‘You know, Jean-Luc.’

      ‘Yeah, I know. What can you do about it?’

      ‘Those stowaways came in on one of your cotton seed stevedore shifts.’

      ‘And?’

      ‘You know how it works, Jean-Luc. You’re responsible. You’re the white man, for Christ’s sake. You’re as good as a monarch.’

      ‘OK. So you can get the ship out. How much?’

      ‘My fee is two hundred and fifty thousand CFA…upfront. Plus some grease to get things rolling. And if you’re going to be as shy as this you’re going to have to make provision for expenses.’

      ‘I have to be shy.’

      ‘If we meet, Jean-Luc, maybe you can tell me about that problem as well and perhaps you can start living a life again.’

      ‘I’ll call you,’ he said, and hung up.

      Carole stood by the door with a little bag under her arm and some gold-rimmed sunglasses with red lenses on. She’d made a bad mistake. The lipstick she’d applied was dark purple. Her mouth looked like a split plum and didn’t go with anything else.

      ‘I’ve got to leave now,’ she said.

       5

      I sat in my Peugeot 504 saloon, picking at the piping on the seat cover. After a few minutes, Carole tottered around the puddles to an electric-blue Renault 5 Turbo. She smoothed her hands over her microskirt-encased bottom which showed no trace of visible panty line, got into the car, shucked her heels and took off at a fair lick. She had a grinning furry monkey hanging off four yellowing sucker pads in the rear window.

      I let her get ahead and put four cars between her and myself on the Porto Novo/Cotonou road going back into town. She cut away from the line of traffic heading across the Ancien Pont, which she could see was backed up, probably because of the dead schoolgirl. The Renault 5 dodged through the muddy backstreets of Akpakpa and humped on to the metalled road going across the Nouveau Pont.

      In front of the huge sprawl of rust-roofed stalls around the Dan Tokpa market she slowed and rocked up on to the central reservation and stopped next to a petrol hawker. She messed around in the car for a few minutes and came out wearing trainers. She crossed the road and went into the market, past the squatting money changers who must have said something other than Deutschmark, Dollar, Franc Français because she lashed a young guy with a caning look that had all the old hands laughing.

      The market was heaving with people and filth from after the rain. The corrugated-iron roofs were set at decapitation height for my 6’ 4”. Carole’s trim, fatless, five-foot-nothing figure was more suited to this terrain, and I lost her in amongst the electrical goods no more than fifty yards in. I took time to extricate myself. A white man gets a lot of attention in a market like this and I was sold to every inch of the way. I arrived at the exit in time to see Carole’s Renault 5 hop off the central reservation and heard the whistle of her turbo as she nipped through the traffic lights and headed up Boulevard Saint Michel.

      I’d just passed my first stupidity test with an alpha. I wasn’t a great one for punching the roof of my car and damning my eyes under these circumstances. It had happened many times before and I’d always been surprised at how many of my clients didn’t mind hiring someone more stupid than themselves. People like me served a purpose. The trick was to find out the purpose before my usefulness ran out. Jean-Luc Marnier was doing some planning around me and I realized I was going to need more dirt on him before we met.

      I

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