Robert Wilson - The Big Killing

‘They dip them in batter, deep fry them and coat them with sugar.’

‘Sounds good. I’ll have six. What you want?’ he said, looking at Kwabena and George.

They’d sat in the same corner they were sitting in now and Fat Paul had ordered a bottle of beer and had it sent over to me. Later he’d asked me to join them for lunch and seeing as I had hell and all to do I went over without bothering with any of the ‘no, no, thank you’ crap.

Before I’d sat down they’d asked me if I was a tourist and when I’d said no Kwabena had produced a chair from behind his back and had let me sit on it. The conversation hadn’t exactly zipped around the table while we were eating but afterwards, while Fat Paul was taking a digestif of another four pineapple fritters, he’d asked me what I did for a living.

‘I do jobs for people who don’t want to do the jobs themselves. I do bits of business, management, organization, negotiations, transactions, and debt collection. Sometimes I find people who’ve gone missing. Sometimes I just talk to people on behalf of someone else. The only things I don’t do are criminal things…that…and domestic trouble. I won’t have anything to do with husbands, wives and lovers.’

‘You been asked that before,’ said Fat Paul, chuckling.

Soon after that they’d paid the bill and left but, by the way Fat Paul had looked back at me from the doorway, I’d expected to see him again, and here he was, the twenty-five-stone pineapple-fritter bin. He made it look so easy, but that’s talent for you.

‘You want join us for lunch, Mr Bruce?’ said Kwabena, measuring each word as it came out and looming dark in my light so that I couldn’t read the paper.

‘It’s ten-thirty in the morning,’ I said, and Kwabena looked back at Fat Paul, lacking the programming to get any further into normal human relations without more guidance.

‘You got t’eat!’ shouted Fat Paul across the bar. ‘Keep you strength up.’

Kwabena picked up the bottle of beer between his thumb and forefinger and took three strides across to Fat Paul’s table. The barman turned on the radio, which immediately played the hit of the year he’d been whistling earlier. Its single lyric was so good that they felt the need to repeat it three times an hour. It was the kind of song that could make people go into public places and kill.

‘C’est bon pour le moral. C’est bon pour le moral,

C’est bon, bon. C’est bon, bon.

C’est bon pour le moral…’

My ‘moral’ dipped as I looked at Fat Paul’s buried eyes, which were like two raisins pressed into some dough so old that it had taken on a light-brown sheen. The mild contour of his nose rose and fell across his face and his nostrils were a currant stud each and widely spaced almost above the corners of his mouth, which had a chipolata lower lip and did a poor job of hiding some dark gums and brown lower teeth. He had a goitrous neck which hung below the hint of his chin and shook like the sac of a cow’s udder. A gold chain hid itself in the crease of skin that came from the back of his neck before exiting on to the smooth, hairlessness of his chest. He had a full head of black hair which for some reason he felt looked great crinkle cut and dipped in chip fat.

The one thing that could be said of Fat Paul was that he was fat. He was fat enough not to know what was occurring below his waist unless he had mirrors on sticks and a jigsaw imagination. He told me that he had a very slow metabolism. I suggested he had no metabolism at all and he said, no, no, he could feel it moving at night. I put it to him that it might just be the day’s consumption shifting and settling. This vision of his digestive system so unnerved him that he lost his appetite for a full minute.

Fat Paul’s nationality wasn’t clear. There was some African in there and perhaps some Lebanese or even American. To me he spoke English in a mixture of excolonial African and American movies, to George and Kwabena he used the Tui language.

George was a tall, handsome Ghanaian who was wearing a white short-sleeve shirt and a tie which he had contrived so that one end covered his crotch and the other stuck out like a tongue from the black-hole density of the knot at his top button. The tie was white with horses pounding across it with jockeys on their backs in wild silks. He hid behind some steel-rimmed aviator sunglasses and did what he was good at – letting his tie do the talking.

Kwabena was a colossus. His cast was probably taking up some valuable warehouse space in the steelworks where he’d been poured. His frame was covered by very black skin which had taken on a kind of bloom, as if it had been recently tempered by fire. He wore a loud blue and yellow shirt which had been made to go over an American football harness but nipped him around the shoulders. He sat with his mouth slightly open and blinked once a minute while his hands hung between his knees preparing to reshape facial landscapes. He looked slow but I wouldn’t have liked to be the one to test his reactions. If he caught you and he’d been programmed right he’d have you down to constituent parts in a minute.

‘What was it you say you doin'?’ asked Fat Paul, the fourth pineapple fritter of the morning slipping into his mouth like a letter into a pillar box.

‘When I’m doing it, you mean?’

He laughed with his shoulders and then licked his fingers one by one, holding them up counting off my business talents.

‘Management, negotiations, debt collection, organization, findin’ missin’ people, talkin’ to people for udder people…no, I’m forgettin’ some…’

‘Transactions,’ I said.

‘Transactions,’ repeated Fat Paul, nodding at me so I knew I’d got it right.

‘As long as it’s not criminal.’

‘And no fucky-fucky business,’ finished Fat Paul.

‘I’ve not heard it put like that before.’

‘Sorry,’ he said, beckoning to Kwabena for a cigarette, “swat ‘sall about, you know, jig-a-jig, fucky-fucky. I no blame you. Thass no man’s business. But transactions. Now there’s somethin'. Somethin’ for you. Make you some money.’

‘What did you have in mind?’

Fat Paul clicked the fingers he’d been sucking and George opened a zip-topped case and handed him a package which he gave to me. It was a padded envelope with a box in it. The envelope had been sealed with red wax and there was the impression of a scorpion in the wax. It was addressed to M. Kantari in Korhogo, a town in the north of the Ivory Coast, where I was expecting to be sent any day now to sort out a ‘small problem'.

‘How d’you know I was going to Korhogo?’ I asked, and Fat Paul looked freaked.

‘You gonna Korhogo…when?’

‘I don’t know. I’ve got a job to do there. I’m waiting for instructions to come through.’

‘No, no – this not for Korhogo.’

‘That’s what it says here.’

‘No. You deliver it to someone who take it to Korhogo.’

‘I see,’ I said, nodding. ‘Is that strange, Fat Paul?’

‘Not strange. Not strange at all,’ he said quickly. ‘He gonna give you some money for the package. You go takin’ it up Korhogo side then you up there wid the money and we down here wid…’

‘Waiting for me to come back down again.’

‘That’s right. We got no time for waitin'.’

‘Why don’t you deliver it yourself?’

‘I need white man for the job,’ said Fat Paul. ‘The drop ibbe made by ‘nother white man, he only wan’ deal with white man. He say African people in this kind work too nervous, too jumpy, they makin’ mistake, they no turnin’ up on time, they go for bush, they blowin’ it. He no deal with African man.’