Robert Wilson - The Big Killing

‘No, you right. This corruption thing with money too bad. You do it for free this time. Is better for you.’

‘You know how to annoy people, Fat Paul.’

‘People been annoyin’ me all my life,’ he said, quick and loud. ‘White people tellin’ me I’m fat. Tellin’ me that all the time, like I don’t remember. So I call myself Fat Paul jes’ so they know, I know.’

‘I’ll be leaving now and I won’t be seeing you.’

‘You staying right where you are and doin’ what you told,’ he said.

‘Is that right?’

‘You got no option.’

‘Don’t order me around, Fat Paul, and don’t make threats. That way we might stay friends the last thirty seconds I know you.’

I walked back down the pillared corridor until I heard a noise like a golf ball being hit into a mattress and a piece of wooden beam in between two pillars disappeared in a burst of powder. I stopped and turned to see George with his gun in his right hand and the suppressor he’d attached resting in his left palm.

‘You involved now, Bruce Medway,’ said Fat Paul, smiling. George slapped the heavy suppressor on his palm. Kwabena put his hand down his trousers and straightened himself out.

‘For the moment,’ I said.

‘To the finish,’ said Fat Paul, shaking his head. ‘The only stupid thing you doin’ is lookin’ too much the money. Mebbe I give you no money you do it right.’

‘I lose interest when I work for free.’

‘I tell you something might help you,’ he said, beckoning me with a flap of his hand. I walked over to him. He took a package off the oil drum where Kwabena had been sitting, identical to the one I’d had, and tapped it on his thumbnail. ‘You a clever man, Bruce. It make sense not to use your car. Hirin’ the Peugeot was good thinkin', and changin’ the numbers a good idea, tekkin’ out the light a better idea…’

‘The policeman?’

‘And the bartender.’ He nodded. ‘You drink three beers. Leave eight-fifteen. They find a Land Cruiser with a dead man down by the lagoon this mornin'. Tyre marks clear in the mud after the rain. They doin’ autopsy findin’ time of death, should be eight/eight-thirty. This lookin’ dicey for you, they find you were there. You understandin’ you involvement now?’

‘It’s coming to me.’

He held the package over his shoulder and Kwabena took it and handed it on to me.

‘Another film?’

‘You no need to know nothin’ this time.’

‘Who’s it for?’ I asked, looking at the blank envelope. ‘There’s no Kantari this time.’

‘Mebbe we findin’ there’s other people in the market.’

‘So where’s the drop?’

‘We call you.’

‘I’m in the Novotel. I’ve got another job starting tonight.’

‘That’s nice. You gettin’ popular. This thing all over before nine tonight.’

‘What time are you going to call?’

“Tween five and six. ‘safternoon.’

‘And if you don’t call?’

‘I’m only half African.’

‘And the other half?’

‘American,’ he said, stroking his neck. ‘My fadder like them white girls. You know them aid workers. He fuck one, she havin’ me then leavin’ me with my fadder when she go back to the States. They don’t like white girls comin’ back home with little black piccaninny under they arms.’

‘You staying out here in Grand Bassam?’

He thought about that for a moment, shook a hanky out and polished his face round and round getting slower.

‘We in the Hotel La Croisette on the front.’

‘You don’t like Abidjan?’

‘They nervous in Abidjan. I like keepin’ calm.’

‘You mean you don’t want to get seen, a man your size in that shirt.’

‘Time for lunch,’ he said, looking at his watch. ‘We no chop yet…you?’

I shook my head. He turned and walked to the hole in the wall with surprising speed, Kwabena just in front of him. He took the big man’s arm to support himself going down the rubble pile.

‘Bon appétit,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘We call you.’ No need to bother about me now. No need to buy me lunch. No need to work on me any more. Someone calls you a clever man, it’s always because he’s cleverer.

From the hole in the wall I watched George swing open the Cadillac’s heavy door and get into the driver’s seat. Kwabena opened the back door. Fat Paul sat on the edge of the seat while Kwabena stirruped his hands. Fat Paul put his foot in them and pushed himself across the back seat into some cushions arranged against the other door. George waited with his hand on the ignition until Kwabena was sitting next to him. The engine roared and then bubbled. The car moved off.

The flat blue-grey lagoon lay stagnant in the afternoon heat. There were no boats out. Two men lay under some palmleaf thatch down by the water, sleeping. A car started, off in the buildings behind me somewhere, and I leaned against the broken wall and thought about how neatly I’d been stitched.

I replayed Fat Paul buying me lunch, opening the package, showing me the contents, resealing it, being open, frank, talking me through it, gaining my trust, letting me think he was a bit of an idiot, letting me bargain him up for a payoff he was never going to have to make. He’d got himself into an all-win situation. If I’d been killed he’d have known he had a problem. I didn’t get killed, he still knew he had a problem and he could use me to clear it up. Saved himself some money, too.

I picked up Moses at the Polyclinique. He’d lost his hang-dog look and was waving his prescription at me as if it was a winning lottery ticket.

‘No money,’ I said, and his face crashed.

‘I still pissing glass, Mr Bruce.’

‘I’m sure you are. Don’t drink anything,’ I said. ‘We might get some money this afternoon. Mebbe you shouldn’t have given the girl the two thousand she giving you trouble down there.’

‘Two thousand CFA don’t catch for this thing,’ he said, shaking the paper, ‘and I don’t know she giving me trouble down there. I know, mebbe I beat her doing this thing.’

‘She looked as if she could give you a beating, you ask me.’

‘Mebbe you right, Mr Bruce. She stroooong woman.’

We parked up in the Novotel garage. Moses gave me his prescription and I told him to come and see me first thing in the morning. I asked reception to put Fat Paul’s new sealed package in the hotel safe and went up to my room, double-locked the door and flaked out on the bed. I dreamt, no doubt something meaningful which would catch up with me later, and just as an unanswered ringing had begun to annoy me, I woke up with the phone on the other side of the bed, insisting. Somebody had filled my mouth with those things the dentist puts in to soak up the goo, but it didn’t matter because it was B.B. on the line and he was speaking through a mouthful of four bananas.

‘You tek your time,’ he said.

‘I was sleeping.’

‘It three in de afternoon.’

‘All this leisure tires me out.’

‘I see…’ he said, swallowing something that must have been the size and furriness of a tennis ball because it took him several goes and left him out of breath. ‘Ra-ra-ra-ra Mary!’ he stammered at a roar to the maid and I heard the slip, slap, slop of her arrival at his side. ‘Drink,’ he said. He put the receiver on his stomach and I heard some subterranean noises that would have made a potholer rush for the surface.

‘What you doing in the Novotel?’

‘I’m staying here.’

‘For your own accoun'?’

‘Unless you want to pay?’ I said, hearing that line fizz through his brain.

‘I not payin’ for dat!’ he roared. ‘Gah! You tinking for one…’