My Name is N. Robert Karjel

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       ‘Qui t’ a payé?’

       ‘Uhn?’

       ‘Tu n‘as été pas payé?’

      Floored by that question he looked off into the garden. It was nearly night by now, with the storm brewing. I slipped him 500 CFA which he kept in his hand and looked at. A trickle of sweat slipped down his chest.

      ‘Le patron n’est jamais ici,’ he said.

       ‘Il habite oú maintenant?’

       ‘Je ne sais pas, monsieur. Vraiment.’

      He tried to give me back the money. I told him to keep it and asked if I could take a look around. He didn’t like it but the money had complicated things. I went up the outside stairs and looked into the living room. In the failing light a basically furnished place revealed itself. The only expensive item a big TV and stereo system. I looked up on the roof and sure enough there was a large and expensive satellite dish. The place wasn’t abandoned and I was sure people had lived here until very recently. There were drinks and glasses out on a tray on a sideboard and a book with a bookmark in it on a pile of glossies on the coffee table. I should have come straight here once Carole had lost me. The alphas were coming up thick and fast on the stupidity tests.

      I left. The gardien looked as if he was going to cry. I drove back into town. The evening fish market was up and people were buying steadily under the orange glow of the streetlights. Parking boys kept trying to usher me into vacant slots in front of the smartest shops in Cotonou. Girls with pyramids of oranges on trays on their heads begged me to buy. I parked up outside the railings of the La Verdure.

      I was ten minutes late. Carlo and Gio were sitting on the back terrace in front of a beer and a Coke. The girls were hovering. The Italians talked without looking up at each other, as if there was some kind of confessional going on. A tall Nigerian girl I knew from playing pool in here with Heike of a Saturday night bumped a hip into Gio and risked running her hand through his hair. He braced a shoulder which was enough to tip her away and then he leaned across and slapped her hard on the long bare thigh she had on show below her miniskirt. There wasn’t anything playful about the slap and she yelped. She retreated to the other girls in the bar, where I was ordering a demi pression, and showed off Gio’s perfect paw mark purpling up into a soft welt she’d have for a week. I told the girl to get some ice on it and went out to join the funsters.

      I gave them a good evening and pulled up a chair to the table for two. They said nothing. Carlo took the foam off his demi. Gio’s peasant hands rested on the table top, taking a momentary break from violence.

      ‘I’ve made contact with Marnier,’ I said.

      ‘Where is he?’ asked Carlo, sucking in an inch of beer, glass held between two fingers.

      ‘He’s inside the cellphone footprint of Cotonou.’

      ‘That’s something,’ said Carlo.

      ‘He’s got another reason to keep quiet.’

      ‘What’s the first reason?’

      ‘You guys.’

      ‘Does he know about us?’

      ‘How much work did you do before you came to me?’

      ‘I went to his office and his home.’

      ‘You didn’t take Gio with you, did you?’

      ‘No,’ he said, and nodded at Gio to keep him calm. Christ, the guy was on no fuse at all.

      ‘Did you speak to anyone?’

       ‘Una ragazza.’

      ‘Bleach-blonde, miniskirt, nails?’

      ‘Yeah.’

      ‘So Marnier knew about you before I got to him.’

      ‘What’s the other reason he’s hiding?’

      ‘Five dead stowaways were found on a ship he was working yesterday.’

      ‘So?’

      ‘They’re his. He put them there. It’s a sideline.’

      ‘You telling us you can’t do the job?’

      Gio’s body odour was starting to get a little feral.

      ‘I’m doing it, aren’t I? I’m here telling you how it is,’ I said. ‘Now look, maybe there’s a few things you can do for me. First of all, never come to my office for whatever reason. He’s going to come and see me sometime…’

      ‘Then we’ll come and talk to him.’

      ‘No. I’ll fix up a meeting and you can turn up and talk to him then. If you sniff around my office he’ll never show in the first place.’

      ‘What’re the other things?’

      ‘Why do you want to find him and what’re you going to do to him when you find him?’

      ‘When you find him,’ he said, and then started blabbing to Gio in some dialect which sounded like a couple of Portuguese talking about opera.

      ‘You said he’s on a cellphone,’ said Carlo.

      I wrote the number for him on a beer mat. They talked some more and Carlo nodded into the bar. Then he got up and said he’d speak to Franconelli, ask permission. Gio sucked on his Coke through the lemon and ice cubes.

      ‘You speak any English, Gio?’

      ‘No.’

      Well, I tried.

      We sat there for ten minutes. Two sailors were playing pinball in the bar and the girls were all over them. They shrugged off the flashier-looking but tougher Nigerian girls. They preferred the smaller, plumper Beninois girls who had a sweeter act but were no less focused on the bottom line.

      Gio ordered another Coke to slurp. The waiter didn’t have to ask me. Carlo rejoined us.

      ‘Mr Franconelli says you’re to do what you’re fucking told and find Jean-Luc Marnier and don’t ask any questions about stuff that doesn’t concern you.’

      ‘Right.’

      ‘You ask me you’re better off not knowing dick. That way it’s safer.’

      ‘You mean if I was indiscreet…’

      ‘Mr Franconelli will know and he will not be happy.’

      ‘As unhappy as he is with Marnier?’

      ‘Maybe more unhappy…I don’t know. I don’t know why you want to know this shit.’

      ‘Only that it’ll help me know where to walk and not to walk СКАЧАТЬ