be options. I could decide whether to hold back and make it look pre-lunch rather than post-breakfast.
There he was. I could hear him, the barman, whistling that bloody tune, preparing himself for another day demonstrating the nuances of insouciance which had taken him a lifetime to refine. I sat back on the splintery wooden furniture, opened the Ivoire Soir and relaxed.
I’d bought the newspaper from a kiosk in Grand Bassam, the broken-down old port town where I was staying, which was a long spit down a palm-frayed shoreline from Abidjan, the Ivory Coast capital city. I normally used it to stave off the first cold beer of the day and the boredom which came from three weeks waiting for the job I was supposed to be doing not to materialize. This time I was actually reading it. There was some ugly detail about a body, recently discovered in Abidjan, which the BBC World Service had told me, at five o’clock that morning, belonged to James Wilson. He had been a close aide to the President of the neighbouring country of Liberia and the President, as everybody in the Ivory Coast knew, had been captured, tortured and killed last month by the breakaway rebel faction leader, Jeremiah Finn.
The World Service had also told me that hundreds of civilian bodies had been uncovered in swampland just north of Springs Payne Airport outside the Liberian capital, Monrovia, and that over the past three days rebel soldiers from Samson Talbot’s Liberian Democratic Front had buried more than 500 bodies of mainly Ghanaian and Nigerian civilians in mass graves four miles to the north west of the capital. All this before they rounded off their report on the country’s civil war with the positive identification of the strangled and mutilated body of James Wilson who’d been found in the Ebrié lagoon near the Treichville quarter of Abidjan yesterday.
All this on snatches of dream-torn sleep, with a hangover to support, cold water to shave in and a body that was finding new ways to say – ‘Enough!’ No. It had not been a morning for skipping down to the beach to dance ‘highlife’ into the long, torpid afternoon. It was a morning for taxing my patience, the beer-foam depth of my resolve, whilst trying to divert myself with the strange facts of James Wilson’s death.
He’d been strangled with a piece of wire, which was the conventional bit, but then the killer had strayed into the occult by using a set of metal claws to open out the abdomen. These metal claws were used by members of the Leopard Societies who hadn’t been heard of for some time. Their cardholders used to kill people who’d been accused of witchcraft and feed on their innards by the light of the moon. That’s what it said. There’d been no moon the last three nights and the police had been informed by the coroner that James Wilson’s innards had been eaten by fish. The reporter seemed disappointed. I made a mental note to hold off on the seafood whenever my next remittance came through.
The article finished with some conjecture as to why James Wilson’s political career had ended with him as a gutless floater – a state, it occurred to me, that most politicians were making a success out of every day in the ‘developed’ world. The journo cited unnamed intelligence sources that linked the thirty-two-year-old James Wilson to the handing over of the late Liberian President to the lethal interrogation techniques of Jeremiah Finn and that it was Wilson’s own Krahn tribe members who had given him the payback.
A cold beer appeared in front of me. I looked up at the barman who slipped back behind his cane-slatted bar and was giving me his ‘eyelids at half-mast’ routine.
‘C’est quoi ça?’ I asked, my watch still clipping its way round to 10.30 a.m.
‘Une bière, M. Bru,’ he said, fond of stating the obvious, and added, ‘grande modèle,’ meaning it was a full litre bottle of ice-cold Solibra and I should stop looking for philosophy when there was a serious opportunity to deaden myself to existence. I stood up so that I could see more than his flat-calm eye language and used my full six feet four inches to impress upon him that I gave the orders around here and I didn’t like barmen making assumptions about my drinking habits. He pointed with his chin across the earthen floor into an obscure corner of the shack.
It was a shock to find that the obese half-caste who’d introduced himself to me yesterday as Fat Paul had managed to rumble in without my noticing. He was sitting there with his buttocks hanging over either side of one of the few metal chairs in the joint, wearing a bright-blue silk shirt with big white parakeets all over it. He gave me a little tinkling wave and a sad housewife’s smile. I nodded, sat back down and blocked out the frosted, beading grande modele with the full spread of the Ivoire Soir.
Fat Paul was sitting with George and Kwabena who’d been with him yesterday. I’d watched them getting out of a large black 1950s Cadillac with tail fins higher than sharks’ dorsals and chrome work you could check your tonsils in. They’d come into the bar and chosen a table next to mine and Fat Paul had started talking to me as if he was a star and I was an extra in a movie’s opening sequence in a bar on Route 66.
‘I’m Fat Paul, who are you?’
‘Bruce Medway.’
‘What they got here that’s any good, Bruce?’
‘Pineapple fritters.’
‘How d’they do that?’
‘They dip them in batter, deep fry them and coat them with sugar.’
‘Sounds good. I’ll have six. What you want?’ he said, looking at Kwabena and George.
They’d sat in the same corner they were sitting in now and Fat Paul had ordered a bottle of beer and had it sent over to me. Later he’d asked me to join them for lunch and seeing as I had hell and all to do I went over without bothering with any of the ‘no, no, thank you’ crap.
Before I’d sat down they’d asked me if I was a tourist and when I’d said no Kwabena had produced a chair from behind his back and had let me sit on it. The conversation hadn’t exactly zipped around the table while we were eating but afterwards, while Fat Paul was taking a digestif of another four pineapple fritters, he’d asked me what I did for a living.
‘I do jobs for people who don’t want to do the jobs themselves. I do bits of business, management, organization, negotiations, transactions, and debt collection. Sometimes I find people who’ve gone missing. Sometimes I just talk to people on behalf of someone else. The only things I don’t do are criminal things…that…and domestic trouble. I won’t have anything to do with husbands, wives and lovers.’
‘You been asked that before,’ said Fat Paul, chuckling.
Soon after that they’d paid the bill and left but, by the way Fat Paul had looked back at me from the doorway, I’d expected to see him again, and here he was, the twenty-five-stone pineapple-fritter bin. He made it look so easy, but that’s talent for you.
‘You want join us for lunch, Mr Bruce?’ said Kwabena, measuring each word as it came out and looming dark in my light so that I couldn’t read the paper.
‘It’s ten-thirty in the morning,’ I said, and Kwabena looked back at Fat Paul, lacking the programming to get any further into normal human relations without more guidance.
‘You got t’eat!’ shouted Fat Paul across the bar. ‘Keep you strength up.’
Kwabena picked up the bottle of beer between his thumb and forefinger and took three strides across to Fat Paul’s table. The barman turned on the radio, which immediately played the hit of the year he’d been whistling earlier. Its single lyric was so good that they felt the need to repeat it three times an hour. It was the kind of song that could make people go into public places and kill.
