I’d jerked awake for the seventh time it was dark. I got up and took two shots of whisky as a mouthwash and then another two to cure the motion sickness. I called B.B. and he gave me the ‘wall small’ routine again. I didn’t bother to check my answering machine at home in Cotonou, Benin, and instead I hit a place with beer and loud music called Le Cafard, the cockroach, a real sleazy joint for men who didn’t shave and women who smelled strongly of cheap sex. I had shaved and I didn’t buy any cheap sex, but people could tell I had the right temperament for the bar. I had le cafard, the blues, and they let me alone to get on with it.
I put away the last quarter of the bottle of whisky when I got back to my room and fainted into sleep, which came in short bursts of violent dreaming, and starts awake in blue-white flashes with instant fears of death, like travelling on a runaway subway train. I woke up face down, twisted in the sheet with sweat cold on my bare back. In the room the darkness was blacker than evil and the mosquitoes had found a note rarely played on the violin which stretched the brain to the thinness of fuse wire. I waited for dawn to paint itself into the room while I marvelled at the size and leatheriness of my tongue.
The bender, which I’d decided was my last, did me some good. I reckoned I’d bottomed out, which worried me because that was what politicians said about economic recessions when there was still some ways to go. I wrote down some pros and cons for doing Fat Paul’s work for him and although his offer still looked as attractive as a flophouse mattress, it was beginning to show some merits. You could sleep on it as long as you held your nose and it would only be for one night.
Sunday 27th October
‘You got it,’ said Fat Paul after we’d been through the drop details for the third time. He leaned over his sloping gut to slap the table top but didn’t make it. He settled a jewel-bitten hand on one of his pappy breasts.
He was dressed in the usual five square metres of face-slapping material. The blue and the white parakeets was off today. It was the red with green monkeys for Sunday. He snarled at Kwabena for a cigarette and took a handkerchief out and polished his face with it.
We were sitting at a table in my corner of the bar, which had annoyed Fat Paul because he had his back to the door and I had an angled view out of it down the beach to the sea. It was just coming up to one o’clock but Fat Paul had lost his appetite, maybe because it was hotter than yesterday with no rainfall for the last couple of days, or maybe he didn’t like his back unprotected. He only ordered four pineapple fritters.
‘It’s not what you’d call a regular piece of business,’ I said.
‘How so?’
‘One, the money. Two, the location for what you call “the drop”. Three, the contents of the envelope. Four, the characters involved.’
‘Characters?’ he asked.
‘Fat Paul, Silent George, Colossal Kwabena.’
‘Colossal?’
‘Very big.’
‘Is good word. I like it. Colossal,’ he said, trying it out for size. Then he changed, getting aggressive. ‘Whass wrong these people?’
‘What do George and Kwabena do?’
‘They my bodyguards.’
‘That’s my point,’ I said. ‘Why do you need your body guarded?’
‘I’m not so quick on my feet.’
‘Why do you need to be quick?’
‘I make money.’
‘Doing what?’
‘Videos.’
‘You got an office?’
He handed me a card which gave the company name as Abracadabra Video, Adabraka and an address on Kojo Thompson Road in Accra, Ghana. The company ran video cinemas. They specialized in showing action movies, mainly kickboxer, to local neighbourhoods. It was a lucrative business, there was a high cash turnover and hardly any overheads. A lot of people were interested in taking over the business but not paying for it. Kwabena provided the muscle to persuade them otherwise and if he couldn’t cope George leaned in with the old metal dog leg and people quietened down, talked sensible, played cards and drank beer as if nothing had been further from their mind.
‘You look like shit,’ said Fat Paul, irritated now and trying another strategy. Trying to get tough with a line I hadn’t heard before.
‘My mother loves me,’ I said without looking up.
‘You got no money,’ he said. ‘No money to chop.’
‘How do you know, Fat Paul?’
‘You let me buy you chop.’
‘You have to pay for what you want. Lunch lets you sit at the same table.’
‘You not workin’ for you’self.’
‘How do you know that too, Fat Paul?’
‘No self-respect,’ he said.
‘I suppose you think you know me pretty well?’
‘I know shit when I see it.’
‘I’ve got a good eye for it myself,’ I said, looking at his brow which was swollen as if recently punched. Beneath it his eye sockets had no contour and his piggy peepers looked black and aware. Sweat ran down his cheeks as if he was crying. He didn’t look as if anything could hurt him unless you tried to take away his plate.
‘You just give the man the package…’ intoned Fat Paul. I held up my hand.
‘Thanks, I’ve got it. Listen…’
‘No, no,’ he said. ‘You listen. First I show you where you mek the drop, out Abidjan west side, down by the lagoon Ebrié in pineapple plantation. You go there in the afternoon. The man he comin’ from the north, he comin’ late, he only get there after dark. You check the place, mekkin’ sure you comfortable. Then go down Tiegba side fifteen-minute drive, nice bar, you waitin’ there, the other man come. Relax some, drink beer, look at the lagoon. They’s a village there on legs, ver’ nice, the tourists like’t ver’ much. Then the time come. You ver’ smooth now widde beer and the pretty place an’ you gettin’ in you car an mek the drop. ‘S very easy thing, you know.’ He sat back and put a hand up to his face and dipped the little finger in the corner of his mouth.
‘Most nights,’ I said, ‘my motor reflexes put on a good show. I wake up in the mornings alive even if I don’t feel it. Then, if I haven’t been kissing the bottle too hard I find I have the coordination to stand up and move around. Getting somewhere, putting my hand inside my shirt and pulling out a package and giving it to someone is a cinch for a man with my kind of skills. What’s more, I have the in-built ability to take something with my left hand while I’m giving something else with my right. I can also count and eat a biscuit at the same time, but you tell me this job doesn’t take such talent.’ I stopped while Fat Paul’s lip took on another cigarette. ‘Now you’re beginning to see you’re talking to someone who’s done a few things in life. Someone who knows the difference between a French-restaurant cheese and a curl of dogshit, someone who knows where
