Blood is Dirt. Robert Thomas Wilson

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СКАЧАТЬ prep. It was a line that wiped out previous goodwill and made me feel more expensive than I had done yesterday.

      ‘We have a small project in a town called Kétou just over a hundred kilometres north of Porto Novo. We’re very close to the Nigerian border. The project is agricultural but we have a medical service there too. Pregnant women have been coming from a small village called Akata across the border. They’re very frightened pregnant women. They’ve been talking about the anger of the god Orishala. Five women from the village have already given birth to deformed babies. They’ve been telling my staff about how their livestock are sick and their crops are dying.’

      There was a knock on the door. Heike came in. Gerhard didn’t need to stand up, suck in his gut and swell his pecs but he did it anyway. His blue eyes flashed across the room like police lights at night. Now I knew at least one of the reasons why we’d got the job and that made me feel even less cheap. Bagado was leaning forward with his thumb on his chin and two fingers astride the ridge he had coming down his forehead to the bridge of his nose, squeezing.

      Nobody misses love walking into a room.

      Heike was self-conscious. She knew the attention she was getting and she knew I was there watching her get it. I now realized that she hadn’t let me into the sanctity of her workplace for the simple reason of a cheap job. There were messages. How to read them, that was the thing. There was no doubt that Gerhard had got himself all atremble with Heike in the room, but what was I there for? Was this Heike telling Gerhard, “This is my man, back off''? Was Heike telling me, “I’m still attractive, watch your step''? This could be Heike giving Bagado and I a break, knowing we needed the money, or it could be a little punishment, a helping of self- knowledge.

      I didn’t think Heike was going to try anything on with Gerhard. He seemed too reasonable and she’d already run that one past me with another guy she’d worked with – Wolfgang. They’d gone back to Berlin together after some ugly business of mine had spilled over into our private life. Wolfgang had been no match for her. When she’d disappointed him he’d cried in the street, sat on the edge of the pavement with his elbows on his knees and his fists banged into the side of his head and added to the rains in the gutter – inconsolable.

      I’d spent some time thinking about Wolfgang’s scene while Heike slept beside me with the sweat of sex still on us. She’d always accused me of holding things back from her, not letting her in, building up walls around myself. Maybe she was right and I was just doing some self-protection, making sure I didn’t end up crouched in a street somewhere making mud out of dust.

      ‘Bruce?’

      I looked up to find three pairs of eyes on me. Bagado’s were the friendliest.

      ‘What was the question?’ I asked. ‘I was thinking of the good god Orishala.’

      ‘There was no question,’ said Gerhard, sounding German for the first time, and looking more triumphant than he should have been.

      ‘You were looking strange,’ said Heike.

      ‘You’re sending me up country to find out why Orishala is angry and you think I look strange?’

      ‘Yes,’ said Gerhard, smiling and walking behind his desk to sit in his leather swivel chair, I see your point.’

      Heike’s eyes remained wide open, two divots of concern on her forehead, looking good with no make-up, no perfume, just with an African pin I’d bought for her up in Abomey in her hair and a light tan. She softened her mouth into a smile and her teeth showed white against her dark lips with the defined cupid’s bow. Heike wasn’t a model beauty. She had too much intelligence and resilience in her features for that-you’d take your eye off the clothes-but I hadn’t met the guy who wouldn’t sit up straight for her.

      Bagado had released his face from his grasp now that the sex had subsided in the room and was staring at a wooden African head on Gerhard’s desk, being patient, which was one of his great strengths. Bagado and Heike had become good friends over the last few years. She’d conveniently forgotten how he’d led me off the winding path of my bread- and-butter business work and into the jungle of more sinister crimes. He wasn’t just my partner. He had a much higher status than that. He was a husband, a father and a totally honourable man. I was the lover, the bastard and as dependable as an island of weed in a mangrove swamp.

      Heike crossed her legs and cued Bagado.

      ‘What do you want us to do, M Gerhard?’

      ‘We respect Orishala,’ said Gerhard, ‘but we are not convinced. I want you to find out what is happening across the border. I can’t, and I don’t want to involve my own people. They have enough trouble in Benin. You will have to be discreet. You’ll have to come up with your own reasons for being over there. Anything that doesn’t bear the agency’s name. Talk to our people in Kétou if you like, they may have something to add. Sie haben den Akten, bitte, Heike.’

      Heike gave him some files and he stood them on end and tapped the desk.

      ‘Perhaps, first, we should talk about money,’ he said.

      ‘Unless, of course, you don’t want the job.’

      ‘We’re interested,’ I said. ‘The money, well, the money’s got a little complicated since devaluation. We used to charge a hundred thousand CFA a day for the two of us.’ A wince shot across Gerhard’s brow like a snake across tarmac.’ We’ve been finding it difficult to double our rate since devaluation. But that’s what we’d like to do. Two hundred thousand a day plus expenses.’

      ‘Impossible,’ said Gerhard.’ I can’t justify that. I have no budget for private investigations, you understand.’

      ‘You have contingency, don’t you, Gerhard?’

      ‘Yes, but you are asking me to pay more than three hundred dollars a day which is my budget for the Kétou station, and this is not our business. Our mandate is for Benin.’

      ‘But it affects you.’

      ‘Yes, but when the accountants ask, “What is this thousand dollars?” I have to give an answer within the mandate or I have to ask my boss in Berlin to … to … pacify the money men. I can’t do that very often in a year. I need to keep favours in reserve.’

      ‘Don’t want to use them up early on?’

      ‘Precisely.’

      ‘What sort of money did you have in mind?’

      ‘That for the whole job … including expenses.’

      ‘Two hundred thousand? You’ve got to be kidding. Three hundred and seventy-five dollars for the lot? It’ll cost seventy-five dollars to get up there and back. Three-day job. A hundred dollars a day. Fifty dollars each if we don’t eat, sleep or bribe anyone. That’s very little, Gerhard. That’s so little …’

      ‘You might as well do it for free?’ he said, finding some cheek to slap me with.

      ‘Not that little.’

      ‘Two hundred and fifty thousand is my limit.’

      I looked long and hard into his unflinching, blue, Aryan eyes. The sort that had spent their youth looking out over cornfields and thinking of Valhalla. There wasn’t even a hair line СКАЧАТЬ