Robert Karjel - My Name is N

‘The only time I’ve heard of people suffocating in holds is on tankers, especially after palm oil. Gives off a lot of carbon dioxide. They send in the cleaners and they get halfway down the ladder before they realize they can’t breathe. I heard of eight people dying like that in one hold up on Humberside.’

‘But this hold isn’t enclosed like a tanker’s,’ said Bagado, leaning against the timber wall.

‘Wouldn’t matter if the oxygen’s displaced from the bottom,’ I said, and walked between the bodies to the other side of the hold. Bagado pushed himself off the timber to follow me.

‘Damn,’ he said, looking at the shoulder of his mac, a big stain on it.

I touched the logs. They were still wet with sap.

‘This timber’s fresh,’ I said.

‘Loaded out of Ghana three nights ago.’

‘I’ve heard about some of these hardwoods. They give off fumes, some of them toxic. They’re pretty volatile in the heat. You put that in an enclosed hold, the oxygen levels drop…’

‘Cause of death – fresh timber,’ said Bagado. ‘Could be.’

‘Who are these guys?’ I asked. ‘They got any ID?’

‘They’re all Beninois.’

‘How’d they get on board?’

‘With the stevedores. They were loading cotton seed in holds one and two over the last couple of days. Four teams of them.’

‘You know that?’

‘A guess. We’re picking up the chef d’équipe now,’ he said.

‘What am I doing here, Bagado?’ I asked. ‘You didn’t get me down here to talk botany.’

Bagado shouted up to his juniors. A head appeared over the platform’s rail. He rattled instructions out using Fon rather than French. The head disappeared. Feet rang on the rungs of the ladder. Bagado turned back to me, a faint sneer on his face from the stink of the bodies and something else.

‘Let’s go up on to the platform,’ he said.

‘Was that guy listening in on you?’

‘As you can see,’ he said. ‘I do have a problem.’

We climbed back up on to the platform.

‘But not with these five,’ I said to the soles of his feet.

‘Bondougou,’ he said, the name mingling naturally with the rotten air. A name that brought tears of gratitude to the eyes of corrupt businessmen, politicians and civil servants. The name of the man who’d targeted Bagado’s life and set about dismantling it piece by piece. The first time Bagado and I met he’d just been sacked by Bondougou for issuing an unauthorized press release about a dead girl’s tortured body. He’d come to work with me after that, until our recent split, and those circumstances weren’t exactly lavender-scented either. Since then Bondougou had given Bagado investigations and pulled him on almost every one as soon as he started getting anywhere. The only people he got to put in the slammer were the ones who’d reined in on last year’s Christmas gift to the Commandant. Bondougou and Bagado were polar opposites. They needed each other only for metaphysical reference.

‘So, tell me,’ I said, once we were up on the platform.

‘He has to be…’ Bagado’s voice faded, as he leant over the rail.

‘Come again.’

‘He has to go.’

‘And you think I’m the man for the job or I’m the man who can find you the man to do the job?’

‘Be serious, Bruce.’

‘So, what does “he has to go” mean? I assume you’re talking about into the ground six foot under or stuffed head first down a storm drain after heavy rain. He’s not the kind to take early retirement just because he’s upset a few of his detectives.’

‘That would be a very satisfactory outcome. The storm drain I think is the more likely…but you know me, Bruce. It’s just not possible for me to even think like that.’

‘Whereas I…’

‘Quite.’

‘…go grasping the wrong end of the stick,’ I said. ‘We used to be partners, didn’t we, Bagado?’

‘And very complementary ones too, I thought.’

‘I don’t remember getting any compliments.’

‘I can’t think why,’ said Bagado, his neck disappearing into the collar of his mac.

‘So what’s Bondougou’s game? What’s he done to…?’

‘He’s gone too far,’ he said, to the dense knot of his dark tie.

‘Well, I thought he must have done more than scribble over your prep,’ I said, wiping a finger across my forehead and dropping a hank of sweat through the metal grating of the platform floor.

‘Five girls have gone missing…’

‘In Cotonou?’

‘Schoolgirls,’ he nodded. ‘The youngest is six, the eldest, ten.’

‘And he won’t let you near it?’

‘He’s put one of his resident idiots on it.’

‘Any bodies turned up?’

‘No.’

‘You think all five are connected?’

‘Things like that are always connected.’

‘Why do you think this is Bondougou’s business?’ I asked. ‘Just because he won’t let you near it, or what?’

‘He’s on it. He reads everything that comes in. Takes all the reports verbally first. He’s very interested.’

Bagado started to snick his thumbnail against his front teeth, a tic that meant he was thinking – thinking and worrying.

‘How am I supposed to fit myself in on this?’ I asked. ‘If Bondougou finds me sniffing around he’ll hit home runs with my kneecaps. And the usual usual – I’ve got a living to earn somehow.’

‘I know, I know,’ he said, and stared down into the hold at the five dead men. ‘How are we going to get these men out of here?’

‘Put them in a cargo net and lift them out.’

‘Let’s go,’ he said. ‘Before I get morbid.’

‘You mean you aren’t morbid yet?’

We climbed back up on to the hot metal deck and leant over the ship’s rail, gulping in air cut with bunker fuel and some muck they had boiling in the ship’s galley – whatever, it was fresh after all that. The full weight of the afternoon heat was backing off now, the sun tinting some colour back into things.

‘I want you to help me, Bruce.’

‘Any way I can, Bagado,’ I said. ‘As usual I’m running this way and that, feet not touching the ground.’

‘Who’s that for?’

‘Irony, Bagado. Don’t go losing your sense of irony.’

‘I’m losing my sense of everything these days…because there is no sense in anything. It’s all non-sense. How did I get to this pretty pass, Bruce?’

‘This pretty what?’

‘Pass.’

‘Is that one of your pre-independence colonial expressions?’

‘Concentrate for me, will you?’

‘OK. You’ve been manoeuvred into a position by Bondougou and now you’ve decided to manoeuvre your way out and I’m going to help you.’

‘How?’

‘You’ve only just saddled me with the problem. Let me run around a bit, break myself in on it.’

‘No hit men.’

‘I don’t know any hit men. How would I know any, Bagado? Just because I mix in that…’

‘Irony, Bruce. I was being ironical.’

I drove out of the port, the sky already turning in the bleak late afternoon. People were still standing over where the boy’s arm had been crushed, the stain darkening into the tarmac. I turned right on to the Boulevard de la Marina, heading downtown. Bagado had told me to keep my mouth shut about the stowaways and the fresh timber theory. If he wanted to land the marlin instead of the minnows he needed some tension to build up on the outside and the best way was to let the rumour machine run amok.

The traffic was heavy in the centre of town, with the going-home crowd heading east over the Ancien Pont across the lagoon. The long rains had been going on too long and the newly laid tarmac for last year’s Francophonie conference was getting properly torn up. Cars eased themselves into crater-like potholes. Bald truck tyres chewed off more edges as they ground up out of the two-foot trenches that had only been a foot deep the week before.