Blood is Dirt. Robert Thomas Wilson
as if a stagehand was standing in for the leading lady.
The policemen standing around the body parted as we arrived. Some of them knew Bagado and there was an exchange of pleasantries, the asking after immediate relatives which can take some time in Africa. Then Bagado tried to get down to business with them and they froze. He was speaking to them in their own language, Fon, and they were looking sheepish in more ways than one.
‘They’ve been told not to talk to me,’ said Bagado. ‘They won’t touch the body until the senior officer on duty comes. Commandant Bondougou.’
‘Your favourite. Is he out of bed yet?’ I asked, and he shrugged.
‘Let us, you and I, Bruce, go and sit for a while and … mull.’
‘Mull? You’ve got some vocabulary on you, Bagado.’
‘Education-the only thing they can’t take away from me.’
We crouched down and sat on another rail in the siding. Some crows had collected on the corrugated-iron roof of a warehouse opposite. Their toenails clinked on the hot roof, their wings clasped behind them, polite, waiting for the police to have their fill before they moved in. Bagado and I mulled.
‘I made some expensive calls after you left for lunch yesterday,’ he said.
‘What’d you want to do a thing like that for? He wasn’t even a client.’
‘Professional reaction.’
‘Who’d you call?’
‘Dupont in France.’
‘I hope it didn’t take too long to find out they’d never heard of Napier Briggs?’
‘It did and they hadn’t and they said they certainly wouldn’t use a shipbroker to sell their product for them.’
‘He might have used another company name.’
‘And an alias to buy the product? I don’t think so.’
‘OK, I’ll buy it. Anything else?’
‘Napier Briggs was a very nervous man. He didn’t want to tell us anything about what he’d been doing and he didn’t want the Nigerian authorities involved. He only wanted a private investigation from here, so we can assume his business wasn’t legal. I mean the original business, supplying what he said were sewage treatment chemicals to Chemiclean …’
‘Who he told us didn’t exist.’
‘But who paid him for supplying the chemicals, so they did exist. They just weren’t legal, they weren’t registered as a company.’
‘Was that another one of your calls?’
‘Yes.’
How does an unregistered company import goods from overseas?’
‘We’re talking about Nigeria, my friend, not Benin. You couldn’t do it here, but over there …’
‘You pay your money,’ I said.
‘So your next expensive call was to …?’
‘Colonel Adjeokuta, the head of the four-one-nine squad, the man I offered to put Mr Briggs in touch with. He hadn’t heard of Chemiclean, but he was going to make it his business to find out if there was anybody in his department who had. He wasn’t surprised about the Benin connection on the second scam. There’s been a number of those recently.’
‘They never stop, these guys.’
‘It costs a stamp and an envelope and there’s a sucker born every day,’ said Bagado. ‘So what happened to you last night?’
‘Do I look that bad?’
‘No worse than usual, but you said you were going to see Napier at the Hotel du Lac. Did you?’
‘I did. He got a call from the boys while I was there saying they wanted to give him his money back.’
Bagado chuckled to himself.
‘So we went and had a look.’
‘You did what?’ he said, setting solid on the rail as if he’d seen a train coming. ‘What did you want to go and do a thing like that for, he wasn’t even a …’
‘Yeah, yeah, Bagado. I know. He offered me ten grand to hold his hand. Dollars. He said there was a big man who’d guaranteed his personal safety. I went because if I hadn’t he’d have gone by himself and …’
‘Got himself killed.’
‘Point taken.’
I told him how it had happened.
‘Now that’s a problem,’ he said, and we did a quick stick-and-paste job on what were going to tell Bondougou if he was predictable enough to ask what the hell we were doing out on the railway tracks at that hour of the morning.
Commandant Bondougou arrived a little after 8.30 a.m. and stood over the dead body with his hat in his armpit. His head was fat and broad with the eyes widely spaced, as sinister as a halloween pumpkin. He passed a hand over his shaved head and plugged a finger and thumb in each of his nostrils to keep his brain in neutral. A junior policeman muttered something. He glanced Bagado’s way and looked as if he’d spit if he could be bothered to drag up the phlegm. I wouldn’t have liked to rely on him for an introduction to Cotonou society, we were lower than bilharzia on his dance card. We kept our distance.
An ambulance arrived. The policemen rolled the body over and stepped back in formation horror. All we could see between their legs was the mass of blood which had poured down Napier’s chest and was now clogged with dust and insects. Bondougou checked Napier’s wrists for a watch and his pockets for money. Nothing. He found a passport in the jacket and opened it. A card fluttered out which a junior pounced on. Bondougou beckoned us over. It was one of our cards. We looked down at Napier. It was a shock.
Around his neck was a length of rope and two knots evenly spaced along it. It must have been used to squeeze the eyeballs out of their sockets because two black holes stared out of Napier’s face. From his ears, protruding about two inches, were the ends of what must have been two six-inch nails. Most horrific of all was his mouth. It gave him the appearance of an African mask because it was set in a terrible grimace-all teeth and gums. Too many teeth, too much gum and too black inside. Whoever had picked him up in the cocotiers last night had hacked out his tongue and then used the knife to cut off Napier Briggs’s mouth.
Commandant Bondougou released us at lunchtime. I’d been lucky not to get too much of his ugly attention. Bagado had caught most of that. I’d been lying on a bench outside his office and the few occasions the door had opened I’d seen a surprisingly tranquil scene. Bondougou slouched with his tunic open, his gut humped up under a string vest, a toothpick jammed between his teeth which he was sucking on when he wasn’t talking. Bagado upright in a chair, his mac rucked up on his shoulders, his head still, listening.
We’d both written up short and inconclusive statements about our meeting with Napier Briggs which, after our mulling, fortunately matched. We left the station and picked up some sandwiches at La Gerbe d’Or patisserie and drove thirty kilometres east, nose to tail with a thirty-five-ton Titan, to the Benin capital Porto Novo, for our meeting with Heike’s boss.
We parked in the agency’s compound, empty except for Heike’s Pathfinder and a Land Cruiser, just before 2 p.m. I broke the silence by asking Bagado if he’d mind me doing the talking during the meeting.
‘White man to white man, you mean?’
‘No, it’s just that we have a habit of shouting each other down. I think it’d look better if one of us took control to start with until the meeting turns into a free-for-all. I’m volunteering.’
‘Or insisting?’
‘No. I like to talk. You’re a good listener.’
‘This