Robert Karjel - My Name is N

Night fell at the traffic lights in central Cotonou. Beggars and hawkers worked the cars. Mothballs, televisions, dusters, microwaves. I didn’t do too much thinking about Bagado’s problem. Disappearing schoolgirls was not my business and the only way Bondougou was leaving was if he overplayed a hand against somebody a lot nastier than I and they gave him the big cure. That might happen…eventually. But me? I’d rather steer clear of that stuff. Make some money. Keep my head down. Things were going better than usual. I had money in my pocket and Heike, my English/German girlfriend, and I were getting along with just the odd verbal, no fisticuffs. I got a surge just thinking about her and not only from my loins.

A calloused hand, grey with road dust, appeared on my windowsill. It belonged to one of the polio beggars I supported at what they called ‘my traffic lights’.

‘Bonjour, ça va bien?’ he asked, arranging his buckled and withered limbs underneath him.

‘ça marche un peu,’ I said, wiping my face off. I gave him a couple of hundred CFA.

‘Tu vas réussir. Tu vas voir. Tu vas gagner un climatiseur pour ta voiture.’

Yes, well, that would be nice. These boys understand suffering. I could do with some cool. I could do with an ice-cold La Beninoise beer. I parked up at the office, walked back to the Leader Price supermarket and bought a can of cold beer. I crossed the street to the kebab man, standing in front of his charcoal-filled rusted oil drum, and had him make me up a sandwich of spice-hammered meat, which he wrapped in newspaper.

The gardien at the office said I had visitors. White men. I asked him where he’d put them and he said he’d let them in. He said that they’d said it would be all right.

Did they?

I went up, thinking there was nothing to steal, no files to rifle, no photos to finger through, only back copies of Container Week and such, so maybe I’d find a couple of guys eager to see someone to brighten the place up and keen to part with money just to get out of the place.

Sitting on my side of the desk, just outside the cone of light shed from a battered Anglepoise, was a man I recognized as Carlo, and on the client side a guy I only knew by sight. Suddenly my lamb kebab didn’t taste so good. These two were Franconelli’s men. Roberto Franconelli was a mafia capo who operated out of Lagos picking up construction projects and Christ knows what else besides. We’d started our relationship by hitting it off and then I’d made a mistake, told a little fib about a girl called Selina Aguia, said she was interested in him when she wasn’t (not for that reason, anyway). Now Mr Franconelli had a healthy, burgeoning dislike for my person and I knew that this little visit was not social.

‘Bruce,’ said Carlo, holding out his hand. I juggled the beer and kebab and he slapped his dark-haired paw into mine. ‘This is Gio.’

Gio didn’t take the heel of his hand away from his face and gave me one of those minimalist greetings I associate with coconuts.

Carlo sat back out of the light and put his feet up on my desk, telling me something I didn’t need to be told.

‘I’d offer you a beer…’ I said.

‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘Gio?’

Gio didn’t move an eyelid.

‘He’ll have a Coke. He don’t drink.’

I slammed my can of beer down and slid it across to Carlo. I shouted for the gardien and gave him some money for another beer and a Coke. I took the third chair in the room and drew it up to the desk. Carlo nestled the beer in his lap and pinged the ring-pull, not breaking the seal. I continued with the lamb kebab and gave Gio a quick once-over. Brutal. Trog-brutal.

‘You eat that shit off the street?’ asked Carlo.

‘Keeps up my stomach flora, Carlo,’ I said. ‘I don’t want you to think I actually like it.’

Carlo said something in Italian. Gio wrinkled his nose. Animated, heady stuff.

‘You don’t mind if I smoke?’ asked Carlo. ‘While you do your stomach flora thing.’

‘I’m touched you asked.’

He lit up. The gardien came back with the drinks. Gio and I opened our cans.

‘Chin-chin,’ I said.

Carlo kept on pinging.

‘This a social?’ I asked, wiping my fingers off on the newspaper.

‘Mr Franconelli’s got a job for you.’

‘I didn’t think Mr Franconelli liked me any more.’

‘He don’t.’

‘Does that mean he won’t be paying?’

‘He’ll pay. You’re small change.’

‘What’s the job?’

‘Find someone,’ said Carlo, stretching himself to a shivering yawn.

‘You can tell me it all at once, you know, Carlo. I can take in more than one thing at a time – beer, kebab, your friend here, who you want me to find – all in one big rush.’

‘The guy’s name is Jean-Luc Marnier.’

‘Would that be a full-blooded Frenchman, a métis, or an African?’

Carlo flipped a photo across to me. Jean-Luc Marnier was white, in his fifties, with thick, swept-back grey hair that was longish at the collar and tonic-ed. It had gone yellow over one eye, stained by smoke from an unfiltered cigarette he had in his mouth. Attractive was just about an applicable adjective. He might have been movie-hunk material when he was younger and smoother, but some hardness in his life had cragged him up. He had prominent facial bones – cheeks, jaw, forehead all rugged with wear – a full-lipped mouth, surprisingly long ears with fleshy lobes and a blade-sharp nose – a seductive mixture of soft and hard. His dark eyes were shrewd and looked as if they could find weaknesses even when there weren’t any. I thought he probably had bad teeth, but he looked like a ladies’ man, which meant he’d have had them fixed. The man had some presence, even in a photo, but it was a rogue presence.

‘Is he a big guy?’ I asked.

‘A metre seventy-five. Eighty-five kilos. Not fat, just a little heavy.’

‘What’s he do?’

‘Import/export.’

‘For a change,’ I said. ‘He have an office?’

‘And a home,’ said Carlo, sliding over a piece of paper.

‘Why can’t you find him yourself?’

Carlo pinged the ring-pull some more, getting on my nerves.

‘We’ve looked. He’s not around. Nobody talks to us.’

‘Does that mean he’s been a bad boy?’

‘Take a look at the guy,’ said Carlo.

‘What do I do when I find him?’

Gio looked at Carlo out of the corner of his hand as if he might be interested in something for the first time.

‘You just tell us where he is.’

‘Then what?’

‘Finish,’ he said, and crushed his cigarette out in the tuna can supplied.

‘You going to kill him? Is that it?’

Carlo and Gio stilled to a religious quiet.

‘Forget it, Carlo,’ I said. ‘That is not my kind of work.’

Carlo’s feet crashed to the floor. He slammed the beer can down on the desk top and leaned over at me so that our faces were close enough for beer and tobacco fumes to be exchanged.

‘I thought you were the one who liked me, Carlo.’

‘I do, Bruce. I like you fine. But not when you’re dumb.’

‘Then I don’t know how you ever got to like me.’

Carlo grunted about one sixteenth of a laugh. He put his hand on my shoulder and gave me a little massage, brutally thumbing the muscle over the bone.

‘I know a lot of smart people who tell me they’re dumb.’

‘It’s a trick we learn,’ I said.

‘Now, Gio, you might be surprised to learn, is a very remarkable teacher ‘cos he can make dumb people think smart and smart people think dumb. Not bad for a guy who’s never been to school, still has trouble readin’ a book with no pictures.’