Instruments Of Darkness (11 page)

    In the bedrooms, the walls were dedicated to people, mainly women, some naked with fruit, others wearing wraps of African print. In one room, two women occupied a wall each and looked across a third wall where two young boys played catch on a beach with a lemon.

    Most of the wall was an aching blue sky with only the yellow fruit sailing through it to the wild outstretched arms of the catcher. In the back room, overlooking the garden, was an unfinished painting of a fisherman hauling on a boat line.

    I went back into the master bedroom whose walls, I'd noticed before, were bare. A double bed with a carved wooden headboard was positioned in the centre of the room. The ceiling had been painted like a break in the clouds. Grey at the edges turning to gunsmoke, then yellow becoming an intense white light at the centre of the room where the single, bare light bulb hanging from a thin flex became a joke.

    On the stretched white counterpane of the bed was an overnight bag. There was a Ghana Airways tag with Kershaw's name on it. I opened the bag and took out two white shirts, a pair of khaki chinos and a washbag. Underneath, was a pair of black lycra cycling shorts. Under them, what felt like a bunch of shoelaces. They stuck to my hand and fell through my fingers, They were strips of black leather encrusted with dried blood. I tipped the bag out on the bed. There was a horse whip, stained with dried blood, two lengths of insulated wire with crocodile clips. One of the clips had a flake of something caught in its teeth. There was also a piece of wood with two holes in it; a two-foot length of cord had been passed through the two holes and knotted. It was the kind of device where if you slipped the loop over someone's head and then twisted the wood, it would allow you a controlled strangulation of your victim.

    I looked up at the ceiling and down at the bed. I walked out of the room, on to the gallery, and found the leopard staring at me from the painted forest with eyes that had already eaten. I was trying to square what I'd found in the bag with what was up on these walls and I couldn't. I went back to the case and the mess of equipment on the bed and repacked the contents as I had found them. I gave the house a cursory search. There was hardly any furniture in it apart from a wardrobe and a chest in the bedroom with a few clothes in the top drawers.

    Yao had said Kershaw wasn't here, but I'd found that his bag was, and I had no idea why someone would want to leave a bag full of that kind of stuff out in the open. It hadn't passed me by that Yao was keen to get away. It could have been because he'd found what was in the bag, or because he'd left the bag there himself. Either reason was a good one for getting out of there.

    I was feeling hot and sick by the time I got back in the car. I had tried talking to the young boy again, who was forthcoming but spoke nonsense. At one point, he had let out a noise like a far off cry (not uncommon from Africans of all ages) and I thought we might be getting somewhere, but he followed it by blubbering his lips. He saw that it was a response that puzzled me so he raised his eyebrows, opened out his palms and smiled. He was the lemon catcher in Kershaw's painting.

    I went to see a friend of mine who was a sergeant in the Surete to see if any dead bodies had washed up on his desk. He told me there were lots of bodies found in the lagoon that morning, but no white bodies had been found anywhere in Lomé yet. He grinned at the word 'yet'. When I asked who was responsible for the bodies in the lagoon, he drew a finger over his lips and told me not to ask that question anywhere in Togo.

Chapter 10

    The day had worked its way around to one o'clock and I found myself sitting in the open part' of the German Restaurant with a beer in front of me that was so cold it steamed like liquid nitrogen. There was a mixed crowd in the dozen or so cubicles. Some trans-Saharan travellers giving themselves a luxury, some German businessmen not talking to each other and plodding through large hunks of roast pork and sauerkraut with huge jugs of beer, a French couple having a sibilant row like two cats fighting, and an ascetic looking Scandinavian who sat at the table next to me reading Kierkegaard and eating his paper napkin.

    I turned round from the French couple whose row had reached a crescendo of hissing and terminated with a loud slap that had silenced the restaurant. A young woman in her late twenties stood at the edge of the table. Apart from her height, the bewildering curvaceousness of her figure and the dangerous length of her fingernails, the thing that jolted me about Nina Sorvino was her hair. There was a hell of a lot of it, enough to stuff several bolsters and have spare for a couple of scatter cushions. It was also very black. It wasn't dyed, because I could see it shining midnight blue in the sunlight that fell through the raffia matting above us.

