Robert Wilson - The Big Killing

The tapes rewound, I boxed them and I went back up to reception to find Moses sitting in the lobby looking hang-dog at his flip-flopped feet.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘I pissing glass, please, Mr Bruce,’ he said a little too loudly for a hotel lobby. We watched the pink newspaper that had been sitting next to Moses close and fold and a businessman took his full head of side-parted hair elsewhere. I sat in his place. Moses shrugged and played with his fingers.

‘What about the condoms I gave you?’

‘They finish.’

‘They finish?’

‘Yes please.’

‘No, you finish when they finish. When they finish you stop.’

‘I don’ understand.’

‘When you no have condom, you stop, you no stop you go get AIDS.’

‘I try,’ he said, showing me a pair of clean palms. ‘They no let me.’

‘I can tell you really protested,’ I said, and told him to get the car.

I went up to my room and split open Fat Paul’s cassette. There was nothing inside it except tape. I stuffed it back inside the envelope with its broken seal. I dropped the copy into reception and kept the original with me. Moses was waiting outside.

We drove around the Baie de Cocody past St Paul’s Cathedral and into the residential suburb of Cocody itself. I left Moses at the Polyclinique and gave him the last of my money.

‘This no catch for nothin', Mr Bruce, please sir.’

‘It’ll have to catch because that’s all I’ve got.’

‘You go-come?’

‘I go-come.’

‘ ‘Cause if the money no catch ibbe big plobrem. They callin’ police and things.’

‘Nobody’ll touch you, Moses, when they know what you got.’

I arrived in Grand Bassam centre ville just after 1.00 p.m. and turned right past a somnolent gore routière and headed out across the lagoon to the Quartier France. This used to be the main trading centre and port of the Ivory Coast until yellow fever hit the town at the end of the last century. The French moved out and opened up the Vridi canal in 1950 which made Abidjan the country’s port. The old trading houses still existed, most of them broken down and crumbling like any African economy you’d care to look at. It was in one of these that I was due to meet Fat Paul. I saw the Cadillac parked outside a building which fronted on to the lagoon. It had a large hole in the wall and a drift of rubble down to street level. I turned left 100 metres in front of the Cadillac and parked up on the other side of the building from it.

I walked up some steps through a cracked and splintered wooden door into a cool dark room whose plaster lay shattered on the floor. There was a short passage from the room into a large and warmer warehouse, still with most of its roof on. At the far end, by the hole, was Fat Paul wearing a short-sleeve shirt of cobalt blue with red palm trees on it. He was sitting on a packing case with Kwabena next to him, up on an oil drum, his trousers tight across his thighs, bare ankles showing, his feet just off the ground. George was leaning against the wall by the hole, looking out over the lagoon and fingering his tie.

The warehouse had a wooden pillared corridor three metres wide. The pillars supported a mezzanine whose floor had been ravaged by a type of beetle that did for wood what the pox did for a port whore’s face. Through the opiate quiet of the early-afternoon heat came the ticking sound of small jaws undermining the structure and powdering the air with dust motes which hung, dazed, in the shafts of light coming through the roof where the tiles had shifted or broken.

Kwabena pushed himself off the oil drum, picked up a strip of packing-case wood with a nail in the end and went over to where George was standing by the hole in the wall. He tried to push the nail out with his fingers and failed, so swung it against the wall where it made a sharp crack like a festive squib. The thin man inside Fat Paul jumped about a foot, and nearly got away, but his elephant-seal body caught him and set off a crescendo tremble which he quelled manually.

George’s sunglassed head turned under beta-blocker control. A gun came from under his jacket in the armpit. He swept the room and put the gun back in his armpit again and turned to look out across the lagoon, thinking he was the Ice Man in some sharp, smart, budget thriller. Fat Paul said something rapid and savage in Tui and restuck a slick of hair that had fallen loose.

‘Fuckin’ man,’ he said for my benefit. ‘I send you back to the forest…you fuckin’ person!’ he yelled over his shoulder.

‘Nervous?’ I asked.

‘No,’ he said loudly, then calm again: ‘What you got for me?’

‘I’m surprised you’re here.’

‘Why?’

George’s right hand was down by his side, the fingertips tapping the outside of his thigh. Kwabena dropped the strip of wood. Fat Paul held his cheek and chewed the end of his little finger.

‘Remember what we talked about on the beach?’

‘We said lot of things.’

‘Snags. Remember that?’

‘Fuckin’ snags,’ said Fat Paul bitterly, so that I nearly laughed. ‘Tell me.’

‘Maybe you know already.’

‘Tell me anyway.’

I was standing in a shaft of light, the sun hot on my head and a shoulder. I moved towards a pillar. Kwabena moved opposite me four or five yards off, his smell strong in the heat.

‘I checked the drop point in the afternoon,’ I said. ‘Someone was watching. I thought it might be the guy who was going to give me the money, thought he might be checking to see if I was white and reliable. I went after him and got close enough to see he was in a dark saloon. When I went back to make the drop at eight-thirty the other car was there, but not a saloon – a Toyota Land Cruiser. The white guy was in the driver’s seat but there was an African sitting next to him. The white man was taking a long nap with a piece of wire around his neck, tied to the head rest. The African had things to say, but with a torch and a gun. That’s what I mean by snags. Big snags. Big snags you didn’t tell me about.’

‘You’re here,’ he said, as if I was making a big fuss.

‘And I wouldn’t mind knowing what’s going on.’

‘Sure you would. Were you followed?’

‘I didn’t look.’

Fat Paul fluttered his fingers and George disappeared out of the hole and Kwabena set off past me down the pillared corridor.

‘Why’d you make the drop out there, Fat Paul?’

‘That’s the way he wanted it.’

‘Like hell he did.’

‘You just in it for the money, what do you know?’

‘My mistake.’

‘You too hungry. No chop enough.’

‘So why didn’t we do it at a petrol station, or a bar outside Abidjan? Why did we go out there in the boondocks?’

‘Boondocks, snags, you teachin’ me things I don’t know. Is good,’ he said, patting his molten-tar hair. ‘But you aksin’ too many questions, my likin'. What you wan’ know everything for? You the paid help.’

George pulled himself back through the hole in the wall, slipping on the rubble outside. He held up a hand, the lump in his armpit visible. I took out the package and shook the cassette out into my hand and threw it on the floor towards Fat Paul. Kwabena came from behind me and picked it up.

‘Not what I’d call an “important film”.’

‘You learnin’ fast,’ said Fat Paul, now standing and giggling. ‘You enjoy the show? They big boys, huh? Mekkin’ you white boys feel small?’

‘So now you know the competition’s out there,’ I said. ‘One man dead, nearly two. The real thing must be important.’

‘You still wan’make some money?’

‘I made that mistake already.’