The Big Killing. Robert Thomas Wilson

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СКАЧАТЬ when the postman does it every day and nobody gives him two hundred and fifty thousand CFA. Don’t tell me there’s no snags when there’s money…’

      ‘Snags?’ Fat Paul interrupted. ‘What are these snags?’

      ‘Snags are problems, difficulties, obstacles.’

      ‘Snags,’ said Fat Paul, weighing the word on his tongue and giving me a good idea of what a cane toad with a bellyful of insects looks like. ‘Lemme write these snags down.’

      He reached around him for a pen and paper and then pretended to write on the palm of his hand. He knew we were coming to it now. I could see him blinking the shrewdness out of his eyes.

      ‘Are you blackmailing somebody, Fat Paul?’ I asked.

      ‘Keep you voice down,’ he said, looking up at the barman who didn’t understand English. ‘Blackmail? I not blackmailin’ nobody. This no blackmailin’ thing. This a secret thing is all.’

      ‘What sort of secret?’

      ‘I’m tellin’ you that, it no a secret no more.’

      ‘I asked you what sort of secret, not what it is. Personal secret, political secret, economic secret, arms secret…?’

      ‘Is a business secret.’

      ‘Show me the cassette.’

      Fat Paul surprised me by flicking his fingers at Kwabena, who took the package out from under his shirt and gave it to him. With one eye closed to the cigarette smoke he broke the wax seal on the package, took out a wad of paper around the cassette, threw the empty envelope on the table. The heavy-duty envelope was still addressed to M. Kantari, Korhogo. He handed me the cassette. There was nothing unusual about it. The cassette didn’t look as if it had been tampered with or opened. I couldn’t see anything in it apart from 180 minutes of magnetic tape.

      ‘See?’ said Fat Paul.

      I folded the wad of paper around the cassette, put it back in the envelope and handed it back to Fat Paul, shaking my head.

      ‘Now you jes’ tell me two things,’ said Fat Paul, ready for it now and finished with the game. ‘One, if you gonna do it. Two, how much you wan’ for doin’ it.’

      ‘A million,’ I said, ‘CFA. Four thousand dollars, you understanding me?’

      The quality of the silence that followed could have been exported to any library in the world. George glanced across Fat Paul’s inflammable hair at Kwabena who looked as if he’d taken a blow from a five-pound lump hammer and was wondering whether to fall backwards. Fat Paul clasped his bratwurst fingers with the implanted rings and checked his watch, not for the time but because it seemed to be hurting him, cutting into his forearm. He pushed it down to this wrist and shook it. He breathed and kissed in the smoke from the glued cigarette on his lip in little puffs. He breathed out and the smoke baffled over his bottom lip.

      ‘Too much. We find cheaper white man.’

      ‘Go ahead. It’d be interesting to see the one you get who’s going to make a drop of a ‘video of a business secret’ at night in the middle of nowhere with money involved and at seven hours’ notice, unless you can delay it some more?’

      Fat Paul suddenly started to manage his hair with both hands like a forgetful toupé-wearer. He settled back down again.

      ‘Seven hundred and fifty…’ he started and I shook my head. He knew it. I had him down on the floor with both feet on his fat neck.

      ‘Show him the place,’ he said, smiling, and in that instant I saw that he thought he had won. He clicked it away with his fingers and Kwabena produced a stick of red sealing wax and a lighter and melted off a pool on to the envelope. Fat Paul planted his ring in it as it cooled and then blew on his finger.

      ‘I need some expenses.’

      ‘For a million CFA, you supplyin’ you own expenses.’

      ‘So where do we meet tomorrow?’ I asked. ‘Grand Bassam, one o’clock. There’s an old warehouse lagoon side Quartier France, near the Old Trading Houses. You see the car. You find us.’

Chapter 3

      Time was speeding up, now that the theoretical pay scale had jumped a few points, so I went back to my room and lay down to get used to it. There was a lot to do if I didn’t want to drift into this exchange unprepared and I reckoned some thinking might help and, although I could do it on my feet, I preferred to be on my back with something liquid in a glass on my chest.

      I didn’t want to use my own car for the drop. It was a mess, which attracted attention, and it had Benin plates which are beacon red on a white background. I’d have to hire a car. My Visa card was in a hospital burns unit somewhere recovering from a seared hologram and couldn’t take a day’s car hire without going into intensive care. B.B. was going to have to be tapped. If he didn’t come through then I was going to have to rely on the money from the drop materializing. If it did, I could pay the car hire but I was still going to have to be careful. Fat Paul looked like the kind of businessman who, when he got money, thought gross rather than net and let his suppliers talk things over with George and Kwabena.

      I found I was thinking more about the money than I was about what was supposed to happen between now and getting it, so I walked to the nearby crappy hotel, which doubled as a whorehouse, where I made my phone calls. There was a woman and a young girl in the lobby, both painted up like Russian dolls. The older and larger woman was asleep with her head on the back of her chair, while the girl sat on her hands and looked across the room as if there was a teacher telling her something useful. She was that young. There was no teacher, but some broken furniture behind the door in the corner which was gradually being used for firewood and above it all an old wooden fan turned with a ticking sound without disturbing any air.

      The madame zeroed the meter without looking at it. I dialled B.B.'s number in Accra. She moved off with a sashay shuffle of such indolence that it took her twelve of my dialling attempts to reach the end of the counter which was three yards long. She was interrupted by a large-bellied African in a white shirt with the cuffs halfway up his forearms and a man’s purse in his armpit. He nodded at the young girl and the madame’s arm struck out for a room key. The man took it and followed the young girl’s neat steps out of the lobby.

      The satellite took my call and beamed it into Accra. B.B. picked up the phone before it had started ringing.

      ‘My God,’ he said, on hearing my voice. ‘Bruise?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘My God. Is ver’ strange ting. I’m tinking ‘bout you dan…you on de phone.’

      ‘A miracle.’

      ‘Yairs,’ he said, and I heard him slapping the wooden arm of his chair. ‘What you want?’

      ‘I’m still here.’

      ‘I see…’ he said, and I heard his fidgeting for a cigarette, the lighter snapping on and the first drag fighting its way down the skeins of phlegm in his lungs.

      ‘I’m СКАЧАТЬ