‘Birthday treats,’ I said.
She shrugged her eyebrows and sat behind her knees in a corner of the sofa. She sipped her Scotch and smoked at me.
‘What about these presents then?’
‘Gerhard wants to meet you,’ she said.
‘Who’s Gerhard?’
‘Bruce,’ she said, her voice taking on a serrated edge. I raised an eyebrow. She reined back. ‘Gerhard Lehrner. He’s my boss. The new one.’
‘That Gerhard. Right. The new one. I’m not used to hearing his name.’
‘How many Gerhards …?’ She stopped herself. ‘Forget it.’
‘Come here,’ I said, lunging at her.
‘Not yet,’ she said, inching her feet back.
‘Gerhard’s going to stay in the office tomorrow afternoon. He wants to talk to you about a job when there’s nobody else around,’ she said. The glass of Black Label stuck to my lips. I sat up straighter and looked her in the eye. No kidding.
‘You’ve been telling him about my charitable soul,’ I said.
‘How long did it take?’ She smiled. I stroked her big toenail. She twitched it away.
‘I didn’t tell him about your charitable soul, in fact. I told him what a complete bastard you are. And you know, he’s interested.’
‘He’s got some poor people need kicking.’
She laughed this time. Appealed to her, that, a man with gout kicking a poor person. The suffering.
‘He’s got a job for Medway and Bagado Investigations. He’s looking for someone who can’t be fobbed off, who doesn’t have the word “no” in their language, who will run something to ground and go down the hole after it and …’
‘Above all, someone who’s …’
‘Cheap.’
‘Thanks for the write-up,’ I said, and took a measure off the Scotch.
‘He tells me it could be dangerous. So you better listen to what he has to say before you say yes.’
‘Well, there’s never been any harm in listening.’
‘Then why don’t you do it to me?’
Our eyes connected. Our whisky glasses hit the table together. She stretched a foot out and undid my towel with her toes. She kicked it away and toyed with what she found underneath until I was gritting my teeth. She sat astride me, yanking her skirt up around her waist and took hold of me with a surprisingly cool palm. Watching herself as she did it she lowered herself with infinitesimal slowness until our lips drew level.
‘Better?’
The tension went out of me and I sat back and let Heike do all the work.
I woke up at 6.30 a.m. with too much light in the room because, in the urgency of the moment, closing curtains had been the last thing on our minds. Heike’s arm was across my chest and the phone was ringing. I was too content to answer it. It stopped.
Heike’s hand slipped down below the sheet line and came across some eagerness she hadn’t expected which made her start and look me in the corner of the eye.
‘Is that for me?’
‘More presents.’
She bit me hard on the shoulder so that I yelped. I rolled over her and she gripped my hips with her hands to steady me on. The phone started ringing again.
‘Shit,’ she said.
I thrust, but she held me back. The phone banged on.
‘Come on,’ I said.
‘It’ll stop, for Christ’s sake.’
‘No. I can’t stand it.’
I dropped on to my knees and waited. And waited. And waited.
‘Answer the damn thing and get back in here.’
I stormed into the living room and yanked the phone to my ear.
‘Bagado here. Sorry to disturb you. He’s been found.’
‘Who?’
Who do you think?’
‘I don’t know. Who are we looking for?’
‘Napier Briggs.’
‘Where is he, the bloody idiot?’
‘Down on the railway tracks. He’s dead, Bruce. Dead as the sleeper he’s lying on.’
Cotonou. Saturday 17th February.
There’d been no harmattan this year. That cooling, drying wind, which made all the Africans miserable and me feel human for once in the year, never arrived. It stopped about 100 kilometres north of Cotonou and wouldn’t come any further. Some said it was the pollution, others that it was just a weak harmattan this year but most put it down to the devaluation – anything out of the ordinary just had to be.
Now it should have settled down into the dry season before the April rains, but the weather, like the currency markets, the world economy and my left foot was a mess this year. Cotonou, and other cities along this stretch of coast, had been thumped about by short, savage night-time storms which had left it flat on its back, with no power and secreting fluids from orifices which should have been free and dry. The town got up groggy in the mornings, the people pasty-mouthed and irritable. The buildings shed their conference paint jobs and looked bruised and broken, with mud spattered up the sides from the rain’s kickback. The mud roads were steaming lakes and the first post-conference potholes opened up in the new tarmac like a teenager’s nightmare acne.
There was nothing refreshing about these storms. The sun eased itself into position in no time at all and hammered down so that at eight in the morning, out on the railway tracks, it was already close to eighty degrees, and a thin mist like kettle steam hung in the air. The place stank of putrid salami. My head was coming apart like a coconut after the first machete blow and there was the same flesh-tearing, sucking noise in my ears.
Bagado was walking ahead of me, pacing the sleepers between the tracks, towards a group of people who were standing around Napier’s body. Bagado was looking over the toes of his shoes for clues, small change, anything that might get him through his current lean patch. I limped behind. Yes, it was back.
I wasn’t really thinking about the harmattan. I wasn’t that upset by the night-time storms, which I slept through anyway. The heat and the humidity were hell but you either got used to that or you got out. I wasn’t even torturing myself over Napier Briggs. Bagado had talked me out of that kind of thinking some time ago. Not even the gout was penetrating. It was rolling over a short few minutes with Heike that had left me feeling uneasy.
After Bagado’s news about Napier the flag was well down by the time I’d come back to the bedroom. Heike was lying there with her arms folded across her bosom with no expression in her face.
‘I suppose you don’t like me now that I’m not the birthday boy?’ I’d said. It was a joke but I could see from her look that there was some truth in it.
‘Bagado with some bad news?’
‘Don’t ask.’
‘I won’t.’
I’d pulled on my clothes with her not saying anything and the room full of it. How had it happened? How had the dynamics changed? It hadn’t been Bagado’s call. She was resigned to that kind of intrusion once in a while.