Robert Wilson - Blood is Dirt

‘Ours is a new business,’ said Bagado, trying to pull some cheer into his voice.

‘Delicately balanced between start-up and instant bankruptcy,’ I added.

‘A great deal of money could be as much as …’

‘… five hundred dollars,’ I said. ‘We need perspective, Mr Briggs.’

He sucked on the Camel, pulling an inch of it into his lungs without even glazing over. His yellow cigarette fingers were shaking and his thumb flickered against the filter. He was tall and thin. The sort who could eat like a pig and never get themselves over 150 pounds, the sort who kickstarted the day with four espressos and five Camels, the sort who could live off whatever their latest stomach ulcer was secreting. His eyes were sunken and dark, his face lined deeply with creases that dropped from the outsides of his eyes to the corners of his mouth. He tugged at his tie, which was down by his sternum, as if it was crimping his windpipe.

‘You do do this kind of thing?’ he asked. ‘Getting my money back. I mean, that is your … bag?’

‘We run a debt-collection service. We call it debt to be polite. People feel better about returning money which has been “extensively borrowed” rather than “stolen”.’

He nodded and threaded an arm through the back of the chair, trying to break it off.

‘Has your money been “extensively borrowed''?’ asked Bagado.

‘No. It’s been stolen. I’ve been ripped off like you wouldn’t believe.’

‘Oh, we would, Mr Briggs,’ said Bagado. ‘Have no fear of that, we would.’

Napier Briggs screwed the cigarette into the corner of his mouth and struggled out of his jacket as if he’d been strapped in there and we were a paying audience. He sat back exhausted with one wrist still stuck in a sleeve’s gullet. Bagado opened a drawer and produced an empty sardine tin, which was the office ashtray. He nudged it towards him. Briggs tore his fist out of the sleeve and whipped the cigarette out of his mouth, taking a lungful of quality filter. He lit another from the butt and crushed it out in the tin and licked and blew on a finger. He looked blasted by sun, booze and nerves. His skin was stretched tight over his skull, and the remains of his blond hair looked as if it had been stitched in. His lower teeth were stained brown from nicotine and bitumen coffee.

‘How much money, Mr Briggs? You didn’t say.’

‘One million eight hundred and fifty-seven thousand and small … dollars.’

‘Gold bars in a trunk? Cash in a suitcase? Diamonds in a condom?’

Napier Briggs bent over and gripped his forehead. The pain and suffering of money loss getting the better of him for a moment. A man bereaved. You’d have seen more control at an English graveside.

‘Take your time, Mr Briggs. Ours has been passing slowly enough without you,’ said Bagado. ‘Begin at the beginning; now that we know the end we just need to fill in the middle. Colouring by numbers. It couldn’t be easier. What do you do for a living? That’s a start.’

He took a card from his wallet and flipped it across the desk at us.

‘Napier Briggs Associates Ltd. Shipbrokers,’ read Bagado. ‘How many associates?’

‘One.’

‘Who’s that?’

‘A sleeping one. Nonexecutive. Nothing to do with the business. Just an arrangement.’

‘So a one-man band,’ I said, ‘with nearly two million dollars in liftable cash.’

‘A specialist in chemical, and clean and dirty fuel transportation,’ read Bagado. ‘You didn’t get muddled up in a Bonny Light Crude scam, did you, Mr Briggs?’

‘What’s a Bonny Light Crude scam?’

‘It’s not as cheerful as it sounds.’

‘Businessmen come here,’ I said, ‘they get introduced to people who are close personal friends of the president of the Nigerian National Oil Corporation. They visit offices with an NNOC brass plate on the wall. They part with money to register their company as a buyer of unbelievably cheap Nigerian crude oil. They part with money for advance expenses and ship’s bunkers. They part with money for a bill of lading for a few hundred thousand barrels of Nigerian crude that doesn’t exist. That’s a Bonny Light Crude scam.’

‘I take it you haven’t done business in West Africa before, Mr Briggs?’ asked Bagado. Napier looked up, confused, too many things bowling around in his head. ‘You specialize in dirty fuel transportation but you don’t know what a Bonny Light Crude scam is.’

‘No. Yes. I see what you’re getting at.’

‘The truth, Mr Briggs, that’s what we want to get at. That way we can help you. Many of these scams sound incredible in the telling and absurd on paper, but if you’re involved in them they become a part of your life, a part of your business hopes and aspirations. You’ve no need to be coy about …’

‘… my greed?’ asked Napier, his head tilted to one side like an intelligent dog.

‘Be brutal with yourself, by all means,’ said Bagado. ‘But tell us what happened too.’

‘I received a letter from a man who described himself as a senior accountant at the Ministry of Finance of the Benin Republic living and working in Porto Novo.’

‘Do you have this letter?’

‘The letter,’ said Napier, surfing over Bagado’s question, ‘offered me a percentage of something over thirty million dollars. The money came from overinvoicing on a contract awarded to a foreign company.’

‘All you had to do,’ Bagado cut in, ‘was supply them with signed letterheads, signed invoices and the name of your bank along with the account number and telephone/fax number.’

Napier Briggs sat rigid, Bagado’s words as good as a glance across a crowded room of Gorgons.

‘Hundreds of these letters are coming out of Nigeria every week. What’s happened to you Mr Briggs is that you’ve been four-one-nined.’

‘Four-one-nined?’

‘Obtaining Goods by False Pretences, section four-one-nine of the Nigerian Criminal Code. You really haven’t done much business in West Africa, Mr Briggs.’

‘I’ve done some deals,’ said Napier, finding a carat of professional pride from somewhere, and then giving himself away by scratching the crown of his head and picking at imaginary specks on his face.

‘The senior accountant at the Ministry of Finance in Benin, did he come to you via one of your successful deals … as a reward for something, perhaps?’

If we’d been impressed by the range of Napier’s nervous tics before, now we were spellbound by the sheer speed with which his hands shifted over his face and head. He tugged his ears, scratched his head, picked at the side of his nose, smoothed his eyebrows, pulled at the point of his chin, pinched his eyelids, the cigarette changing hands all the time, not having enough to do, he could have used six or seven smokes to keep himself occupied.

‘Why don’t you just show us the letter, Mr Briggs?’ I asked.

‘Napier. For Christ’s sake, it’s Napier.’

‘Napier?’

He lit another cigarette from the butt, and dragged on the stub, hauling the most acrid smoke deep down into his lungs. Bagado nudged the tin again, wincing at what the X-rays must look like. Napier brutalized the tin with the butt and walked to the window holding his forehead with his free hand as if the nicotine rush might drop him.

‘Mr Briggs,’ said Bagado, still not comfortable with Napier, ‘I’m not one for turning down custom. As you can see, we need the money. But, in this case, I think you would be better served, and I will write a letter of introduction, by going back to Nigeria to see a man called Colonel Adjeokuta. He has set up an investigation bureau within the Lagos police force specializing in 419 cases. He knows how these gangs operate, he has case histories, he knows some of the gang members, he has some of them available for comment in the Kirikiri Maximum Security Prison in Lagos, some of them are on death row and are interested …’