C’est bon pour le moral…’
My ‘moral’ dipped as I looked at Fat Paul’s buried eyes, which were like two raisins pressed into some dough so old that it had taken on a light-brown sheen. The mild contour of his nose rose and fell across his face and his nostrils were a currant stud each and widely spaced almost above the corners of his mouth, which had a chipolata lower lip and did a poor job of hiding some dark gums and brown lower teeth. He had a goitrous neck which hung below the hint of his chin and shook like the sac of a cow’s udder. A gold chain hid itself in the crease of skin that came from the back of his neck before exiting on to the smooth, hairlessness of his chest. He had a full head of black hair which for some reason he felt looked great crinkle cut and dipped in chip fat.
The one thing that could be said of Fat Paul was that he was fat. He was fat enough not to know what was occurring below his waist unless he had mirrors on sticks and a jigsaw imagination. He told me that he had a very slow metabolism. I suggested he had no metabolism at all and he said, no, no, he could feel it moving at night. I put it to him that it might just be the day’s consumption shifting and settling. This vision of his digestive system so unnerved him that he lost his appetite for a full minute.
Fat Paul’s nationality wasn’t clear. There was some African in there and perhaps some Lebanese or even American. To me he spoke English in a mixture of excolonial African and American movies, to George and Kwabena he used the Tui language.
George was a tall, handsome Ghanaian who was wearing a white short-sleeve shirt and a tie which he had contrived so that one end covered his crotch and the other stuck out like a tongue from the black-hole density of the knot at his top button. The tie was white with horses pounding across it with jockeys on their backs in wild silks. He hid behind some steel-rimmed aviator sunglasses and did what he was good at – letting his tie do the talking.
Kwabena was a colossus. His cast was probably taking up some valuable warehouse space in the steelworks where he’d been poured. His frame was covered by very black skin which had taken on a kind of bloom, as if it had been recently tempered by fire. He wore a loud blue and yellow shirt which had been made to go over an American football harness but nipped him around the shoulders. He sat with his mouth slightly open and blinked once a minute while his hands hung between his knees preparing to reshape facial landscapes. He looked slow but I wouldn’t have liked to be the one to test his reactions. If he caught you and he’d been programmed right he’d have you down to constituent parts in a minute.
‘What was it you say you doin'?’ asked Fat Paul, the fourth pineapple fritter of the morning slipping into his mouth like a letter into a pillar box.
‘When I’m doing it, you mean?’
He laughed with his shoulders and then licked his fingers one by one, holding them up counting off my business talents.
‘Management, negotiations, debt collection, organization, findin’ missin’ people, talkin’ to people for udder people…no, I’m forgettin’ some…’
‘Transactions,’ I said.
‘Transactions,’ repeated Fat Paul, nodding at me so I knew I’d got it right.
‘As long as it’s not criminal.’
‘And no fucky-fucky business,’ finished Fat Paul.
‘I’ve not heard it put like that before.’
‘Sorry,’ he said, beckoning to Kwabena for a cigarette, “swat ‘sall about, you know, jig-a-jig, fucky-fucky. I no blame you. Thass no man’s business. But transactions. Now there’s somethin'. Somethin’ for you. Make you some money.’
‘What did you have in mind?’
Fat Paul clicked the fingers he’d been sucking and George opened a zip-topped case and handed him a package which he gave to me. It was a padded envelope with a box in it. The envelope had been sealed with red wax and there was the impression of a scorpion in the wax. It was addressed to M. Kantari in Korhogo, a town in the north of the Ivory Coast, where I was expecting to be sent any day now to sort out a ‘small problem'.
‘How d’you know I was going to Korhogo?’ I asked, and Fat Paul looked freaked.
‘You gonna Korhogo…when?’
‘I don’t know. I’ve got a job to do there. I’m waiting for instructions to come through.’
‘No, no – this not for Korhogo.’
‘That’s what it says here.’
‘No. You deliver it to someone who take it to Korhogo.’
‘I see,’ I said, nodding. ‘Is that strange, Fat Paul?’
‘Not strange. Not strange at all,’ he said quickly. ‘He gonna give you some money for the package. You go takin’ it up Korhogo side then you up there wid the money and we down here wid…’
‘Waiting for me to come back down again.’
‘That’s right. We got no time for waitin'.’
‘Why don’t you deliver it yourself?’
‘I need white man for the job,’ said Fat Paul. ‘The drop ibbe made by ‘nother white man, he only wan’ deal with white man. He say African people in this kind work too nervous, too jumpy, they makin’ mistake, they no turnin’ up on time, they go for bush, they blowin’ it. He no deal with African man.’
‘There can’t be that many white people up in Korhogo.’
‘Ten, mebbe fiftee', ‘s ‘nough.’
‘The drop? Why did you call it the drop?’
‘You callin’ it transaction. I callin’ it a drop.’
‘Where and when is this drop?’
‘Outside of Abidjan, west side, down by the lagoon Ebrié, eight-thirty tomorrow night.’
‘Why there?’
‘The white man no wan’ come to Abidjan, he no wanbe seen there, he have his own problems, I donno why.’
‘Why don’t you just go to Korhogo and cut out the middlemen?’
‘We’ – he pointed to himself who could easily pass for plural – ‘we no wango Korhogo, too much far, too much long.’
‘Well, it sounds funny to me, Fat Paul. Nothing criminal. Remember.’
‘I rememberin’ everythin’ and this no funny thin', you know. You jes’ givin’ a man a package an’ he givin’ you some money. You takin’ you pay from the money an’ givin’ us the rest. I’m not seein’ anythin’ crinimal,’ he said, getting the word wrong and not bothering to go over it again.
‘What’s in it?’ I asked rattling the package, and Fat Paul didn’t say anything. ‘A video cassette?’
Fat Paul nodded and said, ‘What you puttin’ on a video cassette that’s criminal?’
‘How about
