LITMIR.BIZ

       Chapter 7

      I showered and changed and went out into the cool night and the smell of wet grass. The cicadas were practising. The inside of my car smelt of wet newspaper and damp carpeting. I shut the car door waiting for the satisfying thunk and heard a chord from a cheap guitar with a broken string.

      The lights were back on in downtown Lomé and the place was full of music. A shop selling cassettes had set up some speakers on the street and for half a mile nobody was walking without a wriggle or a jerk. Three girls with snack food in large aluminium bowls on their heads stood together and bobbed up and down and turned around in time.

      I came out on to the coast road and headed east out of Lomé. A wind was blowing through the low palms along the beach. The stiff leaves knocked against each other and made a harsh clapping noise like a few sarcastic people in an audience.

      The Hotel Sarakawa looked like a recently landed space craft illuminating the dark and attracting humans for observation. The port was lit and it looked as if there might be work going on. Charlie’s bar was on the beach a mile beyond the port. There was a rough track through some wasteland from the metalled road up to his compound which continued a further two hundred yards to another bar called Al Fresco’s where the track looped back to the Lomé/Benin road.

      At the entrance the gardien checked the car and opened the barrier. I parked outside a huge paillote which was the restaurant part of the bar. The paillote was a massive thatched cone supported by wooden beams. There was seating for a hundred people and a bar underneath. It was empty. It always was after rain. Next to the paillote was a concrete building which Charlie had built a couple of years ago with profits from all those fingers he had in all those pies. This was the real bar. A huge open plan room looking out to sea with a thirty-foot bar on the back wall, seating for fifty around a piano and a lot of room to stand and fall in.

      I walked into the air conditioning and piano music. The hum of the distant generator that ran Charlie’s compound disappeared. A light-skinned African girl with close cropped hair and a long neck was playing some Billie Holiday and looking out to sea through the arched windows. There was nothing out there except the dark.

      At the bar, balancing on one leg of a four-legged stool, was a Lebanese guy in his early twenties. He had his palms flat down on the bar, his head hung at a level which gave him a perfect view of the whisky in his glass as he spun from one side to the other on the axis of the bar stool’s leg. A Togolese girl was drying some glasses and looking at her single customer with concern and disdain. I stood at the bar and the Lebanese looked at me from under his armpit. His lips hung slackly.

      ‘Charlie?’ I asked the girl.

      The Lebanese swung his head up to look at her too quickly and too hard and it took several adjustments for him to focus. The girl shrugged at me with her eyeballs. The Lebanese gave me an exaggerated translation which was too much for his tenuous equilibrium. The stool spun violently on the axis of the single leg and sent the Lebanese crashing against his back into the bar. The stool slipped away from him and entangled itself in his legs, impairing his recovery so he had to throw himself on the mercy of two other bar stools who wanted nothing to do with him. He came down hard on the tiled floor with the chrome bar stools bouncing around him like a street gang. The pianist stopped, swivelled around on her bottom and gave us a clanging discord with her elbow on the middle section of the piano keys. It had been a very quiet evening.

      The Lebanese needed plenty of help but looked as if the exercise might sober him up. I walked to a door at the end of the bar, opened it and caught a faceful of sea air. It was only four or five yards across some damp, hard ground to Charlie’s house. There was a light on. I closed the door on the Lebanese who was finding new ways to say putain merde. Billie Holiday resumed.

      Charlie’s maid answered my knock as if she’d been waiting on the other side of the door all evening. I stood in the hall which had a single light in it, shining down directly over a plinth with a slim-necked pot on it which spouted a flower with a long green stem and a head like a bird with an excited comb.

      I was trying to work out what this image was saying to me when Charlie’s maid returned and led me down a dark corridor to the living room which, like the bar, looked out through arched windows on to the sea. There was no sound of air conditioning but it was very cool in the room, and although there was no smoke, the smell of Gauloise was strong.

      Charlie was sitting on the edge of a ten-foot white leather sofa, right in the middle with his legs apart, his forearms resting on his thighs and his large hairy hands dangling in between his knees. There were two women each sitting in a corner of an identical sofa opposite him. There was a tiger skin rug laid out diagonally between the sofas held down by a large glass-topped table with three glasses and an ashtray the size of a cymbal on it. One of the women had her bare foot in the tiger’s mouth; a long canine slid in and out in between her big and second toes.

      ‘Bruce! My God!’ said Charlie in his expansive American businessman’s way. ‘How ya doing?’ He came over and clapped me on the shoulder and shook my hand in his strong paw. Charlie looked shorter than he was only because of his width. He was six foot and a little slimmer than a brown bear but with no less body hair. It would be a big mistake to say he was fat and an understandable mistake to think it. He had a covering. Something for the winter, he would say as we sat outside on a December evening in ninety-five degrees, sweating like pigs, drinking dry martinis made with gin and an olive and held in the general direction of Italy for the vermouth.

      He was bald and employed no techniques for disguising it, although I’m sure he could have trained some hair up from his shoulders and worn his collar up if he’d wanted to. His bare head was tanned dark brown and shone like polished teak. His remaining black hair was cut very short. He had strong black eyebrows which you would have thought would meet in the middle but didn’t, and a thick bristly moustache. His eyes were dark green with long dark lashes, his cheekbones high, his jawline solid and square

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