Charlie shivered.
‘She does something for me, that woman.’
‘Confuse you?’ I said.
‘There’s one thing I’m not confused about,’ he said, turning and putting his hand on my shoulder to steer me into the house.
‘They don’t make them like that any more,’ I said.
‘Right.’
‘Now that we’re all being genetically engineered.’
‘Something went wrong in my test tube,’ said Charlie, looking down at his big hairy body.
‘Not us, Charlie. You can still see the ape in us. In the future they’ll iron out all those blips and glitches that make someone extraordinary like Yvette and we’ll all look like leads from shampoo and shaving ads. We’ll be the bathroom people from planet Earth.’
‘You know, Bruce’ – he stopped and looked at me from under his eyebrows with his hand resting on the back of my neck – ‘you’re kinda weird, but you’re OK…I think, anyways.’
We went back into the house and sat opposite each other on the sofas with big tumblers of Scotch in our hands and a bottle and a bucket of ice on the table. We drank and refilled without speaking. I took Kershaw’s photograph out of my shirt pocket and flicked it across to Charlie.
‘I’m looking for this guy. His boss wants me to find him, says he hasn’t heard from him in a week. He describes him as missing.’
‘Steve Kershaw,’ said Charlie, rolling his glass across his forehead. ‘English. Buys sheanut in Cotonou.’ He spun the photo back at me across the table.
‘When did you last see him?’
‘He was in here about three days ago with a blonde girl, French I think, I didn’t know her. Nice looking though. Great legs, nice ass.’
‘Three days doesn’t sound like he’s very “missing” to me.’
‘You asked me a question,’ he shrugged.
‘Was he intimate with this French girl?’
‘Kind of,’ he patted his bald head with his hairy hand. ‘Sex rather than marriage type, I’d say.’ Charlie twisted his leg under himself and winced. ‘You know, this concubinage thing confuses me, Bruce. It sounds…financial.’
‘It’s like a common-law wife,’ I said, my eyes widening with the whisky on an empty stomach which was loosening off the gab more than I wanted it to. ‘I know you Americans are keen on marriage. Divorce, too. But in Europe now, marriage is out. People live together, they don’t need to tie the knot in front of God any more. It keeps the divorce rate down. I’ve met quite a few Americans who’ve had three or four wives, which to Europeans sounds like upgrading, like we do with computers. The Africans? Well, they have all four wives at once, it shows they’re making money. But then they say divorce is not a cheap option in the US. Is it a status symbol there yet, Charlie?’ He didn’t answer but stared at a bookcase with no books in it.
‘You been married before, Charlie?’
Charlie, who was sitting sideways on the sofa with his arm thrown over the back of it, gave me a sideways look as if I was trying to cheat off him in an exam. He held up two fingers and took a large slug of whisky from his glass, including a lump of ice which he crunched.
‘And you’d like to make Yvette number three?’
Charlie didn’t react well to that dart into his private life. He’d shown me more than he’d wanted to earlier and, being a businessman always on the lookout for leverage, thought I could be the type to abuse it, which is the sort of thing he would do. The look he gave me told me so. It left me with frost bite down my front. His face lost expression, his eyelids closed a little, and he spoke in a soft voice. ‘We were talking about Steve Kershaw.’
As he said this, Charlie’s brain spun and clicked into a different mode. He was not a man to reveal what he was thinking. I had caught him off guard. Charlie knew that I knew that Yvette had got through, if not to the heart, then at least to the fillet steak. He leaned back with his elbow on the arm of the sofa, straightened his leg and sipped his whisky, licking the liverish lip to show that he was relaxed. He put his glass down on the carpet and rubbed his face with his hand.
‘Steve Kershaw,’ said Charlie in a voice that had a very straight edge to it. ‘Can I call him Steve?’ he asked, not expecting an answer but just to show me he was back in town. ‘Steve Kershaw used to come in here with a lot of different women. He only came in at the weekends. I never once saw him with another guy. I saw him in here with black girls, white girls, Orientals, Indians, tall girls, short girls, beautiful girls and ugly girls but I never saw him with a guy.’
‘He likes women,’ I said, shrugging my eyebrows.
Charlie drew a straight horizontal line with his hand. ‘I don’t trust that kinda guy.’
‘Did you know any of these women?’ I asked.
‘The only woman I knew to talk to was a woman called Nina Sorvino. She works in the trade department of the US Embassy. She liked him but thought he was kinda intense. I don’t know what happened but something went wrong. She was here last night giving me the lowdown. I think he was into weird sex. She wasn’t specific.’
‘D’you mind if I talk to her?’
‘Try her. She’ll tell you more than I can. She might know some other people. I’ll call her tomorrow, let her know you’re gonna be in touch.’
‘Did you ever talk to him?’
‘Uh huh. Like I said. Not my type.’
Charlie poured himself a very stiff whisky and did the same for me. He took a gulp out of his as if it was nothing more than a cold beer. He grunted as the alcohol hit his system. The blinds were coming down in my head and I could see Charlie was beginning to paw the ground with his hoof.
‘Whaddya think’s gonna happen, Bruce?’ asked Charlie, slapping the back of the sofa and lapsing into a more pronounced American drawl. It was the usual thing – Charlie on the hunt for information. He was a businessman, a trader, one of the good ones who realized that information was everything and he didn’t give a damn about the source. He knew better than anybody else that not hearing the vital piece of news in Africa wouldn’t just mean that you missed out on some action, it could cost you your whole business and, in bad times, your life.
He also knew that the boy who packed his groceries last month, or the young army sergeant at the road block could, with not very many twists of fate if he didn’t draw the line at shooting people, become a highranking minister, or even the president himself.
‘The President might survive this one, but it’s going to be painful,’ I said. ‘He’s losing the support of the people. France is edging away from him. There’s going to be a question mark about future US aid. He’s been around too long. It’s happening everywhere else in Africa. The day of the dictator is over. They’re all feeling the cold wind now. Africa’s going to be a different continent by the end of the century.’
‘What about here?’ said Charlie.
‘The army’s the problem. You’re never safe until you’ve got the army with you. The army’s full of northerners from the President’s