Instruments of Darkness. Robert Thomas Wilson

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СКАЧАТЬ that formed exclusive circles about the place like people at a cocktail party who wouldn’t mix. The one failure was a table and six chairs carved from a single tree, but the table was too low and a man’s bottom couldn’t fit in between the snarling carved heads on the arms of the chairs even if it had wanted to.

      There was a large verandah above the garage and maids’ quarters at the end of the east wing and another at the back of the house overlooking the swimming pool. They were both surrounded by a nursery of potted plants. I parked the car behind Jack’s Mercedes in the garage.

      It was breakfast time. Patience, the most senior of Jack’s maids, with the eyes of a murderess and the shoulders of a mud wrestler, came out of her quarters and pointed to the verandah above the garage. I locked the car. Patience adjusted her wrap and slouched off to the kitchen. Mohammed, a tall, rangy, immensely strong servant of Jack’s who could polish a Mercedes down to the base metal came from the back of the house hunched over, holding a monkey by the hand. Jack had bought the monkey and found that Mohammed came with it. The monkey saw me and hid behind Mohammed’s legs like a shy little girl.

      ‘How are you, Mohammed?’ I asked.

      ‘Yessssir,’ he said with the intensity of a truck’s air brakes.

      A parrot in a cage started running through its repertoire of clicks and whistles, calling for Patience and doing imitations of her cleaning the verandah: little sweeping sounds with the odd chair scraping thrown in. I walked up the spiral staircase to the verandah and heard the murmur of the video-taped soaps that were recorded for Jack and sent from England. He played them in the big gaps of his light-scheduled day. Christ, he played them all the time.

      ‘Mister Jack will see you now,’ the parrot said to the back of my head.

      Jack wasn’t seeing anything. He was lying on a lounger with a cup of coffee the colour of his skin on his stomach, the video zapper on his chest. His eyes were closed. One big finger was crooked through the coffee cup handle. He wore a pair of shorts and nothing else.

      He was a large man, probably as tall as six foot four, with heavy shoulders and a broad chest which must have housed solid slabs of pectoral when he was younger, but was now on the turn to flabby dugs. He had a big hard, round belly which shone like polished wood. He flicked his feet to keep the flies off and his sandals made a loud flopping sound on the soles of his feet.

      Jack was a good-looking man, but it was the mixture of African and European in him that made him peculiar and fascinating. His hair was black but not as tightly curled as a full African’s. His skin was the colour of a walnut shell. He had blue eyes from his English mother and a straight sharp nose with a mouth fuller than most, but not African. He had long flat cheeks that fell from his sharp cheekbones and he kept these and the rest of his face clean-shaven. He had small, perfectly formed African ears.

      Jack’s overall impression, which he’d had to work on, was one of lazy power. He was a lion that turned up for his prepared meals, ate, lounged about, never had to move too quickly but had a look in his eye when he turned his big head that told you who was the patriarch. He had great charm, a boyish smile and he loved to laugh. When he walked into a room of people all you could hear were women’s hearts fluttering like a colony of fantails. He left a wake of despair. He was ruthless in his pursuit of sex. A man who couldn’t sleep alone but couldn’t bear the same woman twice. Women knew this. His bed was never empty.

      He’d had another hard night. He slept more on that lounger than he did in his bed. The parrot tutted as if he knew. Jack’s eyes opened.

      ‘Bruce,’ he said in a thick sleepy voice. He glanced at the coffee cup in his hand, leaned his head forward with an effort and drained it. ‘My God,’ he said, sinking back. It was difficult to find any sympathy for him. I took the zapper off his chest and shut down the TV which sat in its little roofed shelter in the corner of the verandah.

      ‘Madame Severnou’s left you fifty mil short.’ I paused for a moment while his supine brain took this in. ‘And last night she sent some muscle round to my house to pick up the rest.’ Jack’s eyes opened and flickered as he registered. ‘And I’m pretty sure that right now she’s unloading the rice without the original bill of lading.’

      Jack didn’t move for a moment until his tongue came out and licked the nascent bristle below his bottom lip. He stared down through his feet at the blank TV with half-closed eyes.

      ‘Can you turn that on again?’

      ‘Can you listen for a minute?’

      If there’s any good news,’ he sighed, staring off over the wall into the palm trees of the next-door garden with ostentatious lack of interest.

      ‘I’ve got five hundred and eighty-odd million in the Peugeot.’

      He let the hand with the coffee cup in it fall by his side. A dribble of coffee leaked out on to the tiles. He put the cup down and with a sudden jerk shot himself up off the lounger and walked like a man with diving boots on to the rail of the verandah. He leaned on it as if he was catching his breath. On his back were four deep, six-inch long gouges on each scapula.

      ‘And this after you’ve been in bed with a polecat all night,’ I said.

      ‘A lioness, Bruce, a bloody lioness,’ he said as if he was talking to someone in the neighbouring garden.

      ‘What the hell’s going on with her?’ he asked his stomach, which percolated some coffee through his intestines. He turned and walked back to the table by the lounger, squatted with a loud crack from both knees and poured himself some more coffee and filled a cup for me. He took a croissant from a plate and bit into it. His brain wasn’t getting the spark to turn itself over. He heaved himself on to the lounger.

      ‘I got the beef out of Tema, it’s on its way up to Bolgatanga,’ he said without thinking and blowing out flakes of croissant on to his hairless chest. I checked the coffee for insects. He was telling me things I didn’t need to know. Jack’s mobile phone rang. On automatic, he pulled up the aerial, clicked the switch to ‘Talk’, and then said nothing, but listened for some time, his eyebrows going over the jumps. I took a slug of the coffee which kicked into my nervous system. It was robusta and strong and bad for you if you’re the shaky type.

      ‘Can I think about it?’ Jack asked the phone, and then waited while he was told why he couldn’t. ‘I can help, but you have to let me talk…’ He held out a hand to me with eyes that said you can’t tell anyone anything these days. ‘I can’t. I haven’t got the time,’ which was a lie. ‘I have…No you don’t…’ He turned his back to me and I missed a snatch; he came back with some more croissant in his mouth. ‘I have to talk to him first.’ Pause. ‘Let me talk to him.’ Jack looked into the earpiece, pushed the aerial down and switched the phone to ‘Standby’.

      ‘Look,’ I said, ‘I’ll take this lot down to your man Jawa and then I’ll get back to Cotonou.’

      ‘What for?’ he asked.

      ‘If not the rice, Jack, the fifty million might be useful.’

      ‘I have to think about this.’

      ‘Did Moses call?’ I asked.

      ‘No,’ he said thinking elsewhere. ‘Moses didn’t call.’

      I listened to the sound of Lomé getting itself together. Some women walked past the wall at the back of the house with piles of washing on their heads and babies СКАЧАТЬ