Robert Wilson - Instruments of Darkness

‘It’s been a long time,’ I said, holding her wrist and letting my hand slip down into hers. She breathed heavily, licking her lips and said nothing. Moses came in the kitchen. Heike looked across at him, her shoulder against mine. Moses grinned. His sex radar was infallible.

We ate the chicken with some hot Piment du Pays that I’d brought over from Togo. I opened up a bottle of cold Beaujolais that had had Heike’s name on it for the last couple of months. Moses stuck to beer. Afterwards, we dragged ourselves back into the living room and carried on counting the money.

It was 10.30, we were taking it in turns sighing, me like a horse on a cold morning, Moses like a dog left in a car, and Heike like someone who’s into her third day in Immigration. She stood up, stretched and went to her bag and came back with a pack of cards in her hand.

‘Poker?’ she asked.

Moses, who had fallen back with his head resting on some blocks of cash, sat up.

‘You deal, Miss Heike.’

‘Miss Heike beat us no small,’ I said to Moses.

‘There’s nothing like playing with other people’s money,’ she said and riffled the pack of cards. The noise from the cards shot through me and I sat rigid. The tickering from the car, but not the car, the noise of a playing card flicking over the wheel spokes of a bicycle. There was always fifty bicycles behind you in Cotonou. That was the tail. The noise had stopped as soon as we’d got to the house. Vasili was right – Madame Severnou’s first lesson. How to outwit the Oyinbo * without raising a sweat.

‘Something the matter?’ asked Heike.

There was a click at the gate. Moses turned on to his knees and was up at the window looking down like a cat.

‘It’s Helen,’ he said.

‘What’re we nervous about?’ asked Heike.

I found myself staring down at over a million pounds in cash and feeling things going wrong. With Heike here I’d lost concentration, hadn’t thought things through. I’d had that feeling in the port this afternoon that Madame Severnou was going to be trouble. I’d done nothing about it and now lesson number two was coming. How to burn the Oyinbo for the lot.

Moses knew what I was thinking and was already packing the tied-up blocks of money into carrier bags.

‘Let Heike do that,’ I said, tying up the bedsheet. ‘Tell Helen to go back to her sister and get the car ready.’

Heike was on the floor packing the money. I picked up four carrier bags and the sheet and ran downstairs. Moses was reversing the car into the garage. Helen slipped out through the gate. I flung the money into the boot and ran back up the stairs. Moses was out and opening the gates. I hit Heike coming through the doors telling me she had it all.

I left the lights on, checked the floor and dropped down the steps two at a time. Moses drove the car out and I closed the gates. The car pitched and yawed over the mud road. Heike leaned forward from the back seat. We parked up under some bougainvillaea that fell down the walled garden of the house on the opposite corner to mine. We could just see the gates. It was very dark and the light cast from the living room window was blocked by the head of the palm tree in the garden. We sat with our breath quivering like sick men waiting to die.

After fifteen minutes the paranoia wore off. Moses played a drum solo on the steering wheel. Heike sat back, looked out the window and hummed something from Carmen. I sat with my back against the window and my arm hung over the top of the seat and played with her fingers.

‘So,’ asked Heike, with a little German creeping into her accent to show me she was annoyed. ‘What’s going on?’

‘It’s a lot of money,’ I said, only half concentrating, ‘and the person who gave it to me wasn’t very happy about what she got in return. I think we might be getting a visit. We were followed out of the port this afternoon but I thought we’d lost them.’

‘It’s a lot of money for rice.’

‘It’s for parboiled rice,’ I said. ‘Seven thousand tons of it. The Nigerians won’t touch anything else. There’s an import ban, too, which gives it a premium.’

‘You’re going to smuggle seven thousand tons of rice into Nigeria?’

‘Not smuggle, exactly. The Nigerian government have said that each man can bring in a bag of rice legally. We’ve got five hundred guys who are going to take two hundred and eighty sacks each, one at a time, through the border at Igolo, north of Porto Novo.’

‘You can do that?’

‘It needs a bit of help which is why my client, Jack Obuasi, cut this woman, Madame Sevenou, into the deal. She can oil the Customs.’

‘Have I met Jack?’

‘If you had it would have probably been in his bed, and I think you would have remembered that.’

‘So who is he?’

‘He’s an English/Ghanaian who lives in Lomé. This isn’t the first job I’ve done for him, but it’s only the second time with this Severnou woman. She’s not easy. For a start, I can tell there isn’t enough money. I reckon we’re short about fifty to a hundred mil. She’s a greedy woman…with an appetite.’

‘It was only Helen, remember.’

‘So far.’

‘And you’ve still got the documents?’

‘Yes, but that doesn’t mean very much. A non-negotiable bill of lading with a bit of tippex, some faxing and a couple of million CFA could get to be negotiable.’ I gripped her finger and she bit back the next question.

Headlights lit up the mud road and were killed. A quiet engine cut out and a car rocked over on its expensive suspension and stopped in front of the gates to the house. The doors opened. Four men got out. They didn’t close the doors. They weren’t carrying violin cases but they did have long arms. They went through the gates. Moses started up the Peugeot which made a noise like a tractor and baler and we rode up on to the tarmac and went into town.

We bought some pizza at La Caravelle café to take away. We had a beer while we waited. Some white people came in. We must have looked tense. They walked straight back out. Heike had thrown away the cigarette holder and was smoking for Germany.

We crossed the lagoon and turned off down towards the coast and the Hotel Aledjo where we took a bungalow and finished counting the money at three in the morning. The total was fifty million CFA short, a hundred thousand pound commission for Madame Severnou. By this time, I had a half bucket of sand up my eyelids and Heike was asleep sitting on the floor with her head on the bed. Moses and I packed the money inside the car so that it looked empty from the outside. Moses lay down on a mat on the porch of the bungalow with the bedsheet from the money.

I put Heike on the bed and threw a sheet over her; as it landed, she opened her eyes. There was nobody behind them. Her voice said, ‘I’m going.’ Her eyes closed. She was asleep. Normally, when she came down from up country, the first night we made love of the desperate, savage kind that two months’ celibacy encourages. It was something we liked to do besides drinking, something that kept us going together. This time I left her a note. I gave Moses some money and told him to look after Heike in the morning and then drove the 100 miles west along the coast to Lomé, the capital of Togo.

Wednesday 25th September

They didn’t bother to search the car at the Benin/Togo border and it was still dark when I left the Togo side of the frontier. I couldn’t make out the sandbar at the mouth of the lagoon at Aneho but by the time I came to the roundabout for Lomé port, it was light. The morning was fresh, unlike my shirt.

After commercial Cotonou, Lomé was a holiday resort. There were European luxury hotels and restaurants which fronted on to the beach and air-conditioned supermarkets with more than tomato purée in them. Most of the buildings had seen paint during the decade and a lot of the roads were metalled and swept clean. There was greenery in the town which backed on to a lagoon traversed by causeways which took you out to the suburbs. Lomé is a freeport where booze and cigarettes are cheaper than anywhere else in the world. Life was a permanent happy hour.