    'Bruce Medway,' she said, arcing her hand down in a way that might have opened up an unwary person from the neck to the abdomen. We shook hands.

    'Nina Sorvino?' I said.

    'Dat's me,' she said, with a lot of Bronx in the accent. She sat down and her hair drew around her like a heavy shawl. The waiter appeared and I ordered an omelette and salad while Nina asked for a rare entrecote steak and fries.

    'You a vegetarian, Bruce?'

    'I don't look that ill, do I?'

    'You need protein, need some blood in your veins.'

    I looked at the quantity of protein coming out of Nina's head and fingers and reckoned she was on a cow a week.

    Nina wanted some wine so I ordered a cold Beaujolais which the waiter brought straightaway. He poured a taster for Nina who beckoned him with a fingernail saying: 'Don't be shoy.'

    The waiter filled the glass and fled. She took some Camels out of her handbag and holding the cigarette between the pillar box-red razors of her nails, lit it with a match which she blew out with the first exhalation of smoke. She tinkled the wine glass with the other handful of nails and looked at me looking at them.

    'Dey're all my own,' she said, and gave me a little kick with her foot under the table which I winced at.

    'Don't worry,' she said. 'I cut my toenails, I can't afford the sheets.' She laughed with a snort and so did I, forgoing the snort. This was almost too much for a single hangover to bear on its own, so I downed the cold beer and struck out for the wine.

    She had a tough look to her face. It wasn't a mean look, it was a look that could stand up for itself when the chairs started flying in the saloon. She had very straight black eyebrows over dark brown eyes. Her nose was blade sharp and her nostrils arched from the blade like the prow of a ship through water. She had the habit of breathing through her nose and her nose alone, which meant the nostrils flared occasionally giving an air of impatience. As her nostrils flared, her red and glossy lips pouted. She knew this. The smoking was a diversionary tactic. The effect was of getting the come on and the knee in the groin at the same time. She wore a dark blue raw silk blouse and a white cotton skirt. She was dressed for work but I felt there was a racier wardrobe elsewhere.

    She was looking at me with her head to one side. She dropped her bottom lip and showed me the straight line of her white teeth.

    'You know, don't ask me why, but I kinda like English guys.'

    'Any particular reason?'

    'I said, "Don't ask me why."'

    'I thought you were being rhetorical.'

    'You ever been to New York?'

    'Yes.'

    'What happened?'

    'I came out of Penn Station and asked a cop the way to Fifth Avenue, he said: "Piss off, jerk."'

    'Not very rhetorical, right?'

    She pulled on her cigarette and licked her lips, taking them into her mouth, and then pouted out smoke at me.

    'I tell you why I like English guys, because dey don't strip you down wid deir eyes, dey don't sniff arounjew like a dawag, dey don't speak wid deir dicks and dey keep deir hands nicely folded in deir laps.'

    I put my hands on the table to show I was the dangerous type and thought about Nina's impact on the Togolese Minister for Trade. She started laughing.

    'I'm puttin' you on, Bruce,' she said with her eyebrows raised.

    'I see.'

    'You think I'd get a job in the US Embassy if I torked like dat?'

    'You tork like dat to Steve?'

    'Yeah. That's why I did it. He liked it. De Bronx, Southern Bey-elle, North Carliiiina 'n' all.'

    'Very good.'

    'No, but it's true I do like English men,' she said, putting her hand on mine, making me flinch. 'I sanded down de edges. I might graze you but you won't need stitches.'

    'I thought the English were too boring. Not enough wisecracks.'

    'Hey, look, buddy, I've had men cracking wise at me all my life, nobody said anything to me I ain't heard already.'

    'D'you scare people?'

    'I didn't scare Steve.'

    'No?'

    'He was too sure of himself to be scared. He just loved the act. Not many men I know can take a woman being too funny for too long.'

    We drank some more wine. The food arrived with a large bowl of salad and some bread. She stubbed out the cigarette, pulled all her nails off and poured them into her handbag like loose change.

    'What can you tell me about Steve?'

    'How long's he been missing?'

    'About a week according to his employer, and three days according to Charlie.'

    'Not so long.'

