‘What was the question?’ I asked. ‘I was thinking of the good god Orishala.’
‘There was no question,’ said Gerhard, sounding German for the first time, and looking more triumphant than he should have been.
‘You were looking strange,’ said Heike.
‘You’re sending me up country to find out why Orishala is angry and you think I look strange?’
‘Yes,’ said Gerhard, smiling and walking behind his desk to sit in his leather swivel chair, I see your point.’
Heike’s eyes remained wide open, two divots of concern on her forehead, looking good with no make-up, no perfume, just with an African pin I’d bought for her up in Abomey in her hair and a light tan. She softened her mouth into a smile and her teeth showed white against her dark lips with the defined cupid’s bow. Heike wasn’t a model beauty. She had too much intelligence and resilience in her features for that-you’d take your eye off the clothes-but I hadn’t met the guy who wouldn’t sit up straight for her.
Bagado had released his face from his grasp now that the sex had subsided in the room and was staring at a wooden African head on Gerhard’s desk, being patient, which was one of his great strengths. Bagado and Heike had become good friends over the last few years. She’d conveniently forgotten how he’d led me off the winding path of my bread- and-butter business work and into the jungle of more sinister crimes. He wasn’t just my partner. He had a much higher status than that. He was a husband, a father and a totally honourable man. I was the lover, the bastard and as dependable as an island of weed in a mangrove swamp.
Heike crossed her legs and cued Bagado.
‘What do you want us to do, M Gerhard?’
‘We respect Orishala,’ said Gerhard, ‘but we are not convinced. I want you to find out what is happening across the border. I can’t, and I don’t want to involve my own people. They have enough trouble in Benin. You will have to be discreet. You’ll have to come up with your own reasons for being over there. Anything that doesn’t bear the agency’s name. Talk to our people in Kétou if you like, they may have something to add. Sie haben den Akten, bitte, Heike.’
Heike gave him some files and he stood them on end and tapped the desk.
‘Perhaps, first, we should talk about money,’ he said.
‘Unless, of course, you don’t want the job.’
‘We’re interested,’ I said. ‘The money, well, the money’s got a little complicated since devaluation. We used to charge a hundred thousand CFA a day for the two of us.’ A wince shot across Gerhard’s brow like a snake across tarmac.’ We’ve been finding it difficult to double our rate since devaluation. But that’s what we’d like to do. Two hundred thousand a day plus expenses.’
‘Impossible,’ said Gerhard.’ I can’t justify that. I have no budget for private investigations, you understand.’
‘You have contingency, don’t you, Gerhard?’
‘Yes, but you are asking me to pay more than three hundred dollars a day which is my budget for the Kétou station, and this is not our business. Our mandate is for Benin.’
‘But it affects you.’
‘Yes, but when the accountants ask, “What is this thousand dollars?” I have to give an answer within the mandate or I have to ask my boss in Berlin to … to … pacify the money men. I can’t do that very often in a year. I need to keep favours in reserve.’
‘Don’t want to use them up early on?’
‘Precisely.’
‘What sort of money did you have in mind?’
‘That for the whole job … including expenses.’
‘Two hundred thousand? You’ve got to be kidding. Three hundred and seventy-five dollars for the lot? It’ll cost seventy-five dollars to get up there and back. Three-day job. A hundred dollars a day. Fifty dollars each if we don’t eat, sleep or bribe anyone. That’s very little, Gerhard. That’s so little …’
‘You might as well do it for free?’ he said, finding some cheek to slap me with.
‘Not that little.’
‘Two hundred and fifty thousand is my limit.’
I looked long and hard into his unflinching, blue, Aryan eyes. The sort that had spent their youth looking out over cornfields and thinking of Valhalla. There wasn’t even a hair line crack of pity in their blue glassiness. I felt Heike’s tension. She was sitting three feet from me and looked ready to snap up like a roller blind any second. She hated talking about money. I did it so rarely I loved it.
‘Gerhard, I don’t know what Heike’s told you about me. I can be difficult. Unconventional. In this case, I believe your intentions are good. I know Heike’s are. If it wasn’t for her we wouldn’t be here so, for that, and because of the charitable nature of the work, we’ll do it. But you mentioned favours earlier, favours from your boss. Favours are something I’m big on. Favours are my kind of barter system. I’ll do this job for two hundred and fifty thousand and one favour.’
‘What is this favour?’
I thought I might get it over with now and tell him to keep his Teuton muscle out of Heike’s fishing limits and go and be handsome, stable and bossy elsewhere. But that would not be cool.
‘I don’t know, Gerhard. It’ll come to me. It won’t be anything dangerous or unpleasant. It won’t involve money out of your precious budget. You might have to put yourself out a little, that’s all. Are we on?’
Gerhard liked it. He leaned across his desk like a winner and shook hands as if he was crushing beer tins. He handed me the file. We all stood and Heike shook herself out. Gerhard’s jaw muscles were as bunched as a chipmunk’s cheeks.
We read the file in Heike’s office. It was a longer version of what Gerhard had covered in the meeting. Heike walked us to the car. When I kissed her goodbye our noses somehow got in the way, which they hadn’t done before. She touched me on the shoulder as I got in the car. I looked back and her face crumpled a little with pity or worry, I couldn’t decide. Things had been smooth for just over a year, and now, since this morning, I could sense the levels changing, could feel myself being brought to the edge of something.
I checked the camera for film, there was still some in. We bought some whisky and mineral water and drove north in the late afternoon.
It was hot enough for the sweat to curl round the back of my ears like a little girl’s silky hair. Bagado opened up his mac a little and let the hair-dryer-air warm his flat belly. I hadn’t found the day that could make Bagado sweat. His mother called him her little lizard because he always had to be out in the sun. He’d been with the police in both Paris and London. The cold and a desire to find a wife had driven him back, and in that order. He still had nightmares about London – being down on the Thames on a January afternoon with an east wind direct from Siberia blowing up the estuary. I just had to say’ chill factor’ to him and he’d go into the foetal position.
This was Bagado’s season. The dry season, when the heat squirmed up off the tarmac and the beaten earth so that after two minutes out in it a white man would feel sure he’d eaten a bad prawn somewhere. The abnormal rains had unsettled him. He didn’t like rains. They brought malaria with them and he always caught it – hit him like a flu bug, nearly killed me, gave me a headache like the earth must have had when the Grand Canyon opened up.
‘What did you think of our German friend?’ asked Bagado.
‘Looked more of a director