sniffed the air over Cotonou and caught the usual gagging mix of sea breath, rubbish, drains, grilled kebabs all wrapped in a heady concoction of diesel and two-stroke fumes. Yeah, the bicycles have gone and we’ve been overrun by a million mopeds. Marxism is finished.
We had the Francophonie conference here at the end of last year and they stripped the place down, repainted it, repaired the roads and introduced mobile phones. In three months the Beninois became capitalists.
The transition wasn’t completed without pain. The economy, in the jaws of the free market, was given a kick in the pants by the French who devalued the CFA franc by a hundred per cent to one hundred CFA to one French franc. The whimpering is still going on. Imports are hellishly expensive, trips to France are out, supporting kids in school in Europe is painful; on the other hand, exports are cheap. But who gives a damn about that if the wife can’t afford twelve metres of Dutch Wax African print to adorn her body? No one.
I dragged myself back inside and called Heike-my English/German girlfriend, the one who towed me out of the desert all those years ago, the one who works as a latterday saint for a German NGO1 aid agency – to see if my priapic driver Moses’s blood-test results had come through. He’d been sick for a month and a half and my toe had been through hell on the brake pedal. Heike had persuaded him to go and see a doctor last week and it had been like a child’s first day at school.
The receptionist told me that Heike had left the office, and the blood tests hadn’t come through.
I sat in the dark and listened to the radio playing Africando from the tailor’s shack across the street until it seemed like the time to close up for the night and get down to the Hotel du Lac to see if Napier was in pieces yet and needed gluing.
It was a thick, hot night and the stench in the stairwell from the overflowing sceptic tank added a ripeness that had the mosquitoes dancing for blood. I hacked through it and folded myself into my battered Peugeot estate which was so old and decrepit that I’d quite often been mistaken for a bush taxi on the open road.
The mopeds were out in force and their blue exhaust had been changed into a sickly orange by the streetlighting. People were sitting on the first-floor verandah of the redecorated La Caravelle cafe. They were drinking and trying to stay alive in the small pockets of air still available. Some Lebanese lads with baseball caps on back to front hung over the balcony rail looking at a couple of policemen wrestling with a Nigerian street hawker. A huge diesel locomotive, pushing a line of open wagons, honked and grumbled between the stationary cars and trucks on its way across the lagoon. I turned left, overtook it without disappearing into the usual two-foot-deep Peugeot trap, and crossed the lagoon. The dayglo sign of the Hotel du Lac was easily visible from the bridge, as was the scaffolding on its side. I turned right past the Hotel Pacific, which seemed a long way from home, and parked up behind the hotel. The mosquitoes were screaming out here and I was all over myself like a flea-ridden dog.
I walked by the pool and down the steps to the well-lit bar in the front. There were hunched people in there and a po-faced barman scraping foam off the pressions with a throat spatula.
‘Looking for me?’ asked Napier, jiggling something amber in my face from his side-saddle position on his bar stool. He nearly launched himself on to the floor and was only saved by the boniness of his elbow on the lip of the bar.
‘This isn’t one of my usual haunts.’
‘You’re a drinking man then?’
‘It has been known.’
‘What’ll it be?’
‘A beer.’
‘One of these to chase?’
‘I’ve never said no.’
The barman settled the drinks and I backed up on to a stool. A woman eyed us coolly from the other side of the bar.
‘I told her to fuck off before she even got her bum up on the stool,’ said Napier.
‘You’re learning, but it pays to be polite here. It’s the French in them.’
‘Couldn’t get any life into the old boy even if I wanted to.’
‘Anxious,’ I said, and we drank.
‘No,’ said Napier, squeezing his lips with his fist. ‘Fucking petrified.’
‘Petrified?’
“Swat I said.’
‘Have you heard something?’
‘What’s it to you?
‘I’m sitting next to you in a bar. That’s what people do. Tell each other what’s on their minds.’
‘What’s on your mind?’
‘Money. I want to make some.’
‘Out of me?’
‘If there’s any to be made.’
‘Do you mind getting killed?’
‘It’s not high on my list of goals.’
‘You have goals?’
‘No, it was just something to say.’
‘I had goals,’ he said, sniffing at his Scotch and then taking a pull of beer.
‘What happened?’
‘I scored too many in my own net.’
‘Don’t get maudlin on me, Napier.’
‘I thought we could say what was on our minds.’
‘You cheated. You were going to tell me why you were petrified. You lost some money. That’s worrying but it doesn’t make you scared. You asked me if I minded getting killed. Who’s going to kill me if I stick my nose in?’
Napier waggled his finger at the barman. Two more grandes pressions arrived and two more Red Labels. He lit a Camel. The phone rang in the hotel.
‘Gardez l'écoute,’ said the receptionist.
A short fat fellow came into the bar from the hotel and held up a finger. ‘M. Napier. Téléphone.’
Napier squirmed off his stool and leaned back for his cigarettes in case it was a long one.
‘Keep my beer warm,’ he said, and let me know how drunk he was by pinballing his way out of our tight corner before getting on the straight and narrow.
He was back in ten minutes, looking frisky and not half as drunk as he had been. He hopped up on to the bar stool and clapped me on the back. I didn’t like the turnaround in mood, especially as it looked as if it was going to involve me.
‘Still wanna make some money, Bruce?’
‘Not if I’ve got to lay down my life for it,’ I said.
‘You can’t take it with you, Napier, remember that.’
‘Sure I do,’ he said and socked back the chaser. ‘That was them on the phone.’
‘Who’s them?’
‘They said there’s been a mistake.’
‘That’s big of them. Who’s they?’
‘They said they want to give me my money back.’
‘Why should they suddenly want to do a thing like that?’
‘I don’t know …’ he said, without letting his confidence falter, before he remembered not to lie. Pressure.’
‘Tell me about the kind of person who can exert that kind of pressure.’
‘Well, you know, like you say, you meet people. You tell them what’s on your mind. Sometimes they help you. Sometimes they don’t even have to be asked. You coming?’
‘Napier,