    'Long enough when you're supposed to be working for someone.'

    She nodded and forked some salad into her mouth.

    'Did you ever go to his place here in Lomé?' I asked.

    'Yep.'

    'What did you think?'

    'The guy can paint.'

    'Did he tell you anything about himself apart from his job?'

    'He didn't talk about his job; I liked that.'

    'Was there anything you didn't like?'

    'You tried his apartment in Cotonou?' she said, riding over my question.

    'Not yet.'

    I finished the omelette, ate some more salad and started to clean the plate with a piece of bread.

    'In a crowd he was a very nice guy to be with. He could make you feel like the most interesting person in the place. He wasn't the type who'd sit around and look at everybody else over your shoulder, winking and waving like a bookie at a racetrack. I've had plenty of those. He only looked at me. It was great to feel intimate with someone like that.'

    'But?'

    'But when it was just the two of us the intimacy kinda changed to intensity, and hey, I'm not the frothy type, but I mean, he was obsessed.'

    I didn't say anything. She finished eating, lit another cigarette and sat sideways sipping her wine.

    'I'm not used to talking about my private life. I mean, I spoke to Charlie and he says you're cool, but it doesn't make it any easier. I've talked about sex before to my girlfriends. Hell, everybody talks about sex in America. You gettin' it, you not, does he do this, does he do that, he got a big cock, he got a small one… he sucks your… to-o-o-o-oes? Gad… did you have time to shower?

    'We have talk shows about sex. We have cable channels dedicated to sex. We have books about sex. We have stars who have sex and write books about it and show us photographs of how to do it. Which is good because sometimes I forget how and it's always nice to know there's someone there to help.

    'I mean, if you're not getting it in the US of A then you gotta talk about it, you gotta complain, you gotta go to the authorities and shout 'n' holler: "Where's my sex? I am an American citizen!" I think we're weird. Don't you?'

    'It's your culture.'

    'Culture? Wow! You mean, like you've got Big Ben and the Queen and we've got sex. That's a bad deal for Britain.' I laughed, I could feel the Scandinavian not reading his Kierkegaard, listening.

    'The money culture,' I said.

    'Now look here, sonny, I ain't never paid for it… not never, ever! And I ain't never, ever, never goin' to neither. Yo hearin' me, ho!' She jabbed at me with her index finger.

    'Do you have sex in England? Or you just got beefeaters and those fuckers in the furry helmets?'

    'We have sex but we don't talk about it… all the time.'

    'What do you do when you're not talking about it?'

    'We're suppressing it. Then we go to apartments in Mayfair and ask formidable women to tie us up and give us the lash.'

    Nina didn't laugh. She stubbed out the cigarette she was smoking and lit another one and blew the match out thinking.

    'That's what Steve was into,' she said.

    'Domination?'

    'No. The other way round. He wanted to tie me up and stuff. He started off talking about spanking and then it was: "Why don't I just tie you to the bed?" and, I mean, I'm not into that stuff. I didn't know the guy that well. I didn't want to put myself in that position. We got crazy fuckers back home who tie you up and the next thing you hear is the chainsaw starting up in the garage. That ain't no fun.'

    'So you finished it?'

    'Well, it went on for a while. But then he tried to ease me into it. You know, being a bit rough, pinching, biting too hard. He got a kick if I cried out. I just found it creepy. I quit.'

    'When did you last see him?'

    The weekend before last. He was in here. We didn't speak. He was with another girl. Like I say, he didn't look up.'

    A strong smell of grilled beef, fried pork and chips was beginning to thicken up the air. People were leaving for siesta. Nina and I talked for a while, but not about Kershaw. She didn't hit her previous form. I called for the bill, paid and walked her down to her car.

    'Yo give me a call sometime,' she said, getting into her car. 'I like English guys.'

    She left and I waded through a half-dozen hawkers who tried to sell me Cartiers and Rolexes. A persistent and rakish young man insisted I bought a video whose cover had some anatomical detail that a trainee surgeon might have been interested in. I told him to move along and he rushed off to the Scandinavian who'd just come out of the restaurant and who took the video and his eyebrows nearly stood out of his face and left him. He threw it up in the air like a hot piece of toast and ran.