‘Good. Where were we?’
‘What are you going to do about the Nielsens?’
‘The Nielsens? Right. Yes, of course. You know,’ he started and got out from behind his desk and walked over to the window and looked out on to a dull, grey Avenue Noguès, ‘sometimes I look out of the window in the rainy season. The sky is grey. I can hear the wind off the sea around the building, the rain on the window. It’s cold in here, as you know. I have a couple of glasses of Aquavit and I think I’m back in Skagen, you know it? Right on the northern tip of Denmark. Terrible place, but I like it around there.’ He paused, letting the Aquavit shunt around his system, letting it take the edge off his cares. He swallowed something the size of a crab apple, as if he was trying to keep his longing down, and took his glasses off.
‘You know what I think?’ He turned to me. ‘Mrs Nielsen didn’t call herself Mrs Nielsen, she referred to Kurt Nielsen as her husband but she called herself Dotte Wamberg, she’ – he ran both hands through his hair – ‘she couldn’t find her husband, she called me, I asked for her husband’s details, she said she’d have to find them and send them on. Then she must have started thinking and realized that she was going to have some problems if she did that, so she had her husband reappear. How’s that?’
‘You’ve done some conclusion-leaping, Mr Andersen.’
‘Only since you came in asking about him and we’ve found that he’s on a dead man’s stolen passport.’
‘OK, I’ll buy it. What’re you going to do about it?’
‘I’ve a lot…’ He looked at his watch. ‘The ambassador’s coming back from Lagos, the agronomists, back to…’
‘Nothing, then?’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘Will a fourth Aquavit get us through this hazy patch we’re in at the moment?’
Leif locked the door, and took the bottle and glasses out of the drawer again. We had a fourth and a fifth before he put the bottle away, but it didn’t make him any more expansive on what he had in mind. He slapped and kicked his desk around a bit and rolled himself back and forwards on his castored chair and laughed about things in his head without involving me, but he avoided definitive action on Kurt Nielsen and Dotte Wamberg.
Somebody knocked on the door and the vice-consul sat up and asked whoever it was to come in. The door was still locked and he said ‘shit’ under his fiery breath and took off out of his chair, which backed off into the far corner of the room so that he was in two minds as to whether to open the door or go after the chair. He unlocked the door. A woman with straight blonde hair, a light-blue dress and folders held to her bosom, came in. She looked from Andersen to me and then at the chair, which in my vision seemed a long way off. She wore a pair of blue steel-rimmed spectacles whose lenses were the size of throat lozenges. She put the files on the desk and left without turning to see Leif bowing with a flourish from his right hand, which would have given the game away if the alembic fumes hadn’t already. He shut the door, breathless.
‘She’s very attractive, isn’t she?’
‘Is she new?’
Leif didn’t have to answer and he didn’t have to tell me why he didn’t want to go up to Korhogo and find out what had happened to Kurt Nielsen, who was going to be some lowlife, probably an escaped convict. What did he care about all that? He said he’d fax the passport through to the Danish police authorities and get an ID on who Kurt Nielsen really was and ask them if they wanted any action taken. I said I’d appreciate it if he could give me the dirt on Kurt Nielsen and he gave me his card and said to call him in a couple of days.
By ten to five I was back in the Novotel sitting on one of the twin beds in room 307 nearest the window. The high-stacked, bruised clouds of the storm building over Ghana were moving towards me. It would be raining by nightfall. I thought about going out in that storm and doing something for nothing for Fat Paul and that drew me to the secrets of the mini-bar, which I opened but only checked. I needed to be steady for what Fat Paul might have in mind.
I stared at the carpet, waiting for the phone, and had one of those existential lurches when I saw myself – a big man, getting drunk to hold himself together on a small bed in a hotel room in Africa, fresh from a meeting with another drunken bum and about to do something criminal for a vindictive slob. For a moment, I seemed to be on the brink of an explanation for the mystery and absurdity of my situation. Then the god controlling those moments of insight decided I’d be better off without the self-knowledge. A fluorescent light started flickering, pitched at an epileptic-fit-inducing frequency. I turned it off and lay down, relieved that I didn’t have to run down to the bar and tell all the other people deadening themselves to reality that I’d cracked it and we could all relax.
I woke up with the rain on the window and it dark outside and in the room. It was just before six o’clock. I phoned reception – no calls. I made sure they knew I was in 307, having moved me from 205 – still no calls. I took a bottle of mineral water out of the mini-bar and sat in the white light from the chamber and drank it until my teeth hurt. I kicked the door shut and lay back down on the bed in the dark, light coming in under the door.
I was missing something which wasn’t home but felt like it ten times over. Hotel rooms did this to me. I thought of individuals sitting in concrete boxes stacked on top of each other and the human condition got lonelier. I’d fallen for two women before Heike, one of them was now married to Martin Fall. I’ve been disappointed just as much as anybody closing in on forty has. I’d always bounced back, though. It might take a few months of rolling into the cold side of the bed before I’d get used to sleeping in the middle again, but I could always get used to being on my own. This time I wasn’t bouncing back, I was slipping further down the black hole. I was missing Heike more than an amputee missed a leg and people could see it, smell it, and feel it.
Some footage came into my head, black-and-white stuff, a little quick and faltering like an old home movie. Heike was sitting on the floor of my living room in my house in Cotonou, Benin. She wore her big white dress, her legs were crossed and covered by the dress, her long bare arms rested on her knees. She had a cigarette going in one of her large, almost manly, hands and in the other she held a glass with her little finger sticking out. Her hair, as usual, was pinned up any old how so that every loose strand said: ‘kiss this nape'. She sat there and occupied herself smoking and drinking and not saying anything and her completeness brought on a terrible ache, and I shut the film down and drifted off into a lumpy sleep.
I woke up and looked around the darkness in the room, thinking there was a bat flying around expertly missing walls and furniture. I turned on the neon and it blasted the room with light and dark until I’d fumbled around for the light switch by the door. It was 6.30 p.m. The rain still gusted against the window outside and thunder rumbled off in a corner somewhere. The phone went and I tore it off its cradle.
‘I thought you said you weren’t all African…’
‘…This is Leif Andersen, Mr Medway.’
‘Sorry, I was expecting somebody else. Have you got anything for me?’
There was a long crash, one that went on for fifteen, twenty seconds, of falling crockery followed by a roar of approval from down the phone.
‘Are you eating Greek tonight?’ I asked.
‘I’m in a place called Maison des Anciens Combatants in Plateau.’
‘War Heroes in Plate Crash.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Nothing, Mr Andersen.