Robert Karjel - My Name is N

He straightened up at the doorway and walked to the chair like an old soldier pulling himself together, General Gordon, maybe. He sat down and reached into the pocket of his light-blue sleeveless shirt with only two fingers and a thumb on his right hand. Scars like a railway terminus ran up his arms and it wasn’t difficult to see that he’d been cut to the bone. He jogged a cigarette out of the packet and drew it into his mouth. He lit it with a Bic and blew smoke out on the end of a residual cough. Something else different to his photo. He’d dyed his hair black. There was some desperation in that.

‘Now you see why your looks are interesting to me,’ he said, shyly, like a schoolboy with gravel-ripped knees.

I searched for vocabulary but found only first syllables. I reached for Jacques’s whisky and slid it across to Marnier and took a half inch off my own.

‘That’s what I bring out in people,’ he said. ‘Is that Jacques’s glass? Would you mind washing it out?’

‘What happened to you, Jean-Luc?’ I asked, taking another glass out of the drawer and filling it for him.

‘Machete attack. Typical Africans…they didn’t finish the job.’

‘Not here, in Benin?’

‘No, no, Liberia. I shouldn’t have been there. Some tribal problem. The village I was in was attacked. Ten men moved through the village hacking at anything that moved. They sprayed the place with a little gasoline and whumph! They killed twenty-eight people in less than ten minutes. When they left, the locals, who had run, came back. They stitched me up, did what they could for me, got me transport back to Côte d’Ivoire. But, you know how it is, these refugee hospitals they don’t have much call for cosmetic surgeons. So…’ he finished, and revealed himself with what remained of his hands.

‘How long ago was all that?’

‘Must be three or four months now. I was lucky. None of the wounds got infected. The local people covered them in mud. That’s where all our best antibiotics come from.’

‘You must have lost a lot of blood.’

‘Not so much that I let them give me a transfusion. I couldn’t have black man’s blood run through my veins. Don’t know what it would do to me. Make me late…unreliable, things like that.’

‘You don’t think much of Africans for a man whose life was saved by them.’

‘No, no, I like them. I was just joking. I’m very fond of Africans. They are marvellous people. Those local people who helped me. So innocent. So charming. So caring. But I have my prejudices too and at my age they’re difficult to get rid of.’

‘I don’t want you to think I’m being facetious, but for a man who’s suffered what you have and only four months ago…you’ve made a good recovery.’

He grunted out a laugh or a dismissal, I didn’t know which, and stuck his cigarette in his terrible mouth and loosened off the belt of his trousers.

‘Some of my less obvious wounds,’ he said, closing his eye to the smoke, ‘are still open and very badly infected. I’m nervous in crowds. I don’t like loud noises or sudden movements. I find people difficult…to trust.’

‘But this isn’t the only reason you’re hiding, Jean-Luc, is it?’

‘This?’ he asked, pointing at his face and then laying a snub-nosed .38 revolver on my desk. ‘I’m not hiding because of this. I’ll say something for the Africans…it doesn’t bother them. They look at me as if it is normal for a white man to have such a face. And they don’t pity me either. I like that. My own people. Pah! That’s something different. They look at me as if I’m an affront. They look at me as if I should have had the sensitivity to consider their feelings. I should have thought before offending their aesthetic senses. I should be in purdah. Our society is obsessed with beauty, don’t you think, M. Medway?’

‘And your wife?’ I asked, the question in my head and out of my mouth before I could snatch it back.

‘What about my wife?’ he said, quick and vicious.

‘How has she coped with a man who left her whole and came back…It can’t have been easy.’

‘A lot of people underestimate Carole. They spend too long looking at her ass. You know, even before this I was not leading-man material. She didn’t marry me for my looks, M. Medway. And I was fifty-two years old. She was twenty-eight. What does that tell you?’

‘That maybe you’ve got a good sense of humour.’

‘Now you are being facetious.’

‘A little. But that’s what women like in a man, so they say. You look down their ads in the Lonely Hearts columns and they all ask for GSOH…but they never tell you what jokes they laugh at.’

‘And the guys? What do the guys ask for?’

‘Sex, fun, zero commitment. But they do offer something very important to women. FHOH.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Full Head Of Hair.’

Marnier roared. He ran a hand through his thick black locks.

‘I win,’ he said, and laughed some more.

‘So why did she marry you?’

‘That’s personal. I only mentioned it to illustrate a point.’

‘She keeps herself in very good condition.’

‘Perhaps you’re one of these guys who looks at her ass too long,’ he said, touchy.

‘She didn’t give me much opportunity.’

Marnier roared again, hard enough to split any stitches he might still have left in him.

‘She lost you without even having to think about it,’ he said. ‘Ah, M. Medway, I think I’m going to like you.’

‘That worries me.’

‘I don’t like many people.’

‘If you’re including Jacques in your list, I might as well tell you he didn’t seem to like being your friend too much.’

‘Jacques?’

‘The guy who was in here just a minute ago.’

‘Him?’ he said, contemptuous. ‘He’s a fool.’

Suddenly, for a whole load of very good reasons, I had the desire to get out of there, get back home, get away from all this…all this manoeuvring, all this manly sizing up.

‘Let’s get back to why you’re hiding, Jean-Luc.’

‘Is there more whisky?’ he asked, finishing his glass.

I refilled him but not myself. Discourage the man. Let him drink alone. I showed him the olives.

‘Lebanese,’ he said, chewing one.

‘Time’s winged chariot, Jean-Luc.’

‘What?’

‘It’s hurrying near.’

‘You have an education,’ he said. ‘Now look, I want you to do something for me.’

‘Is it to do with why you’re hiding?’

‘I’ll be honest with you…’

‘Is that unusual?’

‘You’re very interesting, M. Medway,’ he said, looking at me out of the corner of his head.

‘Call me Bruce, for God’s sake.’

‘You’re quicker than I thought, Bruce,’ he said.

‘I can be slow too. As Carole found out.’

‘And my gardien,’ he said. ‘It means you have a good understanding of your strengths and weaknesses. Self-knowledge is a rare thing.’

‘Pity I don’t adhere to the little that’s come my way.’

‘Then you’re unpredictable as well…not a bad thing.’

‘Let’s get back to what you want me to do for you. The Kluezbork II, for instance.’

‘That will resolve itself.’

‘You’re not hiding from angry relatives.’

‘I don’t follow.’

‘Of the five dead men. Your stowaways.’

‘Mine? Where did you hear that from?’

‘It’s well known that you shift a little human cargo along with your cotton seed.’

‘They won’t be able to stick that on me.’

‘They’re talking to the chef d’équipe of that final shift…’

‘They won’t get anywhere.’

‘You don’t know the man who’s running the investigation.’