Читать книгу The Big Killing - Robert Thomas Wilson, Robert Wilson - Страница 12

By ten to five I was back in the Novotel sitting on one of the twin beds in room 307 nearest the window. The high-stacked, bruised clouds of the storm building over Ghana were moving towards me. It would be raining by nightfall. I thought about going out in that storm and doing something for nothing for Fat Paul and that drew me to the secrets of the mini-bar, which I opened but only checked. I needed to be steady for what Fat Paul might have in mind.

I stared at the carpet, waiting for the phone, and had one of those existential lurches when I saw myself – a big man, getting drunk to hold himself together on a small bed in a hotel room in Africa, fresh from a meeting with another drunken bum and about to do something criminal for a vindictive slob. For a moment, I seemed to be on the brink of an explanation for the mystery and absurdity of my situation. Then the god controlling those moments of insight decided I’d be better off without the self-knowledge. A fluorescent light started flickering, pitched at an epileptic-fit-inducing frequency. I turned it off and lay down, relieved that I didn’t have to run down to the bar and tell all the other people deadening themselves to reality that I’d cracked it and we could all relax.

I woke up with the rain on the window and it dark outside and in the room. It was just before six o’clock. I phoned reception – no calls. I made sure they knew I was in 307, having moved me from 205 – still no calls. I took a bottle of mineral water out of the mini-bar and sat in the white light from the chamber and drank it until my teeth hurt. I kicked the door shut and lay back down on the bed in the dark, light coming in under the door.

I was missing something which wasn’t home but felt like it ten times over. Hotel rooms did this to me. I thought of individuals sitting in concrete boxes stacked on top of each other and the human condition got lonelier. I’d fallen for two women before Heike, one of them was now married to Martin Fall. I’ve been disappointed just as much as anybody closing in on forty has. I’d always bounced back, though. It might take a few months of rolling into the cold side of the bed before I’d get used to sleeping in the middle again, but I could always get used to being on my own. This time I wasn’t bouncing back, I was slipping further down the black hole. I was missing Heike more than an amputee missed a leg and people could see it, smell it, and feel it.

Some footage came into my head, black-and-white stuff, a little quick and faltering like an old home movie. Heike was sitting on the floor of my living room in my house in Cotonou, Benin. She wore her big white dress, her legs were crossed and covered by the dress, her long bare arms rested on her knees. She had a cigarette going in one of her large, almost manly, hands and in the other she held a glass with her little finger sticking out. Her hair, as usual, was pinned up any old how so that every loose strand said: ‘kiss this nape'. She sat there and occupied herself smoking and drinking and not saying anything and her completeness brought on a terrible ache, and I shut the film down and drifted off into a lumpy sleep.

I woke up and looked around the darkness in the room, thinking there was a bat flying around expertly missing walls and furniture. I turned on the neon and it blasted the room with light and dark until I’d fumbled around for the light switch by the door. It was 6.30 p.m. The rain still gusted against the window outside and thunder rumbled off in a corner somewhere. The phone went and I tore it off its cradle.

‘I thought you said you weren’t all African…’

‘…This is Leif Andersen, Mr Medway.’

‘Sorry, I was expecting somebody else. Have you got anything for me?’

There was a long crash, one that went on for fifteen, twenty seconds, of falling crockery followed by a roar of approval from down the phone.

‘Are you eating Greek tonight?’ I asked.

‘I’m in a place called Maison des Anciens Combatants in Plateau.’

‘War Heroes in Plate Crash.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Nothing, Mr Andersen. You called. Did the Danish police come through with an ID?’

‘Not yet. The Ivorian police came through with something. They’ve found our Kurt Nielsen down by the Ebrié lagoon about eighty kilometres outside Abidjan. In the pineapple plantations off the road down to Tiegba.’

‘They found him, what, walking around, taking a leak, out of his head…?’

‘Dead, Mr Medway. Strangled with a wire garrotte.’

‘Was he a floater?’

‘I’m not sure…’

‘Was he in the lagoon?’

‘No, he was in a Toyota Land Cruiser.’

‘His own?’

‘It belonged to M. Kantari in Korhogo. He reported it stolen this morning. The report made its way down through Bouaké and Yamoussoukro to Abidjan by this afternoon.’

‘Have you seen the body?’

‘No.’

‘How do they know it’s Nielsen?’

‘He had his passport on him. That’s why they called us.’

‘Did they find anything else?’

