After the airport the two-lane Grand Bassam road joined a fourteen-lane highway into downtown Abidjan. I drove through the suburbs of Koumassi and Marcory with the Manhattan-style skyline of the financial district called Plateau in front of me. You could forget you were in Africa if you concentrated on the skyscrapers but at Treichville I broke right and the buzz and hot stink of life in the African Abidjan brought me home. I crossed the lagoon, that separated the two continents, over the Pont Général de Gaulle.
Life hadn’t been so good in Abidjan recently. Before it was no different to being in any modern city; built around the lagoon the cityscape looked like Sydney and the facilities were much the same. Everything had been accessible on a well-larded expatriate salary and after work the residential districts of Cocody and Deux Plateaux were splashed with gold and silver lame and rang with crystal laughter. On the other side of those well-clipped hedges the locals were beginning to hit the ground with sticks while they listened to the President’s fading charisma. Then the power workers went on strike. Now there was no guarantee of getting ice in a whisky and cool air to sleep in.
The Ivorians, like all the people along this coast, wanted to run their own country with a bit of democracy. Now that the money had run out, the price of coffee and cocoa had dropped and the value of pineapples foundered, people had taken to thinking they could do no worse than have a crack at it themselves. The army had sensed a mood and had staged a rebellion and the air force had followed. In the confusion a lot of shops were emptied by people with no credit facilities but strong arms and big appetites.
Order was re-established after a few pay rises were promised but not with the same respect for the law as before. Care had to be taken on the streets. There were a lot of fast young men who weren’t above a little violence to get a handbag or a gold chain. People ran from their cars to the office and didn’t bother to go out for a meal or try to see a film which might not make it to the last reel. Restaurants closed, businesses folded. Everybody stayed in and sweated by candlelight and drank very warm Beaujolais and thought about Geneva and other places of perfect order.
I parked my car in the Novotel basement, picked up the hired Peugeot that blended in with all the other Peugeots that were the only cars in Ivory Coast unless you had a ministerial Mercedes or a bandit’s BMW. I worked my way north up to the Banco National Park passing the fanicos, a bunch of immigrant workers who stood in thigh-deep water all day washing clothes by pounding them against rocks in the river, and headed west towards the coastal town of Grand Lahou. They were few cars out in the susurrating heat, which meant that I didn’t have to eat someone else’s dust, picking grit out of my eyes on the graded road.
The drop point was in a pineapple plantation. Tracks had been cut through the fields for harvesting and one of these led down to a landing stage on the Ebrié lagoon, the body of water which stretched west from Abidjan about sixty miles. I decided to take Fat Paul’s advice and check it out beforehand and then drink beer in Tiegba until time came for the drop at 8.30.
I found a left turn with the orange arrow that George had told me about and took the dirt track between the acres of tilled grey earth with a foot-high pineapple every metre whichever way you looked. Three kilometres later the track dropped down steeply through thick vegetation to a large clearing of beaten and sunbaked earth from which a wooden jetty took off out into the lagoon.
It was no cooler down by the water. There was no fresh breeze coming off it, just more humidity and insects. Out on the jetty, down between the warped and loosening slats of the walkway, the water had hardly the energy to slop around the wooden support struts. Through the haze I could just see the opposite bank of the lagoon. The sun, still high even though there was only another hour and a half’s light in it, punished the scene and the sweat dripped off my eyebrows. I turned back and something flashed in the corner of my eye from high up in the vegetation on the bank. I ambled back towards the car, casting about like a retired colonel with no troops to inspect, and a fish came up for a fly, leaving concentric ripples. Another flash – high up to my right and I got a fix on it this time.
Looking back from the jetty I could see another track dropped down at the far end of the clearing from where I’d parked. I stepped off the uncertain planking and picked up a stone and sent it on a blasé skim across the water. After a minute’s fevered nonchalance I got back in the car and drove fast across the hard earth and up the other track. I broke through the vegetation and out on to the plateau of the pineapple plantation in time to see a whipped-up funnel of dust which hung well and long in the torpid air, making a screen of ash-grey voile through which the car, pulling away, was invisible.
The terrain curved so that I couldn’t see the main road to Abidjan and I had to drive a fast and dusty kilometre to find out that whoever had been watching me was in a large dark saloon. The car, off to the right now where the track joined the main road, slowed into a gully, then kicked up on to the graded road and was engulfed in its own dust for a moment before finding a lower gear and heading east, back to the city.
I followed with the windows shut and the dust still finding its way into the car, mixed with the sweat streaming off my face and down my neck. I reached the gully and stopped. The car was too far ahead, and if I’d taken the gully at speed it would have put a kink in the chassis which might have been noticed. I sat back and watched the dust settle in a film over the dashboard and bonnet. A minibus passed from right to left driven by an African with white people in the back holding on to their seats. They were all wearing hats, which meant they were tourists, and they were hunched, grim and tense from a rough ride.
I should have turned right, driven back to the city, gone straight through Abidjan and out to Grand Bassam. I should have found Fat Paul sitting in some broken-down colonial house and given him his package along with some suggestions as to where, on his unchartered anatomy, he could stick it. I let the tourist bus get ahead and then turned left, following it at a distance down to the lagoon village of Tiegba.
Why did I do that, when the first of those snags I’d been on at Fat Paul about had just left a big rent in the threadbare fabric of my inner calm? Why, when Martin Fall was going to start paying me £300 a day plus expenses, did I carry on with a job that stank of disaster? Maybe my sense of honour needed a long stretch in a rehab centre to get itself realigned to cope with a modern world. Or was I just persuading myself that I was all confused with old-fashioned values handed down by well-meaning parents who would never understand the game.
I drove through the purpling afternoon and ran a film clip through my head which was clear as the day it had happened, twenty-two years ago. My father dying in a London hospital. The iron-grey light of a slate-cold, viral January – the month that saw off the parchment-skinned pensioners and people like my father with weak hearts and lungs black, clogged and bleeding from four decades of Woodbines and Capstans. His fingernails were blue, his grey and phlegmy eyes were frightened on either side of the black rubber oxygen mask which covered his dark lips. His hand dragged at the tube of the mask to pull it off and get it over with. The nurse chided him. He beckoned me over. I pulled the mask off a crack and heard the oxygen and then his voice like a radio on the other side of a windy railway track. ‘Never do anything for the money,’ he said to my sixteen-year-old innocence, ‘and if you say you’re going to do something, do it.’ Those were the last words of a London contract electrician; he survived the night but didn’t make it to mid-morning tea.
I’d taken this job for the money, so I’d failed him once. Now that I was following through with something I’d started would the old man be nodding his approval? I doubted it. I had an attitude problem, brought on by being alone too much, brought on by spending too much of my time with a bottle for company. One thing I did know was that I wasn’t confused. The truth was, I wanted to see if I could get away with it – tempt fate and still beat it. Maybe Heike was right to stay away from me.
No other cars passed on the other side of the road before I dropped down to the landing stage for the boats across to the stilted village of Tiegba. It was 5.30 p.m. by the time I parked up by the bar where the sound of elderly, annoyed Americans filled the air like frogs sending invitations after dark. Some of them were getting into low flat boats, filming their feet with video cameras while