do you want, B.B.?’ I asked, measuring out the syllables. B.B. bubbled some more, chewed over his anger and spat it out like gristle.
‘First ting,’ he belched. ‘You go, you go tomorrow. Kurt, he gone. He not dere. I don’ know where he gone. De wife, she say he still dere. I aks to spik to him. She say he always out. You go, you find de problem. You still haf de Kurt passport detail?’ he asked, knowing I still had it from the last time he’d asked me. He coughed a quantity of phlegm into his mouth and I felt him search for his hanky. ‘Second ting,’ he said, spitting the oyster, ‘you go to Danish Embassy?’
‘Not yet.’
‘What you doin’ all day?’
‘I’ve got a tight schedule.’
‘Mebbe you try wokking in de day like rest of us. Sleep at night, you know.’
‘I’ll make a note of that.’
‘You go to Danish Embassy this afternoon; this Kurt man a criminal, I know it. T’ird ting, de Japanese, dey come.’
‘Which Japanese?’
‘De company dat buy de sheanut. Dey have de croshing plant in Japan.’
‘I know, but what are their names?’
‘My God, dis difficult ting. Har-ra-ra-ra-ra…’
‘Was that one or both of them?’
‘No, de udder one is, Ka-ka-ka-ka-ka…’
‘Fax me.’
‘You tinking correck.’
‘What about money?’
‘Wait de monny!’ he shouted, irritated. ‘De Japanese…you show dem round, show dem de operascharn, you give dem good time, tek plenty whisky. Kurt wife, she help make some food tings an’ such. OK?’
‘Fine. The money for this?’
‘You always aksing de monny!’
‘I haven’t got any and it often slips your mind.’
‘Is there anything left in Korhogo?’
‘No. All gone. You find de books and tell me where it gone. OK. You better horry or de bank it shut,’ he finished, the phone clattering into its cradle.
I called the Danish Embassy and made an appointment to see a vice-consul called Leif Andersen at 4.00 p.m. The sky had clouded over by the time I left the hotel at 3.15 and looked ready for rain. I took a taxi to the bank in the Alpha 2000 building and told the car to wait while I withdrew both B.B. and Martin Fall’s money. I put it in a plastic carrier bag from Le Coq Sportif that I’d brought with me. The taxi was gone when I came out, which was a small worry. I didn’t want to dally too long in the street with a bag holding nearly 3 million CFA – $12,000 doesn’t look much like a pair of running shoes.
Up the street a rangy kid of about twenty, in a sweatshirt with a big number thirty-two on it, strolled out of a shop doorway with his hands in his baggy jeans pockets. He had his hair razored up over the ears and cut flat top. Across the street another punk looked over the roof of a car, wearing a baseball cap the wrong way round and a black T-shirt with something white on it. These kids had been watching movies, I thought, and turned to walk down the hill. Two boys walked out of a garage in front of me, one lifting his T-shirt to get some air up there and to show me what he had in the waistband of his jeans, the other with an ear missing. These two were shabbier, old jeans cut tight, faded T-shirts. The one with two ears had Mr Smile on the front without the smile, both with no shoes. I turned back and the other kid was standing by the door to the bank, his friend starting to cross the road now. The taxi rounded the block and started cruising down the hill in no hurry. I walked up the hill towards it, the kid outside the bank with his hands out of his pockets now, wiping them on his shirt front, nervous, like me. I ran at him. His eyes widened, looking for his friends. I could hear a pair of trainers and the slap of bare feet on the pavement. I kicked the kid outside the bank hard on the inside of his left knee and he went down so fast on to the concrete slabs of the pavement that his head hit the ground first. I turned, the taxi coming in front of me now, the kid from across the road in between the parked cars and the one with both ears between the taxi and me, a flash of silver in his hand. The driver, still coasting, opened the passenger door and hit the kid on the point of the elbow. The kid went down and the knife span across the pavement. I got in the taxi, the other two boys backing off.
I told the driver that when a man goes into a bank and tells the taxi to wait it wasn’t just out of a feeling of importance. He said he knew that but the traffic police didn’t give a damn. Then he thought about it and said he reckoned they were on the take. They were always there for a parking fine and nowhere near a bag snatch. I told him it was the same the world over.
We drove around the block. I pointed him down Avenue Chardy and into a car park at the back of some buildings. I went into a travel agent called PanAfricAbidjan and found a Swiss guy in there who spoke seven languages, one of which was mine. I asked him if he could make 75,000 CFA available in a travel agent called Bénin-Bénin in the quartier Zongo in Cotonou. He made a phone call and said he could. I gave him the money from my Coq Sportif bag.
At the Novotel reception I took some more money out of the bag and asked them to put the rest of it in the hotel safe. I went into a chemist and picked up Moses’s prescription and bought a large supply of condoms for him which they were decent enough to wrap. It was a short walk from the chemist’s to the Danish Embassy and I was shown straight into the vice-consul’s office with its windswept off-white carpeting that looked like snow on its way to sludge.
Leif Andersen was a short, powerful, mid-thirties guy with a friendly brown moustache and a face that had enjoyed a few too many drinks, as it was puffy with vein maps leading nowhere on his cheeks. He was wearing a sports jacket, a white shirt, and some kind of club tie with wine glasses and bottles all over a burgundy background. He sat with his fingers dovetailed across a bit of a belly beneath a painting of some bleak North Sea-whipped Danish coastline which made me grit my teeth in the overstrong air conditioning.
‘How can I help you?’ he asked.
‘Got a visitor’s jacket?’
‘Sorry,’ he said, opening his hands. ‘The AC’s stuck.’
‘At minus five?’
‘Plus sixteen, zero humidity.’
‘Any chance of something to drink?’
‘Tea?’ he asked, and I shook my head.
‘I’m looking for a guy called Kurt Nielsen.’
‘The one running a sheanut operation in Korhogo?’
‘You know your nationals pretty well.’
‘What’s your interest?’
‘My client’s a Syrian businessman in Accra. He owns the sheanut operation.’
‘Kurt Nielsen’s wife was looking for him, too.’
‘Was?’
She called