‘No, but if they did and it was valuable we wouldn’t hear about it.’

‘Well, Mr Andersen, thanks for your help…’

‘One thing more, Mr Medway. We need positive identification of the body.’

‘I never knew him.’

‘No, but Mrs Nielsen, or Dotte Wamberg, did and we have been unable to contact her.’

‘You want a phone number?’

‘We have one, but first of all there’s no answer and second, these things are better done in person.’

‘What about someone from the Danish Embassy?’

‘There’s no one available. We’ve informed the local police, but they cannot be relied on.’

‘I can’t guarantee I’ll get there tomorrow. You know how things are.’

‘He’s in the hospital morgue. He’s not going anywhere.’

‘Well, I won’t put it like that to Dotte Wamberg.’

‘You’re a sensitive man, Mr Medway, I can tell.’

‘How?’

‘Anybody who drinks Aquavit in the afternoon understands.’

‘I thought it was because I was a drunk.’

‘What does that make me, Mr Medway?’

‘You get diplomatic immunity.’

Andersen laughed. ‘Another thing for you that you should keep to yourself. Kurt Nielsen’s stomach had been ripped open by a set of metal leopard claws. I think they found someone called James Wilson in the lagoon here in Abidjan the other day. He had the same problem. Cheers,’ he said, and put down the phone.

I phoned reception again – still no calls, but there was a fax from Ghana. Then I remembered Bagado and put a call through to Cotonou. The phone rang and rang for minutes until a dull, thick voice answered.

‘Bagado?’

‘Yes.’

‘You all right?’

‘I’ve some fever. A little malaria. I was sleeping.’

‘Do you want some work?’

‘What sort of work?’

‘Picking bananas,’ I said, and he thought about it for ten seconds.

‘Forget it,’ he said.

‘Detective work, Bagado. What the hell else would I call you for?’

‘Picking bananas – I don’t know. I’m nearly that desperate. My little girl is sick and I have nothing. I open the cupboard, and the cupboard is bare…not even any shelves…my wife has used them for firewood.’

‘Go to a travel agent called Bénin-Bénin in the quartier Zongo; you know it. They have some money for you. Seventy-five thousand CFA. Give some to your wife and use the rest to get yourself to Accra. I want you to check out someone who calls himself Fat Paul who works out of an office in Adabraka called Abracadabra Video on Kojo Thompson Road. He has two bodyguards who call themselves George and Kwabena. The first one is a shooter, the second is just very big. He says he runs a video business, you know, a chain of video cinemas. See what you can find out about him. Then come to the Novotel in Abidjan as fast as you can. OK?’

‘What’s the hurry?’

I told Bagado about the failed drop, Martin Fall’s job and the James Wilson/Kurt Nielsen killings and we signed off.

I put a call through to the Hotel La Croisette and the receptionist there answered in a thick, tired voice which came from a head that must have been asleep on the counter. She told me that Fat Paul and Co were in 208 and tried to call them – no answer. Then she started waking up a bit and told me the key to the room was in reception, which meant they must be out. I asked her to check the bar and restaurant. They weren’t there. I asked her if there was a large American car parked outside the hotel and she said that was the only car parked outside the hotel. They were the only guests. The hotel didn’t fill up except at the weekends. The phone went dead. I asked reception to reconnect me. They tried, but the woman said the phones were down with the storm. I left a message that if a Mr Paul called, to tell him I was going to meet him in the Hotel La Croisette in Grand Bassam. I said he might call himself Mr Fat Paul, I didn’t know, and I heard her writing it all down. I told her if anybody else called not to give them that message and took the lift straight down to the basement.

There seemed to be several storms around taking their turn coming in. Thunder boomed off in the north and the sky lit up in the east over Grand Bassam. When I came out of the Novotel it was raining, but not as hard as it had done judging by the slow trickle in the road gutters and the huge bodies of water that had collected at the bottom of the steep streets of Plateau. The storm drains were choked and cars were cruising with water up to their sills.

I crossed the lagoon. The lights were out in Treichville, Marcory, Zone 4A and C, Koumassi, Biétri and Port Bouë. Just after the airport I had to pull over and let the storm through, the rain a solid wall at the end of the car, the wipers out of their depth even at that crazy double speed when you stop looking at the road and marvel at the insanity. The rain blasted full heavy metal on the roof for minutes, then backed off to light instrumental. I set off on full beam, down the black glass road to Grand Bassam.

