The Big Killing. Robert Thomas Wilson

do George and Kwabena do?’

      ‘They my bodyguards.’

      ‘That’s my point,’ I said. ‘Why do you need your body guarded?’

      ‘I’m not so quick on my feet.’

      ‘Why do you need to be quick?’

      ‘I make money.’

      ‘Doing what?’

      ‘Videos.’

      ‘You got an office?’

      He handed me a card which gave the company name as Abracadabra Video, Adabraka and an address on Kojo Thompson Road in Accra, Ghana. The company ran video cinemas. They specialized in showing action movies, mainly kickboxer, to local neighbourhoods. It was a lucrative business, there was a high cash turnover and hardly any overheads. A lot of people were interested in taking over the business but not paying for it. Kwabena provided the muscle to persuade them otherwise and if he couldn’t cope George leaned in with the old metal dog leg and people quietened down, talked sensible, played cards and drank beer as if nothing had been further from their mind.

      ‘You look like shit,’ said Fat Paul, irritated now and trying another strategy. Trying to get tough with a line I hadn’t heard before.

      ‘My mother loves me,’ I said without looking up.

      ‘You got no money,’ he said. ‘No money to chop.’

      ‘How do you know, Fat Paul?’

      ‘You let me buy you chop.’

      ‘You have to pay for what you want. Lunch lets you sit at the same table.’

      ‘You not workin’ for you’self.’

      ‘How do you know that too, Fat Paul?’

      ‘No self-respect,’ he said.

      ‘I suppose you think you know me pretty well?’

      ‘I know shit when I see it.’

      ‘I’ve got a good eye for it myself,’ I said, looking at his brow which was swollen as if recently punched. Beneath it his eye sockets had no contour and his piggy peepers looked black and aware. Sweat ran down his cheeks as if he was crying. He didn’t look as if anything could hurt him unless you tried to take away his plate.

      ‘You just give the man the package…’ intoned Fat Paul. I held up my hand.

      ‘Thanks, I’ve got it. Listen…’

      ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘You listen. First I show you where you mek the drop, out Abidjan west side, down by the lagoon Ebrié in pineapple plantation. You go there in the afternoon. The man he comin’ from the north, he comin’ late, he only get there after dark. You check the place, mekkin’ sure you comfortable. Then go down Tiegba side fifteen-minute drive, nice bar, you waitin’ there, the other man come. Relax some, drink beer, look at the lagoon. They’s a village there on legs, ver’ nice, the tourists like’t ver’ much. Then the time come. You ver’ smooth now widde beer and the pretty place an’ you gettin’ in you car an mek the drop. ‘S very easy thing, you know.’ He sat back and put a hand up to his face and dipped the little finger in the corner of his mouth.

      ‘Most nights,’ I said, ‘my motor reflexes put on a good show. I wake up in the mornings alive even if I don’t feel it. Then, if I haven’t been kissing the bottle too hard I find I have the coordination to stand up and move around. Getting somewhere, putting my hand inside my shirt and pulling out a package and giving it to someone is a cinch for a man with my kind of skills. What’s more, I have the in-built ability to take something with my left hand while I’m giving something else with my right. I can also count and eat a biscuit at the same time, but you tell me this job doesn’t take such talent.’ I stopped while Fat Paul’s lip took on another cigarette. ‘Now you’re beginning to see you’re talking to someone who’s done a few things in life. Someone who knows the difference between a French-restaurant cheese and a curl of dogshit, someone who knows where the grass is greenest there’s twenty years of slurry underneath. So don’t pretend to me that this job’s a snap. Don’t tell me about relaxing with beers and a tourist village on legs and all I’ve got to do is give a man a package when the postman does it every day and nobody gives him two hundred and fifty thousand CFA. Don’t tell me there’s no snags when there’s money…’

      ‘Snags?’ Fat Paul interrupted. ‘What are these snags?’

      ‘Snags are problems, difficulties, obstacles.’

      ‘Snags,’ said Fat Paul, weighing the word on his tongue and giving me a good idea of what a cane toad with a bellyful of insects looks like. ‘Lemme write these snags down.’

      He reached around him for a pen and paper and then pretended to write on the palm of his hand. He knew we were coming to it now. I could see him blinking the shrewdness out of his eyes.

      ‘Are you blackmailing somebody, Fat Paul?’ I asked.

      ‘Keep you voice down,’ he said, looking up at the barman who didn’t understand English. ‘Blackmail? I not blackmailin’ nobody. This no blackmailin’ thing. This a secret thing is all.’

      ‘What sort of secret?’

      ‘I’m tellin’ you that, it no a secret no more.’

      ‘I asked you what sort of secret, not what it is. Personal secret, political secret, economic secret, arms secret…?’

      ‘Is a business secret.’

      ‘Show me the cassette.’

      Fat Paul surprised me by flicking his fingers at Kwabena, who took the package out from under his shirt and gave it to him. With one eye closed to the cigarette smoke he broke the wax seal on the package, took out a wad of paper around the cassette, threw the empty envelope on the table. The heavy-duty envelope was still addressed to M. Kantari, Korhogo. He handed me the cassette. There was nothing unusual about it. The cassette didn’t look as if it had been tampered with or opened. I couldn’t see anything in it apart from 180 minutes of magnetic tape.

      ‘See?’ said Fat Paul.

      I folded the wad of paper around the cassette, put it back in the envelope and handed it back to Fat Paul, shaking my head.

      ‘Now you jes’ tell me two things,’ said Fat Paul, ready for it now and finished with the game. ‘One, if you gonna do it. Two, how much you wan’ for doin’ it.’

      ‘A million,’ I said, ‘CFA. Four thousand dollars, you understanding me?’

      The quality of the silence that followed could have been exported to any library in the world. George glanced across Fat Paul’s inflammable hair at Kwabena who looked as if he’d taken a blow from a five-pound lump hammer and was wondering whether to fall backwards. Fat Paul clasped his bratwurst fingers with the implanted rings and checked his watch, not for the time but because it seemed to be hurting him, cutting into his forearm. He pushed it down to this wrist and shook it. He breathed and kissed in the smoke from the glued cigarette on his lip in little puffs. He breathed out and the smoke baffled over his bottom lip.

      ‘Too much. We find cheaper white man.’

      ‘Go ahead. It’d be interesting to see the one you get who’s going to make a drop of a ‘video of a business secret’ at night in the middle of nowhere with money involved and at seven hours’ notice, unless you can delay it some more?’

      Fat Paul suddenly started to manage his hair with both hands like a forgetful toupé-wearer. He settled back down again.

      ‘Seven hundred and fifty…’ he started and I shook my head. He knew it. I had him down on the floor with both feet on his fat neck.

      ‘Show him the place,’ he said, smiling, and in that instant I saw that he thought he had won. He clicked it away with his fingers and Kwabena produced