LITMIR.BIZ

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nightmare acne.

      There was nothing refreshing about these storms. The sun eased itself into position in no time at all and hammered down so that at eight in the morning, out on the railway tracks, it was already close to eighty degrees, and a thin mist like kettle steam hung in the air. The place stank of putrid salami. My head was coming apart like a coconut after the first machete blow and there was the same flesh-tearing, sucking noise in my ears.

      Bagado was walking ahead of me, pacing the sleepers between the tracks, towards a group of people who were standing around Napier’s body. Bagado was looking over the toes of his shoes for clues, small change, anything that might get him through his current lean patch. I limped behind. Yes, it was back.

      I wasn’t really thinking about the harmattan. I wasn’t that upset by the night-time storms, which I slept through anyway. The heat and the humidity were hell but you either got used to that or you got out. I wasn’t even torturing myself over Napier Briggs. Bagado had talked me out of that kind of thinking some time ago. Not even the gout was penetrating. It was rolling over a short few minutes with Heike that had left me feeling uneasy.

      After Bagado’s news about Napier the flag was well down by the time I’d come back to the bedroom. Heike was lying there with her arms folded across her bosom with no expression in her face.

      ‘I suppose you don’t like me now that I’m not the birthday boy?’ I’d said. It was a joke but I could see from her look that there was some truth in it.

      ‘Bagado with some bad news?’

      ‘Don’t ask.’

      ‘I won’t.’

      I’d pulled on my clothes with her not saying anything and the room full of it. How had it happened? How had the dynamics changed? It hadn’t been Bagado’s call. She was resigned to that kind of intrusion once in a while.

      ‘Don’t be late for the meeting this afternoon,’ she’d said.

      ‘I wouldn’t dare.’

      I’d pulled her to me and kissed her goodbye. She was stiff, wooden, unyielding as if a stagehand was standing in for the leading lady.

      The policemen standing around the body parted as we arrived. Some of them knew Bagado and there was an exchange of pleasantries, the asking after immediate relatives which can take some time in Africa. Then Bagado tried to get down to business with them and they froze. He was speaking to them in their own language, Fon, and they were looking sheepish in more ways than one.

      ‘They’ve been told not to talk to me,’ said Bagado. ‘They won’t touch the body until the senior officer on duty comes. Commandant Bondougou.’

      ‘Your favourite. Is he out of bed yet?’ I asked, and he shrugged.

      ‘Let us, you and I, Bruce, go and sit for a while and … mull.’

      ‘Mull? You’ve got some vocabulary on you, Bagado.’

      ‘Education-the only thing they can’t take away from me.’

      We crouched down and sat on another rail in the siding. Some crows had collected on the corrugated-iron roof of a warehouse opposite. Their toenails clinked on the hot roof, their wings clasped behind them, polite, waiting for the police to have their fill before they moved in. Bagado and I mulled.

      ‘I made some expensive calls after you left for lunch yesterday,’ he said.

      ‘What’d you want to do a thing like that for? He wasn’t even a client.’

      ‘Professional reaction.’

      ‘Who’d you call?’

      ‘Dupont in France.’

      ‘I hope it didn’t take too long to find out they’d never heard of Napier Briggs?’

      ‘It did and they hadn’t and they said they certainly wouldn’t use a shipbroker to sell their product for them.’

      ‘He might have used another company name.’

      ‘And an alias to buy the product? I don’t think so.’

      ‘OK, I’ll buy it. Anything else?’

      ‘Napier Briggs was a very nervous man. He didn’t want to tell us anything about what he’d been doing and he didn’t want the Nigerian authorities involved. He only wanted a private investigation from here, so we can assume his business wasn’t legal. I mean the original business, supplying what he said were sewage treatment chemicals to Chemiclean …’

      ‘Who he told us didn’t exist.’

      ‘But who paid him for supplying the chemicals, so they did exist. They just weren’t legal, they weren’t registered as a company.’

      ‘Was that another one of your calls?’

      ‘Yes.’

      How does an unregistered company import goods from overseas?’

      ‘We’re talking about Nigeria, my friend, not Benin. You couldn’t do it here, but over there …’

      ‘You pay your money,’ I said.

      ‘So your next expensive call was to …?’

      ‘Colonel Adjeokuta, the head of the four-one-nine squad, the man I offered to put Mr Briggs in touch with. He hadn’t heard of Chemiclean, but he was going to make it his business to find out if there was anybody in his department who had. He wasn’t surprised about the Benin connection on the second scam. There’s been a number of those recently.’

      ‘They never stop, these guys.’

      ‘It costs a stamp and an envelope and there’s a sucker born every day,’ said Bagado. ‘So what happened to you last night?’

      ‘Do I look that bad?’

      ‘No worse than usual, but you said you were going to see Napier at the Hotel du Lac. Did you?’

      ‘I did. He got a call from the boys while I was there saying they wanted to give him his money back.’

      Bagado chuckled to himself.

      ‘So we went and had a look.’

      ‘You did what?’ he said, setting solid on the rail as if he’d seen a train coming. ‘What did you want to go and do a thing like that for, he wasn’t even a …’

      ‘Yeah, yeah, Bagado. I know. He offered me ten grand to hold his hand. Dollars. He said there was a big man who’d guaranteed his personal safety. I went because if I hadn’t he’d have gone by himself and …’

      ‘Got himself killed.’

      ‘Point taken.’

      I told him how it had happened.

      ‘Now that’s a problem,’ he said, and we did a quick stick-and-paste job on what were going to tell Bondougou if he was predictable enough to ask what the hell we were doing out on the railway tracks at that hour of the morning.

      Commandant Bondougou arrived a little after 8.30 a.m. and stood over the dead body with his hat in his armpit. His head was fat and broad with the eyes widely spaced, as sinister as a halloween pumpkin. He passed a hand over his shaved head and plugged a finger and thumb in each of his nostrils to keep his brain in neutral. A junior policeman muttered something. He glanced Bagado’s way and looked as if he’d spit if he could be bothered to drag up the phlegm. I wouldn’t have liked to rely on him for an introduction to Cotonou society, we were lower than bilharzia on his dance card. We kept our distance.

      An ambulance arrived. The policemen rolled the body over and stepped back in formation horror. All we could see between their legs was the mass of blood which had poured down Napier’s chest and was now clogged with dust and insects. Bondougou checked Napier’s wrists for a watch and his pockets for money. Nothing. He found a passport in the jacket and opened it. A card fluttered out which a junior

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