There were no lights on there either. People were moving around as if an air raid had just finished. A car horn was sounding off constantly in the streets beyond the gare routière and a harsh white halogen light came on by the market, powered by a diesel generator which farted up to full speed somewhere in the dark. The light showed rain slanting silver and people hopping across the streets with plastic bags over their heads. I sank slowly into street-wide puddles and crawled across the lagoon to the Quartier France. I parked next to Fat Paul’s Cadillac in front of the Hotel La Croisette. The sea fringe was invisible in the dark. The roar said it was rough out there. A stiff breeze blew on to the shore, snapping at my shirt.

There were two hurricane lamps lighting the lobby and the receptionist was asleep on a chair behind the desk, her head resting on the wall, snoring. I lifted the key to room 208 off its hook and palmed it as the woman woke up. She was dazed. I asked to go up to the room, showing her the key was out. She took a lamp from under the desk and lit it with the slow and gentle movements of someone on automatic.

The lamplight made huge shadows that loomed and wavered down the warm, bare corridor to Fat Paul’s room. The hotel was silent apart from the loose change and keys in my trousers and my feet on the strip of sisal carpeting over the polished floor. Several rooms had their doors open, sheets piled on the floor in one, the maids slacking with the lack of business during the week. There was a smell of raw sewage that didn’t surprise me after the rain.

Fat Paul’s room was at the end of the corridor, the room on the corner, windows on two sides. The bad smell was getting stronger and changing with sweeter nuances over the sulphur that made my face twitch and my empty stomach sick. The hairs were up on my neck, the sweat cold. I went back down and told the receptionist to find the manager.

The manager was annoyed. He didn’t like problems on a night with no power and with nobody in the rooms. He knew how little money he was making. He changed his tone when he hit the smell in the corridor; in fact, he shut up and got his handkerchief out. He had a master key which I wanted him to use, but his hand was shaking so much I took it and opened up the room.

The stench exploded out of the room, but worse than the smell was the noise. I’d heard that noise on African butchers’ stalls in the market when they flick the black meat with a bloody cloth and with an irritated buzz a skin of flies takes off a foot and relands. That was the first noise. Behind it was something worse. Behind it came the sound of a flap. Something tense and feathery batted the air in the dark. Without thinking, I reached in and turned on the light switch, but the power was still off. I held the lamp in the room and heard the tearing of flesh, and the flap – the flap of a large bird’s wing.

There in the yellow oily light, in the black shadows working their way up the walls, were two vultures. The one with its head down, the other looking up, its whole head covered in blood, black and red in the strange light, as if it had been recently skinned.

The manager’s vomit slapped the polished floor between the carpet and the wall at the same time as the power came back on. Harsh electric light banged on in the corridor and room. The vultures shrieked at the sudden exposure and danced back into the centre of the room, their wings spread. The red-smeared muslin drapes at the windows open to the sea were lifted and twisted almost horizontal to the ceiling by the wind. The floor was covered in blood, the red and black of carnage. The ghastly yellow of Fat Paul’s raw fat quivered as he lay there opened out, mostly naked, his clothes torn off. My vomit, consisting of nothing but soured and burning spirit, joined the manager’s. I retched myself dry and breathless.

We went back downstairs and the manager called the police while the receptionist found me a broom. Back upstairs in 208 the vultures had been joined by a tornado of insects circling the light and speckling the walls. I closed all the shutters but one and beat the vultures out of the room – the two of them screeching, mad, angry, their heads bloodied, their wings heavy. I shut them out and they stayed outside and screeched, scraping their talons on the metal railing of the balcony.

Two of the three bodies in room 208 had been shot. George’s hand was still inside his jacket reaching for his gun. One eye was missing. A large quantity of blood had soaked into his shirt, the jockey tie and the carpet. Kwabena lay with a collapsed wooden table underneath him, one of his large hands over a huge wound in his chest. Fat Paul’s head rested on his shoulder. He had what seemed to be a set of giblets hanging out of his mouth and he’d been opened up the length of his abdomen. Some of his fingers had been sheared off. They lay like cocktail sausages next to him. The ones still attached had no rings on. His gold chain and watch had gone. High up on his chest, against the lighter coffee-coloured skin, I saw the marks that I hadn’t seen on George and Kwabena. The leopard-claw marks. As I closed the door I saw the black hole where Fat Paul’s genitals had been and realized what the giblets were.